The Black Angel

Against the far wall were racks of guns: semiautomatic weapons mainly, along with some shotguns, including a pair of FN tactical police shotguns that were clearly just out of the crate. I saw CZ 2000 assault rifles, and five 5.56N light machine guns mounted on their bipods and lined up on a table beneath their smaller brothers. M-16 mags and M-249 saw belts were stacked neatly beside each. There were also AK-47s and rack upon rack of similar Vz.58s. Beside them were two further racks of various automatic and semiautomatic weapons, and arrayed on a pair of oilcloth-covered trestle tables was a selection of pistols. Nearly everything on display was new, and a lot of it appeared to be military issue. It looked like half of the Czech army’s best weaponry was being stored in Most’s basement. If the country was invaded, they’d have to make do with peashooters and cusswords until someone cobbled together enough money to buy the guns back.

Angel and I watched as Louis checked his weapons of choice, working the slides, chambering rounds, and inserting and ejecting clips as he made his selections. He eventually opted for a trio of Heckler amp; Koch.45 pistols, with Knight’s suppressors to reduce flash and noise. The guns were marked USSOCOM on the barrel, which meant that they were made originally for U.S. Special Operations Command. The barrel and slide were slightly longer than on the usual H amp;K.45, and they had a screw thread on the muzzle for attaching the suppressor, along with a laser-aiming module mounted in front of the trigger guard. He also picked up some Gerber Patriot combat knives, and a Steyr nine-millimeter machine pistol for himself fitted with a thirty-round magazine and a suppressor, this one longer than the pistol itself.

“We’ll take two hundred rounds for the.45s, and I’ll take three thirties for the Steyr,” said Louis when he was done. “The knives you’ll throw in for free.”

Most agreed a price for the guns, although his pleasure in the sale was dimmed a little by Louis’s negotiating skills. We left with the weapons. Most even gave us some holsters, although they were kind of worn. The Mercedes was still parked outside, but this time there was another man behind the wheel.

“My cousin,” explained Most. He patted me on the arm. “You sure you don’t want to stay, have some fun?”

The words “fun” and “Cupid Desire” didn’t seem a natural fit to me.

“I have a girlfriend,” I said.

“You could have another,” said Most.

“I don’t think so. I’m not doing so good with the one I have.”

Most didn’t offer girls to Angel and Louis. I pointed this out to them on the ride back to the hotel.

“Maybe you’re the only one of us who looks like a deviant,” suggested Angel.

“Yeah, that must be it, you being so clean-living and all.”

“We should be there now,” said Louis.

He was talking about Sedlec.

“They’re not dumb,” I said. “They’ve waited a long time for this. They’ll want to look the place over before they make their move. They’ll need equipment, transport, men, and they won’t try to get to the statue until after dark. We’ll be waiting for them when they come.”

We drove to Sedlec the next day, following the highway toward the Polish border because it was a faster road than the more direct route through the villages and towns. We passed fields of corn and beet, still recovering from the harvest, and drove through thick forests with small huts at their edges for the hunters to use. According to the guidebook I’d read on the plane, there were bears and wolves farther south, down in the Bohemian forests, but up here it was mainly small mammals and game birds. In the distance I could see red-roofed villages, the spires of their churches rising above the houses. Once we left the highway we passed through the industrial city of Kolin, the crossroads for the railways heading east to Moscow and south to Austria. There were crumbling houses and others in the process of restoration. Beer signs hung in windows, and chalk-written menus were displayed by open doors.

Sedlec was now almost a suburb of the larger town of Kutna Hora. A great hill rose up before us: Kank, according to the map, the first big mine opened in the city following the discovery of silver on the Catholic Church’s property. I had seen paintings of the mines in the guidebook. They reminded me of Bosch’s depictions of hell, with men descending beneath the earth dressed in white tunics so that they could be seen in the dim light of their lamps, leather skirts at their backs so that they could slide down the mine shafts quickly without injuring themselves. They carried enough bread for six days, for it took five hours to climb back to the surface, and so the miners stayed underground for most of the week, only coming up on the seventh day to worship, to spend time with their families, and to replenish their supplies before returning to the world beneath the surface once again. Most kept an icon of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners, upon their persons, for those who died in the mines did so without benefit of clergy or the speaking of the last rites, and their bodies would probably remain below ground even if they could be found amidst the rubble of a collapse. With Saint Barbara close by them, they believed they would yet find their way to heaven.

And so the town of Kutna Hora still rested on the remains of the mines. Beneath its buildings and streets were mile upon mile of tu

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

We hung a right at a big Kaufland supermarket and came to the intersection of Cechova and Starosedlecka Streets. The ossuary was on the latter, directly before us, surrounded by high walls and a cemetery. Across from it was a restaurant and store named U Balanu, and around the corner to the right was a hotel. We asked to take a look at the rooms, eventually finding two that gave us a good view of the ossuary, then went to view the ossuary itself.

Sedlec had never wanted for bodies to fill its graves: what the mines, or plague, or conflict could not provide, the lure of the Holy Land fulfilled. The fourteenth-century Zbraslav Chronicle records that in one year alone, thirty thousand people were buried in the cemetery, a great many of them brought there specifically for the privilege of being buried in soil from the Holy Land, for it was believed that the graveyard held miraculous properties, and that any decedent buried there would decompose within a single day, leaving only preserved white bones behind. When those bones inevitably began to stack up, the cemetery’s keepers built a two-story mortuary containing an ossuary within which the remains might be displayed. If the ossuary served a practical purpose by allowing graves to be emptied of skeletal remains and freed up for those more in need of a dark place in which to shed their mortal burden, it also served a spiritual purpose at least equally well: the bones became reminders of the transience of human existence and the temporary nature of all earthly things. At Sedlec, the border between this world and the next was marked in bone.

Even here, in this foreign place, there were echoes of my own past. I recalled a hotel room in New Orleans, the air outside still and heavy with moisture. We had been closing in on the man who had taken my wife and child from me, and coming at last to some understanding of the nature of his “art.” He too believed in the transience of all human affairs, and he left behind his own memento mori as he traveled the land, tearing skin from flesh, and flesh from bone, to show us that life was but a fleeting, unimportant thing, capable of being taken at will by a being as worthless as himself.