The devil called Bohdan Kladivo arrives a few minutes before the doors open on my twenty-second day at the casino. He is referred to by the others as Pan Kladivo—the polite title, Pan, somewhere between “mister” and “sir” in formality.
He is short and slightly built, his thinness accentuated by a very expensive, very trim pin-striped suit. Black hair sweeps back from his forehead and frames a thin face with delicate birdlike features while his quick-moving eyes study the world over the top of silver-framed glasses. The other thugs I have met exude strength; I fear them for their muscle and temper. But Bohdan Kladivo exudes intellect, and instantly I fear him for his mind and what looks like surgical rationality. To him, I feel certain, every problem is a tumor, and the one true solution is always the knife.
The Boss makes a fuss over Pan Kladivo’s arrival, pointing out a new chandelier, new felt on the tables, and the new girl they’ve found—me. I smile coyly and incline my head in a little bow of respect. But there are things more important than chandeliers and felt and me on Bohdan Kladivo’s mind because he does nothing more than pass over us with his eyes as he leads the Boss off the casino floor into the kitchen.
“He is, in German, gest?rt,” Rozsa says as the kitchen door swings shut. “How please in English?”
“Troubled,” I say.
“Exactly this,” she says. “Troubled.”
“About what?” I say.
“Everyone has worries.” Rozsa shrugs as she leaves my side. “Monsters, too.”
I stand at my empty blackjack table for an hour. Weekday afternoons are like that, and I’m grateful for the small mercy. It would be hard to count the cards when my mind is on fire with the possibilities of what is being discussed between Kladivo and Beran the Boss in the casino office. I want proof that they still have my dad, that he’s still alive, but I’d settle for even the barest hint of evidence.
“You are available?” asks a voice to my side in English.
I turn and see Bohdan Kladivo standing there, hands held primly in front of him.
“Your table, I mean.” He smiles. “Is your table available?”
My mouth flutters for a moment, but I finally manage to say, “Of course, Pan Kladivo.”
He sits at the middle stool, pulls a five-thousand-euro chip from his pocket, and places it in front of him.
The cards aren’t in his favor, a ten and a six against my eleven. He taps his middle finger on the table, and I toss out another card, a five, giving him twenty-one. I turn my second card over and reveal a seven, giving me eighteen.
“Congratulations,” I say, sweeping up the cards and giving him another five-thousand-euro chip.
“You’re Sofia Timurovna, yes? Do I have the patronymic right?”
My middle name he means, which in Russian is always a modification of the father’s first name. Timur in my case. “Yes, that’s right,” I say.
“Pan Beran says you are a shining star here. Intelligent, excellent with the cards.” He doubles his bet to ten thousand. “Where are you from in Russia?”
“The town of Armavir, in the south,” I say as we play through the hand. “Nineteen. You win again.”
He stacks up all his chips, twenty thousand euros in total. I throw down a jack and a four for him, a pair of eights for me.
“An admirable people, the Russians,” he says. “Disciplined. Loyal. Another card, please.”
“Then maybe we know different Russians,” I say as I deal him a three, which gives him a total of seventeen.
He declines another card, and I deal myself a four, giving me twenty. “Dealer wins,” I say. Just as I would with any other customer, I sweep his stack of twenty thousand euros away.
Bohdan Kladivo eyes me for a moment. Then he fishes a thousand-euro chip from his pocket and pushes it to me across the felt. “For you,” he says. “You are the only dealer here who would dare do that.”
“Do what, Pan Kladivo?” I say.
“Allow me to lose.”
I drop it into my little slot for tips as I would any other and give him a simple thank-you. This too he seems to appreciate and lets his eyes linger on mine until I look away.
“You’re new to Praha,” he says. “Do you have a boyfriend yet?”
My stomach turns. “I don’t date,” I say.
“Yes, this is what Pan Beran says. Speculation is you are a lesbian, but I think you are just being wise not to date the men here. They can be—rough.”
“I’m just a woman who doesn’t date.”
“I am not asking for myself, you understand,” he says. “I’m asking for my son, Roman. I believe your character would be a good, we may say, influence on him.”
I incline my head and smile politely as I can. “I’m sorry, Pan Kladivo. As I said, I do not date.”
“A decision I must respect.” He sighs and removes a small notepad from his suit jacket. “However, in case you change your mind, let me give you my mobile number.”
He jots his information down on a piece of paper with a fountain pen. The silver nib catches the light like the blade of a scalpel, and along the side of the pen’s piano-black body, I see the inscription To Dad, Love G.
Twenty-One
Rozsa makes tea that smells of black licorice and wet summer soil. I sip it and am grateful for the warmth, even if the flavor is terrible. It’s medicine, she tells me, and therefore supposed to be terrible.
Somehow I made it through the rest of my shift, a blur of playing cards and stacks of chips and stacks of money seen through veils of cigarette smoke. Rozsa found me sitting on the ground at the tram stop outside the casino afterward, my face, she says, pale as a dead man’s.
So tea and something to eat at Rozsa’s apartment. She would have none of my protests that I was fine and would really just like to go home. She even sprang for cab fare to her place, a dingy closet of an apartment above a café a long distance west of the river.
It’s all I can do to stay in Russian Sofia’s skin tonight, to remember to pronounce words as she would, and sip my tea as she would. I want desperately to let Rozsa know everything, to tell the truth, to unburden myself of my own story. What I tell her instead is that my current sorry state was simply a migraine brought on by all the cigarette smoke. In reality, my head aches with the deepest sense of shock and panic I’ve felt since the day my dad was taken.
There it was, the pen. The proof I’d been looking for. But what now? What do I do? What I need is Yael the ass-kicking ninja warrior goddess Israeli spy to tell me, but what I get is Rozsa the Hungarian pixie who fancies herself a witch.
“What you taste is anise and something—in Hungarian it is edes gomba,” Rozsa says of the tea. “Medicine for, not the body, but the unseen part.”
“The soul,” I say.
“Soul. Precisely that.”
I pick a little at the roast duck she brought up from the café, but I have no appetite for dead things just now.
Rozsa fusses just like Lili did back in New York, plumping the pillows in a little nest around me, tightening the blankets around my shoulders. Good at this, these Hungarians.
“You’re a strange kind of cat,” Rozsa says, settling into the couch beside me with her own cup of tea. “One minute, peaceful and quiet. The other minute, like your tail’s on fire.”