After a while a kid from Materials showed up and took photographs. We watched him and drank the rest of the wine.
“Someone else was here,” I said. “Stefan had a guest.”
“Is that who killed him?” asked Leonek.
Emil was in the bedroom, grasping at more inexplicable details he would take with him to his death, but Moska was within earshot. He set his wine on the kitchen table, beside the soups. He and Leonek waited.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The door was open when I arrived, and Stefan’s behind it. Seems like Stefan opened the door for the killer. If his dinner guest had done it, he’d be dead in the kitchen-the meal wasn’t finished.”
“This Nestor Velcea came to the door?” asked Moska.
“Looks like it.”
“Nestor was hit, too,” said Leonek. “He left his blood on the stairs.”
“Or it’s the guest’s blood,” I said, rubbing my temples to try and clear my head. “But Stefan’s gun hasn’t been fired. If that’s Nestor’s blood in the stairwell, he and the guest were shooting it out.”
Leonek went over the details again. The uneaten food, Stefan lying in a different room, the open bedroom window. “Or Stefan argued with his guest. The argument took them into the living room, and that’s where it happened. The murderer left by the window to avoid neighbors in the corridor.”
“The blood on the stairs,” said Moska. “Somebody went out the front door with a bullet in him.”
“There were at least three people-that’s a fact,” I said, as we stood beside the photographer. Stefan’s skin, beneath the blood, was so white. “One of them left by the front door, and it looks like the other climbed out the window.”
“You don’t know for sure,” said Moska. He looked at me, then settled into a frown that suggested there were other ideas that had not been touched on yet.
“What?”
He shook his head.
A flash blinded everyone momentarily.
“I don’t know anything for sure,” I said. None of us did.
Emil emerged from the bedroom, nostrils wide. “What’s going on here?”
We watched Feder’s men cover Stefan with a sheet, heft him onto a stretcher, and precariously make their way down the stairs.
Sev was waiting in the station to offer his cool condolences. “I know you two were close. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” But his face was not cool-his lips were uncontrolled; they twitched.
Leonek and Emil waited for orders. I sent Emil to grill Stefan’s neighbors and told Leonek to keep a watch on Antonin’s old apartment.
I called Georgi. He listened in silence as I explained in detail why I needed to find Nestor Velcea. “Is Louis in town?”
“Still in Paris.”
“Try and get in touch with him. If they were friends, he may know something. And ask around.”
“I’ll try.”
“Try hard, Georgi.”
I had too much energy. I kept getting up from my desk to walk up and down the corridor, and ignored people who nodded at me. Then I returned to my chair and picked up the telephone. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment. I didn’t know where Stefan’s ex-wife, Daria, was now, but I knew his father had a telephone. The operator connected me with the Pocspetri number, not so far from Magda’s parents’ house.
“Yes?”
He was a heavy man like his son, and, like his son, he lived alone. “Franz? This is Ferenc.”
He paused. We hadn’t talked in a long time. “Ferenc Kolyeszar? Well how are you?”
“Not well, Franz. I’ve got some terrible news.”
He wept, and I pulled the telephone away from my ear and waited. The two of them had grown apart since Stefan’s mother’s death, and I suspected this was at the root of his tears. He didn’t ask many questions, because like most farmers he knew the details were unimportant-only the results mattered. By the time I told him that the funeral would be on Saturday, his tears were under control. “I wish I could make it. But if I don’t get these onions to the market, I’ll be dead, too.”
Around three the photographer showed up with shots of Stefan on the floor, facedown, the blood-soaked wall, food laid out for two, dirty stairs.
50
I put Agnes to bed and sat by her side as she sniffed the air and asked me, very seriously, to stop drinking so much. “You’re worried about me?”
She sank into her pillow. “Not worried. I just don’t like you stinking. You smell like those Romanians who play music in October Square.”
I turned off the light.
Magda handed me a plate of cold chicken when I came out. “I’m going to bed.”
“Stay up a minute, will you?”
She frowned.
“And get some wine. For yourself. I’ve got to tell you something.”
I tried to eat a little as she fooled with the cork in the kitchen, but the first bite was dry and tumbled into my stomach like a rock. I set it aside and was relieved to see she had brought two glasses. She poured them both. “What is it, Ferenc.”
I cleared my throat. It was a theatrical gesture that allowed me a moment and a bit of pain to distract me from what I was preparing to say. “This morning I went over to Stefan’s apartment and found him dead. He’d been shot.”
She finally got to her wine. Her hands did not shake. She said, “That’s not possible.”
“I know.”
“You’ve got to be lying to me. Joking.”
I waited.
“Come on,” she said, then stood up. She looked down at me. “Stefan?” Then she walked into the kitchen.
The affair was nothing to me. My oldest friend was dead, and the man my wife loved was suddenly gone. We had been together too long for me not to feel some of the pain she must have felt.
When she reappeared she was wiping her red eyes with a dish towel. She said, “That’s why you called me.” Her glass was empty, so I filled it up in her hand and watched as she walked over to the radio set, put her hand on it, and looked out the window. “You said he was shot?”
“Yes.”
“Many times?”
“I don’t know how many.”
“He died quickly?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and wondered why I hadn’t lied.
She nodded at the window and finally came back. The glass was empty, and when she sat down I refilled it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He was your best friend.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
She held my gaze. We were fixed like that for a little while, as if we both had a lot of words that we could not say.
She stood. “I’m going to bed now. But would you rather me stay up with you?”
“I’ll be all right. What about you? Do you need me to be with you tonight?”
“Do you need to be with me?”
We looked at each other a moment more.
“I’m okay,” I said.
She nodded, first slowly, then resolutely, and wandered back to the bedroom.
I went for the sheets and wondered selfishly if her decisions were now finally made.
51
The next morning was a Friday. There was an abundance of housewives out in the street, stocking up for the weekend. I leaned into the fogged tram window and hated myself for not having woken up in the same bed as my wife.
Feder was in a subdued mood. He had left Stefan’s body in the drawer so that no one would have to look at him unnecessarily. He told me when I arrived that the other inspectors had already filed through his office-no one was willing to wait for anyone else. So he repeated his performance for me in his empty lab, without having to read from the clipboard in his hand. “Nine millimeter in the stomach. Two shots. I can’t be sure how long it took, but by the signs in the apartment, the smear of the blood, I’d say he was conscious for several minutes.”
“What about the blood on the stairs?”
“Stefan’s was B-this was O-positive. Couldn’t sa
y whose it was.”
“And fingerprints?”
He looked at the clipboard. “Stefan’s prints on the outside and inside of the front door.”
“And the window?”
Feder frowned. “What about the window?”
“The bedroom window. It was open.”
He tapped his pencil on the clipboard. “Well I’m glad I’ve finally been told. All the lab did was the front door.”
“Have them do the dishes as well. Someone was eating with him when he was shot, and I want to know who.”
“Yeah,” said Feder. “I would, too.”
There was a note from Moska on my desk, and when I went to see him Sev was in the office. I waited outside until they finished, then watched Sev watching me as he left. “Enter, Ferenc.”
I sat across from him and told him what Feder had reported. “I want to see what comes of dusting for more prints.”
Moska stared at the pencil in his hand. He twirled it awkwardly. “Look, Ferenc. I’ve got to talk to you about this. It’s not something I like.”
“Tell me.”
“A month or so ago you attacked Stefan, didn’t you?” He was still looking at the pencil.
“In a bar,” I said. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“I’d rather not, unless I have to.”
He used the flat end of the pencil to scratch his scalp. “You don’t have to tell me anything, Ferenc. I’m just trying to clear things up. I’ve got a dead inspector on my hands, and I want to know who killed him.”
“And you think I killed him.”
He aimed the pencil at me. “Ferenc, don’t get self-righteous.”
“Is that why Sev was here? Is he investigating me now?”
“Just tell me: Why the hell did you attack Stefan?”
“Because he was sleeping with my wife.”
He dropped the pencil and inhaled. Then he shut his eyes and pressed them with his fingertips. “Damn,” he said. “Damn. Just get out of here, okay?”
I sleepwalked the rest of the day with Emil, helping him canvass the residents of Unit 21. A plumber accurately described Nestor Velcea entering the building around 6 P.M. Wednesday. “You notice a guy like that,” he told us. A nine-year-old boy verified the story. Only one gunshot had been heard by the neighbors.
“One shot,” said Emil, as we walked to a bar.
“When there were at least three bullets fired. Two for Stefan and a third into Nestor, who ran down the stairs.”
“Nestor was using a silencer. It’s the only answer.”
“So who shot Nestor?”
Over our silent drink no ideas came to us, and afterward I returned alone to Stefan’s spattered apartment to stare at the terrible walls. After a while, I lay down in Stefan’s bed and tried to sleep. The exhaustion was too much. The ceiling went in and out of darkness as I blinked, but when it went black I saw everything, in pieces. Broken shins and femurs, porridge, beaten faces, and bowls of fish soup. And I saw Stefan’s bleeding forehead and the cracked mirror I shoved him into.
Stefan never really recovered after Daria left him. The reason for the break was a mystery-he’d only said that a man can only get so fat before his woman searches for a thinner man. But what else could he have said? If someone asked why my marriage was crumbling, my answers would have been just as ludicrous. Such things cannot be paraphrased.
I rolled over and forced my face into his pillow. It smelled like him, or I imagined it did. Dirty. The smell of the east, as the Frenchman had said. We stink, and we mutilate one another. The clothes we wear and the words we speak are just masks. We take our revenge because we can’t let the past go. Because in the past we were no better-we ate each other like wild, starving dogs.
Maybe it was then. Maybe later, after I drifted off and woke from uncomfortable dreams about a genius painter who becomes, by way of betrayal, a mad killer. Sometime in that restless night the storyteller in me put it together. Antonin’s rise to fame with the help of Josef Maneck, nearly simultaneous with Nestor’s demise. Nestor, the eccentric who wouldn’t even sign his work. And the things Stefan had fretted over: Josef’s sudden conversion to alcoholism because, as Martin had said, he couldn’t live with himself, and Antonin’s shift into the banality of state art. Then I knew it. I knew, with utter clarity, why Nestor Velcea had killed Josef, Antonin, and Zoia. I knew it in a flash, like a vision from God. It was art. It was all about art.
52
I washed in Stefan’s grime-laden tub, dried off with his mildewed towel, used his toothbrush on my teeth, and drank coffee from his cup. I looked out his window at the gray blocks he saw every morning and paused at the same door he opened each day.
At home I pulled out my dress uniform. All inspectors had one, but only brought it out for celebrations or funerals. I was mildly astonished that mine still fit. Magda and Agnes wore identical black dresses, bought from the same sale. Magda had told Agnes about Stefan, and she seemed to be taking it well. On the drive she asked if dying hurt.
“Depends on how you die,” I said.
She shifted in the backseat, looking out the window. “I think when I die, I want it to hurt a lot.”
Magda looked at me. I said, “Why on earth would you want that?”
“Because. That way I know I’m dying. I don’t want it to be a surprise.”
I looked at her in the rearview and wondered if I should be worried.
With the pleasant exception of Kaminski, everyone was there, in uniform, both Moska and Sev with little rows of medals on their chests. It was as if our office had lost its walls and desks, then grown crabgrass and tombstones. A ring of trees separated us from the city, and Lena, in an impressive black gown, toyed with a leaf. Beside Moska stood his wife Angela, a tall, thin woman with a round face that seemed unable to smile.
She was a good woman, everyone agreed, but she seldom spoke to any of us. Agnes and Magda shook hands with everyone, Magda a little shamefully-she hadn’t seen most of them in a long time-and Agnes boldly. Agnes gave Leonek a big hug, which surprised Magda. She pulled Agnes back, blushing, and said, “Hello again, Leonek.”
Leonek left a hand on Agnes’s shoulder and smiled back.
Emil’s uniform looked too big for him, but it was better pressed than anyone’s. I assumed Lena had taken care of that. “Can I take your husband away a moment?” I asked her.
She smiled and let go of his arm.
We’d made it to a fresh grave not yet covered with grass before he said, “What is it?”
“Nestor Velcea. I know what he’s doing.”
“Then please, for Christ’s sake, tell me.”
I took a breath, then spoke it aloud for the first time. “Antonin Kullmann turned in Nestor so that he could steal his work. All of it. Antonin signed his name on the paintings, and Josef Maneck, the curator, showed them. The guilt turned Maneck into a drunk, and when Zoia learned of it she left Antonin.”
He patted his schoolboy hair. “It’s a stretch.”
“Not entirely. Take a look at the early Kullmann paintings and compare them with the newer ones. Even Stefan saw the difference. Kullmann ran out of Nestor’s paintings and had to make his own finally. I’d been trying to figure out why Nestor had mutilated Antonin, had put him through such pain. It’s because he took his whole life away. He took everything. And I’ll bet that if we look into it, we’ll find that Antonin had been supporting Josef’s lifestyle, in order to keep him quiet about it all.”
“It’s too simple,” said Emil. “How could this kind of thing remain secret?”
“Nestor never showed his work. No one knew it.”
“Somebody must have known.”
“Zoia did. Because they all lived together. Maybe someone else did, too, but this at least gets us moving.”
“But why did he kill Stefan?”
“That, I don’t know,”
He shook his head. “Good job, Ferenc. Really. I wish I’d come up with it.”
/> “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you a thing or two before this is over.”
Georgi brought Vera. I shook Georgi’s hand and gave Vera a hug as my family loitered with the others. “What are you doing here?”
The corners of her lips twitched into a sneer. “You don’t think I remember Stefan? I knew him.”
“Years ago, and you only met a couple times.”
“I didn’t want Georgi to be all alone. He needs a shoulder. By the way, the uniform suits you.”
Vera and Georgi greeted my family. Occasionally during the ceremony I shot glances back at both women standing beside one another, Magda erect beside Vera’s slouch. Beneath my fear I noticed how different they were-their looks, their characters, the way they made love. I was their only shared attribute.
We stood stiffly during the reading, and now and then I caught Sev’s gaze wandering over to evaluate my grief. The casket was open, and Stefan’s uniform was too tight on him, pulling around the belly. Magda was surprisingly dry-eyed, while Agnes clutched her hand and gaped. We were all surprisingly dry-eyed. All except Leonek, who wept quietly.
53
The guys invited me out for drinks, but I looked back at Magda and Agnes and declined. We drove in silence, and silence reigned at home. Agnes turned on the radio, then sat with Pavel on the floor, while Magda prepared dinner. I watched Agnes for a long time, but thought only of Stefan.
Agnes bored of Pavel and found a newspaper crossword puzzle to work on. Pavel climbed into my lap. There was a documentary on the radio-not American, but ours-on the history of the nation and the ethnic diversity that made it an ideal home for socialism.
I scratched Pavel’s ear absently.
Stefan could no longer ease his pain by confessing to me, and I could not sit him down and forgive him. I pressed my eyelids, remembering moments of our childhood in Pocspetri, and later, after Daria left him. I’d distanced myself from him, and with his mother’s death Stefan’s life was empty of almost everything, except regret.
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