Larcenists and Lambs

Prague, Czech Republic - March 1

Prague, Czech RepublicMarch 1

Ever since he was little, Andreas Volk had had a flair for business.

He was born in 1972 in Hollabrunn in Austria, which, according to his own estimation was a hole. (Of course the proud inhabitants of Hollabrunn would categorically disagree with him.) Even though it was only some 55 kilometres from Vienna, Hollabrunn, in the pure sense of the word, was a small town, and Andreas hated it to the bottom of his soul. As early as grade school, he’d decided that he certainly wouldn’t be a small-town, provincial hick, like his parents, and from that moment on, he’d subordinated everything to that goal. His biggest asset he received from the parents he scorned, though unbeknownst to them: bilingualism. He spoke German thanks to his Austrian father. From his Czech mother, who had married into Austria from communist Czechoslovakia for money and who had never learned German properly, he spoke fluent Czech.

He went to high school in Vienna and it was there that his talent for business first became apparent. When, for three months running, students regularly lost small items, it became clear that they had a kleptomaniac in their ranks. Andreas (who, incidentally, was among those hardest hit by this kleptomaniac) announced that he was establishing a one-man student detective agency and that, for a few shillings, he would find the lost items and return them to their owners. Because the number of items recovered by his agency reached 100 percent from day one, tales of his successes quickly spread throughout the school and Andreas’s income rolled in for almost the entire four years.

Or just until the day shortly before the end of school, when a group of fellow students caught him robbing their lockers in order to generate demand for his services. But because there was no hard evidence that Andreas had been involved in the previous (rediscovered) robberies, and because he was still a minor, the only result was a broken nose, expulsion of both Andreas and the student who broke it, and Andreas’s realization that next time he a) had to be more careful and not steal so openly and b) should only steal when the rewards outweighed the risk. Oddly, after Andreas was expelled, the number of robberies in the school dropped to zero.

Andreas’s parents decided the boy was going from bad to worse, and packed him off to his grandparents’ in South Bohemia a few weeks before his 18th birthday. The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia had recently fallen, and people, punch-drunk from their newly gained freedom, didn’t know what to do with it. As luck would have it, while picking the pockets of drunken guests at a village dance, Andreas lifted the wallet and documents of a local politician, a lazy but greedy chap, not much older than Andreas. At first Andreas wanted to keep the money and toss the documents, but then he realized that he’d seen the face on the I.D. before. After straining his brain cells a bit more, he realized it had been in the previous day’s local paper. Andreas Volk, then barely 18, immediately saw his chance.

He returned to the scene of the crime and once again put his tried-and-tested business model of a manufactured loss and ostentatious return of goods to use. The grateful politician offered Andreas a spot on his party’s ticket in the next elections. After all, such self-sacrificing and honest people were exactly what this country needed. Andreas squeezed out a fake tear, expressed his regrets that he wasn’t a Czech citizen and therefore couldn’t run for office, and came up with a counter-suggestion, i.e., that he would become the politician’s advisor and right-hand man. After all, he had experiences from The West (at that point neither of them realized that the Austrian Hollabrunn lies roughly to the east of the South Bohemian town of Prachatice).

And so the career of the political Cardinal Richelieu, the crooked-nosed lobbyist Andreas Volk, was born. It didn’t take long and the cooperation proved to be mutually advantageous. The 18-year-old Andreas, whose only qualifications were an Austrian heritage, advised his bread-giver on political matters, the bread-giver reciprocated by advising Andreas on bedroom matters, because said politician had taken a shine to his young advisor – and to hell with his broken nose. Andreas apparently gave good advice because as early as 1992, his young friend won a seat in the erstwhile Federal Assembly and Andreas, now an assistant to a federal deputy, saw his dream to escape the clutches of the bourgeoisie come true.

Since then, Andreas had been drifting from one politician to another. Officially, he was an advisor or assistant. Unofficially, he was the guy who did the behind-the-scenes dirty work that had to be done, but couldn’t be seen. He’d managed to hang on to his spot in politics throughout the division of Czechoslovakia and through all the subsequent elections. Faithful to his motto to only undertake lucrative risks, he never suffered from financial need. Nonetheless, he felt that the most important role in his life still lay ahead of him. Until recently.

It happened when HE, his current best friend, a man who always liked to stay a bit in the shadows, gave him the idea. Instantly, Andreas knew this was what he’d been waiting for all of his life.

Andreas Volk was savoring this moment: forever after, he would divide his life into “before” and “after.” Just one more, tiny step. Andreas took a deep, thoughtful breath and, with extreme concentration, he swept a speck of dust off of his laptop keyboard. Then he took another thoughtful breath and drank in the text on the screen. Yes, everything was going absolutely marvelously. Exactly as he’d expected.

If Andreas and HE were a little lucky – and Andreas tended to be lucky – before long it would be even better. For the first time in a long time, Andreas was feeling almost great.