Death On Duty

by Graham Brack

  ‘What do you want?’

  Peiperová fished in her pocket and produced a photograph of Savović. ‘Has this man been here?’

  There was just enough hesitation to tell her the answer.

  ‘I don’t see everyone who goes in.’

  ‘That’s an unusual thing for a doorkeeper to admit. Tell you what — I’ll come again with my boss in a couple of days. You have a good think about what you remember.’

  Slonský inspected his watch. ‘The big question is: do we turn the club over now, or have a mid-morning coffee first?’

  ‘I’m not thirsty, sir,’ Peiperová responded. Navrátil nodded vigorously, partly because it was true but mainly because he wanted to appear supportive of her.

  ‘You don’t want to go searching on an empty stomach,’ Slonský announced, but then added, ‘but I suppose we’re only scouting out the lie of the land at the moment. Come on, then. Navrátil, make sure you lock the car properly. There are some shady characters around here.’

  There was a different doorman standing guard at the Padlock Club. A brief glance at him told Slonský that he was unlikely to be a champion crossword solver.

  ‘Good morning,’ Slonský said cheerily, waving his badge. ‘We’ve come to pay you a visit.’

  The doorman seemed unsure whether to let them pass unopposed but it was taking him too long to make up his mind and Slonský was inside before he found his voice to protest. ‘I’ll have to tell the boss you’re here.’

  ‘No need,’ Slonský told him. ‘We’ll find our own way round. You don’t want to leave the door unguarded, do you?’

  The doorman turned back, but a second thug had appeared from a small room off the corridor. He must have been watching the door on closed circuit television and stepped out briskly, as betrayed by the ketchup round his mouth.

  Slonský grabbed Navrátil’s arm. ‘No, lad! Don’t attack till I say.’

  Thug B looked at each in turn. ‘Him? Attack?’

  Slonský was at his most affable. ‘He’s our best. You don’t think someone that weedy could get by if he wasn’t really good at it? Hands like lightning.’

  Despite his best efforts, Thug B’s face displayed a flicker of concern.

  ‘You may find this hard to credit,’ Slonský said in a stage whisper, ‘but this lad is so slick with a flick-knife he can arrange which of your trouser legs your balls are going to drop down. I’ve never actually seen him do one each side, but he says he can.’

  Now Thug B was convinced. He had a job to do, but with only a baton tucked in his belt he knew he was no match for a castration-fixated ninja with a conjuror’s hands. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, semi-graciously.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Slonský said approvingly. ‘I always appreciate a public-spirited citizen who is prepared to help us in our never-ending quest to stamp out crime. We’ve been asked by our colleagues in Bosnia to find some girls who have been abducted. Our enquiries have led us here.’

  ‘The girls aren’t in yet.’

  ‘I didn’t think they would be, which is why we came early. That way you can take your time giving us a list of your girls’ names so we can check them out and come back later with the warrants nicely filled in.’

  ‘All our girls are…’ He paused, searching for the most appropriate word. ‘Volunteers.’

  ‘You mean they dance for nothing? Actually, I can believe that. Your boss isn’t a big payer, is he?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ Thug B mumbled. ‘Looks after us.’

  ‘I bet you don’t get private health insurance? No, I thought not. Not even free Metro passes.’

  ‘Ah, we get them!’ snapped the big man in black. ‘We get the free trips on the Metro to get to work.’

  Slonský leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘You might. I’m not so sure all your colleagues do.’ He nodded towards the outer door. ‘And if you’re getting things others don’t get, what do they get that you don’t?’

  That this had struck a chord was clear from the deep frown crossing Thug B’s brow as he lapsed into something approaching thought.

  ‘That list,’ Slonský prompted. ‘Peiperová will write it down for us. Meanwhile Navrátil will have a little look around just to see that none of the girls have sneaked in.’

  On a signal from Slonský, Navrátil inched past his back and continued along the corridor.

  ‘Oh, and Navrátil!’ Slonský called. ‘No unnecessary violence, please. Keep the choke chain in your pocket.’

  Navrátil, though bewildered, nodded assent, noting with a little satisfaction that the hoodlum appeared very wary of him.

  In the old days, mused Klinger, there was no freedom but there were lots of card indexes, upon which the maintenance of the communist state depended. In offices throughout Prague you could find banks of drawers containing millions of cards recording most aspects of people’s lives.

  Then the wall came down, liberty was ushered in, and the card indexes became a matter of history. Computers arrived, and now it was possible for him to check in just a few minutes how many times Smejkal had left the country and where his immediate destination was. In the past it would have taken him weeks to discover this, but such is progress, sighed Klinger.

  The printer churned out a second list, this time for Nejedlý. Carefully selecting a lime green highlighter, Klinger set himself to comparing the journeys. There were several occasions when both Nejedlý and Smejkal had been out of the country at the same time, though they had never travelled together. But on the fifth of May Smejkal had taken a flight to Belgrade and had not returned until the tenth; meanwhile Nejedlý had crossed a land border leaving the EU in Hungary to go into Serbia on the seventh. Unfortunately there was no clear re-entry point for the return, but he had used a credit card to buy an Austrian toll road token on the ninth.

  Klinger calculated the mileage and estimated the driving time. It was certainly possible for them to have met up. Was this the link they had been looking for? Savović finds the girls and passes them to Nejedlý. He knows the police are onto him so he wants to leave Bosnia for a while, so Nejedlý introduced him to Smejkal and they all meet up in Belgrade. A couple of months later Savović leaves Bosnia and sets up in Prague in a building that Smejkal frequents. I wonder if he owns it?, pondered Klinger.

  Navrátil stared gloomily into his coffee cup.

  ‘Cheer up, Navrátil! They’ll give you a wide berth if they see you again.’

  ‘More likely they’ll shoot first and take no chances,’ grumbled Navrátil.

  ‘Well, there is that possibility,’ Slonský conceded, ‘but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Now, how does that list help?’

  ‘I was hoping you were going to tell us that, sir,’ Peiperová replied. ‘I thought you had a reason for wanting it.’

  ‘No, I just wanted the hooligan occupied while Navrátil had a look round. I thought anything involving writing was bound to be slow. What did you find, lad?’

  ‘I didn’t really know what I was looking for,’ Navrátil explained.

  ‘Well, did you find any girls?’

  ‘No, there was nobody. There must be some Bosnians or Serb girls because there were women’s magazines in the Cyrillic alphabet lying around.’

  ‘Excellent!’

  ‘None of them was dated after September.’

  ‘Even better.’

  ‘And there’s a back door that opens onto an alley. As you come out, it’s blind to the left but it opens alongside the front door.’

  ‘Building opposite?’

  ‘Looks like a shop with offices above. The offices have a door opening onto the alley.’

  ‘Good. So if we need to sneak in the back way we know how to do it.’

  ‘There’s no handle on the back door from the outside, sir. Someone has to let you in. It’s one of those fire doors with a push bar.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘But unfortunately someone has carelessly broken the peg at the top of the door that keeps it s
hut, sir,’ said Navrátil, who curiously had that very peg in his hand and was displaying it for all to see.

  ‘Navrátil, you are destined for high things in this police force. Peiperová, if you don’t come to your senses soon and give him the heave-ho, you’re going to spend your future sewing increasing amounts of gold braid on his uniforms.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll be sewing braid on mine, sir. It’s an age of equality.’

  ‘So it is, and quite right too.’ Slonský leaned over and whispered to Navrátil. ‘I bet she can get one down each trouser leg, lad. Watch yourself.’

  Klinger was puzzled. The building was not owned by Smejkal, which helped to explain why it was in relatively good repair. Moreover, unlike Slonský he had managed to get some useful information about Savović from Bosnian colleagues.

  ‘So basically they don’t know why they’re after him, but they just wanted to know what he was up to?’ Slonský snarled.

  ‘That’s about it,’ agreed Klinger. ‘Savović is a well-known bad boy, who probably has a warehouse or two of ex-army supplies.’

  ‘Weapons?’

  ‘Weapons, but also an awful lot of canned food, I hear.’

  ‘A useful person to know if you want to corner the cling peaches market, then.’

  Klinger tipped the last of his espresso into his mouth with a flourish of his little finger. ‘I think they’re more concerned about the weapons than they are about the cling peaches, Slonský.’

  ‘How times change. In the nineties they had plenty of weapons but cling peaches were like gold dust.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not a devotee of canned food myself.’

  ‘Not now, perhaps, but think of those decades when we lived on tinned sauerkraut.’

  ‘I would very much rather not think of those decades and especially not of tinned sauerkraut.’

  Slonský drained his mug. ‘Where’s your sense of Czech heritage, man?’

  Klinger smiled thinly. ‘I place more emphasis on Dvořák, Janáček and Martinů than on sauerkraut as components of Czech heritage, Slonský.’

  ‘You can’t have been as hungry as I was in the sixties. You can’t eat a Dvořák.’

  ‘Undoubtedly true, but irrelevant. Now, to return to the point, Savović has not cleared all his bank accounts, so our colleagues in Sarajevo plainly expect him to return at some point in the future.’

  ‘Any idea how much he has grabbed?’

  ‘Around four million Euros, they think, leaving about six behind him.’

  ‘Four million Euros? You can buy a lot of tinned peaches with that.’

  ‘A possible, but improbable, use of the money,’ Klinger pronounced.

  ‘So do you have any idea what he could be spending it on?’

  Klinger made a steeple out of his fingers and held them in front of his lips for a moment to signify deep thought. ‘Of course, there’s always arms and drugs. But, speaking as an economist, those markets are already well-supplied and there are significant barriers to market entry.’

  ‘He’s got plenty of cash.’

  ‘I was thinking more of the likelihood of being found in a ditch with a bullet through one’s head. Savović has bodyguards but he could never win a turf war against the existing barons who would combine to stamp out interference in their nicely sewn-up market.’

  ‘We know he’s in cahoots with a sex trafficker.’

  Klinger shook his head. ‘We suspect, but we don’t know. But even if he is, it won’t give him a return on that amount of money. There just aren’t enough people who want Bosnian women.’

  ‘Not who are prepared to pay, anyway,’ Slonský agreed.

  ‘That leaves property. Savović could be trafficking with Nejedlý but using most of his money to bankroll Smejkal. Smejkal would have no difficulty in finding a profitable use for four million Euros, especially if they had not been declared to the tax authorities so the interest rate demanded is likely to be lower than the banks would expect to pay. Unless it’s an interest-free, profit-sharing arrangement, I suppose.’

  Slonský shook his head slowly. ‘No, I can’t see it. In time, perhaps; but I can’t imagine Savović handing over that sort of sum to someone he can only just have met. How does he know Smejkal isn’t going to run off with his cash? Even if he got a receipt, it’s not going to help a lot when Smejkal is sitting by a pool in Mauritius.’

  ‘He may not have handed it over yet. He may still be weighing up the deal.’

  ‘So there could be a big sack of Euros under his bed?’

  Klinger wiped his hands on a large white handkerchief. He always felt the need to do that when he came to Slonský’s office. ‘Actually, four million Euros doesn’t need a particularly large sack. You can calculate the size of a pile of four million Euros.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Slonský, always a stickler for accuracy. ‘You can.’

  ‘Well,’ Klinger responded, ‘let’s put it in simple terms for you. That box of paper by the printer holds two thousand five hundred sheets.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘The label on the side says so, Slonský. Use your eyes. If each of those sheets was a five hundred Euro note, a stack as tall as the box would amount to one and a quarter million Euros. Now, we need to know the size of a five hundred Euro note. I don’t suppose you have one?’

  ‘Have one? I’ve never even seen one.’

  ‘No matter.’

  Klinger tapped a few keys on his mobile phone. ‘160 millimetres long by 82 wide,’ he said. ‘Whereas a sheet of A4 paper is 297 by 210 millimetres.’

  ‘You must be a wow at parties, Klinger. Imagine having all this at the tips of your fingers.’

  ‘I detect a measure of sarcasm in your tone which I shall ignore. Simple multiplication tells us that you could fit 4.75 such banknotes on a piece of A4 paper. Therefore that box of paper could contain the four stacks of banknotes necessary to constitute four million Euros.’ Klinger rose from his chair. ‘Slonský, however entertaining this demonstration, and however fascinating the whereabouts of that money may be to me, I don’t see how it will help you find the murderer of poor Hrdlička.’

  Slonský rocked back in his chair, which creaked alarmingly as the joints were strained. ‘People don’t generally kill other people for no reason. Somebody knew who Hrdlička was and why he was there. Somebody had something to hide. And the prime suspects must be Savović, Nejedlý and Smejkal. Find out what they were hiding, and we may discover why it was worth killing to keep it hidden.’

  Klinger acknowledged the logic with a pursing of his lips and returned to his office, taking care not to touch the doorknob of Slonský’s office with his bare hand, a ritual that Slonský found constantly entertaining.

  ‘Obsessed with hygiene,’ he muttered. ‘I wonder if he’s ever seen the showers in the basement?’

  He took a pair of scissors, a sheet of paper, a pencil and a ruler and set about trying to prove Klinger wrong.

  Peiperová and Navrátil had returned from their respective duties for a debrief at four o’clock as requested. Peiperová had managed to find and speak to some of the women on the list that she had compiled. None of them admitted to having seen Savović in Prague, but a couple were prepared to admit to having met him in Bosnia.

  ‘Will they give evidence that he brought them here?’ asked Slonský.

  ‘Yes,’ said Peiperová, ‘but it won’t help because they say he is just a travel agent.’

  ‘A travel agent?’

  ‘That’s right. They gave him money and he organised bus tickets and the necessary paperwork. They crossed into Serbia, then Hungary, Slovakia and so to Prague.’

  ‘What necessary paperwork?’ asked Navrátil.

  ‘False passports.’

  ‘Isn’t that an unusual service for a travel agent to provide?’ asked Navrátil.

  ‘It is,’ Slonský conceded, ‘but the offence doesn’t sound like it was committed here, so we can’t arrest him for it. We could deport the girls, but how d
oes that help?’

  ‘And I suppose he’ll claim he didn’t know they were being imported for immoral purposes,’ Navrátil added.

  ‘He’ll probably tell us he thought they were a folk dancing troupe. Anyway, keep in touch with them, Peiperová. When they’re ready to talk, they’ll know who to come to. What sort of day have you had, Navrátil?’

  ‘I tracked down Mr Nejedlý. He claimed that he had been at a business meeting on Kampa Island.’

  ‘The other party confirm that?’

  ‘He can’t remember the other party’s name exactly. And he says the other chap suggested the bar as a venue. And he isn’t a frequent visitor to Kampa so he can’t remember the name of the bar, though he could probably take us there if asked. So I asked.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The barman couldn’t swear to the time but was sure that Nejedlý was there at some time during the afternoon.’

  ‘Did he see the business acquaintance?’

  ‘No, they sat in one of the screened booths. He could see Nejedlý who was facing him, but not the other man. And he didn’t see them leave.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. They might not want to be seen leaving.’

  ‘So where does that get us, sir?’

  ‘I don’t think it clears Nejedlý. A very uncertain sighting earlier in the afternoon within easy walking distance of the murder scene isn’t convincing, lad.’

  Peiperová broke into the conversation. ‘If he was making it up, sir, surely he’d pick somewhere a bit further away than Kampa.’

  ‘Bluff and double bluff, lass. Maybe he was banking on us being dim enough to think a real criminal would place more distance between himself and the scene of the crime, whereas actually if he was on the other side of Prague we’d wonder why he just happened to be so far away. Oh, I wish criminals wouldn’t lie to us! It just makes a hard job completely impossible.’

  Chapter 4

  Slonský languidly stirred his coffee and glanced around the canteen. There was nobody he wanted to talk to, which was neatly symmetrical because nobody there wanted to talk to Slonský very much. Lieutenant Doležal was drinking a mint tea, which was the kind of thing you were reduced to when your doctor told you to cut out all forms of excitement, something which probably came easier to Doležal than anyone else. Even Klinger could get more animated, if he came across a particularly well laid out bank statement or a new shape of sticky thing to write notes on for his files.