Victory Square (23 page)

We went to a U-shaped booth beside a tinted window that looked out onto Yalta Boulevard. An army truck rolled past, the one I’d seen being filled with Ministry files. Sully went into the booth first, and we sat on either side of her. She was either drunk or trusting—she didn’t seem to feel trapped by us.

“I know Jerzy Michalec,” she said. “I met him in Paris at one of those emigre conferences a few years ago. Eighty-six. He spoke better French than half of them, so he became an unofficial spokesman for his group, Le Comite de la Galicie. The Galicia Committee. They added‘revolutionary’to their name only recently.”

“What did they do?” asked Karel.

She looked at him. “Hard to tell. Largely, they networked with other emigres around the world. They weren’t as vocal as, say, the Palestinian emigres, but they had good contacts in the French and American governments. Their public persona was gentle. They raised money for orphans and lobbied to have Pankov cut off from the international community. And they succeeded in that. Jerzy always told me their final aim was the usual rigmarole—democracy and freedom—but gradually. Before this year, before the Berlin Wall, they never advocated revolution. I think that was Rosta’s doing.”

“Rosta Gorski,” I said.

She nodded. “Berlin, Prague, Budapest—seeing those, he felt revolution here was inevitable. So they started smuggling people into the country last month to establish networks. Set up printing presses. That sort of thing.”

I sat back and watched her a moment. “Gorski was a farmer. He was just a kid who got into trouble now and then drinking. Then he left, with Michalec, in 1979. Did they know each other?”

Sully looked surprised. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Rosta Gorski is Jerzy Michalec’s son.”

“S-son?” I stuttered, not unlike Tomiak Pankov during his final rally.

Sully shook her head. “No, you didn’t know.”

The pork and cabbage in my stomach began to make noises. Far back, in 1948, trying to convince me to stop looking into his past, Michalec had said,
We don’t make the rules. Others make the rules. We can only try to live by them.

This personal logic had led him to the Gestapo, where he was awarded for his enthusiastic executions of Russians, British, and French. Then, in crumbling Berlin, he became a Soviet war hero by killing those twenty-three
Hitlerjugend
boys who’d been put under his command, boys who trusted him. After the war, it justified him killing Lena’s husband, Janos, and then kidnapping Lena herself.

Michalec had learned sometime early in his miserable life that he would be best served by bending with history. He wasn’t alone in this—most people are this way—but unlike others, he was willing to kill any number of people to achieve his aims.

Now, he had produced an heir.

I said, “How?”

“How, what?”

Not even I was sure what I was asking. How did he make a son? How did Gisele Sully know this for sure? I shook my head. “They have different last names. Why?”

She sipped her wine, then shrugged, as if the world hadn’t just changed again. “I never met Rosta, but he talked about this in an interview in
Le Monde.
His father was released from political prison in 1956. They opened the gate and told him to leave. No money, just the rags on his back. Jerzy went on foot and made it to some village around Stryy, where Irina Gorski, a widow, took him in. One thing led to another, and …” She shrugged. “But Jerzy left. He didn’t know Irina was pregnant. Years later, she died, and he came to her funeral. And there was Rosta.”

“She died in seventy-nine,” I said. “That’s more than twenty years. What was Michalec doing all that time?”

“Agitating, as they say. He worked in the underground, making pamphlets, running meetings. You know.”

“But that’s not true,” I said. “His son doctored his files, so that it looks that way, but it’s a fabrication.”

She put her sharp chin in her palm. “Can you prove it?”

I thought about the files on my bedroom floor, then shook my head. “Not yet. Tell me more.”

She glanced at Karel, who also had his elbow on the table, chin in his palm. He seemed mesmerized by Sully. She put down her hand. “So Jerzy and Rosta started sending in people to network. I imagine they could have contacted that group over in Sarospatak. Perhaps they even convinced them to start their protests over that priest, Meyr.”

I shook my head. “I know the head of that group. He’s an old friend. And he’s not the type to take orders from emigres, no matter how convincing they are.”

“No matter how much money they offered? Remember, they have access to a lot.”

I didn’t really know. Ferenc and his friends certainly could have used some money to keep their printing presses going.

She said, “By the time the revolution started in earnest in Sarospatak, the Galicia Revolutionary Committee was in the Capital, waiting for its moment. Thursday night it came.”

My stomach was bad and my headache was returning. Karel re-acted before I could. “You’re saying the Galicia Revolutionary Com-mittee is run by these guys? The ones who killed Emil’s wife?”

“They’re running the country,” I said.

Karel shook his head as if he weren’t understanding. “But everyone knows the revolution came out of Patak. Everyone. They’re not going to listen to a bunch of people who’ve spent the last ten years in Paris!”

Karel’s naivete was actually very charming, but he did have a point. I remembered the phone call I’d made from the post office. “The Committee didn’t start the revolution in the Capital either.” I stopped short of saying I’d started it.

Sully considered this, then spoke slowly, as if national politics were just a little beyond us. “By now, it doesn’t matter who brought down Tomiak Pankov. The Galicia Revolutionary Committee has control of both your television stations and is printing half the newspapers. They don’t need to prove anything to anyone. It’s done.”

“No,” I said, but the burden of Lena’s death was still making me stupid. “It’s not finished.”

“Have you been reading
The Telltale7”

“What’s that?”

Karel said, “It’s one of the new papers. I saw it on TV.”

Sully confirmed this with a nod. “Yesterday,
The Telltale
reported that on Thursday night President George Bush of the United States was the first world leader to telephone and congratulate the Galicia Committee on its success. France recognized the new government soon afterward. Same with the United Kingdom. The fight’s over.” She shrugged again, and I found her blase attitude infuriating. “There’s only one question now.”

“What’s that?” said Karel, more interested than I was.

“Where are Tomiak and Ilona Pankov?”

•

As
he
was led past other classrooms, Gavra peered through an open door to where two men sat opposite one another at a table, scribbling on sheets of paper. One was fat, with a black beard, while the other was thin and very erect. That second man was Andras To-descu, Tomiak Pankov’s personal advisor.

Gavra turned to Michalec. “You had Todescu all along.”

The old man glanced back at the classroom. “You can’t do this sort of thing without help.”

“Todescu convinced Pankov to call the rally and speak at it.”

Michalec shrugged.

Then Gavra’s scalp went cold, because he’d just made a second, more important connection. “Todescu would’ve left with the Pankovs on that helicopter. If he’s here, then …” He couldn’t finish the sentence. It explained the look of fear he saw in all these officers’faces. “You’ve got the Pankovs.”

They reached the end of the corridor, and Balint put his hand on a
set of
double doors but didn’t open it because Michalec had stopped and turned to face Gavra. He pursed his lips and crossed them with his left index finger, a gesture of silence.

They stepped out into the early morning cold. A wind raged across the barracks, where jeeps and trucks were parked in a disorderly

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fashion and freezing guards with Kalashnikovs paced along the high stone wall. Out here, the barracks seemed to be going through a regular, quiet day, but the guards were alert, peering often through small steel doors in the wall. The cold bore through Gavra’s paint-stained coat.

They took a covered walkway down the edge of the building and through another door to where it was again warm, and thick with moisture. “They still haven’t fixed that radiator,” said Michalec.

Balint grunted some kind of agreement.

The steel doors here were small and unlabeled, with locks on the outside and barred windows to see inside. At the far end of the narrow passageway stood two guards who stiffened as they approached. “How are they?” Michalec asked the younger of the two, a corporal.

“She’s sleeping,” said the corporal. The fear Gavra had sensed in the officers was all over this boy’s face. “He wants his insulin.”

Michalec nodded, and the two guards stepped to the opposite wall so the visitors could better reach the locked door. Michalec peered through the bars, nodded, and stepped back. “Go ahead,” he said.

Even knowing what he would see couldn’t prepare Gavra for the shock. He leaned close, blinking in the musty darkness of the cell, and found President Tomiak Pankov, the Astrakhan hat still on his head, sitting on a cot, wrapped in an officer’s greatcoat. That famous face stared back at him with angry pink eyes.

Nearly all Gavra’s life, this man had been the Great Leader. He was too young to have known the exhilaration of Pankov’s predecessor, Mihai. For him, there was only Pankov and the many names he went by, titles that by now seem ludicrous but once meant something grand:

General Secretary and President
The Conductor
The First Worker of the Country
The Architect
That reliable leader and father and friend of young people
The Sweet Kiss of the Land
Our Polar Star
The Lighthouse
A man like a fir tree who is the sacred oak of our glory
The mountain that protects the country
A well of living water

Then the Great Leader spoke. “Don’t look at me like I’m a fucking animal.
Cretin!”

Gavra remembered that hunting trip in the Carpathians, and the boisterous, deluded, but in the end strangely endearing man who hunted with the aid of expert sharpshooters, perhaps the same sharpshooters who now ran across rooftops, firing into crowds.

“Well?” said Pankov. His voice was sharp and dry. “I need my diabetes medicine, and both of us need real food!”

In the other cot, covered in layers of gray army blanket, Ilona Pankov stirred at the noise. Her husband lowered his voice to a high whisper. “Find my chef—I’m on a diet prescribed by my doctor.”

Gavra couldn’t take it anymore. He straightened and stepped back, involuntarily wiping his eyes. The small passageway was blurry, and he was having trouble getting air.

“You’ll get over it,” Michalec told him.

“What are you feeding him?”

“Army rations. It’s what we all eat.”

“Get me out of here.”

“Don’t have any questions for the Sweet Kiss of the Land?”

“Please,” said Gavra.

“Come on.”

Outside, he couldn’t feel the cold anymore. He leaned over a low shrub bordering the walkway, breathing heavily.

“You had to see that,” Michalec said with a tone of sympathy. “It had to be done.”

Gavra wiped his mouth but didn’t rise. “Why?” Michalec didn’t answer, so he turned to look up at him. “Why did I have to see them?”

“Because,” said Michalec, as if the question were a surprise, “you’re the one who’s going to execute them.”

•

I don’t
know if Gisele Sully believed me or if, as a good journalist, she just smelled a story, but she suddenly raised her hand, called to the bar, and asked Toman to make her a double espresso. As he worked on it, she said, “What’re you planning to do?”

“All I can do. Find Rosta Gorski and Jerzy Michalec.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not. I’m not getting you killed.”

“The snipers are few and far between now, and no one’s going to kill a foreign journalist. They need us.”

Karel made a noise, and we turned to him. “What about Gavra?” he said.

I’d forgotten.

“Gavra Noukas?” said Sully.

We stared at her. “You know him?”

She shook her head. “Not really. Yesterday, he ran in here like a madman. You saw that car by the front door? That was him. He drove up during the battle with the snipers.” She reached into her purse, pulled out an envelope filled with photographs, and started going through them. “Here.” She handed one over. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone, just ran through us, but I met a soldier who knew his name, said he was Ministry. Is that true? Is he Ministry?”

It was Gavra. He looked haggard, his eyes bruised, and he was running through journalists, toward the camera. I handed the photo to Karel. “Why was he here?”