Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

  Michalec said, “I just wanted you good people to see him, and remember his face. His face is our face.”

  That last line revived Gavra’s panic. “No,” he said aloud.

  The crowd looked at him expectantly.

  “No,” he repeated, shaking his head. “I’m not any part of this.”

  “Give him time,” Michalec told them.

  Involuntarily, Gavra tried to run, but Balint was prepared for that. His big hands caught Gavra’s shoulders and pulled him sharply back. He stumbled but didn’t fall.

  Michalec said, “Now to our lessons,” and the people laughed.

  As he was guided back out to the corridor, some came to shake his hand again, and Gavra, bewildered, let them do it. Then the old man who had shouted Viva la revolucion raised two fingers to Gavra’s forehead and muttered a blessing in Spanish as he marked the cross on Gavra’s body.

  SEVENTEEN

  •

  Surprisingly for a man as old as myself, I slept for eighteen hours. I suppose it was my body’s attempt to fight back. Keep me knocked out so I would stop putting it through so much. It was a good try.

  I woke early on Saturday to Karel’s swarthy features hanging over me. Shocked, I pushed back, eyes wide. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He sighed heavily and stepped back. “Sorry.” He settled in a chair that Lena had bought in Bern, Switzerland. “Gavra’s still not back.”

  I closed my eyes. “Did you try the station?”

  “I called yesterday. Someone told me he’d left long ago and then told me to stay inside.”

  It didn’t sound good, but neither he nor I could do anything about it. I forced myself into a sitting position and rubbed my temples. “Can you make some coffee?”

  “Already did.”

  He left the bedroom without closing the door, so I hobbled over to shut it, tripping on the files scattered on the floor. Everything ached. Karel returned with a steaming cup of acorn brew and set it on the drawers, watching me pull on pants.

  “Well?” I said, frustrated.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Just get out of here, okay?”

  He shrugged but did as I asked.

  I drank the wretched coffee quickly, then went to brush my teeth. Karel was in front of the television again. On it, soldiers were stepping carefully through a destroyed room, lifting gold objects—vases, paperweights, a large golden frame around a sentimental painting of the First Family—and showing them to the camera.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “It’s the presidential palace. They got into it late last night. Just look. Food rationing for us, and they’ve got a whole room made out of gold. Bastards.”

  I couldn’t look. Seeing the luxury of the Pankov lifestyle made me sick, like everyone else in the country, but the sickness didn’t fill me with Karel’s self-righteousness.

  One of my most vivid memories is from just after the war, along St. George Boulevard, which would later be renamed Mihai and is now called something else: a stunned, topless woman in rags walking along the Tisa. She was covered in bruises, and her head had been shaved. Across her breasts, in red paint, her self-righteous abusers had written COLLABORATOR.

  I remembered her again as I brushed my teeth, staring into my own bloodshot eyes.

  I filled a second cup and joined Karel on the couch. Spread across the coffee table were pages from The Spark. “Where did you find this?”

  “Outside,” he said without taking his eyes from the screen, where a soldier held up a gold bowl and tiny gold spoon—the commentator said it was a caviar set. “There’s a stack of them on the sidewalk. The delivery guy must’ve gotten spooked and just left them.”

  I gathered the newspaper and refitted it together. I saw it was yesterday’s edition before seeing the front-page story. My throat closed up. Above a grainy photograph of a burning wreck, it said MILITIA CHIEF’S WIFE SLAIN BY PATAK TERRORISTS.

  I rushed to the toilet. I bent over and waited, gasping, my eyes dripping into the bowl. My intestines convulsed but produced nothing. I hadn’t eaten in a long time.

  The official lie behind my wife’s murder would turn out to be the front-page story of The Spark’s final edition.

  When I came out again, Karel twisted in the couch to watch me. “Hey. You all right?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Sit down.” He got up. “Let me cook up something.”

  I did as he commanded but couldn’t look at the paper again. I used the remote to learn that both national television channels were now in revolutionary hands. So it was over. Across the bottom of the screen was a phone number to call if you had any information on the whereabouts of the Pankovs.

  It was almost too much to grasp. A government that had taken a war to put into place and had survived for forty years had been de-stroyed in mere hours.

  A commentator reported on yesterday’s battle at the Hotel Metropol. Revolutionaries had tracked the snipers to the Metropol and informed General Stapenov, who sent a unit to protect the le-gions of foreign journalists camping inside. The gunfight that fol-lowed lasted four hours, ending only when the “terrorists” simply stopped shooting. Soldiers made it to the roof, which had been de-fended along the stairwells, and found that the terrorists had disap-peared.

  Cameras panned across the flat, empty roof, then the chaotic ground-floor lounge, where soldiers and journalists stood around examining the damage. A German man spoke slowly and purposefully in our language as he recounted his fear and his conviction that he was going to die. Then he smiled and pulled over a grinning young soldier. “But these man, he save my life!” He was followed by a Frenchwoman named Gisele Sully, who had an intense, dark stare and a better command of our language. She spoke rapidly, with hard consonants, saying that her own investigations made her think that the terrorists might not be who we thought they were. “They’ve yet to be captured, yes? But they’re everywhere, and when they shoot, everyone’s looking for them. But they disappear. They must be working in collusion with a nongovernmental group.”

  She looked as if she were going to continue, but the camera cut to the studio, where the young man who still needed a shave reported on continued terrorist activity in the First and Fifth districts. There was also rumored activity in the Third.

  Karel returned with toasted stale bread and a pile of Lena’s leftover pork and cabbage. I remembered throwing my serving in the trash and teasing her about her wifely duties. I tried to find the humor in it as I forked the bland stuff into my mouth but couldn’t.

  So I turned to Karel. “Who’s running things now?”

  “Things?”

  “The country. The government.”

  “The Galicia Revolutionary Committee.”

  “But who’s their figurehead?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  With each bite, Lena’s dish tasted better. It was filling that empty space in me and helping my head. I gathered the patience to explain it to him. “It does matter. What happens if the old communists claim they’re the heads of the revolution?”

  “Why would they? Everyone knows who they are.”

  Despite Karel’s simple ignorance, he triggered a thought. It wasn’t about facts. Politics never is. It was about rumors and opinions. Television broadcasts. Journalism.

  I ate the rest of the food quickly without tasting it, wiped my hands on my pants, and went to the phone. It was dead. Karel, putting the plate in the sink, said, “It’s been out since last night.”

  “Where are your keys?”

  “What?”

  “The keys to your car.”

  “It’s Gavra’s car. He said only in emergencies.” “This is an emergency.”

  I didn’t want Karel to come along, but he wouldn’t give me the keys otherwise, and he insisted on driving. “You think I like your apartment that much?” he said as I took a couple of Captopril and pocketed the bottle. “I’m going stir-crazy.”

>   Gavra’s Citroen was parked just around the corner. It would have been a beautiful car had the left side not been covered in smeared red paint and the letter M. “Who did that?” I asked.

  “Stupid drunks.”

  “What did it say?”

  He unlocked the door. “It said‘Ministry’”

  We got in, and he started it up. “Where to, Comrade Chief?”

  “To the Metropol.”

  He was a careful driver, slowing for each turn and stopping at all the proper places. The traffic lights were out or blinking yellow, but Karel still stopped at each empty intersection and looked both ways before driving on. It was driving me crazy. At Victory Square he leaned close to the wheel to see up the height of the Central Committee, which a banner called the Galicia Revolutionary Committee HQ. He pointed at the people loitering on the front steps with cigarettes, shivering in the cold and chatting. “You wanted to know who’s running the country. There they are. Want to talk to them?”

  I didn’t. I’d worry about my country later. “Metropol,” I repeated.

  Yalta Boulevard was a mess. Damaged cars lined the road, and on the sidewalk by the Metropol entrance was a battered white Militia Karpat. Ahead, I could see number 36, where I’d found Yuri Kolev’s corpse only three—three!—days ago. Now, soldiers stood around the Ministry’s entrance, smoking, and young men moved in and out of the building, loading boxes of files into an army truck.

  Since the curb was full, Karel parked in the road. I didn’t think it mattered. At the shattered front door of the hotel, an army sergeant looked at our papers and asked our business. “I need to speak to Gisele Sully.”

  He frowned. “Who?”

  “She’s a French journalist. I need her help in a criminal investigation.”

  “What kind of criminal investigation?”

  I was feeling impatient, but tried not to let it show. “A murder. She may have information about the suspect.”

  “Why’re you so vague?” said the sergeant.

  “Because,” I said, breathing loudly through my nose, “the murdered woman was my wife.”

  He blinked a few times. “Wait.” He read my name again. “Brod? You’re—”

  “Yes. I am.”

  He nodded curtly. I don’t know what he knew about me or my situation. Perhaps he only felt sympathy.

  Once we were inside, the other soldiers ignored us, as did the journalists draped over broken furniture, a few clutching bulky cellular telephones. There were two long lines at the lobby phones, the callers up front talking quickly in various languages as they read off of notepads. Karel and I went to the front desk, where a clerk, sweaty but well maintained, was talking on another phone. He nodded at us to wait.

  “Do you know this woman?” whispered Karel.

  “Who?”

  “This Gisele woman. Can you recognize her?”

  “I saw her on television.”

  She wasn’t in the lobby. The clerk, who had likely been suffering through the roughest days of his professional life, didn’t bother giving us a smile. “Yes?”

  I showed my Militia certificate, though I didn’t know if it would help. “We’re looking for Gisele Sully. French journalist. She’s staying here.”

  “All the journalists are staying here,” the clerk said as his phone rang again. He pointed off to the right. “Mademoiselle Sully is in the bar.”

  We followed the path of his finger down a short, carpeted passage into a bar I’d been to a few times before. Since my last visit, it had been redecorated in black leather and glass. The effect was seedy, and nothing like the labored Habsburg elegance they previously tried and failed to achieve. There were just a few customers, all foreigners, sitting with glasses of beer and wine. A table of four erupted in laugher, but Sully wasn’t there. She was alone at the mirrored bar, talking quietly to the tall bartender, who didn’t bother looking at us when we approached.

  “Gisele Sully?” I said.

  She swiveled on her stool, clutching a glass nearly empty of red wine. She was less attractive than she’d seemed on television, or perhaps she just looked drunk. “Who’s asking?”

  I again showed my Militia certificate. She took it from me, tilting it in the dim light. “A chief, huh? Congratulations.” She handed it to the bartender. “Is it fake, Toman?”

  Toman looked at it, rubbing a thumb over the Militia seal, then handed it back to me without a smile. “It’s real enough.”

  She looked past me at Karel, who was staring at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Sully said, “What can I do for you, Chief?”

  “Can I buy you another?”

  “Only if you join me.”

  I climbed on the next stool, while Karel took the seat beside me. “Three more glasses,” I told the bartender, and he uncorked a bottle of dry Tokaj red. I turned to Sully. “You speak our language well.”

  “Flattery and wine won’t get me in your bed, Chief.” She sniffed. “Certainly not before you’ve had a bath.”

  I felt myself reddening. She was right; I stank. “What I mean is, you’re familiar with our country. I imagine you’re also familiar with our emigres living in France.”

  Sully didn’t bother answering. She nodded at Toman as he set down three glasses of red wine. She lifted hers. “To getting rid of the old.”

  Karel and I joined her toast.

  She set down her glass. “I just came off a forty-eight-hour shift, and now I’m trying to drink myself to sleep. Don’t be surprised if I’m not much help.”

  “I understand,” I said. “We’ve had a hard time ourselves.”

  “I bet you have,” she said. “It’s amazing the things I’ve seen in the last two days. I try to put them into words, but they just can’t fit. You’ve got men shooting into crowds and other men in the army fighting demonstrators, then changing sides. The funny thing is, I’ve seen more dead women than anything else.”

  I remembered the dead woman we’d seen yesterday morning.

  Sully raised her glass again. “To men.”

  I let her drink that toast alone, but Karel joined her. I think he just wanted the wine. I took out Michalec’s 1979 visa photo. “I’m looking for information on this man, Jerzy Michalec. Do you know of him?”

  She lowered her glass slowly, then sighed. “I’m beginning to doubt you’re just a little policeman, Chief. What do you care about emigres? That sounds like a question straight out of the Ministry for State Security.”

  “Want to see my badge again?”

  “Come on,” she said. “If you were Ministry, you could get one of those, no problem.”

  I turned to the bartender, who was leaning on the counter, listening to everything. “Do you have any copies of The Spark7.”

  That seemed to confuse him. He straightened and looked around. “I don’t know.”

  “Yesterday’s,” I said. “It has to be yesterday’s.”

  He disappeared behind the counter, going through a shelf of old newspapers. He reappeared holding crumpled pages. “Here.”

  I found the front page and flattened it on the bar. Rings of moisture bled through the picture of my demolished Mercedes. “There,” I said. “Read.”

  Sully leaned closer and squinted, mouthing the words to herself. Partly to avoid looking at the picture again, I opened my certificate and placed it beside the paper. She saw my name in the article, then compared it to my certificate. She sat back.

  “Hey,” she said, almost tenderly. “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But Michalec has nothing to do with those Patak revolutionar-ies. They’re their own band of renegades. They don’t take orders from anyone.”

  I shook my head and tapped the paper. “This is a lie. They had nothing to do with the murder. It was Jerzy Michalec and someone named Rosta Gorski.”

  “Gorski?” she said, surprised.

  “You know him?”

  “Why would Michalec and Gorski kill your wife?”
r />   “Because they were trying to kill me.” I said this with enough conviction that Karel, behind me, cleared his throat nervously. “Please,” I said. “I need you to tell me about them.”

  Sully looked at the bartender, then grabbed her bulky leather purse and said, “Let’s get a table.”

  We went to a U-shaped booth beside a tinted window that looked out onto Yalta Boulevard. An army truck rolled past, the one I’d seen being filled with Ministry files. Sully went into the booth first, and we sat on either side of her. She was either drunk or trusting—she didn’t seem to feel trapped by us.

  “I know Jerzy Michalec,” she said. “I met him in Paris at one of those emigre conferences a few years ago. Eighty-six. He spoke better French than half of them, so he became an unofficial spokesman for his group, Le Comite de la Galicie. The Galicia Committee. They added‘revolutionary’to their name only recently.”

  “What did they do?” asked Karel.

  She looked at him. “Hard to tell. Largely, they networked with other emigres around the world. They weren’t as vocal as, say, the Palestinian emigres, but they had good contacts in the French and American governments. Their public persona was gentle. They raised money for orphans and lobbied to have Pankov cut off from the international community. And they succeeded in that. Jerzy always told me their final aim was the usual rigmarole—democracy and freedom—but gradually. Before this year, before the Berlin Wall, they never advocated revolution. I think that was Rosta’s doing.”

  “Rosta Gorski,” I said.

  She nodded. “Berlin, Prague, Budapest—seeing those, he felt revolution here was inevitable. So they started smuggling people into the country last month to establish networks. Set up printing presses. That sort of thing.”

  I sat back and watched her a moment. “Gorski was a farmer. He was just a kid who got into trouble now and then drinking. Then he left, with Michalec, in 1979. Did they know each other?”

  Sully looked surprised. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Rosta Gorski is Jerzy Michalec’s son.”

  “S-son?” I stuttered, not unlike Tomiak Pankov during his final rally.