That evening Pike was sitting alone in the hotel’s foyer, drinking coffee, when he was paged, surprisingly in English, to take a phone call at the reception desk. He placed on a chair under the table his leather-bound book that listed Argo contacts, prospects and planned and past activities.
At the reception desk, the line was dead. When he returned to the table, the book was gone. A girl sitting nearby, in a mini-skirt, said a man in a black jacket had collected something at the table. Pike looked around the foyer and asked the receptionist if she had seen a man carrying a leather book. No joy.
He reported the theft to the uniformed policeman stationed at the Norvoski’s front door. The officer was asked to report it to Inspector Gelber. The man seemed little concerned in that city of thieves.
Back in their upstairs room, Pike told Alex about it. ‘I reckon that girl who was at the nearby table is one of the Norvoski’s gang of prostitutes,’ he said. ‘That’s why I didn’t prospect her for Argo. She could have been working with the thief, come to think of it, and given me a wrong description. At least I walked over to her and made sure she didn’t have the book.
‘The big list of our contacts would be useful to other networkers, like the Hungarians. But there could be more to it. If Jack was killed to silence him, the killer or his bosses would want to find out what Jack’s journalist buddy knows, or has on paper.
‘You know a few pages in the book relate what Jack told me about the rot in Argo. Plus, of course, it’s got our Czech and Tasmanian addresses.
‘The book looks like a big wallet, but the thief wasn’t a casual wallet snatcher. He or she knew my name, what I look like, where I was sitting, and phoned me. The thief or an accomplice was near enough to see me put the book on the chair, then grab it in the minute or two that I was at the reception desk. I think it’s connected with Jack’s murder. Oh, the receptionist said the caller sounded American.’
Alex frowned anxiously. ‘Blarn, it’s time for us to leave this country. We might be in danger. We’ve driven all around the republic, worked day and night, and got nowhere near the booming business Richard De Groote and his top confederates promised us. I’ve enjoyed the time here, spending Christmas with Mum and Dad’s families but, from a work point of view, this trip is a costly disaster. I dearly want Argo to deliver us a comfortable living in two more years, when you turn thirty-five and I turn twenty-eight. So, assuming Argo’s not really corrupted, let’s go on with the job at home.’
Her limited ability to speak and write in Czech, to interpret Blarney’s pitchings of Argo to the Czechs, had prompted their visit. She was a mathematics and science teacher at the primary school at Stanley, where her parents had lived since migrating as refugees a year after World War II.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I’m a bit homesick. And in a few weeks I’ll have to begin the next school year.
‘We’re supposed to stay here until Richard arrives. So ring him please, and make sure he’s coming soon to encourage and further skill our pathetic twenty-one recruits.’
Professor Doctor Richard De Groote was their Tasmanian Argo leader and mentor. The consultant psychologist, former Professor of Psychology in New York, and before then a lecturer in psyche in his native Amsterdam, was a gifted salesman and task-master. De Groote’s psyche clients included an advertising agency and a corporation of money lenders. Pike was sure that the professor received considerably more income from Argo than from mind-doctoring. His medical practice was an impressive stage for Argo.
‘We’d better get back to the flat in Palmovka,’ Blarney said. ‘From there, I’ll try again to get Richard on the phone.’
He rang Inspector Gelber and was given permission to leave the hotel. There was no mention of the theft of the book.
CHAPTER 3
It was late at night, windy and snowing lightly, when they arrived from the train at the three-storey stone block of apartments. As Blarney felt about for the light switch in the small foyer, his feet crunched on glass. The globe up there had been smashed. They slowly went up the stairs and felt their way along the narrow hallway to their apartment. All the lights were out. The apartment door was a little ajar. Its basic old lock evidently had been cracked.
Inside, the lights worked. They saw no evidence of a robbery. Still upset about Jack’s death, they sat over coffee talking about it and the theft of the organiser book. Pike opened a drawer in the lounge room. All of the scores of papers he had kept in there were gone.
He went to his main suitcase, which locked automatically by the pressing of a button after the case was closed. Pike had not done that when he left with a smaller bag to stay at the hotel. But the suitcase was now locked. He used a key from his ring of them to open it. Clothing in it had been moved about. No documents.
Alex saw his consternation. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Papers. Anything with info that I had in the stolen book. Dammit, they’re all gone. We’ve been robbed. Go and tell Liba.’
Minutes later, Alex returned with old Liba Prochazka, skinny as a broom stick and deaf. She was the building’s sort-of cleaner and manager. It was her job to lock the front door at midnight after hours of watching television on full volume.
Alex told Liba in Czech about the robbery, the smashed globes, the broken lock on their apartment door.
‘She says the building hasn’t been broken into in years. She reported it to the police this morning. But they haven’t arrived yet. Apparently we’re the only tenants who’ve been robbed.
‘Only the globe in the foyer and those on the way to this flat have been knocked out. Liba cleaned this flat the day after we went to the hotel. She didn’t touch your suitcase, which she thinks was open.’
When Liba had gone, Alex urged Blarney to hurry up with arrangements to leave the republic. ‘Struth, our robber or robbers might be the same horrors who killed Jack,’ she moaned. ‘You can thrash nearly any brute, my love, but if we’d been here when they broke in…if they had guns…’
Pike shrugged. He said nothing. With no police response to the book theft, he did not bother reporting this robbery. He realised that there had to be a reason for the torture of their dead friend, who had invited them to visit his home in New Jersey on their way back to Australia. The torturers might have wanted to know the names of everyone to whom Summons had related his evidence. A particular target would be an anonymous American who, Jack had inferred, was his important investigator.
Blarney reflected on his writing in Stanley of six freelance articles for American and British magazines to help pay for this Czech adventure.
He had got $US4000 for yet another version of THE REAL STORY OF THE TASMANIAN DEVIL. Then a useful cheque came from the Brits for a piece about the demise of the Thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger.
The couple had travelled around the Czech Republic in a rented car, Alex navigating and explaining the road signs to driver Blarney. He had presented the Argo sales spiel, called the pitch, to hundreds of small groups, with Alex translating. A marvellous but industrially polluted country, it was, teeming with history and friendly people. And the food and accommodation were so incredibly cheap!
The Czechs, however, years after being run by the Soviets, were wary of foreigners wanting their hard-earned cash up front in return for promised riches. The pictures of potential wealth the Pikes painted for them had looked too good to be true.
‘Give it time,’ Argo’s top man in Australia, Jerry Bell, had told him before childless divorcee Bell went home to Sydney the day after Jack’s killing. ‘We’ll sort it out, Blarney. You’re one of our very best. You’ve enlisted a good-looking group in Prague. We’ll cultivate it; sow more seeds, like good gardeners. Your crop here will flourish.