The confession tyb-2

by Olen Steinhauer

  Leonek looked at me. I shook my head. “We’ve never heard of him.”

  “Well, he was the only one I’d told about the four soldiers taking those little girls into the synagogue. There were a couple other witnesses, but they kept quiet. I can’t blame them, particularly after all that’s happened to me.”

  “But you saw it?” asked Leonek.

  “I saw enough. They took the girls in there, and I heard them scream. I tried to find some help, but everyone was too frightened. I was, too, or else I would have gone into that synagogue. I told all this to Osip. He knew some of these men. He thought I should go to the Militia about it. But I wasn’t sure. I mean, I didn’t know who I could trust and who I couldn’t. Finally, this Malevich guy started asking questions. He didn’t get anything until he finally came across Osip. Osip told him about me, and he set up a meeting that same night. At the Tisa. Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “With that fog, I knew something had to go wrong.”

  “So you showed up,” said Leonek.

  “I showed up, all right. And I found him. He was on the bank, waiting. But Osip had never really described what he looked like. He’d only told Sergei what I looked like. So I came closer, to let him get a look at me, and Sergei did see me. He started to step forward, then a man’s voice called his name. I could tell this was unexpected because he quickly stepped back into the fog and looked away from me. It was thoughtful of him. The last act of his life was to save mine.”

  Leonek leaned back, hands on his knees, and nodded. “And you saw what happened afterward.”

  “I had no choice,” he said. “I was afraid that if I started walking, this second guy would hear my footsteps. And I didn’t know anything about him. So I stood a little bit away, not moving, and watched a tall man-Kaminski-come over and start talking with Sergei.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I don’t know. It was all in Russian. I know some now, but back then I didn’t know any. Kaminski was very calm, it seemed to me. And at first Sergei was calm, too, but then he wasn’t. Because Kaminski had a gun on him. He must have told Sergei to lie on the ground, because that’s what he did. He lay facedown, and not once did he look in my direction. Then Kaminski squatted and shot him in the back of the head.”

  I remembered it myself. The thick fog and the sound of the gunshot echoing off the water.

  “When the Russian heard more footsteps, he stood up. That’s when I recognized him, from the Jewish quarter. Then he pocketed the gun and ran off. I did, too.”

  Leonek was flexing his hands in his lap, staring. He looked at me. We were both remembering the running footsteps that echoed back at us as we stood over Sergei’s dead body, immobile.

  “My mistake was that I told Osip about it. He didn’t turn me in, nothing like that. But somebody must have suspected he knew something-he was dead a week later. I didn’t know if they knew about me or not, so I kept myself hidden just in case.”

  I said, “You stayed in your apartment with Antonin and Zoia.”

  “They were the only ones who knew where I was, so it only made sense that they had turned me in.”

  “They weren’t the only ones,” I said. “Louis knew.”

  Louis was pouring himself a second shot, and at the sound of his name spilled some on the table. He started shaking his head vigorously. “No. That’s not it. That’s not how it was at all.”

  Nestor stared at Louis.

  I said, “Louis didn’t turn you in on purpose. But whenever he came into town he notified the Office of Internal Corrections. He also told the office who he was going to meet. But Louis couldn’t know that the man who killed those girls and Sergei not only ran this office, but had also probably learned Nestor’s name by beating it out of Osip Yarmoluk before killing him. With all this information, Kaminski didn’t have to track Nestor down at all. Didn’t have to kill him. All he had to do was plant a couple anonymous accusations against him, then connect him with a foreigner coming into town. That’s all that was needed.”

  “But I didn’t show up!” said Louis. “They had nothing on him!”

  Nestor, sunk deep into the sofa, arms crossed over his chest, stared at Louis. “Accusations were enough back then.”

  Louis’s face was red and damp. “You don’t understand! I tried to get him out. I tried.”

  “You did,” I said, then turned to Nestor. “He’s not lying. He went straight to Yalta Boulevard, to Kaminski’s office, when he found out. Kaminski didn’t even open his door.”

  Nestor said to Louis, “But why would you tell them anything in the first place?”

  Louis chewed air, eyes rolling as he tried to find the right words.

  “He was an informer,” I said. “It was his job to tell them when he was in the country. All for the glories of world revolution.”

  Nestor stood up and went to the bathroom. Leonek stood too, as if to follow, then settled back down. He looked at me and shook his head. “Christ.”

  83

  There was a knock at the door. I pulled out my gun and stood beside it. Leonek had his gun out as well, and Louis shrank into his chair, terrified.

  “Ferenc?” It was a woman’s voice. A high squeak.

  I put my gun away and opened the door a little. Claudia peered up at me. “Hello, Claudia. I don’t have a lot of time-”

  “It’s not that,” she said, and glanced down the stairwell. “I just thought you should know. There was a man here last night.”

  “A man?”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “A Russian. He knocked on your door, I could hear him from downstairs. Loud, that one. Loud.”

  “Do you know what he wanted?”

  “How should I know? But he was calling your name. He said he knew you were in. Then he left.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “That’s it. You weren’t there, were you?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s what I thought. I’d heard you go out earlier. But I wasn’t about to open my door and tell him. I’m not that kind, you see.” She smiled and patted my hand on the door to assure me of this.

  “Thank you, Claudia. I appreciate it.”

  She tried in vain to peer past me into the apartment, then rocked back on her heels and shrugged. “We’re neighbors, Ferenc. It’s nothing.”

  After I’d heard her footsteps descend the steps and her door open and shut, I sat across from Louis. “Did you tell them about this trip?”

  “Them?”

  “Yalta Boulevard.”

  He shook his head. “I stopped that after my last visit. They’ve tried to get me back, but I haven’t done anything for them since.”

  Leonek pocketed his pistol. “Louis checked into the Metropol, and the hotel sent in the daily registration report. Of course they know he’s in town.”

  I walked over to the radio set. “And when Kaminski went to Louis’s room, the lock was broken and the room was empty. But he didn’t think to check for our names on the register.” I looked at Leonek. “The three of us were very close to death in that hotel.”

  84

  He had been in there a while, so I knocked on the bathroom door, then opened it. Nestor was on the edge of the tub, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He looked old and exhausted. I came in and closed the door. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” That’s when I realized he’d been crying. He said, “It’s just that I’ve ruined everything. I thought that when I got out of the camp I could make everything right. I would make some justice where there hadn’t been any before. But look at what I’ve done.”

  I sat on the toilet and folded my hands on my knees. The bathroom was very white, and it hurt my eyes.

  He said, “It was luck, at first. At least that’s how I thought of it. I was in this stinking bar, wondering how I could get back at the people who had put me away for so long, and there was Josef Maneck. Like a gift from God. He was so drunk, I hardly recognized him. I’d met him before, and Louis had tol
d me he was connected to all of it, so I waited outside for him. He’d gotten into a fight with another drunk, and was finally thrown out. So I helped him home. He had no idea who I was. He was just grateful I wasn’t hitting him. I got him up to his place and made some coffee, and started to question him.”

  There was a knock at the door. Leonek looked in, saw the two of us sitting morosely in the white bathroom, and left again.

  “Go on.”

  He rubbed his hands to keep them warm. “I didn’t plan to kill him. I really wanted Antonin. But when I told him my name, he went wild. He hit me and tried to run out of the apartment. So I dragged him back. And made him tell me what he knew. He believed the same thing I did, that Antonin had sent me to the work camp in order to steal my paintings. He said he didn’t know for a long time, until Zoia told him. He cried and apologized and finally gave me Antonin’s address.”

  “You wrote it on Josef’s notepad.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, once I had what I’d come there for, I didn’t leave. I couldn’t leave. Something kept me there, kept me hammering at him. I wanted to know why, once he knew the truth, Josef hadn’t gone to the Militia. He said he would have been implicated, because by that point he’d been showing the paintings for months. And he pointed at the apartment and said that it was what he’d been reduced to, because he couldn’t take the guilt. But that wasn’t enough for me, you understand? It was as if I were someone else for an hour. I wanted to take from him what had been taken from me. So I gave him one more punch that knocked him out and dragged him over to the oven and turned on the gas. Then I left.”

  I rubbed my own hands together. It seemed very cold in that bathroom, like the cold of the Canal District, and the cold that comes from an hour of being someone else, and looking back at what you’ve done. “Then you found Antonin.”

  “You saw the body. You know what I did. With him I was an entirely different person. I don’t-” He shut his eyes. “I don’t know how to explain it. By that point I had gone to the Canal District and bought a gun. I arrived at his apartment, and when he opened the door I held the gun on him. At first we talked. He admitted to stealing the paintings, but swore he had not turned me in to Yalta Boulevard. And for a moment I did believe him. He was so earnest. He offered to split everything he had with me, he said I deserved it, but he kept swearing he hadn’t turned me in. But by then I’d already collected three opinions against him-Louis thought he had turned me in, and so did Josef and Zoia. So I was sure he was lying. Because he knew what I would do to him. But I don’t think he could have imagined it-what I did to him.” Nestor shifted on the edge of the tub. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  I got two out. The bathroom quickly filled with smoke, but I didn’t open the door.

  “I don’t know if you can understand what I did without having lived in the camps. Even having lived in the camps, I still can’t believe what I did, but I at least understand it. The things that they do to you, the power they have over you. It throws off your sense of right and wrong.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it.”

  “Just tell me what you did. I’ll see if I can understand.”

  He took another drag. “I gagged him, then tied his hands and feet together. Then I sat and talked to him for a while. I described my life in the camp, I told him how I’d lost my finger, how I’d gotten my limp, and the kinds of things I saw on a daily basis. I told him that what I’d do to him would not be as bad as all that. But I told him exactly what I would do to him. I said I would break his arms and legs with a hammer, drive him to the Canal District in his own car, and then drag him by his broken arms to a place where I would then set him on fire. And that’s what I did.”

  I coughed into my hand. The sound reverberated in the small room. “Why did you tell him?”

  “That’s what they did in the camp. Sometimes they would tell you in the morning that they would kill you, and by the afternoon you’d be dead. They had ways to make even death worse.”

  “But you didn’t put Zoia through all of that, did you?”

  He shook his head. “I had pity on her. I broke in over the weekend and waited in the basement for morning. I didn’t want Mathew around. So after he left I came up behind her and strangled her. Josef had told me she left Antonin because of what he’d done. But still, she-like Josef-hadn’t turned him in. That was what I could not accept. Why did they remain silent when I was stuck in hell for a decade?”

  “Because they didn’t want to join you,” I said, and he squinted at me through the smoke.

  “But I got it all wrong in the end,” he said. “Antonin stole my art, but he couldn’t have done that if this Russian hadn’t gotten rid of me. It seems like human nature that if you give someone an opportunity for easy criminality, he’ll take it. Kaminski gave Antonin the opportunity.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “What?”

  “The murders.”

  His eyes wandered into the smoke, focusing on something I could not see. “Ferenc, all I know is that I’ve failed. I used to be a human being. But now, with what I’ve done, and the mistakes I’ve made, I don’t know if I can call myself human anymore. That’s why I tried to turn myself in. Because it no longer mattered what happened to me.” He focused on my eyes then. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  My cold hands froze and my feet tingled. “I know exactly what you’re saying, Nestor.”

  85

  “Ferenc?”

  It was Emil calling. “What’s going on?”

  “Malik Woznica.”

  “What about him.”

  “He’s gone missing.”

  I opened my mouth and, after a long exhale, said, “Maybe that’s best for everyone.”

  “They’ve given me the case. He was supposed to visit a relative in Perechyn on Saturday, but didn’t, and he didn’t show up at the office yesterday. I’ve checked the apartment; it’s empty.”

  “Any sign of a struggle?”

  “None. His car is gone, but it doesn’t look like clothes are missing.”

  “Maybe he was in a hurry.”

  “We did find a store of drugs. Opiates. Pills and liquids.”

  “All for his Svetla.”

  He paused. “Ferenc, you didn’t…”

  “Didn’t what.”

  “I don’t know. Did you threaten him?”

  “He threatened me. But I never said a word to him.”

  “Okay. I just want to know why he’d leave.”

  “He left because he murdered his wife.”

  “What?”

  “He followed her to Moscow and killed her. Kliment told me last week-Sev and Moska know about it, too. But that’s all I know.”

  “Okay, Ferenc. Thanks. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”

  When I hung up, I leaned against the wall and tried to measure out my breaths. It was difficult. The kitchen seemed to be underwater, and the icebox shivered, but that was because I was shivering. I made it out to the living room, where they were all sitting, looking up at me.

  “You all right?” asked Leonek.

  “Keep an eye on them. I need to lie down.”

  I got into bed with my shoes still on and pulled the blankets over me. But I couldn’t get warm. I kept seeing Malik Woznica in that well, his bloated, dead eyes staring up at me. I had felt nothing then. I had been confused, yes. I had been worried. But I had felt no guilt. And there had been no guilt when I returned to Vera tied up in her own filth and watched her rush with all that self-hatred out my door. I hadn’t known what I had done wrong.

  I twisted the blankets tighter around my legs and tried to still myself. But I couldn’t make the past go away any more than I could bring Malik back to life. I had killed him and brutalized a woman who loved me. And throughout it all, my feelings had remained just out of reach. I was an automaton.

  Nestor had an excuse. He had struggled through a decade of terror and had c
ome out the other side a machine of vengeance. I had been through so little in comparison, but I had acted the same. Both of us had watched our humanity slip away with a cool eye, and only after it returned could we understand what we had done.

  I lay for an hour, stuck in the cycle of these thoughts. They repeated, and I turned each fact, each crime, around in my head, trying to find the justification. There was none, not even in the elegance of well-chosen words. I had always known what I was doing, and I knew that I would do it all over again.

  Only after that hour, when I heard a tap at the door and saw Leonek’s unsure face peek through-he looked so young, and so good-did I understand what I needed to do to begin to right what had been made wrong. It was the only mature decision left to me.

  86

  It was simple and complicated at the same time. If it went wrong, I would not see them again. Leonek wanted to go. “This part is my case. He killed Sergei.”

  I said, “Tell me. Do you still love Magda?”

  He paused. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “And Agnes?”

  “I adore her, Ferenc.”

  “That’s all I want to know.”

  I drove everyone to Emil’s apartment. He answered the door, and though I had called to warn him, he was stunned by the sight of Louis and Nestor. Lena had prepared some small sandwiches. Louis and Nestor were surprised and very polite. It was a funny thing to see, in retrospect: a murderer and an informer sitting under Lena Brod’s expansive, approving gaze, eating her sandwiches. She went to the bar and began lining up drinks.

  Emil and I took the reel-to-reel recorder back to my place. Although I explained everything on the drive, the whole sequence of events, by the time we were climbing my stairs he still looked back, and said, “But I don’t get it, Ferenc. What’s going on again?” It was only the rush of too many new facts that made his head spin.