Larcenists and Lambs

Prague, Czech Republic - March 7-1

Prague, Czech RepublicMarch 7

Helena told her husband to save a little fun for the afternoon and crawled out of bed. Martin noted that his wife didn’t appear especially irritated, even though it was only a few minutes before 9 a.m. This was potentially a high-risk factor, as it indicated that things were not as they usually were.

Strange sounds coming from the kitchen confirmed his suspicions. It seemed prudent to check them out. Reluctantly, he too crawled out of bed and went to see what his wife was up to. He found her rattling the empty alcohol bottles in the pantry, evidently looking for a full one, and very edgy. Briefly, he considered whether it wouldn’t be wiser to keep his mouth shut, but then he took the risk.

“What the he—ck are you doing?” Martin said, feeling uneasy again.

His wife had always been blunt, and her bluntness reached formidable proportions when she was being questioned by her husband.

“I’m looking for booze. And there’s Jack here.”

“What for?” He realized it was a lame question, but he couldn’t think of a better one.

“I feel like getting drunk.”

“And are you aware that it’s only nine in the morning? And that, thanks to your mother, you might have a hereditary tendency toward alcoholism?”

“No, I am not aware of anything but my simple and quite basic desire to get drunk as a Dane,” Helena admitted, and added that she was not of the opinion that the time of day was a relevant factor in relation to this desire. And, after a moment of thought, she further added that, in any case, she was out of luck because she had not found any means of bringing her plan to fruition. And then, to Martin’s surprise, she sat down, right on the floor of the pantry and closed her eyes, tired.

Martin realized that this was something of a problem because his wife’s body language indicated that she had no idea whatsoever what she should be doing at 9 a.m. on a Thursday morning in spring. And that she evidently didn’t even intend to think about it. And that, all in all, she was looking like a person who doesn’t know what to do with herself and, what’s more, doesn’t care.

“Kitty, we’ll find you some other work. Everybody’s going to want a fox like you,” he tried.

Helena opened her eyes and looked at him as if he’d just fallen off of Mars.

“I’m not going to look for other work,” she declared without much enthusiasm. “Maybe I’ll … Maybe I’ll … start a business. No, wait, I’m going to invest, or rather, play the market. I think the NWR stock is going to keep falling. I think it’ll fall to sixteen crowns. We could be able to get something out of that.” She closed her eyes again.

Martin reflected. Prior experience told him that if, just five minutes ago, his wife had decided to play the markets, then she was going to play the markets and, what’s more, she’d be just as good at it as at any other vaguely financial thing she’d ever encountered. Moreover, the family income, despite a hefty mortgage, could be put on the back burner for the moment. No, that wasn’t what was bothering him right then.

“You’re more upset about that other thing, aren’t you?”

Helena didn’t answer. She didn’t even bother to open her eyes. Or even to get up off of the floor.

But he’d bet his bottom dollar that she’d started trembling a little more.

“Look, you know what I think? I think you should do something. Anything. Anything’s better than sitting here and staring at the wall. For example, we could go back to bed. Or you could go buy us some goodies,” he added hastily, seeing the face Helena’d made after his first suggestion.

Helena liked this new proposal. Going shopping meant driving their old, red Mini Cooper with the white racing stripes on the hood and roof and the prospect of that appealed to her.

“We’re going to have to buy a new set of wheels. This bucket of bolts is on its last legs,” she grumbled to Martin over her shoulder on her way out of the door.

Hooray, he thought. It’s not quite 10 a.m. and she’s grumpy, so we’re almost back to normal and hopefully on our way out of this crisis too.

____________

“I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Beck Hansen blared out of the speakers as Helena hung a fast right into the shopping mall parking lot just as the light turned red. Disgusted, she mused that the whiny music was hardly worth listening to, but the text was pretty apt.

Still, in the few minutes it took to drive to the shopping center, her mood had improved a bit. It was mainly because on the empty roundabout, she’d managed to do a handbrake turn, which elicited, one, a huge wailing of tires and, two, adrenalin in her blood, and that was never a bad thing. She was determined to demonstrate her mastery of this maneuver to Martin at the earliest opportunity.

She drove slowly through the parking lot, looking for a free space. Maybe, if she hadn’t been so absorbed by the handbrake turn, she’d have looked left at the crossroads and seen the oncoming Audi Q7. And maybe, warned by its dangerous speed, she’d have stopped and let the Q7 pass, even though she had the right of way. But she didn’t. The impact turned the left rear end of the elderly Mini Cooper into a pile of scrap iron.

Helena took an instant dislike to the 40-something guy who stormed out of the Audi Q7. Not because he hadn’t given her the right of way and plowed into her, but because he was a trifle too loud, a trifle too stylish, and his Armani belt buckle was a trifle too big. She’d learned from experience to watch out for those types.

She didn’t even have time to turn off the engine before the guy flung open her door, stuck his hooked nose into her car and started bellowing things that Helena liked even less. Helena didn’t condone vulgarity.

“You stupid cow, what were you gaping at? You’re gonna pay for this, just wait! What were you f*****g trying to push your way in there for? Don’t you know how to park, you cow?”

“Hello, pleased to meet you too. As for your question, I was planning –”

“Shut your trap you stupid bimbo! You f****d this up! I’m gonna kill you!” The flashy type was looking a mite put off. And Helena disliked being interrupted even more than she disliked vulgarity. The guy, who wouldn’t let her finish a single sentence, was starting to make her angry. She decided that rather than wasting time chatting with such a specimen, she would undertake something more productive. However, hard as she thought, right then she couldn’t recall the proper procedure to follow after a car accident. She had a vague suspicion that she should call the police. But she wasn’t entirely sure. After all, it was her first accident. Unless you counted the wrecked motorcycle, one knocked-off rear-view mirror and a fairly high number of completely destroyed tires. She thought of calling her assistant and asking her to send a taxi so she wouldn’t have to waste her valuable time here. But then she realized that she’d quit a few days ago, that she didn’t have an assistant anymore, that she wasn’t sitting in her company car and that probably her only option was to call her husband.

“Gdd---mtt,” Martin mouthed into the phone, and, out loud, asked Helena the extent of the damage. She told him she had no idea, and that the old heap was a piece of junk already (even though it ran great and had been a lot of fun to drive), so the damages were probably going to be zero point zero. Martin analyzed this and wondered if there was any point in telling Helena that he wasn’t asking about the damage to their car but the damages to the car of the i***t he heard yelling in the background. But then he decided to let it go. He told Helena to get the guy’s contact information and to document everything so they’d have some evidence for the insurance company: she could record it on her cell phone.

Helena thanked him, punched out the cell phone and turned back to the hot-shot who was in the process of kicking the front grille of their Mini. But before she could initiate a conversation, his cell phone rang.

The guy repeated roughly the same vocabulary he had used with Helena into the cell phone. I guess he isn’t just rude to me, she thought, neither angry nor sympathetic. And she started recording the wreck with her cell phone. In the background, the hot-shot continued to yell something about stupid half-wits and suddenly looked very happy. So happy, in fact, that when Helena stuck a pen and a dry cleaning bill under his nose, he quite readily wrote his name and phone number on the back.

Now that’s what I call a balanced personality, she snorted in disgust. That bundle of nerves would lose his shirt on the stock exchange.

____________

“Does it run?” Martin asked when Helena walked in.

“It runs,” she assured him. “It’s just a bit more banged up than before.”

“OK. Good that it runs.” Martin was just on his way out the door and needed to take the heap – unless of course she needed something or didn’t want to be alone…?

Helena assured him that she could handle it – but why the sudden rush?

“I just got an interesting phone call. You know Sykora, the lobbyist? No? No surprise. He’s a kind of gray eminence. Loaded. And he wants something from me – it could mean work. Might be a story in it. He said he’d like to meet with me asap. So I said I’d come right away. Are you sure you can handle it alone?”

Instead of answering, his wife gave him the car keys. Twenty minutes later, Martin was sitting in the lobbyist’s office on Národní Třída.

Martin Stone was used to forming a rapid, but more-or-less kind opinion of the people around him. On the whole, he liked people, and so, provided someone didn’t let him down repeatedly, he had a tendency to see everyone’s good side. But this time, this time he just couldn’t get himself to see the good in Michal Sýkora. Somehow, the guy simply didn’t sit right with him, he just couldn’t put his finger on why.

Maybe it was that double chin that shook every time he moved, Martin mused. “Interesting phenomenon, that chin. Yet the belly-bulge isn’t all that big. Not that the man was skinny, God forbid. I’m a world-class decathlon champion, if he’s skinny. But I’ve seen bigger. This guy is more, well … jelly-like. Especially under the chin. Like pig’s-foot-jelly. Hm, on the other hand, why should that specifically bother me?” he rebuked himself. So maybe it was the excessive propriety, he mused. People who were extremely polite and spoke too correctly were just weird. They were too careful.

He asked for mineral water and espresso, and when the conversation kept going around in circles and it looked like the preliminaries about the weather would never end, he took the initiative and asked what precisely Mr. Sýkora wanted from him.

“Michal to you, Martin, to you always just Michal!” the lobbyist glowed. “You see, we have this client, a very reputable client, who would be very interested in your services. Actually, I think you are the most highly qualified person in the entire country. You are a triumph!” Michal Sýkora paused and waited to see the dramatic effect of his words.

Martin, for his part, was waiting for Sýkora to stop showing off and say something to the point.

“My client would be interested in a little analysis, written by you, presumably, because you really know your way around these things. You’ve got several stories about European Structural Funds and European politics under your belt and you know how to write!” he added with the broadest smile he could squeeze out of his lips.

Martin kept waiting. When the waiting got somewhat tedious, he said, “There are bigger experts on European subjects around than me. What am I not getting here?”

“OK, you know the deal, so I’m not going to tap dance around it: you have contacts in the right places, right? So it will be child’s play for you to get it into the big dailies. In cooperation with us, of course. We will give you full support.”