The Bridge of Sights tyb-1

by Olen Steinhauer

  The holding cells were right beneath their feet, reached by a long walk down the corridor, deeper into the building, through an unmarked door and down metal stairs into the blackness. The air was humid and stank of sweat. The bare lightbulbs gave a hard, contrasty light. The walls became vertical steel bars, and in the gloom behind them Emil saw faces buried in shadow. Gaunt expressions, hungry. He thought again of refugees. Leonek looked positively regal beside them. Cornelius Yoskovich was at the end, on the right; his bald head hung below his shoulder blades. When Leonek tapped the bar with a knuckle, the man looked up quickly, then stood. He was tall, his grimy, sleeveless shirt too short, exposing his navel. “Are you letting me go?” He had a voice like a radio announcer, like someone speaking to a crowd.

  “This is him,” Leonek said to Emil.

  Yoskovich came to the bars and held them in his fists. His beard was coming in, and his eyes were desperate.

  “Where’s your ax?” asked Emil.

  “I told them.” He looked at Leonek. “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Tell me,” said Emil.

  Yoskovich released the bars so he could open his hands to them. “I don’t know. Disappeared. Stolen, I guess.”

  “When did it go missing?”

  “I’ve been through all this.”

  Emil turned to Leonek-slowly, because the motion shot hot threads up his spine. “Is there a reason he’s giving me trouble?”

  “I-” began Yoskovich. “I didn’t know it was missing until the police came. I used the ax last week. Saturday. For wood.”

  “Witnesses?”

  Yoskovich shook his head and whispered, “Only my Alana.”

  At first, Emil didn’t recognize the expression that covered his face. Then he did. He’d seen it on the train, on his way back from Helsinki, on the faces of German villagers following Germany’s new borders out of Poland: heavy eyes finding nothing to focus on, mouth hanging loosely open, wordless and useless. The expression of someone who once had something and now has nothing. The look of someone who is staring into the abyss and can find no reason to keep on going.

  No, he hadn’t killed his girl. But he’d done something. Emil would bet his fresh Militia certificate on it.

  Leonek, Stefan and Ferenc took him out for drinks. It was Fer- enc’s idea, but the big man didn’t know until they reached the bar that Emil couldn’t drink anything but water and some fruit juices. He couldn’t even drink the coffee Ferenc had brought earlier. The bartender unearthed tins of pineapple juice taken from a shipment, he said, of abandoned American army rations. Very expensive stuff. Ferenc bought three glasses of it, and Emil drank out of kindness. It was sticky, and tasted of the steel it had come in.

  “Who did it?” asked Stefan. He’d found a bowl of pumpkin seeds on the bar and was shoving his fingers deep into them. “Your holes.”

  “We know who,” said Leonek. “But our hands are tied.”

  Emil nodded. “Smerdyakov.”

  Stefan wasn’t surprised. “You did throttle him, after all.”

  “But I didn’t.” He tried to lean back on his stool, but it was more painful than sitting straight, which was also becoming unbearable. He grabbed his cane and pointed with it. “Can we sit over there? My back.”

  They moved to a low table near the splintery wood wall, where the chairs could support him, and for their patience Emil took out Grandfather’s cigars. Leonek at first was wary, but Emil assured him they had been bought, not rolled, by the old man. The cigars were rough on the throat, dry from sitting around for so long, but tasty. Soon their corner was thick with smoke. Stefan waved his cigar when he picked up the thread again: “You said you didn’t do what? Didn’t throttle Smerdyakov?”

  “I only knocked him over.” Emil shrugged. “I was going to hit him, but all I got in were a few slaps. Then, he-I don’t know. He shook!’

  “Shook?” asked Stefan.

  “You mean a seizure,” offered Ferenc, puffing smoke.

  Emil thought about that. “Maybe.”

  “You don’t know your literature.” Ferenc leaned into the table. “The name Smerdyakov comes from Dostoyevsky. A fool stricken by the falling sickness. The Russians love their epileptics-turn them all into holy fools.” He rolled ash into a small saucer. “Nicknames don t come out of nowhere. They come from Karamazov.”

  Emil remembered eyes rolling to whiteness, arms and chest trembling.

  “Yes,” muttered Stefan, understanding now.

  Understanding, Emil thought, made the experience no less disturbing.

  The others became drunk surprisingly fast, and Emil, stone sober, watched their steady decline. Their words became weak and overlapped; their bodies slid deeper into their chairs. Stupid grins popped into their faces unannounced, and there were sudden, unpredictable silences. Leonek, distracted by his own thoughts, fell quiet and did not really recover. Emil asked about Chief Moska.

  “What about him? Where’s he from? Why is he…”

  “The goddamn way he is?” asked Ferenc.

  Emil nodded.

  Ferenc and Stefan looked at each other, as though waiting for the other to begin, and finally Ferenc blurted it out: “The old guy’s wife is leaving him. What else?”

  Stefan puffed three quick times on his cigar. “Not everyone has the perfect marriage.” He nodded at Ferenc, who shrugged.

  “You get what you put into it,” he explained. “The chief has no time to put into his.”

  “And me?” asked Stefan. “What the hell don’t I put into mine?”

  Emil felt the tension rise between them, and tried to redirect: “What about my drunk fool over here?”

  Leonek, deep in his silence, didn’t stir.

  “He’ll be a bachelor until the end,” said Stefan. “What woman would live with his mother?”

  Leonek finally stirred. He looked up, blinking himself into focus, and smiled.

  “That’s right, eh?” said Stefan, patting him on the arm. “Isn’t that right? The boy, the devoted son!”

  Leonek’s smile slipped away again, and he faded.

  “I’ll bet you’re not married,” said Ferenc.

  Emil shook his head.

  “But you want it. I can see that.”

  Emil said he didn’t know-he hadn’t thought of it-but Ferenc didn’t believe him.

  “Kid like you, it’s all you really want.”

  Once the cigars had burned down, Ferenc stood up-his own wife and daughter (that was a surprise to Emil) were waiting for him, and Stefan, also standing, teased him. “Tell your old bitch to sit down and wait, for once in her life.”

  Ferenc laid an arm over his shoulder. “You’ve just proven my point.”

  They gave Emil a comical salute and pronounced him the finest cadet they’d ever met. Stefan thought the rhyme was funny, and laughed the whole way out.

  Leonek’s silence was hard to ignore.

  Emil looked past him to the short bar, where men just off of work sat in their blue coveralls, drinking silently. The bartender, a man with blue-veined features, knew them all.

  “Where were you?” asked Leonek, and Emil turned to him again. His dark face was covered in black spots where blood beneath the surface had collected.

  “When?”

  “The war-wait!” He raised a finger. “ Finland.”

  Emil hadn’t realized how drunk Leonek was.

  “The ovens. Did you see them? In your travels?”

  He shook his head. “I was in the south. Ruscova, a village.”

  “So you didn’t see it. Nothing.”

  Emil drank the metallic pineapple juice. He was still, after three weeks, thirsty. “We saw some refugees,” he remembered. “From Romania. They said it was some kind of mania. Whole villages turned on them. Some stayed at our dacha.”

  Leonek spoke loudly: “ My people. They did it to my people first.” He took another swill and banged the glass on the table. Beer spilled over.

  Armenian, Emil remembered the Uzbek sa
ying. Terzian was an Armenian name.

  “In my family’s village the Turks took a whole family. Ten, I think. Yes. I was seven, and there were ten of them. The soldiers tied them together with rope. You know, from the back. Hands back here,” he said as he demonstrated with his own hands behind his back. “All of them connected so they couldn’t see each other. Their faces.” His hands were in front again, clutching his glass. “I watched from a ditch. They tied them so they couldn’t move, then pushed the family into a lake. One whole family. Sunk like a rock. First they screamed, then they were underwater.” He took another drink.

  “And you?” asked Emil.

  “Look at me!” He opened his arms and let them fall by his sides. “I’m here, right? They tattooed my father and took him away with the other fathers. We thought they were going to prison, but as soon as they were out of sight we heard gunshots. On our way out of Armenia we saw Turkish soldiers using knives. You know. Casually. Like cutting fruit.”

  He slipped back into his silence. There were voices building in the front of the bar, jokes and sporadic laughter. Leonek’s black face was sweating.

  “You all right?” asked Emil, leaning closer.

  A tight, glistening smile. “What are you doing here? This job will eat you up.”

  Emil opened his mouth, groping for an answer. Then he realized-with cool shock that drained into his arms and legs-that he had been let into this man’s head.

  This story was the basis of Leonek Terzian. It was the root of all the choices he had made since that day when he was seven and watched a family drown, or saw his father grimace at the burn of a tattoo. It was the same as Ester watching her mother be dragged through the streets of Iasi. It colored everything that followed. It was why Leonek was devotedly living with his mother, and why he worked in Homicide, where the stink of death and the misery of humanity was thickest.

  “Come on, then,” said Leonek. “Out with it.” His smile had become loose, more convincing.

  Then he knew. For the first time. He had known it when he was in Finland and felt that need to return, when he saw the mauled woman on the street and knew it was too late to leave. He had felt it in all his love and hate for this city. He saw it in Lena Crowder s wonderful eyes when he closed his own. He tapped the table with his knuckles. “Because I want to be devoted.”

  Leonek looked into his empty glass, then back at Emil. “What?”

  He knew it all now, and the realization was a rush of pleasure like a clean, warm bath. “I want to believe in one place,” he said. “I want it in my blood.”

  Leonek looked again into his glass, and smiled. “It’ll get into your blood, all right.” Then he did the unexpected. He leaned over the table and pinched Emil’s cheek, like a Ruscova grandmother wanting to make sure the sweet vision of boyhood in front of her was actually there, in the flesh.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Over the weekend, Emil went to a film alone. It was an old Soviet comedy, and he went in order to make himself enthusiastic. He thought that by looking at the pictures flickering on the screen, he might get a touch of that mania he had once known through those Soviet newsreels. But he couldn’t concentrate on the shadows shifting and talking on the screen, the man with the ludicrous mustache whose monocle kept dropping from his eye. And when the audience laughed, he lost track of the Russian dialogue. He left halfway through.

  That Monday Leonek picked him up. Rather than the office, they went directly to the Sixth District and parked outside the newly named “Rosa Luxembourg” High School, and Emil waited behind the wheel, his cane between his knees, while Leonek sauntered inside. He watched the clouds through the windshield collect in the west in preparation for a storm, and almost jumped when Leonek popped open the back door and shoved in a fifteen- year-old girl. He slid in beside her. Although it hurt terribly, Emil turned to face her.

  “Meet Liv Popescu,” said Leonek.

  She was small and pretty with a round, bright face. “You know about your friend?” asked Emil.

  She didn’t say anything. Her gaze was fixed outside the car, on the houses lining the street, at the sky.

  “Liv?” he tried again. “Do you know?”

  “Alana?” she asked, and looked at him. Her cheeks were smooth and unblemished.

  “Thats the one.”

  Liv shrugged and looked at clouds.

  “There s someone out there killing your friends,” said Leonek, his voice softened by a transparent attempt to soothe the girl. “You understand? This person kills them, maybe vomits on them, and tosses them in the bushes.”

  At the mention of vomit, Liv Popescu looked at him.

  “But the problem,” he continued, “is that when we talk to you there’s not an ounce of worry on your face. Nothing. Which leads us to believe…Emil? What does it lead us to believe?”

  The handoff was unexpected, but easily taken. “It leads us to believe that you, Liv, are involved in your friends’ demise. Both Alana and Ion.” His left lung was burning badly at this angle; each word was a little fire inside him. “That you know something, or you did something. Is that what you imagine, Leon?”

  Leonek nodded and placed an arm on the seat behind Liv’s head. The cushion squeaked as he settled. “I imagine this has something to do with Ion Hansson,” he said. “The handsome young man with the ax in his neck. I’m not too far from the truth. Am I, Liv?”

  Liv Popescu made no move, no sound. Her hands were wedged between her knees.

  “Do you know what a crime against the state is?” asked Emil. “It is something which interferes with the smooth operations of the federal and legislative bodies that govern our workers’ state. Would withholding information about her friend’s murder rank as a crime against the state, Leon?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Emil looked away momentarily to ease the pain-just a brief instant-and when he looked back she was crying. At some point the fear had dissolved her confidence in her own silence. Emil had doubted she would have much to give them, but teenagers had a way of saying either nothing or everything. Some small lead, perhaps, would come out of badgering her. But now her twisted face fell into the bowl of her hands, and she blubbered what she knew in wet stutters: Alana’s father was to blame.

  Over her head, Leonek nodded knowingly at Emil.

  “He’s a brute, you understand? A long time- years. He’d been doing things to Alana. His own daughter. It, you understand?” She couldn’t say the word.

  Leonek’s proud face hesitated.

  Alana had been too ashamed to tell anyone other than Liv, her best friend. For a long time, only her. Then, later, she decided to tell the boy who had fallen in love with her: Ion Hansson. But she didn’t tell him at first. She wanted to, but then she couldn’t. She went back and forth daily. Then one afternoon she told Liv she would reveal everything to him that night. But she would only confess after she had let Ion do it.

  “She was confused,” Liv insisted. “She didn’t know how he would react. He might be angry, you know? Or disgusted. Or just shocked. She thought if she gave herself to him, it would be easier for him to accept.”

  The ax was Alana’s idea. It was the only weapon her father owned. She asked Liv to hold on to it and hide in the shrubs. In case her father burst onto the scene.

  “She wanted you,” said Leonek. “In the bushes. Watching?”

  “Protection,” said Liv, her tears under control now. “After that night, Ion could protect her. But until then, I would look over her.”

  “And you were willing to do this?”

  Liv looked at him with complete scorn. “You’ve never loved anybody, have you?”

  Leonek opened his mouth, but could say nothing.

  “Why in the park?” asked Emil. “Ion’s uncle was out of town. There was a bed, right?”

  The scorn remained on her bright face as she showed her teeth. “Neighbors. Why else?”

  Emil started the car and began to drive around the block to avoid prying eyes. He lo
oked at her in the rearview. “Go on.”

  It was a dark night, but she had been able to see it all from the bushes. She saw them have sex, and was surprised by how quiet it was, how calm. Afterward, they lay beside each other in the grass, and Alana told him everything. Liv couldn’t hear it all, but she had a clear view of Ion’s face as it settled into an expressionless, frozen look. He seemed to be taking it calmly. Alana was still speaking when he rolled over and vomited into the grass. Alana got up to see if he was all right, and he grabbed her scarf and strangled her with it.

  “I couldn’t tell,” said Liv, the tears back with her. “Not at first. She wasn’t fighting at all. I didn’t know what he was doing. She just lay there and accepted it. I still don’t understand.”

  But then, in the flash of passing automobile lights, she saw Alana’s head: it hung at an awkward angle, lips thick, her eyes bulging from their sockets. Ion was crying over her body.

  Emil parked again in front of the school. Spots of rain appeared on the windshield.

  “That’s when I did it,” she said, her voice cool once more, and measured. All her tears were gone now. “I watched myself do it. I walked up and raised it over my head and brought it down on him.” She looked at Leonek hovering over her, and his face was lost in a rare fear-complete terror. It was more than simple repulsion, and Emil found himself turning to start the car just to avoid seeing his face. Liv’s voice floated through the car: “It was like cutting wood. But softer.”

  They brought in the girl because there was nothing else to do. On the way she told them she had thrown the ax into the Tisa, which swallowed everything. She was arraigned by a thin woman in uniform who seemed proud of the line of six stamps she had at her disposal. She stamped processed on Liv’s paperwork, and handed her off to another woman, who took Liv to the cells.

  Emil stopped Leonek just outside their own office. A crowd of policemen swerved to avoid running into them. “What was that?” he asked. “Back in the car. You were…I don’t know. What was it?”

  Leonek peered, frowning, into Emil’s eyes, then looked away. Everyone else in the building was going about his business. “It’s nothing,” he said finally. “Weren’t you bothered?”