The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  The peasant in the distance had stopped, leaning on his scythe to stare back. The blade glistened. Beyond him were stalks of wheat. In Ruscova they worked in groups of five and ten, cutting swaths over the low hills, down to the winding creeks,and dozed after lunch in the shade of a haystack, waiting for the sun to become merciful. He’d done some of it himself— hateful, hot work he’d never gotten used to. A cool breeze ruffled the stalks around the peasant, who now sharpened his blade with a stone. The scraping sound came faintly on the wind. Emil was very thirsty. He banged the door with a fist. It was jerked open.

  “Comrade Michalec is attending to other matters,” said the butler, a stiff, anxious grin on his face. “You may return later.”

  “I’ll wait inside.” Emil inserted his foot in the closing door, then leaned into it.

  The marble entryway was cool and dark, and ahead rose a wide, spiraling staircase. He had seen this before, or something like it, in a picture show. A melodrama on the aristocracy. “Tell Comrade Michalec I’ve come on urgent state business. I’ll wait for him here.”

  The butler was visibly angry, but controlled himself. Emil found it vaguely disappointing. He wanted a reason to put his fist in the man’s face. Anything. But the butler only unfolded an arm in the direction of a chair beside a rack of coats and umbrellas. Then he disappeared up the staircase with a soft pat pat of feet.

  It was like Lena Crowder’s house in its absolute distance from anything Emil could ever imagine calling home, but even he could see that its scale was far more grandiose. There were no family portraits crowding the walls, no framed Orders of Lenin, nothing personal at all. The scarlet drapes covering the high windows looked foreign—Oriental—and new. The chair beneath him was modern, angular. Uncomfortable. Not made for human forms.

  He shouldn’t have come here, not in this mood. All mood, no facts. He had no idea why a políticos—a war hero, no less—was in the photographs of a dead man, or why those photos were hidden behind an icebox. Whoever tore apart the dead men’s apartments—were they looking for these pictures? For the money? Jerzy Michalec, at least, had no need for money.

  He paced, soles clicking on marble, his nerves slowly unraveling. Through the front window, the peasant swung his scythe again—slowly, ploddingly. You could put a peasant on a machine and know that, barring mechanical failure, that machine would go on for eternity. For nothing.

  In place of family heirlooms was a sculpture centered along the wall, on a white pedestal. It was a long, vertical sliver of metal, curved slightly, thicker in the middle, pointed at the top and bottom. Perfectly smooth. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. And in the mist of the morning’s drinks, he hated it.

  Pat pat

  The butler trotted down the staircase with a worried eye measuring the distance between Emil and the sculpture. “I’m sorry, Comrade Inspector,” he said, raising his voice dryly. “Comrade Michalec cannot make exceptions when he’s working on his own state business. I’m sure you understand.”

  Emil smelled the tonic lotion in the butler’s hair as he pushed past and started up the staircase.

  “Did you hear what I said?” called the butler, close behind. “The Comrade is exceedingly busy; he’ll get in touch when he’s able. Inspector!”

  Emil was running now, skipping steps, reaching the second floor, where the long red rug slid and buckled beneath his feet, past closed doors toward the sound of a man’s voice ahead. On the dark oak walls paintings appeared, but they were nothing like people. They were splashes of color, unidentifiable shapes. Unformed. Disturbing.

  “Inspector! Inspector!”

  The heavy door at the end of the hallway was half-open, spilling light, and he struck it with his palm. An office, vast walls covered with book spines. He stopped to catch his breath. A marble-topped desk in the center, where the shorter man from the photograph talked loudly into a black telephone.

  “Yes, of course, yes,” he was saying, not looking at Emil. His face was pitted by old acne scars, their shadows lengthening as he nodded, smiling into the telephone. He even ignored the butler s whispered protests about the inspector he could not control. Jerzy Michalec waved his butler into silence with the back of his hand.

  He looked nothing like a war hero. Certainly not a Smerdyakov. He was fatter than the pictures suggested, and his dark suit hung on him poorly, wrinkled at the joints. He rested his neutral gaze on Emil and said into the receiver, “Of course, we’ll do that then. Give her my best. Until later.” He hung up and gave Emil a cool smile. “So you’re the impatient inspector?” He had a voice of so many accents that it was untraceable.

  “I tried-”

  “Radu. Tell the trade commissar I’ll be with him in a moment.”

  Radu bowed and withdrew.

  Michalec’s eyes were a cool blue, surrounded by wrinkled, blackened sockets. He sniffed. “I assume you don’t need anything more to drink.” He reached into a pocket and removed a small red booklet emblazoned with a gold, five-pointed star inside a ring of golden laurel. Above it was a hawk at rest, its head in profile. “Comrade Inspector, do you know what this is?”

  Emil stepped from one corner of the desk to the other, ready to snap, but he spoke clearly: “Proof of membership in the Party.”

  “Yes, and no.” Michalec settled into his chair. His gravelly voice had a way of communicating in each syllable his disregard for Emil. He held the booklet out for him to read. “What does it say beneath the star?”

  Black block print: political section.

  “I’d heard,” said Emil.

  “Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the terminology. Many people are unclear. Times change quickly, and you have to pay attention to everything in order to survive. Believe me.” Michalec leaned back in his chair and tossed a foot on the edge of his neat desk, folding the red card into his shirt pocket. “It’s not simply a word.Políticos has meaning. We, as members of the Political Section, have very specific duties. And these duties confer upon us specific rights. You’re following?”

  He felt like he was back in the Academy. It was a hateful feeling.

  “For example,” said Michalec, “a políticos cannot be imposed upon in the normal course of his duties. Not even by members of the Security Section. Unless, of course, there’s some specific piece of evidence making this necessary. Is there, Comrade Inspector?”

  Emil tossed the ten photographs on the desk. They scattered. “Tell me who you’re talking with.”

  “Maybe you’re as deaf as you are stupid,” said Michalec, only half-glancing at the images. “I knew a políticos once who walked into a Militia station, pulled out a pistol, and shot the station chief.” He raised his arm and used his hand to shoot Emil, then dropped it and shrugged. “The chief had made him angry. Today that man is a member of the Central Committee inner circle, the Politburo.” His smile became wider, more convincing. “I, Comrade Inspector, am very close to the Politburo myself.”

  “Look at the photographs.”

  The smile disappeared, and Michalec pressed his fingers to his cheeks. “I’m giving you good advice, Inspector.” His voice had lowered an octave. “We don’t make the rules. Others make the rules. We can only try to live by them.”

  Emil tapped the desk. “The photographs.”

  Michalec put up his other foot and crossed his ankles.

  Emil picked up the photos, one at a time, his impotence burning inside him. He saw everything at once, like a mystic: the two dead men in the city morgue and the dead soldiers in Berlin, twenty-three in a pile; he saw the hatred and suspicion and ignorance, the wars and the marching little children singing their inane political lullabies; a Bulgarian on the ice. He put nine photos back into his pocket. Busted bodies, bodies kicked in the mud. The tenth photo remained in his left hand. Hookers and pensioners and soldiers and Jews—and Lena—all nothing to the ferocious gears of this world.

  With his right hand, he snatched an ankle and threw it high, so that Michalec spilled back with
his chair. He rolled on the rug, stunned and silent, then Emil was on his chest. He wanted fear. A little terror. But there was only dull shock in Smerdyakov’s eyes, then contempt.

  Emil slapped him hard, three times. Both cheeks were red, the eyes wet.

  “Again,” said Emil, forcing the words through his teeth. He held the photo to Michalec’s face. “The name.”

  Michalec’s blinking eyes focused on Emil’s, then past them. He trembled; his eyeballs shivered. Emil drew back. Michalec’s head jerked sideways; his eyes rolled back into his skull. White eyes riddled with fat, red veins.

  A sputtering groan came from Michalec’s throat, and his whole body seized up, shaking, blue cords rising from his neck.

  A hand on Emil’s shoulder tugged him back, and he saw a flash of Radu’s furious face, then a black stick coming down.

  Pain snapping in his head and neck, trickling like cold water, reverberating.

  It did not put him out, but made him briefly senseless. Radu was over his master, stuffing something into his mouth, holding an arm over his chest.

  Emil closed his sore eyes and saw bright lights.

  When he opened them again, Michalec was wiping his forehead with a hand, eyes closed, and Radu was returning to Emil, swinging the club. He threw up a hand, wanting the strength of his anger back, but it was too late. The club hit the side of his head, burning bright sparks in his skull.

  Pulled to his feet. Heard come on as he was pushed forward, stumbling. Get out came through the hazy noise in his head, and he wanted to stop and turn around and throttle someone, but couldn’t make it happen. There was another thump on the back of his head halfway down the staircase, and it felt like something had cracked.

  For a moment he was still awake—suddenly clear-headed and thinking—and then he wasn’t.

  He was lying in the hot front seat of the Mercedes. His skull felt shattered. Eyes open. Eyes closed. Open. He sat up. The low sun burned his brain. There was blood on his hands, on the passenger’s seat, and in the mirror his tender mouth was crusted with blood. He could smell his own bile and sweat in the stuffy car. He was parked at the beginning of that long drive, by the main road. The light spiked his eyeballs. Poplar trees led up to the rise, and off to the right the bearded peasant swung his scythe in long, low arcs.

  They were staring. His right eye was already puffing up, and he had patted down his hair in an unsuccessful attempt to cover the red scratches around his neck and ears. His head was about to explode. They all could see plainly what had happened, could read everything in his wounds, but he didn’t care. He was as loathed here as he was in Smerdyakov’s house. But it no longer mattered. Nor did his grandfather, not even Lena. For the moment, there was no one else in the world. The beating and the shame were nothing; he would be willing to suffer so much more if there were some sense to it all. But there was no sense. There was nothing here for him.

  No hidden gazes now.

  They watched him stop at his desk and sit down, swivel, and shake his head. It was difficult to ignore them. Pain rippled behind his eyes and throbbed across his skull. From the drawer he took the pen tips, ink and cigars, and found pockets to hold them. He moved his father’s watch to his breast pocket. He left the stamps behind.

  Leonek Terzian was standing in front of Emil’s desk, fingertips spread on the surface. His face showed something approximating compassion—or was it a trick of the light? It was certainly the buzzing in his skull that added compassion to Terzian’s voice: “Michalec called. Angry.” He shook his head. “You attacked Smerdyakov?”

  It wasn’t compassion. It was amusement. Hilarious bruises. Funny, broken boy.

  He tapped the chief’s door, and before he could say enter, Emil was in, closing the door with his backside. The air seemed to compress in that hot, small room.

  “There you are.” Moska hung up the telephone.

  Emil took out his Militia certificate. Not much different than Michalec’s, only green instead of red, with the word militia. He tossed it in front of the chief.

  “What’s this?”

  “Resignation.”

  The word contained within its syllables so much relief that he almost dropped to the concrete floor and cried. But he wanted to make it out in one piece.

  “Now wait, Brod.”

  But Emil was already back in the station house. There was nothing else to take with him, so he passed the inspectors—it was strange, even after only a week, to no longer call himself one. They looked surprised, even big Ferenc, hovering over his typewriter, but Emil didn’t know why they should feel surprise. This moment had been preordained from the very start. Terzian was calling something to him. Asking him to wait. Emil had waited too long already.

  He passed into the corridor that echoed his footsteps and Terzian’s voice behind him-”Hold on, Brod, wait!” Emil stepped onto the bright concrete steps. He wondered if Terzian wanted a repeat of that first day.

  By God, he’d give it to him. He was in just that sort of mood.

  “Brod!”

  A car at the corner laid on the horn to get some horses moving, and a band of Gypsies carried heavy sacks on the opposite side of the street. People shouted, but the buzzing was so loud that their shouts were like whispers. He was on the hot, cracked sidewalk, walking nowhere. Some uniforms looked up—more laughers, no doubt. What a funny town.

  He wanted to take a bath at Lena Crowders grand house, among those paintings. Long beards of history. He wanted Lena Crowder to use her white, intoxicated fingers on his back and his bruised eye. He would go see her. Yes. Get a ride. A taxi.

  “Brod!” Terzian whispered back there.

  Another car, blue, driving beside him—a small, sleek make he didn’t know—honked. It was like a whisper too. The buzzing was a river in his head.

  But when he longed for Lena Crowder he remembered her husband’s crushed skull. It was all sickness and disease anyway, and he might as well search for a hooker with stubby workers’ fingers and a low price. Young, old—it no longer mattered.

  The blue car moved ahead a short distance and stopped. A tall man in a light-colored overcoat stepped out. Another familiar face, but from where? Over the noise of his skull he could hear the man’s accented voice saying, “Comrade Emil Brod?”

  The man had curved smile lines that connected his lips to his eyes. Emil stopped. “Yes?”

  The smile lines deepened as the man pulled out a pistol with his white-gloved hand. There was an instant in which Emil’s mind did the work very quickly and identified it as a Walther. Probably a PPK. Officer’s gun, German—German, like his accent. But as soon as the identification was made, it fled his mind.

  The man emptied three rounds into Emil, jumped back into the car, and swerved away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  *******************

  It was a sharp connection: his head against concrete. His hands wobbled out to the sides, somewhere, his knuckles scratched. Tires burned against the road. Carbon monoxide and hot rubber. The sky fuzzed over and was visible again, and his thumping heart obscured all sounds. The buzzing was gone; only the backbeat of his blood remained. He could not even hear the yell- shaped mouth of the dark, hungry face bent over him. The name came to him in a flash: Leonek. Leonek’s mouth made long ovals as he yelled at the crowd forming around them. Wide-brimmed fedoras and women’s shoes, vivid, red-painted nails emerging from white leather straps. Breathing was forced labor; there was soon nothing in him. He tried to raise his head to swallow the air, but something was sitting on his chest, maybe Leonek, or the Bulgarian, but he couldn’t know. He couldn’t see a thing except blue sky, then nothing. He was sinking in a warm, watery pain, an angry bathwater covering him in blackness.

  A mountain range, high grass above the treeline, tired soldiers poking through the underbrush, looking. They evaporated to white and faded into an angry, violent crowd with large, flat rocks in their hands. They threw in silence. Then came the hard-edged ache behind his eyelids. He ope
ned them to let it out, but light spilled in, cutting into his brain. His thoughts were porridge. The light would not form into shapes. The smell of human sweat and warm decay was inescapable. Voices hummed around him like flies, louder, and when he tried to swat them, fresh pain erupted and he gasped, gripped by it, his whole body seizing up, crying. He saw the calm, everyday expression on that face, but the details, the features, were unclear—Comrade Emil Brod?—then the pistol emerging slowly, more slowly than possible. He could almost make out the slow bullet in the air pocket that burned around it, hot waves rippling along the slug. Then the moment of impact, cracking through ribs, soft tissue, organs. The pain was terrible. Through it a woman’s voice said there was and Comrade Brod. But he was already out again, warm rivulets filling mouth, nose, eyes.

  The hospital room was high-ceilinged and airy, and when he shifted his head, sore neck creaking, he saw a plain-looking nurse in the corner, knitting. She looked up from her needles to his bloodshot eyes, and he thought that in the midday light she was beautiful.

  “You’re up?” She set the needles aside.

  The pain returned when he tried to move. It scratched through his guts and chest. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a whisper: “Water. “

  She shook her head. He said it again, trying to wet the inside of his mouth with a dry, heavy tongue. But she was firm. The doctor forbade it. “You have holes down there. We don’t need you leaking all over the sheets.” He saw the knitting in her hand. Something blue and small and soft, for a baby. “You’ve been out a week, you know?” She put the knitting in her pocket and felt his face for fever. “We almost thought,” she began, then smiled and left the room.

  The windows were covered by a translucent white drape so thin he could see the crowns of leafy trees and white-spotted sky. The walls hummed like a machine.

  So he was alive.

  It surprised him that he couldn’t think it with more enthusiasm. All he could imagine were innumerable days ahead forming a long line to his eventual death. Days of working and fighting, or days of inertia. He didn’t even have a job now. He wasn’t even an inspector.