“I don’t, sweetheart, I don’t remember it at all,” aged Matilda responded cheerfully, working away deftly with her glittering needles.
“But perhaps your friends remember?”
The needles’ movement slowed a little.
“After all, you did tell them the name, right?” Andrei went on. “So it’s quite possible, isn’t it, that their memories might be slightly better?”
Matilda shrugged one shoulder again and said nothing. Andrei leaned back in his chair.
“Well, this is the situation in which you and I find ourselves, Pani Husáková. You have either forgotten the name of that woman or you simply don’t want to tell it to us. But your women friends do remember it. That means we’ll have to detain you here for a little while so that you can’t warn your friends, and we’ll be obliged to keep you here until either you or one of your friends remembers who you heard this story from.”
“That’s up to you,” Pani Husáková said meekly.
“That’s all well and good,” said Andrei. “But while you’re trying to remember and we’re wasting time on your friends, people will carry on disappearing, the bad guys will be chortling and rubbing their hands in glee, and all this will happen because of your strange prejudice against the investigative agencies.”
Aged Matilda didn’t answer. She just pursed her wrinkled lips stubbornly.
“You must understand what an absurd situation we have here,” Andrei continued, trying to hammer home the point. “Here we are, kept busy day and night by all sorts of slimeballs, lowlifes, and scum, and then an honest person comes in and absolutely refuses to help us. What are we supposed to make of that? It’s totally bizarre! And this childish trick of yours is pointless in any case. If you won’t remember, your friends will, and we’ll find out that woman’s name anyway, we’ll get to František, and he’ll help us take out the entire nest of villains. As long as the thugs don’t take him out first, as a dangerous witness… And if they do kill him, you’ll be the guilty one, Pani Husáková! Not in the eyes of the court, of course, not in the eyes of the law, but from the viewpoint of conscience, the viewpoint of humanity!”
Having invested this brief speech with the entire force of his conviction, Andrei languidly lit up a cigarette and began waiting, casting inconspicuous glances at the face of the clock. He set himself exactly three minutes to wait, and then, if the absurd old woman still didn’t cough up, he would send the old crone off to a cell, even though that would be completely illegal. But he had to push this damned case along somehow, didn’t he? How much time could he waste on every old woman? A night in a cell sometimes had a positively magical effect on people… And if there were any problems about him exceeding his authority… there wouldn’t be any, she wouldn’t complain, it didn’t look like she would… but if problems did come up anyway, the solicitor general was taking a personal interest in this case, wasn’t he, and it was a reasonable assumption that he wouldn’t hang Andrei out to dry. Well, let them hit me with a reprimand. I don’t work just to earn their gratitude, do I? Let them. Just as long as I can push this damned case on even a little bit… just a tiny little bit…
He smoked, politely wafting aside the clouds of smoke, the second hand ran cheerfully around the face of the clock, and Pani Husáková remained silent, merely clacking away quietly with her needles.
“Right,” said Andrei when four minutes had elapsed. He crushed his cigarette butt into the ashtray with a determined gesture. “I am obliged to detain you. For obstructing the course of the investigation. It’s entirely up to you, Pani Husáková, but to my mind this is some kind of puerile nonsense… Here, sign the record of interrogation and you’ll be escorted to a cell.”
After aged Matilda had been led away (she wished him goodnight as they parted), Andrei remembered that they still hadn’t brought him any hot tea. He stuck his head out into the corridor, reminded the duty guard of his obligations in harsh terms and at considerable length, and ordered him to bring in the witness Petrov.
The witness Petrov was so stocky that he was almost square, with hair as black as a crow—he looked like the classic gangster, a twenty-four-karat mafioso. He sat down firmly on the stool without saying a word and started watching sullenly as Andrei sipped his tea.
“What is it then, Petrov?” Andrei said to him good-naturedly. “You come bursting in here, creating havoc, preventing me from working, and now you don’t say anything…”
“What’s the point of talking to you spongers?” Petrov said spitefully. “You should have moved your ass sooner, it’s too late now.”
“And what’s happened that’s such an emergency?” Andrei inquired, turning a deaf ear to the “spongers” and all the rest.
“What’s happened is that while you were blabbing in here, sticking to your shitty regulations, I saw the Building!”
Andrei carefully put his spoon in his glass. “What building?” he asked.
“You can’t possibly be serious!” said Petrov, instantly flying into a rage. “Are you joking around with me here? What building… the Red one. That Building. The bastard’s standing right there on Main Street, and people are walking into it, and here you are sipping on your tea… tormenting some silly old women—”
“Hang on now, hang on,” said Andrei, taking a map of the City out of the file. “Where did you see it? When?”
“It was just now, when they were driving me here… I tell the idiot, stop!—and he steps on the gas… I tell the duty guard here, get a police unit there, quick—and he dithers like a fart in a trance.”
“Where did you see it? At what spot?”
“You know the synagogue?”
“Yes,” said Andrei, finding the synagogue on the map.
“Well then, it’s between the synagogue and the movie theater—there’s this dingy dump down there.”
On the map there was a small square with a fountain and a children’s playground marked between the synagogue and the New Illusion movie theater. Andrei chewed on the end of his pencil. “When was it you saw it?” he asked.
“It was twelve twenty,” Petrov said morosely. “And now it’s probably almost one already. Don’t expect it to wait for you… Sometimes I’ve run there in fifteen or twenty minutes and it was gone already, so this time…” He gestured hopelessly.
Andrei picked up the phone and gave an order. “A motorcycle with a sidecar and one police officer. Immediately.”
2
The motorcycle roared along Main Street, bouncing over the battered asphalt surface. Andrei hunched over, hiding his face behind the windscreen of the sidecar, but he was still chilled to the bone. He ought to have brought his uniform greatcoat.
Every now and then loonies who were completely blue from the cold leaped off the sidewalk, skipping and weaving toward the motorcycle and yelling something that was drowned out by the noise of the motor—then the police motorcyclist braked, swearing through his teeth as he dodged away from the outstretched, clutching hands, broke through the lines of striped robes, and immediately revved up the motorbike again so hard that Andrei was flung backward.
Apart from the loonies, there wasn’t anyone else in the street. Only once did they come across a patrol car slowly cruising along with an orange light blinking on its roof, and they saw a baboon running across the square in front of City Hall. The baboon was tearing along at full speed, and unshaven men in striped pajamas were chasing after it with shrill giggles and piercing howls. Turning his head, Andrei saw them finally overtake the baboon, knock it to the ground, stretch out its front and back legs in different directions, and start swinging it regularly to and fro to the strains of some ghoulish, otherworldly song.