The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “That makes me feel better.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. But I do love her, and I love Ágnes as well.”

  He had no right to love my daughter. I shifted, just to watch him lower his hand again. “You know, I would be fully justified in beating the hell out of you. No one would argue this.”

  His voice was a whisper. “I know.”

  I stared at him as he drove. He had nothing to say—or, he probably had a lot to say, but knew none of it would come out right, so he kept quiet. I didn’t have anything more to say. I only wanted him to know that I knew, and to be afraid. I would not hurt him—I could not do that to Magda—but Leonek didn’t need to know that.

  When he came to a stoplight, I placed my hat on my head and opened the door. “Good luck in the Jewish quarter.” I stepped out, and the bright light made me sneeze.

  65

  I called Magda from home. It was a brief conversation; we did not speak of Leonek. Ágnes had become bored by the second day, and her parents were starting to drive Magda crazy. “When are you going to take care of this guy so we can come home?”

  “Home?” I asked. It seemed like a word we were no longer allowed to use. “Soon. I’ll bring you back home soon.”

  Vera did not come over that night, and on Thursday morning when I arrived at the station, Sev was waiting for me. He waved me over. I moved stiffly. “Ferenc.” He paused. “The morning you discovered Stefan’s body, why were you there?”

  I looked at his hands on the desk. “To talk with him about our case.”

  Sev moved his hands so his thumbs touched, a movement I remembered from Lev Urlovsky. “I’m just doing my job, Ferenc. You know this.”

  “I know.”

  “So please tell me the truth.” The absence of emotion in his face always gave it a dull strength.

  “What are you getting at?”

  He glanced around the empty office. “I am aware of your animosity toward Stefan, and I also know it was unfounded.”

  “I know that now, too.”

  “Good. So tell me. Why did you go to Stefan’s that morning?”

  Just talking about it made me feel as I did when I stood looking down on Stefan’s body—weak. I pulled up a chair. “To talk, Sev. That’s all. I just wanted to talk it out.”

  “And you wouldn’t have attacked him again, like you did in that bar?”

  “I don’t think so. Leonek is still alive, isn’t he?”

  Sev nodded at his thumbs. “Thank you, Ferenc.”

  I stumbled back and shuffled through the papers on my desk from the past few days. Among the circulars about new penal codes from the Politburo was a scribbled phone message. Kliment had called.

  I struggled with the Russian operators, using the words I knew and listening to them use all the words I didn’t know. I gave them the direct number Kliment had left. “Da?”

  “This is Ferenc Kolyeszar.”

  “Ferenc. Thanks for calling. Look.” He paused. “I’ve got some terrible news, you’re not going to like it.”

  “I’ve gotten a lot of bad news lately. I can probably take it.”

  “Two days ago Svetla Woznica was killed in her village. She was shot once in the chest and once in the head. They found her body in the woods outside town.”

  I took a long breath. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it. And it’s clear enough who did it.”

  “Was he seen there?”

  “He didn’t hide. He arrived the day before by train, spent a lot of money in the hotel, and disappeared just before the body was found. He crossed over at Turka.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I repeated.

  “I’ve seen it before. Some men are that way. If they can’t have their woman, then no one can.”

  I fogged over, thumbing my rings until they hurt, remembering that battered face at the train station, kissing my hands. But he was speaking again.

  “—can’t do anything about it now. With the proper papers, I could follow him there, but it’s not the sort of thing they’ll sign for. I wish I could.”

  “You’ve done enough, Kliment. Thank you. I’ll take care of it.”

  “I figured you would, Ferenc. Watch out for yourself.”

  As I hung up I looked over at Sev looking back at me. I think that was the closest I ever came to killing Brano Sev, even though he had nothing to do with Svetla’s death. But he was one of many—like the missing Kaminski—whose positions made them feel they could not be touched. I filled his empty features with all the evil in the world. He blinked. I stood up. But instead of ending everything right then, I made myself walk out the door.

  66

  The Canal District was colder than the rest of the city. The water seemed to suck any heat from the air, and wind funneled through the empty passageways. In Augustus II Square, where long before I had found a black shoe, the water level had dropped, and I arrived relatively dry at number three. The chalk x had faded away. The inner room was still a pool, the small well still dry, but the blemish from Antonín’s body was completely gray now, with spots of black corroded by the wet air.

  I could not find Nestor, and Louis was in another country. I was no longer sure who had killed Stefan, but I was convinced I would never figure it out. And it didn’t matter how valiantly I protected my family—my marriage was slipping away. Now, my only virtuous act in recent memory—the only one that I had followed through on—had been erased. No action I took seemed to stick. I wanted to sleep.

  In the mosaic beneath the water were chalices, wine, debauchery—a satyr leaned, grinning, over a white-robed young woman with a breast exposed. In the corner, a platter of wild berries and the head of a pig gazed up at me.

  The Romans had themselves a time in their day, putting everything into their mouths like children. They slaughtered whole civilizations and sowed lands with salt. These were a people of extremes, but somehow over time all the extremes had been bred out of humanity, so that we wore ties and took busses and trams and clocked in and out of the jobs that fed our family. We spoke with calm, responsible detachment and made words that seemed to show what logical beasts we were. But the only important words are those that result in action—Vera knew this. And so did I. In the war I learned who I was—not by the words I spoke, but by the things I did.

  We were captured near Humenne on a bleak, dry hill that had become our home for a week. We ran out of ammunition, and our commander, a young man from Hust, announced that the fight was over. Then he went behind the hill and shot himself in the mouth with his last bullet. The Germans came over the hill in a cloud of dust and their bold helmets, well fed and scornful. They arranged us into lines and walked us westward.

  Before shooting himself, our commander had told us about the camps set up by the Germans. They were for Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. The Germans, he pointed out, were a people of extremes. His stories were difficult to believe, and some of us laughed at him, though since then his descriptions have seemed mundane. But on that dusty walk, as we starved on blistered feet, we began to suspect the truth.

  Each day we stopped so the Germans could rest, and during one of these breaks I escaped with a couple other soldiers. I’ve written about this. I’ve written about the calculations we made, the old trenches we dropped into in order to escape snipers, the grass we ate to hold off starvation, the peasants’ homes where we rested and received nourishment. What I never wrote down was the bitterness between us when we stopped over a clump of grass and tried to divide it up. I used my size to force the largest portion, and once when another escapee—Yakov Teddi, a skinny boy with long hair—tried to take his fair share I kicked him in the face. This is something I never wrote about. My boot broke his nose, and I didn’t care. But he stayed with us until the end.

  67

  Vera was in a mood when she arrived. She didn’t tell me what it was, but the mood was evident by her silence, and the way, in bed, she held my big hand up to her face and turned it to see it from every
angle. She brought the palm up close to her eyes, as if to read my future, and kissed the hair on the back of it. She smiled, then quickly sank her teeth into my middle finger. The pain shot through me, and I instinctively slapped her, harder than I would have wanted. When she got up on her elbow there was a bright red spot on her cheek. But she was still smiling.

  At the station, Leonek was busy struggling through Kliment’s interview of Boris Olonov, in Russian. “Why didn’t he translate it?” Leonek muttered to himself. “He could have translated it.”

  “Get Kaminski to do it,” I muttered.

  Leonek looked up at me, unsure if I was joking. In case I wasn’t, he said, “Kaminski’s got the flu. That’s what Brano says.”

  Brano didn’t seem to notice his name being said.

  Leonek tried a smile. “Maybe we can get Kaminski for sabotage.”

  Through his open door, I saw Moska eating a sandwich at his desk. “Come in, Ferenc. Haven’t seen you much lately. A bite?”

  I shook my head.

  He set the sandwich down and cocked his head. “I heard about the Woznica woman.”

  “What about her?”

  “That she was found dead in her home village.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Brano,” he said as he lifted the sandwich again. “She was officially one of ours, so Moscow sent a report. Brano didn’t think you’d tell me. Was he right about that?”

  “I don’t know. I would’ve gotten around to it.”

  “Are you going to follow up on it?”

  “Any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “Of course not, Ferenc. It’s your job. I’ll see if I can get some clearance for you to work on international cases. It’ll take a week or two, so wait before arresting him. He won’t go anywhere.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m closing down the other investigation. I told Brano this morning. I know you didn’t touch Stefan. He knows it, too.”

  “Thanks,” I said, then looked at him. “Really.”

  He took a bite, pulling his lips back to expose the two holes where teeth had once been, then dropped the sandwich again. “Is there anything you need to talk about? You seem a little weird these days.”

  “You know about Magda and me.”

  “That’s been going on a long time.”

  “It’s worse.”

  His sympathetic smile made me wonder if he, also, knew about Leonek. But he said, “Ferenc, everyone’s marriage is rough. Don’t think you’re alone in this.”

  “I didn’t say I was.”

  “I never told you about Angela and me, did I?”

  “I knew you had some problems.”

  “I don’t gab about it, but it wasn’t pretty. It got bad enough that I started sleeping with some young girl from the administrative typing pool. Exceptional girl. She’s married now, with two kids. Very happy.”

  “Good for her.”

  “The point is, Angela and I finally sat down and talked. There were a lot of things she had never said to me, and a lot of things I hadn’t said to her. Nothing easy about it, marriage. You’ve got to make some sacrifices. How long have you been married?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “Not long at all. We’ll talk again when you get to twenty-five years, and I’ll have some more advice for you.”

  I grinned. “I can’t wait.”

  68

  Emil asked where I had been the previous day, but didn’t wait for the answer I didn’t want to give. “You should’ve come out with me. I had a grand time talking to old women who didn’t want to say a thing.”

  “In Stefan’s building?”

  “Yeah. And Antonín’s. Nothing of use. But then,” he said, sitting on the corner of my desk, “I started thinking about this Frenchman. This Louis Rostek.”

  “Did you?”

  He looked at me.

  “Go on.”

  “There’s a French school over on Yalta Boulevard.”

  “The one I’m going to send Ágnes to.”

  “Exactly. The head didn’t know anything about Louis, but he suggested I check with their consulate. They host parties for French nationals.”

  I sat up. He’d actually been working while I moped in the Canal District. “And?”

  “And I haven’t been there yet. Want to come?”

  It was west of Victory Square, along the tree-lined streets of the diplomatic area. Three identical Mercedes were parked behind the gate, and the guard, a local boy, picked up the telephone in his little guardhouse for permission to let us enter. Then he opened the gate and watched us walk up the stone path to the front door, where another guard stood waiting. This one was French. He took us into a large marble entryway with a board covered by posters for upcoming events and a front desk where we signed in. Another man arrived: thin, white hair, an eye that twitched. His name was Jean-Paul Garamond. He shook our hands. “Good to meet you, Inspectors. Please, please.”

  He waved us down a marble corridor to his office, then waited until we were inside before entering and closing the door. The chairs opposite his desk were old and comfortable, and he held out an open box of cigars. I shook my head, but Emil, intrigued, took one. “Thank you.”

  Garamond lit it for him, then settled behind his desk, looking very pleased to have us both there. “Now what is it I can do for you gentlemen?”

  Emil was puffing frantically on the cigar to keep it lit, and the smoke began to bother me. I said, “We’re here in connection with a homicide investigation. Evidence has turned up a connection to a French national who frequents our country. A Louis Rostek.”

  Garamond didn’t seem to know the name. “Rostek?”

  “His family was from here originally, years back.”

  “I see,” he said, eye twitching. “And you think he killed someone?”

  “No. But he’s connected to our suspect, and he certainly has information that could help us.”

  Emil was finally satisfied with the ember at the end of his cigar, and began waving smoke away. “Do you have,” he said, then blew some smoke from his face. “Do you keep records of your citizens when they’re here?”

  Garamond smiled, but this was a smile I didn’t trust. “Well, we don’t run things your way.”

  “Our way?”

  He shrugged expansively. “We don’t follow our citizens down the street taking notes.”

  “And if you did,” I said, “you wouldn’t give such notes to the local authorities.”

  “That would be our prerogative.”

  Emil had gotten rid of most of the smoke. He took a normal draw of the cigar, crossed his leg over his knee, and exhaled. “Can you tell us, then, why a French national was seen at a labor camp last spring trying to get inside?”

  “Maybe he was a journalist.”

  “He’s a poet,” I said.

  Garamond took one of the cigars for himself, but didn’t light it. He rolled it between his fingers. “I think you should be going through other channels for this kind of information. Here at the consulate we’re more interested in protecting the privacy of our citizens than divulging their secrets. Your people can talk to the embassy.”

  “We’d rather not do it that way,” I said. “For Louis Rostek’s good as well as our own.”

  His eye twitched when he lit his cigar. Three short puffs, and the ember glowed. “I’m afraid I can’t help you men. I can point you to our cultural and language programs if you’re interested.”

  I did consider it briefly, for Ágnes, but said, “No thank you,” and stood up.

  69

  She had told Karel she would spend the weekend with her sister, so I watched her make dinner in my apartment, standing where Magda would stand when I got home from work, turning to lay plates on the kitchen table. I went through some papers while she cooked, old notes for a second novel that had never come together. A lot of ideas, but no words, sentences, or paragraphs. I only had the pages I’d written about Magda and me. I picked up my old no
vel and gazed at it.

  The French consulate had been just one more dead end—one more that convinced me that I had no control over the case, or my life. So I sat there with my book—shoddy, as Stefan had called it—wanting the strength to take control of something, anything. But more than that, I wanted the complete silence of solitude and the ease of a life without responsibility.

  She was bent over the oven when I came in, but I didn’t touch her. This was something I’d noticed. As our relationship progressed, we touched less outside the bedroom. The distance maintained a tension between us—we both understood this. Our time outside the bedroom was spent preparing for the bedroom.

  As she plated the food she told me that she had come upon a fresh understanding of herself. “It’s through failures. After enough of them you can look around and see what’s left to you. Not Karel, that’s for sure. And my career is dwindling before my eyes. My friends are all distant, and even you,” she said, setting the plates on the table. “I don’t really know about you, do I?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So when I look around, what’s left standing? Only one thing. Recklessness. It’s the only thing that makes me feel like I’m becoming.”

  “Becoming what?”

  “Just becoming.”

  “Recklessness, huh?”

  “Yes. Recklessness.”

  While we ate I mentioned the visit to Vátrina. She didn’t seem interested until I told her it was a camp town. “Were there prisoners?”

  “There will be once they get it going again. The guards sit around drinking and waiting for them.”

  She touched her fork to her lower lip, then went back to eating.

  “I slept with a woman there.”

  She laid the fork beside her plate. At first the expression was confused, then it settled. “Did you?”

  “She worked at the hotel desk.”

  “How was she?”

  “All right. Interesting.”