The Bridge of Sighs (22 page)

He read off his Militia identification number and told her this was an emergency. She made him wait while she conferred with

someone else. Finally she returned and unhappily gave him the telephone number.

More operators, another wait for the callback. Then a woman’s faint voice:
“Yes?”

He asked for Leonek Terzian.

The hiss on the line grew louder as he waited. Leonek’s voice was difficult to hear. “Emil? It’s you?” He was shouting. “Emil, listen.” A pause and a whisper directed at his mother to
get out of here.
“Emil?”

“Yes?”

“She wasn’t there.”

“What? She wasn’t—
what
⁷
.”
He had known it before, had known it in his bones: his premonitions had been astute. But hearing it aloud was entirely different.

“I went to Ruscova,” he said. “You didn’t tell me I’d have to get there by horse. But I made it. I went to that woman’s house. Irina Kula?”

“Yes yes, that’s it,” said Emil. Everything was being said too slowly.

“She wanted me to tell you it wasn’t her. She says it was Greta, her friend. She said you’d know her.”

Emil remembered a fat, frizzy-haired woman full of smiles.

“A man came for Lena. That’s what she said.”

“What?”

“She asked you to forgive her. She feels terrible.”

“Whatman?”

“I don’t know. Short, dark hair. That’s all I could get. Rude.”

Emil couldn’t speak. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He could smell Lena’s cigarettes and feel the shape of her ribs through the summer dress she wore in Ruscova. She had been crying then.

Something garbled came over the lines, ending with “dead.”

“What?”

“That maid. Irma? In the hospital—suffocated!”

Konrad brought Emil another drink and exited discreetly.

“You there?”

Emil wasn’t there. He was sitting at the desk, the telephone to his ear, but his body had contracted and convulsed, sending his thoughts elsewhere, to some desperate escape. Part of him wanted to cease right now. To turn off his head and call it quits. This was too much for one young man.

“Emil?”

All he could think to say was “I’m coming home.” He hung up.

A pile of twenty-three boys in a shattered Berlin apartment. Three bodies in the rubble. One in a living room, one in the Tisa. A girl in a hospital room, a pillow over her face. God, how they piled up. And Lena—yes, Lena—was just another.
But why not me?
Why was he not dead among the broken bricks?

He clutched his stomach and leaned over the floor, but this time nothing came.

He called the Schonefeld Aeroflot office. A shockingly friendly and perky Russian woman told him the next flight home wasn’t until four in the morning. Emil reserved a seat and finished his drink. He floated back to the bar. Konrad looked at him sympathetically and made a joke about his walk. Emil put his empty glass on the counter and asked for another.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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

T
he bartender arrived around three. Large, burly, peasant stock. He cleaned off the bar and replaced the corks with spouts for easy pouring. He had the look of workers who appeared on posters—strong, Soviet—with sleeves neatly rolled up and a wrench in their hands, bringing forth the future by way of railroads, dams and bridges. Or the worker statue in Victory Square, sharing a stone torch that lights nothing.

Konrad sat across from Emil and started speaking. It was a kind of nervousness. He didn’t know what to say, so he touched his broken nose and talked about the bartender’s obsessive cleanliness. Like no one he had ever seen. It was the last refuge of civility left in the big man. Konrad slid his glass over to Emil, smiling. “You need this more than I do.”

“What about Janos?”

“What about him?”

Maybe it was the drinks, or the despair, or their brutal combination, but Emil was suddenly very sure of himself. “Janos told you Smerdyakov—
Graz
—was a friend. I can’t believe Janos lied to you about him. Maybe at first he did, but he couldn’t follow through with the deception.”

“Why couldn’t he, sweet Comrade Inspector?” Konrad’s hands were on the table, flat, on each side of his glass.

“Because Janos was in love with you.”

It might have been true, but there was no way for Emil to know. He only knew that the German was holding something back, and flattery was the only way to bring it out.

Konrad let out a long, low sigh, sinking toward the table. He shrugged. “Of course Janos loved me. That is a given. And yes, you clever Slav, Janos could not lie to me for long. I could see right through him. Once Janos was in Berlin, standing in front of me, he could not help but spill the whole story.”

It was much as Emil had suspected. Janos went with Lena to Michalec’s home for a party. Their shared Hungarian past made them one-night friends, and they were inseparable. Then the
Oberst
arrived. He was a drunk who asked Michalec in loud Hungarian how much all this had cost. Only Janos and a couple others understood the words, and, to Janos, Michalec’s angry reaction was shocking. “He grabbed this drunk by the collar and flung him—
literally
—into the garden. The whole time shouting,
What are you doing in my house
?” But the German—a happy drunk— seemed to feel nothing, and murmured joyously that he would go to Berlin, to the files. That’s where anyone could learn how much this life had cost.

“God,” said Emil, his despair fleeing him in one brief, amnesiac moment. “It was all there from the start!”

Konrad shook his head. “When you’re working backwards, Comrade Inspector, yes. But not when that’s all you know. We’re not all criminal experts.”

But Janos’s interest was piqued. He took to following Michalec around town, spying on him, photographing him, and once, when he saw Michalec meet again with that German late one night, he decided to get in touch with his own man in Berlin.

Ten photos, thought Emil. The beginning. “So through you and Birgit he located the file and took one of the photographs.”

“He made a snapshot of the evidence,” Konrad corrected. “Unlike you, he’s not a thief.”

“But he was an extortionist. Janos blackmailed Michalec for six months. And then it ended. Why, Konrad? Why did Michalec decide it was all over?”

Konrad was sinking, slowly, into his chair. “You tell me, Inspector. After he left in February, I never heard from him.” His voice was somber and muted, as if covered by a veil. “It was supposed to set him free. The money was supposed to give him the freedom to leave his wife and come to me.”

Emil watched a moment, this man slipping into his own regrets, then put a hand on Konrad’s. He told him about the plane ticket receipt he had found in Janos’s apartment.

Konrad’s eyes lit up. “What?”

“He was killed the day before he was going to fly to Berlin,” said Emil, glad for once to make someone happy. “To be with you.”

The club was full. There were men dressed immaculately and some women laughing at jokes, and in the corner, on a small stage, a few men wearing women’s clothes and wigs prepared for a show. Emil remembered the black garters from Janos’s apartment—so long ago—and realized they had probably been his. Cabaret music blared from the jukebox—tinny sounds straining the old speakers—and smoke filled the room. He was surrounded by fur collars and fine hats. His own disarray was painful and obvious. They were watching him, even though their eyes never met his. It was the same trick the homicide inspectors conjured on that first day. He drank to ignore it.

He asked someone at the next table for the time, and the man’s milky, German voice almost slipped away before he caught it: 8:15. Still eight hours until his flight. The music swelled and consumed him.

He couldn’t remember where Irma had said she was from. He should find out and visit her family. Tell them something kind about her service to the Crowder household. He should not be here.

He dwelled on Irma to avoid thinking of the other one.

Konrad sat across from him, looking upset, and tapped Emil’s cheek. “You better wake up. There’s someone here to see you.” His face looked very white and stiff.

Behind Konrad, a tall man in a leather overcoat smiled. His smile was narrow, and he had thick, black-rimmed glasses. Emil recognized him from yesterday morning. “You are Comrade Inspector Emil Brod?” he asked, stepping up. He spoke Russian with a Moscow slur.

Konrad stood aside, whimpering quietly. Emil at first needed help getting up, but once on his feet he could make it all right. Outside, he said, “My cane?” and the Russian nodded to a disheveled- looking teenager standing outside a long Grosser Mercedes. The boy ran into the club. The Russian put a hand on Emil’s head to make sure it didn’t strike the frame as he got into the backseat. A chubby man with a broad smile was in there already—yes, this was the one he had lost in the alley—and then Emil was between them.

Behind the wheel was the one-armed taxi driver who had driven him and the bureaucrat from the airport. They looked at each other momentarily in the mirror, but Emil saw no recognition in his eyes.

The teenager reappeared with the cane and leapt into the passenger’s seat. When the car started moving, he lit a cigarette.

“Can I ask where we’re going?” Emil’s pulse was so loud he almost shouted his question.

The Russian who had fetched him pushed his glasses up his nose and shrugged. “Somewhere quiet. We’ll talk, no problem.” He cocked his head. “You want a smoke? Yakov, give the man a smoke. Give me one too.”

Emil took one. The Russian lit it for him with a match, but put his own behind an ear. Emil knew from the first drag that he was back in the East. He didn’t want his last minutes to taste like this.

The silhouetted shells of nighttime Berlin passed them, and all he could think of were methods of torture. Nothing extravagant, but the simplicity of heat and pressure applied to the tender parts of the body. Shards shoved beneath fingernails. Testicles burned with cigarettes—he gazed, horrified, at his own cigarette—and bones crushed. All the rumors of the MVD rolled over him. Simple visits to answer a few questions became days and weeks and months behind stone walls, iron bars. Became missing persons. Became stutterers and cripples and mutes. Soviet Intelligence had never been known for subtlety.

He wanted to think of Lena. He thought she might give him courage, but in these final moments all he could think of were his own bones, his own organs and flesh.

They finally stopped at a low brick building. A bullet- punctured sign said it was a boy s school. But there were no boys behind the twisted iron gate, and only a few lights in the windows. There were other cars parked along the street. Men leaned against their hoods, smoking. Waiting.

Emil’s heart sputtered so loudly he could not be sure of the silence in the street. Then the barking of a dog broke through.

The Russian in glasses, with the cigarette still behind his ear, led him past the gate and inside, down a dim yellow corridor lined by identical, odd-numbered doors: 17,19,21,23. The heavy man with the wide smile followed. Fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed. 33,35,37. Their shoes echoed on the floor. He thought he smelled ether.

They opened 47 and let him inside. Somebody hit the light switch. The room was just as he would have imagined: a small desk with two wooden chairs, facing a lone chair in the center of the room. There was a small spotlight on the desk.

“You know where to go,” said the one who had fetched him.

He did. He sat in the center of the room without hesitation. As he watched them go to their own seats, he wondered if, had they brought him to the edge of a ditch in a bullet-riddled courtyard and told him to kneel before it, he would follow their orders with the same obedience and wait for the bullet. He nodded at the spotlight, tightening his throat. “You’re going to sweat something out of me?”

The wide face looked confused an instant, then understanding overcame him. His smile was huge. “This?” He grabbed the electrical cord and held it up, showing where it ended in a frayed mess. “Hasn’t worked for—how long?”

“Months,” said the other. But he didn’t smile. He left his leather coat on and took some papers from a small bag Emil hadn’t noticed before. He flattened them on the desk.

“Months,” the smiler repeated, nodding. “It would make this job a lot easier. But for now, the Revolution moves at a snail’s pace.”

“Is that what this is about?” Emil’s voice was beginning to relax, though the rest of him couldn’t.

The first one, satisfied with his paperwork, took the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it. “Everything is about the Revolution, Comrade. Some things more than others.”

Emil became aware that the walls were filthy. They were speckled by something that looked like brown paint. But it wasn’t paint.

“What about it, then?” asked the smiler. “Does your visit to the Americans have a bearing on the course of world revolution?”

“None,” he said. “None that I know of.”

“Your face,” said the other through a cloud of smoke, blinking behind his glasses. “Those bruises.”

“I was mugged,” said Emil. “I took the wrong taxi.” He paused, but they did not help him. “The driver and his friends attacked me.

The wide smile faded, and a look of concern replaced it. “Yes, we know. Berlin is extremely dangerous.” He rested his elbows on the table. “Just this afternoon we found three dead men in one of the bombed areas. All three were shot. In their heads.” He shook his own head. “Very ugly.”

“Ugliest I’ve seen in a while,” said the other. He flicked ash on the floor and looked puzzled. “Wasn’t one of them a taxi driver?”

A nod. “I believe he was.” He turned to Emil. “I don’t suppose he was
your
taxi driver? No.” That wide head, shaking again. “The coincidence would be…
unbelievablel”

Emil’s tired body tensed from head to toe.

Of course he was still alive, and of course they came to him. The
Oberst
had not shot him, because he knew the authorities would want a simple answer to three dead bodies in the rubble. He had gotten rid of witnesses to the prized photograph, but had learned in the Capital that leaving unexplained bodies around was not wise. So he had placed the murder weapon in Emil’s hand and walked away. So easy. Efficient. Herr Oberst gets his picture, and cleans up the mess.

And they all knew he was coming to Berlin—the MVD didn’t give out information without wondering who was asking for it, and why.

Emil’s mistakes were endless. He had fled the scene without informing the proper authorities. He had left the Walther with his prints all over it. He had driven the blood-soaked taxicab all the way to the club for the whole city to look into. Berlin, for him, had been an extended exercise in stupidity.

Their eyes were red, tired. These Russians had worked quickly, had tracked him down in no time. They would see through him. These intelligence agents were the kind of policemen he would never be. They were efficient and focused and always thinking. He knew this. They were also MVD: militant, brutal and all-knowing.

“Tell me what you want to know.”

The tall one put out his cigarette on the floor with his foot. “We want to know what you’re doing in Berlin, killing good Germans. It’s our responsibility to watch out not only for our Soviet citizens, but also for the defeated Fascist nation that has been entrusted to us.”

Emil took only a second to think it through. He told them everything in a straightforward tone. He was a homicide inspector. He had come to Berlin to look into the death of a well- connected songwriter. “
Proletarian
songwriter.” He contacted Comrade Konrad Messer because of information received via their office here in Berlin. They nodded knowledgeably—this was not news. The deceased had apparently been interested in military records at the Tempelhof airbase. He tried not to pause before his one lie: “My search for what he was seeking was fruitless.”

He waited for them to ask questions. His body was about to collapse. If they tested him, he would not last any time. But he had to hold his position, if only to have something to give them in case it came to brutality. But they asked nothing. He filled the silence:

“When I returned to the Soviet sector, I was set upon by this taxi driver and his friends. Apparently, they thought I had money. When they discovered how poor I was, they did this to me.” He pointed at his face, then shrugged. He tried for casual sincerity, but didn’t know if it looked right. “I’m not sure what happened then. I was in and out. A fight, I guess. When I woke up, three of them were dead, and the fourth was gone.”

They seemed unmoved by the tragedy.

“I went to Comrade Messer for help, and I made an Aeroflot reservation. To return home. I can’t do anything else here.”

They nodded in unison. “And Tempelhof?” asked the one with glasses. “You searched the base?”

“I couldn’t get inside,” he said slowly, evenly. “They turned me away at the gate.”