“Second question. Georgi and Stefan: have your flats been searched?”
“Ransacked.”
“Turned fucking upside down.” All those Bruce Lee videos, porn films.
“Mine too,” Ilievski says. “While you were still in custody, Anton. That’s how I knew that we’d been had. Then Branka said they’d have to release you. Helena said yesterday they came back and went through your place too.”
“Completely. Even the cellars — you know, where I was going to take it. And the neighbours’ ones. And the attic. And they even …”
“Yeah, we all had that,” Ilievski cuts him off. “Presumably they’ve done that at his flat too. Maňásek’s.”
“You can’t get near there any more,” Milachkov tells him, looking wistful.
“No point anyway. If they’d found it there they wouldn’t be turning places over, or following us around everywhere. What about his parents?”
“Mother,” Milachkov corrects him. “Father’s dead, I think. One brother, who he wasn’t close to. I went round there and said I’d been his friend and that I’d given him a painting for him to renovate. She let me look through some of his paintings, but our one wasn’t there. She’s crazy. I couldn’t get much sense out of her. She did say that the police had been there to look through his stuff too, and not found what they wanted. Oh — and that two other people, foreign people, had been to take things away, including paintings.”
Ilievski jerks his body forwards at Milachkov across the table. “Why didn’t you tell me this straight away?”
“You said we’d wait till Anton got here. And besides, there were so many paintings. And this guy was some Dutch dealer, organizing an exhibition of Maňásek’s work in Amsterdam, and this painting isn’t his work — I mean, it’s not an original painting by Ivan Maňásek, so why would the Dutch guy have taken it?”
“Who was the other foreign person?”
“The boy who lived with him.”
“Nick,” Anton says. “My friend. He’s the one who put me onto Maňásek in the first place.”
Ilievski ashes his cigarette by rotating its tip slowly on the floor of the ashtray, then turns to Anton:
“Where’s he now, then?”
“I don’t know. He lived in the spare room at Maňásek’s, so after Maňásek died, who knows? He used to live next door to me, but that was months ago; he hasn’t turned up back there. He could well have left Prague by now. He had a job lined up for him — in Amsterdam, too — writing for a magazine about art. Maybe he’s gone there. Maybe his French friend who lives in this street will have an address for him, but I don’t think so.”
“What was the magazine called?”
“European Art, Art throughout Europe, Modern Art in Europe, something like that.”
“When you leave here, go and visit his French friend. Ask him. Try to think of anyone else who knows this Nick. Is he the one who I met outside …”
“Blatnička, yes.”
“You, Stefan: did you get an address for this Dutch person? A name?”
“Joost. J-o-o-s-t. No surname. No address. He’s going to send the paintings back to the mother, but that could be months away from now. Maybe they’ll sell at this show and he’ll send her money instead.”
“I wonder if the police know this as well. Oh — by the way: did you find out if we have any contacts in the police who’re on this case, or know about it?”
“Still working on that,” says Milachkov.
“Well, keep working. Work harder. Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
They raise their glasses to meet Ilievski’s, then quickly tip the liquid back into their mouths — all of it, in single throws. Swallowing, Anton winces: he’s never liked drinking this way. His eyes water and his chest burns. All four men set their empty glasses down and are quiet for a few seconds, as though they’d just drunk communion wine. It’s Ilievski who breaks the silence:
“Amsterdam. We have people there.”
* * * * *
Nick said to meet in the art-deco café, which Heidi’s never been to before but has heard about from Brad and Jeffrey, these two English teachers who think it’s cool that they go to weird, out-of-the-way Czech bars. This fact alone, that they consider it cool, makes it not cool. She has to get to the art-deco café so that Nick can give her back her glasses which apparently this Jean-Luc’s found, a mere — what, four weeks after she first lost them at his place; plus, so that Nick can give her some casserole dish he wants her to return to Ivan’s mother; plus, so that she can say goodbye to him. She’s on the concourse of the main station. Hlavní Nádraží. When the English teachers go out drinking after school, they clunk their glasses together and say Hauptbahnhof, because Cheers is Na zdraví which sounds like Nádraží which in German is … like, oh so fucking clever …
Nick told her the upper level, to the left, above the tunnel to the platforms. She rides the escalator, then finds a staircase leading further upwards. There’s a sign in Czech, German and even Russian, which is quite unusuaclass="underline" they’ve taken all the Russian signs down everywhere else and started putting English ones up instead — largely out of spite, she thinks, to confuse their old masters by changing the landscape on them like they did to that poor cosmonaut the gun-toting black queen was going on about back at the party. But this sign’s old school; it says Buffet, Bufet, Kape and it’s pointing up the staircase, so the café must be there. What is art deco anyway? It’s something older than pop art, and cubism — or maybe not older than cubism, maybe about contemporary; then there’s art nouveau which isn’t the same thing or is it? She wishes she knew, just knew and didn’t care that she knew, didn’t even know that she knew, the knowledge just in there, all mundane, like knowing that today was Tuesday or that you were twenty-two, twenty-three in March …
Heidi comes to the top of the staircase and finds herself on a landing: a long corridor whose floor is all mosaicked in two-tone, black and white, with large, curving windows a bit like in Jean-Luc’s atelier. It’s an older, grander world than the sordid station below with all its párek stands and sleazy guides touting for tourists, Gute Wohnung! English? You want room? — ugh, and those Gypsies huddled in rows with all their worldly goods in laundry bags with strings around them. She just saw two of them outside in the bushes next to the sliding doors taking a crap — that’s right, just shitting right there in the open. Heidi did that herself once, walking in the Rockies three winters ago with Hikesoc — North Face rucksacks, Salomon ice picks, the works: she remembers crouching down in the pure snow above a crevasse, right across the slit, then how it fell from her so cleanly to the ice floor twenty feet below, the kadunggg! when it landed reverberating round the walls … But that was different, virgin, clean, these Gypsies stink to heaven — though it’s not their fault, she knows, they’re persecuted, poor as fuck, but nonetheless they stink and that’s a fact.
The large windows face back across the main road that runs right above the lower concourse, back down towards Mústek and across to Staré Město. All the roofs, from this raised elevation, look kind of candy-like, all Disney’s Magic Kingdom: pointy church spires and sloping square roofs with gold tiles on them and round domes and weathercocks. At one end of the landing there’s a door that’s padlocked closed; the café must be down the other end, behind the swinging wooden door a man’s just come from. He looks like a businessman in his suit and his leather shoes which click-clack on the floor’s tiles as he walks towards her. He smiles, turns as he passes her and looks her up and down: her legs, her tits, which dream on asshole, not if hell froze over — although actually it just might at this rate, it’s so damn cold …