The Kingfisher Secret Read online

  Elena looked down at the thin, frayed carpet.

  “I have come here to tell you, Elena Klimentová, that what happened today does not matter.”

  “What is this?” Josef took an aggressive step toward Sergei, who ignored him.

  “You see, darling.” Her mother took both of her cold hands in hers. “It’s a new beginning for us.”

  Sergei Sorokin shook Coach Vacek’s hand and thanked him for taking such good care of Elena. He did not shake Josef’s hand.

  “Who are you?” Coach Vacek stood up straight.

  Sergei pointed to the door. “Good evening,” he said.

  Coach Vacek did not move. “I asked: who are you?”

  Sergei stepped close to him and spoke softly. “Leave. Or I will make you leave.”

  “Petr. What is this?” Coach Vacek looked at Elena’s parents.

  “Go,” said her father, weakly.

  When the front door closed and they were alone, Elena drew a shaky breath. She was sure something terrible was about to happen. This man, Sergei Sorokin, would take her father away and put him in a work camp. Somehow he knew what her father had been thinking since the Russians had arrived in Prague. He knew her father had cheered for Věra Čáslavská at the Olympics when she protested against the Soviet occupation at the awards ceremony. Sergei Sorokin was going to pull a gun from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and shoot her father in the head with that mysterious, crooked smile still on his face.

  Outside, the Škoda roared away from the little house.

  It took a moment to realize Sergei Sorokin was speaking to her. “Your grandmother, I understand, was the foreman of the Laurin & Klement factory.”

  “Yes, sir,” Elena whispered.

  “You are Škoda royalty.”

  Elena watched her mother smile. This was always Jana’s contention, that communism had eroded all the natural and good hierarchies of Mladá Boleslav. They belonged at the top of the hill, in the suite of rooms Jana herself had grown up in. Piano ought to play in the evenings. They ought to dress for dinner, to have a maid.

  Royalty.

  “I like this about Czechoslovakia. You have these matriarchal tendencies.” Sergei Sorokin smiled again, at Jana this time. “Yes?”

  “Oh yes,” said Jana.

  Was that a flower in her mother’s hair? Elena realized it was an old piece of fabric, an artificial rose clipped with a bobby pin.

  “And you, Elena Klimentová, you are so astonishingly beautiful.”

  Elena looked at the carpet again. Was this a threat?

  “You must be wondering why I am here, Elena Klimentová. Can I call you Elena?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  How old was he? Not much older than her, yet he carried so much more intelligence and experience in the way he spoke, the way he stood, the way he mastered the room.

  There were four glasses on the table. He reached down and filled the empty one with Becherovka and handed out the glasses.

  Elena smelled hers. The bitter smell of Becherovka reminded her of Christmas, and the old man winter statue in the town square. This was a nightmare. The Russians had ruined everything. Yet this young man with the cunning smile had not drawn a gun to punish them—yet.

  “To Elena.”

  They lifted their glasses and toasted her and drank.

  “But I fell off the balance beam. Today was a disaster.”

  “In three weeks, Elena, you will move to Prague. You have been accepted into a special program at Charles University, one of the oldest and finest universities in the world.”

  “A very special program, darling,” said Jana.

  “But I applied to no program.”

  “And your parents: they will be moving up the hill, to a much larger apartment. There will be a lovely room for you, when you visit.”

  “You see?” said Jana.

  Elena’s father, Petr, looked at the wall. He had already finished his glass of Becherovka.

  “What sort of program, Mr. Sorokin?”

  “I know you’re a brilliant student, Elena. I spoke to your teachers here in Mladá Boleslav. In Prague you will learn languages and culture. You will learn about economics and finance, philosophy, political philosophy, what we sometimes call statecraft. You will learn how it is to live in other countries, even Western countries. Do you know the French word étiquette? You will learn etiquette. Manners for any room, any audience. Fashion, even. And you will continue with your gymnastics, if you like. With the best coaches in Czechoslovakia. How does that sound?”

  Why me, Elena was thinking. What have I done?

  “There is only one thing you must remember, and it is important.”

  “This is very important,” said Jana. “Listen carefully to this part.”

  Sergei Sorokin turned to her father and watched him for a moment before he addressed Elena again. “It is life or death, I’m afraid.” He paused, his pale face stern. “You must never speak of this.”

  “Of Charles University?”

  “Oh yes, of course you will talk about that. You will be officially enrolled in the physical education department, given your sporting prowess. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can talk about this. Your parents can boast about you, their scholar. But the special program, the special opportunities, the special life all this will afford you: you can never speak of it.”

  “But why?”

  For a moment Sergei Sorokin looked at her the way he had looked at Coach Vacek, and Elena shivered. This man would reach into your mouth and tear your tongue out. “That will become clear later.”

  “Must I say yes, Mr. Sorokin? What if I…”

  For the second time, her father spoke. They all turned to him.

  “I am so sorry, darling.” Her father’s eyes had filled with tears. “It is my most important job, to protect you. But you must say yes to this program. You cannot refuse.”

  5

  PRAGUE, 2016

  The next morning, there was a knock on Grace’s door. A man of about twenty, in a cheap black polyester suit, introduced himself as Gabriel the chauffeur. He led Grace down to the lobby and out to a long silver Craig sedan, not quite a limousine. Once she was settled, he went off to get Elena. The seats were black leather with wood trim and there was a tiny cooler between the front and back. Inside there were soft drinks, water, and a bottle of Perrier-Jouët champagne.

  Grace spoke French but not as well as Elena, who, as she entered the car, was already arguing on the phone about a new distribution deal for her fragrances in the Galeries Lafayette in France. The woman on the phone had wanted to wait until after the election, but Elena disagreed and was gently accusing the woman of discriminatory practices.

  It was a gray morning, with rain threatening to fall. Grace watched out the window as the cobblestones of old Prague turned to pavement and the carved stone buildings turned to precast concrete. Curves and flourishes of art and beauty became hard rectangles. There were few pedestrians around, and no cyclists.

  Grace leaned forward with her notebook. “Gabriel, is there a name for the architectural style of communism?”

  He pointed to a typically ugly set of concrete towers. “You mean for this?”

  “Yes.”

  Next to her, Elena had apparently achieved a victory, and was praising Madame for her intelligence and courage.

  “These are paneláky. It was a very fast and efficient way to build. Many families lived in the same apartments exactly. We in Czech Republic are the world champions of concrete.”

  They reminded Grace of public housing projects on the outskirts of New York and Minneapolis. “It’s so depressing. Sorry.” Gabriel looked at her through the rear-view mirror. “You are a happy woman?”

  “I’m in the back seat of a Craig with a bottle of champagne in Prague. How could I not be?”

  “This is not the Czech way. Maybe someday my children or the children of my children will be happy always like Americans.”

>   Elena ended her call. “Bien. Shall we get started, duše moje?”

  On the flight to Prague, Grace had come up with eighteen questions from eighteen potential women in flyover states, none of them terribly interesting. “How do you speak so many languages?” she asked, instead.

  “Not so many.”

  “Surely it wasn’t normal for a Czech girl, growing up, to be so proficient in languages?”

  Elena reached over for her notebook. “This does not sound like a question for a woman in Ephraim, Utah.”

  They were out of the city, but now and then a hollow mini-metropolis would appear in a valley. There were rural versions of concrete housing projects: a tower with a factory beside it, both now abandoned, a rusted swing set.

  Steadman Coe had ruined Grace’s planned transition to serious investigative journalism, but he had been right about one thing: she had unique access to Elena Craig. Last night, Grace had thought of Elena, alone in the darkness of the presidential suite. She was much more than the owner of a chain of spas. Elena was a complicated, successful, intriguing woman one step away from enormous power. In her small but perfect hotel room, Grace had played with the idea of writing her life story. She went through her own notes from their five meetings, but there wasn’t much outside the Ask Elena material. She had flipped through everything she could find online about Elena’s childhood in Mladá Boleslav, about her marriage to Anthony Craig, about the divorce. Most of it came from New York gossip magazines in the 1990s and it wasn’t terribly interesting.

  She pulled a book out of her purse, the book she had bought at the airport in Montreal: Anthony Craig’s 1988 memoir of business success, Make It Big or Don’t Bother. It was a bestseller again, now that he was running for president. That morning, over a bowl of granola and yogurt in the Four Seasons restaurant, she had underlined the Elena sections. Now, in the back of the Craig, she flipped to page seventy-nine and read aloud.

  Elena Klimentová was on the 1972 Olympic gymnastics team for Czechoslovakia, she was a top model in Europe and in Canada, she had a degree from the best college in Prague, she came from this family of car engineers, and she was tough as nails. And here she is, without a date, at my party, the most important day of my life until that moment. Talk about a perfect woman!

  Elena pulled the book from her and flipped through it herself. There were pictures in the middle. “Anthony was exaggerating. I was merely an alternate.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If a better gymnast was sick, I would compete.”

  “You didn’t compete?”

  “No.”

  It was the sort of no that did not invite follow-up questions. Grace pretended nonchalance but she wanted to open her notebook and begin writing. “Was Josef Straka your boyfriend?”

  Elena laughed. “Yes and no. In the end he was like a brother. But you know how it is when you are young.”

  Grace thought of her strange elevator ride as Straka had led her up to the presidential suite. “I didn’t have a boyfriend-brother.”

  Elena gently whacked Grace over the head with Make It Big or Don’t Bother. “We must work on our questions for the Flash. My time is precious.”

  Gabriel said something in Czech and Elena gave him directions. He turned off the highway and they eased down a secondary road into a deep valley with a small river running through it. There was a large stone house at the end of a long driveway lined with gnarled and twisted, leafless fruit trees.

  The Craig stopped at the end of the driveway and Elena waited for Gabriel to come around and open her door. Grace exited on her own and walked over to Elena’s side of the car. Birds called out but otherwise it was silent here. No one could see them or what they were doing for miles and miles. Elena inhaled and opened her arms. “You smell that?”

  To Grace, it smelled like outside.

  “This should be in every bottle of my perfume. Nature, childhood, hope, family, safety.”

  The large stone house was closed up and the shutters were down. Grace described the place in her notebook and took some photos. “Is this your house, Ms. Craig?”

  Elena did not respond for a while. She walked away from the house, to the muddy banks of the river. The water was brown. “When I was in university, I visited my parents here. My father and I went on such beautiful walks. After Anthony and I married, every summer my daughter and I would visit. I would return to America and she would stay with her grandfather.”

  “Before the end of communism?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What was that like?”

  Elena looked at Grace’s notebook.

  “I mean, your daughter must have found it strange to move from the global center of capitalism to a communist country.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s so different. I guess you could say she lived a double life.”

  “Oh it was not a double life at all. My father taught her things. To fish, to garden, to live on the land in a traditional European way. She learned to take care of herself whether she is a billionaire like Anthony or…” Elena looked at the river again. “My father died too young. I was not here for him when he needed me.”

  “Your father? He believed in communism?”

  “My father believed in his family. He believed in order and safety. There are compromises we make, sacrifices we make. We all do! It does not matter where we live. We protect our children.”

  “How about your mom? You don’t talk about her much.”

  “Oh she very much adores her life in New York and in Florida.” Elena put her arm around Grace, led her back toward the car, and pulled the notebook from her hand. She opened it and looked at what Grace had been scrawling. Gabriel walked ahead, to open the door.

  “Communism doesn’t sound so bad for your family. This is a pretty nice place.”

  “We were lucky. But I will show you something else.”

  Fifteen nearly silent minutes later, they arrived on the flat outskirts of a hilltop town: Mladá Boleslav. Grace wanted to describe it but Elena had not returned her notebook. In Czech, Elena directed Gabriel to an unloved collection of two-storey concrete houses, stained by weather. The trees in the front were neglected. Dusty plastic garbage had gathered in the corners of the yard.

  They stopped in front of a house with two apartments, one up and one down.

  “Does this seem nice to you?” Elena did not look at her as she spoke. “Do you still say communism was not so bad? This is where I lived as a girl. It did not matter that my grandmother was foreman of Laurin & Klement car factory. It did not matter that my parents were educated, my mother an engineer and my father an optician. We lived here, like everyone else. This is communism. Pretty nice, you think?”

  It was difficult to imagine Elena anywhere near this building.

  Grace took a picture of the house and they climbed back into the car. Elena had left the notebook on the seat so Grace took it again and opened it to a new page. She asked what it was like inside the little house, about Elena’s daily routine as a girl. She spoke again of her father and seemed to be on the verge of crying.

  Gabriel drove up a switchback road, toward the hilltop where they passed empty, boarded-up storefronts. Young men and women stood on the sidewalks, drinking beer from cans and smoking cigarettes.

  “What changed?”

  Elena did not answer.

  “How did you and your family go from that house to the beautiful land you showed me?”

  “Like I said, we were lucky.”

  “But what does that mean? Was there a house lottery or something?”

  At the top of the hill there was a hairpin curve and Mladá Boleslav opened into a plaza. There was a statue and a grand old town hall with a clock tower and a cupola shaped like an onion. There were a few industrial-looking pieces of art in the plaza, dark twisted tubes.

  Elena had not answered so Grace continued. “I don’t know much about communist Czechoslovakia. When you were—”

  With
a flash of anger Grace had never seen, Elena turned to her and ripped the notebook out of her hands. She opened it and began to tear out the pages Grace had written on. “Get out,” she whispered.

  “What? Why?”

  “This is not for Ask Elena.” Elena continued to rip the pages out and to stuff them in the side of her door. “I do not know what you are doing, why you are writing these things. For what?”

  “I was…I was going to ask if I could write a book about you. I’m sorry, I should have mentioned it earlier. You’re such an amazing and inspiring woman, to go from that house at the bottom of the hill to your life now, and I think a lot of women would—”

  “Get out of the car.” Elena’s voice was louder.

  “Ms. Craig, please. It’s just an idea. Obviously, if you don’t want me to write it I won’t write it.”

  “A secret book? An exposé? You have abused my trust. Gabriel!” Here Elena switched to Czech, barked some orders. Now that she had ripped out all of the pages with writing on them, she tossed the notebook back to Grace. Gabriel looked in the rear-view mirror, met Grace’s eyes. By the time he had made it around the car Grace had already opened her door.

  Grace stuttered an apology and asked for another chance, but Elena would not look at her. It was raining now and Grace did not have an umbrella or a jacket.

  Without a word, Gabriel moved Grace out of the way, closed the back passenger door, returned to the front seat, and got in. A moment later, the long Craig sedan was rumbling over the cobblestones, past the town hall and down the hill.

  At first it seemed so preposterous Grace wanted to laugh. In all their time together she had never seen Elena react that way to anything. Then she realized it was over: Ask Elena, or at least her role in it. The rain was cold and the wind was unpleasant. There were five or six people in the narrow plaza, walking with bags or leaning against a storefront and smoking. A big black dog wandered through the industrial art, without a leash or even an owner. She was alone in an apparently un-touristed city an hour from Prague.

  Her heart pounding, she scanned the locals for the kindest face and went for a stout, elderly woman standing under the awning of a pet food store with a cigarette in her fingers and a blue beanie on her head.