#14 · Cold Case
October 15, 2026
Episode 14 — Cold Case
At ten in the morning the sun over Riverside was the usual honest gold, and Alfonz was cranking his tinny "Entertainer," and Emma Rodriguez was first at the window, the way she was always first.
"Two scoops of mint chip," she announced. "And you look normal again. Mrs. Fenwick will be relieved."
"I have decided," Alfonz said, building the cone, the second scoop wobbling just so, "to be tediously ordinary for as long as it lasts."
It lasted until she'd crossed the grass.
"Ribbit-7." Handler, low and quick. "You remember the slow ones Vane said he still had. The registration. The shipping ledger. The map."
"I remember."
"We built something after Lyon — not a watch on him, he's off every book, that hasn't changed. A watch on the world he has to work through instead. There are perhaps forty people on this planet who broker vintage American cars into European collections, and we've had eyes on all of them since July." A pause, and something almost pleased under the usual dryness. "This morning, one of them got an inquiry. A chassis number, named outright. An old shell company, out of Lyon, from thirty years ago."
Alfonz found that his hands, closing around the scoop, had gone very still.
"Where."
"Prague."
He found himself, without quite deciding to, counting the cars on the block one more time before he locked the window. Two months of an easy summer had let that habit go soft. It came back now like a coat he hadn't noticed he'd missed.
"A car dealer," he said, on the plane, turning the little he had over and over. "Not a person who knows me. A person who knew the truck, before it was mine to know."
"His name is Emil Novák," Handler said. "Forty years in the trade — imports, mostly, American iron for people who like a car with an accent. If our flag is right, he's the man who sold a decidedly odd, decidedly cash-paying buyer a 1967 Chevrolet a very long time ago, and then watched it get crated up and shipped straight back out of the country he'd just brought it into."
"That would be memorable."
"That's why we flagged it. Ribbit-7—" and here she slowed, the way she did when the next thing mattered more than the rest, "—you're not a day behind this time. You're airborne twenty minutes after the query hit our watch. If Vane's moving on this at all, you may actually beat him there."
"I would like that very much."
"So would I," Handler said. "I've grown tired of hearing about him after the fact."
He did not beat him there.
The shop sat on a narrow street behind the castle, a low garage crowded to the rafters with chrome and old leather and the particular smell of a hundred engines that had all, at some point, been loved. A silver-haired man in a beautiful long coat was already inside, seated at a workbench across from a delighted old Czech, a leather-bound ledger open between them, and Alfonz's whole chest went cold in the doorway the way it always did when he was, once again, one conversation too late.
"—and I said to him," Emil Novák was saying, beaming, "I said, my friend, nobody ships a car back out the week they buy it, this is not how a man treats a Chevrolet, and he only laughed and paid me twice what I asked and told me to forget I ever saw him." He caught sight of Alfonz in the doorway and brightened further, a man delighted by an audience of any size. "You are also here about a car?"
"I am always here about a car," Alfonz said, in the mild, unplaceable accent he kept for exactly this kind of afternoon, and came in, and did not look at Vane, and felt Vane not looking at him, and understood that the next twenty minutes would be conducted entirely in the space between two men who could not acknowledge each other in front of a third.
"Mr. Alfonz." Vane said it warmly, without turning his head, the way one remarks on the weather. "What a small world automobiles are."
"They are famous for it," Alfonz agreed, and picked up a chrome hood ornament from the nearest shelf, and admired it with great sincerity, and gave himself a moment to think.
Emil, God bless him, noticed nothing. He had spent thirty minutes being flattered by a patient, genial stranger and clearly intended to spend thirty more being flattered by whoever else walked through his door, and he turned back to Vane with the easy trust of an old man who has finally found someone who wants to hear the whole story.
"So," Vane said, gently, "you sold the car. And it left again within the week. Do you recall, by any chance, where a car like that would have gone? A shipping line. A port. I collect these little journeys, you understand — a car's whole life, start to finish, is the only kind of biography I've ever found honest."
"I have it written down," Emil said, delighted, already rising from his stool. "I write everything down. Forty years, everything, in the back room — the export papers, all of it, I never throw away a single —"
"Monsieur Novák." Alfonz's voice came out warmer and louder than he'd meant it, and both men turned. "Forgive me. I could not help but overhear. You said a Chevrolet. A 1967?"
"You know it?"
"I am restoring one myself. Terrible condition. I don't suppose—" and here Alfonz let his face do the thing it did best, which was want something transparently and completely, "—I don't suppose you kept the parts manual as well? The original one, from the dealer network? Mine is missing forty pages and my mechanic weeps every time I mention it."
It was, he was fairly certain, the single most boring sentence he had ever spoken aloud, and it worked exactly as he'd hoped. Emil's whole face lit with the joy of a man who has just been asked the one question he has been waiting his entire career for someone to ask.
"The parts manual." He clutched his own chest. "I have three. I have the French, the German, and I believe, somewhere, the original English. Come, come, it will take me a moment, they are not where the export papers are, they are in the other back room—"
He vanished through a curtain of hanging fan belts, radiant, already talking to himself about which shelf.
The shop went very quiet.
"That was well done," Vane said, without heat.
"He'll be twenty minutes. He has three manuals and the attention span of a delighted child." Alfonz set the hood ornament down, carefully, exactly where he'd found it. "You won't have your shipping papers today, monsieur."
"No," Vane agreed. "I don't suppose I will." He closed the ledger gently, as though it were something that deserved to be handled with care regardless of what it had nearly cost him. "You've cost me an afternoon, Mr. Alfonz. I want you to know I noticed, and that it changes nothing at all. I have so many afternoons. It is, in fact, the only thing I still have in any real supply."
"I know."
"Do you?" Vane studied him with something that was almost, infuriatingly, fondness. "You keep arriving to deny me small things. A book. A page. Now an old man's paperwork. Every time, you win the room. And every time, I leave with something anyway, because a patient man does not need to win the room. He only needs the room to exist again tomorrow." He rose, unhurried, buttoning his coat against a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. "Your truck went to America. I already knew that; Gustave told me the shape of it before you ever burned his book. Today I only had it confirmed by someone with no reason to lie. That is not nothing, even if it is not everything."
"It's less than you wanted."
"Everything is less than I want," Vane said, almost gently. "That has been true of my whole life since a certain evening at the Armistice. I have made my peace with wanting less and taking longer." He paused at the door, and something in his face, for just a moment, was almost curious rather than patient. "He did tell me one other thing, before you arrived. Did you know your Monsieur Gustave insisted the truck be repainted before it ever left this country? Pink and turquoise, very particular, very exact — he showed Emil color swatches, apparently, like a man planning a wedding." A small, genuine smile. "I find I am collecting a rather tender picture of the man who built you, piece by piece, from people who never knew what they were giving me. That, too, is not nothing."
He left without hurrying, the bell over the door ringing once, cheerful and small, and by the time Alfonz reached the street there was only the ordinary traffic of an ordinary Prague afternoon, and no sign at all of a silver-haired man who had just walked away smiling.
Emil returned in nineteen minutes, triumphant, with two manuals and an apology for the third, and sold Alfonz a genuine 1967 Chevrolet parts manual for considerably more than it was worth, which Alfonz paid without complaint, because a man ought to leave a kind stranger's shop having actually bought something.
"You have good taste in cars," Emil told him, pleased, at the door.
"I have good taste in very little else," Alfonz said, and meant it more than the old man could know, and left him there, beaming, entirely unaware that he had just spent an afternoon at the exact narrow point where two very different kinds of patience had quietly failed to collide.
"Package secured," he told Handler, from a bench overlooking the river, watching tourists photograph a bridge that had stood there far longer than any of them would. "Vane got a confirmation he already half-had. He did not get a port, a manifest, or an address. Small win, Handler. I will take it."
"It's the first one in three episodes of this," Handler said. "I'll take it too." A pause, weighing something. "He's still moving forward, though. Slower than he wants. Not stopped."
"He told me something else," Alfonz said slowly. "About Gustave. About the color of the truck." He watched the water a moment. "He is not only hunting me, Handler. He is learning me. Piece by piece, from people who never meant to teach him anything. I keep denying him documents. I have never once denied him a story."
"Can you?"
"I don't know yet." He stood, and the old parts manual was heavier under his arm than its size had any right to be. "But I think that may be the actual question. Not how do I stop him from finding the trail. How do I stop him from finding me, one true, small, human fact at a time, until he knows me better than the people who love me do."
Handler was quiet for a moment.
"Come home," she said finally. "Tie your bow tie. We'll think about it from there."
At ten the next morning the sun over Riverside was ordinary and gold, and Emma was first at the window, and Alfonz built her cone with the wobble restored to its usual working order, and found that his eyes, without his quite permitting it, were counting the cars on the block again — the blue sedan, the delivery van, a stranger's rental he didn't recognize and noted anyway.
"You're doing the counting thing," Emma said, disapproving.
"I am admiring the neighborhood," Alfonz said. "It is a very fine neighborhood to admire."
She took her cone and ran, unbothered, into the ordinary gold of the morning, and Alfonz watched her go and thought that a fine neighborhood was exactly the thing he most wanted to keep being true, and least knew, anymore, how to guarantee.
On the other side of the world, in a room kept carefully at 4°C so that nothing in it would ever spoil, Auguste Vane sat down at a clean desk with a cup of tea gone lukewarm, and did not open the shipping ledger, and did not unfold the map.
Instead he took a fresh sheet of paper, and at the top of it, in his patient and unhurried hand, he wrote a single word that had nothing to do with ports or manifests at all.
Pink.
He looked at it a long moment, satisfied, and began, without any hurry, to write down everything else he now knew about the man who had built a frog a life.
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