The Bridge of Sighs (3 page)

He reached the Georgian Bridge that led across to the Canal District, and leaned over the railing to stare into the black, silent currents of the Tisa. He felt the waste of years. Nine years since his father, and then his mother, had left him with this old couple—nine years adding up to this one failed day.

He turned around. The homes along the bank had been repaired haphazardly—boarded-up windows, patches of concrete.

The war had been over three months when, back from Finland, he stood in this same spot, hands in his pockets, spying on families. Then he was distracted by a noise. A half-naked woman—hands tied behind her back, a shaved head, bruised face and shoulders—was being dragged forward by a clamoring mob. The citizens led her down the street by a rope leash, with
collaborator
in cracked red paint across her breasts. He wondered what he had returned to.

CHAPTER THREE

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

O
n the way to the station house he stopped in an alley and scuffed his shoes in the dusty concrete. He twisted his stiff pants in his fists, leaving jagged wrinkles running up from the hem, and swung his jacket hard against a brick wall. He threw himself—and his white shirt—into that same wall a few times, and only after scratching his chin did he brush himself off and continue down the street.

They had abandoned all weapons but the most effective: silence. They attacked with leisure, the hours slowly accumulating, while Emil arranged and rearranged his desk supplies. There were no pranks, no laughter, not even the sense that they were watching him without looking. The big typist was at it again, banging away excruciatingly, and the others either read or ate or mumbled into the telephone.

Emil moved ink bottles to the deep side drawer that moaned when he pulled. Stacked crisp, white sheets on the corner of the desk. Placed department stamps in the accessible wide-top drawer—easily accessible because Grandfather had said that a man with stamps is a man with power.

He was pleased that his father’s scuffed watch, which he examined minute by minute, matched his new, weathered look.

From the administrative buildings on the opposite side of the street, sounds of revelry reached them. A celebration, punctuated by shouts and breaking glass. Emil gazed out the open window, but from his angle could only see a top floor of windows, and blue summer sky.

He was becoming adept at using his peripheral vision, seeing what was not directly seen. The chief, again, was nowhere. The state security inspector was making notes in a file. The fat one was eating sunflower seeds this time, the green flecks of yesterday s pumpkin seeds still visible beneath today’s black shards. Leonek Terzian read a book—Emil couldn’t make out the mysterious, squiggly characters on the cover.

There was no telling what their reasons were. He tried, but came up with nothing of use. Hazing no longer seemed possible. Did they think he was a spy in their midst? A visitor from Moscow? Maybe from a family they disliked—this was still the old world, and family animosities went on and on.

Or maybe it was his face. Unscarred, inexperienced. He stroked his sore, scratched skin. Maybe they hated to see how far they had come from their own honest boyhoods.

It was well into morning when he realized—late, it seemed to him—that he was the only one without a typewriter. His white paper was lined up evenly with the corner of his desk, useless and clean.

“Supply room?” he asked the air. “Anyone tell me where it is?”

The tired answer of bald scalps and messy heads of dense hair. The snap of typewriter keys.

The security officer’s stone face turned from the wall to meet his gaze—Emil could read nothing in those heavy, sleepless eyes—and nodded in the direction of the door.

Light reflected in the corridor, footsteps ricocheting, and up ahead a white-scarved woman dragged a damp mop. Uniformed Militia stood in pairs, talking and laughing—their shoulder patches matched the one on his dress uniform at home: the red hawk with head in profile, wings folded, on a field of yellow.

This was another world. Some smiled at him as they passed, and a few even nodded cursorily. He read what was stenciled on each door s translucent glass:
accounts
and
external
and
munitions
and
toilet
and
interview
. A mousy secretary coming out of the interview room with a notebook to her chest smiled at him. Her eyes twinkled.

The corridor turned left, then right, and at the far end, upon cracked glass, was
supplies
. He rapped with a loose knuckle, then entered.

A thin, tanned man wearing blue coveralls leaned back in a chair, reading
The Spark
—yesterdays afternoon edition— drowsily. His sockless, pale ankles were crossed on the counter, his black shoes polished. Behind him, seven overflowing, gray shelving units led to the dim far wall.

“Comrade,” said the thin man as he dropped his feet. “You are to be congratulated. Says right here that the murder rate in the Capital has plummeted fifty percent in the last three months.” He slapped the paper with the back of his hand. “It thanks
you.”

Emil closed the door. “Me?”

His smile was rich with yellow teeth. Emil couldn’t place the accent. The man’s bloodshot left eye remained trained on the small side window. “You, yes! Figuratively, at least. All the Comrade Inspectors of the People’s Militia.”

This sudden end to the silence stunned him. He opened his mouth. The end of the silence and its form: a deeply creased, tanned face with a lazy red eye. “Not this inspector,” said Emil. “Only my second day.”

“Then don’t send the rate back up.”

Emil propped himself with wide-set arms against the counter. He was acclimating to conversation. “Do you have a typewriter?”

“Your very lucky day.” The supply clerk smiled, wiping sweat out of his day-length beard. He wandered back into the darkness—his slight limp was apparent beside the hard, vertical lines of the shelves—and returned with an old monstrosity, weaving a little, gasping as he dropped it on the counter. “Beautiful,” he said, and swallowed. “No?”

It looked less like a typewriter than a cumbersome piece of steel furniture.

“You cant go wrong with a classic. German. Weimar, no less.”

Emil touched it timidly. “It works?” It was cold.

“Mostly, sure. Except the J, and the apostrophe. And, if I remember-” He pressed a button that clattered loudly, then squinted his strong eye at the black impression on the black roller. “Yes—the B.”

Emil exhaled. “You have something that works?”

A cool look of judgment filled the clerk’s features. “I shouldn’t do this.” He moved with exaggerated labor, his limp almost a stumble, back into the gloom. One hand fondled his chin, and the other held his backside as he frowned at shelves.

Emil wandered to the muddy, face-high window that looked down on a concrete courtyard, thinking again what he’d thought when he returned after the war:
This is a nation of cripples.
Dirty officers’ children played soccer in the courtyard, their shouts muted by glass. A cool tickle of sweat drew down his back. Then something hit the counter.

This typewriter was small, virtually new, and all its keys were intact. The clerk tested them with a light finger.

“Is better?”

“Significantly.” Emil lifted it easily with two hands.

“Is worth something, no?”

He set it down again, and waited.

“The last one that went out,” said the clerk, his brown features paling in the square of light from the window, “went for, I believe, five koronas.”

“Five?”

“But you’re new, right? And, after all, this one used to be at your desk.” He talked a quick retreat. “Sergei’s replacement, correct? I thought so. Exactly. Must be fair,” he said, then gazed at the scratched counter. “Poor Sergei.”

The other cadets had eagerly told Emil the rumor of the man he was replacing: Sergei Lvonic had been shot by a 7.62mm Tokarev. A Red officer’s pistol. But like most things that occurred just after the Liberation, it was never investigated.

“What about you?” asked Emil. “Can I know who you are?”

The clerk shrugged. “Roberto.”

“Spain?”

“Everyone thinks that.” He shook his head. “I get points for the Franco martyrs—the girls think I’ve lost my family to the fascists. But no. Argentinian.” He placed a hand over his chest and intoned: “My parents knew the way of their hearts.” The hand dropped and he winked.

Emil leaned closer. “So you know who I am?”

“Who doesn’t? Brod, Emil. Homicide.”

“Then maybe you can explain it to me.”

“Explain what, Comrade?”

That word dropped a curtain between them, as though Roberto had suddenly reached the limits of his affability and was backing up again. “The men,” said Emil. “They hate me. I don’t know why. They don’t speak to me, and there’s been some violence.”

Roberto snorted, impressed. “Violence?” He wiped his damp cheek with a thumb and settled into his chair. “Sergei was loved. You can be sure of that.” He took a pack of Czech cigarettes from his pocket and shook one out. “There weren’t many like Sergei.” He puffed as he lit up. “Don’t worry, they’ll get over it. What they are are…victims of melancholia.”

“After two years? This is melancholy? Someone hits me in the balls, and that’s just melancholy?”

Roberto shrugged in his tired way; none of this was news to him. “Just wait until you see those men really angry.”

*********

The typewriter was, Roberto assured him, a steal at only four koronas, and he included
The Spark
as a gift. But when Emil returned with his new possessions, he was deep in the silence again. They could not know it had been broken already, so they persevered, keeping their eyes to their desks as he set the typewriter down. He tested the chair with a hand, then settled down and experimented with a few keys. The silence
had
been broken, whether or not they liked it, and with time it would necessarily dissipate.

Again, that hereditary hope.

He got up and gazed over the big typist’s head at the bulletin board. Poorly printed faces of convicts and escapees, letters from appreciative citizens, and memos with stamps that proved they were words sent down from levels as high as the Central Committee. The memos outlined new laws controlling how the inspectors should go about their jobs: which buildings they could enter without authorization and which they could not; the limits of interrogation methodologies; when a case had to be handed over to state security for reassignment.

The typewriter stopped, and the big inspector—whose name, Emil knew from the files, was Ferenc—glanced at the chief, who had just arrived and hurried directly to his office without a word to anyone. Then he looked briefly at Emil before returning to his typing.

Pinned to the corkboard, criminal faces were labeled with names and numbers and lists of murders and dates committed. Some were doubly guilty; frauds or conspiracies were piled upon their homicides. A few faces were obscured by a blue stamp:
deceased.

Emil smiled at Ferenc. The man’s hard, cold stare looked nothing like melancholia.

At three, Leonek Terzian called to Ferenc and the fat one (Stefan, Emil recalled): “It’s time.”

All three grabbed their hats and jackets and headed for the door, Stefan walking with a barely noticeable limp. The security inspector didn’t look up.

Emil followed after a moment, but cautiously, Terzian’s small fist still crisp in his mind, and from the top of the steps watched them climb into a black Mercedes. The engine made knocking sounds as they drove away.

The security inspector looked at him when he wandered back in, but by the time Emil nodded, the inspector’s face had returned to his papers. He was too busy safeguarding the socialist state to acknowledge anyone. There were volumes stored in his locked files, and Emil felt an overwhelming curiosity. A peek, or just a hint. But not even he was stupid enough to break the concentration of a member of state security.

Emil’s desk, tidy and unused,
The Spark
folded loosely beside the smart typewriter, was thoroughly uninviting. He touched the stack of paper with the tips of his fingers.

This, truly, had gone far enough.

He took five firm steps to the chief’s door and pounded with the side of his hand. The milky glass rattled.

“Enter.”

The office was a mess, papers scattered like seed over the wooden floor, stacks slipping from file cabinets and out of boxes piled in the corner. It stank of stale smoke, and the beige curtains behind the chief were untied so only a single white blade of sunlight made it through. Above, a yellow bulb burned.

“Christ”
Chief Moska tossed a pen on the desk, splattering black ink, and settled back into his creaking chair. “What is it?”

Emil shut the door and centered himself. He wanted to do this right. “Chief Moska. I need to work.”

“You have your own desk, Brod.”

He held himself steady. “I have no cases. If you give me a case, then I can do my job.”

“Your job?”

“Exactly,” said Emil. “My job, which is to investigate homicides reported to this office.”

The chief leaned forward between his spread elbows, and his chiseled face stretched a moment. His shirt was stained at the pits; it was terribly hot in the office. “Your job,
Comrade
Brod, is to do what I say. That’s why Γ have these walls and that door.” He nodded at the door as if the movement would push Emil through it. “You follow?”

“Yes, Comrade.”
“Chief.”‘

“Yes. Chief.”

Moska’s chair moaned as he shifted and set his two open hands on the desk. He turned the hands over, palms up, then looked slowly around the room. “I wouldn’t want to waste your particular talents, Brod, which are no doubt considerable.” Something caught his eye, and he leveled a long finger at three boxes of files stuffed in a corner beside a dismantled radiator. “Some jackass put those files in chronological order. Can you believe it?”

“I’m trying to, Chief.”

He peered at Emil, and in the yellow, dusty light his expression was murderous. “I want them in alphabetical order, Brod. You’re familiar with the alphabet?”

“Intimately.”

“Get to it.”

The boxes were unwieldy and heavy, but his stupefied anger sustained him. He lined them beside his desk, ignoring the security inspector’s beady gaze, then sat on the floor. From the first box he removed all files in which the family name began with A. Althann, Abajian, Adamów, Annopol. The same with the second box, and the third. He made a pile. Then B. It went on. A sharp ache rooted into his back, but he did not change position. He wanted to give no sign of pain. Street voices came in waves, arguments and the crack of an automobile hitting a wooden cart. The ache grew into his shoulders, and by the time he reached M, it covered his entire back. Outside, the squeal of a pig being butchered. Maslow, Miroslav, Mas. Unstable towers of folders rose all around him.