The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Can I ask where we’re going?” Emil’s pulse was so loud he almost shouted his question.

  The Russian who had fetched him pushed his glasses up his nose and shrugged. “Somewhere quiet. We’ll talk, no problem.” He cocked his head. “You want a smoke? Yakov, give the man a smoke. Give me one too.”

  Emil took one. The Russian lit it for him with a match, but put his own behind an ear. Emil knew from the first drag that he was back in the East. He didn’t want his last minutes to taste like this.

  The silhouetted shells of nighttime Berlin passed them, and all he could think of were methods of torture. Nothing extravagant, but the simplicity of heat and pressure applied to the tender parts of the body. Shards shoved beneath fingernails. Testicles burned with cigarettes—he gazed, horrified, at his own cigarette—and bones crushed. All the rumors of the MVD rolled over him. Simple visits to answer a few questions became days and weeks and months behind stone walls, iron bars. Became missing persons. Became stutterers and cripples and mutes. Soviet Intelligence had never been known for subtlety.

  He wanted to think of Lena. He thought she might give him courage, but in these final moments all he could think of were his own bones, his own organs and flesh.

  They finally stopped at a low brick building. A bullet- punctured sign said it was a boy s school. But there were no boys behind the twisted iron gate, and only a few lights in the windows. There were other cars parked along the street. Men leaned against their hoods, smoking. Waiting.

  Emil’s heart sputtered so loudly he could not be sure of the silence in the street. Then the barking of a dog broke through.

  The Russian in glasses, with the cigarette still behind his ear, led him past the gate and inside, down a dim yellow corridor lined by identical, odd-numbered doors: 17,19,21,23. The heavy man with the wide smile followed. Fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed. 33,35,37. Their shoes echoed on the floor. He thought he smelled ether.

  They opened 47 and let him inside. Somebody hit the light switch. The room was just as he would have imagined: a small desk with two wooden chairs, facing a lone chair in the center of the room. There was a small spotlight on the desk.

  “You know where to go,” said the one who had fetched him.

  He did. He sat in the center of the room without hesitation. As he watched them go to their own seats, he wondered if, had they brought him to the edge of a ditch in a bullet-riddled courtyard and told him to kneel before it, he would follow their orders with the same obedience and wait for the bullet. He nodded at the spotlight, tightening his throat. “You’re going to sweat something out of me?”

  The wide face looked confused an instant, then understanding overcame him. His smile was huge. “This?” He grabbed the electrical cord and held it up, showing where it ended in a frayed mess. “Hasn’t worked for—how long?”

  “Months,” said the other. But he didn’t smile. He left his leather coat on and took some papers from a small bag Emil hadn’t noticed before. He flattened them on the desk.

  “Months,” the smiler repeated, nodding. “It would make this job a lot easier. But for now, the Revolution moves at a snail’s pace.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Emil’s voice was beginning to relax, though the rest of him couldn’t.

  The first one, satisfied with his paperwork, took the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it. “Everything is about the Revolution, Comrade. Some things more than others.”

  Emil became aware that the walls were filthy. They were speckled by something that looked like brown paint. But it wasn’t paint.

  “What about it, then?” asked the smiler. “Does your visit to the Americans have a bearing on the course of world revolution?”

  “None,” he said. “None that I know of.”

  “Your face,” said the other through a cloud of smoke, blinking behind his glasses. “Those bruises.”

  “I was mugged,” said Emil. “I took the wrong taxi.” He paused, but they did not help him. “The driver and his friends attacked me.

  The wide smile faded, and a look of concern replaced it. “Yes, we know. Berlin is extremely dangerous.” He rested his elbows on the table. “Just this afternoon we found three dead men in one of the bombed areas. All three were shot. In their heads.” He shook his own head. “Very ugly.”

  “Ugliest I’ve seen in a while,” said the other. He flicked ash on the floor and looked puzzled. “Wasn’t one of them a taxi driver?”

  A nod. “I believe he was.” He turned to Emil. “I don’t suppose he was your taxi driver? No.” That wide head, shaking again. “The coincidence would be…unbelievablel”

  Emil’s tired body tensed from head to toe.

  Of course he was still alive, and of course they came to him. The Oberst had not shot him, because he knew the authorities would want a simple answer to three dead bodies in the rubble. He had gotten rid of witnesses to the prized photograph, but had learned in the Capital that leaving unexplained bodies around was not wise. So he had placed the murder weapon in Emil’s hand and walked away. So easy. Efficient. Herr Oberst gets his picture, and cleans up the mess.

  And they all knew he was coming to Berlin—the MVD didn’t give out information without wondering who was asking for it, and why.

  Emil’s mistakes were endless. He had fled the scene without informing the proper authorities. He had left the Walther with his prints all over it. He had driven the blood-soaked taxicab all the way to the club for the whole city to look into. Berlin, for him, had been an extended exercise in stupidity.

  Their eyes were red, tired. These Russians had worked quickly, had tracked him down in no time. They would see through him. These intelligence agents were the kind of policemen he would never be. They were efficient and focused and always thinking. He knew this. They were also MVD: militant, brutal and all-knowing.

  “Tell me what you want to know.”

  The tall one put out his cigarette on the floor with his foot. “We want to know what you’re doing in Berlin, killing good Germans. It’s our responsibility to watch out not only for our Soviet citizens, but also for the defeated Fascist nation that has been entrusted to us.”

  Emil took only a second to think it through. He told them everything in a straightforward tone. He was a homicide inspector. He had come to Berlin to look into the death of a well- connected songwriter. “Proletarian songwriter.” He contacted Comrade Konrad Messer because of information received via their office here in Berlin. They nodded knowledgeably—this was not news. The deceased had apparently been interested in military records at the Tempelhof airbase. He tried not to pause before his one lie: “My search for what he was seeking was fruitless.”

  He waited for them to ask questions. His body was about to collapse. If they tested him, he would not last any time. But he had to hold his position, if only to have something to give them in case it came to brutality. But they asked nothing. He filled the silence:

  “When I returned to the Soviet sector, I was set upon by this taxi driver and his friends. Apparently, they thought I had money. When they discovered how poor I was, they did this to me.” He pointed at his face, then shrugged. He tried for casual sincerity, but didn’t know if it looked right. “I’m not sure what happened then. I was in and out. A fight, I guess. When I woke up, three of them were dead, and the fourth was gone.”

  They seemed unmoved by the tragedy.

  “I went to Comrade Messer for help, and I made an Aeroflot reservation. To return home. I can’t do anything else here.”

  They nodded in unison. “And Tempelhof?” asked the one with glasses. “You searched the base?”

  “I couldn’t get inside,” he said slowly, evenly. “They turned me away at the gate.”

  The wide one asked if Emil could describe the fourth man.

  He shook his head in an approximation of sadness. “I wish I could. It was dark. I only knew the driver’s face.”

  The other looked down at the papers. “Your prints were on the
pistol that killed these men.”

  “I know.” Emil nodded. “I woke with it in my hand. But there was no way I could have done it. You should have seen me last night.”

  “We see you now.” A wide smile. He looked at his partner, then back at Emil. “We’ll be right back.”

  When they were gone, the nausea filled him, a delayed reaction, and he noticed again the speckled dried blood on the wall. It had come out of people who had thought they could outsmart the Soviet secret police.

  His stomach seized up—partly nerves, partly the alcohol. He was so stupid.

  They knew. They had to know—it was their job to know. He was a liar, and they would soon walk back in here with other, larger men whose job was to beat the truth out of the unfortunate. And when the truth was out, they would continue beating until he admitted to any crime they felt like solving, or inventing. He would admit to killing those three men. He would say he had killed Janos Crowder, that he had been hoping for a shot at Comrade Chairman Stalin. They would open their casebooks and tie him to all the unsolved deaths. Yes, he would admit to anything in the end, because that’s how human beings were.

  It could have been an hour, or five. He closed his eyes and began, after a while, to drift off. But then the door opened, loudly, and the smiling Russian came rushing up to him. “You have a plane reservation?”

  Emil nodded. “In the morning.”

  “Now,” he said, cheeks fat and pink. “It’s morning now. I’ll give you a lift.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  *******************

  Emil expected the Russian to pull over to the side of the road, place a pistol to his temple and shoot. He wouldn’t have had the energy to fight it. But then Schonefeld Airfield rose out of the predawn gloom. “You may wonder,” the Russian said, smiling as he drove, “and be afraid to ask. Really, you shouldn’t be afraid. Just ask.”

  Emil’s voice was hoarse: “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “this is not for us. This is for your people. If you want to make trouble with your men, your políticos, as you say, then the people’s representatives of the Soviet Union would not consider standing in your way. Each of our socialist brothers acts independently, and this is for the good of the whole. You follow?”

  Emil nodded, then said that he did understand.

  “Your own state security may take some issue with you, but we don’t. We are for freedom and international peace.”

  Emil wanted to laugh, because it sounded like a joke, but didn’t. As they drove through the gates, the Russian showed an ID to a guard who waved them on.

  “Anyway,” he added, “you certainly didn’t kill those lowlifes. They’re the kind of men you hire to do the kind of thing that was done to them.” He parked in a lot and ran around to open the door for Emil. They began walking to the terminal. “I’m Andrei,”he said. “From Tblisi, you know? Georgian Republic. Good luck finding your man.”

  He shook hands with Emil outside the airplane, and held his forearm firmly. A wink and a smile. Ruddy cheeks. All the way up the steps to the plane, Emil waited for the bullet in the back of the head. But it never came.

  He searched each face and ignored any taxi driver who approached him. He hobbled to the edge of their crowd and woke an elderly driver dozing beneath the morning’s Spark. More airplanes covered the front page, more exclamations.

  It was Sunday—the Militia station wouldn’t be open until tomorrow—so he directed the driver home.

  In the Third District they had to wait at an intersection for a parade to pass. Children with red flags held high. Girls with red kerchiefs and boys with red suspenders. Their song sounded familiar. He folded his arms in the backseat as the driver hummed and waved at the children and the portraits of the Great Economists, as a writer in The Spark had called them. Emil closed his eyes. He saw nothing but failures.

  Janos Crowder, Aleks Tudor, Irma—

  God, he had forgotten her family name again.

  So many dead, it left him numb.

  Lena was the only thing left. Maybe.

  A few uniformed Militia followed the marching boys and girls, and waved the taxi through.

  Grandfather looked disapprovingly at Konrad’s clothes before Emil changed into his own. Grandmother boiled tea. They buzzed and whispered, but did not speak to him. His abused face kept them quiet. He went out to the telephone in the corridor.

  As he listened to the ringing on the line, he had a hopeful dream of escape—air or train, no matter—back to Berlin, but with her—find her and drag her along—she packs something small—a few dresses and hats and shoes—he brings nothing but a handful of Östmarks for the Brandenburg guard, and maybe a joke in Russian. Then they would be through.

  Maybe a coffee with the American officer at Brandenburg, whatever he wants to know, then another excruciating flight. To Hanover, or Frankfurt. The West.

  Filia had asked him why he didn’t stay over there, in the West. The truth was that he didn’t know how to live anywhere else.

  He hung up when it was plain there was no one home at Leonek’s. He had never thought to get Leonek’s address, then a word came to him from the back of his mind: Bobia.

  Swiftly, gratefully. Irma Bobia.

  “Who did it?” Grandfather finally asked. He pulled up a blistered balcony chair he’d brought inside. He touched his face to make himself clear. “Those.”

  “A Nazi,” Emil said, and rolled in the sofa to face the ceiling. He wondered what would happen to his grandparents if he left.

  “Nazis.” He sighed. “They’re still around? I thought the Red Army made good meat of them.”

  Emil closed his eyes. He wondered if they would be put under house arrest. Sometimes that happened to families when traitors ran out on utopia.

  “Shut up about your Russians,” snapped Grandmother. She almost barked it. She replaced Emil’s cold tea with a fresh one. “He doesn’t want to listen to your claptrap.”

  The light was hazy through the windows. Emil blinked toward the sky. “Do you know the time?”

  “Seven o’clock,” said Grandfather.

  He had tried the telephone at least ten times and considered visiting all the bars and cafés in the Capital to find him, but went to bed and tried, again, to focus.

  Lena had been taken. Fact.

  Unlike the others, she had been dragged out of Ruscova, not executed where she stood. So maybe she was still alive, somewhere.

  He could try to force his way onto the estate, but Michalec would be prepared for him. He would only join that long list of dead. Lena’s doom would be sealed.

  He had nothing. No leverage, no power. Nothing.

  Around four he woke from a cold, dreamless sleep to shouting from the next room. Grandmother’s voice quivered at a hysterical pitch, a sound Emil had never heard from her. Grandfather’s voice was staccato and weakly defiant. Then louder, more angry. Emil covered his head with the blanket and tried to sleep, but the walls were like paper. It was as if they were shouting in the room with him. This was one sleep he needed more than any in his life; he needed to be unconscious. Words floated through— Grandfather called her a whore and an ungrateful cunt, words he’d never heard him use against anyone. Sharp slaps. Emil was on his feet then, the cold hardly touching his half-naked form, the impulse carrying him through the door, where Grandfather’s hand was raised to hit her again. The old man was shouting hoarsely, his face twisted in pink fury. Emil caught his hand on its way down, and used a quick fist on his jaw. Grandmother gasped—she was falling back into the sofa—and Grandfather tumbled to the floor.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  But she wasn’t listening to him. She was on her feet and then crouching beside her stunned husband, the trace of blood on her lip quickly licked away as she whispered and lifted his head into her lap.

  She woke him at eight by sitting on the bed and stroking his hair. She did this all the time in Ruscova, before the Jews came. He remembered enjoying
how much she enjoyed it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said groggily, but he wasn’t. He would do it again. He hadn’t gotten much sleep, thinking of how he would do it again.

  She tilted her head from side to side and smiled. The corner of her lip looked a little swollen, but her eyes were sky blue in the light. They had an unreal quality that Grandfather’s dark eyes could never have. She picked at her eyebrow. “Your grandfather’s a little stupid sometimes.”

  He nodded into the pillow and slid up against the headboard. “What was it? The argument.”

  She shook her head. “It’s from a long time ago.”

  He furrowed his brow, and she pressed a warm hand to his cheek.

  “It’s time for you to get up.”

  Leonek’s mother answered again. “This is Emil Brod. I called the day before yesterday.”

  “When?”

  “Saturday.”

  Emil waited. Finally a wary male voice said, “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Emil! Thank God it’s you. Let’s meet.”

  “Why?” This morning he felt the full, deep knowledge of his powerlessness. It had taken all night to seep into his bones, but now it was there, in his marrow. Leonek was saying something. “What?”

  “I said, it’s not all bad.”

  That didn’t make any sense. Emil leaned against the railing as some children scurried and laughed on the ground floor. It was utterly bad.

  “Emil? You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, listen to me, okay? Last night I went to Lena Crowder’s house again. I searched everywhere. Nothing was coming up. Then I remembered those pictures you had. You remember them?”

  Emil said he did.

  “You found them behind the icebox,” he said. “So I went to the kitchen, and there it was. It had been tied up.”

  “With twine.”

  “Exactly. A photograph. I recognized Smerdyakov right away. And get this: He’s accepting a medal from a Nazi officer. Can you believe it? Emil?”