The confession tyb-2

by Olen Steinhauer

  I remembered that day, and remembered her inexplicable panic when I asked her who had been listening to the Americans. It had been him-it was the only station he listened to. “So,” I said, “what is it he gives you? What does Leonek give you?”

  She finally stopped looking at that goddamn floor. I could just make out some of her features. She looked old. “I’ve told you before, Ferenc. You’re different. You’re not the man I married. Leonek…I always know how he feels about me. With you I’m never sure.” She took a breath. “And he does love me.”

  “You love him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. He’s good to me, but I don’t know if he’s good for me.”

  I finally moved. I sat up and leaned against the headboard. But I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you going to leave me?” she asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Do you love me anymore?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not even a ‘maybe’?”

  She nodded. “Maybe.”

  I brought my hands to my face and breathed into my palms. The shock was starting to fade, but slowly. All my emotions were a shadow of themselves now, though I could pick them out and count them where they floated just out of reach.

  I got up and put on my clothes. Magda didn’t say a word as I walked out and found the brandy bottle in the kitchen and took it to the freezing garden. Teodor had left his cigarettes outside, and I began to smoke them, one by one.

  57

  In the morning I walked to the cooperative office at the top of the hill because Teodor and Nora’s phone only dialed out locally. I showed my Militia certificate and watched the lame man behind the desk stumble for the telephone and pass it to me. Then I called Moska and told him I was going to the Vatrina Work Camp in order to look up information on my suspect. He sighed and accepted this.

  Magda and Agnes were in the kitchen with Nora, making breakfast. The smell was heavy with grease. Magda looked at me with an expression that said everything without saying a thing.

  After breakfast I threw my bag into the car. She followed me outside.

  “You’re going back home?”

  “Tonight, or tomorrow. I’ve got to check on some things first.”

  She squinted into the breeze.

  “What is it?”

  She said, “Don’t hurt him.”

  “What?”

  “Libarid.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Leonek, I mean. Libarid’s his birth name.”

  “Oh.”

  “His mother made him change it when they came here. She even called him Leonek in private. Damn.” She looked at the dirt. “I’m babbling, and that was a secret. But listen.” She looked at me again. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. This wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I was looking around and he was just there.”

  I took a step away from her. “I can’t promise anything.”

  She looked at the ground again and when she looked back, her eyes glimmered. She was crying so much these days. “Just don’t put all the blame on him. I want to be fair.”

  “Fair,” I repeated, then went in to say good-bye to the others.

  Vatrina was forty minutes to the north and, entering the small farming town with its tiny train station, it was difficult to believe there was a work camp there. Old men dotted the side of the road, walking past fences and puffing on barely visible cigarettes, and three fat women with babushkas huddled around a well. The central square was small, with a grocer’s, a post office, and a modern hotel that didn’t belong-a wide concrete bunker with a sign that proclaimed HOTEL ELEGANT in peeling red paint. I first tried the post office, but there was a long line of young, sunburned men with slips of paper leading up to the one open window, where a woman with dyed black hair smoked and stared at them. So I went into the Elegant. A worn red carpet stretched to the end of the faux-marble lobby, past the entrance to a dark bar, to where a younger black-haired woman sat behind the counter, smoking and reading a paperback. I leaned beside the guest book. “I’m looking for the Vatrina Work Camp, number four-eighty.”

  She held up an index finger, read for a second longer, and closed the book on her other finger. It was a novel by someone I’d met a few times at Georgi’s. “They don’t put work camps in main squares, idiot.”

  She had a nice, round face with an expression that didn’t match what she’d called me. “I don’t have a lot of practice with them.”

  She sighed and turned her book flat on the counter. “What business do you have there anyway?”

  I started to reach for my Militia certificate, but instead patted my coat for cigarettes. I pulled one out and lit it. “My own business. That’s what business I’ve got.”

  She rolled her eyes as if she’d heard this a million times, and that’s when I realized this was how she flirted. Stuck behind a desk in a dead-end town, you learn strange ways of getting a man’s attention. “And you think your own business is important?”

  “I expect it’s more important than chain-smoking in a flea-infested hotel all day.”

  Her face brightened, and she tapped the counter with a fingernail. “Tell me, come on. I know how to keep a secret.”

  I leaned closer to her face. “How can I trust that?”

  “You’ll just have to,” she whispered.

  “But keep it quiet, you understand?”

  She nodded again, seriously.

  I told her I was a novelist researching a book on the history of the Vatrina Work Camp, number 480.

  She leaned back again. “You’re giving me a line. That probably works on a lot of girls. But not this one.”

  I shrugged. “What can I do if you don’t believe me?”

  “You write any other books?”

  “ A Soldier’s Tale. It was a few years ago.”

  She hesitated, then smiled broadly. “Really? I read that! No.”

  I showed her my transit identification papers to prove who I was, and she leaned close again, her voice back down to a whisper.

  “I thought it was ex treme ly good. You know that? You’re a very good writer.”

  I suspected she had never read it, but didn’t press. She told me to drive down the eastbound road six, seven miles. “It’s as plain as day. You staying the night?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’ll be chain-smoking here until six.”

  58

  It lay on the left-hand side of the dusty road, in a flat expanse of harvested wheatfield. The watchtowers were visible first-five wooden columns connected at their bases by barbed wire-and inside lay five long, low buildings. It was as basic as you could imagine, no signs, no indication of purpose. The towers were empty, but when I turned off the road and took a gravel path to the front gate, a guard in a heavy coat wandered out to meet me, patting his arms. He opened the gate and stuck his head in my window. “What can I do for you?”

  His rancid breath quickly filled the car. His teeth were like over-thickened fingernails. “I’m here to talk with the commander.”

  He looked around the inside of the car. “Are you from Yalta Boulevard?”

  “I’m from Militia headquarters. This is part of an investigation.”

  He licked his discolored teeth and inhaled deeply. I braced myself for the exhale. “Mind if I see some evidence?”

  After I showed him my Militia certificate he waved me inside, closed the gate, and pointed to a space between two buildings. He walked me down to the back of the camp, where a muddy field opened up. In the far corner, beside another gate leading out of the camp, was a small building with a smoking chimney and a telephone cable connecting its roof to a tower. That, the guard pointed out, was the commander’s office.

  I walked the rest of the way alone. The guard was the only person I’d seen, and the long buildings, which I assumed were used to house prisoners, were silent and, I also assumed, empty.


  There was a muddy window on each side of the front door, and before I knocked I tried unsuccessfully to see inside.

  “Enter,” came an unpleasant voice. For a moment I was confused.

  Like Moska, the commander sat in a dim room at a disorganized desk surrounded by stacks of files. Some open steel cabinets revealed piles of letters that had been read and stored there. Against the back wall and beside a sooty Mihai, a small iron stove burned, its open grille revealing a few half-consumed papers on the coals. The commander was bald and surprisingly short-his jacket and slacks were too large on him. When he introduced himself as Comrade Captain Gregor Kaganovich, it was with a voice dirtied from a lifetime of cigarettes and shouting. A coal drawing of the captain hung on the wall-well-done, but severely romanticized.

  “I’ve come to ask some questions relating to a case I’m working on.” I handed over my certificate.

  He slipped on a pair of round glasses, turned the certificate in the weak light from the window, then handed it back. “What kind of case are we talking about?”

  “A homicide.”

  “One of my pets get killed?”

  “One of them is doing some killing.”

  He clucked his tongue, as though we were talking about one of his own children. “I’ve heard of this happening before. Some wolves just can’t help but follow their instincts. You can beat them as much as you like, but they can’t be domesticated. Some coffee?”

  “I’m interested in a particular one. Nestor Velcea.”

  He looked at me as he poured a cup, but I couldn’t catch his expression. “No, I’m afraid I can’t remember all my pets. But look around,” he said, waving at the files. “There’s bound to be something.” He handed me the cup and squatted among some stacks. “I tell you, the Comrade Prime Minister could have given us a little warning over this Amnesty, if you know what I mean.” His fingers flipped through the files at an alarming speed.

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, he announces it, and the next day-not in a week, not a month, but the next day — all my boys are out of a job. A lot of them are from the other side of the country, and were transferred here when we needed them. And we did need them. Then one day they weren’t needed.”

  “Then they get transferred somewhere else.”

  “That’s what you’d think, wouldn’t you?” He lifted a file to the light, opened it, then shook his head and closed it. “It wasn’t until the end of the summer they realized they hadn’t followed through on that small point. That’s a lot of men to suddenly transfer. My guess, though, is that they just didn’t know if they’d change their minds and need the boys all over again.”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  He stopped searching and turned to me. “By the end of the summer they had put through transfers for all the camp guards throughout the region. But nothing for our camp. So I made calls, and after weeks of this, finally got some answers. Number four-eighty is going to reopen in the spring.” He smiled.

  “So what are you doing in the meantime?”

  “I’m cleaning up the old files to make room for new ones. But my boys, they’re the ones in a tough spot. They have to wait around in that hole they call a town until spring.”

  “What kind of work did they do here?”

  “The guards?”

  “The prisoners.”

  He tilted his head from side to side. “Everything, really. We’d take them into town to build things-you’ve seen the Hotel Elegant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our work,” he said, tapping his chest. “We have them farm the wheat around the camp, and during the winter they work the gravel up at Work Site Number One.”

  “The gravel?”

  “Sure. About two miles away there’s a quarry, and my pets bash it to hell. But I’ve got some better ideas up my sleeve for when they return. Some digging.” He raised his eyebrows.

  As he leafed through the files, I nodded at the cabinet of letters. “Mail from your admirers?”

  He looked confused, then the smile came back. “Oh those! No. Just letters my pets wrote while we put them up. To the family and that sort of thing. Want to read some?”

  I didn’t.

  Velcea’s incarceration file was interesting. I had my own theory about how things had unfolded, but this at least settled a few facts. On 17 February 1947, an anonymous call to Yalta Boulevard reported that Nestor Velcea, a painter, had been seen handing out an underground broadside called Independence. On 25 February, a handwritten letter arrived at Yalta Boulevard, unsigned, claiming that one Nestor Velcea had been overheard at a party criticizing Comrade Mihai’s foreign policy initiatives in particularly disturbing and violent terms. Then, on 1 March, another call came through. This one said that Nestor Velcea would, on the evening of 3 March, go to the central rail station to meet with an agent of foreign imperialism in order to give away sensitive national information.

  Armed with this knowledge, state security agents waited in the station on 3 March. According to the report, Nestor Velcea arrived at 7:12 P.M. and sat on one of the benches near the ticket windows. He did not purchase a ticket, and he regularly looked around at arriving passengers. At a quarter to eight, he got up to leave, and that’s when he was arrested.

  The rest of the file contained signed transfer documents and arrest paperwork, and some reports on his behavior in the camp over his ten years. Other than various instances of falling ill, his behavior had been exemplary. The final sheet was his amnesty certificate, a form letter with his name scribbled in a blank space, signed and stamped by the camp commander sitting across from me.

  “So what does this tell you, Comrade Inspector? If I can ask.”

  The file told me that Antonin Kullmann had framed Nestor in as methodical and precise a way as he kept his old letters. “Not a lot. I was told he’s missing a finger, that it was cut off by a guard.”

  He winked at me. “They like to spread stories. It gives them a thrill.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “I’ve had a lot of pets here, it’s hard to remember the quiet ones. The ones you remember are the ones who shout all the time, and keep returning to this office for their reprimands.”

  “It looks like Nestor was all right, then.”

  The captain shook his head. “None of them is all right, Comrade. And what he’s done on the outside just proves it.”

  I took my hat from his desk and stood up. “Thank you, then.”

  When we shook hands he held on to mine a little longer. “You get him, now. Make sure you get him alive so we can have him back.”

  “You want him back here?”

  “I’ll make up a bunk for him today. I like to have all my pets back at home…who wouldn’t?” Then he frowned. “Hey-you didn’t touch your coffee!”

  59

  It was only four, but I needed a drink. I’d heard enough about the work camps to know I had walked across soil with a heavy blood content and had talked to one of the most brutal sons of bitches that state security could find-because that’s who you put in charge of work camps, the ones who could stomach it.

  Along the road to the center there were more bars than anything else, so I parked and entered one at random. Young men leaned against high tables and cupped their shot glasses with thick fingers. The bartender smiled thinly at me. “You need a coffee?”

  “Palinka.”

  He poured it and looked me up and down. “You one of the new ones?”

  “The new what?”

  “You know. The new guards.”

  I sipped my drink. “New guards? I heard there were plenty already.”

  He leaned close so he could whisper. “That’s the word. New guards are being shipped in any day now. What are these boys going to do?” He nodded at the drinkers. “They’ve waited long enough as it is.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them.”

  “That’s good for you,” he said with a wink. />
  I leaned on a free table and gazed at the photographs that covered the wall. Shots of “old Vatrina.” The only difference between old and new Vatrina, the photos told me, was the Hotel Elegant, and the camp.

  A thick man with a close-shaved head set his drink next to mine and looked up at the photos, as if unaware of my presence. The back of his neck was swollen with wrinkles where his excess flesh had collected, and his puffy cheeks were riddled with gray pockmarks and stubble. “You come in from the Capital?” he asked the wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “Horia says you’re not a guard.”

  Horia watched us from behind the bar. “That’s true.”

  “It’s all right if you are,” he said to a photograph of a woman and a horse in front of the feed store. “We’re not vindictive here. Everyone’s in the same boat.”

  “I’m still not one.”

  “Then what are you?” He turned to look at me. His eyes were light blue, and below one of them was a scar.

  I said it before I could think it over: “I’m a writer.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Novels.”

  “You mean, stories you make up?”

  “That’s it.”

  He considered this as he finished his shot, walked back to the bar, and returned with two more. He put one in front of me.

  We raised our glasses to each other.

  “So why aren’t you in some cafe in the Capital right now? Why are you on the stinking edge of the world?”

  “Research.”

  “Working on a story about this town?”

  “About the camp.”

  His mouth opened, but then he closed it. He noticed someone at another table. “Hey, Krany!” A little dark-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth looked up. “Krany, come over here.”

  Krany sauntered over with his glass and leaned on our table without looking at me.

  “This guy wants to know about the camp. He’s a writer.”

  Krany put out his cigarette and frowned at the lingering smoke. “Why’re you writing about that, Comrade?”

  “Because somebody’s got to.”