“Did you see the bodies?”
“I watched them do it.”
Gavra drank, shaking his head. “Your sister?”
“She was at school.”
“No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
“That she believed she had made them kill themselves. She must have dreamed and hoped they would do it. Then, one day, they did.”
Adrian gazed at him a moment, then continued. “It was after that that she became hysterical. The local Militia chief-a fat, useless mansent her to the Tarabon Clinic. I, on the other hand, lived as a ward of the state in an orphanage outside the Capital, in Zsurk. The less said about that place, the better.” He quieted, then said, “I still can’t believe she’s dead,” and laid his head on Gavra’s shoulder as “To ak”-the Wheel-went into a speed-drunk guitar solo.
Gavra felt his muscles relax beneath Adrian’s ear, and when Adrian asked if he would sleep there with him, Gavra took a quick, loud breath and turned to look at the crown of Adrian’s head. Adrian raised his face close to Gavra’s and kissed him.
Their sex was strange for Gavra, who seldom had affairs inside his own country. He was used to single nights with Turkish boys found at dance clubs, Austrian men picked up from underground bars, and once even an American businessman he met at the airport bar in Frankfurt. During those brief encounters, each participant knew exactly what he wanted; the enjoyment was always visceral. Though in the mornings he was sometimes annoyed or disgusted by his choice the previous night, he never regretted a thing.
With Adrian, the reasons were elusive. Adrian had, in the space of a few days, lost a sister and had his own life threatened. He was looking for comfort. Because of this they acted as if they’d known each other many years. At first they only kissed, and in bed they gripped each other tightly. For the first time in his sexual life, Gavra felt as if he wanted something more than the wonderful violence of sexual organs and wasn’t sure why.
Was that love? He didn’t know, and it was beside the point-because afterward he passed out, the stress of the last days overcoming him, and slept hard, like a peasant after a long day working the land.
He woke alone in Adrian’s bed to the sound of the front door buzzer. The clock told him it was nine, and he could smell coffee.
“Who is it?” he called.
“It’s your girlfriend,” Adrian said. “Katja’s on her way up.”
Gavra sprang out of bed, scooped his crumpled clothes in an arm, and swept past Adrian on his way to the bathroom, saying only, “I slept on the couch.”
“Good morning to you, too.”
While washing himself in the sink and dressing, he heard Katja being let in and offered coffee. Then, in answer to no question at all, Adrian told her, “He’s in the bathroom.”
Gavra nodded in the mirror. Okay. Katja didn’t reply, but Adrian felt the need to awkwardly add, “He slept on the couch.”
“Oh,” said Katja.
Shut up, Adrian.
But Adrian didn’t shut up. “Did you hear about the excitement last night?”
Gavra fumbled with the buttons on his shirt, grimacing.
“The dead man was American,” Adrian told her. “We don’t get many Americans in this neighborhood.”
“Dead man?” Katja said as Gavra flung open the door and came out in his socks. Katja, sitting on the couch where Adrian had kissed him, looked up with a confused expression. “Gavra, what the hell happened?”
“There was an incident. I’m going to look into it now.”
“Yes? And? ”
“An American was killed,” Adrian added unhelpfully. “You didn’t know?”
Gavra glanced at him without kindness and began slipping into his shoes. “Yes, an American. He entered the building and was killed.”
“Killed by that man,” said Adrian. “What was his name?”
“Not important,” said Gavra.
The confusion in Katja’s face was shifting into anger. “What do you mean-”
“Later,” Gavra said as he reached for his hat. “We’ll talk later. See you.”
He drove through the morning traffic, trying not to worry about what Adrian might be telling Katja. He’d made a mistake, he knew, sleeping with someone involved with this case-a grieving brother, no less-and felt the unfamiliar queasiness of regret.
The Hotel Metropol was very familiar to him. He’d often come with Brano Sev for meetings in its nondescript rooms, usually to speak with foreign contacts. Gavra knew that in its lobby at any moment were at least three watchers, one of them a young woman well suited to seducing foreign businessmen. The only thing that separated Tania from most prostitutes was that she had a remarkable memory for anything her johns muttered and knew ways to make them mutter almost anything. She was smoking on a padded chair when he entered; she watched him cross directly to the elevator. Gavra spun Timothy Brixton’s key on his finger and stepped inside, turning to see Tania rise as the doors slid shut.
Timothy Brixton’s room was tidy, cleaned by a maid that morning, with a sheaf of papers on the desk. He went through them, but they were only forms from the Foreign Ministry’s Trade Council, requests for trade concessions to bring American televisions into the country. All requests had been denied.
He’d searched a lot of rooms during his apprenticeship, and Brixton’s was exceptionally clean. He very much lived his television-salesman cover. Gavra found color brochures for the new twenty-five-inch color set, with young blond women posing as if they came in the box as well.
He rang the front desk and asked for a list of telephone numbers called from this room to be prepared, and when he hung up he noticed the hotel stationery pad. It was clean, but the top page was indented from an earlier note. Using a pencil, he rubbed over it and found the words
Gavra continued through the room, but there was nothing else. So he locked up and showed his Ministry certificate to the desk clerk and asked for the list. While waiting, he noticed that Tania, the hotel’s best informer, was no longer around. The clerk handed over a list of five calls, with times and dates beside them. All the numbers were identical, except the last, placed the previous morning at ten, just before Timothy Brixton left the hotel for the last time.
Gavra pointed at the phone on the desk. “May I?”
The clerk shrugged and walked away. Gavra dialed that final number, and after two rings heard a vaguely familiar male voice. “Yes?”
“Uh, who is this?”
The man on the line sounded amused. “Please, Comrade Noukas. If you don’t know who you’re calling, then why are you dialing the number?”
Gavra choked a little, and when his voice came out it was a whisper. “Ludvik Mas.”
“Hang up now, Gavra.”
Gavra did as he was told, and held on to the counter.
An American spy named Timothy Brixton telephoned Ludvik Mas, who gave him the work address for Adrian Martrich. Brixton had no doubt been nearby as Gavra drove Adrian from the butcher shop to his apartment. The American was after Adrian, to learn something, perhaps. But Ludvik Mas had followed the both of them and killed Brixton before he could speak with Adrian.
Amid the confusion, Gavra knew one thing. Adrian Martrich had information of interest to an American spy, and perhaps of interest to Ludvik Mas as well.
There was no doubt: Last night had been a grave mistake. Adrian was hiding something, and his reticence could kill him, or Gavra.
He marched out of the lobby and pushed through the revolving doors, but before he reached his car a short man with a round, flabby face stepped up to him. He had a pistol in his hand.
“Comrade Noukas,” he said. “Please come with me.”
Katja
Istvan dresses quietly, but I’m awake by the time he’s knotting his tie. He gives me a bright morning smile. “Well, hello!”
“Morning,” I say with a clotted voice, as if I smoked too many cigarettes the previous night, though I didn’t.
“Are you
doing the Sultan Ahmet Camii today?”
“The what?”
“Blue Mosque,” he reminds me, and grins. “I have a feeling you’re not one of the world’s most fastidious tourists.”
I wipe my eyes. “When will you be back?”
“I’ve got a meeting in an hour, another one at lunchtime, and then another at four.” He shrugs. “Six or seven. You’ll be here?”
“Of course, Istvan.”
After he leaves, there’s a knock at the door. I wrap myself in a hotel robe and face a tall man in a uniform holding a box. “Your audio machine, ma’am?”
He places it on the desk and pauses at the door, clearing his throat. Only after he’s gone do I realize I was supposed to tip him.
In the Militia we sometimes use these machines, but as I thread the audiotape through the play heads into the take-up reel I fear I’m doing it wrong, that when I press PLAY the tape will shred and whatever lies on it will remain a mystery. But I’m not as clumsy as I suspect, and soon I’m sitting on the thick carpet in my robe, listening to a tinny conversation through the speaker. Two male voices in a hollow-sounding room. The first voice is plainly Brano Sev’s-seven years have changed little with him. The other is a voice I haven’t heard for that many years, the slow drawl taking me back to a black month that I have, for years, tried to erase from my daily memories. But here it is again, that voice, and it’s telling everything just as I remember it. He makes no excuses. He simply tells the facts as he sees them. He explains that he killed the soldier named Stanislav Klym in order to save himself, that he then moved into Stanislav’s apartment and one day opened the door to find Katja Uher, the girlfriend Stanislav had told him about. So he pretended to the girl; he made up stories of his friendship with the boy she loved, saying Stanislav had given him the keys to his apartment and would arrive in another week or so. She had no reason to doubt it, because this was the kind of guy Stanislav was-he’d give his keys to a stranger just to be hospitable. At one point he even laughs and says, I couldn’t believe she believed me. Can you believe it?
People will believe most anything, Comrade Husak.
Two hours later, after listening to it twice through, I pick up the phone and dial.
“This is Sev.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
He lowers his voice. “You’re there?”
“It was you. You. You knew what he’d done, but you let him stay free. You’re a cretin, Brano Sev.”
For a moment there’s just the hiss of the phone line. “He was useful to us, Comrade Drdova, But now he’s served his purpose.”
“He’s served your purpose.”
“Would you like to know where he is?”
“Of course I would.”
“The Sultan Inn, in Sultanahmet. On Mustafa Pasa. Number 50.”
“Wait.” I stumble to the pencil and hotel stationery on the desk, beside the machine. “Repeat that.”
He does, and I write it down.
“Are you all right, Comrade Drdova?”
“Oh, me? I’m fine, Comrade Sev. I’m just fantastic.” I change tone. “Why are you doing this?”
“What?”
“Helping me find him. I doubt this is in the interests of socialism.”
He hums into the telephone, then takes a breath. “This is the final stage in ending something that should have never begun.”
“Does this something have to do with Zrinka and Adrian Martrich?”
“Yes.”
“With Libarid’s death?”
“Everything is connected, Comrade Drdova. And everything I do is in the interests of socialism. Trust me on that.”
“No, Brano. Everything you do is in the interests of Brano Sev.”
He ignores that. “Are you armed?”
“Armed?”
“I suppose you’re not. I want you to do something, but do it right now. It’s for your protection. Go to Istiklal Caddesi. It’s a street just two blocks from the Hotel Pera Palas, behind the Dutch consulate. Are you writing this down?”
“I am.”
“There is a Dutch chapel, the Union Church. Ask for Father Janssen.”
“A priest?”
“You’d be surprised where socialism finds its friends, Comrade Drdova. Ask Father Janssen, in these exact words, in English…you know English?”
“Not much.”
“Just remember this sentence: Has the harvest come down from the mountains? ”
“What?”
“Those exact words, Comrade Drdova.” He repeats the words as I write them. “Father Janssen will give you what you need.”
“Brano.”
“Yes?”
“How long have you known this? That I was the girl from Peter Husak’s story.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Comrade Drdova.”
“It does to me.”
He pauses. “Your name is different now. You have your husband’s name. And it’s quite surprising you never ran into each other before, but I suppose Peter Husak didn’t come to the Militia offices.”
“When?”
“I didn’t know until yesterday afternoon at the Metropol, when you told me about your relationship to Stanislav Klym.”
Then he hangs up.
For a long time I don’t move. I’m standing next to the desk with the buzzing receiver in my hand, and it’s all coming back to me. Only once I’ve replayed it again in my head, that night in all its painful detail, can I put down the phone and go to dress for the day ahead, for what I have to do.
Gavra
His flabby-faced companion drove him out to the Seventh District, to Tolar, a street of low, sooty Habsburg buildings, and parked in front of number 16, behind a white Skoda. He’d taken Gavra’s pistol at the hotel, but just inside the front door he returned it. Then he trotted up the stairs; Gavra followed.
The door was on the second floor, and the driver tapped a few times, then waited for the lock to be pulled. Brano Sev opened the door.
“Ah, Gavra. Come in.”
The driver remained in the stairwell and pulled the door closed behind them.
It was a sparse office, with empty factory shelves and a single desk. Behind the desk sat Ludvik Mas, his thin mustache, in this light, looking damp. He smiled and motioned to a chair.
Brano was already sitting down.
“Thank you for coming,” said Mas. “Comrade Sev felt that you should be made aware of what’s going on with your case.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Gavra.
“Of course. Brano?”
The colonel turned to him with a straight face. “Gavra, what do you know of parapsychology?”
The question threw him. “Not much. I’ve heard of Special Department Number 8 in Novosibirsk, but didn’t the Russians shut that down?”
“Yes,” said Mas. “Six years ago. But research continues.”
“The KGB,” Brano explained, “controls Soviet research now. But in our country, we set up a laboratory in 1967, in Rokosyn.”
Gavra tugged his ear, worried about where this was going. “Zrinka Martrich actually was there?”
Brano shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“But she was being experimented on-wasn’t she?”
Mas slapped the table and shouted, “Yes!”
Brano chose not to raise his voice. “Comrade Mas is pleased because your supposition is exactly what he hoped others would believe. You see, the research clinic was closed because of lack of results in 1972. The building was torn down. The fact is, there is no research institute anymore.”
“Then where was Zrinka Martrich?” Gavra asked. “She’s been somewhere for the last three years.”
Ludvik Mas said, “She was living her life with us and a few other delusional patients. Elsewhere. What we needed was for her, and the others, to disappear. We plant a few rumors here and there-stories that scientists at Rokosyn have made sudden breakthroughs-and the story is complete. Zrinka Martrich, the rumors go, is at the ce
nter of a project to tame the forces of psychokinesis and use them to stomp out the Western imperialists. Beautiful!”
Gavra looked from one face to the other. “I don’t understand.”
Brano leaned forward, slipping into the familiar tone of the educator. “It’s a Ministry counterintelligence project. We plant evidence of a nonexistent psychokinetic project in order to lure Western spies into the country. The Ministry controls the flow of information to these foreign agents. The spies can then be identified by this method, tracked, and interrogated.”
“Or liquidated,” said Mas, his chin settling on his chest. “I’ve been very pleased by the results. In the last two years we’ve taken care of two British, a French, and two American agents-poor Mr. Brixton included.” Mas raised his eyebrows. “Brixton even made it as far as Rokosyn-just to be more puzzled when he found no clinic. But that didn’t stop him searching. You saw the fruits of our labor in Adrian Martrich’s stairwell.”
“Smert shpionam,” said Gavra.
“Death to spies,” said Mas.
Gavra turned to Brano. “Are you telling me that the plane was part of this? You killed sixty-eight passengers as part of a hoax? ”
Mas shook his head. “Now that is something we had nothing to do with. We put Comrade Martrich on the plane to Istanbul, yes. We wanted to try the same ruse in Turkey-our embassy is riddled with leaks, and by having her there, by placing a few rumors, we thought we could clean the place out.” He grunted. “The fucking Armenians we never predicted.”
“Like I told you before, Gavra,” said Brano, “it was a coincidence.”
Mas lit a cigarette. “A tragic coincidence. Tragic in the obvious way, but now the Comrade Lieutenant General is closing down the operation. Zrinka Martrich was our central character in the scheme, and with her dead the operation is losing its momentum. We’ve had a good run, but now it’s over.”
“Which is why,” said Brano, “we’ve had these deaths.”
“We’re cleaning up the loose ends,” said Mas.
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