The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  Toftlund sauntered off, like any other sightseer strolling back to his hotel. The leather-jacketed thug with the gold ring in his ear stepped out deliberately into the middle of the narrow street. He had a small scar above his left eye. Per removed his hand from his pocket, let his arms swing loosely. He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, found his balance. The uniformed policeman who had been patrolling the spot earlier was nowhere to be seen. Maybe someone had slipped him a couple of bills to go and get himself a coffee. Preferably somewhere well away from here.

  ‘Was that gypsy bothering you?’ Leather Jacket asked. He spoke English like a B-movie baddie. Toftlund tried to go round him, but with a little chassé he blocked the way again. Per’s heart was beating faster now. He measured the guy. He was big, but he looked slow. It had to be done before his mate got back.

  ‘No,’ Per said.

  ‘You shouldn’t give anything to beggars.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Toftlund said, taking a step to the side, but Leather Jacket moved with him, as if they were dancing.

  ‘Or not without getting something in return, anyway.’

  ‘You’re in my way.’

  ‘Maybe he gave you something you should give to me.’

  Toftlund could hear people on the street, but they were obviously steering well clear. There did not appear to be anyone close by. The citizens of Bratislava seemed to know that there were certain things it was better not to witness. Per felt he ought to let the other man make the first move, lay a hand on him first. But it was time to drop the pretence, stop playing games. There was no doubt that Leather Jacket knew who he was.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Toftlund said.

  That did it. Leather Jacket was so sure of himself that he took a step closer, puffed out his chest, raised his right hand and clamped it over Toftlund’s left arm just above the elbow. Leather Jacket was used to intimidating folk; used to getting his way. The boss would take care of the formalities with the authorities later. But his cockiness made him careless and stupid. Toftlund’s right hand shot up and with one quick flick he grabbed hold of the earring and tore it off. Blood gushed from the thug’s ear, it must have hurt because he let go of Toftlund’s arm and pressed his hand to his lobeless appendage. Toftlund belted him in the chest with his left fist, sending him reeling into the side of the building behind them, threw the little earring in his face and strode off quickly towards the Old Town gate. An elderly couple shrank back against a wall. Two young girls stared at him in alarm, but made no attempt to accost him and when he glanced backed he saw Leather Jacket standing with one hand over his ear while trying to key in a number on his mobile with the other.

  Per’s heart was pounding, but he was not afraid. Nonetheless, he felt happier once he was back inside the cosmopolitan hotel lobby. He walked into the bar and ordered a cup of coffee. Through the bar’s panorama windows he could see the other heavy standing outside on the pavement, looking, but he did not come in. He too made a call on his mobile and shortly afterwards a black BMW arrived and picked him up. Toftlund removed the slip of paper from his pocket. It was neatly folded, like a love letter sent from the back row in class to the front. On it in bold capitals was written: ‘You were followed. Same time tomorrow. But in Prague. On Charles Bridge.’

  He went up to the travel agent’s desk, which lay next to Reception and the usual Business Centre equipped with fax machine, phones, computers and Internet connection and handed the woman behind it his sheaf of plane tickets.

  ‘I’d like to take the next plane to Prague. Are there any more flights today?’

  ‘Lots. When would you like to leave?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘If you go ahead and check out, sir, I’ll see to that for you.’

  ‘I’m not booked into a hotel in Prague until tomorrow.’

  She smiled at him. Only now did he notice how attractive she was, and would have been even more so if she wore less make-up. She had dark wavy hair, big brown eyes, a sensual little mouth and a cute up-turned nose.

  ‘If you would be so good as to let me have the confirmation of your reservation I’ll see to that too,’ she said, almost flirtatiously.

  ‘Now that’s what I call service!’

  ‘Oh, we try, we try,’ she said, glancing at his ticket. ‘We do our best, Mr Toftlund. We do so want to be a part of Europe.’

  ‘You’ll get there, don’t worry.’

  She picked up the phone to make the necessary arrangements, gave him a little smile and said, almost hopelessly – as if he, who had it so good, had no idea of the obstacles she could see along the way to that Europe from which her parents’ generation had barred her for so long:

  ‘Maybe. If we work for it. But as a Slovak you learn not to take anything for granted. There is always someone who has other ideas.’

  13

  PER TOFTLUND HAD TO BE ONE of the few people from Denmark who had never been to Prague. Since the collapse of the communist system thousands of Danes, spearheaded by beer-thirsty high-school students, had made the trip to the Czech capital. Prague was inexpensive. And the Danes are great ones for going places where the food and drink are cheap. Not only that but, to begin with at least, Prague was a bit more exotic than Majorca. Toftlund was not greatly impressed by the city, though. Not that the buildings weren’t beautiful, but everything seemed to be geared towards the tourists. On every other corner of the narrow streets in the city centre stood young people in production-line folk costumes, handing out fliers. You were never allowed to forget that Mozart had once lived here, what with all these pushy, costumed kids waving yellow handbills under your nose, every one promising Mozart’s music as it was played in Mozart’s day. Toftlund could not have cared less. He had no interest in Mozart’s music, or any other classical music. He had never outgrown rock. Although in actual fact he rarely listened to anything but whatever happened to be on the car radio and simply could not see how Lise could put on a CD in the living room at home and just sit and listen. Without doing anything else. What a waste of time. It looked like those kids were wasting their time too. People did take their fliers, but with scores of them being blown about the street it seemed clear that most were dropped, unread, onto the cobbles. They made a hell of a mess. One of the odd things about walking around the city was that he heard so many languages being spoken: Danish, German, Swedish, Norwegian, American, Japanese – just about everything, in fact, except Czech. At one point he passed a group of fifteen or so young men in hideous trousers and identical down jackets. Under the down jackets beer bellies strained over white T-shirts printed with the legend Danske ølbamser – Danish ale-heads. Pathetic! Prague was a magnet for gullible Mozart lovers and the citizens of heavily taxed countries who monitored the beer prices the way a speculator keeps an eye on the share index. There was nobody in this city but tourists, Per thought to himself, as he walked down to Charles Bridge, which he had located on his map. The crowds milling about on this cold, windy early spring day suited him just fine. He nipped into a shop and out again. Cut across a courtyard encircled by newly renovated restaurants and up a long avenue lined with trees on which tender new buds were all set to burst into leaf. Here, ten years after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, one was continually struck by the contrasts in the buildings: a lovely, freshly painted mansion abutting onto an old house with the plaster and paint peeling off its walls. He was constantly being confronted with evidence of the communists’ appalling taste and ineptitude. There was rain in the air, but as yet it had come to nothing. He studied the bizarre equipment in a porn shop, stopped to look into the gleaming window of an elegant jeweller’s. Churches towered over his head. By the time he reached the Old Town Square he was certain that no one was following him. Or if there was, then they really knew their job. A crowd of sightseers was standing gazing up at a clock surrounded by painted wooden figures. He thought they looked a bit like garden gnomes. But this had to be something special, what with all these people peering up at it as if
waiting for a miracle to occur. He made his way through the crowd. A number of horse-drawn carriages were lined up in the square. In the pavement cafés tourists sat under awnings and heat lamps. With colourful guidebooks lying next to their coffee cups, they surveyed the square as if not knowing quite what to do with themselves. You had to travel, but when you reached your destination and saw all the other people who had had the same idea, you could not help wondering what exactly you were doing in Prague.

  Toftlund stood for a moment and pretended to be looking up at the chiming clock and the figures revolving around it. He noticed nothing and nobody suspicious. No one among the down-jacketed tourists and importunate pushers of local musical offerings stood out or seemed out of place. He had memorised the map so now he turned left onto the street leading down to Charles Bridge. The time was nine forty-five a.m. when he caught his first sight of the bridge, lined with tall statues, extending from a huge tower. He chose to ignore the outstretched hands proferring fliers. This was not like India, where they begged for money. Here they did their begging with advertisements. What did they get for every one they gave away – a krone? Just before the busy road which ran past the bridge he spied a young girl in an old jacket. She was listening to music on her Walkman and smoking a cigarette with half-shut eyes. She carried a sign advertising a museum of torture and an Internet café. Toftlund stopped next to her. He waited until the lumbering red tramcar was almost level with him then strode smartly across to the other side and into the huddle of pedestrians waiting patiently for the lights to change. Behind him he heard the angry clang of the tram bell and the tooting of horns as he made a quick left turn and bore towards what looked like a church or a concert hall. He pulled up behind two big men in black folk costumes who were waving the eternal fliers for concerts and purportedly historic musical experiences. The tramcar moved on and still he noticed nothing untoward. No one scanning the street for him. And, more importantly, no one forging their way through the slow-moving lines of traffic. Now he was absolutely sure: he was not being followed. He walked onto the bridge at a leisurely saunter to make it easy for Pavel Samson to spot him and, when ready, make contact. Toftlund glanced up and around. From the mass of people on the bridge even this early in the day back to the massive bridge tower and from there to the buildings on the other side of the river: Samson could be hiding anywhere, equipped with a pair of binoculars. Through the slight haze he could see the Castle, which he knew to be the Czech president’s official residence – known locally as ‘the palace on the hill’. The river, brown and muddy, flowed sluggishly past. Some sort of excursion boat was turning lazily at the bridge. Along the riverside, too, the buds on the trees seemed simply to be waiting for a sign from God to spring open.

  Toftlund was not much of a one for art, but he was intrigued by the statues on the bridge: a grotesque mix of demons and Christ figures. Bizarre black ghouls with leering faces. Kings and slaves. Traitors and heroes. There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to them. But their expressions were all either agonised or baleful. The only things they had in common were those fascinating faces and the pigeon droppings. They seemed to lean in over the bridge, while at the same time having a kind of laid-back look about them. Charles Bridge was a pedestrian bridge, he noted. It was also a con artists’ bridge! One big tourist trap. A place where the crafty ripped off the less crafty. A place where tourists were tempted by fake antiques, dashed-off watercolours of the Castle, tacky postcards and other weird tat, and risked having their portraits painted or caricatures sketched by youthful art students, or being taken to the cleaners by the ancient, but apparently undying scam which involved hapless suckers trying to guess under which of three egg cups a pea was hidden. How could people let themselves be taken in like that? And then there was Per’s pet hate: the buskers. Every twenty yards or so there was another musician, or a group of them, with their hats on the ground, screeching out some song or other. Prague might be Mozart’s city, but Charles Bridge would have given Mozart a heart attack. That much even someone as tone-deaf as Per could tell as he sauntered across to the far side then turned to walk back. This music would have driven Lise up the wall. One wrong note, even on the car radio, was all it took for her to switch off or change station. It actually made her feel physically ill. He felt a pang of guilt. He had not got round to calling her this morning and he had his mobile switched off. Where could she have been yesterday evening? He shook off the thought the way he shook off the pest of a beggar who kept bothering him, and slowly proceeded to stroll back across Charles Bridge.

  He knew the rules of the game. He was the wooer, but in this game it was up to the wooed to make himself known. If he was at all interested in the proposal, that was.

  He stopped in the middle of the bridge. There was a box set up against the parapet at the foot of one of the statues, painted black and decorated with primitive stars. Inside it was a tiny microphone on a stand. At about the height of an overgrown Barbie doll. Next to the microphone stand was a miniature black grand piano. Also in the box was a skeleton – about half a metre tall and made of plastic, but a very lifelike skeleton nonetheless, with a hat on its head. Per Toftlund watched, mesmerised, as the skeleton began to move. A young man dressed in what Per would have described as hippie gear, had picked up the microphone and switched on a ghetto blaster. With his long, lank hair and straggly beard he looked like something out of a black-and-white photo from the early seventies. Toftlund could not make out the strings connecting the skeleton to the man. But, of course – puppet shows were a big thing in Prague. Among the fliers handed out by all those kids there had also been lots advertising different marionette theatres. He seemed to remember learning at school that the Czechs had practically invented puppet shows. These days, at any rate, they were pushing marionettes as doggedly as a drug dealer touting his wares. And going by the number of handbills these touts tried to stick into his hand, they must assume that this was what the tourists wanted. Puppet shows and Mozart. That was what Prague was famous for. And for Kafka, Toftlund suddenly remembered. One of Lise’s favourite writers. He had written a novel which she had told him he had to read. It might help him to comprehend what he himself had gone through after the Flakfortet business, with its depiction of how an individual can be rendered utterly helpless, like a fly caught in a spider’s web, when unseen powers make accusations which cannot possibly be answered. When, simply by responding to the charges and thus acknowledging them, one confirms one’s guilt, even though one never, in fact, knows what exactly one stands accused of. This novel, the title of which had slipped his mind, was still lying on the bedside table with a bookmark at page four. But that in itself was a start.

  The hippie had finished his technical preparations and the skeleton began to speak. The hippie pulled the strings, making the mouth with its big, yellowish teeth open and shut realistically, but it was the tape in the ghetto blaster which actually provided the soundtrack.

  ‘Hello,’ said the skeleton in the black top hat. ‘How are you all today?’ It spoke English with an American accent. It bobbed back and forth in the box, working to catch the attention of the tourists. With some success. People stopped to look at this curious apparition, so obviously plastic and yet so alive. It was like something out of a second-rate horror movie, but it also had a sinister air to it that was both exciting and compelling. There was something eerie, too, about the deep bass voice emanating from the tape recorder, its words as perfectly in synch with the movements of the skeleton’s mouth as the careful dubbing of a film on some awful German TV channel.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ it said, as its long, knobbly fingers sketched the air in front of it. ‘This is how we all look in death. And death is waiting just around the corner. Death is the shadowy companion who walks by your side. Turn around and try to catch sight of it and it is gone, moving faster than your own shadow. But do not fool yourselves. It is there. So live your life while you have it. Your time on this earth is short compared to the time you will sp
end with me.’

  The skeleton gave a guttural laugh, sat down on the piano stool and proceeded, in the same sinister vein, to mime to the strains of Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’, now hissing from concealed speakers. ‘They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within …’ The skeleton’s singing and playing were so well synchronised that a ripple of uneasy laughter ran through the crowd now standing in a semi-circle around the puppet show. ‘First we take Manhatten. Then we take Berlin.’ When it came to the chorus the puppet master gave a quick jerk of his left hand and three more skeletons, clad in minuscule bikinis, sprang up from the floor of the box and began to sing the backing vocals with their grotesque red-painted lips.

  A spontaneous burst of applause broke out and the clapping grew even louder as the number reached its climax, with the male skeleton on his feet, pounding the keys, and the bony backing singers trilling and jigging about like can-can dancers in gay Paree. All to the accompaniment of Cohen’s deep, seductive voice and the mellow light over the grey bridge. Still, though, most of the tourists drifted off without dropping any money into the hat in front of the black box. Toftlund placed some Czech notes in it as he watched the puppeteer laying the skeleton on its sleeping bench in the corner, ready for the next performance.