“Emil?” Leonek said.
Brano Sev had hung up the telephone and was staring at him. Emil nodded his recognition. The security inspector turned his simple, peasant’s face back to the paperwork on his desk.
“Some coffee?”
He blinked at Leonek and knew, finally, that he had made a mistake. He had suspected it before, ever since they sat in the station waiting for the Sighet train, but now it was undeniable. There was no place to hide in this country; there was no place out of reach. He had left her in a little village, unprotected, and anyone with his file would be able to figure it out in five minutes. Michalec had a whole universe of files at his fingertips. He could send any number of shadows into the countryside to close in on Lena Crowder.
“Leonek,” he said, deciding everything as the words came out. “You have to get her for me. Forget everything else. You have to protect her.”
Leonek began to make a joke about only wanting coffee, but changed his mind when he saw Emil’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
*******************
The rain-wet blacktop stretched unnervingly into the darkness—this midnight flight had been the earliest available. He imagined slick rubber tires skidding forward, then the explosion amid the pine trees at the far end of the runway. The Soviet stewardess, a pretty Georgian in a long, straight skirt, told him to hurry. He turned back to the fat Aeroflot plane and mounted the steps. His feet were numb.
Through the window he saw the propellers kick and begin to spin. The vibration shook the whole cabin. Businessmen and government men—all the shades of Slav—cracked jokes among themselves. The stewardess made sure he was strapped in, and he noticed her hair was tied tight beneath a blue cap that reminded him of his nurse, Katka, in her medical cap. Hospitals.
Again, violent deaths. Explosions.
She smiled very close to his face—some musky scent from Moscow department stores—and he tried to relax, thinking of the field in Ruscova, of Lena, but he only saw men in tall grass, converging on Irina Kula s fenceless house.
The takeoff was shaky and insecure, but no one else seemed concerned.
He could tell the government bureaucrats by the smug way they called the stewardess over and tapped her ass to send her on her way. The businessmen were the ones who laughed loudly; the bureaucrats supplied the jokes. He’d heard there was big business to be done in Berlin—supplying a decimated city always took work. And these days, with all supply trucks cut off from the western half of the city, some westerners migrated east during the day to buy the goods the Americans and British hadn’t yet dropped from their planes.
He’d only seen pictures of Berlin: flattened residential buildings and fire-gutted churches. Some newer news clips showed women and children wrapped in gray blankets, crowds huddling around military transports full of bread. Three years after the defeat, and Berlin was still crippled and hungry.
When he felt flush he waved at the stewardess and she brought a paper cup of tepid water. She held it to his lips and whispered something he could not hear above the whine of the engines.
Then the cabin became very cold. For those without heavy coats, she retrieved blankets, and, covered by his, Emil turned to the window, where black clouds merged into black, starless sky. He wondered what the pilots could be using for navigation. He felt like a peasant facing a locomotive. Everything was beyond him.
Emil was astonished by how solid the chilly earth at Schonefeld felt. The Russian customs officer, a severe young soldier, looked him up and down and jotted his name in a notebook. A second guard stamped passports between yawns. It was three-thirty in the morning.
A taxi driver approached him, and Emil shared the ride with a fat bureaucrat he thought he recognized as one of the famous “thick Muscovites,” but wasn’t sure. He had a dramatic mane of wavy hair rising from his forehead. “Hell of a town,” he said, nodding at the shadowy ruins passing them by. “Been here before?”
Emil shook his head.
He stuck a thumbnail between his lips and picked at his front teeth. “But you can’t sleep here anymore. This trash with the Allies. Blockade, airlift, Christ—planes all hours of the night!” He cracked his window and let the cold hiss inside. “The Germans are remarkable people. Like slow-witted insects who don’t get it. They just turn up the jukeboxes and dance!”
He laughed at his own observation, and Emil noticed the taxi driver looking at them in the rearview. He was a thick-jowled man who steered with one arm. The other sleeve was pinned flat. A veteran, maybe. A one-armed veteran forced to listen to foreigners’ views on his people. The bureaucrat opened the window the rest of the way, and they could now hear the far-off murmur of airplanes.
The Hotel Warsaw was one of the few comfortable places in the Soviet sector. Half the buildings on the street were shells of rubble. He had seen this kind of damage on that train ride back from Helsinki, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, tall buildings compressed until they came up to your nose. It made him wonder how much space the Capital would take up if all the air were sucked out of it. A home was always smaller than you thought.
The Warsaw was generally filled to capacity, but when Emil tried out his German on the morose desk clerk, he learned that a small, cold room—just big enough for the bed frame and a sink—had recently been cleaned. He took it. His head lay near the windowpane, and through it came the whine of engines. It was like flies buzzing in his ear, and he wished he had a bottle of plum brandy to put himself out. He wished he had a stomach that could take that much liquor. He wished he could stop thinking of Lena. He would have to lie here until sleep, at its leisure, claimed him. Then, from the exhaustion of his anxiety and the low, dull pain of his wounds, it did.
The airplanes had not ceased.
After a shower down the hall, he bought the sector’s currency —Ostmarks—at a bad rate from the front desk, and breakfasted in the hotel café. The bureaucrat from last night sat with a young brunette who looked like she had weathered a storm. She sipped at her coffee and stared straight ahead, while the bureaucrat shoveled fluffy eggs into his mouth.
It was a cool, brisk morning. There were a lot of pedestrians out, going to work, which was strange against the backdrop of a demolished city. It brought him back to that first year when he returned to the Capital, after the Arctic. Women in thick heels stepped carefully over broken bricks and stood outside shops waiting for work and busses. There were few men—German men, at least—except the very young and the very old. Russian soldiers with rifles walked in pairs, watching over everything under a sun that gave no warmth. It was all too familiar.
The rubble of broken buildings had been collected at some corners, and children scrambled up the little mountains, laughing. Some workers in coveralls held hammers and long, discolored boards cannibalized from exploded homes. Now and then his cane slipped, and he grew accustomed to watching the broken sidewalks. Ahead, a crowd descended into a metro station.
Always, the backdrop of planes. Buzzing.
It took a while, maybe an hour, before he picked them out. Ever since arriving, he had been paying close attention to faces. Maybe too much attention. He hadn’t seen a thing. When eyes met his he paused a moment to give them a once-over, or stopped now and then to look around, playing the lost tourist. Then, while looking at a store window stocked with ten colors of fabric, he noticed a man pause at a display of children’s clothes. Low-slung fedora. A leather overcoat.
He couldn’t know for sure, so he crossed to the other side of the street, took the corner, and waited in the blackened doorway of a firebombed restaurant. The man appeared soon, hands in his coat, and was followed by a partner. Fedora, leather coat and, for distinction, thick prescription glasses. The first was wide-faced, fat, while the one with glasses was thin. They both had serene, unsmiling faces.
Russian Intelligence. MVD. He was expected.
He left the doorway and took some streets at random. His shadows held back as he made his way up streets; then, ju
st before he took a corner, they began jogging after him. Near an uprooted park, he found a sidewalk café and sat in the shade. By the time his coffee had arrived, the two men were at the edge of the park, waiting. They sometimes came together and talked, nodding and shrugging, and once a third man recognized them and shook their hands before leaving. Emil paid for his coffee, but did not leave. He gazed at the other customers, some pretty girls and an old man. He tried to clear his mind, to look utterly at ease, but when he did that, Lena came inevitably to him, and worry thickened his throat.
Finally, the shadow with the glasses spoke to his partner (who gave an unexpected, broad smile) and walked away.
Emil waited. Once the man was out of sight—looking for a telephone, perhaps, or a car—Emil got up and left the café.
The abandoned partner hesitated, unsure and again unsmiling, then followed.
Emil took quick turns, hobbling along, and dove into small, unlabeled streets. He was getting himself lost, he knew, but that wasn’t his worry now. In some dark alleys, men slept among trash cans, and in others, plump prostitutes muttered at him. Then he appeared in an empty, bomb-damaged courtyard with three possible avenues of escape. It was lined with trashcans on one side and a high pile of discarded clothing on the other. Emil crouched behind the clothes, as low as the pain would allow. The soiled clothes stank of death.
In no time the fat Russian appeared, gasping. He looked up each alley, considering the possibilities. Then he chose the middle way, and rushed forward.
Emil waited for his breath to return and his heart to slow. Then he backtracked, leaning more heavily on his cane. His stomach was troubling him again. A prostitute recognized him and smiled. “Change your mind, sweetheart?”
He offered a few coins and asked the fastest way to Wilhelm Strasse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
*******************
Wilhelm Strasse 14 was one of four buildings that survived on its block. It rose three floors, noticeably tall and skinny amid the ruins scattered around it. On the steps, three children blocked Emil’s way.
“Pay the toll,” said the tallest one, maybe twelve.
“Yes yes,” said a smaller one. Eight, or nine. “Money.”
Emil considered their grimy, open hands a moment. “Listen,” he said. Their faces wrinkled as they tried to place his accent. “You clean these steps, and I’ll pay you. I mean it—will you look at them? They’re filthy.”
The tall boy cocked a head that had been shaved bald to rid him of lice. “You’re Russian?”
“Close enough.” He stepped past them into the foyer, where the mailboxes placed a κ. messer on the second floor. He looked back at the children and made a swirling motion with his index finger. “Clean!”
Hardly any light leaked into the stairwell, only the buzz of planes, and he had to feel his way up. There was something foul- smelling here, turpentine or urine; he couldn’t place which. On the landing, he had two doors to choose from. One had been struck repeatedly until the wood around the handle had shattered. When he pushed it open, dusty sunlight from the empty apartment illuminated the other door behind him. He knocked and waited.
“Yes?” came a thin voice.
Emil knocked again. “Konrad Messer?”
The door opened a few inches. A tall man with dark hair swept over his brow stared at him. “The very same. Who the hell are you?”
“Emil Brod. I’m a homicide inspector.”
Konrad Messer nodded. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Noon,” said Emil.
“Smartest Slav I ever met.” Konrad showed straight, clean teeth when he smiled, then licked his lips, and at first Emil thought from these gestures that the man was scared, really terrified, then he wasn’t sure.
“I need to ask some questions.” Emil took off his hat. “I’ve come a long way.”
Konrad opened the door. He wore a short, rose-colored silk robe and Oriental slippers. “Do I look ready to answer your questions?”
Emil was out of words. He shrugged.
“Where are you from, then?”
Emil told him. “I’m here about Janos Crowder.”
Konrad judged him a moment more. His thin, arched brows were almost sculpted, and his skin looked soft. But his thick nose was as bent as a boxer’s. He sighed finally. “Then come on. I need to get ready for work anyhow.”
The bright apartment was fully furnished. Konrad pointed beside the sofa to a large radio set.
“Put something on. And don’t touch anything.” He disappeared behind a door.
When the radio warmed and the dial glowed, Emil heard a voice speaking in German with a heavy American accent. “Operation Vittles, the goodwill of the Allies toward the German people.”
“Something lighter7.” came Konrads annoyed voice.
There was big band music on another station, Duke Ellington, and Emil tapped his foot, remembering the music he’d heard in Helsinki. It was fast music, good for dancing, but when he returned home there was none of that business anymore. Stravinski, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. No Ellington, no Mercer, no Basie. He’d almost forgotten the world còuld produce such fine music.
At the window, Emil hummed beneath his breath and looked out over the field of rubble that surrounded them. Red Army trucks navigated the crumbled hills, and Berliners waited at corners for busses he didn’t see. To the west he could just make out Allied planes descending through the haze.
“Quite a view,” said Konrad, dressed now in tan slacks and a red cravat folded inside his open collar.
“Janos Crowder came here in February, didn’t he?”
“All business.” Konrad sat down and took out a cigarette. “Just don’t start talking ill of the dead.”
Emil pulled up a small cushioned chair and opened his own cigarettes. Despite a fine covering of white powder, he could make out the thick black follicles on Konrads jaw line. Konrad lit both their cigarettes with a heavy glass lighter.
“Are you working for the Russians?”
Emil shook his head. “I’m just trying to find out why Janos was killed.”
“How’s that wife of his? Liza?” Konrad picked tobacco from his lip.
“Lena.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Someone’s after her.”
“Someone?”
“To kill her.”
Konrad bit the nail on his little finger, and thought. “Fair enough,” he said finally, as though something had been decided. He held Emil’s gaze. “Janos Crowder was a beautiful man, you know that? Intense eyes, statuesque. Did you ever see him?”
“Only in the morgue.”
Konrads mouth hung open a moment, then closed. “Janos Crowder was a genius. A real one. You’ve heard his songs?”
Emil nodded.
“Then you know. He wasn’t the kind of man who can keep track of the mundane side of life. Money, taxes, friendships. He kept losing it all. It wasn’t his fault. No one understood him. Do you follow?”
Emil said he did.
“But I understood him,” he said, settling back in the chair. “I think Janos knew that. We were what you would call very close.”
It was in the enunciation of “close”—intim. That, and the robe and all the dramatic sighs. Emil understood completely. He cleared his throat, and knew he was blushing.
Konrad smiled at his discomfort. “This is not so strange. Difficult to prance around in public, maybe, but always a large, unspoken clan. Before the Kristallnacht it was different. We ran Berlin. But like everyone, we learned to shut up. Or go join our Jewish friends.”
Emil nodded brusquely. “This is why he visited you? You were…”
“This is how we knew each other,” said Konrad. “We saw each other when we could, usually once a year or so. Keep the fire burning, and so forth. Does that surprise you?” He sculpted the edge of his cigarette ash, rotating it in the ashtray. “But this is not why Janos Crowder visited me in February.” He tapped his forehead and smiled
. “This time he loved me for my mind.”
Emil waited. Duke Ellington had ended, and someone he didn’t know played a sappy waltz.
Konrad crossed his legs at the knee. “We’d been in contact for weeks before he came to Berlin. Telephone. A friend of his was in trouble. Was being blackmailed for a lot of money. And the incriminating evidence, it seemed, was here in Berlin. He didn’t know what the evidence was, or where. But, knowing of my extensive contacts, he asked for my help.” Konrad frowned. “I could never say no to him.”
Both their cigarettes had gone out, and each offered the other his own. Emil accepted the American tobacco, but Konrad shook his head. “No offense,” he said as he lit another one.
He described how he talked with Soviet colonels and lieutenants who frequented his nightclub. “Even the Slavic soul has room for liberal love,” he said, toying with Emil. “They come for the stage shows, and stay. All rather wonderful.”
Emil realized his arms were clenched uncomfortably, so he crossed them over his stomach. “Go on.”
In the mist of their blissful intoxication, the Soviet officers listened to Konrad s subtle inquiries and smiled, clapped their hands, and told him everything. “Janos’s friend, it turned out, was very well known to all of them.”
“Jerzy Michalec?” Emil tried.
Konrad s eyes swelled. “You really are exceptionally bright for a Slav. You should be proud.”
“I am,” he said.
“Well, the Russians had no real dirt on this Michalec character—some war hero, they said. But they didn’t call him Michalec. Something like—Smerrykov?”
“Smerdyakov. It’s from Dostoyevsky,” said Emil.
Konrad winked, ever more impressed. “Exactly. So I talked more to my friends—my German friends, of which I still have a considerable number. This Michalec—or Smerdyakov—apparently has even a third name. Do you know this one as well?”
The Bridge of Sighs Page 18