28
Staropramenná 2, Prague, Czech Republic
November 29
Eva turned the coat over in her hands, the smell of her mother still strong. Pyotr stood beside her, frowning.
“I got her this coat the winter before I went to school,” Eva said quietly. “She said the red and the black flowers made it look like she was the angel of death.”
“Nice,” Pyotr smiled.
“She wore it anyway. I think she liked being the angel of death sometimes.”
She felt around it, in the pockets, found nothing but tissues and fluff. Then, on the inside breast pocket, she pulled out a folded fragment of a paper. It was filled with numbers, split by dashes, spilling off the edge. She grinned at it, then flipped it over and gasped. Pyotr caught the paper before it dropped out of her hand.
It read: ‘Rhodri,’ and a phone number.
“Is that…?” Pyotr asked
“Our old number, yeah.”
“Did your mother know Rhodri?”
Eva shook her head, sat down on the sofa.
“No, they never met. I don’t know how she’d have this number. We never called each other or…”
Pyotr sat down next to her, took her hands in his.
“Maybe she was contacting him, trying to find out where you were? You said you’ve been travelling a lot… maybe she got worried and was checking up on you.”
Pyotr sprang from the sofa, across the room to a small rotary phone, sitting in the corner, dusty and cracked. He brushed it off, carried it over to Eva, set it on her lap.
“Maybe she went after you. Maybe she’s already out of town.”
“What’s the phone for, Pyotr?”
“If she went to Rhodri, the two of them might be looking for you.”
Eva took the phone, gripped it tight.
“That didn’t happen,” she said seriously, and put it on the ground beside her. She flipped the paper over, looked at the string of numbers.
“What’s all that? Some kind of address?”
“It’s a note to herself. She writes in code to keep people from snooping.”
“What people?”
“Me, mostly,” Eva said with a smile, “Lists for birthday presents, stuff like that. Letters-to-numbers, shifted on a rolling cipher. It’s complicated, but she really has it down.”
“She’s pretty good with patterns, I guess.”
“Yeah,” nodded Eva, squinting at the paper, “Took me until I was seven to catch on myself. Learned about my first laptop three weeks early, and I’ve been keeping my codebreaking skills secret ever since.”
“So wait, you can read this?”
“Oh yeah, definitely,” she smiled, “It’s a bit tricky with the edge of the page ripped off, but I’m pretty sure it says something like ‘Wednesday, five o’clock, Sestak’…”
“Dobroslav Sestak?” Pyotr hissed.
“It doesn’t say. Who’s that?”
“Director of Public Safety. Real hard ass. He’s the one who shut down all the city squares, made the police his personal germ-killing army. He’s got more power than the mayor, and he knows it.”
“So my mother went to him for what? As an advisor?”
“Couldn’t be. She was fired. Why would he meet with her?”
Eva nodded, rubbed her temple gently. The leftovers of the Tezocet were making her so tired…
“There’s only one way to find out,” she said. “We’ll have to go ask him ourselves.”
Pyotr barely got in front of her, pushing her back with a pleading hand.
“Eva, wait, hold on! His office is like a fortress over there. There’s no way we’d get in to see him, even if we weren’t on the run from the police!”
“He might know what happened to my mother, Pyotr!”
“All you have connecting them is this… this scribbled note that means nothing! Eva, listen! I want to find your mum as much as anyone, but this is not the best use of our time right now!”
She grabbed his shoulder tightly, looked into his eyes.
“I’m going,” she said simply. “With or without you.”
She started down the stairs again, holding her breath for fear of losing her resolve. Pyotr stayed still a moment, then let out a deep sigh and followed her outside.
* * *
The gear they’d stolen from the storehouse at the park on Rašínovo nábÅ™eží smelled clean and crisp, like antiseptic and lemons. Eva fidgeted with the latch on the back of her mask, pulling it tighter around her face until she could no longer feel the cold air on the skin below her cheekbones.
Pyotr rifled through a plastic bag, frustrated.
“There’s only one glove in here. They forgot to pair them, the bastards.”
“You should go back and complain,” Eva smiled.
They paused at a corner near the old apartment building Sestak had claimed as his office. They glanced around in turns, checking out the trio of armed guards by the front doors, floodlights blasting onto the sidewalk like a fortress.
“See what I mean?” Pyotr whispered, “It’s not like they’re offering tours of the place.”
“Maybe there’s a side entrance or something,” Eva said, “We’ve got to get closer. Come on—”
Pyotr grabbed her arm, pulled her back.
“Not a chance,” he warned, “You’re waiting here. I’ll go see if there’s another way in.”
“Is this chivalry?”
“No, it’s you looking so dazed that they’re going to know something’s up at the sight of you. I can still pull off ‘casual’ if I have to.”
Eva nodded, patted him on the back.
“Keep the mask on tight, and don’t stare, okay?”
“What am I, an idiot?” he smiled back, then strode around the corner as if on a midday stroll. In any other circumstances, it would have seemed natural.
Eva peered around the corner, watching as Pyotr closed the gap towards Sestak’s building, hands deep in his pockets. He skipped off the sidewalk, down onto the street, and started crossing closer to the floodlights.
“Hey!” shouted one of the guards, taking aim with a machine gun, “Other side, kid!”
Pyotr skidded to a stop, held his hands up to show compliance, and moved back to the far side of the street, eyes carefully away from the guards, who were watching him cautiously.
Eva tracked him until he turned the corner a block away, then started walking back to meet him halfway, breath streaming out of her mask in tense bursts.
Just as she spotted Pyotr rounding the corner ahead, the air filled with the sound of bells… clumsy at first, then a slow, mournful tolling that echoed off the buildings, drawing Eva deeper into despair.
“What’s going on?” she said to Pyotr when they met halfway down the block.
“The clocksmith’s son just died. People are freaking out.”
Eva glanced up as more bells rang out, the distant sound of weeping from untold homes nestled away from this frozen hell she was living.
“They were really that loved?” she asked.
“The clock’s a symbol of hope to the city,” Pyotr said. “It’s irrational, but people really care about that family. Nuts as he is, Sestak understands that pulse.”
Eva squinted, looked to Pyotr.
“Sestak knows them?”
“Knows them? They’re like his pet project. He’s going to have a hell of a time finding a way to spin this mess. He must be in agony right now.”
Eva checked back the way she’d come.
“You said there was a daughter, right?”
Pyotr glared at her.
“Yes. Why?”
“How old is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“How old was the son?”
“I don’t know that either. Listen—”
“You know all the ins and outs of this entire city, but when it comes to the most beloved family of all, you’re drawing blanks?”
“Yeah, right after I eat my stale wafer rations off the floor, I put on my tux for a night out with Prague’s social elite. Nobody gets to see these people anymore. They don’t leave home at all.”
Eva smiled to him, patted his cheek.
“Not usually, no.”
* * *
The guards outside Sestak’s building had their guns on her the second she started towards them. They were not taking any chances, especially with a lone woman weepy and stumbling, wearing no jacket in this weather.
“Other side!” the close one called, but she didn’t turn or slow down. He stepped out onto the street, adjusted his mask and took careful aim at her head.
“Ma’am! Stay on the other side of the street!”
Eva looked up at him with horrible, teary eyes, her mask pulled tight around her face, and choked down as loud a sob as she could manage.
“They’re all dead!” she wept, treading a fine line between melodrama and authenticity.
“Ma’am, you need to back up right now,” the guard warned, taking a step back himself. Eva slowed, stood there in the street, shivering from the cold.
“My… my father was the clocksmith,” she said staring into the sky. “My brother just died. I need to see Dobroslav. I need to tell him… my brother, he left a message for him.”
The guard squinted at Eva a moment.
“You’re the clocksmith’s daughter?”
Eva met his eyes, pushed as many tears as she could to the surface.
“Y-y-yes,” she nodded.
The bells in the air were stifling. Inescapable. The guard kept his gun on her, but touched his earpiece, tilting his head away.
“I’ve got the clocksmith’s daughter here to see the Director. Says she has a message from her brother.”
He heard something over the radio, glanced up at Eva.
“She said that too,” he nodded, easing his gun a bit.
Eva tried to bide her time with as authentic a way as possible, staring into the clouds and praying for the soul of her lost family. It wasn’t as hard to do.
“Hold on,” said the guard to the radio, then looked at Eva sternly. “You’re Ana?”
Eva realized she had no idea what the daughter’s name really was. The guard looked suspicious, untrusting. If it were a trap, she’d have no way to talk him out of it. She wavered, let out a long, sad breath, met the guard’s stare head-on.
“Yes,” she said.
He watched her seriously as the wind bit cold across them both. His left eye twitched.
She let her breath go, inhaled sharply, let her gaze wander down, down to the snow, and started to cry again.
The guard watched her, wincing, then lowered his gun.
“Give me the message,” he said.
“I… I need to see—”
“Nobody sees the Director, ma’am. I’m sorry. Give me the message and I’ll let him know as soon as he’s free.”
Eva shook her head sadly, inhaled deeply.
“It’s… it’s personal. I don’t think Dobroslav would want anyone else to—”
“Ma’am, I appreciate your concerns, but I’m afraid there’s no way you can see him. No disrespect, but you’ve just come from your brother’s deathbed. I can’t take the risk that the Director will catch whatever it is that killed your family.”
It was the perfect cue. Eva began crying loudly, fell to her knees, cupping her face in her hands.
“Please!” she wept. “Please, it was his last request! I can’t ignore his last request! Please!”
The guard grit his teeth, looked back at the building and put his hand to his ear again.
“You’re getting this?” he asked quietly. “Yes. All right.”
He reached a hand down to Eva, touching her shoulder lightly.
“The best I can do is the clean room,” he said. “You’ll be separated by two sheets of plastic, but you’ll be able to talk. I know it’s not what you want, but it’s private, and it’s as personal as you’re going to get.”
Eva looked up with teary eyes.
“Thank you!” she gasped. “Thank you! That will be perfect. Absolutely perfect.”