The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  He dreamed of seal boats cutting through the ice sheets of the north. A ship of nomads who thought nothing of risking their lives in the miserable cold. They had nothing to lose. They drank heavily and fought on the icy deck; by the time they reached the hunting grounds, the Croat was already dead, having plummeted, drunk, into the black waters. In his dream, when the dissatisfied Bulgarian pulled a knife on him over a card game, his stomach did not sink as it had in reality; it levitated. Then he floated up through the cabin ceiling. He dreamed of little fat bodies, gray and silver bundles sliding down ice slopes into the water, eyes like black coins with a woman’s long lashes. Their insides steamed when he cleaned them out; their red organs misted in the white snow. He dreamed of the Bulgarian who was found among the seal guts, facedown in the gore. Gored himself. Gutted and discarded on the ice.

  When he woke his conviction of failure was somehow less inevitable. The night’s sleep, or the passage of time, had rejuvenated him, and he rushed through the alphabetizing of the chief’s files. He ignored its insignificance—the task was something he had to do as quickly and mindlessly as possible. Like the seal carcasses.

  A few files fell open, and he scanned their contents. Criminals now locked away in prisons in the provinces, some working in the western swamps, raising land from mud, harvesting reeds. The records went back decades, and the prewar files had stamps with the icon of a crown. All that was over now. Some new files had symbols borrowed from the Soviets, while others—the hawk, primarily—were local. Wings pressed to its sides, its beak in profile, talons extended. Hammers and sickles and stalks of wheat bent like parentheses. Above a star: 1917.

  “Enter.”

  He pushed the door open with the S-through-Z box and set it in the far corner. The chief watched as he brought in the other two, stacking them on the first. Then Emil stood before his desk. “Now,” he said breathily. “You have a case? For me.”

  The boredom in Chief Moska’s eyes was overwhelming. “Those are in order?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Maybe you should give them another look-over. To be sure.”

  Emil’s face warmed. He closed the door and, after it latched, stood again in front of the chief’s desk. He spoke clearly and calmly, his jaw muscles tensed: “I don’t know what’s been going on here, why you and your men are acting like this. But I came here as a homicide inspector for the People’s Militia, and if you refuse to give me a legitimate case, I can’t be responsible for what follows.”

  The chief leaned back and balanced a stubby pencil between his fingers.

  Emil hoped his red face and boldness would give the impression of someone who might do anything if provoked, however reckless. It was the look a young man had to cultivate in the Arctic waters.

  The chief brought the pencil to his mouth, his lips closing on it, and when he brought it away there was black residue. He spoke slowly, lazily. “Yesterday. Something came through and, well, I don’t want to waste my men’s time with it.” He was talking to the papers on his desk. His hands had given up on the pencil and were flicking through smeared, typewritten sheets. “Fourth District, a singer. No. Songwriter.” He licked his fingers with a fat, lead-blackened tongue as he searched through the pages. Emil made sure he missed nothing.

  “This songwriter’s dead?”

  “That’s how they come to us, Brod.” He held out a handwritten sheet.

  Male, Janos Crowder, 35, dead in apartment, severe trauma to head. Liberation Street 12.

  “Called in after hours,” the chief muttered. “District police station took pictures, samples, the usual. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

  Emil opened his mouth. He wanted to ask what the usual meant, but nothing came out. His feet seemed to disappear from under him. He had his case. So quickly, easily.

  “You need mobilization papers? Get going.”

  Emil found his feet.

  On the tram, he held on to a leather strap, a pendulum swinging between a woman taking bites out of a round loaf of bread and two laughing boys repeating damn and shit to one another. Emil recalled the dead man. At least one of his songs was very famous, something children sang in school. He’d heard them on their marches down the boulevards, looking smart in kerchiefs and buttons, but he couldn’t remember the name of the tune. Part of a lyric came to him as they left the First District’s mustard-colored administrative centers for the carved entryways and wrought- iron gates of the unbombed, still-prestigious part of the Fourth: There are White Guards in your heart that must be torn apart.

  There was nothing left of Janos Crowder’s face for him to recognize.

  The policeman who had been waiting for him—a boy little younger than Emil, with a loose-fitting blue uniform—let him in and nodded at the body. A wrench lay a few feet away, where it had stained the thick, white rug in a brown mess.

  The melody would not leave—it revolved in his head. There are White Guards…

  It was a lush, expensive apartment, and it had been ripped to pieces. The humid stench was everywhere. Upturned shelves lay on the floor, atop books and broken vases; the sofa cushions had been sliced open and ripped inside out. A baby grand piano filled a corner. Its lid was propped open, and on the carpet beside it lay framed pictures that had slid off.

  It was the stink, Emil realized, of rotting meat. The musk of the country’s finest patriotic melody-maker turning to mold.

  “Your chief said to leave it as it was.” The young cop held his cap in his hands, shaking his head. “Never seen anything like that before.”

  The body was arched backward over a sturdy, coarse coffee table that looked like it had been made in the provinces. It was cracked and bent in the middle where the body had hit, but was not separated.

  That was peasant craftsmanship for you. …must be torn apart.

  The wrench had been used to beat the face until it collapsed into pulp, then had been used on the back of the head, leaving tiny pink skull shards sprinkled over the carpet. Emil tried not to breathe through his nose.

  He had seen plenty of dead bodies before—on the Arctic ship, in the fields and trains between Finland and here—but nothing quite like this. Not a corpse inside a wealthy man’s living room. The location separated it somehow, made it more appalling. Boats were for dead people. Trains and open fields. Not living rooms.

  “Get some air in here, will you?”

  The policeman opened the French windows. A hot breeze took some of the stink with it. Emil joined him and they looked out over the city, where clay and tin rooftops led into the distance.

  Reluctantly, he went back and kneeled by the wrench. The steel was caked with blood, but there were no fingerprints, only gnarled threads. Once white, they were now a crusted brown. Gloves.

  He went through the photographs that had slid off the opened piano. Behind framed, cracked glass was the Magyar face- prominent brow, gaping nostrils—he now remembered from clippings in The Spark. The dead man smiled broadly at a soiree with none other than General Secretary Mihai. Some of his best songs had been for their dashing partisan leader—now an overfed politician: a “thick Muscovite,” as they were called in private. The chubby arm of the interior minister hung over Crow- der’s shoulders in another picture.

  Emil went through the other luminaries on the carpet, who presented the dead songwriter with star-shaped trophies and plaques which, despite the black and white, were plainly gold, their stars a glossy red. He wondered idly where these trophies were stashed, and how much they were worth. Shaking hands surrounded him on the floor, clapping hands and hands presenting valuable awards. And everywhere: big toothy smiles.

  Then it came to him. A flush of understanding.

  He had walked into a trap.

  At first he didn’t believe it—the realization was too easy, too sudden. But he thought it through. It made more sense than he would have liked. Moska had given him this case to get rid of him.

  He looked at the photo of the General Secretary again.
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  Janos Crowder was connected; he had friends at the very top. This simple fact made the case, by default, political. In political investigations, nothing was allowed to go wrong. At the first sign of a mistake, Emil would be ripped off his first case, maybe even kicked out of the department. The security inspector with the metallic gaze and peasant’s features would be handed the Crow- der case. He was probably sitting at his desk now, browsing through files, waiting for it.

  His hands went cold, and the General Secretary, smiling, fell with Janos Crowder to the carpet. Emil patted his thighs to get the blood moving again. He stood up.

  “Tell me about him,” Emil commanded the empty room.

  The young policeman came out of the kitchen, licking butter off a finger. His peaked cap was set back on his head. Emil didn’t know how anyone could eat with this smell.

  “Crowder. Tell me about him.”

  “Comrade Janos Crowder,” the policeman recited from memory. “Songwriter of note, from Budapest originally, moved here just before the Patriotic War. An infantryman on the Front, suffered a shrapnel leg, Royal Medal of Honor. After the Liberation he produced a remarkable variety of songs honoring the country.”

  “Remarkable variety?” asked Emil.

  The policeman shrugged. “One hundred thirty-seven songs in two years.”

  Emil nodded. “Remarkable. Anything else?”

  The policeman sighed the last detail: “Married to Lena Hanic in 1945.”

  “Has she been notified?”

  “No, Comrade Inspector.”

  “Good. I’ll do it myself. You’ve taken photographs?”

  The policeman returned to the kitchen and came back with a large, cream-colored folder. It was heavy with prints.

  “Who found the body?”

  “Building supervisor. Aleksander Tudor. Was bringing up the mail.” He nodded at the vanity beside the door, where some envelopes lay. “Decided to leave them inside. This is what greeted him.”

  Emil surveyed the demolished room, trying to remember what else to ask. In the Academy there had been simple checklists that alleviated the need to think things through, but he had gone blank. “Have the supervisor come up on your way out.”

  “Youre done with me?”

  Within the policeman’s voice, Emil thought he heard something like surprise. Surprise that the interview was so short. So incomplete, inept. “You have the wife’s address?”

  The policeman paused, eyes shifting across the floor, deftly bouncing around the corpse.

  “Call it into the station,” said Emil. “They’ll leave it on my desk.” Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure he believed it.

  Three envelopes, all bills. He opened and read each in the vain hope that something would float to the surface, but the first two were nothing but the mundane finances of life. An expensive tailor on Yalta Boulevard had made Janos Crowder a suit and was waiting for his payment. A greengrocer two blocks away was becoming impatient for his fee. The third, though, was from the Aeroflot office down by the Tisa, the itinerary for a flight to Berlin that was leaving this morning. Emil checked his father’s watch— 12:40. A flight that had just left.

  “Comrade Inspector?” A fat man stood in the doorway, his pink arms spilling from a white sleeveless shirt stained by cooking grease and sweat. When he breathed, Emil could hear it across the room.

  “Comrade Building Supervisor Aleksander Tudor?”

  The supervisor nodded, lips pressed tight as he edged his way inside, peering at the body. His nose flared involuntarily.

  “Close the door, will you?”

  He did.

  Emil held up the envelopes. “Since when do building supervisors deliver mail?”

  “Two days. The mail was just sitting there.” His voice had a pleading note to it. “They might have been stolen. I worried.” His eyes fell again on the body, as though gravity pulled him there.Emil stared at the supervisor s white face until the eyes flickered back.

  “Tell me what happened when you discovered the body. Every detail.”

  Aleksander Tudor tried to breathe steadily. “Yesterday. Night, yes. After dinner.”

  “So you were in your apartment.”

  “The dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  Aleksander Tudor nodded eagerly. “They were barking outside my window. Like always, but this time.” He closed his eyes then opened them. “This time I went to shoo them away. That’s when I noticed. His box. Comrade Crowder’s. Full of letters.” His loud exhale sounded choked. “Two days. Very irregular. But there was no answer,” he said. “To my knock.”

  “And you had heard nothing before this?”

  “Only the dogs.”

  “No noise? No sounds of struggle?”

  Aleksander Tudor shook his head stiffly.

  “And you just came right in?”

  “I have the key, Comrade Inspector.”

  “You couldn’t slide them under the door?”

  The supervisor turned toward the gaping, drafty space beneath the door. He turned back to Emil, mouth working but forming no words.

  “Comrade Supervisor,” said Emil, slipping into the authoritarian tone the professors had made him practice for hours. “You seem disturbed. Do I disturb you?”

  “I-” he began, then faltered. He leaned his full weight against the vanity; Emil could see the other half of his sweating face in the mirror. He blinked at the corpse, ready to faint.

  Emil led him into the hallway, where frying oils obscured the smell of rot. “Try again?”

  Tudor steadied himself on the railing, and finally formed words: “I was curious, Comrade. That’s all. I wanted to see if he was gone, or…I don’t know.” He shook his head.

  Emil reached into his jacket and retrieved his notepad and a small pencil. 25 Aug 48. Victim: J Crowder. Interview: Apt Super, Aleks Tudor—found body. Delivering mail. Nerves, a wreck. “Did you suspect this?” he asked. “Before you opened the door.”

  “This?”

  “Murder. You heard nothing?”

  “No. Oh, not at all.” When he shook his head, his flushed, damp cheeks trembled. “I only…wondered. You see?”

  “How long has Comrade Crowder lived here?”

  “Six, seven months? I need to look it up.”

  Emil pointed at the door across from Crowder’s. Someone had painted it a garish red. “The neighbor?”

  “Polacks,” Tudor whispered. Then, with a wry smile and a halfwink: “Genuine proles.

  “Comrade,” Emil said, his voice now very official again, “this is a nation of proles. The proletarians have succeeded with the generous assistance of our friends to the east. Proles is the name by which we all live.”

  Aleksander Tudor looked ready to cry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  *******************

  The Polish proles included a mother, father, three children and three grandparents. The door opened noisily, the thin, blond father shouting back for one of the children, a Marie, to shut up. But when Emil unfolded his green Militia certificate, a silence dropped over the household, as though even those out of eyeshot had seen an alarm blink in the other rooms.

  “Come in,” said Tomislaw, the father, wiping a hand on his pants and then waving Emil inside.

  There was the dense, familiar smell of boiled cabbage and overused sunflower oil in the fabric of the home. All three grandparents ushered him to a lace-covered dining table and served hot tea, while Tomislaw changed into a clean shirt. The grandparents—two of them women—stood against the stained, floral wallpaper and stared at him, smiling nervously, while the heavy, dark-haired wife herded the children into another room. But the whole time there, Emil could make out the children’s shadows beyond the cracked door.

  Tomislaw appeared at another door, a fresh, brown shirt hanging from his bones. He smiled as he sat down. “What happened to Master Crowder,” he said, using the title a peasant would and simultaneously mauling the language with his accent. He pressed his lips togeth
er in a tight frown, shaking his head. “This city, it will get you.”

  “Tom,” warned his wife. Her sturdy face looked unaccustomed to taking chances.

  “But you heard something? From next door, I mean.”

  “In this apartment?” asked Tomislaw, looking to the grandparents for support. All three faces nodded vigorously. “With the dogs outside and the kids in here, how can I hear a thing?”

  The whole room was in agreement: it was an unassailable point. When Tomislaw smiled, his high, acne-speckled cheekbones became pronounced.

  “Where do you work?”

  Tomislaw sat up straight. “I assemble kneading machines. Huge.” He opened his arms wide. “For factory bread.”

  “And how long have you lived here?”

  “Two years,” the wife said quickly. “We were told to transfer, we have our papers. We were as surprised as you that we ended up in such a place.”

  “Of course,” said Emil. But the inside of this aristocratic house, cluttered by their stout Polish furniture and water stains on the walls, no longer resembled anything aristocratic. He smiled reassuringly and opened his notepad. “I just wondered if you knew your neighbor.”

  “Sure,” said Tomislaw, pointing to the door with an oil- darkened thumb. “Sometimes, we sat out there and had a vodka, maybe some brandy.” He used his thumb and forefinger to measure the height of a shot. “Just a little. Or his wine. Bull’s Blood. From Eger.” He raised his brow proudly. “He told me about his songs. You know his songs? There’s a right in the might of the valley!” he sang in a tuneless march, but Emil recognized it—again from kerchiefed children’s throats. He could hear the little ones in the next room giggling at their father’s performance. Their mother shot a silencing look at the door.

  “What else did he talk about?”

  Tomislaw ran his fingers through a pack of cigarettes, finally coming up with a twisted, loose one. Tobacco peppered the tabletop. “Money, what else? He said he could spend more than anyone he knew. Even with all those songs. Can you imagine? He always ran out.”