I walked around the desk to Gorski, who was finally showing a bit of fear. “You won’t,” he said, as much to convince himself as convince me.
With as much speed as my old body could muster, I moved behind him and wrapped my arm around his neck so he had trouble breathing. I, too, had trouble breathing. My pulse banged in my ears, then came that electric hum. I placed the barrel against his temple. His hands leapt up to my arm, but my grip was strong.
Close to his ear, I whispered, “I’m going to kill your father. Understand? When you see him, tell him that. Tell him that Emil Brod is going to murder him, and that’s the only reason I’ve left his worthless son alive.”
I said all this because I meant it.
Then I lowered the pistol from his temple, took aim, and shot him through the thigh.
His body convulsed. Both he and Gisele Sully screamed at the same moment. I let go of his neck, ears humming, and watched him tumble to the floor. Blood pumped from the hole in his pants and spilled over the marble.
I made sure not to step in the blood. I was levelheaded enough to remember that. I walked, shivering, over to Sully and leaned close to her. She recoiled. Her face was pale, in shock. I whispered, “I used you to get here, but you don’t know what we said. You know nothing. Remember that. It’s for your own safety.”
Her head jerked in a kind of agreement.
The corridor was empty, but I heard shouts from the stairwell. I ran the opposite way, slipping the gun into my coat. I glanced back as I reached the door to the service stairs. Soldiers were just arriving to save their revolutionary friend.
TWENTY
They brought Gavra back to the conference room and left him alone with a container of army rations. He ate it quickly-the last food he’d had was on the flight from America-but could understand why the Pankovs complained about having to eat the foul stuff. Afterward, he started to pace the length of the room and work through the immensity of what he’d been told.
But he couldn’t, because it still didn’t make sense. He’d been kidnapped from the Hotel Metropol in an elaborate scheme meant to place him here in order to execute the Pankovs-that in itself made no sense. With a building full of armed soldiers, they didn’t need a gunman. Why Gavra?
He posed the question to Michalec two hours later when the old man unlocked the door and came in looking flushed and weak, slipping a cigarette between his dry lips.
“Why me?”
Michalec lit the cigarette and waved away scented smoke. “Why not you, Gavra?”
“Because I’m nobody. You don’t even know me.”
“Sure I do,” said Michalec. He took a chair, grunting as he settled his bones. “You’re Gavra Noukas, born in a little town outside Satu Mare, but you’re estranged from your family. You don’t talk to them.
I don’t know why, I just know it’s true. You joined the Ministry in 1973, and by the next year you were picked by then-Colonel Brano Oleksy Sev to succeed him in his post as First District Militia liaison for the Ministry for State Security, focused on the homicide department. You apprenticed with him for two years before being left on your own. You share an apartment with your good friend Karel Wol-lenchak, who is a line worker at the Galicia Textile Works. Not the best worker in the world, but not bad for a socialist economy.”
Gavra stared into Michalec’s clear blue eyes, going over each word he’d just heard. Then it hit him. “It’s because you can’t find Brano.”
Michalec cocked his head. “What?”
“Brano Sev. He was on the list. You were going to kill him, but he’s eluded you.” He nodded, very sure now. “You’re more scared of him than anyone else on that list. He’s someone who could truly expose you.”
The old man tapped some ash off his cigarette. “I think I’d worry less about your old mentor and more about your present situation.”
Gavra started to see it now. “But that explains my situation, doesn’t it?”
Michalec took a drag and looked at him but didn’t answer.
“How, though?” Gavra started thinking aloud. “You can’t find Brano and kill him; you need another way to get at him. Through me. You bring me here, get me to kill the Pankovs, and… and what?” His mind was working more quickly now. “How does me killing the Pankovs silence Brano Sev?”
Gavra closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose, concentrating.
“No, it won’t silence Brano. But it will connect him to the murder. He was my mentor. And if you can prove that he was behind my trip to America, you can show that I’ve been working under his orders. That I killed Lebed Putonski for him. Then it would be simple to make it seem that I killed the Pankovs under Brano’s orders.” Gavra released his nose and looked at the old man. “You’re trying to frame Brano for their murder, so you won’t be responsible.”
“I’m impressed,” said Michalec, though he didn’t seem so. He seemed bored by the discussion. “You have a fine imagination, but you’ve worked for too long in the Militia office. You think like a cop.” He shook his head. “Why would I want to frame Brano for the murder of the Pankovs? I’d like to do it myself. I’d be a national hero.”
“Again.”
He raised his brows. “What?”
“You’d be a national hero again, just as you were for a few years after the war.”
Michalec laughed. It was an honest laugh, devoid of bitterness. He wiped his eyes. “Trust me, Gavra. Being a war hero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve had enough of public life. I just want to watch my family prosper, then I want to die easily.”
Gavra didn’t believe that, but in the end I think it was one of the few truthful things Jerzy Michalec said that week. Gavra said, “Maybe I do think like a cop. But you, Comrade Michalec, think like a Ministry official. You know that?”
Michalec seemed to find that funny. “You think so? Well, I guess it makes sense.”
“How long?”
“What?”
“How long were you in the Ministry?”
Michalec considered his answer, then shrugged. “A few years in the sixties and seventies, just some minor surveillance work. But if you’re feeling ambitious, you can forget it. As of yesterday, there is no record of my brief tenure with the Ministry for State Security. Nothing.”
Gavra was feeling ambitious, but in a different way. He went back over his thoughts. “I may have gotten some details wrong, but I’m on the right track. You are trying to frame Brano. But it won’t work, because I’ll never kill the Pankovs.”
“You might,” said Michalec. “We’ve got your friend, you know. Karel.”
“You’re bluffing. He’s safe.”
Again, Michalec laughed, but quietly. “Bluffing was the plan. Honestly, it was. But I just got an interesting phone call. Some of our guys found Karel running around the Metropol, searching for you. He made no secret of it; he asked everyone he found, even our guys.” He shook his head. “That man is very attached to you.”
“Where is he?”
“Don’t worry, he’s fine. Karel thinks he’s coming to see you.” Michalec paused. “He will, won’t he? He will live to see you?”
“That’s up to you, I suppose.”
“No, Gavra. It’s up to you.”
TWENTY-ONE
I worried about Gisele Sully. If she followed my instructions and spoke only in French, then she would be safe. No one would assume she’d understood anything during those minutes before I shot Rosta Gorski. No one would assume I’d told her anything. But I didn’t trust that she would keep her mouth shut, and that terrified me.
If she made it, though, the cassette in her pocket might bring something positive out of all this mess.
I also worried about myself. Sixty-four years is only as old as the life you live, and for too long I’d spent my days in a chair behind a desk. My heart slapped the inside of my chest as I galloped down the steel service steps; my lungs burned. But I reached the Citroen before anyone decided to start looking on other fl
oors for me. I nodded at the soldier who’d let us in, and he said, “Where’s the lovely Frenchie?”
“She decided to stay,” I answered, gasping, but winked. He laughed.
I had to drive quickly. I took the turnoff that placed me on Mihai Boulevard, then crossed the Georgian Bridge, heading south past the Canal District. I could only guess how long it would take them to search the Central Committee Building, decide I wasn’t there, then send out my name and description to the army units checking papers around the edge of the Capital.
By that hour-it was eleven thirty-cars had started to appear on the streets again, and I had to swerve around smoke-coughing Karpats and Trabants and Skodas while avoiding oncoming traffic. I reached the roadblock by noon, stopping behind four Karpats as the soldiers casually leaned over windows, checked papers, and chatted with pretty girls. I almost laid on the horn to hurry them up but decided against attracting attention.
When I reached the front of the line, I was faced with the same soldier who’d checked me and Agota on Wednesday, the one who had given Agota and Sanja a flirtatious smile. Having faced hundreds of faces since then, all of them much more memorable than mine, he didn’t remember me. When he asked where I was going, I answered honestly. “Tisakarad and Sarospatak.”
“The First City,” he said.
“What?”
“First City of the Revolution. That’s what they’re calling Patak now.”
I forced a smile. “First City it is.”
He waved me on, and soon I was in the fields that lay to the south of the Capital. I wondered what would become of all this farmland, which in 1947 had been nationalized, chopped up, and given to farmers who owed half their yield to the State. By 1950, they were giving 95 percent to the State. I imagined some of the families who’d once owned all this land were still around, and soon they’d be filing claims to get it back. What would happen to the farmers who’d spent the last forty years working the soil?
That’s when it came over me, and enveloped me. I pulled over on a barren patch and climbed out. Beneath my feet, frozen mud stood in ridges. I turned slowly, taking in all of it.
Shooting Rosta Gorski had cleared out a part of my head that I hadn’t used, probably, since I was a child. My personal tragedy receded for a moment, and for the first time I saw that my country had become an entirely different place. It was as vast and beautiful as it had always been; everything I knew and loved was inside its borders. But now it had changed. Maybe that’s when I changed as well. After forty years, I suddenly felt the need for all of this to survive. I actually believed I could protect it.
It’s the other reason I’m writing this.
I got back in the car and kept driving-carefully, because my eyes kept tearing up, turning the landscape into mist. The afternoon sun burned my roof as I crested the next hill, and the golden countryside spread out for miles.
TWENTY-TWO
Michalec again left Gavra alone in the conference room, telling him to consider his options; he’d be back in a few hours. By now, Gavra had recovered fully from whatever drug they’d used to bring him here, and he was able to think through the mathematics of his situation. Escape paths.
There were none. The conference room was simple reinforced concrete, without even a vent that he could find. There was only one exit, through the locked door and past the large, gun-toting block of muscle named Balint.
Somehow, Michalec had known that Karel was his weak point. He was the closest thing Gavra had to a family. He told me later that, despite the vigorous training he’d excelled at in the Ministry, no one had ever taught him how to let his loved ones die. He was only taught not to get himself in that kind of situation. Once there, he was in trouble.
His salvation perhaps lay in understanding why Michalec needed him to kill the Pankovs. Maybe the old man was telling the truth- he wasn’t interested in framing Brano Sev for the murder-but he was certainly trying to tie Brano to it. What would that achieve?
He thought back to America. The CIA was involved with the whole operation, and that meant something. Why would the Americans care about protecting Michalec’s past?
Gavra sat at the long table and rubbed his eyes. That answer was obvious.
Both the Soviet Empire and the American one worked through satellite nations. Moscow was more blatant in its aspirations, setting up puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe and in places like Afghanistan. When communist leaders came to power in Cuba or North Korea or Africa, no secret was made of the money sent pouring into their coffers.
The Americans were subtle. Their money, often passed on by the Central Intelligence Agency, was funneled to political figures they supported. People they believed would help American interests once they gained power. Rather than spreading their troops around the world-though they did that often enough-America used her great wealth to give her favored side an upper hand in any fight.
Americans had supported Solidarity in Poland and Charter 11 in Czechoslovakia-indirectly, perhaps, but there had been help. They’d found ways to stamp their support throughout the Bloc, in the hopes that once the Russians were kicked out they would have a united group of allies along Europe’s eastern edge.
Gavra and the Ministry knew a fair amount about Ferenc Kolyeszar’s activities, and not just from Bernard’s compromised reports. The Ministry never really feared Ferenc’s group, because they were cut off from the outside world. Despite some international attention, Ferenc never met with American spies or diplomats. Occasionally, French literary critics would arrive to talk to him, sometimes bringing along money buried in the false bottoms of their suitcases, but it was only enough to keep him afloat, not enough to truly threaten the government.
To the Americans, Ferenc and his people were nothing more than a rumor spread by the French. What the Americans wanted was someone they could see and hear and touch, someone who could convince them with charm. Only emigres could do this, charming emigres like Jerzy Michalec.
And if the Americans gave their support to Michalec over the years, might they protect their investment by killing someone on their own soil who would risk the millions they’d already spent?
Of course they would.
It made enough sense for him to back up again and whisper it aloud to see if it sounded crazy or not. “The Americans are funding Michalec’s people and have helped erase Michalec’s past to ensure he can come to power without resistance.”
Gavra was suddenly desperate for a cigarette, but Michalec had taken his scented French packet with him. Instead, he poured more water and gulped it down.
The problem wasn’t that it sounded crazy; it didn’t. From an intelligence standpoint it was completely reasonable, an everyday occurrence. What disturbed him was the idea that Jerzy Michalec, a murderer and former Gestapo agent, would be elected as our country’s first democratic president. That was what he couldn’t take.
He heard a sound and looked up to see the door opening. He considered leaping from the chair to catch Michalec off guard, perhaps to kill him-that, at least, would save his country the trauma of having him as president.
It wasn’t Michalec, though; it was Beth, smiling, followed by Harold.
“You look tense,” said Beth.
“Of course he’s tense,” said Harold as Balint shut the door behind them. “The man’s about to become a national hero.”
Despite the way this peculiar couple had tricked him, Gavra couldn’t hate them. He had a feeling they were falling for a much bigger ruse.
So he stood up and gently shook Harold’s hand, then kissed Beth’s cheeks, which made her giggle. “No one’s so polite in the States. I love being back home.”
“Sit down,” said Gavra.
“I told you he’d be fine,” said Beth.
Harold pulled out a chair for her and winked at Gavra. “The woman’s an optimist even when optimism’s a fool’s errand.”
“Have you eaten?” asked Beth.
Gavra nodded. “I feel much better
. But I’m still confused. How did the two of you end up here?”
So the story began. Their marriage was true-they’d wed in 1952 in Vranov under their real names, Heronim and Bronislawa Arondt. Soon they had two children, Oskar and Itka. “Beautiful children,” said Beth. Harold squeezed her hand.
“We were just simple folk,” said Harold. “I worked in a grain cooperative, and Beth in the textile factory. We raised our kids as best we could.”
“But you left the country,” said Gavra.
“We left because we had to,” Beth said in a near-whisper.
“You’re probably too young,” said Harold. “You wouldn’t remember what happened when Tomiak Pankov first took power in 1957.”
“Tell me.”
“Before then, we’d lived under Mihai.” Harold smiled sadly when he said this. “Despite the fact that he was a complete bastard, the country loved him. We’d come out of a terrible war, and we were desperate for someone to look up to. He was all we had. Mihai sent his political competition to forced labor camps, but the rest of us found ways to ignore this. Beth and I were no different. We pretended there wasn’t a plague in our country.”
“It’s what people do the world over,” said Gavra.
Harold nodded seriously. “Well, then Pankov took over. He was younger, and we thought this might be a good thing. Maybe things could normalize. But we were wrong. See, he knew how much the people loved Mihai, how much support the old man had in the Central Committee, and how many other politicians had been hoping to take his place. So, very quickly, he started searching for enemies. It started in the Central Committee, and by 1958 a full third had disappeared, replaced by Pankov’s automatons. Then he decided he hadn’t secured his position well enough. He had to find enemies among the regular citizens. That’s when the hell began for the rest of us. Ministry toughs started visiting the factories, quizzing the managers on who was dissatisfied with the government. And the managers, they knew that if they kept quiet, they’d be suspected of harboring criminals. So it soon became a quota system. In a factory of a hundred people, you’ve got to give at least five names; ten is better. And the manager of Beth’s factory, he’d never liked Beth.”
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