Only later did I learn that Ludvik had been in prison at the time. His mother was the only one in town who'd known. When she died, the Kouteckys took over the body of an unloved sister-in-law and proclaimed it their own. At last they were avenged on their ungrateful nephew. They had robbed him of his mother. They had covered her up with a heavy marble stone guarded by a white angel with curly hair and a palm frond. I'll never forget that angel. He was soaring above the ravaged life of a friend from whom even the bodies of his parents had been stolen. The angel of robbery.
