Pain sliced through the head of Alois Pech, one time informer to the Moravian Staat Polizei, causing him to screech in agony. A large abscess on one of his remaining teeth had just been injured by the hard crust of bread he was eating and the effect was immediate and brutal. His wife looked his way, but said nothing.

Grabbing his coat and throwing down the remains of his meal, Pech ran for the door and escaped out into the street. He was standing in the middle of a squalid avenue of dingy tenements, in the middle of a festering suburb of Brno, close by the Svitava river. In this street there were no churches, chapels, halls, theaters or institutes, in fact no public buildings of any kind.

Alleyways less than a meter wide formed narrow passageways running at right angles to the main street, if it could be dignified by that name, and from them filth of every sort streamed out into the main gutter over which Pech was now standing. Dwellings crowded one on top of another and so close did they jostle and squeeze together that their inhabitants had never known the concept of privacy or been free of the sounds of hammer, children, or vermin for their entire lives.

Although he was still quite young, Pech had a lanky, haggard, rickety appearance and the grime around his neck and collar spoke loudly concerning the lack of sanitary facilities in his house and life.

On a map of Brno and its environs this place was called the Zabrdovic, but to all that had come to live there from the villages and towns of the surrounding countryside it was know as vstup zakazan which in literal translation means 'forbidden to enter', but which also had the darker meaning of 'the place where all hope is abandoned upon entry'.

Times had been hard for the informer. Since the recent war streams of new immigrants had been arriving daily from the starving villages and many of them had been more than willing to inform on their friends, neighbors, family and even themselves for the price of a meal. Professional informers, such as Pech, had suddenly felt the cold winds of competition, and their incomes had decreased in proportion.

Pech and his family had moved in successive stages from a clean, neat apartment one of the middle class areas of Brno, to this area, where the rapidly expanding weaving industry had attracted the large pools of labor they needed to run their machines, night and day, without giving any thought to where their masses would live and breed.

Squatting across the sluggish stream of water called a river, the Zabrdovic district, which had once been a small, rural area, became a contiguous series of rapidly erected slums made of cheap wood and cheaper slate which leaked constantly and never dried properly, even in the full heat of summer, when the temperatures in the narrow passages easily passed that of cooking meat.

Where Pech now lived had only one advantage; it was a town and land without any obvious owner. No landlord came in his carriage to collect rent, if such coins were collected at all, it was by thugs carrying large wooden clubs, and it was never quite clear for whom such 'rent' was being collected at all. No one claimed any right over the area, and anyone who wanted, and who had the means, could build any structure they wanted so long as they were strong enough to defend it, by force if necessary.

For no meddlesome supervision regulated the lives of the people living there and no parish profited from their tithes or provided any kind of law. No exterior department enforced any kind of control over who went to live there or what they did when they arrived. Yet the place was by no means devoid of society or social construct. The original inhabitants had brought with them many required skills, and had placed well in the mills and manufactories. These were the aristocracy, and like the privileged everywhere, were jealous of their rights and what was owed them by the less fortunate.

There were no shortages of food, fuel or even wool and clothing, although very few of these items had ever seen the inside of a legal warehouse or store, much less been subjected to unnecessary taxation or dues. However the distribution of these necessities was strictly controlled by just a few men, all of them protected and guarded by stronger arms than theirs, but smaller brains.

Any family which wished to eat that day was required to send one of its female members to one of the large, windowless warehouses down by the river where the infamous 'tommy-shops' opened once a day for business. But no capitalist would have recognized the transactions taking place. Each tommy-shop owner sat behind a well guarded counter and did little else but swear at the sweating lines of anxious women waiting to be served.

Each day there was no choice as to what items went on sale, or, more correctly, what was available to the customers. A 'price' for each was fixed by the owner and no free-market forces could sway him from his decision. The day Pech groaned in agony a flitch of bacon was being carved up and distributed to his wife at a sum that would have increased his agony several fold, had he known.

Rubbing his jaw, he left the tenements and walked over some open ground in the direction of the 'First Brno Weaving and Dyeing Works', a recent and very modern manufactory that usually had temporary day-labor available, at a price.

As he was crossing a muddy ditch he noticed a fine carriage pulled by matched horses and guided by a post-master, postillion and whip-master drawing up to the main gates of the factory. This was not unusual, the owners of these technological edifices were very rich and could afford all of life's luxuries. But the outlines of the passengers seemed strangely familiar to Pech, so he moved closer.

He was not wrong. A strong shaft of light illuminated the inside of the carriage and Pech immediately recognized three of the four men inside. They were monks from the Monastery in Old Brno that he had once watched and reported on before the war. One of them was the Hussite, Klacel, a person of considerable interest to Pech's master in the Staat Polizei.

Suddenly Pech became much less interested in picking up a half-a-day's work pushing a broom, and much more interested in finding out why three monks were coming to the manufactory owned by Herr Otto Grunewald. His professional nose told him that there were things to be learned here that could bring him a substantial fee, if properly reported and explained.

He settled down to wait and observe with long practiced patience.