Radko Mrázek

Radko Mrázek is 52 and has raised building facades for thirty years. Born in Ostrava, in Czechia, the son of a welder and a factory cook, he came to Vienna at 22 for better pay. He started as a bricklayer's helper, was a stone restorer's apprentice and today is the foreman of a firm that specializes in old facades. He boasts that nobody puts up a scaffold as cleanly as he does.

He works most of the time in a firm's yard, behind a tin shed, among numbered sandstone blocks, wooden trestles and boxes of carving tools. There he examines each stone before sending it to the site, talks to the carvers in the loud voice of someone who lives outdoors and keeps his tea in a biscuit tin, next to his lunchbox. He believes the police don't understand construction and the rest of the world doesn't understand stone.

He is tall and heavyset, with a square, sunburned face, unshaven gray stubble and a nose broken in some old fight. He wears a plaid flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, an orange reflective vest, boots dirty with lime and carries a white hard hat under his arm. He is rude, direct and wary, grumbles his answers and takes pride that in thirty years of work he never left a cent crooked.

About the job, he tells it with relish: the firm restores the facade stone by stone, the scaffolding has stood since March, from the ground to the dome, and he put up every tube himself. Those with access are the crew, by day, the bottom ladder has a padlocked hatch and the netting covers everything. At night, he says, nobody climbs. He knows the museum's guard pointed at him, because of the hoarding gate, and replies that she should mind her own job.

Radko knows whoever put up the scaffolding and keeps the keys to the hoarding is the one asked how someone went up it. When the detective says he broke the museum's window, he squeezes the white hard hat under his arm and answers that he raises buildings, not breaks windows, and that thirty years of work don't fit in that conversation. It could be the hurt of an honest man, or the anger of someone plugging a crack: the squeezed hard hat doesn't tell which.