When Mrs. Marhoul, the neighbor of the later detained pastry chef Mr. Svoboda, called the precinct station, according to the police record it was two thirty-three A.M. Seeing as she was more than seventy years old and there was nothing unusual about her phone call, nobody paid it much attention. Mrs. Marhoul was an elderly widow who lived with a small pinscher, and the entryway of her apartment looked like a small country museum. There were two display cases of mineral specimens and one with polished flasks of various colors. A few pictures and drawings hung on the walls, showing views of Prague from different perspectives, and an unfinished drawing of a railroad station under construction that looked somewhat out of place. Mrs. Marhoul welcomed the officers in, but didn’t invite them into the living room or the kitchen, instead sternly informing them that they had arrived more than twenty minutes later than their colleague on the phone had promised. The two officers felt cramped between the display cases. First because her dog kept walking around them sniffing at them, and second because the cases seemed fragile, shaky, and liable to smash into a thousand tiny pieces at any moment. It was complicated to avoid the pinscher, what with the display cases on three sides and Mrs. Marhoul on the fourth. Then the old lady decided to give them a lesson in mineral collections and the geological bedrock of Prague and its surroundings. Originally the officers had thought she was just being polite, but by the time they realized what was happening, they were up to their necks in an explanation of tectonic plates, fractures, and bedrock. It wasn’t easy interrupting her lecture, but the more experienced of the two men awkwardly managed to turn the subject back to the reason for her call. She wasn’t pleased, but she concluded her talk, saying that, as they could see, these specimens, which her husband had collected, and the pictures, which he had painted, demonstrated that the city and its surroundings were unrivaled. Unrivaled! She repeated the word several times with her index finger raised in the air. Unrivaled. Meanwhile the mineral specimens glowed phosphorescently through the glass of the display cases. Each piece rested on a lace doily, with its Czech and Latin names written on a now barely legible card. Before the police had a chance to ask, she informed them that the reason the framed drawing of the unfinished railroad station was hanging on the wall was because her deceased husband hadn’t had a chance to finish it. When it seemed like she was on the verge of describing the last few months of his life in the hospital and the pulmonary sanitarium, the more experienced officer ordered her to lock her dog in the room next door or they would leave. That provoked the reaction he hoped for. The old lady was insulted by his lack of manners or respect for old age and finally got to the point. When she spoke about her husband’s death, there was no longer even a hint of emotion; any feelings of pain or sadness had long since faded away. The seventy-year-old woman’s account was more like a lecture on national history than an ordinary description. Her desire to hold up her former marriage for admiration was too great, though it was the matter of least interest to the two officers. It had never even crossed her mind to call herself a widow, she was just the temporarily abandoned wife of an irresponsible husband, who in his declining years had suddenly had the bad manners to pass away. She still blamed him for it and was building up a store of condemnations, which someday he deserved to hear.
At approximately one o’clock in the morning from the next-door apartment there was the sound of a scream, maybe even a struggle, followed by sudden silence. When one of the officers asked in a skeptical tone how the old lady could have heard it, he received an admonishing look and a lecture to the effect that not all elderly people were as incapable as the young generation thought and that they weren’t demented either, or even just plain deaf. That forced the officer to apologize, which Mrs. Marhoul took advantage of to instruct them to take a good look at the shiny black stone, adding that silver was also mined in the vicinity of Prague in the Middle Ages. The policemen, having no appetite for any further commentary, interrupted to offer thanks, stepped back out in the hallway, and rang and knocked a while on the door of the neighbor’s apartment. That calmed the old lady down and improved her mood, and afterward she wouldn’t even admit to having had any objections to the young generation. Everything had gone as she expected, as she had hoped. She stood peering out from the doorway a while, but when nobody came to answer the door for the two policemen, the less experienced one told her they would have to search the building and the garden one more time, so she should lock the door just in case anyone dangerous might still be nearby. That made her happy, and she did as she was requested.
The officers searched the entire building but didn’t find anyone. As they were going through the garden, however, they discovered some shards of broken glass from the window of the apartment the widow had told them about. They were aiming the cones of light from their electric lamps into the bushes along the garden wall when suddenly they heard the sound of uneven wheezing, like the compression and expansion of bellows in some human or animal organ, maybe even the tearing of a lung. Then a scream sliced the night air, from the canopy of the darkening clouds right down to the ground. A cry, a wheezing, a disembowelment. What surprised the policemen the most was that the cry was requesting their presence. Yes, it wanted them. It was asking for help, begging to be rescued, screaming for them not to leave him alone, not alone with him. Screeching and howling. The policemen switched off the safeties on their weapons and aimed the beams of their flashlights at the bushes where the voice was coming from. They could hear the voice running out of breath, it wouldn’t be long before it broke. The beams of their lights intersected as the officers advanced toward the source of the uproar, in the bushes along the wall, looking back every moment or two, just in case there was somebody else around. Finally they pulled back the last branch of the thicket to find a man huddled in a dirty brown coat.
“Police,” said the more experienced officer. “What’s all the racket about?”
“Police?” said the man. “Really? Well, you do have the uniforms.” That was all he managed to get out before he fainted. Meanwhile, several lights had gone on in the windows of the building overlooking the garden.
As they untangled the man from the bushes, the officers realized that he had a broken leg. They tried to examine it, but the man had wedged himself in so firmly between the wall and the bushes that it was difficult to extract him. When they finally managed to do so, the more experienced of the two switched on his transmitter, reported that they had found a wounded man, and requested an ambulance and instructions. The ambulance and another police car arrived almost simultaneously. Given the suspiciousness of the wounded individual and the broken window on the second floor next to Mrs. Marhoul’s apartment, they decided to do one more search of the building, the garden, and the vicinity. One of the officers rode with the man to the hospital, in case they needed to write up a report of the incident and take a statement from him.