Men in Space (26 page)

“
Perfektní!
” Ilievski’s beaming at him, warmed up already by a vodka. “Ilievski Import/Export: four; Prague Police Force: nil.”

“Did you hear,” says Anton, hanging his own jacket on his
chair’s back, “what happened when Levski decided to set up dustbins on their training ground and practise dribbling round them?”

“No,” they all reply in unison.

“The dustbins won three-nil.”

They roar with laughter at this, slamming their hands onto the table. Janachkov, who’s sitting closest to Anton, slaps his back:

“Always the joker.”

As Janachkov draws his arm away again, Anton notices a black metal object resting in his jacket’s inner pocket. Could it be a gun? Maybe it’s just his calculator. Anton smiles and sits down. Pigeon stew. The small room has four other tables in it and they’re all full, but he can tell instantly that they’re not police: grey Czech men, wrinkled, fat, drunk, playing cards or pointing at each other as they growl out their opinions about Mečiar and Havel and the
Restituce
. A waitress, forty-odd and tall with shoulder-length brown hair, comes and asks him what he’ll have. He tells her a Turkish coffee. Ilievski orders more vodkas all round. As soon as she’s gone, Ilievski rests his elbows on the table and makes eye contact with all three of them, calling the meeting to order.

“So,” he says, knocking a cigarette out of its packet, “we find ourselves in a rather odd position. We’ve fucked up, but our fuck-up was our fortune. I don’t think it would do any good, at this point, to start apportioning blame – or should I say praise?” He’s rehearsed this speech. Lighting up, he goes on: “But I would like to clear a couple of things up, just out of curiosity. First, Anton.”

Anton’s been worrying about this ever since Ilievski and Branka dropped him off back at Korunní three days ago. In the car Ili asked him about what the police had asked him, and asked him why they’d held him for so long. He answered that they’d tried to get him to admit he knew the painting was stolen, and to implicate others, i.e. Ilievski, in it – which
was, after all, true if not the whole truth. Ili asked question after question and he gave answer after answer, while Branka listened in with his sharp lawyer ears – but he was so exhausted that he couldn’t remember afterwards what he’d said, and has had the feeling since then that he must have contradicted himself at some point. There’s been no contact between any of them since, on Ilievski’s instructions: just a phone call to Helena at her work yesterday to tell her to tell him to meet up at Hradčanská today. Anton tries not to look flustered now as Ilievski turns to him and asks:

“Did you tell this Ivan Maňásek how valuable the painting was?”

That’s easy. “No. He’s a strange person. I don’t think he tricked us so that he could sell it on.”

“Then why …”

“I think he just liked it.”

Ilievski can’t respond to this. He looks away, shaking his head slowly, and draws on his cigarette. Before he can ask his next question Janachkov chirps up:

“
Was
a strange person.” He looks at Milachkov, then both men look down at the table. The waitress arrives with new vodkas; Ilievski passes one to each of them, and each sets theirs down on the tablecloth in front of him.

“Second question. Georgi and Stefan: have your flats been searched?”

“Ransacked.”

“Turned fucking upside down.” All those Bruce Lee videos, porn films.

“Mine too,” Ilievski says. “While you were still in custody, Anton. That’s how I knew that we’d been had. Then Branka said they’d have to release you. Helena said yesterday they came back and went through your place too.”

“Completely. Even the cellars – you know, where I was going to take it. And the neighbours’ ones. And the attic. And they even …”

“Yeah, we all had that,” Ilievski cuts him off. “Presumably they’ve done that at his flat too. Maňásek’s.”

“You can’t get near there any more,” Milachkov tells him, looking wistful.

“No point anyway. If they’d found it there they wouldn’t be turning places over, or following us around everywhere. What about his parents?”

“Mother,” Milachkov corrects him. “Father’s dead, I think. One brother, who he wasn’t close to. I went round there and said I’d been his friend and that I’d given him a painting for him to renovate. She let me look through some of his paintings, but our one wasn’t there. She’s crazy. I couldn’t get much sense out of her. She did say that the police had been there to look through his stuff too, and not found what they wanted. Oh – and that two other people, foreign people, had been to take things away, including paintings.”

Ilievski jerks his body forwards at Milachkov across the table. “Why didn’t you tell me this straight away?”

“You said we’d wait till Anton got here. And besides, there were so many paintings. And this guy was some Dutch dealer, organizing an exhibition of Maňásek’s work in Amsterdam, and this painting isn’t his work – I mean, it’s not an original painting by Ivan Maňásek, so why would the Dutch guy have taken it?”

“Who was the other foreign person?”

“The boy who lived with him.”

“Nick,” Anton says. “My friend. He’s the one who put me onto Maňásek in the first place.”

Ilievski ashes his cigarette by rotating its tip slowly on the floor of the ashtray, then turns to Anton:

“Where’s he now, then?”

“I don’t know. He lived in the spare room at Maňásek’s, so after Maňásek died, who knows? He used to live next door to me, but that was months ago; he hasn’t turned up back there. He could well have left Prague by now. He had a job lined
up for him – in Amsterdam, too – writing for a magazine about art. Maybe he’s gone there. Maybe his French friend who lives in this street will have an address for him, but I don’t think so.”

“What was the magazine called?”

“
European Art
,
Art throughout Europe
,
Modern Art in Europe
, something like that.”

“When you leave here, go and visit his French friend. Ask him. Try to think of anyone else who knows this Nick. Is he the one who I met outside …”

“Blatnička, yes.”

“You, Stefan: did you get an address for this Dutch person? A name?”

“Joost. J-o-o-s-t. No surname. No address. He’s going to send the paintings back to the mother, but that could be months away from now. Maybe they’ll sell at this show and he’ll send her money instead.”

“I wonder if the police know this as well. Oh – by the way: did you find out if we have any contacts in the police who’re on this case, or know about it?”

“Still working on that,” says Milachkov.

“Well, keep working. Work harder. Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

They raise their glasses to meet Ilievski’s, then quickly tip the liquid back into their mouths – all of it, in single throws. Swallowing, Anton winces: he’s never liked drinking this way. His eyes water and his chest burns. All four men set their empty glasses down and are quiet for a few seconds, as though they’d just drunk communion wine. It’s Ilievski who breaks the silence:

“Amsterdam. We have people there.”

* * * * *

Nick said to meet in the art-deco café, which Heidi’s never been to before but has heard about from Brad and Jeffrey, these two English teachers who think it’s cool that they go to weird, out-of-the-way Czech bars. This fact alone, that they consider it cool, makes it not cool. She has to get to the art-deco café so that Nick can give her back her glasses which apparently this Jean-Luc’s found, a mere – what, four weeks after she first lost them at his place; plus, so that Nick can give her some casserole dish he wants her to return to Ivan’s mother; plus, so that she can say goodbye to him. She’s on the concourse of the main station.
Hlavní Nádraží
. When the English teachers go out drinking after school, they clunk their glasses together and say
Hauptbahnhof
, because
Cheers
is
Na zdraví
which sounds like
Nádraží
which in German is … like, oh so fucking clever …

Nick told her the upper level, to the left, above the tunnel to the platforms. She rides the escalator, then finds a staircase leading further upwards. There’s a sign in Czech, German and even Russian, which is quite unusual: they’ve taken all the Russian signs down everywhere else and started putting English ones up instead – largely out of spite, she thinks, to confuse their old masters by changing the landscape on them like they did to that poor cosmonaut the gun-toting black queen was going on about back at the party. But this sign’s old school; it says
Buffet, Bufet, Kape
and it’s pointing up the staircase, so the café must be there. What is art deco anyway? It’s something older than pop art, and cubism – or maybe not older than cubism, maybe about contemporary; then there’s art nouveau which isn’t the same thing or is it? She wishes she knew, just knew and didn’t care that she knew, didn’t even know that she knew, the knowledge just in there, all mundane, like knowing that today was Tuesday or that you were twenty-two, twenty-three in March …

Heidi comes to the top of the staircase and finds herself on a landing: a long corridor whose floor is all mosaicked
in two-tone, black and white, with large, curving windows a bit like in Jean-Luc’s atelier. It’s an older, grander world than the sordid station below with all its
párek
stands and sleazy guides touting for tourists,
Gute Wohnung! English? You want room?
– ugh, and those Gypsies huddled in rows with all their worldly goods in laundry bags with strings around them. She just saw two of them outside in the bushes next to the sliding doors taking a crap – that’s right, just shitting right there in the open. Heidi did that herself once, walking in the Rockies three winters ago with Hikesoc – North Face rucksacks, Salomon ice picks, the works: she remembers crouching down in the pure snow above a crevasse, right across the slit, then how it fell from her so cleanly to the ice floor twenty feet below, the
kadunggg!
when it landed reverberating round the walls … But that was different, virgin, clean, these Gypsies
stink
to heaven – though it’s not their fault, she knows, they’re persecuted, poor as fuck, but nonetheless they stink and that’s a fact.

The large windows face back across the main road that runs right above the lower concourse, back down towards Mústek and across to Staré Město. All the roofs, from this raised elevation, look kind of candy-like, all Disney’s Magic Kingdom: pointy church spires and sloping square roofs with gold tiles on them and round domes and weathercocks. At one end of the landing there’s a door that’s padlocked closed; the café must be down the other end, behind the swinging wooden door a man’s just come from. He looks like a businessman in his suit and his leather shoes which click-clack on the floor’s tiles as he walks towards her. He smiles, turns as he passes her and looks her up and down: her legs, her tits, which dream on asshole, not if hell froze over – although actually it just might at this rate, it’s so damn cold …

Nick, Mladen the real Yugoslavian and Nick’s friend Gábina who’s very beautiful and swung him the job at the
art school – these three are sitting at a table on the far side of the café. It’s a tall, ornate room with cornicing around the ceiling and huge paintings of women on the walls – or, well, not paintings, but they’re glazed into the large ceramic tiles, the women, like a great big jigsaw so that each woman starts at about head height and goes up all the way to the ceiling, with her hair hanging down her back. So that’s art deco, then. Nick’s got three enormous bags, or one bag and one big green trunk and then a smaller bag and then a shopping bag as well; how’s he ever going to get all that shit out of the train when he gets to Amsterdam? They’re stacked up round the table, the three smaller ones on top of the green trunk, and this waiter’s saying something to Mladen as he walks by, pointing with his finger that he can’t get by to take stuff to the tables, which bullshit he can’t. The waiters are such assholes here in Prague: they’ll complain about anything and do anything just to be – what was the word she had to explain to her class the other day?
Contrary
. Nick’s looking away, laughing, ignoring the waiter; he must be glad he won’t have to put up with
that
crap any more. It’s Gábina who first sees Heidi as she’s walking up to them; she kind of starts, perks up and nudges Nick:
Your friend’s here
. Nick gets to his feet, sways slightly, takes her by the shoulders, kisses her hello on both cheeks, and oh boy has he ever been drinking, and not beer at that: it’s something sharp that rolls right from his mouth in waves of vapour. He says:

“I’m really glad you came. Hey, Mladen! Tell that guy to bring another round. Old Penguin there.” And he starts explaining how the waiter looks kind of like a penguin with his black-and-white suit, and the way he waddles if you watch him – which is true, he does, and Heidi says:

“His suit matches the black-and-white mosaic floor,” and Nick gets all excited and starts going on about this café he knew when he was a student:

“The floor was black and yellow. Black and yellow, right? You with me?”

And they all nod yes, so he continues:

“In big squares, black and yellow. It was called Brown’s, just to make things complicated. But the point is that the floor …”

“This we know. Black and yellow,” Mladen says, and she can tell he’s quite drunk too. Nick says:

“Right. And guess who used to hang out there? Beside me and some other students, I mean. Guess who was in there every time I went inside there. Every fucking time.”

They all look at him, smile and slightly shake their heads. Nick waits, then leans forwards, like he’s confiding some great secret to them:

“Traffic wardens!”

“Traffic what?” Gábina doesn’t get it. It’s hard to tell if she’s as drunk as the other two but if Heidi had to bet one way or the other she’d go for yes. Nick raises his voice and throws his hands up:

“Traffic wardens! Wardens! They go around slapping tickets on your windscreen if you park on yellow lines. Oh, right, you won’t know this, none of you, but in London they wear uniforms of black and yellow. Black with yellow stripes. There’s, I don’t know, ten, twenty cafés to choose from and they go for the one with the black-and-yellow floor. It’s as though the colour drew them there. In fact, I think it did. And what’s even better, the … the icing – no, the fucking
cherry
on the cake is this, right: once I saw a bee there, black-and-yellow stripy bumblebee, crawling on a traffic warden’s hat which he’d put on the table top beside his coffee. Isn’t that just …”