Victory Square

VICTORY
SQUARE

ALSO BY OLEN STEINHAUER

Liberation Movements

36 Yalta Boulevard

The Confession

The Bridge of Sighs

VICTORY
SQUARE

 

OLEN STEINHAUER

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

VICTORY SQUARE
. Copyright © 2007 by Olen Steinhauer. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book maybe used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steinhauer, Olen.

Victory Square / Olen Steinhauer.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36971-2 ISBN-10: 0-312-36971-9

1. Police—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. 2. Europe, Eastern—Fiction.

3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.T4764V53 2007

813’.6—dc22           2007014286

First Edition: August 2007

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

FOR

KATRINA
AND
IAN

•

I want to thank my good friend John Nadler for reading an early draft of this novel and offering wise and informed suggestions. Also, my former agent, Matt Williams, was vociferous in his encouragement and faith in this series from the beginning. Without his support, I certainly wouldn’t have made it this far.

More than my previous books, this one depends on research I conducted during a 1999 Fulbright grant, so I would be remiss in not thanking the Fulbright Commission for its generosity. Specifically, I want to thank loana Ieronim, a wonderful poet and human being, who enthusiastically assisted me during my year in Romania.

As ever, Slavica Pilic has helped me better understand my own writing, as well as myself. For both, I’m eternally grateful.

26 DECEMBER 1989
TUESDAY

•

There are
things you know but forget. Truths that don’t stay in your head because you’re distracted by daily affairs, by the manic effort of living your life. Then, unexpectedly, the knowledge returns and changes you. It makes murder possible.

Leaning through the high stone window of the Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta, I looked down at tourists and pigeons vying for space on the damp marble floor of the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, Trieste’s central square. In the cold wind blowing through from the Adriatic, a basic truth came back to me: Old men die every day.

They submit in overstuffed chairs across from blaring televisions, slip in the bathtub, sink deep into hospital beds. They tumble down the stairwells of barren apartment blocks and face heart failure in swimming pools and restaurants and crowded buses. Some, already sleeping on the street, go quietly, while others take care of it themselves, because that’s the only power left to them. Their wives are dead and their friends as well; their children have fled from the stink of mortality. Sleeping pills, razors, high terraces and bridges. Usually, old men go alone.

Before that week, I’d never been to Italy, though when I was a young man I dreamed of it, and of a famous bridge in Venice that spelled out a metaphor I could understand. No longer. Metaphors help you boil down the complications and ambiguities of your too-long life into a picture book. They help you lie to yourself.

My wife, Lena—she was the one who traveled, and for a long time I didn’t know why. In truth, I knew nothing about her. Only later, among whining Vespas, garlic-scented streets, and bombastic Italians, feeling every one of my sixty-four years, did I finally understand. I understood her, and I understood everything, for just a moment. To the left, beyond the square, the Adriatic glimmered.

The pedestrians below didn’t notice me. Bald on top, white along the sides; my one striking feature was that I had bright eyes that should’ve been on a younger man. Not tall—neither in height nor stature. That was me. A normal man in all ways, with the cold sea wind flapping my gray blazer. I owned nothing; even my clothes were borrowed from Brano Sev, who, until I betrayed him, was probably the luckiest man I’d ever known. Borrowed, too, was the still-warm Walther PP I kept in the blazer’s stretched pocket so the tourists below wouldn’t be frightened.

I wasn’t thinking of the man I’d shot, who made quiet noises in the room behind me. No, I’d thought about him far too much over the last week. I was thinking, instead, about the greatness of life. All the sensations and people and moments that, if you don’t hold on to them, disappear forever. And once they’re gone, they might as well never have existed. That’s one reason I’m telling this story, to make them last a little longer. The other reason will explain itself.

I turned back to the room. It was one of those Italian prestige hotels filled with corroded grandeur, the most expensive in town. The old man groaned on the blood-wet bed, clutching his left knee. He wasn’t even looking at me now, because he knew it made no difference.

I settled into a chair, told him I would finish this, and watched as the tremors began. He let go of his knee and seized up. His right leg shot out, then the injured one, and that movement made him scream. I didn’t react.

This man, descending into epileptic spasms, had an unbelievable resilience. He’d survived so much over the last century, been near death so many times, beaten down but always rising again over eighty years, despite being crippled by the falling sickness. I even felt, briefly, a measure of respect. In comparison, my own life had been soft and simple. But old men die every day—yes, women, too—and this day was no exception.

20 DECEMBER 1989
WEDNESDAY

•

•

It started
six days before. Only a week. Gavra Noukas would later fill in the details I wasn’t around to see, and he’s checked what I’ve written to verify it all, at great cost to himself. Despite everything, I stand behind his version of events. The young spy has always been straightforward with me, and if anyone in this new world wants to prosecute him for what he did in the old, he can call on me to speak in his defense. But I don’t think he needs my help anymore.

He’d been traveling a long time. First, a TisAir flight to Zagreb, where a cramped JAT jumbo jet brought him to JFK Airport. On that long flight he’d distracted himself by flirting with the Croat stewardess who, after bringing him vodka on the sly, told him her name was Radmila. He gave her the name on the passport he’d switched to after leaving, but before reentering, Zagreb International, and her head popped back. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“That’s my father’s name.”

His passport, like all those issued by the Ministry for State Security, was worn and authentic-looking. Lieutenant General Kolev had chosen the name Viktor Lukacs, which just happened to be the name of this stewardess’s father. With that name, Gavra cleared New York passport control and took a 3:00
A.M.
taxi to LaGuardia. While waiting for a Delta flight to Virginia, he bought a baseball cap emblazoned with the letters
N
and
Y.