The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  Sergei had explained that capitalism had its philosophies and its aesthetics. All of this had to feel natural to a gentleman caller.

  In downtown boutiques they had spent nearly eight thousand francs on bracelets and necklaces, on a gold-plated watch, dresses and short skirts, loose slacks and tight blouses in pure, bright colors—polyester combinations that were unimaginable on the streets of Prague. It made Elena feel dizzy, that all of this excess was permitted. She thought of her mother with her two dresses and three sweaters: six possible outfits. Anything else of value was an inheritance from another time and Elena remembered her mother hiding those things. Now she hid nothing. Now, thanks to the program, Jana Klimentová walked through the city like a pre-communist mayor. Elena had warned both her parents about their bourgeois apartment in the central plaza of Mladá Boleslav, their new clothes, their new food, and how they all came with a new set of rules.

  They did not have to worry about the neighbors anymore. Their new apartment was bugged. Secret police were always watching and always listening. When they came, they would come in the middle of the night; they would not knock on the door; they would use their own set of keys.

  Like all of her classmates, Elena was to begin with a job at Kara Modeling, an international agency with offices in New York, London, Montreal, Paris, Milan, and West Berlin. In France the agency also had addresses in Lyon, Marseille, and, because of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg. Elena would have modeling jobs all over Western Europe.

  Her appointment with the agency manager was the following morning, in an office on the Grand’Rue. Though it was already settled, she was nervous. What if they did not think she was pretty enough, poised enough? She was nervous about Sergei leaving her, about school ending and this new life beginning, about what came next.

  There was a club of men in Strasbourg, all graduates of Sciences Po, all sons of wealthy families, all involved in business and politics who called themselves Les Albertins, after Albert Schweitzer, the famous Strasbourgeois. Once every six months the Albertins allowed women to join them at an event to raise money for the astronomical clock in the magnificent old cathedral. Sergei had arranged for one of his “possessions,” an Albertin, to escort her to the dinner in two weeks.

  When Sergei had compromising material, kompromat, on a man abroad, he was a “possession.” His possession in Strasbourg was a gay man named Chastain. Tonight, Chastain would meet them for dinner at the Maison des Tanneurs. It was busy enough with tourists on the canals of the Grande Île that no one would notice a man and a woman speaking French with Slavic accents.

  “How did you come to be here, Elena?” Sergei asked.

  Elena sighed. They had been over this so many times. Couldn’t they just have an intimate conversation over wine like normal French lovers? She had bought a sachet of dried lavender. She brought it to her nose, closed her eyes, and smelled it.

  “How did you come to be here?” There was an edge to his voice that made her tremble.

  “I left when everyone else left, when it was obvious the Prague Spring had come to an end.”

  “That sounds rehearsed. Details.”

  “One night in August, when the rumors began—”

  “What rumors?”

  “That the Russians were sending in the troops and the tanks, to bring us back in line, I decided to leave.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I took the train to Linz, dressed up for a hiking holiday in the Salzkammergut. From there I went to Salzburg, Innsbruck, Basel, and arrived here where my friends were living.”

  “And what do you do now?”

  “A bit of modeling. I had done this in Prague. I might also teach gymnastics. I competed back home.”

  “Why did you leave Czechoslovakia?”

  “Freedom and opportunity. I want adventure, to see the world. But I’m not an overly political girl, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Perfect.” Sergei looked at his watch. “Sit with me.”

  Elena sat across from him in a hard vinyl chair and he poured her a glass of the sweet amber wine. She wished Sergei could see her as she was: his wife, not his mistress. It was agony to be in the same room with him, to know how soon he would leave, that he could overlook the terrible, wonderful truth of what they shared. She knew he was filled with love for her yet he contained it and twisted it and he made himself cruel.

  “Sergei, when this is over…”

  “This never ends.”

  “It must.”

  “You must understand, Elena, this is our struggle, yours and mine, the struggle of exceptional people. We will meet from time to time, I promise you.”

  “From time to time. When I can escape…” she could not say it.

  “Your husband.”

  She stood up straight, forced herself. “My husband.”

  Since January 1969 she had learned English and French, etiquette and music, fashion, movies, how to walk and how to eat and—this had shocked her—how to make love. She had learned surveillance and counter-surveillance, self-defense, and the basics of kitchen chemistry and clandestine photography. Deception was a muscle that needed constant exercise. How do covert meetings work? How best to pass material on a busy street? Her first objective was to marry well, which could only bring joy to a girl from the train station ghetto of Mladá Boleslav.

  Lucky, lucky Elena.

  Polite men, quietly confident men, good solid husbands were not their targets. The swallows were after the proudest, most ambitious, most aggressive men in the Western world, men on their way up, men who would succeed in life, in business, in politics.

  “None of my other girls reacted this way.” Sergei said. “They were excited about their adventures.”

  Elena sighed. “But none of the others were in love with you.”

  11

  PRAGUE, 2016

  Grace woke up out of an ugly dream and into the memory of the smell of urine. The woman-of-steel thoughts that had taken her into sleep slammed into a headache inspired by mulled wine, vodka, and black beer. It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning. She lay in bed, feeling fragile, flipping imaginary coins between investigative reporter and tourist.

  It would be so easy to buy a ticket for a river trip on the Vltava, to eat salty meat and potatoes in an authentic pub, to spend an hour in the Franz Kafka Museum instead of feeling like a Franz Kafka character: vulnerable and watched. If someone was willing to steal her purse and break into her apartment, she imagined they might also hurt her.

  Since Grace could not find Sergei Sorokin on the Internet, and since Elena Craig would not speak to her, there was really only one avenue left: to hunt for any files on Elena that had not been burned by the Czech secret service. If she found nothing, Grace would take the river trip and the pork and dumplings and become a regular tourist without a hint of self-loathing.

  On her way out of the apartment, she wrapped a paring knife in some paper towel and stuffed it in her purse.

  A cloud had descended on Prague, so low that it met the top of the astronomical clock tower in Old Town Square. Grace had a meaty breakfast that was actually a lunch at a corner table, so she could watch everyone in the dark little restaurant. Afterward she walked through the mist with her plastic poncho over a sweater, turning every few minutes to scan the route behind her.

  She was certain a man in a navy suit and beige raincoat was following her as she passed the Church of Our Lady before Týn. Then a young woman with large-framed eyeglasses talking on her phone, with a canvas Charles University bag, watched her from the Starbucks. A couple walking arm-in-arm with coffees turned right down an alley after her, and then left. As Grace passed the train station a uniformed policewoman spoke into the little black receiver on her shoulder.

  If this was unwarranted paranoia, she could not imagine how to treat it. Her usual remedy, a bit of dark self-mockery, was undone by the lingering image of her dildo on a pillow. She imagined what it must have been like for Elena to grow up in
a time when neighbors snitched on one another for sport and status.

  The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes was a five-storey box covered in aluminum siding the color of a nicotine stain. Grace climbed its steps, beyond the train station, and looked back at the pocket park and city below wrapped in mist.

  Inside the stark lobby she made for the turnstile and a bald man with clipped white hair on the sides grasped her arm. She pulled away from him and shouted back at his smoky Czech monologue in English that she would call the police.

  Like the police could help her.

  The man stepped back, his arms up in retreat. There was a frosty layer of dandruff on the shoulders of his security uniform. He said something else in Czech, calmer this time.

  Grace apologized. Though it was clear he did not understand, she wanted him to know she was feeling jumpy for reasons that had nothing to do with him. She pulled a fold of crowns from her pocket and showed him. “Pay? How much?”

  He shook his head.

  “Archives?” Grace pointed to the turnstile, mimed a book.

  The guard led her back to the front door and pointed at the city below. The mist had turned into rain and the wind was up. Wet leaves and a white plastic bag blew across the square of grass and trees in front of them. “Good day, lady. Thank you.”

  His two phrases of English were better than any of the Czech Grace had picked up from Elenka since the spring of 2014. She was about to step back into the rain when a thin man in thick glasses hopped into the building and shook the water from himself. The security guard pointed to him. “English. English man.”

  “Yes, Englishman.” The thin man’s accent was what her father used to call plummy. His black hair was pasted to his head. He opened his jacket to reveal the sort of sweater that, in Montreal, straddled the line between bad taste and hipsterism. “Can I help you with something?”

  Grace extended her damp hand. “Lovely to meet you. I’m Grace Elliott.”

  “William Kovály. How do you do? American?”

  “American researcher, yes. I’m trying to explain to the gentleman that I want to go upstairs and look through the archives.”

  “I see.” William said something to the security guard in Czech. Then he addressed Grace. “You can’t go up.”

  “Why not?”

  “You aren’t an approved researcher.”

  “But I am.”

  “How is that?”

  “It just is, William. I’m a journalist at an actual newspaper, and you see where I’m from—”

  “Ah yes, that’s it. This isn’t where you’re from, Grace. We’re in Prague.”

  “But these are public documents and I’m a member of the public.”

  “Perhaps you aren’t who you say you are. Perhaps you’ve come to remove something or destroy it.” William leaned against the wall in a poorly lit alcove that carried the scent of wet leaves and soil from his shoes. “Do you have any idea what happened to archives and records in this country in 1989? Thousands of files, millions of them, were shredded and burned. You need to be approved.”

  Grace nodded. “So how do I do that?”

  William pulled his wet jacket off and draped it over his computer bag, a cheap silver thing. “You submit paperwork to the governing authority of the Institute.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Six to eight weeks.”

  “What?” Grace tried to conceal her frustration. She pointed to the security guard. “How about if he comes up with me to ensure I don’t burn or steal anything?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I have some names to research.”

  “Family, is it?”

  She remained silent.

  “None of my business, I suppose.” William gestured at the security guard and said something in Czech. The security guard crossed his arms. Then William moved past Grace and through the turnstile. “I’m just here to drop something off.”

  “Maybe I could have a quick look around, while you do it? Are you an approved researcher? Could you say I’m your assistant? Please?”

  “He doesn’t speak English, Grace, but he’s not a fool.”

  She smiled at the security guard. The security guard did not smile back.

  “I tried to give him money. Maybe it wasn’t enough. Would he take a bribe, do you think?”

  William pressed his glasses up his long nose and squinted at her.

  “What can I do? I have to look something up and I don’t have six to eight weeks.”

  “Submit the paperwork.” He turned and began to walk away.

  “A tour! Tell him it’s a tour. A cultural tour. I swear to God I’ll be five minutes. And I’ll give him a gift, not a bribe. Just a little something for his family.”

  William talked to the security guard again. This time the man shrugged and proposed something in the form of a question.

  “One thousand crowns for a tour.” William swallowed and looked away, pressed his glasses up on his nose again. “Afterwards you buy me a beer.”

  Once the transaction was completed, Grace followed William up the stairs.

  “They’re beginning a renovation,” he said. “A lot of the files have already been moved downtown.”

  “Is there a computer? To search?”

  “It’s a bit ragtag, compared to what you’re accustomed to, I imagine. You tried Google?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not much there?”

  “Not what I’m looking for.”

  “It would help a lot, Grace, if you could tell me what you are after.”

  They walked through a heavy door and into an over-lit library, half torn apart. Beams were exposed behind smashed drywall, covered with plastic. There were a number of cubicles, more than half of them abandoned. Three women worked behind a horseshoe desk. “This place is lousy with asbestos. You start a simple renovation and…well.”

  William led Grace to a long set of shelves, just above waist height. “This is the reference desk.”

  None of it was in English.

  “How do I search for a name?” said Grace.

  “In what context? Do you want to know if—”

  “The secret police. The StB.”

  “What about the StB?” said William.

  Grace realized she really didn’t know how to do this. If she had four or five hours on her own, with a mousy librarian, she could tease the information out of her without any humiliation. “Say there’s a person who lived here until the early 1970s. Let’s say the StB and the KGB got…involved in his or her life.” William nodded. With a crackle in his knees and the grunt of an older man, he crouched down and pulled out two guides from the bottom shelf, both of them the size of a big city telephone book. “Do you know what these are?” he said, putting them on one of the tables.

  “No.”

  William sat and pulled out a chair for Grace to sit next to him. “There was a band in Prague in the 1970s called the Plastic People of the Universe.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was an underground thing, inspired by your Frank Zappa. The voice of dissidence, at the end of the Prague Spring. Yes? But the communists were back, in a big way, and when the band was arrested a group of artists and thinkers came together and published something called Charter 77, outlining all the illegal things the regime had done. Contravening international agreements on human rights…”

  “I read about it in the Museum of Communism.”

  “Well, one of the members of Charter 77 was Václav Havel. You’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course. The first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia.”

  “Another was this man, Cibulka.” William slapped his hands on the tops of the guides. “He was thrown in jail loads of times, before 1989, for criticizing the regime. Probably tortured. The usual stuff. Well, after the fall of communism, whatever the secret police hadn’t burned was supposed to be declassified over time. Czechs who’d been mistreated, they wanted revenge. Unde
rstandably, the new authorities were more interested in a calm transition. Maybe something like what happened in South Africa with truth and reconciliation after Apartheid. But Cibulka wasn’t patient. He wasn’t forgiving. He somehow got the list of classified names and started printing them without anyone’s approval.”

  “Whoa.”

  “I think this edition was published in ’99. It was a sensation.” William opened one of the guides. There were hundreds of tiny names on each page. He pulled a pair of reading glasses out of his bag.

  “This gives you names, birthdates, and code names. Not everyone had a code name, of course. The StB recruited about forty thousand people between the end of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Some were covert collaborators and worked for the secret police in some way. Others were confidential contacts who passed on information. They named names, as Americans like to say.”

  Grace moved closer. “How do you know all this?”

  William smiled. “I’ve devoted my life to studying it. Rather a grim prospect, no?” He opened the second book. This one had photographs. “We also have the names and sometimes even portraits of official StB agents. So. What names are you looking for?”

  Grace stepped in to ease him out of the way. “If you don’t mind, that’s private. It’s alphabetical?”

  Instead of answering, William stood up and retreated to the women at the horseshoe desk. When he was too far away to see what she was doing, Grace looked for Josef Straka. There were a few Strakas, but no Josefs. Grace looked back, to be sure William was far enough away, and then she went to the Ks.

  She did not make it to Kliment before William had finished his business at the horseshoe desk. On his way back to her he announced himself. “Any luck?”

  “No, actually.”

  “This person you are looking for: he or she is still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Living here?”

  “No.”

  “But he—he?—is Czech?”

  “He left in the early seventies.”

  “What? When exactly?”

  “Maybe ’71 or ’72.”

  “How did he leave?”