Then an explosion of noise from above.
Someone is banging on the door.
Him, of course.
He’s come early, hoping to find me unprepared. I am clearly not to be trusted. And with a sinking feeling, I understand that hours or days later would still find me unprepared for what needs doing. Had I been truly intent on murdering the doctor, would I not have been scheming how best to accomplish the deed rather than losing myself in the long-forgotten saga of John Dee and Edward Kelley?
The man above cries out, calling my name perhaps, cursing me, but it reaches my ears only as a low moan, the words themselves carried away by the wind. I slump over my workbench, listening, waiting. I can’t bring myself to go upstairs. His smell, his yellow skin. I stare at the gears of the Rudolf Complication still turning against all physics. Maybe he’ll go away. Would it not be plausible that I might’ve had to leave my shop unattended in order to seek out supplies for the repair? The knocking continues for a few moments longer and then all is silent.
I can’t kill the doctor, yet can’t risk encountering him tomorrow at the train station. I could leave tonight, Franz and I steal away on any train headed anywhere. I could get word to Max somehow, meet him in Holland or in England before heading to America. This would be entirely feasible had I money, but even with Doctor Kačak’s generous advance, I lack funds for lodging and two continental train tickets, all of my other monies tied up in this shop that is to become my mausoleum.
Sometime later Doctor Kačak returns and kicks down the door with a single blow. I hear it crash to the floor above me with a great boom, and dust rains from the ceiling. I leap from my stool, swaddle the watch in its velvet cloth. His footfalls above thunder across the shop’s floor.
I slam shut the door adjacent the stairs just as he begins hurtling down them. Hands atremble, I manage to secure the lock before his mass crashes against the door like a cannon shot. Back I stumble, struggling to keep my feet beneath me. Again Doctor Kačak hurls his weight, the knob rattling, wood bulging and groaning. Two, perhaps three such assaults and the door will splinter and he will be upon me.
My eyes flit around the room, scanning for some forgotten window or miraculously appearing exit. Another crash at the door, the walls shiver, the air roils with dust. My eyes fall upon the old Spanish pistol dangling from the bent nail. I can hear Doctor Kačak, his breath coming in animal bursts.
Somewhere is a leather ammunition pouch with gunpowder and three lead shots. For one panicked moment its location escapes me, until I spot the battered metal footlocker stored beneath the workbench, one filled with Franz’s childhood playthings. I snatch the pistol from the wall and rush toward the footlocker. Metal hoops and whipping tops, jackstraws and Jacob’s ladders, I rummage through them all before finally discovering the pouch underneath a one-eyed Golliwog doll.
The room shudders with another assault on the door.
I pour the black powder into the muzzle. I drop one cloth-wrapped lead ball inside and remove the thin jamming rod from the underside of the barrel. Packing the shot is an easy matter, not so priming the flash pan. A puppet of Prince Bayaya stares up at me from inside the trunk, wooden grin knifed into his face. The pistol is loaded.
Another crash and a piece of the door splinters loose and clatters to the floor. Gripping the weapon I rise quickly. Too quickly. My legs go wobbly and objects start losing solidity. I reach out to steady myself and lurch through the dusty haze toward the door.
From the other side comes a series of low groans. I now stand directly in front of the stairs, some eight feet back from the door. Through the narrow three-inch slit where a splinter of wood had been dislodged, a flicker of movement. He is preparing another attack. I cock the hammer, take a deep breath, and level the pistol. From this distance there can be no missing.
A rush and the door bursts shattering open and I close my eyes and squeeze the trigger just as the man launches himself into the room. An explosion of sound and a thick black cloud fill the air. The gun’s recoil jams my arm up into my shoulder socket, and the man is lifted off the ground and looses a terrible cry. He lands in a heap at my feet and makes no further movement.
The air is heavy with the acrid smell of gunpowder. My ears are ringing, and when I look down and my eyes first land on the shiny little lion glinting through the haze, I think it must be a mistake. The Order of the White Lion. And next to it the Commemorative Cross, the Medal of the Revolution, the Žižka Medal, the Order of the Sokol, all showing in their dulled glory upon the moth-eaten army jacket. God’s Miracle is sprawled arms akimbo, eyes opened and fixed at a point beyond reach.
He is certainly with you now, Klara. Happy and whole again as you knew him. Now that my farewell letter is nearly complete, I shall be joining you both. In truth, this manner of resolution has occurred to me many times over the years, but I’ve always resisted. Nothing in this world now remains to keep me from your side.
I had hoped penning these words would allow me some better understanding of what has happened. But there is no understanding. I held Franz in my arms, just as I’d done when he was a child, until he was gone. As I first tried hopelessly to staunch the blood, I couldn’t help but notice that his keys were no longer around his neck. He’d lost them and then come knocking. When I didn’t answer, he panicked and broke the door down. Perhaps in his disjointed thoughts, he even believed me to be in danger, was coming to rescue his old man. Maybe one day he can tell us both how it happened. Maybe he’ll have no memory of it at all. If there is a world better than this one, he’ll have forgotten the last twenty odd years.
It is nearly 9 AM. Our nephew Max will be waiting at Wilson station. When Franz and I miss our appointment, perhaps he too shall come calling. I will leave this letter and the others upon the workbench so that he may find them. And Max, if you are reading this now, let me spare a few words to say you were right. Perhaps there was a part of me that yearned to lose everything. And perhaps having lost so much already, it was inevitable that this part would eventually win out. The battle raging within me has long ceased to be a fight among equals.
But maybe Max won’t come. Maybe after checking his watch one last time, cursing his obdurate uncle and shaking his head, he will reluctantly board the train to Holland and eventually make his way to America, never to return. I hope it is so.
Perhaps it will then be Doctor Kačak who finds me. As he has not yet returned to claim his cursed watch, I can’t help but think his travel plans must have changed. It’s unfathomable that he could now be standing on the platform at Wilson, readying to leave without the Complication. Though I feel he and his nefarious watch were in some shadowy way complicit in my downfall, I should spare a word to thank him for speeding my deliverance, for ending these decades of life suspended. I have become a fly trapped in amber, like those the street peddlers of old Josefstadt used to sell when I was a boy.
Having spent my last days removed from the outside world, it occurs to me too that perhaps The Little Mustache has already arrived. Perhaps our city is even now echoing with the cadence of heavy boots over the cobblestones, the saints on the Charles Bridge gazing down on a procession of German tanks crossing the river. Here then one less Jew for The Little Mustache to worry over.
My only hope is that my next shot from the old Spanish pistol may ring true as the last. If whosoever reads this is one faint of heart, look no further about this place but summon the authorities. Tell them to listen for the ticking of the Rudolf Complication. They will find me in the corner, my face filled with flies.
Ever yours,
Jan
PART THREE
CHAPTER 10
Time started up again in a hurry.
My eyes roamed a rippling underbelly of clouds, blinking against the rain. I could smell car exhaust and feel the pavement beneath my hands and hear the sound of car doors opening and closing. Turning my head, I saw my cell phone lying in pieces just beyond my reach. Prague Unbound wasn’t far from it, lyin
g open and facedown with granular bits of shatterproof glass rising embedded and glittering like jewels from its spine, its leather cover the unglossed gray of a dead fish. A large woman with a black umbrella was suddenly standing over me and saying words I couldn’t understand. She wore a pair of big rubber galoshes redder than anything I’d seen in my entire life.
I let her talk for awhile then pushed myself to a sitting position. She started shaking her head like crazy, speaking twice as fast and twice as loud. “Look at my boots!” she said. “Look how red my goddamn boots are!” Only she couldn’t have been saying that, was probably saying stay down, don’t move, an ambulance is on the way. My whole upper body hurt like hell, and my brain surged against the inside of my skull like rioters against a police barricade. I was soaking wet, the shoulders of my coat were shredded, and blood stained my shirtsleeves and cuffs. But I could feel my arms at least. I could feel my legs. No bones were sticking out anywhere. I swiveled my neck and winced, blinded by headlights only a few feet away. When I struggled to my feet the woman started backing away, her eyes pleading, blubbery lips moving a mile a minute, voice echoing and garbled like she was underwater. I touched my cheek and my hand came away bloody. Red the color of galoshes. There was a gash beneath my left ear. The woman wrestled a phone from her handbag, punched numbers with the bleached carrot end of her thumb, said something indistinct and shrill.
The ex-detective’s Skoda had jumped the curb and was bent around the wrecked bus stop shelter that prevented us from smashing into the side of the building. There was a gaping hole in the middle of his windshield where I’d been ejected. I’d bounced off the hood of the car and tumbled maybe another twelve feet across the rain-slicked pavement. Had we been going just a little bit faster, had I sailed just a bit further, my head would have been cratered against the wall a couple yards away. As it was, there was still little reason my skull should be intact.
Soros was alive too, still in the driver’s seat, though I couldn’t see anything but his arms pinwheeling on either side of the deployed airbag like he was being attacked by a giant marshmallow. A few beer cans had flown out the windshield and were strewn across the pavement.
I couldn’t recall much of how this had happened except that someone or something in the road had made Soros swerve, but now there was no sign of who or what it might have been. Traffic was stopped and a crowd had begun to gather on the other side of the street. I took a few halting steps toward the car. I retrieved Prague Unbound and my broken cell phone. Next to it was a yellow sticky note reading “Na bojišti 8 #414 Prague 2.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but something told me I should take that too. Then I heard sirens and hightailed it out of there.
By hightailed I mean staggered off in the opposite direction of the crowd.
The big woman on the cell phone barked in dolphin speak and even trailed me for half a block or so but then disappeared. The streets were making me dizzy, never mind trying to read signs with their clusters of unpronounceable consonants, their hooks and diacritics. I came across what looked to be a large park. I followed a dimly lit footpath along which empty spaces were dotted here and there with trees, the odd statue. Too many statues in this city, everywhere you looked the face of some dead someone staring back at you, giving you a look like haven’t we met somewhere before?
Five minutes or two hours later I stopped at a bench next to a misshapen tree. Nearly trunkless, grown out rather than up, as if some force were pressing it down. Nearby was a withered garden with a sign poking out of the ground whose English translation said No pets step on. I picked pieces of glass from the cover of Prague Unbound, tossed them in the grass. I closed my eyes, felt the world merry go round. Then I started throwing up. The Wenceslas Square sausage proved less delicious in reverse. I wiped my mouth with my wet jacket sleeve, and while I was at it tried to rub some of the blood from the side of my face. Then I kicked my feet up and stretched out on the bench. The tree looked like an inverted octopus. An albino octopus planted head first into the ground. I needed to gather my strength, figure out what to do next. Needed to stop worrying about what the tree looked like. Two, three minutes, I’d be back on my feet.
Later I woke to a full-scale mining operation inside my head. Tractors, drills, big union guys with jackhammers and picks and shovels tunneling through my gray matter. The rain had stopped. Some fifty feet away, five or six sketchy looking dudes were drinking from large cans of beer. Their cigarettes flared orange in the dark like fireflies in a slow, drunken waltz.
I noticed I was only wearing one shoe. The left one.
I wondered if the sketchy dudes had taken my other shoe, but what the hell would anyone want with one shoe? The state of my sock told me I’d lost the shoe in the accident. I promptly took off my other shoe. You see a guy with no shoes you think, well there’s an eccentric fellow. One shoe, the guy is just fucking crazy. I took my socks off too.
Then I fell asleep again.
When I woke the second time it was drizzling, and the sketchy park hobgoblins were long gone. There was a yellow sticky note in my pocket reading “Na bojišti 8 #414 Prague 2.” I stared at it a long time wondering what it meant. Then I remembered. Bob Hannah’s address. He’d said he had documents I needed to see. I needed to warn him that Detective Soros would be coming for him.
What I needed was to get back to the hotel. Take the mother of all hot showers, put on a bathrobe. Order room service, send my suit for intensive dry cleaning, and ask the concierge where I could get a decent pair of shoes and a CT scan. I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel, though. It was pink. Kinda orange. Orangey pink, like what’s it, that fish grizzly bears eat? It would be good to figure out where it was, make my way back to the general area. Karlín, that was the neighborhood I needed. My hotel was distinctive-looking enough I was confident I could recognize it.
No sooner had I thought as much than I noticed a hulking building at the end of the square painted the same vibrant salmon color. It wasn’t my hotel, but I made my way over to it anyway, feet slapping puddles on the footpath.
A copper plaque on the wall said Faustův Dům.
A landmark. I could at least find out where I was.
I had trouble consulting Prague Unbound—the pages kept fluttering about, forcing me at length to pin the damn book against ground to keep them still. When I did, this is what it said:
This baroque mansion in Charles Square was reputed to be the dwelling place of the legendary Doktor Faustus, a fourteenth-century scholar who famously sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge. There is said to remain to this day a hole burned in the roof through which the Devil whisked the doomed scholar off to Hell, though the hole was in reality not a Beelzebubian exit but the result of an alchemical experiment gone explosively awry. This experiment was not conducted by original owner and alchemist Prince Václav of Opava, nor latter occupant Ferdinand Antonin Mladota of Solopysky, nor astrologer Jakub Krucinek—whose younger son murdered his own brother over treasure hidden in the house—nor nineteenth century eccentric Karl Jaenig, who commissioned functional gallows to be built on the premises and slept in a wooden coffin and specified in his will that he be buried face down in order to see where it was he was going (as might you be, if we’re being frank here). Instead the hole was created by a certain Edward Kelley—forger, adulterer, duelist, occasional necromancer, mountebank, bad credit risk, accomplished bullshitter—but not, despite such obvious qualifications, a famous artist.
The best account of former occupant Edward Kelley’s unhappy time in Prague can be found in “The Woeful Saga of Kelley and Was-Kelley,” included in these pages for your edification.
The Faust House is currently closed to the general public. But they will gladly make an exception for you, you wascally wabbit.
Even by Prague Unbound’s standards, the passage baffled to the point that I couldn’t be sure how much was the actual text and how much attributable to my concussed head. I tried rereading it under the diffuse light o
f a streetlamp but the text wouldn’t sit still, words writhing across the page like halved worms. Colors appeared behind them, as if someone had indiscriminately highlighted passages in pink or green or yellow, and random words pulsed and flickered like a neon sign on the fritz. I’d look away, turning my eyes to the Faust House or the clouded moon, and when I looked back the text was normal again, at least for a few seconds, until the next wave of nausea started building.
And when last I glanced up at the Faust House, I couldn’t help notice a single lit window in its uppermost story. Silhouetted there was a lone figure, unmoving as he looked down on me below. Dark clothes, long hair, what must have been a beard. Just to show whoever it was I knew he was watching, I gave a little wave. The gesture was not returned. I waved again, this time with both hands over my head. Nothing. Suddenly angered that he would pretend he didn’t see me when it was so painfully obvious he was watching every move, I began jumping up and down and frantically pumping my arms. This is I did for some time before realizing how insane it might look to someone unaware of the man in the window. I managed to get a hold of myself, and as my fury slowly subsided, I had a strong desire to get as far away as I could from the Faust House, from the deserted square.
I looked up Na bojišti Street on the map at the back of the book. Bob Hannah’s apartment was just blocks away, and there were few people around to double take on my naked feet as I passed. The building was indistinguishable from any of the other Hausmann-style apartments lining the street, block-long, four-story units with entrances lit by dusky lamps modeled on old gas lanterns. Hannah’s name wasn’t listed on the directory by the battered metal buzzer, but I punched #414 and waited. In response came a sound like a robotic goose, and then the door clicked open. The elevator had an old-fashioned iron grillwork door, was roughly the size of a phone booth. The way it lurched and jolted on the way up made me picture a hunchback in the basement tugging on a frayed rope. I wondered if the cops would be waiting in Hannah’s apartment. If that’s how it ended, so be it. They’d be able to give me a new set of clothes at least. Some paper slippers, maybe a nice new straightjacket.
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