by Pavel Mandys
“That’s enough!” Emil yelled from the ground while Dan caught Suong from behind and grabbed her hands. “Stop that amateurish idiocy!”
Finally, Bombay successfully dislodged the hoe from his back.
“So? Are you going to explain yourself, Suong?” He gestured toward the gardener. “How come he’s not Vietnamese, huh? How come he’s not a gook? What’s going on here?”
“Go to hell, you asshole,” Suong spat.
It was not a very comprehensive answer—but in a sense, it was enough for Emil. Therefore, he did not protest when Bombay attacked Suong with rage in his face and a bloody gardening tool in his hand.
* * *
In that exact moment, something small and white and blue flew in through the door. It was a cylinder, and it was turning in the air.
Huk was probably the only one who recognized what it was, even in his state. He covered his ears with his hands and closed his eyes as tight as possible.
* * *
It is true that we were not all that gentle handling those idiots, conceded Bartoš.
* * *
When ten mini grenades explode under your feet, each with the intensity of 160 decibels, it shakes you up quite a bit.
And when, additionally, there are four tear gas grenades of chlorobenzalmalononitrile—CS gas—it really is something to cry about.
And that, approximately, was Emil’s reaction. Even if he could not remember exactly what had happened, he suddenly found himself on all fours—tears streaming from his eyes, snot in his nose, skin burning like it was on fire, ringing in his ears. The entire world was swinging in the discs of white smoke and Emil was suffocating and vomiting on his hands. He perceived the figures in black uniforms as if from a distance. They came out of the smoke and yelled at him to lie down on his stomach and put his hands behind his head—to lie down and not to stand up, so hurry, hurry—now, you asshole! He did as they ordered him to do and sank down in his own puke, and he felt the policemen pull his arms behind his back and fasten plastic handcuffs on his wrists—he now knew for sure that he was out of the amateur league.
* * *
Huk was ungluing his eyes slowly and painfully—it took some time to get his vision sharp enough to see the guys from the ESU, who had infiltrated the hall through all three entrances and were now standing above the bodies on the floor. They were securing Emil and Dan, and calming the resisting Bombay. One such figure clad in black was even standing above Huk, offering him a hand. “So how is it going, Huk?”
He took the offered hand and let himself be pulled up to his feet. Because of the gas mask he couldn’t see who the person was—was it Pergl or Fiala? “Good,” he croaked. “I’m okay.”
“Really?” said Pergl or Fiala. “Your face is all bloody.”
“Oh well,” Huk answered, “they hit me with a mop.”
The tear-gas haze was breaking into cotton candy–like tufts, and a man from the team who had been recording the entire operation pointed outside. Solemnly, Major Bartoš himself marched into the warehouse along with some VIP from the Ministry of the Interior. They both wore bulletproof vests and gas masks. Bartoš was explaining in a low voice that this Vietnamese growhouse had been secured three weeks ago, and they had used it as a decoy. First Lieutenant Břetislav Hukvald—he pointed at Huk—had pretended to be a gardener, and together with his informer, they’d lured the gang right into the trap. The VIP nodded his head in awe and looked as if he wanted to shake Huk’s hand, but Huk ignored him, because, finally, he saw Suong.
He approached her at the same moment she started walking toward him. They fell into each other’s arms, and Huk felt relief enveloping him, perhaps even euphoria. Not just because they got Emil and his group exactly as planned, but because Suong had just given him definitive proof—she had lured them and betrayed them for him, for him and nobody else. It seemed to Huk that everything around him floated away, disappeared and lost its meaning—Major Bartoš and his posse, the ever-so-important VIP and the team member in charge of recording (who was just then recording bags filled with substrate, being mindful not to catch the group of colleagues on the recording who kept on beating Bombay with batons as he was still resisting, swinging the hoe wildly, yelling that they would never get him, ha ha, he knew very well all of this was just a hallucination . . .). Huk was not taking notice of any of that—only of how he now held Suong, and how she held him, and how both of them were shaking.
It was true love. He knew it with absolute certainty.
Disappearances on the Bridge
by Miloš Urban
Charles Bridge
“So, everyone pay attention,” the technician said, and then paused dramatically. “A camera with a chip is fine, but these ones have their own kind of intelligence and, to top that, are high definition. This means that they can independently count the number of people on the bridge; they can remember a face which they then know to distinguish from a hundred million other faces. But what’s more important, they can identify a criminal even if he is not in their memory yet. And you can then zero in on that person and probe him.”
Soukup looked around at the audience and gloomily admitted to himself that his lecture hadn’t yet made the kind of impact he would have expected. The police are probably too dense to appreciate this kind of technology.
“The cameras can identify the criminal based on what?” Officer Vacek asked.
Based on shit, thought Soukup, though out loud he said that it’s based on the concentrated look on one’s face—but absolutely not based on skin color, because the European Commission for the Improvement of Monitoring Technology is particularly sensitive about the issue.
Vacek looked at his boss and they both turned the corners of their lips down. Well, if the European Commission watches it . . .
The technician continued his lecture. This was his fourth one—the first was with the city police at the castle; then in the Old Town Square; next in Malá Strana. But here, it was more interesting: the cameras—twelve of them altogether—monitored the Charles Bridge, where the migration and fluctuation of people is great, comparable to the area under the Eiffel Tower or Piccadilly Square. Not that the sea of people here was identical—the bridge couldn’t support such masses—but the movement was similar. He touched the monitor and the number 679 appeared in the upper right corner. It immediately changed to 682, then 674, then shot up to 711, because from both sides platoons of tourists came marching, following their guides. From the Old Town Square side came Koreans or Chinese; from the Malá Strana side, what looked like Italians.
“One day it’ll crumble under the weight of all of them,” Matlach, the shift commander, said.
“I hope soon,” Vacek responded. “I can’t bear to see that bridge anymore.”
“Our cameras will watch it for you,” Soukup assured him.
“Turn off those stupid numbers, it gets on my nerves how they keep on changing,” Matlach grumbled as he put his lips to his electronic cigarette. “It’s like I’m watching gas consumption in real time while driving the car. Then I don’t really watch the road; I stare at the dashboard instead. I wanted a car without it, but apparently they don’t sell those anymore.”
“That’s great that you don’t have to smoke outside,” Soukup remarked. “If you excuse me, I’ll have one out on the sidewalk.”
“That’s unnecessary, we have a police backyard here.” Vacek nodded at his boss to make sure he was okay with it. “I’m going with you.”
“To the backyard?” said Soukup. “Where the inmates walk around in shackles? I’m not going there.”
“Come on, smart guy.”
Vacek hoped that he would not be sorry for having a cigarette with this kid.
* * *
“That was great,” the young man laughed in the backyard, and lit his cigarette without offering the light to Vacek. “How your boss wanted to turn off the numbers. An old brain simply can’t track both at once—the numbers and the images.”
; Vacek shrugged. “You can’t fault him. Those cameras only remind him of his looming retirement.”
Soukup was inhaling his already exhaled gray-blue smoke. He had gotten used to the fact that a few policemen could be smart, but the majority are fatheads who have no technical foresight or sense of humor. This one was trying to be approachable, but to him he was just as dead as the old boss. “I also don’t think those cameras know everything,” he tapped ash into a broken cup placed on a beat-up chair, “but if they announce that somebody is sticking a hand into somebody else’s pocket or handbag, then I think it’s useful.”
“It’s clear to a robber that we’re here to stop him,” Vacek commented. “We also stop thugs, vandals, and those idiots on the bridge who climb on the baroque sculptures. I am not worried about that. But what if one person supports another, for example? What if people simply walk across hanging onto each other, or maybe they just want to take a picture by a sculpture? What if the camera sends us to get those people too?”
“That has not yet happened. Your other departments would already be complaining. Until you get familiar with a new thing and you really learn how to use it—and that sometimes takes a long time with the police, please excuse me for saying so—we have enough time to work the bugs out. We’ll fine-tune the software and send it to your cameras. Often you don’t even notice; you simply can’t keep up.”
If this brat wanted to demonstrate to Vacek that he had a far better and more sophisticated job, he had been quite successful. The constable realized that his cigarette didn’t taste all that great and he killed it in the cup. “How exactly will the arresting camera work?” he asked.
“When it sees a pickpocket in action, “ Soukup answered with a serious expression on his face, “it shoots an electric beam at him which, over a long distance, will incapacitate the pickpocket until you arrive.”
Vacek raised his hand to scratch the crown of his head and the boy jumped, startled. They both knew it was all just drivel.
“Such cameras are very expensive—the criminal department will get them; the city police cannot afford them,” Soukup added, and hurried back into the building.
Vacek imagined he was holding a throwing knife and that he would launch it at the boy and then watch it sink between his shoulder blades. The kid would be tremendously surprised right before his death; cloudy eyes full of reproach and self-pity.
Vacek returned into the operations room. Matlach was already waiting for them, and right away asked Soukup to go through the entire presentation again, using PowerPoint. The young man shrugged indifferently and began. Vacek, who remembered it all, stared at the monitor. He had to admit to himself that the image offered by the new cameras had the same definition as a good TV screen.
Shot: the Charles Bridge from the Old Town Tower side; the immediate space between the Pieta on the left and the Calvary on the right. Vacek couldn’t help but look away every now and then from the colorfully clad selfie-takers toward the dark, still sculptures that stood in resigned silence above the unstoppable bronze river and a vibrant mass of promenading foreigners. With his finger, he tentatively touched the screen to enhance a beautiful detail of the Pieta. Some woman is kissing the hand of Jesus, just taken from the cross. He didn’t know who it was. The other figure would be Mary—the mother mourning her son, that eternal old Virgin, he laughed to himself. Then there was a man—probably an angel—but who was the girl kissing the hand, as if offered to her by the dead? It could be Mary Magdalene, who sang so wonderfully in the musical he had seen the previous year. Understood—one doesn’t kiss only the hands of superstars. Then he aimed the long-distance eye toward the sculptures right across the way, where there was a golden glinting inscription. Vacek knew quite a bit about that: it was Hebrew and it meant “the God of multitudes is holy.” And he had a saintly patience, he said to himself, that God of multitudes. It was at this inscription where the city police had intervened twice already, and he personally took part in one. Once a ginger-haired American Jew, wearing a black jacket and white shirt with a hat on his head, threw a sponge soaked in black paint on Christ. He had concealed the sponge in a plastic bag. The sculpture had to be expertly cleaned, and the American—content with himself—willingly, almost gaily, paid the fine. Perhaps he had come to Prague only to do that. Another time, a Filipino who came on a chartered trip attacked the Calvary. When he saw the inscription in the language of the Jews, without thinking, out of pure Christian passion, he climbed the cross to break off the letters. His foot slipped and so he grabbed the letter on Jesus’s left side and remained there, hanging. The sculpture has an electronic fence, and Vacek was there in exactly three minutes and nine seconds—he timed himself on his Casio G-Shock watch—and carefully, almost like a rescue squad, brought the small Filipino down from the cross. Before he realized it, at least a hundred people must have taken pictures of the scene. That same evening, he saw himself on social media; the story even made it onto the news. He expected to be promoted after that, but it never happened.
* * *
Soukup finished the presentation and Vacek stopped reminiscing. Matlach dryly said that the cameras were excellent but also very expensive, so the number of interventions on the bridge would now increase, even if half of them were false alarms.
Some of the officers left and Matlach sat down beside Vacek. He leaned on his shoulder which somewhat startled the constable, though he was also pleased.
Matlach admitted that it would take him some time to learn to work with the new cameras. In his opinion, there had already been plenty of innovations and the inventing should stop for at least five years, so that ordinary people could get used to it.
Soukup protested that Commander Matlach was a commissioned officer, and so he didn’t need to gape at screens; he had people to do it, like Mr. Constable here. And right away, he began quizzing Vacek on how to zoom, and how to use the electronic focus on face shots to immediately search the archives for offending persons.
Vacek almost began telling him off but Matlach took it in stride and said that he intended to learn it—come what may. Soukup suggested that in this case he could explain the system for the fourth time. But the boss only waved his hand and pointed to a chair where the boy was supposed to park his bottom for the remainder of the day. Should the officer here during his shift find something unclear (all those pixels were, after all, somewhat treacherous), then he should explain everything to him in detail.
Soukup sat down and danced his fingers on the display of his cell phone. Vacek switched two of the cameras onto a full shot of the central part of the bridge. One set of lenses recorded the entire long runway. Another set, like an invisible spider, nosily moved all over the tourists: arms, jeans, heels, cameras, cell phones on selfie sticks, scruffs, and faces; when somebody started laughing, you could see all his or her teeth and the tongue down to its root.
Then a shot of Jan Nepomucký, that familiar shiny bas-relief and frequently fingered cross. They’re still there; nobody had stolen them and no pilferer with a concentrated look on his face was taking anything out of the pockets of the assembled and promenading people. The numbers in the corner of the monitor stopped; the cameras, however, continued recording and the crowd flowed from one sculpture to another, from a street vendor to a portrait painter and an enamel jewelry vendor; from the orchestrion on wheels, to a moving barrel organ, all the way to the jazz band with eight players. In that moment, nobody entered or left the bridge, which was confirmed by the first and last screens. That lack of change is rare, and had been proven by students from the physics department. Especially during the high season, at the apex of tourist turnout between ten a.m. and midnight, the time period when nobody entered and nobody left the Charles Bridge was surprisingly long: an entire seven and a half minutes.
The police had this data and Soukup was aware of it, and now he was helping to configure the cameras and was teaching their use and operation to those forever unsavvy cops.
Currently he was ente
rtaining himself with an app his friend had come up with. On the display of the cell phone, a naked young woman appeared, and he looked up. He wanted to make sure nobody could see his display over his shoulder. Good, nobody could spy on him. But when his eyes slid on the monitors in front of Vacek and Matlach, something stopped him in his tracks. He watched for a while and the chewing gum fell out of his mouth. He stuck his finger on the sculpture of Nepomucký.
“Eighteen seconds. Rewind it on this monitor and then again forward, play a loop. Over there, let the camera run.”
Vacek rewound the recording and then hit play. Then he saw it too: a woman with a red hood. Peculiar clothes in such hot weather, even if the hood was attached to a T-shirt with short sleeves. In any case, the woman looked more conspicuous than the people around her. She didn’t have any luggage, not even a purse. She wasn’t holding a cell phone; she didn’t have anything in the pockets of her tight white pants—that’s the detail Vacek had to enjoy, checking out her butt. For a fraction of a second she turned, leaning against the stone fence. Vacek and Matlach peered at the lenses of her big sunglasses when unexpectedly, their view became obstructed by a large group. The people dispersed after a while, and that’s when it all became peculiar: the woman in the red hood had disappeared. They played it one more time while scanning the side monitors as well to keep checking the live feed. Soukup divided the screen of the middle monitor so they saw the live feed in the upper half, while the bottom half repeated the scene with the vanished Red Riding Hood. Nobody complimented him for it. Using his cell phone, Soukup took a picture of the last frame of the woman, when she looked toward the camera through her sunglasses.
“Have you tampered with this?” Vacek asked, puzzled. “The super-clever camera deleted that woman long-distance?”
“The police expect reliability from its business partners. Even if you’re so young, you should understand that, young man,” Matlach commented.
But Soukup shook his head. “What do you mean tampered? That’s ridiculous—we’re a serious, reliable business. In my opinion, that woman fell into the water when we couldn’t see her. An unsuccessful selfie. Or she’s a junkie and she jumped in. Perhaps she thought she’d fly. Or—”
