The Bridge of Sighs (12 page)

He passed into the corridor that echoed his footsteps and Terzian’s voice behind him-”Hold on, Brod, wait!” Emil stepped onto the bright concrete steps. He wondered if Terzian wanted a repeat of that first day.

By God, he’d give it to him. He was in just that sort of mood.

“Brod!”

A car at the corner laid on the horn to get some horses moving, and a band of Gypsies carried heavy sacks on the opposite side of the street. People shouted, but the buzzing was so loud that their shouts were like whispers. He was on the hot, cracked sidewalk, walking nowhere. Some uniforms looked up—more laughers, no doubt. What a funny town.

He wanted to take a bath at Lena Crowders grand house, among those paintings. Long beards of history. He wanted Lena Crowder to use her white, intoxicated fingers on his back and his bruised eye. He would go see her. Yes. Get a ride. A taxi.

“Brod!” Terzian whispered back there.

Another car, blue, driving beside him—a small, sleek make he didn’t know—honked. It was like a whisper too. The buzzing was a river in his head.

But when he longed for Lena Crowder he remembered her husband’s crushed skull. It was all sickness and disease anyway, and he might as well search for a hooker with stubby workers’ fingers and a low price. Young, old—it no longer mattered.

The blue car moved ahead a short distance and stopped. A tall man in a light-colored overcoat stepped out. Another familiar face, but from where? Over the noise of his skull he could hear the man’s accented voice saying, “Comrade Emil Brod?”

The man had curved smile lines that connected his lips to his eyes. Emil stopped. “Yes?”

The smile lines deepened as the man pulled out a pistol with his white-gloved hand. There was an instant in which Emil’s mind did the work very quickly and identified it as a Walther. Probably a PPK. Officer’s gun, German—German, like his accent. But as soon as the identification was made, it fled his mind.

The man emptied three rounds into Emil, jumped back into the car, and swerved away.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

*******************

I
t was a sharp connection: his head against concrete. His hands wobbled out to the sides, somewhere, his knuckles scratched. Tires burned against the road. Carbon monoxide and hot rubber. The sky fuzzed over and was visible again, and his thumping heart obscured all sounds. The buzzing was gone; only the backbeat of his blood remained. He could not even hear the yell- shaped mouth of the dark, hungry face bent over him. The name came to him in a flash: Leonek. Leonek’s mouth made long ovals as he yelled at the crowd forming around them. Wide-brimmed fedoras and women’s shoes, vivid, red-painted nails emerging from white leather straps. Breathing was forced labor; there was soon nothing in him. He tried to raise his head to swallow the air, but something was sitting on his chest, maybe Leonek, or the Bulgarian, but he couldn’t know. He couldn’t see a thing except blue sky, then nothing. He was sinking in a warm, watery pain, an angry bathwater covering him in blackness.

A mountain range, high grass above the treeline, tired soldiers poking through the underbrush, looking. They evaporated to white and faded into an angry, violent crowd with large, flat rocks in their hands. They threw in silence. Then came the hard-edged ache behind his eyelids. He opened them to let it out, but light spilled in, cutting into his brain. His thoughts were porridge. The light would not form into shapes. The smell of human sweat and warm decay was inescapable. Voices hummed around him like flies, louder, and when he tried to swat them, fresh pain erupted and he gasped, gripped by it, his whole body seizing up, crying. He saw the calm, everyday expression on that face, but the details, the features, were unclear—
Comrade Emil Brod?
—then the pistol emerging slowly, more slowly than possible. He could almost make out the slow bullet in the air pocket that burned around it, hot waves rippling along the slug. Then the moment of impact, cracking through ribs, soft tissue, organs. The pain was terrible. Through it a woman’s voice said
there was
and
Comrade Brod
. But he was already out again, warm rivulets filling mouth, nose, eyes.

The hospital room was high-ceilinged and airy, and when he shifted his head, sore neck creaking, he saw a plain-looking nurse in the corner, knitting. She looked up from her needles to his bloodshot eyes, and he thought that in the midday light she was beautiful.

“You’re up?” She set the needles aside.

The pain returned when he tried to move. It scratched through his guts and chest. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a whisper:
“Water. “

She shook her head. He said it again, trying to wet the inside of his mouth with a dry, heavy tongue. But she was firm. The doctor forbade it. “You have holes down there. We don’t need you leaking all over the sheets.” He saw the knitting in her hand. Something blue and small and soft, for a baby. “You’ve been out a week, you know?” She put the knitting in her pocket and felt his face for fever. “We almost thought,” she began, then smiled and left the room.

The windows were covered by a translucent white drape so thin he could see the crowns of leafy trees and white-spotted sky. The walls hummed like a machine.

So he was alive.

It surprised him that he couldn’t think it with more enthusiasm. All he could imagine were innumerable days ahead forming a long line to his eventual death. Days of working and fighting, or days of inertia. He didn’t even have a job now. He wasn’t even an inspector.

It was almost funny, but not enough to test his body with laughter. Only a week into his job, and someone had blown a hole in him. Three holes.

A young doctor with a buzzed head looked into his eyes while holding the lids open with his thumbs, then removed the bandages that covered his chest and stomach. Emil almost screamed. The doctor winced with him, as though he could feel his patient’s misery. Then the bandages were off, and Emil—with an extra pillow behind his head—looked down on the white expanse of sickly flesh and sewn holes. It was as if he were looking down on a different body, one uncovered by the gleeful Uzbek coroner. Only the pain reminded him it was his own, each time the doctor touched the puckering, swollen seams stitched by black thread. There were three gashes: one along the edge of his right breast, another just below his left breast and heart, and the last in the center of his soft gut. The doctor affirmed that his survival was a miracle.

“A scientific miracle,” the doctor specified. He looked at a watch while he held Emil’s wrist. “Feeling up for visitors?”

He felt up for nothing. The doctor’s hand was covered by a thin mask of black hair.

“Inspector?”

“Sure,” Emil croaked. “Of course. Watch?”

“Pardon?”

Emil pointed at the doctor’s wristwatch, then at himself. “My watch?”

The doctor settled his patient’s hand back in the sheets and rummaged through the things on the bureau. Pushed past the photos, lifted the garter with a wink. Then he found the chain, and lowered the watch into Emil’s hand. “We’ll wait a few hours for water.”

He felt the ticking in his palm. Steady and even.

“They’ve been calling every day.”

“My grandparents?”

“Yes,” the doctor nodded. “Them too.”

Chief Moska came as sun was falling and the tree outside was just black silhouette. Holding a copy of
The Spark
in one big hand, he rapped on the doorframe with the other. Emil felt an urge to mutter
enter
in the chief’s resolute way, but words were making his thirst a desperation. The chief had a lumpy expression of bafflement, and when he pulled a squeaky wooden chair beside the bed, he left his jacket on. He sweated the whole time.

“Brod. You’re feeling well.” It was almost a command.

“I’m awake.”

“That’s something,” Moska agreed. “We made sure you got your own room, a ward didn’t seem right.” He looked at the sheets. “They say it’s a remarkable recovery.”

“Scientific miracle.”

The big man’s hat was in his hands, squeezed and released repeatedly. He settled back in the chair and blew through pursed lips. His eyes focused on the far wall, the bedside table, the framed amateur painting of the Georgian Bridge at twilight, then back to the sheets. Emil’s hands lay there, beside the newspaper. The chief cocked his head to the side. “I wanted to talk to you. About the case,” he said. “Your case.”

Emil’s voice lowered. “No case. For me.”

“We agree there,” the chief said quickly. “But we both know, don’t we? Who did this to you.”

He nodded.

Moska looked at the sheets, then his hat in his lap, the light fixture in the ceiling, and squinted. “Youve been treated unfairly, Brod. We know this now. There were…
misunderstandings.”

Emil waited.

The chief’s squint tired. He blinked and wiped his cheek with a hand. “This is the nature of bureaucracies.
Large
bureaucracies. Lack of trust. Before the war it was different.” His voice wavered slightly, as if he were about to cry. But he wasn’t. “Before the war we didn’t even need a homicide department, you remember? We were all just
police.
Then it grew. Everything grew. The Militia, the divisions, state security. I don’t know anyone outside my little department anymore.”

He seemed genuinely saddened by this, but Emil was still unable to understand. He almost asked for clarification, but the chief was on his feet again.

“It’s insidious, this situation. Yet we have to make it work.” His large, long features twisted as they forced out the words. “Apologies all around, Brod. It’s what I’ve come to say. I’d prefer you didn’t resign. The others too. They feel the same. We’ve all been shamed by this.”

Emil opened his mouth to ask for something more, some detail he knew he was missing—some
why
—but the chief was already out the door.

The tree had gone indistinct against the night sky by the time his grandparents arrived. She patted her tear-stained cheeks with a musty handkerchief, and the old man stood in various corners of the room, as though ascertaining all possible avenues of escape. She opened a package of bread and hard cheese and told him to eat it slowly, because that was what the doctor had told her, that the hole in Emil’s stomach would require slow eating. “Slow,” she repeated, patting his head like a dog’s.

“Water?” he whispered.

“Will they let you?”

“I’ve had nothing all day.”

She frowned. “That can t be good.” She set the cheese and bread on top of the newspaper. “Let me find out.” She was gone.

Grandfather emerged from one of his corners and informed Emil again that he’d been unconscious for a week. “We thought,” he began, but like the nurse he couldn’t finish.

“I’m all right now.”

The light made Grandfather’s flesh pink and more healthy- looking than it really was. “You’re a hero,” he said earnestly, but Emil didn’t answer. The silence between them was awkward, so after a while Grandfather cleared his throat. “This is a
great
pride. For you. Serving your country this way.”

“Serving the great collective,” said Emil, finally smiling. But Grandfather didn’t smile. Emil felt the old man’s loose fingers in his hand, squeezing, kneading his palm. The door opened. Grandmother stood, like an angel, holding a glass of cool water.

Clarity came with Leonek Terzian. Emil had slept off and on, and in the morning, after breakfast, he read the paper. There were trials beginning to unravel in the east, in Moscow, and airplanes still flying in the west. On the second page was brief coverage of Palestine; there was more fighting in the Holy Land. Only at home was everything ideal: record crops and the lowest crime rate in memory. Then Leonek arrived with the lunch. He slouched in the chair beside the bed to better reach Emil’s tray. He took a bite of bread and dragged an index finger across the wide block of margarine, white wrinkles collecting over his print, and sucked it with his small, dark mouth. Emil ate mashed potatoes and waited.

Leonek swallowed. “Chief talked to you. Didn’t he?”

Emil nodded.

Leonek seemed satisfied. He took another bite of bread. “He’s right, you know. About everything. It’s been a mistake, and I’m not the only one whos sorry. There are—do you mind?” He took a slice of red apple from Emil’s tray. “You have to understand.”

“Bureaucracy,” offered Emil.

Leonek shook his head. “Rumors.
That’s
the problem. We get them in the office every day.” He pursed his lips in reflection, and Emil found his easy manner annoying. Maybe he hadn’t noticed, but Emil had almost died. Leonek shrugged. “Sometimes the rumors catch, sometimes not. We heard a rumor once that Sergei, the man you replaced, was going to be killed. That rumor didn’t catch. Then he was dead.” Leonek finished the apple slice and shrugged, as though Sergei’s story was commonplace. “Then, a month ago, a rumor did catch. From this guy, an informer I keep down in the Canal District. The one I was talking to when you came by that day, the interview room. A weasel named Dora.”

“Dora?”

“A man with a woman’s name,” said Leonek, nodding. He took another wedge. “I met him years ago, some nasty business.” He stopped, as if he had lost his thread, then began again: “Anyway, that’s when he started informing. But three months ago, the district police picked him up for black-market pork. You know the stuff. Rotting right through, covered in flies. Real shit.” He waved a hand. “So when they brought him in, he said he had information for Homicide—for me, since I’m the one he always deals with.”

Emil shifted his arms painfully and brought water to his lips. He was still so parched.

“Dora told us that sometime soon—he didn’t know when—a spy would be brought into Homicide.” He paused. “Preparation for a shake-up.”

Leonek watched closely, but Emil was not reacting yet. He was waiting. Leonek finally gave some more:

“Come on, you know how things are. Berlin. And Vienna and Italy, I hear. We’ll be fighting the Americans soon—even the Big Comrade in Moscow is uneasy. He’s seeing enemies everywhere. It’s like the thirties all over again.”

“How would Dora know this?”

Leonek took Emil’s water to rinse out his mouth. “He knows everything and everyone. He gets jobs out of town, in the mansions, or the bars here in the First District. He listens. We never ask where it comes from because he wouldn’t tell us. Eighty percent of the time Dora tells us the truth.”

Hearing it explained made it made it no less incomprehensible. “You thought I was a spy.”

“Right out of the Academy. Why wouldn’t we?”

In the Academy he had been taught that informing on a fellow officer who chose to disregard the tenets of Marxist justice in favor of opportunism was a duty. But he knew no one who believed that outside the classroom.

“And your Opa. Yes, we know about him. Old-time lefty. Privilege home in the Fifth District. You know what happened last year? Three policemen were put away for life. A snitch working right beside them.”

“And Brano Sev? What’s he?”

Leonek frowned suddenly. “Take a look—no one talks to him. He’s nobody’s friend.”

He had finished the whole apple and was now picking at the potatoes. Emil doubted this oaf’s regret went nearly as deep as his stomach. He’d known men like this in the Arctic, men with consciences the size of sunflower seeds. Little more than dogs. “What about the case?”

He took a moment to swallow. “What case? It’s dead.”

“Not for me, it isn’t. Tell me what Dora told you.”

Leonek’s tongue cleared food from his palate. “Listen, Brod. Jerzy Michalec is a member of the Central Committee. He has friends
everywhere
. Why do you think you’re lying in here? We know about limits in the People’s Militia.” He gave a final swallow. “Don’t worry about your record. We’ll erase the whole case.”

The banality came over him: the erasure of two men’s murders, as though Janos Crowder and Aleksander Tudor had never existed. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s why they give us erasers.”