What The Ferry Company Knew
Her supervisor was a man called Pan Ryba, which meant "Mr. Fish," a coincidence of name and occupation that had been a source of mild amusement on the river for forty years and which, as far as Zdenka could tell, he had long since stopped noticing. He was sixty-three, a widower, and he had worked for the Prague Passenger Shipping Company since he was eighteen. He had known her father. He had signed the transfer of her licence in 1937 with a fountain pen he had been given for his twenty-fifth anniversary with the company, and he had, on that occasion, told her that her father had been a more stubborn man than most, and a better ferryman than any, and that he hoped she had inherited the second thing along with the first.
He kept his office in a small wooden building at the Na Františku landing, at the top of the Old Town side, where the big company steamers put in for coal. The office had a cast-iron stove, a calendar from 1938 that he had never taken down, and a photograph of President Masaryk on the back wall that had been covered, from June of 1939 onward, with a framed commercial print of the Charles Bridge in watercolour. Everyone who went into the office knew what was behind the bridge. Pan Ryba had never spoken of it.
He summoned her by note on a Monday morning in July. *Please attend at 11,* in his small, slightly backward-sloping hand on the back of a timetable slip.