Free Complication by Isaac Adamson

half a size too large, and I could feel my feet blistering as I slumped down on a bench at the edge of the river. On the other side of the Vltava, a giant metronome sat on a high plateau, unmoving atop a concrete pedestal. Praguers were evidently nuts about all things timekeeping. Clocks in the metro stations, clocks on streetlamps, the Astronomical Clock with its creaky wooden effigies. But then, if my brother had died in a plot to steal a Maltese Falcon, I’d probably be noticing birds everywhere. Prague Unbound mentioned that the plinth where the metronome now stood was once the site of the largest sculpture in the world, one depicting Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Liberator of Nations, Gardener of Human Happiness, better known as Josef Stalin. The sculptor responsible for its creation suicided before the statue was unveiled, while the model drank himself to death because his friends turned on him and refused to call him anything but Stalin. The statue stood for only six years. When the Soviet leader’s crimes were brought to light, Czechoslovakian authorities were further embarrassed because they couldn’t figure out how to dismantle the 17,000-ton eyesore and had to
call in West German demolition experts. “Remnants of Stalin’s exploded head may still be found in the stygian depths of the Vltava River below,” noted the book, “a reminder that men great and small may come and go but the Vltava is forever.”
    I sat pondering my encounter with the ex-detective. What he’d told me was troubling enough—willful police indifference, a killer of some sort on the loose, something having to do with my brother’s right hand—but what he didn’t say was equally puzzling. He hadn’t mentioned anything about the Rudolf Complication and didn’t seem to know much about Vera beyond her name, the fact that she’d once been seen with my brother at the Black Rabbit, and that five years later she’d decided to start frequenting the place again. Could he be ignorant of the fact that my brother was part of a conspiracy to steal the watch? Maybe—but then why would he have arranged the exhibit booklet to be left in my room?
    Maybe he was the third man. Martinko Klingáč.
    Didn’t seem likely. Nothing slick about wild hair, his wrestling-match-inside-a-Salvation-Army-drop-box outfit.
    I’d also been thinking about the map in Prague Unbound , the one strangely marked with my exact location when I’d opened the book in Old Town Square, and decided this at least presented less of a mystery. It was a used book, after all—obviously its previous owners had drawn the dot and hand written Here you are in tiny script when trying to get their bearings. The Astronomical Clock was one of the biggest tourist draws in the city, after all, along with the Charles Bridge, one of two places probably everyone who came to Prague visited. This person, I guess, came twice, and either a frustrated or humorous impulse caused them to add again . Whatever the case, the coincidence wasn’t that striking, and I had bigger things to worry about.
    Somewhere church bells started ringing, and the sight of an old guy in a canoe fishing near one of the tiny islands in the river
got me thinking back to a trip to Wisconsin the three Holloway men had taken the summer my mom left—a memory I hadn’t dusted off in years. I was thirteen, which would’ve made Paul nine or ten. It was a weekend thing where we stayed at a lakeside cabin owned by one of my dad’s friends. Rained the whole first day, and we were stuck in a cramped cabin with no TV, no video games. Instead of grilling hamburgers, my dad had tried cooking them on an old potbellied stove and turned them into hockey pucks. By Sunday the three of us were sick of each other and began retreating into the silences of our separate worlds. But when the rain cleared we made a go of it anyway and headed out in a