Complication

by Isaac Adamson

  BOB HANNAH.

  Speak of the devil.

  Soros was squinting at me through the mirror. He’d heard the phone. If I didn’t answer it, he’d just get even more suspicious. “Jackasses in marketing,” I stage muttered, making a show of staring daggers into the phone. “Leave for a couple days, fuck-sticks can’t find their dicks to piss with.” My words sounded nothing like me. Apparently Soros’s swearing was contagious. I clicked open the phone and put it to my ear.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Hannah said.

  “No bother, Jimmy.”

  “No, this is Bob. Bob Hannah. Is this a bad time?”

  “Having a great time. Good food, great people over here.”

  “I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t urgent.”

  “I’m in a car, Jimmy. Going into a tunnel.”

  “I can hear you fine. Can you hear me?”

  “Absolutely. With you one hundred percent. In a car.”

  He puzzled through it. “Whose car are you in?”

  “Yes, we covered that issue earlier.”

  Silence for a moment. “Are you with Soros?”

  “That’s the ticket, Jimbo.”

  “What are you doing with him?”

  “Just shoot me the text on over.”

  “Can he hear you?”

  Inside the tunnel it was eerily quiet without the rain pounding the cab roof, so quiet I worried Soros could make out every word Hannah said. There were disadvantages to everybody knowing English when you couldn’t speak a second language. Maybe my brother had been onto something with that Klingon idea.

  “Just shoot me the text,” I said.

  “I’ll make this quick,” replied Hannah, not taking my text message hint. “Our chat earlier had me curious. I talked to that journalist friend of mine, the one from Mladá fronta. Turns out our detective didn’t lose his job over your brother’s case. He was dismissed over something that happened when he was StB back in the day. Secret police.”

  “That’s an interesting development.”

  The tunnel lights turned Soros’s face a sallow green and revealed a network of broken capillaries pulsing and spreading across his face like some cruel time-lapse montage. I had to look away to concentrate on what Hannah was saying.

  “Yes and no,” said Hannah. “Lots of police came from the StB. Police, politicians, entertainers, priests—everyone had ties to the StB. Half the country was busy informing on the other half. But our detective was no mere informant nor StB thug. He was a ranking officer of the most feared institution in the country. Details on exactly what he did are murky, but something in his past spooked someone bad.”

  The ex-detective and former StB man kept his eyes on mine in the mirror. I was practically shoving the phone up my ear canal in hopes of muffling Hannah’s voice. If Soros had bothered to turn off the windshield wipers when we entered the tunnel he probably would’ve heard everything. As it was they screeched and whined against the glass, adding another layer of dissonance.

  “It gets worse,” Hannah continued. “Not only was Soros’s dismissal unrelated to your brother’s supposed murder—your brother hadn’t even gone missing when it happened. Soros left the police in 1999.”

  “This news is not good, Jim.”

  “It gets worse.”

  Bob Hannah then told me how ex-detective Soros hadn’t just sat around collecting his pension and obsessing about the Right Hand of God after leaving the force nearly a decade ago. Instead, he’d spent time working as a black sheriff. “Private security,” Hannah explained, “thugs protecting bigger thugs. His boss was a Slovakian gangster. Con man, pornographer, drug dealer, pimp, arsonist, kidnapper, murderer. A trafficker of women and stealer of identities. Then he vanished. Just like that. The ÚOOZ—they’re the national organized crime unit here, like the FBI—they don’t even have a photograph of the guy.”

  “This party have a name?”

  “Martinko Klingáč. A pseudonym. Means—”

  “Rumpelstiltskin.”

  Soros’s head jerked as if in recognition. We rocketed out of the tunnel and the rain came slamming down on all sides. Hannah said his journalist friend had dug up some documents I might be interested in seeing. He’d be home for the next couple hours if I wanted to come by and pick them up.

  As he started to give me his address, I should have found some way to warn the journalist that the StB-turned-police-turned-black-sheriff and I were at that very moment headed his way, and maybe he ought to leave in a hurry. I should have told him that if the Prague police hadn’t been in touch yet, they soon would be, because his business card had wound up in the pocket of a comatose art gallery curator.

  But I never got the chance.

  Soros had turned half around in his seat now, eyes glassy slits, mouth clamped in a shriveled hyphen, and I saw the shape ahead before he did.

  In the middle of the road, maybe sixty feet distant, a small figure in red.

  A little girl with a hackwork of stringy wet hair.

  I pointed and yelled, and Soros just kept glaring and the car just kept careening towards her. She must’ve been crossing the intersection against the light, but now she was just planted in the middle of our lane, frozen by the onrushing headlights, dress dripping wet and hair plastered over her face. She opened her mouth to scream and revealed an expanse of black.

  I reached over Soros shoulder and yanked the wheel hard left. The car lurched sideways, my shoulder slamming against the inside of the door, head connecting with the window a split second later with a dull crack before my body was sent sailing into the opposite door as Soros wrestled the wheel back from me.

  I didn’t know if we’d hit the girl or not. There was no time to wonder. We veered off the road, and I ducked and covered and heard splashing and screaming and brakes squealing and then felt a sudden weightlessness as I pitched forward. Then all sound disappeared. Time slowed. I was on a spacewalk, floating over the backseat as my shoulder dipped and my body rolled. Beer cans drifted slowly in the air around me. Prague Unbound came tumbling right past my head, the embossed gold lettering on its cover appearing to glow as it caught the light. Then my back slammed against the windshield and time stopped altogether.

  The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang–Part III

  March 14, 1938

  My Dearest Klara,

  The closer I get to saying goodbye, the more the moment seems to recede. A poet you admired (there were so many) once wrote that each second holds its own eternity, and maybe now I begin to understand his meaning. As I pen yet another farewell, time seems to move as if governed by the Rudolf Complication, backwards and forwards at once, resolution getting closer each moment yet remaining tantalizingly beyond reach. But this shall truly be the last farewell. Resolution is now at hand.

  There is much to say. I’m not sure I can make the events comprehensible to you when even to their very author they seem fantastic, a progression governed by murky, unprincipled logic, but in recounting what has befallen me, perhaps some order shall reveal itself. I am doubtful.

  We begin once more in my cellar. Having slept poorly after Max’s drunken visit, I awoke still resolved to abscond with the Rudolf Complication and throw myself and God’s Miracle at the mercy of America. My morning is spent trying in vain to discover what hidden mechanism has kept the watch in motion since I removed the fusee cord and mainspring.

  The watch seems to be ticking more slowly now, a hypothesis I test against my modest wristwatch. Precise measurements are impossible as the Rudolf Complication has no minute hand, but there can be no doubt that the piece is losing in excess of ten minutes an hour. By my calculations, it shall cease functioning sometime early this evening. But then it should not be ticking at all. Not with half itself removed.

  I’m no closer to discovering its secret, so on it ticks as I sit in my cellar, tinkering and worrying. I haven’t bothered to open the shop and would hazard its closure shall go unnoticed among our fine citizens. Business has been poor. Antiques remi
nd people of the past, and the only thing less popular than the past at present is the future. Children in gas masks, air raid shelters being dug in the parks, what kind of future can this be? For months people have been shuffling down the streets with stitched brows and wooden faces, thinking only of the war that’s coming, the war that’s over, the war that’s already lost.

  And yet my thoughts are of the future. Tomorrow we’ll be leaving on a 9 AM train to Holland. From the coastal town of Flushing, we will make our way to Harwich, England, and then board a freighter ship to New York. Max will no doubt see my capitulation as a great victory, proof of his superior ability to peer into the shadowy crystal ball of Europe’s future (I must bring the chessboard to ensure his sense of victory doesn’t last across the Atlantic).

  God’s Miracle and I shall wash up on the shores of America, a two-man huddled mass. I’ll need help, of course, to find a proper buyer for the Complication once we arrive, but I doubt it shall prove insurmountable. Even in these dark times, that country is said to compensate in wealth what it lacks in culture, and surely any self-respecting Vanderbilt or Carnegie or Rockefeller couldn’t turn down a one-of-a-kind, late sixteenth century timepiece once worn by the Holy Roman Emperor himself. A watch not only preserved in its original condition but, miraculously, in complete working order. One lucky windfall, and Franz and I will live off the profits until the end of our days. Maybe there will even be something to spare for our meddlesome nephew Max. My ship has taken a long time to right its course, but at last it seems to be sailing towards providence.

  Or so I believe until ten o’clock this morning, when my thoughts are bludgeoned into silence by a terrible racket above.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  Someone is knocking at the door of the shop, and it’s not the measured rapping of our drunken nephew. My guilty conscience knows who it is, who it has to be. Crack crack crack, the cane rattling the whole building. I throw on my coat and make my way up the groaning staircase, trying to will my craggy features into a mask of innocence and servility as I stroll across the shop and throw open the door.

  Doctor Kačak’s shadow blackens the doorframe, his narrow body like an upright coffin. The cold air carries him and his sickly odor inside, and he shambles past me, only beginning to speak once he has clip-clop hobbled into the center of the shop.

  “A change of plans” he announces. “I shall be travelling sooner than anticipated. I will be leaving the country by train at nine in the morning tomorrow.”

  The same time my own train will be leaving.

  But then there must be many trains leaving in many directions. If he’s fleeing the country, though, it will certainly be from the same Wilson station where Franz, Max, and I shall stage our departure. Scenes from a film unspool in my mind. The tophatted, silver maned doctor spotting our motley party on the platform, eyes set ablaze as he shoots an accusatory finger our way, THIEF!!! intertitled onscreen. The cheeks of a mustachioed policeman ballooning as he blows his whistle. Me cast as villain, my eyes darting in panic. NO ESCAPE!!! flash the intertitles. Franz grinning, dimly excited by the commotion as policemen rush through the crowd, truncheons raised overhead. Max as tragic hero suddenly realizing that he too will be implicated, that all his plans are in ruins. ALL MY PLANS—IN RUINS!

  “Nine in the morning?” I parrot weakly.

  “The repair must be complete by this evening.”

  “That may not be possible.”

  In a single electric movement, he bounds forward and swings his cane in wide arc. I try to avoid the strike but it is too late. My eyes slam shut and teeth gnash anticipating the blow. None comes. When I open my eyes, the polished golden bear handle shimmers inches from my skull. The hard, sunken eyes of Kačak gleam in the gray morning light.

  “Then you’ll just have to return my watch,” he calmly states, dropping his arm and rapping the cane against his false leg for punctuation. “Along with my money, minus a fair sum to compensate you for your time. I’m not an unreasonable man. I would, of course, greatly prefer it if the repair could be completed. If it’s a matter of money—well, of course it’s a matter of money. It always is with your sort.”

  “My sort, sir?”

  “You’re a Jew, are you not?”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

  “About Jews I’m never mistaken.” In swiftly linked movements he removes his stovepipe hat, reaches inside, and produces a thick envelope, which he summarily jams into the waistband of my trousers. His eyes are inches from mine, the malodorous scent of him at such close quarters so pungent I nearly gag. “These funds should speed your progress.”

  My tongue is a dead thing in my mouth.

  “I’ll return for the watch this evening,” he announces, replacing the hat with a flourish. “You have until 8 PM to complete your work. Don’t disappoint me.”

  Doctor Kačak turns on his heel and hobbles out the door. My eyes fall upon the fire poker, still sitting against the wall where I left it after last night’s encounter with Franz. I stare at it for a long time. Then I shove the doctor’s money uncounted inside a desk drawer.

  Franz has again spent the chilly, sunless afternoon outdoors. Before he left I told him I didn’t want him playing with that strange little girl I found in his company yesterday. She looks sickly and may be carrying any number of fearsome diseases. I worry over the fact that God’s Miracle wears his keys around his neck (he often manages to lose them nonetheless), and she has the desperate, larcenous face of one fully capable of duping him into handing over the keys in exchange for a bouquet of weeds or a dead mouse.

  Whether my warnings register in his divided mind is unknowable. Even if he understood, an hour later he’d be likely to forget my instructions entirely. Besides, the thieves could help themselves for all I cared. Aside from the Complication, some clothes, my pipe, the chessboard, and your photograph, all will be left behind. My own little Kunstkammer to be plundered by conquerors.

  Back in the cellar, my diligent work toward discovering what drives the watch movements is rewarded with equal portions zilch and nil. My nerves are frayed and concentration is difficult—there’s so much left to do. Packing our bags, settling my meager account at the bank, deciding how to kill Doctor Kačak. If only the man was leaving one day later, if only his train did not depart at the same hour as my own. For all I know he’ll be on the very same train, in the very same car. The risk is simply too great, and after Doctor Kačak’s show with the cane this morning, I fear a fire poker may be inadequate for the job at hand. Kačak is quick, even with his false leg. He’s surely stronger than I am, and something in his manner tells me he is no stranger to physical confrontation. Tells me he would perhaps relish it. I find it difficult to explain why he disturbs me so, whether it’s the bruised yellow pallor of his skin, the unyielding expression in his eyes, or even that faint but decidedly foul odor that calls to mind spoiled meat. Maybe its is none of the characteristics he possesses. Maybe it’s that essential part of him that seems lacking.

  The watch has meanwhile slowed to such a degree that it ticks only once every eight or ten seconds. Less out of any wish to adhere to Doctor Kačak’s demands than a desire to make sure my investment shall still be in working order when we arrive in America, I decide to give the winding key a turn.

  To my astonishment, the key won’t budge.

  I remove the key and re-insert it in the slot, but the mechanism holds firm, as if fused into place. At a loss, I examine the strange symbols etched in miniature on either side of the key. Perhaps they are not merely decorative but contain some kind of instructions? A warning maybe. “Caveat” on one side, “Furtificus” on the other?

  And so to the bookshelves I go, extracting any volumes that might conceivably contain information on Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic—the eldritch symbols could come from any number of languages living or dead. I tear through my library, scarce discarding one book before I’ve cracked opened another, painfully aware all the whi
le that such a rudderless expedition into this depthless swamp of quasi-scholarship is wasting precious minutes. The ticking of the watch has grown so irregular now that each time the sound startles me afresh.

  Two fruitless hours elapse before I stumble upon an annotated epic poem in a worm-eaten journal published in 1881 by the Department of the Occult Sciences and Speculative Arts at Prague’s own Royal and Imperial German Charles Ferdinand University. The poem is called “The Ballad of Edward Kelley,” its author the mad poet Otto Rentner—one of your favorites I believe, but then all your favorites were mad.

  I wait for the sound of another second passing.

  I allow myself to indulge in this poem concerning Irish lowlife Kelley who came to Prague centuries ago—his story is also an immigrant’s story, after all, one in which I may find a cautionary lesson—but I am chiefly concerned with a reference to the Enochian Keys, an alphabet reputedly transmitted to Kelley and Dee by an impish spirit called Madimi. This little sprite was said to be six thousand years old but took the form of a small girl when she appeared to them to help unlock the angelic language in use before the Fall of Adam. Herein might be a clue to the symbols on the winding key. My diligence pays off, for in appendix I find reproduced the entire known Enochian language. Pulse quickening, my fingers race through the pages and sure enough, the symbols I seek appear all but leaping from the page. I check them once more against the winding key to be absolutely certain. They match.

  One the one side of the key, TELOAH.

  Death.

  On the other, AZIEN.

  Hand.

  Death’s Hand? The Hand of Death? Fingers of Death? Death Fist? My body trembles with the thrill of discovery, but the fervor soon cools with the realization that this ancient bit of nonsense contributes precisely nothing to helping me unravel the twin mysteries now causing me a high degree of anxiety; the unfathomable ticking, the inoperable winding key.

  I soon find myself returned to the ballad, somehow certain that in their stanzas all shall be revealed. Looking at my watch, however, I discover there is no time to pursue it until its end. Doctor Kačak will soon be returning to reclaim the Rudolf Complication, which I realize with sudden alarm has not sounded for over an hour. As if conjured by the very thought, its emits another click, a dull note that rings on and on.