Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

  Karel, who’d been nursing his scotch a long time in silence, suddenly looked up. “Gavra.”

  “Yeah?” He was standing by the window again, looking out into darkness.

  “I forgot because of all the commotion—someone called for you. At home. Around seven or so.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Brano Something.”

  The rest of us woke up and turned to stare at him. Gavra said, “Brano Sev?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.” He paused, licking his lips. “Do all of you know this guy?”

  Our surprise was interrupted by the radio. A deep, heavy voice, older than the voices we’d heard so far, identified himself as General Igor Stapenov of the People’s Army, in charge of the Capital and its surrounding counties. “I’ve come here to tell you that my men are with you. We are with the Revolution. Down with the tyrant, and up with the people!” Then, with just as much urgency: “We are still looking for Tomiak and Ilona Pankov. We’ve issued a military arrest warrant, and the charge is crimes against humanity. If you have any information at all, please call…”

  Katja laughed out loud. I didn’t know what to do.

  It was midnight. The telephone rang.

  22 DECEMBER 1989

  FRIDAY

  •

  THIRTEEN

  •

  Gavra was at the phone before I could get to my feet. “Hello?” he said hopefully, then dropped an octave. “Oh, yes. Moment.” He leaned out of the kitchen and said, “It’s for you, Emil.”

  Ferenc greeted me with “Was that Gavra Noukas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus, Emil. All this going on and you’ve got a Ministry agent in your house?”

  Up to that point I hadn’t considered how it looked having Gavra around, or whether or not he was a risk. Ferenc had never met Gavra, but over the years, the young Ministry man had become just one more associate I trusted to assist me in my work—the only caveat was that I knew to hide things from him that his job might compel him to report. I treated Bernard the same way. “Don’t worry about him,” I said. “Did you hear about Lena?”

  “What about Lena?”

  So I told him. I spoke with the same distant, unsettling calm he had first used to tell me about the shootings in Sarospatak. When I finished, he was silent a moment. “I don’t know what to say,” he managed. “I loved that woman.”

  “Not just you.”

  “Who the hell did it?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you find Tatiana Zoltenko?”

  That seemed to confuse him. “Well… yes. I mean, we found her, but she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t look suspicious, though,” said Ferenc. “She ordered her unit to fire on some demonstrators, and one of the soldiers turned around and shot her. A Ministry corporal. The guy’s a hero now.”

  I almost collapsed.

  I never did find out if the hero-soldier—who I later learned was a Ukrainian named Dubravko Ilinski—shot Colonel Tatiana Zoltenko out of moral conviction, or because he’d been paid to do it. Either way, the list of endangered senior citizens had shrunk to only three: myself, Brano Sev, and Jerzy Michalec. As of seven o’clock the previous evening, at least, Brano was still alive. Alive enough to call Gavra. I had no idea about Michalec.

  To fill the awkward silence, Ferenc told me that Sarospatak was nearly theirs. The army in that region had not yet turned to their side, but it wasn’t confronting them either. The soldiers had retreated to their barracks on the northern side of town. Twice, he used the phrase “the Soft Revolution,” and that marked my introduction to the term—but, like the mysterious quote on the memorial to Tisavar, I’d never figure out what it meant. “Fantastic,” I told him.

  He could hear my lack of enthusiasm. “I don’t expect you to feel it now, Emil, but it really is.”

  By the time I hung up, Ferenc had told me five times how sorry he was about Lena, but his pity left me cold. When I came out, Gavra was slipping into his coat, which I noticed was covered with dry red paint.

  “He thinks he’s going to Yalta,” said Katja.

  “No,” I said.

  Gavra wasn’t waiting for my permission. He took his Makarov from his pocket and checked the cartridge. “It’s the only place I can get an international phone line.”

  Despite being a little drunk, I could register how dangerous this was. “Weren’t you listening to the radio? The army’s out there. They see you going into Yalta Boulevard, they’ll check your papers. They’ll lock you up, or kill you.”

  “I have to get in touch with Brano. I’ll lay odds he’s the one who sent me to the States.”

  “I thought you were in Yugoslavia.”

  “I lied, Emil. It’s my job.”

  Karel crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s not your job anymore.”

  “Then I’m going with you,” I said. I wasn’t sober enough to care about my own safety. Nor did I care about my fatigue. It was late, and I’d been squeezed out like a cleaning lady’s sponge. A fresh headache flickered around the edges of my brain.

  “No, you’re not,” said Gavra.

  “Don’t argue.”

  Katja broke our stalemate: “What about the files?”

  We looked at her. I said, “What files?”

  She looked at me as if only now, after all these years, had she recognized what a stupid man I was. “It’s a straight shot up Friendship to the Eleventh District. No one’s watching the Central Archives. We get in there, we can find out who authorized Rosta Gorski to take out those files. Then we follow up on it.”

  As usual, she made the most sense.

  Aron wanted to come with us, but Katja took him aside and whispered a convincing argument against it. By the time she finished, his face had reddened; I wondered what she’d said. Karel, almost unconscious now from the half bottle of scotch he’d put away, didn’t ask to come. He only grabbed Gavra’s sleeve in a particularly affectionate gesture and told him to come back soon. Gavra promised he would, then gave Karel the keys to his Citroen. “Just for emergencies. Don’t leave the house. Okay?”

  We took the stairwell, and at the second floor a door opened. My elderly neighbor, Zorica, peered out. Her husband had been a major during the Patriotic War, surviving with a chest full of medals and scars to match, but ever since his death in 1982 she’d lived alone off his pension. She often brought us food, because it was no secret that Lena was a lousy cook. Zorica clutched her robe shut at the neck and whispered, “Emil!”

  I stopped by her door as the others went on.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just stay inside.”

  “You must know. You’re a Militia chief.”

  “Pankov is gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone7.”

  I didn’t really know what it meant either. A president takes a helicopter from the Central Committee Building and flies away. That only means he’s left a building, not that he’s gone for good. “I’m sorry, Zoka, I don’t have time. Listen to the radio. It’s all there.” I didn’t want to tell her about Lena; that could wait.

  The three of us piled inside the Militia Karpat Katja had used to drive me home. I felt claustrophobic and hot in the passenger seat, wishing I’d brought along my Captopril. It was nearly one, and this section of Friendship Street was vacant, but we could still hear voices from the south, in the direction of Victory Square. We drove north, the street lit only by the car’s headlights.

  From the Second District, we crossed into the Sixth, where I lived just after the war with my grandparents. Back then, it had been a prestigious neighborhood, where Friends of the Liberators were given Habsburg houses cut up to accommodate many families. My grandfather, a communist since before the Russian Revolution, had been given a place with a view of Heroes’Square. In 1980, though, Pankov’s massive reconstruction of the Capital started in this district, and my old home, as well as the whole block and even He
roes’Square itself, was plowed into the ground and replaced with more socialist-friendly concrete architecture.

  We came across marauding groups of drunks who seemed as confused about the situation as Zorica. Unlike Zorica, they weren’t kept indoors by their confusion. Some climbed through the broken window of a grocery store, stealing bags of flour and canned goods. Another group of five men tried to wave us down with dim flashlights—our blue-tinted license plates gave us away as government—and Katja swerved to get around them.

  “Aron was right,” she said.

  “What did Aron say?” asked Gavra from the back.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  Once we reached the Eleventh, Friendship was quiet again, and we stopped at the high stone wall surrounding the Central Archives. Through the bars of the gate we saw a small, unlit pillbox with a guard inside. Our headlights woke him, and he came out squinting. I got out of the car and approached.

  “I need you to open up,” I said.

  He shook his head. “We’re closed.”

  I showed my Militia certificate, but that didn’t change his mind. He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “I’m under orders, Comrade Chief. That’s all there is to it.”

  Gravel crunched behind me as Gavra walked up. “Any trouble?”

  “Maybe. This man says we can’t come in.”

  “Oh?” Without hesitation, Gavra took out his Makarov. “Comrade Guard, please open up.”

  The guard also had a sidearm, a bulky Czech CZ-75 in a leather holster, and he considered it.

  “Don’t,” said Gavra. “I don’t want to kill you, but it’s really been a very long day.”

  Heinrich—the name he gave us when we asked—let us in, and we brought him with us across the parking lot to the high yellow-brick cube that held the archives of the People’s Militia. I’d been here often over the decades, spending endless hours among stacks of yellowed files, tracking down the identities of suspects and victims.

  They’d bought a roomful of IBM mainframes last year and were going through the agonizing process of shifting the records to floppy disks, but with four floors of files and a socialist work ethic, this would take forever.

  Katja did a trick on the front-door lock that impressed both me and Gavra, and even Heinrich—he let out a disappointed gasp. We passed through the entryway, where a wall of punch cards was positioned beside a time clock, and quickly found the central distribution office, with small file-card drawers stacked to the ceiling.

  Once we got going, I realized this wasn’t going to be quick. None of us—not even Heinrich—understood the filing system, so for the first hour it was a matter of opening drawers at random, examining the cards inside, and then trying to infer what that set of cabinets was for. In each set, we looked for “Gorski,” and finally found a typewritten card:

  GORSKI, ROSTA

  1957-

  QPC-203-2948B

  “What the hell does that mean?” said Gavra.

  I looked at the guard and was pleased to see he was no longer scared. “Heinrich?”

  He shrugged. “Higher mathematics.”

  I liked Heinrich.

  After another hour, on the third floor we found a storage unit numbered 203, which contained an aisle marked c in section QP. Gavra held on to Heinrich as Katja and I walked the aisle, which was long enough so that the far end appeared very small. Toward the end, Katja said, “There,” and pointed. Eight feet up was a file drawer marked 2948. She found a stepladder on wheels, and I climbed it. There was nothing between the files for GORJAN and GORSKOV. In the front of the drawer I found a single-page notice that referred the researcher to the overflow file, 2948B, in the basement.

  By three thirty, we found it. Rosta Gorski’s file was only a few pages long, mentioning Gorski’s mother—Irina Gorski, widow—his home in Stryy, and his profession: farmer. There were two Militia sheets on him, dealing with small-time crimes. He’d stolen someone’s cow in 1971 when he was fourteen and was jailed for a night. When he was nineteen, in 1976, he’d started a brawl in a local bar and spent another night in jail, charged with hooliganism and drunkenness.

  The last sheet was a replica of the first one, dated February 1980. It restated his name, mother (deceased as of 1979), place of birth, and profession, but with a single additional line:

  Stryy Militia reported the disappearance of

  R. Gorski on 12 September 1979. As of 28.2.80

  he has not been located.

  “Nothing here about the files,” I said, folding up the papers and slipping them into my coat pocket.

  It wasn’t until after five in the morning, an hour before the first archive clerks would arrive for work, that we finally tracked down what we were interested in. By then, I was exhausted, feeling the heat of overpressured blood thumping under my skin, but I kept going. It wasn’t a measure of my loyalty to the job; Yuri Kolev hardly even entered my mind. It was a measure of the guilt slowly growing inside me. The explosive charges that killed Lena had been meant for me. I—in part because I’d never had her car fixed—was responsible for her murder. I couldn’t take that burden. I needed to know, without a doubt, the identity of the responsible person, so I wouldn’t have to carry that guilt alone.

  That’s how I was able to stay awake.

  We again began in the central distribution office but realized after a long time that we were in the wrong place. Behind the office was another door leading to a table with two computer terminals, two pencils, and a stack of notepaper cut from used printed sheets. On the shelf were folders of perforated computer printouts that listed file numbers followed by codes. It took a while, but we found Gorski’s QPC-203-2948B, which was followed by TR000293X.

  By then, Katja had warmed up one of the computers and started a file-keeping program called Nutshell. She typed in the code and waited. After half a minute of hums and clicks, it gave us two names:

  1. ROMEK, NIKOLAI

  2. KOLEV, YURI

  I was amazed; it was the first time I’d witnessed the speed of computers.

  “These,” she said, “are the two people who’ve signed out Gorski’s file.”

  Gavra made a noise. “This is why they killed Kolev. They saw he’d been looking into Gorski’s file. That made him a threat.”

  I touched Katja’s shoulder. “Can you find out what other files Romek signed out?”

  She didn’t know, but she tried typing “1,” followed by ENTER. After a minute and a half, we were presented with this list:

  1. GORSKI, ROSTA

  2. 10-3283-48 (RUTH)

  3. VOLAN, DUSAN (RUTH)

  4. SEV, BRANO (AUTH)

  5. BROD, EMIL (AUTH)

  6. PUT0N5KI, LEBED (AUTH)

  7. MICHALEC, JERZY (AUTH)

  8. ZOLTENKO, TATIANA (AUTH)

  9. PREV TEAR5

  “There’s your answer,” said Katja, leaning back in her chair. “Romek authorized the release of all the files.”

  “Type four,” I said.

  She did, and a few lines of letter-and-number codes came back. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but Katja was able to decipher the abbreviations. “Brano’s file is in the building,” she said.

  “No. None of the files were returned.”

  She pressed a finger to the screen. “Right here. Taken out December eighth. Brought back yesterday, at six in the evening.” She turned to Heinrich; we’d sat him down at the other terminal. “What time does the building close?”

  He shrugged. “Open and close at six.”

  “Then it hasn’t been filed yet,” said Katja.

  It was nearly six o’clock by now, so Gavra waited by the front door, watching for arrivals, while Katja and I went to the deposit room, a simple counter with steel shelves covering the wall, filled with returned files. We finally had some luck, because the clerk, eager to get home, had simply placed the returned stack of six personnel files—the 1948 case file hadn’t been returned—behind the counter for the morning cler
k to deal with.

  We left Heinrich at his pillbox. I guessed he would stay quiet about his night’s adventure rather than be grilled on why he hadn’t shot any of us. We hadn’t destroyed anything, and six missing files was probably their daily quota.

  We kept stifling yawns, but all three of us knew it wasn’t yet time for sleep. When your country is falling apart, time changes. Everything becomes equally urgent. Adrenaline kicks in, followed by something else, some undiscovered substance the body produces during national emergencies. Unlike Katja and Gavra, though, I was no longer young. My heart could only take so much of this before it would just give up.

  I didn’t have to tell them where our next stop was, because Nikolai Romek’s house was the only place left to go. Gavra, who’d been at the colonel’s for a Ministry party last year, gave Katja directions.

  Farther up Friendship, we saw a dead body outside an electrical shop. The woman, lying facedown, was alone on that vacant block. Katja slowed as we passed the blood-spattered body—she’d been shot in the back—then sped up, turning onto another street. None of us felt like talking about it, or even calling it in.

  On Belgrade Avenue, the tower-lined road that would get us out of town, we saw an army roadblock at the intersection with Tisa Street. A jeep and a truck. Seven soldiers checking cars from each direction, Kalashnikovs strung over their shoulders.

  “Can we make it?” said Gavra, leaning forward to see better.

  “Pull over,” I told Katja.

  She did so, and we squinted through the dim morning light. They weren’t bothering with the vehicles, instead asking each passenger for his papers. Katja and I would be fine, but I wasn’t sure about Gavra. I turned to him. “Let me see your documents.”

  All he had on him were his passport, his Ministry certificate, and a driver’s license—but that, too, identified him as a Ministry employee. He’d left his Viktor Lukacs papers in his paint-smeared car.