Prague Noir

by Pavel Mandys

  “Do you know who finally figured it out? My daughter.”

  “Tereza?”

  “Yeah. I was calling various people all day long. I called the university, the department of musicology, I tried music journals, but nobody knew the name Percy Thrillington. I didn’t understand it at all, but I was becoming more and more sure that the key to the mystery lay in that Thrillington.”

  “And what is it that Tereza figured out?” Dráb asked.

  That evening Skorec was sitting in his living room exactly as now, and out of desperation, he played some McCartney songs. Tereza poked her head into the room at one point and the music piqued her interest. “Are you fed up with Dvořák?”

  Skorec told his daughter about the problems he was having with Mr. Kolář’s funeral song list.

  “Will you show me that note?” Tereza asked.

  He handed her a copy of the note. Tereza skimmed the page. “Do you think it’s a cipher?”

  Skorec watched her closely. That is it, that’s what had made him nervous. It was silly to discuss a murder with a high school student, but he just needed help, a different view, fresh eyes on the problem, and his smart daughter seemed ideal. “Imagine, Tery, that somebody wants to kill you but wants to mask it as a suicide. And the person makes you write a farewell note.”

  “How do you force somebody to write a farewell note?”

  “That’s not the point right now. You decide to cipher into that note the identity of the murderer.”

  “Percy Thrillington.” Tereza raised her eyebrows. “That’s why nobody knows him. He is not a musician, he’s a murderer.”

  Skorec shrugged: “It’s not that easy. It has to be something that the murderer would not recognize. Percy Thrillington had to make a record.”

  Tereza was still staring at Kolář’s suicide note. “Dad, look how he wrote it. Every line has a different form. It’s supposed to be a list of songs. But with the album he doesn’t have, he didn’t remember the title of the song, only its order—number three. Isn’t that odd? Everybody remembers the titles of their favorite songs, right? He doesn’t have the album but he knows what songs are on it.”

  Right then, Skorec saw it: “Tery, it really is a cipher—read it.”

  “The Beatles . . .” Tereza started.

  “In Czech. Help! ‘Tell Me What You See.’ Here and now. And who he saw we will find out when we listen to the third song from the Percy Thrillington album.”

  “Which we do not have,” Tereza remarked, as if her dad had forgotten.

  The Paul McCartney album finished right then and the gramophone stopped. Silence. Disappointment. Without the record, they would not progress.

  Skorec got up, took the album, and put it back into the dust jacket. Then he played the third side of All the Best! Kolář’s favorite singer launched into “Live and Let Die.”

  Tereza immediately reacted: “This is from a Bond movie, right?”

  Skorec shrugged his shoulders. He was helpless. They stopped speaking and listened to the music. Tereza found the liner notes with a Czech commentary on each song. The first song finished and “Another Day” had started and right then—

  “Dad!” Tereza was pointing at the liner notes. “Here’s Percy Thrillington!”

  Skorec took out the Beatles star’s album with the inside dust jacket and handed it to Dráb. “I had it at home the entire time. Read the last line.”

  Dráb looked at the place the old detective pointed to: “. . . McCartney released an instrumental version of Ram under the name Thrillington.”

  “That’s why he was trying to get the LP. Without it, the collection would not be complete. And that’s why nobody knew about it. It was just Paul McCartney’s pseudonym and only a marginal recording,” Skorec explained.

  “Still—we don’t have the LP,” Tereza exhaled.

  “But we have its original version,” her father answered optimistically. In his notes, he looked up Kolář’s home phone number and hoped Adéla would answer.

  After the third ring, her tearful voice sounded: “Hello?”

  “Good evening, this is Skorec. I need you to look at the album Ram. You told me yesterday that it was your dad’s favorite. Find out the title of the third song.”

  Tereza excitedly listened in on the conversation next to her dad, pushing her head against the phone.

  “Hello?” Adéla spoke tiredly after a short while.

  “I’m here,” Skorec confirmed.

  “Did you say Ram? Third song?”

  “Yes, Adéla . . .”

  “‘Ram On’ . . . It’s noted here that it means, Let’s go, let’s start. Dad has the Czech version.”

  Skorec ended the call. Tereza was looking at him with disappointment. “It was a Spaniard who killed him?”

  “Tery, it’s not a Spaniard, it’s an anagram.”

  “It was a curious situation,” Skorec told Dráb, “nothing like it would ever happen to me again. To investigate any murder, there are three fundamental questions—how, why, and who? Usually, how is not a problem—the question why is key, and to answer it, you need to know who. But in this case, it was different. We had who, but how and why—we had no idea. The pathologist and forensic specialists went back to work. They were looking for the slightest suggestion of violence, proof that it was murder. Nothing. The court graphologist checked the farewell note again. Nothing. Textbook suicide. But I knew that Roman did it somehow. So pro forma, we closed the case as suicide so that Roman wouldn’t become nervous, but we continued with the investigation. How remained a mystery; we were looking for the motive. But the motive by itself proves nothing. We had to get Roman to confess.”

  * * *

  Fourteen days had passed since Kolář’s funeral. Prague was still immersed in a bluish smog haze. Mojmír Skorec spent those two weeks rummaging through Roman’s finances, his team strengthened with a colleague from the financial crimes unit.

  Mr. Roman sat in his office and looked worried. When the secretary ushered Skorec in yet again, the expression on his face was replaced by vacant astonishment. The detective informed Roman that there had been new findings in the case of the death of Mr. Kolář, and that they would like him to come with them to the station.

  “What if this is not a good time for me?” Roman tried.

  Skorec raised his eyebrows. “Then I’ll call my colleagues and they will bring you in.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  The correct answer was no, so Roman gave up.

  “You mentioned that you have the same pen as Kolář,” Skorec said as Roman was putting on his nylon Puma jacket. “Could you bring it with you?”

  “Why? You can’t write much with it, it’s kind of broken.”

  “Take it anyway. The cartridges as well.”

  “Cartridges?” Roman put the pen in his leather briefcase. “I don’t like this, I’m calling my lawyer.”

  “I was just about to suggest that to you.”

  * * *

  Engineer Roman’s Parker pen was indeed “kind of broken.” He had probably pushed too hard and the tip came apart, and when writing with it, the thin line would sometimes double. If Kolář had written the second part of his note with Roman’s pen, everybody would have noticed the difference. Of course, Skorec knew he had no proof yet, but he understood how Roman’s cartridge had ended up in Kolář’s pen.

  So he decided to bluff: “The day of his death, a little thing happened to Mr. Kolář. He got a paper cut on a very silly spot. That’s why Mr. Kolář was wearing a Band-Aid.”

  Skorec could see how hard Roman, behind his stone façade, was trying to remember the Band-Aid.

  “This detail problematizes his death. First—the cord on which he hanged himself. It was made of synthetic fibers and so we could get fingerprints. However, neither—not the knot on the noose nor the knot on the beam—had any fingerprints on it. On the places which Mr. Kolář held, there was a clear fingerprint
of the index finger with the Band-Aid . . . Why would Mr. Kolář wipe off fingerprints from the cord which he wanted to use to hang himself?”

  Roman’s facial expression betrayed him. His gaze wandered to the upper-right corner of the office and the corners of his mouth turned down; he looked like a student who was trying to remember which answer the professor wanted to hear.

  Skorec continued: “Second—in the middle of writing his farewell note, Mr. Kolář ran out of ink. A silly situation when you’re trying to commit suicide. The person is being kept from committing the act.”

  “I have never committed suicide,” said Roman impatiently.

  “What he did was change the cartridge in the pen.”

  “When you run out of ink, that is what you do.”

  “Well, yes, but he always filled his cartridge himself.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Where did he get the new cartridge?”

  “Perhaps he had one in the drawer . . .”

  “But that cartridge was half empty. You cannot store an open ink cartridge. It either dries up or leaks.”

  “So he got it from somewhere!”

  “Third—Mr. Kolář refilled the pen, but where did the empty cartridge disappear? It wasn’t in the trash can.”

  Roman could not answer.

  “I cannot imagine that Mr. Kolář would rummage through somebody’s drawer looking for an extra cartridge. I’d expect he would simply refill his own. Don’t you think?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Roman was practically yelling.

  “True,” Skorec said. “The problem is that there are no fingerprints on the cartridge.”

  Roman remained silent.

  “Which leads to only one possible scenario. Kolář could not have changed the cartridge himself.” This was a key moment. The trap either works, or everything goes wrong and the murderer gets away.

  “I understand where you’re going,” Roman snickered.

  “That’s good. At your company, nobody has a Parker pen—except you.”

  “But I wasn’t there. Whoever changed the cartridge, it wasn’t me . . . Damnit, say something!” He turned to his lawyer. “He can’t put it on me because of one empty cartridge!”

  “How then do you explain that we found Mr. Kolář’s fingerprints on your pen?”

  “I was showing him the broken nib. You have nothing on me!”

  “Ah,” Skorec remarked as if everything had become clear. “How is it possible to leave a fingerprint when wearing a Band-Aid?”

  “That’s ridiculous, Miloš wasn’t wearing a Band-Aid.”

  “The secretary put it on him.”

  “I’m saying he had no Band-Aid!” Roman’s eyes jumped between Skorec and his lawyer.

  “One more question,” Skorec said. “How did you make Mr. Kolář write that farewell note?”

  * * *

  “The interrogation lasted five hours and it was a collusion not only between me and Roman and me and his lawyer, but also between Roman and the lawyer. Then, finally, he told us everything; it was a relief for him. Roman had defrauded a lot of the company’s money and the firm came under the threat of a hostile takeover. Roman unwisely invested in a fund that went bankrupt, and he forged signatures and borrowed from bad people, which is when Kolář found out that the company hadn’t paid their employees’ health and social benefits for four months. Because he considered Roman a friend, he wanted to come to an agreement—he would not sue him if Roman immediately corrected the situation and returned at least half of the stolen money—in other words, Kolář’s share. But that was not possible. If the fraud was uncovered, the creditors would start breathing down his neck . . . Roman concluded that the only solution was to take full control of the company and finish the money funneling. A colleague from the financial crimes unit said that it was a standard MO: since he could not get rid of his partner legally, the only option was murder. Roman was familiar with Kolář’s work routine; he knew that Kolář would be in the office alone in the evening. He came to his office with a pistol and prepared a noose, a canister of gasoline, and a plan in which he arranged everything in detail. When I think about it, Roman looks to me like a calculating, ruthless man. He told Kolář that he had a choice—either he would die alone, or both he and his daughter would die. Either Kolář would hang himself, or Roman would kidnap Adéla and burn her in front of him. Miloš looked as if he was really afraid I would do it. He really believed I meant the threat seriously, he told me when we were finishing up the interrogation. Ruthless, egotistic asshole!”

  Dráb stayed silent. He had nothing to say—what had been entertainment turned into disgust. He knew that in certain situations, parental emotions would overtake professional police demeanor, and therefore he was glad that he’d never had to deal with a case where a cruel scoundrel beats a baby because he’s bothered by its crying, or an unstable mother poisons her child with antifreeze because she wants to punish the father. He could imagine what in that moment Kolář must have been feeling, because he too had children. How long did it take? How much time did Roman need to convince his friend that he was serious? Skorec always said that murderers—however intelligent they may be—lack something, a certain type of emotional intelligence and empathy, because they do not understand the pain they inflict. Dráb pictured Roman aiming the pistol at his friend while giving him the “choice.”

  “I kind of understand that,” the old detective said. “When somebody aims a gun at you, you do not really have a choice.”

  Roman pointed the pistol at Kolář, who was paralyzed by fear. So that no accidental spectator could see his actions, he turned the lights off and the scene was lit only by the outside lanterns on the other side of the street and, from afar, a neon advertisement on the front of a bank. The shadow of the hand holding the gun was projected onto the photo of Adéla on the desk. Roman spoke with a quiet, calm voice.

  “I’ll give you whatever you want, I’ll sign anything . . .” Miloš Kolář had muttered with exhaustion.

  “Please, I am not that naive. I know you and I know how you think.”

  “What will you gain by hurting Adéla?”

  “Nothing. But you can spare her. It’s your choice.”

  “How could he be assured that if he hung himself, Roman would spare Adéla?” Dráb asked.

  “Interrogating Roman, I understood one thing. Kolář was used to listening to Roman. That’s why it took so long for him to uncover the fraud. Roman always had a good explanation handy and was able to convince Kolář. Kolář was in charge of the construction jobs; he communicated with architects while listening to McCartney; meanwhile, Roman was in control of finances and speculated with bonds. I would say that Roman was an able manipulator but, on the other hand, he would only dare manipulate those who were weaker. And Kolář was weaker. The success and prosperity of their company was based on the one hand on Kolář’s meticulousness, and on the other hand, on Roman’s lack of scruples. As entrepreneurs, the two of them completed each other. I think they needed each other, but Roman didn’t understand that without his partner he would never be more than just a profiteer. And Kolář had nothing else left but to believe him. Roman would gain nothing by Adéla’s death; once Kolář was dead, his share would automatically go to the other partner. During the interrogation, Roman took pleasure in how everything went according to plan. Kolář wrote the farewell note and then he put the noose around his own neck.

  “Why did Kolář cipher the message in the LP in such a complicated way? Why didn’t he simply write that he wanted the third song from the original version?” Even though it sounded like a question, in reality, Dráb was merely thinking aloud, as was his habit while discussing cases.

  “He needed to make sure, just in case Roman checked the list. He thought Adéla would understand. That she’d be able to connect the two LPs. He had no idea how much his daughter was ignoring him.”

  They sat in silence for a bit longer, each immersed in his own thoughts
.

  “I’ll show you something.” Mojmír stood up and rummaged through his collection. Then he handed an album to his colleague. On the cover in a circular red cropping, between a palm tree and a music stand, sat a classically dressed violinist with the head of a ram. A white inscription on a black background in the upper-left corner told Dráb what he was holding. “A present from Tereza—she found it about three years ago in a market in Paris.”

  Dráb examined the LP.

  “Tery told me that I could make more than my monthly income by selling this on eBay.”

  “So if you find yourself in need . . .” Dráb said.

  “I could never,” Mojmír replied. He took the vinyl out and showed Dráb the inside paper sleeve, where Tereza had written a dedication: Dad, some experiences are unforgettable! T.

  “Shall we play it?” Dráb asked.

  “You know, it’s not that great.”

  “Right, Janáček is better,” Dráb smiled.

  “Something more fitting since we’re reminiscing . . .” Mojmír hunted among the LPs, took one out, and showed the dust jacket to his younger colleague. Smetana’s String Quartet no. 1 in E-

  minor (From My Life) played by Smetana’s quartet, in a beautiful, well-preserved 1964 edition. Martin Dráb nodded contentedly. They were like two wine connoisseurs who were looking forward to a particularly delicious vintage. The old detective took the LP from its jacket, affectionately peered at the dark-blue lettering, and with a look of full concentration put it on the record player. A soft click, the static of the starting groove. With the first sounds of violins, Skorec raised the volume using a remote, sat down in the chair, and blissfully closed his eyes. The old LP crackled but the warm, deep sound of the new gramophone amazed them.

  “Well, Mojmír, it plays marvelously,” Martin said.

  “Beautiful,” Skorec agreed.

  Outside, it became cloudy. The room filled with the sounds of the string quartet while thick snowflakes fell densely over Prague.

  PART IV

  In Jeopardy

  Better Life

  by Michaela Klevisová