Complication

by Isaac Adamson

  Forty or fifty yards, we came to a hole like the entrance to some animal’s cave. Vera was through it before I even had a chance to warn her that we could be walking into a trap. But then she knew it was a trap. What else could it be in place like this? The only question was whether she was the bait or the quarry.

  Several dilapidated structures awaited us on the other side. Even in ruins the buildings were stately enough you could almost picture a nice summer pastoral with ladies cavorting about with parasols and flouncy dresses, lords in long-tailed coats and powdered wigs, cooks and coachmen and stable boys bustling about. Now the stone walls were stained and crumbling, the windows smashed out, the roofs a patchwork of chipped tiles and rotting wood. Plywood boards were nailed up over the doorways, except for those ripped away by squatters or bored teenagers. Searching all the buildings would take more time than we had. I nodded toward what appeared to be the main house, and after a moment’s hesitation Vera nodded back.

  We found a large, busted-out window in the back and climbed inside. Uneven shafts of light pierced the room from holes in the roof above, strewn trash was piled nearly two feet high in places, and the walls were layered in unreadable graffiti. Vera cursed and I spun to the sound. She was pressing a hand to her forehead. Her headscarf had been ripped off and was hanging stuck from a shard of splintered glass still clinging to the window frame. When she removed her hand it came away bloodied. She winced and nudged me forward with the same hand.

  At the far side of the room a short stairwell littered with chunks of dislodged stone descended into darkness. Darkness seeming less an absence of light than a palpable presence all its own, spilling formless in all directions, filling up the space. Vera took out her cell phone, flipped it opened. Feeble blue light penetrated a few feet, enough to keep us from smashing headlong into a wall, tripping over rubble, or falling into a hole if we moved slowly enough. If we moved carefully enough.

  And still I brushed against Soros before I saw him.

  Feeling his flesh, I jerked back and Vera shrieked. Soros said nothing, didn’t even blink or change expression. Nothing of him was visible except his face and the gray stocking cap on his head. His eyes were lusterless, his mouth turned in a frown. Vera moved the light lower.

  There was nothing else of Soros to see.

  And suddenly I understood why. The rest of him was in Bob Hannah’s apartment.

  Dressed, like me, in a suit not his own.

  Because Hannah was a palindrome, too.

  Vera moved the light quickly away, but the afterimage of Soros’s head remained in ghostly outlines I couldn’t blink away. Then a circle of white light exploded at the other end of the room. A flashlight beam froze us in place, its holder invisible in the gloom. Vera stood just behind me, shielding her eyes. A branching rivulet of blood ran from her scalp and down her cheek, catching the light like quicksilver. Filling the room was a sickly sweet odor so palpable it nearly made me choke.

  “You have it?” Hannah’s voice called out. He was speaking English but his accent had lost its reassuring news anchor timbre, its regionless Americana. His voice sounded deeper, vaguely Anglican and tense. Martinko Klingáč, Bob Hannah, I knew he was neither of these people, not really. Whatever name he chose he would always be the Right Hand of God.

  Vera gently rattled the shoebox.

  “Good. Bring it to me.”

  “Where is Tomáš?”

  The flashlight beam swung some fifteen feet to our left. Tomášek huddled against the wall, stripped to his underwear and blindfolded, knees pulled to his chest. His wrists were bound with a zip tie and there was an honest to goodness manacle around his ankle connected to a heavy chain bolted to the wall. Vera started shaking so hard I could feel the vibrations in the floor. She wanted to tell Tomáš that it was okay, that everything was going to be alright. She didn’t trust her voice to make anything sound alright. She addressed Hannah instead.

  “Let him go.”

  “The Complication first. Bring it to me. No, better still, let that man bring it to me. Let him do what should have been done five years ago.”

  Vera looked at me, her eyes a silent apology.

  Then she handed me the box.

  Despite refusing to look at it in the car, I’d been curious about what a $5 million watch would look like up close. And it struck me Paul must once have been curious, too. After the rain began falling, after he’d taken the flood as his sign, after he’d paddled unseen down the Čertovka canal, hoisted himself into the gallery, successfully located the target. Before he wrapped it in plastic or stuffed it in a waterproof sack there must have been a moment where he took time to gaze upon it. Allowed himself a measure of wonderment that some object built hundreds of years ago was about to become the instrument of his deliverance. Maybe he thought about returning to Chicago a millionaire with a beautiful Czech bride in tow, the prodigal son proving all the naysayers like his big brother wrong. There must have been a moment where he felt pretty damn good about himself, about the future now stretched out before him.

  But I would never see what Paul saw, never lay eyes on the object that prompted those feelings I imagined him experiencing five years ago. Vera stepped past me, emerging from my shadow, and leveled a gun in the direction of the flashlight across the room.

  “Your hair.” Hannah’s voice angry and frayed. “You have no—this is a trick!”

  The shot was deafening. My ears rang as it echoed off the walls enclosing us. Tomáš screamed and the man cried out, waves of sound overlapping, filling up the room. His flashlight bounced and rolled across the floor. I reached for Vera but she was already gone, had flipped closed her cell phone and was moving, invisible, until she picked up the flashlight and closed in, training its beam on Hannah. His pinprick eyes were focused and unblinking, his face onion yellow and stiff, a mask of itself. One of his legs was sticking out as he sat half-crouched against the wall, clutching his chest, blood running over his fingers.

  “Don’t kill me,” he intoned. “You don’t have to kill me.”

  “Do you have the key?”

  “You’re being used. You don’t know.”

  “The key! Do you have the key to unlock my son?”

  “I have it,” he moaned. “I have it.”

  He reached toward his leg, the one stretched out before him. Vera kept the light and the gun trained on Hannah as he slowly rolled up his pants, past his black shoes, past his socks, to reveal instead of skin a length of tapered wood, black and worn smooth with age. His hands trembled and fluttered over its surface as they rose to find a series of metallic fasteners at the knee. Then his hands stopped. Hannah looked up, eyes narrowed against the flashlight beam focused on him. At length his features slackened. His shoulders slumped and he closed his eyes. He drew a deep breath and slowly released it. That rancid meat smell filled my nostrils and my hand went to my mouth to hold back a gag.

  “I’m not giving you the key,” he said.

  “Give it to me now!”

  His eyes opened. “No. I think instead I’m going to kill you.”

  “Don’t you fucking move!” Vera’s voice ragged.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Hannah sighed. “You, him. The boy. That’s me. What I do.”

  “Your hands. Put up your hands!”

  “Hands!” He laughed, slowly shaking his head. “Hands?”

  Hannah grinned and kept grinning, gray teeth flashing as the circle of light fixed on his face strayed and quivered, Vera trembling so violently she couldn’t keep the flashlight still. Then all at once Hannah stopped grinning. His teeth snapped together and his face pinched tight, veins bulging at his temples as he surged forward, going for his wooden leg. Vera yelled for him to stop, but there was no stopping him. He yanked off the false leg. As his hands fumbled for something within I knew what would happen next, was already lurching toward her as if I could somehow reverse time, take it all back, make it all stop.

  But time kept moving, and time moves in only one
direction.

  She fired three rounds, one after the next.

  Three flashes of white, the room exploding in sound. Gunshots reverberating, echoing, and finally receding until all that was left was the smell of cordite and rot. And moments later the sound of rain arriving, rain coming down all at once, rain like a child’s tantrum too full of its own fury to last.

  “Look in the box,” she said. “Take a good long look.”

  I picked up the flashlight from the floor. Then I did as she instructed.

  Inside the box was nothing but a mirror.

  CHAPTER 16

  First thing I’d done when I got back to Chicago was purchase a new pair of shoes. Bought them right in O’Hare, along with a pair of shorts and a golf shirt. I changed into them inside a bathroom in Terminal 5, leaving behind a T-shirt, sweater, and corduroy pants that belonged to Vera’s father. My dad’s suit had been so thoroughly destroyed Vera didn’t think it was a good idea to wear it to the American consulate in Prague in order to get an emergency replacement passport. According to the sob story she’d hastily concocted, I wasn’t supposed to look like I’d been living in the Hlavní nádraží train depot after all, just like I’d been jumped outside it. The park near the city’s main railway station was known as “Sherwood Forest” for the merry bands of homeless people, junkies, and muggers who inhabited it. Not the most dangerous place in Prague, but one of the dicier ones a tourist could conceivably stumble onto. Listening to Vera concoct the narrative, adding and subtracting details, measuring its plausibility until perfectly calibrated, I realized I was out of my league. Lying came as naturally to her as graft did to my hometown politicians. She was an expert deceiver, and I was going to have to accept that I’d never be certain how much of the truth she was telling. About Paul, about Martinko Klingáč, about her role in stealing the Rudolf Complication. About her certainty the man in the Cibulka Manor cellar was going for a gun when she shot him (he’d wanted her to think that—but there was no gun in the hollowed out compartment of his prosthetic leg, only the key to unlock Tomáš). About her rare cancer she didn’t know the English name for. I could tell she was relieved to drop me off at the consulate, to be rid of me. After what we’d been through together, I couldn’t blame her.

  The extra two days I’d spent waiting at the Hotel Dalibor for the consulate to clear me to leave without a passport or ID were the worst of all. I couldn’t contact Vera; my cell phone was busted. I was afraid of what might be on TV or in the newspaper and was sure any moment there would be a knock on the door and I’d peer out to see police fisheyed in the peephole. Not a historically uncommon experience in Prague, a city I’ve since developed a misshapen fondness for, despite everything that happened.

  In the weeks that followed, my plunge into the Čertovka canal was the memory that came to me most often, visiting me in the long, empty afternoons in the weeks after my return. In dreams I’d dive into the canal and find myself immersed in complete darkness. In these dreams I’d propel myself toward a bottom I could never reach, and over and over the pressure would build in my lungs, panic would set in, and I’d race back to the surface. Galleria Čertovka curator Gustav played no part in these dreams. I was looking for something in that water though, groping blindly, sure it was within reach if I just held my breath just a little longer. I never could.

  And the dreams made me think of my brother Paul out on that canal, made me wonder what it must have been like the night he stole the Rudolf Complication, and where the thing finally ended up. If Klingac didn’t have it and neither did Vera—and I was sure she didn’t, sure she wouldn’t risk her child’s life just to keep it—then Paul was the only member of the conspiracy left. Had he hidden it somewhere? As I thought about it a scenario entered my mind with such sudden clarity it felt like the answer had been there waiting all along.

  Paul paddling a canoe through the submerged streets of Malá Strana, maneuvering onto the Čertovka canal. Breaking the third-story window of the building housing the gallery, hoisting himself inside. Finding the Rudolf Complication right where Vera said it would be. Slipping it inside a plastic bag, lowering himself out the window, back into his canoe.

  And then, just as his feet hit the canoe, the boat moving beneath him, shifting and rocking unbalanced upon the water. Paul widening his stance to stop the boat swaying, his hands shooting out to restore his equilibrium. Paul losing his concentration, loosening his grip for just a split second. The bag sailing from his hand. The Rudolf Complication hitting the water and sinking almost without a sound, gone before he even realizes he’s no longer holding it. Maybe he even flashes back to that fish he’d dropped on our trip to Wisconsin all those years ago, the summer mom left.

  An instant later, boat no longer in danger of toppling, he realizes what has happened. He doesn’t need to think about the implications. Maybe he dives after it, groping through the inky blackness just as I’d done while trying to find the curator. Just as I still did in my dreams. Or maybe he just slumps down and sits in the canoe and as it undulates upon the water. He tries to keep the panic at bay. He chews his fist and wonders what to do next.

  And instead of deciding to hide out, or trying to flee the city, alone or with Vera, he decides he’s just going to have to meet up with Martinko Klingáč that night as planned. Rendezvous somewhere on the riverbank. He decides there is nothing to do but man up, face the music. But of course Klingáč doesn’t believe his story—who would? Maybe Klingáč had planned to kill him all along once he delivered the piece. This just makes it easier.

  Except now Klingáč can’t kill him straightaway. Not until he finds out who helped Paul steal the piece, fed him information about the gallery, worked the supposed double-cross. But Paul isn’t talking. Maybe Klingáč has accomplices, goons who tie Paul up, toss him in the trunk of a car, are forced by all the washed-out roads to take a winding route to a safe house in Karlín. Once there, in an otherwise evacuated house on Křižíkova, still tied up, Paul is beaten. He is tortured. But still he won’t talk except to repeat that he screwed up, that he accidentally dropped the watch in the canal, that it was a mishap no amount of violence would undo. He sticks to his story even as Klingáč breaks Paul’s ribs and breaks his nose and threatens to cut off his right hand. And when Klingáč starts to make good on this threat in a scene my imagination shirks from detailing, Klingáč knows it’s a lost cause. He leaves the hand intact. Paul is dragged onto the balcony overlooking a courtyard. Floodwaters have turned it into a wide pool some four to six feet deep.

  Paul is barely conscious as they heave him over the edge. He splashes down into the water below, the sensation bringing him part way to his senses. For awhile he struggles to stay afloat, thinking there must still be a way out. But his ribs are broken, blood is pulsing out his mouth and the large gash in his wrist. His eyes are swollen shut, his nose broken. He can barely breathe. There is no way out. Paul understands this, accepts it. They didn’t get Vera’s name. They didn’t get anything. Vera is smart, and if she is careful, she’ll be safe. He stops struggling and takes one last breath and then slowly expels the air from his lungs, his body stretching limp across the water. Paul washes out of the courtyard, joining the swelling river, and then all that’s left is the wavering reflection of the moon.

  Grimley & Dunballer Recovery Solutions had no choice but to let me go. First a week, then ten days, then two weeks passed without me bothering to respond to the increasingly concerned messages they’d left on my voicemail. It was inconsiderate, even cowardly of me not to let them know what was going on, but my reason for leaving wasn’t something I could easily explain, nothing that would have its own little checkbox on an exit interview form. My dad had left me a little money, enough to live on for a couple years if I was careful. I moved into his house with the idea of staying there until I knew what to do next with my life. It was like graduating college, minus any sense of ambition or optimism.

  I spent lots of time looking through that box of old photos I’d f
ound, all the ones my father had kept of him and Paul. And after awhile I started wearing the Tag Heuer watch my dad had left behind, the same kind Steve McQueen used to wear. At night when I couldn’t sleep, I sometimes found myself searching Czech news sites. I discovered a short article written in Czech about the Galleria Čertovka that I cut-and-pasted into an online translator to render into English. The resulting text was choppy, but the gist was there had been an assault at an art gallery in Malá Strana in which the gallery owner had been pushed out a third-story window. He’d managed to “shun his attacker” by hiding himself under a wheelbarrow propped at the back of the house. Meaning he’d been cowering unseen just a few feet away while I threw myself into the canal. He’d broken his arm and had received numerous stitches in his head, but had otherwise suffered only a concussion and was discharged from the hospital after one day’s observation. “The police have suspected this is not the time,” concluded the article, which after much puzzling I took to mean the police had no suspects at present. Detective Soros had either been lying about Gustav being in coma in order to scare me into talking, or it was a simple misinterpretation of the word “concussion.” I chose to believe the latter.

  There were a fair number of posts related to the detective, though it took lots of clicking through “see related” links to piece it all together. First a decapitated body found in an apartment near Charles Square. Then the body identified as former homicide detective Zdenek Soros, who’d retired from the department in 2002 after suffering a debilitating leg wound in the line of duty. Nothing about him being former StB, nothing about him being a hired thug for some shadowy Eastern European gangster. But then, I reminded myself, all the scary bad stuff I’d heard about Soros had come from a single source—Bob Hannah, the man who killed him. From all other accounts, Zdenek Soros appeared to be exactly who he’d said he was. One story quoted his estranged wife, a woman named Dominika, who said he had battled alcoholism since leaving the police. She begged anyone with information about his murder to come forward. The story ended, as all stories related to Soros did, with a reassurance that police were investigating all possible leads. I didn’t need a computerized translator to know that the statement meant they didn’t have any.