Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Read online

  A great pool of blood covered the stones beneath the body and began to fray around the edges; as the raindrops hit the dark stain, it began to unravel and seep into the crevices between the cobblestones. Conrad saw his cassock in tatters. The face he looked down on was clearly his, though bruised. A tooth looked broken.

  He held his hands before his face. Clean. Smooth. His cassock intact. “What dream is this?” he muttered aloud. Was this a nightmare inspired by his nightly pilgrimage to Lucrezia’s window above them?

  It all came rushing back to him. His confrontation with the Italian bricklayers. The blows from the club. His falling to the street. And then…

  He backed away from the body cradled by his fellow countryman. Nausea gripped him. He turned and doubled over, attempting to retch but unable to heave anything from his stomach.

  The rain continued to drench the square, which was filling with more people. Many crowded into the side street to see the body under Lucrezia’s window. No one noticed Conrad doubled over near the church.

  The suspended priest finally stood. “Why is this happening to me? If I am dead, I should face God. Be judged. Sentenced to Purgatory until welcomed into Paradise. Or…” The thought that he might be condemned to Hell had never really occurred to him before. But he should certainly not be standing here, in the Old Town Square, watching the crowd gather around his corpse. Some of them seemed to be laughing at his predicament, his death beneath the Italian whore’s window.

  He turned towards the church doors. He raised his hands towards the sky and began to weep uncontrollably. “Oh, Lord,” escaped his lips between sobs. “What is happening to me?”

  As he stood there, arms outstretched and reaching towards heaven, his eyes downcast but filled with tears and unable to focus, he felt the cobblestones drop away from his feet. He quickly wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and the sleeve of his cassock. He could see the square below him, the rain dropping past him on its way to splatter in the puddles. His mouth gaped open. Was this it? Had there simply been a delay of some kind? Was he now to face his judgment—and his vindication? A gentle light began to coalesce around him. A smile began to play around his lips. He folded his arms across his chest. He closed his eyes and turned his face upwards.

  Crash! His face was driven into he knew-not-what but it felt as hard as the brass candlesticks he had polished in the parish of his youth. Cold. Smooth. He reeled and felt himself dropping away. He opened his eyes. The light around him was fading and there seemed nothing in the sky above him to explain what he had just experienced. Only storm clouds and raindrops.

  His descent quickened. Was the way to God through the earth of his grave? Must he descend into the earth in order to find the rest he sought? He crossed himself and began the prayers for the dead. For himself.

  “Requiem aeternum dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis… Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda…”

  For the third time that morning, his breath was knocked out of him with the force of a fist to his stomach. His knees buckled as his feet struck earth that felt colder and harder than any cobblestone. For an instant, the cobblestones around his feet vanished and he thought he saw a sheet of dark metal blocking his descent. He blinked to clear his eyes and peered again. Cobblestones.

  Conrad stood in the pouring rain, his hands still folded across his chest, noticing for the first time that his cassock seemed merely damp, not drenched with the rain as he had expected. The dampness, in fact, seemed to correspond to the place where the lake of blood had emerged from the knife wound on the corpse in the alley. He pulled one hand away from his body, half-expecting to see it bright red. It was not. But it was sticky.

  He stared up at the church again, a silent hulking mass before him. His brow knit together, an uncomprehending plea spread across his face. Then, as he turned the puzzle pieces over and over in his mind, he slowly realized what was happening.

  Katrina sat with her family at dinner. It had been two weeks since the discovery of the priest’s body in the early morning light, in the narrow street beneath Lucrezia’s window.

  “Do you believe it, Father?” Katrina asked her father. “Do you believe what they’re saying about Father Conrad?”

  “Believe what?” demanded Anna, her youngest sister, her mouth full and her legs swinging under the table. “Believe what about Father Conrad?”

  “They say he was kicked and clubbed before he was knifed,” interjected one of the middle girls. “You could tell from the marks on the body. But no one saw, or has any idea, who it might have been.” She paused, and then added in a conspiratorial hush, “I even heard that when they washed the body, they discovered his left hand had been cut off!”

  “Probably one of the drunken Czech boys on their way home from a pub. Looking for a fight,” sniffed their mother.

  “Why?” interrupted little Anna again. “Why would they cut off his left hand?”

  “It wasn’t even as if that were the hand he had used to hit Lucrezia,” the middle sister continued, as if no one else had spoken. “He was right-handed, not left, so cutting off the hand couldn’t have been retaliation for the murder. Could it?” She turned from one parent to the other, waiting for an answer.

  “Even so,” interrupted Katrina, wanting to hear her father’s opinion in response to her original question. “What do you think, Father?”

  Georg sighed. “I don’t know, Katrina. It is certainly odd. I felt sorry for Father Conrad, and it pained me to have to refuse his request for assistance with the archbishop. But these strange reports… Why should he be so infatuated with that whore, Lucrezia? To be seen three times since his death, walking behind the church in the middle of the night and then standing below her window and staring up at it. I just don’t understand.”

  “It makes as much sense as it did for him to walk there and stare up at her window every night before his death,” the other middle sister reported. “You know, they say people watched him from behind their windows with all the candles out, so he would think no one was looking. But more and more people watched him every night and made jokes about him during the day. He killed her, and then he couldn’t stay away from her window. He must have been in love!” The middle girls laughed and even Anna giggled.

  “But to refuse to rest in his grave after the funeral mass,” Katrina continued her line of thought aloud. “I can understand his seeking solace at her window before he was killed; he must have felt so guilty. But why would he not embrace the opportunity to rest quietly in his grave after the funeral at St. Jakub’s parish? Do you think…” She paused. She wasn’t sure that she dared formulate the idea completely, even in the silence of her own thoughts. “Do you think, Father, that the curse of that old witch could really close Heaven and Hell to him and make it impossible for him to find rest anywhere? So that he has to walk that street behind the church and lurk under that window forever?” It seemed impossible to her that an old woman’s curse could thwart the judgment of God.

  “Unless that is God used that curse as judgment on him for killing that wretched girl in the church.” Her father sipped his wine.

  Katrina thought a moment and resumed eating, wondering how many more times in the days and years to come Father Conrad might be seen maintaining his lonely late-night vigil below Lucrezia’s window.

  Five of Coins

  (April 2002)

  F

  lauros and Halphas. Over the next several days, Magdalena mulled over the names she had heard under the bridge that night. She had stood on the edge of the cove for quite some time after the rowboat had disappeared from sight. She had stared after it, overwhelmed by her experience of meeting Jarnvithja and Fen’ka and by what Fen’ka had told her. Finally, with reluctance, she had turned around and walked back through the Little Town to her apartment. It was that turning away from the river that signaled the definite end of her nocturnal experience of Prague’s long-dead past manifesting itself, and she wanted to prolong that cha
nce to step outside her normal existence for as long as possible. But by heeding Fen’ka’s plea for assistance, would she be able to not only prolong the experience but also to integrate it into her daily existence? Her existence finally seemed to have some meaning, some purpose, and she was grateful for that. If she could do some small part to right an ancient wrong, she would consider whatever act was required or however long it took to be time and energy well spent.

  “Should I tell Victoria?” she asked herself both on the walk back to her apartment and the next morning. As she sat drinking her morning coffee, she concluded, “She will all think I’m crazy, at least at first. Laugh her heads off. I can hear her now. But will she believe me after she’s done laughing? Or will she just keep thinking that I’m crazy and keep laughing at me under her breath? It’s hard to say, but she will definitely think I’ve ‘gone off the deep end.’ There’s no way she will ever take my experience seriously. Better not to say anything about it in the first place.”

  She shook her head. “She would probably be right! How can I not be crazy? Who else would meet a troll and a dead woman under the Charles Bridge?”

  Throughout the day, the memory of what she had experienced kept rising, as if to slap her in the face. It was hard not to tell Professor Hron, especially about Jarnvithja. The ogress who had piloted the rowboat was so unlike Magdalena’s image of the troll her grandmother had told her about that she was sure the professor would be intrigued. To say nothing of Fen’ka’s assertion that Jarnvithja was only interested in protecting those who had drowned in the river, as opposed to the stories of her grandmother in which the troll’s primary interest was in drowning as many innocent passersby as possible.

  Her sense of the reality of her encounter had not faded but she felt as if she needed some other indication or sign to take the encounter seriously. How could she justify expending the time and effort to find the Halphas and Flauros that Fen’ka had told her would help?

  “It’s one thing to meet the dead, but… take seriously what a dead woman tells me?” she thought. “That would really be a good reason to put me in a straitjacket!”

  The next week she found a note on her desk when she arrived at the office. Professor Hron must have left it for her after she’d left the afternoon before; he had been out of the office but must have stepped in briefly. She knew that he was in the midst of editing his most recent book.

  “Magdalena,” the note began, in the professor’s small but very neat handwriting. “I need to send a birthday gift to a friend of mine. I know the perfect gift and exactly where to find it, but have no time right now to get it. Could you do me a tremendous favor and pick it up? It’s one of the little touristy places on Golden Lane. The shop at Number 22.” He named a particular book. “Just leave it on my desk if I’m not here. Thank you so much!” He signed it with his usual indecipherable scrawl.

  Magdalena knew exactly which shop the professor meant. Golden Lane was the small alleyway behind the castle on top of the hill across the river. It had begun in the twelfth century as part of the castle fortifications and by the sixteenth century, the archers and soldiers stationed there had begun to build a series of tiny houses to stay in while on duty. It had supposedly been where the alchemists were housed by Rudolph II in the 1700s (hence its name, “Golden” Lane) because they could be locked in at night by the gates at either end of the alley; the emperor, known for his fascination with alchemy and the occult, had wanted to insure that none of them could escape during the night with whatever secrets they had discovered during the day. In the late nineteenth century, the little one-and two-room houses had been used as offices or dwellings, and since the fall of the Communists, had been renovated and become a series of shops selling books, gifts, and trinkets aimed at the tourists that strolled along the narrow street. The tiny, intensely blue shop at Number 22 had been owned by Kafka’s sister Otla and he had used it as an office to write some of his short stories. It now specialized in editions and translations of his works, as well as books about Prague’s favorite son of recent memory.

  It was a good excuse to get out of the office. She walked out the door before Lida, the senior departmental secretary who loved the status her title bestowed, or either of the other secretaries in the office could walk in and try to steal the assignment from her.

  She headed back the way she had come to work, retracing her steps to the Mustek underground metro station on Wenceslaus Square. She jumped on the green-line train and emerged from the Malostranska station in the Little Town. She skirted the palaces and gardens that had become embassies and hotels. She dodged between the streetcars still disgorging the hordes of commuters arriving for work. She turned and headed up the steep stairway that functioned as the back door to the castle in general and Golden Lane in particular. The craftspeople were just setting up their stalls to sell trinkets and gifts to the tourists that would stream past them on their way down the steps after finishing their visit to Hradčany. She flashed her university identification card at the soldiers guarding the entrance into the castle complex; they were stationed there primarily to stop the tourists from entering the wrong way without paying their admission.

  She charged up the remaining stairs, past the plaza for tourists to catch their breath and have a bite to eat before beginning their grand descent. She skirted the Daliborka prison tower. She turned one more corner and entered Golden Lane.

  The stores were already open with tourists milling about. “They must have run past Vladislav Hall, the cathedral, and St. George’s,” Magdalena thought. “Or maybe they saw the crowds arriving in the tour buses and decided to come here first.” It had been months since she had come along Golden Lane. Maybe even a year or two. She slowed her pace and paused at each window that she passed on the narrow, colorful street.

  The alley dipped in the center, a trough of rough stone serving as the original gutter and sewer in the lane. The tiny houses were all gaily painted bright blues, greens, oranges, yellows, reds.

  She passed the first cottage, Number 13, the only one that was preserved in its original layout from 1597. Then came Number 14, where Madame de Thebes, a famous tarot reader, had lived before the Nazi occupation; Magdalena knew she had been executed by the Nazis because she kept predicting their downfall. The bright red of Number 15 was next and then Number 16, which was the most broken up and divided into the most rooms in the lane. Next was…

  Magdalena noticed a tall woman on the other side of the lane staring at her. The woman stood rooted in one spot, opposite Number 14, but her eyes followed Magdalena’s every move. She was a stern-looking older woman whose silver hair peeked out from the wide brim of her vintage black hat with a sequined crown. A fur stole was draped across her shoulders and a tight, but once stylish, black dress hugged her ascetic figure. She had been elegant once. Now there seemed a slightly musty air hovering around her. But her eyes were bright and noticed everything.

  Magdalena shivered but continued on her way. She glanced back over her shoulder. The woman turned her head. Magdalena felt the older woman’s eyes boring into her soul. She hurried on, past Number 19 (the smallest house in Prague) and Number 20 (the only one that preserved the Renaissance half-timber façade). She looked back. The woman was gone.

  Magdalena ducked into Number 22, the shop she had been sent to by Professor Hron. She gave the shopkeeper the title she was after and he pulled it off a shelf by a window looking out over the moat on the other side of the cottage.

  “My last copy,” the spectacled old man said with a smile, his eyes twinkling. Magdalena paid the shopkeeper and he wrapped the purchase carefully in tissue paper, taping the edges down. He handed her the book, they exchanged a few pleasantries, and she stepped back out into the morning light.

  The woman in the black hat was a few doors down the lane, toward the White Tower, near the other entrance into the narrow street. Her body directly faced the cottages and shops but her head was turned towards Number 22. Her eyes were fixed on Magdalena.
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  “Who is she?” wondered Magdalena. “What does she want with me?” An unwelcome tingle of warning rippled along Magdalena’s spine. She turned to go down the lane the same direction she had come. She glanced back over her shoulder while continuing to walk. The woman was gone and she breathed a sigh of relief, bumping into a tourist.

  “Excuse me,” the secretary muttered in English, figuring that was a phrase any tourist would recognize.

  Magdalena turned forward to watch where she was going. There was the woman, standing this time opposite the pale blue Number 17. Magdalena locked eyes with her and, as she passed, she and the woman both turned their heads, gazes fixed on the other.

  Magdalena almost tripped over a jagged corner of cobblestone. She looked around the lane again, and the woman was nowhere to be seen. Unnerving. To say the least. “I hope I can get out of here before I see her again,” Magdalena muttered to herself nervously. She hurried past the door to Number 14 and almost bumped into the same woman.

  She was standing on this side of the lane now, next to the cottages rather than facing them. In fact, her back was to the cottage. She seemed unaware of Magdalena’s presence. She stared ahead of her, into the blank wall opposite—staring at where she had been standing when Magdalena first noticed her.

  They were so close now that Magdalena could detect the scent, not simply the appearance, of mustiness. “Of faded grandeur,” she described it to herself later.

  Magdalena was speechless. Unable to move. Then, recollecting her wits, she bowed her head, mumbled “excuse me,” and began to step around the woman.

  Magdalena’s forearm was caught in the vice-like grip of the old woman. Magdalena jerked her head around. The woman, slightly taller than Magdalena had realized at first, was staring intently into Magdalena’s eyes. Determined. Almost grim.