The Woman From Prague

by Rob Hart

  I step into the stall, close the door, and lock it. Vilém bangs his palm on the door. His voice takes on a heavy, urgent tone. “Open this up, right now.”

  There’s an old-fashioned toilet with a tank on the back of it. I take off the lid of the tank and flip it over. Scrawled on the back of it in blue pen is: Eogih23t9h4gLwfjh39kDjg8f.

  I dip my finger into the water inside the tank and rub at the last letter, F, in the string. Vilém is banging harder on the door, yelling for me to open it. I’ve got a few seconds before he rips it off the hinges. Lucky for me the letter erases pretty easily.

  I commit it to memory: F.

  F as in ‘fuck Roman’.

  Vilém reaches up, grips the door, and leans back. It twists down and toward him, the metal groaning. I unlock the door and it swings open, throwing him back into the wall. I hold up the tank with the code facing out.

  “Found it,” I tell him.

  He yanks it out of my hands.

  We pull up in front of Kaz’s building. Vilém extends his hands to me. I look at it for a second, wondering if I should take it. If he’ll grab my hand and pull me forward and stick a knife in my throat, then send me tumbling out of the car.

  But it feels impolite to not accept, so I take his hand. It envelops mine and he squeezes. It hurts, the bones in my hand grating against each other.

  He lets go. Reaches inside his jacket for what I figure is a gun, but comes out with my passport. Seeing it makes me want to cry with relief. I flip through it to make sure it’s intact, and stick it in my pocket.

  “The girl’s phone,” he says.

  I take it out of my pocket and hand it over, feel like I’m letting down Sam in the process.

  “So we’re done?” I ask.

  “Not quite,” he says. “You are to stay here. You are booked on a flight leaving Prague tomorrow. You will be escorted to the airport and someone will make sure you get on the plane and go. Until then, we will be keeping an eye on you.”

  “I could really go for a trdelník,” I tell him.

  “Have someone bring it to you,” he says. “You are smart young man. This is almost over. You must continue to be smart. Roman will be posting someone by your mother, too, to make sure you comply. My understanding is they have found her, and this man is already on a plane. He will be there in a few hours. He is not a nice man. Do you understand?”

  I climb out of the car. Vilém lingers, like he wants to say something.

  “What?” I ask him.

  “You understand we are not friends, correct?”

  “I don’t expect a Christmas card.”

  “No one here is your friend.” He glances up and looks back at me. “No one.”

  “I get it. Everything sucks. Thanks.” I salute him and he drives away. I watch as the car turns the corner and check my passport again. A light snow begins to fall and I know Sam will be dead soon. I stare up into the night sky for a minute and then scream “FUCK” at the top of my lungs, so hard it makes my throat hurt, the word echoing off the buildings around me.

  It doesn’t make me feel any better.

  Because I want to believe that I have no choice but to run.

  As I enter Kaz’s building, I notice a rotary phone hanging from the wall. I go over and pick it up and it’s got a dial tone. I should call my mom. Make sure she’s okay before I hunker down.

  Should I warn her?

  Should I tell her everything?

  Maybe. Let her know that her son is an idiot and a coward and got himself into so much trouble halfway around the world that the weight nearly came down on her. Maybe I should tell her to get a motel room somewhere, pay in cash, wait until I’m home.

  I dial her cell. Should be early afternoon.

  She picks up on the third ring. “Ashley?” she asks, her voice a little tired.

  “How’d you know?”

  “The caller ID. It’s a foreign number. Is everything okay?”

  “No, Ma. Not really. Look, I need to tell you something. And it’s going to sound a little crazy. But I need you to listen and trust me, okay?”

  She sighs. “Can’t be any weirder than the day I’m having.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got a fraud alert from my credit card company. So I checked my account. Someone got the number and ordered plane tickets and a hotel room, all in my name. Which makes no sense. Why would they do it in my name?”

  “That is weird. Where did the fake you go?”

  “Florida.”

  Florida.

  Is Florida nice this time of year?

  Oh, fuck.

  Sam asked for my mother’s name. She asked about Florida. There’s a man on a plane to her location, but you wouldn’t take a plane to Aunt Ruth’s because there aren’t any airports around there. You drive or take the train.

  Sam did this. Created a paper trail that would send Roman’s men in the wrong direction. Bought her some time.

  Tried to protect her.

  My brain starts spinning so fast I can barely keep up with it.

  I’m formulating the plan as I’m speaking.

  “Ma, I need you do me a favor,” I tell her. “I need you to trust me. Do you trust me?”

  “…Yes?”

  “Do not dispute those charges. Not until tomorrow. Do you understand me?”

  “Ashley, why in the world…”

  “Please trust me on this. I’ll talk to you soon. And listen… I love you. I love you so much.”

  “Ashley, you’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t worry, Ma. I just… I drank too much. I’m feeling a little sentimental. I’ll call you in the morning. Everything is going to be fine.”

  That last bit feels like a lie.

  “…Okay,” she says.

  I click off.

  Sam saved my mom’s life.

  Or at least she tried.

  Which means I’m sure as fuck not going to sit around and wait to go home. I have been running away from fights for a year. No more. There’s a job that needs getting done and I’m the only one who can do it.

  Roman thinks I’m smart enough to keep my head down and follow orders.

  Too bad for him I’m not that smart.

  Moscow rule. Don’t harass the opposition.

  You know what?

  Fuck the Moscow rules.

  Kaz takes a big chug from his bottle of vodka, places it on the coffee table, and gestures toward it. I shake my head. A mouthful of vodka would be nice right now but I need to be sober for this.

  He leans close to me. He has to. Gogol Bordello is playing loud over the surround sound stereo system in the living room. It was the first thing I did when I came in; turn on the music nice and loud in case Roman is listening in addition to watching. I don’t know how deep his abilities go, and no sense in playing around.

  “So I am to understand all of this,” Kaz says, his voice barely audible over the music. “You mean to go up against these men, rescue Sam, retrieve the information they have stolen, and evade an assassin in the process.”

  “Yup.”

  “Why do you need to do this? You can go home. You are free.”

  There are a lot of things I can say right now. About guilt. About atoning for past mistakes. About the foreword momentum of a goal. More than anything, it’s that Sam tried to protect my mom, and for that, I owe her.

  But really, there’s only one thing to say.

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” I tell him.

  Kaz nods, like he gets it.

  “So we have a couple of problems we need to solve,” I tell him. “I need to get out of here without them following me. I need to find out where they’re holding Sam. And I need to take down at least eight people quickly.”

  “The weapons, I have you covered on,” he says.

  “How so?”

  “I told you,” he says, smiling. “I know people. We need to get out of here first. Do you think we could escape across the roof?”

  “R
oman’s not stupid. I don’t think it’ll be that easy.”

  “Then let me think on it,” he says. “How do we find Sam?”

  “She left her laptop here. She found me using a tracking device. Maybe she still has it on her. I can check her laptop and see.”

  “Well, then do that,” he says. “I will work on getting you out of here.”

  I head into the bedroom Sam was using. There’s the bed and the dresser and no closet. The bed is neatly made, to military precision. There’s a charged laptop and a few articles of folded clothing on the dresser.

  When I open the laptop, I see a fingerprint scanner, like the one on Fuller’s computer. Well fuck. That’s not going to work. I think about it for a few minutes. Look around the room.

  How do I get Sam’s fingerprint?

  The doorknob.

  There’s a smudge that looks like a thumb on the inside knob, which she touched when she last came out of the room. I head into the living room, where Kaz is typing on his laptop.

  “Need some tape,” I tell him.

  “Drawer under coffee machine,” he says.

  There’s a roll of masking tape in the drawer. I take it back into the room, lay it over the thumbprint, and pull up a faded outline that looks to be more than three-quarters of her thumb. I lay that over the fingerprint scanner and then use the back of my pointer finger to press down, feeling a rush of pride and accomplishment.

  Nothing happens.

  Well, I guess I’m not as clever as I thought.

  I toss the laptop aside, lie back on the bed, hanging my boots off the end so not to dirty the sheets. Think about that long hallway. Roman leading us down toward the end. There was the room with the computers. The bathroom. Nothing in either of them that could have revealed a location.

  Everything so bland and vague and old. No details.

  I close my eyes, try to re-imagine that hallway. But I was pretty sure I was about to be killed so fear clouds my memory. I can remember my panic and heavy breathing more than I can remember the details.

  The sound of our footsteps on the tile. The smell of dust. There had to be something.

  But nothing comes up.

  It’s a hallway, in a building, somewhere in an entire city that I don’t know a thing about.

  When I come back into the living room, Kaz sees it on my face but he says it anyway: “It did not work.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  He sighs, sits back in his chair. “I think it is time to leave this be. You are alive. Your mother is alive. These are all good things. This was a game you never had any business being in. Maybe it is best to move on?”

  He’s right. I fall into the couch, reach over, and pick up the bottle of vodka. The thing I said I wasn’t going to do anymore. No more hard liquor. Another promise broken. Because that’s all I can ever seem to do: break promises.

  As I’m pressing the bottle to my lips, the sharp smell of it stinging my sinuses, Kaz says, “That will help, my friend.”

  And I stop.

  Think about what Vilém said, about not having friends.

  The words pulse in my ear.

  Kaz is usually so amped up with nervous energy, but right now his muscles are taut. His eyes are darting around the room. He’s trying too hard to be casual about getting me to drop this.

  And if that wasn’t enough, Vilém really fucked up.

  Because he took me here without me asking him to.

  I put the bottle down. “Kaz… there’s something that strikes me as a little strange.”

  “Yes?”

  “You let us stay here. Which was risky, considering my current situation. Especially considering Roman and his men were pretty good at tracking me down. But they never showed up here.”

  Kaz nods slowly, trying very hard to keep his face even. The music still blasting, up-tempo gypsy punk filling the air around us.

  “I’ll allow that you and I have a pretty tenuous connection, but at some point, Roman should have showed up here,” I tell him.

  He’s holding his breath. “I trusted Sam. She said it was safe for you two to be here.”

  “You trusted Sam,” I tell him.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends.”

  “You sold me to Roman.”

  He looks around the room. When he speaks, his voice is slightly chilly. “I do not know what you mean.”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Do you scope out targets for him? Expats who might have some skeletons in their closet that can be exploited? Is that why we became friends?”

  “I don’t think…”

  “Kaz, we fucking sang Johnny Cash together.”

  He picks up the vodka bottle and drinks too much of it. Places the bottle back down and looks up at me, his eyes suddenly sad. “I did not mean for any of this to happen.”

  I want to leap over the table. Grab him around the throat. Scream in his face. Hit him, hard. “You set this whole thing in motion. What did you get?”

  “Money.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “No, it was not. I did not even think anyone got hurt. It has never been like this.”

  “Do you know where Roman took us? The place he took Sam and me to? Where he’s keeping her?”

  “I had to drop something off to him once. A list of names. I met him right outside the city. Old building, being torn down.”

  “Good. Now we know where she is.”

  “I do not think this is…”

  “You better start thinking about how you’re going to get me out of here and over to there. You fucked me and now you’re going to make it right.”

  “Roman is not a man to be crossed.”

  “At the end of tonight, either he’s going to be dead, or I will be. Either way, you’ll be fine.”

  “My friend…”

  I stand up. Tower over him. He leans back a bit in the seat. “Don’t call me your friend. We’re not friends.”

  He looks at me like a child being scolded.

  More importantly, he looks regretful enough to do what I say.

  A cup of coffee and twenty minutes of pacing and I’ve got no idea how to get out of this building. The basement was a dead-end. I checked. No egress. There’s only one entrance, at the front of the building. I could play the roof trick but that’s too obvious.

  Kaz has been pacing and thinkin,g too, but carefully avoiding my path, like if he gets too close to me, I might strike him.

  Which I’ve considered.

  Throughout this whole mess, I’ve had Kaz to fall back on, and that was a real source of comfort. And now I don’t even have that. Now I’m completely alone, save Stanislav. But by now I’m sure he knows something went down at the apartment in Kraków. I’m probably on his shit list, too.

  Whatever. I’m not here to make friends.

  “Ash.”

  I turn and Kaz is standing at the entrance of the kitchen, holding something around his back.

  “For what it is worth, I truly am sorry,” he says, his eyes rimmed in red. “I will help you. Whatever you need. I will make this up to you. I think I have an idea.”

  He brings his hands around to his front, holding a deflated blow-up doll with blonde hair and a round O-shaped mouth rimmed by pink lips.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Trust me,” he says. After a moment, he adds, “Please.”

  It’s not too long before the bell rings and there’s a gorgeous brunette strolling into the apartment wearing a white fur coat. She looks at Kaz and says, “This will cost a lot extra.”

  He nods at her and turns to me. “Ash, this is Lenka.”

  “We have met before,” she says to me, smiling.

  It takes me a minute, but I realize she’s the porn star who warmed me up after I took a swim in the Vltava.

  “Right,” I tell her. “Thank you for that, by the way.”

  “You are looking a little better, at least.”


  She places a small, sleek piece of machinery on the counter, about the size of a car battery. A portable inflator for an air mattress. It has a built-in battery supply so it doesn’t have to be plugged in.

  The plan itself is pretty simple. Lenka will take the doll and the compressor and get her car. When she pulls up out front, I get in the passenger seat. Once we’re sure we’re being followed by whoever is watching the building, we wait for the first hard turn. I bail at the same time as we hit the inflator. The doll pops up and from the vantage point of the car behind us, it’s like there are still two people in the car. Lenka will continue to drive in the opposite direction of the warehouse where they’re keeping Sam.

  Kaz will then get me and we hit the road. This way, even if Roman is pissed at me for not staying put, he won’t know I’m headed for him. Kaz insists this is a real spy trick he found on the internet, but I find that claim pretty dubious.

  We dress the doll in a spare jacket and hat and hit the compressor. It takes a little less than minute for the doll to inflate.

  Lenka leaves, taking the doll and inflator, and promising to be out front in five minutes. I feel a little light-headed, bouncing on my toes, clenching and unclenching my fists.

  I’ve done some boneheaded things in my life. This ranks pretty much near the top.

  “I will go meet my driver,” Kaz says. “We will be behind you.”

  He hugs me and claps me on the back, then kisses me on the cheek. Again I think about hitting him but I think he’s trying to make up for things, so I’ll roll with this until I’m proven otherwise.

  I wait two minutes after he’s left and head down the stairs after him. Outside the front door there’s a small red car waiting with Lenka in the seat. I dive into the passenger side. The interior is heavy with the smell of cigarettes.

  Lenka pulls away from the curb and another pair of headlights turn on behind us. A black car swings out from the curb in. In the dark, I can barely make out the driver, but I don’t think it’s Vilém or Fran. Definitely not Roman. And it’s only one guy.

  I pick up the doll and inflator off the floor under my feet, trying to keep everything out of view. The machine hums as the doll slowly inflates with air, filling the small space under the dash.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” I ask. Feeling guilty for asking because it’s been months since I’ve had one, and I considered myself quit, but if I’m going to die tonight, it may as well be with a little bit of nicotine in my blood.