The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  It was almost funny, but not enough to test his body with laughter. Only a week into his job, and someone had blown a hole in him. Three holes.

  A young doctor with a buzzed head looked into his eyes while holding the lids open with his thumbs, then removed the bandages that covered his chest and stomach. Emil almost screamed. The doctor winced with him, as though he could feel his patient’s misery. Then the bandages were off, and Emil—with an extra pillow behind his head—looked down on the white expanse of sickly flesh and sewn holes. It was as if he were looking down on a different body, one uncovered by the gleeful Uzbek coroner. Only the pain reminded him it was his own, each time the doctor touched the puckering, swollen seams stitched by black thread. There were three gashes: one along the edge of his right breast, another just below his left breast and heart, and the last in the center of his soft gut. The doctor affirmed that his survival was a miracle.

  “A scientific miracle,” the doctor specified. He looked at a watch while he held Emil’s wrist. “Feeling up for visitors?”

  He felt up for nothing. The doctor’s hand was covered by a thin mask of black hair.

  “Inspector?”

  “Sure,” Emil croaked. “Of course. Watch?”

  “Pardon?”

  Emil pointed at the doctor’s wristwatch, then at himself. “My watch?”

  The doctor settled his patient’s hand back in the sheets and rummaged through the things on the bureau. Pushed past the photos, lifted the garter with a wink. Then he found the chain, and lowered the watch into Emil’s hand. “We’ll wait a few hours for water.”

  He felt the ticking in his palm. Steady and even.

  “They’ve been calling every day.”

  “My grandparents?”

  “Yes,” the doctor nodded. “Them too.”

  Chief Moska came as sun was falling and the tree outside was just black silhouette. Holding a copy of The Spark in one big hand, he rapped on the doorframe with the other. Emil felt an urge to mutter enter in the chief’s resolute way, but words were making his thirst a desperation. The chief had a lumpy expression of bafflement, and when he pulled a squeaky wooden chair beside the bed, he left his jacket on. He sweated the whole time.

  “Brod. You’re feeling well.” It was almost a command.

  “I’m awake.”

  “That’s something,” Moska agreed. “We made sure you got your own room, a ward didn’t seem right.” He looked at the sheets. “They say it’s a remarkable recovery.”

  “Scientific miracle.”

  The big man’s hat was in his hands, squeezed and released repeatedly. He settled back in the chair and blew through pursed lips. His eyes focused on the far wall, the bedside table, the framed amateur painting of the Georgian Bridge at twilight, then back to the sheets. Emil’s hands lay there, beside the newspaper. The chief cocked his head to the side. “I wanted to talk to you. About the case,” he said. “Your case.”

  Emil’s voice lowered. “No case. For me.”

  “We agree there,” the chief said quickly. “But we both know, don’t we? Who did this to you.”

  He nodded.

  Moska looked at the sheets, then his hat in his lap, the light fixture in the ceiling, and squinted. “Youve been treated unfairly, Brod. We know this now. There were…misunderstandings.”

  Emil waited.

  The chief’s squint tired. He blinked and wiped his cheek with a hand. “This is the nature of bureaucracies. Large bureaucracies. Lack of trust. Before the war it was different.” His voice wavered slightly, as if he were about to cry. But he wasn’t. “Before the war we didn’t even need a homicide department, you remember? We were all just police. Then it grew. Everything grew. The Militia, the divisions, state security. I don’t know anyone outside my little department anymore.”

  He seemed genuinely saddened by this, but Emil was still unable to understand. He almost asked for clarification, but the chief was on his feet again.

  “It’s insidious, this situation. Yet we have to make it work.” His large, long features twisted as they forced out the words. “Apologies all around, Brod. It’s what I’ve come to say. I’d prefer you didn’t resign. The others too. They feel the same. We’ve all been shamed by this.”

  Emil opened his mouth to ask for something more, some detail he knew he was missing—some why—but the chief was already out the door.

  The tree had gone indistinct against the night sky by the time his grandparents arrived. She patted her tear-stained cheeks with a musty handkerchief, and the old man stood in various corners of the room, as though ascertaining all possible avenues of escape. She opened a package of bread and hard cheese and told him to eat it slowly, because that was what the doctor had told her, that the hole in Emil’s stomach would require slow eating. “Slow,” she repeated, patting his head like a dog’s.

  “Water?” he whispered.

  “Will they let you?”

  “I’ve had nothing all day.”

  She frowned. “That can t be good.” She set the cheese and bread on top of the newspaper. “Let me find out.” She was gone.

  Grandfather emerged from one of his corners and informed Emil again that he’d been unconscious for a week. “We thought,” he began, but like the nurse he couldn’t finish.

  “I’m all right now.”

  The light made Grandfather’s flesh pink and more healthy- looking than it really was. “You’re a hero,” he said earnestly, but Emil didn’t answer. The silence between them was awkward, so after a while Grandfather cleared his throat. “This is a great pride. For you. Serving your country this way.”

  “Serving the great collective,” said Emil, finally smiling. But Grandfather didn’t smile. Emil felt the old man’s loose fingers in his hand, squeezing, kneading his palm. The door opened. Grandmother stood, like an angel, holding a glass of cool water.

  Clarity came with Leonek Terzian. Emil had slept off and on, and in the morning, after breakfast, he read the paper. There were trials beginning to unravel in the east, in Moscow, and airplanes still flying in the west. On the second page was brief coverage of Palestine; there was more fighting in the Holy Land. Only at home was everything ideal: record crops and the lowest crime rate in memory. Then Leonek arrived with the lunch. He slouched in the chair beside the bed to better reach Emil’s tray. He took a bite of bread and dragged an index finger across the wide block of margarine, white wrinkles collecting over his print, and sucked it with his small, dark mouth. Emil ate mashed potatoes and waited.

  Leonek swallowed. “Chief talked to you. Didn’t he?”

  Emil nodded.

  Leonek seemed satisfied. He took another bite of bread. “He’s right, you know. About everything. It’s been a mistake, and I’m not the only one whos sorry. There are—do you mind?” He took a slice of red apple from Emil’s tray. “You have to understand.”

  “Bureaucracy,” offered Emil.

  Leonek shook his head. “Rumors. That’s the problem. We get them in the office every day.” He pursed his lips in reflection, and Emil found his easy manner annoying. Maybe he hadn’t noticed, but Emil had almost died. Leonek shrugged. “Sometimes the rumors catch, sometimes not. We heard a rumor once that Sergei, the man you replaced, was going to be killed. That rumor didn’t catch. Then he was dead.” Leonek finished the apple slice and shrugged, as though Sergei’s story was commonplace. “Then, a month ago, a rumor did catch. From this guy, an informer I keep down in the Canal District. The one I was talking to when you came by that day, the interview room. A weasel named Dora.”

  “Dora?”

  “A man with a woman’s name,” said Leonek, nodding. He took another wedge. “I met him years ago, some nasty business.” He stopped, as if he had lost his thread, then began again: “Anyway, that’s when he started informing. But three months ago, the district police picked him up for black-market pork. You know the stuff. Rotting right through, covered in flies. Real shit.” He waved a hand. “So when they brought him in, he sai
d he had information for Homicide—for me, since I’m the one he always deals with.”

  Emil shifted his arms painfully and brought water to his lips. He was still so parched.

  “Dora told us that sometime soon—he didn’t know when—a spy would be brought into Homicide.” He paused. “Preparation for a shake-up.”

  Leonek watched closely, but Emil was not reacting yet. He was waiting. Leonek finally gave some more:

  “Come on, you know how things are. Berlin. And Vienna and Italy, I hear. We’ll be fighting the Americans soon—even the Big Comrade in Moscow is uneasy. He’s seeing enemies everywhere. It’s like the thirties all over again.”

  “How would Dora know this?”

  Leonek took Emil’s water to rinse out his mouth. “He knows everything and everyone. He gets jobs out of town, in the mansions, or the bars here in the First District. He listens. We never ask where it comes from because he wouldn’t tell us. Eighty percent of the time Dora tells us the truth.”

  Hearing it explained made it made it no less incomprehensible. “You thought I was a spy.”

  “Right out of the Academy. Why wouldn’t we?”

  In the Academy he had been taught that informing on a fellow officer who chose to disregard the tenets of Marxist justice in favor of opportunism was a duty. But he knew no one who believed that outside the classroom.

  “And your Opa. Yes, we know about him. Old-time lefty. Privilege home in the Fifth District. You know what happened last year? Three policemen were put away for life. A snitch working right beside them.”

  “And Brano Sev? What’s he?”

  Leonek frowned suddenly. “Take a look—no one talks to him. He’s nobody’s friend.”

  He had finished the whole apple and was now picking at the potatoes. Emil doubted this oaf’s regret went nearly as deep as his stomach. He’d known men like this in the Arctic, men with consciences the size of sunflower seeds. Little more than dogs. “What about the case?”

  He took a moment to swallow. “What case? It’s dead.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t. Tell me what Dora told you.”

  Leonek’s tongue cleared food from his palate. “Listen, Brod. Jerzy Michalec is a member of the Central Committee. He has friends everywhere. Why do you think you’re lying in here? We know about limits in the People’s Militia.” He gave a final swallow. “Don’t worry about your record. We’ll erase the whole case.”

  The banality came over him: the erasure of two men’s murders, as though Janos Crowder and Aleksander Tudor had never existed. “You can’t do that.”

  “It’s why they give us erasers.”

  “Tell me,” said Emil. “Dora.”

  Leonek leveled his gaze. “Twenty percent.”

  “What?”

  “What I told you,” Leonek explained patiently: “Eighty percent of the time Dora tells the truth. Twenty percent…” He shrugged. “The story about you was made up. After you were shot I tracked him down. He didn’t know anything about you, not even your name. All he knew was he needed to come up with a story to save his ass.”

  “What did he say about the case?”

  “Nothing. He told me he’d heard a gunshot near the water, in the Canal District. On his way he tripped, made some noise— probably because he was scared—and then heard something being rolled into the water, then someone running away.”

  “That’s something,” said Emil.

  “It’s nothing,” Leonek repeated. “Nothing, no identification, no clues beyond what we already know, and it’s all for a case that doesn’t exist. Got it?”

  The nurse came for the tray and complimented Emil on his healthy appetite. Leonek followed her out with his eyes.

  Emil knew he would go back—it was the only thing left to him—but right now he wanted nothing to do with the People’s Militia.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  *******************

  The nurse s name was Katka, and she hovered over Emil through the daylight hours, provoking brief erotic fantasies to accompany his naps. The doctor finally appeared again after a week to remove the stitches from his chest; the ones in his stomach would have to wait. They left behind a dull, throbbing ache that settled into his ribs and back, particularly when he struggled to the corner of the room in his soiled, gray robe, practicing the art of walking.

  Katka told him about her family. Mountain shepherds from the north. She said her grandfather was famous for breeding the loveliest sheep in the Tatras. He wondered how close they lived to the spot where Maria Brod had starved to death, somewhere, perhaps, above the treeline. He asked when he would be released, and as she took his bedpan she said she would find out.

  His father’s watch had been chipped along the edge of the glass. Its ticking filled the hours.

  The photographs were still on the bureau, and he asked Grandmother to bring them to him when she visited. She turned them over in her hands. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing.”

  Two men, a street, night.

  She handed them over and smiled before turning to go.

  He wished for Lena Crowder all the time.

  *********

  It was a little embarrassing when the roses and daffodils arrived with a card that said in typed capitals: homicide, first district. He imagined those gorillas fumbling through a flower store. They’d probably sent a woman from Accounts, or one of their wives. He wanted to like the bouquet, the way it lit up the room in reds and yellows, but couldn’t escape the feeling that the flowers were a trick. Something to humiliate him, or to lure him.

  At the end of two weeks, Katka brought him a damp bag of baked apples and said he was free to go. He was helped into his clothes—Grandmother had left behind a fresh change when she incinerated the bullet-and-blood-scarred suit—and given a worn, wooden cane. He hobbled around the room a few times— clumsy, shaky. Leonek was waiting in the corridor. He looked Emil over approvingly. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  In the Mercedes, each small bump ripping through Emil’s insides, Leonek asked about the broken headlights.

  “We didn’t know. We thought maybe you went crazy and broke them.”

  “Yes,” Emil grunted. “I went crazy. I took a piece of wood and I beat the hell out of them.”

  He spent two miserable weeks at home, in bed. It was difficult holding in the frustration. There were so many hours in each day, and during most of them he tottered on the verge of shouting at his grandparents to leave him alone. Grandfather beamed, reveling in his newfound pride—he had a hero in the house, after all—and Grandmother pestered him with food. Grandfather read the paper to him, using his most urgent voice to say that General Secretary Mihai had announced his distaste for the corruption being practiced in some corners of the state security division. It was an urgent matter—the stability of the nation was at risk— and would be looked into. Grandfather smiled when he said that the General Secretary’s standing ovation had lasted seven full minutes. Sometime during those two weeks the refugee mothers who slept on the staircase disappeared. No one knew if they had found their sons, or if the supervisor had had them shipped away. Grandmother appeared with a bowl of cabbage soup and a crust of stale bread. Emil was beginning to hate all leafy vegetables.

  On his second Thursday, he used his cane to reach the communal telephone on the landing. A Militia operator patched him through.

  “Terzian.”

  “It’s Emil.”

  “You’re ready to come in?”

  “I think so. You have something I can help with? Some work?”

  “Sure…” He made clicking sounds with his tongue. “Two bodies. In Republic Park. Coitus interruptus.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I’ll bring the file by.”

  As he hung up he heard movement behind him—the building supervisor, on her blue-veined, tree-trunk legs, puffy hands folded on her wide hips, stared suspiciously. He was the first one to use the phone in over a week, and her sweat-sealed brow said she woul
d brook no nonsense on her landing.

  True to his word, Leonek arrived a little after five with a folder under his arm. Hungry face, hungry eyes. Grandfather asked if he was called Mouse.

  “Mouse?” He frowned at her.

  “No,” Emil said quickly. “Not this one.”

  “Dinner,” said Grandmother, her soft, lined cheeks flushed from the heat of the kitchen. “You should eat. With us.”

  “My mother’s expecting me,” said Leonek. “I live with her.”

  “That’s a good boy.”

  Grandfather plied him with his bad cigarettes. “Come on, have one on me. Rolled myself.”

  They withdrew to the bedroom and opened the file. Emil supported himself against the headboard, and Leonek sat at the foot of the bed, passing individual pages on to him.

  “Here it is. Two kids, teenagers.” Leonek produced photographs of a boy and girl, both blond and half-naked, bent among the overgrown bushes along the eastern edge of Republic Park. Near the bush was a small splash of white vomit, also photographed. Then, a map of the park with the location of the bodies marked by two overlapping Xs.

  The girl, Alana Yoskovich, had been strangled with her scarf. The boy, Ion Hansson, had been struck with an ax where his shoulder met his neck. The ax had not been found at the scene.

  “You’ve done some work on this?” asked Emil, setting the photographs aside.

  Leonek lit one of Grandfather’s cigarettes. “Of course. The evidence points to the girl’s father.” He took a drag and gave the cigarette an abrupt, fearful look. He jumped up and tossed it out the window. “Christ!” He blinked, recovering, and waved away the black smoke, then was back. “It’s simple: The old man finds young Hansson molesting his only daughter, and proceeds to kill him. Then strangles the girl—out of rage, shame, whatever.”