The Woman From Prague

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Rob Hart

  Quote

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  New Yorked

  City of Rose

  South Village

  The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella

  “You are free, and that is why you are lost.”

  —Franz Kafka

  To Bree

  The dishwasher is broken.

  At least I think it’s broken. The wash cycle has been going for nearly an hour now, even though it usually takes about fifteen minutes. I check the dial to see which setting it’s on but that doesn’t help anything because the dial settings are in Czech. I’ve picked up a little of the language in the past two months, but nothing that covers home appliances.

  I consider calling someone—one of the local maintenance guys who will undoubtedly look at this, hit a button, and fix it. Then give me a withering look of disappointment that the American needed to be bailed out of something yet again.

  Fuck that.

  I open my laptop, type the model number of the dishwasher into Google, and find a website offering a PDF of the instruction manual. Bingo. Click on that, but it’s also in Czech. Figures.

  A little clicking around in the browser reveals a translate option. I click that and the text flashes and re-appears in English. Some of it is nonsensical—I don’t know what it means to “re-appropriate soap material”—but there’s enough that I can figure out the dishwasher is on the self-cleaning cycle. I turn the knob to the regular cycle and within a few seconds it stops and drains.

  Score one for the moderately clever.

  With the dishwasher draining, the apartment is a good bit quieter and I can hear the faint sound of bells ringing in the distance. Probably the astronomical clock in Old Town Square, chiming on the hour.

  There’s a faint odor of pot in here. I open the windows even though it’s cold and a light snow is falling. The bells get a little louder. The Scandinavian backpackers who had been staying here the past week weren’t supposed to smoke inside, but the trip downstairs and outside is a long one, so I don’t entirely blame them. A few minutes and it’ll be fine. Probably not worth going after them for the security deposit.

  This apartment is clear for the next three days. This is where I’ve set up base for now, which means I could use some groceries. I step into the hallway, make sure the door locks behind me, head down the dark, winding staircase that looks transposed from a gothic cathedral. Down to the courtyard at the center of the apartment complex. The air is cold and sharp but also a little pleasant.

  A calico cat with bright yellow eyes pads through the snow and meows at me, then disappears behind the line of trash bins. I push through the courtyard door, into a long, empty hallway that leads to the front of the building, my footsteps echoing in the dim space.

  Outside it’s crowded, mid-day and close enough to Old Town Square there’s spillover of the hordes of tourists. Snowflakes spiral around me, leaving a light dusting on the ground, the area crisscrossed with footprints. To my left, the sea-green spires of the Church of St. Havel stick into the stone gray sky. It’s the kind of church that’s stunning against any other background, and here is just another beautiful building lost in a sea of beautiful buildings.

  Without even making a conscious decision to do it, I walk toward the church and enter. It’s quiet inside, and warm, the space permeated with the intoxicating smell of incense. At the front of the pews is a sign forbidding photography, which means less incentive for gawkers, so as per usual, it’s nearly empty. Only one other person, seated up toward the front. Someone kneeling and hunched over, lost in silent prayer.

  I take a seat in the back pew and look around. Contemplate the ornate altar that culminates in a sun-inspired sculpture perched at the top. Soak in the silence and the seclusion. Look at all the beautiful decorations and architectural flourishes I don’t know the names for. I do know the Church of St. Havel is also known as the Church of St. Gall. Established in the 1200s by King Wenceslas I, named after an Irish monk who helped introduce Christianity to Europe. It was rebuilt in the Baroque style sometime in the seventeenth century.

  At least, that’s what the internet tells me.

  The woman sitting up front slowly lifts herself to a standing position, makes the sign of the cross, and shuffles out of the pew. She walks slowly down the aisle, giving me a small smile as she passes, which I return. After the door falls shut behind her, the sound of it echoing through the space, I look around to verify that I’m alone.

  When I’m alone, I’m able to breathe deeper. My muscles unfurl and relax. It’s when I’m alone and it’s quiet I feel most like myself. For a very long time, I felt afraid of the silence. That it would force me to face the things all the noise was covering up. But I’m not afraid anymore. Instead, I’ve found it can be quite nice to be alone in a quiet place.

  My stomach rumbles. Hunger wins out over contemplation. I slide out of the pew and back into the cold. Pull up my collar and cut through the market at the end of the block, traversing narrow, cobbled streets. Sidestepping people who are walking backwards to take photos on their phones, not paying attention to where they’re going. Dodging the occasional kamikaze biker. The chaos of it makes me wistful for home.

  I stop at a kiosk to grab a trdelník, which is essentially a donut shaped like a beer can. My second one today. I’m glad this is a good walking town. If it weren’t, with the way I’ve been eating, I’d need to buy new clothes.

  Another few blocks and three near-collisions, I find my destination: a blank building with a small, open doorway that leads into a pool of shadow. I step into the gloom, to an indoor shopping plaza. You’d never know it was here if you weren’t looking for it. There’s a luggage store, a travel agency, and most important to my needs right now, a grocery store.

  I grab a basket and wander the aisles. Grocery stores are my favorite thing about being here. In America, you get used to a certain layout—fruit and vegetables on one end, dairy on the other, meat along the back wall, everything else in the middle. The layout is different here. The meat counter is off in one corner, and the freezer case is in the other. The aisles are different lengths, so you get the feeling you’re playing Pac-Man. Plus, nearly everything is in Czech. It’s a bizarro version of a grocery store, and sometimes, even when I don’t need anything, I’ll go to one and stroll around, mostly looking for what’s familiar, but occasionally grabbing something I don’t know to see if I can figure out what it is. Like my own personal game show, where sometimes you end up with really delicious potato dumplings, and sometimes you end up with meat of unknown provenance.

  I fill my basket with bread and eggs and bacon and apples and frozen vegetables and chips and other assorted items that’ll get me through the next few days. The girl at the checkout counter is a thin brunette with a pixie cut, her small boy body swimming in a yellow polo shirt. She smiles and scans the items and I smile back. I’m sure she speaks English because she’s young—most young people in Prague do—but I say “Ahoj” anyway because it makes me feel like I’m assimilating.

  “Jak se máš?” she asks. How are you?

&n
bsp; “Dobry,” I tell her. Good.

  She smiles again, recognizing from my stuttered inflection that I’m not a native, but at least I’m trying.

  I pay the bill and head back toward the apartment. As I exit the building, I nearly bump into a tall man with a sharp nose and cheesy ponytail and reflective aviator glasses. He puts up his hands, showing off fine leather gloves, and says, “Prominte.” Sorry.

  He lingers for a second, looking into my face like maybe he recognizes me, which happens every now and then. I must look like a lot of people. After a moment he smiles again, this time giving me a flash of dazzling, nearly-glowing teeth, and turns away from me.

  As he turns, he says it again. “Prominte.”

  Weirdo.

  I’ve always had an ear for languages. Growing up in New York will do that. Not that I can speak anything fluently, but I can usually get the gist if the person is speaking slow enough. This town has been my first true test of how good I am, and the answer is: not very. The way people speak when they’re home is fast, loose, comfortable. They slow it down when they go somewhere else. That’s why I was able to pick things up. Here, I feel like I’m watching a foreign film at double speed with no subtitles.

  Not that it matters. I’ve found when you’re in a foreign country, there are six things you need to be able to say.

  Just six. The first is “sorry.”

  The rest are:

  Please. Prosím.

  Thank you. Dekuji.

  Bathroom. Toaleta.

  Beer. Pivo.

  Cheers. Na zdraví.

  Everything else comes in time, but if you’re able to do those, you’re pretty much set. Prague isn’t too bad with the language barrier. I keep a translation guide in my back pocket and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to take it out.

  Back at the apartment building, I fish the key fob out of my pocket. It’s the size of a quarter, connected to a small leather strap. I hold it up to the black box next to the door and a green light flashes. The door clicks. I push through and head upstairs. Inside the apartment, I unload the groceries and close the window, sit at the counter with an apple and open up Google Maps, zoom out until I’m looking at the whole of Europe and Asia.

  I’ve been here a little more than two months and my visa is only good for three. My boss, Stanislav, has offered to hire me full time so I can stay here—he likes me a lot—but I’m not sure. I really do like Prague. It’s gorgeous and everything is cheap because even though they’re in the European Union, they’re on the crown instead of the euro. The exchange rate is bonkers. I can go out and have a beer and get a nice meal for a couple of bucks.

  But there’s something off about this place.

  I can’t say that I’m stuck. That’s melodramatic. I feel like I’m in a car, driving down an empty stretch of highway, and the place I’m headed to may be over the next rise or a hundred miles way, and there’s no way for me to tell. So I keep driving, wondering when I’m going to stumble across my destination.

  Wait. That was way more melodramatic.

  Let’s go back to stuck.

  Stanislav is the cousin of an old friend from back home. He owns dozens of apartments across the city he rents out through an online service called Crash Hop. The site was intended for people to rent out their homes to make a little extra cash. But an entire industry has popped up around services like these. It’s a nice setup, and for a lot of travelers, preferable to a hotel. You get a kitchen and a few bedrooms and if you go in with a couple of people, it ends up being pretty cheap. There’s something nice about being forced to fend for yourself rather than having a front desk do everything for you. A little more of an authentic experience than staying at the Best Western in Kinsky Garden.

  For example, you get to go to the grocery store.

  My role here is jack-of-all-trades. Cleaning vacated apartments, fixing stuff, delivering packages. It’s a far cry from my previous jobs: amateur private detective, amateur bouncer, amateur chef, in that order. Though, truthfully, the detective thing never goes away, even though I’ve tried.

  And I’ve accepted that. I’m the guy who can’t sit by while something bad happens.

  Acceptance is the first step.

  Not that I’ve figured out what to do with that.

  So where do I roam to next? There are other places in the world I want to see. Ireland, because that’s where my family is from. I’d love to visit Paris, because who doesn’t want to visit Paris? Tokyo is high on my list, because it’s a country built from neon and strict honor codes and Hello Kitty and sexual repression. Sounds fun.

  I could also go home.

  Back to New York City.

  It’s been more than a year since I left. And there are things I miss about it. But I’m not sure if I’m ready. Considering the number of bridges I nuked in my wake, I’m not exactly keen to buy my return ticket yet.

  And anyway, there’s something I like about the solitude of travel. There are entire days where I don’t have to talk to anyone. It’s oddly comforting. For a very long time I haven’t done a good job of being myself. This allows me the space to do that.

  All I know is, if I’m going to leave, I need to visit the Sedlec Ossuary at Kutná Hora. I promised someone. Someone I met once for only a few minutes, but hey, a promise is a promise.

  I take a deep breath. Feels like a beehive buzzing in my brain. I’m done thinking for a little while. I close the laptop, chuck the apple core into the trash, kick off my boots, and head into the living room. Drop onto the couch and turn on the television.

  The Simpsons is on. The Simpsons is always on. This episode is from after season twelve, when the show stopped being good, which means normally I would skip over it, but there’s something about the Czech dubbing, making you focus on the visual gags, that it ends up being pretty entertaining. I settle in, figure on watching this episode and working up the energy to make myself an actual meal to eat, or call Kaz to meet for a drink.

  There’s a knocking sound from the front of the apartment.

  I figure it’s for the apartment across the way, because no one knows I’m here or would have any cause to visit me, but then I hear it again, a little more insistent this time. I head toward the front and open the door.

  The man who bumped into me outside the grocery store is standing there in the dark hallway, still wearing his sunglasses. I can see myself in them and I don’t like the way he’s smiling. Like he wants to sell me something that’s broken.

  “Ashley McKenna?” he asks.

  “How the fuck do you know my name?”

  “I have a job offer to discuss with you,” he says, like this is a perfectly normal thing to say to a stranger in a strange city.

  “I already have a job,” I tell him. “Fuck off.”

  Before I can close the door, two thick men in jeans and heavy coats step out from either side of the door, flanking the first man. They are very big, heavy-browed men who both exude an “angry caveman” vibe. I can rumble and I get a little ahead of myself sometimes, but these are two guys I would not fuck with.

  “This isn’t the kind of job you get to turn down,” the man says. He smiles, and even though I imagine it’s the confusion and adrenaline warping my vision, his bright white teeth look slightly sharper than human teeth should.

  “I know that’s supposed to scare me, but I stick with my original answer,” I tell him. “Fuck off.”

  He nods. “Thought so.”

  The man on the left reaches inside his jacket and comes out with a small pistol. He points it at my gut as the man on the right pulls out a gun, too. He holds his in front of him, like he’s uncomfortable with it.

  Not that it matters. Their two guns trump my zero.

  “I guess we should have this conversation inside,” I tell them.

  The apartment has a living-dining room combo on the other side of the kitchen. Which means a sofa unit on one side and a cheap Ikea-style table on the other, with a couple of strai
ght-backed, uncomfortable chairs around it.

  This meeting feels too formal for the couch. I sit on the far end of the table and wait for the others to take their seats. The whole time wondering what the hell is going on.

  There’s not much information I can glean from these guys. The sidekicks look local. Weary, stone expressions that indicate they wouldn’t understand or appreciate sarcasm. They’re not going to like me.

  One guy, his face is chubby and bunched, like a pug dog, his bottom lip protruding as if he’s actively sticking it out. The other is solid muscle, and given the odd proportions, I imagine he gets those muscles as much from drugs as he does from working out.

  Pug and Hulk for short, until they introduce themselves.

  They stash their guns and sit on either end of the table. I sit on the long end, my back against the wall.

  I hate how appropriate that feels.

  The man in the aviator glasses picks up the remote off the couch. He turns off the television as Homer is gesticulating wildly at Bart.

  “Aww, c’mon,” I tell him. “Can’t we at least finish this episode?”

  He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even acknowledge I said anything. He takes the free seat, across from me, and places the remote down in front of him on the table. He removes his sunglasses and places them down next to the remote. His eyes are small and dark. There’s deliberateness to his movements that seem almost alien. Once he’s got the glasses perfectly lined up with the remote, he looks up at me and smiles.

  “So, Ashley McKenna,” he says. “That’s an interesting name.”

  “It’s a girl’s name. What do you want?”

  “You’re awful cavalier for someone being held at gunpoint by three strangers.”

  “Not my first rodeo, fuckface.”

  He winces at my casual use of profanity. Hard to get a read off him, otherwise. Accent is completely flat. Features tell me maybe he’s Italian or Greek, but I wouldn’t be shocked to find out he was Middle Eastern. His clothes are expensive. Under the jacket, which he hasn’t removed, is a dark sweater with a thread count so high it shimmers in the light.