Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street

by Heda Margolius Kovály

  “Well, despite our assumptions, Kouřimská wasn’t a nice lady at all,” he began slowly. “She was actually a strange and pretty frightening person, when you get right down to it. Not like Nedoma—she wasn’t a murderer or a sadist—but she needed a lot of cash, and she had no way to get it, so she signed on as an informant.” He gave another sigh. “As noted earlier, this isn’t particularly uncommon for us, and Kouřimská followed a fairly established recipe. She figured she’d outsmart us. Supply us with some trivial information, do us some harmless favors, keep the wolf well-fed . . . and she got away with it for a pretty long time. Nedoma would plant her in some inconspicuous spot and she’d tell him who was talking to who, who they were talking about, who was in bed with who—the usual gossip. I guess she got used to it. It was a lucrative sideline. Didn’t do any serious harm. She never said a word to Nedoma about me and Marie, for instance. Maybe what she was doing wasn’t that good, but she was convinced it wasn’t that bad, either. And that’s where the hitch comes in.” The fat man sat up straight in his chair, put on his glasses, and narrowed his eyes at the fatter man.

  “Where?” the fatter man asked through a cloud of smoke.

  “Most people can’t imagine something unless they’ve had the experience themselves. That’s why half the time they don’t realize what they’re doing. Kouřimská helped Nedoma and Hrůza set an ambush for Helena Nováková not out of ill will, but because she literally couldn’t imagine how much Novák’s wife meant to him. She was incapable of the kind of relationship they had, so it never even crossed her mind that something like that could exist. For her it was just an assignment like any other—only this time it ended in death. The death of Karel Novák. And everyone is affected by death. People understand death based on future experience, so to speak, the only one that no one on this earth can avoid, and this was not only death, but a violent, premature death—a murder in fact. Any attempt at innocent games can’t help but end in murder. Novák’s death came as a huge shock to Kouřimská. Suddenly she was horrified.”

  The fat man cleared his throat and again took off his glasses. The moment he stopped speaking, his whole body relaxed, beginning to slip into sleep like a bath of warm water. He rubbed his eyes and shook himself like a dog.

  “And to top it all off, Kouřimská was a religious woman. When she had the stroke and realized how little time she had left, she was desperate to repent. She probably thought if she took the blame for Nedoma’s death to save Marie, it would atone for the part she played in Novák’s death and redeem her sins. She knew no one here on earth could hurt her anymore. But she wanted to set her reputation right with the big man up top. I can just imagine her lying there in the hospital, churning it all over in her head, getting her story straight, polishing and refining it, checking it for holes . . .”

  The fatter man pulled the ashtray toward him and knocked out his pipe. “I’m sure this is all an accurate analysis of Mrs. Kouřimská’s mental state, but it doesn’t particularly interest me. I’m a simple man. I just want an objective account of the facts. If you’d be so kind,” he said with an edge in his voice.

  The fat man slumped down in his chair to a near-horizontal position.

  “It was like a merry-go-round,” he went on, sounding half-asleep. “Vendyš suspected Hrůza, but he was too high up for Vendyš to get to. Besides which, Hrůza had to keep him at arm’s length as long as there was a risk that Kouřimská might talk. He had to get rid of her as quickly and discreetly as possible—she knew too much. Kouřimská was scared to death of him, but when it came to Nedoma’s murder, she suspected Marie.”

  He thought a moment, then added, “I’d really like to know what’s going to happen now that Kouřimská has let on why Novák killed himself. Vendyš took the whole thing down in a detailed statement that Marie signed as a witness that same evening. Well, given that Kouřimská and Nedoma are dead now and can’t testify, and Marie’s in so deep she won’t breathe a word, they’ll probably hush the whole thing up and smooth it over as usual,” the fat man said philosophically.

  “Please,” said the fatter man, clearly losing his patience, “just take it from the beginning. I realize it’s all swirling around inside your head, but this is a complex case and I need it to be clear. Start from the Friday when Nedoma called up Vránová.”

  “Okay, right, that’s how it started.” The fat man yawned again, leaned his arms on the armrests, and slowly raised himself to a sitting position.

  “I could use a cup of coffee, if you don’t mind,” he said. “But none of that dishwater slop. Something that packs a punch.”

  The fatter man shot him an unfriendly look, but opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a little red electric coffeepot. He shook it to make sure there was water inside, then turned to insert the plug into the socket in the wall behind his chair. Reaching back into the drawer, he fished out a battered earthenware mug, a teaspoon, and a loud yellow can, loaded two heaping teaspoons of coffee into the mug, and splashed water over it from the pot, which had meanwhile begun to bubble. Digging around again, he unearthed two grimy sugar cubes and pushed them across the desk along with the mug and the spoon.

  The fat man took the mug in both hands, stared into it in disgust, and took a sip.

  “So that Friday afternoon,” he began in a slight singsong as though telling a fairy tale, “Nedoma called Marie Vránová at the Horizon and told her he needed to meet her that night at eight. Right away, from the tone of his voice, Marie could tell it was bad. She’s an extremely clever woman, in her own way, whereas Nedoma was a downright moron, and a dirtbag to boot. Marie had him pegged from the start. Which is why she was so scared. You see, I myself was supposed to come in that afternoon for a handoff, less than a half hour later. So Marie’s got this huge bandage on her behind, and she knows Nedoma, sneaky bastard that he is, might have called just to make sure she was there, and could have her arrested at any moment. Of course she had no idea how much he actually knew, but she guessed that he only suspected her, since if he’d had any proof he would have locked her up right on the spot. It wasn’t a lost cause yet, but she needed to take action, fast. At first she was so frightened, though, she didn’t know which way to turn.”

  The fat man finished his coffee and set the empty mug on the desk. “Then there’s this,” he said. “The day before, Marie had found a pair of scissors somebody dropped under one of the seats and she just picked them up without thinking. So now she reaches into the pocket of her uniform and they slip right into her hand. All of a sudden a light bulb goes off in her head. She goes running into the ladies’ room, peels off the bandage, cuts it up, and flushes it down the toilet—except when it comes to the middle piece with the microdots, she can’t do it. I tell you, that Marie’s got some guts,” the fat man said. “Talk about a gamble!”

  He watched with a faraway look as the fatter man scraped out his pipe.

  “We had a kind of a primitive warning signal agreed—you know, the usual: newspaper cutouts—for a situation like this, in case something went wrong. So Marie used the scissors to snip up an old Rudé právo and by some miracle I managed to decipher that her cover had been blown and I needed to be on the street around the corner at eight o’clock. She barely finished it in time for me to come rolling in, and of course instead of an envelope with a bandage in it I stick my hand in my pocket and come out with a fistful of newspaper. Needless to say, I got bored with the movie pretty quick, so I shuffled out of there and got lost.”

  The fatter man put down his pipe, folded his arms, and tilted his head as though finally he was starting to get interested.

  “Like I said, it took some divine assistance to work out what Marie’s message said. But the other thing I fished out of my pocket was a squished chocolate truffle. And when I cut it open, there were six tiny pieces of bandage inside, with a microdot on each one. She did such a clever job of folding them up, they weren’t even damage
d. I mean, can you believe it? She figured that, no matter what happened, I could always swallow the truffle or step on it, so she took the risk. That is one cunning vixen, I tell you,” the fat man said, starry-eyed. He reveled in the thought a moment before going on.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Marie wiped off the scissors and stuck them behind the mirror in the ladies’ room. She wanted to make sure she was clean as a whistle, get rid of anything that suggested any connection to me or, even more important, those cutouts I had in my pocket. The interesting thing is, Vendyš somehow sensed the scissors had something to do with Nedoma’s case. He kept trying to find the link, and Kouřimská also ingeniously managed to work them into her fairy tale. She probably thought we’d found a trace of blood on them so she had to explain.”

  The fat man didn’t look even a little jolly anymore. The closer he got to the climax of his story, the more his face revealed, like a palimpsest, a graphic record of those awful minutes that Friday night.

  “Well, I had plenty of time till eight to get organized and think it all through. I didn’t even really need to. I took care of the microdots and a couple other things, as per instructions . . .”—he glanced up at the fatter man but got no reaction—“. . . so shortly before eight o’clock I took up my position on Steep Street. I still didn’t really know what I was waiting for, or what I was going to do when it happened. It looked like a plague had hit, the place was so dead, but not for long. Next thing I knew, Nedoma’s car pulled up to the sidewalk and a minute later Kouřimská jumped out and shot off like a bullet. Not up toward the entrance to the Horizon on Broad, but the other way, down Steep Street—probably so no one could spot her from the snack bar on the corner. I casually strolled past the car, peeked in, and saw Nedoma in there snoring away, out for the count. So I ducked into the doorway of the nearest building, switched off the safety on the gun in my pocket, and poked out my nose to make sure the coast was clear, when all of a sudden I see a thin man in a beige suit turn into Steep Street. Striding along quick and easy, like a soldier. When he got to Nedoma’s car he stopped and leaned in the window on the passenger side for a couple seconds, where Kouřimská was sitting before. Then he straightened back up and marched off down Steep Street again, just as quick and calm as he’d come. As soon as he was around the corner, I went to take a look and saw that he’d saved me the trouble.”

  The fat man hunched over in his chair and thought a moment.

  “Steep Street is practically made for a knife,” he said. His voice was slow with sleepiness and husky, perhaps with the memory of the darkness on Steep Street. He laid a palm on his eyes and rubbed them as if trying to erase the sight from his mind.

  “I know, pal,” the fatter man said. All of a sudden his voice changed, as if he were up on stage addressing an audience, some unseen third person in the room. “I know how you feel. It isn’t a pleasant experience. I wish the world were different, too. I wish we could all live in peace and none of this was necessary. But, sadly enough . . .”

  He was too simple to grasp the look directed at him through the rounded lenses of the fat man’s glasses. His voice trailed off and he went back to scraping his pipe. The fat man drew in a deep breath.

  “The worst was yet to come. Because then I turn around and see Marie sashaying past the snack bar onto Steep Street. Almost gave me a heart attack. Naturally I figured she’d stay holed up in the Horizon, where everyone could see her, so whatever else happened she’d have a rock-solid alibi. And here she was, traipsing around like Little Bo Peep, the nosy minx,” the fat man said affectionately, cheering up a bit.

  “Not to mention it’s a gross violation . . .” the fatter man interjected.

  “Oh yeah. But you can’t look at it that way with her. I waved to her to get lost and you should’ve seen how she tore out of there! Apart from that, you’ve got to admit she handled it with flying colors—even without instructions,” the fat man said acerbically, then sat a while lost in thought.

  “You know,” he said at last. “I think it must’ve gone something like this: Hrůza’s ship was going down. His methods aren’t in fashion anymore and Nedoma had enough on him to make a mess of his lovely, carefully cultivated career. The times call for subtlety, for players who can twist and dodge, and Nedoma isn’t capable of that kind of finesse. So Hrůza made up his mind to get rid of him, and he was just waiting for the perfect opportunity. Nedoma gave it to him when he walked in to report that he had a strong suspicion about Marie, but dammit, he didn’t have proof. My guess is they put their heads together and Hrůza came up with an idea. He ordered Nedoma to bring in Kouřimská to help put the screws on Marie—how, we’ll never find out now, but effectively enough to make her come clean. So Nedoma, obedient as ever, carried out the order, which in turn gave Hrůza the ideal opportunity to do him in such a way that suspicion would have to fall on Marie, or, if he really got lucky, Kouřimská.”

  “In that case, he seriously miscalculated . . .”

  “Oh, God yes. Even for people like Hrůza, not everything in the world works out the way they planned. But anyway, imagine the pleasant surprise he got when he stuck his head in the window and saw Nedoma fast asleep. Everything went smooth as silk. Of course Kouřimská still took some work, but she made it a lot easier on him by dropping dead before he could even lay a hand on her. So in the end everything turned out alright, and Vojtěch Hrůza is safe and sound and will live happily ever after.”

  “Now, now,” the fatter man said, reverting to his artificial voice. “You need to take it easy and get yourself some sleep. After that, things will look different.” He fixed the fat man with a look of electric intensity produced by total concentration and the suppression of any distracting influences; in fact you could say it was a direct result of his simplicity. He immediately recognized that the fat man’s fatigue wouldn’t disappear no matter how much rest he got. He might never get over it.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “What really happened between Nedoma and Kouřimská?”

  “Well, the way me and Marie figured it . . .”

  “Wait a minute. When did this figuring take place? You realize personal contact is to be restricted to extreme—”

  “This is an extreme situation,” the fat man exploded. “How else was I supposed to find out what story Kouřimská told them at the hospital? How else was I supposed to assess whether Marie was out of danger and I could get the hell out? You may not realize,” he snapped, “but this was top priority for me, an extreme case, as you would say. We got together the night after Kouřimská’s death, and we both agreed it must’ve been something like this: After Novák’s death, Kouřimská swore she’d never have anything to with Nedoma again. If he wasn’t such an idiot, he would’ve seen for himself that she was a nervous wreck and couldn’t be counted on anymore. But instead he went back to her that Friday—probably on Hrůza’s orders—and told her the agent they had been after all that time wasn’t Helena Nováková, but actually Marie. And they were going to expose her that night. I’m sure he said ‘expose.’ That’s their favorite word,” the fat man said in disgust. “Then he probably explained to her what she was supposed to do. But that was the one thing Kouřimská didn’t want to do for anything in the world.

  “I don’t know how Nedoma sniffed us out, but we shouldn’t have been surprised. Once he got over his fixation on Nováková, sooner or later he had to fall for Marie. We should have scrapped the whole thing as soon as that kid got murdered. It was exceedingly risky, once they locked up Fišer, that kid who was sleeping with Novák’s secretary . . .”

  “Risky, yes, but I wouldn’t say exceedingly,” the fatter man said coolly, taking another filthy pipe from the rack. “I can assure you, however, that the Horizon has screened its last show. And Vránová’s acting days are over. I assume Hrůza will leave her alone now, in his own interest, but we won’t be using her anymore. And you need to get some rest. After that we’ll see . . .�
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  The fat man shot him another glare, which the fatter man ignored.

  “So to finish what I was saying,” the fat man said. “As far as I can tell, Kouřimská decided that she was going to warn Marie. She mixed the barbiturate into Nedoma’s beer to gain time, but by the time she made it to the cinema, Marie was already gone. Kouřimská must have realized what a dangerous situation she’d gotten herself into, so she had to cover herself somehow. As a precaution, she went the long way, all the way around the block, which is why she missed Marie. And when she didn’t run into her downstairs either, she ran back up to the snack bar to try and catch a glimpse of her on the street through the window, but by then it was too late. There was nothing anyone could do. When word got out that Nedoma had been murdered, Kouřimská must have concluded Marie was the one who did it.”

  “Sounds like a plausible explanation,” the fatter man said, pulling some shreds of tobacco from a leather pouch and stuffing them into his pipe. “What was the lieutenant’s reaction to her confession?”

  “Marie got the impression he didn’t buy it. Unlike Nedoma, Vendyš is no fool, and he probably figured out Kouřimská was covering for someone, but what could he do? Her statement fit with the facts as far as he knew, and she gave it on her deathbed in the presence of a witness. I reckon he had no choice but to close the case, but I’m sure it’ll be haunting him for a while.”

  “I’m really at the end of my tether right now, but remind me to have a good laugh about all this someday,” the fat man said bitterly. “The thing is, Vendyš might have been able to nail Hrůza down in the end. His instinct and experience had him heading the right direction the whole time. But Mrs. Kouřimská, who wanted to do a good deed before she died—save someone’s life and earn her redemption—made it impossible. She saved a serial killer who ended up bringing about her death as well.”