The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  The security officer’s stone face turned from the wall to meet his gaze—Emil could read nothing in those heavy, sleepless eyes—and nodded in the direction of the door.

  Light reflected in the corridor, footsteps ricocheting, and up ahead a white-scarved woman dragged a damp mop. Uniformed Militia stood in pairs, talking and laughing—their shoulder patches matched the one on his dress uniform at home: the red hawk with head in profile, wings folded, on a field of yellow.

  This was another world. Some smiled at him as they passed, and a few even nodded cursorily. He read what was stenciled on each door s translucent glass: accounts and external and munitions and toilet and interview. A mousy secretary coming out of the interview room with a notebook to her chest smiled at him. Her eyes twinkled.

  The corridor turned left, then right, and at the far end, upon cracked glass, was supplies. He rapped with a loose knuckle, then entered.

  A thin, tanned man wearing blue coveralls leaned back in a chair, reading The Spark—yesterdays afternoon edition— drowsily. His sockless, pale ankles were crossed on the counter, his black shoes polished. Behind him, seven overflowing, gray shelving units led to the dim far wall.

  “Comrade,” said the thin man as he dropped his feet. “You are to be congratulated. Says right here that the murder rate in the Capital has plummeted fifty percent in the last three months.” He slapped the paper with the back of his hand. “It thanks you.”

  Emil closed the door. “Me?”

  His smile was rich with yellow teeth. Emil couldn’t place the accent. The man’s bloodshot left eye remained trained on the small side window. “You, yes! Figuratively, at least. All the Comrade Inspectors of the People’s Militia.”

  This sudden end to the silence stunned him. He opened his mouth. The end of the silence and its form: a deeply creased, tanned face with a lazy red eye. “Not this inspector,” said Emil. “Only my second day.”

  “Then don’t send the rate back up.”

  Emil propped himself with wide-set arms against the counter. He was acclimating to conversation. “Do you have a typewriter?”

  “Your very lucky day.” The supply clerk smiled, wiping sweat out of his day-length beard. He wandered back into the darkness—his slight limp was apparent beside the hard, vertical lines of the shelves—and returned with an old monstrosity, weaving a little, gasping as he dropped it on the counter. “Beautiful,” he said, and swallowed. “No?”

  It looked less like a typewriter than a cumbersome piece of steel furniture.

  “You cant go wrong with a classic. German. Weimar, no less.”

  Emil touched it timidly. “It works?” It was cold.

  “Mostly, sure. Except the J, and the apostrophe. And, if I remember-” He pressed a button that clattered loudly, then squinted his strong eye at the black impression on the black roller. “Yes—the B.”

  Emil exhaled. “You have something that works?”

  A cool look of judgment filled the clerk’s features. “I shouldn’t do this.” He moved with exaggerated labor, his limp almost a stumble, back into the gloom. One hand fondled his chin, and the other held his backside as he frowned at shelves.

  Emil wandered to the muddy, face-high window that looked down on a concrete courtyard, thinking again what he’d thought when he returned after the war: This is a nation of cripples. Dirty officers’ children played soccer in the courtyard, their shouts muted by glass. A cool tickle of sweat drew down his back. Then something hit the counter.

  This typewriter was small, virtually new, and all its keys were intact. The clerk tested them with a light finger.

  “Is better?”

  “Significantly.” Emil lifted it easily with two hands.

  “Is worth something, no?”

  He set it down again, and waited.

  “The last one that went out,” said the clerk, his brown features paling in the square of light from the window, “went for, I believe, five koronas.”

  “Five?”

  “But you’re new, right? And, after all, this one used to be at your desk.” He talked a quick retreat. “Sergei’s replacement, correct? I thought so. Exactly. Must be fair,” he said, then gazed at the scratched counter. “Poor Sergei.”

  The other cadets had eagerly told Emil the rumor of the man he was replacing: Sergei Lvonic had been shot by a 7.62mm Tokarev. A Red officer’s pistol. But like most things that occurred just after the Liberation, it was never investigated.

  “What about you?” asked Emil. “Can I know who you are?”

  The clerk shrugged. “Roberto.”

  “Spain?”

  “Everyone thinks that.” He shook his head. “I get points for the Franco martyrs—the girls think I’ve lost my family to the fascists. But no. Argentinian.” He placed a hand over his chest and intoned: “My parents knew the way of their hearts.” The hand dropped and he winked.

  Emil leaned closer. “So you know who I am?”

  “Who doesn’t? Brod, Emil. Homicide.”

  “Then maybe you can explain it to me.”

  “Explain what, Comrade?”

  That word dropped a curtain between them, as though Roberto had suddenly reached the limits of his affability and was backing up again. “The men,” said Emil. “They hate me. I don’t know why. They don’t speak to me, and there’s been some violence.”

  Roberto snorted, impressed. “Violence?” He wiped his damp cheek with a thumb and settled into his chair. “Sergei was loved. You can be sure of that.” He took a pack of Czech cigarettes from his pocket and shook one out. “There weren’t many like Sergei.” He puffed as he lit up. “Don’t worry, they’ll get over it. What they are are…victims of melancholia.”

  “After two years? This is melancholy? Someone hits me in the balls, and that’s just melancholy?”

  Roberto shrugged in his tired way; none of this was news to him. “Just wait until you see those men really angry.”

  *********

  The typewriter was, Roberto assured him, a steal at only four koronas, and he included The Spark as a gift. But when Emil returned with his new possessions, he was deep in the silence again. They could not know it had been broken already, so they persevered, keeping their eyes to their desks as he set the typewriter down. He tested the chair with a hand, then settled down and experimented with a few keys. The silence had been broken, whether or not they liked it, and with time it would necessarily dissipate.

  Again, that hereditary hope.

  He got up and gazed over the big typist’s head at the bulletin board. Poorly printed faces of convicts and escapees, letters from appreciative citizens, and memos with stamps that proved they were words sent down from levels as high as the Central Committee. The memos outlined new laws controlling how the inspectors should go about their jobs: which buildings they could enter without authorization and which they could not; the limits of interrogation methodologies; when a case had to be handed over to state security for reassignment.

  The typewriter stopped, and the big inspector—whose name, Emil knew from the files, was Ferenc—glanced at the chief, who had just arrived and hurried directly to his office without a word to anyone. Then he looked briefly at Emil before returning to his typing.

  Pinned to the corkboard, criminal faces were labeled with names and numbers and lists of murders and dates committed. Some were doubly guilty; frauds or conspiracies were piled upon their homicides. A few faces were obscured by a blue stamp: deceased.

  Emil smiled at Ferenc. The man’s hard, cold stare looked nothing like melancholia.

  At three, Leonek Terzian called to Ferenc and the fat one (Stefan, Emil recalled): “It’s time.”

  All three grabbed their hats and jackets and headed for the door, Stefan walking with a barely noticeable limp. The security inspector didn’t look up.

  Emil followed after a moment, but cautiously, Terzian’s small fist still crisp in his mind, and from the top of the steps watched them climb into a black Mercedes. The engine mad
e knocking sounds as they drove away.

  The security inspector looked at him when he wandered back in, but by the time Emil nodded, the inspector’s face had returned to his papers. He was too busy safeguarding the socialist state to acknowledge anyone. There were volumes stored in his locked files, and Emil felt an overwhelming curiosity. A peek, or just a hint. But not even he was stupid enough to break the concentration of a member of state security.

  Emil’s desk, tidy and unused, The Spark folded loosely beside the smart typewriter, was thoroughly uninviting. He touched the stack of paper with the tips of his fingers.

  This, truly, had gone far enough.

  He took five firm steps to the chief’s door and pounded with the side of his hand. The milky glass rattled.

  “Enter.”

  The office was a mess, papers scattered like seed over the wooden floor, stacks slipping from file cabinets and out of boxes piled in the corner. It stank of stale smoke, and the beige curtains behind the chief were untied so only a single white blade of sunlight made it through. Above, a yellow bulb burned.

  “Christ” Chief Moska tossed a pen on the desk, splattering black ink, and settled back into his creaking chair. “What is it?”

  Emil shut the door and centered himself. He wanted to do this right. “Chief Moska. I need to work.”

  “You have your own desk, Brod.”

  He held himself steady. “I have no cases. If you give me a case, then I can do my job.”

  “Your job?”

  “Exactly,” said Emil. “My job, which is to investigate homicides reported to this office.”

  The chief leaned forward between his spread elbows, and his chiseled face stretched a moment. His shirt was stained at the pits; it was terribly hot in the office. “Your job, Comrade Brod, is to do what I say. That’s why Γ have these walls and that door.” He nodded at the door as if the movement would push Emil through it. “You follow?”

  “Yes, Comrade.” “Chief.”‘

  “Yes. Chief.”

  Moska’s chair moaned as he shifted and set his two open hands on the desk. He turned the hands over, palms up, then looked slowly around the room. “I wouldn’t want to waste your particular talents, Brod, which are no doubt considerable.” Something caught his eye, and he leveled a long finger at three boxes of files stuffed in a corner beside a dismantled radiator. “Some jackass put those files in chronological order. Can you believe it?”

  “I’m trying to, Chief.”

  He peered at Emil, and in the yellow, dusty light his expression was murderous. “I want them in alphabetical order, Brod. You’re familiar with the alphabet?”

  “Intimately.”

  “Get to it.”

  The boxes were unwieldy and heavy, but his stupefied anger sustained him. He lined them beside his desk, ignoring the security inspector’s beady gaze, then sat on the floor. From the first box he removed all files in which the family name began with A. Althann, Abajian, Adamów, Annopol. The same with the second box, and the third. He made a pile. Then B. It went on. A sharp ache rooted into his back, but he did not change position. He wanted to give no sign of pain. Street voices came in waves, arguments and the crack of an automobile hitting a wooden cart. The ache grew into his shoulders, and by the time he reached M, it covered his entire back. Outside, the squeal of a pig being butchered. Maslow, Miroslav, Mas. Unstable towers of folders rose all around him.

  It was after five-thirty when the chief emerged from his office, stretching into a gray blazer. He nodded at the security inspector, then stood over Emil a moment.

  “Don t work so hard, Brod. You want to make this last. Consider it your own five-year plan.”

  Emil squinted up at him; the light from the windows made a hard silhouette. When he spoke, his throat was dry: “Is this what everyone does?”

  “Everyone?” The chief’s smile was just visible on his backlit face. He shrugged instead of answering, and walked out.

  The security inspector, hands on the file in his lap, turned to him and frowned. His flat face expressed nothing.

  “There’s something you want to say?” called Emil, all good sense gone. “Have some thoughts you want to share?”

  The security inspector stared a moment more, raised his eyebrows as though about to shrug, and closed the folder in his lap. He stuck it under his arm, grabbed his hat and umbrella, and followed the chief out of the station.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  *******************

  The war was winding down when he took the train, alone, from Ruscova, through the Capital, and farther north. Through sallow, crumbling cities: Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn. The ferry brought him across the Gulf of Finland. Soviet Russia had only recently stopped bombing, but Helsinki, compared to those others, was still a city in form and structure, waterborn and regal. It took his breath away.

  He didn’t know the language, so like all foreigners he found his way to the little bars scattered throughout the islands like tiny, intoxicated nations. He found his own nation in the Carp, a dark, fetid place where they posted news of work and warnings to newcomers. A drunk countryman stumbled off his stool and told Emil about the fishing expedition into the Arctic. This is real money, he had said, nodding into his vodka. You come hack a rich man.

  That hadn’t been quite true, but after four months of splitting open those heavy, gray creatures with his curved knife and washing their scarlet guts from the deck alongside bitter Slavs and Mediterraneans and lost Arabs, using German as their shared language, he returned to the Capital with enough money to take an apartment in the crowded Sixth District, where the proles emerged from their low, rented rooms and squeezed into trams headed for factories and shops in town.

  On one of those trams he met Filia, a pale girl married to a soldier not yet back from the war. She was reading a magazine with Soviet dancers kicking legs high on the cover, and when he looked over her shoulder she asked him if he was always so rude. Thin, bitter lips and straw hair. At a café he explained that his family had recently returned from the southern provinces, he from abroad; her family, she told him, was dead. Her husband, who had marched off to war years before, was a question mark. Emil never saw her apartment, but she moved her clothes into his, and after they made love she told him stories about her childhood in the mountainous northern provinces. She spoke as though it were a paradise of honesty and brotherhood.

  Why don t you go hack? he had asked her, and she only stared at him, as if he were mad.

  She had sudden, unexpected moods, when her eyes became cold, dull stones that looked right through him. The squirming fear this provoked in him was always matched by desire.

  They ate their meals on the living room floor—whatever was available at the market—and listened to the radio trials of Nazis and their sympathizers, and the reports of the coordinated rebuilding efforts. Russians and British and Americans, briefly, unified. They were rebuilding the Capital too. Russian engineers filled the city with their measuring equipment and cyrillics, and the Soviet soldiers who had arrived a year earlier did not leave.

  Once, when she was in a mood, Filia said she only stayed with him because she was afraid of being raped by the Reds. You’re my protection against the Bolshevik drip. He looked at her stone eyes, hurt. Her smile came back and she asked why he had come back to the east, when he could have stayed in Helsinki, or gone on to London. Even America. She said America like an incantation.

  Instead of answering, he told her his father had led a campaign through Warsaw that ended in a hero’s death. She didn’t believe him.

  You’re telling the story with pauses and bursts; youre a bad liar. Her own husband was at the Front; she could see right through Emil. So he admitted he didn’t know anything about how Lieutenant Valentin Brod had died, nothing except Warsaw and a bullet, this knowledge culled from a sparely worded telegram addressed to his mother, who was by then dead as well. Was she satisfied? Hardly, Filia said, then asked again why he had come back from the west. He said
because he needed to meet her. She laughed and said, Seriously.

  He told her how his mother had died. Starvation. On the Front.

  War and war. She had heard plenty of it, she said. But he told her anyway.

  Maria Brod had been one of those nurses who followed their husbands all the way to the battle lines, then died. Stray bullets or disease or, if, like Maria Brod, they were unfortunate enough to become separated from their staff on those vast mountain ranges, they died of starvation and exposure. The Red Army soldiers who came across her body on a ridge of the Tatras mailed her papers back to the Capital, where a friend at their old address forwarded them on to Ruscova. But there was no word on what they had done to the corpse, and Emil imagined her still lying among the snow-stripped trees in the mountains, missing only her identification papers.

  Filia didn’t ask anything more—this story, at least, was true. The following Monday morning she left for the factory, and did not return. By then the last of the troops were stumbling back into town, and her husband was no doubt among them. He was alone now, almost out of money, and his grandfather had moved from Ruscova to the Fifth District with a red card and a modicum of prestige.

  “Today?” Grandfather asked when the silence of the table had stretched too long. “How was it?”

  They were unbearable tonight. Both of them. It was no one thing they said; it was every word, every syllable. He plotted his escape. He would relocate near the water, maybe even the cleaner edges of the Canal District. Over boiled cabbage he did the math, knowing from the start the numbers were doomed, but following them hopefully to their predictable, lacking end. The pittance from the People s Militia would not earn his freedom; bribes, the government assumed, would make up the difference.

  He’d had money once, but that had all been frittered away. On that girl.

  “A day. Just a day.”

  Grandmother frowned at Emil’s wrinkled, soiled suit. “You really must learn to take care of yourself. What’s that on your face?” She wiped the sore on his chin with a spit-damp finger.