The thick one nodded his agreement, but Krany still wasn’t convinced. “What are you going to say about the camp?”
“I’ll know when I learn more.”
“You some scaremonger who’s going to say we’re a bunch of thugs who like beating up on people?”
“Are you?”
He smiled then, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I offered them to the guards and left the pack on the table.
Krany, it turned out, was primarily a tower man. He had spent his days, summer and winter, up in one of the boxes overlooking the camp and the farmland surrounding it. He was one of the best shots in the camp, and once killed an escapee from a distance of five hundred yards (though his friend disputed that figure). “And he went down. I wanted to get his leg, just stop him, but it ended up going through his head.” He took another of my cigarettes.
The first guard’s name was Filip. He worked down in the mud with the prisoners. Each morning he would herd them out of their cots and march them to the quarry. “It was all about following orders,” he told me. “They were ordered to walk, and if they didn’t, we would hit them. Usually in the stomach and chest, because we didn’t want to break their legs.”
“Come on, Filip,” said Krany. “You broke some legs. I could see you just fine.”
“So you get carried away.”
“It was easier up in the tower. You didn’t have to smell them, you didn’t have to do that kind of work.”
I bought another round and asked if they knew Nestor Velcea. Krany shook his head, but Filip thought it over. “A small guy? What was he…an artist?”
“That’s the one.”
“Sure, I knew him. An okay kid. He thought we didn’t know about all those charcoal drawings he did. But when prisoners clean up a wall, you notice. The wall’s dirty already, and then you’ve got this big clean spot.” He smiled grimly. “Some of them were real idiots.”
Krany nodded. “Yeah, the artist. The one who did Gogu’s portrait.”
“Who’s Gogu?”
“The commander,” said Filip, and I remembered the portrait on the captain’s wall.
I passed out cigarettes, emptying the pack. “But Gogu said he didn’t remember Nestor. Does that make any sense?”
“Of course he remembers Nestor,” said Filip.
“He was pulling your leg,” said Krany. “He damn well knows who Nestor is.”
“But there were a lot of prisoners. Why would he remember Nestor?”
Krany looked at Filip, as if asking something. Filip shrugged. “What does it matter?”
Krany turned back to me. “Last spring, this gray Citroen comes up to the gate. Cosmin checks it, but the driver doesn’t have the right paperwork to come inside.”
“Who’s Cosmin?”
“No one. Another guard. Pay attention, okay?”
I nodded.
“So Cosmin won’t let him inside. And this guy gets out-a big guy, kind of oily hair-and starts shouting for Nestor through the fence. Only it’s daytime, and all the prisoners are off at Work Site Number One. He was a foreigner, maybe he didn’t know any better. So he’s shouting to an empty prison.”
“What kind of foreigner?”
“Don’t know,” said Krany. “But you could tell there was an accent. What a hothead he was. Finally, Gogu had to come out and deal with him.”
“I heard about it that evening,” said Filip.
“We all heard about it,” said Krany. “And this is why Gogu will swear he doesn’t know Nestor. Because the foreigner bribed him with a stack of koronas the size of my fist. Gogu tried to cover it up, he told him to put it away, and they went back to the office to take care of it. But we all saw it. Bribing’s no big deal, just as long as you keep it quiet.”
“So what happened?”
Filip said, “I brought Nestor back from the work site and into Gogu’s office. Gogu stepped outside for a few minutes to leave them alone. Then Nestor went back to work, and the foreigner left.”
“But-what was it about? What did he want?”
Filip finally lit the cigarette I’d given him. “No one knows. We asked Gogu, and he told us to keep out of his business unless we wanted to end up as one of his pets.”
“And Nestor, too,” said Krany. “He wouldn’t say a word, would he, Filip?”
“Not a word. I punched him a few times because I was so curious, but the lump just wouldn’t speak.”
60
It was after seven when I returned to the Elegant with my small bag of clothes. There was a different clerk at the desk, a young man who took my papers and wrote the information in a ruled notebook. In the middle of writing, he squinted up at me. “You came in here before?”
“For information.”
He tossed his head in the direction of the bar. “Tania’s waiting for you.”
I had forgotten about her. My mind was stuck in the realm of barbed wire and mud and beatings, and spending the evening with a woman just didn’t fit in. So I took back my documents and key and walked directly to the stairs, not looking up as I passed the doorway to the bar.
The stairs and the doors and the corridor and the tiny room-all of them had been built by cracked and bloody fingers, slumped backs and sore stomachs. I lay on the bed, my feet hanging off, and stared at the beige ceiling.
There was a knock at the door, but I didn’t get up. I was wondering what was said in Gogu’s office last spring.
The knocking started again, so I got up, grunting, and opened the door. Tania smiled at me. “Think you can get rid of me that easily?”
“Look. I’m tired.”
She put her hand on my chest and pushed me back. I noticed an open bottle of wine in her other hand as she closed the door. “You don’t look so tired to me.”
There was a certain prettiness to her, but I couldn’t see it then. She got two glasses from the bathroom and filled them up. There was no other place to sit than the bed. She tapped my glass against hers and winked.
“You kept me waiting so long I almost found myself another victim. But then I remembered this,” she said, touching the rings on my right hand. “And this.” She touched my chest. Then she set her glass on the floor and moved her round face up to mine. “And this,” she whispered, before kissing me.
The kissing was enough for a while, and we rolled on the bed, a mess of tongues and saliva. Sometimes she got up suddenly, leaned over the edge of the bed as I rubbed the back of her thigh, and took a sip, then returned with wine-reddened lips. But when she started to take off her clothes I stopped her. “No,” I said, and she frowned, took another sip, and began kissing me again.
This was all I wanted, something simple and almost childlike, and that’s all we did until we were lying together on the bed, both very tired.
Tania was twenty-five, had grown up in this town, and the only outsiders she met were connected to the work camp. “I like this, meeting people from all over. Most of them are pretty nice, and sometimes we can have ourselves some fun.”
“So you do this a lot?”
She stretched an arm over her head. “Now and then. There are a couple guards I see regularly, but we all know I’m not the kind of girl to settle down.” She looked at me. “It’s too fun, isn’t it?”
“Fun, yes.” I poured the last of the wine into her glass and asked if she wanted to stay over.
“Think there’s enough room?”
There wasn’t, but I wanted to sleep with a warm body tonight. “We can make it work.”
The room was getting cold, so I checked the radiator, which didn’t seem to do a thing. Tania banged on the knob a few times. “This hotel is a joke.”
As she undressed, I noticed the black, shiny spot on her stockings, where she’d used nail polish to repair a hole. I turned out the lights.
It was difficult, but she curled up with her back to my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her. She talked steadily through the next hour, mumbling about how she’d had offers from men to take her out of t
his town, but she would never go. “Here I’m somebody. What would I be in the Capital? Just another peasant. Just another slut.” She said she’d even had offers from state security men. One of them sent her packages of Swiss chocolates on a regular basis. “He’s in love with me. That job must have screwed up his brain. You can see it in them, those security types are all a little off.”
“You should watch out for them.”
“Me? No, they should watch out for me.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Her hair shifted against my nose. “I’m serious. One told me that he was frightened of me.”
“A little girl like you?”
“I didn’t believe it either, but,” she said, then paused, trying to remember exactly. “He said he was afraid of my inability to commit to one man. Not that it scared him, not personally, but he said that more and more people were like me, and if you couldn’t commit to a single person, how could you commit to a state?”
“That sounds like state security.”
“I even get the occasional foreigner.”
“Foreigners?”
“Well, not many. So you remember them. The last one was French. Nice enough guy. Big and fat, but not so jolly as he looked. He was trying to get a friend out of the work camp. I could’ve told him it wouldn’t work.”
My arms around her twitched, but she didn’t notice. “Remember his name?”
“Louis. Yes-Louis something. Nice guy.” I felt her fingers grip my elbow beneath the covers, as if for support. “But he wasn’t such a gentleman as you.”
61
I drove home with the first light, having whispered a farewell to Tania’s sleeping form. I showered and changed, and by three was at the station. Emil was in, so I sat on his desk and took one of his cigarettes. He winked. “Got some interesting news for you.”
“Me first,” I said. “Watch out for yourself and Lena. Nestor found out where I live.”
“You saw him?”
“He tried to break in while I wasn’t there.”
Emil frowned.
“I took Magda and Agnes out of the city. You might consider the same thing for Lena.”
He nodded very seriously. “Okay.”
“Another thing: A Frenchman named Louis Rostek saw Nestor last spring at the camp. The commander won’t tell me anything, and the guards don’t know what it was about. But I think he told Nestor that Antonin had put him away.”
“A Frenchman?”
“Someone I know. Through Georgi.”
Emil dragged his fingers through his hair. “I think my interesting news will stand up to yours.”
“Tell me.”
“The lab came back with prints on Stefan’s bedroom window and those fish soups. Guess who his window-climbing dinner guest was.”
“Don’t make me guess,” I said, as his phone began to ring.
He reached for it and winked. “Nestor Velcea. Matched his work camp fingerprint card perfectly.”
I watched him lean into the telephone. Stefan and Nestor Velcea, sitting at the same table eating fish soup-why? Was Stefan involved in the crimes? No. Then who came to the door? I didn’t know how to put it all together.
Emil hung up. “Sorry, but that was Lena. She’s vomiting everything she takes in. And,” he said with a grimace, “she’s a little hysterical.” He got up and went for his coat.
I stared at the empty doorway after he left, then wandered slowly toward my own desk. Louis’s role made sense-the scene at the camp was of one man’s loyalty to another, of a friend who had put some clues together. I remembered that Antonin Kullmann’s paintings had even made it to Paris-his success enabled his downfall. But the scene in Stefan’s kitchen over fish soup-
On my desk was a phone message from Georgi.
I met him in the cafe attached to the opera house on the corner of International and V. I. Lenin. It was another of those Habsburg monstrosities that seemed not to have changed in the last fifty years, with the exception of its nonplussed waiters, who smoked in the back corner and watched you wait.
Georgi handed me a list of names of people who might know the whereabouts of Nestor Velcea. As I looked it over, he said, “They’re all writers. Nestor didn’t like painters.”
“So I heard.” I pocketed the list. Georgi was looking good. He had a new hat, something a friend had brought from Vienna-not Louis, though. “Tell me more about him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
It was a tough thing to ask, but Georgi was up to it. “I met Louis some years ago. ’Forty-seven, — eight? He was spending some time here at the expense of the Writers’ Union. He was thinner then, that’s for sure. The women went wild for him. French accent and all. You can imagine.”
“Sure I can.”
“My book had just come out, and they had me read a little bit. Louis was impressed. I can’t say I liked his poems-he was a little too didactic in those days.”
“In what direction?”
“You know, glories of world revolution and all that. He’s calmed down a lot since then.”
“Did he know Nestor Velcea?”
“Apparently they’d met each other during the war. ’Forty-four or so. I’m not sure. He knew Nestor was a basket case, but thought he was talented.”
“Did you think Nestor was talented?”
“I never saw his paintings, never met him until he came to my party.” Georgi gave an elaborate shrug. “Nestor was already in the camp when I met Louis.”
A waiter appeared and reluctantly took our order. Then he returned to the smoking group, the order still on the notepad he had dropped into his pocket.
“You should have seen it when they met again at the party. They embraced and cried like father and son.”
“Before I showed up.”
“Yeah. Before.”
I noticed my thick fingers were pulling at my rings, sliding them up a knuckle, then back. “What did Louis think about Nestor’s imprisonment?”
Georgi pulled out a cigarette. “He wasn’t in the country when they took Nestor away. He was supposed to come in on the same day Nestor was arrested, but something kept him-some visa problems, I don’t know.”
Nestor went to the train station to meet a foreign agent, but the foreigner didn’t arrive.
“Anyway, Louis didn’t hear about the arrest until maybe six months later, when he came through again. That’s when I met him. And, of course, he was angry. When Louis is angry, you don’t want to get in his way.”
“He has a temper?”
“Not at all. That’s what makes him so tough. If you’ve done enough to get Louis angry, you know you’re in for big trouble.”
“What did he do then?”
“When?”
“When he found out Nestor had been taken away.”
Georgi puffed a couple times, spreading smoke. “He lodged a complaint. He felt sure he could get Nestor out, maybe because he was a foreigner. But he went directly to Yalta Boulevard, to the Office of Internal Corrections. Can you believe it? Walked right in, alone, and came out a few hours later, furious. They hadn’t let him talk to anyone. They had him sit in the waiting room for something like two hours, then told him the officer had left for the day.”
“Who was the officer?”
Georgi shook his head. “No idea.”
I wondered what had happened that day. It was hard enough to get into Yalta Boulevard, particularly a foreigner. And then expect to free someone? Louis knew that. The only way he could have expected to have any pull in Yalta Boulevard was if he was connected to state security. Probably as an informer.
The waiter finally appeared with our coffees and placed the bill under the sugar bowl. Georgi scooped a spoonful into his coffee and stirred.
62
Driving to Vera’s block that evening was instinct. It didn’t occur to me to go home. By now my desire for her was its own separate thing that turned the wheel and applied the brake like a
nother, more sure Ferenc, to whom I had not yet been introduced.
I knocked on the door. Her voice came from the other side, but it wasn’t directed at me. It was quieter, as if for someone else in the apartment. Then I figured it out, but too late. The door opened and Karel stared back at me.
His surprise was evident in his thick brows and the big, flaccid mouth peeking out from his beard. He’d gotten fat as his poetic success increased, but he had never lost his youthful inability to hide his emotions. Then he smiled and glanced back at Vera, who looked stuck to the sofa. “How about this! Ferenc Kolyeszar, what a surprise!”
Outside of Georgi’s parties, he and I never talked, but he had always been one of the many who made halfhearted promises to meet for dinner or drinks. He waved me in. Vera stood up and gave me her cheeks to kiss politely.
“I was just telling Vera about Yugoslavia. What people! Incredible.”
“That’s why I came over,” I said. “Georgi told me you were back, and I wanted to hear all about it.” I noticed a plate of food on the coffee table. “I should have called, though, and it’s late. How about tomorrow?”
“Nonsense,” said Karel. He pushed me toward the sofa, and Vera moved over to give me plenty of space. “I have photos! You better believe I’ve got photos. Vodka?”
I forced a smile and nodded, and he disappeared into the kitchen.
Vera and I communicated with our eyes. Wide, round, surprised eyes. Half shrugs.
Karel asked about Magda and Agnes, and I said they were out in the provinces for a little while, staying with Magda’s parents. He winked at me. “Be sure and behave yourself!”
He had more photos than anyone I’d ever known. A heavy stack of black-and-whites of drab, gray-clad poets and professors standing stiffly for group portraits against blank walls or beside tables covered with books. He had some underexposed shots of Belgrade and Zagreb, and overexposed ones of Roman ruins in Dubrovnik and the beaches of Split, leading to the Adriatic. And he had stories that went on for too long. He laughed a lot and rubbed the back of his neck. The experience had invigorated him. He was a national emissary brought in to exemplify the best our little country could produce in a man of letters, and this was the role he felt most comfortable in. He said this without modesty, then followed with, “Those Serbs eat up stuff like that. Next we’ll send them our country’s finest garbageman, and they’ll build a statue to him.”
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