I’d have to let Bob Hannah’s call go unanswered. I’d call him back after I spoke anonymously with the police, after I got back to the hotel and booked a flight. I’d return Bob Hannah’s call from Tahiti or Thailand or wherever some quick Google query told me had no extradition treaty with the Czech Republic.
Instead I answered.
“Bob Hannah calling,” said the voice on the other end. He was American, had the flat, regionless intonations of a TV news anchor. “Received your message. We should talk. Face-to-face would be best. I’m on assignment much of this afternoon but perhaps you could meet me in, say, one hour? I’ll be at the St. James Church, near Old Town Square. Can you find this place?”
“I have a map.”
“Just the two of us. No detective.”
Then he hung up. Another tram rattled by. One of the anarchist kids on the sidewalk shot me a look. His shirt had CLOWNING FOOL, a band I guess, printed in thick gothic letters. I slipped the cell back into my pocket and reholstered the payphone. Upon second glance the kid’s shirt said DROWNING POOL. I stood rooted in place, weighing my options. The woman in the window on Kampa Island had either called the police or she hadn’t. They’d either found the curator’s body or they hadn’t, he was alive or he wasn’t. Tying me to him would take time. There was no reason to panic. I snatched my coins from the return slot of the payphone. From now on I would be all about leaving nothing behind.
My suit had apparently shrunken as a result of my diving expedition because taking Prague Unbound out of my inner pocket on the train back to Old Town turned into a silent comedy of tugging and pulling, jerking and twisting. The thing just would not come out, until it did, with sudden, mocking ease. More likely the book had expanded, the pages having soaked up water, though in truth they looked neither damp nor warped. On the subject of St. James Church, the guidebook had this to say:
If you insist upon visiting the Kostel sv. Jakuba (St. James Church), make your way to Old Town Square where twenty-seven noblemen were once executed in a single day, their severed heads then hung in iron cages on the Old Town Bridge Tower where they remained for ten years. Seek guidance from some agreeable local merchant. In absence of agreeable personages, you may wish to write the words Sv. Jakuba upon a piece of paper and hand it to one of the worthless shitsmelling vagabonds to be found on the benches encircling the Jan Hus monument. Offer him a small gratuity, or liquor if you have it upon your person (the cheaper varieties will do). If he refuses, threaten him with violence and spit upon him as you would a three-legged mongrel.
Not the sort of advice you’d find in Lonely Planet.
I went on reading.
The St. James Basilica was founded by minorites in the twelfth century before being rebuilt in the Baroque style after the fire that cleansed Old Town in 1689. Among its many attractions is the unrestful resting place of Count Vratislav of Mitrovice, accidentally entombed alive by dimwitted clergy in the fifteenth century. For three days and three nights the Count’s agonized wails echoed throughout the church while palsied husks of men blinkered by their ignorance bowed their liverspotted skulls and shuffled in circles, mumbling in Latin. They cast holy water here and thereabout as the Count scraped and clawed at the walls of his enclosure, wearing the very flesh from his fingers until they were bloodied shards of bone and there was no more air to breathe and so he breathed no more. Of special interest is a severed, mummified arm that hangs inside the church’s entrance. One night some four hundred years ago, a thief tried to snatch a necklace of pearls from a statue of Mary, but Our Lady held fast to his arm and would not release it even in the morrow until at length the executioner was called to hack off the appendage. After prison, the repentant, one-armed thief returned to St. James and the monks accepted him into their brotherhood, and he would late at night enter the church and gaze in reverie upon his own severed limb, which still hangs there to this day.
St. James is also acclaimed for its splendid pipe organ, said to be one of the finest in Europe.
Like many travel guides, I assumed this one had multiple authors and was edited on the cheap, but there was no “About the Contributors” section to be found, and neither could I locate the name of any editor before the train pulled into Můstek station. Getting the book back in my pocket meant running the whole jerking, tugging, shoving gag reel in reverse.
I was able to find St. James without bothering any shopkeepers or spitting on any homeless people. Saints and angels dogpiled in relief above the church entrance like some medieval version of the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Inside, every lavish nook and gilt-edged cranny of the narrow church burst with iconography, as if these holy things had fled three or four larger churches and taken up refuge in this one. There was a St. James Church in Chicago, too. I’d been there for a wedding. It looked like a dentist’s waiting room compared to this place.
At this hour the light from the clerestory above struggled to penetrate the lower reaches, leaving the dark pews and carved wooden pulpits in a twilight haze. A sign at the entrance warned that photography and cell phones were forbidden, but except for an older couple whispering along the aisle, the place was deserted.
A voice spoke my name from the darkness and I caught a flicker of movement at the left edge of the nave. As my eyes adjusted, I could just make out a man beckoning in the middle distance. I made my way down the center of the pews and as I neared the transept crossing, a hand extended into my face.
“Bob Hannah,” the hand’s seated owner announced. Judging by the hand, he was a big guy. The failing light obscured most of his face, but I could see he was somewhere in his mid-forties. Wavy brown hair. A head oversized and squarish plopped on rounded shoulders without the intercession of a neck. He wore a black suit much like my own (so much for the curator’s theory that I was overdressed for a journalist), but his ballooned where mine slackened. We looked like Laurel and Hardy after a wardrobe mix-up.
“Apologies for the venue,” he said as I shook his hand and settled into the pew next to him. “Not the church-going type myself, but I’m interviewing an organist who is giving a concert here as part of the festival. They say St. James has the second-most beautiful organ in all of Europe. Lucky guy that James, eh? Now that I’ve broken the ice with a penis joke, let me ask you—is this your first time in Prague?”
I nodded.
“A wonderful city. Magical even, though less so every day. How does the song go? ‘In the days when you were hopelessly poor, I just liked you more.’” He sat for a moment as if trying to recall the rest of the lyrics or maybe formulate another dick joke. “Truth be told, you ask me, there is no such thing as a beautiful organ. The noises they make. No coincidence organists are not happy people. Being subject day and night to those awful sounds, it does something to them. I’ve met my fair share. Their skin is universally horrible. Ashen, starved of B12. I feel for them, though, I do. Years of grueling practice, countless recitals in dismal churches, an ever-dwindling number of suitable instruments. Audiences shrinking, aging, growing every year more geriatric and indifferent. I imagine these organists alone in hotel rooms. They sit on bed corners, feet planted on the floor, ties undone and collars loosened. They stare at the walls and their heads are filled with awful sounds.”
The church acoustics gave his voice a disembodied quality, and it was difficult to read his expression as he spoke. My eyes were still adjusting, struggling to pick out details in the half-light. Next to Hannah sat a white cardboard box roughly the size as an accordion case. In the distance behind him, several life-sized marble figures were draped over the hulking mass that must have been Vratislav’s tomb. The Count would’ve needed a jackhammer to get out.
“Whenever an organist is late for an interview, I think the worst,” Hannah continued. “Did you know organists have the highest suicide rate of any classical musicians? And they’re not punctual, these organists. Not as a rule. The man I am speaking with today was supposed to be here two hours ago. I even brought him a cake,” he no
dded toward the box at his side, “A bublanina sponge cake. It has cherries. Are you hungry? We could eat the cake and he’d never know the difference.”
I forced a smile and shook my head.
“Maybe we could just look at the cake? No—you’re right, that would just make it worse.” Hannah drummed his fingers on the box and then forced himself to stop with what seemed a supreme act of willpower. “Very well. So, your message. Your brother. Detective Soros. Let me start by saying I am truly sorry. I did not know Paul Holloway, but when I got your call, I felt a certain responsibility to set the record straight. Which is not to say I believe our detective friend is trying to mislead you. Not deliberately. Was he drunk when you saw him?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Good for him. But why did he have you call me?”
“He said I should ask about my brother’s right hand.”
Bob Hannah nodded. “The one they cut off.”
“Cut off? As in severed?”
Hannah made a crude chopping motion, followed by a shrug.
“He didn’t tell me that part. Jesus, nobody ever told me that part.”
“Right Hand of God,” Hannah pronounced, as if that should make everything clear.
“What’s the Right Hand of God?”
“He didn’t tell you that either? Maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe he’s getting better.” Hannah checked his cell phone again, glanced at the cake box, grimaced. “The Right Hand of God is a local legend of sorts. Dates back to the seventeenth century, probably earlier. Has variously to do with a goblin or demon. Or gypsy or Jew. Or serial killer or psychotic Balkan gangster, depending on which era’s boogeymen are being invoked. The Right Hand of God commits a murder each year. Late August usually, early September. He then severs the right hand of his victim. According to legend, this marks said victim as being unworthy of a seat at the right hand of God, meaning Heaven. Said victim is thus not only relieved of his mortal coil but damned for all eternity. I must say that sitting next to a cake can make you incredibly hungry.”
“How do they know his hand was cut off? They never found a body.”
“They don’t know. All they had to go on was the rather impressive bloodstain on his right sleeve. And there was the timing. According to Soros’s theory, your brother vanished just when the Right Hand of God was poised to strike again. ”
How much of this had my dad known? Did he have any copies of the police reports? Would he have had them translated from Czech into English? I didn’t know. Easy to curse the old man now, but back then I’d been reluctant to ask about details. It was half a decade too late to feel indignant about his possible lack of oversight.
“So the hand was never found?” I asked.
“I don’t believe so. Does it make a difference?”
I supposed not—either way he was gone. Near the altar, vespers began lighting candles, the flames emerging colorless and fragile in the middle distance. Wherever I looked, eyes looked back at me, cherubs, saints, angels, Madonnas, and Christs staring out from the lusterless paintings and dark wooden statues perched on the balustrades.
“How did you get hooked up with Soros?” I asked.
“Started with an All Hallows’ Eve piece,” said Hannah. “Little thing I wrote about spooky local legends, ghost stories and such. Right Hand of God I learned about from the first landlady I had here. She was the superstitious sort. A sparrow flew through an open window and into my apartment once, and she was convinced it was an omen of death. So convinced she made me pay next month’s rent early, just in case, though I think she was trying to drive me out because I could never get accustomed to the Czech habit of removing one’s shoes at home. Said my clomping around was keeping her awake, ruining her floors. But then she died that fall, so maybe the sparrow was an omen. Anyway, I wrote a few sentences about the Right Hand of God, along with stuff about the begging skeleton outside the Karolinum, the headless coachman of Jánský vršek Street. Rabbi Löew and his obligatory Golem, Edward Kelley and other alchemists and black magicians who called Prague home in its heyday. A week later, Detective Soros phoned. He was very upset. You think he’s salty in English, you should hear him speak Czech. Man can swear for half an hour straight without once repeating himself. He said the Right Hand of God didn’t belong in my story, that it wasn’t a myth or legend at all. People really were being killed each autumn, corpses showing up without right hands. He said he had proof. So I met with him. He gave me this.”
The paper he handed me had been unfolded and refolded many times, its creases worn smooth from multiple backpocket-ings. It was a map of Prague. The Vltava River ran like a question mark down its center, crosshatched with a series of hand-drawn lines that connected yellow squared numbers at various points throughout the city.
“The squares show where bodies were found,” Hannah explained. “The number is the year the alleged murders took place. According to the detective, this map shows every Right Hand of God killing that has occurred over the last twenty years. On the back is a list of victim names with street addresses corresponding to the year numbers.”
I flipped it over, eyes running down the list. Midway down the second column, there it was, sandwiched between a M. Husova in 2001 and a J. Macha in 2003—P. Holloway 2002, Křižíkova 60, 186-00 Praha 8-Karlín. I flipped back over to the map.
“What does this mean,” I asked, pointing to the corner of the map. “Tik-tak.”
“The sound a watch makes,” Hannah replied. “Tick-tock. To remind himself, I suppose, that the clock was ticking. That it would only be so long before the killer struck again.”
“And these lines?”
“Detective Soros said he was looking for a pattern. If he found one, I can’t make sense of it. I was able to confirm that a handful, er, fair number of these names and locations do correspond to unsolved murders. As for the rest, I assume the detective is privy to information I can’t access. I understand he still has friends on the force.”
Through some trick of the light, the darker it grew, the more Hannah’s body seemed to expand. His face looked inflated, features photoshopped ten pixels too large. Only his eyes looked normal, two small holes punched in afterthought at the center of his face. I think I was starting to hallucinate from adrenaline withdrawal and lack of food. The low light of the church and all the sad-faced statues weren’t helping. Nor was the smell, a pungent, faintly sour odor that may have come from Hannah, may have just been air trapped for eons in the old building. May even have been the cake.
“A Czech reporter friend of mine who works for the Mladá fronta newspaper told me the hand thing isn’t as uncommon as you might think,” continued Hannah. “It became kind of a trend in the nineties among organized criminals. A gang from Albania or Serbia or somewhere used it as their signature. Then other gangs started doing it, whether because they thought it was cool or to throw off police, I don’t know.”
“But Soros says it isn’t gangs behind these deaths?”
“The gangland calling-card explanation was created by the police department itself, according to him. A fabrication to cover up what was really happening. But then he says the same of any evidence that contradicts his Right Hand of God hypothesis.”
“So you don’t buy the serial killer theory?”
“I’m in no position to buy or sell,” Hannah sighed. “I write about local documentary film festivals. New clubs, restaurants. Indie rock bands coming to town. Czech hip-hop, if you can imagine such a thing. And of course, the annual festival celebrating the wheezy organs of Prague and the miserable bastards who play them. Maybe the detective thought The Stone Folio would do a five-part investigative piece, make a big stink about him getting booted off the force, put pressure on the local authorities. But we’re not that kind of paper.”
“Kicked off the force? Soros told me he retired.”
Hannah said it depended on how you looked at it. They’d moved the detective from working homicide to manning the non-emergency call
center. He stuck around for a year hoping some big break in my brother’s case would come along to prove his theory right, get him back in with the big boys. Eventually he decided he was better off working the Right Hand of God case on a freelance basis than fielding calls about fender benders and missing dogs. Plus, as an added bonus, working alone gave him more time to drink. Technically he may have retired, but he was forced out.
“Not that I ever confronted him on this point,” said Hannah, looking again at the cake box. “I suppose I’ve been guilty of indulging him. Each year around this time he rings me up, convinced another murder is coming. Each August he’s a little more desperate, a little less coherent. During our last conversation, he let slip that his wife had left him. At a point he became somewhat threatening. He said by not helping him bring this story to the world, I was as good as an accomplice. That I had blood on my hands. I was surprised he’d given you my card. That he might consider me his confidante is somewhat alarming.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous?”
Hannah considered. “I think he’s alcoholic and sad.”
“But you think he’s right that my brother was murdered.”
“I can’t speak to that,” Hannah said. “But given the circumstances, I thought you should know a little about the former detective so that any conclusions you draw might be better informed. As we say in our dying newspaper biz, if your mother says she loves you, check Wikipedia.”
Just then Hannah’s phone began buzzing. He picked it up and stared in puzzlement for several moments, his swollen head illuminated by the LCD glow. From the confusion on his face, I guessed it was the police. They’d found the card in the curator’s pocket. I knew it would happen but figured I’d have more time. Hannah put the phone to the side of his head and muttered a few words and then clapped the phone shut with a sigh.
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