The apartment smelled like old coffee and something Kael couldn't place at first. Took him a few seconds. Cigarettes, but old ones, the ghost of them, the kind of smell a room holds for years after the smoking has stopped. Someone had made an effort with the place. The surfaces were clean. Books on the shelf in a row. But the effort had the quality of something done for its own sake rather than for anyone watching, which was a different thing entirely, and it left a particular kind of loneliness sitting in the corners of the room.
Dvořák stood near the window with his glass and did not offer Kael a seat. Kael sat down anyway, in the chair nearest the door, and put his bag on the floor and waited.
"You shouldn't be here," Dvořák said.
"You didn't leave me many options."
"I left you one. Don't contact me."
"And I didn't. I came to your door." Kael looked at him. "You opened it before I knocked. You'd been standing there. So whatever you told yourself about not wanting to talk to me, some part of you has been thinking about it."
Dvořák said nothing to this. He moved from the window to the armchair across the room and lowered himself into it with the care of a large man whose knees had opinions. He set his glass on the side table. Water, Kael decided. Not vodka. The hand holding it was steady.
"The case was clean," Dvořák said. "I've said this."
"The case was closed in seventy-two hours. For a traffic fatality with an unidentified driver."
"The driver was identified. A hired car. The company"
"The company had no record of dispatching a vehicle that night. The entity that owned it was dissolved four months before the accident." Kael said this without emphasis, the way he said most things. "The file was sealed the week after I submitted my first request. Cultural heritage classification. I'm working from copies I had already made."
Dvořák looked at his glass.
"Why cultural heritage?" Kael asked.
"I don't know."
"Who applied the classification?"
"I don't know that either."
"What do you know?"
A long pause. The kind of pause that isn't someone searching for words but someone deciding how many to use.
"I know the case was clean on paper," Dvořák said finally. "Everything I submitted was accurate. Everything I wrote was what I found. The physical evidence at the scene was consistent with" He stopped.
Kael waited.
"Consistent with what the report says it was consistent with." Dvořák picked up his glass and set it down again without drinking. A small gesture that meant he was aware of what he had almost said and had pulled back from it. "The case was closed because there was nothing in my official findings to keep it open. That's the truth."
"There's a word in that sentence I want to focus on."
Dvořák looked at him.
"Official," Kael said.
The silence in the room changed in quality. Not longer, necessarily. Just heavier. Dvořák's face did a thing not much of a thing, a small tightening around the eyes, and then it didn't do that thing anymore, and he was looking at Kael with a flat, professional steadiness that Kael recognized as the expression a man puts on when he has decided to stop deciding and simply hold position.
"You need to stop," Dvořák said. "I'm telling you this not because of the case. I'm telling you because Prague is a city where certain questions, old questions, questions about things people have been keeping quiet for a very long time, don't get asked without consequences. I've seen consequences. I don't want to see them again."
"What kind of consequences?"
"The kind that don't get reported."
Kael looked at him steadily. "My wife died on a bridge at three in the morning, and the investigation into it was closed in three days and is now sealed under a law designed to protect historical buildings. I've been in Prague for eight months, and in that time, I've found things that don't belong in any version of this story that makes sense. I'm not going to stop. So you have a choice about whether to help me or not, but you don't have a choice about whether I continue."
Dvořák was quiet for a moment. He looked out the window. It was a gray day outside, the sky the color of old concrete, and a tram went past on the street below, making its particular sound that low electric hum that was one of the few sounds Kael had come to associate specifically with Prague.
"Her injuries," Dvořák said.
Kael went very still.
"The official report describes them as consistent with impact debris from the barrier collision." Dvořák was still looking out the window. Not at Kael. At something in the middle distance that had nothing to do with the gray street below. "That is what I wrote. That is what the report says."
He stopped.
"But?" Kael said.
"But the pattern." Dvořák picked up his glass. Set it down. A habit, apparently something to do with the hands. "The distribution of the injuries. I've been in traffic fatalities. Dozens of them. The distribution wasn't right. The angles were wrong. The force vectors, when you modeled them against the barrier trajectory," He shook his head. "It didn't add up the way it should have. Not for impact debris."
Kael's voice came out very level. He had practiced this in the months of investigation, the control of his voice when the subject was her. "What was it consistent with?"
Dvořák finally looked at him. Really looked at him. The eyes of a man who had been carrying something for two years and was setting it down, and didn't know yet whether that would make things better or worse.
He opened his mouth.
Then he closed it.
He stood up from the armchair. Set his glass on the side table precisely, deliberately, the way you set something down when you need both hands free and your thoughts in order.
"I shouldn't have said that much," he said. His voice had changed. The brief opening was over. Something had closed behind his eyes.
"Dvořák"
"You need to leave." He walked to the apartment door and put his hand on it. Not threatening. Just finished. Done for now. The door between the space where the thing had almost been said and the space where it hadn't. "I'll think about what you've told me. That's all I'm promising."
Kael stood. He picked up his bag. He walked to the door and stopped in front of it, in front of Dvořák, and for a moment they were close enough that he could see the thing the man was carrying the weight of it, the specific exhaustion of someone who has been afraid for a long time and has gotten used to the fear and hates that he has gotten used to it.
"What were the injuries consistent with?" Kael asked again. Quietly. The last time he was going to ask it today.
Dvořák opened the door.
Kael went through it.
The door closed behind him. He stood in the corridor for a moment listening. No sound from inside. No movement. Just the quiet of an apartment with a man in it who had said almost enough and had stopped himself one sentence too soon.
He went down the stairs and out into the gray November street and stood on the pavement with his bag over one shoulder and thought about what Dvořák had said and, more carefully, about what he hadn't.
The pattern. The angles. The force vectors.
Wrong.
He walked to the tram stop. The tram came. He got on and stood with his hand on the overhead bar while the city moved past the windows, and his mind kept returning to the same point the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth the knowledge that there was a thing, a specific thing, that Dvořák knew and had almost said and hadn't, and that thing was sitting somewhere in that apartment in Holešovice getting heavier every day it wasn't spoken.
He would go back. Not yet. But he would go back.
The tram hummed beneath him. And in the bones of his feet, through the floor of the tram, through the rails and the cobblestones and whatever lay beneath the cobblestones, the other hum answered it. Steady. Patient.
Waiting for him to ask the right question.
End of Chapter 5