The Woman From Prague Read online

  But she backs off.

  I reach up and touch my throat and my finger comes back with a dot of red.

  “Really?” I ask.

  “C’mon. We’ve got work to do.”

  She takes a few steps. Realizes I’m not following her. Stops and turns.

  “Who are you?” I ask. “Who do you work for?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She turns around and walks. I know it’s stupid of me to follow, but I really don’t see any other moves on the board. I hold my hand to the nick on my throat, in case it’s still bleeding.

  The man sitting at the window is wearing a pair of headphones so big I’m sure the back of the store could blow and he wouldn’t notice. The café is busy and the space between the tables is narrow. This might actually look legit.

  I weave through like I’m headed for the counter, but stumble and knock his espresso into his lap.

  He leaps to his feet and yells, more from surprise than anything. It was halfway drunk and looked like it had been sitting there for a while so I got the sense it wasn’t too hot. I reach down to grab the cup and pull a wad of paper towels off the table across from us.

  “Prominte, prominte,” I tell him, handing him the napkins and moving my body to shield his view from what I hope will be Sam taking his laptop. I feel a little bad about this, but the guy has money. Designer glasses, expensive boots, a fine leather bag, and noise-canceling headphones. Sam has been wanting to pull this move for six blocks now but I told her we’re not taking anything from anyone who can’t seem to afford a replacement.

  And here we find ourselves.

  “No trouble,” the man says in a British accent. I’m pretty sure that translates to “Fuck you and die in a fire” in the Queen’s English.

  The man takes the wad of napkins and dabs at the front of his pants. There are only a few drops of espresso on them.

  Once he’s settled, I look down and see his laptop is gone, and Sam is nowhere in sight, so I head to the counter and buy a coffee, because turning around and running immediately after a show like that would end with someone chasing after me.

  Another point where Sam and I diverge. She told me to hoof it out the second I could. I argue that there’s no sense in making it look like I’m guilty. What if there’s a cop in the vicinity and the guy points me out?

  The man realizes his laptop is missing, yells in frustration, and runs to the front to look around. He doesn’t seem to regard me at all, even though he knows I’m still there, so my plan worked.

  After a moment, he comes up to me.

  “I think someone made off with my laptop,” he says. “Did you see anyone?”

  “I saw a guy lingering near the front. Skinny guy, tattoos, looked like a junkie. I’m sorry, man. Now I feel like this is my fault.”

  “Not your fault it was taken,” he says, like he blames me entirely for the laptop being taken. He heads back toward the front to pack up his stuff and look for the imaginary thief.

  I take my coffee and leave a big tip in the jar, out of guilt, and head to the bar a few blocks away where we’re supposed to meet. When I find Sam, she’s tucked into a booth in the back, where you can’t see her from the street. She’s got a drained half-pint glass in front of her and she’s clicking away at the laptop, her face illuminated by the blue glow.

  She doesn’t look up when I sit across from her on the scarred wooden bench.

  “Want a beer?” she asks.

  “Better not.”

  She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. “What’s the matter, not a big drinker?”

  “Used to be too big.”

  “What was your poison?”

  “Jameson. Though a few months ago I was mainlining plastic jug whiskey I got from a wholesale distributor. Nothing says rock bottom like plastic jug whiskey.”

  She betrays the slightest hint of a smile, which feels like real progress, but doesn’t stop typing. “So what happened?”

  “I was self-medicating,” I tell her. “A bad thing happened. It was messing with my head. Drinking made it easier to sleep. When the supply got cut off, I caught a case of the DTs. Which was bad enough. But I was living in a bus in the middle of the woods, and that’s a weird place to have the DTs.”

  “What was the bad thing?”

  I put my hands flat on the table. Think about whether I should keep this to myself. Then figure she’s heard worse. “Killed someone. Accidently but a little on purpose. He was very bad so I don’t think it was entirely wrong… but… yeah.”

  “It’s not fun, is it?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Killing someone. i’ll tell you what: It’s good that you suffered. Means you still have a soul.” She looks down at the laptop and mutters under her breath, “That must be nice.”

  I can see pages of her life flipping past me. There is so much in that statement, so much more than anything she’s told me up until now.

  I’m about to ask her to elaborate when an old man comes over, wiping his hands with a towel, and asks if I want a beer. I decline and ask for ice water. He looks at me much the way Sam looks at me most of the time and wanders off. I get the sense I am not getting my water.

  “So what happened at Crash Hop?” I ask.

  “Put a remote wireless transmitter on the tower,” she says. “Lets me log on and do whatever I want without anyone noticing.”

  “Do we have to go back and get it?”

  “Once I’m done, I send a command that fries and erases it,” she says. “By the time they find it, if they find it, it’ll be a useless piece of plastic.”

  “I knew it.”

  “What?”

  “You totally have cool spy gear.”

  “Shut up. You can buy them off the internet.”

  “And you said there was already one in there?”

  “In the USB port. Not happy about that. It means someone is monitoring that computer. It could be completely unrelated to everything we’re doing here, but it’s safer to pretend like it’s related.”

  “Moscow rule,” I tell her. “Everyone is potentially under opposition control.”

  “Gold star for you.”

  She finishes typing, takes a deep breath, goes to take a sip of the beer, and finds that it’s empty.

  “Well,” she says. “I’m in. All their records for the last six months. Now I have to figure out his alias.”

  “You don’t know what it is?”

  “He switches them up a lot.”

  “Okay, so, do you know any of his other aliases? Maybe there’s a connection between them. Like baseball players or movie characters or something.”

  “The last one he used that I know about was John Jones. And once he used Barry Allen.”

  “Let me see the computer.”

  She turns it toward me and I click around a bit in the customer database, focusing on recent rentals. It doesn’t take long to find at all. I highlight the entry and turn it around.

  “Hal Jordan,” I tell her. “That’s the one.”

  “How can you be sure?” she asks, actually a little impressed.

  “Your handler has a thing for comic books. John Jones is the Martian Manhunter. Barry Allen is the Flash. Hal Jordan is the Green Lantern. He’s working his way through the Justice League.” I pump my fist. “Boom.”

  “You fucking nerd. Let’s go.”

  I stand and a small wave of dizziness hits me. My head feels like there’s loud music playing against my skull. “That address is a good half hour walk from here. Should we cab it? Get on the train?”

  “We walk.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “Public transportation has cameras and cab drivers have memories.”

  “Fine.”

  As we head outside, there’s another light snow falling. It’s always snowing a tiny bit, but never a whole lot. As we walk, I ask, “So where are y
ou from, originally?”

  She doesn’t answer. I thought I had detected a crack in her façade but I guess we’re back to not being friends. She walks quickly, not pausing, not seeming to care whether I’m able to keep up. I duck and weave through the crowd, try my best to match her pace.

  When we reach the building, which is further from the river than I’ve been, I pull out my key and Sam says, “Those things can probably be tracked. There’s got to be a log or something. Put it away for now.”

  “How are we going to get in?”

  Without slowing down or answering, she heads to the door and pulls out a small piece of metal that’s dull and hammered flat, along with another slim, longer piece with a slightly curved end. She inserts them into the lock and within a few moments the door clicks open.

  “That’s so awesome,” I tell her.

  “It’s a valuable skill.”

  “Can you teach me to do that?”

  She looks at me for a moment and says, “Maybe later.”

  We climb the three floors to the apartment. There are four other doors in the hallway. As soon as we make it up to the top, I can tell we’re not going to like what’s behind the door. There’s a faint but unmistakable smell of rot.

  She makes short work of the door and as soon as it cracks, the stench hits us like an open hand. A full dumpster on a hot summer day.

  There’s a narrow hallway that opens up to a living room. A small couch and a coffee table and a flatscreen television mounted on the wall, and in the center of it all, a man splayed out on the floor wearing only boxers, lying in a black pool of blood. The nexus point of which is a jagged gash in his neck.

  Best I can tell, Fuller was in his foties. Maybe he was in his fifties and took care of himself. His skin is a shade somewhere between blue and gray. The hue grows darker closer to the floor, where the blood has stopped flowing and settled. He has no tattoos, and his hair is unkempt, but he looks like the kind of person who kept it kempt. Despite the horror of it, he has the kind of face that makes it easy to imagine him as fun to talk to at parties.

  There’s a deep spray of dried, brown blood on the wall next to him, a flourish against the tacky and evaporating pool underneath him. There are some flies crawling across the body, lingering in the wound on his throat, but no maggots. I think that means the body is reasonably fresh. The smell in the room is so thick I can taste it on my tongue.

  The last time I saw a dead body, a few months ago, down in the woods in Georgia, which right now feels like a million years ago, I had a much more visceral reaction.

  It’s a little easier now. Not to say it’s easy. I knew nothing about this man but still I feel a little chasm open up in the center of me. Dead in real life doesn’t look like dead in the movies. Dead in the movies is serene. In real life it looks like a perversion of nature, the way the whole body collapses in on itself. The way you can tell something is missing by looking at it.

  It’s sad. It’s sad when anyone dies. Someone somewhere in this world loved him, and that person will be very sad to find that he’s gone.

  When I look to my left, I find the person who loved him.

  Sam’s eyes are rimmed red and she’s fighting back tears. Not well. Her left hand is bound in a tight fist, which she’s pressing into her leg. Her other hand, also in a fist, is pressed against her lips, like he’s trying to prevent something from escaping her mouth. Usually, the way she stands is like she’s ready to spring at you, but now she looks like a coat left to hang on the wall.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, immediately realizing that’s a stupid question.

  She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even register I said it. Just continues staring at the body. Given her habit of outsized reactions, I figure it best to leave her there for a few moments to process things. There’s a small hand towel on the couch so I use that to flip the latch on the window and get a little air into the apartment. I step into the kitchen and root around, using the towel to open and close drawers, until I find what I’m looking for: a half-empty bag of ground coffee. I dump it into a dented, scarred frying pan on the stove and turn on the electric burner. There’s a scratch behind me and I turn to find Sam standing in the doorway, like she’s waiting for me to invite her in.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Covers up the smell,” I tell her. “Cop told me that once. They do it at crime scenes. Figured you’d want to have a look around. If we’re going to be here a bit.”

  “You keep moving stuff around like that, you’ll make it obvious people were in here after the victim died.”

  Her voice is cold and her eyes are still a little red but they grow hard again. I want to ask her again if she’s okay—given she’s referring to Fuller as “the victim,” clearly not—but instead I tell her, “We may as well look for what we can. No one’s found him yet.”

  She opens her mouth to say something but stops and inhales, looks down at the floor.

  “What do you need?” I ask.

  “Anything weird or out of place,” she says.

  She turns into the living room. I walk the edges of the room, using the towel to move things. It looks the same as all the Crash Hop apartments. Sparsely but tastefully furnished. Nothing that’s too expensive. The occasional piece of detritus left behind by guests. Receipts and books and a blank book of matches and a white ceramic mug on the counter stained brown with the remains of coffee.

  The bedroom is at the back of the apartment. There’s a small dresser, which turns out to be empty, a roller suitcase in the corner, and a nightstand next to the bed. The bed is unmade, and on the nightstand there’s a bottle of lube and a box of condoms, both unopened. Next to that is a small yellow bottle with a plastic wrap seal. I pick it up with the towel and turn it over.

  Alkyl nitrites, also known as poppers. A sex aid popular in the gay community.

  Footsteps behind me. Sam asks, “Anything?”

  “He was expecting to get laid,” I tell her. “Everything’s out and ready to go, but he didn’t use any of it.”

  “I can work with that,” she says. “We have to find his laptop or his phone. If the victim was having someone over, they’d be well hidden.”

  She moves to the kitchen without another word.

  Given her reaction, I thought she might be in love with him. Maybe she was, even though he was gay. Maybe he was bisexual, or was a straight guy who liked poppers. Maybe she didn’t know, although that would surprise me. Could be he was a father figure. Like a mentor.

  Whatever it is, she’s riven.

  There’s no closet in the bedroom. It’s practically a bare room. No vents, either. I walk around and tap my foot on the floor. Hardwood, but it’s a cheap faux laminate, so there are no loose boards to hide things under. I hear Sam open the bathroom door, and then the ceramic clunk of the toilet tank.

  In the kitchen there are plenty of hiding spaces, but I think about what she said. Well hidden. Cabinets are out. That’s too easy. I check the fridge, then lean against the wall and peek behind it. Nothing. There’s a vent down near the floor that doesn’t look big enough to hold a laptop but I take out a butter knife and unscrew it to be sure. Only dust.

  As I’m screwing the vent back in, I look along the floor. There’s the stove and the dishwasher, separated by a row of cabinets. I look inside the appliances, for fun, and when I close the door of the stove, notice some scrapes in the floor, like it had been moved. Maybe recently, judging from the stray flecks that come up on my finger when I touch the gouges.

  The pan with the coffee grounds is sizzling and smoking. The apartment smells better. At least in here. Burnt coffee is preferable to dead body. I turn off the pan and move it to the back of the stove, grip the sides and pull. I manage to slide it out far enough I can see behind.

  And, bingo.

  A small laptop bag. I pull it out, wipe down where I touched the stove, and slide it back into place.

  “Sam,” I say.

  I put the computer case
on the counter

  “Good,” she says, nodding.

  She opens the bag and takes out a small laptop and a smartphone, putting them both on the counter next to each other. Next up: chargers, a handful of passports from various countries, and a thick stack of hundred dollar bills, tied with a purple rubber band.

  Finally, a postcard.

  She turns it over in her hand. The picture on the back shows the Eiffel Tower at night. It’s worn, like it’s been taken in and out of pockets for years. There’s a shiny piece of tape mending a tear down one side. Handwriting, too. Faded. Sam reads it over, nods, and puts the postcard in her pocket.

  She opens the laptop, and positioned underneath the keyboard are two track pads—one right underneath the space bar, and a smaller one off to the right. She presses her thumb to the one that’s off-center and says, “Fingers crossed.”

  After a moment, she smiles. Fingerprint scanner, I guess. She looks up and sees I’m watching. “Keep looking.”

  She types on the laptop as I move to the living room. I avoid the body the best I can but feel compelled to at least give it a once over when I’m done with everything else.

  I crouch down close to it, covering my nose and breathing through my mouth. The eyes are looking up at the ceiling, cloudy and unfocused. It makes me think of how every movie with a dead body has a scene where someone solemnly places their hand on the face of the deceased to close their eyes. Give them a little dignity by making it look like they’re sleeping.

  There’s nothing dignifying about this.

  And I figure it’s best to not touch a dead body.

  The way he looks is doing something to me. It’s not him being dead. It’s him being dead in this place. This blank space. My life lately has been an assortment of apartments like this—white, inoffensive, easily mistakable for each other. Worst of all, cold. Like dying in purgatory. Alone and afraid with nothing to comfort you. Where do you even go from a place like this?

  “Ash,” Sam calls from the kitchen.

  She turns the laptop toward me as I walk in. It shows the picture of a handsome man standing against a brick wall. Young, very trendy, which I can tell because the sleeves of his sport jacket are pushed up and he’s wearing a scarf wrapped a hundred times around his neck. He has a shaved head and a five-o’clock shadow that’s rolling over toward six. Standing next to a canvas covered in trippy, multi-colored boxes.