Alex Archer - The Mortality Principle

“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.”

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.