The Bridge of Sighs (25 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

*******************

O
n the way out of the Canal District, Lena tore off a strip of her skirt and tied it around Leonek’s shoulder to slow the bleeding. He grunted when she knotted it, and gave Emil a queer grin. “Crazy bastard. You didn’t get hit
once?”

First, Emil felt only the fatigue—a draining anticlimax, then, once they had reached the drier areas, he put his arm around Lena. She bowed her head into his shoulder. He had gotten her back, alive. He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. He felt her steadying breaths against him, and when he looked down, her soft hair was in his face.

Leonek muttered curses. He was trying to figure out if he’d gotten the
Oberst
at all.

But by the time they reached the parking lot, Emil’s joy and self-congratulation was ebbing, and as they drove in silence to the hospital, he became focused on Michalec’s Politburo seat, and what lay in their future. In weeks or months, maybe, there would be no place to hide. He felt the Marakov again as he leaned into a turn, and wanted to go back. He still didn’t understand why he had let Michalec live.

He touched his bare head. “Anyone seen my hat?”

They both stared at him.

He helped Leonek out of the car and walked him into the crowded hospital corridor. Moaning peasants looked up—they were the same ones, it seemed to Emil, who had been here two months ago when they had gone down to the morgue. As he looked into the glazed eyes of the on-duty nurse he realized he would have to use the photos waiting in Janos Crowder s Zorki camera. Self-preservation demanded it.

The old, stale mess at her house was disheartening. She moved from room to room until she found one—the dining room—that had not been completely demolished by the colonel, Leonek, and whoever else had cut paths through the rubble. She made them both apricot brandies, and apologized for the lack of ice. It had melted. When the icebox, mysteriously, had been knocked over. Then she stood him up, put her arms around him and kissed him very hard on the lips. They stood like that for a while, kissing, their teeth sometimes rubbing together. The whole time it felt like desperation.

He told her about Irma. It came out over the oak dining table, where they sat in stiff chairs with high backs. She didn’t cry at first, but her shoulders sank toward her chest, and she shivered as though very cold. The bottle of brandy was near her, so she poured another. She had washed and changed into a long dress made of green, spongy material, and while taking the second drink she spilled some on it. The brandy turned the green to black where it fell.

After a while, Lena said, “She was my friend.” She smiled a tight, ironic smile. “It wasn’t servitude, not really. Not anymore. She was a sister.” Then she shook her head because she knew no one would believe that these days.

Emil was still on his first drink, and his nerves had not calmed. “Can you tell me about it?”

“Irma?”

“Smerdyakov.”

She made herself a third drink and swallowed it all without spilling. “This man came to Ruscova two mornings after you left.A single small man, wiry. A sneerer,” she said, and he knew it was Radu, the butler. “He’d been misinformed, I guess, at that little bar, and had already broken into Greta’s house. She told him to get out of her house, to go to Irinas, but he must have been afraid of breaking too many doors, so he just knocked. He said it was time for me to go, no arguments.” She shrugged. “Irina tried to argue, but what could she do? He dragged me to the car. Some old farmers came out of their houses and yelled at him, it was nice to see. They waved their hands and said God would judge him harshly, but he wasn’t fazed. Atheists never are.”

It had taken half a day for Radu to drive her, at gunpoint, back to the Capital. Once he stopped and showed his Party card at a house and was given fruits and dried meat from a terrified farm couple. It was twilight when they arrived at Michalec’s estate.

She refilled her glass and tilted the bottle toward him.

He shook his head. “Did they hurt you?”

“No,” she said, then gripped her glass between her breasts. “He had one of his fits.” She spoke quietly, as though Michalec were right there on the floor, convulsing. “The first night. He was arguing with me, and he fell out of his chair. His eyes rolled into his head. It was terrible.”

“What were you arguing about?” he asked after a while, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

He’d shown her pictures of his wife. Small, ornately framed sepia prints of a dark, beautiful woman in formal white dresses. “He thought I’d understand. Because she was killed in a labor camp.”

“Understand what?”

“How it was to lose someone.”

He waited.

She loosened her grip on the glass. She took a brief drink, then squinted. “My uncles shot in Austria, that and my father. He said he knew Papa from their social circles, said he was a practical man and that he respected practicality. He said I should understand his position, having lost so many of my family, and being left to fend for myself.” She looked at the table, at the glass, then back at Emil. “I told him I didn’t know how he felt.”

“He was a collaborator,” said Emil, suddenly flushed. “He worked for the Gestapo. Did he tell you that?”

She shook her head no.

“And the boys he shot? The ones in Berlin? The ones who loved him?”

She said, “He told me that war makes people like him, that nations did. When he was drunk, he said that after all the wars, natural selection would leave only him and his kind on the earth. But he stopped trying to explain once he saw I’d never understand.”

In his dream the boat was made of ice, and the steel bergs floating on the ocean shattered it. Everyone bobbed in the water like ice in a drink. The Bulgarian, Smerdyakov and Lena. And the other faces, Poles and Germans, he recognized from the long ride to Helsinki and back home. Penniless, destitute, weepers and stone- faces, and the whole village of Ruscova, their hands empty. They all swam deeper, but no one drowned. Then he was washed onto a mountain ridge, above where trees grew, and in the high spring grass his mother sat up, smiling. She looked just like her photographs. The soldiers were disappearing behind rocks.

She woke him in the morning with a kiss. He was on the sofa, where he had moved to support his back and then passed out, and she was leaning over him. Sunlight streamed through the ripped curtains. She apologized for waking him so early, then handed him the bulky black telephone from the foyer. “It’s your friend.”

“Emil? Have you heard?” came Leonek’s voice.

“Where are you?” Emil tried to sit up, but his back was stiff and he slid down again.

“The hospital. But listen. Jerzy Michalec.”

Lena was stretching by the windows, hands meeting high above her head. He had woken up with her, and though they had not made love, they were lovers. He had trouble paying attention to the phone. “What about him?”

“He s gone. No one knows where. Moska’s been looking for you.”

He tried again and finally sat up, painfully. “Any details?” Lena looked at him from the window.

“The butler. He says some men broke in last night. Kicked through the door. He heard Michalec calling for help. Squealing, I don t know. I’m just imagining. When the butler came out finally, he was gone.”

Emil remembered Radu s adept use of his truncheon. “He didn’t help?”

“Would you?”

Lena sat beside him on the sofa, smiled, and stroked his shoulder. “Where is he now? The butler.”

“At the station. Moska wants you to call him.”

Lena could not be ignored. She drew her fingers over his cheeks and whispered something filthy into his ear.

An hour and a half later he was in the station house. The chief’s door was open, but no other investigators had arrived yet. Moska got up when he heard him come in. “Brod, come on. Let’s go talk to him.”

They took the steps down to the cells. Most were empty because of a recent transferal to the central prison up north, but at the very end Radu sat where Cornelius Yoskovich had sat last week, longing miserably for his daughter. Radu looked just as miserable, but smaller. It was warm down here, and he was only wearing an undershirt and pants. Without a tie he looked like a little boy. He said nothing even when he recognized Emil.

“You want him here?” asked the chief.

“Interview room.”

He came without a fight, led by Moska s iron grip. He settled quietly into the interview seat, in a room a lot like Room 47 in Berlin. A table with two chairs, and a single chair in the center of the room. The walls were not quite as dirty as the ones in Berlin, but there were some questionable streaks. Chief Moska stood at the door. “I’ll be outside if you need me.” He left.

“Let’s have it.”

“Can I have a cigarette?” Radu asked.

Emil went out, got one from Moska, and after it was lit, Radu told the whole story without a fight.

“I don’t want that to happen to me,” he said. When he spoke his voice was unusually deep, as though hearing his master being dragged screaming out of his own house had matured him drastically. “I’ll cooperate.”

Janos Crowder was blackmailing Michalec with the photograph he had acquired in Berlin, but after six months, Janos decided he could not go on with it. “I heard them talking in the foyer. Janos said he was feeling guilty about everything and wasn’t going to take any more money.”

“Did he threaten to turn Michalec in?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head scornfully. “But how can you trust a creep like that? It wasn’t
guilt
—he just thought he’d get something from his father-in-law’s death. Above-board money. Secure. Who doesn’t want that?”

As he talked, Radu’s voice raised in pitch until it was almost natural, and he spread his feet on the floor. Aleks Tudor was the wild card, he said. The apartment supervisor had his hand in everyone’s business, and during that week when Janos was back with Lena, he went through Janos’s apartment and found the ten photos and a box of money. On the strength of these and some telephone conversations he had overheard, Aleks approached Janos when he returned from Lena empty-handed. “Now we had
two
creeps looking for a payoff. What else was Jerzy supposed to do?”

When Emil asked about Lena, he held up his hands. “Listen, I
was a gentleman.
I didn’t touch her. Just doing
a job.”

“What about last night, then? Did you turn your own man in?”

“Are you crazy?”

Emil shrugged, as though anything were possible. “You’re pretty open now.”

Radu crossed his arms, his cheeks going pink. “I don’t know who turned him in. Maybe the colonel. Maybe
you.
All I know is I’m not going down with the ship. This is just a job,” he said. “It’s not some kind of
devotion.”

They returned him to the cell and, back in the office, Moska watched as Emil unlocked his desk. He could bring out the evidence now, it didn’t matter. “Would you like to see?” Emil asked, and the chief, indecisive, waited. Emil opened the drawer and reached in. There were a few loose papers in the drawer, some pen tips, a bottle of ink, but no camera. He reached back, sliding his hand around. Nothing.

Under the fluorescents the chief’s expectant face had a subdued, greenish tint. Behind him the others were beginning to arrive—Ferenc and Stefan together. Brano Sev was not around yet. The chief looked at Emil’s white face. “Something wrong?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

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T
he planes stopped in Berlin. It took months and miles of newsprint, but in May the Comrade Chairman touched his mustache and let the British and American trucks through the barricades. Emil didn’t realize how much the whole business had been affecting him until it was done, and when Lena brought him the news he shouted involuntarily. Grandfather shook his head.
We’re living through History, and we don’t even know it.
Grandmother said that now that there was hope for the world, Emil and Lena should get married and have children. Grandfather claimed to have no opinion on the matter, but advised Emil to eat more garlic with his meals; it would stimulate both virility and fertility.

There were cases. He worked often with Leonek, but when Leonek came down with a debilitating flu that January, he worked with Stefan, who was quicker than he appeared. He joked a lot, said his wife had had it with his eating. He’d been thin before the war, he claimed, but after seeing all those bright young men blown up, and then getting shrapnel in his own leg, his joy at living had been so strong that he couldn’t help himself. He ate whatever tasted good.

In March they tried unsuccessfully to investigate the death of a German national named Teodor Schiffen found floating in the Canal District. He was a tall man, blond, and had been, as an official search of his apartment unearthed, a Wehrmacht colonel.

Someone had gone through the apartment before they arrived, and there was nothing left to tie the colonel to anyone in the Capital, in particular the missing person of Jerzy Michalec. The best they could figure was that Teodor Schiffen, after the war, had ended up on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. A bad place for any ex-German soldier; a man in that situation, Emil reflected, would need friends—voluntary or coerced. On a hunch, Emil rang Berlin to see if there was more information on him in the Tempelhof files, but Konrad Messer, after making inquiries, informed him that the crates of papers had finally been transported away—maybe to Washington, maybe elsewhere.

The Uzbek had a good laugh when Emil first saw the body, and vomited.

Lena sold the family house in April. She had never hired anyone to take Irma’s place. She called distant relatives in Poland and Austria with names other than Hanic, but no one in the extended clan was in a position to take on such an estate—it was the same all over Europe that year. A Central Committee member finally bought the house without much haggling, and after it was gone she heard rumors that it had been purchased for General Secretary Mihai. A privacy fence was put up a month later, so when she drove by, she could not find out if this was true.

In June, Emil suggested they marry. They were by now sharing a large apartment in the Fourth District, near the Tisa, and lived as a couple. She laughed. “You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to buy the cow.”

“But I want to,” he insisted.

“No, you don’t.”

So they lived, as Leonek called it, in sin. Grandfather grandly called it a modern socialist arrangement.

*********

The trials started again, in earnest. They were broadcast on the radio just as they had been after the Liberation, filling the airwaves. Titoists on the national scene, like their dangerous Yugoslav model, were trying to lure their People s Republic into the decadence of the West. These conspirators were ferreted out and put on trial. With wobbly voices they asked the forgiveness of the working classes. The bourgeoisie, they admitted, had hypnotized them.

In August 1949, two weeks before the Comrade Chairman tested his first atomic bomb, they heard Jerzy Michalec on the radio. It was a weak voice, marred by coughs and strange hesitations, and hearing him admit to collaboration with Hitlerite forces brought Emil surprise, but no satisfaction. He admitted to murders in both the East and the West, and claimed he had long been a counterrevolutionary agent for the Americans. He was a Titoist, an opportunist, a Fascist, and actively undermining the structures of socialism in the country. Not once did they identify him as Smerdyakov, the Butcher, or a war hero. There were more admissions and presentations of documents and photographs as evidence—they went on for an hour—and when a judge broke in angrily and said he had heard enough, this man should be shot, the eager applause was deafening. Then a confused silence. The accused, apparently, had begun to shake all over like a madman. His eyes had rolled themselves white.

He listened with Leonek and Ferenc and Stefan to the live broadcast from Ferenc’s radio in the station house, and even the chief stopped, briefly, halfway to his office, absorbed. It was a miserably hot day—not even the new ceiling fan made much difference.

“Did they want you to witness?” asked Emil.

Leonek shook his head. “No one asked anything.”

“Me neither.”

Brano Sev came in from the corridor. He nodded at them as he settled at his desk.

Leonek had taken some brandy from his drawer, and they were all drinking. Emil took only a little—his stomach had never quite healed.

The judges returned after ten minutes’ deliberation and sentenced Jerzy Michalec to death by firing squad.

“Justice,” called Brano Sev from his desk. They all stared as he took off his leather coat. Underneath, he wore a finely tailored dark jacket. Green shirt and brown tie. He picked something off his desk and walked it over. He set the Zorki down on Emil’s desk and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.

Leonek looked at the camera, at Emil, then back to the security inspector, confused. Emil had an impulse to rip open the Zorki, but the film, he knew, was no longer there.

Brano Sev nodded at the radio. “Don’t worry about him. In a week he’ll be commuted to hard labor. He’ll be digging in the swamps the rest of his life. This,” he said with disdain, “is modern correction.”

He lit his cigarette and returned to his desk. Then, with the elegance of those who know they are being watched, he took a file out of his drawer and began to read.