The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Come on,” said the youngest, still standing in the doorway. “Let’s get a bottle in town. Come on? He was the weak one; he pleaded.

  The one with the pistol ripped down the French poster and rolled it carefully into a tube. He tapped it on Emil’s shoulder and smiled. “Come along?” His expression lacked anything like anger or real human comprehension, just a boyish desire to share his enjoyment. “We’re going to have a good time.”

  Emil shook his head no.

  They sang on their way out, some Russian folk song with bawdy verses. They yelled and kicked gravel. Glass was smashed, horses whinnied nervously. They had problems starting their jeep, shouted curses, then roared off into the night.

  The barmaid regained control of herself and wiped off the counter with a towel, then told them to excuse her. The farmers nodded sympathetically. Before stepping outside, she told Emil to take a bottle home if he wanted. Please.

  He finished his shot and placed the glass on the counter. He didn’t want a bottle, but knew it would mean a lot to her. The farmers gave him severe, respectful nods, and the barmaid almost ran into him on his way out. She looked pleased to see the bottle in his hand. She was wearing a different skirt. He realized she had wet herself.

  He started the Mercedes, but the headlights would not come on. He got out under the gazes of the nervous workhorses. The lights had been smashed to pieces.

  It was still dark that morning when he arrived home, having worked his way through the rest of his first bottle and the unlit back roads of the Capital. He had kept his eye out for the Russians, wondering without decision what he’d do if he saw them again, then stumbled drowsily up the dusty steps, where the supervisor still snored in her chair. Grandfather was in a robe and slippers in the kitchen. Emil wobbled over and sat across from him. He wanted to tell the pouting old man about the soldiers and his small act of courage, but the only thing that came out was, “I’m leaving the Militia. I’ve had enough.”

  Grandfather pressed his hands on his knees, standing slowly, and stepped over to Emil. Then slapped him once, sharply. The arthritic bulges struck like stones and left his cheek burning. “Don’t tell me that.”

  So Emil rose, the chair scratching the floor, and left again. He edged around the supervisor and made it out the front door before the old man caught up with him. They sat together on the front steps, but did not talk for a while. Grandfather produced two cigarettes and lit them both. He handed one to Emil. The dark city was almost silent. They ashed on the cobblestones.

  “Men are different,” Grandfather said after a while. “They’re made different. Your father, he was…unchanging. Truly. Him and that god of his. But he could walk out onto the battlefield. He had that in him. He was loyal. Loyal to his country.” He took three quick drags, trying to keep his cigarette lit; it glowed. “Not me. I was never loyal to my country. I stayed out of their so-called Great War. But I went to Moscow. I was in their war because I loved the workers. My loyalty was that I loved anything that wasn’t a king. And when the Fascists arrived, I supported that fight, though I was too old to pick up a gun myself. You follow?”

  Despite the heavy, sleepy end to his drunkenness that muted everything and kept his throbbing eyes from focusing clearly on a family of Gypsies passing on the other side of the street, he was following everything because he knew where it all was going. His grandfather had said nothing new in a decade.

  “And there’s you,” Grandfather said wearily. “I don’t think you’re a coward, but maybe…maybe I’m too old to want to think that. Not of my flesh and blood. You could have gone to the Front. Yes,” he said, raising a hand against Emil’s lazy attempt to debate. “You could have. They would’ve allowed it. Gone with your father. Maybe even saved him from that bullet. But you decided to leave, go on a trip. To where you weren’t needed. To make money you wasted on some girl. I never understood why.” He shrugged as though the effort of understanding had exhausted him. “When you leave your family—if you leave your family—it should be for a reason. I don’t know yours.” His cigarette had gone out, and he flicked it into the street. “Why did you go?”

  A boy detached himself from the family and snatched the cigarette butt.

  “Get away, rat,” snapped Grandfather.

  The Gypsy boy scurried back to his parents, sucking on it, and Emil watched them turn the next corner. He wondered if it was age, if the old bastard was too far along to remember what it was like to be a teenager, to want to have nothing to do with war, with these vast movements of people, to want only to find your own way, even if that meant cutting a path through the Arctic waters and risking your neck over dead seals and violent Bulgarians. Maybe Emil had been a coward, maybe that was why he had decided it was impossible to join his father’s military unit or his mother’s medical regiment. But his grandparents had not been around that day in Ruscova when he saw how crowds can turn inhuman, or later, the other mob here in the Capital that led the woman to her death. And was there no room in the old man’s heart for insolence and confusion and the simple fear of death?

  “When you told us,” Grandfather said, his wavering voice still even-tempered, “that you were joining the Militia—well, I can tell you we were very proud. And I thought, This is the day he finally becomes a man. No more fear.” He turned his heavy eyes on Emil, his lids half-drawn. “Now here you are, only—how many? Four days! And now, here you are, quitting.” He shook his head. “It makes me sick.”

  Emil opened his mouth, half stunned, half preparing to defend himself. But all the words drained from him, and he was left with only the impotent fussings of a child. You dont understand. Leave me alone. I dont need to listen to this. A frightened child with nothing show for all the miles he has traveled.

  CHAPTER TEN

  *******************

  Leonek Terzian was not at his desk when Emil sauntered in, though his jacket was draped over the chair and his worn leather bag lay on the floor. Emil waited at his own desk. Despite the aching muscles and joints, the burning forehead and throat, and the fact that he’d gotten no sleep, he wanted to get moving. He wanted to see Lena Crowder again. He wanted to hear what she had to say when she wasn’t a drunk, grief-stricken widow.

  He went through his sparse case notes, trying to assemble facts. Two bodies. Money. Ten photographs. A German. A Walther PPK.

  The speculations…he had them, but this wasn’t the morning his sleepy head would put them together.

  A half-hour later, Terzian still hadn’t appeared. The others had been doing an admirable job ignoring Emil, even Brano Sev, who was back in his files, making occasional phone calls and glancing everywhere but at him. Emil said to the room, “Where’s Inspector Terzian gone?” The only reply was a squealing pig and the smell of sawdust from outside.

  He went through the notes again, slowly.

  The money in Janos Crowder’s cardboard box, found in Aleks Tudor’s apartment. Fifteen thousand…payment…for what?

  A possibility floated to the surface.

  It helped that he was feeling terrible. He could concentrate on the pain that rippled up and down his body with each step toward Brano Sevs desk. He stopped beside it, a shoulder against the wall, then squatted so his face was just above its edge. Sev looked up blankly.

  “Comrade Inspector,” said Emil. “I was wondering.” A sharp pain trembled behind his eye, then went away. “Do you have a file on Janos Crowder?”

  Sev looked down at the open side drawer. “Your dead man?” His voice squawked. “That Janos Crowder?”

  Emil nodded. “I’d like to rule something out.”

  “His loyalty?” The question was snapped back. No hesitation.

  Emil opened his mouth to say yes, his loyalty and patriotism were in question, but couldn’t spit out those kinds of words. “Do you have a file on him?”

  Brano Sev closed the files on his desk, one at a time, and leaned close. He had a mouth of half-digested garlic that fumigated the air between them. “These file
s are for suspected traitors.”

  “You’ve told me. Thus my question.”

  The flat face puffed as he chewed the insides of his cheeks. He leaned back and spoke firmly. “A public figure such as Comrade Crowder is by necessity examined very closely. We have no evidence of his involvement in traitorous activities. Do you?”

  Emil stood up, his knees cracking. He had at least ruled out the Queen of England from his list of suspects. “Thank you, Comrade Inspector.” He paused. “Do you happen to know where Terzian is?”

  The small eyes blinked up at him. “Try the interview room.”

  It felt like weeks had passed since he had wandered these corridors looking for a typewriter. The room he wanted was beside the toilet, its scratched wooden door the only one without a glass panel. He leaned his head against the stenciled interview and listened. Voices—two men, words unclear—then laughter that dissipated when he knocked. The handle wouldn’t budge. The sound of his knuckle striking wood provoked the beginnings of a fullfledged hangover. The lock was fooled with, and the door opened a fraction. Leonek Terzian s dark features appeared: “What is it, Brod?”

  He could see nothing past his face except hazy walls covered by more scratches. He hadn’t thought through his words. “What are you doing? On the case. Let’s compare notes.” Emil took out his notepad to make his intentions clear.

  “Not now,” said Terzian. “Later. Maybe.”

  “Who are you interviewing?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s something.”

  Terzian sighed heavily and opened the door enough to slip out into the busy corridor. His voice was a high whisper: “Never interrupt me when I’m interviewing. Understand?”

  “Who is it?”

  “No one. An informer.” Terzian’s hard, weathered face would not give Emil anything but eyes, nose and mouth.

  “For our case?”

  “ Your case, Brod.”

  “Well?”

  Terzian nodded at a pair of Militia in dress uniform. They muttered a familiar greeting back at him. Once they were gone, he said, “A witness. He may have come across Aleksander Tudor’s killer.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Terzian’s features became harder, the bags under his eyes deeper. Anger was easy to read. “You don’t talk to him, Brod. And the fact that I hate you has nothing to do with it. He’s a regular. He’s my boy. No one else ever talks to him.”

  “It’s my case.”

  “If s my case” Terzian whined back. “You’re a fucking infant, Brod.” He said, “This is the way.”

  Emil remembered the last time he had heard that phrase, on an icy boat in the Arctic, a drunk Bulgarian accent making a mess of the words. He felt the chill of that hard deck, and when he returned, the door to the interview room was closing again. He heard the lock drawn into place, and felt the hangover come upon him like an animal: fully, hungrily.

  He drove first to Liberation Street to find out if Tomislaw recognized anyone in the photographs. But the family, the new building supervisor—a severe, forty-year-old spinster—told him, had left for their summer holiday. So he went where he truly wanted to go: westward. Past the one-room bar—in the morning light, it was more dilapidated than it had looked last evening—and past the low, muddy riverbanks to where the driveways led back over small hills. The morning lit Lena Crowder’s home particularly, and the windows glowed like those in the Canal District, reflecting sharply into his aching skull.

  Irma made him wait in the entryway, where he cradled his head in his hands and gazed up at the painted men with thick white Tolstoian beards, echoes of some family fortune that predated everything he knew. Grandfather had, with the blush of joy, described invading abandoned mansions with the Russian hordes, turning over expensive vases and crapping on portraits. Emil picked up a long, blue vase covered in angular, gold etchings. Grandfather said that these people held an ax over the heads of the working classes. Equality was a blade away. The vase was heavy in his hands.

  “Don’t break it,” Lena Crowder commanded. She stood in the doorway with her hands joined in front of her white nightgown. Its draped form accentuated rather than hid the easy lines of her body. She seemed never to dress. “My dead father’s in there.”

  Emil put the vase back, using both hands to keep it stable.

  She placed a cigarette in her mouth and waited for him to stumble over and light it. She sniffed at his face, her small nose wrinkling. “The Comrade Inspector s been drinking this early?”

  “Last night,” he admitted.

  Her eyes roamed his face, hair, shoulders, his hand that held the lighter. “Too bad,” she said. “I admire early drinkers. It’s a rare honesty.” She smiled suddenly. “But last night? That makes you unclean. You want a bath?”

  “No,” he said, hesitated, then repeated: “No.” He wasn’t quite convincing himself. “I just have some more questions.”

  She turned up her cigarette hand—a kind of shrug—then led him back into the lounge. Long sofa against tissue-thin curtains. The chair where he had watched her slide to the floor in a widow’s intoxication. Now she was tall and lithe, and the billowing hem of her gown made her seem to float as she swooped to the sofa and settled down. She was a different woman, almost, but no less impure.

  “How are you?” he began.

  She stopped in mid-drag to frown at him. “This is part of the investigation?”

  “Could be.”

  She completed the drag. “Then I’m fine, my dear Comrade Inspector.” She placed the ashtray on her bony knee, where it wobbled. “Today I’ve been thinking of my poor father and his weak heart. Do you realize that in the space of a month I’ve lost both my father and my husband?”

  She had a look of surprise on her face, as if only now, while saying it, she had learned the news. “I,” he said, “I didn’t know.”

  She wiped a thumb beneath her eyelid and sat up. “You don’t want to listen to a rich girl’s blubbering. No,” she said, “you want to know about my husband. You want to know, for example, that Janos and I were not very close in the end. You want to know that he used his little apartment in town for his girls, and I did what I pleased out here. A marriage in name, but more of a business proposition.”

  Emil’s notepad was on his own knee, but he couldn’t bring himself to open it. “I don’t understand. You were with Janos for money?”

  “Me?” she said in disbelief. “Did you see those men in the hall? With all the hair? My great- and granduncles. Industrialists living off the wage slaves. Coal All the time. Coal and coal” she said, echoing War and war in Emil’s head. “That songwriting ponce came from a long line of mud-eaters. Peasants, all. Everything he has he got from me.”

  “Had,” corrected Emil involuntarily, and she looked at him as though she didn’t understand. Then she did, and the look became unkind. Emil said, “This apartment in town. With your money?”

  “Why should I pay for his lifestyle when he treats me like a prole? No offense to our comrade workers,” she added, flashing a nervous smile. “When we married, I gave Janos a modest allowance. When it became clear I wouldn’t give him more, or less, he had no reason to speak to me anymore.” She looked around. “It’s a big house; you can miss each other if you try.” She was smiling at him again, but with Lena Crowder, he didn’t know what a smile really meant. “Seven months ago the bastard moved out. Are you thirsty?”

  His mouth was a ball of cotton.

  Irma brought big iced scotches, and Lena made sure he drank his. “Don’t go around smelling like a drunk unless you actually are.

  “But your husband,” said Emil, setting his half-empty glass aside. “How did he get money? If he wasn’t assigned his apartment, he had to pay for it. It wasn’t cheap.”

  “Maybe he was writing songs. That was his business.”

  Even Emil knew melodies never earned boxes of cash. “What about these women you mentioned?”

  “His whores?”
r />   “Were they really that?”

  This smile seemed to be a weary apathy. “I’ve no idea. I never saw one, he never talked about them, but I’m still enough of a woman to see through a man.”

  He finally opened his notepad and leaned back.

  “Your drink,” she said, and pulled her feet up beneath herself again. Her toes were as white and the nails as polished as before.

  His ice was melting. “You said before that you last saw him a week ago. What happened?”

  She moved her tongue quickly inside her mouth. “He had come back a week before then, two weeks before…it. He tried to patch things up. He’d heard my father had died. Wanted to console me.” She gave a small, tight smile.

  “Your father?”

  “My father. Elias Hanic. Heart attack, I don’t know. While riding a horse.” She nodded, muttering, “The last Hanic.” Then: “I still need to take his urn out of here. To Stryy.”

  Emil waited while she mulled over that trip with her father’s ashes. Then he prodded: “Janos came back.”

  She woke up. “Yes. Janos got word of my father, and he came like a prince. What should I have done? I was still angry about the women, and how he treated me—like some money tree—everything. I kicked him out. But he came back the next day, apologetic. And he came back the next. This is the dumb persistence that makes the weak inherit the Earth.” She took another swill, and even in this dim room Emil could see the wet glaze over her eyes. “He had the key, he’d always had it. He could come and go as he pleased. On the fifth day I gave in. Women get stupid for the men they’ve married, it’s a fact. I think one of our Comrade Soviet scientists proved it.”

  When she smiled at him his scalp tingled pleasantly.

  She gazed into her glass and drank the last of it. “Irma!” She looked at him. “But something was clear to me after, I don’t know, the second day we were back together. According to the inheritance laws, everything of my father’s was supposed to go to the state. But Elias Hanic was no imbecile. He had found a way to give most everything to me. The house, the land, the money from the old coal shares.” A grim smile. “This is what Janos had learned, the little mud-eater. That’s why he came back. That much money was so good that even staying with me was worth it.”