Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street

by Heda Margolius Kovály

  5

  During the day the sun still showed itself occasionally, but the evenings grew rapidly longer and a cold wind kicked up at night. The summer had been unusually long, yet this year, like every year, it was still a surprise when autumn came. On her way home from work, Mrs. Kouřimská tried to recall those not-so-long-ago summer nights, when the streets were filled with people in lightweight colorful clothing, nobody felt like going home, and her walk home was a refreshing stroll she looked forward to all day long. It was hard to imagine now. It seemed like summer had floated off to some faraway island in the Pacific, and this street had never been anything other than dark and cold.

  Usually she hurried to get home as soon as possible, but today for some reason she couldn’t be rushed. Lately she’d felt an inexplicable fatigue creeping over her, intensifying day by day. Even sleep didn’t help. She got out of bed in the morning more tired than when she got in at night. Maybe I should stay home for a few days, she thought. But what for? It wasn’t as if she was sick, and it certainly wasn’t going to help to spend more time alone. The traffic light on the corner of the embankment turned red. Mrs. Kouřimská stopped and unconsciously looked up.

  Today he had on a brown coat over his light-colored suit, which made him look a little shorter, but more brawny. He stared intensely into her eyes, as always, but instead of being threatening the way it usually was, this time she detected a flash of triumphant contempt, the possessive assurance of a hunter with his finger on the trigger. The blood pounded furiously in her brain. She charged forward, before the light could change, almost straight under the wheels of a taxi. The driver poked his head out the window and shouted something at her. Mrs. Kouřimská dashed headlong across the bridge, almost to the middle, then stopped and turned around. Today, for the first time, Hrůza didn’t remain on the corner, instead marching straight toward her with measured strides.

  She broke into a run. It’s all over, he’s going to kill me, she thought. Today, today is the day he’s finally going to kill me. Her stomach lurched as tiny bubbles fizzed in her head. She felt the air pressing down on her chest, and the bag slung over her shoulder suddenly weighed a ton. She let it fall to the ground, dragging it by the strap along the sidewalk. She raced ahead, bent forward, but the street was sliding out from under her feet, the ground heaving as the world turned upside down. Mrs. Kouřimská looked up at the sky and staggered dizzily. Suddenly it felt like there was an elephant resting its foot on her chest, slowly pressing down on her, with all its weight, pinning her to the ground. Something inside her head popped, like the cork flying out of a bottle of champagne, and the bubbles fizzed up and out, into the heavy autumn sky.

  As the screen lit up with color and a cacophony like a flock of frightened birds filled the room, the ushers walked out of the auditorium, carefully closing the doors behind them. The afternoon screening was under way. The manager came out of her office and walked to the concession stand, where Líba was tallying the receipts. The ushers gathered around her.

  “They just called again from the hospital,” the manager said, leaning against the counter. “Mrs. Kouřimská just barely survived the first heart attack. They managed to restore her heartbeat, the doctor said. But last night she had another episode. The doctor asked if she has any relatives. Do any of you know? Apparently it doesn’t look too good, so they’d like to notify the family.”

  Her question was met with silence. Líba pulled a rubber band around a stack of bills, deposited them in the register drawer, and clicked it shut.

  “I don’t think she’s got anyone,” she said. “She never said much about herself, as we all know. But she did mention to me once that she was all alone in the world. Poor thing.”

  “Is she conscious?” Ládinka asked with red-lidded eyes.

  “Yes. And the doctor says it would do her good to have visitors. Though they don’t want crowds of people. I’m going to go over there now and”—the manager looked around at the half-circle of befuddled faces—“and I’d like you to come with me, Marie. On behalf of all the staff. We’ll buy her some flowers and bring her greetings from everyone, okay?”

  The manager turned and disappeared into her office. Marie looked at her coworkers and threw up her hands.

  “Why me? I don’t get it,” she said, heading for the cloakroom.

  “I don’t either,” said Ládinka. “Poor Mrs. Kouřimská. She should’ve been years away from a heart attack. But who knows what she’s been through. And she was such a sweetheart. Never a cross word to anyone.”

  Helena followed Marie into the cloakroom. She already had on her coat, with a colorful knitted cap and a matching scarf tied around her collar.

  “Marie,” Helena said. “I’d like to come too, if I could. Mrs. Kouřimská was always kind to me. She was the one who introduced me to the man who helped Karel. Please, if you could find out whether she would see me.”

  “Sure thing. I think all the girls’ll go and visit her, if they can. It’s really weird the boss chose me. I never thought Kouřimská was all that hot on me.”

  Marie grabbed her gloves and bag and stepped into the hallway just as the manager closed her office door behind her.

  The tram rattled up a depressing street that trickled downhill like a river of brown leaves. Marie held a bouquet of carnations in her lap, wrapped in dark green tissue paper. Every now and then she glanced uneasily at the manager, who stared straight ahead the whole way. The two women sat side by side, thinking the same thing, but didn’t exchange a single word. The force of human compassion had thrown their worlds, normally light years apart, so far out of their regular orbits they nearly collided; but the more powerful force of mistrust and superficial habits had intervened to correct them from their momentary deviation.

  As the two women got off the tram at the top of the hill, the wind whistled in their ears, swirling around them from head to toe, rustling through the dry leaves like a snake. They walked up a driveway to the tall white wall surrounding the hospital grounds, passed through a narrow pedestrian gate with a decorative iron grille, and found themselves in a quiet, sheltered world where even autumn walked on tiptoe. The trees here had more leaves than the ones on the street outside, and the roundly trimmed bushes were still as lushly green as in summer. The sky cleared for a moment, the clouds breaking up and swarming like iridescent amoebas under a microscope.

  They walked up a path through manicured lawns, and as they reached the cardiology pavilion, the manager turned to Marie. “Just so you know, Mrs. Kouřimská specifically requested that you come. The doctor said she asked for you several times. She said she needed to speak to you as soon as possible.”

  Marie, clutching the flowers to her chest to shield them from the wind, pulled up in amazement. “I thought it was strange that you asked me of all people to come along. I hardly even knew her. What do we have in common, huh? What could she want from me?”

  Marie lifted her head and, probably for the first time in her life, looked into the manager’s eyes from up close. As a ray of sun shone through the gap between the wisps of cloud, Marie noticed tiny gold dots sprinkled across the older woman’s gray-green irises. The curtain opened for an instant, then fell back into place.

  “I guess now you’ll find out,” the manager said. She strode off down a side path that led to the building’s rear wing and a door with a black sign marked visitors.

  They entered a small elongated lobby. A petite blonde in a white smock sat behind the desk talking on the phone. A stocky, dark-skinned man in a belted trench coat lifted himself from the bench along the wall and offered an awkward bow. An overstuffed black briefcase, almost as big as a suitcase, lay next to him on the bench.

  The cinema manager nodded to him and with raised eyebrows turned to the receptionist, who was just finishing her conversation. She hung up the phone and looked at a list on the desk in front of her.

  “You’ve come to se
e the lady in room sixty-eight, correct? Mrs. . . .” She slid her finger down the page. “Kouřimská, yes. The lieutenant is also here to see her. She asked me to have him come at the same time as you. The nurse will be here shortly.” She pulled a file out of a drawer and began flipping through it.

  The manager turned, walked to the window, and looked out at the garden. Marie studied the crumpled green paper wrapped around the bouquet. Vendyš stood next to the bench wearing the same hardened look he always did when he was uneasy.

  The door opened and a big, beefy nurse walked in. Her puny cap sat perched atop her cropped gray hair like a white baby bird.

  “Follow me,” she said and set off down a long white corridor that twisted and turned so many times Marie lost her sense of direction. If we go all the way to the end, she thought, I’ll never be able to find my way back. The hulking nurse strode along at such a brisk pace it was almost impossible to keep up. We’re trotting like horses, Marie thought, panting and sweating in her overcoat. But just then they came to a door at the end of the corridor, and the nurse’s mighty posterior blocked all further progress.

  She motioned for them to wait and went inside. A moment later she came back out, closing the door behind her. “She wants to talk to the manager first. That’s you, right?” She looked at the manager, then turned to Vendyš and Marie. “The two of you can go in after her. There are only two chairs in there anyway. Don’t stay any longer than you need to, and ring for me if she needs anything.” The nurse marched off at a racer’s clip.

  The manager took the bouquet from Marie. “I’ll give her the flowers and pass along the girls’ greetings. I don’t want to tire her out, so I won’t be long. Then I’ll head back to work but, Marie, you stay here with her as long as you need to. No rush.” She turned and stepped through the door.

  Inside, it looked like the machine room of a small but highly efficient factory: instruments, flasks, and dials hanging all over the walls, resting on tables and stands, busily ticking and blinking. A pale, glowing dot bounced intermittently across a black screen over the bed, trailing a tail behind it like a tiny sprightly comet.

  The woman’s body on the bed was wrapped in wires and transparent tubing. A thin tendril led from the needle sticking out of her left wrist to a glass bottle, which every now and then gave off a deep gurgling sound. The skin around her cheekbones had sunken into a lunar landscape of tortuous valleys and gorges, her eyes plunged into shadow. The center of her silvery-white face was covered with a small oxygen mask like a muzzle.

  The woman didn’t move or open her eyes.

  “Mrs. Kouřimská,” the manager said quietly, laying the flowers on the bedside table.

  A flicker of light appeared in the shadows. A white hand lifted up and removed the mask. The mouth, now exposed, smiled.

  “Mrs. Kouřimská,” the manager said once more, even softer. “How are you?”

  “I died, did you know that? Then I rose from the dead like Jesus Christ,” the woman in bed whispered. “You might not believe it, but it wasn’t so terrible, really. The end . . . of everything. Good and bad. It was a relief. Life is overrated . . .”

  “Mrs. Kouřimská,” the manager said anxiously, “you mustn’t lose hope.”

  “Hope? What for? It’s just an eternity of waiting . . . for something that will never come. Do you have hope?”

  The manager, visibly flustered, gave no reply.

  “You see?” Mrs. Kouřimská said. “What good is hope to someone who’s happy? It’s only for the desperate. And once you stop despairing, you don’t need hope anymore . . . just peace of mind . . . and even without hope, I believe that will come in the end.”

  Mrs. Kouřimská closed her eyes and placed the oxygen mask back on her mouth.

  The manager looked around the room and spotted a glass vase on the shelf above the sink. She placed it in the sink and filled it with water. She took the bouquet of carnations from the nightstand, removed the paper, and arranged the long straight stems with the huge pink blossoms in the vase.

  Suddenly she realized she’d made a mistake. I should have brought her some ferns in a flowerpot, she thought. The flowers’ beauty interrupted the impersonal feel of the room, so perfectly designed for a person to quietly finish her life and return it like a book she had read to the end. The manager had to choke back her tears at the cruel and fragile preciousness of life.

  She took the vase and placed it on a nightstand in the back by the wall, where the woman couldn’t see it. Then she sat down on a chair and just quietly watched for a while.

  “The girls send their best regards,” she said finally. “We all miss you. Do you need anything?”

  The woman in bed shook her head.

  “Marie is here with me. And also Lieutenant Vendyš. I should probably go now, so you won’t get too tired. If you want anything, just tell the nurse to let me know. She can even call me at home . . . any time.” She paused a moment, then timidly reached out and touched the woman’s white hand. “I can come again, if you want,” she said.

  Kouřimská just looked at her.

  “Bye for now,” the manager said, rising to her feet.

  She stood by the bed a while, then suddenly sat back down. “One more thing, Mrs. Kouřimská. You may have wondered why nobody asked where you were that Friday afternoon and how come you didn’t get into work until almost eight. Well, when the commotion broke out and the police showed up, I quickly checked the sign-in sheet and saw you weren’t there. So I put you down as though you’d come in like you normally do, at two thirty. It never even occurred to the police that you weren’t there that afternoon. And since they didn’t know, they didn’t ask anyone about it, and since they didn’t ask, no one told them. You know the girls: they don’t say anything they don’t have to, and by some miracle Božena didn’t notice. So, that’s what I wanted to tell you, just in case you were wondering.”

  Mrs. Kouřimská stared at her in silence. Then she removed the hideous mask from her mouth again. “Thank you. I didn’t deserve it, but thank you very much all the same.” She closed her eyes again. “Why did you do it?”

  “To keep things neat,” the manager said drily. “I wanted them to go away and leave us alone. I knew you had nothing to do with the murder, and I wanted to save all of us the complications and headaches. If anyone had let something slip or the police had found out from Božena, I always could have said I put you down by mistake. I didn’t lie to anyone, because nobody asked. So what could they do to me?”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Kouřimská said again in a barely audible voice. “You’re an incredible woman.”

  The manager stood up again. She touched the motionless hand on the blanket once more, then turned to leave.

  “Mrs. Kouřimská,” she said with her hand on the doorknob. “Just hold on.”

  “To what?” said the woman in bed. She almost smiled.

  Lieutenant Vendyš sat at the head of the bed, tape recorder on his knees, holding a microphone to Mrs. Kouřimská’s mouth. He didn’t move a muscle once she began to speak. After a while his face went numb, which made him look almost brain-damaged. He tried hard not to think, not to judge, just to listen coolly and carefully. But the longer she talked, the more difficult it was.

  Marie sat huddled in a chair beside the bed, not even daring to breathe. She could almost feel Mrs. Kouřimská’s effort and fatigue in her own muscles and nerves; the desperate determination to tell it all while there was still time. Every sentence was punctuated with lengthy pauses, every few words, but what she said was clear.

  It was obvious she had thought through every aspect of her story in detail, crossing out every unnecessary word, as though she knew, down to the last minute, how much time she had left and how much she could squeeze into it. Marie could see only one thing mattered to Mrs. Kouřimská now: testifying to what she knew and what she wanted. It was the last thing
she would do in her life, and the most important. This moment represented the culmination of her entire existence.

  “. . . so now you know why Karel Novák died,” Mrs. Kouřimská was saying. She breathed in and out laboriously several times. “I had to tell you. So that now, when I die, Hrůza won’t be the only one who knows.”

  Kouřimská put her oxygen mask over her mouth and closed her eyes. After resting a while, she spoke again, her voice clear and calm.

  “It wasn’t till Nedoma told me that that it dawned on me what I was doing. Up until then, I’d always thought I was just supplying him with gossip—ordinary stupid stuff that couldn’t hurt anyone . . . and I needed the money,” she added with some insistence.

  It was quiet again for a while, the only sound the chatter and ticking of the instruments around them.

  “But then it hit me: A man had lost his life and I was responsible . . . I helped drive him to suicide. I realized there’s no such thing as a ‘little’ bad thing, because nobody can predict what will come of it . . . it can grow into a big thing, before you even know it . . .”

  Marie leaned forward in her chair, feeling an urge to caress her hand, say something soothing. But Mrs. Kouřimská stared up at the ceiling, doggedly pushing ahead:

  “No one can do a thing to stop people like Hrůza . . . They’re like earthquakes, or the plague. But they could never inflict so much misery if it weren’t for little bastards like Nedoma . . . the little helpers who try to convince you it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing wrong with a little snitching . . . They make evil seem like a natural, trivial thing . . . They blur the line between guilt and innocence, till eventually you accept it and murder just seems like an accident with nobody to blame . . . That’s why I killed him.”