The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  Leonek picked him up in the Mercedes with the smashed headlights, and his face fell when he saw the bruises. “Christ,” he said as he drove. “You really are the world’s punching bag.”

  “Let me see the photograph.”

  It was a large print that had been folded for so long that a white crease cut down between the two men sharing a medal. The difference was that it was a photograph of a photograph that was lying on a floor.

  “This is it,” said Leonek. “Right?” He squinted at some soldiers crossing the street.

  Emil held it up in the sunlight, then returned it to his knee. He began to think clearly again.

  She was not dead. Michalec was a killer, but he did not kill without reason. He knew this photograph was still at large. Michalec worked according to the logic of self-preservation. Others make the rules. We can only try to live by them.

  When they trembled over the tram tracks at Yalta Boulevard, Emil saw what he had to do. A swift, immaculate vision.

  “Can you get in touch with Dora?”

  “Dora?” Leonek sounded doubtful. “Why do you want that son of a bitch?”

  “We need him.”

  Leonek gazed ahead at nothing in particular. “Did you hear about Liv Popescu?”

  Emil shook his head.

  “They took her to the holding cells north of town, and she used her prison clothes to hang herself from the pipes.” He turned at the next corner.

  A bruise on Emil’s cheek was beginning to itch. He scratched it. His organs felt hard and cold. Outside, parade banners were on the ground, and crowds of drunk soldiers were mindlessly trampling political slogans.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  *******************

  They crossed the Georgian Bridge and parked near the arched footbridges leading into the labyrinth. It was quiet here—no farmers shouted out their vegetables, and no engines rumbled— so their footsteps on stone, and the fifth step of Emil’s cane, echoed before them. They walked in perpetual shadow. Faces peered through slits in yellowed lace curtains, and some pensioners came out to their stoops to watch Emil and Leonek pass. In place of engines, there was the quiet murmur of water smacking stone. Cats in windowsills kept track of them.

  After a few turns, they were in an area of the Canal District Emil had never been to before, not even when he was younger and curious. “We aren’t lost,” he whispered involuntarily; it was a question.

  “You’ll get to know this place well,” said Leonek. He whispered too.

  It was quickly apparent that everyone knew they were Militia. Hesitant glances and mistrusting frowns shot their way. The prostitutes smiled at them, because a single pair of policemen with law enforcement on their minds wouldn’t have a chance back here. Emil noticed the young one who had whispered to him before. Her freckles peeked out from beneath powder, and when she whispered to one of the veterans he caught sight of her milk teeth. She moved now with the smooth grace of the broken, as if she had nothing left to lose.

  A redheaded, barefoot hooker cut the distance between them in half. “There’s four of us, Comrade Inspectors.” Her voice was smoky and rough. “That’s a mighty good time.”

  Leonek smiled and touched her arm lightly. “Maybe we’ll come back for that, Beatrice. But this time it’s easier money.” He took a few bills out of his pocket.

  She folded the koronas until they were a tight, tiny package she could slip into her mangled stocking. “How easy?”

  “Your brother. Where is he?”

  She pouted playfully. “Inspector. What kind of sister-”

  “Just business, Bea. It’s always just business.”

  Dora’s address was in the center of the Canal District, in the grimy back passages where water trickled loudly—Emil heard the occasional high pitch of rats. It was a small courtyard still named after a dead king, and Dora’s front door was a soft, waterlogged plank that stank of the sea. There was a worn hole instead of a handle. They climbed the narrow, damp stairs where light came in through a shattered window, and knocked at one of three doors at the top.

  There was scurrying inside.

  “Dora! It’s Terzian. Want to open up?”

  The movement stopped, but then they heard a faint shhh from someone’s lips.

  “I just want to talk, Dora. It’ll be worth your time.”

  A lock snapped, and the door opened a few inches. An eye appeared from the gloom, looking at them jerkily, one and then the other. Then the door opened the rest of the way, and a thin, graying man in his forties stood in boxer shorts and an undershirt. He had a thick white scar along the side of his neck. “What is it?” His voice was high like a child’s.

  “Some help,” said Leonek. He showed more bills, but returned them to his pocket. “Can we come in?”

  Dora’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of help?”

  “We need you to set up a meeting. Simple stuff.”

  Dora retreated into the room, where a fourteen-year-old sat in a corner, her bare, scratched knees pulled to her chin. Her makeup had been smeared by old tears, but she smiled at them.

  “Hanna,” said Dora. “Get out of here.”

  She looked at the visitors again, then at him, and went into the next room. When she stood up, Emil noticed the black needle marks on the pale inside of her left thigh, and maybe that was what did it.

  Dora sat on the edge of a cracked coffee table, bare feet spread, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “Who’s your kid?”

  “Inspector Brod,” said Emil, but he was no longer seeing clearly. What he saw was that first week, the humiliations, the fighting, the gunshots. He saw the unfounded, nearly fatal suspicion all over again, felt it grinding in his gut. The suspicion caused by this one wretch. He saw the abused girl who had just left, saw the freckled hooker who was once a girl and now completely broken, and he saw Liv Popescu and Alana Yoskovich rotting in their graves because of the same kind of sickness. He saw those faceless schoolgirls who now walked the Capital as women who had known more of this man than they ever wanted. Emil’s hands were ice cold. “Inspector Emil Brod,” he said, making his identity completely clear.

  He waited for it. Dora lit a match, but the flame didn’t make it to the cigarette. He had no doubt learned what had followed his stab in the dark—There will be a spy…

  His hand lowered again, and his face fell slack.

  Emil swung before he could gather himself, fist connecting with bony cheek. Dora’s feet lifted from the floor a moment, then he fell back off the coffee table, sprawled across the floor.

  Leonek’s shock paled him.

  Dora propped himself up with a hand and wiped his nose with the other. It came up with blood. “What the fuck is this, Leon?”

  The urge was all over him now: to jump on Dora and beat him unconscious, to take a blade to him. He couldn’t even remember why he hated this man, but the hatred was running him now. For a moment he was sure that if he killed Dora he could get them all back. Janos Crowder, Aleks Tudor, Irma. Lena. Maybe even Filia. Ester.

  “Fuck!” shouted Dora.

  Leonek found his voice, but all it said was “Emily “ pleading. Emil’s breaths were shallow and loud as he walked out.

  From the mossy square he could hear Dora saying that he wouldn’t be treated this way, not by anyone, for no amount of money, and he wasn’t going to help a single fucking cop again, it wasn’t worth it. Then he was quiet while Leonek counted out koronas and tried to convince him otherwise.

  Water dripped from a ledge, and between the stone houses he thought he saw things moving. It was early afternoon, but cold and damp.

  Scraping. Their voices again.

  Hanna looked down at him from an open window. Her smile was still there—a vacant, bruised one. She had wiped her eyes, but instead of repairing them the makeup had streaked to her temples.

  “Is Hanna your real name?” he asked in a high whisper.

  The smile deepened into her pale cheeks. When she nodded, her dark, stringy hair bobbe
d around her ears.

  “Where are you from?”

  She glanced back into the apartment, then hissed, “Presov” “I knew a girl from there,” he lied.

  She leaned farther out the window, and he saw how thin her shoulders were. She reminded him in some unnamable way of Ester. “Really?” “A beautiful girl.” “More beautiful than me?”

  “Hardly,” he said, and a mist of color came into her cheeks. “How long have you been in the Capital?”

  “Six weeks,” she said. “And three days.”

  “Are your people here? Your family?”

  She shook her head.

  The adrenaline had faded, and he was getting a pain in his shoulders from looking up, so he backed against a wall. “My name’s Brod. Inspector Emil Brod. Do you think you can remember that?”

  “Inspector Emil Brod,” she repeated. “I’m very bright.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was making fun of him. “I work in Homicide. Our station is in the First District.”

  “I’ve seen it,” she said. Very seriously.

  “If you need anything, you come to me. Okay?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Hanna? Can you remember that? Anything, whatever. I’ll try to help.”

  She nodded, still very serious. Her brow was stitched tight. Then she looked back into the room and disappeared. Dora took her place. Sadly, there was nothing left on his face of the punch, though Emil’s knuckles were still sore. “Get out of here, Inspector!”

  Leonek was stepping sheepishly down from the front door.

  Emil showed Dora his teeth, then growled.

  “Christ, Brod. What the hell is going on?”

  Chief Moska glared from his side of the desk. Someone had partly repaired the radiator, and it hissed in the corner, a thin line of steam shooting from a loose bolt. The window had been opened to air the office out.

  “Nothing, Chief.”

  “What’s t/ns?” He leveled a thick finger at Emil’s bruised face.

  “A fight, Chief. Happens all the time.”

  Moska settled on his elbows. He lowered his voice. “What about Berlin? You went?”

  Briefly, Emil wasn’t sure what to say. “I made a visit.” He knew the man wanted to know as little as possible.

  “And how was it?”

  When Emil spoke it came out as a long exhale: “It’s a city that makes you think, Chief.”

  A smile finally cracked his features, and he leaned back again. He looked ready to laugh. But instead, he scratched his scalp, fingers knuckle-deep in his gray mess. “There’s a whole world above you, Brod. You know that, right?” He dropped his hand to the desk. “That’s why I’m here. I’m the one who has to listen to their worries. They say, Why do we have complaints from a políticos about your new inspector? I have to have an answer. I tell them what I can, and sometimes I even ignore them. But they’re not the bad guys, Brod. They’re just like me. Someone above them is asking questions, wanting answers. So when they come to me I must have answers, or at least promises.” The chief paused to look at him, and blinked once, slowly. “They say someone in the Central Committee wants a rookie on this dead songwriter case, don’t waste time with good men.” He touched his chest. “I say okay. Later, they say the same committeeman wants that rookie off the case, wants the case closed. I promise, because I’m a loyal servant, that this will be done. I haven’t lost you in all this, have I, Brod?”

  Emil shook his head.

  “Good. Because sometimes I make promises for other people. You. I promise you’re no longer involved in this case. It’s a promise I can keep, isn’t it?”

  The chief had given him everything he needed—had asked him a question and given him the answer. So Emil nodded soberly. “Yes, that’s a promise you can keep.”

  Moska’s tongue rummaged around in his mouth. They did not misunderstand each other. “Go on, Brod. Go do your job.”

  His job consisted of waiting. Dora would not get back to them until the next day, Tuesday, when they would wait in a café for his phone call. Dora would contact the people he knew, the ones who knew Michalec, and either it would happen or it wouldn’t. Emil wasn’t sure what he would do if the deal wasn’t accepted. He floated through the afternoon indecisively, and during long bouts of silence had the uneasy feeling that he might be near the end of his life. He was a young man, but if Lena was dead he felt an obligation to follow through with certain measures that would certainly be fatal. And he realized then that he had achieved what he had told Leonek he truly wanted: He had achieved devotion.

  Leonek brought him home for an early dinner. The house was a low, two-room shack on the edge of the city, just before the farmland, with an outhouse and a well. It had once been a servants’ quarters to the large house Emil could just make out on the horizon, beside a black stretch of woods, but after the Liberation the land had been chopped up and redistributed. There were other hovels peppering the field, and a few makeshift tents where families lived until they could build. It reminded Emil of the Tiergarten.

  Seyrana Terzian wore her long past on her face. Emil thought he saw the roads of Armenia in her cheeks, and the other countries she’d had to go through to get here. She said only the obligatory greetings to Emil and served them a lentil-and-apricot dish she called mushosh, which he ate ravenously. This pleased her, and she finally smiled. She listened as the men talked. Emil told them about Helsinki, the Arctic, and Ruscova. He said his life was not something you could base a movie on, and Leonek said that their life—Emil noticed he never said my life—was a movie that couldn’t be made. Armenia to Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Italy and here. Poverty and violence all along the way. The life of a refugee was not photogenic.

  “Then you came here.”

  Leonek nodded. “After a few more countries, yes. You go where they’ll take you. The king was feeling liberal the month we arrived. He even let me go into public service.”

  Seyrana nodded a steady agreement, occasionally wiping her eyes.

  “And here you are,” said Emil.

  “A simple life.”

  “Not so simple.”

  “Extremely,” said Leonek. “It’s just me and mother.” He smiled at her, and she patted his hand on the table with her own shriveled hand. “Look at the others,” Leonek said to him. “Ferenc is writing his novel, can you imagine?”

  “A book?” Emil had trouble imagining it.

  “You didn’t know?” Leonek grunted and raised his eyebrows. “Why do you think he’s typing all the time? Those aren’t reports he’s working on. He’s been writing that book as long as I can remember. And Stefan is a magician at rebuilding engines. Any time you have trouble with the car, bring it to him. Astounding work. Even the chief.”

  “The chief?”

  “He paints. I guess you couldn’t know that. Landscapes. Really very beautiful. But me? All I do is sing. Sometimes. And not very well. And I’m a detective. Not the best, but I make do. And there’s you.”

  Emil didn’t answer. He was wondering as well.

  “For you, Her Highness.”

  “Who?”

  “Madam Crowder.”

  Emil smiled, but then there was no energy to sustain it. He looked at his empty plate.

  They discussed the case while Seyrana was in the kitchen. Emil told him what he had learned, the details of Janos’s blackmail. “This went on for a while. Six months or so. With his money he left his wife and got an apartment in town. But along the way something happened—maybe excess greed, I don’t know. Michalec felt he had to kill him.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Leonek, his hand on his rough, dark chin. “You saw how much money they were dealing with. Who’s stupid enough to screw that up?”

  “Whatever happened, Janos was scared they were going to kill him, so he booked a flight to Berlin.” Emil smiled at Seyrana coming back to sit down, and decided to avoid mention of Janos’s sexual tendencies. “There is one possibility, though, for what scre
wed all this up for Janos.”

  “Aleksander Tudor,” said Leonek.

  Emil nodded. “Tudor knew about the boxes of money. He was that kind of supervisor. And he could get inside the apartment whenever he wanted. Maybe he had found the picture, or at least those ten pictures Janos had taken of Michalec meeting the German colonel. Maybe he wanted something out of it.” He shrugged. “Too many people in on a conspiracy, and it starts to crumble. Janos was killed, and Tudor knew he was next. I thought he was just a nervous man when I met him. But he had reason. He knew he was going to die.”

  “Please,” said Seyrana. Emil enjoyed the heavy sound of her accent. “No more death at the table, okay?”

  “You were in Italy?” Emil asked later, remembering.

  Leonek shrugged, Seyrana nodded. She set down plates of sadayify syrupy shredded dough. They gave proper attention to the dessert before Emil picked up the thread again.

  “Venice. Did you see Venice?”

  Leonek smiled and shook his head. “No, but Trieste, yes. It was a gorgeous city.”

  “But terrible without money,” Seyrana said finally.

  “Youve seen Venice?” asked Leonek.

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Emil. He described the Bridge of Sighs, trying to tell it as the Croat had, but knowing he couldn’t do it justice. “You know when you’re on the bridge that all hope is gone, and you’re now and forever a prisoner. Behind iron bars.”

  Leonek leaned back and lit two cigarettes. “I don’t think I want to go to Venice; sounds like a sad place.” He handed one to his mother, then got up. “Before I forget,” he said as he found his leather satchel in the corner and brought it back to the table. He set his fuming cigarette on the edge and took a pistol out of the bag. Not a Walther, but a Marakov 9mm. He set it on the table. “Be careful—it’s loaded.”

  Seyrana raised her weathered hands and muttered something in Armenian, a loud moan of misery.