The Confession

by Olen Steinhauer

  “I can’t pass it on to someone else tomorrow?”

  “Stefan’s still wasting time on that suicide, and Leonek’s working on a dead case—not to mention he thinks I hid Sergei’s files.” He shook his head. “That kid doesn’t have the slightest idea how a bureaucracy is run. Anyway, when Emil gets over his flu, he can help you.”

  On my way out I passed Kaminski and Brano Sev in the corridor. Brano looked again like himself—he’d gone back to the long leather coat, and his somber mouth was too small to ever form a shout.

  “So you’re feeling better,” said Kaminski. There was no more levity in his manner. He’d run out of it.

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of sick guys today. Me, I’ve got a sore back. Stumbled carelessly into a van. You, though,” he said, his trigger finger tapping his thigh, “You were quite sick yesterday. Very ill. It was obvious in everything you did.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Brano nodded at my hand, which held the folded sheet. “But you’re shaking. You’re not quite recovered.”

  “Looks like we should keep an eye on him,” said Kaminski.

  I pressed my lips together until they formed something meant to look like a smile.

  14

  The anxiety collapsed upon me on the front steps, the bright sun spotting my vision. I had bribed state employees of the railroads, frontier guards, and even a Moscow militiaman. I’d aided the wife of a Party official in leaving the country illegally. Yesterday, I had walked away from the scene of battle, and in the process attacked a member of the KGB.

  I reached the empty sidewalk and found my car. I had trouble getting the key into the door, then into the ignition. My joints were heavy, gummed up. I leaned my head on the wheel and took deep breaths.

  A burned body would not walk away. I could wait for tomorrow. Or the next day. Or forever.

  There were only a few farmers in the markets I passed, looking bored and alone. No children, and all the window shutters were closed. A general, unspoken strike had descended on the Capital. Just as the students had predicted.

  I turned on the radio and settled into the sofa. There was a show of song and recitation for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. There is nothing secret about the Party—we all know what it is. I wished the day would end. I lit a cigarette, and in the smoke saw Svetla Woznica sick in her cabin, racing toward the Soviet border. It’s all of us. It’s me; it’s you. I saw an empty city, shutters closed, then another one filled with tanks and gunfire and shattered windows. The Party is a tree in the desert; it’s a star at midnight. Magda beneath Stefan’s sweating white body, half-listening to the Americans’ radio broadcasts, then stumbling home and muttering some guilty words about Lydia, but feeling only the ache in her groin.

  Be happy. A great Party means you are never alone.

  Ágnes showed up with Pavel, and I realized I hadn’t noticed his absence. He sprang onto the sofa and climbed on me. His breath stank as he licked my chin. Ágnes brought a cup of water from the kitchen.

  “Why are you home so early?” I asked.

  She sat on the floor and squinted—her glasses were nowhere to be seen. “Not enough teachers,” she said. “Sick. They tried to teach us anyway, but by lunchtime they saw it was no use.”

  “You took the bus back?”

  “Had to wait forever. But Daniela came along. Wasn’t so bad. Where were you? I thought you were sick too.”

  “I had to work.” My cigarette was burned down, so I carried it to the kitchen, dropping ash along the way. Ágnes changed the radio station.

  “Daniela told me about this,” she said by way of explanation.

  So we sat together on the sofa and listened to the Americans. It was a day of injustice, they said. Although sporadic fighting continued in some areas of the city, Budapest was now clearly lost. Imre Nagy was hiding in the Yugoslav embassy. I put my arm around Ágnes, and she leaned into me. Pavel was quiet in her lap. When the news began to repeat itself, I turned it off.

  Around six, as I was cooking eggs for dinner, Magda showed up. She seemed disheveled somehow, as if she’d put her clothes on backward. But they looked fine. She sat at the kitchen table and watched me with surprise. I didn’t think it was because I was cooking.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked finally.

  “What?”

  “Yesterday. The demonstration. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  I stared back at her. “How did you know?”

  “Word gets around.”

  I wondered if Stefan had shed tears when he’d told her the story. I set a plate in front of her. “You weren’t in a listening mood.”

  After dinner, we put on the Americans again, sitting together like a proper family, until the screech of jamming overcame it. As I turned it back to music, I told Ágnes that, whether or not everyone else listened to this station, it was still against the law. It should not be discussed outside the family. “The volume should remain low,” I said. “And afterward, always change the station. You understand?”

  “I knew all this before, Daddy.”

  “Now it’s more important than before.”

  She nodded, and so did Magda.

  We put Ágnes to bed, then drank wine in the living room. We didn’t talk, but for the first time in weeks the silence wasn’t strained. I didn’t know why. I was too exhausted to dwell on her and Stefan or even the mistakes I’d made these last two days. I was blank. I was disconnected from everything around me, even all that we had learned from the radio. It was disturbingly like the blankness I acquired on the battlefield, where all tender emotions are kept at arm’s length, so they will not harm you.

  But then she smiled and nodded at the bedroom door. “You want to sleep in a real bed tonight?”

  I did.

  We undressed and got beneath the sheets in the dark. At first we did not touch, then she slid against me, and I could feel that she had not worn her nightdress. She buried her face in my chest in a way that made the blood rush into my head. It had been so long since she’d held me like that, and I stroked her bare, warm ribs with the tips of my fingers. But it was no use. After the initial flush of excitement, my body wouldn’t stay up for it. Everything receded to arm’s length. I kissed her ear and let her go. She rolled away from me, her cold heels just touching my shins, and began to cry.

  15

  The students had been right. A general strike can arise spontaneously out of the malaise of discontent triggered by a single act, and when this happens it seems that the entire population has found its voice at last, one that rises above all the little voices in The Spark. But the students were wrong to think a strike can last without organization. No leaders came from the Sixth of November Strike. No Imre Nagy. Even Kozak the Engineer stayed quiet. So over the days that followed, the streets became fuller, the shop counters staffed, the shutters open. Because despite our proud talk at parties and clandestine meetings, all any of us wanted was some food on the table and a little security. When on the twelfth The Spark proclaimed that the imperialist-financed counterrevolutionaries in Budapest had finally been crushed completely, we were all already back to work.

  Emil came back first, on Thursday the eighth. We took his Russian Zorki camera over the Georgian Bridge and parked in the lot on the edge of the canals and walked the rest of the way.

  The lumpenproletariat of the Canal District was still on strike. We crossed arched stone bridges over stagnant water and heard our footsteps through the ancient alleys. A few old women in black scurried behind their doors.

  Augustus II Square was in the flooded Deeps, the center of the canals. It had always been the most crumbling, waterlogged area of the district, and recent fires had turned a lot of upper floors into charred shells. We paused at the summit of a bridge and tried to figure out how to reach the dry curb. My leap was just short, and I landed shin deep in icy water. Emil, lighter and more agile, arrived unscathed. One more long alley, my shoes squea
king, and we were finally there.

  Two centuries back, it had been a tanners’ square, and there was still an eroded wooden sign depicting the shape of a cow’s flesh, removed and flattened. Below it, a man’s black shoe floated in the water. But number three was an old, aristocratic residence. Its front door was missing, and beside its frame, the anonymous caller had been kind enough to mark it with a white chalk x.

  In the entryway, the temperature dropped and a decomposed rug slopped under my feet. Emil cursed as he slipped and almost dropped the camera. I lit a match to see better. The cracked walls were blackened by moss. Light came from a doorway up ahead. I blew out the flame.

  The smell hit us first. I’d smelled charred flesh during the war inside burned farmhouses. Its pungency is different than any other burned substance, but in a way I still can’t describe with words. The room was vast and circular, its edge raised like a walkway, everything lit by the shattered glass roof above. In the corner was the stone lip of a well, probably dug so the servants could avoid mixing with the tanners in the street. The lower level of the room was now a circular pool coated with pieces of shattered glass and fragments of colored stone that had once been part of a mosaic. A bacchanal scene of nymphs and satyrs with chalices of wine and grapes. All that was left was a hoof here, a breast there, and pieces of purple grapes scattered through the water. A Roman scene—here, in the middle of the Carpathian basin.

  Emil pointed to a black mound curled up on the dry edge, facing the wall. The stone floor beneath it had been discolored by heat. That indescribable smell filled me as we approached, and I had to focus to quell my stomach.

  Emil snapped a picture.

  I crouched and examined as best I could without touching it. Gender unknown. Folded up fetally, arms together, black hands pressed tight as if praying. That, at least, made some kind of sense. A final prayer. Then I noticed the lump around the wrists. “Tied up,” I said, and Emil took another photo. There was more charred rope around the ankles.

  I didn’t know if the body had been alive or dead when it was burned, but it seemed to mean something that the body was only two feet from the ledge that dropped off into water, and salvation.

  Emil circled the room, shooting and looking for clues. I started to do the same, but I wasn’t seeing anything clearly. “Emil.”

  He heard the tone in my voice. “Go on. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I squatted on the steps outside. The chill froze my wet feet, but I was more worried about my stomach. I stared at that lone shoe beneath the tanner’s sign and tried to steady myself, the fall light making everything too crisp and too gray. The nausea was more than it should have been; it was proving how weak I really was.

  A flaming body, bound and twisting, so close to the water. One roll, that’s all it would have taken. The tragedy was magnified. Then, inexplicably, I remembered earlier that morning, waking up next to Magda for the first time in months. That first rush of joy was tempered as she rolled over, smiling, and said, I’m going to call in sick again. She didn’t remember at the moment of waking that she’d told me she had worked her full shift.

  I walked through the water and retrieved the shoe. Black, unadorned leather, not very worn, right foot. If I needed it in the future, I wouldn’t want to come back to search for it.

  “Nothing,” said Emil from the doorway. He noticed the dripping shoe in my hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Back at the station, I called Markus Feder and told him to send his men to pick up the body. “You think I’ve got men here? I’ve got no one. Your corpse will just have to wait.”

  16

  By Friday we were fully staffed, except for Kaminski, who had mercifully disappeared. But even in his absence I had the feeling he was in some other room in the Capital, trigger finger flicking, calculating my demise. Kaminski’s eyes—Brano Sev—worked at his desk, silent, his back toward us, but he was aware of everything we did. He knew that each of us wanted to smash his head against his steel file cabinets for what he’d made us do at that demonstration. But none of us touched him.

  Emil had developed the pictures in his darkroom at home, and Leonek joined us to look them over in a café, far from Brano Sev.

  Our first choice was still closed, its metal blinds pulled down, so we went a couple streets farther to a crowded, smoke-congested bar on October Square. We leaned on the counter as Emil passed around the photos. “Bad light, a little blurry. But you get the idea.”

  We did get the idea. Leonek squinted the blackened human mass, and the smell came back to me, cutting through the living bodies all around us.

  There were photos of empty corners, the dry well, and fragments of decadent Roman life underwater, “It’s an empty crime scene,” I said.

  Emil drank his coffee, “Except for a shoe.”

  “It was outside the scene. And I’m not walking all over the Capital with just a shoe, not when half the stores are still closed.”

  “Then we wait for the coroner.”

  A table became free, so we took it. Emil asked Leonek how his investigation was coming.

  “Not well.” Leonek leaned close, arms on the table. “But I’ve learned a lot. Sergei kept good records of his interviews, and I’ve got a list of names. He had tried to talk to the families of Chasya Grubin and Reina Westreicher, the two dead girls, but they wouldn’t tell him anything.” He frowned at this. “Why would they? He was Russian. So I looked them up. The Westreicher family got out soon afterward, to Austria. The Grubin family—only the brother and the grandfather are still here. The grandfather’s a little crazy, I can’t get much out of him. And Chasya’s brother—Zindel—is in Ozaliko Prison. He’s in for political crimes—a societal menace, they told me.”

  “Can you talk to him?” asked Emil.

  “I filled out the paperwork two weeks ago, but now—now, I don’t know.” He coughed into his hand and waved to the woman behind the counter for another coffee. “Corina!” he called, but she didn’t notice him. “Sergei interviewed a lot of Russian soldiers, but that was a decade ago. They’re all back home. So, like you, I wait.”

  “What about Stefan?” My voice cracked. “Is he helping you?”

  He tilted his head from side to side. “Now and then, yes. He’s still working on that suicide.”

  “Looks like a suicide to you too?”

  “Stefan hasn’t convinced me otherwise. He’s talked to a lot of people, but none of it seems to lead anywhere.”

  “But why is he so convinced?”

  Leonek blinked at me, as if he’d said too much already. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” He went to the counter and ordered another coffee.

  17

  Homicide investigations work in starts and stops. Clues move them forward; the absence of clues takes the drive out of them. When this happens, you move on to the next case, or complete paperwork.

  Markus Feder called to say he’d received the body but wouldn’t have anything for us until Monday. The waterlogged shoe in my drawer was useless until then. Emil and I had neither another case nor backed-up paperwork, so, to avoid Moska thinking up more paperwork (something he had a great talent for) and to keep myself from dwelling on the train that had by then reached Moscow, I helped Emil pick up his wash from the laundry. We carried the tied bundles to his apartment.

  He lived a little farther back from the Tisa than Woznica, but still clearly in the upscale Fourth District. Lena’s money had paid for the entire top floor, for renovations, and no doubt the functioning elevator as well. The view, as Emil had promised, was breathtaking. Red clay-tiled roofs crisscrossed in a jumbled mix that reflected how the Capital had grown over the centuries: piece by piece. I could spot the ragged shards of a couple buildings not yet rebuilt from the war. Beyond were the two spires of the Georgian Bridge and the roofs of the Canal District, speckled by holes. To the left, low plains rose eastward to the Carpathians.

  They had lived here for seven years, and after Emil’s grandfather died, his gran
dmother came to live with them. She had passed away three years back, and since then this space big enough for five families had housed only two people.

  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.”