Detective Story

by Imre Kertész

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Imre Kertész

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Copyright

  About the Book

  From his prison cell, Antonio Martens, an interrogator for the recently fallen dictatorship, awaits execution. His charge? Multiple counts of murder; the murder of those disappeared by the state. Bereft of authority, and unable to avoid the consequences of his actions any longer, Martens turns his story to his involvement in the assassination of the high-profile Salinas family, and with it peers into the murderous mechanics of a regime bent on achieving its ends – no matter the means.

  About the Author

  Imre Kertész was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fateless, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Imre Kertész died in Budapest in March 2016.

  Tim Wilkinson was born in 1947. He is the translator into English of many works on Hungary’s history and culture. His literary translations include the prose of Imre Kertész and other contemporary writers.

  Also by Imre Kertész

  Fateless

  The Pathseeker

  Fiasco

  Kaddish for an Unborn Child

  The Union Jack

  Liquidation

  Dossier K

  IMRE KERTÉSZ

  Detective Story

  TRANSLATED FROM THE HUNGARIAN BY

  Tim Wilkinson

  1

  THE MANUSCRIPT THAT I am hereby making public was entrusted to my care by my client, Antonio R. Martens. As to who he is, you will learn that from him in due course. All that I shall say in advance is that, given his scholastic attainments, he evinced a surprising flair for writing, as indeed does anyone, in my experience, who for once in his life steels himself to face up to his fate.

  I was appointed by the court as counsel for his defense. In the course of the criminal proceedings that were initiated against him, Martens did not try either to deny or to gloss over the charge against him of complicity in multiple murders. He did not fall into any of the behavioral categories with which the experience that I have gained to date in similar cases has made me familiar: either stubborn denial in respect to both material evidence and personal responsibility, or else that species of tearful remorse whose true motives are brutal unconcern for the victim and self-pity. On the contrary, Martens freely, readily, and uninhibitedly acknowledged his crimes as a matter of record—and with such stony indifference, it was as if he were giving an account of someone else’s actions, not his own, those of another Martens with whom he was no longer to be identified, even though he was prepared to accept the consequences of his deeds without batting an eyelid. I considered him cynical in the extreme.

  One day he turned to me with the surprising request that I secure the authorization needed for him to write in his cell.

  “What do you wish to write about?” I asked him.

  “About how I have grasped the logic,” he replied.

  “Now?” I was flabbergasted. “You mean you didn’t understand it during your actions?”

  “No,” he replied. “Not during them. There was a time beforehand when I understood, and now I have understood again. During one’s actions, though, one forgets. But then”—he gave a dismissive wave—“that’s something people like you can’t understand.”

  I understood better than he might have believed. All that surprised me was that I had not supposed that, with his being a lowly cog in a big machine and so having relinquished all powers of discernment and appraisal of a sovereign human person, that person might stir again in Martens and demand his rights. That is to say, that he would wish to speak out and make sense of his fate. In my experience, that is the rarest case of all. And in my view, everyone has the right to do so, and to do it in his own way. Even Martens. So I set about securing what he requested.

  Do not be surprised by his way with words. In Martens’s eyes the world must have seemed like pulp fiction come true, with everything taking place in accordance with the monstrous certainty and dubious regularities of the unvarying dramatic form—or choreography, if you prefer—of a horror story. Let me add, not in his defense but merely for the sake of the truth, that this horror story was written not by Martens alone but by reality, too.

  Martens finally handed the manuscript over to me. The text that is published here is authentic. I personally have not interfered with it in any way apart from making corrections where stylistic shortcomings absolutely demanded it. What he had to say, I have in all places left untouched.

  2

  I WISH TO tell a story. A simple story. You may ultimately call it a sickening one, but that does not change its simpleness. I wish therefore to tell a simple and sickening story.

  My name is Martens. Yes, the very same Antonio Rojas Martens who is presently arraigned before the judges of the new regime: the people’s judges, as they like to call themselves. You can read more than enough about me these days, as the tub-thumping tabloids have made sure that my name is known throughout Latin America and maybe even over in distant Europe as well.

  I must hurry, as most likely my time is short. It concerns the Salinas case: Federigo and Enrique Salinas, father and son, proprietors of the chain of department stores that are dotted all over our country, whose deaths so astounded people. Though back then people were not so easily astounded. But then no one believed that Salinas, whose name is given to the Uprising, could be a traitor. The Colonel did indeed later have cause to regret that we made news of Salinas’s execution public; without a doubt it triggered a big moral backlash, far too big, and all quite unnecessarily. Still, if we had not issued a communiqué, then we would have been accused of seeking to mislead and of violating the law. Whatever we did, we were only ever going to get it wrong. The Colonel incidentally clearly saw that well in advance, and between you and me, so did I. But then what possible influence could a detective’s beliefs have had on events here?

  Back then I was still just a new boy with the Corps. I had transferred to them from the regular police, not from the political lot—they had long ago been taken over—but from the criminal investigation branch. “Hey, Martens!” says my boss one day. “Do you fancy a transfer?” “Where to?” I ask, being a cop, after all, and not a mind reader. He gave a toss of his head. “Over there,” he says. “To the Corps.” I said nothing, neither yes nor no. It wasn’t bad in CID, but I was already starting to get a bit fed up with murderers, burglars, and whores. New winds were blowing, I had heard about one breakthrough and another, and there was said to be a future for anyone who made an effort. “The Corps is asking for men,” the boss continued. “I was wondering whom I could recommend. You, Martens, have talent, and you’ll be noticed sooner there.”

  Well, if you put it like that, I was thinking much the same myself.

  I completed the course; they brainwashed me. Not enough, though, not by a long chalk. All sorts of things were still left in there, much more than I would have any need for, but then they were in a tearing hurry. Everything was screamingly urgent. Order had to be created, the Consolidation had to be pushed for, the Homeland saved, upheaval polished off; and it all seemed to come down to us. “We’ll see about that,” people would say if something were giving them a headache. I’m damned if I learned anything, but the work interested me. And the pay even more.

  I ended up in Diaz’s group (the Diaz for whom an APB has been put out, though to no purpose). There were three of us: Diaz, our boss (I can assure you all that he is never going to be found); Rodriguez (who has already be
en given a death sentence, just the once, though the scumbag deserves it a hundred times over); and myself, the new boy. Plus of course the auxiliary staff, cash, wide-ranging powers, and unlimited technology that your garden-variety flatfoot wouldn’t even dare read about lest he get too carried away.

  The Salinas affair soon intruded itself. Too early, damnably early. At precisely the time when my headaches happened to be at their worst. So it intruded, but nothing could be done about that; I have not been able to escape it since. I have to speak out, therefore, in order to leave behind some testimony before I go … before I am sent on my way. But forget that; it is the last thing on my mind right now. I was always set to do this. Our line of work is hazardous; once you get started, the only way back is to carry on straight ahead, as Diaz was in the habit of saying (you know: the one for whom an APB has been put out, though to no purpose).

  Let me see, how did it start? And when? Only now that I am ordering my recollections do I have a sense of how hard it is to remember those early months of the Victory, and it’s hard not just on account of the Salinases. Well, in any event we were already well past Victory Day, that’s for sure, long, long past. The banners over the streets had gradually slackened and drooped, the slogans of the Victory on them were soaked through, the flags had wilted, and the street loudspeakers were hoarse from hammering out martial music.

  Yes, that was how I saw it every morning when I crossed town to go from where I lived to the well-known classical palace where the Corps had set up operations. In the evenings I noticed none of this; no, in the evenings all I noticed was my headache.

  Things were being made very uncomfortable for us around that time. The honeymoon period was over; the populace was getting jumpy. The Colonel too. On top of everything, we had picked up intelligence about an impending atrocity. We had to prevent that, or at least ought to have, with every available means: our Homeland and the Colonel demanded it of us.

  That infernal jumpiness and the associated fluster were at the root of it all. Rodriguez was let loose, and Diaz—the ever-unruffled and ever-soothing Diaz—raised not so much as a peep against him. In point of fact, I had only then begun to see where I was and what I had taken on. As I say, I was still the new boy; up till then I had not done much more than loaf around. I was trying to figure out and enter into the spirit of things in order to be able to do what I had to do. I am an honest flatfoot, I always was, and I take my work seriously. Of course, I was aware that a different yardstick applied here at the Corps, but I thought there was at least a yardstick. Well, there wasn’t, and that was when my headaches started.

  Don’t think I’m making excuses; for me it’s now truly neither here nor there. But the fact is, you think you are being very clever in riding events out, and then you find that all you want to know is where the hell they are galloping off to with you.

  That Rodriguez worried me most of all. He slowly became a mania with me. I wanted to be clear about him, figure him out, understand him like—yes, like Salinas his son perhaps. In another sense, of course, but with just the same investigative zeal. I say to him one day:

  “Hey, Rodriguez, why are you doing that?”

  “What?” he asks.

  “Don’t play the innocent with me, you bastard,” I say sweetly. “Cut the whats!”

  “Oh, that,” he says, and smiles.

  “Listen up,” I continue. “We polish them off, crack down, roll up, interrogate—fair enough, that’s our job. But why do you hate them?”

  “Because they’re Jews!” he snaps back. I was so astounded, I all but choked on my cigarette. I suspected that the book he was constantly concealing—it was in his hands right then—had driven him loopy. Was I supposed to believe that Rodriguez could speak English? He had to, since the book was in English, an American edition—one of those nasty contraband goods. There was no way of knowing how he had laid hands on it. Maybe he had confiscated it in the course of a house search. The only word that I understood from the garish title was “Auschwitz,” and that isn’t an English word but the name of a place. I’d heard something about it, of course: it had been a long time ago and also a long way away, somewhere in that scummy Europe, in its eastern half. The hell if I could make out what it had to do with us, and how it entered into things.

  “You crackpot!” I say to him. “There can’t be more than a few hundred, or maybe a thousand, in the whole country.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” he says. “Anyone who wants something else is Jewish. Otherwise why would he want something else?” I just looked at him dumbfounded. Rodriguez had his logic, and no mistake. But once he had set off on the path of his logic, there was no stopping him. “Why?!” he bellowed in my face. “Why do they resist?”

  “Because they’re Jews.” I tried to calm him down. I could see that his blood pressure was starting to rocket. I’d had enough of him. And then, however odd it may seem, what with me being a policeman, a member of the Corps—I was scared of him. His eyes smoldered. Rodriguez had the eyes of a leopard, only for heaven’s sake don’t look on that as any kind of compliment. It’s just that, like those stinking big cats, he had yellow eyes with longish lashes.

  My efforts to calm him down were in vain, however.

  “Why do they resist?” He grabbed the shirt on my chest. “We want what’s good for them, we want to pluck them out of the filth. We want order for them, so we can be proud of them!” Oh yes, that’s what he said: “so we can be proud of them.” I was just thunderstruck.

  “And yet they still don’t want order.” He kept on tugging at my shirt. “They’re still resisting! Why? What for? Why?!”

  A tricky question, indeed, as far as I was concerned. Seriously, why? I didn’t know. I still don’t know, not I. To be honest, I wasn’t much interested either. I have never given any thought to motives; I’ve made do with the idea that there are criminals on the one hand and criminal investigators on the other. As far as I was concerned, I belonged to the latter category. In the CID that had been perfectly adequate; any speculations would have been a waste of energy. But with the Corpsmen, of course, it’s different. There you need a philosophy, as Diaz put it, or a moral worldview, as they taught in the training course. I had neither: Rodriguez’s view was not at all to my liking, whereas I didn’t quite grasp Diaz’s.

  Maybe Diaz himself didn’t take it seriously. With him you could never be sure. That sounds a little perplexing, what with Diaz being a serious man. Serious and deliberate, not at all the type cut out for wishful thinking. Once he happened to be leafing through some confiscated writings, the usual revolutionary tripe, a cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth, his inimitable smile in the other.

  “Idiots!” He suddenly smacked the open palm of one hand down onto the document. “There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution!”

  “Dern right!” Rodriguez concurred, with a guffaw.

  “Idiot,” Diaz said quietly to him. There was nothing strange about that; it was something he used to say. This time, however, he seemed angry—if Diaz could seem anything at all.

  Another time—I no longer recall what prompted it—he declared out of the blue, “The world would look very different if we policemen were to stick together.”

  So I said, “But we do stick together, don’t we?”

  “Not just here, at home, but throughout the world!” he growled.

  “In every state, you mean?”

  “I do,” says Diaz, elegantly crossing his legs, rocking his stocky, slightly squat upper body in his armchair, and shrouding his smooth, oily face in an enigmatic cloud of cigar smoke. It was getting into the afternoon; we were just taking a bit of a break, and the mood seemed cordial. At such times, it does one good to chat, even with the boss.

  So I dug a little further. “You mean the police of hostile states as well?”

  At that he raised a finger. “Nowhere and at no time,” he said, “are the police hostile.”

  I was unable
to drag anything more out of him, though, however nice the afternoon.

  When all’s said and done, I don’t know if he genuinely believed this view. Today I’m inclined to suppose that he did. A person has to believe in something to be such a nasty piece of work. In any event, he would often come back to the subject, never entirely seriously, always in that ambivalent way he had, but I wouldn’t be a policeman if I didn’t know what that means.

  It’s just that it was of precious little help to me. There is no denying that by then more than once I had caught myself stuttering. Then at other times I would drop into my speech stupid expressions like “thingy” and “I mean” and “how should I put it” and suchlike that previously I had never been in the habit of using. And a good job too! Just imagine, a policeman who stutters, jiggles uneasily with his hands, and trails off in the middle of sentences. I quickly kicked the habit; by then my headaches were plenty for me to put up with.

  Anyway, it soon became clear what Rodriguez had picked up from that book. One fine day a statuette appeared on his desk. It was small, some four to six inches high, no bigger than a paperweight, but you could still see everything, clearly and distinctly. Rodriguez kept that statuette on his desk all the time. Before long a copy of it was also ready, and this was no longer a model but life-size, roughly five feet tall. Rodriguez had his assistant install it in the room next door. He had found that chap for himself, among the lower ranks, and I have to say he chose well: anyone who took one look into that ape face could have no doubt, and no mistake. Otherwise he was silent as a shark and as eager as a trained gorilla. His military blouse was forever unbuttoned at the neck, his sleeves were rolled up to the elbow on his hairy arms, and he reeked of sweat and liquor and filth of every kind. That room was their kingdom—“my operating theater” as Rodriguez called it.

  I’m reluctant to talk about it, but it can’t be avoided. I’m damned if it’s of any interest to me; it never was. But now they keep asking me about it—the examining magistrates, that is. It’s useless my declaring I gave even the vicinity of that lousy room a wide berth. “So,” one of them will pipe up from the rostrum, “you claim that you were unaware of what was going on in the room known as the operating theater?” The hell I’m claiming! “All I said, sir, was that I didn’t drop by the room.” “I see,” he gloats triumphantly. “And what do you have to say about the statement made by witness Quintieros that he saw you in the so-called operating theater on several occasions?” Well, if your witness saw it, then obviously that’s how it was. What cleverdicks! As if I cared in the slightest whether I dropped by the room or not. But then what do I expect, magnanimity? At least I’m allowed to write in my cell—that’s something we would never have permitted. It went against all the rules.