The Kingfisher Secret Read online

  “How much is this in euros?”

  Daniel took back the pad of paper, wrote something down, and furtively slid it over the counter: €180.

  Ten minutes later, Grace was wheeling her suitcase over the cobblestones to a small Airbnb apartment above a spice shop for seventy-two Canadian dollars a night. She dragged her suitcase up the spiral stone stairs and said hello to a woman smoking and reading a gossip magazine outside the door. Anthony Craig was on the cover, along with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Here was the Czech version of her people.

  There was no bathtub in the apartment, which smelled of paprika, so she took a hot shower. On the tiny kitchen table the landlady had laid out seven brochures for river cruises, restaurants, and museums. She flipped through one for the Museum of Communism, turned on her computer, connected to the wifi system and transferred everything she had written in her notebook into a new document on her laptop, then hunted around on the Internet for Katka Vacek, her father, Czech gymnastics, and Elena Craig.

  Grace found a single newspaper article, in Czech, and copied and pasted it into Google Translate. It was from 2011. Despite the awkwardness of the translation it was obvious that Coach Vacek was regretful his talented trainee, Elena Klimentová, had quit gymnastics so early—in 1968.

  “I suppose it all turned out for her,” the reporter quoted Coach Vacek as saying.

  If she had quit gymnastics in 1968, how was Elena an alternate on the Czech Olympic team in 1972? Why did Anthony Craig claim she was on the team, in his book? Why did she lie?

  Grace’s phone buzzed with a call: Steadman Coe. No doubt Elena or her assistant had called him to complain, maybe even his pal Josef Straka. Rather than answer, Grace finished getting dressed and stepped back out into the cool afternoon with the Museum of Communism brochure. She joined the river of tourists and, at the first white kiosk, she bought a mulled red wine. Her phone buzzed again, and again.

  Just as she arrived in front of the Museum of Communism, set into a pretty Prague version of a strip mall, surrounded by restaurants and a sunglasses store, she received a text.

  Call me back or I will have to fire you.

  There was a farmers’ market in front of the museum. Grace bought another mulled wine and drank it so fast she burned her throat.

  He answered on the first ring. “Gracie, what did you do to Elena?”

  “Steadman, remember when you said something like, ‘You could write a book about her’?”

  “I don’t think I said that.”

  “You did. Well, I was thinking the same thing.” It began to drizzle again, so Grace took shelter inside the lobby of the Museum of Communism. “All I did was ask a few innocent questions about her childhood, what it was like to grow up under communism, and she went bananas and kicked me out of her car. She abandoned me in the middle of nowhere.”

  “She says you were harassing her.”

  “Steadman, she’s been good to me. She’s the most fascinating person I’ve ever met. But she’s a liar. And not just about me.”

  “I don’t really care if she’s a liar, Gracie. She pays us on time. She has a readership. And besides, I thought you two were friends. That’s what she told me. That you betrayed her friendship.”

  “Friends? She said that? Friendship?”

  “She sounded legitimately hurt.”

  Grace wanted to end the call and drink another mulled wine or two. She told Coe about the Olympics story and he sighed. “No one in the seventies and eighties figured there would be an Internet when they grew up,” he said. “I used to tell people I was in the Lemon Pipers.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A rock band. Green Tambourine?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “The point is, people at parties in 1979 didn’t carry computer encyclopedias in their back pockets. What are you saying anyway? You’re going to write a whole book about how Elena Craig lied about being in the Olympics?”

  “No.”

  “Listen, I don’t want to hurt your feelings but you know what you’ve been doing for almost twenty years? Since you were a kid? Working for me. Working for the National Flash. You’re not an investigative journalist. You’re never going to be Christiane Amanpour. You don’t even know how to be Christiane Amanpour. You know how to go through court documents looking for embarrassing details in a divorce. You can make fun of Scott Baio for a readership with a seventh-grade education better than anyone in the business. But I’m sorry. I take back what I said. You’re never going to write a book about anything, Gracie. Now get your ass back here. I need you to fix this thing with Elena.”

  “You’re breaking up,” Grace yelled. “I’m losing you.”

  “Don’t hang up on me! You’ll regret it.”

  Grace hung up. Then, instead of throwing her iPhone against the wall or screaming she bit the inside of her left cheek so hard it bled.

  The lobby of the Museum of Communism was long and thin, a marriage of white and gray with no rounded corners, and the only other person in it was the woman at the counter, who stared at her from behind a pair of comically large glasses.

  “I’m sorry,” said Grace. “Was that loud?”

  The woman shrugged. “Are you coming in?”

  Grace paid and walked up the stairs into the first room, which featured placards on the walls with descriptions in Czech and English of what she had already seen on Wikipedia when she clicked on “Czechoslovakia.” There were black-and-white photos of Stalin and his local bootlicker, Klement Gottwald. Further on she watched videos from the offices of propaganda and censorship, and read about the clever ways the government controlled the truth. There was a black market, and another market just for party officials. The KGB was omnipresent, through its Czech underlings in the StB. There was an alcove furnished and decorated to look like the bedroom of a Czech teenager. Grace imagined Elena Klimentová in the single bed. She made notes and took photographs of the most interesting placards. Steadman Coe’s voice echoed: you’re not an investigative journalist.

  No, this was not investigative journalism.

  She read that the hardest time to escape to the West from Czechoslovakia was between 1969 and 1979. So how had Elena managed it? Grace knew she was briefly married to a Frenchman, and this had allowed a route farther west to Montreal and eventually New York. Yet everything in the Museum of Communism suggested this was impossible, unless she had defected during the Olympics in Munich. Does an alternate actually go to the Olympics? But what if she had quit gymnastics four years earlier?

  How does a poor Czech girl meet a Frenchman?

  In the gift shop at the end of the exhibits Grace showed the woman at the cash register some of the quotations she had written down, about the StB and the possibility of defection.

  “Is there a library or something, an archives, where I could find more information about this?”

  The woman called her manager, who spoke better English. He gave her a card for a place called the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. “It isn’t far. Just up the hill. But it will close soon.”

  On her way, Grace passed the central train station. The prospect of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes was more attractive than a train, but since it was closing soon she asked herself: what would a real investigative journalist do? She already knew an express ticket to Mladá Boleslav was 280 Czech crowns, about 10 dollars.

  Ten minutes into her voyage back to Mladá Boleslav, she called Manon. Manon was her next-door neighbor on Rue Saint-Christophe, and her most reliable also-divorced wine-drinking companion.

  “Have you had sex with a European man yet?” Manon asked.

  Grace laughed. It was soothing to hear her friend’s groggy morning voice. She wanted to launch immediately into what Elena Craig and Steadman Coe had said and done, but there was something more important: the welfare of her cat. “Not yet, Manon. I remain cautiously pessimistic. How is my Zip?”

  “I was in your apartment an ho
ur ago. I fed Zip and cleaned her disgusting litter box. It’s absurd and demeaning, you know, to have a cat.”

  “I’m feeling kinda low. Things aren’t going so hot here. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Can you go next door and put the phone near her?” Grace asked.

  “Near the cat. Really?” Manon sighed. Then Grace could hear her walking along the hardwood, opening and closing one door and then the other. “This is crazy, you know?”

  “I know.”

  Then, despite her protests Manon cooed at the cat as she pet her. Grace could hear her purr over the line and she told Zip she loved her and missed her, that she should not scratch her furniture, that she would be home soon.

  Manon was the only person who knew what Grace was really doing in Prague. While Grace had always taken non-disclosure agreements seriously, she did not see how anyone could possibly care that she ghostwrote Elena Craig’s National Flash advice columns.

  “I asked Elena if I could write a book about her.”

  “Really? And?”

  “It was a disaster. She shouted at me and threw me out of her car. But now I’m on my way to her hometown, to follow up on a lead.”

  “A lead? I am so happy to hear you say this. A lead!”

  “You know what Steadman said?”

  “What?”

  “After Elena flipped out he told me I’m not a real investigative journalist. He said I couldn’t write a book.”

  “Fuck him!” There was a bang over the line, as though Manon had just punched something. Grace worried it would startle Zip. “I’ll run down to Old Montreal right now and kick him in the neck.”

  “Oh that’s a lovely thought,” said Grace.

  Manon, who was an archivist at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, gave Grace a pep talk. Then there was another call on Manon’s phone. “I should get to work but take care, okay? Zip and I need you to come home. I truly hate litter boxes.”

  The train car was only half full. Once she was off the phone Grace scanned it for the two men who had seemed to follow her. They weren’t following her now. When the train arrived, she walked around the corner to the house of Elena’s youth. No lights were on inside, though it was nearly five o’clock. Now that Elena was not watching her, she took more photographs. She stepped into the scrubby yard and peeked into the window. There was a small kitchen with dirty plates and pots piled haphazardly. This is where Elena had washed dishes. Behind it, a carpeted floor was splattered with plastic toys and clothes.

  It was warmer than it had been in the morning. Grace crossed the white bridge over the Jizera River and passed multiple Škoda buildings: a sales office and factories. The sound of grinding metal echoed through the valley. Grace tried to imagine Elena’s grandmother walking through the property in a queenly fashion, the foreman here when it was still Laurin & Klement.

  At a set of black stone stairs that reeked of piss she climbed to the upper city. Men in black stood in front of a barbershop and smoked. One of them played an angry Slavic death metal song on his phone and muttered something Grace did not need translated. His friends laughed.

  Just as she reached the upper plaza the clouds gave up in the west and the last of the late afternoon sun shone on the clock tower. It was majestic and pretty. School was out so children shouted and chased one another around the wormy black industrial art.

  There were a few customers in the sporting goods store, two parents and a pre-teen son looking at cross-country skis and an old man in a shirt and tie with a cardigan over it. He leaned on a cane and scowled at the snowboards. Katka was helping the family.

  A few minutes later, the family left without buying anything and Katka walked them out, with a bright and hopeful tone in her voice. When the door was closed she turned to Grace. “Don’t tell me: you didn’t make it to the train station. You’ve been wandering around all day, confused and hungry.”

  Grace laughed. “I made it to Prague and then I came back.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t mention this before because it wasn’t settled, but I’m working on a book about Elena Craig.”

  “Oh.” Katka frowned.

  “I was hoping to interview you and your father about the city, what it was like under communism, and about Elena’s youth.”

  Katka did not say yes or no.

  “To be perfectly honest, I was with her this morning,” Grace said. “She dropped me off in the plaza. Given how close you were, I wonder why Ms. Craig didn’t come by for a visit. I mean, it sounds like the two of you were quite close.”

  Without a word, Katka led Grace to the old man in front of the snowboards. “This is my father. He’s known to everyone here as Coach Vacek.” She spoke some Czech to him and he turned and squinted at Grace.

  There was obvious tension in the back-and-forth between Katka and her father. With a quick eye roll, Katka turned to Grace. “He wants to know if anyone followed you.”

  “I don’t think so.” She thought of the two men in the train and in the Old Town Square. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, no, I’m not sure.” Grace went to the window and scanned the plaza. “But I can’t see anyone now.”

  Katka’s father grumbled.

  Katka went to the door, opened it, and looked out on the street and the plaza. When she was back inside, she locked it. “We closed ten minutes ago. If we’re going to talk, we can do it upstairs in my father’s apartment.”

  “Why is he worried I was followed?” said Grace.

  “My father has become paranoid. He was young and strong under communism. My theory is he hungers for it the way he hungers for his youth.”

  Katka pulled her father up the stairwell, lit by a single incandescent bulb. Grace came in behind, prepared if he tumbled back.

  “How does the shop do?”

  “Poorly.” Katka helped her father to the top. “But Elena owns the building and charges us no rent.”

  “Why?”

  Katka translated for her father as she guided him to a chair. Up top, the low-ceilinged apartment smelled like the ghosts of five hundred years of boiled root vegetables. It was lit soft orange, from three matching lamps, the opposite of the bright fluorescent lights of the shop. The walls and beams were rosy wood. The furniture was sturdy and useful, a tidy collection of wood and artificial fabrics. Someone had crocheted a massive collection of colorful blankets, the sort Grace’s mother called an afghan, and they lay on the backs of chairs and the couch, in a neat folded pile in the corner. On the wall there were photographs of gymnasts in vast halls, standing by vaults and bars and trampolines.

  “Father thinks she does it to keep us quiet,” said Katka. “But honestly, I worked for her in New York and I cannot imagine what we would say about her and to whom. To a writer of a book maybe? I will be honest, but I saw nothing in my time with her that would be interesting enough for a book. She works hard. She pretends to be less intelligent than she is, like many women. I think she doesn’t charge us rent because it would be nothing to her and because she and my father were close at one time.”

  Katka’s father shouted at her. His eyes were wet and cloudy.

  “What is he saying?” said Grace.

  “Five or six years ago Elena was here. She and Father had an argument.”

  “About what?”

  Katka and her father spoke in Czech for a while. It was frustrating for Grace not to understand. As they spoke, Katka opened a clear bottle with herbs inside, filled three glasses neatly to the top. She shook her head and laughed, addressed Grace. “He has never been to New York. He does not watch television. My father believes poor Elenka has been suffering all these years because she quit gymnastics and left Mladá Boleslav. He makes it sound like they dragged her off to the Gulag.”

  Her father had begun speaking again.

  “Who are they?” Grace asked.

  “The Russians, he says. My father, he is not a fan of the Ru
ssians. If you ask me, it has clouded his memory. Na zdraví.”

  Grace smelled her drink: vodka. She had not touched vodka since an unfortunate night in her junior year at Thomas Jefferson High in Bloomington. She sipped it and sipped again. The infusion was fennel and it was delicious.

  In one gulp, Katka’s father’s vodka was gone. He said something and Katka shook her head.

  “What?” said Grace. “What is he saying?”

  “The Russians took Elena away in the beginning of 1969,” said Katka.

  “Took her away from here?” Grace tried to keep up in her notebook. “Where did they take her?”

  Katka and her father spoke some more, and she did not immediately translate.

  “What did he say?” said Grace.

  “It’s crazy,” said Katka.

  “I don’t care. I like crazy. Tell me.”

  “Come,” said Katka’s father, in English, before his daughter could divulge whatever had seemed crazy. He stood up and, supporting himself on furniture, walked to the window that opened on the square. He pointed to a building on the right of the town hall. It was carved stone, so beautiful it belonged in a photograph of Paris.

  Katka translated. “He says once she left, Mr. and Mrs. Kliment moved to the penthouse of the finest building in Mladá Boleslav. It was their reward.”

  “For what?” said Grace. “For something Ms. Craig had done?”

  Katka shrugged and finished her glass of vodka.

  “Anthony Craig, and Ms. Craig herself, talk about the 1972 Olympics,” said Grace. “Either she competed in the Munich Games or she was an alternate. Then I found an article where your father says Ms. Craig quit gymnastics in 1968.”

  “That article is why Elena stopped speaking to us,” said Katka.

  “Was she in the Olympics?”

  Katka shook her head. “Elena was nowhere near Munich in 1972.”

  As he made his way back to his chair, Katka’s father spoke non-stop. Grace recognized the word Elenka, but that was about it. When he was finished, Katka sighed and said her father was tired. “Let me drive you back to the train station, Grace.”

  They would go as soon as Katka was finished in the toilet. When they were alone, Katka’s father reached out to shake Grace’s hand. When she took it he pulled her close. For a moment she thought the old man was trying to feel her up. Then she realized he wanted to whisper in her ear. Grace had to press on his bony shoulder to prevent herself from falling on top of him completely.