The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  Afterward, we had pork and zucchini by candlelight. The candle seemed out of place. It was something that belonged to the world of romance, but what we did could not be called romantic.

  “You like the wine?”

  “Delicious.”

  “Did you know that Karel’s going to be gone another week?”

  “Is that so.”

  “Seems the Yugoslavs are fond of his poems. He’s been invited to Split to give a reading and take part in their ‘Week of Culture.’ That’s what they call it.”

  “So what do you have planned for the Week of Culture?”

  “I’m planning to stay in, entertain a guest.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “Maybe.”

  That night we did the closest thing to making love we would ever do. We stroked one another’s bodies, as if comforting the flesh, and kissed more than we ever had. For a long time we just lay together, embracing, sometimes whispering tender words. She said beneath her breath, “I don’t have to say it, do I?” and I told her she didn’t. She smiled and slid under me and took me in herself. She didn’t need to tell me she loved me, and by the next morning I was glad she hadn’t.

  We ate toast and jam with our coffee. I noticed, with a little shame, that Vera looked a mess in the mornings. Some women are this way. In the afternoons and evenings, they’re radiant. But catch them before they’ve had a chance to put themselves together, and their looks turn to ash. Magda always looked like herself. Her hair could be pillow-pressed and her makeup gone, but there was an essential beauty to her that always came through. Vera looked as if she had taken off a mask.

  “This is nice,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “The coffee’s good.”

  “I mean, this. Breakfast, sunlight coming in, sitting here with you.” She nodded into the cup she brought to her face.

  “You’re right,” I lied. “It’s wonderful.”

  “Remember what I said before about us not talking?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I forgot to mention that sometimes I’m wrong.”

  I smiled at her smile.

  She watched me a moment. “You’ve never asked me about my Swiss professor. Not interested?”

  “I knew you’d tell me when you wanted.”

  “I want.”

  I leaned back in my chair.

  “It was very strange with him,” she said. “I was a virgin—Karel and I had only kissed before—and this professor was forty-five. Very experienced. And very…unexpected. He had what he called toys.”

  “Toys?”

  “Handcuffs. A riding crop for horses.”

  Stupidly, I said, “He rode horses?”

  “He’d never ridden one in his life.”

  I put down my fork.

  “It’s strange for a girl when her first lover uses all that Western decadence. It makes her feel dirty, but she also learns to love the filth.”

  “Did you?”

  She nodded. “But after a while it frightened me. I felt like I didn’t have any more control of myself. I ran back home like a little girl. That’s what the professor said when I told him I was returning: You’re just a scared little girl.”

  “So you ran home and married Karel.”

  She looked at her hands on the table, at her tarnished wedding band. “I married him as fast as I could.” She blinked, eyes damp. “And I still don’t know.” Then she smiled. “Want to learn some more philosophy?”

  “Next time. I have to leave.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like someone thinks he’s going to get a next time.”

  I gave Vera a proper kiss good-bye, but when I made it to the car and sat behind the wheel, I stopped. I was suddenly very heavy, a swarm of leaden feelings buzzing in my limbs. I did not want to return to Vera again, and I did not want to go back to Magda the way things were. We had both avoided our problems for so long that I doubted we even deserved happiness anymore. I hated our immaturity, and knew I had to be the one to start climbing out of it. I had to try to be mature, to face at least part of this problem. Immediately.

  The Militia radio hissed through the Sixth District—no one was talking today—and on the stairs to Stefan’s apartment I noticed the brown drops. I leaned down and touched them—dry, blood.

  I took the steps two at a time and saw that his door was ajar, but not broken. I took out my pistol. There was no sound. Then I kicked the door. It popped open and the first thing I saw was more blood on the wall. A brown burst. It was on the wall and sofa and rug, where Stefan lay. He was facedown, one hand extended awkwardly as if reaching for the pistol that lay between him and the sofa. His head was turned to the side, eyes open, mouth pressed against the blood-soaked rug.

  The building was unbelievably silent. No noise from other apartments, only my footsteps squeaking against the floor and rug as I leaned over him. Then my head cleared a little, and I checked the other rooms. They were empty, but the bedroom window, despite the cold, was open.

  I sat on the couch and looked at Stefan. I looked at him a long time.

  49

  Through the bad phone line Moska’s voice had no air to work with. “No, don’t say it.”

  “Let’s get some people over here.”

  “Immediately.”

  The fifteen-minute wait lasted forever. I looked over the apartment again. There were dry crusts of bread beside two bowls of fish soup and a half-empty bottle of wine.

  Who had been eating with Stefan?

  I grabbed the phone and dialed. No answer. There was a telephone directory in the kitchen, and I flew through it, frantic, until I found Galicia Textiles. The shift head didn’t want to get her, so I had to become a brusque militiaman rather than a terrified husband.

  “Ferenc? Ferenc, what is it?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  I couldn’t catch my breath.

  “Ferenc, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you tonight.”

  I hung up and sat in the living room, heard the dry blood crackle beneath me, and rubbed my face in my hands. I hadn’t told her, because she would have to deal with it all day at the factory. I would tell her tonight and make it as easy as I could. I would tell her at night so there would be fewer hours to go through before the respite of sleep.

  Looking at the body, thinking suddenly of Stefan’s guilt and the years of loneliness since Daria had left him, another wave of dread came over me. I squatted beside him and lifted the pistol to my nose. No smell at all—it hadn’t been fired. He had not taken his own life.

  Moska arrived with Leonek and Emil. They were in almost as bad a state as I was. Leonek paced furiously from corner to corner, picking up crumpled greasy wrappers and overfull ashtrays, then setting them back down, disappointed that they gave him no answers. Emil crossed his arms by the door, speaking occasional mysteries—It smells like baklava, can you smell that? Stefan’s wrist is bent, what does that mean? Moska marched into the bedroom and emerged a while later shaking his head. “Can someone tell me what’s going on here?” No one touched the body.

  When you’re faced with a corpse, you fight the instinctual urge to look at it by staring at the smoke-stained curtains, the frayed sofa cushions, the grime in the unwashed rugs. It would be a blessing if you noticed the sunlight or the bright colors of the quilt that Stefan had hung on the wall to remember his mother by. But the brain is clear enough to know such details are a lie. Somewhere in the room lies a dead man with a bullet in his belly. So what I remember from that day is the detrius of Stefan’s life, and because of that his bloated body is that much clearer.

  After a while a kid from Materials showed up and took photographs. We watched him and drank the rest of the wine.

  “Someone else was here,” I said. “Stefan had a guest.”

  “Is that who killed him?” asked Leonek.

 
Emil was in the bedroom, grasping at more inexplicable details he would take with him to his death, but Moska was within earshot. He set his wine on the kitchen table, beside the soups. He and Leonek waited.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The door was open when I arrived, and Stefan’s behind it. Seems like Stefan opened the door for the killer. If his dinner guest had done it, he’d be dead in the kitchen—the meal wasn’t finished.”

  “This Nestor Velcea came to the door?” asked Moska.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Nestor was hit, too,” said Leonek. “He left his blood on the stairs.”

  “Or it’s the guest’s blood,” I said, rubbing my temples to try and clear my head. “But Stefan’s gun hasn’t been fired. If that’s Nestor’s blood in the stairwell, he and the guest were shooting it out.”

  Leonek went over the details again. The uneaten food, Stefan lying in a different room, the open bedroom window. “Or Stefan argued with his guest. The argument took them into the living room, and that’s where it happened. The murderer left by the window to avoid neighbors in the corridor.”

  “The blood on the stairs,” said Moska. “Somebody went out the front door with a bullet in him.”

  “There were at least three people—that’s a fact,” I said, as we stood beside the photographer. Stefan’s skin, beneath the blood, was so white. “One of them left by the front door, and it looks like the other climbed out the window.”

  “You don’t know for sure,” said Moska. He looked at me, then settled into a frown that suggested there were other ideas that had not been touched on yet.

  “What?”

  He shook his head.

  A flash blinded everyone momentarily.

  “I don’t know anything for sure,” I said. None of us did.

  Emil emerged from the bedroom, nostrils wide. “What’s going on here?”

  We watched Feder’s men cover Stefan with a sheet, heft him onto a stretcher, and precariously make their way down the stairs.

  Sev was waiting in the station to offer his cool condolences. “I know you two were close. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” But his face was not cool—his lips were uncontrolled; they twitched.

  Leonek and Emil waited for orders. I sent Emil to grill Stefan’s neighbors and told Leonek to keep a watch on Antonín’s old apartment.

  I called Georgi. He listened in silence as I explained in detail why I needed to find Nestor Velcea. “Is Louis in town?”

  “Still in Paris.”

  “Try and get in touch with him. If they were friends, he may know something. And ask around.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Try hard, Georgi.”

  I had too much energy. I kept getting up from my desk to walk up and down the corridor, and ignored people who nodded at me. Then I returned to my chair and picked up the telephone. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment. I didn’t know where Stefan’s ex-wife, Daria, was now, but I knew his father had a telephone. The operator connected me with the Pócspetri number, not so far from Magda’s parents’ house.

  “Yes?”

  He was a heavy man like his son, and, like his son, he lived alone. “Franz? This is Ferenc.”

  He paused. We hadn’t talked in a long time. “Ferenc Kolyeszar? Well how are you?”

  “Not well, Franz. I’ve got some terrible news.”

  He wept, and I pulled the telephone away from my ear and waited. The two of them had grown apart since Stefan’s mother’s death, and I suspected this was at the root of his tears. He didn’t ask many questions, because like most farmers he knew the details were unimportant—only the results mattered. By the time I told him that the funeral would be on Saturday, his tears were under control. “I wish I could make it. But if I don’t get these onions to the market, I’ll be dead, too.”

  Around three the photographer showed up with shots of Stefan on the floor, facedown, the blood-soaked wall, food laid out for two, dirty stairs.

  50

  I put Ágnes to bed and sat by her side as she sniffed the air and asked me, very seriously, to stop drinking so much. “You’re worried about me?”

  She sank into her pillow. “Not worried. I just don’t like you stinking. You smell like those Romanians who play music in October Square.”

  I turned off the light.

  Magda handed me a plate of cold chicken when I came out. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Stay up a minute, will you?”

  She frowned.

  “And get some wine. For yourself. I’ve got to tell you something.”

  I tried to eat a little as she fooled with the cork in the kitchen, but the first bite was dry and tumbled into my stomach like a rock. I set it aside and was relieved to see she had brought two glasses. She poured them both. “What is it, Ferenc.”

  I cleared my throat. It was a theatrical gesture that allowed me a moment and a bit of pain to distract me from what I was preparing to say. “This morning I went over to Stefan’s apartment and found him dead. He’d been shot.”

  She finally got to her wine. Her hands did not shake. She said, “That’s not possible.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got to be lying to me. Joking.”

  I waited.

  “Come on,” she said, then stood up. She looked down at me. “Stefan?” Then she walked into the kitchen.

  The affair was nothing to me. My oldest friend was dead, and the man my wife loved was suddenly gone. We had been together too long for me not to feel some of the pain she must have felt.

  When she reappeared she was wiping her red eyes with a dish towel. She said, “That’s why you called me.” Her glass was empty, so I filled it up in her hand and watched as she walked over to the radio set, put her hand on it, and looked out the window. “You said he was shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Many times?”

  “I don’t know how many.”

  “He died quickly?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and wondered why I hadn’t lied.

  She nodded at the window and finally came back. The glass was empty, and when she sat down I refilled it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He was your best friend.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  She held my gaze. We were fixed like that for a little while, as if we both had a lot of words that we could not say.

  She stood. “I’m going to bed now. But would you rather me stay up with you?”

  “I’ll be all right. What about you? Do you need me to be with you tonight?”

  “Do you need to be with me?”

  We looked at each other a moment more.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  She nodded, first slowly, then resolutely, and wandered back to the bedroom.

  I went for the sheets and wondered selfishly if her decisions were now finally made.

  51

  The next morning was a Friday. There was an abundance of housewives out in the street, stocking up for the weekend. I leaned into the fogged tram window and hated myself for not having woken up in the same bed as my wife.

  Feder was in a subdued mood. He had left Stefan’s body in the drawer so that no one would have to look at him unnecessarily. He told me when I arrived that the other inspectors had already filed through his office—no one was willing to wait for anyone else. So he repeated his performance for me in his empty lab, without having to read from the clipboard in his hand. “Nine millimeter in the stomach. Two shots. I can’t be sure how long it took, but by the signs in the apartment, the smear of the blood, I’d say he was conscious for several minutes.”

  “What about the blood on the stairs?”

  “Stefan’s was B—this was O-positive. Couldn’t say whose it was.”

  “And fingerprints?”

  He looked at the clipboard. “Stefan’s prints on the outside and inside of the front door.”

  “And the window?”

  Feder frowned. “What about the window?”<
br />
  “The bedroom window. It was open.”

  He tapped his pencil on the clipboard. “Well I’m glad I’ve finally been told. All the lab did was the front door.”

  “Have them do the dishes as well. Someone was eating with him when he was shot, and I want to know who.”

  “Yeah,” said Feder. “I would, too.”

  There was a note from Moska on my desk, and when I went to see him Sev was in the office. I waited outside until they finished, then watched Sev watching me as he left. “Enter, Ferenc.”

  I sat across from him and told him what Feder had reported. “I want to see what comes of dusting for more prints.”

  Moska stared at the pencil in his hand. He twirled it awkwardly. “Look, Ferenc. I’ve got to talk to you about this. It’s not something I like.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A month or so ago you attacked Stefan, didn’t you?” He was still looking at the pencil.

  “In a bar,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  “I’d rather not, unless I have to.”

  He used the flat end of the pencil to scratch his scalp. “You don’t have to tell me anything, Ferenc. I’m just trying to clear things up. I’ve got a dead inspector on my hands, and I want to know who killed him.”

  “And you think I killed him.”

  He aimed the pencil at me. “Ferenc, don’t get self-righteous.”

  “Is that why Sev was here? Is he investigating me now?”

  “Just tell me: Why the hell did you attack Stefan?”

  “Because he was sleeping with my wife.”

  He dropped the pencil and inhaled. Then he shut his eyes and pressed them with his fingertips. “Damn,” he said. “Damn. Just get out of here, okay?”

  I sleepwalked the rest of the day with Emil, helping him canvass the residents of Unit 21. A plumber accurately described Nestor Velcea entering the building around 6 P.M. Wednesday. “You notice a guy like that,” he told us. A nine-year-old boy verified the story. Only one gunshot had been heard by the neighbors.