The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “I know.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  I raised the pistol so he could see into the barrel. “Lie down.”

  “You wouldn’t shoot me.”

  I shot a bullet past his ear that buried into the wall. He got on his knees. “Down,” I said. “Arms out.”

  With his nose in the rug and arms spread, I found in the lining of his jacket his pistol—a nine-millimeter with a long silencer attached to it—and tossed it into the kitchen. I knelt beside the chair where I had left Ágnes’s knotted rope and bound his hands behind his back. He wrinkled his nose when the rope passed near his face. “Damn, Ferenc. That thing smells like piss.” I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, watching him as I phoned Emil, but he made no move. When I hung up, he said, “This is it, then. You understand, right? Once I’m in custody, I’ll tell everything about November the sixth, and about Svetla Woznica. If you put me away, I’ll put you away. That will be the end of you.”

  I sat in the chair. “Then we’ll go down together.”

  88

  All four of them arrived, Leonek and Emil with guns drawn. Kaminski smiled at everyone. I wanted more from him. I wanted some kind of pleading, something to let us all know that now he was finished. But he only smiled as I gathered the audiotape and Emil and Leonek lifted him and took him out to the car. Louis and Nestor sat together on the sofa. Louis said, “What about us?”

  “What do you think?”

  Nestor was tipsy—Lena had kept him drinking. He smiled grimly. “I suppose it’s time for me to pay back society again.”

  Louis was a French national, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to charge him with anything. He was a fool, but that had never been much of a crime in our country. So I drove him back to the Metropol. He and Nestor hugged on the dark street, and Louis kept apologizing, but Nestor was serene. The alcohol must have helped.

  As we got into the car, I glanced back at the hotel. A white-haired man in the lobby stood and approached Louis. Jean-Paul Garamond did not look happy.

  Kaminski was already in a cell, and Leonek and Emil were waiting for me. They stood to the side as I filled out forms for Nestor’s detention, then Moska showed up. He was tired and confused and a little angry that he hadn’t been told what was going on. But he got over it. After Nestor was taken away we went to a bar. I wanted to be drunk, to gain Nestor’s serenity, but intoxication only made me feel sick. I couldn’t quite hear what the others were saying. One thing I did make out was Emil’s confusion over something Kaminski had said. “He told us that by tomorrow no one will give a damn about him, or Nestor, or anyone. He said tomorrow everything is going to be different.”

  “What does that mean?” Moska asked.

  Emil shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

  Leonek wagged his head over his glass. “I don’t wish I did. I’m very glad not to know a thing.”

  I felt the same way. I wanted to forget Kaminski’s last words to me—That will be the end of you—but memory and knowledge are the killers of serenity. Then, around one, when we were all too drunk to read a thing, a heavyset woman came in, red-faced, frantically waving a special late-night edition of The Spark.

  “God, oh God,” was all she could get out, repeatedly.

  Leonek swiped the paper from her, and as he moved it back and forth, trying to focus, he looked baffled. “It’s Mihai,” he muttered, maybe to us, maybe to himself. “He’s dead.”

  89

  It rained most of the drive. I had not had the patience to clean up the house; all I wanted was Ágnes and Magda. I wanted them with me immediately; there could be no delay. I splashed through craters of rainwater and flew past hitchhikers stumbling through the mud, the sputtering radio teaching me more about the life of Mihai than I would ever have wanted to know. All I learned of his death was that lung cancer had taken him.

  I ducked beneath my coat to stay dry and banged on the loose front door. Nora looked surprised.

  “Where are they?”

  “Inside, dear. Eating lunch.”

  Ágnes threw herself into my arms, weeping. It was strange to hold my daughter again, and I had to adjust my arms to accommodate her. Maybe she’d grown in the past week. But her tears weren’t for me. “He’s dead, Daddy! W-what can we…” She broke down again.

  Magda was easier to hold. I sank my face into her shoulder and held her for a few seconds longer than she expected. Then she pulled back. “Are you okay?” She wiped my cheek.

  “Me? Oh, sure. I’m fine.”

  “Your hand is scratched.”

  “It’s nothing. I’m okay.”

  It took a while to relax, a meal that tasted better than any Nora had ever made before, and a long smoke with Teodor. We discussed Mihai’s passing and speculated without knowledge on what would follow. No one that week had any idea what would happen. “Ágnes is a wreck,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Maybe those Pioneer meetings had their effect.”

  He asked about the case.

  “It’s over.”

  “And it went well? You got your man?”

  “I got him.”

  “And what about you two?”

  “What about us two?”

  “Mag told me she asked you to take her back.” He put out his smoke. “Are you going to do that?”

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  All five of us took a walk across the wet communal plots and greeted farmers who stood smoking in empty, long-harvested fields. We made it to the social club, a low wooden building where a couple men played guitars in a corner while drunk farmhands danced with young girls. I didn’t like it when one of them covered us with his atrocious breath and asked to dance with Ágnes, but I was pleased when she declined.

  At the farmhouse Magda and I took the room where she had once told me about Leonek. But this time she examined my hand with concern, then told me again how sorry she was. I kissed her to keep her quiet, and we made love in a way I’d not done for a very long time: simply, and without any motives other than love. Afterward she told me she could never leave me, because a man as pure and true as me was a once-in-a-lifetime find. “Pure?” I asked her. I was standing naked by the opened window, smoking.

  She put herself up on an elbow, and in the darkness she might have been any woman. “I know you, Ferenc. Your impulses are pure. You’ve proven it to me all these years.”

  “I’m not pure, Magda. I’m so far from that.”

  “But you are.”

  “No,” I repeated, then told her about Vera. I told as little as possible.

  She was quiet for a moment, then whispered, “I knew something was going on. All those nights out.” I noticed her breaths were uneven. “But what else should I expect?” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t do it earlier.”

  I flicked the cigarette out the window and latched it tightly.

  90

  Magda was disheartened by the apartment—I hadn’t cleaned a thing while they were gone—and peered closely at the bullet hole in the wall. Standing with her and seeing it through her eyes, shame overcame me. Ágnes ran with Pavel to her room, and Magda leaned against the radio and sighed.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll help.”

  “You’re damn right you’ll help.”

  So we spent that afternoon cleaning. She dusted and mopped; I swept and washed dishes. Both of us went through the apartment with rags, wiping down all surfaces, and by the afternoon it was done. We bathed together, washing each other’s backs, and when we were done I suggested we go to a puppet show. “That’s a nice idea,” she said.

  But the theater was closed in deference to Mihai, and on the front door was a twenty-line poem extolling the virtues of that great patron of the arts. We ended up at a restaurant where I told them to get whatever they wanted. Ágnes chose fried potatoes. I tried to get her to add some meat to her order, or vegetables, or even ice cream, but she shook her head firmly. “You said whatever I want.”

  “
Fair enough.”

  We put Ágnes to bed and undressed in our bedroom. I watched Magda slide out of her clothes as if I’d never seen her do it before in my life. Her face and shoulders were brown from a week in the country, and I touched an old scar on her shoulder, white against her tan. We shut off the lights and kissed for a while and made love without speaking. Then, as we lay beside each other in the dark, she finally began to tell me.

  “Remember how it was when you came back from the war?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “You were a different person. Really, you were. The Ferenc I married was bright and happy. God, you could make me laugh. You did it without effort. You saw the humor in everything around you, and you always pointed it out to me.” She shifted, and her hand slid up to my chest. “I was never like that. Then when you came back it was different. Of course, at first you couldn’t do anything. You’d been through something I couldn’t imagine, and I was willing to work with you through it.”

  “I remember that. You were so good to me.”

  Her fingers weaved through the hair on my chest. “Why wouldn’t I be? Your family was dead, and you’d been through a war. I loved you. So we moved to the Capital when Stefan got you the job. I knew why he wanted to help you—we both felt guilty. But I swear it only happened once.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Once you were working again, you started to come out of your shell. I can’t tell you how excited that made me. I was looking forward to greeting the boy I’d fallen in love with.” She paused then, her fingers continuing to stroke.

  “But he didn’t appear, did he?”

  Her hand flattened just over my heart. “Not really. I saw moments of it now and then, particularly after Ágnes was born. But you were a different man. I had to realize that. And when you started writing, it seemed to take you away even more. The only time you were like your old self was with Ágnes. I was jealous of her for a long time.”

  “Of Ágnes?”

  “She was the only one who got the old Ferenc. I wanted that Ferenc for myself.”

  I considered that decade and a half with a man she hadn’t married. “Was it so bad?”

  “What?”

  “Being with me.”

  She stroked the stubble on my cheek. “Of course not. There were moments, I have to admit, when I was scared of you. You’d get into one of those moods, you’d go silent, and I didn’t know if I could trust you. With me. With my body.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said, then paused again, “you don’t realize what your size does to people. You could snap someone in half. You could snap me.”

  “But I’d never do that. Not to you.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. But sometimes I’d look at you, mulling over your brandy, distant, and wonder if you could. I wondered what would happen if I did something to really provoke your wrath.” She removed her hand. “And then I did. I did the most provocative thing imaginable. And you…you didn’t touch me. Not once. Not many men are that way, Ferenc.” Her hand returned, this time to my scalp. “Maybe this is what I realized at my parents’. I was throwing away my family because I didn’t have enough faith. God,” she said, placing her hand on mine again and squeezing.

  I could hear the tears.

  She said, “I found that letter you wrote.”

  “What letter?”

  “It was in your jacket. You said you were going to leave me and take Ágnes with you.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t understand—”

  “Don’t explain.” Her hand tensed on mine. “I deserve it. But please, consider growing old with me.”

  I held her with my arms and legs for a long time until, the crying done, she fell asleep. To the sound of her soft snores, I tried to figure out what I wanted now, now that it had all been exposed. I was numbed by the prospect of decision.

  But what numbed me more was my impotence: My decisions did not matter. Kaminski’s threat still resonated in me, and reminded me that any life I chose had a fast-approaching expiration date.

  The next morning, over breakfast, Ágnes smiled at us—she could tell we were better. Then she asked the question: “Daddy, do you know where my rope ladder is? I can’t find it.”

  91

  Friday morning I typed up the paperwork on the Nestor Velcea case. I listed off the victims—Josef Maneck, Antonín Kullmann, Sofia (a.k.a. Zoia) Eiers, and Stefan Weselak.

  Then I outlined the understood sequence of events, from Sergei’s case in 1946 to the art fraud in 1948 to its discovery in Paris by Louis Rostek and Nestor Velcea’s attempt to right history. Were there a place in the report to mention such things, I might have noted that history can never be made right, but the forms did not ask those kinds of questions. Nor did they allow me to observe that if there was a God, His aims were inconceivable: He gave Svetla an unlocked door, and He also handed Nestor a chance meeting in a bar with his first victim.

  I wasn’t far into the report when Leonek approached me. Nestor and Kaminski had been moved up to Ozaliko, but Leonek had gotten a call from a friend who was a guard there. “Tells me they took Kaminski away. A couple state security guys.”

  “They’re going to want to know everything he knows,” I said.

  Leonek smiled. “I hope he makes it difficult for them.”

  I felt my eyes glazing over. Leonek was saying something. “What?”

  He had settled in a chair beside me. “That night. Before you went to The Crocodile. You asked me if I loved them. Why did you do that?”

  Part of me wanted to smack him, another part to embrace him. “Insurance,” I said. “Now get out of here. I’ve got to finish this report.”

  I didn’t get much further before Emil pulled up the chair that Leonek had vacated. “Thought you’d like to know, they found Woznica’s car on the road to Perechyn. It had been rolled into the trees.”

  “Did he have a wreck?” I asked with surprising calmness.

  “Don’t think so.” He scratched his chin. “Haven’t seen it yet, but the local Militia told me the fender only tapped a tree.”

  “You haven’t seen it yet?”

  “I’m going now. Want to come?”

  I looked at the half-written report in the typewriter. “No. I don’t think so.”

  He didn’t move, and I noticed he was grinning.

  “What?”

  When he told me, my grin matched his.

  “For Christ’s sake, Emil. Congratulations!”

  “We’ll get it confirmed by the doctor, but she’s pretty sure. I just hope it works this time.”

  “When’s the due date?”

  “Twentieth of August.”

  “So you’ve decided,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Not to leave her.”

  He touched the corner of my typewriter. “I suppose my love’s not that mature, Ferenc.”

  He went to his desk as I looked at the report, dazed by the white paper. Emil’s new life was just beginning as my new life was preparing to end. Then, on cue, two men entered the station. They were obvious—the long leather jackets, the low-slung hats—but they walked as if no one knew they were state security. They paused in the doorway. This had come sooner than I expected. I took my fingers off the typewriter and reached for my bag. But then they noticed Sev, smiled and walked over to his desk.

  Not yet.

  So I continued, working with the sticky T to make the name Nestor and being gentle with the carriage return so the roller would not shoot out of the machine. I was almost finished when I heard his footsteps behind me. “Ferenc?”

  I turned to Sev.

  He looked at the report in the typewriter, then at me. “Can you tell me, generally, what you did after the riot on November the sixth?”

  I looked past him at the two men waiting by his desk. “I walked back to the station and drove home.”

  “And did you receive any telephone calls at home?”

  “No,”
I lied. “I went to sleep.”

  Sev blinked, no expression cracking those features. “Thank you, Ferenc.” He returned to his desk.

  Through the rest of the report my hands did not shake. My stomach was steady, and my mind was focused. It didn’t matter that everything was closing in on me. I was still able to work like an automaton through the details of my life, grab my hat, and go home to my family as if each hour did not lead nearer to my demise. I had taken so many steps toward my own end that by now the steps were easy. I could believe in fate or not; it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. I sat with Ágnes on the floor, helping her fashion a new knotted rope out of one she had found on her way home from school. I smiled at her and joked as though I were still a man with human feelings. Magda touched me in bed and I made love to her as if I still knew what that meant. And she believed it. Both of them believed it.

  92

  The crowd lined the entire length of Yalta Boulevard, sprouting out of Victory Square and growing straight and sure past state security headquarters at Number 36, out to where Yalta terminated in the middle of the Seventh District. We were somewhere in between. The announcements had been plastered on walls ever since Wednesday, and the radios had broadcast unending reminders of the time and place, but I never imagined so many would heed the call. After the Sixth of November, this kind of turnout seemed impossible. But here they were, all the discontented of the Capital alongside the satisfied and even the apathetic. And they were all weeping.

  Children sobbed on fathers’ shoulders; mothers clutched their heads whenever anything appeared on the cleared boulevard. Banners fluttered down from windows, announcing that MIHAI LIVES FOREVER IN THE HEARTS OF THE WORKING CLASSES and quoting him: “THE PATH TO FREEDOM IS TREACHEROUS, BUT WE ARE GREATER THAN MERE TREACHERY.” His younger portraits hung from lamp-posts like Roman standards and filled shop windows. Magda grabbed my hand as we were pushed forward. The motorcade began with white Militia cars, their aerials bound in black ribbons, then came the long hearse. Magda slipped as the crowd surged, but steadied herself on my arm. Bullhorns on the hearse’s roof bellowed a slow dirge and a deep voice listing all his titles: Liberator of the Nation; Friend to the Young and Old; Fount of Impenetrable Knowledge…Wails shot up around us.