Victory Square (8 page)

“Oh.”

It was from 1985 and labeled “unsolved”—but that was a lie. His was the second “unsolved” case surrounding a dead militiaman, the first being the death of my oldest friend, Libarid Terzian, during a botched airplane hijacking in 1975. Terzian’s case was transferred to the Ministry for State Security. Then, ten years later, we found my young Captain Imre Papp in the Canal District with five bullets in his head, lungs, and leg.

It made no sense to any of us. Imre wasn’t on a case, and he had a wife and child; he wasn’t the kind of man to go poking around the Canal District for whores. None of us knew why he was even there. We followed a number of leads, but they all ran cold until I got a phone call, at home, from Brano Sev.

The old man—then a general—had left the homicide department in the midseventies, moving on to an expansive office at Yalta Boulevard 36. Our friendship had always been tenuous—for plenty of good reasons, I’d never trusted him—and once he left the station we rarely saw each other. I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me. And that was fine. I didn’t really want to spend time with a man so devoted to protecting socialism in our country—so devoted that he had even arrested our friend Ferenc in 1956. Which is why it was a surprise, and a little unnerving, to pick up the kitchen phone and hear his voice.

“Emil?”

“Brano, is that you?”

“Yes, Emil. Can you step outside a moment? I’d like to talk with you. About Imre.”

After that talk, I decided never to speak to the man again. But there was no sense dredging up those old, difficult memories now. I put the file back.

“Find the other one,” Lena said, moving closer.

“Which one?”

“Number one.”

I pretended I didn’t understand.

“When you fell madly in love with me?”

“Ah!” I said. “That one.”

She tapped the remote until the Popa family was silenced. “Come on. Show me.”

The files weren’t in order—some clerk had stuffed them in the box haphazardly. So I pulled out half the box, a stack of thirty files, and handed it to Lena. “Look for 1948.”

“I remember,” she said, “even if you don’t.”

Of course I remembered. In 1948, I was only twenty-two, and Lena was a thirty-year-old widow with a serious drinking problem.

The case had begun with the murder of her first husband, Janos Crowder, a songwriter found bludgeoned to death. He’d been blackmailing a political figure named Jerzy Michalec with documents proving that Michalec had been a decorated Gestapo agent during the war. In the end, Michalec—amazingly vital despite being afflicted with epilepsy—kidnapped Lena, then traded her for incriminating German documents I’d gone all the way to Berlin to track down. Despite our deal, Brano Sev used the photographs to bring the man to justice.

Jerzy Michalec was first sentenced to death, and I can still remember the show trial we listened to on the Militia radio. It was 1949. We heard everything—the prosecutors and the hysterical witnesses, and even the confusion when, during a judge’s tirade, Michalec suddenly shivered, frothing, taken by an epileptic seizure. Later, his punishment was commuted, and he was put to work in one of the many labor camps that filled the country during the late forties and fifties. Like a bad dream, he simply vanished. It was the way of the world back then. People vanished.

But the file wasn’t here. I went through my stack twice, then took Lena’s. In the front of the box, I found the order form I’d sent over, listing cases to be retrieved. Each had been checked by the archives clerk, except the one labeled “10-3282-48—
MICHALEC, J,”
which was marked
NH
—
ne har.
The file was missing.

The phone rang, and Lena went to get it. Central Archives was notoriously inefficient, but of all the files to be misplaced, I was surprised it would be this one.

“Cher
comrade?” Lena was waving the receiver from its cord. “Comrade Kolyeszar requests your presence.”

While I talked, Lena went through the cabinets, finding a glass and making me a scotch and soda. She’d picked up the ten-year-old malt on a trip earlier that year to England. Unlike in the old days, she didn’t make one for herself.

Ferenc said, “Sorry to call at home.” He sounded strange, distant, and spoke with an unsettling calm.

“What is it?”

“They’re dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

Lena handed me the drink. Ferenc said, “I don’t know. They … they
shot,
Emil.”

“Who?”

A voice—Magda, I think—said something to Ferenc. Then Agota took the phone. “For fuck’s sake, Emil, he’s telling you the Ministry bastards shot into the crowd! We don’t know how many people they killed—but there are dead people. Lots. You have to spread the word. Understand?
The Spark
will say something different, but you have to tell them. You have to make sure they
know
^?

Agota spoke to me with a voice I’d hear more and more over the next days. It was more than Ferenc’s abstracts—it was the voice of the astonished and self-righteous.

I don’t mean to say people weren’t justified feeling this way
_;
almost always, they were. I just mean that it was a voice I hadn’t yet accustomed myself to. My heart palpitated and my hand sweated. I gulped down the scotch and soda and handed the empty glass back to Lena, who was staring wildly. I said, “Just tell me what to do, Agi.”

What she wanted me to do frightened me, but I couldn’t do it until the next day, so for the rest of the night I was impotent. Predictably, there was no mention of the Patak massacre on the two state television stations that evening.

I wanted to distract myself with my old files, because there was some comfort in cases that had been solved and closed, but in light of what was going on, they were like stories out of a piece of fiction. Lena, on the other hand, was empowered by the news. “Finally, this godforsaken country is going to see the light.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, dear, that Pankov has crossed the line. He can starve us and cut off our energy, but once he starts shooting people in the streets it’s over. Only a desperate man resorts to this.”

I didn’t share Lena’s optimism. We’d both lived through the arrival of socialism, and both of us welcomed the idea of watching it leave again, but I worried—perhaps too much—about my friends. We weren’t like the Czechs or Poles. We’d never been the kind of people to vent our frustration through the ballot box.

My problem, of course, was that I had no faith in people to make my country better. After forty years in the People’s Militia, it’s hard to maintain such faith.

Around ten thirty, Bernard called and swore angrily that if anyone touched Agota or Sanja, he was going to blow something up. I suggested he not say this over the phone, but there was no stopping him. He finally made it around to what I knew, when I first heard his voice, he was going to ask: “Do you really need me here?”

“Go,” I said, hoping his Militia ID would get him through the roadblocks. “A dead Ministry officer, one way or the other, makes no difference.” I said that because I was foolish enough to believe it.

The foolishness stayed with me all night, even as I sat in bed watching Lena clean makeup from her hollowed cheeks in the vanity mirror. She’d listened in on my conversation, so she asked about the dead Ministry officer, and I told her about Kolev. She showed more surprise than I would’ve expected, lowering her hands from her face in shock. “You’re saying he was murdered?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Why did you run the tests? That colonel told you not to bother.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“You think he did it? Romek?”

“Maybe. But I don’t really know.”

She went back to her face, and I peered around for cigarettes but couldn’t find any. I looked back at my wife. It wasn’t just the stupidity that left me feeling calm. It was a kind of detachment. As I would a week later in Italy, I was thinking about something else, something to take me away from the moment, because the moment was frightening. I was remembering how thankful I was for the Afghan War.

All our life together, Lena had been an alcoholic. No—
drunk
is the better word. We twice separated because of her drinking, and her drinking led to two miscarriages and many, many hospital visits. Then, in 1983, Lena woke from another of her brief comas, this time triggered by a bottle of black-market
rakija
that had been mixed with methanol. The nurse smiled at her and laid a copy of the day’s
Spark
on her bedside table. After a couple of hours, she was finally able to focus enough to take in the front-page story about the Soviet troops who had been killed in the mujahideen’s most recent offensive in the Panjshir Valley.

Maybe it was the poison in her bloodstream, lingering even after the stomach pump of bad Serbian brandy—whatever it was, it had a lasting effect. On the third floor of Unity Medical, she cried uncontrollably.

Never the weeping sort, Lena nonetheless let forth at times with the hysterical weeping of the unbalanced; it was a sound that always troubled me. There in Unity Medical, though, it was as if someone else were crying, someone who understood exactly why she was crying, understood that if she’d had her wits about her, she would have been crying like this ever since she first picked up a bottle, sometime during her first disastrous marriage more than forty years ago.

She showed me the newspaper, and though I didn’t understand, I never admitted it. I didn’t want to undermine the vow she’d just made in a fit of emotion: As long as men were blown up in obscure corners of the world, she, Lena Brod, would not touch another drop of alcohol.

Now it was 1989, and she was seventy-two. A dry seventy-two. Her hands no longer shook, and when I returned home I no longer opened the door with apprehension, wondering about her unpredictable moods. In the winter of our lives she had given me something not unlike spring, and I was thankful.

Thankful for the floundering Soviet war in the deserts of Afghanistan, only recently ended, and for the cretin who added methanol to his batch so he could sell more of his black-market
ra-kija
to the alcoholics of our country.

Lena was staring at me, the light in the mirror shining against the large spectacles she’d slipped on to see me better. “What is it? You worried?”

“Not anymore,” I said. It’s amazing how the human mind can comfort itself.

•

“Shell wonder,
” said Lebed Putonski.

Gavra pulled the beige Stop & Drop curtains shut, then parted them with a finger. He peered out at the parking lot and beyond the line of trees, to where headlights sped through the darkness. “Who?”

Putonski had trouble turning on the bed to face Gavra, because his arms were above his head, tied to the bedpost with a leather belt. “Maureen. She’ll come over and wonder why I’m not home. She’ll go to the school. She’ll worry—she’s that kind. Then she’ll call the police.”

“The school will say you’re with your cousin.”

“She’ll panic.”

“She won’t.”

It took Putonski a moment to realize this was true. “What’re you going to do with me?”

Gavra dropped the curtains. “I’m not sure.”

“Then let me go.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re in danger.”

Lebed pressed his face into the motel pillow. “It’s starting to drive me crazy, you know.”

“What?”

“You’re not telling me anything.” He raised his head. “You’ve come all this way to find me, but you don’t tell me who sent you. You tell me I’m in danger, but you won’t say why. And then you tie me up. You expect me to
not
go a little crazy?”

“You hungry?”

“I’m more curious than hungry.”

“Well, I’m hungry.”

“Please.”

In the bathroom, Gavra washed his face. The lack of sleep was showing in his eyes. Or perhaps it was just confusion. He’d been sent to get hold of Lebed, and he had done this, but now Kolev lay dead in a morgue, unable to tell him what to do next.

He dried himself and sat on the corner of the bed while Lebed stared at him. “Okay,” he said. “I was sent by Lieutenant General Yuri Kolev.”

Lebed’s dry lips worked a moment.
“Kolev?
Jesus.”

“You know him?”

“Of course. What does he want with me?”

“He’s dead. He had a heart attack earlier today.”

“Heart attack?”

“Yeah,” said Gavra.

“So it’s finished. Let me go.”

I cant.

“You think I’m the cause of his heart attack?”

“Maybe. Indirectly.”

“A man like that has enemies. He’s got hundreds.”

“How do you know him?”

Lebed shook his head, unwilling to answer.

“Listen to me,” said Gavra. “Kolev wanted me to find you and protect you. His words. And if this wasn’t simple heart failure, then the people who killed him will want you next. I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”