Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  “What about his passport?” I inquired through clenched teeth.

  “First thing we find. Just outside door where crime took place.”

  The salt in the fried cheese made me thirsty. I bolted half my beer.

  “Coincidence,” I said.

  “Just what we think at first, innocent American lose passport,” Zima admitted. But the merchant had identified the thief as an English speaker, probably American, who didn’t understand Czech or Russian. About my cousin’s height and build, between twenty and thirty years of age, though the merchant had been so badly beaten he couldn’t remember much more than that—at present at least.

  The improbable location of Dickie’s passport just beyond Zdeněk’s doorstep confounded me. I blanked, could not remember if I had brought the passport with me, had stuffed it into pocket or satchel, had looked at it while waiting in the change booth, had accidentally or intentionally dropped it as I left. Could I so hate my family that I would commit any self-destructive act just for the pleasure of dragging them down with me? Impossible.

  “Please don’t look so upset. If your cousin is innocent, sooner or later we know.”

  Did I imagine Zima’s seemingly reassuring remark concealed an intent to prove my cousin innocent but me guilty? “You seriously can’t expect a young tourist like my cousin to have an alibi at eight in the morning. He probably didn’t get into the hotel until four.”

  “Why he not have alibi is less interesting, from legal point of view, than fact he not have one.”

  I tried and could not hold my thoughts still long enough to count the possible ways his passport might have been dropped. The waitress set down two beers and shots of the traditional Czech liquor, Becherovka, reputed to be an excellent digestive, but which always made me faintly nauseous. The marks on the slip of paper began to look like a small stick-figure army. I said, “You confuse a simple accident for something meaningful. Any reasonable person would conclude that sometime during the night, my cousin, probably a little drunk, dropped the passport while making his way between clubs.”

  “That is not what your cousin say.”

  “What does my cousin say?”

  “At first, nothing. Then he say he give passport to hotel clerk. Never see passport again.”

  “Well, then,” I said.

  “But that is not what clerk say.” Without a na zdraví he tossed down his shot of Becherovka.

  My voice raised a frustrated octave, “And what did the clerk say?”

  “He return passport to cousin that afternoon.”

  I hid a pleased smile behind several large swallows of beer. Bad news for Dickie, but extraordinary luck for me. If the clerk insisted he returned the passport, I couldn’t have stolen it. I said, “I don’t care how bad it looks for my cousin, I can’t possibly believe he could do such a thing. You know, he always did have a lousy memory. I still say he dropped it or he had his pocket picked.”

  “I think instead clerk lies,” Zima said.

  “Nonsense. No motive,” I said, dismissing the idea as unworthy.

  “We are nation of ex-Communists and short gray people. We do not tell truth if truth makes us different. When we steal, we steal little things, paper clip here, bottle of wine there, because to steal above crowd is to be caught. We tell little lies. Big lies need imagination, and makes you different, so is better to tell safe little lies. Like hotel clerk.”

  “I’m not following any of this,” I confessed.

  “We are nation of small criminals. Waiter cheat you, taxi driver charge double, but we will not hit you over head or shoot you.”

  “Well, I guess we’ve drunk enough beer.”

  “This is why I think you steal cousin’s passport from hotel.”

  I stared, unbelieving. Zima’s face lurched in and out of focus. I threw down the shot of Becherovka and heard loud, raucous laughter before I realized it was my own. I said, “I’m sure your reasoning is flawless. I just don’t understand any of it.”

  “Richard Greenleaf is not type to beat man half to death.”

  “Half to death?” I echoed. Impossible. I’d only hit him a couple of times. He lied, trying to catch me out.

  “If passport is stolen from desk, clerk is afraid he lose job. He thinks, Such little lie, what is harm? He later say he make mistake, confuse one guest for other guest. To say he give passport to cousin is just normal lie for short gray man in this country. And if he not give passport to cousin, then someone else steal passport, and that same person, I think, beat merchant. And you, Mr. Miller, were at hotel that afternoon.”

  I said nothing. To say anything would damn me. I tried to struggle to my feet, but my legs lay helplessly tangled under the table. I gave up, buried my head in my hands, confessed, “This is absurd. I’m hallucinating. A Czech cop did not just accuse me of grand theft and assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “Please forgive me, we are old friends here, I must ask you question, and you must answer. Where were you two mornings ago, from seven in morning to eight?”

  I lifted my head from my hands and tried to fix him with an honest stare, but his face wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to catch it with anything more than a frustrated glance, like the eye of a needle which repeatedly evades the thread. I said, “Almost any other morning I would have been asleep in my bed. Two mornings ago, however, I left my apartment about seven to see my Romanian friend off at the main train station.”

  “Her name?”

  “I already said. Nadia.”

  “Last name?”

  “Something unpronounceable.”

  “Address and phone number?”

  “I was sleeping with this woman, not writing her biography.”

  “You have no alibi, then.”

  “Is that what I was giving you? I thought you just wanted to know where I’d been.”

  “I believe is true if you tell me is true, but is my job to judge with proof, and not with opinion, even if I have highest opinion of you. To have alibi, you need witness. Someone who says you were someplace where crime was not committed. Rozumíš?”

  I understood only too well. “I went out drinking at Club Repré that night,” I confessed. “I can give you a half-dozen names of people who saw me at two that morning.”

  “With Romanian girl?”

  “Unfortunately not. I met her later, at Old Town Square.”

  “Then this Romanian girl, if no one sees her, could be in your imagination. You are famous Hollywood screenwriter. You have big head for imagination.”

  I made a show of pouncing on memory like a foot to windblown paper, pointed my index finger at Zima, said, “Wait, something else. … Of course! I stopped at my friend Andrew’s apartment after I left the train station.”

  “What time?”

  “About eight or a few minutes after.”

  “And this Andrew was home?”

  “He was asleep. Woke him up. He was quite angry, I’m afraid.” I thumbed through my address book, and cited Andrew’s full name and address, as well as the names of those I had seen at Club Repré that night.

  He wrote the information in a small black notebook and, when finished, pocketed it with a satisfied smile. “I am happy if information you give is true. It’s not good politics now to arrest Americans. Your cousin, he has good lawyer?”

  I told him the embassy had given me a list. Zima signaled the barman, who approached the table with a thick wallet in hand and began adding up the pen strokes on our tab. He asked, “Is man named Ladislav Havran on list?”

  I ferreted through my pockets, finding on my third attempt the crumpled sheet of paper on which I had written the information. Havran was the third of six names. The barman wrote and circled a number on the tab, something in the range of ten dollars. I reached for my wallet. Zima stayed my hand.

  “No, I ask you to lunch, you are my guest.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  “I insist.” Zima pulled from his front trouser pocket a roll of thousa
nd-crown notes as big as his fist. He peeled off a single note and handed it to the barman. I estimated the roll contained thirty or so bills, all the same telltale color. In American money, just over a thousand dollars. The amount stunned me.

  “You recommend I hire this man Havran?” I asked.

  He pocketed the bills and rose effortlessly from the table. “A case like this has many complications. Many people must be satisfied for cousin to be released. I hope you not take offense when I say you need lawyer too. It’s not my job to tell you who to hire. I can only say Havran knows how things work in this country.”

  I untangled my feet, steadied myself with a palm laid flat on the table, and stood up. The blood rushed from my head as though from a floodgate. The room flared with a bright red light. I opened my eyes to Zima’s pouched face, leaning over me. It seemed I had fainted and fallen to the floor.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” I said.

  He helped me to my feet. After a false start, which nearly upset a neighboring table, I managed the mechanics of lifting first one leg, and then the other, until the momentum of my effort carried me to the door. He took my arm and guided me onto the sidewalk. “Really, Mr. Miller,” he admonished, “you shouldn’t drink so much, not this early in afternoon!”

  22

  Ladislav Havran sat behind a cubist rosewood desk in an office across from the Hotel Paříž, as ample a physical specimen as I’d seen in a country where corpulence was as cramped as the money supply. On evidence of girth alone, he seemed to have made the transition from protecting ethically disgraced Communists to representing legally compromised capitalists with the efficiency of a parasite able to adapt to multiple host species. He swept open his arms and dipped his head to welcome my entrance, clucking, “Dobrý den, bonjour, buenos días, guten Tag, vítamé vas, prosím, posejte se.”

  “Quite the polyglot, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Languages are one of my specialties,” he crowed, and counted them out with fat, manicured fingers. “I’m fluent in English, German, French, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Polish, and Serbian.”

  “Most of us Americans can’t even speak English properly,” I admitted, pleasantly self-deprecating.

  “The Hindus say, ‘The wise have no need of language.’”

  “Then Americans are the wisest people on earth,” I quipped.

  He laughed heartily and made note of the remark on his pad. “Very good, sir!” he said. “Very good indeed. This conversation is quite enlightening. Would you give me the pleasure of stating your business?”

  Tuning my voice to a frequency between embarrassment and anxiety, I detailed the phone call I’d received that morning from the U.S. Embassy. A half-raised eyebrow, the suggestion of a curled lip, a note jotted quickly on a legal-sized yellow pad—Havran’s gestures were concise and comforting, able to convey not only his surprise at the charges but his professional sympathy and mastery of the situation. When I mentioned that earlier in the afternoon I had eaten lunch with Inspector Zima to discuss the case, he laid his pen across the yellow legal pad and folded his hands.

  “One of our very finest investigators,” he remarked. “How do you know him?”

  “I suppose you might say we know each other socially. We met over a silly misunderstanding, but once he learned that I was in Prague to write a screenplay for a major Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise, well, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say we became better acquainted, even friends.”

  When I casually mentioned the words major Hollywood movie his face glowed as though illuminated by a baby spotlight. “How terribly exciting! Hollywood has so much excitement and glamour—”

  “Not to mention sex and money,” I interjected.

  He laughed appreciatively and observed, “After the bright lights of Hollywood, Prague must seem like a dark little town to you.”

  “Not at all. Prague is a gothic Disneyland, and the behavior of its inhabitants is as wonderfully exotic to me as the people in Hollywood must seem to you. There was an incident this afternoon with Inspector Zima, for example, which I’m at a loss to explain.”

  Havran’s level of attention heightened, as though listening to a radio program for coded messages. “Perhaps I might assist you in the interpretation?”

  “Over a considerable quantity of beer and vodka, Inspector Zima actually suggested that I was personally suspect, due to my close relationship to the accused. That struck me as odd enough, but then he insisted on paying the bill and flashed a very large roll of thousand-crown notes. I mean, what do you think he makes a month, legitimately?”

  Havran looked at the ceiling, spread his palms, and shrugged. “A man in Inspector Zima’s position, many years of respected service to the State, I would think earns a salary of approximately six or seven thousand crowns a month.”

  “He carried half his annual salary in his pocket.”

  “As chief investigator of Prague’s most serious economic crimes, it does not seem unreasonable that he carries large amounts of cash, for one reason or another,” Havran observed, and his accompanying smile was as bland as the remark was ambiguous.

  “Nothing improper was actually said, but I had the distinct impression that he was suggesting that if a little money were to change hands—well, to be perfectly blunt, I thought he was signaling that he could—no, should—be bribed.”

  “One of the unfortunate facts of our poor country,” Havran admitted. “Salaries are low, so low even the honest are corrupt. During the unfortunate years of state socialism, the most common saying in Prague was, The State pretends to pay me and I pretend to work. In situations like this and a thousand others, it is expected that a little money should pass hands. Perhaps it is easier to understand if you think of it as a primitive form of capitalism.”

  I felt a momentary love of Prague swelling my heart, because not only could anything be had for money, anything could be had for so little money. I said, “I’m not judging. I come to you because I’m trying to understand how things work here.”

  “I will tell you exactly. It is a system of lines, forms, and official stamps, controlled by little bureaucrats in little offices. If you wish to convince one of these bureaucrats to stamp your form—and to do anything in this country you need the proper forms and correct stamps—you must offer a gift. If you don’t offer this gift, something will be wrong with the way you completed your form. Errors can be found on any form, real or imagined. And if by chance you fill one out so perfectly that even a thousand angels with microscopes cannot find a flaw, well, then, there is no law stipulating when the bureaucrat must give the form his official stamp of approval. He can keep it on the bottom of the stack, or lose it, or simply vanish when you appear. The police inspectors regrettably are no different from the plumbing inspectors in this instance. It is sometimes necessary to give them financial motivation to solve a specific crime when they have so many to investigate, or to clear the unjustly accused when so many—almost everyone arrested, it seems—are unjustly accused.”

  “You suggest, then, that I offer Inspector Zima a bribe?”

  “Despite your youth, Mr. Miller, you seem to be a man of the world, and a man of the world does not need to say such words explicitly. I do not suggest you offer anyone a bribe. Such an act is illegal in this country, and we must always act according to law. But I recommend a retainer be paid for my services, which will be used to take care of certain contingencies. Naturally, upon termination of the case, you will not request the return of this retainer.”

  “And the size of the retainer?”

  Havran puffed out his cheeks and threw his hands in the air, gestures which certified that despite his charade of uncertainty the retainer would be a significant sum. “There are a number of researches I must make before I can answer that question. We do not know for certain the seriousness of the charges.” His eyes settled on mine a look both shrewd and curious. “Is this retainer to cover just your cousin or also your honorable person?”

  “Inspector Zima ha
s no evidence against me and, frankly, never can. I am absolutely innocent. But my work is far too valuable to risk the whims of police harassment.”

  “I’m personally relieved to hear you confess your innocence and am firmly convinced we’ll prove it to the authorities.”

  “And once this retainer is paid, we’ll have nothing to worry about?”

  Havran’s smile tightened with the unpleasantness of what needed to be said. “Please don’t misunderstand, justice would not be well served if so easily bought. The retainer does not make it certain the case will be decided for you, merely that it will be considered by someone disposed to listen to your advocates. Complete certainty is granted only to those in position of authority to give complete certainty on something of equal value. But rest assured, in most cases, the evidence is not so substantial that complete certainty is required.”

  “Suppose the proof is substantial.”

  “A foreigner, high-profile case, it would be most difficult indeed to convince the authorities of the injustice of the accusation and the innocence of the accused.” Havran’s glance caught mine with frank regret that such a tragic outcome could be possible. A slap of the desk broke the mood and he stood, beaming with vigor and optimism. “But we won’t even consider that possibility, no sir! I’m a great admirer of your Power of Positive Thinking!”

  I took the cue and rose to clasp his hand in grateful embrace. He walked me to the door, giving my arm an extra squeeze of confidence and good fellowship. “None of these gloomy-doomy European philosophers for me, thank you. American optimism and can-do, that’s the ticket! Call me tomorrow, and perhaps I’ll bear the good news that this entire affair is the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding.”