36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  It popped open a couple of inches, then slammed shut again.

  Brano pushed and found resistance. As he pressed, something slid back and the door opened farther, enough for him to stick his head in.

  Cerny was on the toilet, his jacket and shirt off. His knees were tight between the door and the wall, and in his forearm was a syringe.

  Brano squeezed through and got the door shut again. Cerny’s blue head was tilted back against the wall, mouth open beneath that disheveled mustache. When Brano removed the syringe, the plane trembled, the flaps tilting for descent, and he had to hold the sink to steady himself.

  A woman’s voice outside the door was telling him something.

  Brano removed the plunger and brought it to his nose. There was no smell. And when he touched the inside with a finger, it came up dry.

  Then he leaned against the door and stared at the colonel. There are many ways to kill yourself. Sometimes all it takes is a little air.

  POSTLUDE

  14 MAY 1967, SUNDAY

  •

  Brano Oleksy Sev paused at the top of the metro steps, a hand gripping the rail. Škodas and Trabants and Ladas shook over the cobblestones around the statue at the center of Victory Square: a handsome couple sharing the burden of a flag held aloft. It was very warm, and as he made his way along the crosswalk to Victory Park, at the beginning of Yalta Boulevard, he unbuttoned his jacket. Behind him, the Central Committee building, wide and gray, looked over everything.

  He walked through the gate to where more trees were covered in fresh yellow blooms and couples settled in the grass, eating bagged lunches. At the end of the trail lay a memorial to the war dead of all centuries, a bronze soldier sitting on a boulder, his rifle lying across his knees. In front of it, the wide back of the Comrade Lieutenant General faced him. Beneath his arm was a manila folder.

  “Good afternoon,” he said as Brano approached. His red alcoholic’s cheeks were puffy. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m still easily tired, but otherwise I’m all right.”

  “Excellent,” the Lieutenant General said. “So you’re happy.”

  “I think that would be asking a lot.”

  The big man frowned. “Do you want to know?”

  “Yes,” said Brano. “I do.”

  There had been four men at the airport when he landed, and they didn’t wait for him to come out. They found him squatting beside Colonel Cerny’s body in the back of the plane, mute, gripping the old man’s hand.

  Then, inevitably, they placed him in the back of a white Mercedes. Like Ludwig’s men, they were adept at silence. They brought him into town, him staring through the window like a tourist at the dirty Habsburg buildings that were so much smaller than the ones in Vienna. They brought him to Yalta Boulevard, number 36.

  He found himself dreaming of Austrian interrogation techniques when they tied him to a hard chair in the middle of a concrete cell, then turned off the light.

  It didn’t seem to matter how much he told them. He answered each question earnestly, hiding nothing, not even the existence of Dijana Franković, but still they treated him like a liar. And he found that, after a few days, he also began to wonder if he was lying. What was he leaving out? Who was he protecting? He wasn’t protecting himself; he admitted his mistakes and lack of foresight. When they asked who was to blame for the death of Colonel Cerny, he told them he was to blame.

  By the end of the week, he was unable to speak because his teeth, which had once been so perfect, were bleeding too much.

  Then he woke in a hospital bed, the Lieutenant General gazing down on him. Our celebrated Comrade Sev, he said, but without a smile.

  Now, though, the Lieutenant General was all smiles.

  “You’ll be happy to know the streets are peaceful, Brano. Generally so. We’ve had three incidents—two here in the Capital, and one at the reactor in Vámosoroszi. Some joker tried to get inside, and we had to shoot him. The other two we picked up on the edge of town this morning. They had a truck full of old rifles. They were going to the Second District to distribute them to the others.”

  “And the others?” asked Brano.

  The Lieutenant General shook his head. “No one showed up. It seems the scheme required a cue. The two arms dealers told us that. There would be a notice in The Spark announcing, of all things, a flower show. How do you like that? Flowers! Cerny’s wonderful imagination yet again.” The Lieutenant General wiped his lips. “But since he wasn’t around to place the notice, well, no one came to get their guns. Pretty anticlimactic, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  “One of them told us their plan was to remove Adam Wołek from prison and place him at the head of our great country.”

  “Father Wołek?”

  The Lieutenant General nodded. “Would’ve been a surprise when they learned he was dead. About a month ago he dropped while working on the Canal. Heart gave out.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, we have quite a job ahead of us. There are enemies of the state to rout out. But we’ll get it taken care of.”

  “I’m sure we will.”

  “Come on, Brano. Let’s take a walk.”

  They continued past the statue, off the path into clusters of birch trees, from which Brano could hear, but not see, birds.

  “Your father, you may be interested to know, is back in America. With his family. Would you like to see the photographs?”

  “No.”

  The Lieutenant General laughed. “You know who’s most angry about this? Not you, not me, but your friend Ludwig. He complained directly to the embassy. He’s demanding your extradition! But that was clever, what you did. Turning in Cerny before you left, so he’d be arrested if he returned.” He shook his head. “That poor Ludwig has been in the dark about everything all along.”

  “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “How long have you known about this?”

  The Lieutenant General cocked his head, shifted the folder, and reached into his pocket for some cigarettes. As he explained his side of the story, his initial suspicion of Brano, Cerny’s elaborate excuses for him and for his demolished Viennese network, and that final, exquisite plan to get Brano into Vienna—“That man always had a byzantine sensibility for schemes, didn’t he?”—it occurred to Brano that, although he had uncovered his own father’s scheme, he was still under suspicion. The Lieutenant General paused now and then, working his way around occasional details, as if he were talking to a member of the opposition.

  “Tell me,” said the Lieutenant General, “why didn’t you rest longer on the Fertő Lake?”

  “I didn’t want to be captured by the Austrians again.”

  “So you didn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “That the good Dr. Simonyi was one of our men. He would have taken care of you.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Here.” The Lieutenant General handed him the manila folder. “You can dispose of these as you like.”

  Inside was a stack of photographs. Half of them were of Brano, from a grainy distance. Brano in that Bóbrka bar with Pavel Jast, Brano exiting the safe house on Felberstraße, Brano with Ludwig in the Café Mozart, Brano with Dijana outside the Web-Gasse apartment. Others were completely devoid of people. Brano looked at him.

  “Seems our man fancied himself an artist,” said the Lieutenant General. He sniffed. “Wasted a lot of film on empty streets and parks.”

  “Who took these?”

  “You lost my man a number of times, but he’s persistent. I suppose that makes up for the artistic streak.” He winked. “You never thought you were actually alone, did you? No, Brano. You’ll never be alone.”

  Brano gazed at the photos. Him in the Carp with Ersek Nanz, him in a nighttime street with Jan Soroka. Then, in the back, he found another one of Jan. He was with Lia and Petre in a street with English signs. Brano held it up.

  The Lieutenant General took the
picture and squinted at it. “Just thought you’d like to know what happened to your friend. His wife had a change of heart.”

  “I see.”

  “And I suppose you heard about Fräulein Franković?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Like our photographer, she doesn’t give up easily. She’s been sending you letters, hasn’t she?”

  Brano nodded.

  “I heard she visited the embassy again on Friday, with Ludwig. They both want to know what happened to you. Any message you’d like us to pass on? Want them to know you’ve been made a colonel?”

  Brano shook his head. “They won’t care about uniform decoration.”

  During the last week, as he recovered in his apartment from the bruises of the interrogation, he had received two visits from Regina Haliniak. She brought him the news she overheard from her desk—after his return, everyone seemed to know his story. She was sympathetic, arriving with food she had cooked in her and Zoran’s kitchen. She made him sit while she shaved him, and sang folk songs while she ran his bath. She had seen photographs of Dijana Franković and told Brano that he was a fool. He could have given his information on Cerny to Romek and stayed in Vienna with Dijana. Everyone at Yalta had the same question: Why did he come back?

  The Lieutenant General asked him the same thing. “You could have even been of use to us there.” Brano shrugged, groping for an answer that he didn’t have, and the Lieutenant General shook his head, perhaps disgusted, then left.

  Brano descended the steps back into the metro, joining a crowd of young people with hair not quite as long as the Viennese youth’s, and faced the cool wind that preceded the gray train. He got on, holding tightly to the leather straps as the floor shook beneath him and the train tilted into turns.

  He got out in the Eighth District, where the gray towers spread out as far as the eye could see. He weaved between old cars in the cracked parking lot, on his way to Unit 57, Block 4.

  The elevator brought him to the twelfth floor. When he stepped out, he noticed that at the end of the hall a small child—the neighbors” girl—was staring at him. She held a ball in her hands. He gave her a smile, but it was too slight to be noticed, and she turned and disappeared through her door.

  He hung his coat in the foyer, then found a bottle of water in the kitchen that he brought to the living room. He looked at the coffee table, where Dijana’s last, unopened letter lay. The writing on the envelope was erratic—some characters slanting to the left, others to the right—and perhaps that was why he hadn’t opened it.

  The telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Brani?”

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “You’re still coming tomorrow?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I, dear?”

  He nodded into the phone. “You got my letter?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, and he wondered if she was going to cry. He’d written her a story about her husband’s flight west in 1948, about how he ended up in a displaced persons camp in Frankfurt and died the next year of tuberculosis. But she didn’t cry. She only said, “Afternoon tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll prepare something good.”

  “You always do, Mother.”

  He hung up, then sat a moment on the sofa, staring at his small television. He turned it on and flipped between the two channels, settling on a repeat of the May Day parade down Mihai Boulevard. He’d always avoided such celebrations, but next year, he promised himself, he would attend. Then he looked up at a sound.

  Clicking, from the front of the apartment. Like a lock being turned. He stood and walked quietly to the foyer.

  Beside the coat rack, he waited, listening. More clicks, and then a quiet groan beneath the cacophony of trumpets from the television. But the sound was in the kitchen, and he knew then that it was only the water heater, trying desperately to raise the temperature. There was no one here at all.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE: THE SHOULDER

  PART TWO: THE JOWLS

  PART THREE: THE INNER PARTS