The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  He shook his head.

  “The organs of state security at work. I thought you knew everything.”

  “I’m not state security,” said Emil, “and I’m not with the police. Homicide is a division of the People’s Militia, and we only know what people tell us.”

  She accepted the drink Irma handed her and tested it with a frown. Her voice came out thicker, clotted. “Six months. That’s how long we were separated. Maybe a little more. Still married, yes, yes.” She waved her hand again. “That kind of thing drags on, but he lived in town, and I lived, well, here.” She opened her hands to display her world of oak cabinets and framed portraits and French lounge pieces.

  “So, no enemies?”

  “He had bill collectors, but as far as I know they just disappeared.”

  “What kinds of bills?”

  She shrugged. “Living, what else? Food, drink, women”

  “Women?”

  “Suspicion, intuition. Nothing you would call hard evidence.”

  “When did you last hear from him?”

  She opened her mouth as if to let another casual remark spill out, something she might find funny and expect him to be amused by as well, or horrified by, but nothing came. She closed her mouth again. “A week ago,” she said. “He came to see me.”

  Emil’s pencil was poised above paper.

  She took another swill, then set her drink down. “What he said was he wanted to come back. To me.” She looked into her empty glass, eyes glazed. “That’s what he said. He said six months was much too long, and he knew now what he had always wanted. And that was me.” She pointed at herself with a finger that touched her chin. “Me. “ She smiled thinly.

  “Didn’t you believe him?”

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t have?” Her smile was gone. “You know, there was a time when I mattered to him. Sometimes that’s enough, just knowing you matter. He even used to show jealousy. He called me an unredeemable flirt.” She paused. “But then not even that mattered to him.”

  “I-”began Emil.

  She dropped the glass and threw her face behind her thin fingers, instantly sobbing. There was no transition, no warning, just a sudden plummet into tears.

  Inexplicably, he almost cried as well.

  Irma appeared out of nowhere, arm around her mistress, and whispered things Emil could not make out. But he was already standing and retreating to the door. He could think of nothing else to do; the Academy’s limits were becoming more apparent by the second. “I’ll be in touch later.” His voice sounded weak. “When it’s better.”

  Lena Crowder did not look up.

  Irma met him at the front door with his hat. The walls had muted the weeping. “Be easy on her,” she whispered, and Emil recognized her accent—the southern provinces, maybe near Ruscova. She had ruddy, loyal features.

  “Where are you from, Irma?”

  She held out the hat and blushed marginally. “You wouldn’t know. It’s south of Sighet. Vadu Izei. Just a village.”

  “Of course I know Vadu Izei,” he said. “My family came from Ruscova.”

  She blinked at him.

  “See?” he said. “You think you come from a small village.” He accepted his hat and slid the brim in a circular motion with the tips of his fingers. “When did they call Comrade Crowder?”

  Her face went serious again. “About Master Crowder? Yesterday.”

  “Early? Late?”

  She thought a moment. “Before dinner.”

  He placed the hat on his head and nodded thanks before going out into what had quickly become a purple, breezy night. His hand in his pocket came up with his father s watch and its soft, soothing tick. The other hand held the black garter he had forgotten to show the widow. His hands, he noticed, were trembling.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  *******************

  Instead of returning the Mercedes to the station, he delivered peach and strawberry preserves to his grandmother. Her pink face flushed deeply as she turned the jars over, looking for clues. He placed the Zorki camera on a shelf. “How did you…?” she began. He told them he was taking them for a ride.

  “A what?” Grandfather cupped his ears in a mockery of old age. Children were standing around the car, touching the fender and pressing noses to the windshield. Emil waved them off and opened the back door. Grandfather’s emotions raced unconcealed across his face and through his shaking hands, but Grandmother fell into a somber sobriety as she climbed inside. To bring out a smile, Emil explained: “A special car for a special case.” It worked.

  Grandfather sat in the front, hands flat on his thighs, and gazed through the breezy open windows at the town passing by. His face lit up through the government center, past the Militia station steps that Emil tried to ignore, and the Central Committee building on busy Victory Square. They looked across to the Canal District’s gas-lit perimeter that cast an unreal glow, and Emil could sense the speech building inside the old Marxist humming beside him. Tonight, Emil felt generous—let the old man talk.

  From the backseat, Grandmother said, almost to herself, “You remember,” and Grandfather nodded.

  They drove along the Tisa to the unlit city limits and turned north into the half-built residential blocks.

  “I heard Ivan Ilych even here,” said Grandfather suddenly. “Even then, you know?”

  The speech was upon him.

  “They said in the Party newspaper that Comrade Lenin was going by train,” he explained, rapping knuckles on the doorframe. “All the way to Moscow. But no one knew when. It was illegal, you know. The newspaper.” He opened his mouth and gulped the breeze. “The Petrograd strikers, they were my heroes. And Ivan Ilych, well, he was everything. So I told Mara. I said I was going to take part in a workers’ uprising in Russia. She didn’t believe me.”

  “I believed you,” came her soft voice. “I just said you were out of your mind.”

  “There was nothing to lose.” He flapped a knobbed hand in the rushing air. “What did we have then? We had nothing. We shared a room with two other families, and we had nothing to eat. We had education—the Brods always educated—but it’s worse for an educated man to be without space. Without necessities. He knows better.” Grandfather paused, and Emil turned the big steering wheel counterclockwise. They were on Union Street. “You’ve seen the Sixth District—they have so much more now than when we were there.”

  “True enough,” said Grandmother. But she didn’t sound convinced.

  “I remember,” said Emil.

  Grandfather nodded. “And I knew that this was a piece of History I was living through.”

  So in late October 1917, he and two other husbands from the neighborhood climbed on a livestock train heading east. When the stationmaster swung his lamp into the car, they crawled back and hid among the boars.

  “The stink. It’s still in me.”

  “Truly,” came the backseat voice.

  “Woman.”

  They changed trains in L’viv, then again in Minsk, and crossed into Soviet Russia at Krasnoe, a little west of Smolensk. When they arrived at the outskirts of Moscow three weeks later, they were just cold, hungry foreigners. The other two men depended on Avram Brod for his smattering of Russian as they begged off the kindness of the already starving peasantry.

  In the city, they fell in with crowds that choked the grand avenues and chiseled away at the czar s façades. Statues were pulled down with ropes and sweat, and People’s commissars in greatcoats directed the workers. Really, though, the Revolution had run its course before they even entered Russia. They saw peasants dragging crates of potatoes through the streets, and for a long time this was their picture of revolution. Crates and sacks of potatoes. No one heard or saw Lenin anywhere. Then he was on the balconies again. “Once a criminal in hiding,” Grandfather said, his voice quivering, “now surrounded by generals who looked like dock workers. You hear him speak.” He tapped his ear. “It doesn’t matter what the words are. I couldn’t unders
tand his accent. But no matter. Just him moving his arms, shouting in the cold. Foggy words in his mouth. A man.”

  He wiped his eyes unabashedly with his too-large knuckles because thirty years ago was like yesterday. He had returned to the Capital with a red card in his bag and orders to foment revolution. He and his two friends already constituted a cell. But then the rigors of life set in again. Food and money. There was a war still tearing apart the rest of Europe, and food was scarce for everyone. All he could do was eke out a living selling withered vegetables to women in the Sixth District who couldn’t afford them, trying to support his wife and boy. Years passed, a world depression struck, and their cell consisted of three men who drank together, commiserating over their failures. War came again, and the king sent their boy Valentin—a father himself now—to Poland to defend the monarchy against fascists; then Valentin’s wife followed into oblivion. When the Germans marched into the Capital, they fled south with their insolent teenage grandson. Avram Brod had thought it could get no worse than the slums they had come from, but he had never been a farmer before, had never met the Romanian Jews who wore the terrors of the world on their faces.

  By the time they returned to the Capital, the Brod clan was decimated, but in the chaos of the Liberation, that weathered, muddy red card earned them an apartment with a view. It was a miserable tradeoff—a family for a home—but Grandfather did everything in his power to justify what he could.

  “The ‘thick Muscovites’ were everywhere,” said Grandmother.

  “Be kind, Mara.”

  The “thick Muscovites” were those men who, after spending the 1930s throwing rocks and shooting politicians, had escaped to Moscow during the war, where they camped out in hotels. General Secretary Mihai had been among them. They appeared again just behind the Red Army to set up the interim government, and with the 1946 elections had the remarkable good fortune of being voted immediately into power.

  They were called “thick” because when they returned from Moscow they were, almost without exception, so plump their own families had trouble recognizing them.

  In no time they were setting up tribunals, sentencing old comrades—primarily those who had chosen to stay in the country and fight the Nazis—to work camps and prisons, some to the firing squad. The Spark, the revived Party daily, gave notice of those old communists who no longer carried the torch, and would pay for their lack of enthusiasm. Finally the handsome Mihai—handsome despite the fresh rolls of fat—who before the war had styled himself as a partisan fighter against the monarchy before fleeing to Moscow, found himself with the title, first, of Prime Minister; then, in addition, General Secretary. His portrait began appearing everywhere.

  Grandfather was settling into his emotions, ignoring the passing city. Emil noticed the glint of tears on the old man’s cheeks.

  For Avram Brod, there were two events in history: the Russian Revolution and the Patriotic War, which resulted in his country’s proletarian liberation. In both these events he had been close enough to smell the dead, but too late to make a difference.

  “This is the problem with History,” he said after the tears had dried and they were turning back toward home. He had regained his liveliness, and kept turning to look at passing shop windows. “When you’re living in the midst of it, you don’t even realize. You’re preoccupied by money and food and the appointment you’re late for. But look around yourself, boy. We’re living through it now.”

  Emil slowed behind a delivery truck unloading heavy, unmarked steel barrels. The workers paused in their work to watch the Mercedes drive past.

  “What happened in ‘seventeen was just the start. There are so many of us now. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, the Baltics and even the Czechs. It’s just the beginning. You may not believe it, but in ten years we’ll look back with nostalgia. We’ll forget how hard it was to get a little meat, or to repair the pipes. We’ll wonder how we were so lucky to live through these times. Helping to shape the great experiment.”

  He was out of words again, and turned to the window. They were back in the Fifth District, moving slowly through dark, narrow side streets.

  Emil concentrated on the functional details of driving. Shift, turn, accelerate.

  “You glorify so much,” said Grandmother. When Emil looked in the rearview, he saw a face obscured by shadows. “The Russians are pigs.”

  Emil kept his eyes on the road and the families wandering the cracked sidewalks. He’d seldom heard her contradict him like that. Finally, Grandfather’s voice came briskly: “Mara, you don’t know. I was in Russia. They fed me. They were good and true. I was the one who saw them in their own country.”

  Her voice was hard. “Don’t tell me what I don’t know.” She shifted in the darkness. “I’ve seen enough Russians to last me a lifetime.”

  Just before their building, in the reflection of a passing streetlight, Emil saw that she, too, had been crying.

  He watched the others work. Leonek Terzian leaned into his telephone on the other side of the room, mumbling and nodding. He stared back at Emil with an indecipherable expression as he wrote in his notepad. Big Ferenc, beneath the bulletin board, typed slowly. Stefan, still unshaven, spat pumpkin seed shells that missed his wastebasket, and the security inspector—still, remarkably, in leather—arranged stacks of files on the floor beside his desk, which faced the blank wall.

  This was manageable. This tenuous silence. Each person working on his own business.

  He read over the notes from Lena Crowder’s interview. So little, he’d have to talk with her again. Part of him dreaded it, while another was eager for the chance to revisit her in that mansion. There was something beyond his prole jealousy that wanted to touch those expensive things. To see those legs folded beneath her.

  He looked up as Terzian cradled the telephone and went to the chief’s door. When he knocked, Emil could hear the faint “Enter.”

  He called the Fourth District police station, which had originally reported Crowder’s body, and recognized the voice of the bored young policeman who was able to eat butter near a bashedin skull. “Comrade Inspector?”

  “You remember me?” asked Emil.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you remember telling me that Lena Crowder was not informed of her husband’s death?”

  There was a brief pause, the hiss of wires. “Sure.”

  “You know why I’m asking this?”

  No reply.

  “I’m asking because she already knew.”

  A crackling exhale. “Maybe she read it in the paper.”

  “She learned it from a phone call,” said Emil.

  “I said nothing, Comrade Inspector.” His words were short, abrupt. “I spoke to no reporters. I did not call Lena Crowder.”

  There was a small, warm anger inside him. By the time he had shown up, Lena Crowder s window of interrogation had been open, then slammed shut and bolted. And now, no one was taking responsibility.

  “Then who made the phone call?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you should ask Comrade Crowder.”

  “I-”

  “Brod.”

  It was Chief Moska, filling his doorway. As he stepped back into the office, Emil hung up and followed.

  Terzian was stretched out in a chair across from the chief’s desk, one leg tossed over a padded arm. The chief settled, grunting, into his own chair. Emil glanced around for a free seat that wasn’t there. He stood finally with his hands clasped behind his back, Academy-style. “Comrade Chief?”

  Moska didn’t notice the slip. He looked at Terzian, who was focused on some point beyond the beige curtains, and said to Emil, “How’s the Crowder case coming?”

  It was cooler in the office today. “The wife has been interviewed. But preliminarily. Someone informed her of her husband’s death before I could.”

  “Someone?” asked the chief. “Meaning us?.”

  “The district police, I imagine.”

  �
��Go on.”

  Terzian did not shift his gaze from the curtains.

  “I have the murder weapon.”

  The chief squinted. “The wrench?”

  “It’s being traced.”

  “Any fingerprints?”

  He shook his head. “Gloves.”

  Terzian glanced at him, and Emil wished he could read something, anything, in his tanned, hungry face.

  “Other interviews?” asked Moska.

  “Neighbors on the same floor, Poles. They couldn’t tell me much. And the apartment supervisor. I was planning to see the coroner this afternoon.”

  Terzian looked away from the curtains. He laid his eyes on Emil and said in a quiet voice: “The supervisor’s name?”

  “Aleksander Tudor.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Yesterday,” said Emil firmly, wanting no indecision to get in his way. “Three in the afternoon.”

  Chief Moska raised his eyebrows, and Terzian’s head swiveled slowly back to the window, his face a passive mask. The chief said, “Tell him, Leon.”

  Terzian’s head shook incrementally, and he spoke without looking at Emil. “This morning a citizen found Aleksander Tudor floating in the Tisa with two bullet holes in the back of his head.” He placed two fingers on the back of his scalp to demonstrate. “His face had been struck struck repeatedly so that identification had to be made by fingerprints.”

  “Like-” Emil began, but stopped himself from stating the obvious.

  “Exactly, Comrade Brod,” Terzian murmured.

  The chief had another pencil point in his mouth that he pulled out. Again, there was a mark of lead on his lips, and he pursed them before speaking. “My personal inclinations take a backseat to protocol. We understand?”

  No one made a move to suggest they didn’t.

  “There are two bodies,” he said. “In the interests of the state, both of you will take the case. The interests of the state. Right, Brod?”