“A couple seconds pass,” she resumes, “and then WHAM! He throws the vase to the floor. Big noise, pieces scatter everywhere. He stands looking around like he’s not sure what happened. Then he goes running out the door without a word.”
I checked to see how many of my ninety minutes have passed, noticed my watch was still set to Chicago time. Right about now I’d be figuring out how to kill ten or forty minutes on the Internet before heading out to lunch. Looking at my watch did me no good anyway because I couldn’t remember when our ninety minutes started. Time did strange things here.
“The next day I told my boss that I knocked over the vase when cleaning. An accident. He tells to me a lecture about what it means to be careful. My boss Gustav, he likes to make lectures.”
I felt a little sick. I thought of Gustav laying there on the edge of the canal, his arm twitching, blood pooled around his head. I felt a little sicker.
“A couple days later your brother comes back. Just before closing. He looks . . . what’s the word? Like a sheep. Sheepish. He tells me that he has come to pay for the vase. I say this is not necessary. He takes a pile of money out of his pocket and spreads it on the counter. Like a card dealer. Its over thirty-five thousand crowns. Nearly what, two thousand U.S. dollars? Put it away, I tell him, it was just a mistake, a misunderstanding. He says to me if I won’t take his money, will I let him buy for me dinner? So I agreed. What can I say, I thought he was funny.”
“They ever catch the pickpocket?”
She lit a cigarette. “That’s the best part. Your brother found his wallet in another pants, where it had been always. There never was any pickpocket.”
Just then a waiter arrived. I hadn’t even noticed that we’d gone unattended since being seated. Vera ordered for both of us and dispatched him without further ceremony.
“Two thousand dollars is a lot of cash,” I said. “What did Paul do here? Where did he work?”
She dragged on her cigarette and frowned. “He was an ambassador, he tells to me. The Ambassador of Awesome. Or he would say he worked on behalf of the International Brotherhood of Kicking Ass. When I got tired of his joking and tried to make him be serious, he would get angry. Why it was important? People were not their jobs. As for money, he didn’t always have money. Often he was broke.”
Paul could never hang on to money. I knew he’d used my dad’s credit card to buy his plane ticket to Prague, an act I would have caught holy hell for, but with Paul all was forgiven. Dad was always sure Paul could make something of himself, he just needed a fresh start. About every two or three years, as it turned out.
“Did my brother have many friends here?”
Vera considered. “He knew many people. Prague 1 or Prague 8, it didn’t matter; when we went out people would know him. His mobile was always ringing. Paul would answer, say a few words, hang up. Or he would look at the caller screen and not answer. He rarely introduced me to people who came up to him in a club, or on the street. I thought there were reasons. I didn’t want to know these reasons.”
“Where did he live?”
“With me.”
“With you where?”
“Is it important?”
“You said you’d answer my questions.”
“In Smíchov. At my apartment. South from here, on the other side of the river. We’d only been together maybe two weeks when he moved in.”
So I’d been right. They were in a relationship, a serious one from the sound of it.
“He had only one suitcase. But he would come and go. Like having a cat. Where he stayed when he wasn’t with me, I don’t know.”
“Weren’t you curious?”
“Of course.” She looked away and snubbed out her cigarette. “Even now sometimes I wonder if we would have been together much longer. What would’ve happened to us.”
“How long were you together?”
“Nearly one year. It seemed longer. Also shorter. Being with Paul, there was always something happening, you know? He had so much energy he didn’t know what to do with. Like something was missing for him. Always he was looking for this something. And this can wear you out. It can wear out the people around you. They never know what you’re about, what to expect. Does that make sense?”
“You’re saying he was undependable.”
“Not really what I meant. But yes, he could be undependable. But also dependable. Big things yes, little things no.”
“So dependable or undependable, depending?”
“Paul would die for me,” she said. “This I knew in my heart. This I know still. In this way I could depend on him. I could believe in him. But when he said he would meet me at the theater at 7:30? Or when he promised to pick up bread on the way over? This I could never believe. And normal relationships are full of little things like this, you know? More small things than big ones. Not that maybe our relationship was so normal. But I wanted it to be. I wanted to make us normal.”
As she spoke I wondered whether he had in fact died for her without her even knowing it. I’d been thinking a lot about those bloodstains found on his shirtsleeve. Soros thought it meant Paul had been victim of some ritualistic serial killer who liked hacking off people’s hands. But wasn’t the blood also possible evidence that he’d been tortured? And why? Maybe because the mysterious Martinko Klingáč was trying to get Vera’s identity out of him?
There was no way I could bring up this theory with Vera, just as there was no way I could tell her what had happened at the Galleria Čertovka earlier that morning or ask if she’d ever heard of the Right Hand of God. She was still my only real link to Paul, the only person who knew him as anything other than a disappeared body, even if she’d already determined our association would dissolve in less than ninety minutes. But I wondered if she knew about the bloodstained shirt. If so, why hadn’t she mentioned it? If not, how could she be so sure that Paul was murdered in the first place?
The obvious answer was that she was in on it.
That she had set him up.
I didn’t want to believe this. I couldn’t rule it out.
“Whose idea was it to steal the watch?” I said.
She lit another cigarette. I found myself craving one even though I’d quit years ago when the price crept over five dollars a pack, reasoning you can only be expected to pay so much to kill yourself. “One day Paul came home with a page from the newspaper,” she said. “This was not like him. Especially because this newspaper was in Czech, and he cannot read Czech. This is in May I think, maybe June. I remember it was before your brother’s name day.”
“His what day?”
“In Czech Republic everyone has a name day,” she said. “Like a birthday. Paul’s Czech name would be Pavel, so his name day is sometime in June. Anyway, he handed me the newspaper. It had been folded many times. Like he’s had it in his pocket. One paragraph is circled in red. He hands the paper to me and says, ‘This is where you work, right?’ This newspaper story is about art shows for the fall and summer. The paragraph he circled is for something called Rudolf’s Curiosities. I tell to him, yes, that’s where I work, so what? Paul smiles and puts the newspaper back in his pocket.”
A loud hiss issued from behind the counter as a barista heated milk, the steam rising and obscuring her face, rendering her momentarily headless. Vera went on to explain that two, maybe three weeks passed before he made mention of the Rudolf Complication again. Then one night riding the tram home after they went drinking with some of her friends in some unpronounceable Prague suburb, he asks what she would do with a million dollars.
First she laughs. He asks again. She says she sees no point in imagining impossible scenarios. But Paul tells her this question is not hypothetical. They could each have a million dollars—more than a million dollars—in two months. He knows a person who will pay $5 million dollars for a certain work of art. One that will soon be at the Gallery Čertovka. All they had to do was steal it, and half the money would be theirs.
I didn’t know if
$5 million was a ridiculous sum for the watch, and I’m sure Paul wouldn’t have either. Pricing work for hire like this was probably tricky. Offer too much, the help will smell a rat, know they’re going to be stiffed or worse. Offer too little, they’ll consider cutting out the middleman and taking the piece on the open market. Or maybe if you’re someone like Martinko Klingáč dealing with someone like my brother, you just pull a figure like $5 million out of your ass and watch the guy go all swirly eyed.
“I didn’t take Paul seriously,” Vera said. “We were both drunk and he is always saying some crazy thing. The conversation moved on and that was that. But a few days later, he starts asking questions. Do we have alarms at the Galleria Čertovka? Do we have security cameras? Are there cleaning people who come when we are closed? Does the door have an electronic lock or are there keys, do we have a safe, what are the busiest times? He’d write down what I said in a notebook. Notes and drawings in this child’s notebook with a ridiculous cartoon mouse on the cover. Not a mouse, what’s it called, a mole. Krtek the mole. It was an absurd game. I only started worrying when he brought home the gun.”
“A gun? Where did he get a gun?”
“He said, ‘I’m American, we all carry guns. For hunting wascally wabbits.’ Always joking, your brother. But I asked was he planning on robbing the gallery with a gun? Because I wouldn’t allow this. The gallery owner was a family friend and I would not let Paul put a gun into his face. I got very angry. Paul he says nothing, just listens. Finally he says, ‘I’m not going to pull the gun on him. I’m going to pull the gun on you.’”
“And this was Klingáč’s idea?”
She shook her head. “Paul’s idea. Martinko Klingáč did not know about me, remember. He did not know Paul’s accomplice was a person from the gallery. Paul swore to this, and I believed him. Whatever happened, he wanted to protect me.”
“By sticking a gun in your face.”
She explained the plan also called for a witness being inside the gallery when the robbery took place. Not Gustav—they’d pull the heist during the late afternoon, when he was usually at a pub called the Golden Weaver—but a customer, a tourist, best case a lone female or an old couple. With a witness and a gun, it wouldn’t look like an inside job—either to the police, or just as importantly, to Martinko Klingáč. Paul wouldn’t tell her much more about the plan because he wanted her to act natural, behave like a person getting robbed. All she knew was that one day, a man in a ski mask would burst in yelling in a language from Star Trek.
“Star Trek?” I repeated. “What, like Vulcan?”
“No, Klingon,” she said. “That’s what it was called, I think. Because this way, if the witness was from Japan or Sweden or Austria or the UK, it didn’t matter. No one could know what Paul was saying, and so they would only be able to tell to the police of a man with a skiing mask yelling in a strange language. He bought a book on the Internet and taught to himself a sentence always he was repeating. God, I still remember it. Fi tevakh ek yemtor. I have no idea what it meant, but for weeks he would mutter fi tevakh ek yemtor, fi tevakh ek yemtor. He lives in Prague for two years, doesn’t speak five words of Czech. Instead he wants to learn some language of TV aliens.”
But the robbery didn’t happen the way Paul planned, Vera said.
Martinko Klingáč insisted they wait for a sign.
“A sign? What kind of sign?”
“Paul didn’t know,” Vera said. “‘Martinko Klingáč says there will be a sign,’ was all he said. ‘When the sign comes, we’ll know. And then we must act. No hesitation.’ Paul is drinking a lot at this time, sleeping very little. He smokes like a fire and stops changing his clothes, shaving, taking showers. And then there was his hair.”
“What hair?”
“Yes, exactly. Always he had been bald since I’ve known him. Always he kept his head shaved. But then he started growing his hair. For eight weeks, ten weeks, he lets his hair begin to grow.”
“Like as a disguise?”
She shook her head. “Klingáč, he does not trust people with no hair, Paul tells me. He will not even be in a room with a bald man. A superstition or something like this. And Paul always talking about Klingáč says this, Klingáč says that. Like Paul was in a cult. I say to him I don’t want any part of this anymore. We had a terrible fight, our worst—and believe me, we fought all the time. We were passionate people, both stubborn. But in the end we reached a compromise, less from understanding than exhaustion. That’s how it went. We would just go and go until there was nothing left. We decided if there was no sign within two weeks, he would give up the idea of stealing the watch. We would never speak of it again. Not the Rudolf Complication, Martinko Klingáč, none of it.”
Two days later, one perfectly fine summer afternoon while waiting for my brother Paul to meet her for lunch at a café near the west bank of the Vltava River, she looked out the window to see dark clouds gathered low across the horizon. The moment she formed the thought rain was on the way, it had already arrived. No thundering overture, no cautionary flash of lightning, no drizzly prelude—just rain suddenly crashing down like a child’s tantrum, too full of its own fury to last. Paul never showed up for lunch. She told me how she’d later waited for him at Andel station as she would sometimes, watching the crowds scurry out of the metro below and the big new Nový Smíchov mall above like confused mice flushed from their nests, women struggling with umbrellas, men angled against the wind, collars upturned on their raincoats. She told me how the rain kept falling for days as she waited for him to come home, to call, anything. How the low clouds moved across the sky, an endless conquering army flattening the cityscape, rendering it in blurred layers of gray, and how she’d watched the trees sway on the far side of the riverbank as tram after tram rattled across Palackého Bridge. How she’d allowed herself to believe that Paul was in one of them, rehearsing apologies, how she’d believed he would soon appear at her door, bedraggled, wet hair plastered to his forehead, sheepish grin plastered on his face.
How the TV filled with images of the flood, shots of bleary-eyed tourists lugging suitcases through the maze of wet streets or crowded between the procession of stone saints on the Charles Bridge to marvel at the river below, now a thick, silty brown. Instead of tour boats and regal swans, the churning waters now ferried fallen trees, untethered rowboats, broken furniture, the odd discarded refrigerator. How the plight of an eighty-one-year-old elephant trapped at the Prague Zoo became the media focus, even as first thirty, then fifty, then seventy thousand people were evacuated, a process made more difficult as roads were washed out and tramlines severed. Thirteen Soviet-era subway stations were knocked out of commission, despite the fact that the system was designed to double as an impenetrable fallout shelter in the event of nuclear war. Busses transported residents to makeshift emergency shelters in school auditoriums while holdouts in the city center fortified their businesses, sandbagging doors, reinforcing windows, shuttling merchandise to higher elevations. Cash machines throughout the city were quickly drained, and canned food and bottled water disappeared from the shelves in ways not seen since the Nazi invasion nearly seventy years prior. How she’d called and called trying to reach Paul, and when her cell phone battery died how she’d slogged through the wet and abandoned streets to a pay phone outside the Nový Smíchov shopping mall. How an unfamiliar voice answered Paul’s mobile, a voice she knew belonged to Martinko Klingáč.
“Who is this?” he’d said. “Who is speaking?”
How she’d dropped the phone, let the handset dangle and sway on its cord, the voice repeating the question as she backed away.
“Who is this? Who is speaking?”
How she’d run splashing down the hill and then up the stairs to her apartment, how she’d locked the door, how she hadn’t taken her boots off until she’d turned on every light in the place. How all the lights had suddenly gone off, and the water too, as the flood swallowed the city. A perfect fairytale seven days had passed, she’d reali
zed, since she’d last seen Paul. And then how lulled by the murky sonata of water cascading over the rooftops and streaming through rain pipes and spilling onto the streets, she’d finally succumbed to this wordless lullaby.
How later she woke from a dreamless sleep to find the rain had stopped just as it had started, suddenly, without warning. The clouds had parted and the sun was pouring through the window, and someone was pounding against the door of her apartment.
She was evacuated by emergency rescue personnel patrolling the area on rafts and taken to a makeshift shelter in a high school gymnasium where she slept on a cot for two days and spoke to no one. The water drained from the city and she knew Paul was gone.
“And I’ll tell you one more story,” she said. “This story is a Christmas story. From when I was little. But I think it is also a story about Paul. Each year at Christmas time, my father would bring home a carp and put it in the bathtub. Here it’s tradition to eat carp for Christmas dinner. To keep the carp fresh, it would live in the bathtub until time came to cook it. When I was seven years old, I decided I did not want this particular carp to die. I decided to rescue it. Put it in a plastic bag, take it to the river—which was stupid because the river was so polluted then it would never have survived. But when I tried to catch the fish, it squirmed away. Again and again. I started crying and tried explaining to the fish that I only wanted to help, that terrible things would happen soon if it did not be still. But it thrashed and squirmed and raced around the bathtub, and I couldn’t catch it.”
By the time she’d finished we were well beyond the ninety-minute mark. She gave me a chance to ask one more question, anything I wanted, and then she really would have to go and that really would have to be the end.
I didn’t ask her anything. I just told her I was sorry things turned out the way they did—not just for my brother, but for her, too. I said she seemed like a good person, and if Paul really had his mind set on something, there was nothing she could have done to stop him. More than once she looked like she was going to cry. More than once she gave me that look, like she was seeing Paul again. In the end she thanked me again for coming all the way to Prague, said talking with me had helped her more than I knew. Then she put on her coat and walked out the café, giving me one more hesitant glance as she disappeared down the stairs. I counted to forty and then got up to follow her.
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