The confession tyb-2

by Olen Steinhauer

  I measured out my syllables, as if for a child: “We’ve been through this, Claudia. I can’t arrest your brother for drinking in his own home. Anyway, homicide inspectors don’t take care of this. You have the number to call.”

  “See what I told you?” she said to her friend, who hadn’t looked up from the chickens until now. “Just does his hours and goes home.”

  The friend shook her head, muttering something I couldn’t hear. I started to tell Agnes to hurry up, but she was already ahead of me, looking down on Pavel, his leg raised, pissing absently on the corner of our block, Unit 15:6.

  The mailbox was empty, which was a good sign. The stairs had been recently cleaned, though nothing could get rid of the smell of boiled cabbage, and on each landing someone had set out leafy green plants. On the top floor, there were none. Our door was locked. The apartment felt stuffy, unlived-in, and I began speculating wildly. We opened the windows, the fresh air bringing in voices and the hack of a car coughing to life.

  “She’s not here,” said Agnes as she set Pavel on the rug. He did not run away, only peered around at the sofa and table and the wide German radio against the wall.

  The bed didn’t look slept in. But Magda made it up every morning; it told me nothing. The icebox, though, had fresh milk. Agnes took out some water. She drank from the bottle and leaned against the counter, looking at me.

  I hoped she wouldn’t repeat the obvious, because if she did I was afraid I might shout at her. She didn’t. She instead drank her water and left the kitchen, making tsk tsk sounds, calling for Pavel.

  When she came across the note on the radio, I was still in the kitchen. The curtain was pulled, so it was very dark. Agnes, from the doorway, said, “Daddy?”

  I didn’t answer right away, but noticed that she’d turned on the radio. Shostakovich murmured through the house. “What is it?”

  “She left a note for you.”

  Something seemed to crack inside me. She had a small sheet of paper in her hand. It was almost weightless, and when I brought it into the light of the living room it shook in my hand. I unfolded it by the window and got a clear view of the angular script. I read it twice to be sure. Then I almost laughed. It was a telephone message. Stefan, my old friend and Militia partner, had called. While I was on vacation-if that’s what it could be called-there’d been a case.

  “Daddy?” said Agnes. She sounded afraid, so I smiled and turned up the Shostakovich.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, my smile now authentic. “Someone’s been killed.”

  6

  I slept on the couch, because this was where I’d been sleeping for months. The mosquitoes woke me, but I survived by pulling the sheet over my head and sweating. I heard her come in, saw the dim light from the stairwell as she opened the door, then smelled the cigarettes on her clothes when she passed. Pavel whimpered in recognition. She didn’t look at me, and I didn’t say a thing.

  A thump to the head woke me. Agnes’s stern face was in mine-she was dressed. “We’re going to be late,” she said.

  “Have you walked your dog?”

  Her expression relaxed.

  “Well then,” I said.

  I waited for the hot water to reach our floor, then shaved and gave myself a quick wash from the sink. I toweled off and went into the bedroom for clothes. Magda was still sleeping under a mess of sheets, her walnut hair curled against the pillow, and a bare, dirty foot stuck out below. I considered waking her, then realized she was probably already awake, playing dead until I left the apartment.

  I drove Agnes to a cafe in the center before sending her off to school. I always did this on first days-the drive and the breakfast were to mark something important. There was the usual mess of blue work clothes and old, quiet men in berets who perked up at the sight of a young girl. We sat by the window. “Are you nervous?” She shrugged and pushed her glasses closer to her eyes. “First days are exciting.” But she didn’t answer; she was becoming quieter as she got older. She was becoming more like her mother.

  Emil Brod and Brano Sev were the only ones in the office this early, and Brano, behind his files, turned his round face with its three moles and gave the usual, polite half nod. The last time I’d seen him, the state security inspector had a mouth full of metal braces, but now they were off, and his teeth, when he flashed a brief, self-conscious smile, were straight and true. It was a clever lie. We’d worked with him over a decade now, but like all the world’s secret policemen, his world was run by a dark logic none of us was privy to.

  Emil’s blond hair was combed to a perfect part, like a schoolboy’s. “You’re back,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m back.”

  He sat on the corner of my desk. The smile wouldn’t leave him. “So?”

  He was one of the few I’d told. I shook my head.

  Emil was the youngest in Homicide, only thirty. We’d given him a hard time when he was first transferred here-there were misunderstandings on all sides-but after a while he became part of the wood-work. “No decisions, I guess?”

  “We wait.”

  “You know, Lena’s still willing to talk with her. It might help.”

  I didn’t want his crazy wife talking to mine. “I still don’t think so.”

  “You hear about Leon?”

  “What?”

  “His mother died.”

  I looked up at him.

  “Two weeks ago. We all went to the funeral, even the Comrade himself,” he said, tilting his head toward Brano’s desk. “Leon’s taking it badly.”

  “I imagine.”

  “He adored Seyrana. I liked her a lot too.”

  “I never met her.”

  He shrugged in a way that suggested these kinds of events were beyond us all, then got off my desk.

  There was nothing to do until Stefan showed up and walked me through the case, so I rolled a fresh sheet into my typewriter, gave the ring on my left pinkie a half turn, and stared at the page. I’d written the book on this, adapting my touch to the stiff T, the rusting carriage return, and its fragile, gray body.

  A half hour later, the paper was still blank. I scratched a mosquito bite on my ankle, then typed a few words to get it going. But it went nowhere. I tapped my fingers on the edge of my desk and gazed at the ubiquitous portrait of Prime Minister Mihai-young, a wave of healthy hair, a smile that begged to be trusted.

  Finally, Stefan stormed into the room, his satchel banging against the doors and clattering to the floor as he arrived at his desk. He was looking fatter than usual, and his shrapnel limp was stronger today, but he had a pink, lively glow above his sparse beard. “There you are,” he said, out of breath.

  We shook hands, a little formally.

  “You get my message?”

  “Magda wrote it down.”

  “Good, good.” He rubbed a hand through his whiskers. He seemed to be deciding something. “What are we waiting for?” He got his satchel again, and I followed him out of the office.

  7

  I’d known Stefan since childhood. When you know someone that long, the actual circumstances of your introduction disappears. We went to school together, got into trouble together, and lusted after the same girls together. It was a joke, around the time of my marriage, that he’d never forgiven me for seducing Magda, because we’d both stared at her from across the schoolhouse, gauging our prospects. But by the wedding we weren’t boys anymore. It was 1939 and we were preparing to meet the Germans, who had crossed over from Czechoslovakia and were ready to make quick work of us. Stefan was wounded that first week by a mine and sent back home. I survived the whole month and a half of useless fighting, all the way to the defeat in May. But by the time I returned home to Magda, and to the news that my parents had died when an errant bomb fell on their house, I was sick and mentally worthless. I had to begin anew.

  I wrote about my condition in the novel, a few sentences about how the act of killing Fascists seemed to take away my humanity, and when the war was over I thought
it would never return-I was surprised that those lines made it past the Culture Ministry editors. But the humanity did return, months after the war, with Stefan’s help. He had become a police officer in the occupied Capital, and he continually came out to visit us at Teodor’s house, trying to save me from my self-pity with the offer of a job. It took a lot of prodding, but by 1940 I accepted it, and two years later Agnes was born. Two years after that, I was best man at Stefan’s marriage to Daria Vidra, the first girl who’d ever slept with him. But by the end of the decade they had split up. He’d been alone ever since.

  In the car, he adjusted the mirror and went over the details. On Friday morning, a neighbor had smelled gas around the victim’s apartment door and informed the building supervisor, who, when he unlocked the door, was almost knocked unconscious by the fumes. But he made it inside and turned off the stove by reaching over the body of the deceased. “His name’s Josef Maneck.”

  “So it’s a suicide?”

  Stefan leaned into a sharp swerve around a trio of broom-sellers. “That’s the easy answer, but I’m not sure. He’d been beaten up pretty badly.”

  “Any word on that?”

  He stopped behind a cart overflowing with yellow squash. The farmer tapped his stick on the tired mare’s rump. “The supervisor could only say that the victim was a drunk. I got the name of his bar.”

  “Nothing in the apartment?”

  “I went through it once, but didn’t find anything.”

  “And the neighbors?”

  “Heard nothing, saw nothing. The usual.”

  We were in the last hot days of September, and everyone seemed to know this. Women wore uncovered heads and those tight, unignorable skirts that had become fashionable that summer; the men went without jackets. It was as if they were taking this final chance to soak up the sun. I saw a few familiar faces in the bookstore displays, then wondered how Agnes was doing at school. “What now?”

  “Let’s hear from the coroner,” he said, “then visit his watering hole.”

  He took a few more turns, scratched at his beard, and asked how the writing was coming. I told him the writing wasn’t coming along at all. He didn’t seem fazed. “So did the countryside do its magic for you and Magda?”

  I shook my head. “I heard about Leonek’s mother.”

  “Heart attack.” He turned into the Unity Medical Complex parking lot. “Happens every day, and she was old enough.” His eyes roamed the cars for a spot. “Leonek’s fallen apart, though. Remember when Sergei was killed?”

  1946: Leonek’s longtime partner, with a bullet in the back of his head down by the Tisa.

  “Same as he was then,” Stefan said. “He looks like hell, he doesn’t come into work half the time, and he can’t even do the job when he does.” He put on the parking brake, turned off the engine, and looked at me. “That man wears his grief on his sleeve. It’s not pretty.”

  He said this with more scorn than I would have expected. In the last years-since his divorce and the more recent death of his own mother-he’d been losing his ability to empathize with misery. I’d noticed this often and once made the mistake of mentioning it to Magda. Her answer: And you can?

  In the basement morgue, the new coroner set aside his newspaper. “Markus Feder,” he announced as he shook our hands with his rubber-gloved one. Yuldashev, the previous coroner, had moved back home to Tashkent in July. He’d done it in a hurry, without any announcement, and they replaced him with this redheaded child who delicately pulled back a white sheet covering the body of Josef Maneck.

  Fifty-one, very thin, flesh loose over his limbs. There were black welts on his face, around his cheeks and jaw, and his skin was white except where the sun had browned his head and hands. His ears, lips, and the fingernails on his clenched hands were blue. Markus Feder repositioned the head for us to see clearly. “I cleaned the froth and blood off the lips, and we had to change his drawers because of the defecation. I also pushed the tongue back in to get a look inside the mouth. See here,” he said, and pulled open an eyelid. Around the cornea was a field of burst capillaries. “It was the gas, all right. Suicide.”

  “And what about these bruises?” I waved a hand at the face.

  Markus Feder grimaced. “Somebody hit him, sure, but that was hours before he died.”

  “I wonder who,” said Stefan.

  “That, Comrade Inspectors, is your job.” He covered the dead man with the sheet.

  8

  It had no name. Before the war, it had been named after the owner, but he had been shipped off somewhere when his bar was nationalized. Now, it was only CAFE-BAR and, below the sign, on a small white placard, #103. It was the kind of dingy place I would lurk in when I came back from the Front. In these places maimed veterans grumbled into their shot glasses and made menacing noises at anyone who looked whole. For the price of a drink you could learn their stories or see their scars. I had no scars to show but my gaunt body, though I grumbled too.

  Stefan wrinkled his nose. There were a couple men in the back corner, hunched in the darkness over their tables, and we could smell them from the door. The bartender looked at us through round glasses, and said, “What, then?”

  “Not much of place you’re running here,” said Stefan.

  “If you’ve come to complain-”

  “We’ve come to ask questions.” Stefan unfolded his green certificate to display the Militia hawk.

  I stepped up to the bar. “One of your customers.”

  The man flinched, just slightly. My size does that to people sometimes.

  “Josef Maneck,” said Stefan. He climbed up on a stool and settled in for a long talk.

  Cafe-bar #103’s portrait of Mihai, suspiciously sandwiched between vodka bottles, was blackened by years of smoke. The bartender squeezed a dirty rag, and a few drops fell on the counter. Then he set it down and soaked them up. He looked at me. “Don’t know any Josef Maneck.”

  “Sure you do,” said Stefan. “About my height. But thin, very thin. A drunk.”

  “Oh,” said the bartender, smiling, still looking only at me. “A drunk. That guy.”

  “This drunk’s dead,” I told him.

  His smile went away, and he stepped back, holding the rag in both hands. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Josef Maneck,” said Stefan.

  The bartender took off his glasses. He put them back on. “Maybe.” When I leaned against the bar, he finally looked at Stefan. “Maybe I know him. Did he have a way of blinking? You know.” He blinked a few times to demonstrate.

  “When we saw him his eyes were shut,” said Stefan.

  He looked at me again, as if I’d confirm it. Then he peered past us at the dark corner. “Hey, Martin! Martin!”

  One of the two figures shifted a little, the head rose, then swung slowly toward us.

  “Martin, is your friend dead? The one with the blink.”

  I could just make out his features in the darkness-pink eyelids, wide mouth, high cheekbones. His face sat still a moment, then his lips parted. “Josef?” His voice was like gravel in a ditch.

  “That’s the one, Martin,” said Stefan. He walked over. The second drunk, deeper in the blackness, didn’t budge. “Did you know he’s dead?”

  “Josef?” Martin repeated.

  I kept an eye on the bartender.

  “Come on, Martin.” Stefan stood over him now, his wide gut level with the man’s face. “Why don’t you tell us about your friend.”

  “He was crazy,” the bartender whispered.

  I turned to him. “How’s that?”

  “That man was trouble.” He picked up his rag again. “Started fights all the time. Isn’t that right, Martin?”

  Martin, by Stefan’s belly, closed his pink eyes and considered it.

  “Did he start fights, Martin?” asked Stefan. “Is that what your friend did?”

  There were pumpkinseeds in a dish on the counter, and I collected some in my hand. “Was he a good fighter?” I aske
d the bartender. “Did he win his fights?”

  “That nut?” He shook his head. “Never. He was crazy. He’d start a fight, then get brutalized. Every time.”

  Stefan’s voice: “What do you say, Martin? Could you have beaten him up?”

  “He was a nut, all right.” The bartender adjusted his glasses and looked at me. “So how’d he die?”

  “Come on, Martin. It’s your friend we’re talking about! Give us some help.”

  I chewed on a pumpkinseed, but it was soggy, so I spit it out in my hand and dumped it back into the dish. I had heard enough, and the familiarity of this place disturbed me. It was all so obvious; there was no reason to be here. Josef Maneck was a drunk who had reached the end of his tether. He got into a fight and lost, like every other time. He stumbled back to his apartment and, faced with the reality of where his life had brought him, decided to finally end it. He turned on the gas and sat on the kitchen floor. I had seen enough of his kind to know it was the inevitable end.

  Stefan was squatting beside the drunk, a hand on his frayed jacket, shaking to keep him awake. “Come on, Martin. You can do it. Tell me about your friend.”

  I scratched a mosquito bite on the back of my hand.

  “Martin, tell me, did you kill your friend? Is that what happened? You can tell old Stefan.”

  “I’ll be in the car,” I said, but didn’t know if he heard me. As I left, the bartender washed out the dish where I’d dumped my chewed seed.

  9

  He was in there a while longer, but on the drive back only said that there wasn’t anything to be learned from an alcoholic like that. We were in agreement.

  Leonek had finally arrived at the station. He and Emil and Chief Moska were over by Brano’s desk. That in itself was strange; no one spent time with Brano Sev. But through them we saw a tall man with a thin mustache leaning back against the desk, his long legs crossed at the ankle. His top half was animated, arms moving around in his well-tailored jacket, smiling, speaking in heavy, grinding syllables. He had a horrendous Russian accent.