of Sunday, September 23â
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: As long as you refuse to acknowledge the killerâs existence, you arenât accountable for stopping his crimes, is that it? Has some official at some ministry or other declared serial killers a cancer restricted to decadent Western societies? The embodiment of capitalismâs brutal excesses?
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AGENT #3553: We refuse to engage in such demoralizing speculation, but itâs worth pointing out that you wonât find a single verifiable account of the so-called Right Hand of Godâs exploits anywhere.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: Of course not. The killer and his crimes have been systematically erased from history. Thatâs what they say.
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AGENT #3553: Who is âtheyâ?
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: You want me to name names? âTheyâ is everybody. âTheyâ is probably your own mother. Havenât you ever heard the childrenâs rhyme? You people are always listening and yet you never hear anything.
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AGENT #3553: If next you plan on asking us about the mysterious black vans that drive through the streets snatching up children to harvest their organs, we can assure you that this story, too, is a fabrication.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: âWhen moon is high in August sky, and wind howls through the trees / They say at night a killer walks the gloomy crooked streets . . . â
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AGENT #3553: On Sunday, September 23, you left your apartment.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: Youâve really not heard it? The song based on that poem by Rentner?
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AGENT #3553: You boarded at the redline train at Kosmonautů.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: âCondemned to wander till timeâs end, bowed neck hung with clock/His wretched fate to ever hear, the dread tick-tock, tick-tock . . . â
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AGENT #3553: You boarded at the redline train at Kosmonautů station 3 and rode to Muzeum.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: You can ignore it if you choose, but people still talk. In whispers over dinner tables after the children have gone to bed. Between those endless suffering contests the old women hold while waiting in line outside the butcher shop. In slurred barroom tales I overhear at the Black Rabbit. The missing garbage manâs corpse found last year in BubeneÄ. A year before, the dead girl in the VyÅ¡ehrad cemetery. A thirteen-year-old boy namedin a warehouse of rubber tires in SmÃchov two years before that.
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AGENT #3553: You transferred to the green line and then exited at Malostranská. You caught a tram on Klarov Street to the base of PetÅÃn Hill. Correct?
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: For as long as anyone can remember, people have been disappearing. Each autumn, like clockwork. Some found strangled, some bludgeoned, others drowned or with their throats slit. Some are women, some men; occasionally they are children. All are found with their right hand missing. Never the left. Always the right.
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AGENT #3553: You transferred to the green line and then exited at Malostranská.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: As a girl, my mother lived across the street from an antique dealer and his mongoloid sonon Street in Josefov. Thefamily. Just before . . .
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[unintelligibleâduration 7 seconds]
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: . . . in the corner, his face swarming with flies.
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AGENT #3553: You caught a tram on Klarov Street to the base of PetÅÃn Hill.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: All stories follow the basic pattern. Grisly stories that stray into the realm of fairytales. The missing right hand is often just the start.
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AGENT #3553: You were seen carrying an accordion case.
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REZNÃCKOVÃ: And now a little girl. Her body found in BÅevnov. Or was it the gymnasium in SmÃchov? Stories vary. The girl bled white, or with her eyeballs pushed inside her skull, or with every tooth removed at the root. Asphyxiated, mouth stuffed with locks of her own black, red, blonde hair. In another