The Bridge of Sighs (13 page)

“Tell me,” said Emil. “Dora.”

Leonek leveled his gaze. “Twenty percent.”

“What?”

“What I told you,” Leonek explained patiently: “Eighty percent of the time Dora tells the truth. Twenty percent…” He shrugged. “The story about you was made up. After you were shot I tracked him down. He didn’t know anything about you, not even your name. All he knew was he needed to come up with a story to save his ass.”

“What did he say about the case?”

“Nothing. He told me he’d heard a gunshot near the water, in the Canal District. On his way he tripped, made some noise— probably because he was scared—and then heard something being rolled into the water, then someone running away.”

“That’s something,” said Emil.

“It’s nothing,” Leonek repeated. “Nothing, no identification, no clues beyond what we already know, and it’s all for a case that doesn’t exist. Got it?”

The nurse came for the tray and complimented Emil on his healthy appetite. Leonek followed her out with his eyes.

Emil knew he would go back—it was the only thing left to him—but right now he wanted nothing to do with the People’s Militia.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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

T
he nurse s name was Katka, and she hovered over Emil through the daylight hours, provoking brief erotic fantasies to accompany his naps. The doctor finally appeared again after a week to remove the stitches from his chest; the ones in his stomach would have to wait. They left behind a dull, throbbing ache that settled into his ribs and back, particularly when he struggled to the corner of the room in his soiled, gray robe, practicing the art of walking.

Katka told him about her family. Mountain shepherds from the north. She said her grandfather was famous for breeding the loveliest sheep in the Tatras. He wondered how close they lived to the spot where Maria Brod had starved to death, somewhere, perhaps, above the treeline. He asked when he would be released, and as she took his bedpan she said she would find out.

His father’s watch had been chipped along the edge of the glass. Its ticking filled the hours.

The photographs were still on the bureau, and he asked Grandmother to bring them to him when she visited. She turned them over in her hands. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.”

Two men, a street, night.

She handed them over and smiled before turning to go.

He wished for Lena Crowder all the time.

*********

It was a little embarrassing when the roses and daffodils arrived with a card that said in typed capitals:
homicide, first district.
He imagined those gorillas fumbling through a flower store. They’d probably sent a woman from Accounts, or one of their wives. He wanted to like the bouquet, the way it lit up the room in reds and yellows, but couldn’t escape the feeling that the flowers were a trick. Something to humiliate him, or to lure him.

At the end of two weeks, Katka brought him a damp bag of baked apples and said he was free to go. He was helped into his clothes—Grandmother had left behind a fresh change when she incinerated the bullet-and-blood-scarred suit—and given a worn, wooden cane. He hobbled around the room a few times— clumsy, shaky. Leonek was waiting in the corridor. He looked Emil over approvingly. “Let’s get you out of here.”

In the Mercedes, each small bump ripping through Emil’s insides, Leonek asked about the broken headlights.

“We didn’t know. We thought maybe you went crazy and broke them.”

“Yes,” Emil grunted. “I went crazy. I took a piece of wood and I beat the hell out of them.”

He spent two miserable weeks at home, in bed. It was difficult holding in the frustration. There were so many hours in each day, and during most of them he tottered on the verge of shouting at his grandparents to leave him alone. Grandfather beamed, reveling in his newfound pride—he had a hero in the house, after all—and Grandmother pestered him with food. Grandfather read the paper to him, using his most urgent voice to say that General Secretary Mihai had announced his distaste for the corruption being practiced in some corners of the state security division. It was an urgent matter—the stability of the nation was at risk— and would be looked into. Grandfather smiled when he said that the General Secretary’s standing ovation had lasted seven full minutes. Sometime during those two weeks the refugee mothers who slept on the staircase disappeared. No one knew if they had found their sons, or if the supervisor had had them shipped away. Grandmother appeared with a bowl of cabbage soup and a crust of stale bread. Emil was beginning to hate all leafy vegetables.

On his second Thursday, he used his cane to reach the communal telephone on the landing. A Militia operator patched him through.

“Terzian.”

“It’s Emil.”

“You’re ready to come in?”

“I think so. You have something I can help with? Some work?”

“Sure…” He made clicking sounds with his tongue. “Two bodies. In Republic Park.
Coitus interruptus.”

“Can I help?”

“I’ll bring the file by.”

As he hung up he heard movement behind him—the building supervisor, on her blue-veined, tree-trunk legs, puffy hands folded on her wide hips, stared suspiciously. He was the first one to use the phone in over a week, and her sweat-sealed brow said she would brook no nonsense on her landing.

True to his word, Leonek arrived a little after five with a folder under his arm. Hungry face, hungry eyes. Grandfather asked if he was called Mouse.

“Mouse?” He frowned at her.

“No,” Emil said quickly. “Not this one.”

“Dinner,” said Grandmother, her soft, lined cheeks flushed from the heat of the kitchen. “You should eat. With us.”

“My mother’s expecting me,” said Leonek. “I live with her.”

“That’s
a good boy.”

Grandfather plied him with his bad cigarettes. “Come on, have one on me. Rolled myself.”

They withdrew to the bedroom and opened the file. Emil supported himself against the headboard, and Leonek sat at the foot of the bed, passing individual pages on to him.

“Here it is. Two kids, teenagers.” Leonek produced photographs of a boy and girl, both blond and half-naked, bent among the overgrown bushes along the eastern edge of Republic Park. Near the bush was a small splash of white vomit, also photographed. Then, a map of the park with the location of the bodies marked by two overlapping Xs.

The girl, Alana Yoskovich, had been strangled with her scarf. The boy, Ion Hansson, had been struck with an ax where his shoulder met his neck. The ax had not been found at the scene.

“You’ve done some work on this?” asked Emil, setting the photographs aside.

Leonek lit one of Grandfather’s cigarettes. “Of course. The evidence points to the girl’s father.” He took a drag and gave the cigarette an abrupt, fearful look. He jumped up and tossed it out the window. “Christ!” He blinked, recovering, and waved away the black smoke, then was back. “It’s simple: The old man finds young Hansson molesting his only daughter, and proceeds to kill him. Then strangles the girl—out of rage, shame, whatever.”

“And you’ve followed up on it?”

He settled on the bed again. The shifting mattress shot sparks through Emil’s sewn gut. “He’s in the holding cell. Hasn’t admitted to anything yet. We searched his home and a small dacha out of town they share with another family. But listen to this: not a single ax.”

Emil understood immediately. “With winter coming on? No ax?”

“Exactly,” said Leonek. “And rows of firewood up to my chin.”

“There’s another boyfriend?”

“No one knows of any.”

“And a mother?”

“Died. Back in’forty.”

“Boy’s parents?”

“Live in Cisna. He stays with an uncle, who’s been on business in Prague for the last three weeks.”

Emil let this settle in. He tried to see it from different angles in his head. It was a simple mental exercise, but something. Finally something after these empty weeks. “You’ve talked to the friends?”

Leonek smiled. “School’s out until next week.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“You’re sure?”

Grandfather stuck his head in and asked how the cigarette was.

“Terrific,” smiled Leonek.

Grandfather waved, grinning, as he withdrew.

“I am,” said Emil. “I’m very sure.”

The next day—Friday, the first of October—he came by the station. It took a lot of effort, hobbling down the stairs, then along the insecure cobblestones to the main street—he couldn’t move faster than a steady walk, nor raise his hands over his head. He didn’t know why the pedestrians looked at him—his wounds were hidden beneath his shirt, and there were so many real amputees and maimed citizens in the Capital that a pale young man waiting for a bus could not have deserved much attention. But they did watch him as they passed, and on the bus a woman offered him a seat, but he refused. Each bump and turn ripped through him. In the station, his shaky form limping toward his desk was the only thing to look at. He was the youngest in the room, but he looked like a pensioner. Leonek appeared next to him. “You aren’t up for this.”

“Change of scenery,” said Emil. He settled into his desk and again took the pens and ink out of his pockets. He took out Grandfather’s still-unlit cigars and the notepad filled with scrib- blings about his dead case. Everything into the drawer. His eye kept wandering the desk for telephone messages from her he knew wouldn’t be there.

The chief stood in his doorway, hesitant, as if preparing to tell Emil to come to him, then realizing his mistake. He said something under his breath and lumbered forward. Emil leaned back in his chair to look up at him. “Chief?”

Moska reached into his jacket pocket and placed Emils Militia certificate on the desk. He left his index finger on it. “This is yours, Brod.”

Emil looked at the chief’s finger, at the green, glazed cover with the imprint of the hawk, its head turned aside as though trying to ignore something.

The chief was plainly uncomfortable having an invalid in the station. But the others, after a few minutes, were relieved to have a chance to express their self-loathing. Big Ferenc said it outright as he brought Emil a cup of coffee: “I must apologize for the way I’ve acted. It’s unforgivable. I can only try to repair what’s come before.” His tight, sympathetic smile and eloquence were unexpected, and Emil, stunned, accepted the coffee.

Stefan brought a potato casserole his wife had made, his limp a little more noticeable today. “Russian recipe, but filling.” It was the first time he had spoken to Emil. He smiled then, winking. “Now I’m not the only cripple.”

Brano Sev did not approach him directly, but gave him a knowing nod and smile from his desk. Leonek shot Emil a wide- eyed look of warning.

The holding cells were right beneath their feet, reached by a long walk down the corridor, deeper into the building, through an unmarked door and down metal stairs into the blackness. The air was humid and stank of sweat. The bare lightbulbs gave a hard, contrasty light. The walls became vertical steel bars, and in the gloom behind them Emil saw faces buried in shadow. Gaunt expressions, hungry. He thought again of refugees. Leonek looked positively regal beside them. Cornelius Yoskovich was at the end, on the right; his bald head hung below his shoulder blades. When Leonek tapped the bar with a knuckle, the man looked up quickly, then stood. He was tall, his grimy, sleeveless shirt too short, exposing his navel. “Are you letting me go?” He had a voice like a radio announcer, like someone speaking to a crowd.

“This is him,” Leonek said to Emil.

Yoskovich came to the bars and held them in his fists. His beard was coming in, and his eyes were desperate.

“Where’s your ax?” asked Emil.

“I told them.” He looked at Leonek. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Tell me,” said Emil.

Yoskovich released the bars so he could open his hands to them. “I don’t know. Disappeared.
Stolen
, I guess.”

“When did it go missing?”

“I’ve
been
through all this.”

Emil turned to Leonek—slowly, because the motion shot hot threads up his spine. “Is there a reason he’s giving me trouble?”

“I-” began Yoskovich. “I didn’t know it was missing until the police came. I used the ax last week. Saturday. For wood.”

“Witnesses?”

Yoskovich shook his head and whispered, “Only my Alana.”

At first, Emil didn’t recognize the expression that covered his face. Then he did. He’d seen it on the train, on his way back from Helsinki, on the faces of German villagers following Germany’s new borders out of Poland: heavy eyes finding nothing to focus on, mouth hanging loosely open, wordless and useless. The expression of someone who once had something and now has nothing. The look of someone who is staring into the abyss and can find no reason to keep on going.

No, he hadn’t killed his girl. But he’d done something. Emil would bet his fresh Militia certificate on it.

Leonek, Stefan and Ferenc took him out for drinks. It was Fer- enc’s idea, but the big man didn’t know until they reached the bar that Emil couldn’t drink anything but water and some fruit juices. He couldn’t even drink the coffee Ferenc had brought earlier. The bartender unearthed tins of pineapple juice taken from a shipment, he said, of abandoned American army rations. Very expensive stuff. Ferenc bought three glasses of it, and Emil drank out of kindness. It was sticky, and tasted of the steel it had come in.

“Who did it?” asked Stefan. He’d found a bowl of pumpkin seeds on the bar and was shoving his fingers deep into them. “Your holes.”

“We know who,” said Leonek. “But our hands are tied.”

Emil nodded. “Smerdyakov.”

Stefan wasn’t surprised. “You did throttle him, after all.”

“But I didn’t.” He tried to lean back on his stool, but it was more painful than sitting straight, which was also becoming unbearable. He grabbed his cane and pointed with it. “Can we sit over there? My back.”

They moved to a low table near the splintery wood wall, where the chairs could support him, and for their patience Emil took out Grandfather’s cigars. Leonek at first was wary, but Emil assured him they had been bought, not rolled, by the old man. The cigars were rough on the throat, dry from sitting around for so long, but tasty. Soon their corner was thick with smoke. Stefan waved his cigar when he picked up the thread again: “You said you didn’t do what? Didn’t throttle Smerdyakov?”

“I only knocked him over.” Emil shrugged. “I was going to hit him, but all I got in were a few slaps. Then, he—I don’t know. He
shook!’

“Shook?” asked Stefan.

“You mean a seizure,” offered Ferenc, puffing smoke.

Emil thought about that. “Maybe.”

“You don’t know your literature.” Ferenc leaned into the table. “The name Smerdyakov comes from Dostoyevsky. A fool stricken by the falling sickness. The Russians love their epileptics—turn them all into holy fools.” He rolled ash into a small saucer. “Nicknames don t come out of nowhere. They come from
Karamazov .”

Emil remembered eyes rolling to whiteness, arms and chest trembling.

“Yes,” muttered Stefan, understanding now.

Understanding, Emil thought, made the experience no less disturbing.