Georgi had just returned from lunch with some friends, with whom he had talked poetry and politics and the search for the new socialist man. I hardly heard a thing he said until I took off my jacket and he stopped abruptly: “Is that blood on the back of your shirt?”
“It’s nothing. Just a fight. Can I use your shower?”
“Going to tell me the details?”
“I don’t think so.”
Once the water was hot, I relaxed into it. Instead of Malik Woznica, I thought of Vera. She lay in my bed, probably terrified of what had become of me. Perhaps she thought I was never coming back. I wondered what that thought did to her and how she would react when I returned and made love to her.
Georgi opened the door as I was toweling off. “By the way, I finally got hold of Louis.”
“Tell me.”
“You’re not going to arrest him, are you?”
“I’ve no plans to.”
“Well, he’s coming into town tomorrow morning, the ten-twenty from Vienna.”
“Did he say why?”
“I didn’t ask. You be nice to him, all right?”
“I’m nice to everyone, Georgi.”
“I don’t imagine you were nice to the guy whose blood is on your shirt.” He smiled. “I tell you, it’s going to be good to have him around again. This city’s become a goddamn bore.”
I went to dress.
Georgi found a shirt that barely fit me. “You hear Karel’s back in town?”
“Yeah, I talked to him.”
“Did he show you those awful photos? That’s what I mean about this city. A goddamned bore.”
At least Georgi could still make me smile.
73
I paused outside the door and listened. From down the stairs came Claudia’s high, irritating voice squealing at someone over the phone, so I leaned closer, but heard nothing.
I let myself in quietly, then moved to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. No hurry. In the icebox lay a leg of cold chicken from last night. I took a few bites, which only increased my hunger. Each time I made a noise, I stopped and listened for a reaction that didn’t come. So I left the chicken on the counter and stood next to the open bedroom door. I heard it then: the high rasp of labored, wet breaths. She was just as I had left her, tied at the ankles, wrists behind her, large mouth open in her sleep. There was a strong smell of urine—a dark spot had spread on the sheets. The last rays of evening sun through the windows glimmered on the curve of her stomach and her eyelids where old mascara had run from the edges: She had been crying. She looked beautiful.
I ran warm water over a hand towel in the bathroom and began to clean her. She woke with a start, then saw it was me. “What time is it?” she croaked.
“You wet yourself.”
“My wrists hurt.”
“Hold on.”
I finished cleaning her and took off my pants. The smell was still strong, but what I saw and what I smelled came together and filled me with desire. I entered her slowly. She was dry at first, but soon wasn’t, though at one point she shifted beneath me and repeated, “My wrists hurt.”
Afterward, I cleaned her again and untied the rope. Her hands were purple when she took them out from behind her and started rubbing them. I kissed them before she went to the bathroom.
When she finished her shower, she dressed and ate the rest of the chicken, then watched me as I sat listening to the radio. “What time is it?”
“It’s almost five.”
“Five?” She sat in the chair. “What the hell were you doing all this time?”
“I had some work to do.”
She looked at the floor. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
“Did you call out for help?”
“I would have once it got dark.”
“I’m glad I didn’t leave you that long.”
She got up and turned off the radio. “You’re a real bastard.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
She went into the bedroom and closed the door.
I waited a while before following. It says something about me that I could not understand. I could not see that I’d done anything wrong that day.
She was sitting on a dry corner of the bed, crying. She had opened the window to air it out; the room was becoming cold. I stood over her and watched her shoulders tremble. If she had been Magda, I would have embraced her. But she wasn’t.
“I can’t believe this,” she said through her sobs.
“What?”
“Myself.” She uncovered her swollen eyes and looked at my knees. “I can’t believe what I’ve done to myself.”
“You didn’t do it. I tied you up.”
“I feel so humiliated.”
I touched her shoulder then, and she shrugged me off.
“You know,” she said very quietly, so that I had to lean closer to hear, “my mother always said to me: Vera, you’re just like your father. You never know how good you have it.”
I followed her into the living room, where she found her purse and the small bag with her change of clothes. “Let’s talk about this,” I said halfheartedly.
“I can’t.”
I opened the door for her. “Where are you going?”
“My sister’s.” She stopped and looked up at me, as if deciding whether or not to kiss me. She decided against it.
74
I changed the sheets and closed the window, then made myself a drink. I browsed my old book, finding the passage that Emil had been affected by. But it did not affect me. My own writing bored me.
I still could not see what I’d done. I knew I should, but the fact that I couldn’t did not trouble me. Every feeling was beyond my reach. I had given in to the recklessness that Vera claimed was all she had left, but the problem with recklessness is that there are other people in the world. They lie in the path of your recklessness, and you inevitably run them down. I understood this later. But on the sofa, gazing into the murkiness of my empty wineglass, I only understood that I had continued a game that Vera had started—a game she had first learned in Switzerland; and as for Malik, I had shown him the inevitable result of his own recklessness.
Once I was drunk I settled deeper into the sofa, closed my eyes, and tried to think over the case. Antonín Kullmann had used the state security apparatus to get rid of Nestor Velcea, then stole his paintings. Zoia became aware of the scheme and left Antonín in disgust. Yes—and Josef Maneck was caught between turning Antonín in and keeping his own prestige. The tension had turned him into an alcoholic.
Nestor, when he was arrested, had been waiting for a foreigner in a train station: Louis Rostek. Louis tried in vain to get him out. Then, years later, he figured out what had happened. So he went to the camp and told Nestor, then returned again after the Amnesty, when he told me of that most glorious of human desires: revenge.
And tomorrow Louis would return.
My first impulse was to call Emil, but there was a possibility of gunplay, and I didn’t want him hurt.
“Hello?”
“It’s me, Leon.”
“Oh. Hello, Ferenc.”
“Look, I need your help tomorrow morning. Can you meet me at the central train station at ten?”
“What is it?”
“We’re going to get Nestor.”
He paused. “Ten o’clock?”
“Don’t be late.”
75
Around one in the morning, I drove over the Georgian Bridge and parked in the Canal District. There were no lamps, so I had to feel my way, unsure, through the narrow alleys. I kept stepping in puddles, but pressed on. I had woken with a head cleared by a wave of remorse. For Vera, first of all. I had gone too far—this was now apparent. It may have begun as her game, but I had changed the rules and turned a simple enjoyment into torture. Then I remembered Malik Woznica, stuck in his hole. I had no remorse for him—just remembering Svetla justified anything I could do to him—but again, I knew that this
was going too far. It could only end in prison. After what I’d put him through already, he wouldn’t risk turning me in. I had proven that I could track him down, even in the mountains, and end his life.
Halfway there I started to worry about how to get him out. He was heavy, and the well was deep. I had brought along the knotted rope that still smelled of Vera’s urine. He could tie it around himself, but I wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull him out on my own.
Like Vera, he wasn’t calling for help. No doubt he’d tried earlier in the day, moaning through his underwear, but no one in the Canal District came to anyone’s rescue. My eyes had adjusted over the long walk, and stars shone through the shattered ceiling on the mosaic. “Malik,” I said as I approached the well. “Malik Woznica, it’s time to go home.”
The well was too dark to see into.
“Malik? You there?”
I lit a match and saw Malik Woznica’s bound head tilted back, his dead eyes staring up at me. The match slipped and fell onto his shoulder, where it glowed brightly before going out.
My first scattered instinct was to get rid of the body. I uncoiled the rope and ran it down into the darkness before realizing that this wouldn’t work. I sank my hand down into the well, but fell just short of his head. Then I tried to see all of my options, but it was hard to see anything with a dead body beneath me. I went out to the square and sat on a step. My knees were shaking, so I walked.
A heart attack made sense. That or suffocation—if his nose stopped up, it was the end of him. But that possibility had never occurred to me as I was tying him up and shoving him into that black hole. I pulled my rings off and slipped them back on, one at a time. That other Ferenc—reckless and sure—had been unable to see the simple consequences of his actions. But now I was back.
I had killed a man.
I could not move the body, and so I would leave it. That seemed the only option. When found, it could be another murder to add to Nestor’s tally. But this one did not fit. A victim outside the group of art friends, one already known to the Militia. One that could be traced—by Sev and Kaminski, or anyone—back to me.
I returned and looked for something that could help me, but the place had been cleaned out years ago by vagrants. I lit another match. He was naked except his shirt, its collar loose and high around his ears. I climbed on the lip of the well, lying across it and bracing myself with my waist and my head. I reached down. My fingers groped, just reaching the hair, the top of the ear, then the shirt. I had to tilt my head to grip it fully, then use my neck, straining, to tug him up a little. My veins were ready to burst. He stuck to the walls, then slid up a bit. I grunted, rolled, my rising shoulder pulling him farther. It took a lot of sweat, but finally I had his upper half folded over the lip of the well. I gasped at him in the darkness.
Burning came to mind, but there would be smoke—Nestor had been lucky when he burned Antonín. And the canals weren’t deep enough to cover him for long.
I collected the rest of his torn jacket, his pants, and shoes, and lifted him over my shoulder, covering him with his trench coat. Then I started for the car. A smaller man couldn’t have pulled it off, and I almost didn’t make it. I stumbled through puddles, tripped over loose stones, and dropped him twice, his body making a wet thud when it hit the ground. The sky was still black when I folded him back into the trunk.
Once his car was found up in the mountains, they would search the area for his body. So I drove southeast, where the forests near the Soviet border would be out of their reach. The woods were thick there, and the roads empty. The sun had begun to turn the night a bluish gray. A dirt road turned off to the left, and at the end of it were the ruins of an old dacha that had burned to the ground. I carried Malik Woznica deeper into the forest, using my free hand to push aside thorns and vines. Finally, I looked back. I was out of sight of the ruins. I dropped Malik and his extra clothes on the dry leaves, covered him ineptly with a few more, and stumbled back to the car.
76
I arrived at the train station at nine-thirty as the rain began. It was a strange bit of luck that no one had seen me when I returned home. I had only had time to wash in the sink and change out of my clothes, which I put into a small trash bag. I then drove to the outskirts of town, where I added stones and dropped the bag into the Tisa. It sank quickly.
The station was busy enough—the regular throng of weekend travelers going to and from the Capital or stopping along other journeys, farmers and clerks alongside one another. I had a brandy in the bar, waved away a Gypsy muttering about all the children she had to feed, then returned to the main hall. A woman’s voice over speakers told me that the ten-twenty from Vienna, headed to platform six, would be fifteen minutes late. She repeated the announcement in Russian.
I looked at my empty glass.
At exactly ten, Leonek arrived, hunched and dark, almost a Gypsy himself. He crept over with a nod.
“You look like hell. What happened to your hand?”
It was covered in thorn scratches. I stuffed it into my pocket. I smelled like hell, too.
“So you going to tell me?”
I nodded at the arrivals board. “The ten-twenty from Vienna. It’s late.”
“Who are we waiting for?”
“A Frenchman. I don’t want to stop him. I want to see where he goes.”
“Where’s Emil?”
“At home with his wife, where he should be.”
Leonek looked up at the arrivals board to avoid showing me his expression. Then he looked back. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’ve told you. A Frenchman. The ten-twenty.”
“Not that.”
He seemed to want to discuss it. But I didn’t think I could converse right now, and I saw no need to help calm his guilt. “Let’s wait over by the bar.”
We leaned on the counter, looking through a window over the platforms and drinking slowly. He said, “I learned something very interesting.”
“Did you.” I looked past him at families chatting about times and places and people.
“I finally made it through that interview. Had to use a Russian dictionary for half the words.”
“Should’ve had someone translate it for you.”
“I’m stubborn.”
“I guess you are.”
He looked at his coffee. “Turns out this Boris Olonov knew quite a lot. He told Kliment the names of two of the other three soldiers who killed the girls.”
“What about the third?”
“Wouldn’t give it up. But more importantly, he knew about Sergei’s murder, because there was a witness to it.”
“Someone saw Sergei killed? How did he know about that?”
“Because another soldier knew the witness,” he said. “Now ask me his name.”
“The soldier’s?”
“No, the witness’s.”
“Okay. What’s the witness’s name?”
Leonek smiled. “Nestor Velcea.”
“Nestor—” I began, but stopped. “That’s impossible. Isn’t it?”
“I didn’t make it up.”
I reached for my drink, but it was empty. I couldn’t believe the coincidence. It couldn’t have been a coincidence—that was obvious. But I couldn’t see anything clearly yet. “So what’s the connection?”
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“Nestor witnesses Sergei’s murder,” I said, thinking it through slowly. “And soon after goes to a work camp.” But I couldn’t follow the thought through because it was time for us to meet the train.
77
It crawled to us and stopped, its brakes gasping. The rain had given its hull a bright sheen, washing away a little of the dirt. The doors opened and spilled passengers onto the platform. We each took a side of the crowd, watching faces under newspapers held like umbrellas. As the crowd thinned, I saw Louis holding a small, beaten suitcase. I motioned toward him, and Leonek nodded.
Leonek retreated to the other side of the engine
as I sat on a bench that faced the opposite direction. I wanted to hide my height. Then I leaned forward as if to tie my laces and looked back between my legs. His feet shuffled past. Ten seconds more. Then I stood slowly and turned around. His back disappeared into the main hall, followed by Leonek’s.
I tossed Leonek my keys and waited by the front door. As he started my car and swung around to get me, Louis climbed into a taxi.
We followed it south. Leonek had to speed up suddenly at some corners, nearly running down irate pedestrians, and below the passenger’s seat I pressed my foot into the imaginary brake. “Turn on the wipers.”
“Rain’s not so bad.”
“Turn them on.”
The streets narrowed, and the taxi stopped at the Hotel Metropol. Louis went inside.
I said, “Let’s give him a minute to get to his room.”
Leonek parked across the street, and we checked our pistols for cartridges.
The lobby’s low ceiling gave the white room a feeling of immense breadth. The men lounging on the upholstered chairs with issues of The Spark didn’t seem to notice us, but I still wondered how many of them were state security men—this was a hotel that housed foreigners, after all—and if they knew anything about Louis. The clerk was a young man who set his fingertips on the counter when he spoke; “Good evening, comrades! Two rooms or one?”
“We’re looking for one of your guests.”
I showed him my certificate, and that made him more eager. “Well of course, Comrade Inspectors. Do you have a name?”
On a hunch, I tried Nestor Velcea first.
He went through a ledger, tapping his fingers happily on the page, but found no Velcea.
“I’m sorry, comrades. Perhaps,” he said, then lowered his voice. “Perhaps an alias?”
Leonek looked at me, but I shook my head, “Maybe you’ve seen him. About this tall.” I held my hand at shoulder-height. “Blond hair. Missing a finger on his left hand.”
“A finger missing? Oh, that’s good. But no, no one like that.”
The Confession Page 27