Victory Square (4 page)

Bernard had finally tired of pestering the local women, and as he walked back I turned him around and guided him up the street to the BMW. “Quick search,” I said.

“What’re we looking for?”

“Anything. Maybe medication.”

Bernard inhaled audibly when I unlocked the car. Across the way, the guard tossed his cigarette and stared. I took the front seat, rummaging around the floorboards and in the glove compartment, while Bernard crouched in the back. “Hey,” he said.

He held up a narrow sheet of paper—a poorly printed flyer— that said

It was the same slogan they used in Czechoslovakia just before everything changed there. Student radicals and underground workers had used the question-and-answer to identify compatriots. The activists of our own country had borrowed the phrase.

I took the flyer and stared at it.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

I looked at him a second, then past him, through the rear windshield. The guard had returned to the steps of Yalta 36 and was speaking with the other guard. I lowered my voice, though it wasn’t necessary.

“This”
I told him. “We’re called in to process the death of a Ministry lieutenant general. Forty years, and I’ve never seen this happen. We’re being brought in for a reason.”

Bernard waited for me to complete my thought, but I couldn’t, not yet. I locked up the BMW, pocketed the keys and thanked the guard again for the cigarette.

Markus Feder was quicker than expected; when we stepped into the homicide office, my phone was ringing. “Emil, I’ve got something.”

“Be right down,” I said, then went out to Bernard, who was settling into his chair. He groaned as he got up again.

We went back down the stairwell to the first underground level and Markus Feder’s “body shop.” Feder had been assigned to the First District Militia in the fifties, and since then he’d gradually built a reputation as the most astute coroner in the country. He was the one who tracked down a rare Nigerian poison used to kill a television broadcaster in 1978. Two years later, he identified not only the weapon—a wrench—that killed the wife of a Ukrainian diplomat, but the manufacturer, the year produced, and the shop where it was purchased. He’d conjured many small miracles in his cold, stainless steel lab, and today was no exception.

“Poisoned,” he said, leaning against the gurney that held Yuri Kolev’s large, naked body aloft. This, for some reason, wasn’t a surprise to me. He raised a finger. “Guess how.”

That, I didn’t know. I shrugged.

“Ever heard of an eight-ball?”

“Billiards?”

Bernard said, “Crack cocaine and heroin.”

Feder wagged the finger at him. “The young man wins. He’s been watching American movies. Anyway, what you’ve got is the same thing but without the crack. Colombian cocaine mixed with heroin.”

“Injected?” I offered.

“Not at all. This man’s been snorting for years. His nasal cavity’s like the Postojna Caves.” Feder propped his gloved finger on the tip of Kolev’s nose to demonstrate. “But this time, it was mixed with uncut heroin. It was pure poison. If his heart hadn’t killed him first, he would’ve suffocated as his body shut down.”

I looked down at Kolev’s pale body and noticed his freshly shaved genitals, which were unusually red. “Could he have done it by accident?”

“Emil, you don’t get hold of pure heroin by accident, and you certainly don’t snort it by accident.”

“What’s wrong with his privates?” said Bernard.

“Herpes,” Feder told him. He wagged his finger again. “A visual lesson for you, son. Oh!”

“What?”

Feder stepped back to the sink and picked up a plastic bag filled with slips of paper, some change, a wallet, and two identification booklets. “His effects.”

I held up the bag and peered through it. “So if it wasn’t an accident, someone spiked his cocaine.”

Feder nodded. “Someone who could get hold of the pure stuff.”

“There you are!” said a woman’s voice. “There’s Daddy!”

Feder brightened, looking past us to where Agota stood in the doorway, clutching two-year-old Sanja wrapped in a purple hooded coat. Agota was beautiful in the way her mother, Magda, had once been, with pale blue eyes and dark hair.

She came in slowly. “We’re interrupting?”

“Absolutely not, dear,” said Feder, a massive grin filling his face.

Bernard waved for her to leave. “I’ll be right out.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to step in front of the corpse. “Go.”

“Oh,” said Agota. She’d just caught sight of Yuri Kolev’s white body. She clutched Sanja tighter, one hand covering the child’s face. “I—”

“Wait outside,” said Bernard.

We watched her retreat and close the door behind herself, then heard coughing from the corridor, and Sanja’s low whine.

“Nice one,” said Feder, a gloved finger on Yuri Kolev’s navel. “I’ve always said your wife was a nice one.”

“Yeah,” Bernard said without interest.

“If I was you, I’d keep a tight rein on myself. A woman like that doesn’t come along every day.”

Bernard looked at Feder, then at me. He blinked and muttered, “Shut up,” before marching out of the lab.

Using Feder’s lamps, I examined Kolev’s effects. He had two ID booklets: a Ministry for State Security certificate with his name, and a general citizen’s pass under the name
LIPMANN, ULRICH.
He’d used the false one to travel to Sarospatak three times in the last week. It didn’t look like the travel habits of someone who was only making photocopies for the office.

The slips of paper were receipts for four meals at the Hotel Metropol. Large bills, at least three people at the table.

I thanked Feder and found Bernard and Agota whispering in the stairwell, Sanja on her mother’s knee.

“Hey, old man,” said Agota.

Since moving to the Capital in 1984, Agota had gone from disconsolate textile-factory worker to weekend photographer. Then, after one successful commission shooting a Ministry general’s son’s wedding, she started getting calls. She applied for permission to leave her factory just after the birth of her daughter two years ago and had been photographing full-time ever since, sharing a studio co-op on Lenin Avenue, not far from the Militia station. Her life showed us that change was never impossible. She’d married a man ten years youngerthan herself and then became pregnant at the age of forty-five—Katja often spoke of this as if it were a miracle—and then she’d made a complete career change. These things gave the rest of us hope.

I kissed her cheeks, then Sanja’s soft white forehead. “You know better than to walk into that room.”

“I needed to find Berni.” She wrinkled her nose. “But the smell. What is that smell?”

“Chemicals,” Bernard guessed. He reached down to take Sanja.

“So how was it?” I asked.

“How was what?”

“Don’t be funny. It doesn’t suit you.”

People say a lot of things about Tomiak Pankov now, most of them true, but back then you could think what you wanted; it didn’t change the fact that his very name frightened you. So none of us said it aloud.

She’d done his portrait in the newly finished Workers’Palace, that Third District monstrosity fronted by the long, cobblestone Workers’Boulevard, which
The Spark
continually reminded us was one meter wider than the Champs-Elysees.

She frowned, trying to find the words to describe the experience.

“Scary?” I offered.

She blew some air, then nodded. “Terrifying. I got some nice shots, though.”

“That’s good.”

“They searched me.”

“What?” said Bernard, bouncing Sanja on his hip.

“On my way out. They searched me. As if I were a thief.”

Neither of us knew how to answer that. Agota reached for her purse as she stood. “I’ve gotta go. Train leaves in a half hour.”

“Wait a minute,” I told her as we started up the stairs. “Let’s call your father—I might drive you halfway. He can take you the rest.”

Bernard groaned loudly. He and his father-in-law spoke only at family gatherings in the Tisakarad farmhouse. Even then, conversation was strained. He smiled, pressing his nose against Sanja’s. “If you can get him to speak about something other than how much the French love him, you’ll have done a great service to humanity.”
“Bernard,”
warned Agota.

Back in the office, I closed the door and pulled the blinds shut before dialing. After three rings Magda Kolyeszar picked up. We hadn’t talked in a month, and it surprised me how old she sounded. “Emil, that you?”

“How’s the easy life, Magda?”

“Speak for yourself. I’ve been assigned the job of archivist.”

“Archivist?”

“For the dissident. It’s amazing how much bad writing you can accumulate over a lifetime.”

“You should read my case reports.”

She gave a polite chuckle. “You hear about Agi’s commission? Scares me to death.”

“She’s here now. Made it out without a scratch. Is the farmer in?”

“You’re in luck,” she told me. “He’s decided to stay in today. You’ll put Agi on afterward?”

Sure.

She called for her husband, and after a moment that deep voice came on the line. “Emil?”

“Ferenc.” I leaned into the receiver. “How’s the farming?”

“The land doesn’t like me.”

“Can we meet today?”

“Important?”

“I’ve got a dead Ministry officer, and I’d like to know what all’s possible.”

“Who?”

“Yuri Kolev. Lieutenant general. You know him?”

“I know them all, but…” Ferenc trailed off. “The usual spot? I’ll have to get back for tonight’s rally”

“Should you say that over the phone?”

He made a
harruph
noise. “Trust me, Emil. They know already.”

“What time?” I said, looking up as Agota opened my door and smiled. I waved her in.

“Say, three o’clock.”

By the dusty clock on my wall, it was a little after one. “Perfect. Hold on. I’ve got someone who wants to talk to you.”

•

It was
one by the time Gavra reached the Stop & Drop office. The next flight from Richmond to New York wouldn’t leave until late that night, so in the meantime he could at least catch up on his sleep.

Yuri Kolev’s death surprised and disturbed him, but it couldn’t be called a shock. Gavra had long heard Ministry rumors about the Lieutenant General’s cocaine addiction, and so a sudden heart attack wasn’t out of the question. He even began to wonder if this whole job had been some drug-fueled fantasy.

But no. Brano Sev had made such a particular point of trusting the Lieutenant General that Gavra had no choice but to feel the same. That’s how much General Brano Sev’s judgment meant to the younger man, even though he hadn’t spoken to or heard of Brano in the last three years.

Brano Sev’s postretirement vanishing act had only deepened his near-legendary reputation among Ministry agents, as well as those of us in homicide who had worked with him. He’d fought the Germans in the Patriotic War, tracked down ex-Nazis after it, and had quietly, meticulously, made the country safe for socialism. His name evoked both admiration and fear. For me, though, his name provoked feelings of revulsion.

But if the now-absent Brano Sev had said that Lieutenant General Yuri Kolev was to be trusted, that was all Gavra needed to know.

He found Freddy behind the desk, feet propped up, wearing an Orioles cap. Freddy raised the brim with a knuckle. “Well, hey there, Viktor! Decide to take me up on that beer?”

“I need to pay my bill. I’ll be leaving tonight.”

“As you like, man. But as for the beer, I’m insisting.”

“I’m a little tired, Freddy.”

“Trust me. You’ll sleep like a baby.”

Gavra rubbed his eyes for effect. “Okay, but just one.”

Freddy leveled a finger-pistol at him and shot. “You got it, buddy.” He took two cans of Budweiser—not the Czech Budweiser Budvar but something else entirely—out of a tiny refrigerator and passed one over. Gavra tried to appear pleased with the taste—like a half-can of beer topped off with stale water—but it was difficult.