Complication Read Free Page B

much liked Czech beer. Perhaps I should order an extra one. Who knows if he will be coming back.”
    For a moment of freefall, I thought she was going to tell me Paul was still alive. That he’d run into some kind of trouble, been forced to fake his own death five years ago. That he’d been hiding, lying low, waiting for things to blow over. She’d written the letter because she needed help. Together we could bring him back into the world. I started feeling guilty for believing all this time that he’d been gone.
    But Vera wasn’t talking about Paul coming back. She was talking about the waiter, who in the next moment arrived and took Vera’s order with an air of weary reluctance. Across the room, a bedraggled-looking fiftyish man with long, unwashed salt-and-pepper hair spilling out of a wool stocking cap shared a joke with the bartender. His eyes had a bleary intensity as he repeatedly glanced over at our table. But then Vera probably provoked repeat glances wherever she went. She lit her cigarette, and the flame illuminated a small U-shaped scar riding across the ridge of her cheekbone beneath her left eye.
    â€œWhen I wrote the letter,” she began as the waiter walked away, “I never believed anyone would come. Many times I tore it up. Always I wrote another. When finally I sent it, I felt difficult to come here day after day. But I came anyway. I’ve nearly lost count of the days. And now here you are. Why are you here?”
    â€œBecause of your letter.”
    â€œBut you must also have reasons.”
    â€œHe was my brother. I want to know what happened.”
    â€œAnd if I tell you, what then?”
    I shrugged. “Then I go home.”
    She fell silent, regarding me behind a curtain of cigarette smoke. “Maybe you have a certain way you wish to remember
your brother. What I say could change your idea of him. Please understand I have told no one. What I say is only for you. No one else can know.” Vera snubbed out her cigarette and edged closer, fingers unnaturally long and white as she placed her hands flat upon the table’s surface. “Your brother,” she uttered in a low voice, “stole a watch.”
    I waited for her to go on.
    She didn’t.
    â€œA watch,” I prompted. “Like what, a Rolex? A Tag Heuer?”
    â€œNot an ordinary watch. The Rudolf Complication.”
    â€œIs that Swiss?”
    Vera leaned back, placing a hand to her throat and blinking in rapid succession. “You don’t understand. The Rudolf Complication is not a watch for knowing what is the time. Not something you wear. It’s art. An important work of art. Of history. When Paul disappeared, he was planning to take this watch from a gallery near the river. Or had already taken it. I don’t know for 100 percent.”
    â€œI’m not following you.”
    â€œOn the other side of the river, between Malá Strana and Kampa Island, is a canal called Čertovka. Means in English ‘the Devil’s Stream.’ Near the—”
    â€œWhy do they call it that?”
    She shrugged. “Something about an old woman who lived near there in olden times and everyone thought she was a devil. The villagers painted little devils all over her house as a warning for, I don’t know, to other villagers I guess. There’s a big wooden wheel in the canal. A famous water wheel. You have probably seen it on postcards.”
    â€œPaul didn’t really do postcards,” I said.
    But I remembered that he had sent at least one. Nearly a year after he’d left Chicago, six months or so before he died. It was
from some place called the Prague Torture Museum and featured a medieval engraving of a man spread eagled and strung upside down by his ankles, hands bound behind his back. Two men on either side of him held the handles of a large saw they were using to divide their prisoner in half at the crotch.
    On the back, Paul had