The Infant of Prague
- Автор: Granger Bill
- Серия: November Man #8
- Год: 1987
- Язык: французский
- Год: Warner
- ISBN: 0446347809
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Infant of Prague». Краткое содержание книги:
For in a humble Chicago parish church, the sacred statue of the Infant of Prague is found weeping real tears. A visiting Czech child star actress, transfigured by the wondrous event, declares, on live television, her intent to remain in American in the name of Christ and freedom.
Only an operative as cynical and seasoned as the November Man can sense the sinister link between two dramatic, yet apparently unrelated defections. A miracle has plunged him into a vast global adventure. And it will take a miracle to get him through it alive.
The defection of a highly visible Czech sparks an international crisis, and the November Man is caught in the middle.
Mason thought she must be tough because she had to be a woman who could stand up to someone like Devereaux, a man who knew what he was doing. Mason saw that in her as well.
“I’m supposed to do what I can for you,” he said in a flat tone. “That’s always part of the instruction, I understand. Do what you can. Maybe I can do something for you.”
She stared at him.
“Maybe the best thing is to take you to Brussels because you want to go there. You want to do some things in Brussels and I am going along because that’s part of the instructions,” he said. His voice was so laconic she almost didn’t catch the implication.
She said, “Yes. Maybe that would be the best thing to do.”
8
Stephanie Fields instructed Anna.
They sat at a bare wooden table in one of the windowless interview rooms off the main courtroom. Her hands rested on the table and Anna imitated her posture. They sat very straight and stared into each other’s eyes.
“Your mother arrived from Prague a little while ago,” Stephanie told her.
“She can’t be my mother,” Anna said.
“She has papers and documentation, but we’ll have to wait and see it. The lawyers from the other side are going to arrange a stay and have a hearing next week.”
“I can stay with you another week?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said. She saw the leap in the large black eyes. Anna was slow to smile but there was a smile at the edge of her mouth now.
“Is she your mother?”
“No,” Anna said. “I was an orphan. I can remember my mother, my real mother, a little, I think. I can remember the way she smelled. It’s funny, but I can wake up sometimes and remember the way she smelled. But this woman I had to stay with, she smells different. And she drinks all the time.”
“She drinks?”
“She drinks brandy and vodka even if we have little money.” Anna frowned. No, that was not quite right. The role had to be more sophisticated. “But she drinks. She is drunk in the afternoon all the time. And a man comes to the apartment, but I don’t know who he is. He sits with her.”
“Does she have a lot of men who come to see her?”
“Sometimes,” Anna said.
Stephanie stared straight at her. Anna made her bed in the spare room every morning. She brushed her teeth and combed her hair as though she did the acts consciously and took pleasure in them as individual assertions rather than as part of a routine. She seemed to want to please Stephanie. Stephanie thought she saw the little touch of strain in the child sometimes, a shadow of fear. She had seen the same look in other children, the children who were sometimes broken or beaten or abandoned or unloved, untouched, unwanted. “The abuse of neglect,” someone had called it.
“Poor Anna,” she said. She touched Anna’s hands folded on the table.
She had taken the child into her apartment with the permission of the court. It was a bare, modern flat in a rehabilitated three-story building on the near North Side. Stephanie bought clothes for Anna, especially jeans. Anna loved jeans. Stephanie told her one night she would be a beautiful woman, and did she want to be anything besides a movie star? Anna said she wanted to be a mother someday and have children, perhaps three children. She would stop working then, she said. Stephanie had been touched by that sentiment as she was by many things about Anna; she had shared her life with Anna in the last few days like a sister. Stephanie always knew the right thing to do for Anna for the simple, uncommon reason that she was good.
The quality of goodness in Stephanie had even affected Father Frank Hogan when she had come to interview him for a deposition. Father Hogan had pried a fresh pot of coffee out of the housekeeper in the rectory and they had shared it in one of the plush, “male-club” interview rooms of the house. Father Hogan had felt warmed by Stephanie’s presence that afternoon and had been unusually garrulous for someone under scrutiny by the chancery office.
Stephanie had asked about the “miracle” and Father Hogan had permitted himself a moment of silence before framing an answer. “Miracles, you might say, are in the eye of the beholder,” he told her. It was a way of showing he was a man of the world. A man of faith, certainly; there was no doubt about that. But a man of the world as well. And she was a woman of the world, was she not? He noticed her legs crept right out from the lap of her blue skirt and they were long and nicely formed. That was the thing about legs, Father Hogan had once thought: Most women have pretty nice legs, all in all.
“You don’t believe in this miracle?” she had asked.
“I believe in believers,” he had said. He might have been making a neat point in an argument in theology class at the seminary. “I believe God moves the heart.”
“Anna said that,” Stephanie said. “She said ‘God moved me.’ It’s an extraordinary thing, don’t you think, for a child to say?”
“Extraordinary, and her not even all that used to speaking English,” he said.
“No. She said it in Bohemian but she said it—”
“Let me put it this way, Miss Fields. Do you believe in weeping statues? I took you over to the church and what did you see?”
“ ‘What did you go into the desert to see? A man clothed in soft raiments?’ ”
“You know your Bible. Answer a question with a question.”
“I saw a statue called the Infant of Prague with stains on the plaster face and a dampness on the lace collar,” she said. “I saw what I saw and I can’t explain it.”
“So there you are,” Hogan said.
“I believe in intentions,” Stephanie said. “Anna is a good child and she has a good heart, but I don’t think anyone has ever asked to see it. She’s not so tough and she’s been used by a lot of people, I think, and I don’t want to be someone to use her to get a headline or be on the evening news. That isn’t what this is about. If Anna had been twenty-one years old, she wouldn’t have been questioned about her defection. She would have been accepted just like that. But she’s fourteen and that makes everything about her suspect because children don’t have rights. So she says she is an orphan and some woman is coming from Prague with a lot of papers that say she’s the mother of Anna. Why do I believe those papers and not believe Anna? And if Anna sees a miracle and God moves her heart, why don’t I believe it? And if Anna says she is unloved and unwanted except she was loved by her little Infant of Prague that she had in her home, why don’t I believe her? Or you? Or the courts?”
“It’s not really up to me—”
“She saw that statue and something in herself at that moment and it broke her heart,” Stephanie said.
“We don’t want the church to be used.”
“You mean the Big C Church or this particular one?”
“Both,” he snapped.
Her voice went soft. “I don’t intend to use anyone.” She hesitated. “But I intend to help Anna and this is part of it. The government is no help, they wish Anna would go home, go away. Two men came to see me yesterday, they gave me those phony ID cards. I think they were agents. I mean, spies. The government gets so weird sometimes, you actually start believing in false beards and invisible ink and all that. I’m convinced they were CIA, and they wanted to talk to Anna.”
Father Hogan started. She saw it.
“Someone came here.”
“No, not at all,” he lied.
“They said they were State Department.”
“No, not at all,” he lied.
“I don’t like this,” she said.
“It doesn’t concern me—”
“Your church, your miracle—”
Hogan said, “My connection with Anna Jelinak, whom I have not even met, does not even exist except by the coincidence of videotape. She didn’t even see the statue, Miss. She saw a videotape of a statue. I can’t see what I can do for you any further. Or for Anna.”