The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “Where are you?”

  “Fucking Chi, where else. I don’t know, Julie, I feel better if we take the direct-action approach to this and see which way Langley jumps after that.”

  “Is the girl protected?”

  “Usual shit. A couple of cops. No big thing. She goes to bat again next Monday in court. They flew in some bag who says she’s Anna’s mother and the judge is not one of ours.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Direct action, Julie,” Ben Herguth said. “Snatch the kid.”

  “I don’t like it. It’s always the last option. I want Kay Davis out of this—”

  “Put a hit on her.”

  “I told the station manager to promote her out of this story, I hope the idiot knows how to do it—”

  “Or we just put the hit on her,” Big Ben said. It was cold in the phone booth, cold in Chicago. He was outside a joint on Division Street owned by people in the action. He’d had a good time with two very clean and imaginative hookers sent up by Tony Lavelli, along with the comp champagne, but two days in Chi was two days in Chi. His clothes and blood were too thin for winter. Put the hit on someone, he silently screamed to Julie in New York. This was a put-the-hit-on-someone kind of town. Nobody’d notice.

  All he heard was the icy caution at the other end of the line.

  “I think we just keep going along the way we go along, feel our way. See what happens at the TV station, see if we can hose down the heat a little bit. Turn the heat down and then if we have to move, it doesn’t look like we’re doing it on the cover of People magazine. There’s too much circus right now.”

  “I appreciate that. But time is money, too, Julie.”

  “You don’t have to remind me.”

  “We’ve got a lot of contracts tied up, lots of out-front dough even if the movie never gets made. We gotta be in Prague in January, fucking six weeks away, with the setup, ready to shoot. It drives me crazy thinking about it.”

  “I know that, Ben. I know all that.” The voice was faintly weary. Ben caught the tone. Don’t piss off Julie, not ever.

  Ben wiped his forehead where the sun freckles were arrayed. “Whatever you say, Julie. I’m just here to back your play.”

  “Keep your eye on things and be in touch. Things might start moving quick.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Ben said. He heard the click. The hookers were inside, in the bar of Lavelli’s place. Division Street was filling up with Friday-night people looking for love.

  Let ’em find it, Ben Herguth said to himself. He was going back to the hotel. Fuck it. He thought he was coming down with a cold. What he wanted right now was a bowl of chicken soup. He wondered if the hotel had any.

  Elena Jelinak arrived in the international terminal at O’Hare Airport shortly after two P.M., and Kay Davis and the cameraman named Dick Lester waited outside the customs shed with all the other reporters.

  The doors banged open—she had been rushed through the VIP line while the rest of the passengers were still sweating out their luggage—and Anton Huss was at her side, supporting her arm. She was a haggard woman in a print dress with the smell of brandy all about her. Kay sniffed, looked at Dick, smiled, and plunged in.

  Why had she come here?

  To get my daughter.

  Is your daughter devoted to the Infant of Prague?

  That is propaganda, the American government has stolen my child—

  “Do you believe in miracles?” Kay asked. She asked everyone that now. She had gone back to the church twice, on her own, without a cameraman and without any real reason except to see the statue again, to stand in the lines with the pilgrims who filled the street now, paying her admission at the coffee table set up in the vestibule by officers of the Holy Name Society. As the president of the Society had explained to Father Hogan: “Miracles are fine, but when it comes down to a new roof for the church before winter, the roofer isn’t going to be looking for no miracle, he’s going to be looking for cash.” Father Hogan had given in and the admissions—called “donations”—were piling up in the rectory safe.

  Kay Davis did not believe she saw a weeping statue when she stared at it. So she wanted to find out what others saw. She somehow had a strange feeling that if she asked enough people and got enough answers, she would understand.

  Anton Huss, pale and a bit shaken by all the cameras pointed at him, translated the questions for Elena Jelinak. He wanted no part of this. When it was over, he would be transferred out. Farewell Washington and all the beautiful women of the city. He would probably end up in Addis Ababa.

  “What did she say?” Elena asked Anton sharply.

  “She says ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ ”

  “Sure. Tell her I believe in miracles. Tell her I got fucked by a dove one day and Anna dropped out between my legs.”

  Anton Huss blushed. He knew that the woman was drunk but this was a disaster.

  “She said she only wants to see her little girl again.”

  “Tell her I believe in the miracle of the workers’ paradise where bread turns into stones and meat into statues of Lenin.”

  “Shut up,” Anton said in harsh Bohemian. He smiled at Kay Davis. “Mrs. Jelinak is weary from the flight—”

  “Where is Mr. Jelinak?” the bluff, red-haired reporter from Channel 7 boomed. “How come we don’t hear about Mr. Jelinak?”

  Anton Huss began to translate and Elena laughed. “Oh, should I tell them about Anna’s father? About fucking me that night in the Stromovka park? I can tell you all about him if she wants to know that, pan Huss.”

  It went like that for another minute with Anton Huss trying to save Elena from herself.

  “Have you been drinking?” Channel 7 screamed. Channel 5 shouted, “What about the state of East-West relations? Are you going to see the mayor while you’re here?” Channel 2, doing a standup, intoned: “The obviously distraught mother is being led away while somewhere in the city sits a lonely child, thinking of her homeland, her loved ones, the grief of her countrymen.…”

  “And you told me nothing is worth eighty-seven seconds,” Kay Davis smiled. They were in the control booth. Hal Newt had just walked in and was looking at the monitors on the panel. Cut to the crowds outside St. Margaret’s; cut silently to Elena Jelinak at O’Hare, obviously drunk; cut to Stephanie Fields standing in the lobby of the Everett McKinley Dirksen Federal Building.

  “People magazine called me,” Kay said. She couldn’t keep the excited tone out of her voice. “How does my book look now, Hal?”

  But Hal wasn’t smiling. Not that he ever smiled all that much, but he was frowning at the clips on the monitor and chewing his lip exactly as he had done at their lunch at Arnie’s.

  Kay didn’t seem to notice. She was watching the tape, filling her head with images of the day and the day to come. The story had legs and it was going to carry her all the way to New York.

  She was right in the middle of it. She had Stephanie Fields’ home number, she had an in with Father Hogan and the cute priest at the chancery office and she was completely wired with everyone, right down to the head of the Holy Name Society who ran the card tables in the vestibule. She had never been as in on a story and it was the adrenaline-maker that surged in her all the time now.

  “Kay, Al Buck said he wants to see you.”

  The words sliced right through her good feelings. Al Buck was station manager and Big Tuna had been sulking about this story, about his small role in it, and that probably meant he had leaned his $900,000 hulk on Al Buck and Al Buck was instructed to tone her down.

  She did a quick frown and an even quicker smile. “Raise?”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s what it is.”

  They went down the windowless, concrete-block corridors to Al Buck’s office on the second floor at the back of the squat building. They walked right past the secretary because they were expected. Why was Hal Newt along? But then, the smart executives always kept a stooge as a witness when unpleasant things had to
be said and done.

  Al Buck had a big, plain office and he stood behind the desk. Pictures of the station’s news stars were on the wall. Including Kay’s. On the big desk was a brass plaque: The Buck Stops Here.

  “Kay, Kay, glad I caught you.” Big smile, pressed hands. Al led himself around the desk as if it were a maypole. They went to the leather couch and all three sat down, Kay on the couch, Al and Hal in chairs. Very informal.

  “Kay, want coffee?”

  Black all around and decaffeinated. The coffee came and was put on the coffee table and Al said in his big voice, “Close the door and hold my calls.” All this for Kay’s benefit. She understood the rules and she felt very cold in the room with the two men staring at her.

  “Kay, how’s the story going?” Al Buck asked.

  “Great, Al,” Kay said. She couldn’t help the enthusiasm, she wasn’t faking it this time. “No one has had a chance to talk to Anna except for that one press conference, but Stephanie Fields is going to give me a one-on-one this weekend. She wants it to break before the court hearing on Monday and—”

  “Kay,” Al Buck said in a voice that teachers use when they interrupt a child’s nonsense monologue. “I’ve been talking to Hal, we’ve been putting our heads together, and, frankly, we think this story is getting a little carried away. Not, I want to say, that you are not doing a super job on this—”

  “Did I tell you about People magazine?” Kay began.

  “Wonderful,” Al continued, as if he had interrupted himself. “But, frankly, we are getting a lot of Catholic feedback, they’re offended by all this publicity. We’re getting sensitive and I mean up at network level about a lot of things, but if it was up to me—”

  “What are you saying, Al?”

  Al Buck looked at Hal Newt.

  “I think what we’re saying here,” said Hal, “is that it is time for you to go on to bigger and better. You know Duane Hernandez is leaving as Midwest correspondent for the network.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “He’s going to Nicaragua.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “A war is always a good chance to move up,” Al said.

  “And there’s going to be an opening coming up very fast,” Hal began.

  “We’d hate to lose you like the dickens but—”

  “Well, it’s from network, and when New York talks, Chicago listens.”

  “And they know the kind of job you’ve done,” Al continued.

  Midwest correspondent? Kay blinked. She saw herself in cornfields, talking to farmers. She saw herself in Kansas City, looking at beef. She saw herself in Minnesota, talking about the “flood-swollen Mississippi” or the “ice-choked Mississippi.”

  “You got to be kidding. I was in Iowa for four years. I mean, I got out of Iowa. I escaped the corncob jungle.”

  Al Buck tried a new smile that included a chuckle. Hal Newt was not smiling anymore and not trying.

  “There’s a lot on drugs,” Al Buck said. “Duane was working on a drug distribution ring in Missouri.”

  “In Missouri?” Kay said in a loud voice. This was wonderland and she was talking to the Mad Hatter and March Hare.

  “—step up. Network level—”

  “Duane doesn’t make six figures.”

  “We can arrange—”

  “But my story—”

  “—story has run out—”

  “My story!” she shouted.

  They were very quiet then.

  Al Buck said, “Kay, forget the story. It’s just a story. We are talking career here. We are talking about the brass ring.”

  “The Midwest slot is the brass ring? I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” she said. She felt hysterical. What was this about? And then she saw it. It was the story and that didn’t make any sense at all, to want to kill the story.

  “Why do you want to kill the story?” she said. It was the direct, corn-fed, Iowa voice she thought she had packed away years ago along with all the other souvenirs of childhood. But it had come back to her suddenly in that moment of anger.

  Al Buck blushed. He looked directly at her and his eyes went flat. “Don’t be tiresome, Kay. We talk about an opportunity, we thought you would be so happy—”

  “No, you didn’t, Al. Don’t give me that. This is about killing this story. I won’t kill this story, Al. You can’t make me kill it.”

  Hal Newt looked miserable. “Kay, this is a chance, a real golden opportunity for you.”

  She turned on him. Why was she ever afraid of people like this? And their stupid lunches at Arnie’s?

  “I’ve got two publishers interested. I’m going to walk away from a story like this for crop reporting in Kansas?”

  Al Buck said it very flat and straight, the way an executive does when he is bottom-lining: “Three years network contract: one ten, one twenty-five, and one seventy-five. To make up the difference, one bill a week in expenses and car and we pick up your rent and—”

  “Last week I was on the way out.”

  “That was before. This is different.”

  “The money isn’t there.”

  “One twenty-five, one fifty, two,” Al Buck said then as though he were reciting numbers on the market wire without owning any stock. His voice was so dead, Kay thought.

  “You’re scaring me, Al,” she said. “You think stories just disappear.”

  “Stories are things we make up,” Hal Newt said. “The filler between the commercials. Anna Jelinak is a small story.”

  “My story,” she said.

  “We pull off,” Al said. “That’s the way it is.” There was no shadow to his voice. None of the words carried weight.

  She stared at Al Buck. She thought about it. “I’ve got to think,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to think about.”

  In the corner of the office was the inevitable TV monitor tuned to the station. News at five, film at ten, world and national news at five-thirty P.M. Right now, however, it was the syndicated game show in which all the contestants tried to guess who their marital partners would really rather be sleeping with.

  “I have to think,” said the reluctant little girl who had to take piano lessons at the age of ten at Miss Groomby’s house and who delayed the moment by walking very slowly down the street, hoping the time for piano lessons would pass. “I have to think.”

  And thought and thought.

  “No. It’s my story. If you don’t want it, someone else will want it,” she said.

  “You won’t work for the network ever again,” Al Buck said.

  “There are worse things.”

  Hal Newt sighed and his face was white.

  “You blew it, Kay. You’re yesterday,” he said.

  Kay said, “We’ll see. You guys are strange. I mean, this is strange. You’re the ones blowing it.”

  “Clear the building. Now,” Al Buck said. “We’ll send your things.”

  “This is crazy, Al,” she said, feeling the craziness in the room. “I’ve got clothes in the dressing room and—”

  “Dead,” Al Buck said. “Dead in this town now. Clear the building now.” He punched the intercom. “Send up Rollins from Security.”

  She couldn’t believe it.

  This time it was from a pay phone off the main room where the card game was going on. Ben hated cards. He felt like he was in jail, killing time. He punched in his card number and waited for the computer-voice to thank him for using AT&T and then counted the rings.

  “Me,” he said.

  “Our man did not handle it well. Perhaps I was too… oblique. She quit or was fired and that doesn’t resolve anything, she’ll have another job tomorrow. I don’t know why he blew it.”

  “So what do we do now?” Ben asked, but he knew and he felt good about it because the waiting time was over and he could throw in his cards.

  “Your way,” Julie said.

  Hit her, Ben thought. He hung up the phone and went back into the card room and said he was
tired and he had a cold and he was going back to the hotel. Actually, he felt better than he had in days.

  9

  READY OR NOT

  For a long time, there was darkness.

  He could move if he crawled. The pain was constant, just at the surface, and it spread hot fingers across his body. He groaned when he moved. Because of the darkness, he could not take a measure of the pain and where it came from; the darkness intensified the feeling of pain.

  He lay in the darkness and tried to isolate the pain by thinking about it as something separate from himself and, that way, to make it less. It was like being a child, shut up in a sickroom, surrounded by goblins of fever who make the world shrink and expand constantly.

  He felt his left hand with his right and could feel the taut, puffy skin. When he pressed his third and fourth fingers, the pain came sharp and hard and made him sick. He vomited on the floor of the place where they had put him.

  His left leg was heavy and swollen as well. He touched it with his right hand and then he tried to flex it. He could feel the place where the muscle was torn. His left leg was so heavy that when he finally tried to move, he had to crawl across the damp floor and drag the leg behind him.

  How long had he been here?

  There were no windows and no doors, and the damp smell of the place crept into his nostrils, his clothes, his dreams. The dreams were the worst thing because when he would start awake, the darkness and the goblins remained. The ceiling was low enough to touch when he finally pushed himself up against a stone wall and reached. He thought he must be in a basement. He could hear the rats scuttling away from him. The rats sang to each other across the darkness in high-pitched, almost crooning voices. Sometimes, when he fell asleep and could not fight against the dreams, the rats ran across his body and he felt their sudden weight and the skidding, light steps.

  He thought he could go mad if it lasted long enough and if that was what they wanted.

  His clothes were damp, but if he took them off he would be even colder. He huddled against a wall and against the pressing dampness of the place they held him. He tried to move his hands and arms to make heat and flex the swollen muscles.