The Kingfisher Secret Read online

  “Hello, excuse me.”

  The woman did not return her smile but she lifted the cigarette in greeting.

  “Do you speak English?”

  Apparently not. After a beat the woman pointed her cigarette at a building across the plaza.

  “Over there? That store? Someone speaks English there?”

  “English,” said the woman.

  Grace ran over the gray cobblestones of the plaza to a sporting goods store across from a restaurant. It was a short but discouraging journey. She imagined calling Steadman Coe to tell him their most popular feature was in jeopardy and it was entirely her fault.

  Far worse was losing someone she had hoped would become a friend. She did not have many, and in the minutes since Elena had blown up at her in the back of the Craig she had come to see her reaction as extreme but possibly justified. Grace could not imagine what it must have been like to divorce Anthony Craig, to be drawn into his election campaign twenty-four years later, and to have your own efforts as a businesswoman dismissed. Like the journalists in the basement ballroom of the Four Seasons, she had been trying to use Elena to enter Anthony Craig’s orbit of fame and power. With Violet Rain, and now with the notion of a book.

  In the window of the sporting goods store, mannequins were decked out for winter fun: hockey and figure skating, alpine and Nordic skiing, snowshoeing. Grace entered and a fit, muscular woman about her age, wearing black tights and a yellow T-shirt, looked up from a rack of down jackets. She carried a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other.

  “Dobrý den.”

  “Hi there. I’m sorry.” Grace took a deep breath, to slow her heart. “I don’t speak Czech, and I’m a bit lost.”

  “You’ve come to the right place.” The woman smiled. She spoke English with a North American accent. “How can I help you?”

  “I need to get back to Prague. Is there a bus or a train?”

  “Of course. The train runs every hour, I believe, to Prague central station. The express runs less often but if you have a bit of time even the slow train will get you there. It’s about a twenty-five-minute walk to the station. Car trouble?”

  “Sort of.”

  The woman had short red hair and freckles. “Just a moment.” She walked through the shop and behind the cash desk, where she bent down and re-emerged with a small box. “I knew these would come in handy someday.” She pulled out a thick transparent poncho that said Praha 2016 on it, with a laurel leaf logo. “Prague bid for the Olympics a long time ago. They didn’t make the shortlist but they did make a lot of stuff.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh I can’t sell it. I’m not even sure why I kept it around.”

  Grace pulled the poncho over her head. It knocked her glasses off and the woman picked them up. Grace thanked her and introduced herself.

  “I’m Katka.”

  “Your English is amazing,” said Grace. “You lived in…”

  “New York, actually. For seven years, in my twenties. My father trained a woman who ended up in New York, and she hired me in a marketing role for her business. She’s from here in Mladá Boleslav. I’m sure you’ve heard of her, or at least her ex-husband. Elena Craig?”

  6

  PRAGUE, 1970

  A man—no, two men—whispered outside Elena’s door. The dim hallway light, disturbed by shadows, flickered through the cracks.

  It was nothing. She was silly to worry about it. But the whisperers did not pass when she willed them to pass. Instead, her door handle gently shivered.

  Her instinct: leap out of bed and to the window, smash it open and climb down and run. But run where? This was surely nothing, a couple of professors joking around, real life mixed with half a dream. Her days at the university had been long: classes from eight in the morning until five in the evening, and then physical training. Running and gymnastics, but strange things too: self-defense, with a professor from China, and shooting.

  Recently, she had learned how to make a poison from castor oil seeds.

  Break the window! Go! But if she was wrong and this was just a silly prank, it would be an embarrassment for her and for her mother. Her friend Sergei Sorokin would send her home.

  The whispers in the hall changed.

  A man was counting in Russian, down from ten. Seeaym, shayst, pyaht. Now it was too late to go to the window. Elena put her head under her covers and silently called to her father, her tatínek, to save her.

  The door crashed open and two men burst into her room. Elena screamed and one of them hit her in the face, pulled a sack over her head, and bound her hands behind her. Shut up. Shut up, bitch. Whore. Traitor. They growled in her face, with sausage and beer breath so powerful it went through the sack. She called out for help and one of them hit her again, this time so hard she lost consciousness for a moment. Longer than a moment.

  She was in a bus or a van, rattling over cobblestones. Under the sack, her face was wet with blood from her nose. A hand, no, a foot, rubbed up and down her left shin. Then she heard the voice of her friend, her best friend in the program.

  “Elenka,” her friend whispered. “It’s me. Danika.”

  “What’s happening?” Elena sobbed. “My nose is bleeding.”

  “They’re taking us somewhere. Be brave, Elenka. I’m here with you.”

  “Did we do something wrong?”

  The van stopped abruptly. Elena slid forward and her arms, tied to a bar behind her, felt like they would rip from their sockets. The door opened and cold air blew in under her nightgown. For an instant, as it sneaked in under the sack on her face, it was something like pleasure. Their thick boots boomed on the metal floor of the bus, the truck, the van. More words in Russian. A man put his hands on her bare thigh and she screamed at him. He shoved her body aside and fussed with the ropes on her wrists.

  Now she was walking barefoot over cold, wet concrete. “Where are you taking us?” she said, in her schoolgirl Russian.

  “Shut up and it will be better for you, bitch.”

  Elena guessed they were on the other side of the river, beyond the palace, where the city rose west out of the valley. The men who brought them here were not professors, not leaders. This one smelled like old meat. They entered a corridor of echoes, another one.

  Keys jangled.

  “Elena, say nothing to them!” There was a thump—a strike?—and a man told Danika to shut her ugly mouth.

  “Tell my parents, if they kill me…” The man slammed Elena face-first against the cold concrete wall. Her nose hurt again. The man shoved his body into hers and breathed into her neck. She could feel the grotesque bulge of his penis. He spat into her ear that if she said another word what was coming would only hurt worse.

  Then he removed the rope from her wrists, the sack from her head, and shoved her into a small concrete room with mold-blackened walls and a drain in the middle of the floor.

  She was in prison.

  It was true what they said in school, what her father said. Sometimes people say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, and they just disappear.

  This is where they go.

  She thought of Sergei Sorokin, who had been kind to her parents, thankful, solicitous. They were to be praised for raising a daughter so talented, so intelligent, so pretty, so tall, he told them. She was a Slavic princess, destined for greatness.

  Elena went over what she had done, what she had said, what she had read, what she had thought in the past two months of school yet could remember nothing objectionable. What sort of school was it? None of the other girls there knew what they were being trained for either. “Leadership,” was all Sergei ever said. Her professors repeated the same thing. Yet they were not to speak of it, even with each other.

  Perhaps one of the women in the program did not like her, Elena thought now. There were one or two, sullen and mysterious, but surely no one who would hate her enough to put her here with a lie? This is what her father had warned her about. Always be kind: anyone can destroy you with
a phone call.

  She did not want to sit on the cold and dirty floor, in her nightdress, yet there was no choice. Sleep when you can sleep, they had been told. If your enemies interrogate you they will wear you down with fatigue.

  But who? Who were her enemies?

  Just as she lowered herself to the floor the speakers on the ceiling began to screech: repetitive, atonal guitar notes so jarring she had to block her ears.

  Her parents had said something, done something, Elena thought. For different reasons both of them, in their hearts, wanted things to be the way they were before the communists came. Jana wanted to be the queen of the city or at least the boss of the plant. Petr wanted to be left alone with his work and his evenings and weekends in the country. Everyone listened: through the ducts and on the street and in the factory, the stores, over the telephone.

  Her mother in particular found it hard to be silent, to keep a secret. She had been so happy when Elena went to university, so proud to move to the apartment at the top of the hill. There was only one rule and her mother had surely broken it.

  Or maybe Sergei himself, and the whole program, was against the rules. None of her friends in the program believed it had anything to do with the university. She and her parents had thought it was one thing but it was another thing and now their lives were over.

  Hours passed. One mealtime and then another. She tried to sleep through the guitar, through the rumbling in her belly, and she failed.

  She peed in the drain, hoping no one was watching from a hole in the wall. The fluorescent lights were unbearably bright and the noise became a living being, a beast inside her. She stopped thinking about who might see her nakedness and she pulled her nightdress up and wrapped it around her eyes and ears, forced herself to think of anything but food.

  Just as she was beginning to drift into sleep, the door opened with a clunk.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  The same two men pulled her out and into the warmer corridor.

  “You disgusting pig,” one said, as he pulled her dress down over her body. “I saw you shit on the floor.”

  They led her through a door, into a room that was empty but for a few wooden chairs and a poster of a skeleton on the wall. Danika stood shivering in the corner.

  “Elena!”

  The men shoved her into Danika, and the two girls held one another desperately. They whispered. Where are we? What have we done to deserve this? Are we going to die? Not ten seconds later the men dragged them apart.

  “You are stronger than them, Elena!” Danika screamed back at her.

  This next room was dark and hot, lit with a single lamp. It carried the scent of dust and old fumes, like a garage, also cigarettes and something else, something burned—hair? There was a large basin of water. Elena wanted some but she knew not to ask for it. A bearded man sat in the corner, the side of his face barely lit by the orange lamp, smoking. He had an array of implements with him, including a car battery, a bucket, cords and ropes and tools.

  The men turned her around and warned her with a slap in the ear to cooperate. They led her through the room and into a chair, and then—Oh please no—they put the sack over her head again and tied her to the chair, her legs and arms.

  “Now. Quiet. If you fight it will hurt more.”

  She sobbed and moaned. “I want to go home.”

  “Quiet.”

  There was a buzz, an electrical hum. She knew what would happen next. The man in the orange light of the lamp was going to hurt her. She hated the word: torture. Her father could not save her because this man was the police. He was the government.

  What had she said? What had she done? What did she know?

  And then she remembered. She remembered what she knew, what Sergei had told her she was supposed to know if this were ever to happen.

  Nothing.

  She heard the man’s hard soles on the dust. The door slammed shut. He was close enough that she could hear his breathing, smell his cigarette.

  “Where are you, Elena?”

  Nothing.

  “You are part of a special program. Are you not?”

  Nothing.

  “Perhaps they told you it was run by the government. The secret police, perhaps, or the StB, even the KGB. They are liars. They are traitors. They have used you. Why would you, a nobody like you, be invited into a special program?”

  He backed away from her. She could hear him take a deep drag of his cigarette and throw it on the hard floor, mush the butt. His voice turned soft now.

  “Elena Klimentová. Daughter of Petr and Jana, whom you love. You love them. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is not your fault. I see how you are innocent. This is an illegal program. You did not know, did you?”

  Nothing.

  “Here you are, beautiful Elena, in your nightclothes, nearly naked before me. I could do anything to you. But I don’t want to. I am not a bad person. I am only protecting the interests of Czechoslovakia. Do you understand?”

  Nothing.

  “You must tell me one simple thing: the name of the man who recruited you.”

  Elena could feel the warmth of it now, hear the hum. The commander brought the electricity close enough to her cheek that it began to vibrate in her, to hurt in a way nothing else hurt.

  “No,” she moaned. “Please, no.”

  “No what?” He tore her nightdress, in the front, and she struggled against the ropes because she did not want him to see her naked body. “Tell me the name of the man who recruited you.” Now he brought the humming wand close to her breasts and zapped her just once. Every cell in her body exploded with the jolt and she screamed.

  “Just tell me and I stop. I’ll bring you a plate of dumplings and chicken and fried cheese. You can call your parents. One of my colleagues is with them now, to ensure you cooperate. Everything can go back to the way it was. You do not have to worry about betraying your friends. We have them all: all you girls, your phony ‘professors’ and administrators. We have you all. All but one.”

  He brought the wand close to her again and Elena finally remembered what she had read, what her instructor had said. Just travel. Leave your body and travel out of the concrete room, up the beautiful river, to the mountains, perfect snow, a spring day with your grandparents where you take off your jacket and tie it around your waist and ski up, up, up above the bowl of cloud.

  “It’s so simple, Elenka. One little name.”

  But she was at the top of the mountain looking down, where no one and nothing could touch her.

  7

  PRAGUE, 2016

  Grace made her way from the crowded central station to the doors that would lead her to old town Prague. The rain had stopped but the city was drenched and windy. She followed the crowd through a mini-park, down a busy road, and into a blandly attractive shopping boulevard. On the train, Grace had rewritten from memory everything Elena had ripped out of her notebook. She wrote down everything Katka had said about her father, the gymnastics coach, his relationship with Elena, though none of it was fascinating. The more Grace wrote, the more pointless it seemed. There would be no book without Elena’s cooperation, but it took her mind off the more pressing crisis: calling Steadman Coe.

  In the fairy tale postcard quarter east of the Four Seasons men and women in white kiosks sold sausages, mulled wine, and though December was more than a month away, Christmas decorations. Tourists took photographs from horse-drawn carriages in Old Town Square. An English-speaking woman carried a red stick and shouted history lessons at a massive, multicultural tour group in front of the astronomical clock. To Grace, the whole city smelled of seared pork and alcohol and she wanted some. There was no point pretending she was anything but a visitor now, in the market for cultural adventures. She joined the tour group for a moment, dodging selfie sticks, learning about this neighborhood in the fifteenth century, until she recognized two men from the train. They had sat two seats behind her and, when she returned from us
ing the toilet, one of them had watched her. He wore a thick leather motorcycle jacket and he had pale blue eyes that would have been pretty on a woman. They did not go well with his veined nose and thin poof of blonde hair.

  It was cool and even with the rain poncho Grace had got wet on the walk from the sporting goods store in Mladá Boleslav to the train station. She wanted a steamy bath and she wanted to get away from the creepy men from the train so she joined the flow of tourists from Old Town Square to the Charles Bridge, past tourist shops and restaurants and boutiques selling Bohemian crystal. Every few minutes she casually turned around, to see if the men were following her.

  The Four Seasons lobby was warm and fragrant. A woman played a song from the Amélie soundtrack on the piano. The concierge and the woman who had served her in the main floor café welcomed her back. When she reached her door, on the second level, her card did not work. Grace tried again and again, every way she could, and nothing happened.

  At the lobby the woman at the front desk informed her she had already checked out. Her luggage was waiting for her in the storage area. Was Madame not aware?

  “There must be a mistake,” said Grace. “Can you check again? I’m booked here for five days.”

  Two minutes later a manager, a small and delicate man whose nametag said Daniel, stood behind the computer and whispered that Madame Craig had departed early. She had canceled not only her suite but Grace’s room as well.

  “But all my stuff was in there.”

  “I am so sorry. Madame Craig had said you wanted her to pack everything up for you. We have your bag. Was she…was Madame mistaken?”

  “If I were to pay on my own, and stay as planned, how much would it be?”

  Daniel the manager continued to whisper, as he fussed on the computer. “I will get you the best rate possible.”

  The rate was apparently so good he had to write it down and pass it over the counter to her, as though saying it out loud would cause trouble. Five thousand Czech crowns per night.