CHAPTER 8
There’s the truth and there’s what people tell you. They’re like a married couple laughing at each other’s jokes in public when privately they’ve grown so far apart they can barely stand the sight of each other’s socks. This assuming there is a truth, verifiable facts. The assumption makes life easier when you’re dealing with, say, buying a used car, more difficult when dealing with questions of human motivation. Trickiest of all are the things you tell yourself, which in an ideal world would be outsourced for evaluation to an objective third party before you’re allowed to act upon them.
All of which is to say there were a million questions I could’ve asked Vera, but I knew she had already told me everything she was prepared to share. Anything else I’d have to learn without her consent because as much as I wanted to believe her, she still hadn’t answered the two most basic questions. One, why tell anyone that you were involved in an unsolved criminal conspiracy gone murderously awry—and two, why now? She’d written that letter to my father for a reason, and after talking to her for nearly three hours over the last couple days, I was no closer to finding out what that reason was.
After stepping outside she had taken out her phone and made a call, but she hadn’t let the conversation slow her stride as she slipped through the throngs crowding the sidewalk. I’d nearly lost her when a bunch of Brits came stumbling drunkenly out of some bar at the corner of Vodičkova and was trailing some fifty feet behind her as we entered Můstek station. As I approached the ticket machine kiosk, I watched the top of her head disappear down the escalator. Stop to buy a train ticket and I’d risk losing her.
I walked right past the turnstile and hopped on the escalator, expecting beeping, sirens, some official someone putting a hand upon my shoulder, but nothing happened. Below the tube, walls were decorated in anodized steel a champagne color that made you feel like you were inside a Christmas ornament. The platform was crowded, and I took up a position just behind a marbled column, safely outside of Vera’s sightlines. She rarely looked up from playing with her phone anyway. When the train came she got on, and I boarded two cars behind her.
Vera had told me she’d lived in Smíchov when Paul was around, but a glance at the subway map plastered above the train’s doors told me Smíchov was southwest, on the yellow line. We were travelling northwest on the green line. Either Vera didn’t live in Smíchov anymore, or she wasn’t headed home. Staroměstská, Malostranská; at each stop I hopped off, looked for Vera, and then hopped back on just as the doors whisked shut, a move which evidently annoyed a woman opposite me with purple boots and a red streaked rooster hairdo like Keith Richards circa 1972. She spent most of the ride glowering at me while managing to completely ignore the teenage couple making out next to her. If the train ride lasted much longer, I might witness the actual conception of a little Czech.
Vera emerged at Hradčanská station. When I exited too, she started walking right towards me. She’d spotted me. She knew I was following her and was going to confront me, make a big scene right here on the train platform, probably scream “stalker!” or worse in Czech until the police came and hauled me off. Except that she hadn’t noticed me yet. Everyone was walking my way. The only exit was located behind me. Ducking behind a column and circling behind Vera seemed too risky so I turned and rushed toward the escalator, trying to put some distance between us.
The ride up was excruciatingly slow. When I reached the street level I practically started running, a bad move as it attracted the attention of one of three guys dressed in black uniforms hanging out by the newspaper kiosk near the exit. Ticket inspectors. Two of them were already hassling some college kids, both of whom where digging around their backpacks and baggy pants in a transparent pantomime. The third one zeroed in on me. He stepped forward just as I was about to pass and held up a hand in the international hold-it-right-there gesture. Only when the rooster-maned redhead in purple boots unleashed a torrent of grievances did I realize the hand wasn’t meant for me.
The darkening sky was crosshatched with tram cables and the rain had picked up, cars and trucks splashing by on either side of a narrow concrete strip where people stood waiting for trams and buses, looking miserable. It was oddly quiet outside the tourist zone, like being in another city entirely. I ducked behind a payphone and Vera emerged a moment later. She made another call with her cell, dialing and putting it to her ear, but she didn’t appear to say anything. Could be the other party never answered, could be she was just checking messages. A tram pulled up and she slipped her phone back into her pocket and queued to board. I opted for the car behind her and got a window seat so I’d be able to see when she exited. We were on tramline 18, somewhere north of the city center and on the left bank of the river, but that was as precise as I could figure it. The tram could have been headed to some distant suburb for all I knew.
She got off at a stop called Ořechovka. With only three other people exiting, there was no crowd to blend into. I just had to hope she didn’t see me. Luckily it wasn’t the sort of weather for taking a leisurely stroll and having a look about. She tucked her chin to her chest and hurried through a gap in traffic across Střešovická Street. I watched her turn down a smaller street called Lomená, letting some distance build before I followed. If she saw me now, I’d just be some blurred figure across the road.
She kept up her hurried pace, staying on Lomená and marching past street names I tried to note for the way back. Západní, Cuk-rovarnická, Na Orechovce. Gone were the crowded, crooked ancient lanes where edifices crammed leaning one into the next. Here were empty sidewalks and high concrete security walls enclosing brick villas, estates, mansions replete with sloping green lawns lush with trees and shrubbery. I’d read apartments in the city center had price tags comparable to those in New York, and if that was true then maybe this was like the exclusive Connecticut suburb. Whatever the case, Vera’s quarter of the Rudolf Complication money couldn’t have bought a home here. Her portion and my brother’s combined probably wouldn’t have been enough.
Pondering the unknowns of the local real-estate market jarred loose a thought that should have occurred to me much earlier. Ever since I’d heard about the watch theft and the existence of Martinko Klingáč, I’d assumed that he killed Paul so he wouldn’t have to pay him his cut. But then if he already had the watch, why torture Paul? I’d theorized Klingáč wanted to know the identity of the third conspirator, but I hadn’t reasoned out why. To tie up loose ends? To keep an eye on her in case it looked like she might talk to the cops?
I hadn’t considered the most obvious reason.
Paul didn’t have the watch. Vera did.
By the time Martinko Klingáč had caught up with my brother, he’d already ditched the watch with Vera for safekeeping. Maybe as an assurance that he got paid. Or maybe they had just plain double-crossed Klingáč, had stolen the thing without ever intending to pass it on. They would sell it themselves, keep all the profits, double their money.
Vera stopped in front of a white, three-story, many-gabled house guarded on either side by twin pine trees rising above the obligatory red tiled roof. A BMW motored past as Vera stood outside the gate and punched her code into a keypad mounted on the fence. Amber lights blazed from inside the large picture window on the first floor, and I saw a fleeting silhouette move behind the glass as Vera closed the wrought iron gate behind her and started walking up the entryway. I hurried to the other side of the street for a better view.
Just as she was walking up the stairs, the front door swung open and a child rushed out. The kid was maybe five or six years old, barefoot and dressed in his pajamas. Vera chirped some mild admonishment, he giggled, and then she scooped him up in her arms. His face shone over her shoulder and even through the rain, from a distance of some thirty yards, I knew. Same broad nose, same mischievous turn to his lips. It was so much like looking at an old Polaroid that I half expected to find my younger self in the frame, posed next to my little brother in a snap button
shirt and Tuffskins jeans from Sears circa 1977.
She carried the boy inside and pulled the door closed and then all was silence and stillness save for the pines moving in the breeze, their heavy limbs undulating as if dancing to secret music. Then a car roared up and came to a splashing halt beside me, and the driver rolled down the window and stuck out his head, red eyes bulging, teeth grinding inside his mouth so hard for a time he couldn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The first floor lights in a white house on a quiet corner of Lomená Street went off, and I stepped from the sidewalk, opened the car door, and slid inside.
The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang—Part II
March 13, 1938
My Dearest Klara,
You excelled at the abrupt departure, taking even your ultimate leave with but a few indiscriminate words, a parting to fit your lifelong abhorrence of the sentimental, the maudlin, that urge to say things more powerfully left unsaid. For me goodbyes have always been an agonizing, drawn out exchange, and I fear this farewell may yet grow more tortured.
And so let us now resume with my haggard face pressed to the smoked glass of my shop window, as I watch Doctor Kačak tottering down the street, afraid that any moment he will change his mind, reverse course, and come back toward me with his crippled spider’s gait. Let us begin as he finally rounds the corner and I retreat from the window. Let us commence as I carefully swaddle the watch in its velvet cloth and steal down the groaning backstairs to the cellar that acts as my workshop, storeroom, and sanctuary, a cluttered enclosure that makes the shop’s main floor appear a cheery paragon of organization and restraint.
Let you find me in the cellar where rickety shelves line damp stone walls, where rows of forgotten books form a vast mildew farm and cobweb skeins cling to every corner (curiously, I’ve seen neither spider nor fly in all my time there—perhaps they’ve fled to be with spider and fly relations in America). Upon the floor are strewn decaying wooden crates crammed with a hodgepodge of rolled maps, cases of old Victrola records, forgotten musical scores, rolls for player pianos. From a bent nail in the wall hangs an eighteenth-century rare Spanish Miquelet flintlock pistol. Broken gramophone, bladeless ice-skates, chipped Meissen figurines, brass candelabra, jar of preserved fetal pig, box of mousetraps, box of better mousetraps; for the thousandth time I pledged all must be gotten rid of lest they start crossbreeding and multiplying. Except now it appears they will remain while I’m the one who’ll be gotten rid of.
But my narrative outraces my pen.
When Doctor Kačak had unveiled the piece, it was the exquisitely crafted ivory inset of the White Lion which first alerted me, nay, grabbed my lapels, shook me bodily, and roared, Wake man! Raise the alarms and rouse the guards, for I am no ordinary watch! Now in the privacy of my cellar, I am able to inspect it unencumbered, without fear that my mounting enthusiasm may betray me.
The watch’s shape is the first sign of its authenticity, its tambour cylinder housing typical of watches made in the latter half of the sixteenth century. I find no anachronisms in the works—there is no minute hand, and the fusee cord consists of catgut rather than miniature drive chains. The escapement is of the verge rather than anchor, deadbeat, or lever variety and uses a primitive balance wheel but no balance spring. No suspect alloys, the delicate gears fashioned from hand-cut steel and everything held in place by pins and rivets rather than screws. Closing the watch’s casement and turning it over, I discover upon its rear surface the obsidian symbol I almost dared not hope to find.
The self-consuming snake. The Ouroboros.
I re-swaddle the piece and set it down on my workbench as if delivering an infant into the arms of sleep. I need no further proof but still race to the bookshelf and scan the dusty leather and cracked vellum spines of my library until I’ve found Curiousities of Late Medieval Horology. Scarce do I begin thumbing through its yellowed pages of when my eyes land on the description in mid-sentence:
“ . . . though many believe the ivory lion engraving on the watch’s case had special significance for Rudolf II. Court astronomer Tycho Brahe had prophesized that Rudolf’s fate was tied to that of his favorite pet lion, a declawed and toothless beast given to him by the Sultan of Turkey. An inventory of the Kunstkammer completed in 1595 also describes the case as featuring an inset of the ‘Ouroboros’—the Greek name given to the circular symbol of a serpent swallowing its own tail, which alchemists used to represent infinity and primordial unity.
“Beyond its rumored link to nefarious court charlatan Edward Kelley, the origins and authorship of the Rudolf Complication remain murky. Jacob Zech, inventor of the fusee in 1525, likely had no role in its creation, though we can’t rule out a skilled apprentice. Jost Bürgi is another name often put forth, but the Rudolf Complication predates the Prague arrival of the clockmaking genius and algorithm inventor by some years. If surviving accounts of the piece are to be trusted, the Rudolf Complication also far surpasses in miniaturization any known work by famed Rudolf contemporary Christof Margraf.
“Its ultimate fate remains murkier still. After Rudolf died in 1612, the unrivaled collection of art, esoteria, and naturalia that made up his ‘Cabinet of Curiousities’ was systematically looted over the next 150 years. His hated brother and successor Mathias took many of the treasures to Vienna, new seat of the Hapsburg Empire. Following the Battle of White Mountain, Bavarian conquerors hauled away some 1,500 additional wagonloads of precious works. During the Thirty Years’ War, Rudolf’s elderly Kunstkammer guardian, Dionisio Mise-roni, was tortured into giving up the keys to occupying Swedes in 1648. What little the Swedes left behind was auctioned off by order of Emperor Joseph II in 1781. Unsold items were unceremoniously dumped into the Vltava River below the Hradčany, and the space which once housed perhaps the largest and most varied collection of art the world had yet seen was henceforth used as a storehouse for gun powder and cannonballs.
“As with so many of Rudolf’s treasures, the whereabouts of the Rudolf Complication are unknown to this day. Sadly, this treasure must be presumed lost to history.”
Emperor Rudolf II stares out from the page opposite, eyes hooded, wide, Hapsburg chin jutting above a disc of white frills orbiting his neck while the watch dangles at the end of its golden chain a gaudy albatross. A clever forger could have used this very portrait as a model of the watch now before me, but only the most diligent cheat would have known about the black serpent on the reverse side of the case.
I clap the book shut. Ouroboros or no ouroboros, the final, surefire method of verifying that Doctor Kačak’s watch is the genuine Complication is to pry the back casing open and find the hidden clock face where time runs backwards, just as on the Hebrew clock adorning the Jewish Town Hall mere blocks from my shop.
Happily, I discover the complication intact, an ingenious reverse geometry built to send the indicator dial spinning the wrong way around the hidden face. In watches of this era, the movement was typically somewhere signed by its creator, but in keeping with its unknown origins, no signature is etched thereupon. Perhaps the watchmaker had a knack for self-preservation. The piece was, after all, delivered to Rudolf II under the pretense that it would give him eternal life. And when Rudolf eventually noticed that he was still getting older, still getting sicker, someone would be made to pay.
Two curious markings do appear etched in miniature upon the winding key, which Doctor Kačak has left in its arbor slot. Seemingly Hebrew symbols of some sort, they might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphs as far as this would-be Jew was concerned. Perhaps Grandfather Weil, wellspring of my pending racial impurity, could have transliterated the eldritch markings, but I find myself at a loss. The important thing is that the key is there at all—had Doctor Kačak truly wished to prevent me from stopping the piece while I repaired it and then just winding when the work was complete, he need only have withheld the key.
And so I set to work, opening the frontspiece to access the forward-turning half of the inner workings. The problem is readily apparent—the fuse
e cord is in tatters, scarcely enough catgut left to link the mainspring and escapement much less preserve the tension necessary to govern the watch’s speed. Before removing the cord, I spend time digging through various boxes and drawers trying to find appropriate repair materials, mindful that replacing it with a length of wire would be simpler but may lower the piece’s resale value when I take the Complication overseas (though perhaps I’m granting American antiquarians higher powers of discernment than they in fact possess). In the end I settle on an old lute string. It’s not ideal, but the width and tension seem adequate.
But when trying to unhitch the old cord from the mainspring barrel, I find it too tightly attached. Forced to ignore Doctor Kačak’s absurd instructions, I remove the mainspring itself, which will stop the watch movement. I’m inspecting the fusee and gauging the width of its spiral grooves (I know, Klara, that the minutiae of watch repair would bore you to death were you not dead already, but I go into such detail only to demonstrate that I have done nothing out of the ordinary) when it occurs to me that something quite extraordinary is happening.
The escapement is still working.
The tiny drive train gears of the Complication are still spinning. For several moments I listen to the half-dissembled watch tick as I stare dumbly at the piece, searching its exposed machinery for some hidden drive mechanism. Perhaps the backward spinning of the secondary, reverse mainspring somehow also propels the forward workings through a hidden cross-beat escapement? But even with epicyclic gearing—well, I’ll cut to the quick.
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