Liberation Movements (8 page)

Gavra was
furious. He had brutalized a man who, though not innocent in the classical sense, was not guilty of the particular thing Gavra was thinking of as he put his knee into his face.

“Why did you do that?”

Brano turned onto Mihai Boulevard and cocked his head. “I wanted you to keep the pressure on. If you believed Adler had given them the explosives, then you’d push him. He didn’t move the explosives himself, but if he knew who had done it he would have said something. He didn’t know.”

Gavra watched the gray Tisa flowing past. Everyone in the Militia office hated Brano Sev, and he was beginning to understand exactly why. Brano understood people; he knew them well enough to know what to say, or do, to most trouble them. And for Gavra, this method was finally showing results.

When he was ten, Gavra’s father told him that a wild dog lived just outside their village, and that it ate children. When he realized that this was a lie to keep him from wandering, Gavra began to hate his father. Two decades later, his Ministry mentor was doing the same thing.

Gavra lit a cigarette. “We need to look at the Ministry. Someone at Yalta called Wilhelm Adler and told him what information to pass on.”

“We don’t know it was someone from the Ministry,” said Brano. “Adler doesn’t know—he’s just guessing.”

“Ludvík Mas was waiting at the airport. He’s involved.”

“We were at the airport,” Brano countered. “Does that mean we’re involved?”

Gavra cracked the window to let out smoke. “You know what most bothers me?”

“Tell me.”

“You’re choosing to ignore the biggest connection—or coincidence. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Then enlighten me, Gavra.”

“Why was Libarid, the only Armenian in the Militia, on a plane taken over by Armenian terrorists?”

Brano didn’t answer at first. He turned onto Karl Liebknecht, a small side street filled with vegetable shops, and parked. “Continue.”

“I just think it shouldn’t be overlooked.”

“Do you propose speaking to Zara, his widow? One day after she’s learned her husband was killed?”

Brano was testing him; he knew that. The old man always looked him in the eyes when he wanted to measure Gavra’s abilities. “Why not?”

“Okay,” Brano said as he started the car again. “Let’s go see her.”

They parked in a narrow, muddy lot in the Tenth District, between block towers riddled with terraces hemmed in by opaque colored glass. Each piece of glass was cracked. They took a loud elevator to the fifth floor and found
TERZIAN
on a plaque beneath an eyehole. “Go ahead,” said Brano.

Gavra pressed the buzzer.

From inside came a woman’s voice, “Vahe…Vahe, no!” Then footsteps, and a pause as she peered through the eyehole. Zara opened the door, a robe pulled tight around her small body, her face swollen, her eyes slits. “Brano. Gavra.”

“How are you?” said Gavra.

She looked at him as if the question made no sense. She glanced back. “Come in.”

They sat in the cramped living room, trying not to step on Vahe’s wooden toys, which were scattered across the carpet, though the boy was nowhere to be seen.

“Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, thank you, Zara,” said Gavra.

Brano shook his head; he was choosing silence.

She sat in a stiff wooden chair and put her hands together between her knees, as if in prayer. “Did you catch them?”

“We’re working on it,” said Gavra.

She nodded, and Gavra noticed Brano was suddenly distracted, looking at the wall. To the left of the television hung a large cross decorated at the ends with ornate swirls.

“Which is why we’re here,” Gavra continued. “These terrorists, the ones who were responsible. I guess you know they were Armenian.”

She nodded again.

“So we’re trying to follow up on any possible connection.” He cleared his throat as she stared at him. He should have thought this through before coming here. “During the past few weeks, did you or Libarid have any contact with Armenians you didn’t previously know?”

“You’re asking if we’ve been talking to terrorists?”

He shook his head. “No. What I mean is, the Armenian community here is very small, and it makes sense that if new people arrived, it would be well known.”

She sighed. “Gavra, when people leave the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, they don’t come here. They go to Moscow, or Belgrade, or even New York. But not here. The Armenians you find in our country had the bad fortune of being born here.”

She bit her lip, as if what she’d said hadn’t come out right. From a back room, Gavra heard the child humming.

“Do you go to church?” Brano asked, nodding at the cross.

Zara’s cheekbones reddened, and she smiled at him, but it wasn’t a kind smile. Her small eyes were pink. “Comrade Sev, my husband may have kept our religion a secret, but I’m not my husband. Here.” She reached back to the bookcase behind her and grabbed a thick book called
Orations
—the collected writings of General Secretary Tomiak Pankov. She opened it to show that the guts had been ripped out and replaced with a leather-bound book, gold squiggly letters across the cover. “Here it is, comrade. I’m not going to hide my Bible anymore. Want to read?”

Brano said nothing, only leaned back and crossed his arms over his stomach, while Gavra tilted forward, elbows on his knees.

“We’re not here to make accusations, Zara. We’re trying to figure out what happened to Libarid.”

Zara closed the book as Vahe stumbled into the room, grinning. There was a smudge of dirt across his forehead. When he saw the men, he stopped. “Come here,” Zara said, and he approached warily. She replaced the book in her lap with her son, wet her thumb with her tongue, and wiped his forehead clean.

“Hey, buddy,” said Gavra, smiling, but the boy didn’t answer.

“Comrade Terzian,” said Brano, “I asked my question because the church, as the center of the Armenian community, may have some answers for us.”

She nodded, then squeezed her son to her breast. “Sorry. I—I’ve lost the only thing I could depend on. Libarid was the one person in my life devoted completely to me—to
us
—and now I’m left with only a memory. I…” She kissed the crown of Vahe’s head; he rolled his eyes. “This is no fake emotion, you see. It’s real. It makes rational thought a little difficult. No—we didn’t hear about any new Armenians. We knew about Gourgen Yanikian, of course, like everybody, but that’s America for you. America encourages people to do things like shoot each other.” She paused. “But I don’t know anyone who approved of Yanikian’s killings.”

Then she started to cry, but her son smiled at them, as if to say,
Look at her, would you?

At the Militia station, Katja was standing by the window, alone. She looked up as they entered and said, “Any leads?”

“No,” Brano said before Gavra could open his mouth. “And you? Any luck at the hotel?”

She wagged a finger at him. “The desk clerk told me you’d already been there. Would you call that a lead?”

“Perhaps,” said Brano, then went to his desk and began to dial the phone.

Once Brano was looking in the other direction, Katja raised her eyebrows at Gavra and pointed at the door, before walking out through it.

The old man was hunched over the mouthpiece, talking quietly to someone as Gavra followed her out.

He found her on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. “What’s going on?”

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a drink.”

She led him to the underground parking lot and took a Militia Škoda. She drove them to a smoky café-bar on October Square. On the way, she only said, “I’m not going to talk to the old bastard. Only to you. Because I know you’ll work with me on this. Am I right?”

“Yes,” said Gavra, unsure. “Of course.”

They said hello to Max and Corina—the couple gave discounts to the Militia, which made their café popular with the station—and ordered palinkas. Gavra waited for the drinks, then carried them to the window table where Katja sat.

She smiled—Katja often smiled at Gavra, and he worried that she was flirting with him. He knew she had difficulties in her marriage, and in Gavra’s experience marital troubles raised the chances he’d find himself in the embarrassing situation of fending off a female advance. Women sensed something in him that, unlike their men at home, was unthreatening.

She hadn’t invited him out for anything like that, though. “Brano thought he trumped me by letting me go to the hotel when he’d already been. But the old comrade doesn’t quite know everything.”

Gavra leaned closer.

“He asked the staff if the Armenians had talked to anyone while they were there—phone calls, meetings in their rooms—and they hadn’t. But I found a very cooperative desk clerk who seemed to like me. I had him go through their records again, and he came up with this.”

She produced a slip of paper marked

Gavra took it. “No message, no first name?” He turned the paper to look at its blank reverse. “Just
Comrade Martrich
?”

She shrugged.

“Why didn’t they give this to Brano?”

“Because,” she said, “the message never reached the hijackers. Comrade Martrich called
after
they had checked out and left for the airport. Look at the time.”

“About an hour before—”

“—the plane took off,” she said. “But that’s nothing. I thought the name was familiar, so I went back to Flight 54’s passenger manifest. Tenth line down, Zrinka Martrich.”

“A woman? On the same flight?”

Katja looked very pleased with herself. “So I sent Imre to Victory Square to look up her file. Almost nothing there at all. But just try to guess her last known address.”

“What?”

“Guess!” She was enjoying this.

“I don’t know,” said Gavra.

Katja placed her hands flat on the table. “A mental asylum, just outside Vuzlove. The Tarabon Residential Clinic.”

Gavra opened his mouth but was too stunned to speak.

She said, “I’m thinking this woman was insane.”

“An insane accomplice to hijacking?”

Katja shrugged. “Now you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Tell me what you and the
Com
rade have learned.”

Which is what he did.

The stewardess
smiled when I asked for water, but that was twenty minutes ago, and now she’s talking to the fat man in first class. He flicks his little red star self-consciously, flirting, and the stewardess is so flattered she’s forgotten my drink.

There’s a middle-aged man snoring beside me. Before passing out he tried to start a conversation, informing me that he was to meet with some extremely important Turks to discuss exporting locally made electric fans. “We’re famous for manufacturing the best fans in the region, did you know that? Better even than the Poles, and they’re admirable competition.”

“Interesting,” I told him, then turned away and asked for water.

His face is now pressed into the cushion of the headrest, his mouth flaccid and damp.

Up front, the stewardess laughs liltingly.

So I wave until she notices, touches the fat man’s sleeve to ask his patience, and walks over.

“Yes?” The stewardess squats beside me, showing off her intense brown eyes.

“That water, please.”

“Water?”

“Yes. I asked for water a while ago.”

“I see,” she says, though it’s plain she doesn’t. “I was just getting that.”

Or maybe, I think as the stewardess continues to the rear of the plane, it’s just that unreliable sense of time. Maybe I did only just ask for the water, and the stewardess has decided I’m one of the troublesome passengers, one of the bitches.

As if to confirm this, the fat man grunts and twists in his seat so he can get a good look at me.

I find myself wishing the fan salesman awake. Conversation would at least distract me from the fact that I’m having trouble remembering the last week. There are details—the explosion of the Turkish Airlines flight. The insane asylum. And the trail leading to a dead woman and her brother, Adrian. Adrian Martrich. And, of course, Gavra.

Out of the week there are only three vivid faces that remain with me, all men. Gavra, Adrian, and
him.
But I’ve lost track of what connects them all. Why were we protecting Adrian Martrich? Gavra never would explain anything in detail. Soon after the investigation started he became cold and uncommunicative.

And then, two days ago, Adrian Martrich suggested we go out for a drive. “Where?”

He shrugged. “To someplace I think you’ll be interested in.”

A voice is speaking to me.

It’s the stewardess, holding a plastic cup. “You did want water, right?”

“Of course. Thank you.”

The stewardess hands it over, smiles briefly, and returns to the fat man, shaking her head as she speaks to him.

I drink the whole cup in one go and crush it into the pocket of the next seat.

There is a part of me that tries not to remember that short trip with Adrian Martrich, because when I recall its details I shake and the surety of what I’m doing begins to collapse. So I jump to Wednesday morning—
this
morning—when I called the Militia station. Imre, that poor dunce, had spent the last week completely in the dark; I treated him with the same silence Gavra gave me, and when I called I was in no mood to fill him in. “Get me Brano Sev.”

“Brano?” said Imre.

“Just get him, will you?”

Imre timidly called for our Ministry officer to please take the phone.

“Sev here.”

“This is Katja.”

“Good morning, Katja.”

“Where’s Gavra?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.”

“Can we meet?”

“You don’t want to speak in the office?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Can you make it to the Hotel Metropol at noon?” He sounded so much more accommodating than he naturally was. “The bar.”