The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  She reached into her purse and pulled out the keys, fashioned them into a weapon. “What are you doing here?”

  “We had dinner plans.” He retreated. “Well, sort of. This is the only real spice shop in the old town, so I made an assumption. When you weren’t here, I—”

  “You what?” said Grace.

  “Well, I worried something happened to you. After what we learned yesterday, at the Institute, I was a bit spooked. You were too.” William approached her again. “For good reason? You’re bleeding.”

  Grace was too exhausted to interrogate William, to assure herself he wasn’t a different sort of spy, or agent, or thug. For the first time all day she was hungry, and there was no food upstairs. There was no point sneaking around, as the pursuers now knew everything there was to know about her: where she was staying, what she was discovering, what she had written.

  “I’m hungry. Can we eat?”

  “Of course. You mean, now? No offense, Grace, but you might want to wash up just a bit.”

  Reluctantly, she allowed William into her building and up the stairs. She asked him to wait in the small kitchen of the Airbnb while she tended to herself in the bathroom. The blood from her nose had somehow smeared all over her face. Her hair was a mess. There was a visible footprint on the front of her jacket and on her forehead. The warm water on her face felt so good that something between a sob, a laugh, and a hysterical scream escaped from her.

  “You okay, Grace?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She put on a pair of jeans and a sweater, and on the way out with William she put the knife back in her purse.

  They ate at a Czech-Indian fusion restaurant that was open late, with dark tables, plush gold chairs, and romantic lighting. Once they were seated in the corner, with water in their glasses and menus in their hands, Grace scanned the room for anyone who might be watching. No one was close enough to hear them.

  On the walk over, Grace had recounted the day’s exploits and she had watched his face for reactions. William had seemed authentically horrified, though perhaps he had been well trained at spy school.

  “You have to stop. You have to go back to the embassy.”

  “No point. They think I’m a nutcase.” She stared at him, his dirty glasses. “Who do you work for, William?”

  He slid his glass of water over to make room, as he liked to talk with his hands. “You think I followed you to the Institute, reluctantly brought you upstairs and then across town in the pouring rain, introduced you to Milan, pretended to be excited by your revelations to…what, exactly? What’s my sinister motive here?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe you work for them.”

  “For whom?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know! Are we ordering wine? Three days ago I was a supermarket tabloid hack. No one cared what I wrote. No one believed a word of it.”

  “Now that these men have attacked you, perhaps the embassy officials will take you more seriously.” William spoke softly. “I’ll vouch for you. Nothing is worth getting hurt, or worse.”

  “I have no proof they attacked me.”

  “Your face! And the police could—”

  “I threatened the killers with that, with calling the police,” said Grace. “They laughed at me. They’re so far beyond all of that.”

  “So far beyond?” said William.

  “They are the police, somehow.” She finished her glass of water. “Ever since I stood up from the smelly cobblestones where I thought I was going to die I’ve been wondering: why didn’t I die? It would have been easy for them, even preferable. The only answer is they—you, William?—need to know exactly what I know and who I might have spoken to about it. I’ve spoken to you and Milan, to Steadman, to Elena herself…”

  “Last night after that second beer I called Milan and I went back to his office. I was a little drunk and feeling conspiratorial. If you go through Elena Craig’s biography online, point by point…”

  The server, a mop-haired man in his late twenties, arrived at the table and bowed. William ordered a bottle of Moravian Muscat—Mopr—and asked that the chef do his best to mix Czech tradition and tandoori delights.

  When the server was gone, William leaned forward and lowered his voice. “The first problem is her degree from Charles University. There is no record of it whatsoever. So what was she doing here in Prague, after she left Mladá Boleslav? Let’s say she was studying. What exactly was she studying? Next: the man in Strasbourg. We are to believe he was an athlete, that they met at a competition of some sort. Guess what? Despite all the talk of her gymnastics prowess, her name falls off the list of competitors in 1968. When she was eighteen. From 1969 to 1972, when we are supposed to believe she somehow met this Frenchman…”

  “Jean-Yves de Moulin. I just met him.”

  “Well, she wasn’t competing at all, according to the records, and there were no Czech-French competitions whatsoever. So either someone removed these records, which makes no sense because they are part of her official story. Or…none of this actually happened. She didn’t do a master’s degree at Charles University. Or gymnastics.”

  “Which makes it hard to join the Czech Olympic team.”

  “Indeed! So how did she get to Strasbourg? And of all places, why there? I wish you had asked me to join you in Strasbourg.” The server returned with the wine, opened it, and invited William to smell the cork. Then he poured a bit of the Muscat and William swirled it and stuck his big nose into the glass, tasted it, and said a Czech synonym of delicious.

  After cheers and eye contact and their first proper drink, ten seconds of silence hung over the table. Grace interrupted it. “What should I do?”

  “The only reasonable option is to give this up,” said William. “It’s dangerous and impossible. People are dead. They’ll kill you the moment they feel like it. Your own boss has forbidden it.”

  Appetizers arrived: a salmon and crab dish that smelled of curry, a bit of quail marinated in honey wine, and a pâté of deer. Grace found it absurd. You think you are going to die and an hour later you’re eating a quail.

  “But you’re not going to stop, are you?” said William.

  “No. I fly out tomorrow, to Miami, to see my mother. Then I go back to Montreal.”

  “Where Elena Klimentová lived before she moved to New York.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll go through the archives.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I join you?”

  Grace paused before answering. The wine had begun to work on her, but she was not sure about him. He had waited two hours in front of a spice shop, in late October. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, can I please come with you to Montreal?” William refilled their glasses. “I’m a historian. I study totalitarian regimes, popular movements, politics. Elena’s ex-husband could soon be president. I’m on sabbatical until January, to work on a research project. Until yesterday, I thought I knew what it was, the kind of thing nine of my colleagues would read and immediately forget. But this? This is a research project. I could…help you? Protect you?”

  She stared at him.

  “There is nothing at all wrong with London South Bank University.” He removed his glasses, cleaned them with his serviette, and put them back on. “I always suspected I’d be there until retirement and that would be fine. Fine! But I’ll be honest with you, Grace. I’d much prefer to be teaching at Cambridge and this is surely the only chance in my life to make it happen.”

  23

  HORKY NAD JIZEROU, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1978

  Petr Kliment held Kristína, his six-month-old granddaughter, on a patch of grass on the shore of the Jizera River. When Elena reached for Kristína, to take her away, her father kissed the baby’s chubby cheeks and bald head and spoke into her tiny ear. Elena worried he would squeeze her too hard.

  “I cannot let her go, Elenka. She is the most beautiful, best-smelling creature on the planet.”

  Elena had never be
fore seen tears in her father’s eyes.

  But the car was waiting and the men inside were impatient because their bosses in Prague were impatient.

  Petr Kliment was spending more and more of his time at their country home along the river south of Mladá Boleslav. At first it was only summers but now that he no longer had to work so much he preferred to fish earlier in the spring and later in the fall. Jana, his wife, joined him from time to time. But she preferred life in Mladá Boleslav and in Prague, now that she could live the life she was always meant to lead.

  It was more pleasant and more beautiful in their apartment in the upper town. Neighbors looked up at them instead of down. They could stay in hotels in Prague, even spend ten days at the Hotel Croatia in Duga Uvala. None of their friends understood what had happened with Elena, not precisely, but Mladá Boleslav was a city of gossips. Their daughter had not defected because Petr and Jana were not sent away to work camps or thrown in prison. On the contrary, Petr and Jana had entered the quiet elite of Bohemia. They shopped at the Tuzex stores and bought blue jeans and sweets with the special currency reserved for party officials.

  If others envied them, it did not bother Jana one bit. She had been born into a special class and now she had returned to it. As for the advantages they sought and received: this was no different than buying and selling wares on the black market, which everyone did. There were many versions of the proverb: if we are not stealing from the state, we are stealing from our children.

  If they offer it, take it; this was what Jana had always believed.

  Now, Elena took the baby from her father. He wiped the tears from his eyes and shook his head. “I am so sad, Elenka. The feeling will not go away. It gets worse and worse.”

  “Sad to see us go, tati? Kristína and I will be back soon.”

  “I want you back for good. I want them to release you from all of this.” Her father reached out and squeezed her arm. “Now that you have a baby with one of them…”

  “With one of them?” She smiled. “He is my husband. I love him. I have a very important job, designing cars, and—”

  Her father walked slowly back toward the house, a new slouch in his shoulders, as though he could tell his daughter was lying.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Jana. “This work you are doing, it is very important. You are so lucky to have these opportunities. And it has made us so happy.”

  Elena hugged her mother and the driver opened the back door of the Škoda 120 GLS. She had gone from knowing nothing about cars to knowing everything about them, just as her mother had transformed from a jealous nobody into the Czech version of a society matron.

  “Will you come back soon?” her father called.

  Jana rolled her eyes. “When you can, Elenka. Though we would love to meet your mysterious Anthony.”

  Kristína was a good baby and fell asleep almost immediately as the car climbed out of the valley. It was a bumpy road, and despite being a 1978 model the suspension on the Škoda was so stiff the child bounced in her arms. Anthony would want all of the details. She could hear him telling guests at their table: “Russia might be a huge military force. They might be. I don’t know. Do you know? All I know for sure is this: if you can’t make a car that isn’t an utter piece of shit, how tough can you be? How tough can you really be? Based on what Elena tells me about communist cars, we should attack yesterday.”

  The men in the front of the Škoda did not speak to her, which was preferable as it didn’t disturb Kristína. Besides, Elena had learned enough in the past years to see these men had no power. They knew they had no power. If they felt obliged, out of personal weakness, to fill the silence with talk of the weather or the car or the population of New York City, that was fine. But these men in the Škoda were not permitted to discuss anything of consequence.

  What she had come to understand in the program was that communism as a political system was as irrelevant as capitalism. The revolution had traded tsars for party leaders. In New York almost no one moved from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. It was not entirely impossible: she had met Holocaust survivors at gala dinners, haunted people who had arrived with nothing but suitcases and had amassed great fortunes. But these survivors were rarer than wolves in Central Park. Statistically, they were insignificant. Yet this was the noblest achievement in American mythology. All of the rich people Elena now knew preferred to boast about launching themselves out of poverty than tell the truth about their fortunes. Even Anthony liked to pretend he was a “self-made man,” because it seemed cleverer than inheriting a profitable family business. This way, he was more American.

  In Moscow, in Prague, she thought, at least they were honest. There was only one way to reach the top of the pyramid. You had to be born there and you had to follow the party rules.

  Or you did what she had done.

  They parked in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel in the spot reserved for taxis and official hotel vehicles.

  With Kristína in her arms, Elena walked through the busy but almost silent lobby and into the elevator. A short, plump, middle-aged woman with rosy cheeks greeted them with a curtsy as the elevator door opened into the rooftop restaurant.

  “Mrs. Craig? I am the nurse assigned to you for your upcoming meeting. I am honored to take care of baby Kristína so you can focus on the discussion.”

  “But…”

  The nurse reached for the baby. “Do not worry, Mrs. Craig. I will remain on this floor, within sight. If Kristína awakens, I will feed her.”

  While the lights were on and a small team of waiters and waitresses stood at attention in the middle of the restaurant, there seemed to be no customers. The maître d’hôtel silently led Elena to the corner table overlooking the Vltava River and the palace.

  No, there were two customers.

  Sergei stood first. Then, more cautiously, the man next to him stood up. In the special program at the university, not far from here, some of her “professors” had cultivated this look over the course of their careers. The man next to Sergei was blank. He revealed nothing. She could not tell if he was happy or sad, impressed or disappointed, thrilled or bored.

  Yet his eyes were on her and it made her feel like she often felt: that her inner secrets had been revealed. They knew. They knew she hated what all of this had done to her father, who would never be impressed by her clothes or the photographs of her apartment in New York, of her houses on the water, her vacations, her famous friends. She could not fool her father and she could not fool this man.

  “I am Aleksandr Mironov.” The man’s hand was white and faintly moist.

  “Elena Craig.”

  “Sergei has told me quite a story about you and your impressive husband. Please sit.”

  She did, and a waiter arrived with a bottle of champagne. He popped it and poured it in their flutes. At the same time, a waitress arrived with crackers and a black paste—tapenade.

  Mironov did not take his eyes off her.

  If they were going to execute her for a transgression, Elena assured herself, they would have met her on the shore of the river where no one could see them, not in a brand-new restaurant full of waiters and waitresses. They would not waste champagne on a woman they planned to murder. They were giving her champagne and tapenade because they knew it had hurt her to leave Strasbourg and Montreal. Perhaps a hot tray of escargots was on its way, with some baguette and some Alsatian choucroute. For another woman in the program, another swallow, it might have been a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino and bruschetta, or bangers and mash with an English stout.

  The hot afternoon was transforming into a long, warm evening. Some of the windows were open and a breeze blew through the restaurant. With it came the voices of families, of children walking along the river or on the distant bridge. Elena looked back to ensure the nurse and Kristína were still there.

  Sergei lifted his flute. “To Elena Craig.”

  “Thank you.” She lifted her flute.

  “To Antho
ny Craig,” said Mironov.

  They drank. No music was playing in the restaurant, one of the reasons why Elena felt so strange. It was not just the quiet and the formality, the distant nurse and her baby. Invisible ants crawled over her body whenever Mironov looked at her, and it seemed he could not look away.

  “Tell me about Craig,” said Mironov.

  “But Sergei already told you about him.”

  “Sergei has never met the man. I want to hear it from you.”

  It was not the first time Elena had reported to the KGB, but this was different. This was not official. Sergei and this man Mironov were not leaders, not yet. They were plotters. Neither of them took notes or made her feel like she would be punished if she made an error.

  Still, she tried to be as precise as possible, and to focus on what Sergei and Mironov wanted to hear: that she had never met a man more confident yet so lacking in confidence. He was the most ambitious, least disciplined man in New York. There were no secrets with him. He said aloud every thought that arrived in his brain, to anyone, and a good number of these thoughts were lies. He was vengeful yet he forgave easily. All you had to do was praise and flatter him.

  “What do his peers think of him?” said Mironov.

  It hurt Elena to say what she was about to say. “They find him inferior, a crass and boastful arriviste. He received money from his father, who was also an arriviste. He married a dumb blonde from Czechoslovakia who can’t even speak decent English. Anthony thinks his audience, the market for his products, is a cadre of wealthy and powerful men, aristocrats. But he is wrong. The men who buy his cars are hopeless strivers.”

  “Does he know this?”

  “I think so, in his secret heart. Yes.”

  “And it hurts him?”

  “His pride is everything.”

  Mironov dipped a cracker in tapenade and noisily ate it. “Remember always that a wise man walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Sergei laughed. “Elena, you must understand. Aleksandr is no fan of America. But there is a television show, Kung Fu.”