by Joseph Kanon
“He couldn’t hide the book,” Frantisek said. “Everyone knew what he was doing. Last year, when they opened the case, even the police wanted to help him. Everyone wanted the truth about Masaryk. Last year. Now they won’t even let you go to Lany. No flowers.”
“His grave,” his father said to Nick. “The family grave. Not far from Lidice. We’re a country of symbols here. It’s a way to talk to each other. Last year people started taking flowers there. A shrine. Now that would be an embarrassment to the government, too Czech, so they put an end to it.”
“People remember,” Frantisek said vaguely, his words a little slurred.
“What did he mean, when they opened the case? Who’s they?”
“The Government-the old Government, Dubcek. One of the first things he did was order an investigation into Masaryk’s death. It’s time to know the truth, he said. Of course, the Russians weren’t pleased. They knew what it meant. Another symbol, you see.”
“It’s twenty years ago.”
His father looked at him. “Yes. But a crime like that-to know the truth can be a political act.”
Nick looked back, reading the code. “Here,” he said.
“Like Masaryk,” Frantisek said again, lost now in drink.
“Is that how he did it?” Molly stood behind him, a dishtowel in her hand. “Like Masaryk? Out the window?”
“No, pills,” his father said, then to Frantisek, “he felt no pain. You just go to sleep. It’s the best way.”
Frantisek nodded. “The best way.”
“Such talk,” Anna said.
Nick looked at his father. Had he ever thought about it? Those years now were a story, a walk around the boat deck, but what had they really been like? Bad enough to wonder? A glass of water before bedtime. You just go to sleep.
“Masaryk said the window was the housemaid’s way out,” his father said. “A servant’s death.”
“Hah. That’s good, the housemaid’s,” Frantisek said. “Those fools. Did they think we would believe it? That he’d go like that?” He took another drink. “He thought he could work with them. Like Milos?”
“Our clothes must be dry,” Molly said, excusing herself.
The two men kept staring at their glasses. Nick listened to the sound of Molly on the stairs, Anna rattling the dishes in the sink. “Ach,” Frantisek said finally, out of words, tired of it all. He poured again from the bottle, clearly determined to pass out. Now Nick could hear the clock. Neither of them seemed to notice when he got up and left the room.
Upstairs, a low room under the pitched roof, Molly was brushing her hair, already changed. Finally alone.
“We should go,” she said casually, nodding toward his clothes. “He’s here for the night.”
“Look at me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” A sharp tug of the brush. “Everything’s lovely. A perfect weekend.”
“Stop it,” he said angrily, then lowered his voice. “Why are you hounding him? What police report?”
She glanced at him, then picked up her bag. “Not now. Let’s just go,” she said softly. “I’ll help Anna finish up.”
Nick sat on the bed for a minute, frustrated, looking around the room. A heavy crocheted bedspread, like a giant doily. A few books. He picked up the picture frame on the night table. His father and Anna, younger, smiling shyly. He still had all his hair. They were dressed for snow, bundled up, standing in an empty city square. Moscow? He wondered what the occasion was, who had taken the picture, then put it back. Their life-still a blank to him.
When he went back down, Frantisek was laid out on the couch, not yet really sleeping but no longer there. His father was covering him with a blanket. “You’re leaving?” he said, seeing the changed clothes. “So soon.”
“We have to get back.”
“No, no, he’ll sleep now. One more drink.”
He moved unsteadily, a little tipsy. Nick glanced toward the kitchen, where the women were working, then shrugged and joined him at the table.
“No more,” Anna said from the sink.
His father winked and poured out a glass. When had the drinking started?
“ Na zdravi,” he said, raising the glass slightly, and Nick drank, trying not to cough as the rough liquid hit his throat. His father said nothing, just looked at him, his eyes gentle, a little clouded. Then he reached over and patted Nick’s hand, his touch as hot as the drink. “I knew you would come,” he said, his voice low.
Nick nodded. A few hours ago he’d wanted to walk away, right through the woods, but he saw in the face, so like his own, that he could never do it. Upstairs, a stranger in a picture, and now, suddenly, a touch he’d known all his life.
“You see what it’s like here.”
His color had begun to drain, a sickly pale. What would he become, another Frantisek, sleeping it off on the couch?
“What I see is that you’ve had too much,” Anna said, coming over with some water and his pills. She put a hand to his forehead, shiny now with sweat. “How do you feel?”
His father placed the pills in his mouth, the movement deliberate and slow. “Perhaps a little tired,” he said quietly.
“It’s late,” Nick said, standing, eager now to get away. “You should get some rest. I’ll help you upstairs.” Anna moved toward him. “No, I’ll take him.”
“I’m all right.” His father waved his hand, a mild protest, but allowed himself to be lifted up and led by the elbow across the room.
Nick followed him up the stairs, then turned down the bed as his father began to undress. His body was bony, frail, and Nick looked away.
“You see what it’s like,” his father said again. “I can’t stay here.”
Nick faced him. “It may not be possible. You know that, don’t you?”
But his father grabbed his arm, clutching him. “No. It is. You think I don’t know what they want? I know. Something valuable. I can pay.”
Nick looked at him, dismayed. There was no talking to him. “Okay. But now let’s get some sleep,” he said, a nurse.
“We’ll meet tomorrow-I’ll come back early. The Narodni Gallery.” He began to cough. “Go around noon,” he gasped, trying to hold down another cough, so that it came out a desperate wheeze.
He took off his shorts and moved to the bed naked, his thin legs and ropy behind as white and vulnerable as a child’s. Nick turned away, hanging things in the wardrobe to avoid the sight of his body, and when he finally looked back his father was under the covers, his eyes closed, his hands folded over his chest. In that instant, Nick saw him as he would be, lying in a coffin, and his own breath went out of him, an unexpected panic. He stood holding the hanger, utterly alone in the room, as if he’d been abandoned. It was only when he saw the blanket stir, a faint rise, that he could move to the bed and lean over to arrange the covers.
His father opened his eyes and smiled. “Nicku,” he whispered. He reached up to smooth Nick’s hair back from his forehead, the old gesture. “Now you tuck me in.”
Nick nodded, feeling his father’s hand slip back.
“Are you all right now?” he said.
His father smiled, closing his eyes. “As snug as a bug in a rug.”
Chapter 10
The drive back was long, slowed by patches of low-lying fog and wet mist that condensed on the windshield, forcing him to lean forward to make out the road. Occasionally tiny lights appeared in the darkness, like fireflies coming out of the woods, then joined the halting stream of cars inching toward Prague. He hadn’t expected traffic. In town, the streets had been almost empty, conduits for trams, but here in the country he saw that the cars had only been in hiding, parked in secret pockets of free weekend air.
Molly was restless, fiddling with the heater, then turning the radio knob to scratchy bursts of Czech that faded in and out until, fed up, she snapped it off and stared out the window. He could feel her next to him, bottled up, wanting to talk but not knowing how to start. He fixed his eyes on the ro
ad, where there were only red taillights, not old men with stories, a frail arm reaching up to him from the bed. Now she was rummaging through her bag, pulling things out as she dug deeper, crinkling paper, then finally extracting a thin, misshapen cigarette.
“Don’t say a word,” she said, lighting it. “Just don’t.” She drew on it deeply, and the smell of dope filled the car.
“I thought you left that in Austria.”
“I lied.” She rolled down the window, letting the smell escape into the air, shivering a little at the sudden chill. “Don’t worry. I just kept one. For a rainy day.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see police lights, but there was only the dark. He rolled down his window a little, creating a draft. “What report?” he said finally.
She sighed. “The D.C. police report, from the night she died. I asked to see it.”
Nick looked at her. “Just a reporter doing her job,” he said, still angry. “Is that the story you’re writing? You want to make him a killer too? Great.”
“He did kill her,” she said quickly, then looked away, her voice apologetic now. “I’m not writing anything. I just said that.”
“Then why-”
She took another drag, stalling, then exhaled slowly. “Okay. She was my aunt. Rosemary Cochrane. My mother’s sister. That’s how I knew who he was. You’re not the only one who-” She stopped, looking over at him. “I know. I should have told you. I was going to. And then, things changed, and I thought, let it go. What’s the good? She’s dead. Why upset everything? Let him take it with him. And all the time here he is, packing his bags.”
Nick said nothing, too stunned to reply.
“I’m not writing anything.” she said again. “It was personal, that’s all.” For a minute there was no sound but the swish of the tires. Then she reached over and handed him the joint, a peace offering.
“Want a hit?” she said, and suddenly he did, a piece of the world they’d left at the border. He extended his right hand, eyes still on the road, and felt her place the joint in the V of his fingers. He drew on it, aware of the quick glare at the tip, then held the smoke in his lungs. They passed it back and forth, still not saying anything, until he felt it grow hot in his fingers.
“Keep it,” he said. “I’m driving.” He saw her place the end between the tips of her fingers and finish it with sharp intakes of breath.
“There. Clean,” she said, flicking it out the window.
“Feel better?”
“No. But I will,” she said. “Give it a few minutes.” But he could feel it already, moving through him with his blood, relaxing and buoyant at the same time. He eased into it, letting his mind drift with the mist on the road.
“God,” Molly said, leaning back in her seat, “that dinner.” He said nothing, listening to another conversation inside his head.
“It’s interesting, the way he does it,” she said slowly.
“Does what?”
“Tells the story. It’s all there, isn’t it? All the way to Canada. Everything but the first stop.”
Nick let a minute pass, watching the road. “Were you close?”
“No, I never knew her. I mean, I must have known her, but I don’t remember. We never talked about it. You know, the one unforgivable sin.”
“But what was she like?”
“Well, let’s see. Also born Bronxville. She wanted to be a singer.”
“Really? An opera singer?”
“A band singer. You know, nightclubs and things. She had this picture-one of those professional pictures they put in delis? ”Best wishes to Mel.“ Like that. She’s got this big smile and a flower in her hair. All set, you know? I never heard that she actually sang anywhere, though. She probably just did it to freak out my grandparents. Nightclubs. I mean.”
“Pretty radical.”
“It was, in a way. She was always doing that. Of course, it wasn’t hard with them. My grandfather got on a train in the morning and walked through the door at six-twenty every day of his life. They wanted her to go to Manhattanville — where else? — and when she went to NYU there was this big fight, and the next thing you know she’s waiting tables for money and-do you really want to hear this?”
Nick nodded.
“Of course, I got most of this from my grandmother, so consider the source. She still blamed NYU, right to the end. All those ‘undesirable influences’-that was the phrase. Anyway, there was Aunt Rosemary, waiting tables and being influenced. Funny, isn’t it? In a way my grandmother was right. I mean, that must have been when she-became political.”
“Became a Communist, you mean,” Nick said, saying it.
“If she was. An actual Communist, in the party. They never said that.” She stopped. “Talk about splitting hairs.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then she dropped out of school and went to Washington. She was a secretary for a while, I think. During the war. And then-well, the rest you know.”
“Except we don’t.”
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “I used to think about it, the way kids do. We had this box in the attic, you know, with the Mel picture in it, and I’d go through it, making up stories about her. Then I put the picture up in my room and my mother had a fit. I suppose she thought I’d turn out the same way.”
“What, a Communist?”
“No, man-crazy. She always thought that was the start of all the trouble.”
“What made her think that?”
“Oh, there’s always a man.” She waved her hand. “She had to tell herself something. The more she didn’t talk about what happened, the more it was there. You know when she told me? When they sent the suitcase back. The one she had in the hotel. I guess the police took it as evidence and then, months later, out of the blue, they delivered it and my mother had to explain it to me. She just sat there crying, and I guess that must have upset me, her crying, because that’s when she told me.”
“What was in it?”
“Nothing. You know, just overnight stuff-cosmetics, a nightgown. Nothing. It was the fact of it. And because they’d torn it all up. The lining was sliced-I guess they were looking for secret messages or something-and they never even apologized. She just sat on the couch with this beat-up bag and that was her sister, what was left of her, and-”
A nightgown, Nick thought. Planning to spend the night. A bag packed to meet someone.
“Anyway, that was Rosemary,” Molly said. “Public Enemy. Part of the Communist conspiracy. Remember that, in school? I thought they were talking about her. And I used to think, I know one but you don’t have to worry about her. She turned herself in.”
“Except she didn’t.”
“According to him.”
“But why would she?” Nick said, brooding. The others who talked, they were all tied up in the politics of it.
“You know, you lose one faith and you replace it with the opposite. And then the opposite has to destroy the first. They really did believe a conspiracy was threatening the country, because they used to believe in it themselves. So in some crazy way it was their duty to expose it, now that they were on the other side. But that doesn’t sound like her at all. Not from your description. How many nightclub singers have a problem with apostasy?”
She looked at him, the helpless beginning of a smile. “You know, I’ve never heard that word used before. In speech. Only in print. Is that how it’s pronounced?”
“You don’t want to talk about this.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe she had political convictions, I don’t know. What are they, anyway? What would you do to stop the war? Besides rallies and things. Suppose there was a way. What would you do? Name names? Maybe it wouldn’t seem like much if you really thought they were the enemy. Maybe you’re right-maybe she didn’t care about any of that. I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted a little attention. Anyway, she got it.” She paused. “While he was on his way to Canada.”
“You sti
ll think he’s lying.”
She said nothing, as if she had to think about it, then sat up and reached for a cigarette. “Yes.” He watched her light it, her movements stretched in time by the dope. “Now I know it.”
“How?”
“Remember that drive in the snow? All the little details. How he was dying for a smoke but he left his lighter behind?”
“So?”
“So they found it in the hotel room. That’s where he left it-it’s in the report. He still doesn’t know. I was watching. He probably still thinks he left it at home.” She turned to him. “He was there, Nick.”
“How do they know it was his?”
“They didn’t use these,” she said, indicating the disposable plastic lighter in her hand. “They had real lighters. With initials. W.K.”
“And O.K.,” he said softly.
She looked at him, puzzled.
“My mother. It was from her. She was always giving him stuff like that.” He stared at the road. “That still doesn’t mean he was there.”
“Have it your way. How else would it get there?”
“Somebody could have planted it.”
“Do you really think that’s likely?” she said quietly.
“No.” He remembered it in his father’s hand, shiny, always with him, like the wave in his hair.
“He was there,” she said, an end to it.
“That still doesn’t mean he killed her. I don’t believe it.”
“You mean you don’t want to.”
“Do you?”
“Want to? No. But that doesn’t change things.” She paused, biting her lip in thought. “I’ll give you this, though. I sat there and I thought, could he really do that? It doesn’t feel right.”
“How is it supposed to feel?”
“I don’t know. Threatening. But he’s not.”
“No.”
“Whatever that’s worth. Maybe that’s how they get away with it. They stop believing it themselves. So there’s nothing to pick up on.”
“Killer vibes.”
“I know, it sounds stupid. But there should be something. A little radar blip, you know? A little ping.”
