A jogger found Lucy early the next morning, peacefully hanging from a low bough of an old oak tree in a quiet park in a pleasant residential suburb of Prague, her shapely legs swinging and her swollen tongue protruding. The jogger, a well-preserved round-faced blonde woman named Irena Golemova, passed the body three times as she conscientiously ran her customary four laps around the park. On the first lap, her vision still obscured by lack of sleep and by the thick early morning mist, Mrs. Golemova believed that she had seen a particularly large beehive. On her second circuit, she felt a sentiment of vague benevolence towards this athletic young girl who was doing gymnastics at so early an hour. Mrs. Golemova was looking forward to the forthcoming Olympic Games in which she very much hoped that the Czech team would acquit itself well, bringing honor to the nation and setting a good example to the country's youth. It was only in the middle of her third lap, some three hundred meters downwind of the corpse, that Mrs. Golemova, still running, burst into hysterical screams, much to the bewilderment of a retired postal clerk who was walking his dog, a large bull terrier bitch named Matka.
The Czech police, efficient as ever, immediately concluded that the Park Killer had struck again in the latest of a series of outrages which had begun in November 1989, after Good King Wenceslas, flushed with the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution, had issued a general amnesty to all prisoners in Communist jails. The Park Killer had cunningly changed his modus operandi in this case, however; the corpse bore no sign of sexual violence, its hair had not been chopped off, and its clothing had not been ripped to shreds. The only thing missing were the panties. But this wily maneuver failed to deceive Lieutenant Boruvka, the experienced detective investigating the sixteen murders committed by the Park Killer: Boruvka immediately began to trace the whereabouts of all prostitutes who had not been seen in Wenceslas Square during the past two days. Boruvka's uncanny intuition also told him that the foreign labels on the corpse's clothing meant that the Park Killer had recently bought or stolen a complete set of women's garments, probably from one of the international boutiques which had recently opened outlets in Prague. Boruvka perceptively noticed that the clothes did not appear brand-new. He realized that this was a clue of vital importance since it obviously implied that the Park Killer was a transvestite whose secret fetish for Amerikan underwear had finally come out into the open. In fact, as Boruvka explained to his boss, Captain Jahoda, who stared with an air of stupefied admiration at his pudgy subordinate, the Park Killer's sexual deviance had finally overpowered his rationality. The very fact that the latest corpse had not even been sexually assaulted proved that the killer was not actually interested in sex itself, but rather in eliminating women since they frustrated the killer's desire to be a woman himself. Moreover, the Park Killer did not want to be just any woman: he wanted to be a Western woman. Czechoslovakia had been a closed society during those crucial years in which the killer's sexual orientation had been decisively formed. The killer had clearly been unhinged by the sheer rapidity with which young Amerikan women flooded into the country after the Velvet Revolution. At first, the killer had been content to express his hostility by violently attacking Czech prostitutes but now his psychosis had reached a stage in which no foreign woman was safe in Prague anymore. Captain Jahoda immediately agreed to launch a public information campaign warning Western women in Prague to guard their underwear and lives carefully. Young Czech women merely had to behave in a moral manner.
And so, later that morning when I came down to make a phone call to my friend Steele, I found cute little Annichka as usual behind the reception desk, but dressed in a long magenta skirt and a severe mauve tunic whose tight long sleeves ended at her wrists in a froth of ancient yellow lace. Her short dark curly hair had been painstakingly bound into two unruly plaits and a large cardboard hand-lettered placard hung lopsidedly from a loop of rope around her neck.
"What does the sign say?" I asked curiously. "And what's with the fancy dress?"
"It says that I am a nice Czech girl," Annichka said petulantly. "I'm not, but my mother said that I had to wear the sign. And she made me wear my grandmother's clothes as well."
"Is it some sort of national custom or something?"
Annichka giggled, but then a worried look came over her pretty young face. "No, it's because of this new murder in the park. Look!" She waved a tabloid at me. "It's horrible! The police are saying that all women who look like foreigners will be raped and murdered."
"Has a foreigner been murdered or something?" I looked at the paper but I could only see a full-page picture of a fat middle-aged man looking pleased with himself. "Is that the killer?"
"No, it's the detective investigating the case. The police aren't giving any details about the victim. They're just saying that she was a young woman. Oh, I don't feel safe anymore!"
"You'll be all right," I said soothingly but my mind was far from calm. "Just keep wearing the fancy dress. Do they think she was a foreigner? Have you seen Lucy anywhere?"
"No, I haven't seen her..." Annichka's big brown eyes widened. "I haven't seen her for days! You don't think..."
"Annichka, I'd better make a phone call," I said soberly. "Can you call the Amerikan Embassy?" Annichka nodded, dialled a couple of numbers, spoke briefly, and then handed the phone to me. "Hullo. I want to speak to Steele Remington. Look, I'm sure he works at the Embassy. It's extremely urgent. Look, lady, I do not give a fuck about how busy you are. I would not give a fuck even if you were Shirley Dimple herself. Oh, really? Well, get off your fat ass and find Steele for me. Now. Yeah, well, the same to you, bitch. Thank you." I glowered at the phone. Annichka looked taken aback at my language. I shrugged. At that moment I really didn't care about some starchy paper-pusher's hurt feelings. "Steele. Where's Lucy?"
"Hey, bud!" Steel sounded cheerful. I had a sudden vision of my mild-mannered old school friend laughing insanely as he chased a frightened Lucy with a machete. "What's up? My boss said she'd never been so insulted in her life."
"She said she had never heard of you. Where's Lucy?"
"How should I know?" Steele sounded puzzled. "She changed her mind about going home with me that night. She said she wanted to go to the train station."
"The train station?" I asked incredulously.
"Yeah. I don't know why but she was really insistent. One minute we were kissing, you know, and then the next..."
"Maybe you have bad breath."
"I don't think so," Steele said huffily. "I think your little pal is a little crazy. She said she had to change bodies. What is that supposed to mean?"
"Steele. Lucy has disappeared. Have you heard about this murder?"
"What murder? Oh, yeah, the body they found in the park this morning, right?" Steele laughed. "We've had at least five hundred phone calls this morning from all these worried mothers in the States saying that they haven't heard from their daughters recently. Look, there are millions of Amerikan chicks in Prague. What makes you think it's Lucy? She's probably gone for a holiday to Germany or something."
"She did ask me what Berlin was like," I said slowly.
"See. Well, there you go. She probably decided to go visit friends in Berlin."
"Steele. Lucy has disappeared," I repeated. "Nobody has seen her in nearly a week. She left no messages. She didn't tell her boss. She didn't tell me."
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Steele sounded tired.
"I want you to call the police and to arrange for us to see the body."
"Oh, come on, pal," Steele yelped. "Do you know what the Czech police are like? They'll probably arrest us or something."
"I'll be waiting for your call."
It took Steele two and a half hours to arrange everything. He sounded furious when he called back. "Okay. Everything's set. Meet me at the morgue in ten minutes flat." I hastily noted down the address and asked Annichka to get me a taxi. "I hope you're right," Steele said nastily, slamming down the phone.
I was right. The highlights of her ash-blonde halo had faded away as she lay with closed eyes on a steel table and there were small spots of decay spreading like age marks on the dainty little hands folded neatly over her breasts, in the perpetual twilight of the cold morgue. But it was Lucy's body, all right. Unfortunately, Steele was right as well. The fat man investigating the case had both of us arrested right away on suspicion of murder.
"See what you've done now?" Steele snarled as we sat in our prison cell, waiting to be questioned. "I'll never be able to live this down. It'll be in all the papers. This is the stuff of headlines." His steel-rimmed glasses glinted accusingly. I grimaced at my hands. I needed a manicure. "`Amerikan Attache Accused'," Steele intoned. "`Death-Dealing Diplomat To Dangle.' `Sex-Starved Slayer Spoils States' Standing'."
"Did you kill her?" I asked curiously.
Steele gasped. "Oh, my God. You've known me since we were in school together. Did I look like a killer back then? Do I look like a rapist now?" He buried his head in his large hands. "My best friend once upon a time," his muffled voice moaned. "And he thinks I'm capable of murder. God alone knows what my boss will say," Steele wailed. "She'll probably lead me by the hand to the electric chair."
"If you didn't kill Lucy then why are you so afraid?"
Steele made a face at me. "If we didn't kill Lucy then why are we under arrest?" he mimicked.
"They just want to talk to us."
"Great. Okay, let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that these fucking ex-Communist policemen don't want to frame Westerners. Maybe they're nice guys. Maybe they'll offer us coffee and a cigarette and tell us how much they like police shows on Amerikan television and then they'll let us go home. It's still not going to look good, you know, pal. Shirley Dimple will not be happy when she hears about how one of her attaches was questioned by the Czech police on suspicion of the murder of an Amerikan citizen. People will give me funny looks. A little cloud of uncertainty will poison their minds. `Did he kill her?' they will wonder and their smiles will be brittle and insincere and just a little bit too fucking polite. Pretty girls will refuse to go out for a drink with me unless they can bring along a seven-foot tall Marine to stop me from strangling them. My sex-life is ruined! My only consolation is..." Steele grinned at me mirthlessly. "The only thing that prevents me from throwing my glasses on the floor and stamping on them and slashing my wrists with shards of broken glass right this moment is that... your life is ruined as well."
"Glad it makes you happy." I morosely looked around at the bleak little detention room and pictured spending my life in jail. At that moment, two fat policemen waddled in. We rose. They motioned us back to our seats.
"I am Lieutenant Boruvka," the one who had arrested us said. "And this is Detective-Captain Jahoda. We want to ask you a few questions. Would you like some coffee?" He offered us cigarettes. Steele grabbed one. Boruvka lit it for him.
"Do you like underwear?" Jahoda barked at me suddenly.
"I wear it," I replied cautiously. Jahoda looked triumphantly at his lieutenant. With a pang of unease, I remembered pestering Lucy for her panties. I'm not big on sniffing but I like to fondle. But she had never given me any. For one terrifying moment, I wondered if I had in fact killed Lucy for her underwear and promptly forgotten all about it.
"Any particular kind of underwear?" Boruvka asked insinuatingly.
"Boxer shorts. Long sleeved T shirts in cold weather." I desperately tried to remember other varieties of underwear I had worn in my life. "When I go hiking, I wear long silk underwear."
"Silk," Boruvka breathed. Jahoda shook his head sadly at my depravity. Boruvka almost looked disappointed that I had broken so quickly. He turned his attention to Steele, but only as a matter of routine. "And you, Mister Remington?"
"What are you guys trying to get at?" Steele asked angrily. "I want to call the Embassy lawyer."
"You are not in Amerika, Mister Remington," Jahoda said smugly. "We have seen your television programs. We know your rights. But you don't have such rights in our country."
"I have diplomatic immunity," Steele responded belligerently.
"Just answer the question," Boruvka urged politely. "I'm sure we will let you go." His glance flickered briefly past me. I felt convicted.
"All right, I like wearing my girlfriend's panties," Steele said impatiently. "She's back in Amerika and I miss her terribly so she sends me her underwear by registered mail and I sniff it and... Hey, what is the matter with you guys?" he yelped as Boruvka whistled shrilly and a horde of grim-faced policemen burst into the room and began dragging Steele out of his chair by his armpits. "Let me go! What did I say?"
"What have you done with those panties, you filthy pervert?" Jahoda snarled, clouting Steele across the ear with a beefy fist. "Decadent capitalist pig. Admit it. You killed the girl and then stole her panties."
"Captain Jahoda," I interjected with a calm I did not feel. "If he killed Lucy then why did we take the trouble to come down to the morgue to identify her?"
Boruvka cast me a contemptuous look. "Obviously because he could clear himself that way."
"Can't you take a joke?" Steele called plaintively, his long legs slithering over the grimy linoleum. "I was only joking. I don't wear my girlfriend's underwear! I don't even have a girlfriend!"
"You don't have a girlfriend now because you killed her!" Boruvka bellowed. "Do you deny that you like women's underwear?"
Steele gasped for air. "I deny it. I despise women's underwear. It gets in the way. I despise everything even remotely connected with women... Guys, not again!" he pleaded as Boruvka blew his whistle again and the policemen rushed in again. "What did I say this time?"
"You said you hate women," Jahoda sneered, puffing smoke at Steele's prostrate face. "Where were you on the night of August 22, 1991? May 26, 1991? April 8, 1991? March 19, 1991? March 10, 1991? February 13, 1991? February 4, 1991? December 4, 1990? November 16, 1990? October 15, 1990? October 7, 1990? September 8, 1990? Do you deny that you knew this woman you have identified? Or Jana Movotna? Martina Pavratilova? Helena Zhukova? Well?"
"Stop," Steele begged. "I have no idea what you are talking about. The dates mean nothing to me. Nor do the names. The only person I knew was Lucy. And I had only met her that night. He introduced her to me." Steel pointed at me. Following his compass finger the two detectives turned towards me as though magnetized.
"Yes," I confirmed. "I introduced Lucy to Steele. We went out for a drink together. And then I never saw her again."
"I see it all..." Boruvka said softly. "You two work as a pair. You stalk these innocent girls. Well, some of them are prostitutes but you evil Westerners take advantage of their trust and you lure these poor unsuspecting little women to their deaths. Captain, we were wrong all along! So far we have been assuming that only one maniac was committing these heinous crimes. But actually it was these two fiends collaborating together." Boruvka nodded bravely, stood to attention, and saluted. "I take full responsibility for the error, sir!"
Jahoda shook his head magnanimously. "It was not your fault, Lieutenant Boruvka. How could we have known? The cunning of these devils..."
"Wait a second." I interrupted. "All these dates you mentioned. I wasn't even in this country then."
"Hey, that's right!" Steele shouted from the floor. "Me neither! I was in Washington until a month ago!"
Jahoda and Boruvka gaped at us. "Can you prove it?" Jahoda asked dubiously. Without a word, Steele and I fished out our passports (never leave home without it) and handed them over. Boruvka and Jahoda pulled out their reading glasses and flipped the pages carefully. They looked across at each other and sighed. "Go home!" Jahoda snarled crossly. "Don't leave the country without informing us. Decadent Western pigs..." he muttered to himself as we saluted and ran away, exchanging high-fives as we left the building.
"But who killed her if we didn't?" I asked as I got into a taxi.
Steele thumped the side of his head and stuck out his tongue idiotically. "Let the police ponder that one!" he giggled hysterically. "Call me," he yelled as my taxi pulled away. "Let's go drinking together. From now on nobody else will go out with us anyway..."
The news of our arrest and interrogation took up most of the next morning's newspapers. Annichka at the reception desk translated bits for me. One newspaper referred to Steele as the Amerikan ambassador's closest adviser. Another paper believed that he was the CIA representative in Prague. I was either Vietnamese or Indonesian or Malay or North Korean but everyone agreed that I was up to no good in Prague and ought to be deported to my country of origin. An important skinhead group were rumored to be hatching plans to kidnap me and then kick my head in and cut off my genitals for `defiling the honor of White women.'
"Oh, God. I need a drink," I groaned. "Come and have a drink with me, Annichka. Cheer me up. Tell me about your grandfather's preferences in drugs."
"Uh... Actually, I really can't have a drink right now," Annichka squeaked fearfully. I looked at her big brown eyes made even larger by terror and nodded sadly. She eventually relented but I noticed that she stood as far away from me as she could as we rode up in the elevator. "Marek's in the bar right now, isn't he?"
"Yeah, Annichka," I said heavily. "Don't worry. He's a big guy. He'll protect you from me."
"Oh, I didn't mean it that way," Annichka protested but for some reason our drink together failed entirely to cheer me up. Steele had been right. I was now a certified sex-killer and a pariah.
The Czech police, efficient as ever, immediately concluded that the Park Killer had struck again in the latest of a series of outrages which had begun in November 1989, after Good King Wenceslas, flushed with the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution, had issued a general amnesty to all prisoners in Communist jails. The Park Killer had cunningly changed his modus operandi in this case, however; the corpse bore no sign of sexual violence, its hair had not been chopped off, and its clothing had not been ripped to shreds. The only thing missing were the panties. But this wily maneuver failed to deceive Lieutenant Boruvka, the experienced detective investigating the sixteen murders committed by the Park Killer: Boruvka immediately began to trace the whereabouts of all prostitutes who had not been seen in Wenceslas Square during the past two days. Boruvka's uncanny intuition also told him that the foreign labels on the corpse's clothing meant that the Park Killer had recently bought or stolen a complete set of women's garments, probably from one of the international boutiques which had recently opened outlets in Prague. Boruvka perceptively noticed that the clothes did not appear brand-new. He realized that this was a clue of vital importance since it obviously implied that the Park Killer was a transvestite whose secret fetish for Amerikan underwear had finally come out into the open. In fact, as Boruvka explained to his boss, Captain Jahoda, who stared with an air of stupefied admiration at his pudgy subordinate, the Park Killer's sexual deviance had finally overpowered his rationality. The very fact that the latest corpse had not even been sexually assaulted proved that the killer was not actually interested in sex itself, but rather in eliminating women since they frustrated the killer's desire to be a woman himself. Moreover, the Park Killer did not want to be just any woman: he wanted to be a Western woman. Czechoslovakia had been a closed society during those crucial years in which the killer's sexual orientation had been decisively formed. The killer had clearly been unhinged by the sheer rapidity with which young Amerikan women flooded into the country after the Velvet Revolution. At first, the killer had been content to express his hostility by violently attacking Czech prostitutes but now his psychosis had reached a stage in which no foreign woman was safe in Prague anymore. Captain Jahoda immediately agreed to launch a public information campaign warning Western women in Prague to guard their underwear and lives carefully. Young Czech women merely had to behave in a moral manner.
And so, later that morning when I came down to make a phone call to my friend Steele, I found cute little Annichka as usual behind the reception desk, but dressed in a long magenta skirt and a severe mauve tunic whose tight long sleeves ended at her wrists in a froth of ancient yellow lace. Her short dark curly hair had been painstakingly bound into two unruly plaits and a large cardboard hand-lettered placard hung lopsidedly from a loop of rope around her neck.
"What does the sign say?" I asked curiously. "And what's with the fancy dress?"
"It says that I am a nice Czech girl," Annichka said petulantly. "I'm not, but my mother said that I had to wear the sign. And she made me wear my grandmother's clothes as well."
"Is it some sort of national custom or something?"
Annichka giggled, but then a worried look came over her pretty young face. "No, it's because of this new murder in the park. Look!" She waved a tabloid at me. "It's horrible! The police are saying that all women who look like foreigners will be raped and murdered."
"Has a foreigner been murdered or something?" I looked at the paper but I could only see a full-page picture of a fat middle-aged man looking pleased with himself. "Is that the killer?"
"No, it's the detective investigating the case. The police aren't giving any details about the victim. They're just saying that she was a young woman. Oh, I don't feel safe anymore!"
"You'll be all right," I said soothingly but my mind was far from calm. "Just keep wearing the fancy dress. Do they think she was a foreigner? Have you seen Lucy anywhere?"
"No, I haven't seen her..." Annichka's big brown eyes widened. "I haven't seen her for days! You don't think..."
"Annichka, I'd better make a phone call," I said soberly. "Can you call the Amerikan Embassy?" Annichka nodded, dialled a couple of numbers, spoke briefly, and then handed the phone to me. "Hullo. I want to speak to Steele Remington. Look, I'm sure he works at the Embassy. It's extremely urgent. Look, lady, I do not give a fuck about how busy you are. I would not give a fuck even if you were Shirley Dimple herself. Oh, really? Well, get off your fat ass and find Steele for me. Now. Yeah, well, the same to you, bitch. Thank you." I glowered at the phone. Annichka looked taken aback at my language. I shrugged. At that moment I really didn't care about some starchy paper-pusher's hurt feelings. "Steele. Where's Lucy?"
"Hey, bud!" Steel sounded cheerful. I had a sudden vision of my mild-mannered old school friend laughing insanely as he chased a frightened Lucy with a machete. "What's up? My boss said she'd never been so insulted in her life."
"She said she had never heard of you. Where's Lucy?"
"How should I know?" Steele sounded puzzled. "She changed her mind about going home with me that night. She said she wanted to go to the train station."
"The train station?" I asked incredulously.
"Yeah. I don't know why but she was really insistent. One minute we were kissing, you know, and then the next..."
"Maybe you have bad breath."
"I don't think so," Steele said huffily. "I think your little pal is a little crazy. She said she had to change bodies. What is that supposed to mean?"
"Steele. Lucy has disappeared. Have you heard about this murder?"
"What murder? Oh, yeah, the body they found in the park this morning, right?" Steele laughed. "We've had at least five hundred phone calls this morning from all these worried mothers in the States saying that they haven't heard from their daughters recently. Look, there are millions of Amerikan chicks in Prague. What makes you think it's Lucy? She's probably gone for a holiday to Germany or something."
"She did ask me what Berlin was like," I said slowly.
"See. Well, there you go. She probably decided to go visit friends in Berlin."
"Steele. Lucy has disappeared," I repeated. "Nobody has seen her in nearly a week. She left no messages. She didn't tell her boss. She didn't tell me."
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Steele sounded tired.
"I want you to call the police and to arrange for us to see the body."
"Oh, come on, pal," Steele yelped. "Do you know what the Czech police are like? They'll probably arrest us or something."
"I'll be waiting for your call."
It took Steele two and a half hours to arrange everything. He sounded furious when he called back. "Okay. Everything's set. Meet me at the morgue in ten minutes flat." I hastily noted down the address and asked Annichka to get me a taxi. "I hope you're right," Steele said nastily, slamming down the phone.
I was right. The highlights of her ash-blonde halo had faded away as she lay with closed eyes on a steel table and there were small spots of decay spreading like age marks on the dainty little hands folded neatly over her breasts, in the perpetual twilight of the cold morgue. But it was Lucy's body, all right. Unfortunately, Steele was right as well. The fat man investigating the case had both of us arrested right away on suspicion of murder.
"See what you've done now?" Steele snarled as we sat in our prison cell, waiting to be questioned. "I'll never be able to live this down. It'll be in all the papers. This is the stuff of headlines." His steel-rimmed glasses glinted accusingly. I grimaced at my hands. I needed a manicure. "`Amerikan Attache Accused'," Steele intoned. "`Death-Dealing Diplomat To Dangle.' `Sex-Starved Slayer Spoils States' Standing'."
"Did you kill her?" I asked curiously.
Steele gasped. "Oh, my God. You've known me since we were in school together. Did I look like a killer back then? Do I look like a rapist now?" He buried his head in his large hands. "My best friend once upon a time," his muffled voice moaned. "And he thinks I'm capable of murder. God alone knows what my boss will say," Steele wailed. "She'll probably lead me by the hand to the electric chair."
"If you didn't kill Lucy then why are you so afraid?"
Steele made a face at me. "If we didn't kill Lucy then why are we under arrest?" he mimicked.
"They just want to talk to us."
"Great. Okay, let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that these fucking ex-Communist policemen don't want to frame Westerners. Maybe they're nice guys. Maybe they'll offer us coffee and a cigarette and tell us how much they like police shows on Amerikan television and then they'll let us go home. It's still not going to look good, you know, pal. Shirley Dimple will not be happy when she hears about how one of her attaches was questioned by the Czech police on suspicion of the murder of an Amerikan citizen. People will give me funny looks. A little cloud of uncertainty will poison their minds. `Did he kill her?' they will wonder and their smiles will be brittle and insincere and just a little bit too fucking polite. Pretty girls will refuse to go out for a drink with me unless they can bring along a seven-foot tall Marine to stop me from strangling them. My sex-life is ruined! My only consolation is..." Steele grinned at me mirthlessly. "The only thing that prevents me from throwing my glasses on the floor and stamping on them and slashing my wrists with shards of broken glass right this moment is that... your life is ruined as well."
"Glad it makes you happy." I morosely looked around at the bleak little detention room and pictured spending my life in jail. At that moment, two fat policemen waddled in. We rose. They motioned us back to our seats.
"I am Lieutenant Boruvka," the one who had arrested us said. "And this is Detective-Captain Jahoda. We want to ask you a few questions. Would you like some coffee?" He offered us cigarettes. Steele grabbed one. Boruvka lit it for him.
"Do you like underwear?" Jahoda barked at me suddenly.
"I wear it," I replied cautiously. Jahoda looked triumphantly at his lieutenant. With a pang of unease, I remembered pestering Lucy for her panties. I'm not big on sniffing but I like to fondle. But she had never given me any. For one terrifying moment, I wondered if I had in fact killed Lucy for her underwear and promptly forgotten all about it.
"Any particular kind of underwear?" Boruvka asked insinuatingly.
"Boxer shorts. Long sleeved T shirts in cold weather." I desperately tried to remember other varieties of underwear I had worn in my life. "When I go hiking, I wear long silk underwear."
"Silk," Boruvka breathed. Jahoda shook his head sadly at my depravity. Boruvka almost looked disappointed that I had broken so quickly. He turned his attention to Steele, but only as a matter of routine. "And you, Mister Remington?"
"What are you guys trying to get at?" Steele asked angrily. "I want to call the Embassy lawyer."
"You are not in Amerika, Mister Remington," Jahoda said smugly. "We have seen your television programs. We know your rights. But you don't have such rights in our country."
"I have diplomatic immunity," Steele responded belligerently.
"Just answer the question," Boruvka urged politely. "I'm sure we will let you go." His glance flickered briefly past me. I felt convicted.
"All right, I like wearing my girlfriend's panties," Steele said impatiently. "She's back in Amerika and I miss her terribly so she sends me her underwear by registered mail and I sniff it and... Hey, what is the matter with you guys?" he yelped as Boruvka whistled shrilly and a horde of grim-faced policemen burst into the room and began dragging Steele out of his chair by his armpits. "Let me go! What did I say?"
"What have you done with those panties, you filthy pervert?" Jahoda snarled, clouting Steele across the ear with a beefy fist. "Decadent capitalist pig. Admit it. You killed the girl and then stole her panties."
"Captain Jahoda," I interjected with a calm I did not feel. "If he killed Lucy then why did we take the trouble to come down to the morgue to identify her?"
Boruvka cast me a contemptuous look. "Obviously because he could clear himself that way."
"Can't you take a joke?" Steele called plaintively, his long legs slithering over the grimy linoleum. "I was only joking. I don't wear my girlfriend's underwear! I don't even have a girlfriend!"
"You don't have a girlfriend now because you killed her!" Boruvka bellowed. "Do you deny that you like women's underwear?"
Steele gasped for air. "I deny it. I despise women's underwear. It gets in the way. I despise everything even remotely connected with women... Guys, not again!" he pleaded as Boruvka blew his whistle again and the policemen rushed in again. "What did I say this time?"
"You said you hate women," Jahoda sneered, puffing smoke at Steele's prostrate face. "Where were you on the night of August 22, 1991? May 26, 1991? April 8, 1991? March 19, 1991? March 10, 1991? February 13, 1991? February 4, 1991? December 4, 1990? November 16, 1990? October 15, 1990? October 7, 1990? September 8, 1990? Do you deny that you knew this woman you have identified? Or Jana Movotna? Martina Pavratilova? Helena Zhukova? Well?"
"Stop," Steele begged. "I have no idea what you are talking about. The dates mean nothing to me. Nor do the names. The only person I knew was Lucy. And I had only met her that night. He introduced her to me." Steel pointed at me. Following his compass finger the two detectives turned towards me as though magnetized.
"Yes," I confirmed. "I introduced Lucy to Steele. We went out for a drink together. And then I never saw her again."
"I see it all..." Boruvka said softly. "You two work as a pair. You stalk these innocent girls. Well, some of them are prostitutes but you evil Westerners take advantage of their trust and you lure these poor unsuspecting little women to their deaths. Captain, we were wrong all along! So far we have been assuming that only one maniac was committing these heinous crimes. But actually it was these two fiends collaborating together." Boruvka nodded bravely, stood to attention, and saluted. "I take full responsibility for the error, sir!"
Jahoda shook his head magnanimously. "It was not your fault, Lieutenant Boruvka. How could we have known? The cunning of these devils..."
"Wait a second." I interrupted. "All these dates you mentioned. I wasn't even in this country then."
"Hey, that's right!" Steele shouted from the floor. "Me neither! I was in Washington until a month ago!"
Jahoda and Boruvka gaped at us. "Can you prove it?" Jahoda asked dubiously. Without a word, Steele and I fished out our passports (never leave home without it) and handed them over. Boruvka and Jahoda pulled out their reading glasses and flipped the pages carefully. They looked across at each other and sighed. "Go home!" Jahoda snarled crossly. "Don't leave the country without informing us. Decadent Western pigs..." he muttered to himself as we saluted and ran away, exchanging high-fives as we left the building.
"But who killed her if we didn't?" I asked as I got into a taxi.
Steele thumped the side of his head and stuck out his tongue idiotically. "Let the police ponder that one!" he giggled hysterically. "Call me," he yelled as my taxi pulled away. "Let's go drinking together. From now on nobody else will go out with us anyway..."
The news of our arrest and interrogation took up most of the next morning's newspapers. Annichka at the reception desk translated bits for me. One newspaper referred to Steele as the Amerikan ambassador's closest adviser. Another paper believed that he was the CIA representative in Prague. I was either Vietnamese or Indonesian or Malay or North Korean but everyone agreed that I was up to no good in Prague and ought to be deported to my country of origin. An important skinhead group were rumored to be hatching plans to kidnap me and then kick my head in and cut off my genitals for `defiling the honor of White women.'
"Oh, God. I need a drink," I groaned. "Come and have a drink with me, Annichka. Cheer me up. Tell me about your grandfather's preferences in drugs."
"Uh... Actually, I really can't have a drink right now," Annichka squeaked fearfully. I looked at her big brown eyes made even larger by terror and nodded sadly. She eventually relented but I noticed that she stood as far away from me as she could as we rode up in the elevator. "Marek's in the bar right now, isn't he?"
"Yeah, Annichka," I said heavily. "Don't worry. He's a big guy. He'll protect you from me."
"Oh, I didn't mean it that way," Annichka protested but for some reason our drink together failed entirely to cheer me up. Steele had been right. I was now a certified sex-killer and a pariah.
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