The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “A Frenchman?”

  “Someone I know. Through Georgi.”

  Emil dragged his fingers through his hair. “I think my interesting news will stand up to yours.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The lab came back with prints on Stefan’s bedroom window and those fish soups. Guess who his window-climbing dinner guest was.”

  “Don’t make me guess,” I said, as his phone began to ring.

  He reached for it and winked. “Nestor Velcea. Matched his work camp fingerprint card perfectly.”

  I watched him lean into the telephone. Stefan and Nestor Velcea, sitting at the same table eating fish soup—why? Was Stefan involved in the crimes? No. Then who came to the door? I didn’t know how to put it all together.

  Emil hung up. “Sorry, but that was Lena. She’s vomiting everything she takes in. And,” he said with a grimace, “she’s a little hysterical.” He got up and went for his coat.

  I stared at the empty doorway after he left, then wandered slowly toward my own desk. Louis’s role made sense—the scene at the camp was of one man’s loyalty to another, of a friend who had put some clues together. I remembered that Antonín Kullmann’s paintings had even made it to Paris—his success enabled his downfall. But the scene in Stefan’s kitchen over fish soup—

  On my desk was a phone message from Georgi.

  I met him in the café attached to the opera house on the corner of International and V. I. Lenin. It was another of those Habsburg monstrosities that seemed not to have changed in the last fifty years, with the exception of its nonplussed waiters, who smoked in the back corner and watched you wait.

  Georgi handed me a list of names of people who might know the whereabouts of Nestor Velcea. As I looked it over, he said, “They’re all writers. Nestor didn’t like painters.”

  “So I heard.” I pocketed the list. Georgi was looking good. He had a new hat, something a friend had brought from Vienna—not Louis, though. “Tell me more about him.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  It was a tough thing to ask, but Georgi was up to it. “I met Louis some years ago. ’Forty-seven, -eight? He was spending some time here at the expense of the Writers’ Union. He was thinner then, that’s for sure. The women went wild for him. French accent and all. You can imagine.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “My book had just come out, and they had me read a little bit. Louis was impressed. I can’t say I liked his poems—he was a little too didactic in those days.”

  “In what direction?”

  “You know, glories of world revolution and all that. He’s calmed down a lot since then.”

  “Did he know Nestor Velcea?”

  “Apparently they’d met each other during the war. ’Forty-four or so. I’m not sure. He knew Nestor was a basket case, but thought he was talented.”

  “Did you think Nestor was talented?”

  “I never saw his paintings, never met him until he came to my party.” Georgi gave an elaborate shrug. “Nestor was already in the camp when I met Louis.”

  A waiter appeared and reluctantly took our order. Then he returned to the smoking group, the order still on the notepad he had dropped into his pocket.

  “You should have seen it when they met again at the party. They embraced and cried like father and son.”

  “Before I showed up.”

  “Yeah. Before.”

  I noticed my thick fingers were pulling at my rings, sliding them up a knuckle, then back. “What did Louis think about Nestor’s imprisonment?”

  Georgi pulled out a cigarette. “He wasn’t in the country when they took Nestor away. He was supposed to come in on the same day Nestor was arrested, but something kept him—some visa problems, I don’t know.”

  Nestor went to the train station to meet a foreign agent, but the foreigner didn’t arrive.

  “Anyway, Louis didn’t hear about the arrest until maybe six months later, when he came through again. That’s when I met him. And, of course, he was angry. When Louis is angry, you don’t want to get in his way.”

  “He has a temper?”

  “Not at all. That’s what makes him so tough. If you’ve done enough to get Louis angry, you know you’re in for big trouble.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “When?”

  “When he found out Nestor had been taken away.”

  Georgi puffed a couple times, spreading smoke. “He lodged a complaint. He felt sure he could get Nestor out, maybe because he was a foreigner. But he went directly to Yalta Boulevard, to the Office of Internal Corrections. Can you believe it? Walked right in, alone, and came out a few hours later, furious. They hadn’t let him talk to anyone. They had him sit in the waiting room for something like two hours, then told him the officer had left for the day.”

  “Who was the officer?”

  Georgi shook his head. “No idea.”

  I wondered what had happened that day. It was hard enough to get into Yalta Boulevard, particularly a foreigner. And then expect to free someone? Louis knew that. The only way he could have expected to have any pull in Yalta Boulevard was if he was connected to state security. Probably as an informer.

  The waiter finally appeared with our coffees and placed the bill under the sugar bowl. Georgi scooped a spoonful into his coffee and stirred.

  62

  Driving to Vera’s block that evening was instinct. It didn’t occur to me to go home. By now my desire for her was its own separate thing that turned the wheel and applied the brake like another, more sure Ferenc, to whom I had not yet been introduced.

  I knocked on the door. Her voice came from the other side, but it wasn’t directed at me. It was quieter, as if for someone else in the apartment. Then I figured it out, but too late. The door opened and Karel stared back at me.

  His surprise was evident in his thick brows and the big, flaccid mouth peeking out from his beard. He’d gotten fat as his poetic success increased, but he had never lost his youthful inability to hide his emotions. Then he smiled and glanced back at Vera, who looked stuck to the sofa. “How about this! Ferenc Kolyeszar, what a surprise!”

  Outside of Georgi’s parties, he and I never talked, but he had always been one of the many who made halfhearted promises to meet for dinner or drinks. He waved me in. Vera stood up and gave me her cheeks to kiss politely.

  “I was just telling Vera about Yugoslavia. What people! Incredible.”

  “That’s why I came over,” I said. “Georgi told me you were back, and I wanted to hear all about it.” I noticed a plate of food on the coffee table. “I should have called, though, and it’s late. How about tomorrow?”

  “Nonsense,” said Karel. He pushed me toward the sofa, and Vera moved over to give me plenty of space. “I have photos! You better believe I’ve got photos. Vodka?”

  I forced a smile and nodded, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

  Vera and I communicated with our eyes. Wide, round, surprised eyes. Half shrugs.

  Karel asked about Magda and Ágnes, and I said they were out in the provinces for a little while, staying with Magda’s parents. He winked at me. “Be sure and behave yourself!”

  He had more photos than anyone I’d ever known. A heavy stack of black-and-whites of drab, gray-clad poets and professors standing stiffly for group portraits against blank walls or beside tables covered with books. He had some underexposed shots of Belgrade and Zagreb, and overexposed ones of Roman ruins in Dubrovnik and the beaches of Split, leading to the Adriatic. And he had stories that went on for too long. He laughed a lot and rubbed the back of his neck. The experience had invigorated him. He was a national emissary brought in to exemplify the best our little country could produce in a man of letters, and this was the role he felt most comfortable in. He said this without modesty, then followed with, “Those Serbs eat up stuff like that. Next we’ll send them our country’s finest garbageman, and they’ll build a statue to him.”


  The stories became duller as the night wore on, and as he was relating an anecdote about Tito’s brand of cigarettes, I finally gave a yawn and thanked him for the enthralling description of our socialist friends. When we shook hands, he said, “This was great, Ferenc. You should come over more often.”

  I kissed Vera’s cheeks again as Karel smiled radiantly at us.

  The apartment was stuffy, so I opened the windows, which only made it cold. I closed them and poured myself a brandy, then turned on the radio. For once, it was not set to the Americans, just an easy Austrian waltz. I had a copy of Karel’s first book of verse, published five years ago, and settled on the sofa with it. His lines were as dull as his stories, loose rhyming statements about the open-ended quality of life, the ambiguities that make it a pleasure despite the hardships. They were optimistic poems, and I wondered if he could write such happy drivel if he knew what I had been doing to his wife, or what that Swiss philosophy professor had done to her before their marriage.

  I woke to a dim room. Then I heard what had woken me: a knock at the door. Although a large part of me knew, I grabbed my pistol. “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” she whispered.

  I set the pistol on a table. We didn’t embrace when she came in. She looked cold.

  “I thought he’d be gone a few more days,” she said. “That was weird.”

  “A drink?”

  We sipped our wine in the kitchen. “I told him I needed to stay with a girlfriend tonight. His head is too far in the clouds for him to be suspicious.” She looked at me. “Is that all right?”

  I put my arms around her and kissed her deeply on the mouth.

  The climbing rope that Ágnes had been awarded was knotted every foot-and-a-half so that the Pioneers could use their feet to climb up into trees. I found it rolled up beneath her bed and brought it to the bedroom.

  I told Vera to take off her clothes. She looked at the rope suspiciously, but seemed to like not being the only one to give orders. Once she was naked, she lay back and I tied a knot around one of her ankles, then around the other, so that she could spread them a couple feet, but no farther.

  “What are you—”

  “Quiet,” I said. I tied the other end to her wrists, so that when she brought her hands to her face she was forced to bend her knees. She did this once. When she pulled her hands away, her smile was dreamy.

  I did not take off my clothes. Instead, I unbuttoned my trousers and aroused myself in front of her. She watched me, the smile fading into a heavy-lidded gaze as her hands moved slowly up and down, her knees bending and unbending, sliding the knotted rope between her legs. I watched her as she watched me, but although I wanted to badly, I did not touch her.

  She came very quickly, but quietly, her face convulsing as if in pain, mouth falling open.

  I took off my clothes and lifted her by the rope, so that her feet and hands, red from constriction, wavered above her thin body. Then I lowered her to the bed and finished inside her.

  I began to untie her wrists, but she shook her head, eyes closed. “Not yet.”

  So I lay beside her and drew my finger over her damp body, over the rough fibers of rope, over the knots. It was a long time before we slept.

  63

  Lena had gotten over her illness, and Emil and I went to see the few people on Georgi’s list. As I drove and Emil spoke about the long night spent nursing Lena, I mulled over the previous night. I’d never done anything like that before, but while doing it I’d known exactly what to do, and how long to do it. But it hadn’t been me—it had been that other, more sure Ferenc, the one I’d met on the drive to Vera and Karel’s. It was the Ferenc born of the recent past, amid deaths and work camps and infidelities, the Ferenc sick of being able to do nothing. I still didn’t know how I felt about this strange man.

  “…was the best thing to do,” I heard Emil saying.

  “I’m sure it was,” I said.

  Tamas Brest, surrounded by books I suspected he went out of his way to keep dusty, said he hadn’t heard from Nestor since that party for Louis. “Once word got around that my camp book was going to be state-printed, everyone dropped out of touch. As if I’d done something.” He puffed on a pungent cigar when he spoke. “And now I’ve got two militiamen in my home. How is that going to look?”

  Stanislaus Zambra just wanted to tell me that his series of poems remembering the end of Stalinism was finished. “Four months, and all straight from the heart,” he said proudly, then nodded at Emil. “Is he a writer, too?” Emil shook his head. “Well, that’s all right. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not,” Emil muttered.

  “But Nestor,” I repeated. “Can you help us find him?”

  He couldn’t, and neither could Bojan Kuz, though he did suggest we talk to Kaspar Tepylo, which I assured him I’d already done.

  On the way to Miroslav Olearnyk’s home out in the Seventh District, I told Emil not to let these writers get to him. “I avoid them as much as I can, and when I can’t, I fall silent.”

  “They’re amusing,” he said. “They don’t bother me.”

  “But something is bothering you.”

  He looked at the windshield—not through it, but at it—and nodded. “What do you think about love, Ferenc?”

  I changed gear as we turned into a narrow street cluttered with traffic. “I think I’ll need a drink to answer that.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and I stopped behind a line of cars, then moved slowly forward with it. “I reread your book last week.”

  “Glad to hear it’s worth a second read.”

  “It’s good,” he said, but without enthusiasm. “There’s a line in it that always stuck to me. I don’t remember the exact words, but it’s about love of your country. Something about the love of a soldier for his country is the most mature, because it’s about sacrifice. What was it? If your love is mature, you will not hesitate to sacrifice yourself if the object of your love will benefit.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

  He nodded into his chest, and I stopped again behind a truck filled with bags of onions. “You said it was the same whether the love was for a country or a woman.”

  “I remember.”

  He turned from the windshield finally. “I’ve been thinking about this, and about Lena. I’m not sure I’m any good for her.”

  “That’s a load of crap, Emil. It’s obvious even from the outside that without you she’d go off the deep end.”

  He shook his head. “Wasn’t always that way. She used to be the strongest woman I knew. Then we married, and she became steadily more terrified by life. And when she leaned on me, I was happy to support her.”

  “Just what I’m saying.”

  “But now she doesn’t know how to stand on her own. I can see it getting worse each day. And it will get worse, unless she’s forced to stand on her own.”

  “Well, force her.”

  “I can’t. If I’m there, I’ll help her. I can’t do otherwise.”

  I turned onto an emptier street and got going. “Listen, Emil. I’m not one to give marital advice, but if you truly believe this—if you think your presence is doing Lena more harm than good—then I suppose you’re thinking the right thing.”

  “If my love is mature.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “What about you?” he asked, looking back to the windshield, and through it. “Would you leave Magda if you found out you were bad for her? Would you leave Ágnes?”

  “Sure,” I said, but I just wanted to sound decisive. “If I was bad for them, I’d leave.”

  Emil let the subject rest. We soon appeared at Miroslav Olearnyk’s block, but he was not in.

  64

  At the station, I saw Leonek for the first time since before the provinces. His hair was a little long, and oily, and he looked pale. But he was smiling about something, and that smile kept me from being able to focus on anything. He pulled up a chair. “Not onl
y has Kliment found Boris Olonov, but he interrogated the son of a bitch. The transcript should arrive tomorrow.”

  I stared at him, expressionless. “Did he kill Sergei?”

  “Kliment didn’t tell me much, but he did say that while Boris isn’t my man, he was one of the soldiers who killed the girls. There’s something else in the interview. He wouldn’t tell me what it was—he wants it to be a surprise. But he said it should begin to bring everything together.”

  I continued to stare at him.

  “Kliment’s very interested in this case.”

  “Of course. It’s his father.”

  “Yes,” said Leonek, nodding, his smile wavering. “Look, I’m going to give the Jewish quarter another try. If I tell them we’ve got one of the girls’ murderers, maybe I can get something more. Come along?”

  I shrugged.

  On the drive, he began telling me about how he had almost given the case up. “So many blind alleys. I thought it would have been easier. What about your case? How’s it coming?”

  “It’s coming.”

  Leonek patted a dark hand against the horn, frightening an old woman in the middle of the street, and I couldn’t help but think of all the things that hand had touched. “He mailed the interview transcript, it should arrive by tomorrow.”

  “You told me that.”

  Leonek gave me a look I’d seen before, and only now did I understand where the shame had always come from. “You all right, Ferenc?” He spoke quietly. He didn’t want to ask, but there was no choice. “Is there something wrong?”

  I turned to watch a group of workers with pickaxes walk by, their breaths coming out like smoke. “Maybe it’s the thing I had to learn from my wife.”

  He brought a hand down from the wheel. He seemed to recognize how close we were in this car, and that he was trapped. Then an ounce of courage came into him, and he put the hand back on the wheel. “I’m not proud of it, Ferenc. But I do love her. Honestly.”