Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

  The pillow behind my back had grown soft, and I was slipping deeper into it. I had to rub my eyes raw to keep from passing out as I squinted at Michalec’s file. He was born in Szekszard, Austro-Hungary, 12 January 1909. By now, if he was still alive, he’d be eighty. In 1933, he married Agnes Holler in Vienna, and ten years later Agnes died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The rest of the story—his history with the Gestapo—was not mentioned.

  I found a photograph from a 1979 visa mug shot. Years in a socialist labor camp had put weight into his haggard eyes, and he’d lost the extra fat that living well after the war had given him. Remarkably, he was smiling in the picture. I wondered why.

  I set the picture aside and found this:

  August 1949: Sentenced to death for counterrevolutionary activity. Charges included collaboration with anticommunist forces with ties to American and British imperialists, as well as sabotage of Soviet military communication lines.

  I finally closed my eyes, feeling sick. I’d been seeing it all wrong, and here was the evidence. Still, I had to go through more pages, through the rest of Jerzy Michalec’s history, to be sure.

  The file told me that a month after his verdict, Michalec’s punishment was commuted to life in a labor camp. He served it until 1956, when our former leader, Mihai, bowing to the new wave of tolerance emanating from Khrushchev’s Moscow, initiated a blanket amnesty for political prisoners. Jerzy was among those freed.

  I hadn’t known this before, but it made sense, and was probably true. A lot of marginal, embittered people were suddenly put on the streets that year, making our jobs that much more difficult. It also marked the beginning of Ferenc Kolyeszar’s worst year.

  Another whiter, and thus fabricated, sheet said Michalec was ar-rested by the First District Militia in 1968 for passing out leaflets supporting the Prague Spring, then again in 1976 for running a printing press from his basement. The arresting officer in 1968 was Lieutenant Libarid Terzian. In 1976, Captain Imre Papp.

  Both of whom were now dead and couldn’t dispute the lie.

  I shut my eyes again, trying to control my exhausted emotions. They had doctored the memory of my militiamen to protect a man who was once called the Butcher. Because that’s what Michalec was. The name had been used as a compliment, because of a single after-noon in the crumbling ruin of Berlin in 1945, when he assembled twenty-three Hitlerjugend boys under his command and killed them all. He presented their corpses to the Red Army and was cheered. Only a butcher could do that.

  On the next page I found something even more striking. In June 1979, Jerzy Michalec applied for, and received, permission to emigrate to France. He left in September of that year.

  September 1979.

  I put the file aside and, in my underwear, stumbled through to the living room, where Karel was dozing in front of the muted television, the remote in his hand. I wondered where he had found that. On the screen, soldiers were crouched behind bullet-damaged cars, shooting up into the sky. I paused. It was Yalta Boulevard, and they were shooting up at the Hotel Metropol.

  But I ignored it and went to my coat on the rack, searching the pockets until I found the few crumpled sheets from Rosta Gorski’s file. As I walked back to the bedroom, I checked them. Yes. September 1979 was the same month that Rosta Gorski, according to the Stryy Militia, “disappeared.”

  By the time I made it to bed again, I knew it was true. When it came to Jerzy Michalec, coincidences did not exist. Michalec and Gorski moved to France together.

  This, finally, was something.

  But it only led to more questions. Why did they leave together? And how did Michalec, a labor-camp veteran, get permission to emigrate? For that, you had to go directly to Yalta 36 and suffer the rigors of an entire life study before you could even arrange your first interview. The Ministry only let you leave if it wanted you to leave.

  I laid the files on the floor and slipped deeper under the covers, trying to silence my aching head. I was too tired to muddle through it all.

  Despite my efforts I couldn’t sleep. I was finally able to push Jerzy Michalec out of my head, but his place was taken, instantaneously, by Lena.

  Ever since the guests started filling my home, I’d set her aside because it was the only way to deal with what had to be done. I’ve set aside grief many times in my life, only to come back and face it later. All those tragedies were nothing next to this. The day before, I’d felt as if all my organs had been stolen from my body, but now they were back, all of them, bloated and painful.

  I kept seeing her face, and the extra lines she had from a lifetime of hard drinking and smoking. That was my Lena. She’d been beautiful when she was young, but when she lost that beauty she never let go of the toughness that had always given her beauty power. Even during our worst moments—and we had so many—that underlying fierceness bound me to her.

  I was always just myself, Emil Brod, a normal man. Average in so many ways. But Lena was always a little more of everything. Funnier, more social, more destructive, and more loving than I could ever hope to be. That made her more tangible than anyone I’d known in my life, all the way through to that final moment when she was cursing at the key she’d stuck into the Mercedes.

  That did it. That’s what broke me. For the next hour, until the exhaustion finally did me in, all I could do was cry, and my ears were

  filled with that horrible electric hum. Somewhere in the middle of my fit I felt the real power of my discovery. Jerzy Michalec wasn’t just another senior citizen who’d been targeted for murder. He was rewriting history and killing off those who knew otherwise.

  I didn’t know why, and I wasn’t sure how. All I knew was that he’d finished what he’d tried to do forty years ago—he’d killed me. By killing Lena, he’d succeeded more effectively than if he’d broken each of my bones and then put a bullet in my brain.

  23 DECEMBER 1989

  SATURDAY

  •

  SIXTEEN

  •

  Gavra woke in darkness, cold and disoriented. His head was splitting, his mouth parched. He was on a cool floor, wood by the feel of it, and the wall behind him was rough concrete. He started to stand, but the dizziness hit, and he had to settle down again.

  About five feet ahead, he could make out a line of light from the bottom of a door. When his ears cleared up, he heard heavy footsteps on the other side of the door. Dozens of them, moving purposefully back and forth, and quiet murmurs.

  He rubbed his eyes and forehead, but nothing could get rid of the ache. He remembered the hotel room, and the sudden, nauseating confusion when he realized the old American couple were not what they had seemed. And Romek. What connected the colonel to these old people? Then Balint, the Ministry heavy whose loyalty to Yuri Kolev was a joke. There hadn’t been much of a struggle; Balint’s brute strength easily outmatched Gavra’s. The bag was soon over his head, and then he felt a small, sharp pinch against his arm. That must have been it, an injection. Because soon afterward he blacked out.

  And woke here.

  He was scared, but not as scared as he had been in America when he found Lebed Putonski’s corpse in his motel room. He knew he would be dead if Romek wanted him dead. Instead, the colonel had risked exposure transporting Gavra from the Hotel Metropol to here, wherever here was.

  I’m going to make you famous, he’d said.

  What did that mean?

  It was hard to think with the headache and cottonmouth. What he now knew for certain was that Romek’s game was tied to the revolt tearing through the country. Brano, too, was connected—why else would he, after three years’absence, have suddenly called?

  Gavra also knew that he was here because of his own stupidity. He’d forgotten Brano’s rule: Act, but never react. Once you start re-acting, you’ve already lost.

  To try to regain control, he went through the facts. Romek had been trying to kill off everyone associated with the 1948 criminal case against Jerzy Michalec. Gavra didn’t yet realize that Mich
alec was also behind the killings; he still believed Michalec was a potential victim.

  By that point, he took as truth his assumption that the Americans were part of the plan. They had sent Frank Jones to kill Putonski but hadn’t given the assassin orders to kill Gavra as well. Perhaps his job had been to tail Gavra and find out how much he’d learned before killing him. That was something he would never know.

  Despite the risks, Gavra was angry he hadn’t tried to get to the Ministry. One phone call, and Brano Sev might have been able to clear everything up with a few words.

  But there was an elephant in the room he was missing. He’d been working along the edges of Romek’s operation. He didn’t have enough information to even guess what was at its center.

  He looked up at the sound of a key fitting into the door and tried again to get up. He pressed against the wall, sliding into a standing position, fighting the nausea as the door opened and light poured in. It blinded him briefly, and he squinted. A tall, backlit form stood in the doorway. Behind it, soldiers moved in a nondescript concrete corridor. He could now see that he’d been sitting inside a small closet with shelves filled with hundreds of rolls of toilet paper.

  “Gavra Noukas,” said the form. There was enough light for him to see it was an old man, very old, with just a few wispy strands of white crowning his head.

  “Who’re you?”

  The man smiled—he was missing several teeth. “Please,” he said, offering a hand. “Come with me.”

  Gavra ignored the hand as he stepped forward, using the wall for support. Once he reached the corridor, the old man, looking strange among these soldiers in his tailored gray suit and red tie, stepped back and let Balint—now in an infantry uniform with a sidearm— help Gavra walk.

  “Your head should clear soon,” said the old man.

  It was an army barracks. One steel door said ARMAMENTS and another said MESS. Gavra didn’t ask anything, because there was no point. This old man had come to get him for a reason, and Balint, holding him by the waist, was guiding him slowly to that reason.

  They ended up at a door marked OPERATIONS V. Through its glass, he could see a long conference table. The old man led them in. The room was windowless. Balint gently set Gavra down onto a metal folding chair, then saluted the old man and left them alone, closing the door to wait outside.

  On the far wall was a blackboard that hadn’t been cleaned well, and in the center of the table was a large glass ashtray, also dirty, beside a pitcher of water and two glasses. The old man filled one and slid it close to Gavra. “Here. Drink. You need to hydrate.”

  Gavra stared at the glass but didn’t move.

  The old man poured a second glass and drank half of it. “See? No ill effects. Drink. You’ll feel better.”

  As Gavra drank the whole glass, the man pulled the ashtray to the edge of the table and lit a scented French cigarette. “You want to know who I am, yes?”

  Gavra set down the empty glass and watched the old man refill it. He didn’t want to admit to curiosity, but he had no other options. “Yes.”

  “I’m Jerzy Michalec.”

  That was something Gavra didn’t see coming, and it told him what I’d figured out in the misery of my empty bed. He looked again at the old man’s fine suit and the self-conscious way he brought the cigarette to his dry lips. Unlike most people those days, he was well shaven, and Gavra noticed a scar—faint but still visible—along his jawline. “And?” said Gavra.

  Jerzy Michalec offered a cigarette, but Gavra shook his head. The old man sat a couple of seats down and scraped ash into the ashtray. “You’re Brano Sev’s protege, yes?”

  Gavra didn’t answer.

  “No need to be shy about it. In fact, you should be proud. Not everyone can claim something so prestigious.”

  He spoke as if they were both in an elegant drawing room, enjoying glasses of port by a fire. It annoyed Gavra.

  “That’s why you’re here, you know.”

  “Because of Brano?”

  Michalec nodded slowly. “It’s integral to everything.”

  Gavra rubbed his head. “I don’t know where Brano is, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “I gave up on trying to find him long ago,” said Michalec. “But whether or not I find him, it makes no difference.”

  “Would you mind making sense?”

  “We have to work you into this, Gavra. That’s just how it has to be. Tell you everything, and your poor head won’t be able to take it. We’ve still got time.”

  “Have a little faith in me. You’d be surprised how much I can take.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Michalec said affectionately, then winked.

  Gavra nearly threw himself across the table in order to rip out the man’s eyes. Instead, he muttered, “Tell me where I am.”

  The old man was suddenly serious. “You’re in the Sixteenth District Third Infantry barracks. No one knows you’re here. If we want, we can get rid of you, and no one will ask us a single question. Remember that.”

  Gavra reached for his glass and started drinking again. Michalec was right; his head was clearing enough for him to start to make connections. “You and Nikolai Romek have been killing people who know about your Nazi associations. You’re erasing your past. Even in America. Why?”

  Michalec set his cigarette hand against the table and scratched his scar. “Mr. Lukacs.”

  Gavra nodded.

  Michalec put out his cigarette. There was a studied look on his weathered face, but then the smile returned. “It’s funny. Nikolai thought you were in Yugoslavia; so did I. Kolev turned out more wily than we thought. Then the Atkinses ended up on a plane with you. Rather beautiful coincidence, don’t you think?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever you think you know about my past is beside the point. The only matter of importance is that you are here and that your country requires your help.”

  A series of rebuttals came to Gavra. What do you know about my country? You have no idea what my country needs. I’d help my country best by killing you. They were all childish taunts, so he remained silent for a moment, then said, “What kind of help?”

  Michalec stood. “Can you walk now?”

  With Balint now following them, Gavra and Michalec continued down the corridor, passing soldiers Gavra could now see were all officers. Their faces were flushed, as if they were scared. Then he saw Nikolai Romek, also fitted out in an army uniform, walking past,but the Ministry colonel was involved in reading papers and didn’t notice him.

  They turned down another corridor, which was lined with classrooms marked by numbers. Odd on the left, even on the right. They stopped at number 6, which was open, and through the doorway he saw chairs with attached desktops, the kind children used. They had once been arranged in perfect rows when recruits attended lessons but now were disordered. The desks were occupied by old people, about fifteen of them, some talking animatedly, others sitting quietly with their thoughts. Through a far window, he saw black tree branches and faint light—it was dawn.

  When Michalec stepped through the doorway, the conversation stopped abruptly and they all looked up. Among them sat Harold and Beth Atkins, both breaking into huge smiles. Harold came over, grabbed Gavra’s hand, and started pumping it. “You feeling all right? Better now?”

  “Don’t crowd him, Harry,” said Beth.

  Harold returned to his wife, and Michalec continued to the wide lecturer’s desk at the front of the room. On the large, dirty blackboard someone had written:

  AIMS

  END STREET FIGHTING

  UNITE FACTIONS

  CENTRAL CONTROL OF UTILITIES

  INSTALL BUREAUCRACY

  SECURE DEMOCRACY

  Balint urged Gavra forward until they also reached the desk at the front. Michalec said to the room, “Once again, I thank you all for traveling so far.” He patted his hands together to applaud their long journeys, and they briefly applauded themselves.

  One of the old men in the
back called, “Viva la revolucion!”

  The others laughed, and even Michalec smiled. But Gavra didn’t. He started to understand, and the understanding frightened him more than the confusion had.

  “I have to be brief,” Michalec said, then gestured toward Gavra. “You all know why this young man’s here. But he doesn’t know. Not yet. As we discussed before, we’re going to take this slowly. We’ve got…” He checked his watch. “Nearly twenty hours to bring our man to our way of thinking.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” said an elderly woman at the front. Her accent was strange; Gavra couldn’t place it.

  “We’ll deal with that when it comes. It won’t change our plans.”

  She nodded very seriously, as did a few others.

  “But I wouldn’t worry,” said Michalec. He winked at Gavra. “I have great faith in Mr. Noukas.”

  That provoked another round of applause and brought on the nausea again. What he understood was that he was standing among emigres who had returned home after decades away to assist the revolution. Unlike Gavra, and unlike me, they felt it was in their power to change a foul regime; they felt it was their duty. He should have been overcome by admiration for them, but he couldn’t manage it. There was something wrong here. Their euphoria felt like hysteria, and he knew that hysterical revolutions were the bloodiest.

  Then he considered the writing on the chalkboard. Practical reasons for whatever they were doing. There was nothing hysterical there—the list concerned the stabilization of the country. Rearranging the bureaucracy so that utilities would continue to work and people wouldn’t be killed in the street.