The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  We settled into the plush, modern sofas—thick white cushions shaped like boxes—and began to drink. This was a serious thing with Emil. When he first joined the Militia, he had been a child who couldn’t hold his liquor, and a bullet in the stomach had slowed him even more. But eight years with Lena had seasoned him, and now he treated drinking as a respected ritual. There were the thin, openmouthed glasses that felt ready to shatter, the polished tumbler into which he delivered crushed ice with an elegant silver spoon. “You develop a taste for it,” he told me. “The ice has got to be crushed, at least that’s what they say. Then the gin. Wait a minute—it’s got to get to know the ice. Then the vermouth. This,” he said as he shook the mixture with both hands, “is something special. They drink it in New York City.”

  He called it a martini, and it tasted like flowers.

  “The place I go to ran out of olives a few days ago, but you get the idea.”

  I smiled.

  The first one put me over, and the second kept me moving. Lounging in that huge living room, gazing at the painting above the radio set—a stern, white-bearded old man—I thought I could get used to this. Leonek had told me once that Emil’s home had always made him uncomfortable, but I couldn’t see why.

  Were I not a little drunk, I might have kept quiet about it. But by the third drink, as we were touring the apartment and he opened the door to the darkroom, he asked. I told him everything. He switched on a red overhead light as I talked and touched the prints hung up to dry like clothes. Images of the burned body, snapshots of Lena that made her look younger than she really was, views of the countryside. His face darkened as he listened, the red lights deepening his cheeks. “So I called Moscow. It’s been arranged.”

  “What are you going to do when Woznica finds out?”

  The gin was making me unconcerned. “Don’t tell. He won’t know.”

  Emil waved that away. “A couple well-placed questions, and he knows it all. Have you thought about this?”

  “You think I should have handed her back?”

  “Of course not. But there are other ways.”

  “What ways?”

  “Go after him. It’s possible.”

  “It’s not possible. He might as well be a politicos.”

  “What about papers? You could have gotten papers from Roberto in Supplies. He’s got connections, and he’s helped me out before.”

  “It would have taken too long.”

  Emil closed his eyes as he considered possibilities. Then he opened them. “Maybe you’re right.”

  In the living room, Emil described the effect of the Hungarian uprising on his marriage: “Lena’s starting to go crazy.”

  “She’s afraid?”

  “Not of the Russians. Not that. She wants children.”

  I looked into my empty glass, fearing for any child with that woman as a mother.

  “We’ve been trying for years. Once it did work, but—”

  “Miscarriage?”

  “Four years ago. I don’t want her to go through that again.”

  “What does this have to do with the Magyars?”

  “Nothing, not really. She’s just feeling her mortality. She needs to give her love to someone other than me.”

  “Watch out she doesn’t leave you.”

  He went silent, so I looked over at him. He was staring into his glass. “Each of us has his own marriage, Ferenc.”

  Lena showed up with a shopping bag on her arm and a smile on her face. “The very comradely Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar. How did Emil ever get you here?”

  Her beauty was beginning to wear from her drinking, but there was still something about Lena Brod that gave the illusion of a woman in her prime. She glided over in a cloud of perfume, her dark hair stroking my cheeks as she kissed them. “You’re looking well, Lena.”

  She winked at me, her mascara thick but precise. “When are you going to bring your extremely well looking wife over for dinner?”

  “Soon. Very soon.”

  “I hope. What are you drinking?”

  I looked blankly at my empty glass, then at Emil.

  “Martinis,” he said. “Here’s yours.” He was already pouring it.

  The conversation turned to shopping. Lena had recently traveled to Paris, and it saddened her when she had to shop here. “That’s the tragedy of our situation, do you realize? Look at this material.” She showed us a black blouse she had found. “It’s so thin. And do you know how many colors I had to choose from? Two. Black and blue. Doesn’t that tell you something?” Then she began a monologue on the virtues of capitalist department stores, her hands turning continually in her lap until Emil put his own hand on them.

  “I don’t think Ferenc cares too much about shopping.”

  She touched a red nail to her chin and looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  Lena stood up. “I’ll let you boys discuss homicides, then.” She grabbed a bottle of vodka from the bar and marched into another room.

  “She okay?”

  Emil took a sip. “She’ll be fine.”

  But there was nothing more to talk about. He fell into one of his unself-conscious silences, distracted by other matters, and it only made me self-conscious. So I reached for my hat.

  I drove slowly and carefully through the early dusk. The apartment was empty. I lay down in the empty bedroom. It was still a lovely novelty: a bed. Its breadth was amazing, the even firmness of the mattress, the headboard. I breathed in deeply to cleanse my head, and caught a faint whiff. I was unsure. I rolled facedown and sniffed. I thought it was the drunk, webbed parts of my imagination, but no—this was a very definite, heavy stink: sex. I put my nose into the duvet, then pulled it back and smelled the sheets. Its strength went to my head. I’d slept with Magda those last couple nights, but we’d slept beside one another, touching only hands.

  I considered, briefly, taking it all out on Stefan as I should have done before. Our years of friendship meant nothing in the face of this. I could drive to his apartment, whether or not she was there, and beat him until there was nothing left to love. But I used the only real weapon I had. I grabbed the spare pillow, took an extra sheet and blanket from the wardrobe, and made up my bed again in the living room.

  When she saw it that evening, she did not say a word.

  18

  On Monday morning, we found Markus Feder chain-smoking in the corridor outside his lab. He didn’t stop as we approached. “Rough weekend?” Emil asked.

  Feder put a hand to his red hair as if he’d forgotten something. A few passing colleagues looked at him. “Comrade Inspectors,” he began, “what do you know about this body already?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Bound wrists and ankles. Burned in the Canal District. I’ve got a shoe in the car, but I don’t know if it’s the victim’s.”

  Feder dropped his cigarette and stepped on it.

  There was a lump on the examining table that he didn’t uncover. He washed his hands in the sink and talked loudly over the water. “It’s a man, all right. The bone structure’s clear enough.” He shut off the faucet and went for a towel. “Height, five-nine, average. I’d guess he was balding, but can’t be sure. He was killed about a week ago.” His hands were dry now, so he turned to us. “Inspectors, both his arms and legs had been broken.”

  “By the heat?” asked Emil.

  Feder shook his head. “The victim was tied and gagged. Then his legs and arms were broken. Probably with a simple household hammer. And then the victim was dragged a long distance by his broken, bound arms. The way the bones are separated and the muscles stretched, I can’t imagine how far he was dragged. Very far. And, finally, the poor bastard was doused with benzene. And lit. There are carbon monoxide particles in the lungs—he was burned alive.”

  We stared at the lump on the table. There was that smell again, though the ventilation kept it to a minimum.

  “He couldn’t roll over,” I said. “Into the water.”

  “Your victim�
��s arms and legs were useless. All he had was jelly and bone shards.” Another cigarette hung from his lips, unlit.

  Emil looked a little sick.

  “What about his shoes?” I asked.

  “His left shoe,” said Feder as he lit his cigarette and started for the door. “It melted into him.”

  “His right shoe?”

  Feder shrugged and passed through the swinging doors.

  Emil suggested we stop for a coffee, and over our cups we said nothing, thinking of muscles contracting uselessly and bones crunching. I could feel it too, in my legs, and this is the imagination that had made me believe I could write; this was how I could feel Stefan’s weight on Magda’s dry skin, could see his twisted face at the moment of climax.

  The first cobbler, an old professional with half-moon glasses, turned the shoe over in his hand. First the heel, which was worn at an angle (he disapproved of this with a shake of his head), then the mold of the toe, the sewing around the lace holes, and finally the compressed insole. He handed it back to me. “I don’t know this work, and I don’t think I want to.”

  “But it’s not a factory shoe, correct?”

  “Absolutely not. Unskilled work, but hand-made.”

  The second cobbler was a young man on the other side of town. He wore a tailored jacket and wide red tie. His name was Petru Salva. “Comrades, this shoe was not made in the Capital. You may be assured of that.”

  “Can you be certain?” asked Emil.

  Salva held the shoe up on his fingertips and touched a long nail to the toe, the laces, the border with the sole. “This threading is absolutely provincial. No doubt about it.”

  “Which province?”

  “Difficult to say, Comrades. Extremely difficult. Each village with its own cobbler has a style individual to that one cobbler. It’s idiosyncratic.”

  “But you,” I said, “you’re very familiar with such things. You can find out?”

  Petru Salva tugged the end of his jacket. “Of course, Comrades. I imagine I’m the only one in the Capital who can. I will make inquiries.”

  “It’s much appreciated.”

  “We all do our part.” He smiled. “The times require it.”

  “The times do,” I said.

  We did not get our answer until Thursday, and on Tuesday I suggested we help Leonek. “Another set of eyes is what I need,” Leonek told us. “I can’t see straight anymore.” He handed over a thick stack of pages.

  They were interviews with Russian soldiers conducted in mid-1946. The questions were simple—Where were you on—? Where was Comrade Private—? When? The answers were direct. The bar, Comrade. Asleep, Comrade. Fishing in the Tisa, Comrade. After a while I couldn’t see straight either. Nothing pointed to anything; these were good boys who fished and slept and drank. Yet Sergei’s questions continued, as if he were filling in pieces of an outline, but could not find its shape.

  Sergei had been an impressive militiaman. It wasn’t easy to trust a Russian, but with him it was possible. He was earnest and straightforward with everyone. He had a simple view of justice from which he never deviated. When the girls turned up dead in that synagogue, it crushed him. It was a Russian crime, and only a Russian could set things right—he told us all that. He went off on his own, feverishly plowing through interviews, then Leonek and I were on the foggy bank of the Tisa, and he was dead.

  Emil drifted to sleep over his stack. I went back to reading. Buying cigarettes, Comrade. Fishing in the Tisa, Comrade. The Russian boys were all doing the same thing, day after day. Asleep, Comrade. The same things, no complications. The same words. The answers began to look as if they had been scripted. The bar, Comrade. Scripted and agreed upon and practiced until they were rote.

  I handed Leonek the pages. “They’re all lying.”

  “Of course they are.” Something crossed his face when he looked at me.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Listen—I need to get to Zindel Grubin, Chasya’s brother. They’re ignoring my prison interview request. Do you think you could get me into Ozaliko? Moska would never help me. But maybe he’d help you.”

  “Try him yourself. Moska’s not hiding anything from you. He even told me that.”

  The look crossed his face again. Something like disappointment, or shame. “Forget it.”

  My phone rang.

  “Ferenc?” The line was staticky.

  “Yes?”

  “Ferenc, this is Kliment.”

  I realized there had never been a need for me to struggle through Russian with him. “Good to hear from you. Tell me.”

  “Without a hitch, Ferenc. She’s with her father now. There were a lot of tears.”

  “You get all the money?”

  “No broken knees. But it looked like she needed it more than I.”

  I couldn’t quit smiling—not that day, or the next, as we continued our haggard reading of Sergei’s interviews.

  19

  Petru Salva called Thursday morning. Perhaps for our benefit, he had attached his Party pin to his lapel and dusted his portrait of Mihai. He held the shoe—cleaned now, and polished—by the heel and the toe as he spoke. “The inquiries have been made, Comrade Inspectors. The verdict is in. Notice this, please.” He turned the toe to face us. “The corners of the leather are uneven. Very sloppy. And this.” He raised it so we could see the bottom of the heel. “Nine nails to hold the heel in place. Wear this shoe for six months, it will fall off. Guaranteed.”

  “But where is it from?” asked Emil.

  Salva placed the shoe on the counter. “There is a cobbler in the Fifth District. A friend of mine. He has had much experience touring the provinces in order to nationalize the means of shoe production. But provincial cobblers are a notoriously uncooperative bunch, if you get my meaning.” He was smiling again. “My friend has seen this work before—once you see such terrible work, you don’t forget it.”

  “Where?” Emil repeated.

  Salva’s smile spread. “There were hundreds of possibilities. You see, each village is like a little pompous ego. But my friend—”

  “The village,” I said.

  His smile went away.

  Drebin was an hour out of town, its sign half-buried in the long grass, just past an enthusiastic billboard that said in large red letters: THE PARTY’S POLICIES EXPRESS THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE WHOLE WORKING NATION!

  It had once been a farming village, then, after collectivization, a tractor factory was built in one of the fallow fields and workers were moved from the Capital to run it. The blocks constructed to house them—two identical concrete towers—overlooked the tin-roofed village homes and Orthodox church. Earlier that day, a rain had turned the white walls gray. Along the main street lay all the stores—bakery, bar, grocer’s, butcher, post office, and cobbler. The tiny cobbler’s workshop was filled with leatherworking tools hanging from hooks. Scraps of leather covered the floor, and the old cobbler sat at a wide wooden table covered with finished shoes. He took off his glasses and smiled toothlessly. “Morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “What size?” he said, looking at the shoe in my hand.

  “We haven’t come for that,” said Emil.

  “Repair, then? Here.” He reached for the shoe, and I let him have it. He replaced his glasses as he turned it over. “My work,” he muttered, then tapped the heel on the table and examined it again. “What’s the trouble, then?”

  We pulled out our Militia certificates. “Can you tell us who you made that shoe for?”

  The cobbler chewed the inside of his mouth.

  “We’re trying to identify a dead man,” I said. “He was found in the Capital, but his shoe was from here.”

  The cobbler went to a low shelf where some cheap notebooks lay. “In the Capital, huh? Size forty-one,” he muttered, then opened a notebook on the table.

  Emil eyed a hand-drawn poster with the shape of a cow’s hide, like the tanner’s sign in the Canal District. I read the
labeled sections over his shoulder—the back, the bend, belly, side and double shoulder.

  “Oh Lord,” said the cobbler. He was shaking his head over his notebook. He checked the shoe again, then went back to the page. His face had lost its color. “Oh poor Beatrice.”

  “A woman?” I asked.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his nose. “Beatrice is the boy’s mother. Antonín,” he said. “Antonín Kullmann. That’s whose shoe this is.”

  20

  He didn’t trust us to deliver the news properly, so he closed his shop and led us. He would only say that Antonín was a good man who lived in the Capital but still remembered where he came from. He would never trust one of those overpriced cobblers. Then he fell to muttering, shaking his head and sucking on his gums. People paused to watch us pass, and a few greeted the cobbler, but he didn’t hear them. The housing blocks watched over us as we turned onto a dirt road lined with face-high metal fences. We stepped around puddles like lakes. The cobbler entered the fifth gate on the left and kept moving up the front steps. “Beatrice!” he called, then knocked.

  A fat woman with squinting eyes and red hands opened the door. “Frederik.” As she kissed his cheeks she noticed us at the bottom of the steps. A curt nod.

  “I need to talk to you, Bea.”

  She pulled back to look into his face. “Come in, then.”

  Frederik followed her, but before he shut the door he held up a finger. “One minute.”

  Behind him, the muted sound of Antonín’s mother: “What, Frederik?”

  Emil kicked the dirt. “I’ve never gotten used to this.”

  “It’s hard.”

  “More than that.” He took a deep breath. “I feel like I’m giving myself the news for the first time. I’ve seen the body, I know it’s dead, but only through someone else can I feel it. Does that make sense?”

  I was looking at the twisted rose branches that lined the house. Dead branches: Winter was fast approaching. “Yeah.”