Complication (4 page)

 

AGENT #3553: Are you married?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You asked me that before. The answer is still no.

 

AGENT #3553: Children?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Never.

 

AGENT #3553: Boyfriend?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I'm too old for boys.

 

AGENT #3553: Are you a lesbian?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: What does this have to do with accordions? I don't understand. I don't understand any of this.

 

AGENT: We're not interested in accordions. We're chiefly concerned with—

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Yes, I know, the
case
. Some accordion case. And again, I've never seen it.

 

AGENT #3553: How can you be certain you've never come across the particular accordion case in question when we haven't even shown it to you? Unless you're telling us you've never laid eyes on any accordion case whatsoever. Only then can we absolutely rule out the possibility of your having come across the specific accordion case in evidence.

 

AGENT #3553: Is this to be your official statement? That you've never in your entire life crossed paths with a single accordion case fitting any description whatsoever? Speaking plainly, Comrade Reznícková, we find that difficult to accept.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Then show me already! Bring it in here. Then I can officially say I've never seen it.

 

AGENT #3553: To do so at present would be reckless. We believe your vision severely impaired. Please read that poster aloud, if you would.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: This is absurd.

 

AGENT #3553: You are capable of reading, we assume? Meaning your inability to recite the words appearing on the notice posted some three meters to our immediate left does not indicate a literacy deficiency. You agree the text is perfectly legible and the light is wholly sufficient for the purposes of—

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: With my glasses, yes, of course I can read. Glasses I would be wearing were it not for your comrades deliberately stepping on them when I was arrested this morning. Or yesterday morning. Whenever it was. Tomorrow is already yesterday.

 

AGENT #3553: Meaning what exactly?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: The poster. It says, “Tomorrow Is Already Yesterday.” There's a worker with his sleeves rolled up and sledgehammer slung over his shoulder and the poster says, “Tomorrow Is Already Yesterday.” I have no idea what it means.

 

AGENT #3553: Very well. We should note, however, that you had to narrow your eyes nearly to the point of closing them and lean precariously in your chair in the direction of the poster in order to decipher what should be an easily readable message celebrating the achievements of the heroic workers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Without your glasses, isn't it fair to say you're practically blind, Comrade Reznícková?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Fair, yes. I can barely see your face without squinting. But I don't want to make you any clearer. You're just a blur of thinning hair and graying flesh wrapped in stiff layers of green. Dark green military cap, green wool overcoat, pea green tie. The Green Blur, I'll call you. You smell of Stag soap and smoke
Rudá hvězda
, Red Star, proletarian cigarette of the people. Off duty you probably smoke American cigarettes bought with Tuzex vouchers. You're in every apparent way a standard issue policeman. And yet, I think to myself, isn't my situation plainly a matter for the StB,
Státní bezpečnost,
the secret police?

 

AGENT #3553: Why would you think this?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Could the Green Blur then be a covert StB operative disguised as a regular overt VB cop? Or are so many secret police already posing as professors and priests, engineers and factory foremen, that a street cop is the only disguise left? Couldn't even be considered a wolf in sheep's clothing. Maybe there are no sheep left. Only wolves and dogs.

 

AGENT #3553: We've searched your apartment and have discovered a number of items—we shall be discussing those in due time—but you should be happy to learn that we found a second pair of glasses you keep by your nightstand.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: My reading glasses.

 

AGENT #3553: We'll get them to you once they're examined. At that point, perhaps we can consider allowing you to identify the accordion case.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You're examining my reading glasses?

 

AGENT #3553: We examine all evidence that maybe relevant.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: How are my glasses relevant?

 

AGENT #3553: We're not at liberty to discuss your glasses.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: [Unintelligible]. But can you tell me whether playing or owning an accordion is now a crime? If that is really what this is all about. Or maybe you're saying the instrument itself is suspected of some transgression?

 

AGENT #3553: We find your fixation on this accordion curious.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I find it curious you've asked me about it some six hundred times.

 

AGENT #3553: We've merely been discussing the case.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: And apparently my case involves an accordion.

 

AGENT #3553: Your case involves an accordion case. Which you well know. The accordion as musical instrument has nothing to do with the charges against you.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Ah. So there are charges?

 

AGENT #3553: We're not at liberty to discuss any charges. Let's talk about your whereabouts on Sunday morning. You left your apartment at approximately 8 am.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Permit me one question. Don't you, comrade, have a murderer to catch?

 

[Silence—duration 3 seconds]

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: From one citizen to another, wouldn't it be more in the people's interest to let me be and instead go after this monster we all know is on the loose?

 

[Silence—duration 4 seconds]

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You know what I'm talking about. The young girl's body found Saturday morning near the Strahov stadium. It was all my customers could talk about. They say it's him, you know. The Right Hand of God.

 

AGENT #3553: The Right Hand of God is a superstition, as I'm sure you well know. On the morning of Sunday, September 23—

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: As long as you refuse to acknowledge the killer's existence, you aren't accountable for stopping his crimes, is that it? Has some official at some ministry or other declared serial killers a cancer restricted to decadent Western societies? The embodiment of capitalism's brutal excesses?

 

AGENT #3553: We refuse to engage in such demoralizing speculation, but it's worth pointing out that you won't find a single verifiable account of the so-called Right Hand of God's exploits anywhere.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Of course not. The killer and his crimes have been systematically erased from history. That's what they say.

 

AGENT #3553: Who is “they”?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You want me to name names? “They” is everybody. “They” is probably your own mother. Haven't you ever heard the children's rhyme? You people are always listening and yet you never hear anything.

 

AGENT #3553: If next you plan on asking us about the mysterious black vans that drive through the streets snatching up children to harvest their organs, we can assure you that this story, too, is a fabrication.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ:
“When moon is high in August sky, and wind howls through the trees / They say at night a killer walks the gloomy crooked streets . . . ”

 

AGENT #3553: On Sunday, September 23, you left your apartment.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You've really not heard it? The song based on that poem by Rentner?

 

AGENT #3553: You boarded at the redline train at Kosmonautů.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ:
“Condemned to wander till time's end, bowed neck hung with clock/His wretched fate to ever hear, the dread tick-tock, tick-tock . . . ”

 

AGENT #3553: You boarded at the redline train at Kosmonautů station
³
and rode to Muzeum.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You can ignore it if you choose, but people still talk. In whispers over dinner tables after the children have gone to bed. Between those endless suffering contests the old women hold while waiting in line outside the butcher shop. In slurred barroom tales I overhear at the Black Rabbit. The missing garbage man's corpse found last year in Bubeneč. A year before, the dead girl in the Vyšehrad cemetery. A thirteen-year-old boy named
in a warehouse of rubber tires in Smíchov two years before that.

 

AGENT #3553: You transferred to the green line and then exited at Malostranská. You caught a tram on Klarov Street to the base of Petřín Hill. Correct?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: For as long as anyone can remember, people have been disappearing. Each autumn, like clockwork. Some found strangled, some bludgeoned, others drowned or with their throats slit. Some are women, some men; occasionally they are children. All are found with their right hand missing. Never the left. Always the right.

 

AGENT #3553: You transferred to the green line and then exited at Malostranská.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: As a girl, my mother lived across the street from an antique dealer and his mongoloid son
on Street in Josefov. The
family. Just before . . .

 

[unintelligible—duration 7 seconds]

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: . . . in the corner, his face swarming with flies.

 

AGENT #3553: You caught a tram on Klarov Street to the base of Petřín Hill.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: All stories follow the basic pattern. Grisly stories that stray into the realm of fairytales. The missing right hand is often just the start.

 

AGENT #3553: You were seen carrying an accordion case.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: And now a little girl. Her body found in Břevnov. Or was it the gymnasium in Smíchov? Stories vary. The girl bled white, or with her eyeballs pushed inside her skull, or with every tooth removed at the root. Asphyxiated, mouth stuffed with locks of her own black, red, blonde hair. In another version—

 

AGENT #3553: The girl was six years old.