The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  I leaned on the counter. “All right. Let’s have Louis Rostek, then.”

  78

  I knocked, and Leonek waited beside the door, so that he could not be seen through the viewhole. I knocked again and waited. The light in the viewhole darkened a moment, then brightened. I knocked and said, “Louis? This is Ferenc. Georgi’s friend. Maybe you don’t remember me—”

  A crash came from inside the room. I pounded with a fist.

  “Louis? You all right in there?”

  Something fell to the floor; Louis groaned.

  I threw my shoulder into the door, and the second time it popped open. The room was empty. I ran to the bathroom and found Louis climbing to his feet. The window was broken. I helped him up. “What are you breaking things for, Louis?”

  His face was deep red, and the fear popped into his eyes when he saw Leonek over my shoulder. “Oh God, Ferenc. Oh God.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down. Nothing to worry about.”

  He shook his sweat-damp hands and came with me back into the main room. Leonek was trying to latch the broken door shut, but couldn’t, so he leaned against it. I set Louis on the bed.

  “What do you think I’m here for? To kill you?”

  Louis looked up at me, his big eyes shivering in their sockets. “Well…what are you here for?”

  I sat and put my arm around him; he flinched. “Well I’m certainly not here to kill you. Where would you get an idea like that?”

  He looked at Leonek, then at me, the terror just beginning to subside. “Nothing.”

  “You’re on the fourth floor,” said Leonek. “You would’ve broken your neck out there.”

  Louis looked at the open bathroom door, then shook his head and, unexpectedly, laughed. “You’re right about that one. I’m not cut out for this.”

  “Is there a bar in here?” I asked, and Louis nodded at a cabinet. I poured him a vodka. He took it quickly, so I poured him another. “Better now?”

  Louis nodded. “You were the last person I expected to see on the other side of that door, Ferenc. How’s the writing coming?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. First, let’s talk about our mutual friend.”

  “Georgi?”

  “Nestor.”

  He made a valiant attempt to hold my gaze, but the color rushed back into his glistening cheeks as he dropped his eyes to the bed-sheets. “I don’t know who that is, Ferenc.”

  “Sure you do, Louis. He’s why you’ve come back here, isn’t he?”

  Louis shrugged. “Nah. I’ve got to go to some Union meeting. International cooperation and all that.” But he was still staring at the sheets.

  “Let me tell you a story,” I said.

  Louis finally looked up, but at Leonek. He nodded in my direction. “Writers. Always a story.”

  Leonek nodded a polite agreement.

  I got up and poured myself a vodka. “In this story, there is a brilliant painter. He’s ahead of his time, way ahead of his time. But no one knows this, because he’s also an eccentric. He doesn’t show his paintings to anyone, he doesn’t even sign the paintings. He’s that eccentric. Well, he is sent to a work camp. Happens to a lot of people. But after a while another painter—an untalented painter who can’t make any headway on his own—comes up with a brilliant idea. He takes those paintings, signs his own name, and gladly shows them off. He’s not so eccentric, just a little unethical. And this works. It works so well that his shows even travel into Western Europe—to Paris, even.”

  “Paris?” said Louis, his fingers tapping his glass uncontrollably.

  “This is bad luck for the unethical artist, because a very close friend of the jailed painter lives in Paris. He recognizes the work, and quickly deduces what happened. He decides that this artist sent his friend to the work camp, then stole his paintings. So what does he do?”

  I watched Louis chew the inside of his mouth. But he did not speak.

  “He returns here and goes to the work camp. He’s such a good friend that he even risks himself by bribing the camp commander to have a word with his friend. And there he tells his friend the story of his incarceration. Because, like anyone, this Parisian wants justice for his friend. And not only that, he wants to nurture the most glorious of human desires: revenge.”

  Louis squeezed his eyes shut, as if they hurt. He remembered telling me this, and hated himself for the slip.

  “Once the painter was amnestied from the work camp, the Parisian returned to the Capital to see him—that, by the way, is when I met the Parisian. I imagine he gave his friend the address of the art curator who had shown the stolen paintings—Josef Maneck.”

  “No,” said Louis, shaking his head. “I gave him nothing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But either way, the artist began killing. Before killing the art curator, he got the address of the unethical artist out of him. Then he tracked down the unethical artist and tortured him. He broke his bones and dragged him into the Canal District, where he set the man on fire.”

  Louis looked up at me.

  “Then he killed the artist’s ex-wife, who had nothing to do with the crime in the first place.”

  He blinked at his hands, which were scratching his knees through the pants. He didn’t seem to know about Zoia.

  I sat on the bed again. “The Parisian’s heart was in the right place, at least generally so, but mistakes were made. The ex-wife, for one. She actually left Antonín Kullmann in disgust when she realized what had happened. And I’m not entirely convinced the curator knew about it at the beginning. I think he found out later, and the guilt turned him into an alcoholic—Antonín supported him to keep him quiet. But that’s the least of the Parisian’s mistakes. The biggest one is that, while Antonín Kullmann stole those paintings, he did not turn in Nestor Velcea. Someone else did.”

  “What?” That was Leonek’s low voice by the door.

  Louis stared at me, baffled. “That’s not true! It’s obvious.”

  “It seems obvious,” I said. “I believed it, too. But before Nestor was sent away he witnessed the murder of a militiaman in 1946. And that’s a much more plausible reason to send someone to a work camp—to keep them quiet. The man who put Nestor away killed my partner a week and a half ago, and I think he tried to kill Nestor as well.”

  “W-who?” said Louis.

  “I don’t know.” I nodded at Leonek. “It’s the same person who killed Sergei Malevich, ten years ago. That person didn’t care about art, he only cared that Nestor Velcea had witnessed him shooting a militiaman on the banks of the Tisa. And as for Antonín, he was an untalented painter left with an apartment full of his roommate’s brilliant paintings. He only took advantage of another man’s tragedy.”

  I let that settle in while I poured vodkas. I gave one to Leonek, who, red-faced, nodded at me. He was trying to comprehend what I had only begun to put together myself. The second vodka I gave to Louis. He took it without looking at me at all. The third I drank, feeling the burn slide down into my stomach. I was sure now of all I had said—it felt right. The act of speaking is like the act of writing; it makes ideas real. But only Nestor knew who had killed Sergei and Stefan.

  “So, again,” I said. “Why have you returned to our country?”

  Louis set his drink on the floor unfinished and mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I brought Nestor’s papers. To get him out.”

  “To France?”

  He nodded.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Just that he needed papers. It was a telegram.”

  “And when are you meeting him?”

  He looked at Leonek at the door, then at his hands.

  “Come on, Louis. We’re the only ones who can keep him alive.”

  “But you’ll put him in jail, won’t you?”

  “I don’t know yet what we’ll do.”

  Louis finally looked at me. “Day after tomorrow. Tuesday.”

  79


  It gave us forty-eight hours to watch Louis. Leonek took the first shift. He paid for another room one floor up and took Louis to it. The hotel staff would notice the broken door and window, but there would be no one left in that room to blame.

  Before I left, Leonek pulled me aside, and whispered, “Let’s keep this between us for now.”

  “We could call in Emil.”

  “I trust him to be quiet, but he won’t keep it from Lena, and she doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut. Then Brano Sev will know. Wasn’t he the one with Nestor’s file?”

  I thought about that, but admitted that, despite everything, I still found it hard to believe that Brano Sev would kill Stefan.

  “Believe it. That man has no friends.”

  This was true. “But I also haven’t noticed any bullet wounds on him. Have you?”

  Leonek shook his head. “Brano Sev is a machine.”

  And I’d been wrong about plenty of things already.

  At home I sat beside the radio set and considered giving Vera a call. The apartment was lonely without even her bleak company. But she hated me now.

  So I drank in the empty apartment and wondered what Malik Woznica’s body looked like now, if it was covered or if the wind had blown the leaves off of him, exposing him to the elements. I closed my eyes.

  The sound of the ringing telephone made me reach, instinctively, for my pistol. But I’d left it in the bedroom. I walked into the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “Ferenc?” My legs tingled. She was crying.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “What happened to Leonek?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “I tried to call him all day.”

  “He’s fine. He’s working.”

  “I have to speak with him.”

  “I’m not going to be your liaison, Magda.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “I was calling him to end it. I can’t believe what I’ve done to you.”

  I let that hang between us.

  “Ferenc?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Can you…”

  “Can I what?”

  “Can you forgive me?”

  I hadn’t thought of that before. There had been no reason to. All I’d known was that my wife was leaving me, and that there was no decision to make. I could either accept it or go crazy. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You’re right. We can talk about it later.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Dad has a key to the cooperative office.”

  “Oh.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a number where I can reach him?”

  “I’ll get him to call you. How about that?”

  “Thank you.” Then she started to cry again.

  I wondered afterward if it had been a dream. Almost two in the morning—it seemed impossible that this had just happened. There was no evidence, except the sweat on my palm.

  80

  I showed up at ten the next morning under a clear sky, and as Leonek left I told him to call Magda. He stopped at the door. “Magda? You want me to call her?”

  “She’s been trying to get in touch with you. I’ll give you the number she’s at.”

  He held up a hand. “I’ve got it. See you at noon tomorrow.”

  I had brought coffee and rolls, and as we ate, Louis said he would write an epic poem about this. “It’s quite a story, isn’t it? I mean, are the paintings any more or less valuable because they’ve got the wrong signature on them? I wonder what the galleries in Paris would say.”

  He was talking again the way I remembered him. “Does it matter, Louis?”

  “Sure it matters.” He brushed crumbs off his shirt. “Though Antonín didn’t send Nestor to the camp for his paintings, he could have. So is a painting as valuable as a man’s life? For that matter, is anything as valuable as a man’s life? Or is everything that valuable?”

  I wasn’t in the mood to listen to this. It made me wonder what was equal to Malik Woznica’s life, and I didn’t want to think about that.

  “What do you say, Ferenc?”

  “I don’t say anything.”

  Louis grunted. “You were more engaging at Georgi’s party. Maybe we need to get you drunk.”

  “Did you know Georgi was interrogated at Yalta Boulevard?”

  Louis’s smile faded, and he gave a sharp nod. “I heard.”

  “What if he didn’t come back? Would you still be asking if a painting was as valuable as a man’s life?”

  Louis patted the air. “Point taken. No more, okay?”

  I finished my coffee.

  “Tell me about those, then.” He nodded at my hand. “You never told me about those rings before. It’s a lot for any one man.”

  I flexed my fingers. “They’re from the war.”

  “Most people get medals.”

  “Well,” I said, then touched the one on my left index finger. “This one belonged to Friedrich Schultz, captain second-class. He was born in Hamburg in 1915. I killed him on 28 April 1939.”

  Louis leaned back. “You—all of them are from Germans you’ve killed?”

  I nodded at my hand, touching Hans Lieblich, Franz Müller and Heinrich Oldenburg. “Except this,” I said, and touched my wedding band, which had its own story.

  “Forgive me, Ferenc, but that’s pretty morbid.”

  I crushed my coffee cup. “Sometimes I need the reminder that I won’t live forever.”

  We shared the bed that night and I lay on my back, hands on my chest, staring at the ceiling. I wanted to be home in case she called again. I wanted to hear her voice. I was sick of this world of men who loved revenge and other men’s wives. I didn’t want to puzzle through bloodstained walls or the shallowness of love. But it strikes me now that that is the only world there is, and all I wanted to do was lie and dream.

  In the morning, I called the front desk for more coffee, and as we drank it I said to him, “You were an informer, weren’t you?”

  He looked up from his cup. “What?”

  “After the war, when you came here. You informed on your friends.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “When you found out Nestor had been sent away, you went directly to Yalta Boulevard. Most people would go to the Militia office and file a complaint. But not you. You went to the heart of state security and demanded your friend be released. Georgi said you were tough, but you’re smart, too. You wouldn’t walk into Yalta Boulevard unless you thought you had some pull with the people inside.”

  “I,” he began, then set his coffee on the bedside table. “I knew they wouldn’t do anything to a French citizen.”

  I shook my head. “A lot of spies were being arrested back then, a lot of foreigners. And I’ve never heard of a foreigner, other than a Russian, being allowed in there. No. You knew someone at Yalta, and thought that because of your services you could get your friend out. He wasn’t political, after all, and you thought they would trust you. So you went directly to the Office of Internal Corrections. But you were wrong. They wouldn’t even see you, would they?”

  Louis got up and took his tie from a door handle. He put it around his neck and began to knot it. “They made me wait in the front room for two hours. I left them my name, and periodically went to the desk to ask what was going on, but they told me nothing. I had to give up.”

  “Who were you going to see?”

  “Just the office. I only knew the field operatives I’d meet in the parks around town. I’d never been in Yalta Boulevard before.”

  I looked out the window to the busy street. “And when Nestor was picked up, he was waiting in the train station to meet you.”

  “But I didn’t show up,” he said, fixing his tie in the mirror. “I couldn’t get past Hungary.”

  “You told Yalta Boulevar
d that you were coming. They knew, didn’t they?”

  He left his tie alone and turned to me. “Yes.”

  “And when you came back last September you talked to them once more. You gave them a description of Nestor for their files, and used the code name ‘Napoleon.’”

  He looked at me, his mouth chewing air, and I felt close to something big. The Office of Internal Corrections had stalled Louis when he came to plead for Nestor a decade ago. It was the one office that knew when he would come to meet Nestor in the train station, and it also had the power to stop Louis at the Hungarian border. I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Leonek.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then: “I talked to Magda.”

  “What did she want?”

  “You know damn well what she wanted.”

  “We’ll talk about it later. Before you come over here, try and get hold of some files—Brano’s and Kaminski’s. They should be over at the Central Committee.”

  “Kaminski?”

  “He’s been out sick,” I said, but didn’t elaborate on my suspicions.

  He arrived early, while Louis was in the bathroom. He hadn’t gotten any sleep, and it showed in his red-rimmed eyes and slack mouth as he handed over the file. He seemed to be laboring over the words before they came out: “I’m still shaken up about this.”

  “The files?”

  “No.”

  I took out two cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know exactly what to say.”

  I took the files to the bed and settled down. “There’s nothing to say.”

  His eyes were focused on nothing in particular. “Maybe not. I wasn’t lying before. I love her. I love them both. I always will. But if she’s made her decision, then it’s done.”

  “I’m glad you understand.”

  “Can I have that cigarette?”

  I lit it for him.

  Because of the nature of their work, both men’s files were minimal: Yalta Boulevard would store the details of their own men. These files contained a brief biography, photos, associations, and a page that listed assignments. Brano’s assignment had been our own Militia office for the last decade, but Kaminski’s listings gave me pause: Chief of the Office of Internal Corrections of the Ministry for State Security, March 1946 to December 1948.