The Magician's Accomplice

by Michael Genelin

  “I’m in Prague.”

  “There is no trouble in Prague. Why are you in Prague? And how are all the little Czechs? Or is that unimportant?”

  “I arrived yesterday. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. How much I’ve accomplished is another question.”

  “I got a call from the Dutch police. They’re still demanding that you file a report on the killings in Holland. Reports are more important to the bureaucrats than finding murderers. However, that still doesn’t explain to me why you’re in the Czech Republic.”

  “Kroslak was alive as of two days ago. He announced he was coming to Prague, so it seemed reasonable for me to come after him.”

  “A rational move, Janka.”

  “Did you have any other ideas for me?”

  “No.”

  “How are the investigations of the two homicides in Slovakia coming?”

  “Everything has been put on the back burner until the national situation is resolved. I expect it to quiet down enough by tomorrow so we can get back to business on the important things. Have you contacted our friend in Prague? A nice man, isn’t he?”

  “The general is a little gruff.”

  “Gruff is good in our kind of job.”

  “I’m sure that kind of approach would keep up the morale of the troops in Slovakia, Colonel. Wouldn’t you agree? Perhaps a new approach to our officers is necessary?”

  “Are you being sarcastic, Janka?”

  “Never, Colonel.”

  “Good.”

  He hung up.

  Jana put the phone down on its cradle. She’d had the faint hope that some type of help or advice might be coming from Trokan, but she was disappointed. Which meant that she would have to go forward with the plan that the Czechs had come up with: become an inviting target in an effort to draw out the people who were committing the murders. It was not pleasant to contemplate.

  She and the professor had been put up by the Czechs in a hotel suite. The electronic gear they had been given was still on a table top. The elements looked like pieces of dead insect skeletons that had been painted different shades of black and gray. The professor came in from his bedroom looking rumpled in the terrycloth bathrobe the hotel had supplied, fiddling with the tracking device he’d been given.

  “I’ve decided that magic is much better than the things these crazy inventors of arcane modern artifacts come up with.”

  Jana rose and took the very small oval device out of his hands, peeling off the plastic covering from its back to expose adhesive.

  “I would suggest you put it under your arm. They always look for it on your back or in your underwear, but seldom under the arm.” She folded back his bathrobe, pressed the tracking device into the space between the chest and arm; then pulled the bathrobe back into place. “It shouldn’t be too uncomfortable there.”

  “It feels like I’ve got a tumor,” the professor grumbled. “Why can’t they just follow us?”

  “That’s what the bug is for, Professor. There are too many people in the central city. The crowd may swallow us up. This way they’ll be able to track us electronically, as well as visually, without worrying that we’ll become lost in the multitude.”

  She went over to the coffee table, picked up her tracking device, removed its plastic covering, and fixed it under her own arm. There was also a tiny black box, which she looked over as she checked her watch for the time.

  “We’re at the point at which I have to activate the alarm.” She pressed an even tinier switch on the end of the device, then slipped it into a side pocket of her pants. Almost immediately, there was a ring on the telephone. Jana answered it just as quickly. “All okay,” she answered the phone; then, “Every hour, as agreed.” She hung up.

  “What was that?”

  “A reminder to press the button on the alarm every hour to tell them we’re okay.”

  “We’ll forget.”

  “Not with you to remind me.”

  “I always forget things like that,” he warned. “Besides, you’re responsible for our safety.”

  Jana gave him a jaundiced look.

  “Have you felt safe since you’ve been traveling around with me?”

  “No.”

  “So don’t forget to remind me.” Watching the professor’s face drop, Jana tried to lessen his unease. “It’s just a backup alarm. If I forget to push it, they swoop in to save us from ourselves. Or, maybe, they save us from our murderers.”

  “We hope.”

  “Optimism, my friend. It’s the key to success—and survival.”

  The professor watched her as she checked her gun, then stowed it in her shoulder bag.

  “As I watch what you’re doing, I have this feeling that neither of us is very optimistic.”

  Jana hesitated, then changed her shoes to a lower heel.

  “Just in case we have to do some running.”

  “The right costume is important. Think through your rehearsal. When I used to perform, I always thought it was safe only after we rehearsed until we hated it. Then I was ready for showtime.” He snapped his fingers, brightening up. “Maybe that’s a good sign. I already hate what we’re doing.”

  “This is real life. We don’t get the opportunity to rehearse.”

  “That’s why I became a magician. Who wants real life? Look what’s happening to us in the real world. Comedy is better than tragedy.”

  “I agree, Professor.”

  He was struck by a sudden thought. “Maybe this is all a fantasy and we’re actually performing on a stage?”

  “This is real, Professor.” She finished her preparations. “Time to go.”

  He grimaced. “I always get nervous at curtain time.”

  Twenty minutes later, the two of them were walking down the street.

  Their rooms were at the Leon, a modern hotel situated close to Old Town Square, a plain looking building on a quiet street. On the inside everything was ultra modern. However, once you walked fifty meters from the hotel in either direction you were in the middle of the hubbub of bars and restaurants and knick-knack stores that catered to the tourists that flooded Prague. Jana made no effort to be unobtrusive. Appearances were the key to the operation. They were supposed to look confident, as if they felt safe.

  Showtime, as the professor had said.

  Nonetheless, a rehearsal would have been nice.

  Chapter 30

  They walked for hours, stopping only to eat a quick meal at the rear of a large café. Jana found them a table where they could sit with their backs to a wall. She didn’t want to be surprised, so she frequently glanced at the door, sweeping her eyes over the customers, looking through the plate-glass front window. The customers at the outside tables in the fresh air were enjoying themselves, everyone flirting with everyone else, the waiters serving copious amounts of Czech pilsner guaranteed to lift even the most morose spirits. The people at the tables were living in the moment, which was a state, a feeling that Jana had not experienced for herself since Peter had died. She envied them.

  The professor finished mopping up the last of his knedliky, took a final sip from his glass of mineralka, and pronounced himself ready to go. “I want to visit some friends of mine I haven’t seen for a while.”

  “Not good. You may be bringing trouble with you if you visit them.”

  “Stage people always have trouble. We expect it. If it doesn’t happen today, it will tomorrow, so what the hell.”

  “Not this kind of trouble, Professor.”

  “In the theatre, everyone dies at one time or another. If it’s not the audience throwing things at you, you’re killed by the hero. The trick goes wrong and the manager fires you, and no one else will speak to you because they’re afraid of getting fired too. This is a kind of murder. Everybody in Shakespeare’s Hamlet dies, not to speak of Lear and Macbeth, or of Arthur Miller, or Godzilla. I once had a jealous husband come after me with a large carving knife. Fortunately, he tripped and cut himself on the arm, and the lad
y in question went back to him to comfort him … so that was a kind of death as well.”

  “Professor, we’re talking about real-life dying. Like your nephew,” she reminded him.

  He nodded. “Of course.” A brief, sad smile appeared. “I was just trying to cheer us up. Nobody really dies in the theatre; everyone dies in real life. That’s why I liked the theatre.”

  “Why did you leave it?”

  “I got old. No one wants to see old magicians or old clowns. They’re too close to the truth. And I was a combination of both.” They watched the other customers for a few minutes, then the professor suddenly stood. “I’ve decided where I want to go.”

  Jana put money down for the check, slowly standing, still checking out the room. Now that they were about to leave, she focused on the exterior of the café.

  “Where to, Professor?”

  “In the old days, the really old days, they used to go up to Hradcany and St. Vitus’s Cathedral. You would either petition the king or some noble at the castle to sponsor you or pray to God at the cathedral for success if the nobles had spit on you. So we go to the Mala Strana on the hill. Besides, a lot of my friends have settled in the ‘little quarter’.”

  “I was hoping you’d given up the idea of seeing them.”

  “I’m still thinking.” There was a stubborn edge to his voice. “We’ll let things play out, see how it goes, okay?”

  She nodded, resigned. The professor was determined to see his friends.

  When they left, Jana concentrated on trying to avoid the people crowding the inner streets of this part of the city. It would be too easy for an anonymous assailant to hide among the thousands of gawkers and to shoot her and the professor as they walked by. She steered them toward Smetanovo Nabrezi, the long avenue running along the murky Vitava River. The area they needed to get to was on the other side of the water. Meantime, they had to negotiate their way through the crowds of tourists that infested Prague like hordes of gnats. All of Europe, America, and Asia appeared to have come to see the historic capital of central Europe, but the avenue along the Vitava was one of the few places where the crowds thinned out slightly.

  From time to time, Jana would casually glance back, trying to spot the guardians whom the police had promised would keep the two of them under protective observation, but except for a guess at some magazine-stand browser or river-embankment leaner, there was nothing to indicate that their protectors were nearby, which disturbed Jana.

  Perhaps, Jana rationalized, since she and the professor had their monitors on, their guardians were hanging well back or tracking them from adjacent side streets to keep from being spotted. If Jana could identify their protectors, the murderers could as well, so she consoled herself that it was probably better that she couldn’t spot their guardians. They reached the Charles Bridge, the span across the Vitava connecting the New and Old Towns with the Mala Strana. As usual, the passage was jammed with pedestrians, buskers, vendors, and street artists making it almost impossible to push through the mass of bodies. They walked under the Stare Mesto bridge tower, slowly making headway past the statues of saints lining the bridge, Jana pressing ahead as quickly as she could, the professor following in her wake. Just as they reached the sculpture of St. Anthony of Padua, approximately in the middle of the bridge, Jana glanced back and saw Gyorgi Ilica, the Romanian investigator from Europol.

  She grabbed the startled professor, pushed him past a mime who was dressed all in white and presenting himself as Jesus on the Cross, to the side of the bridge where they would have a wall at their backs.

  “I was going as fast as I could,” the professor protested.

  “I saw someone I shouldn’t have, Professor.” She eased her gun out of her shoulder bag, holding the bag so it concealed the pistol. “If he’s here, then there will be others as well.” Jana pressed the alarm activation in her pocket.

  “Who’s he?” the professor got out.

  “A man I worked with, a man who shouldn’t be on this bridge.”

  She looked back, but she had lost Ilica in the crowd.

  Her eyes ranged over the bridge, in both directions. She focused on smaller sections, quartering the area, trying to concentrate on individuals in the hope of spotting Ilica or anyone else who had been at Europol. There was no one who looked even remotely familiar.

  “Shouldn’t you hit the alarm button?” the professor asked. “The police will come to help us.”

  “I have. But they won’t be able to get through the crowd quickly enough. Come on. We’ll run for it.” She pushed the professor ahead of her, prodding him to go faster, alternately checking behind them, then scanning the area ahead, all the while hoping that they could reach the other side of the huge pedestrian bridge before they were attacked.

  Almost miraculously, a space cleared in front of them, allowing them to pick up their pace to a rapid jog. The professor counted the saints aloud as they went past them, as if hoping that naming them would shorten the distance between the statues.

  “Saint Luitgard … Saint Phillip … Saint Adalbert. …” He began to wheeze as he struggled to breathe.

  “Stop talking,” Jana growled. “You’re using too much air.”

  “I’m depending upon the … saints … to hear me. Saint Vitus. …” Now he was beginning to stagger; Jana had to hold him up. “The Blessed Ivan … Christ and Saint Cosmas. …”

  He almost went down. Jana pulled him erect. “We’re almost there, Professor.”

  “Saint Wenceslas. …”

  And they were suddenly through the arcade of the Mala Strana Bridge Tower and off the bridge, on the other bank of the Vitava.

  Jana steered the professor to the side of the arcade, looking back.

  “Shouldn’t we go on?” the professor wheezed.

  “We choose the battleground this time, Professor. They have to come through a very narrow space if they want to get to us. It reduces the odds. So we stay.”

  They waited for a good ten minutes. At long last, Jana signaled that it was time to go on and put her automatic back in her pocketbook.

  “It appears that they decided against taking that final step to get to us.”

  “Are you sure you were right? You’re positive it was one of them?”

  “As positive as one can be under these circumstances. Ilica is easy to recognize, but there were a lot of faces in that crowd.”

  They hurried on, up to the castle.

  Jana had the childish hope that the castle walls would protect them.

  Chapter 31

  As they climbed the long hill to reach the castle the houses seemed to get older and smaller. They had been built wall-to-wall; none of them afforded a safe place to hide. Oddly, now the professor didn’t appear eager to arrive. He had retreated into himself and appreciably shortened his steps, lagging behind. Eventually, the truth came out.

  “I want to go somewhere else first.” He wanted to see his friends, or at least a particular one, a woman. “I want to see Marketa.”

  “Marketa?”

  “Yes, Marketa.”

  “A lady, naturally. Men do stupid things over women,” she warned him.

  “I never claimed to be smart.”

  “She’s a special friend?”

  “She was my special friend.”

  “The love of your life?” Jana guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “And she lived around here?”

  “The last I heard.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Ten years ago. When I stopped performing.”

  “Ten years is a long time, Professor.”

  “We were angry at each other. It was my fault. I wouldn’t move here from Slovakia.”

  “It’s hard to conduct a long-distance romance.”

  “It is.”

  Jana checked the immediate neighborhood. Aside from the people trudging up the hill, all of them comparatively innocent-looking, there had been no hint of trouble since the bridge.

  �
��You know the danger we may bring with us if we go to her house, Professor?”

  “She was a very brave woman. I think she would want to see me.”

  “Don’t confuse your hopes with reality. She’s probably found someone else.”

  “She had someone else.”

  Jana blinked at the statement.

  “Another boyfriend?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “You’re still intent on going?”

  “I want to go.”

  “I can’t persuade you not to?”

  “No.” He gave it a few seconds’ consideration. “I would like you to come, too.”

  “I should think that the two of you would want to be alone together.”

  “It will be more awkward, at first, to be alone. If things work out, you can quietly excuse yourself later.” He let her think about his invitation to join him. Then he said, “Please.”

  “I’m uncomfortable with this.”

  “We’re partners in jeopardy, aren’t we? Partners humor each other.” He looked at her with pleading eyes; then, once more, said “Please.”

  Jana gave in.

  They doubled back, actually a good strategy, Jana concluded. No one would expect them to turn so quickly. Then they veered onto Karmaletska, set back slightly on the hill. They were walking roughly parallel to the river, only this time on the west side.

  Just in case, Jana kept a grip on the gun in her purse, ready for any eventuality, but no one looked at all suspicious. Unfortunately, she could not see any of their supposed police chaperones. She had pressed the alarm. They should have come running to their aid. They hadn’t.

  Perhaps they were following them from the air, perhaps using a helicopter at an angle and altitude high enough that it would not be easy to see even when she looked up? But then ground support would be so far back, it would take them half of forever to arrive if the two of them were attacked.