yanking the door closed.
He ran out of the room and stood at the head of the platform. He’d have to pass this way, see Nick, not bother with the men’s room. Just take the ticket and go. Nick looked around, frantic, then down at his watch. Not this close. It was stupid. They’d notice. The boxy suit and the pacer were gone, settled in the car. Only the attendant was now on the empty platform, looking at him. Nick turned to the waiting hall. He’d be running across the room now, late, accidentally bumping into Nick, snatching the ticket before anyone could see. The soldier was coming back, smoking again. Then Nick heard the whistle and jumped, swiveling his head between the train and the hall. The soldier looked at him. The train was beginning to move. There was no one near, no one running. Nick looked at his watch-what else did you do when someone was late? When the soldier came up to him and said something, Nick turned his palms up and shrugged. She had missed it. Then he turned and saw the train sliding out, the attendant waving as it passed him, faster now, on its way to Vienna.
He stood for a minute, not sure what to do. The soldier was still looking at him. Play it out. The story was everything now. He’d wait for her. He arranged his face, concerned and annoyed, as if he still expected to see someone walk through the hall. He stood against the wall, giving it a few minutes, waiting for the soldier to move away. Then he picked up the canvas bag and headed toward the door, away from the ticket windows. His father would never be late. Something had happened again. For a second Nick was angry-why put him through this? Was he supposed to go back to the hotel, wait for the next plan? But all this was just pushing away the dread. He saw his father’s face outside the concert hall, tense with worry.
Outside, he got into a taxi. If something was wrong, he should avoid him, wait for the right time. But he couldn’t.
“ Namesti sovetskych tankistu,” he said, almost blurting it out. The driver looked at him-had he mispronounced it, or was it too unlikely a destination? — but put the car in gear. Nick lit a cigarette, trying to calm his shakiness, and watched the streets as they started down the hill. Red street nameplates on building corners, indecipherable. Bouncing across the embedded tram rails, fast, as if the driver felt Nick’s urgency. The river. Finally the tank at the foot of Holeckova, the empty traffic circle. He paid the driver and got out, unfolding his map and pretending to read it, part of the story. Then the taxi was gone and he was running up the long hill. No one ran in Prague. A workman coming down the hill scuttled to the side, avoiding him, flattening himself against the park wall. But Nick was running from his own demons now, not caring, the sound of ragged breathing in his ears.
The hill was steep and he stopped once, gulping, then started again, out of time. The apartment buildings appeared now, rising up against the park slope, set back from the sidewalk behind patches of banked lawns. White concrete balconies with their city views. He’d been lucky to get one. There was a black metal gate in the wall and Nick hung on it, jiggling the latch, then sprinted up the row of concrete steps leading to the building. Hell in the winter, slippery for old people. The entrance was in the back, at the end of the pavement. He raced up another series of steps, past some shrubs, the steep apron of lawn, a clump of pale blue shrub on the grass.
He stopped. Not a shrub. Pajamas. He walked across the lawn in slow motion, his chest heaving. The legs were twisted, probably broken by the fall, the face lying on its side, blood underneath, a dried streak at the corner of his mouth. Nick sank to his knees, staring. He reached out to feel for a pulse in the neck, but the skin was already cold. Then, without thinking, he moved his hand up, brushing back the thin hair, stroking the side of his head, smoothing away the lines of his skin so that the face seemed to him again the one he’d always known, not old, the same high forehead and wavy hair. With his other hand he lifted the head into his lap, still stroking it, rocking back and forth a little in a silent wail. His eyes swam. How could it hurt this much?
He looked up. Everything quiet. Was there no one to help? The balcony above them. Had no one heard? Or had there only been a thud, a dull thump onto the grass cushion? He rocked harder, cradling the head, heavy in his lap, oblivious to the dampness of the blood. When he glanced at the pajamas and saw the dark stain on the pants where his father had soiled himself, a final embarrassment, he held the head closer, comforting a child, telling him it didn’t matter. The quiet was unbearable, death itself, and he saw why people keened, made any sound to break the stillness so they weren’t swallowed up in it too. But a part of you went anyway, seeping out like blood. He stared down again at the face, smooth, irretrievable, somewhere else. The only thing he had ever wanted.
He didn’t know how long he knelt there, out of the world, but when he came back all his senses were there at once — the sound of a car passing in the street, the stickiness on his pants, the tingling surge of adrenalin fear. He should call somebody. Weren’t there neighbors? Gently he moved his father’s head, laying it back on the grass, and stood up. Maybe he shouldn’t be seen at all. But now what did it matter? He walked over to the sidewalk and followed it around the building to the door.
A jumble of nameplates, two apartments to a floor, Kotlar on the top. He ignored the small elevator, afraid of being enclosed, and climbed the stairs, the landings bright through a wall of glass brick. Moderne. Instinctively he raised his hand to knock on the door, but who would be there? Then he saw that it was already ajar, as if someone hadn’t closed it properly. Who? He pushed it quietly and stepped into the chilly apartment.
“Anna?” he called out, hearing nothing but the sound of a clock. He looked around the room-low Scandinavian furniture, bookcases, everything in order. The sliding door to the balcony was closed. He opened it, stepped out, and looked down. The body was still there, slightly to the right. He saw then that the balcony extended along to the next room and that the door there was open. He moved toward it, stopping when he saw the marks on the painted rail. Here? But his father had been barefoot, in pajamas, nothing to scrape against.
The bedroom was a mess, covers flung back, pillows scattered, as if he’d got up in a hurry. The night table was upright but at an angle, some pill vials and a book knocked to the floor, the lamp pushed near the edge. The desk chair was pulled back, out of place, where someone would bump into it in the dark. The desk wasn’t ransacked, the drawers still in place, but somehow disheveled, at odds with the neat living room.
He stood for a minute, imagining how it might have been. The sudden impulse in bed, knocking against the night table as he got up, staggering (drunk?), bumping against the desk, yanking the chair out of the way, the rush to the balcony, and over. Soiling himself in the terror of the plunge. None of that happened. It would have been deliberate, planned out like everything else. A note. Nick looked on the desk, moving some of the papers aside, and then stopped. You weren’t supposed to disturb the scene of the crime. The phrase struck him, another adrenalin surge. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? He looked at the room again. Another phrase: signs of struggle. Someone pulling him off the bed, dragging him, knocking against the furniture. Had he screamed? Nick leaned against the desk, lightheaded. Had he begged them to stop, fought back, one final swing, knowing his luck had run out? But no one had heard. The body was still lying there, unreported. Nick imagined instead a hand clamped over his mouth, muffling him, his arms thrashing as they forced him out, an old man, so terrified that he went in his pants.
No note. The papers were bills, scattered now from what must have been a neat pile, making sure everything was paid before he got on the train. Nick opened a drawer. Was there really a list? There seemed to have been no effort to find it, no search. The inside of the desk was untouched, folders of letters and bills and what seemed to be official documents with his name, the paper trail of socialist life.
Nick heard a noise in the hall, the whirring of the elevator. One of the neighbors would see the body now, glance across the lawn as he went out, curious, then cry out and run back for the telephone. Should he do it first? But the idea of calling the police in Czech defeated him. Let someone else do it. Maybe instead he should slip down the stairs, go back to the hotel and his own life. Call Anna later. What more could he do here? All this paper, receipts and letters, some in Russian, the desk of a foreigner. Only on the grass, strangely young again, had he been his father.
In the top drawer he brushed aside pens and paper clips. A passport, Russian, his father’s. He drew out a manila envelope dark with age. Newspaper clippings, in English. His disappearance, his press conference, a loose scrapbook of disinformation. Why had he saved them? Then Nick saw that each of the clippings had family photographs-the three of them in front of the house on 2nd Street; the old wedding picture, blurred on newsprint; his parents shaking Truman’s hand at a reception. Their tabloid life. At the bottom of the pile were two real photographs, worn at the edges. His mother, young, maybe during the war, shoulder pads and short skirt, a vivid lipstick smile, her mouth open with the beginning of a laugh. The other was a boy in hockey gear at Lasker Rink, a wintry Central Park in the background, the boy unaware that he was being photographed by a spy. Nick looked at himself. He wished now that he had been smiling, that every time his father had looked at it he’d seen what he wanted to see, his happy boy, not somebody caught from behind a tree. Too late. His eyes filled, and he wanted to make a noise again. The photographs were like the stillness of death. If you gave in to them, you drifted away to another place. Nothing ever came back.
He was still looking at the pictures when he heard the sound in the next room. He raised his head. Two
