The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  Emil came through next, painfully, holding the cane ahead of himself to open the way, and was followed by three boys. The last one, the baby, stood on the other side, watching, frowning. He had his cigarette behind his ear. He muttered something no one could hear.

  The first boy crouched and rushed forward. Emil tried to follow his lead, bending and rushing forward, but his damaged body wouldn’t bend easily, and could not move that fast. “We should split up,” Emil told them. “That way if one of us is caught the others can get away.”

  They liked the conspiracy in his voice, and were soon running far ahead and to the right, to where the planes were settling down. But Emil waited, then ran to the left. Behind him, he knew, the baby was standing on the other side of the fence, watching, muttering his worries.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  *******************

  Birgit’s scrawled directions were impeccable. They led him down the dark outside of the building s arc, where the planes on the other side were muted by brick. He was to skip the first door, which was locked, and make it to the second, which had been busted two months ago and never fixed. As promised, where its deadbolt should have been there was a perfect hole drilled in the door. He put two fingers through it and pushed.

  A generator kept a dull sidelight burning that barely lit the concrete walls, and he had to pause at each turn to make sure the path was clear. Birgit had told him to look for stairs, and had marked where he could find them. The stairwell was completely black, and he had to feel his way. After the noise of outside, the silence made his footsteps elephantine.

  First underground level. Then the second. Third. He pushed through the door.

  The corridor was lit by a single fluorescent and, at the far end, light spilled from beneath an office door. He waited, sweating. His stomach made noises. He listened. Nothing.

  He crept to the door and stopped again. Still, nothing. He turned the knob slowly, hearing the mechanism clicking, then stopped again. This door was not supposed to be unlocked. Birgit had told him he would have to break the lock. But he still heard nothing. He pushed it open.

  It was a long office, more like a small warehouse, filled chin- high with brown boxes in all conditions. Ripped, cut, punctured by holes, water damaged. On half of them Emil spotted the small red imprint of flat wings on either side of a circled swastika. A few on the floor were open, revealing files, and more files covered the gunmetal desk in the center of the room, where a single lamp burned. The chair was empty, save a crumpled gray army blanket.

  He heard a noise. A door closing.

  He scrambled back into the darkness between the towers of boxes, his jacket scraping—loudly, it seemed—on cardboard as he squatted and waited.

  A thin man came in and wiped his eyes, pushing round wire- framed glasses up his red nose.

  Lieutenant Harry himself. Emils bubbling stomach threatened to explode.

  Harry Mazur went to the desk and closed some files, dropping them into the squeaking desk drawers. He coughed into a thin hand, sniffed and belched. Emil noticed how gaunt the man was, how pale. The office was windowless, subterranean, and he imagined this historian hadn’t seen much sun these last months. He was practically wilting. Mazur took his coat and hat from a rack in the corner and turned off the desk lamp. The only light was from the hall. The historian muttered something—a deep, hoarse English Emil couldn’t understand—and left, closing and locking the door behind himself. The hall lights went off. Emil sweated and gritted his teeth against the pain in his stomach, but did not move.

  Five minutes, maybe ten. He no longer had a watch to judge. He waited in the blackness, wishing he had sent Leonek here instead, Leonek with all his limbs and organs intact. But Leonek would have given up at the front gates; anyone else would have.

  Once he was sure Mazur was gone for good, he felt his way to

  the desk and turned on the lamp.

  *********

  He didn’t know where to begin; Birgit’s directions were only meant to get him here.

  A dullard would pick up these boxes, one at a time, and go through each file, looking for the name Michalec, or Smerdyakov, or Graz. But the boxes were everywhere, stacked in little fascist towers that would take weeks, months to get through. About a third of the boxes, he noticed, had been moved to the front of the room, beside the desk. Maybe a hundred boxes, stacked tight. Each of these had been marked with a black X through its winged swastika, and a number beside it. The one closest to him was numbered 0087. He assumed these boxes had been through Mazur’s cataloguing process.

  Emil went through the desk.

  Beside loose files filled with economic forecasts written in German, there was a thick, hardbound notebook. Inside, grid paper was covered with columns of numbers and English writing. Emil didn’t understand a word. Mazur had written records on the front cover.

  It was in here, he knew. There were columns of descriptions, each followed by a number, presumably to one of the boxes. The only way Janos Crowder could have found his evidence, Emil decided, would be to use these boxes, and this chart. He went quickly through the pages, dragging his finger down the lists, looking for anything familiar. But other than the occasional loose word he recognized nothing.

  He found a few pages in English that were duplicated in German—a report by Lieutenant Harry Mazur on the history behind the files—but even that didn’t go into the contents of the boxes. The files had been taken, it said, from two places: a schoolhouse in Munich and a depot north of Berlin that had been set ablaze by retreating soldiers, then saved by the Red Army (many boxes, he saw, had water stains and running ink). Most of the Munich documents had begun in a warehouse in Oranienburg. When it was bombed, the boxes were moved, inexplicably, all the way to Munich. Even Harry Mazur had no explanation. It’s the madness of war, he offered in the report.

  The rest of the drawers had only pencils, stale fried potatoes wrapped in paper and a full ashtray.

  Emil took off his jacket and removed his tie. He would have to be a dullard.

  The first box was filled with records of oil shipments from Ploieçti, Romania, and lists of gas usage in five Reich cities between 1942 and 1944. At the height of war the measuring and gauging had gone on unabated. There were letters from a colonel in France requesting extra petroleum rations for trucks that brought cheese shipments of Claqueret from Lyon to Paris.

  Emil retrieved the next box and settled at the desk, and by the time he was on the third he had noticed a chill and used the gray blanket to cover his shoulders.

  There were boxes of water records and others with troop movements. There were reports on Austrian wheat harvests and predictions for economic activity within Czechoslovakia.

  Emil almost fell asleep after the ninth box, but hobbled to the end of the room and back a few times, quickly, to get the blood flowing again, then returned to a box on Dutch black-market activities.

  It was late, he suspected, or early. But down here he could hear nothing, not even the planes. For all he knew, there was a war going on up there.

  He skimmed over boxes that reported on grain shipments scheduled for the retreating forces on both fronts, and saw their tonnages dwindle. He’d heard stories from men on the seal boat about starving German soldiers raiding homes in a fury. Less verifiable stories had the soldiers eating each other. The one German in their crew, a pink-skinned Bavarian named Jos, sank into silence whenever the stories came up. No one prodded him, not even the Bulgarian. They knew he had seen his future, and it was iron bars, and walls.

  A water-stained box contained wrinkled reports on awards given for valor in battle. Lists of men who had received their Iron Crosses posthumously, or those who had killed so many Allies that their lists of commendations went on for many pages. There were reports on brave soldiers of the Reich, and most of the recommendations came from the final months of the war. The soldiers were becoming younger, until they were just children with rifles and sticks, lined up in a ring around Berlin: th
e Home Guard. Three-quarters were posthumous recommendations. The Luftschutz medal, War Merit Crosses, a few West Wall medals for the builders of the failed D-Day defense on the Siegfried line, and numerous Russian Front medals. Each recipient had his own folder, filled with biographical information and photographs when available.

  Then he spotted the folder in the back. Unlike the other orderly files, it was shabby, as if it had been perused by someone unorganized, or excited, or artistic, and then stuffed back into the box with no regard for order.

  The label said kontakt: “graz.”

  The first page was an identification sheet. A small photo of Jerzy Michalec: a younger, smooth face. Boyish. Born in Szek- szárd, Hungary, 12 January 1909, to a Polish father and a Magyar mother. Married Agnes HÖller in Vienna, 1933. A handwritten note in the margin said that Agnes Michalec had died in 1943 in Mauthausen labor camp, Austria. Jerzy Michalec s association with the Gestapo, said line 26, began on 6 February 1941. Line 31: For decorations, see attached.

  The attached included typewritten letters that recommended “Graz” for medals of distinction. On 15 March 1942, Michalec had, at peril to himself, used prewar contacts within France to secure the identities of sixteen members of the French Underground. Thirteen of these sixteen had been taken into custody.

  Firm block letters at the bottom of the recommendation: neinjud. Jew.

  No—Michalec was not a Jew. It was his wife, Agnes. For that they could not award his work.

  During the week of 10 October, that same year, Michalec caught and personally executed three British spies in Prague. Again, nein.

  Then, in March 1944, he led thirty boys of a mobilized Hitlerjugend regiment into a Soviet garrison in Poland. They returned with the mangled caps of nearly a hundred Russians. Two large, messy letters—ja—in red ink.

  Next was a page-sized photograph of Michalec, much older than the young man who had, only three years before, entered the mess of battle. His face was heavy with killing, a blackness lingering beneath the flesh. He wore a loose-fitting black suit, and his smile was weary.

  He stood shaking hands with the man Emil had seen twice before in his life: on a series of ten photographs, and stepping out of a blue Tatra with a Walther pistol. A little younger, this man s features were shadowed by his Wehrmacht officer s cap. His dress uniform showed the stripes of a colonel—Oberst. He handed Jerzy Michalec a small ribbon, weighted in the center with a cross, and a certificate. Emil could just make out the elaborate Gothic script—lm Namendes Führers…

  It took him a moment. He stared, unbelieving, for a long time.

  Then he folded the photograph down the middle, and again, into quarters, then slipped it into the back of his pants, into his underwear. He turned off the lamp, grabbed his cane, unlocked the door and left.

  Up three dark flights to the corridors, then out into the shadows. It was still dark, but dawn wasn’t far away. He could tell by the increased activity—figures jogging in the distance, workers and soldiers, shifts changing. He followed the curve of the wall to the corner, where the noise of planes grew to a pitch, whining loudly. Across the tarmac, where he and the children had crept onto the base, two American soldiers stood at the fence. One kneeled at the hole with pliers, mending, while the other stood with the lederhosen-clad baby boy. The boy was crying, waving his arms around, telling the soldier everything he knew about the hole in the fence. And, no doubt, the man with the cane, the bad cigarettes and Slav accent who had gone through it. The soldier brought a two-way radio to his face and started speaking.

  Half-jogging back along the perimeter of the airport, he was glad, at least, that he hadn’t brought the whole file. Lightness was imperative. Speed. The knots in his stomach plagued him, but he pressed the pain down.

  He slid his cane into his pant leg until its end hung by his ankle. It made him look awkward, crippled, but everyone in this city was.

  Up ahead, a crowd of white, flour-dusted workers, tired and sagging, mumbling to themselves, approached the front gate, about twenty yards away. He didn’t know if it could work, and the sharp grind in his stomach was becoming unbearable. He needed to lie down. He needed sleep.

  He walked as fast as his stiff leg would allow and joined the men. He hung back, behind them, in case they were from earlier—in case they recognized him. He stuck his hands in his pockets to hide his trembling.

  Some GIs smoking by the gate looked casually through the papers of the men lined up to enter.

  No one recognized him. The workers were too tired to see who was following them out, and the guards were busy with the newcomers. They didn’t care who left Tempelhof.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  *******************

  He urinated in an alley, pulled out the cane, then leaned against a brick wall and vomited a thin stream. He took the tram back to the center of town. The black streets were mostly abandoned, and he even found a seat on the unlit car. His empty stomach bubbled angrily. He wanted to hold the photograph again, to prove to himself what he had seen, but was afraid that if he held it in his hands it would fly away.

  Michalec.

  A Hungarian who had married a Jew who had been put in an Austrian concentration camp. He had begun working with the Gestapo in 1941. Was his wife in the camp by then? Was this the leverage they had used on him?

  But then she died in 1943, and his best work was yet to come. Did he know she was dead? Or was he working under the illusion he was saving his wife’s life by all the insidious jobs he did?

  Or had he, by that point, become a different person?

  Others make the rules, he had said. We only try to live by them.

  Berlin slid by, and a drunk man in the front of the train gazed at him, squinting.

  A war hero twice over: first for the Nazis, then for the Russians. He had turned sides as quickly as the war had shifted. With each shift of history he had relearned the rules. A clerk and then a spy and then a war hero, and now—Jerzy Michalec was a políticos. Untouchable. Almost.

  *********

  When he recognized the annihilated Tiergarten, he got out and walked the rest of the way to the Gate, where the gray dawn lit pockmarked columns and loitering soldiers. He held up his passport, but no one looked. He didn’t recognize the American GIs who waved him through, nor the Russian peasants in soldiers’ uniforms who accepted him back into their sector. He asked one of them the time, and the Russian looked at his left wrist, where he had two watches side by side. “Six o’clock.” His other wrist had three watches.

  This night had lasted forever.

  A gray-haired man noticed him and jogged up. “Taxi? Taxi?” Emil wasn’t in the mood to debate prices. The car sat at the beginning of Unter den Linden. Past it, a few brightly lit clubs still tempted westerners with heat and electricity. Beneath the sound of the planes, the low bass of music, bands, voices. Emil climbed into the taxi. “Die Letze Katze” he said. The driver started the engine.

  He took it out finally, and unfolded it. He wiped the sweat from the photograph with the corner of his shirt and gazed in the murky light at the two men passing a medal between them.

  As Smerdyakov, Michalec had entered a crumbling Berlin and assassinated twenty-three German boys—by then that was all that was left of the Wehrmacht: old men and boys. He handed their bodies over to the Russian peasants, probably with a bag full of the dead soldiers’ watches and gold teeth.

  The car trembled and shot pain through Emil’s side. He gasped.

  It was clear, at last. The connection that had been nagging at him. The twenty-three soldiers Michalec had stacked up in a bombed-out living room in Berlin were what was left of the Hitlerjugend regiment he had taken into Poland and used to kill off a hundred Soviet boys.

  He understood.

  These children had seen their commander again, after months without him, in the midst of the bombs. He would have called them together for a meeting. He would have said, Lef s plan our own defense of the Reich. They had nothing else; it wa
s their last hope. They were desperate children in an exploding city. He would have had them stand together at one side of the room, him at the other, as if it were a lecture. Their trust must have been immeasurable as they met in the living room with no ceiling, only jagged walls, the planes dropping everything onto their heads. They must have felt a surge of hope as he paced back and forth in front of them, holding his machine pistol like a mother would hold an infant. If they had any suspicions they would have beat them down, because knowing the truth would have been so much worse than those few minutes of delusion and devotion.

  He wondered if Michalec had had to reload to finish them all off, or if he’d had two machine guns. Or a partner—the colonel: Herr Oberst? Or maybe he had simply been a careful, precise shot.

  The taxi groaned up a dusty road, and Emil tried to orient himself. He saw piles of rotting mattresses and bedsprings and shattered wood. This was rubble Berlin, where not even three years of work had made a dent. Not a single building stood. Emil leaned forward, feeling it in his stomach. “Where are we?”

  The driver glanced into the rearview, but said nothing. The car bumped over rocks.

  “You” said Emil. He folded the photograph into the breast of his blazer. “Turn around. This isn’t what I asked for.”

  But the driver was already parking.

  They were surrounded on three sides by rubble, and inside this U stood three men. Two wore threadbare, cold-looking suits, while the third, who raised a hand to shield his face from the headlights, was elegantly dressed. A gray, long coat with white cuffs just visible at the sleeves. When he dropped his hand Emil recognized the Oberst. Hard, pale cheeks, wide lips. Very deutsch. He squinted.