I ended up going all the way across the river to Můstek station, then back across it to Hradčanská, onto tram 18, off at Ořechovka, and through the wide pristine streets and to Lomená, just like I had when following Vera. The sky was a faultless blue immensity, and the neighborhood looked even more pleasant by the light of the morning sun. Dignified without being imposing, the kind of retiring, unassuming place where you could imagine yourself leading the uncomplicated life of someone in a home furnishings catalog.
I strolled right up the bricked walkway, past a neat lawn polished by last night’s rain, and into the cool shade of the trees flanking the front door. I rang the bell and stood around inhaling the scent of pine needles. A few moments later the door opened to reveal not Vera but an older version of her, a quizzical woman with gray hair in an unruly pile atop her head. She audibly gasped, one hand reaching for her chest, her mouth contracting in a withered pucker. She was looking at Tomášek’s father. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind.
I asked if Vera was around. She fishmouthed a moment longer and then yelled something over her shoulder. Deep in the recesses of the house someone yelled back. Mrs. Svobodova hollered again, louder and with a lot more words, and moments later a small old man in thick glasses tottered around the corner. He was wearing a gray sweater and a permanently harried look. As Vera’s mom gave him an earful, he looked me up and down and didn’t seem to reach any conclusions one way or another. When she finished he addressed me.
“What can I help?” he said in a leaden accent.
“Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Vera.”
“Vera is not here.”
“Do you know where I might find her?”
Before he could answer, his wife unleashed a barrage of verbiage, each volley prompting him to sigh or shrug or issue terse rebuttals that did nothing to slow her attack. They carried on like this for what seemed an eternity, neither so much as glancing at each other, both keeping their eyes focused on the unshaven object of debate. Then all at once they were taking turns saying the same phrase, and I realized it was directed at me.
“ Ona je v parku Stromovka,” mumbled the man.
“Stromovka sady,” she repeated.
“Stromovka park,” the man clarified. “Do you know where is this place?”
“I’ll find it,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
I walked back down the pathway and they resumed arguing behind me. Eventually one of them shut the door, but I’m sure that didn’t end the discussion. I didn’t know if Mrs. Svobodova wanted to pummel little Tomášek’s father for leaving him and Vera to their own devices for five years or whether she was flustered with excitement because meeting him meant maybe there was a chance he had returned for good. Maybe he even had a certified check for a half a decade’s worth of child support payments. Vera said she never spoke about Paul, and her parents must have wondered all these years who’d fathered the kid. Too bad I didn’t speak Czech, or we could have had tea and coffee and compared notes on all the things about Vera and Paul we didn’t know.
Thirty-five minutes later I reached the dense green stillness of Stromovka, an expanse sloping upwards into the distance as if here, exactly here, was where the city ended and beyond lay untrammeled wilderness. The illusion was quickly dissipated as I entered and saw couples holding hands along the rain-softened gravel footpath, people out walking their dogs, mothers pushing baby strollers, and all those other things civilized people do on a normal Sunday morning, but it was still jarring after the time I’d spent in the old parts of an old city whose every inch was layered in old stone.
After a few minutes wandering I was getting some idea of the immensity of the place. It would take hours just to walk its perimeter, not to mention all the grounds inside. I took out my map and sure enough, Stromovka covered more territory than all of Old Town. The chances of randomly stumbling upon Vera and Tomášek were about the same as my chances of finding the Rudolf Complication hung suddenly ticking about my neck. I’d hoped the map might give me a hint as to what the park’s attractions might be other than birch tree groves and slopes of patchwork grass, but all it showed was what looked to be a pond at the park’s center. A yellow square on Soros’s map showed that it wasn’t far from where one of the Right Hand of God bodies was found in 1990, if Hannah’s reading of the document had been correct. And as I looked at that yellow square, all at once those crisscrossing lines made sense. Soros hadn’t found some bizarre pattern, though he was looking for one. By penciling directional arrows on the lines he’d drawn, I now saw they were connecting the body sites chronologically, starting with 1988 and finishing at 2006.
On and on the lines went, slicing across the city to connect the victims in chronological order. If these markings actually corresponded to real-life crimes—and Bob Hannah seemed to think at least some of them did—then what had Soros been hoping to gain by showing this to Bob Hannah? If he’d been under the employ of Martinko Klingáč, then why had he approached Hannah after the Right Hand of God article? He’d been interested in me and Vera because of Paul and the Rudolf Complication. But where did Hannah fit in?
I put away the map and tried to put these questions out of mind. With no idea where in the park to look for Vera, I ended up just following some lady pushing a two-year-old in a baby stroller and yapping on her phone some thirty yards ahead of me. She had a kid; maybe she was going somewhere kids go. I don’t know where she and her little tyke ended up because after five minutes I spotted Vera and Tomášek in the distance adjacent one of the footpaths. Lee was climbing some orb-shaped and spiny piece of old playground equipment that looked like a Sputnik satellite. Vera was sitting on a bench not far away, her back to me as she unscrewed the cap of a thermos. She was wearing a purple scarf tied tight around her head, buccaneer rather than babushka style, no wig beneath.
She never saw me approach. I sat down beside her, watched the steam rise from her thermos. Tomášek had climbed the ladder and was inside the orb, peering out from the oval-shaped opening. On the other side of the orb, a rickety plastic slide descended to a muddy landing pit filled with several inches of standing water. We were sitting next to an empty swing set, and behind us was a merry-go-round painted fire engine red.
“Where’s the folder?” I said.
Vera jumped. Coffee spilled onto her sleeve.
She didn’t look at me. “Gone.”
“What do you mean gone? Gone where?”
“In the pond.” She screwed the lid back onto her thermos. Tomášek was sticking his foot out of the hole now, wiggling around a yellow rubber galosh. Vera took a tissue from her pocket, dabbed the spilled coffee on her sleeve. There was another kid inside the Sputnik too, one sticking a red sleeved, pale hand through the same opening. The sound of Tomášek giggling reverberated inside the orb.
“You threw the folder in a pond. Here in the park?”
“That’s right.”
I flashed to an image of papers floating across its surface. Me diving in, gathering what I could salvage. But after my dip in the Čertovka canal, I’d had enough swimming for one trip.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you wouldn’t.”
“Especially not with my passport and wallet inside.”
She shrugged. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Did you even look inside before you tossed it?”
She looked away and didn’t answer. I barely had enough energy left to heave a proper sigh much less get worked up into a righteous fury. Itchy thoughts about Vera’s latest action all but proving there had been something in the folder to implicate her I left unscratched, lest my whole brain get inflamed. What was done was done. I just wanted to get out, go home. Which would now mean a trip to the American consulate, wherever that was. Concocting a story about my lost passport and wallet. Copious amounts of alcohol, a band of pickpockets, a transexual prostitute skilled in martial arts. Whatever lie I told them was bound to be more feasible than the truth.
“We used to come here,” Vera said. “Paul and me. Not to the playground, but Stromovka. In the summer we would bring some beer and just lay around on a blanket drinking and talking. Or not talking. Doze off under the sun, wake up beneath the moon. You can still see stars at night in Stromovka. I remember one afternoon, Paul, he took off his shoes and when he woke up he could only find one. We searched everywhere in the dark but the other shoe was gone, vanished. He had to walk home without it.” She smiled a little. “You went to my parents’ house? This is how you found me?”
The little girl in red darted out from behind a tree and Tomášek followed in squealing pursuit, but he didn’t have a chance. She leaped into a fenced-off flowerbed, leading Tomášek right into the thick of it, both of them trampling rows of daisies. Vera yelled and her kid froze guiltily in place, then gave her a smile that asked how much trouble he was in and how much the smile could get him out of. Next to the flowerbed sat the same sign I’d seen last night in Charles Square. No pets step on.
The message read the same backwards and forwards. A palindrome, of all the useless things to notice.
“Vera, I need to ask you a question.”
“Aren’t you tired of questions?”
“Listen, I know you’re sick.”
Her eyes met mine, slid away. “That’s not a question.”
On the path next to us, a pair of guys came by on mountain bikes, and Vera waited until the sound of their tires crunching over the gravel had passed. “Cancer,” she said. “I’m sick with cancer. I don’t know the English for what kind. Tumor on the brain. Very special, very rare. My last treatment was four months ago. The results were not what was hoped. Soon I start another. If this one doesn’t work, well, that’s that. Not many people survive. But then almost everyone who has this cancer is very old. Or they have HIV.” She slowly unscrewed the lid of her thermos, watching for my reaction before showing me a wan smile. “Don’t worry, I’m very special. Very rare. I don’t have HIV or anything else you can catch. You’re safe. At least from me.”
The coffee had gone cold now, giving off no steam as she raised it to her lips. I didn’t know what to say.
“Assuming the treatment goes well . . . ” I started.
“The cancer leaves and I get better,” she finished. “Otherwise, I have a few months left. With luck maybe longer. But it will be months, they say. Not years.”
So there it was, the reason for her letter and its timing. She was dying and wanted to unburden her conscience about the watch heist. About her role in Paul’s death. She didn’t want to involve the police because, well, who wanted to spend the last months of their life dealing with cops and lawyers? More importantly, she wanted my father to know about what Paul had left behind when he disappeared. She wanted him to know about Tomášek. She wanted him to meet his grandson.
“Vera,” I said, my voice just audible over the whispering trees, “why didn’t you tell me about Tomáš that first night at the Black Rabbit? Or in the letter you sent. It would’ve saved us both a lot of trouble.”
“Second thoughts,” she said with a tired shrug. “Always so many second thoughts. And third thoughts. For years I wanted to tell your family. Always waiting for the right time. But there is no right time. Only the time we have. Does this make sense?”
It made sense. Not perfect sense, not even good sense. Just the kind of sense left to people like Vera and me. The kind of sense that remains when someone up and disappears. The kind of sense I could live with as long as I didn’t have to try to explain it to anybody else. And who else was left?
“When does your next treatment start?”
“Day after tomorrow. Tuesday it all begins again.”
In her letter she’d pledged to be at the Black Rabbit every day for two months. The time between her treatments, the only functional time that remained to her.
“You must be scared,” I said.
“Yes, I must be.”
I could think of nothing else to say.
Two figures on a bench under blue skies and the shade of old trees. I reached out a hand, put it on top of hers. She let it stay there. After a few moments she intertwined her fingers in mine. She turned away, and I couldn’t see her face. I don’t know if she cried. I don’t know how long we sat there like that, unmoving and unspeaking, eyes elsewhere, hands clasped in her lap. There is a kind of time you can’t measure. A kind you don’t need to. Wouldn’t want to.
And then the little girl was standing in front of us, the merest hint of a grin on her face as she shuffled from one foot to the next.
“Tik-tak,” said the girl.
Vera dropped my hand and looked up.
“Tik-tak,” the girl intoned, louder this time.
All at once Vera’s jaw slackened, her eyes scanning the perimeter as she shot to her feet.
“Tomáš?” she called weakly. “Tomáš?”
I knew I’d seen the girl before when she smiled to reveal a toothless black maw.
The Woeful Saga of Kelley and Was-Kelley (cont’d)
Was-Kelley follows the crimson-clad, rot-mouthed Madimi across the tavern and down the worn stones leading to the cellar. He removes a torch from the cellar in order to see better only to find she has vanished. At the rear of the room, past the casks of wine, is a door with a bolt held in place by a large padlock. Was-Kelley hobbles over, finds the lock undone, and stumbles into a passage not twelve hands high, no wider than a confessional, and utterly without light. After a quarter of an hour of hobbling his legs fail, and he commences to crawling. He holds the torch aloft in his right hand, giving him only one arm and half a leg to propel him forward. The tunnel twists and turns, rises and suddenly falls. Another quarter of an hour passes, and the torch is extinguished for lack of air. Was-Kelley can hear the scuttling of rats moving over the floor. He can smell their damp fur as they brush against his face. As the rodents grow more brazen, he registers their claws digging into his arms, feels their teeth piercing the flesh of his face as inch by inch he pulls himself through an enormity of darkness. And when the passage grows too constricted to allow him even this meager movement, he feels the rats writhing beneath him in mass, bearing him from head to toe upon their hundred backs, conveying him towards a flickering light some ways distant. Closer he sees it is candlelight spilling from a crack beneath an iron door. The passage widens and the rats take their leave. He has reached the end of the passage. He clamors upright and leans upon the damp wall and listens but hears nothing, not the beating of his own heart nor the wheezy bellows of his lungs, for since his resurrection the blood has been motionless in his veins.
Was-Kelley raps three times upon the door and waits.
With a great moaning the door opens, and before him is silhouetted a bent figure black robed and white of beard. As Was-Kelley’s eyes narrow against the light he sees a second figure in the room, a young man no more than twenty reclining upon a table, his naked flesh glistening and wet. One arm dangles over the edge of the table, and drops of water roll off his pale fingers.
You took your time, the white-bearded figure says. Only upon hearing the voice does Was-Kelley recognize him to be Jacob Eliezer, the Black Rabbi. The years have not been kind. His flesh has grown papery and spotted, his dark eyes further receded into his skull. His eyes are milky and unfocused.
Welcome to the Fifth Quarter, says the Black Rabbi.
The Black Rabbi helps Was-Kelley to stand. You are in the Chevra Kadisha adjoining the Jewish cemetery, he tells him. Here we cleanse the body before burial according to the laws of Halacha. Here is a sacred place. Here I sit nights as the shomrim, guarding against any who should endeavor to pilfer our fine and healthy corpse
s. A fit job for a blind man! I trust you have no designs upon them?
The rabbi laughs and Was-Kelley perceives three shapes laid upon another table at the far side of the room, bodies draped in sheets of white. A trunk in the corner is filled with bolts of fabric and a set of heavy iron shears for cutting. The room smells of soap and tallow and putrefaction. The Black Rabbi moves past Was-Kelly and closes the heavy iron door behind him. From inside the room the door is concealed, its surface overlaid with false brickwork. The mystery of the Black Rabbi’s comings and goings from the walled Jewish ghetto years ago when he would secretly meet Edward Kelley to discuss gematria was a mystery no longer.
Forgive the foul stench, says the Black Rabbi, moving with all the speed of a wounded goose to a corner where sits the large trunk heaped with fabric. You never grow accustomed to it, but some nights are worse than others. These fellows must be especially ripe. After rummaging through the trunk’s contents, the rabbi emerges with a parcel draped in a familiar swath of black.
Was-Kelley unwraps the parcel given him by the Black Rabbi and finds the Complication remains as it was the day he delivered it to his melancholy Emperor, unscathed, preserved in all its gilded glory, complete save the winding key. Was-Kelley gazes upon it for several moments then drapes the watch about his own neck and tucks the instrument safely beneath his mud-encrusted cloak. It warms his cold flesh as if alive.
Procuring the piece was no easy task, says the Black Rabbi, his thick white eyebrows drawn together like clouds pushed by opposing winds. He produces from his robe a scrap of paper with listed figures and dates, but before he can present the bill to the resurrected suicide, Was-Kelley has withdrawn his means of payment.
With a single thrust to the Rabbi’s throat he buries the gypsy dagger to its hilt. The Rabbi stumbles back and stammers in a garbled tongue as blood issues forth in a fountain of sputtering arcs. As his beard goes from white to crimson, the rabbi tries to steady himself on the table’s edge but upsets its balance and dislodges the body thereupon. The corpse topples to the floor and the rabbi is not long in joining it. Supine, their splayed bodies offer a study in contrasts. Still one young, naked, and clean. Old one clothed, besmirched in gore, and twitching as the life pulses out of him.
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