Complication (18 page)

“
Star Trek
?” I repeated. “What, like Vulcan?”

“No, Klingon,” she said. “That's what it was called, I think. Because this way, if the witness was from Japan or Sweden or Austria or the UK, it didn't matter. No one could know what Paul was saying, and so they would only be able to tell to the police of a man with a skiing mask yelling in a strange language. He bought a book on the Internet and taught to himself a sentence always he was repeating. God, I still remember it.
Fi tevakh ek yemtor
. I have no idea what it meant, but for weeks he would mutter
fi tevakh ek yemtor, fi tevakh ek yemtor
. He lives in Prague for two years, doesn't speak five words of Czech. Instead he wants to learn some language of TV aliens.”

But the robbery didn't happen the way Paul planned, Vera said.

Martinko Klingáč insisted they wait for a sign.

“A sign? What kind of sign?”

“Paul didn't know,” Vera said. “‘Martinko Klingáč says there will be a sign,' was all he said. ‘When the sign comes, we'll know. And then we must act. No hesitation.' Paul is drinking a lot at this time, sleeping very little. He smokes like a fire and stops changing his clothes, shaving, taking showers. And then there was his hair.”

“What hair?”

“Yes, exactly. Always he had been bald since I've known him. Always he kept his head shaved. But then he started growing his hair. For eight weeks, ten weeks, he lets his hair begin to grow.”

“Like as a disguise?”

She shook her head. “Klingáč, he does not trust people with no hair, Paul tells me. He will not even be in a room with a bald man. A superstition or something like this. And Paul always talking about Klingáč says this, Klingáč says that. Like Paul was in a cult. I say to him I don't want any part of this anymore. We had a terrible fight, our worst—and believe me, we fought all the time. We were passionate people, both stubborn. But in the end we reached a compromise, less from understanding than exhaustion. That's how it went. We would just go and go until there was nothing left. We decided if there was no sign within two weeks, he would give up the idea of stealing the watch. We would never speak of it again. Not the Rudolf Complication, Martinko Klingáč, none of it.”

Two days later, one perfectly fine summer afternoon while waiting for my brother Paul to meet her for lunch at a café near the west bank of the Vltava River, she looked out the window to see dark clouds gathered low across the horizon. The moment she formed the thought rain was on the way, it had already arrived. No thundering overture, no cautionary flash of lightning, no drizzly prelude—just rain suddenly crashing down like a child's tantrum, too full of its own fury to last. Paul never showed up for lunch. She told me how she'd later waited for him at Andel station as she would sometimes, watching the crowds scurry out of the metro below and the big new Nový Smíchov mall above like confused mice flushed from their nests, women struggling with umbrellas, men angled against the wind, collars upturned on their raincoats. She told me how the rain kept falling for days as she waited for him to come home, to call, anything. How the low clouds moved across the sky, an endless conquering army flattening the cityscape, rendering it in blurred layers of gray, and how she'd watched the trees sway on the far side of the riverbank as tram after tram rattled across Palackého Bridge. How she'd allowed herself to believe that
Paul was in one of them, rehearsing apologies, how she'd believed he would soon appear at her door, bedraggled, wet hair plastered to his forehead, sheepish grin plastered on his face.

How the TV filled with images of the flood, shots of bleary-eyed tourists lugging suitcases through the maze of wet streets or crowded between the procession of stone saints on the Charles Bridge to marvel at the river below, now a thick, silty brown. Instead of tour boats and regal swans, the churning waters now ferried fallen trees, untethered rowboats, broken furniture, the odd discarded refrigerator. How the plight of an eighty-one-year-old elephant trapped at the Prague Zoo became the media focus, even as first thirty, then fifty, then seventy thousand people were evacuated, a process made more difficult as roads were washed out and tramlines severed. Thirteen Soviet-era subway stations were knocked out of commission, despite the fact that the system was designed to double as an impenetrable fallout shelter in the event of nuclear war. Busses transported residents to makeshift emergency shelters in school auditoriums while holdouts in the city center fortified their businesses, sandbagging doors, reinforcing windows, shuttling merchandise to higher elevations. Cash machines throughout the city were quickly drained, and canned food and bottled water disappeared from the shelves in ways not seen since the Nazi invasion nearly seventy years prior. How she'd called and called trying to reach Paul, and when her cell phone battery died how she'd slogged through the wet and abandoned streets to a pay phone outside the Nový Smíchov shopping mall. How an unfamiliar voice answered Paul's mobile, a voice she knew belonged to Martinko Klingáč.

“Who is this
?
”
he'd said
. “Who is speaking
?
”

How she'd dropped the phone, let the handset dangle and sway on its cord, the voice repeating the question as she backed away.

“Who is this? Who is speaking?”

How she'd run splashing down the hill and then up the stairs to her apartment, how she'd locked the door, how she hadn't taken her boots off until she'd turned on every light in the place. How all the lights had suddenly gone off, and the water too, as the flood swallowed the city. A perfect fairytale seven days had passed, she'd realized, since she'd last seen Paul. And then how lulled by the murky sonata of water cascading over the rooftops and streaming through rain pipes and spilling onto the streets, she'd finally succumbed to this wordless lullaby.

How later she woke from a dreamless sleep to find the rain had stopped just as it had started, suddenly, without warning. The clouds had parted and the sun was pouring through the window, and someone was pounding against the door of her apartment
.

She was evacuated by emergency rescue personnel patrolling the area on rafts and taken to a makeshift shelter in a high school gymnasium where she slept on a cot for two days and spoke to no one. The water drained from the city and she knew Paul was gone.

“And I'll tell you one more story,” she said. “This story is a Christmas story. From when I was little. But I think it is also a story about Paul. Each year at Christmas time, my father would bring home a carp and put it in the bathtub. Here it's tradition to eat carp for Christmas dinner. To keep the carp fresh, it would live in the bathtub until time came to cook it. When I was seven years old, I decided I did not want this particular carp to die. I decided to rescue it. Put it in a plastic bag, take it to the river—which was stupid because the river was so polluted then it would never have survived. But when I tried to catch the fish, it squirmed away. Again and again. I started crying and tried explaining to the fish that I only wanted to help, that terrible things would happen soon if it did not be still. But it thrashed and squirmed and raced around the bathtub, and I couldn't catch it.”

 

 

B
y the time she'd finished we were well beyond the ninety-minute mark. She gave me a chance to ask one more question, anything I wanted, and then she really would have to go and that really would have to be the end.

I didn't ask her anything. I just told her I was sorry things turned out the way they did—not just for my brother, but for her, too. I said she seemed like a good person, and if Paul really had his mind set on something, there was nothing she could have done to stop him. More than once she looked like she was going to cry. More than once she gave me that look, like she was seeing Paul again. In the end she thanked me again for coming all the way to Prague, said talking with me had helped her more than I knew. Then she put on her coat and walked out the café, giving me one more hesitant glance as she disappeared down the stairs. I counted to forty and then got up to follow her.

T
here's the truth and there's what people tell you. They're like a married couple laughing at each other's jokes in public when privately they've grown so far apart they can barely stand the sight of each other's socks. This assuming there is a truth, verifiable facts. The assumption makes life easier when you're dealing with, say, buying a used car, more difficult when dealing with questions of human motivation. Trickiest of all are the things you tell yourself, which in an ideal world would be outsourced for evaluation to an objective third party before you're allowed to act upon them.

All of which is to say there were a million questions I could've asked Vera, but I knew she had already told me everything she was prepared to share. Anything else I'd have to learn without her consent because as much as I wanted to believe her, she still hadn't answered the two most basic questions. One, why tell anyone that you were involved in an unsolved criminal conspiracy gone murderously awry—and two, why now? She'd written that letter to my father for a reason, and after talking to her for nearly three hours over the last couple days, I was no closer to finding out what that reason was.

After stepping outside she had taken out her phone and made a call, but she hadn't let the conversation slow her stride as she slipped through the throngs crowding the sidewalk. I'd nearly lost her when a bunch of Brits came stumbling drunkenly out of some bar at the corner of Vodičkova and was trailing some fifty feet behind her as we entered Můstek station. As I approached the ticket machine kiosk, I watched the top of her head disappear down the escalator. Stop to buy a train ticket and I'd risk losing her.

I walked right past the turnstile and hopped on the escalator, expecting beeping, sirens, some official someone putting a hand upon my shoulder, but nothing happened. Below the tube, walls were decorated in anodized steel a champagne color that made you feel like you were inside a Christmas ornament. The platform was crowded, and I took up a position just behind a marbled column, safely outside of Vera's sightlines. She rarely looked up from playing with her phone anyway. When the train came she got on, and I boarded two cars behind her.

Vera had told me she'd lived in Smíchov when Paul was around, but a glance at the subway map plastered above the train's doors told me Smíchov was southwest, on the yellow line. We were travelling northwest on the green line. Either Vera didn't live in Smíchov anymore, or she wasn't headed home. Staroměstská, Malostranská; at each stop I hopped off, looked for Vera, and then hopped back on just as the doors whisked shut, a move which evidently annoyed a woman opposite me with purple boots and a red streaked rooster hairdo like Keith Richards circa 1972. She spent most of the ride glowering at me while managing to completely ignore the teenage couple making out next to her. If the train ride lasted much longer, I might witness the actual conception of a little Czech.

Vera emerged at Hradčanská station. When I exited too, she started walking right towards me. She'd spotted me. She knew I was following her and was going to confront me, make a big
scene right here on the train platform, probably scream “stalker!” or worse in Czech until the police came and hauled me off. Except that she hadn't noticed me yet. Everyone was walking my way. The only exit was located behind me. Ducking behind a column and circling behind Vera seemed too risky so I turned and rushed toward the escalator, trying to put some distance between us.

The ride up was excruciatingly slow. When I reached the street level I practically started running, a bad move as it attracted the attention of one of three guys dressed in black uniforms hanging out by the newspaper kiosk near the exit. Ticket inspectors. Two of them were already hassling some college kids, both of whom where digging around their backpacks and baggy pants in a transparent pantomime. The third one zeroed in on me. He stepped forward just as I was about to pass and held up a hand in the international hold-it-right-there gesture. Only when the rooster-maned redhead in purple boots unleashed a torrent of grievances did I realize the hand wasn't meant for me.

The darkening sky was crosshatched with tram cables and the rain had picked up, cars and trucks splashing by on either side of a narrow concrete strip where people stood waiting for trams and buses, looking miserable. It was oddly quiet outside the tourist zone, like being in another city entirely. I ducked behind a payphone and Vera emerged a moment later. She made another call with her cell, dialing and putting it to her ear, but she didn't appear to say anything. Could be the other party never answered, could be she was just checking messages. A tram pulled up and she slipped her phone back into her pocket and queued to board. I opted for the car behind her and got a window seat so I'd be able to see when she exited. We were on tramline 18, somewhere north of the city center and on the left bank of the river, but that was as precise as I could figure it. The tram could have been headed to some distant suburb for all I knew.

She got off at a stop called Ořechovka. With only three other people exiting, there was no crowd to blend into. I just had to hope she didn't see me. Luckily it wasn't the sort of weather for taking a leisurely stroll and having a look about. She tucked her chin to her chest and hurried through a gap in traffic across Střešovická Street. I watched her turn down a smaller street called Lomená, letting some distance build before I followed. If she saw me now, I'd just be some blurred figure across the road.

She kept up her hurried pace, staying on Lomená and marching past street names I tried to note for the way back. Západní, Cuk-rovarnická, Na Orechovce. Gone were the crowded, crooked ancient lanes where edifices crammed leaning one into the next. Here were empty sidewalks and high concrete security walls enclosing brick villas, estates, mansions replete with sloping green lawns lush with trees and shrubbery. I'd read apartments in the city center had price tags comparable to those in New York, and if that was true then maybe this was like the exclusive Connecticut suburb. Whatever the case, Vera's quarter of the Rudolf Complication money couldn't have bought a home here. Her portion and my brother's combined probably wouldn't have been enough.