“Calculating for inflation, I would put its current value at…” He looked at the ceiling while his mind ran the numbers. “At least five thousand euros.”
“Out of my price range. But helping me with this story might make it easier for you to find a buyer.”
He frowned, then got the gist of it.
“I see what you mean. By creating an embarrassment for them. A welshed deal to an important Cold War contact.”
“Why do you think it was the Agency?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable with the question.
“Maybe it is not wise to talk so openly of these things, even now.”
He pushed back his chair, putting some distance between us, and in doing so he bumped the shelves, which creaked and swayed alarmingly, a Babel tower of books that seemed ready to topple at the slightest touch. I instinctively braced my hands against the arms of my chair, ready to leap to safety. Bruzek smiled and didn’t budge.
“No need to panic. These shelves have been like that for years, hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. But the books are my children. They would never do me harm.”
I tried to steer things back on track.
“Did Ed’s ‘friend’ make the request that you keep the ledger?”
“No. It was done through another channel. A phone call.”
“Wasn’t that kind of risky in those times?”
“Yes. But the wording of the message was very vague.”
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“No, no. Whoever the contact was obviously used someone else to make the call for him.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the voice was that of a child. A boy. He must have been paid to deliver the message, and probably didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant. He might even have done it for free. In those days, being requested by a stranger to place an anonymous phone call would have been too daring and exotic for any boy in Prague to resist. My own son would have done it. So it could have been anyone.”
As Bruzek spoke, something cold and prickly began creeping up my spine, like a droplet of sweat defying gravity. When the sensation reached the space between my shoulder blades I felt the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. I leaned forward.
“Do you remember the wording of the message?” I held my breath for his answer.
“Oh, yes. When that much money is mentioned, you don’t forget the slightest detail. The call came to me at home. I was alone. It was a Friday, and my wife and son were at the cinema, some awful Stalinist film about the heroic fight against the Germans. This boy’s voice came on the line sounding like he was trying not to laugh.
“‘Vaclav,’ he said-he never once used my last name-’Vaclav, you are instructed to keep a ledger of all particulars for all future deliveries. Payment tenfold upon completion.’ Meaning tenfold of my usual take for each transaction, that was my assumption. So of course I complied.”
By now the coldness was creeping back down my spine.
“But no one ever paid you?”
“Because no one ever came to pick up the ledger.”
“Would you show it to me?”
He paused again, shaking his head but not refusing. Then he grimaced, wavering.
“How about tomorrow?”
“I can see it then?”
“I’ll have an answer for you. No promises. I must think about this. But I can tell you for sure tomorrow. Come after hours, seven o’clock. No, make it eight, after dark. These kinds of things should not be revealed by the light of day, don’t you think?”
He stood slowly, and I did the same. At his shift of weight the ominous shelves groaned and creaked. Or maybe I was just feeling the effects of what he’d told me.
“Shall I call Anton to show you out?”
“I know the way.”
My steps on the narrow stairways felt stiff, wooden, as if I was descending into a dream. The feeling persisted all the way to the front of the store, where Litzi was still waiting and Anton stood behind the register. She must have read the emotions in my face.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “What happened up there?”
“He has more information, but he wants a day to think about it. I’m-we’re-supposed to come back tomorrow night at eight.”
“What kind of information?”
“Details about courier transactions. Could be nothing, could be everything.”
I withheld the biggest revelation, telling myself it was to keep Anton from overhearing. In retrospect, I’m not sure I was ready to tell Litzi, either, not until I’d had time to digest it.
Because I was the boy who had phoned Bruzek. I had read the message straight from a typewritten page that had been handed to me by a stranger who paid me fifty crowns. The stranger was no one notable, probably just a cutout. I had no idea who I was phoning, of course, and at the time I was convinced it was yet another of those small errands that had somehow been engineered by my father, in his role as a bit player on the fringes of CIA intrigue. Now I wasn’t sure what to think.
We stepped into the street, where I was momentarily blinded by sunlight.
“What’s our next stop?” Litzi asked. “Are you still planning to go on the offensive?”
I blinked, still emerging from the fog of disbelief.
“What? Oh, yes. Right. Later, if it’s possible.”
Deep memories, once they’ve been pulled from the muck, sometimes churn up enough old sediment to reveal other buried recollections, as long as you’re patient. And by reliving that old phone call I had now remembered something else, an item that had probably been working its way to the surface ever since I’d seen my old address, 22 Divadelni, typed on a sheet of my stationery the night before. That, in turn, had just given me an idea for a possible preemptive action, a means of indeed taking the offensive.
“Where to, then?” Litzi sounded impatient, but now I had an answer for her.
“An old monument called Kranner’s Fountain,” I said. “I’m going to do a little illegal climbing, and you’re going to be my spotter.”
23
Kranner’s Fountain with its grim medieval figures peered out at the Vltava River from a small park just across Divadelni Street from my old apartment building. Sixteen of the statues looked as if they’d walked straight out of The Canterbury Tales — an archer, a carpenter, a miller, a baker, and so on.
As a boy I had a prime view of them from our third-floor balcony, and they often featured in my dreams, climbing down from their perches after midnight to roam the square and beckoning me to join them.
My awestruck regard was probably what led me to boast to Karel one night that the creases and folds of their stone garments would offer the perfect hiding place for something small and valuable. At the time, the topic of spare keys was much on our minds. The Russians were poised to invade, and we took the threat personally. What if they seized our homes for billets? How would we retrieve all our stuff?
Dad had a spare, but he kept it in one of those obvious spots, beneath a flowerpot. Surely the wily Red Army would figure that out in no time. So I swiped it one day and had an extra copy made. Karel did the same at his house. Then, with conspiratorial excitement, we each came up with a hiding place, and mine was Kranner’s Fountain-specifically, beneath the lower hem of the tunic of the horn-blowing hunter, whose face I could see in profile from our front window.
We cached our treasure by night. I crossed the dewy grass of the silent park and climbed ten feet up the marble barriers to the hunter’s pedestal. Taking the key from my pocket, I groped above his right knee and glued it
