Complication Read online

  Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV)

  170 34 Poštovní úřad

  Praha 7

  Poštovní schránka 21/ÚDV

  AUDIO RECORDING #3113a

  Date: September 24, 1984 [Time unspecified]

  Subject: Eliška Reznícková

  Case: #1331—Incident at Zrcadlové Bludiště

  Interview session #2

  Location: Bartolomějská 10, Prague, Praha 1

  Investigator: Agent #35532

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I don’t play the accordion.

  [Unintelligible—duration 4 seconds]

  AGENT #3553: We must begin again. Please state your name.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: My name is Eliška Reznícková.

  AGENT #3553: Your age.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I’m twenty-seven years old.

  AGENT #3553: Occupation.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You know my occupation.

  AGENT #3553: Please state it once more.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I work at the Black Rabbit. It’s a tavern.

  AGENT #3553: Located where?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: On Ostrovní Street, in Nové Město. Prague 2.

  AGENT #3553: Describe the duties you perform.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I pour beer. I take money and put it in a cash register. I wash and stack glasses. When the customers leave, I lock the front door. If my boss is coming in the next day, I sweep up. Those are my duties. I don’t play the accordion, either at work or at home. I don’t know anybody who plays the accordion.

  AGENT #3553: Are you married?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You asked me that before. The answer is still no.

  AGENT #3553: Children?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Never.

  AGENT #3553: Boyfriend?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I’m too old for boys.

  AGENT #3553: Are you a lesbian?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: What does this have to do with accordions? I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.

  AGENT: We’re not interested in accordions. We’re chiefly concerned with—

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Yes, I know, the case. Some accordion case. And again, I’ve never seen it.

  AGENT #3553: How can you be certain you’ve never come across the particular accordion case in question when we haven’t even shown it to you? Unless you’re telling us you’ve never laid eyes on any accordion case whatsoever. Only then can we absolutely rule out the possibility of your having come across the specific accordion case in evidence.

  AGENT #3553: Is this to be your official statement? That you’ve never in your entire life crossed paths with a single accordion case fitting any description whatsoever? Speaking plainly, Comrade Reznícková, we find that difficult to accept.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Then show me already! Bring it in here. Then I can officially say I’ve never seen it.

  AGENT #3553: To do so at present would be reckless. We believe your vision severely impaired. Please read that poster aloud, if you would.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: This is absurd.

  AGENT #3553: You are capable of reading, we assume? Meaning your inability to recite the words appearing on the notice posted some three meters to our immediate left does not indicate a literacy deficiency. You agree the text is perfectly legible and the light is wholly sufficient for the purposes of—

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: With my glasses, yes, of course I can read. Glasses I would be wearing were it not for your comrades deliberately stepping on them when I was arrested this morning. Or yesterday morning. Whenever it was. Tomorrow is already yesterday.

  AGENT #3553: Meaning what exactly?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: The poster. It says, “Tomorrow Is Already Yesterday.” There’s a worker with his sleeves rolled up and sledgehammer slung over his shoulder and the poster says, “Tomorrow Is Already Yesterday.” I have no idea what it means.

  AGENT #3553: Very well. We should note, however, that you had to narrow your eyes nearly to the point of closing them and lean precariously in your chair in the direction of the poster in order to decipher what should be an easily readable message celebrating the achievements of the heroic workers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Without your glasses, isn’t it fair to say you’re practically blind, Comrade Reznícková?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Fair, yes. I can barely see your face without squinting. But I don’t want to make you any clearer. You’re just a blur of thinning hair and graying flesh wrapped in stiff layers of green. Dark green military cap, green wool overcoat, pea green tie. The Green Blur, I’ll call you. You smell of Stag soap and smoke Rudá hvězda, Red Star, proletarian cigarette of the people. Off duty you probably smoke American cigarettes bought with Tuzex vouchers. You’re in every apparent way a standard issue policeman. And yet, I think to myself, isn’t my situation plainly a matter for the StB, Státní bezpečnost, the secret police?

  AGENT #3553: Why would you think this?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Could the Green Blur then be a covert StB operative disguised as a regular overt VB cop? Or are so many secret police already posing as professors and priests, engineers and factory foremen, that a street cop is the only disguise left? Couldn’t even be considered a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Maybe there are no sheep left. Only wolves and dogs.

  AGENT #3553: We’ve searched your apartment and have discovered a number of items—we shall be discussing those in due time—but you should be happy to learn that we found a second pair of glasses you keep by your nightstand.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: My reading glasses.

  AGENT #3553: We’ll get them to you once they’re examined. At that point, perhaps we can consider allowing you to identify the accordion case.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You’re examining my reading glasses?

  AGENT #3553: We examine all evidence that maybe relevant.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: How are my glasses relevant?

  AGENT #3553: We’re not at liberty to discuss your glasses.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: [Unintelligible]. But can you tell me whether playing or owning an accordion is now a crime? If that is really what this is all about. Or maybe you’re saying the instrument itself is suspected of some transgression?

  AGENT #3553: We find your fixation on this accordion curious.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I find it curious you’ve asked me about it some six hundred times.

  AGENT #3553: We’ve merely been discussing the case.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: And apparently my case involves an accordion.

  AGENT #3553: Your case involves an accordion case. Which you well know. The accordion as musical instrument has nothing to do with the charges against you.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Ah. So there are charges?

  AGENT #3553: We’re not at liberty to discuss any charges. Let’s talk about your whereabouts on Sunday morning. You left your apartment at approximately 8 am.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Permit me one question. Don’t you, comrade, have a murderer to catch?

  [Silence—duration 3 seconds]

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: From one citizen to another, wouldn’t it be more in the people’s interest to let me be and instead go after this monster we all know is on the loose?

  [Silence—duration 4 seconds]

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You know what I’m talking about. The young girl’s body found Saturday morning near the Strahov stadium. It was all my customers could talk about. They say it’s him, you know. The Right Hand of God.

  AGENT #3553: The Right Hand of God is a superstition, as I’m sure you well know. On the morning of Sunday, September 23—

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: As long as you refuse to acknowledge the killer’s existence, you aren’t accountable for stopping his crimes, is that it? Has some official at some ministry or other declared serial killers a cancer restricted to decadent Western societies? The embodiment of capitalism’s brutal excesses?

  AGENT #3553: We refuse to engage in such demoralizing speculation, but it’s worth pointing out that you won’t find a single verifiable account of the so-called Right Hand of God’s exploits anywhere.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Of course no
t. The killer and his crimes have been systematically erased from history. That’s what they say.

  AGENT #3553: Who is “they”?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You want me to name names? “They” is everybody. “They” is probably your own mother. Haven’t you ever heard the children’s rhyme? You people are always listening and yet you never hear anything.

  AGENT #3553: If next you plan on asking us about the mysterious black vans that drive through the streets snatching up children to harvest their organs, we can assure you that this story, too, is a fabrication.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: “When moon is high in August sky, and wind howls through the trees / They say at night a killer walks the gloomy crooked streets . . . ”

  AGENT #3553: On Sunday, September 23, you left your apartment.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You’ve really not heard it? The song based on that poem by Rentner?

  AGENT #3553: You boarded at the redline train at Kosmonautů.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: “Condemned to wander till time’s end, bowed neck hung with clock/His wretched fate to ever hear, the dread tick-tock, tick-tock . . . ”

  AGENT #3553: You boarded at the redline train at Kosmonautů station3 and rode to Muzeum.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You can ignore it if you choose, but people still talk. In whispers over dinner tables after the children have gone to bed. Between those endless suffering contests the old women hold while waiting in line outside the butcher shop. In slurred barroom tales I overhear at the Black Rabbit. The missing garbage man’s corpse found last year in Bubeneč. A year before, the dead girl in the Vyšehrad cemetery. A thirteen-year-old boy named in a warehouse of rubber tires in Smíchov two years before that.

  AGENT #3553: You transferred to the green line and then exited at Malostranská. You caught a tram on Klarov Street to the base of Petřín Hill. Correct?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: For as long as anyone can remember, people have been disappearing. Each autumn, like clockwork. Some found strangled, some bludgeoned, others drowned or with their throats slit. Some are women, some men; occasionally they are children. All are found with their right hand missing. Never the left. Always the right.

  AGENT #3553: You transferred to the green line and then exited at Malostranská.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: As a girl, my mother lived across the street from an antique dealer and his mongoloid son on Street in Josefov. The family. Just before . . .

  [unintelligible—duration 7 seconds]

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: . . . in the corner, his face swarming with flies.

  AGENT #3553: You caught a tram on Klarov Street to the base of Petřín Hill.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: All stories follow the basic pattern. Grisly stories that stray into the realm of fairytales. The missing right hand is often just the start.

  AGENT #3553: You were seen carrying an accordion case.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: And now a little girl. Her body found in Břevnov. Or was it the gymnasium in Smíchov? Stories vary. The girl bled white, or with her eyeballs pushed inside her skull, or with every tooth removed at the root. Asphyxiated, mouth stuffed with locks of her own black, red, blonde hair. In another version—

  AGENT #3553: The girl was six years old.

  [Silence—duration 2 seconds]

  AGENT #3553: Her name was .She had her skull fractured in four different places from blows delivered by a blunt instrument, and the body was in fact found at none of those locations.

  [Silence—duration 9 seconds]

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You would know better than me.

  AGENT #3553: Perhaps not.

  [TAPE ENDS]

  CHAPTER 3

  Around 8 AM I woke disoriented and enclosed by pale yellow walls empty save for a grim painting featuring two bearded men playing chess in a smoke-filled tavern. You could tell which one was losing by the way he clutched his meerschaum pipe hard between his teeth, his face rigid with concentration, while his younger opponent was casually wiping his glasses on his coat sleeve. All other figures in the painting were subsumed in the shadows, their conversations, I imagined, muted by the blanket of hovering smoke.

  My hotel was one of few in Karlín, a neighborhood just north of the city center, the hotel itself only blocks from where my brother’s blood-stained shirt and expired work permit were found in the courtyard of a building on Křižíkova Street. A five-story Neo-Renaissance building with a salmon pink façade going gray from its proximity to a highway overpass one hundred yards from my third-story window, the hotel looked out over a small grassy lot, a McDonald’s, a tram stop. On the other side of the street, the world’s saddest looking shoe store stood next to a seedy establishment with mirrored windows and a neon sign reading “non-stop herna bar.”

  Heading home from the Black Rabbit last night, I’d been accosted on the street by a little girl no older than eight who trailed me from the subway station. Following close at my heels, she kept repeating some phrase over and over and trying to hand me a used, pocket-sized tourist guidebook called Prague Unbound. It looked to be in good condition, its cover even improbably embossed with faded gold lettering and bound in black leather, but I didn’t plan on doing any sightseeing. The little girl was devilishly persistent, though. When I finally gave up and handed her a couple crowns, she loosed a grin that gave me shudders. The poor kid had diseased blackened gums and not a single tooth in her mouth.

  Prague Unbound had yellowing pages and that singular musty old book smell as I cracked it open and set about finding out what herna bars were. Turned out they were low stakes gambling establishments and not, as I would have guessed, high-energy protein snacks. Oddly enough, the photograph in the book was of the very same herna bar across my hotel and was taken from nearly the same perspective I had looking out the window. In the distance beyond lurked the massive Žižkov TV Tower, rising on a hilltop like a malformed rocket awaiting takeoff. The guidebook said it was the tallest structure in the city, built by the Soviets allegedly to jam Western radio and television broadcasts. After the Russians left, a local artist had decorated it with sculptures of faceless black babies crawling ant-like up its surface.

  Prague Unbound also mentioned that the area was the site of a bloody battle between the Holy Cross Army and the Hussites in 1420 which saw hundreds of the retreating Crusaders drown in the Vltava as they made a panicked attempt to flee, the book noting, “in layers of mud and silt the river records bone-by-bone the measure of human folly.” The book didn’t have much to say about anything else in my vicinity, except for mentioning a nearby museum that housed a huge 3D model of the city handmade entirely from paper and built by a lone man in the eighteenth century over the course of eleven years before he died broken and penniless. “Prague has a genius for inspiring grand ambitions in its most ardent suitors,” the guidebook warned in sidebar, “and a history of rewarding such devoted efforts with complete and utter ruination. As perhaps its most famous writer put it, this little mother has claws.”

  My ambitions for the morning were anything but grand. I had nothing to do all day until my meeting with Vera and no interest in pretending to be a tourist. Maybe I resisted experiencing Prague because in some irrational, abstract sense, I blamed the little mother with claws for Paul’s death. Even when he was alive, I’d never gotten used to the idea of him being in Europe. Paul was no liberal arts grad putting off penning the Great American Screenplay, no wild oats sowing trust-fund bohemian with a café-ready copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, no high-risk entrepreneur looking to score in the Wild, Wild East. You’d never mistake him for a member of the intelligence or diplomatic communities, neither intelligence nor diplomacy being among his noted qualities. Paul was smart in his own way, I had been fond of saying. You might think it was like saying a fat girl had a pretty face, but that’s not exactly what I meant. Paul certainly knew things I didn’t. He understood the intricacies of wagering at off-track betting parlors, could find a good twenty-four-hour diner in any part of the city, knew how to talk shop to bookies and low-level drug dealers and policemen. He knew how much a
transmission rebuild should cost before you’re getting ripped off, the medical risks associated with ultraviolet tattoo inks, the difference between regular and goofy foot, and which pawn shops were open on Christmas Eve.