On Fire

by Thomas Anderson

An hour before dawn, Bog, wrapped in blankets, is laid out cold on a black vinyl sectional, a glass coffee table pushed aside, in the living room of his friend’s Stare Mesto apartment in Prague. The television flickers away, its shadowy changes in luminosity playing over his unmoving figure, alternately brightening the room and plunging it into darkness, while emitting a muted, garbled sound, lulling and indecipherable.

  Around a corner and at the end of the room are a set of sliding glass doors to the apartment’s balcony. Bog forgot to turn off the patio light, which has proven fortuitous for the three burly men in black gloves and dark, close fitting attire that now stand outside those doors. They have managed to climb down from the balcony above, which was part of an empty apartment. The patio light aides the one playing with the locking mechanism on the door. He operates for several minutes before finally defeating the lock.

  The man opens the door with a light whoosh of air and the three quickly gain entrance. They move silently and descend on Bog with quick moves. One tapes his mouth. Before he can really awaken, they have pushed him onto his back, where another wastes no time zip tying him. Bog starts making guttural noises and kicking his feet before they too are zip tied.

  Of course Bog’s struggle makes plenty of noise and then there is the rush of cold air from the open balcony doors. This wakens Viktor, Bog’s erstwhile friend, who now calls out from his bedroom. One of the three men positions himself by the bedroom door. When Viktor steps out a moment later, he is clocked with unmistakable ferocity and falls like a heavy sack to the floor. Bog keeps struggling, but there really isn’t a whole lot he can do.

  Bog considers himself lucky to have missed the treatment just handed out to Viktor, when suddenly he feels a fist planted entirely too forcefully to his kidney, a blow that hammers the pain centers of his brain like the force of a concussion, and he nearly faints. Leastwise, he stops moving, which was probably his attacker’s objective all along. His lack of movement is a development greeted with satisfaction by all around and the men begin to talk in low voices as to what is to happen next. After a short bit of this, they turn their attentions again to Bog. They turn him over and sit him up on the black vinyl sofa. At least they try to sit him up. For a man tied in the fashion that he is, it’s awkwardly and sideways.

  Up to now all three men have been wearing baklavas, but now one steps back, seats himself on the coffee table, and pulls his off.

  “Hi. Bogdan? My name is Christopher Gray. I suspect you may have heard of me.”

  Bog doesn’t move. He doesn’t even blink an eye. But it’s still clear that he knows who Christopher Gray is.

  Gray would like to think that this is a sign, a sign that he has frozen the graduate student in fear. But he doesn’t really believe that. Instead, he sighs, heavily.

  “We’re going to get going now and we appreciate your cooperation. We’re going to remove your leg constraints to facilitate your transfer, but if that becomes a problem you will be dealt with very harshly. You know what I mean.”

  Gray nods to the others and in an instant the tie on Bog’s legs is cut, allowing him to plant his feet on the floor. They toss him a t, jeans, sneakers and a jacket, removing the zip tie holding his hands behind him so he can put them on. After he has done so, they zip tie his hands again, but this time in front of him, placing a sweater over them. Bog is grabbed, forced to his feet, and walked to the door. Again, Gray addresses him.

  “I’m going to remove the tape. If this becomes an issue, you know what will happen.”

  Bog does nothing but cooperate as they move through the building, down the fire stairs, and to the front door. The front door is glass and Bog can see yet another man standing in the light of the awning on the sidewalk, next to a large SUV. Upon seeing them the SUV man moves to open the rear door of the vehicle.The grasp of the men on either side of Bog tightens and they rush him out, very aware that if a subject is ever going to try and bolt, this is when it’s going to be the most obvious time for it to happen.

  As Bog notices one of the City’s trams coming down the street, he forcefully raises his tied hands, breaking the grip of the man to the right, striking him in the face. He wheels and does the same as fast as he can to the man to his left. Bog is off before they can react, rounding the vehicle. It is an older tram, one of a wide collection that the City routinely operates, and in an instant, Bog is on one of its rear steps. The man nearest the SUV has his gun out and leveled when Todd Harris steps over and pull’s his arm down, shaking his head.

  The tram driver activates the door after a block and Bog climbs into the white over orange colored tram. It’s half empty because it’s so early in the morning, and he has no trouble finding a seat. In front of him is a young man wearing a heavy grey shirt with epaulets. On the back of the shirt in large black, stenciled letters are the words Property of Alcatraz Prison. Bog is unsure of their significance, but if this guy has a sense of humor, maybe that’s exactly what he needs right now.

  “Excuse me?” Bog says, touching the man on the shoulder over the back of the seat.

  “Yes?” the young guy says, turning his head. If anything, he appears even younger than Bog, especially because of his longish brown hair. Bog hopes his shirt may be a sign of anti-authoritarianism, possibly helpful under the circumstances.

  Bog raises his hands, tied as they are, together.

  “I have a bit of a problem.”

  The dude smiles. This is, Bog thinks, an even better sign.

  “I have a girlfriend into BDSM. What can I say?” Bog tells him sheepishly. Bog doesn’t think his English really registers with the Czech.

  “Can you help me out?”

  In an absolutely amazing moment, certain to be ingrained in Bog’s memory forever, the young man smiles, a small pocket knife appearing in his hand. Bog wastes no time offering his hands with the zip tie, and just as magically the tie is gone and Bog is left profusely thanking his benefactor. Bog offers him money, but instead the dude grins and shakes his head, refusing to take it.

  The tram turns at the corner, enabling Bog to catch a glimpse of the Old Town Square a block away. Looking to the rear, he mentally photographs the traffic behind, concerned that his pursuers might not be far away. Climbing down, he jumps off the tram and runs toward the Square.

  The night wind gusts and the temperature drops. Flakes of snow fall fast and surreptitiously from the black sky. The brick street is wet but Bog finds that his sneakers navigate it easily. A car comes up behind him and he moves across the granite curb to the empty snow covered sidewalk. The ancient cobblestone street and sidewalk undulate slightly, curving around the old vernacular, multi-story buildings. Lantern lights attached to the face of the buildings light up the street, as do spotlights intended to brighten hanging shop signs and arched doorways. The street glows in soft amber in the night as Bog flies down its length to a Square decorated in Christmas lights. He remembers the Square at Christmas from his childhood in Prague.

  Bog slows near a twelve foot angel trumpeting a golden horn. Beyond is a bronze sculpture thirty feet high on an oval over a hundred feet wide at the North end of the Square, unveiled in the early part of the century to celebrate five hundred years since the death of Jan Hus, who stands regally in the sculpture in a flowing cloak. He was taught about Hus in school. The sculpture stands in the Square before the old Kinsky Palace, now the National Gallery and next to it the tallest building in the square, the gothic Tyn Cathedral. Hus is a martyred figure defiant of authorities imposed from outside of Prague and Czechoslovakia, authorities such as the Vatican and Hapsburg rule, and he was a predecessor to Martin Luther. During Communism, the people of Prague would sit on the concrete benches surrounding the immense bronze to express unspoken disapproval of the regime. Sitting at the feet of the Jan Hus Memorial became an act of symbolic defiance that Hus would have supported.

  Next to the lighted steps and Memorial is a brightly lit, very tall Christmas
tree. Everywhere around the Square are rows of Christmas Market booths fringed in colored lights. Bog is concerned that he will leave a trail in the snow. Despite the early hour, there are a few people wandering among the closed booths. His only option seems to be to find a spot to stop and consider what to do next. He watches the snow, starting to come down in blotches, as he sidles his way into a narrow space between red roofed booths, breathing hard from his run and hoping his luck holds out just a little while longer.

  “Get up there!” yells Todd Harris, aka Christopher Gray, to his nearest man.

  Harris figures Bog made the Square and must be hiding out somewhere within it. The ‘up there’ to which he refers is the observation deck of the Old Town Hall, which has the best vantage point of the Square. Like everything else on the Square it dates back about a thousand years and, like everything else on the square, it was not carpet bombed during the war. The Town Hall was struck however, sheering a side, which has been left as it was at the time, a standing rebuke to those who tried to destroy it.

  SUV man runs to the heavy wood front doors and bangs away at them, hoping to scare someone into opening up, and, after a minute of this, the door opens and a man appears. SUV man barrels inside, pushing the janitor out of the way. He runs past the ticket counters for the catacombs beneath the building and to a central glass elevator that rises through a spiraling steel cage in the open center of the building. The elevator goes to the top of the Hall’s spire, and he immediately commandeers it.

  It takes a few minutes, but he is at the lookout, staring down through thick stone archways at the Christmas wonderland before him. It is beginning to lighten to the East, but is still so dark that he can’t make out everything on the Square. Directly across, the dark, gothic façade of Tyn Cathedral is washed white by the powerful floodlights trained on it. Spires rising from its twin towers are dressed in rings of twinkling gold lights.

  As if by divine providence, SUV man’s problem is solved. On the Square, someone has just taken off, walking fast along the Town Hall side of the street. The subject is moving past the old astronomical clock on the side of the building, just beneath SUV man, when SUV man gets a call off to Harris.

  Bog picks it up as he hits the narrow pedestrian Charles Street, Karlova on the street sign, which he knows is going to take him to the Charles Bridge. He is hoping to lose Gray and his team once on the other side of the River.

  It is several blocks and Bog is sprinting, getting winded as he passes the wood booths of an al fresco restaurant. Finally, he sees the medieval Charles Tower, taller than all the buildings around it, constructed of such a massive weight of stone that it would seem to be beyond the talents of the builders of its day. It forms a huge arch over the entrance to the bridge and Bog is not breaking stride to reach it.

  The first rays of the sun burst on Bog’s left as he heads to the middle of the bridge. The rays of morning light etch the tower, the domes, the spires, and the rooftops of Prague in shades of grey against a brightening overcast sky. Dark statues along the bridge stand menacingly. Wind driven snow falls erratically. Bog is running. Everybody else on the bridge is not. A pathway among the pedestrians between the Tower and the middle of the bridge suddenly opens, and Bog is racing for it when he hears a gun go off.

  Bog, his coat flying up around him, is paused for a moment in mid-flight. In the next, he doesn’t see the cobblestones reaching up to hit him in the face or feel the cold of the snow on which he is sliding to a stop.

  Chapter 57