The Mortality Principle

The rest of the day passed slowly.

The hotel lobby filled and emptied, filled and emptied, all walks of life seeming to drift through the atrium and yet it maintained its sense of calm. She could imagine the monks all those years ago shuffling through the same chambers, heads bowed in quiet contemplation. There was a conference in town, medical supplies by the sounds of the jargon being bandied about by the participants as they tried to one-up one another with jokes and punch lines that made no sense to Annja.

By early evening she was finally starting to feel hungry. She thought about calling room service, but the menu was fairly unappetizing and she had an entire city at her disposal. She’d heard about a place down by the river where the intellectuals and artists used to gather that had become a hive of secret activity during the revolution and now was renown for cheap good-quality eats in an authentic environment. It was proper precapitalism Prague, and it was only a five-minute walk away along one of the wider boulevards. Nothing was going to happen at five-thirty, she told herself, and ventured out in search of food.

Shop windows with words she couldn’t read emblazoned across them shone invitingly at one end of the street and were boarded up at the other. She saw young women walking in groups, laughing, and young men behind them, studious with book bags slung over their shoulders and earnest expressions behind their black plastic-framed glasses. She heard snatches of conversation in English about Kafka and a church around the corner that they were sure was featured in one of his stories. Those strands of intellectualism were cut across by more mundane chatter, including the fact that some website had gone down. What she didn’t hear was anyone talking about the murders.

The restaurant itself was the last building on the street, with huge plate-glass windows looking out over the Vltava. Inside, soft lighting from huge chandeliers gave the impression of opulence that was contradicted almost immediately by the tables beneath them, which looked like they would have been at home in a greasy spoon in the Bowery.

She sat at a table by the window, with a great view of the castle on the hill, and watched as one by one the stars came out. She asked the waiter what he’d recommend, something local, authentic Czech cuisine. He came back with a sampler filled with all sorts of peculiarities. She had no idea what she was putting into her mouth. Some of it was delicious, some of it wasn’t.

The meal killed another hour, the leisurely coffee after it another thirty minutes. Annja was good when it came to keeping her own company. She didn’t need to hide herself in a book, either. She was just content to simply be. To sit, gazing out of the window at the world as it passed by. To think.

And tonight she was thinking about Roux and Garin.

There was obviously something going on between the pair of them again. They were like a couple of teenage girls sometimes. She wanted to bang their heads together. But Roux was right: Garin’s simply turning up this morning was uncharacteristic even if he tried to pass it off as boredom. Very little Garin Braden did was without some underlying cause, and that cause only ever benefited Garin Braden. That was just the way of the world. It was hard to be angry with him for it. It was who he was. You might as well be angry with the wasp for stinging you or the milk for expiring. To quote the motivational poster: shit happens.

By the time Annja headed back to the hotel, the sun was a thing of the past, and the sky was verging on black. Cities were a different animal at night. Streets that had felt safe even just an hour earlier had a hostile undercurrent once the moon ruled the sky.

Annja made it back to her room for nine. Garin was nowhere in sight. It was still early to go out looking for the journalist, but she called Lars, anyway. “Fifteen minutes?” she said.

Getting back out there seemed to be more useful than sitting there tapping her foot. She didn’t know how life on the street worked. Turek might already be trying to lay claim to a sheltered spot for the night.

“Thought you’d bailed on me,” Lars replied. “I’ve been watching the news for the past three hours, but there’s been no mention of the killings.”

Annja wasn’t surprised. She said as much to Lars.

They arranged to meet down in the atrium.

Annja didn’t take much with her. All she needed was the street map where she’d marked a few possible locations and landmarks of interest. It hadn’t been difficult to identify the kinds of places where the homeless gathered, where soup kitchens were set up to feed them and where the hostel beds could be found to keep a few of them warm at night. But she wasn’t interested in those places. There was safety in numbers. She knew she should focus on isolated places where someone would be alone and therefore more vulnerable.

She headed to the lobby.

Her cameraman had managed to beat her to the punch and was leaning against the wall, his camera still packed in its flight case at his feet. He was chatting with the doorman just inside the glass doors. They slid open as she approached him.

“Ready?” Annja asked as she felt the cool air on her face. The temperature had dropped a good five degrees since she’d come back from the restaurant. It was only going to get colder out there as the night wore on.

The streets were filled with late-night tourists following the curves of old cobbled streets around to the famous bridge to get their photographs taken and gaze up at the castle under the bright spotlights. The distant sound of traffic was barely audible over the music piping out of the row of tourist-trap restaurants with their tables spilling out into the streets. That was where the lucky ones would be congregating—those who could afford to go out for a good time knowing that they would have a warm bed to go home to when they’d finished having fun for the night. Plenty of them would be there until the early hours, but they would have taxis to take them to their homes or hotels. They weren’t the ones at risk.

“The guy on the door told me that there are a few places around here where people try to make a bed for the night,” Lars said.

She fell into step beside the big Swede. He was every bit the archetype of his people—big, blond and burly. “We were just talking about the murder that happened last night. He said that it wasn’t far from here. Want to go check it out?”

“I saw the body.”

“You did what? And you didn’t think to mention it? Way to bury the lead.”

“Consider it exhumed.” She quickened her pace. There was no point in hanging around so close to the main roads and the hotels this early in the evening. They needed to find the darker corners, away from the eyes of the kind of people who would be uncomfortable if they saw the genuine poverty of the city they’d come to visit.

“I’ve already marked on the map a few places we might want to check out,” she said as Lars hustled to keep up with her. They moved with a purpose. No one else did. That meant she had to twist and weave between milling people, looking for breaks in the press of bodies to step into. Part of the reason for the haste was to avoid questions. It was harder for Lars to pepper her with them if he was chasing to keep up with her. Part, though, was that she was eager to find the journalist. He was the only one who seemed to know anything about what was happening on the streets. That, of course, had prickled her suspicions, too. It wouldn’t have been the only time a killer had played the press for his own agenda. But she didn’t think Turek was the killer. Not that she had anything to base that assumption on, not even his picture.

“Let’s start with some background shots of the conditions these people are forced to live in.”

“This really doesn’t feel like Chasing History’s Monsters,” Lars said.

He was right, of course. There was a fine line between history repeating itself and exploitation, and she wasn’t sure which side of that line she was walking right now.

“We don’t need much, just a few shots to give the story some genuine impact.”

She hesitated for a second when she reached the alleyway where she’d seen the body that morning. There were strands of police tape tied to downspouts on either side of the mouth, but the tape had been snapped and hung loose against the wall. The black stain on the ground wasn’t going to stop anyone from using the alleyway as a shortcut to wherever he or she needed to be.

“This is where it happened?” Lars asked, looking at the dark patch at his feet.

Annja found herself nodding. She focused on the gloom between the buildings. The streetlights penetrated only a short way before the alleyway was swallowed in darkness. She could understand why the homeless man had picked it for his shelter.

She heard the sound of something shuffling in the darkness and her heart skipped a beat.

“Hello?” she called to whoever was hiding inside the alleyway. It wasn’t like she thought they’d stumbled on the killer, no matter what pop psychologists said about returning to the scene of the crime. “Hello?” she called again, feeling a tingle up her spine.

Instinctively Annja caught herself flexing her fingers, ready to reach into the otherwhere to call on her sword. She glanced around, looking at Lars, who was peering over her shoulder, camera trained on the darkness. Well, she thought, if we get killed by some psychopath, at least he’ll get the shot. It wasn’t the most comforting of thoughts.

Annja took a step closer to the darkness, her breath catching in her throat as she strained to hear whatever it was that was hiding back there.

The shuffling stopped.

Annja didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

But she could hear breathing.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Each one grew louder with every tentative step that she took into the darkness.

The space was suddenly flooded with light as the lamp in the camera behind her burst into bright life. The only darkness that remained was cut out inside her shadow.

The blinding light was greeted by a scuttle of panicked movement and then, a fraction of a second later, whoever it was hiding in the darkness charged straight at her in a whirl of panic.

The source of the movement was much closer than she’d expected.

A body swathed in streaming rags of shadow barreled into her, slamming Annja back against the wall.