36 Yalta Boulevard tyb-3

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Turned up dead last night.”

  “Dead?”

  “In the woods. I’m helping Captain Rasko investigate it. If you hear of anything important…”

  “Of course,” he said, turning back to the window. “Of course I will.”

  Brano took him to his house without asking for directions. He said nothing more because there were stages to go through in this kind of situation. What he had told Pavel Jast was true-he believed Soroka’s plan was to take his family west. This could happen at any moment, but if Jan were planning to leave tonight, he couldn’t have maintained his calm. He would have sweated and shook like so many men Brano had quizzed in the past.

  The only risk was that, if he pressed, Soroka would panic and flee come nightfall, leaving Brano with nothing to give Cerny-nothing to assure his return to Yalta.

  He lunched with his mother and her assistant, Eugen, a thin boy of about seventeen who tapped his foot continuously. They had bread and cheese and salami from the store’s stock. Then he returned to Bieniek’s. He came across a single entry for Lia Soroka: 4 February 1967: She and the boy cross the street and buy food for the house. She’s much too elegant for this town, or for that fool who ran off with a peasant slut. What is this loyalty she feels? What ties her to a man like that? I could never do such a thing to her. Even after all these years, I’ve never been unfaithful to Janica.

  There were two pages on Brano’s mother, and a sense of decorum made him lay the sheets to the side, unread, on the floor. But after learning more on people he did not know or care about, the decorum left him and he found himself reading of visits SEV, IWONA made, weekly, to Juliusz, the doctor. Bieniek speculated on the “carnal interests” of the doctor, whose wife spent much of her time in Krosno.

  Brano’s palms were sweating as he put down the pages, and he felt the beginnings of a headache.

  It was already dark, the cold was seeping into the house, and he had so little to go on. But there was one thing that, in his growing impatience, he felt he could look into right now. One person might know the name of Soroka’s contact, who drove a green Volga GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates.

  Pavel Jast’s house was on the edge of the woods, separated from the next house by a field marked by ruts and pits that, in the darkness, Brano had to be careful to avoid. The house was small, with two very bright windows. The murmur of muted voices rolled toward him.

  He approached from the back, along the tree line. The windows were fogged over by the breaths of many men, creating a diffused glow. He squatted beneath a window and rose slowly until he could just make out the forms. Men around a table. A voice said, “Cucumber-you’re dead!”

  Laughter followed, and a few moans. Pavel Jast said, “That’s fifty-two koronas… and that lousy mule!”

  Brano used the tip of his finger to rub a corner of the window clean. Five men sat at a table with faceup cards. Jast; Mother’s assistant, the hyperactive Eugen; Zygmunt; Juliusz; and a fat man he didn’t recognize. Jast collected the cards spread over the table and began to shuffle them like a satisfied pro. Eugen was smiling, drunk, and Juliusz was serene. Zygmunt looked sick; perhaps he was the one who had just lost fifty-two koronas and a mule. Yes-Jast set down the cards and leaned over to kiss Zygmunt’s cheek. Zygmunt pushed him away.

  The fat man he didn’t recognize sucked on a cigarette and put it out in his vodka, then laughed. Behind Jast’s large right ear was the German ballpoint pen with its naked woman.

  He crept back across the field, tripping once, and made his way back home. Mother was asleep, so he drank headache powder with water, then took a glass of Lucjan’s vodka to bed. He rolled his face into the pillow, closing his eyes, but not even his brother-in-law’s concoction could help him sleep.

  11 FEBRUARY 1967, SATURDAY

  Mother was already awake. She crouched beside his bed, touching him lightly on the wrist. “Brani?” He opened his eyes to her large features close up and felt momentarily like a child.

  “Yes, Mama?”

  “Brani, there’s someone here to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “That captain,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay. He just needs my help.”

  She pressed her dry lips together and stood up as Captain Rasko appeared in the bedroom doorway, hat in his hands.

  The blanket fell from Brano’s thin, pale chest when he reached to the foot of the bed for the shirt he’d folded the night before. “Good morning, Comrade Captain. Can you give me a minute?”

  Rasko nodded and left. Mother still looked concerned.

  “What is it?”

  She glanced back at the doorway. “He asked if you were planning to leave. I said you weren’t. You aren’t, are you?”

  “No.” He finished dressing and put a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you let me talk with him alone.”

  She went to her bedroom.

  Rasko, in a chair, was still holding his hat as Brano sat on the sofa. His hair looked dirty. “What is it, Captain?”

  “This is difficult, Comrade Sev.”

  “Then do it quickly. That’ll make it easier.”

  “You see,” he began, shifting his feet, “I went through the evidence Juliusz gave us. In that bag. The handkerchiefs found on Jakob Bieniek.”

  “The ones used to silence him.”

  “Right.” He passed his hat to the coffee table. “Well, there was something inside the handkerchief. The one that was inside his mouth.”

  “What was it?”

  He clutched his hands between his knees. “A matchbook.”

  “Excellent. That’s more than we had before.”

  “It was from the Hotel Metropol. From the Capital.”

  Brano leaned back. He struggled a couple of seconds with what to say next, remembering Juliusz’s hesitation when they met. Then he knew there was nothing to say. He could point out that other villagers made trips to the Capital, but they both knew none of them could afford a night in the Metropol, nor a drink from its bar. And even if they could afford it, the coincidence of his arrival from the Capital and the matches in a dead man’s mouth could not be ignored by any responsible investigator. So Brano asked the captain what he would like to do.

  Rasko cleared his throat. “I’d like to search the house for evidence.”

  Brano stared into Rasko’s dark eyes until the captain blinked. “Be my guest,” he said.

  While Rasko went through his room and the others, followed nervously by Mother, who cried out for him not to be clumsy, Brano waited on the sofa, turning over the one thing he was sure of. Pavel Jast had used his matchbook to frame him for the murder of Jakob Bieniek. Either he had returned after they discovered the body, or he had been involved in the actual murder and had stuffed Brano’s matches between Bieniek’s struggling teeth, encased in a wad of handkerchief. But why?

  “Any luck?” he asked when Rasko came back, flushed, wiping sweat from his forehead. Mother stood behind him with crossed arms, silent now, utterly disgusted.

  “Can you give me the keys to your car?”

  Brano stood up. “It’s unlocked.”

  Rasko first checked the trunk but found only a spare tire and a jack. He searched the backseat, which Brano had cleaned meticulously before leaving the Capital, then under the driver’s seat. He reached beneath the passenger’s seat and made a face. It wasn’t elation, nor was it defeat. It was somewhere in between, and the expression remained with him as he drew out a crumpled white shirt with large splotches of reddish brown. Brano suppressed an involuntary shout as Rasko flattened the shirt on the seat, eyeing the bloodstained slices, each between a couple of inches and a foot long.

  Brano looked up at the house, where his mother had opened the curtains, her fat fingers tapping her chin.

  Rasko exhaled. “Well, I suppose you know what’s next.”

  “Of course I do.”

  Brano walked behind his Trabant to the passenger door of the white Skoda. Rasko said, “You want to tell your mo
ther where you’re going?”

  She was still in the window, her hand now covering her mouth. “I think she already knows.”

  On the drive to the station house, his palms together between his thighs, Brano was not overly troubled. Surprised, yes, but many times in the past he had been faced with inexplicable turns of fortune. It had been an inexplicable night in Vienna as he was arranging the final hours of Bertrand Richter. The last thing he’d expected was interference from Bertrand’s girlfriend, the tarot-card reader. And then, when he’d woken the next morning in the Volksgarten, a blow to the head briefly relieving him of the burden of memory-who could have predicted that? As he had then, he now calmed himself by measuring the length of his facts. Pavel Jast, the one man in town who was to assist Brano, had arranged a murder conviction for him. Check. Which could only mean that Pavel Jast had his own agenda in this larger investigation of Jan Soroka.

  Which meant, most likely, that Pavel Jast was assisting Jan Soroka by making sure Brano would not hinder his and his family’s escape.

  But was Jast really so shortsighted? Once the truth came to light, Jast would find himself in a work camp, or in the eastern mines. Jast was too much of a survivor for that. He was the sort of operative that hangs on for many years, always a step away from being caught or being made redundant. His kind, the small-town informer, was as resilient as the cockroach.

  Jast wouldn’t wait to be caught. He would leave with Jan Soroka’s family while Brano was in jail, perhaps in the backseat of that GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates, heading westward.

  “I’ll need to make a call,” said Brano.

  Rasko parked in front of the station. “I already called Yalta. I wanted to clear this with them.”

  “You knew you’d take me in?”

  “I wanted to know what I could and couldn’t do. The man I talked to told me to do what I felt necessary, and someone would call later.”

  “What was the man’s name?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  This, he understood-the Ministry would want to pretend they didn’t know he was here.

  The cell was no more than a large closet with a lock on the outside, a small, high window, and a mop in the corner, the room Rasko had been stumbling around in when Brano first met him. A low bench below the window was the only furniture.

  “You want coffee?”

  “If you’re making some.”

  Rasko stepped out. Brano watched the door close, heard the lock slide into place, then wiped his hands dry on his knees. He climbed on the bench to look out the window but could see only patches of blue sky. So he settled on the bench again and, as he often did when in need of assurance, remembered her.

  He remembered their long walk back to her apartment that night, her drunken complaints about the zbrka of the modern world. He remembered that she had a long body, pale but dark around the eyes, and he remembered leaving her apartment after their sex, the kiss she had placed on his cheek, leaving damp marks he could not bring himself to wipe off. Brani, she’d whispered, this not the end from all for us, then drew back, smiling.

  Weeks after the Lieutenant General’s interrogation, he had begun receiving her idiosyncratic love letters with the apprehension of a man fearing the unknown, and sometimes on the way home from the factory he wondered if he’d find her at his apartment, waiting with a smile.

  I not knoing what you will to say when this getting to you. Maybe you are thinking I am little crazi, I dont kno. We have only 1 night-not I night but 2 hour!

  But no, dragi. I not kno what you was thinking, but that night it was for me very good. I am not so sentimental person, no. I more practic that what people think.

  She wrote, That night when we was together Bertrand he die. Police dont kno who kill him, but was no accident. He die in Volksgarten. It make me start to thinking. You kno death, it do this. I start to thinking why I am in Vienna? I not like Vienna. I love in the world only 1 thing only. You, Brano Sev. Are you understand me? In the world this one thing.

  She told him that she was a Vojvodina Serb from Novi Sad, born in 1939. Her father, a professor of economics, was in prison from 1954 to 1957, though she couldn’t explain why. Was only what Tito say, if he think you enemy, you is in prison. Dijana studied economics as well, and in 1959 married Dusan Frankovic, a medical student who also played in a jazz quartet called “Sol,” or Salt. Two years later, her father died from injuries sustained in prison, and the following October her mother killed herself.

  I then 22. I sudden tired for econometrics. I stop talk with friends and I read on Carl Gustav Jung and on other things, like occult. That when I learn tarot first. Dusan, he not understanding why am I so quiet and not interesting, and we fight. So in 1963 I go. I start to thinking Yugoslavia is a country from losers, so I go. My husband he very sad, of course, but now is ok. He marry again.

  She told him everything, and he was surprised by the things he told her. He said that he would try to get back to Vienna, and if that didn’t work, he would get her a visa to visit him. He even believed the promises himself.

  Rasko brought two cups of coffee and sat with him a moment. They sipped in silence, pursing lips over the hot liquid and looking at the smoke-darkened walls. Brano said, “The other day, I noticed you talking with Lia Soroka.”

  Rasko nodded into his coffee’s steam.

  “Do you mind telling me about her?”

  He tilted his head from side to side. “What’s there to tell?”

  “Why she’s come back here.”

  “Because her husband is here.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “I take things as I see them, Comrade Sev. I’m a simple man.”

  “Have you talked with Jan Soroka?”

  “Of course. He registered when he arrived.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “The same thing he’s told everyone. He was with a woman.”

  “And you believe that as well?”

  “I see no reason not to believe it.” Rasko stood up, holding his cup near his chest. “Is there anything else you need? I have some paperwork to attend to.”

  “Just tell me when the call from Yalta comes through.”

  For months he’d tried through regular channels to get papers to visit Dijana in Vienna, and it wasn’t until his second refusal that he approached Cerny for help, in November, during one of their regular weekend drinking sessions in the old man’s First District apartment. Cerny had spent most of the afternoon complaining about the diet his doctor had put him on to regulate his diabetic condition. The man says I can’t eat rugalach-what kind of claptrap is that? Brano admitted he didn’t know, then broached the subject that had been on his mind all week. Colonel Cerny shook his head. I’ve been waiting for this. I thought you’d ask earlier.

  I’m asking now, Comrade Colonel. All I need is travel papers.

  Let me put you out of your misery. The answer is a strong no. That you could even ask after what happened in Vienna… this woman has already gotten you drummed out of the Ministry, and don’t fool yourself. She’s only a path to more failures. I’m not going to have one of my oldest friends compromised by a spy.

  She’s not a spy.

  A Yugoslav living in Vienna? What makes you think she isn’t? We have reports she’s been entertaining KGB agents in her apartment. The girl likes sex-I’m not a prude, but what’s she up to? She’s certainly not reading their fortunes. He shook his head. The Lieutenant General thinks you worked, through her, for the Russians. How would it look if you went back to her?

  But she’s not a spy.

  Cerny doubted that. We’ve read her letters to you. They’re something to look at. She needs a good lesson in grammar instead of making intrigues against my oldest friend. My God, man, she’s half your age!

  Brano had argued more, testing the limits of Cerny’s patience, but the man had an answer for everything. There were photographs of Dijana Frankovic with Russian agents in her apartment-Cerny had been to Vienna
and seen them himself. She was clever, Cerny told him, clever enough to outsmart the very clever Brano Sev. Maybe, Brano, you’re just getting old.

  So Brano had put her letters into a box behind his wardrobe at home, keeping them as a reminder that, in this life, luck does not come without requiring something of you, sometimes requiring something you cannot give.

  Rasko tapped the frame of the open door. “It’s the call.”

  Cerny’s voice was labored. “Do you realize you took me from my wife’s grave?”

  “I’m sorry, Comrade Cerny.”

  “You’ve really done it this time.”

  “But-”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he continued. “ You don’t make sense to me. Killing a nonentity like this Jakob Bieniek. You know how much I hate psychological pedantry, but it seems to me you’ve got a very self-destructive impulse. This really isn’t important to you, is it?”

  “Comrade Cerny,” said Brano, “you’re absolutely correct, this makes no sense at all, which should make it plain that I am innocent.”

  “Innocent?” Cerny sounded amused.

  “I was framed. And I know who did it.”

  “Who, then?”

  Brano glanced back; Rasko was not in the room. “Our informer, Pavel Jast.”

  “That’s ludicrous!”

  “It’s true. I believe he’s turned against us. He wanted me in jail so he could help the Sorokas escape. I expect he’s leaving with them.”

  Cerny paused. “What about Soroka? Whether or not he remains in the country is a minor concern. I want to know what he’s up to. Any results?”

  “I’ve spoken to him once, but as yet there are no results. I’ve only been here four days.”

  “Spare me your excuses, Brano.”

  “Yes, Comrade Cerny.”

  “Take care of your job and stay out of jail. I don’t want to have to repeat myself. We understand one another?”

  “We do.”

  “Good. Now let me talk to the captain.”

  He called for Rasko, gave him the phone, and returned to his cell. Through the doorway he heard the captain’s weak voice murmuring, Yes, Comrade Colonel, yes, I understand, immediately.