Liberation Movements (11 page)

Brano Sev
arrived looking as he always did. Unamused. He stared at Arendt’s body, the blood that matted his once-white hair and soaked the rug, then turned to Katja. “Comrade Drdova, would you please interview the neighbors? I saw a few venturing out. Statements might be of use.”

Katja looked at Gavra, who shrugged. She marched out.

Brano spoke quietly. “So?”

“We interviewed the doctor earlier,” Gavra said. “We learned that Zrinka Martrich was delusional. She spent time in the Vuzlove clinic—Tarabon—but was transferred three years ago to Rokošyn, a research institute.”

“Rokošyn?”

“Yes. But the brother—her brother, Adrian Martrich—claims this is a lie, because there’s no clinic in Rokošyn. While we were interviewing the brother, someone did this.”

“Adrian Martrich is right,” said Brano. “There hasn’t been a clinic in Rokošyn for years. There was, but it was shut down long ago.”

Gavra raised Zrinka Martrich’s file. “The killer made a mess, probably looking for this.”

“I see.”

“I want to talk to Adler again.”

Brano squatted beside the doctor. He used the flat end of a pencil to look inside Arendt’s pants pockets. “I wouldn’t worry about Wilhelm Adler. His wife returned home an hour ago and found him in the living room, much like the doctor here.”

“Dead?” Gavra muttered, but Brano didn’t bother answering. He walked to the front door and began examining the frame for forced entry, while Gavra tried to manage his annoyance. “Adler’s killed because he talked to us,” said Gavra. “So it’s what I thought. The Ministry’s involved.”

Again, Brano Sev didn’t answer.

“You know something about this, don’t you? Where’s Ludvík Mas?”

Brano maintained his silence as he walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and peered down at the dark street, now empty of promenading families. “A funeral and two murders.” He let the curtain go. “It’s been a long day.”

Gavra threw Zrinka Martrich’s file on the desk. “Why aren’t you helping?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“What does that mean?”

“Are you watching the brother?” said Brano. “This Adrian Martrich?”

“I will.”

“Give Katja the first shift. You need sleep.”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s an order. And Gavra?”

“Yes?”

“Be sure and have your pistol next time. I can see you’re unarmed.”

“Oh. Right.”

Brano Sev walked out.

Katja returned, predictably, with nothing from the neighbors. She’d knocked on doors, and the few who chose to answer insisted they had just returned home or had been watching the evening repeat of
Family Popa
and heard nothing. So Gavra told her about Adler’s murder.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Can you watch Adrian Martrich’s apartment? The Comrade insists I get some sleep.”

“No problem,” she said, then looked at the wet rug and added, half to herself, “Better than going home.”

Gavra had a natural affinity for puzzles, but this one wouldn’t fit together. Two murders in the Capital and a terrorist action gone wrong. The only connection was a young woman, Zrinka, who had died on the plane, a delusional who left a message for the terrorists when they were standing in the same terminal she was. Zrinka’s old therapist was dead, as well as the German who helped arrange the hijacking.

The answer was in there, he knew, but his Yalta-trained logic was of no use. So he floundered, rolling in his musty bed, finally going to the kitchen for the palinka, which only did its job at 3:00
A.M.

He nearly made it out the door without his Makarov, and had to run back to the bedroom to search for his shoulder holster. He relieved Katja at ten, by which time she’d followed Adrian Martrich in her Škoda from his apartment to the tram, and then to Union Street—where, it appeared, Martrich had decided to open for a few Sunday hours in honor of the next day’s holiday, Monday the twenty-eighth of April, General Secretary Tomiak Pankov’s birthday.

Katja had nothing to report because she was tired—she admitted to falling asleep a few times in the car. Gavra was too exhausted to practice intimidation with her.

After she drove off, he settled in his own Škoda across the street from the butcher shop. It was warm out, so he’d worn shirtsleeves under his jacket, and now loosened his tie. He spent the next few hours trying not to sleep.

During the past year under Brano Sev’s tutelage, he’d sat in so many cars on so many street corners, simply watching. At first it was nearly impossible to take. He grew bored and fidgety within the first half hour and always had to pee. He’d limp off to an alleyway to relieve himself, glancing around the corner to be sure his subject hadn’t changed position, then hurry back to sit behind the wheel. For daytime watches, he found it helped to bring along a novel. He’d read
Anna Karenina
during a week-long session last summer, and remembered being pleased when Tolstoy entered the mind of a hunting dog as easily as he entered Anna’s.

But Brano disapproved of reading on the job and forced him to learn to do without his books.
Mental quiet,
his tutor said.
Like the Buddhists.

What do you know about Buddhism?

A woman I loved used to be a Buddhist.

Gavra couldn’t imagine Brano with either a woman or a man. Who, after all, could fall for someone as cold as that? The advice was sound though. Sitting in his car, Gavra silenced his wandering thoughts and watched Adrian Martrich come out now and then to oversee the mute crowds their country produced whenever a fresh shipment of lamb arrived. The line grew the length of the block. Gavra observed with some detached interest the subculture of the queue—how, with time, a straight line becomes a crowd, and then each person takes a role. A tall, older man becomes the dictator, keeping track of the order, stopping one person and letting one through. Another, perhaps an old woman, becomes his assistant, her careful eye on everyone, tugging the dictator’s sleeve at the first sign of disruption. Among the sheep are the gossipers, the knitters, the readers, as well as the complainers who make speeches to strangers about the infiltrator—usually a Gypsy who ignores the painstakingly arranged order and tries to slip in undetected. But he never succeeds, because the assistant has tugged the dictator’s sleeve; the dictator has spoken and pointed; and the infiltrator has been blocked by a wall of firm backs, shoulder to shoulder, these steadfast sheep acting as if there’s no one behind them, trying to get through.

Gavra watched until four, when the meat ran out and Martrich walked the length of the block, asking everyone to please leave. Adrian carried himself very well among his disappointed customers. He patted their shoulders and bent to speak with very old, shrunken women. He knew them all and treated them as if they were his people. And they, Gavra could see, appreciated this. They appreciated him. They liked this handsome, pale-eyed young man who handed them their daily ration of meat.

An hour later Gavra watched Adrian’s young assistant leave for home, then Adrian himself locked up. He paused at the door, looking up the street toward the tram stop at the next intersection. He ran his fingers through his hair.

Then Adrian Martrich turned, smiled directly at Gavra, and crossed the street to meet him.

Gavra rolled down his window; Adrian bent close.

“Comrade Noukas, you’re not trying to be secretive, are you?”

“Uh, no.” Gavra’s mental silence was breaking up.

“I noticed Comrade Drdova out here earlier, too. You don’t think I blew up my sister’s plane, do you?”

Adrian was becoming irritating, but Gavra had the overwhelming sense that he was doing this on purpose. “Just making sure you’re all right.”

“Very comforting,” said Adrian. “If you’re watching anyway, can you give me a lift home? Save tram fare.”

Gavra wasn’t sure how Brano would feel about this, but there was no point letting the old man know. “Come on.”

They drove north along empty Sunday streets, and while Gavra tried not to look at his passenger, he felt Adrian’s presence; the right half of his body began to sweat.

“Why do I need protection?”

“We’re not sure you need it.”

“But you have reason to worry.”

“Yes.”

“Doctor Arendt?”

Gavra submitted and looked at him. “How did you know that?”

Adrian was staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Lucky guess. Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Gavra. “Do you?”

Adrian shook his head. “You think it has something to do with Zrinka?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t know much, do you?” He didn’t say this with any bitterness, and Gavra didn’t bother answering.

When they parked in the vast gravel lot between apartment blocks, Adrian said, “Might as well come up. You’ll fall asleep down here.”

Gavra knew what his mentor would say to that. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“You won’t fall asleep, then? I mean, if I’m in danger.”

“No.”

Adrian nodded, then climbed out. Gavra watched him walk gingerly to the glass door of his building and open it with a key. Before entering, Adrian turned back and shot him another smile.

Gavra lit a cigarette.

He watched neighbors arrive. Old men and women, a group of three teenagers lighting cigarettes, a family with two young children. Everyone appeared tired, returning from long Sunday lunches that inevitably grew into drunken dinners with lascivious uncles, dozing fathers, fussy mothers, and grandmothers cooking vast meals for dozens. Gavra remembered them from childhood as wonderful, exhausting affairs, where he would run around his grandparents’ farm with a pellet gun, shooting crows perched on branches. But he’d never known those Sunday lunches as an adult, because after joining the Ministry he had never returned home. He sometimes considered visiting—surely by now he had no reason to be uncomfortable there. He was an adult, and an officer of the Ministry for State Security.

Besides, it was so long ago that his father found him in his grandparents’ barn with that young farmhand from Krosno. Gavra had been sixteen then; fourteen years was a long time for any father to sustain his anger.

He’d lost his mental silence, and because of that he nearly missed it when, around six thirty, as the shadows of the occasional tree stretched across the glass entryway, an old Saxon walked up to the front door, fumbling with his keys, then stopped. The old man looked back as a younger man in a wide hat jogged up, calling for him to wait. From his open window, Gavra could hear the peculiar accent of the jogger. Flat, the syllables spoken from the front of the mouth.

Western. Perhaps American.

The old man noticed it, too, his surprise evident even from this distance, but let the man in with him as Gavra threw his cigarette out the window.

Gavra didn’t open the door, because there were perhaps eighty apartments in Zrinka’s brother’s ten-story building, making a total of at least two hundred inhabitants. There was no reason to assume this foreigner had arrived to see Adrian Martrich. So he hesitated, just a few seconds, until another man jogged across the pitted courtyard and used a key to get inside. The man’s suit was too tight, and an air of claustrophobia surrounded him.

Gavra climbed out of his car and began to run, because that second man was Ludvík Mas.

1968

They were
the only customers left in the bar when it closed at one, and they stumbled arm in arm down Celetná, past soldiers standing against the old town’s medieval stone walls. Stanislav sometimes drunkenly saluted them. “Oblov, you’re still here?” he called in Russian.

A fat soldier on the opposite corner squinted. “Stanislav, get your ass out of my district or I’ll personally take care of that girlfriend of yours!”

Stanislav shot him a rude hand gesture, then grabbed Peter’s shoulder and walked on.

By the time they reached the arch of the Charles Bridge’s Old Town gate, Stanislav was failing. A long day of drinking had broken up his words into barely comprehensible syllables. “Got to…I’m…uh…tired.”

“You’re tired?”

“Da.”

“Should I get you to the train station?”

“No…
nyet.
There.”

Stanislav pointed at the small door on the inside of the bridge’s gate. “In there,” he mumbled. “Good for sit.”

Peter was surprised to find the battered old door unlocked. Inside in the darkness, he squinted to make out the twisting stone steps leading high into the tower. He peered back to see Stanislav falling through the door, then closing it behind himself. “I don’t think you’ll make it,” said Peter.

“Eh?”

“To the top.” He pointed up into the blackness.

“I’ll make it.” Stanislav ushered him up with his hands.

But as they reached the fourth narrow window that looked down on the bridge and across to the castle district, Stanislav sat heavily on a step.

“Just a little…rest.
Da?
But you…” He yawned and looked up. “But you will wake me? Eight,” he said. “Eight thirty.”

“I’ll do that.”

Stanislav stifled another yawn and closed his eyes. “You won’t…sleep?”

Peter settled on a step above the soldier and opened the window, letting in a cool river breeze. The alcohol had been washed away by his night’s act of betrayal, and as his eyes adjusted to the shadows of the bridge he wished they’d brought along another bottle. “Don’t worry. I won’t sleep.”

For a half hour Peter remained there, his knees up to his chest. The breeze coming in off the Vltava seeped through his thin coat and pants. From below he heard occasional distant voices he thought were Russian. Once, a truck rumbled across the bridge, and he watched its lights dwindle between the rows of statues.

“What’re you thinking, Peter?” Stanislav seemed to be speaking in his sleep.

“I’m wondering how I can have a life like yours.”

The soldier squirmed into a tighter fetal position, his head on the step just below Peter’s foot. “
Da, da.
Well, wake me up when you know.”

Another truck passed under them, then the noise faded away. He had no answers. The only sure thing was that he could not return to the university. His phone call to Captain Poborsky had ended that. Those who had not been rounded up would know who had turned them in. They would manhandle him from his bed in the night, then carry him to some vacant janitor’s closet or toilet stall; they would teach him a lesson.

The soldier began to snore. In the darkness, Peter could just see his hunched back, the way he was rolled tight. On the crest of his hip, where his fine coat had fallen back, the knife from his father was looped in his belt. It seemed to Peter like a motif in their relationship. A single object that signified the difference between the two of them. Stanislav’s loving family was in that knife, and the knife, like the family, protected Stanislav as he made his way through the world.

Peter cleared his throat. “Stanislav?”

The snores continued, the soldier’s chest rising and falling.

Peter spoke quietly. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve done. I killed my best friend and the woman I loved. Not on purpose, but because of my stupidity. But now—now I’m not so sure. Did I mean to do it? Did I want us to be caught? Was I so jealous I’d rather they were dead than together? Because afterward I did something completely consciously. I made a phone call I never thought I would make. And right now, my old friends are in that convent on Bartolom
jská. They’re probably…” He couldn’t finish the sentence aloud, but his mind repeated it in full:
They’re probably being tortured.
He cleared his throat again, his mind now inventing grotesque scenes that took place in that small basement room. Poor meek Jan in a chair, tied down, his glasses cracked and blood dripping from his fingernails.

He felt like he was going to be sick, so he put his face as far through the window as he could, sucking in fresh air.

It wasn’t only the gore of his imagination, but also the realization of this fact: Because his old friends were the kind of men they were, with their pride and convictions, at some point Comrade Poborsky would walk them out to the convent courtyard and shoot them in the head.

He looked out at the river and across to the lights of the castle district. That was something he would miss. Mistakes or not, what he’d done in the last days had rerouted his life. It was entirely different.

He sank back on the steps, his stomach now settling.

The only sounds were water lapping medieval stones down below and Stanislav’s irregular snores. Peter leaned forward and reached out, touching the handle of the knife. Another hawk was carved into its worn wooden handle, stretched to fit the length. When he slid it out, the blade reflected a distant street lamp into his eyes, and he blinked. It was a heavy knife, and well balanced. Like the soldier’s family, he thought, and smiled. Because not even then did he know what he was going to do.

In his study of the semantics of music, he had learned about Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the “dyadic sign,” that which unites a work’s concept with its sound-image. What Peter liked about this was that it completely disregarded the composer, who, at the point when his work is being played, is entirely disassociated from the piece. His intentions and desires no longer matter. The piece he has written is now simply action and sound. Now, here, Peter felt like a composer out of touch with his creation; he was instead in the audience, only understanding his actions as they were being performed.

He took two steps down and bent over the snoring soldier’s large ear. The Warsaw Pact collar was up over the neck, so he folded it down. The soldier did not stir, his snores a steady engine echoing lightly up the tower’s stairwell.

By now he knew, though to put it into words would have been impossible. He lowered the knife in front of the soldier’s throat, parallel to the ground, and placed a knee behind the neck.

Peter remained in that position for a minute, his quick breaths feeling hot in this cool place.

Only now could he find the words to describe what he was doing.