by Pavel Mandys
But I better not hurry. I know what I want. And I know myself so well that I could take my finals on it. And I am proud that I can see through myself. Most of the time, everybody is just lying to themselves. I have learned not to do that. To others, I lie often. Calmly, as I see fit—never to myself. Did Vilda feel the same? He would have said that he didn’t want to lie to himself, that he didn’t want to feel like vomiting because of himself. How I understood him then! He was beside himself with rage. From how everybody pretended that nothing was really happening, how they all retreated, how they groveled; then Beneš capitulated, the Jews did not defend themselves . . . How everybody, including me, scurried away like rats and spiders from a sinking ship. He did not pack his suitcases; instead, he started organizing resistance. Back then, I was not trying to dissuade him; I did not ask him to go with me, I did not push him into anything. I loved him, even with his laughable, dangerous pride, with his need to start a family and have everything. I have never tried to change anybody; perhaps out of laziness, perhaps out of disgust toward those tiny lies that people find in their pockets and then try to turn into some large truth about themselves. But that pride was not Vilda’s lie, that was him; he was very proud and he paid for it. And then I tried to save him, because I did not care about money, but about him. I did not care that I shelled out six million to the Nazis, which today is more like six billion or trillion; it doesn’t matter. I thought that money was absurd, just like Vilda’s pride. And I knew they would never let him go. Despite that, I did pay that money. I wanted him to feel—even if only for a while—like a human being, and not like an animal driven into a corner.
So, young pup, what’s the story? I want to kick him under the table. And suddenly I’m fed up. It’s not impatience, but it’s starting to get boring—this waiting for somebody who’s supposed to come but is not coming, and the kid is growing a tad nervous. Or am I paranoid? Am I like those old curmudgeons who always imagine that everybody wants to steal their wallet, break their bones? Vilda used to say that the price for great imagination is fear. He always disapproved of my imagination, and he always made a decent profit out of it. I have a large but already fragile body. I can shove as much calcium down my throat as I want to, but I feel how it simply is not what it used to be. So I should take off; I should think of something. But I am starting to fear. Fear that I will not be able to manage anymore. I will not manage in the same city where I buried all that old and useless junk; memories of the fabulous prewar ride, of Vilda’s wide shoulders and tailor-made white shirts—and the silky smooth skin underneath. I see in front of me his silhouette, his fashionably twisted cotton shawl; he stands over there by the park gate, leaning on the cracked wall, imagining his new villa, taking a drag on his cigarette. We used to come here often. Me and Vilém Šantavý. The beast and the beauty. At night, we would just sit around on benches or lie down under blossoming chestnut trees, smoking and holding hands.
Where did his bad boy of a grandson plan on ditching me? The trash cans by the park, or the tiny river flowing behind the fence? And would I then be found by a pooch being taken for his morning walk? Will they then assume the culprits are the young junkies sitting around behind the stone gate? Or the playboy Russians who go whoring in the houses not far from here? Or the tasteless coal baron who demolished Vilda’s villa and built in its place a luxurious concrete bunker?
I nervously fidget my legs under the table, and I start to sweat. Perhaps I better inhale my own scent one last time, before it becomes clouded with cold fear. I smell the perfume Vilda used to give me every year for my birthday. It has been given so many names and so many labels, but the basics are the same—the heavy, musky smell of tiny deer that use it to mark their territory. Today, it is made synthetically. But before the war, everything was real—furs and musk. I sniff at my wrist, where every morning I have applied two or three drops of the perfume since Vilda gave me the first bottle. It may be more than just an aphrodisiac. Every morning, it gives me the feeling that I should still live. And I still do not quite want to kick the bucket even if this homophobic puppy in a cheaply cut suit—who dares to judge us and at the same time wants our money—believes he’s got me.
But my plan is laughably simple—the kind that works the best. I got it from Marcus Aurelius. I watch Vilda’s grandson. He prattles on about restitutions again—it sounds somewhat complicated; with an air of importance, he discloses the names of his lawyers. He rubs his hands, squirms in his chair. Then he stands up and goes to the bathroom.
Now or never.
I too get up and follow him. On the way, I manage to upend a chair; the noise echoes in the empty tavern like a cave full of agitated bats. I’ll wait until he comes out of the stall. I hide myself behind another toilet door and when he’s washing his hands and drying them politely in the drone of the hand dryer, I put on secondhand kid gloves.
I stab very precisely. One motion. Clean job, just like in the old times. When Marcus Aurelius had to be read in its original form. He slides down like a rotten log. Dear goodness, I will have to drag him to a stall! But he’s not heavy. I position him so that it will take a long time to discover him. And so that the blood flows into the toilet bowl. And in my head, a quiet moment of power.
Vilda would for sure ask me: What is it like, to kill somebody? I don’t want to lie to him and so I answer him in my thoughts that murdering his good-for-nothing grandson for money was as sweet as doing in his killer. It gives me strength. The strength to keep up the fight. Back then, I fought through life without him and his body. And now I’m fighting getting old; the feeling of drying up, vanishing, wrinkling. I need that strength.
Suddenly, I am in no hurry. And so I nicely wash my hands and politely dry them up. I savor the fact that I have managed here too. Even in this city done up in a grubby dress from a closet of bygone fame. I pay. For both of us. And am I still afraid somebody may come? Somebody hired by this kid? Maybe yes and maybe no. The fear resulting from a compulsive imagination can be conquered with time. So just go ahead and imagine whatever you want to! You don’t need to worry about me. I have a driver waiting for me already. The plane leaves in two hours. I still have time to get a stiff drink at the airport—I deserve it. The lawyers whose names the boy so importantly listed will now have to really earn their money. But bribing cops so that they find a convenient culprit is not a problem at all in a post–Eastern Bloc shithole of a place like Prague. And all the restitution documents are ready. They only need my signature.
Percy Thrillington
by Michal Sýkora
Pohořelec
When Commissioner Mojmír Skorec retired, his colleagues knew exactly what farewell present would make him most happy. They all knew his life passion: his hobby was as renowned as his most famous cases. From an early age, Skorec had exceptional musical talent; in his hometown, he had acquired a reputation as the local Mozart, who by the age of twelve had become an attraction not to be missed at town events. Everybody foresaw a brilliant career as a pianist for him. He himself fully identified with this dream. His showcase became Beethoven’s Fourth Sonata in E-Flat Major. During his concerts, he would always amaze and touch his audience with his precise interpretation of all the sonata’s themes, with his subtle mastering of leggiero passages, with his contrast between the meditative second movement and the playfulness of the final rondo, delivered with a childlike naïveté.
After school, he went straight to the music conservatory where he piqued the interest of the audition committee with Beethoven’s Rondo in G Major, impeccably capturing its rococo levity. At home, he was considered a genius. However, that was not the reputation he would enjoy at the conservatory, because he had achieved the limits of his talent at sixteen and he could not develop further. When, years later as a Prague detective, he listened to his juvenile recordings, he could clearly hear why. Even if every note was correct, every tone exact—there was nothing more. Technical precision was no substitute for feeling; lyrical passages sounded cold an
d unemotional.
But the young Mojmír did not know that. Spoiled by all the attention he had gotten as a child prodigy, he did not deal well with the fact that in the company of truly talented musicians, he could not astonish anybody. The feeling of being undervalued had germinated in him, and it was amplified by the fact that even though he was able to finish the conservatory, he couldn’t get into a music college. An eighteen-year-old boy who had dreamed about the world of concert halls, only to realize that the future before him was one of a teacher of medium-talent pupils in the same backwater town where he was born. And to add to his depression, instead of a college acceptance letter, he received his draft papers. Due to his bleak prospects and to the harassment he faced in the army, Mojmír grew depressed and fell into unending despair. Fortunately, one of the officers took pity on him, and he told the young man that his service would shorten to five months if he applied to the police academy. This suggestion thus became the proverbial straw that the drowning Mojmír grasped.
At his new school, he shined—his love for music provided him with skills and allowed him to excel among his classmates. These skills also became fundamental to his successful police career. Precision, attention to detail, excellent memory. Just as he never forgot one note, his investigations were pedantic, with an air of abstraction and precisely executed administration. The love for music never left him, though. Skorec became famous for his collection of Czech classical music and his proclamation: Nothing can make one happier than enjoying Leoš Janáček in peace after having solved a case.
Therefore, when Commissioner Skorec was retiring, his colleagues got him a Swiss gramophone as a farewell present so that he could enjoy his collection of vinyl to the fullest.
* * *
It was a freezing Saturday afternoon, and fresh snow glistened as if two suns had risen that morning. A longtime colleague of Skorec, Martin Dráb, had brought along the present for the retired commissioner, which Skorec’s colleagues had ceremoniously promised to him at the farewell retirement party two days prior. It was a pleasant duty for him; Dráb shared with his boss an interest in music, and he knew that once he set up the gramophone, Skorec would take out a rare LP and offer an in-depth commentary. Dráb had become enamored with classical music thanks to Skorec; and this led his colleagues to joke that the ideal case for him would be the murder of a female harp player from the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. When Dráb set up the gramophone, the old detective had an unexpected surprise for him too: he opened a small cabinet under his TV, the contents of which had been kept secret until then. Dráb was not surprised to see more albums in there. He was surprised to see which records. Instead of Dvořák and Janáček, the cabinet contained a veritable mélange of illustrious foreign names.
“I haven’t shown you this yet,” Skorec said, and displayed to Dráb the most eclectic portion of his collection. He’d built the basis for it in the seventies and eighties, when in addition to classical music, he was buying American and British albums as well. Together, they read through the titles and Dráb was astonished: Armstrong, Cash, the Beatles, Genesis, Pink Floyd . . . At the end, Skorec produced a double LP of Paul McCartney, peered nostalgically at the dust jacket, and said: “Thanks to this LP I solved my first homicide.”
Dráb raised his eyebrows in astonishment. Naturally, this bit of information could not remain unexplained. For now, the gramophone was turned off; they sat down in the living room and Skorec topped off tea for both of them.
“It was January of 1992,” Skorec began. “That time was a nightmare for the police force. Plenty of people thought that everything was allowed, and when you insisted on upholding the rule of law, they would deem you a relic of the old totalitarian regime. Back then, we had to deal with a wave of suicides. Many people’s dreams of entrepreneurship collapsed. They could start a business but they did not really know how to do it; they had to learn on the go and many went bankrupt. The famous aphorism of our first post-Communist premier—Dirty money does not exist—was interpreted by many entrepreneurs their own way, and thus the standard methods of doing business became not paying invoices, fraud, and all sorts of schemes. This case was, for that period, typical. They called us over to a construction company. The administrative assistant came in in the morning and found one of her bosses hanged in the office. Because it was a suspicious death, it became my assignment to investigate.”
The construction company Kolář & Roman resided in the attic of a bourgeois baroque house in Pohořelec. The office windows offered an amazing view of the Hradčany panorama. Mojmír Skorec remembered very well the morning when he arrived to the crime scene: the historic army barracks, which dominated the square, were disappearing in the haze and smog; the slippery cobblestones glistened; the plaster on the old houses was flaking off and, in the claustrophobic blueish shade, the ruined memorial to Jan Nepomucký resembled a tombstone for a homeless person rather than a memorial for a martyr and a Czech patron saint.
“The suicide of one of the company’s owners surprised their employees, because the deceased Miloš Kolář was very popular, and everybody believed that the firm had a bright future. When I got there, they had already hauled the body away. His office, exceptionally organized and aseptically clean, was a room in the attic—the ceiling was made of supporting beams and the window offered a breathtaking view of the old-fashioned roofs. From one of those beams hung a piece of nylon cord. Under it was a chair, upside down, and on the table we found a suicide note. According to the pathologist, the death occurred at approximately ten p.m.; nothing pointed toward a suspicious death.”
Martin Dráb was looking sadly at Skorec. “Hanging is a terrible death,” he said. Today’s sunny afternoon, with a fresh layer of gleaming snow, could not be more different from that gloomy dark-blue morning. In the hangman’s office, they had to turn on all the lights to counter that depressive desolation. The police pathologist showed Skorec the suicide note.
I can’t go on anymore—this is the only way. I can’t deal anymore with the loneliness and the incessant pressure. The company is not doing well and I am responsible for it. I am taking my own life after a long reflection; my continued existence would only cause problems for people I like. I am not able to live anymore with the remorse that, due to my mistakes, many people could lose their livelihood. I ask for your forgiveness.Adéla, forgive me, I wanted to be a better father but I failed.
Miloš Kolář
p.s. At my funeral, please play the following songs:
The Beatles, Help!: “Tell Me What You See”
McCartney, Tug of War: “Here Today”
Percy Thrillington: Song no. 3
* * *
The secretary gave Skorec all the details about the day-to-day running of the company. She had tearful eyes, and with a shaking hand she lit a cigarette—surely not her first one, as the air in her office suggested. The dead engineer Kolář was divorced, but he had been living with his daughter, who was studying at a school of education. The ex-wife had died of cancer three years before, and the daughter had moved in with her father. “But they really didn’t get on well, and it troubled Mr. Kolář. But I had no idea how much . . .”
“Was this morning typical?” Skorec asked the secretary.
She inhaled more smoke, shaking. “What?”
“The door, for example. Was it locked?”
“Yes.” The secretary dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “I wanted to put today’s newspaper on Mr. Kolář’s desk, when . . . I saw him hanging there.”
“The door to his office was not locked?”
“No, he never locked his door. It was enough for him that the door to my office was locked.”
Skorec looked back over his shoulder. There were three doors in the secretary’s office: to the hall, and then two opposite each other—one to the office of the deceased; the other remained closed. “This door leads where?” he asked.
“To the office of the engineer Roman, the other business partner,” the secretary sa
id. “The poor soul doesn’t know yet. He traveled on business to Tábor yesterday. Mr. Kolář”—a head movement toward the door of the deceased—“did it yesterday so that Mr. Roman”—she nodded toward the other door—“couldn’t stop him, surely. They were friends.”
“When does Roman come to work?”
“He doesn’t know about it . . .” she repeated. “God, what is he going to do?”
Half an hour later, Mojmír got an answer to the question, when the partner of the deceased materialized, in the form of a tall man in his fifties, who could be considered elegant if he didn’t come to his office in a dark-blue nylon tracksuit with the Puma logo on the pants, sleeves, and breast. The death of his partner devastated Mr. Roman, but he was still able to answer Skorec’s questions. They started the business in 1990. Their jobs were divided—Roman was in charge of finances and contracts, while Kolář communicated with architects and builders. Until the previous year, they had been doing well. Then, however, problems started: clients wouldn’t pay; meanwhile, they always paid their employees on time, and the business had been going slowly down the drain.
Roman sat in his office and narrated how his partner reacted to the news of business problems. “Miloš was devastated,” he sighed. “I told him a month ago because I still believed I could solve it somehow. We had a horrible argument. Miloš thought it was my fault. Perhaps Zdena here”—he pointed to the secretary’s door—“told you about the scene.”
