Chapter 1
The Great Falls


My father killed five people. Like most murderers who need only to press a key or push a lever or a switch to elevate themselves for one unfettered instant to the rank of masters of life and death, he did this without touching a hair on his victims’ heads or even looking them in the eye but by means of a series of chrome winches to flood a navigation channel used by riverboats.
The surge of water released by the open sluice gates transformed this narrow channel lined with larch beams into a raging culvert. Instead of gliding gently through it from the upper to the lower reaches of the White River, a languid narrowboat with twelve people on board suddenly gathered speed and shot downstream between moss-covered cliffs. Then, where the passage re-joined the old riverbed, the longboat flipped over in the torrent as if struck by a giant fist, and tumbled bottom-up through the seething whirlpools and currents.
The roar of the Great Falls, a cascade over 120 feet high which boats were able to bypass via a system of canals my father had regulated—no, ruled over—for almost thirty years, drowned out the horrified shrieks of those gathered on the craggy banks who witnessed the sinking as well as heard the screams and cries for help of the capsized and drowning passengers. All sound not produced by the eddies or the spray or the echo of the white water pounding against the rocks was swallowed up by the White River and its falls, a centuries-old source of dread to rafters and watermen.
It was a warm and slightly cloudy early summer’s day, a Friday in May on which, according to a Calendar of the Martyrs observed both then and now, many villages and towns on the banks of the almost 2,000-mile-long river celebrated the feast of St Nepomuk—the patron saint of rafters, bridge-builders and lockkeepers, but above all the custodian of secrets. According to one legend carved in hand-sized gilded letters into a rock beside the Great Falls, Nepomuk, the bishop and imperial confessor of Prague, had refused to divulge a crime an emperor had avowed to him and had, as a result, been tortured and thrown into the swollen Vltava with a grindstone around his neck.
Even though by the time of his feast most ferry connections were already discontinued and many bridges that had once spanned the White River on its way to the Black Sea had been destroyed, the spirit of the bridge protector seemed to hover over dynamited and flooded pillars and shattered steel arches, over remains corroded by rust or crumbling under blankets of moss, smothered by deep-green thickets in the summer months, while in winter they loomed cold and black from the clouds of spray like the ghosts of a world that had sunk into infamy.
Over forty languages were spoken along the White River, yet the number of bridges that had once stitched its banks together dwindled with every passing year, a clear and dramatic sign of an age of division and borders. The loss of the bridges had been accompanied by the dissolution of most alliances and ties between states on the European continent, splintering it into a plethora of micro-states, tiny principalities, counties and tribal territories, each boasting its own flag and coat of arms. The White River flowed as calmly and inexorably as ever towards a future in which only the occasional rotten barge or cable ferry would ply its way through the gurgling, frothing eddies that licked the rubble jutting from its waters.

Five dead. Whether my father had actually intended to cause this many casualties or a comparably alarming number—or was perhaps even willing to countenance the death of all twelve of the longboat’s passengers—will presumably remain a mystery unless a confession nailed to the sluice gate or some other scrap of evidence turns up among the driftwood and jetsam along the gravel banks to confirm or refute my suspicions. Any question to him is but an echo in the void. On the first anniversary of his deed, as if after precisely one year’s penance he had resolved to atone, he glided along the upper reaches of the White River past a shocked fly fisherman who shouted a warning as the rock-salt-laden lighter, similar to the narrowboat in which my father’s victims had capsized, headed for the veils of spray of the Great Falls.
He didn’t even glance at the frantically gesticulating angler nor, according to the man’s statement, take a single stroke with his oars to avert the inevitable. And with his cargo, he plunged into the thundering depths.
Smashed planks from his lighter were found on three different sandbanks and gravel shoals; his corpse—despite the deployment of rescue divers, who had retrieved nothing but dead bodies along this stretch of river—never was. And too much time has now passed to find in the deep, or hidden under an overgrown patch of riverbank, even one shard of bone that might be traced back to the missing man.