Complication Read online

  My cab driver pointed out the window at an imposing stone building as we came to a halt, said it was the National Theater. Atop its roof a winged goddess piloted a chariot pulled by three horses frozen in mid-gallop and about to heave themselves over the edge of the building and into the latticework of tramlines above the street. A block down was Ostrovní Street. No cars allowed. Too small, the cabbie said, too many people. He told me to head for Divadelní Street, then turn right.

  The moment I stepped outside the cab and set foot in the city itself, I finally started to ask all those questions I should’ve asked before I left. Was I in Prague to fulfill a journey my father had been denied? Here to answer questions about Paul I hadn’t thought about in years, if I’d thought about them at all? I couldn’t say. A friend of mine, upon hearing his mother had died, got into his car and drove straight across the country, from Maine to California, never eating, stopping only for gas. Why California, he couldn’t be sure. He would’ve kept going, he said, but for the ocean. Maybe this was my version of that. But as I stood there it struck me that flying halfway around the world based on a letter from a stranger was more like something Paul would’ve done.

  I headed down Ostrovní Street. The cabbie wasn’t kidding—no broader than twelve feet at its widest point, the tilting and cobblestoned lane was hemmed in by low buildings crowded one into the next. Above a door on a building halfway down the block hung a wooden sign depicting an emaciated rabbit raised on its hindquarters. The rabbit’s ears were drooping, mouth agape, milk white eyes sagging like melted dinner plates. A diseased, demented Bugs Bunny.

  The Black Rabbit said the sign in English.

  The door opened onto a hallway leading to a curved stairwell cut from red stone and descending into a catacomb cellar enclosed by vaulted ceilings. Small white candles flickered atop sleek black tables, and well-dressed patrons chatted quietly over wine or beer. Too well dressed to be tourists, I figured. Czech professionals, Euro yuppies. No one paid me any attention whatsoever except a woman sitting alone in the far corner.

  Thin and shapeless inside a loose black sweater, she was in her mid-thirties, her straight black hair swept forward with just a little window carved out for a face with jutting cheekbones and hard blue eyes almost gray. She was less pretty than striking. More striking was that she made no effort to hide the fact that she was openly staring at me as I approached.

  “You must be Vera,” I said.

  Her mouth parted, but no words came.

  “My name is Lee,” I said. “Lee Holloway.”

  Closer, she looked less thin than simply frail, her skin ashen, mouth inelastic and sad. When I’d received the letter, I wondered if Paul and this Vera person had been romantically involved, but seeing her now, there was no question. She was exactly his type, only more so. Thinner, darker. From the looks of it, more troubled. I’d bet anything she had some weird tattoo hidden somewhere, some Goth leftover from a youth that was further away than she maybe wanted to admit.

  “Paul was my brother,” I prompted.

  She blinked. “He never mentioned he had a brother.”

  This didn’t surprise me. Paul liked to act like he had no family at all. A lone wolf.

  “I’m sorry,” Vera said. “This is strange for me. You look just like him.”

  People said this often enough that I’d stopped pointing out that my brother was at least three inches taller and forty pounds heavier. When last I’d seen him, he’d sported a bald head and a goatee. His nose bent to the left where it had been broken by a girl in a punk rock bar on North Avenue when he was twenty-four. He had a tattoo on his left forearm of Elmer Fudd, which he didn’t like to explain but had to do with the way he laughed—a stuttering, gravelly monotone that surfaced and disappeared often for no apparent reason.

  She motioned me to sit. A thin silver bracelet orbited her wrist, and a bottle of Matoni sparkling water sat half empty next to a glass on the table. She extended her hand and I moved to take it before realizing she wasn’t offering a handshake but had merely paused in an upsweeping motion aimed at getting the waiter’s attention.

  “Your father sent you?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. My father is, well, he’s dead.”

  She placed a hand over her mouth.

  “Heart attack,” I said. “Mowing the lawn.”

  “Ježíš Maria. That’s terrible.”

  “A lot of people die mowing the lawn. More than you might think. Not that you probably have any thoughts about lawn mower fatalities. Happened just Saturday.”

  Some part of me wondered why the other was talking about lawnmowers.

  “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

  My throat suddenly felt constricted, my face hot. Bad time to get choked up, but when is a good time? “Thanks,” I managed. “He was a good guy. A people person.”

  Christ, I thought, next I’d be telling her he’d died with his boots on. I wondered whether my dad might have met Vera when he had flown out when Paul’s personal effects were recovered. He’d returned without saying a word about his trip. Nothing about what he’d eaten, where he’d stayed, how much paperwork he had to fill out, whether he’d been treated with kindness or indifference. He came back carrying only the same suitcase he’d left with, and if he’d had Paul’s possessions shipped back, I never saw them. Are you going to be okay? That was all he’d said in the car as we rode back from O’Hare. Worrying about how I was taking the news was I guess his way of trying to keep his own emotions at bay, to hold himself together. Not knowing what else to do, I’d reached out to squeeze his shoulder. He started crying and stopped in the same breath, like the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail. But thinking back to Vera’s letter, I knew they hadn’t met before. It was clearly a letter written to a stranger.

  We sat in silence while she rummaged through a handbag and produced an unopened pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?” she asked. I’d hardly noticed up to now that she had an accent, slight though it was.

  I shook my head.

  “I also don’t smoke.” She tore the cellophane wrapper and tapped the pack against the inside of her wrist. “I stopped long ago. But I told myself if your father came, I would make an exception. For you, I will also make an exception. Finally a waiter. Do you like beer? Czech beer is very good. Your brother, he very much liked Czech beer. Perhaps I should order an extra one. Who knows if he will be coming back.”

  For a moment of freefall, I thought she was going to tell me Paul was still alive. That he’d run into some kind of trouble, been forced to fake his own death five years ago. That he’d been hiding, lying low, waiting for things to blow over. She’d written the letter because she needed help. Together we could bring him back into the world. I started feeling guilty for believing all this time that he’d been gone.

  But Vera wasn’t talking about Paul coming back. She was talking about the waiter, who in the next moment arrived and took Vera’s order with an air of weary reluctance. Across the room, a bedraggled-looking fiftyish man with long, unwashed salt-and-pepper hair spilling out of a wool stocking cap shared a joke with the bartender. His eyes had a bleary intensity as he repeatedly glanced over at our table. But then Vera probably provoked repeat glances wherever she went. She lit her cigarette, and the flame illuminated a small U-shaped scar riding across the ridge of her cheekbone beneath her left eye.

  “When I wrote the letter,” she began as the waiter walked away, “I never believed anyone would come. Many times I tore it up. Always I wrote another. When finally I sent it, I felt difficult to come here day after day. But I came anyway. I’ve nearly lost count of the days. And now here you are. Why are you here?”

  “Because of your letter.”

  “But you must also have reasons.”

  “He was my brother. I want to know what happened.”

  “And if I tell you, what then?”

  I shrugged. “Then I go home.”

  She fell silent, regarding me behind a curtain of ciga
rette smoke. “Maybe you have a certain way you wish to remember your brother. What I say could change your idea of him. Please understand I have told no one. What I say is only for you. No one else can know.” Vera snubbed out her cigarette and edged closer, fingers unnaturally long and white as she placed her hands flat upon the table’s surface. “Your brother,” she uttered in a low voice, “stole a watch.”

  I waited for her to go on.

  She didn’t.

  “A watch,” I prompted. “Like what, a Rolex? A Tag Heuer?”

  “Not an ordinary watch. The Rudolf Complication.”

  “Is that Swiss?”

  Vera leaned back, placing a hand to her throat and blinking in rapid succession. “You don’t understand. The Rudolf Complication is not a watch for knowing what is the time. Not something you wear. It’s art. An important work of art. Of history. When Paul disappeared, he was planning to take this watch from a gallery near the river. Or had already taken it. I don’t know for 100 percent.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “On the other side of the river, between Malá Strana and Kampa Island, is a canal called Čertovka. Means in English ‘the Devil’s Stream.’ Near the—”

  “Why do they call it that?”

  She shrugged. “Something about an old woman who lived near there in olden times and everyone thought she was a devil. The villagers painted little devils all over her house as a warning for, I don’t know, to other villagers I guess. There’s a big wooden wheel in the canal. A famous water wheel. You have probably seen it on postcards.”

  “Paul didn’t really do postcards,” I said.

  But I remembered that he had sent at least one. Nearly a year after he’d left Chicago, six months or so before he died. It was from some place called the Prague Torture Museum and featured a medieval engraving of a man spread eagled and strung upside down by his ankles, hands bound behind his back. Two men on either side of him held the handles of a large saw they were using to divide their prisoner in half at the crotch.

  On the back, Paul had written:

  Brotherman Lee,

  Hope you’re hanging in there (har har!) Would write more, but I’ve been tied up (ack ack!) Merry XXXmas. Gotta split! (yuk yuk!)

  Yours in Masculine Brotherhood,

  Paul

  “Near this waterwheel is an art gallery called the Galleria Čertovka,” Vera continued. “I worked there. I helped Paul plan to steal the watch. Your brother and the Rudolf Complication, they disappeared together. For five days Paul was missing. Then some of his clothing was found in Karlín, in Prague 8, after the flood. An expired work permit in his name and blood stains that matched his blood type. Karlín is far from the gallery. Far from where Paul lived, far from anywhere Paul has a reason to go. The watch was never found. There was another person, a third man helping to steal the watch. It was his idea. His plan. This is why I wrote the letter. Your brother, he did not die of the flood. I believe Paul was killed. That this third person, he murdered Paul.”

  I experienced the same slow-mo knee-jerk as when I learned Paul was dead five years ago. Shock, but not surprise. Across the room, two women with matching hoop earrings kissed each other on the cheek. The older guy at the bar in the stocking cap was looking our way, but he turned his head the moment he realized I’d noticed. Or maybe the timing was coincidence. It was a conversation to make you paranoid.

  “He was killed,” I said. “You’re sure about this?”

  Vera nodded.

  “Did you tell the police?”

  She twisted her lips and looked sharply away.

  “The police. Did you speak to them?”

  “Not about Paul. Of course, they asked questions to all workers of the gallery. Interpol also investigated. But they wanted to know only of the watch. The Rudolf Complication. Nobody asked about Paul.”

  “This third man you mentioned—”

  “I don’t know him,” she interjected. “Only Paul knew this man. This was for my protection. If this man was caught, he could not tell the police of me. If I was caught, I could not tell the police of this man. Only Paul was in the middle. Paul was not protected.”

  Except, I reasoned, if Paul was caught, he could have told the police about both of them. Of course, that conclusion depended on him being alive. Which meant at least two people had reason to see that he wasn’t, one of whom was sitting across the table from me.

  “How did my brother know this other guy?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t say,” Vera said.

  “He must’ve told you something about him.”

  “He said the man had slick hair.”

  “Slick like stylish, or slick like oily?”

  “Just slick.”

  “Did slick have a name?”

  “Martinko Klingáč.”

  “That should make things easy enough.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not a real name. Martinko Klingáč is from a story for children. Slovak fairytale just like, oh, what is it? Rumpelstiltskin. Martinko Klingáč means the same as Rumpelstiltskin.”

  Before she could continue, the waiter arrived and unloaded two tall beers filled precisely to the .5 liter mark on the glass. Vera insisted on paying right away—or maybe that’s just how they did it here. The waiter made change from a coin purse, then wandered off to pick imaginary lint from his shirt as Vera snubbed out her cigarette and pushed the ashtray to the edge of the table.

  “I must go,” she said.

  “Our drinks just got here. I just got here.”

  “I can’t stay. I’m sorry.”

  “So when can we meet again?”

  She pushed back her chair and stood. She was taller than I’d imagined. At least as tall as my brother. “It is not possible,” she said.

  “I flew ten hours for this?”

  “I’ve told all what I can say. Please understand.”

  “This isn’t even my suit,” I sputtered. “These aren’t my goddamn shoes. Do you know what it’s like trying to walk around in someone else’s shoes?” I knew I wasn’t making any sense and forced my mouth to stop before I embarrassed myself. Her eyes dropped and she pulled on a thin black leather coat, hands climbing white and spidery as she did up the buttons.

  She was really leaving, just like that.

  “Why tell me anything at all?”

  “Someone should know.”

  “The police. They’re the ones should know.”

  “They have no interest.”

  “Why now? After five years.”

  She slung her purse over her shoulder.

  “The word for beer is pivo,” she said. “If you want more, just tell to the waiter pivo. When you wish to leave, have the barman call for you a taxicab to your hotel. One from the street will cost you twice as much. Where are you staying?”

  “I’m going to the police.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “We meet again tomorrow or I go to the police.”

  She muttered something, her voice drained, inflectionless. Czech seemed a language well suited to muttering. Then she looked at me and said, “In Wenceslas Square there is a statue of a man on a horse. We can meet there at six thirty in the evening. But you must not go to the police. You must not tell anyone what I have told you. I have my reasons for this.”

  “Fine. Tomorrow. Man on a horse.”

  “And you will tell no one.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Say that you promise.”

  “I promise. Cross my heart. Whatever you do here.”

  She regarded me for a moment longer before reaching some silent conclusion and then turned and walked across the room and was up the stairs and gone. The fiftyish man across the bar, the one with the stocking cap, watched her walk off then smiled and gave me a knowing little nod. Like he and I were in on some secret. I looked away and caught my own twin reflections in the two glasses of beer on the table. Two warped faces wondering what to do next.

  INSI
DE THE MIRROR MAZE

  Report on the investigation into the Zrcadlové Bludiště Incident 12 December, 1997

  The following report has been compiled by the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV) at the behest of Detective Zdenek Soros of the Prague Metropolitan Police. Materials herein have been transcribed from audio recordings discovered at the declassified State Security Services (StB) archives. Names of third parties deemed non-essential to the investigation have been withheld in compliance with the 1992 Act on Protection of Personal Data.

  These transcriptions and the accompanying documents do not in our estimation constitute a comprehensive record of the 1984 investigation of Eliška Reznícková and the Zrcadlové Bludiště1 Incident. Recovered audio recordings appear to be incomplete and certain documents explicitly cited or alluded to within said recordings are missing. It’s unknown whether files related to this case were intentionally compromised during the days leading up to or in the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary November Events of 1989, either by members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), the Ministry of the Interior, State Security Services (StB), or other parties, or whether documents have gone missing through some clerical or other institutional error. We do not know the number of related materials that may be missing or destroyed, nor the nature of those potential materials. While its our hope that further documents related to this case may be unearthed as we continue cataloguing and digitizing materials stored in the StB archives, it’s impossible to speculate on the likelihood of such an occurrence.

  The concluding summary of events subsequent to the StB’s involvement in the Incident at Zrcadlové Bludiště is based on our own independent, present-day investigation. Recommendations for any future related investigations and/or legal actions also appear at the end of this report.