The Combinations, page 133
Home safe. Even the sound of it… The scaffolds, looming out of the swirling
snow. Black shapes flapping in the wind.
Flap! Flap! Flap!
867
It was only once he’d navigated the mess the workmen’d left behind in the
courtyard that Němec could see the caretaker’s door was ajar. There didn’t seem
to be any point knocking. The green parrot stared out at him from the window,
eye stuck to the glass, unmoving. The devious creature made no sound when he
pushed the door open & stepped inside. The reason was obvious. Someone had
shot a hole in it — there was blood with bits of feather in it all up the wall, the
perch wedged under the windowsill with the bird’s head sticking up like it was
on sentry duty. It looked like it’d been that way for days, turned stiff in the cold,
rigor mortis, eye gone dim. There was something faintly ridiculous about it
sitting there like that, like a stuffed toy with the stuffing blown out of it,
grinning at him, its black tongue between its beak, caked with dried puke.
They say parrots have long memories. I bet you could’ve told them a pretty
story, eh, Polly? Someone had knocked over the kitchen table. Broken china &
tea leaves littered the floor. A smashed jar of uncandied honey. A cracked
rhinestone broach. Whoever it was must’ve turned up right when the old bird
was reading her fortune. Wonder if she saw it coming… Further inside the flat
there was a smell of cinders hanging in the air, but no smoke. The glowing blue
eye of the large old woodframed Tesla faintly hissed. Němec switched it off.
Now the only sound in the place was of the soles of his shoes on linoleum. There
was a bed-sit out the back & that was all, a fairly Spartan existence for our
Severínová. Wardrobe virtually bare, drawers containing only knickknacks:
pencils, blank sheets of blue letter-paper, tweezers, a magnifying glass, eyedrops,
balls of yarn, knitting needles, a pattern book & a photo album with all the
pictures torn out. As if, for whatever reason, the woman had been determined to
leave behind only the minimum possible trace.
Back in the kitchen, he went through the drawers & cupboards again
looking for what wasn’t there to be found. Whoever they were, they’d gone to
the effort of wiping their shoes at the door — but the footprints could still be
seen, just faintly, where the spilt Yunan tea had dried & the honey had set.
There would’ve been two of them: they would’ve come in through the door
while the caretaker was busy gazing into her cup — they wouldn’t’ve been
expecting the parrot, though — it would’ve kicked up its usual fuss, maybe gone
for one of them with its beak, & so they popped it — then what happened?
Maybe they knocked Severínová on the head & put her in a bag — but why?
Why go to the trouble of kidnapping an old babička with virtually nothing to
her name? And if they’d simply wanted to do her in, why steal the body?
Němec kept looking. There was a pile of ashes lying in the grate of the old
868
iron stove, the source of the cinder smell. He reached in & got his hands dirty
sifting through fine leaves of carbonised paper. He tried gently lifting a piece out
but it disintegrated between his fingers. Getting an idea he went back out to the
bed-sit & found the tweezers & magnifying glass, then tried again: no matter
how delicately he worked, there were only fragments — at best, bits of printed
type, black on black, which could’ve said anything. But by digging with the
tweezers he had more luck. Severínová must’ve been hoping to hide it, because it
was inside a folded square of tinfoil at the back of the grate: the foil was black
with charcoal, but the photograph it contained barely showed a blemish.
At first Němec wasn’t sure he was seeing clearly & then he was. At first
he figured it must’ve been Alice Steinerová, in one of those movie stills. The
Teratologists. Though how the hell it could’ve got into the caretaker’s fireplace
was something else. But that hardly mattered, because it wasn’t. Staring out at
him from the photograph was the face of Elsbeth von N____. It was an almost
identical photograph to the one the caretaker had given him months ago, the
one of the Prof sitting at a table on the Barrandov Terraces, the one Němec left
beside the Old Man’s urn at Olšanská — except that in the place where the
Prof’d been sitting in the other photo there was now an empty chair & where
before there’d been an empty chair Elsbeth von N____ was now sitting. She was
much younger, but not as young as you’d expect. Her features were exceptionally
fine, striking even, severe. Her hair was cut very short, like Alice Steinerová’s.
And unlike the Prof in the first picture, Elsbeth von N____ was gazing intently
past the lens of the camera, instead of at it.
But it wasn’t what she might’ve been looking at that bothered Němec.
What bothered him was the fact that Elsbeth von N____ appeared to be dressed
in a man’s grey military uniform, deathshead waffenfarbe stitched on the left
lapel like a tiny Karl Lagerfeld mask. Apart from that little anomaly, the same
chessboard was sitting on the table. As in the first photograph, the board
showed the position at the end of a game: white’s king in checkmate, but even
clearer now was the fact that both of black’s bishops were positioned on white
squares. Somehow neither the Prof nor Elsbeth von N____ seemed to’ve
noticed. Or else one of them had accidentally disturbed the arrangement (getting
up from the table, perhaps)? Or maybe it’d been intended that way: some kind of
drama concealed in a calculated error — a code, a sign, a riddle addressed to the
person behind the camera, or someone else, someone in the future — someone
869
who was expected to look at that photograph and recognise the specific
significance of one of black’s bishops being out of place.*
In this second picture, Elsbeth von N____ was resting one of her hands
on an attaché case lying open on the adjacent chair. A moment earlier, or a
moment later, she & the Prof might’ve been in conversation. He might’ve been
showing her something, as was his habit, on the board, or from the attaché.
There might’ve been a third party, too. The whole thing might even’ve been
staged as some kind of fancy-dress tableau, in questionable taste admittedly,
but… Whatever it was, something about the occasion had demanded a
photograph: one of them had brought a camera — perhaps they’d even brought
the camera for the express purpose of recording their terrace rendezvous,
recording that particular scene, that particular tableau. Except they hadn’t
recorded a rendezvous. In neither photograph did the two subjects appear
together, but only separately. Could there’ve been yet another picture, snapped
by somebody else — a person seated at a neighbouring table perhaps, or (was
there a reason for her omission?) Alžběta Hájková, whose absence might be
construed as more than a little conspicuous? A third picture, in which they were
both, the Prof & Elsbeth von N____, in the same frame?
Absorbed in the drama of the photograph, Němec almost failed to register
the date pencilled on the back, in the lower right-hand corner. June, . He
stared at it. It seemed too fantastic, ridiculous, absurd. Could this have had
something to do with the Prof’s secret? A secret the caretaker had guarded, till
now, loyal to the end? But why now? Then a different thought occurred to
Němec: Was the picture real, or was it something else — something that only
potentially existed, once, as a kind of hypothesis, acted-out in advance yet
ultimately unrealised, cancelled-out — a perturbation merely, haunting the
present like a ghost? Or was he, Němec, still deceiving himself? Was the image
itself a deception & not at all what it seemed? Němec kept studying the
photograph, the face, the uniform, the date. He couldn’t stop wondering why
Severínová had lied? It was obvious, of course, why she lied. But why hold onto
that picture? Right up to the end. And even then she’d tried to protect it. Who
was she hiding it from? And who was she hiding it for? Why had she kept the
photograph at all? What did Elsbeth von N____ mean to her?
Němec switched off the light & pulled the door closed behind him, the
dead parrot still there with its eye frozen to the window. He stopped & listened.
* But which one? [:]
870
There was only the sound of the snow falling very faintly now. Somehow he
knew that in the meaning of the photograph lay the key to something
important. Retreating back upstairs to the sanctuary of the hidden room, he sat
for a long time, taking stock. The Nazi manuscript was on the desk where he’d
left it, the Reich eagle, trying to tell him something, not by ciphered runes but
by something obvious & overlooked.
Němec lay the photo on the desk & went over it again with a magnifying
glass: the image bulged up at him in facets as he swept the glass back & forth
looking for clues. And at last it began to dawn on him: What did he know about
Elsbeth von N____, except that he’d seen her once in the flesh & once before in
a photograph…? Staring at the face of the v officer in the picture, a very
obvious fact presented itself. It should’ve been obvious from the very start, from
the moment the Prof first mentioned Kircher’s letter. How everything about
him & it — everything Němec had accepted as being the case — was in actuality
supported by nothing but a fabric of supposition & circumstance. He wanted to
put the Prof somehow into that picture, his face there beside the face he was
staring at, to bridge that gap. The chessboard, the Nazi uniform, the attaché
case (just like the one sitting there, in the room he was in now, beside the desk,
identical to it), the people in the background, the telltale date pencilled on the
back making nonsense of chronology. And if the Prof didn’t belong in that
picture, was it because he was never there?
Perhaps, Němec thought, adding the situation up, there was still a chance
he could still get past whoever might be down on the street waiting for him —
slip back out unnoticed, make one last foray. To retrieve the one piece of the
puzzle that might shed light on the mystery. He took his hat, stuffed the
photograph in his jacket pocket, then out through the cupboard into the hall,
down the stairs, past the scaffolds. No-one tried to stop him.
Just click your heels & think of…
The cemetery looked different at night — the lights of the City reflecting off the
snow, the clouds like a glowing shroud making the trees skeleton-thin, their
branches meshed-together like spiderwebs against the sky… The nighttram’s
bell faded as the tram heaved off past the freight terminal towards the valley. A
glacial wind blew along the wide unsheltered boulevard, the snow underfoot
turning to ice. Němec kept close to the cemetery wall, groping for the gate, like a
blindman with a stick. It was a small gate with a Judas-hole & with an effort he
871
supposed he’d able to climb it without breaking his neck. But he must’ve fainted
from the pain, heaving himself over, because the next thing he was lying on a
mound of snow & mulched leaves, but still in one piece.
For a moment he experienced that familiar thigh-tingling sense of déjà vu,
seeing in his mind-of-minds the Old Man in brown suit paring his fingernails. It
passed. Somewhere an undertaker’s mutt growled in its sleep — nearby or
further off, it was impossible to tell. Němec made his way through the labyrinth
of headstones to the alcoved wall where the urns stood in tiers like boxes at an
opera — the most patient of all audiences, places booked for the last show in the
world. They’d be waiting a while yet, he thought, & if it ever came, it’d be over
before they knew it.
The face watching out at him from behind the square window was still
enough like the Prof’s. Němec had to smash the glass to retrieve the picture &
prayed the deadman would forgive me the trespass. In the gloom of the
cemetery, by the wall, under the glow of a streetlamp, he pulled out the photo of
Elsbeth von N____ & held it up beside the Prof, trying to get the two images
into the same focus, like disjointed Siamese twins. Side-by-side, they somehow
failed to connect. The backgrounds were at odds, as if a key element had been
shifted. The camera position in the second picture was further to the right, more
elevated, the river clearly visible below the terraces, yet something about the
scenery itself had been adjusted, or left out, or avoided — something that
couldn’t be shown.
Like the date on the back of the first picture, the one with the Prof. A “”
superimposed on the “,” almost but not entirely obliterating it — something
Němec had entirely failed to twig before — making it the annus horribilis of
& not that holiday in the foothills of state socialism four years hence. Was
someone trying to buy time? (Anyone we know?) Němec put the two
photographs together again, like a shot/reverse-shot in a film that was out of
sync. But it wasn’t only the angles that didn’t match: placed next to each other,
the faces, also, seemed to form a contradiction: “the Prof” on the left, “Elsbeth
von N____” on the right (or he on her right & she on his left). But what Němec
took for contradiction was possibly nothing more than disillusionment. Like the
true believers of the Revolution when their time came to be strung up. How did
a person live with their own disbelief?
Under the dim streetlight Němec tried to change “the Prof” back into
himself. Perhaps it was the wind that did it, a brief flare of the streetlight
between shifting branches, only slightly, but enough — enough to see what he’d
872
so far failed to see. For too long he’d been making his own pact with the Devil,
seduced by details, becoming blind to the bigger picture. What the movement of
the light showed him was the scenario for a very different story than the one
he’d been telling himself. All he needed now was to write it, for everything to
fall into place, or nearly into place. And only nearly everything. It might even
have a happy ending, if he ever got that far.
873
63
___________
THE CASE OF ELDRICH VON N____
A man can have so little liking for himself that people come to detest him.
Right at this moment, Tomáš Hájek, Snr. [T.H.] a.k.a. Josef Kulička,
junior archivist at the State Literary Archive situated on the premises of Strahov
Monastery, is thinking precisely this — wishing he was as far from where he
presently is as humanly possible: in Tahiti, for example, the South Pole, or the
Moon.
It’s been eight months since that nut Heydrich took von Neurath’s job as
Reichsprotektor (acting) & for the last six of them T.H. has felt like he’s been
losing his marbles. His assumed identity serves a double purpose, to protect
himself on the one hand against charges of collaboration by the partisan
underground, & on the other to throw the Gestapo off his scent on the
offchance someone gets wise to his little blackmarket sideline in literary
antiquities.
Recently T.H.’s conscience has been troubling him more than usual, on
account of this Heydrich, who’s had most of his (Kulička’s) colleagues tortured
& shot on account of some private obsession to get his hands on the lost
alchemical library of Rudolf II & one volume in particular, the Roger Bacon
manuscript, socalled, the original (but not copy) of which, unbeknownst to
Heydrich (but not to T.H.), is at that moment residing in a safe deposit box at
the First Bank of America, Manhattan branch, registered to the widow of one
W.M. Voynich. Kulička’s on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, but so far T.H. has
had the advantage: he knows Josef Kulička doesn’t exist, while the Gestapo (he
thinks) don’t yet know he exists.
The idea had come from Eldrich von N____: they’d known each other
since kindergarten. Kulička is T.H.’s insurance policy & a convenient cover for
Eldrich von N____’s scam-mongering: his insurance policy is that he’s managed,
through old Silesian family connections, to get himself a junior commission at the
Ministry of Inertia, complete with desk, pen-set & tailored grey v uniform.
When he’s not busy supplying the “enemy” with morale-defeating celeb gossip
snow. Black shapes flapping in the wind.
Flap! Flap! Flap!
867
It was only once he’d navigated the mess the workmen’d left behind in the
courtyard that Němec could see the caretaker’s door was ajar. There didn’t seem
to be any point knocking. The green parrot stared out at him from the window,
eye stuck to the glass, unmoving. The devious creature made no sound when he
pushed the door open & stepped inside. The reason was obvious. Someone had
shot a hole in it — there was blood with bits of feather in it all up the wall, the
perch wedged under the windowsill with the bird’s head sticking up like it was
on sentry duty. It looked like it’d been that way for days, turned stiff in the cold,
rigor mortis, eye gone dim. There was something faintly ridiculous about it
sitting there like that, like a stuffed toy with the stuffing blown out of it,
grinning at him, its black tongue between its beak, caked with dried puke.
They say parrots have long memories. I bet you could’ve told them a pretty
story, eh, Polly? Someone had knocked over the kitchen table. Broken china &
tea leaves littered the floor. A smashed jar of uncandied honey. A cracked
rhinestone broach. Whoever it was must’ve turned up right when the old bird
was reading her fortune. Wonder if she saw it coming… Further inside the flat
there was a smell of cinders hanging in the air, but no smoke. The glowing blue
eye of the large old woodframed Tesla faintly hissed. Němec switched it off.
Now the only sound in the place was of the soles of his shoes on linoleum. There
was a bed-sit out the back & that was all, a fairly Spartan existence for our
Severínová. Wardrobe virtually bare, drawers containing only knickknacks:
pencils, blank sheets of blue letter-paper, tweezers, a magnifying glass, eyedrops,
balls of yarn, knitting needles, a pattern book & a photo album with all the
pictures torn out. As if, for whatever reason, the woman had been determined to
leave behind only the minimum possible trace.
Back in the kitchen, he went through the drawers & cupboards again
looking for what wasn’t there to be found. Whoever they were, they’d gone to
the effort of wiping their shoes at the door — but the footprints could still be
seen, just faintly, where the spilt Yunan tea had dried & the honey had set.
There would’ve been two of them: they would’ve come in through the door
while the caretaker was busy gazing into her cup — they wouldn’t’ve been
expecting the parrot, though — it would’ve kicked up its usual fuss, maybe gone
for one of them with its beak, & so they popped it — then what happened?
Maybe they knocked Severínová on the head & put her in a bag — but why?
Why go to the trouble of kidnapping an old babička with virtually nothing to
her name? And if they’d simply wanted to do her in, why steal the body?
Němec kept looking. There was a pile of ashes lying in the grate of the old
868
iron stove, the source of the cinder smell. He reached in & got his hands dirty
sifting through fine leaves of carbonised paper. He tried gently lifting a piece out
but it disintegrated between his fingers. Getting an idea he went back out to the
bed-sit & found the tweezers & magnifying glass, then tried again: no matter
how delicately he worked, there were only fragments — at best, bits of printed
type, black on black, which could’ve said anything. But by digging with the
tweezers he had more luck. Severínová must’ve been hoping to hide it, because it
was inside a folded square of tinfoil at the back of the grate: the foil was black
with charcoal, but the photograph it contained barely showed a blemish.
At first Němec wasn’t sure he was seeing clearly & then he was. At first
he figured it must’ve been Alice Steinerová, in one of those movie stills. The
Teratologists. Though how the hell it could’ve got into the caretaker’s fireplace
was something else. But that hardly mattered, because it wasn’t. Staring out at
him from the photograph was the face of Elsbeth von N____. It was an almost
identical photograph to the one the caretaker had given him months ago, the
one of the Prof sitting at a table on the Barrandov Terraces, the one Němec left
beside the Old Man’s urn at Olšanská — except that in the place where the
Prof’d been sitting in the other photo there was now an empty chair & where
before there’d been an empty chair Elsbeth von N____ was now sitting. She was
much younger, but not as young as you’d expect. Her features were exceptionally
fine, striking even, severe. Her hair was cut very short, like Alice Steinerová’s.
And unlike the Prof in the first picture, Elsbeth von N____ was gazing intently
past the lens of the camera, instead of at it.
But it wasn’t what she might’ve been looking at that bothered Němec.
What bothered him was the fact that Elsbeth von N____ appeared to be dressed
in a man’s grey military uniform, deathshead waffenfarbe stitched on the left
lapel like a tiny Karl Lagerfeld mask. Apart from that little anomaly, the same
chessboard was sitting on the table. As in the first photograph, the board
showed the position at the end of a game: white’s king in checkmate, but even
clearer now was the fact that both of black’s bishops were positioned on white
squares. Somehow neither the Prof nor Elsbeth von N____ seemed to’ve
noticed. Or else one of them had accidentally disturbed the arrangement (getting
up from the table, perhaps)? Or maybe it’d been intended that way: some kind of
drama concealed in a calculated error — a code, a sign, a riddle addressed to the
person behind the camera, or someone else, someone in the future — someone
869
who was expected to look at that photograph and recognise the specific
significance of one of black’s bishops being out of place.*
In this second picture, Elsbeth von N____ was resting one of her hands
on an attaché case lying open on the adjacent chair. A moment earlier, or a
moment later, she & the Prof might’ve been in conversation. He might’ve been
showing her something, as was his habit, on the board, or from the attaché.
There might’ve been a third party, too. The whole thing might even’ve been
staged as some kind of fancy-dress tableau, in questionable taste admittedly,
but… Whatever it was, something about the occasion had demanded a
photograph: one of them had brought a camera — perhaps they’d even brought
the camera for the express purpose of recording their terrace rendezvous,
recording that particular scene, that particular tableau. Except they hadn’t
recorded a rendezvous. In neither photograph did the two subjects appear
together, but only separately. Could there’ve been yet another picture, snapped
by somebody else — a person seated at a neighbouring table perhaps, or (was
there a reason for her omission?) Alžběta Hájková, whose absence might be
construed as more than a little conspicuous? A third picture, in which they were
both, the Prof & Elsbeth von N____, in the same frame?
Absorbed in the drama of the photograph, Němec almost failed to register
the date pencilled on the back, in the lower right-hand corner. June, . He
stared at it. It seemed too fantastic, ridiculous, absurd. Could this have had
something to do with the Prof’s secret? A secret the caretaker had guarded, till
now, loyal to the end? But why now? Then a different thought occurred to
Němec: Was the picture real, or was it something else — something that only
potentially existed, once, as a kind of hypothesis, acted-out in advance yet
ultimately unrealised, cancelled-out — a perturbation merely, haunting the
present like a ghost? Or was he, Němec, still deceiving himself? Was the image
itself a deception & not at all what it seemed? Němec kept studying the
photograph, the face, the uniform, the date. He couldn’t stop wondering why
Severínová had lied? It was obvious, of course, why she lied. But why hold onto
that picture? Right up to the end. And even then she’d tried to protect it. Who
was she hiding it from? And who was she hiding it for? Why had she kept the
photograph at all? What did Elsbeth von N____ mean to her?
Němec switched off the light & pulled the door closed behind him, the
dead parrot still there with its eye frozen to the window. He stopped & listened.
* But which one? [:]
870
There was only the sound of the snow falling very faintly now. Somehow he
knew that in the meaning of the photograph lay the key to something
important. Retreating back upstairs to the sanctuary of the hidden room, he sat
for a long time, taking stock. The Nazi manuscript was on the desk where he’d
left it, the Reich eagle, trying to tell him something, not by ciphered runes but
by something obvious & overlooked.
Němec lay the photo on the desk & went over it again with a magnifying
glass: the image bulged up at him in facets as he swept the glass back & forth
looking for clues. And at last it began to dawn on him: What did he know about
Elsbeth von N____, except that he’d seen her once in the flesh & once before in
a photograph…? Staring at the face of the v officer in the picture, a very
obvious fact presented itself. It should’ve been obvious from the very start, from
the moment the Prof first mentioned Kircher’s letter. How everything about
him & it — everything Němec had accepted as being the case — was in actuality
supported by nothing but a fabric of supposition & circumstance. He wanted to
put the Prof somehow into that picture, his face there beside the face he was
staring at, to bridge that gap. The chessboard, the Nazi uniform, the attaché
case (just like the one sitting there, in the room he was in now, beside the desk,
identical to it), the people in the background, the telltale date pencilled on the
back making nonsense of chronology. And if the Prof didn’t belong in that
picture, was it because he was never there?
Perhaps, Němec thought, adding the situation up, there was still a chance
he could still get past whoever might be down on the street waiting for him —
slip back out unnoticed, make one last foray. To retrieve the one piece of the
puzzle that might shed light on the mystery. He took his hat, stuffed the
photograph in his jacket pocket, then out through the cupboard into the hall,
down the stairs, past the scaffolds. No-one tried to stop him.
Just click your heels & think of…
The cemetery looked different at night — the lights of the City reflecting off the
snow, the clouds like a glowing shroud making the trees skeleton-thin, their
branches meshed-together like spiderwebs against the sky… The nighttram’s
bell faded as the tram heaved off past the freight terminal towards the valley. A
glacial wind blew along the wide unsheltered boulevard, the snow underfoot
turning to ice. Němec kept close to the cemetery wall, groping for the gate, like a
blindman with a stick. It was a small gate with a Judas-hole & with an effort he
871
supposed he’d able to climb it without breaking his neck. But he must’ve fainted
from the pain, heaving himself over, because the next thing he was lying on a
mound of snow & mulched leaves, but still in one piece.
For a moment he experienced that familiar thigh-tingling sense of déjà vu,
seeing in his mind-of-minds the Old Man in brown suit paring his fingernails. It
passed. Somewhere an undertaker’s mutt growled in its sleep — nearby or
further off, it was impossible to tell. Němec made his way through the labyrinth
of headstones to the alcoved wall where the urns stood in tiers like boxes at an
opera — the most patient of all audiences, places booked for the last show in the
world. They’d be waiting a while yet, he thought, & if it ever came, it’d be over
before they knew it.
The face watching out at him from behind the square window was still
enough like the Prof’s. Němec had to smash the glass to retrieve the picture &
prayed the deadman would forgive me the trespass. In the gloom of the
cemetery, by the wall, under the glow of a streetlamp, he pulled out the photo of
Elsbeth von N____ & held it up beside the Prof, trying to get the two images
into the same focus, like disjointed Siamese twins. Side-by-side, they somehow
failed to connect. The backgrounds were at odds, as if a key element had been
shifted. The camera position in the second picture was further to the right, more
elevated, the river clearly visible below the terraces, yet something about the
scenery itself had been adjusted, or left out, or avoided — something that
couldn’t be shown.
Like the date on the back of the first picture, the one with the Prof. A “”
superimposed on the “,” almost but not entirely obliterating it — something
Němec had entirely failed to twig before — making it the annus horribilis of
& not that holiday in the foothills of state socialism four years hence. Was
someone trying to buy time? (Anyone we know?) Němec put the two
photographs together again, like a shot/reverse-shot in a film that was out of
sync. But it wasn’t only the angles that didn’t match: placed next to each other,
the faces, also, seemed to form a contradiction: “the Prof” on the left, “Elsbeth
von N____” on the right (or he on her right & she on his left). But what Němec
took for contradiction was possibly nothing more than disillusionment. Like the
true believers of the Revolution when their time came to be strung up. How did
a person live with their own disbelief?
Under the dim streetlight Němec tried to change “the Prof” back into
himself. Perhaps it was the wind that did it, a brief flare of the streetlight
between shifting branches, only slightly, but enough — enough to see what he’d
872
so far failed to see. For too long he’d been making his own pact with the Devil,
seduced by details, becoming blind to the bigger picture. What the movement of
the light showed him was the scenario for a very different story than the one
he’d been telling himself. All he needed now was to write it, for everything to
fall into place, or nearly into place. And only nearly everything. It might even
have a happy ending, if he ever got that far.
873
63
___________
THE CASE OF ELDRICH VON N____
A man can have so little liking for himself that people come to detest him.
Right at this moment, Tomáš Hájek, Snr. [T.H.] a.k.a. Josef Kulička,
junior archivist at the State Literary Archive situated on the premises of Strahov
Monastery, is thinking precisely this — wishing he was as far from where he
presently is as humanly possible: in Tahiti, for example, the South Pole, or the
Moon.
It’s been eight months since that nut Heydrich took von Neurath’s job as
Reichsprotektor (acting) & for the last six of them T.H. has felt like he’s been
losing his marbles. His assumed identity serves a double purpose, to protect
himself on the one hand against charges of collaboration by the partisan
underground, & on the other to throw the Gestapo off his scent on the
offchance someone gets wise to his little blackmarket sideline in literary
antiquities.
Recently T.H.’s conscience has been troubling him more than usual, on
account of this Heydrich, who’s had most of his (Kulička’s) colleagues tortured
& shot on account of some private obsession to get his hands on the lost
alchemical library of Rudolf II & one volume in particular, the Roger Bacon
manuscript, socalled, the original (but not copy) of which, unbeknownst to
Heydrich (but not to T.H.), is at that moment residing in a safe deposit box at
the First Bank of America, Manhattan branch, registered to the widow of one
W.M. Voynich. Kulička’s on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, but so far T.H. has
had the advantage: he knows Josef Kulička doesn’t exist, while the Gestapo (he
thinks) don’t yet know he exists.
The idea had come from Eldrich von N____: they’d known each other
since kindergarten. Kulička is T.H.’s insurance policy & a convenient cover for
Eldrich von N____’s scam-mongering: his insurance policy is that he’s managed,
through old Silesian family connections, to get himself a junior commission at the
Ministry of Inertia, complete with desk, pen-set & tailored grey v uniform.
When he’s not busy supplying the “enemy” with morale-defeating celeb gossip
