The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  The driver turned in his seat. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “Get out.”

  At each door a thug waited. He tried the weaker-looking one on the right, but he wasn’t weak at all. His big, sculpted hands wrapped completely around Emil’s forearm—a grip like a machine—and led Emil over to the colonel, who was tugging white gloves over his hands. Emil wondered if they were the same ones he wore while crushing Janos Crowder’s skull. Cleaned thoroughly, and bleached. Maybe they were what he always put on as a prelude to killing. Executioner’s gloves. From across the rubble came the whisper of Allied planes.

  “You rose from the dead,” he said, and Emil remembered the voice—a little thinner than before, weaker. Comrade Emil Brod? “Really quite amazing. Impressed and, in no small way, disturbed.” Irma was right: He had old eyes. “I guess we don’t need to discuss anything. The photograph, please.” He opened a hand to accept it.

  Emil only half-heard. He was measuring the distance to the piles of rubble, their height, and how much time it would take him to scramble over and sprint toward the silhouetted buildings in the distance. But it was cold—he had to take that into account. And he didn’t know if he could sprint at all. He was still, and always, an invalid.

  “I don’t have the photograph.”

  The colonel’s face was pink in the cool breeze. He sighed audibly, but it was more a sign of weariness than disappointment. He looked at the thug whose grip was cutting off blood in Emil’s tingling arm. The colonel said quietly, “Take care of it,” and walked away.

  The two men went at it together, laying into him with hard, rock fists. Stomach, chest (they knew his weak points) and face. A steel-toed boot struck his shin, nearly breaking it, and he went down quickly to the damp earth. All the fight in him was concentrated into squirming. His hands fluttered about, swatting uselessly. Rocks cut into his back as they leaned over him and swung, and the numb pain shot through him like the sounds of their voices, saying things in German he had trouble understanding. Then a pair of hands on him—he flinched, but the hands only searched his pockets and removed the photograph.

  He closed his eyes to darkness, and when he opened them the two men stood over him, looking at the picture, passing it back and forth. The colonel was shouting. Snatching the picture from them with white gloves.

  Then blackness.

  Then all three, still standing over him. One pointed a finger down at Emil, then all their hands were moving. Then blackness. A shot rang out.

  Then more talking, and Herr Oberst was holding a gun. Emil didn’t know what kind. It was aimed at Emil’s face. He moaned, turning his head. He saw the shadow of the barrel’s corridor.

  Then a shot, but the gun was aimed elsewhere. One of the other men fell. A flash of light, and the second fell.

  The colonel was squatting over him and looking into his face, upside down. He felt the breath on his nose, but the colonel’s words were unclear. Now for yours or Off with you or This is all yours. Emil understood nothing because he was sliding again into that warm black river.

  Pain. And white, cold sky.

  The sun burned overhead. Closing his eyes did nothing to help the grind of his nerves. Sitting up was misery.

  He checked himself for holes.

  He lay near the front of the taxi. His red-and-purple belly was bruised and aching, but not torn. There was blood on his shirt and jacket, but he didn’t know if it was his. In his right hand was a pistol.

  He dropped it.

  PPK. Walther.

  Around him, inside the U of rubble, were two lumps of clothes, filled with two dead men. A face was twisted toward him—one of the thugs. The other—he crawled and checked the face with the hole in its jaw—was the second thug. Flies crawled over their features.

  After a while he could stand, but standing was hell, so he threw himself on the fender to help stay up. He shivered from cold and from everything else. He uneasily drew himself up to his full height, and saw the dead driver behind the wheel, head back, the passenger-side of his head blown out by an escaping bullet.

  The noise of western planes was suddenly louder, drilling his ear. He tried to be quick about getting to the door and not looking too closely at the corpse as he dragged it out. The seat was covered with dry, sticky blood.

  Why am I not dead?

  When he sat down he closed his eyes and left his hands on the wheel.

  Twice, he thought. I have died twice and twice been reborn.

  He held down the nausea.

  If this could happen here, if Michalec had found him with so little effort, then Lena was finished. He knew it then, was finally, utterly sure: She was dead. The pain rolled across his skull, pressing him down.

  The car started quickly, but was difficult to turn around in the rubble. He worried about crushing the bodies as he backed up and drove forward many times. Once he was turned around completely, he had trouble staying on the path. He had the feeling, and it was overwhelming, that time was moving very quickly while he himself moved in slow motion. Dust shot up as he scraped the concrete blocks and shattered wood that bordered it, and he heard the scrape of baby carriages and bricks. When he came to splits in the path he made intuitive guesses—slow, stupid presumptions. Once, he stopped, opened the door and vomited clear liquid. Finally the rubble ended, and he turned onto a cracked, paved road. A truck filled with Soviet soldiers drove by, their faces tired from late nights out. A few jeeps with stern senior officers followed. No one noticed the bruised, achingly slow man in the scratched taxi, who, every time he shifted, felt the adhesion of blood holding him to the seat.

  More guesses. Vague remembrances. He appeared at the far end of Unter den Linden, but could hardly see the peak of the Brandenburg Gate because of speeding delivery trucks that filled the broad avenue. The city was going on as it had yesterday, and the day before. As though everything in Emils life had not just collapsed. After a few more streets, he was clear enough to find The Last Cat. The bar was closed. The taxi s clock said it was just after noon.

  He parked and opened the windows to let out the stink. His hands, his feet, his face—everything shook. When he closed his eyes there were bodies.

  Some women with carriages noticed him. They gasped and looked away quickly. Their pace increased. He saw other women, mothers and grandmothers and daughters. Their faces all reminded him of one. Affected faces, faces that have lost their girlhood. A grandmother with long gray hair braided at the neck asked if he needed some food. She seemed to talk so quickly that he had trouble understanding, and when he did understand, he could not make his mouth move fast enough-”Thank you, no, thank you, Γ m waiting for a friend. ΓΪΙ he all right. “

  “The Americans did this to you?” It was Konrad Messer, standing a few hesitant feet from the window.

  Emil groaned and opened the door. Everything was stuck, then it was unstuck. “Just let me in.” He hobble toward Konrad s grimace. “Please?”

  The dark and cool, stale air of the club was soothing. He stripped and washed, using the kitchen faucet in the back while Konrad went to move the car away from his club. He came back shaking his head, then went to retrieve a spare suit he kept in the office for emergencies. It was a little large, but better than anything Emil had ever owned. No worker materials here.

  Konrad handed him something sweet with gin. “You’ll need a few of these.”

  Emil almost declined, he needed to make a call, but his hands shook too much, and he knew he couldn’t make sense yet. He threw the drink back. His stomach would have to take it. He leaned against the bar and began muttering about what had happened. He’d thought he would just tell a little, but when it began he couldn’t stop. Konrad nodded continuously to prove he was listening, but his expression never changed as he made gin drinks for them both.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He blinked into his glass. “Do you have a telephone?”

  “In the office.”

  He took a fourth drink with him. The wor
ld was beginning to slow. He talked to three operators in as many languages—their voices sped and slowed with the rhythm of his drinking—and then he waited for the callback. Konrads office was covered with yellowed photographs from before the war, men on stages. Showbusiness shots, vaudeville. Men standing next to other men who were dressed up like women. The telephone rang.

  It took two more operators to patch him through to the station. He was told by a curt woman that Leonek Terzian, along with the rest of the homicide department, was not in the office. It was Saturday. He asked if there was a home listing for Leonek. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  He read off his Militia identification number and told her this was an emergency. She made him wait while she conferred with

  someone else. Finally she returned and unhappily gave him the telephone number.

  More operators, another wait for the callback. Then a woman’s faint voice: “Yes?”

  He asked for Leonek Terzian.

  The hiss on the line grew louder as he waited. Leonek’s voice was difficult to hear. “Emil? It’s you?” He was shouting. “Emil, listen.” A pause and a whisper directed at his mother to get out of here. “Emil?”

  “Yes?”

  “She wasn’t there.”

  “What? She wasn’t—what7.” He had known it before, had known it in his bones: his premonitions had been astute. But hearing it aloud was entirely different.

  “I went to Ruscova,” he said. “You didn’t tell me I’d have to get there by horse. But I made it. I went to that woman’s house. Irina Kula?”

  “Yes yes, that’s it,” said Emil. Everything was being said too slowly.

  “She wanted me to tell you it wasn’t her. She says it was Greta, her friend. She said you’d know her.”

  Emil remembered a fat, frizzy-haired woman full of smiles.

  “A man came for Lena. That’s what she said.”

  “What?”

  “She asked you to forgive her. She feels terrible.”

  “Whatman?”

  “I don’t know. Short, dark hair. That’s all I could get. Rude.”

  Emil couldn’t speak. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He could smell Lena’s cigarettes and feel the shape of her ribs through the summer dress she wore in Ruscova. She had been crying then.

  Something garbled came over the lines, ending with “dead.”

  “What?”

  “That maid. Irma? In the hospital—suffocated!”

  Konrad brought Emil another drink and exited discreetly.

  “You there?”

  Emil wasn’t there. He was sitting at the desk, the telephone to his ear, but his body had contracted and convulsed, sending his thoughts elsewhere, to some desperate escape. Part of him wanted to cease right now. To turn off his head and call it quits. This was too much for one young man.

  “Emil?”

  All he could think to say was “I’m coming home.” He hung up.

  A pile of twenty-three boys in a shattered Berlin apartment. Three bodies in the rubble. One in a living room, one in the Tisa. A girl in a hospital room, a pillow over her face. God, how they piled up. And Lena—yes, Lena—was just another. But why not me? Why was he not dead among the broken bricks?

  He clutched his stomach and leaned over the floor, but this time nothing came.

  He called the Schonefeld Aeroflot office. A shockingly friendly and perky Russian woman told him the next flight home wasn’t until four in the morning. Emil reserved a seat and finished his drink. He floated back to the bar. Konrad looked at him sympathetically and made a joke about his walk. Emil put his empty glass on the counter and asked for another.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  *******************

  The bartender arrived around three. Large, burly, peasant stock. He cleaned off the bar and replaced the corks with spouts for easy pouring. He had the look of workers who appeared on posters—strong, Soviet—with sleeves neatly rolled up and a wrench in their hands, bringing forth the future by way of railroads, dams and bridges. Or the worker statue in Victory Square, sharing a stone torch that lights nothing.

  Konrad sat across from Emil and started speaking. It was a kind of nervousness. He didn’t know what to say, so he touched his broken nose and talked about the bartender’s obsessive cleanliness. Like no one he had ever seen. It was the last refuge of civility left in the big man. Konrad slid his glass over to Emil, smiling. “You need this more than I do.”

  “What about Janos?”

  “What about him?”

  Maybe it was the drinks, or the despair, or their brutal combination, but Emil was suddenly very sure of himself. “Janos told you Smerdyakov—Graz—was a friend. I can’t believe Janos lied to you about him. Maybe at first he did, but he couldn’t follow through with the deception.”

  “Why couldn’t he, sweet Comrade Inspector?” Konrad’s hands were on the table, flat, on each side of his glass.

  “Because Janos was in love with you.”

  It might have been true, but there was no way for Emil to know. He only knew that the German was holding something back, and flattery was the only way to bring it out.

  Konrad let out a long, low sigh, sinking toward the table. He shrugged. “Of course Janos loved me. That is a given. And yes, you clever Slav, Janos could not lie to me for long. I could see right through him. Once Janos was in Berlin, standing in front of me, he could not help but spill the whole story.”

  It was much as Emil had suspected. Janos went with Lena to Michalec’s home for a party. Their shared Hungarian past made them one-night friends, and they were inseparable. Then the Oberst arrived. He was a drunk who asked Michalec in loud Hungarian how much all this had cost. Only Janos and a couple others understood the words, and, to Janos, Michalec’s angry reaction was shocking. “He grabbed this drunk by the collar and flung him—literally—into the garden. The whole time shouting, What are you doing in my house?” But the German—a happy drunk— seemed to feel nothing, and murmured joyously that he would go to Berlin, to the files. That’s where anyone could learn how much this life had cost.

  “God,” said Emil, his despair fleeing him in one brief, amnesiac moment. “It was all there from the start!”

  Konrad shook his head. “When you’re working backwards, Comrade Inspector, yes. But not when that’s all you know. We’re not all criminal experts.”

  But Janos’s interest was piqued. He took to following Michalec around town, spying on him, photographing him, and once, when he saw Michalec meet again with that German late one night, he decided to get in touch with his own man in Berlin.

  Ten photos, thought Emil. The beginning. “So through you and Birgit he located the file and took one of the photographs.”

  “He made a snapshot of the evidence,” Konrad corrected. “Unlike you, he’s not a thief.”

  “But he was an extortionist. Janos blackmailed Michalec for six months. And then it ended. Why, Konrad? Why did Michalec decide it was all over?”

  Konrad was sinking, slowly, into his chair. “You tell me, Inspector. After he left in February, I never heard from him.” His voice was somber and muted, as if covered by a veil. “It was supposed to set him free. The money was supposed to give him the freedom to leave his wife and come to me.”

  Emil watched a moment, this man slipping into his own regrets, then put a hand on Konrad’s. He told him about the plane ticket receipt he had found in Janos’s apartment.

  Konrad’s eyes lit up. “What?”

  “He was killed the day before he was going to fly to Berlin,” said Emil, glad for once to make someone happy. “To be with you.”

  The club was full. There were men dressed immaculately and some women laughing at jokes, and in the corner, on a small stage, a few men wearing women’s clothes and wigs prepared for a show. Emil remembered the black garters from Janos’s apartment—so long ago—and realized they had probably been his. Cabaret music blared from the jukebox—tinny sounds straining the old speakers—and
smoke filled the room. He was surrounded by fur collars and fine hats. His own disarray was painful and obvious. They were watching him, even though their eyes never met his. It was the same trick the homicide inspectors conjured on that first day. He drank to ignore it.

  He asked someone at the next table for the time, and the man’s milky, German voice almost slipped away before he caught it: 8:15. Still eight hours until his flight. The music swelled and consumed him.

  He couldn’t remember where Irma had said she was from. He should find out and visit her family. Tell them something kind about her service to the Crowder household. He should not be here.

  He dwelled on Irma to avoid thinking of the other one.

  Konrad sat across from him, looking upset, and tapped Emil’s cheek. “You better wake up. There’s someone here to see you.” His face looked very white and stiff.

  Behind Konrad, a tall man in a leather overcoat smiled. His smile was narrow, and he had thick, black-rimmed glasses. Emil recognized him from yesterday morning. “You are Comrade Inspector Emil Brod?” he asked, stepping up. He spoke Russian with a Moscow slur.

  Konrad stood aside, whimpering quietly. Emil at first needed help getting up, but once on his feet he could make it all right. Outside, he said, “My cane?” and the Russian nodded to a disheveled- looking teenager standing outside a long Grosser Mercedes. The boy ran into the club. The Russian put a hand on Emil’s head to make sure it didn’t strike the frame as he got into the backseat. A chubby man with a broad smile was in there already—yes, this was the one he had lost in the alley—and then Emil was between them.

  Behind the wheel was the one-armed taxi driver who had driven him and the bureaucrat from the airport. They looked at each other momentarily in the mirror, but Emil saw no recognition in his eyes.

  The teenager reappeared with the cane and leapt into the passenger’s seat. When the car started moving, he lit a cigarette.