The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  He stopped searching and turned to me. “By the end of the summer they had put through transfers for all the camp guards throughout the region. But nothing for our camp. So I made calls, and after weeks of this, finally got some answers. Number four-eighty is going to reopen in the spring.” He smiled.

  “So what are you doing in the meantime?”

  “I’m cleaning up the old files to make room for new ones. But my boys, they’re the ones in a tough spot. They have to wait around in that hole they call a town until spring.”

  “What kind of work did they do here?”

  “The guards?”

  “The prisoners.”

  He tilted his head from side to side. “Everything, really. We’d take them into town to build things—you’ve seen the Hotel Elegant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our work,” he said, tapping his chest. “We have them farm the wheat around the camp, and during the winter they work the gravel up at Work Site Number One.”

  “The gravel?”

  “Sure. About two miles away there’s a quarry, and my pets bash it to hell. But I’ve got some better ideas up my sleeve for when they return. Some digging.” He raised his eyebrows.

  As he leafed through the files, I nodded at the cabinet of letters. “Mail from your admirers?”

  He looked confused, then the smile came back. “Oh those! No. Just letters my pets wrote while we put them up. To the family and that sort of thing. Want to read some?”

  I didn’t.

  Velcea’s incarceration file was interesting. I had my own theory about how things had unfolded, but this at least settled a few facts. On 17 February 1947, an anonymous call to Yalta Boulevard reported that Nestor Velcea, a painter, had been seen handing out an underground broadside called Independence. On 25 February, a handwritten letter arrived at Yalta Boulevard, unsigned, claiming that one Nestor Velcea had been overheard at a party criticizing Comrade Mihai’s foreign policy initiatives in particularly disturbing and violent terms. Then, on 1 March, another call came through. This one said that Nestor Velcea would, on the evening of 3 March, go to the central rail station to meet with an agent of foreign imperialism in order to give away sensitive national information.

  Armed with this knowledge, state security agents waited in the station on 3 March. According to the report, Nestor Velcea arrived at 7:12 P.M. and sat on one of the benches near the ticket windows. He did not purchase a ticket, and he regularly looked around at arriving passengers. At a quarter to eight, he got up to leave, and that’s when he was arrested.

  The rest of the file contained signed transfer documents and arrest paperwork, and some reports on his behavior in the camp over his ten years. Other than various instances of falling ill, his behavior had been exemplary. The final sheet was his amnesty certificate, a form letter with his name scribbled in a blank space, signed and stamped by the camp commander sitting across from me.

  “So what does this tell you, Comrade Inspector? If I can ask.”

  The file told me that Antonín Kullmann had framed Nestor in as methodical and precise a way as he kept his old letters. “Not a lot. I was told he’s missing a finger, that it was cut off by a guard.”

  He winked at me. “They like to spread stories. It gives them a thrill.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “I’ve had a lot of pets here, it’s hard to remember the quiet ones. The ones you remember are the ones who shout all the time, and keep returning to this office for their reprimands.”

  “It looks like Nestor was all right, then.”

  The captain shook his head. “None of them is all right, Comrade. And what he’s done on the outside just proves it.”

  I took my hat from his desk and stood up. “Thank you, then.”

  When we shook hands he held on to mine a little longer. “You get him, now. Make sure you get him alive so we can have him back.”

  “You want him back here?”

  “I’ll make up a bunk for him today. I like to have all my pets back at home…who wouldn’t?” Then he frowned. “Hey—you didn’t touch your coffee!”

  59

  It was only four, but I needed a drink. I’d heard enough about the work camps to know I had walked across soil with a heavy blood content and had talked to one of the most brutal sons of bitches that state security could find—because that’s who you put in charge of work camps, the ones who could stomach it.

  Along the road to the center there were more bars than anything else, so I parked and entered one at random. Young men leaned against high tables and cupped their shot glasses with thick fingers. The bartender smiled thinly at me. “You need a coffee?”

  “Palinka.”

  He poured it and looked me up and down. “You one of the new ones?”

  “The new what?”

  “You know. The new guards.”

  I sipped my drink. “New guards? I heard there were plenty already.”

  He leaned close so he could whisper. “That’s the word. New guards are being shipped in any day now. What are these boys going to do?” He nodded at the drinkers. “They’ve waited long enough as it is.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them.”

  “That’s good for you,” he said with a wink.

  I leaned on a free table and gazed at the photographs that covered the wall. Shots of “old Vátrina.” The only difference between old and new Vátrina, the photos told me, was the Hotel Elegant, and the camp.

  A thick man with a close-shaved head set his drink next to mine and looked up at the photos, as if unaware of my presence. The back of his neck was swollen with wrinkles where his excess flesh had collected, and his puffy cheeks were riddled with gray pockmarks and stubble. “You come in from the Capital?” he asked the wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “Horia says you’re not a guard.”

  Horia watched us from behind the bar. “That’s true.”

  “It’s all right if you are,” he said to a photograph of a woman and a horse in front of the feed store. “We’re not vindictive here. Everyone’s in the same boat.”

  “I’m still not one.”

  “Then what are you?” He turned to look at me. His eyes were light blue, and below one of them was a scar.

  I said it before I could think it over: “I’m a writer.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Novels.”

  “You mean, stories you make up?”

  “That’s it.”

  He considered this as he finished his shot, walked back to the bar, and returned with two more. He put one in front of me.

  We raised our glasses to each other.

  “So why aren’t you in some café in the Capital right now? Why are you on the stinking edge of the world?”

  “Research.”

  “Working on a story about this town?”

  “About the camp.”

  His mouth opened, but then he closed it. He noticed someone at another table. “Hey, Krany!” A little dark-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth looked up. “Krany, come over here.”

  Krany sauntered over with his glass and leaned on our table without looking at me.

  “This guy wants to know about the camp. He’s a writer.”

  Krany put out his cigarette and frowned at the lingering smoke. “Why’re you writing about that, Comrade?”

  “Because somebody’s got to.”

  The thick one nodded his agreement, but Krany still wasn’t convinced. “What are you going to say about the camp?”

  “I’ll know when I learn more.”

  “You some scaremonger who’s going to say we’re a bunch of thugs who like beating up on people?”

  “Are you?”

  He smiled then, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I offered them to the guards and left the pack on the table.

  Krany, it turned out, was primarily a tower man. He had spent his days, summer and winter, up in one of the bo
xes overlooking the camp and the farmland surrounding it. He was one of the best shots in the camp, and once killed an escapee from a distance of five hundred yards (though his friend disputed that figure). “And he went down. I wanted to get his leg, just stop him, but it ended up going through his head.” He took another of my cigarettes.

  The first guard’s name was Filip. He worked down in the mud with the prisoners. Each morning he would herd them out of their cots and march them to the quarry. “It was all about following orders,” he told me. “They were ordered to walk, and if they didn’t, we would hit them. Usually in the stomach and chest, because we didn’t want to break their legs.”

  “Come on, Filip,” said Krany. “You broke some legs. I could see you just fine.”

  “So you get carried away.”

  “It was easier up in the tower. You didn’t have to smell them, you didn’t have to do that kind of work.”

  I bought another round and asked if they knew Nestor Velcea. Krany shook his head, but Filip thought it over. “A small guy? What was he…an artist?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Sure, I knew him. An okay kid. He thought we didn’t know about all those charcoal drawings he did. But when prisoners clean up a wall, you notice. The wall’s dirty already, and then you’ve got this big clean spot.” He smiled grimly. “Some of them were real idiots.”

  Krany nodded. “Yeah, the artist. The one who did Gogu’s portrait.”

  “Who’s Gogu?”

  “The commander,” said Filip, and I remembered the portrait on the captain’s wall.

  I passed out cigarettes, emptying the pack. “But Gogu said he didn’t remember Nestor. Does that make any sense?”

  “Of course he remembers Nestor,” said Filip.

  “He was pulling your leg,” said Krany. “He damn well knows who Nestor is.”

  “But there were a lot of prisoners. Why would he remember Nestor?”

  Krany looked at Filip, as if asking something. Filip shrugged. “What does it matter?”

  Krany turned back to me. “Last spring, this gray Citroën comes up to the gate. Cosmin checks it, but the driver doesn’t have the right paperwork to come inside.”

  “Who’s Cosmin?”

  “No one. Another guard. Pay attention, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “So Cosmin won’t let him inside. And this guy gets out—a big guy, kind of oily hair—and starts shouting for Nestor through the fence. Only it’s daytime, and all the prisoners are off at Work Site Number One. He was a foreigner, maybe he didn’t know any better. So he’s shouting to an empty prison.”

  “What kind of foreigner?”

  “Don’t know,” said Krany. “But you could tell there was an accent. What a hothead he was. Finally, Gogu had to come out and deal with him.”

  “I heard about it that evening,” said Filip.

  “We all heard about it,” said Krany. “And this is why Gogu will swear he doesn’t know Nestor. Because the foreigner bribed him with a stack of koronas the size of my fist. Gogu tried to cover it up, he told him to put it away, and they went back to the office to take care of it. But we all saw it. Bribing’s no big deal, just as long as you keep it quiet.”

  “So what happened?”

  Filip said, “I brought Nestor back from the work site and into Gogu’s office. Gogu stepped outside for a few minutes to leave them alone. Then Nestor went back to work, and the foreigner left.”

  “But—what was it about? What did he want?”

  Filip finally lit the cigarette I’d given him. “No one knows. We asked Gogu, and he told us to keep out of his business unless we wanted to end up as one of his pets.”

  “And Nestor, too,” said Krany. “He wouldn’t say a word, would he, Filip?”

  “Not a word. I punched him a few times because I was so curious, but the lump just wouldn’t speak.”

  60

  It was after seven when I returned to the Elegant with my small bag of clothes. There was a different clerk at the desk, a young man who took my papers and wrote the information in a ruled notebook. In the middle of writing, he squinted up at me. “You came in here before?”

  “For information.”

  He tossed his head in the direction of the bar. “Tania’s waiting for you.”

  I had forgotten about her. My mind was stuck in the realm of barbed wire and mud and beatings, and spending the evening with a woman just didn’t fit in. So I took back my documents and key and walked directly to the stairs, not looking up as I passed the doorway to the bar.

  The stairs and the doors and the corridor and the tiny room—all of them had been built by cracked and bloody fingers, slumped backs and sore stomachs. I lay on the bed, my feet hanging off, and stared at the beige ceiling.

  There was a knock at the door, but I didn’t get up. I was wondering what was said in Gogu’s office last spring.

  The knocking started again, so I got up, grunting, and opened the door. Tania smiled at me. “Think you can get rid of me that easily?”

  “Look. I’m tired.”

  She put her hand on my chest and pushed me back. I noticed an open bottle of wine in her other hand as she closed the door. “You don’t look so tired to me.”

  There was a certain prettiness to her, but I couldn’t see it then. She got two glasses from the bathroom and filled them up. There was no other place to sit than the bed. She tapped my glass against hers and winked.

  “You kept me waiting so long I almost found myself another victim. But then I remembered this,” she said, touching the rings on my right hand. “And this.” She touched my chest. Then she set her glass on the floor and moved her round face up to mine. “And this,” she whispered, before kissing me.

  The kissing was enough for a while, and we rolled on the bed, a mess of tongues and saliva. Sometimes she got up suddenly, leaned over the edge of the bed as I rubbed the back of her thigh, and took a sip, then returned with wine-reddened lips. But when she started to take off her clothes I stopped her. “No,” I said, and she frowned, took another sip, and began kissing me again.

  This was all I wanted, something simple and almost childlike, and that’s all we did until we were lying together on the bed, both very tired.

  Tania was twenty-five, had grown up in this town, and the only outsiders she met were connected to the work camp. “I like this, meeting people from all over. Most of them are pretty nice, and sometimes we can have ourselves some fun.”

  “So you do this a lot?”

  She stretched an arm over her head. “Now and then. There are a couple guards I see regularly, but we all know I’m not the kind of girl to settle down.” She looked at me. “It’s too fun, isn’t it?”

  “Fun, yes.” I poured the last of the wine into her glass and asked if she wanted to stay over.

  “Think there’s enough room?”

  There wasn’t, but I wanted to sleep with a warm body tonight. “We can make it work.”

  The room was getting cold, so I checked the radiator, which didn’t seem to do a thing. Tania banged on the knob a few times. “This hotel is a joke.”

  As she undressed, I noticed the black, shiny spot on her stockings, where she’d used nail polish to repair a hole. I turned out the lights.

  It was difficult, but she curled up with her back to my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her. She talked steadily through the next hour, mumbling about how she’d had offers from men to take her out of this town, but she would never go. “Here I’m somebody. What would I be in the Capital? Just another peasant. Just another slut.” She said she’d even had offers from state security men. One of them sent her packages of Swiss chocolates on a regular basis. “He’s in love with me. That job must have screwed up his brain. You can see it in them, those security types are all a little off.”

  “You should watch out for them.”

  “Me? No, they should watch out for me.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Her hair shifted
against my nose. “I’m serious. One told me that he was frightened of me.”

  “A little girl like you?”

  “I didn’t believe it either, but,” she said, then paused, trying to remember exactly. “He said he was afraid of my inability to commit to one man. Not that it scared him, not personally, but he said that more and more people were like me, and if you couldn’t commit to a single person, how could you commit to a state?”

  “That sounds like state security.”

  “I even get the occasional foreigner.”

  “Foreigners?”

  “Well, not many. So you remember them. The last one was French. Nice enough guy. Big and fat, but not so jolly as he looked. He was trying to get a friend out of the work camp. I could’ve told him it wouldn’t work.”

  My arms around her twitched, but she didn’t notice. “Remember his name?”

  “Louis. Yes—Louis something. Nice guy.” I felt her fingers grip my elbow beneath the covers, as if for support. “But he wasn’t such a gentleman as you.”

  61

  I drove home with the first light, having whispered a farewell to Tania’s sleeping form. I showered and changed, and by three was at the station. Emil was in, so I sat on his desk and took one of his cigarettes. He winked. “Got some interesting news for you.”

  “Me first,” I said. “Watch out for yourself and Lena. Nestor found out where I live.”

  “You saw him?”

  “He tried to break in while I wasn’t there.”

  Emil frowned.

  “I took Magda and Ágnes out of the city. You might consider the same thing for Lena.”

  He nodded very seriously. “Okay.”

  “Another thing: A Frenchman named Louis Rostek saw Nestor last spring at the camp. The commander won’t tell me anything, and the guards don’t know what it was about. But I think he told Nestor that Antonín had put him away.”