The Confession

by Olen Steinhauer

  Emil opened his mouth. His no was too quiet to hear.

  But she heard it, and asked me, “Why was my son burned? Do you know this? Old ladies in the provinces are harder than the ones in the city. You can tell me.”

  “We don’t know anything yet. That’s why we’re here.”

  Frederik shook his head, sucking. “They don’t know anything.” He squeezed her hands tighter.

  “Did you hear from your son much?” I asked.

  “Hear from him?” Her head popped back. “He was my son, Inspectors. Look around you. Everything you see is from him. He knew about family. Antonín had his faults, but ignoring his mother wasn’t one of them. Let go of me, Frederik.”

  The cobbler returned his hand to his own knee.

  “Then perhaps you can help us out.”

  Maybe it was my size, or the way I chose to hold her gaze, but she shifted on the sofa to face me. Despite the others, it became a dialogue. “He called me a few weeks ago, Inspector. Not a rare thing, but unexpected. It worried me.”

  “Why did it worry you?”

  “Because he didn’t have a reason. He only called to say he loved me.”

  “He didn’t do that usually?”

  When she smiled, her eyes shut and her cheeks swelled. “He always said he loved me, Inspector. He usually called for other reasons. He liked to give his mother things.”

  “So you heard from him often.”

  “Let me tell you about Antonín.” She leaned back into the sofa. “He’s a good boy. He reveres his mother. He works hard—you probably don’t even know what he does, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s the most important painter in the Capital.”

  I noticed that Emil was recording everything in his notepad. “Go on.”

  “Do you know how he became so important? No? He worked for it. Out here, he got no education at all, and everyone expected him to be a cooperative farmer like his useless father. Or a factory worker. But my Antonín is better than that. He loved art. And when you love art in Drebin, you had better leave. So that’s what he did. He left, with my blessings, at the end of the war—he and his wife—and after only a few years he had his very own shows. Can you believe it?”

  I had been on the periphery of the arts in the Capital for a long time now, and the name Kullmann did not ring a bell. But Antonín…“He was married?”

  Her face settled. “Zoia Lendvai. That tramp left him the same year as his first show—nineteen and forty-eight. For a clerk. You can bet she kicked herself once my Antonín became famous.”

  “Do you know the name of the clerk she married?”

  “I don’t care. My Antonín survived her treachery, that’s all that matters. See that?” She pointed to the marble nude. “Antonín made it for me. And here.” She pointed at a small framed painting. It was peculiar—a simple image of tree branches, black winding lines on a white surface, and where the black and white met my eye could not quite focus. “That’s an early one, when his genius was first apparent. He’s still big, no matter what they say, certainly bigger than that big-headed friend of his, Vlaicu.” She put her hands together. “My Antonín.”

  Then it hit me. Antonín: the repetition dug deeper into my memory. The name on Josef Maneck’s notepad. “Tell me,” I said. “Do you know Josef Maneck? He used to be a museum curator.”

  “Know him? Well, of course. I haven’t talked to him in years, but he was the one to recognize my boy’s genius. He put up my son’s paintings—that’s all it took. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  My hands were cold as we shook her hand at the door and nodded at Frederik.

  “Catch my boy’s killer, Inspectors.”

  “We’ll try,” I said.

  “And say hello to Josef for me.”

  “We’ll do that,” said Emil.

  21

  On the drive back I explained the connection to Emil. He frowned at the fields. “Why was his name on Maneck’s notepad?”

  “They were probably friends. What’s Antonín’s address?”

  Beatrice had given it to us with Antonín’s extra key. “Karl Marx fifty-nine.”

  K——R—5—: K. Marx 59.

  The apartment was another one near the Tisa, but in the Second District, and on the ground floor. It faced a small, overgrown courtyard through barred windows. Books had been tossed casually around, clothes strewn on the chairs, and a smell of fried eggs lingered in the kitchen. Emil brought out his pistol.

  It was soon clear that the apartment was empty, though someone had eaten there not long ago. There was no sign of forced entry.

  “Another spare key?” Emil suggested.

  “Or Antonín’s key.”

  The apartment had been treated roughly, but not destroyed; I didn’t think anything had been taken. Someone had slept in the bed recently.

  Emil looked through some canvases leaning against the wall. Family scenes: dinner tables, children in a lake, an overfull Trabant driving to holiday. The signature was quite legible: A. Kullmann.

  We went through the apartment and came up with little. Whoever spent the last few days there had left only old food in the kitchen—potatoes, eggs. There were crushed cigarettes on a plate beside the chair in the living room, and a couple books on the floor around it—a volume of Kandinski’s writings on the spiritual in art, and a book on Socialist Realism. Our anonymous man was a reader—that was the only thing we learned.

  A small room with a large window housed the studio. Empty tubes of oil paints littered the floor with crumpled newspapers. A couple canvases—more family scenes—had been destroyed with a knife. “When artists get frustrated, watch out,” said Emil, then stopped at the canvas on the easel. It was empty except for the image of a hand, a couple inches wide, that had been painted in the center—or, it had been begun. The brushstrokes were awkward—they trembled—as if Antonín had been terrified when he painted it.

  I looked around the corridor. Clean enough, and empty. The buzzer on the only other ground-floor apartment was marked SUPERVISOR, but there was no answer to my ring. An old man came through the front door as I was heading back, and I asked if he knew the building supervisor.

  He squinted up at me. “Supervisor?”

  I pointed at the door.

  “Yes, some time ago.” He pressed his temple with a finger. “I suppose, yes.”

  “And now?”

  He shrugged with opened hands. “Haven’t had one for I-don’t-know-how-long. What can you do?”

  “How about here?” I nodded at the open door. “Antonín Kullmann. Did you know him?”

  “How could I? A man like that doesn’t talk to us.”

  “A man like what?”

  “You know. Didn’t have time to talk to us proles.”

  “Bourgeois?”

  He touched his temple again. “You’re not kidding.”

  “Did you ever see anyone else go in there? Another man, perhaps?”

  “I didn’t look. I’m no spy, you know. Why did you say, did?”

  “Did?”

  “You said, Did you know him. Is he gone now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “So his apartment’s free?”

  22

  It was getting late, and Emil had plans with Lena, so I told him I’d see him in the morning. I called home using Antonín’s phone. Ágnes had received a red ribbon for her fitness aptitudes, and was being chosen as a group leader. “The Pioneers are funny. I don’t think I understand half of what they tell us, but the sports aren’t bad.”

  “What about your French? How’s that coming?”

  “Our Pioneer chief said that French was below me. That’s what he said word for word.”

  “Well he’s not your father. I expect you to study tonight.”

  Her grumble broke apart through the telephone lines.

  “Your mother around?”

  “She’s going to be late too. I told her not to be out with more tha
n three friends.”

  “Why not?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in the Militia? They even told us in class about the new law. After dark, more than four people together can be arrested for hooliganism.”

  “I see. Can you make yourself dinner?”

  “I’m not a child, Daddy.”

  I found a tin of orange juice in the refrigerator. I was no longer particularly interested in finding out who had stayed here. If it was the killer, he hadn’t left obvious clues. In the morning I’d call in the lab coats to dust for prints, but for now I could do nothing. So I focused on who Antonín was. In some desk drawers were newspaper clippings chronicling his shows. He’d had his first one in the Museum of National Contemporary Art—Josef Maneck’s place—in 1948, and soon after became a regular fixture of the state-owned museums. There were even clippings from a German newspaper praising his early work, some of which traveled to Paris and Köln as part of a series of “international friendship exchanges.” I knew a little German, and could muddle through an article about him, published in 1954, that described “the rise and fall of Antonín Kullmann.” According to the critic, Antonín had burst upon the socialist world in 1948 as a full-fledged genius “by any regime’s standards.” His compositions were ahead of their time and utterly original. But in 1952 that changed. Antonín, in the statement that accompanied his 1952 Köln East/West Friendship Exhibition, claimed to be reinventing himself. But to the German critic it was not a reinvention, but an eradication of the Antonín Kullmann of the earlier exhibitions:

  The flat, insipid Socialist Realism of this Kullmann seems to give doubt to the idea that the soul can rise above totalitarianism. He has given up art for the pleasures of submission.

  Some of our local critics, on the other hand, felt his genius was continuing to grow “by great schismatic leaps.”

  Once I started looking, I found papers everywhere. Reams of typewritten sheets—half-written artist statements, catalogs for upcoming exhibits and, in the bottom drawer of the bedroom bureau, typed drafts of letters. I took them to the living room and settled into the sofa.

  Antonín had been a meticulous man. In his correspondences he seemed to work out different versions—sometimes three variations of one letter—before sending them off. There were some addressed to gallery owners and critics—a couple names I recognized—and one was to his ex-wife, Zoia. It was dated 1 November, two weeks ago, about a week before his death, and there was only one draft. The second, presumably, had been sent.

  My dear Z. I’ve tried, and I’ve failed so often. The times we’ve spent together are the happiest of my life, but I’ve made clear that this is not enough. I have to be firm about this, or we will go on with these dishonest rendezvous.

  You know what’s brought this on, this sense of my mortality, and yet you will not succumb. Why? I again offer myself to you and ask you to leave him. He’s never made you happy in the way that I have. We can leave together. We can go west. I will take care of everything.

  Please, don’t think of this as desperation. These are only the words of a man who knows the one thing he wants, and must have it at all costs.

  With love and shame, Antonín.

  The entire letter was nullified by a large red X.

  I went through everything, but could find no replies to his letters, and no address book.

  I looked again at the trembly hand on the studio’s easel. It was green-tinted and the paint was very thick. I touched it and jerked back as the small hand smeared onto my index finger. I washed it off.

  The pictures on his walls were scenes of socialist utopia—one by the famous Vlaicu, the others by himself, though in one corner I saw the “new” Kullmann and the “old” Kullmann side by side. First, a factory scene of determined, muscled men at work. Nothing new. The second one was entirely different. Two men sitting at a table in a dark room, and on the table was a pig’s head, with black flies hovering over it. But the pig’s head glowed, casting fly-shadows on the wall and lighting the men’s faces. I didn’t know if I liked it or not. It left me with an unsettled feeling.

  I bought a cheese sandwich from a store in the neighborhood, then looked at the painting again as I ate, sitting at Antonín’s typewriter. I rolled in a fresh sheet. But nothing came. I typed a few useless words and found myself surprised that the T did not stick. Its ease almost disconcerted me, and the whole machine felt too foreign, too perfect. I finished the sandwich, grabbed the Kandinski book, and settled into the chair again. Although Kandinski was not actually banned, he was certainly in disrepute, and the only places one could find his works were the used bookstores with their spare selections of dusty, twenty-year-old paperbacks like this one. I didn’t make it much further than the introduction, where Antonín or the other man had marked some lines that still stick with me:

  Our souls, which are only now beginning to awaken after the long reign of materialism, harbor seeds of desperation, unbelief, lack of purpose. The whole nightmare of the materialistic attitude, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, purposeless game, is not yet over.

  I woke to the key turning in the lock, and for an instant didn’t know where I was. The floor lamp was still on, and I had to blink to adjust to the light. On the other side of the room, the apartment door opened a little, stopped, then closed again.

  I ran. The glass front door was easing shut, and in the dark street a figure bounded away. I skipped over craters in the sidewalk and shouted for the runner to stop. But despite his visible limp and the bag bouncing on his shoulder, he was small and quick, turning the next corner, then the next. By the time I stopped to catch my aching breath, he was gone.

  23

  I drove through the Friday morning work crowd up to the Sixth District, to Unit 21, Block 10. The entryway was one of those dismal greens that give the feeling of being underwater, and the elevator was broken. So I climbed to the fifth floor and knocked. Stefan was in his underwear. “This is a surprise. Finally decide to finish me off?” He was smiling, but when I stepped forward, he stepped back.

  I peered past him. “Have any coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll buy you a cup.”

  I waited for him to dress. His view was like ours: blocks upon blocks; up, sky. He lived the same way ever since Daria left him; he lived like the bachelor he would always be. This, I supposed, was why he and Magda used my marital bed.

  I considered talking to him then. We could have it all out in the open and start settling things finally. But when he wandered out of the bedroom and found his shirt under a sofa cushion, I changed my mind. Magda had said she was making her own decisions, and this, in the end, was the only way. It was not up to him, or to me. He pressed a hand against his swollen belly to flatten the wrinkles of his shirt, but it didn’t help. What did she see in him?

  In the car, he leaned forward and frowned. “That your engine? You need to have it looked at.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I’ll take a look if you want. I just hate to have cars going around sounding like that.”

  I stared at him until he shut up.

  We went to the same place he had been going to for years. Café-bar #338. A dark workers’ hole almost in the Third District where Turks drank coffee from very small cups. “Why don’t you try another bar?”

  He shrugged. “Why should I? I’ve brought Leonek here. He likes it.”

  “Leonek likes it? I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Because of the Turks? Come on, Leonek’s a bigger man than that. These guys didn’t kill his family.”

  “Well, neither of you has any taste.”

  We got coffees and rolls and settled on knee-high stools around a low table. A thin Turk with a little beard raised his cup to Stefan, and Stefan nodded back. “Out with it,” he said to me.

  “I’ve found your Antonín.”

  “Antonín?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

&n
bsp; He knew, but it took a moment to settle into his skull. “My Antonín?”

  “Antonín Kullmann. He was found in the Canal District, burned to a crisp.”

  His tongue moved around his teeth, then he swallowed. “So that was Antonín.”

  “I talked to his mother, in Drebin. He was an artist, and Josef Maneck showed his stuff. He has an ex-wife named Zoia who’s married to a clerk. He was trying to get her back.”

  Stefan folded his hands beneath his chin.

  “I think the killer came by last night, but I lost him.”

  “The killer?”

  “Maybe.”

  He finished the roll and ordered another coffee from a barmaid with striking dark eyes. Then he watched me a moment. “And you’re bringing this information to me?”

  “It’s a case.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And I can be a big man too.”

  “I’m glad.”

  We returned to Antonín’s apartment and went through everything again. There was nothing new, but Stefan was thorough as he read the letters and examined the newspaper clippings. I pointed out the letter to Zoia mentioning the sense of my mortality. “He may have known he was going to be killed.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Stefan. He looked at the cigarettes still dirtying the plate beside the chair and read their brands. “This one’s yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  He examined the bed, then went on to the bureau. The clothes were good quality, expensive, and I wondered if Lena Brod would approve of them, or if I was too much of a prole to know the difference. As he searched he told me what little more he had learned about the dead curator, Josef Maneck.

  “Before he was sent to the bottling plant, he was doing very well for himself. The Culture Ministry gave his museum a significant percentage of their budget.”

  “Why?”

  He straightened. “This is where I become embarrassed. It was because of his contribution to the art world, having brought some genius—an A. Kullmann—to the attention of the public.” He shrugged. “I never followed up on it.”