Complication Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    AGENT #3553: The girl was six years old.
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    [Silence—duration 2 seconds]
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    AGENT #3553: Her name was.She had her skull fractured in four different places from blows delivered by a blunt instrument, and the body was in fact found at none of those locations.

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    [Silence—duration 9 seconds]
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    REZNÍCKOVÁ: You would know better than me.
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    AGENT #3553: Perhaps not.
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    [TAPE ENDS]

CHAPTER 3
    A round 8 AM I woke disoriented and enclosed by pale yellow walls empty save for a grim painting featuring two bearded men playing chess in a smoke-filled tavern. You could tell which one was losing by the way he clutched his meerschaum pipe hard between his teeth, his face rigid with concentration, while his younger opponent was casually wiping his glasses on his coat sleeve. All other figures in the painting were subsumed in the shadows, their conversations, I imagined, muted by the blanket of hovering smoke.
    My hotel was one of few in Karlín, a neighborhood just north of the city center, the hotel itself only blocks from where my brother’s blood-stained shirt and expired work permit were found in the courtyard of a building on Křižíkova Street. A five-story Neo-Renaissance building with a salmon pink façade going gray from its proximity to a highway overpass one hundred yards from my third-story window, the hotel looked out over a small grassy lot, a McDonald’s, a tram stop. On the other side of the street, the world’s saddest looking shoe store stood next to a seedy
establishment with mirrored windows and a neon sign reading “non-stop herna bar.”
    Heading home from the Black Rabbit last night, I’d been accosted on the street by a little girl no older than eight who trailed me from the subway station. Following close at my heels, she kept repeating some phrase over and over and trying to hand me a used, pocket-sized tourist guidebook called Prague Unbound . It looked to be in good condition, its cover even improbably embossed with faded gold lettering and bound in black leather, but I didn’t plan on doing any sightseeing. The little girl was devilishly persistent, though. When I finally gave up and handed her a couple crowns, she loosed a grin that gave me shudders. The poor kid had diseased blackened gums and not a single tooth in her mouth.
    Prague Unbound had yellowing pages and that singular musty old book smell as I cracked it open and set about finding out what herna bars were. Turned out they were low stakes gambling establishments and not, as I would have guessed, high-energy protein snacks. Oddly enough, the photograph in the book was of the very same herna bar across my hotel and was taken from nearly the same perspective I had looking out the window. In the distance beyond lurked the massive Žižkov TV Tower, rising on a hilltop like a malformed rocket awaiting takeoff. The guidebook said it was the tallest structure in the city, built by the Soviets allegedly to jam Western radio and television broadcasts. After the Russians left, a local artist had decorated it with sculptures of faceless black babies crawling ant-like up its surface.
    Prague Unbound also mentioned that the area was the site of a bloody battle between the Holy Cross Army and the Hussites in 1420 which saw hundreds of the retreating Crusaders drown in the Vltava as they made a panicked attempt to flee, the book noting, “in layers of mud and silt the river records bone-by-bone the measure of human folly.” The book didn’t have much to say
about anything else in my vicinity, except for mentioning a nearby museum that housed a huge 3D model of the city handmade entirely from paper and built by a lone man in the eighteenth century over the course of eleven years before he died broken and penniless. “Prague has a genius for inspiring grand ambitions in its most ardent suitors,” the guidebook warned in sidebar, “and a