perfidy

Later this year, I will be travelling on official Ministry business to Prague, jewel of Bohemia and former site of one of the Ministry's finest and most active field offices. Unfortunately, that office was closed rather bloodily by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, not long before his untimely but incredibly welcome assassination, and its wealth of occult and scientific knowledge was lost. Alas, the Iron Curtain fell before we could get another office satisfactorily established, and so our presence in Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic has been for six decades informal, ad hoc, and highly erratic.

(One rather tragic outcome of der Wixer's sacking of our office was that the Ministry lost track of the Golem of Prague. Although we of course had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the Golem, nor with contributing to nor puncturing the enormous corpus of legends, wives's tales, bedtime stories, parables, and plain out tall-tales that have accreted over the centuries since Rabbi Judah Loew first created his monster, through a remarkable twist of fate we were among several parties entrusted in the mid-eighteenth century with the knowledge of the Golem's long-term resting place within the Old-New Synagogue. But the ravages of the Great War and then the coming of Heydrich led to the loss of that knowledge and many, many more secrets of great and terrible importance.)

Although we at the Ministry have long since given up our ongoing search for clues as to the current resting place of the Guardian of Prague, feeling it is a secret much better left to others, there is much business for us in Bohemia, matters that have gone unseen-to in the more than sixty years since Hitler's filthy butcher came to town. The city has awakened by degrees from the stultifying effects of decades of totalitarian rule, and is once again the scrappy, proud, and vibrant seat of independent Czech identity. Its hard times are not entirely behind it, but good times are ahead.

This brings me to my point. If any of the Ministry's readers have been to Prague in the recent past, do kindly let me know if there's anything I should, uh, know, before I go. There's nothing like greasy food, dumplings, smog, puppet shows, smoky bars, spectacular lager, and long, long walks to set my soul to rights, but since my talent for Slavic languages is limited and my knowledge of the terrain very small, any experiences you might care to relate would be greatly appreciated.

End transmission.