The Mortality Principle

2

Annja still had no appetite.

She made her way into the dining room for breakfast, though she wasn’t sure she could face much more than a cup of strong black coffee. The stronger, the better, given it was going to have to mask the taste of death that had been cloying at the back of her throat since she stood in the alleyway.

“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked as she topped up her cup with a third refill in half an hour.

“I’m good, thanks,” Annja replied, picking up the cup without even thinking about it. She was no stranger to death, which wasn’t something she would have ever thought she’d find herself thinking a few years ago, but things had changed since Roux and Garin had walked into her life. What should have been the most horrific thing imaginable had almost become a fact of life, and of course there were those harrowing times when it had been her doing, a matter of kill or be killed.

But this was different.

She couldn’t shift the guilt. She could have done something. She’d heard it happening, had known instinctively something was wrong, but hadn’t gone down to check it out. She’d simply lain there telling herself there was nothing she could do. And even now, knowing that she was right—at least academically—emotionally she couldn’t banish the self-loathing that came with not even trying.

Someone had torn that vagrant open.

“Is something wrong?” the waitress whispered, her voice so quiet that none of the other diners would be able to hear what she said.

“Nothing that another cup of coffee won’t put right if I know you,” a familiar voice said, the man joining her at the table.

Annja didn’t need to look up to know who her visitor was.

“Garin,” she said. “I’m not even going to ask how you found me.”

“Shall I get another cup?” the waitress asked, smiling at Garin.

“That would be great.” Garin Braden tilted his head and offered a killer smile. “And I think maybe eggs Benedict.”

“Of course.”

At times it almost felt like he was stalking her. Wherever she was, he had the unnerving ability to find her without calling first.

“I really need to change my cell phone number,” she said.

“Wouldn’t help, I’ve had you tagged.” Garin grinned, and she wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.

“What do you want?”

“Why so hostile?”

“I’m not, I’m just exhausted,” Annja said, which was partially true.

Garin nodded. “To be honest, I was just bored, and I hate being bored. I thought about taking a trip, but you know how it is. The thrill of white-water rafting and wing suits and bungee jumping and all that just pales into insignificance against everything else we do, so I thought, ‘I know, I’ll go see Annja. She’s normally up to her neck in something.’ And here I am. I took the liberty of checking into the room next to yours. No adjoining door, alas.”

“I don’t have time to amuse you, Garin. I’m working.”

“Actually, you’re having a cup of coffee.”

It had been a long time since Annja had worried about hurting his feelings; as far as she could tell he had no feelings to hurt. It didn’t stop him pulling a face as if she had mortally wounded him.

“I’d hate to have come all this way and not be able to at least share breakfast with my favorite television star.”

“Stop it, Garin. I’m not in the mood.”

“In the mood for what?”

“You.”

“Harsh, woman. Harsh.”

“The world doesn’t revolve around you. Hard to believe, I know, but someone’s got to tell you the truth.”

“And that, my dear, is why I love you most.”

“Shut up.”

Garin grinned.

“Anyway, I’m not sure I can sit around wasting more time today. I’ve already lost an hour this morning thanks to the police.”

“Oh, see, now I knew you’d be up to your neck in something interesting. The police? Do tell.” Garin leaned forward, elbows on the tabletop, all smiles and full of interest.

She knew that he was only sucking her in, a spider smiling at a vain fly, but she couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t that she was fooled by his easy charm; that only worked for so long. She needed to talk. If she didn’t, the guilt would only fester. She knew that. She knew herself. The sooner she gave voice to her thoughts, the sooner she would be able to leave it behind. It wouldn’t be the first time Garin had played Father Confessor to her. “There was a murder,” she said.

“Next time we sit down for breakfast I suggest you starting with that. ‘Hello, Garin, there was a murder.’ That’s so much more interesting than ‘What do you want?’ Did you see it?”

“No, but I am ninety-nine percent sure I heard it. I just didn’t realize that’s what it was at the time. I went out for a run this morning, and found people gathered around the body. I gave a statement to a policeman, but I’m pretty sure he was just humoring me by then. After all, it was just some homeless guy,” she said bitterly. “It’s not like the cops will lose sleep over it.”

“Oh, so cynical for one so young,” Garin said, with no hint of laughter even though his smile was still firmly in place, predatory now. “Sadly I think you’re right. The system doesn’t care about the poor bastards who slip between the cracks.”

“I care,” Annja said.

“I’m sure you do. So, what have you got?”

“Nothing, really. Time of death. That’s it. At 3:00 a.m.”

“I once heard that more people die at three in the morning than at any other time of day.”

“Not really very helpful.”

“No, but interesting. So, an argument over shelter? Or a bottle?”

She didn’t have time to answer him. The waitress returned and placed a cup in front of Garin, filling it with rich black coffee. Annja pushed the cream in his direction, but he waved it away. “Watching my figure,” he said.

The waitress laughed, no doubt another willing victim of Garin’s charms should he decide to stick around. And judging by his appreciative expression as he watched her retreat toward the kitchen, he’d decided to do just that.

“You know what else is interesting? I read about a dead vagrant in this morning’s newspaper.”

“Not a chance. There’s no way it was in the morning paper. They only found the body an hour ago.”

“I didn’t say your dead vagrant.”

“There have been others?”

“Oh, Annja,” Garin said patronizingly. “You really ought to take more of an interest in the here and now and pay a little less attention to what happened centuries ago. Dusty old books have nothing on television or the internet, you know. Not when it comes to living in the real world.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Just tell me what you know.”

“You take all the fun out of life, Annja Creed, but you know that, don’t you?”

“Share or shut up.”

Garin smiled, clearly enjoying the moment and determined to make the most of it.

That stupid grin was really beginning to grate on Annja’s nerves, but she wasn’t about to let him know that, so she smiled right back, sweetly.

“Okay,” he said at last, raising his hands in surrender. He’d had his fun. “There have been three deaths in as many weeks. Four now. One every week for a month. All of them have been street people. If the papers are right, the police are clueless. No one seems to know if this is a case of the city’s homeless fighting among themselves or if they’re looking for a lunatic who’s taken it upon himself to try to clean up the streets.”

“Clean up the streets? Surely no one in their right mind could think that they could kill every homeless person?”

“I did say lunatic, didn’t I?”

Annja shook her head. “There must be thousands of people living on the streets. It’s a capital city.”

“To clean up the streets you don’t need to kill all of them. You just have to make the ones left behind so afraid they gather up their few possessions and head out of town.”

“But they’ve got nowhere to go. They’re not on the streets for fun.”

Garin shrugged. “Right, but then they’re someone else’s problem.”

Annja knew he was right. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend, sort of thing,” Annja agreed. “And you think that’s what’s happening here?”

“I have no idea. Maybe. Hell, I’m sure Jack the Ripper thought that he was doing something positive about the number of prostitutes in London.”

Annja was doubtful. There were plenty of sick people in the world who would do something like this for kicks. She said as much. She wasn’t sure which was worse—someone killing out of some crazy idea that they were doing good or a calculating killer doing it for the simple pleasure of killing.

“Maybe the police are right,” Garin offered. “Maybe it really is just a case of the homeless fighting among themselves.”

His eggs arrived while she was thinking about the possibility.

One thing was sure—she didn’t feel any better about the fact that she hadn’t intervened, even if it had only been to call the police when she heard the scuffle. The time between the act and the discovery of the act only made it more difficult for justice to catch up with the killer.

She needed to get out of there.

Her head wasn’t in the right place. There was no way she was going to come up with something clever to say in front of the camera, at least not today. She made a call while Garin was eating and gave Lars, her cameraman, the day off. He wanted to know if she was okay. She assured him she was.

“So you’re going to have some free time, after all,” Garin said, wiping his lips as she ended the call. He’d made short work of polishing off his breakfast and was already signaling for a top-up to his coffee. He flashed the waitress that smile again, earning one right back.

“I’ve got things to do,” Annja said, dropping her napkin on the table. “I’m sure you’ve got enough here to entertain yourself.” She looked meaningfully toward the waitress, who in turn was pretending to look busy.

“I’m sure I can keep myself entertained for a few hours. After all, we’re in a hotel. Lots of bedrooms.”

“Just spare me the gory details.”

3

Annja was itching to get out and about, to do something, see something, anything that would take her mind off the nagging guilt.

She picked up the research on the golem, skimming it without finding any inspiration in the dry text.

She needed an angle.

That was what made stories work.

A human element. Something…different. Fresh. Something that would make the whole thing a little more interesting. If she couldn’t do that, maybe there was a second story from Prague she could stitch together to make something that might work.

The rack at the back of the desk held a well-thumbed collection of tourist brochures with dull photographs of landmarks and sites to visit in and around the city. Some of those brochures probably dated back to the Charter 77 revolution. A few of the landmarks were too obvious. They offered the shots of buildings that appeared in every holiday brochure and website about the city. They offered little of real interest to her. She didn’t want to simply retread the footsteps of well-known history, especially with the added pressure on this segment from the suits. To be perfectly honest, it was bad enough that the golem was so ingrained in the psyche of the city that she couldn’t find anything to say that hadn’t already been said. It was the kind of myth that pushed all the other folk tales to one side. There was only room for one fantastic beast here. But surely that in itself should have helped her? It made the less well-known legends more appealing, didn’t it?

Maybe.

If she could find one worth telling.

And with that thought it was as if something had clicked inside her head.

She had found something to search for even if she had no idea what it was.

This might be the golem’s city, but there had to be a more fascinating story beneath it, something better, in a city as old as Prague. She’d come across an epigram in her notes: Your problem, city, is that you have no soul. She couldn’t recall where she’d come across it, but she liked it.

Annja pondered the notion of going out to Sedlec, in the Kutná Hora suburb, to check out the ossuary. There was a building with a story to tell—a church dating back eight hundred years, with upward of seventy thousand corpses exhumed, their bones used to decorate the chapels. Chandeliers of bones, garlands of skulls, an altar consisting of every single bone from the human body, monstrances fashioned from childlike skeletons and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms, also executed in bone. It was like nowhere else on Earth. That a half-blind monk had done the exhumation five hundred years ago was the stuff of macabre fairy tale, rather like the bone sculptures of the carpenter František Rint, who was behind the decor. Could she somehow marry that in with the stories of the golem? A made man against a backdrop of a quite literally man-made chapel? It would provide an incredible visual for the live broadcast, she realized. It was a possibility.

She stuffed a handful of the leaflets into her bag and headed out with a little more of a spring in her step than when she’d come back into the room.

Even without consulting the street map she’d picked up from reception, she knew that there were any number of places she could start looking for her story that didn’t involve heading out to the ossuary. The most obvious was the city’s Old Town.

A convenient signpost only a few yards from her hotel pointed her in the right direction. The streets were considerably more alive if not teeming with tourists. Give it another hour, though, and that would be an entirely different matter. She walked on, looking at the endless matryoshka dolls on display in the shop windows around her.

The traffic had started to build up toward the morning rush hour, but the way the city was constructed, most of it never entered the more pedestrianized center. Some of the wider boulevards with expensive designer-brand stores were lined with lush trees and lusher price tags while the narrower streets were snarled up with people trying to take shortcuts. That was another legacy of cities first built before the invention of the internal combustion engines; some survived by keeping the traffic out of town as much as possible while others allowed developers to gradually change the landscape. Prague, it seemed, wanted to be the best of both worlds, but just might be the worst.

She turned onto Karlova Street and kept walking.

A delivery bicycle hopped onto the curb to pass a stationery van delivering parcels. Annja had to step out of the way, ducking into the deep doorway of a building. There was no point in yelling at the cyclist’s back; he was already half a street away. No one was hurt, nothing was broken. An impatient car—a big black shiny SUV—behind the van sounded its horn. The van driver showed no sign of moving for the time being. He climbed out of the cab and gave a wave that, while it was meant to say Bear with me, I’ll only be a moment, came across more like Screw you, I was here first.

Annja realized he was heading straight toward her, package in hand.

She stepped aside to let him get to the door, catching sight of the confused expression on the man’s face, and guessed he’d thought she’d come down to take the delivery from him.

“Sorry,” she said as she let him ring the bell.

He just nodded, obviously uncomfortable with the foreign language.

It was an unassuming little archway that promised the internet, a hair salon and a tobacco shop farther inside. There was a face carved into the keystone above the arch. As she stood on the sidewalk, she read the sign on the door. Kepler Museum.

She’d heard of Kepler, of course. He’d been a key figure in the seventeenth century scientific revolution, with his breakthroughs in the understanding of planetary motion providing the groundwork for Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory.

She was still trying to trawl her memory for anything she could remember about Kepler when the door opened. A middle-aged woman appeared on the doorstep to take the parcel. She signed his clipboard, then looked up at Annja, obviously unsure what she was doing loitering in the museum’s doorway.

She was still looking at her when the man slammed the door on his cab and gunned the engine, much to the relief of the waiting line of vehicles that snaked down the length of Karlova Street.

“Hello,” Annja said.

“Ah, hello,” the woman replied. “I’m sorry, but we do not open for another hour.”

She took a step out from under the archway to look up and down the street, rather like some wartime spy looking for a tail. Annja couldn’t help but smile to herself at the image. Maybe being in Eastern Europe was beginning to rub off on her way of thinking.

The traffic began to move again, following the van down Karlova Street toward the wider roads that waited beyond.

There was no one else on foot.

“You’re welcome to come inside, if you don’t mind the old house being a little on the chilly side. We seldom get visitors so keen they’re standing outside waiting for us to open.”

“Thank you,” Annja said, offering a smile, happy to play the excited tourist rather than correct the woman’s assumption. The entirety of her plan today was to follow the whims of the universe. If this was where the wind blew her, to this door in this part of town, then this was where she needed to be. How she got here, by accident or design, didn’t matter.

She followed the woman inside.

The air was a good ten degrees colder on her skin than it had been outside.

The woman disappeared through a doorway along the corridor, the old wood-and-glass paneled door swinging closed for a moment before she opened it again. She wedged a rubber stop under it to prevent it from swinging closed again.

“Please,” the woman said, beckoning Annja into her small office where papers and files covered every inch of the two desks. “Would you like coffee? I find that I can’t do anything until I’ve had at least my second cup of coffee in the morning. That is, unless you’d be happier taking a look around yourself?”

“Actually, it’s been one of those days already, so I could use a decent cup of coffee. And then, if you’re willing, I’d love it if you showed me around,” Annja said.

“Then coffee and the grand tour it is.”

The woman busied herself with an expensive coffee machine.

Annja picked up one of the brochures from the pile that lay on the top of the filing cabinet. It was newer than the ones she’d seen in her hotel room, but offered much the same information. It was hard to imagine that the glossy paper produced all that many additional visitors. But then not all tourists were as jaded and world-weary as she’d been feeling recently.

Looking at the brochure didn’t inspire any great sense of adventure, though, and surely that was how you sold history? You made it come alive and feel real. This one offered little other than the fact that Kepler had worked in the city between 1600 and 1612, and was written in five different languages—though not well, it seemed, in any of them—beneath a reproduction of the portrait that was set in the keystone above the arch outside. There were a few pictures of the exhibits, as well. The flipside provided a small street map with an arrow pointing to the museum’s location, which, given that she was already standing in the middle of it, was fairly redundant. That said, Annja wasn’t sure she would have been able to find the small museum on the basis of the map alone, even though her hotel was only a few streets away.

“It doesn’t give a lot away, does it?” the woman said with a beaming smile on her face. She handed Annja a mug that bore the same portrait. She wondered idly how the astronomer would have felt to know his face had become a brand. “But then, we wouldn’t want too many people banging down the door in search of some Holy Grail or other. We like it just as it is.”

If it was good enough for the woman, it was good enough for Kepler himself, and that meant it was good enough for Annja.

“So, tell me, what brought you to our doorway? Do you have a special interest in Kepler? Or is it going to rain?”

Annja smiled at that.

“Perhaps I should explain,” she began. She fished out a business card from her bag. She handed it over. The woman looked as if she was being offered confirmation that they were receiving a surprise visit from the tax man, but eventually her expression lightened.

“Annja Creed,” she said. “Chasing History’s Monsters.”

It never ceased to amaze Annja when she came across people outside the mainland United States who’d heard of the show.

“I’m afraid I’ve never seen the program,” the woman said, piercing that particular bubble apologetically. “But my sister lives in New York and her son loves it. He talks about it every time I speak to him. You’ve made quite an impression on him, but then, he is a teenager.” Her grin was knowing.

“Do you think I could get you to sign something to send to him? He would be absolutely thrilled.”

“Of course,” Annja replied.

The woman looked around for a piece of paper, then decided it might be more fun if Annja signed one of the museum’s brochures. She was more than happy to oblige. It wasn’t exactly a hardship to send her best wishes to the budding archaeologist, and it gained the woman’s gratitude. She had no idea if there was a story here, but if anyone was likely to be able to help her find it, it was the curator.

“So are you thinking about doing a program about Kepler?” Her brow furrowed for a moment, seeming to realize something. “I would never have thought anyone would consider him a monster.”

“Unless you know some deep, dark secrets,” Annja said. “I’m in Prague to make a segment about Rabbi Loew and the golem, but I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly finding it inspiring.”

“Ah, yes, the golem. Now there was a proper monster,” she said. “In the oldest sense of the word. So what are you looking for?”

“Inspiration,” Annja said, painting as broad a canvas with the single word as she possibly could. “The city has to have more than one story to tell. If not here, then somewhere nearby. I am just following my nose. If I can’t find anything, then I’m not really sure what I’m going to do just yet. Maybe back to the golem if I can find a fresh perspective.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” the woman said. “It would probably be more than my job’s worth to help you if you wanted to turn Kepler into a monster. After all, the whole purpose of the museum is to celebrate his life and work.”