Lost and Found in Prague (11 page)

“Perhaps,” Dana said without much enthusiasm. How would the death of an old nun and the possible theft from the church have any connection to a political event that had taken place almost twenty years ago? They should start by finding Pavel Novák.

“We must begin by locating this Novák,” he said, echoing her thought, then pushed aside his plate and reached for his cigarette balanced on the edge of the ashtray.

“Caroline wrote that he left Prague years ago.”

They sat without words. When the waiter appeared to inquire if they wanted anything more, Borelli gestured for him to remove the plates.

“Could we get a key?” Dana asked. “To the church? To the box on the altar?”

“You want to examine the statue?” he asked with a dismissive grunt, a wave of his hand that sent ash from his cigarette flying to the ground.

“We could get the keys, go in after the church closes, open the box. See if it’s real or fake. At least then we’d know what we’re dealing with.”

“I’m sure Father Ruffino has keys, but I’m hesitant to ask, until I know how he . . .”

She understood how difficult it was for him to believe that his friend might be involved in any way. She could see this was the major source of his frustration, and she could also see that Borelli suspected his friend had deceived him.

“If I request the keys,” the priest said, “I might as well ask if he knows who took the Infant and why he didn’t bother to mention it.”

“Why don’t you?” she replied.

They sat silently for many moments.

“You could ‘borrow’ the keys,” she said. “You are staying with him?”

“Oh, no, of course not. I’m staying at a hotel. He lives in a monastery with a bunch of Carmelites. Not much fun.”

“All those vows. Poverty, chastity, and obedience.”

“Yes.” He grinned despite himself. “Perhaps this evening . . . I’m going to the monastery; I could attempt to find—no, I don’t believe I would have time. What about the nuns? They must have keys. You could ask Sister Agnes.”

“She already told me the Infant is missing. Of course I’d like to talk with her again, but I can’t even get in to see her. The whole convent is in lockdown until Sunday. And I’m concerned. She seemed so . . . well, nervous and scared. One of their own has just died under very strange circumstances.”

“I’m sure they have keys; they work at the church,” he said slowly, as if thinking it through. “The funeral Mass and burial are scheduled for tomorrow morning at ten. Father Ruffino is saying the Mass. All the priests and nuns will attend. He’s asked me to serve as a concelebrant. Everyone will be in chapel for at least an hour, possibly two.”

“You would be inside the convent and you could search for the keys.”

“It might indeed be a perfect opportunity to borrow the keys.”

“Do you think you can break away from the services?”

“Not long enough to search for the keys, but possibly long enough to check the door. I could probably find a moment to unlock it. Then someone else could come in and take a look around while everyone is occupied in the chapel.”

“Someone else?” she asked. “Who did you have in mind?”

Dal Damek stood between two buildings across the street from her hotel where he had a good view of anyone leaving, out of the way enough that he wouldn’t be seen. After about twenty minutes, wondering if he’d arrived too late, he started across Nerudova, around the muddy ditch, and stepped inside the hotel and up to the desk. “Has Dana Pierson left this morning?” Dal pulled out his badge.

“She left about a half hour ago,” the clerk said.

Early riser, Damek thought. He’d misjudged on that one. It seemed he was making a number of errors in judgment lately.

“Which direction?”

The clerk glanced outside as though trying to recall. “I’m not sure. They went . . .” He pointed right. “I think they went that way.”

“They?”

“She left with a large man.” He held his arms out to his sides, allowing substantial air between his own slender body and the curve of his lanky limbs.

“A priest?”

“He wasn’t dressed like a priest,” the clerk said, then added, “They asked where they could get her glasses fixed.”

Of course, Dal thought, as blind as the woman seemed to be, she’d find a place to have her glasses repaired.

Within ten minutes he stood across the street from the address the clerk had given him for the optometrist’s shop, watching for someone to come in or out, wondering again if he’d arrived too late. After waiting ten more minutes, sure enough, they strolled down the street and entered the building, a rather odd couple—the enormous priest and that dainty Dana Pierson. If the two were associates, Dal wondered why they’d come separately to his office, then each solo to the theater the previous night. Yet, from the way she’d reacted to his mention of the name Pavel Novák, he was sure she hadn’t heard the name earlier from Father Borelli. Dal couldn’t quite see the connection between the two. He’d already run a background check on each and she was indeed a reporter from Boston—an award-winning journalist at that—and he a priest from Rome.

•   •   •

“I no can fix these,” the clerk told them. “You buy new glasses.”

“How long will that take?” Father Borelli asked with impatience.

“I have them in one week,” the man said. His voice was high-pitched to the point of being irritating.

“She needs them now,” Borelli insisted.

Dana looked down at the display case, amazed to see frames identical to her broken glasses. The styles of frames seemed to change every time she went to get a new pair, but she’d purchased these shortly before her trip. She wondered if they could possibly just switch the lenses. She pointed this out to Borelli, who asked to have them taken from the display case, then asked for her broken glasses.

The priest and man now conversed in Czech, having switched over from the English they’d spoken to accommodate Dana. The shopkeeper’s shrill voice rose and fell, his thin shoulders bobbing up and down, his head shaking in disagreement. After several more moments of intense verbal exchange, Borelli reached in his pocket, yanked out a credit card, and slapped it on the counter. Then, rattling off a string of angry words, he grabbed the display frames and snapped them against the counter, breaking them in two.

Dana’s hand went to her mouth in amazement as the two men continued, words flying. The shopkeeper’s brows rose, as did Borelli’s voice, and then, abruptly—silence. With a grand gesture the shopkeeper slid the credit card through the register. He stared at Borelli, then Dana, his mouth so tight it could have snapped his head in two. Glaring at Borelli, he slid pen and credit card voucher toward the priest, who signed. The man stuffed it into the register and then took out a pliers and miniature screwdriver and proceeded to dismantle one side of the broken glasses, a magnifier affixed to one eye like a jeweler. His mouth twitched as his hands and tools moved quickly, attaching the stem from the new frame to Dana’s original frame. After several more minutes, in which no words were exchanged, the man held the glasses up and handed them to her. Carefully she tried them on, glancing around the showroom. Perfect! She smiled and nodded an okay. “They’re great,” she told the two men. She just wanted to get out of there.

As soon as they completed the transaction and exited, she said, “You got him riled up.”

“I told him emphatically that I would pay the full price for the frames, plus labor, and he went on and on, how these were for display only, that he would order you a new pair. And I said, ‘The poor girl cannot see; she does not wish to wait a week. Just remove one stem from this frame, attach it to her glasses. I offered to pay him double the price for the frames and he still refused.” Borelli pulled out his cigarette, fumbled for a smoke, and lit it up. Dana could see he was still irritated. She wondered how much he’d paid for fixing her glasses.

“That’s when you snapped them in two?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a guilty grin. “That’s when he really began raving.
‘Now what am I going to do with these broken frames?
’” Borelli laughed. “I explained what he could do with them.”

“Which was . . . ?”

“Stuff them up his ass.”

•   •   •

For two people attempting to solve what they had evidently decided was a murder, Dal thought they were having an unusually good time. He watched as Dana Pierson and Father Giovanni Borelli left the optometrist’s shop. At first they were involved in what appeared to be a serious discussion. Within seconds, the woman stopped, stared at the priest, and broke into hysterical laughter. The priest joined her.

Dal noticed she was wearing glasses, so she must have gotten hers replaced or fixed. As they walked down the street, they were so engaged with one another, they didn’t even notice him. He could have followed a mere two steps behind.

They continued for several blocks, stopping a couple of times to rest—Dal thought for the benefit of the large priest, as the woman seemed to be in good physical shape. Father Borelli enjoyed a cigarette as they strolled. They spoke to no one.

They arrived at a hotel in the Malá Strana and went inside. Had they set up a rendezvous with Novák here? Or were they on holiday, just as they’d both informed him, enjoying the city? Were they now about to enjoy a midmorning tryst?
No,
that was ridiculous, Dal thought. The man was twice her age, bald, and fat.

He waited a few moments, then slipped inside, discreetly checked out the lobby—empty—and then approached the front desk, showed his badge, asked the clerk if a Dana Pierson, Giovanni Borelli, or Pavel Novák were registered at the hotel. Informed that Borelli was on the third floor, Dal hopped on the elevator and went up.

He waited several minutes, and then quietly, feeling more like an amateur detective in a goofy film than a chief homicide investigator, he approached the room and put his ear to the door. He heard voices inside. Just two—the priest and the American reporter. Conversing, he judged from the cadence, not grunting and rolling around in bed. The priest did most of the talking, but Dal couldn’t make out the words. He watched the room for some time. No one went in or came out. Finally he left, heading directly to his office to pick up Kristof. They had an appointment later that morning with the director of the Archives of Security Forces, then they were headed back to Kutná Hora to visit with the professor once more. Dal needed to let go of Sister Claire and Our Lady Victorious, a case that most likely wasn’t a homicide case, though he wasn’t sure what it was. He needed to let go of this, but for some reason he could not.

•   •   •

Stanislav Buzek looked and smelled as musty and bloated as the three million pages stuffed into the ancient faded files that had been entrusted to his care. His thinning hair, a dull gray, appeared as if it had not been washed or combed in weeks, and the wool vest he wore under his tweed jacket, straining against a protruding belly, was spotted with what might have been his breakfast porridge or last week’s goulash.

Though the records were now open to the public, the archives’ hours were limited and a special appointment was required to gain access.

“You know this man?” Dal asked, handing a photo of Hugo Hutka to the director.

Buzek pushed his reading glasses, lined bifocals, up on his nose and studied the photo. “Quite a nuisance, this man.”

“A nuisance?”

“In here night and day, requesting this file, then another.” The man’s arm circled in the air with agitation. “He wanted to bring in his computer,” he added, as if this were some destructive device that might blow up his precious files.

Dal understood that Stanislav Buzek made the rules, that he presided inflexibly over his domain. There didn’t appear to be any stated or written guidelines as to how many files a person might request, but the director had made it clear that a written form was required for each. Notes could be taken, using pencils only, not pens, and on small notepads, both supplied by the archives. A strong whiff of Communist control still permeated the air.

Kristof had meticulously filled out the forms, requesting a number of files, which, according to the information obtained from Hugo Hutka’s computer notes, contained references to the actor and Communist dissenter Filip Kula. The young detective had contacted Hutka’s widow to ask if there might be handwritten notes, but she had cleaned out the apartment when she moved and believed everything had been transferred to the laptop. As it turned out, the files in Hutka’s computer were not as easily understood as they had hoped, and they were still attempting to open several protected by unknown passwords. But when Kristof had discovered the name Filip Kula, along with reference numbers to state archived files, he knew he was onto something. Dal, too, was eager to take a look. It appeared that Hutka had begun to gather information for his index but, as far as they could tell, no complete index yet existed.

Director Buzek had sent his assistant off to retrieve the requested files, as the two police officers would not be allowed direct access to the rows and rows of shelves bulging with the archived materials.

With a stack of files cradled in her arms, the assistant appeared, as young and fresh as the director was old and musty. She wore a short skirt, a curve-enhancing sweater. And smelled of a strong, musky-floral mix of perfume, as if she had doused herself to combat musty with musky. She smiled flirtatiously at the younger detective, then at Dal as she handed the files over, flipping her long blond hair back as she did. “Let me know if I can help you with anything else,” she said sweetly, before turning and leaving.

Kristof’s brows rose as he watched her shapely butt sway back into the rows of shelves. He glanced at his superior with an embarrassed shake of the head as if to indicate,
Let’s not get distracted here
. Dal placed the files on the table, separating them into two piles, pushing one toward Detective Sokol as they sat.

Dal scanned the first few pages, finally finding a reference to Filip Kula, the actor, identified as a government dissenter, outlining his involvement in setting up some of the initial protests. He flipped over to the next page, which included a photo, a head shot of the handsome young man. Filip Kula in his prime, such a contrast to the photos in the official crime report. Then a snapshot of a meeting with a half dozen others. Dal recognized the leader and future president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel. Others he did not know. As he sifted through several additional files, it seemed as if he were looking at history itself. He scanned a list of dissenters. Scheduled meetings. Locations, times, names of those involved in leadership roles, surely supplied by someone on the inside, one of the dissenters. As he studied the next couple of files, Dal realized that Kula had begun sharing information with the StB, the Communist secret police. An informer as well as a dissenter. A famous actor, doing what he did best—acting—set in the thick of it all, gathering information for the enemy. Dal knew many had played such roles, some because of ideology, others seeking monetary rewards, many keeping options open if the Communists prevailed. But they had not. Thousands of these people had faded back into society. Others, such as Professor Kovár, had been outed and removed from prestigious positions.

He slid the file toward Kristof, who read, a look of amazement spreading over his face. “Kula was an informant, an StB collaborator, working for the Communists even as he marched with the protesters, demanding reform and overthrow of the regime.”

“But motive for his murder?”

“Revenge?”

“Possibly.”

“But . . .” Kristof spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “Kula’s bank account? Where was that money coming from? The deposit scheduled for the morning he died was never made, which surely indicates—”

“The person paying him was also the person who killed him,” Dal said.

“He was blackmailing someone? Someone who decided murder would be a better way to handle the problem?”

“He definitely wasn’t the one being blackmailed.” Dal considered what he’d just read. “Information he shared with the Communists concerning dissidents would have no value to a present-day possible blackmailer. These protesters are still considered heroes.”

Kristof nodded. “But information regarding another informant? Someone who aided the Communists? Someone determined that this information remain hidden?”

Dal rolled this thought around and around in his head. The value of the information in these files lay in the possibility of finding information on those who had been Communist informants or collaborators. Since Communism had been overthrown back in the late eighties, the dissenters had become the new leaders, the heroes. Those who had aided the Communists were the “bad guys.” Some, whose true roles in the revolution had not been revealed, had become part of the new democratic society. Intuition now told Dal that Filip Kula’s death was related to ancient politics, but did any of this relate to the senator’s murder? Hugo Hutka’s accident? If the murderer was the same, he . . . or she . . . had taken care to use a different means of doing away with each. Kula stabbed, the senator shot, Hutka suspiciously meeting his demise in a car accident. As Dal gazed down an aisle between rows of dusty files, bulging with the weight of tons of yellowing papers, he realized what a momentous task they had before them and wondered if they were even on the right track. Something tied these three deaths together. Was the answer hidden here in these ancient archives?