The Woman From Prague

by Rob Hart

  “What?” I ask.

  “You’re not my type,” she says, her voice soft. A little more of that Southern accent peeking through.

  “What’s your type?”

  “Not you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t apologize.”

  I pull my hands away and go back to trying, because I want to learn how and also I don’t want to look at her right now. I’m not upset, just embarrassed.

  After a minute or so, I get all the pins aligned and the tension wrench slips, turning the tumbler. The lock pops open. I look up and Sam is smiling. “See? Not completely useless. It’s harder on older locks. This is like riding a bike with training wheels on both ends. When you get good at it, try doing it with your eyes closed. When you can do it quickly with your eyes closed, consider yourself graduated.”

  She doesn’t wait for me to say anything, just swings herself up and onto the bunk. I don’t hear anything else from her. It’s like she disappeared and I’m alone in the compartment. I play with the lock for a little while, locking it and unlocking it, trying to ignore the burn of rejection.

  I don’t even know what my intention was there. But right now all I want in this world is for her to come down here and lie next to me. I don’t even want anything to happen. It’d be nice to feel someone close.

  And I want to say this to her but I can’t bring myself to say it, so I concentrate on the lock.

  I practice until I can open the lock in a couple of seconds. So I do what Sam suggested, close my eyes and try to visualize the movements. It is suddenly a million times harder. After a little while, I give up, take some comfort that I made at least some progress.

  “Hey, you said you got us some waters?” I ask.

  “Oh, right,” she says.

  A bottle appears. I grab it and find the cap has already been loosened. “Did you drink out of this?”

  “Sorry, I only got one.”

  “Want it back?”

  “All yours. Hey, Florida is nice this time of year, right?”

  “Presumably. I’ve never been during the winter but have to figure the weather is mild. Why?”

  “Curious.”

  “That’s a weird thing to be curious about.”

  Silence from the top bunk.

  I take a gulp and stick the bottle into the mesh pocket on the wall next to me and pick up the book. Best case scenario, it’s awesome and keeps me riveted throughout the trip so that I’m entertained, because there’s literally nothing else to do besides play with the lock. Worst case, the book is boring as shit and puts me to sleep. Maybe that’s best case. I don’t even know. I take another sip of water and ask, “How long is this train ride anyway?”

  The words feel like marshmallows in my mouth.

  Something is wrong. It takes a second for me to realize what it is: drugs. I know drugs. I used to do them all the time. I know when there’s something in my system that shouldn’t be there.

  “Eight hours, without delays, and there’ll probably be delays,” Sam says. “There are always delays.”

  She hangs upside down from the bunk, her blonde hair cascading around her.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about that, though,” she says.

  “Did you give me something?”

  “Yup,” she says. “Sweet dreams..”

  I try to say something but my mouth won’t work. Try to lift my arms but they feel disconnected from my body. I want to scream but instead darkness creeps in on the edges of my vision, swallowing me.

  Waking up is like going over the first dip of a rollercoaster. Sudden and a little frightening. The sunlight cutting through the curtain and the thunderous rattle of the train overwhelm my senses. It takes few moments for things to get down to a bearable level.

  When it does, I take stock of where I am. Inside the sleeper car. The train is moving. I have no idea where we are.

  I slide off the bunk and pull myself to standing in the narrow space and find the bed above me is empty. The sheets and blankets are folded and neatly put back, like Sam hadn’t even slept on them.

  So I’m alone on the train, without my passport, or a lot of spending money, or a cell phone I can actually use. I look out the window but can’t tell anything about where we are. Snow-covered fields as far as I can see, like we’re traveling through a canvas that hasn’t been filled in yet.

  This is fucking great.

  I slide open the door and check the hallway. No one on either side. I consider fishing the phone out of my jacket because at least that will tell me what time it is, when I notice something metal and gleaming, poking out from under Sam’s pillow.

  That knife she pulled on me and Evzen.

  I take it and flick out the blade. It’s short and looks sharp enough to cut through the wall of the train. Sam’s bag and coat are still on the rack, so she must be in the bathroom or looking for food.

  Either way, when she comes back, I’m going to be ready.

  Maybe she found the phone, or she knows I kept it. Maybe there’s some other reason for her to drug me. Either way, I’m getting off this train, going back to Prague, and figuring out how to deal with Roman. There has to be a way. Something else I can offer him. Some way I can convince him to find another golem and leave me the hell alone.

  I back up into the room and wait. After a few moments, the door opens and I hold the knife down by my side, out of view. Sam is wearing a white undershirt, jeans, and her gray Nike sneakers. She looks me up and down and nods. “Good timing, sleepyhead. We’re almost there.”

  She enters the room and shuts the door, and as she’s turned slightly and looking away from me, I bring the knife up, placing it flat against her cheek. She freezes but doesn’t say anything, just waits for me to speak.

  “Why did you drug me?” I ask.

  Her voice is level, unconcerned. “You understand I could take that and gut you before you even realize the stupidity of this decision.”

  “Why did you drug me?”

  “Sleeping on trains sucks. I thought you’d like to get a full night’s rest. Anyway, you need it, considering how hard you got knocked around the other night.”

  I press the knife a little, forming a tiny groove in her skin with the blade. Not enough to break it. Enough to let her know I don’t believe her.

  “What did you think? That I wanted to have my way with you while you were unconscious? Look, I’m not going to lie to you.” She raises an eyebrow. “I might have.”

  “Why not tell me, then?”

  “Because you’re a pain in the ass. I’m going to give you a pass on this, on the condition you fold up that knife and calmly hand it to me right now. You do anything other than that, and we’re going to have a real problem. In the form of you exiting this train immediately. We’re moving pretty fast.”

  Breathe.

  I fold up the knife and hand it to her.

  She smiles, accepts it, and places it in the coin pocket of her jeans.

  “What did you give me?” I ask.

  “Something you’ve never heard of. Provides a nice restful sleep without any fuzzy feeling the next day. Admit it, you feel pretty good right now.”

  She’s right. I feel like I slept for four days. I’ve had dark, blackout sleeps like that before. They come from one of two things: alcohol or Benadryl. Problem is, with both of those things, you come out on the other end hung over or with a head full of cotton. Right now I feel like I could run a marathon while solving complex math equations. And I’m terrible at math. This is the best I’ve felt since my meeting with Chernya Dyra.

  “You should have told me,” I tell her. “I have a concussion. The drugs could have made it worse.”

  “Yeah, well, they didn’t. If anything, the sleep probably helped. Now get your stuff together. We arrive in Kraków in a few minutes.”

  She exits the car. I didn’t bother to bring anything so all I have to do is pull on my boots and check the pockets in
side the bunk to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind. I shrug into my coat, stash the book and the lock pick set, making sure the lump of the phone is still there. I exit the car and Sam is looking out the window.

  “Hitting the bathroom,” I tell her.

  “Enjoy,” she says without looking at me.

  Inside, after getting myself situated, an unfortunately-timed burst of frigid air teaches me the toilets work by opening a latch that dumps everything onto the tracks.

  An announcement comes over the loudspeaker, garbled so I can’t understand it. The train slows down and I find Sam waiting for me outside the door, coat on and backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  We post up by the door as the train pulls into the station. When it finally stops, we climb off and follow signs through concrete corridors and wind up inside a shopping mall. Are all train stations in Eastern Europe like this? We exchanged confused glances, then shrugs, and go hunting for daylight. We pass an ATM and Sam stops.

  “Hold up,” she says. “Don’t have any złoty.”

  As she pokes at the ATM, I look around and see a massive clock that says it’s 10 a.m. We should have arrived in Kraków hours ago.

  “Train got delayed?” I asked.

  “We were sitting on a track waiting for a connection from Budapest,” she says. “Aren’t you glad you were sleeping for that?”

  “What did you do to pass the time?”

  “I told you. Sexually assaulted you.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It is a little bit funny, because now you’re wondering if maybe I did,” she says.

  After extracting a handful of colorful bills, she looks around, nods, and walks toward the exit.

  If Prague is ancient, Kraków may as well be prehistoric. The feeling of going from Prague to here is like going from Manhattan to Queens. Not as dense, more native. The buildings are smaller but no less intricate.

  I know a little about Kraków. I know it escaped the worst of the aerial bombings in World War II, so a lot of the architecture is pre-war. I know I’m supposed to be nice to the pigeons because local legend says they’re really knights who were trapped in that form by a witch. I know Auschwitz is nearby. Being this close to the blackest mark on human history makes me feel compelled to see it, to pay my respects, but I suspect Sam will not be down for sightseeing.

  The taxi driver lets us off at the bottom of a road running next to a long brick wall. It’s cold but not too cold. The snow is thick, somewhere between six inches and a foot. I’m glad I have a sturdy pair of boots. We follow footpaths carved out by the flow of pedestrian traffic.

  It’s a long walk up the road, following alongside the wall, the incline leading us above the city. The path leads to a large open field covered in snow and ringed by ancient, ornate buildings that are so fancy I imagine we aren’t allowed to go inside them. The tallest is a cathedral, the green spires flecked with white peeking up into the gray sky.

  “What now?” I ask.

  “Still early,” Sam says. “We wait.”

  “Can we go inside the church?”

  Sam looks at her phone. “Fine.”

  There’s a long, winding path carved in the snow that leads to the front of the cathedral. There are tourists taking pictures, looking up at the tight collection of buildings. At the entrance, we join the slow queue of people waiting to get inside. We pass a sign that says the cathedral dates back to the fourteenth century. The Royal Archcathedral Basilica of Saints Stanislaus and Wenceslaus on the Wawel Hill. I suspect neither of them are the patron saint of brevity.

  It takes a few minutes of shuffling along with the crowd, and we find ourselves inside a vast chamber flanked by tapestries and leading to a gilded altar that makes me think of Kaz’s apartment, except with less of a porn vibe. The space is filled with the low hum of prayer and hushed conversation. There are people snapping pictures, or kneeled in pews. I walk toward a section of pews that are empty and sit, happy to be warm and to have something to look at.

  Sam sits next to me. “Didn’t take you for a member of the god squad.”

  “I’m not. I like churches.”

  “Why?”

  I have to think about that for a second. I have yet to explain it to anyone. It’s one of those things that makes sense in my head but the meaning gets lost on the way to my mouth. After a few moments, I tell her, “Legacy.”

  “Legacy?”

  “I’ve just been thinking a lot lately about that. What I’m doing with my life. What I’m leaving behind when I’m gone. And look at this place. It’s been here for, what, something like seven hundred years? It’s not even that it’s old. It got built back before electricity. Before they had anything that would have made the job the slightest bit easy. And here it is. It’s… incredible. It’s nice to sit in a quiet place and look at a mark someone left on the world.”

  Sam nods slowly. Digesting it.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask. “No witty comeback? You’re not going to make fun of me?”

  “You think you’re the first person to ever have a deep thought?”

  We sit there for a little while, taking in our surroundings.

  Sam takes her phone, looks at it, puts it inside her coat.

  “Why do you do it?” I ask.

  “Do what?”

  “This job. This thing you do. Be a spy, or whatever you want to call it?”

  “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

  The answer comes too quickly. It’s practiced.

  It’s also bullshit.

  “Seriously,” I tell her.

  She breathes in sharply through her nose, lets the air hiss out of her. Takes another breath. Folds her hands in her lap, then twists her fingers to crack her knuckles. “Inertia. One thing led to another thing led to another thing. That’s how I got here. One day it’ll kill me, like it did Fuller. That’s the job. I’ll go to my grave alone but I’ll know I tipped the scales a little bit in the right direction.”

  “You don’t have to be alone, you know.”

  “You’re alone,” she says.

  “That’s a matter of circumstance. And for a long time I thought I needed to be. I shut myself away. Turns out the best thing I ever did was learn to talk about the way I felt. I know that might be a little touchy-feely for you, but it helped.”

  In my peripheral vision, Sam’s face softens. For a moment I think I’ve gotten past the façade. Then she purses her lips. “You and I don’t do the same thing. Not even in the same league.”

  “First, it’s not a contest. And second, I think we do. Because what I’m doing is what I think is right. It might not be the legal thing and it might not be the smart thing, but it’s the thing I know in my heart needs to get done. If the path is tough, fine, I can handle it. Because in the end, that’s the legacy I hope to leave behind. That I made someone else’s life better. Doesn’t mean I need to suffer in the process.”

  She looks at me. Opens her mouth. Begins to speak.

  Stops. Takes her vibrating phone out of her pocket.

  “That’s weird,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Got a text. My contact is here. The message says: St. George’s enemy?”

  “Your contact likes riddles.”

  “I keep telling him this phone is secure and he doesn’t need to do it. He’s a little… strange.”

  An old man in a navy vest is walking down the aisle toward us. Tall, long hair tied back in a ponytail, with a friendly smile and a bushy mustache. He’s got on a nametag that says: Alesky. I’ve seen enough tour guides to know he’s a tour guide.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I say, getting up from the pew. “What can you tell me about dragons?”

  The man smiles, like he was expecting this question. “Have you not heard the dragon legend of Kraków?”

  “We have not, but would like very much to hear it,” Sam says in a sudden and effortless French accent.

  “
Would you like me to show you the way to the dragon’s lair?” he asks.

  “Please,” Sam says.

  We follow alongside the man as he leads us outside the church, back into the biting air, and across the property. We stick to the paths, walking slowly.

  “So,” I tell him. “Dragons.”

  The man smiles. “The earliest telling of the story dates back to the thirteenth century. The dragon first appeared during the reign of King Krakus, and required weekly offerings of cattle. This was, as you can imagine, a bit of trouble for the townsfolk.” He laughs and it sounds like a rattle in his chest. “So Krakus asked his two sons, Lech and Krakus II, to intervene. They fed the dragon a calfskin stuffed with sulfur, which felled the beast. Lech was a jealous boy, and decided he wanted the credit, so he killed his brother and blamed the dragon. Lech later became king. But the secret got out and he was exiled from the country. This city is named after the brave and innocent Krakus.”

  “That’s quite a story,” I tell him.

  “It is not the only one,” Alesky says. “There is another interpretation, from the fifteenth century. Very similar to the first, but it is the one I prefer. The dragon was terrorizing the town, but instead of cattle, it ate young maidens. Fearing for his daughter’s safety, the king offered her hand in marriage to whoever could defeat the dragon. So a cobbler’s apprentice named Skuba stuffed a lamb with sulphur. The dragon ate it and became so thirsty it drank from the Vistula until it exploded.”

  “Sulphur, it would seem, is the preferred method for combatting dragons,” I tell him.

  “In this part of the world, yes,” Alesky says.

  “Why do you prefer the second version?”

  Alesky smiles again. It’s a warm smile. “Less villainy.”

  “What does the dragon stand for?” Sam asks.

  “The origins are actually thought to predate Christianity. Some historians believe the dragon was symbolic of the Avars, a nomadic tribe of barbarians who lived on this hill, sometime around the sixth century.”