Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

Sully shook her head. “No, you didn’t know.”

  The pork and cabbage in my stomach began to make noises. Far back, in 1948, trying to convince me to stop looking into his past, Michalec had said, We don’t make the rules. Others make the rules. We can only try to live by them.

  This personal logic had led him to the Gestapo, where he was awarded for his enthusiastic executions of Russians, British, and French. Then, in crumbling Berlin, he became a Soviet war hero by killing those twenty-three Hitlerjugend boys who’d been put under his command, boys who trusted him. After the war, it justified him killing Lena’s husband, Janos, and then kidnapping Lena herself.

  Michalec had learned sometime early in his miserable life that he would be best served by bending with history. He wasn’t alone in this—most people are this way—but unlike others, he was willing to kill any number of people to achieve his aims.

  Now, he had produced an heir.

  I said, “How?”

  “How, what?”

  Not even I was sure what I was asking. How did he make a son? How did Gisele Sully know this for sure? I shook my head. “They have different last names. Why?”

  She sipped her wine, then shrugged, as if the world hadn’t just changed again. “I never met Rosta, but he talked about this in an interview in Le Monde. His father was released from political prison in 1956. They opened the gate and told him to leave. No money, just the rags on his back. Jerzy went on foot and made it to some village around Stryy, where Irina Gorski, a widow, took him in. One thing led to another, and …” She shrugged. “But Jerzy left. He didn’t know Irina was pregnant. Years later, she died, and he came to her funeral. And there was Rosta.”

  “She died in seventy-nine,” I said. “That’s more than twenty years. What was Michalec doing all that time?”

  “Agitating, as they say. He worked in the underground, making pamphlets, running meetings. You know.”

  “But that’s not true,” I said. “His son doctored his files, so that it looks that way, but it’s a fabrication.”

  She put her sharp chin in her palm. “Can you prove it?”

  I thought about the files on my bedroom floor, then shook my head. “Not yet. Tell me more.”

  She glanced at Karel, who also had his elbow on the table, chin in his palm. He seemed mesmerized by Sully. She put down her hand. “So Jerzy and Rosta started sending in people to network. I imagine they could have contacted that group over in Sarospatak. Perhaps they even convinced them to start their protests over that priest, Meyr.”

  I shook my head. “I know the head of that group. He’s an old friend. And he’s not the type to take orders from emigres, no matter how convincing they are.”

  “No matter how much money they offered? Remember, they have access to a lot.”

  I didn’t really know. Ferenc and his friends certainly could have used some money to keep their printing presses going.

  She said, “By the time the revolution started in earnest in Sarospatak, the Galicia Revolutionary Committee was in the Capital, waiting for its moment. Thursday night it came.”

  My stomach was bad and my headache was returning. Karel re-acted before I could. “You’re saying the Galicia Revolutionary Com-mittee is run by these guys? The ones who killed Emil’s wife?”

  “They’re running the country,” I said.

  Karel shook his head as if he weren’t understanding. “But everyone knows the revolution came out of Patak. Everyone. They’re not going to listen to a bunch of people who’ve spent the last ten years in Paris!”

  Karel’s naivete was actually very charming, but he did have a point. I remembered the phone call I’d made from the post office. “The Committee didn’t start the revolution in the Capital either.” I stopped short of saying I’d started it.

  Sully considered this, then spoke slowly, as if national politics were just a little beyond us. “By now, it doesn’t matter who brought down Tomiak Pankov. The Galicia Revolutionary Committee has control of both your television stations and is printing half the newspapers. They don’t need to prove anything to anyone. It’s done.”

  “No,” I said, but the burden of Lena’s death was still making me stupid. “It’s not finished.”

  “Have you been reading The Telltale7”

  “What’s that?”

  Karel said, “It’s one of the new papers. I saw it on TV.”

  Sully confirmed this with a nod. “Yesterday, The Telltale reported that on Thursday night President George Bush of the United States was the first world leader to telephone and congratulate the Galicia Committee on its success. France recognized the new government soon afterward. Same with the United Kingdom. The fight’s over.” She shrugged again, and I found her blase attitude infuriating. “There’s only one question now.”

  “What’s that?” said Karel, more interested than I was.

  “Where are Tomiak and Ilona Pankov?”

  EIGHTEEN

  •

  As he was led past other classrooms, Gavra peered through an open door to where two men sat opposite one another at a table, scribbling on sheets of paper. One was fat, with a black beard, while the other was thin and very erect. That second man was Andras To-descu, Tomiak Pankov’s personal advisor.

  Gavra turned to Michalec. “You had Todescu all along.”

  The old man glanced back at the classroom. “You can’t do this sort of thing without help.”

  “Todescu convinced Pankov to call the rally and speak at it.”

  Michalec shrugged.

  Then Gavra’s scalp went cold, because he’d just made a second, more important connection. “Todescu would’ve left with the Pankovs on that helicopter. If he’s here, then …” He couldn’t finish the sentence. It explained the look of fear he saw in all these officers’faces. “You’ve got the Pankovs.”

  They reached the end of the corridor, and Balint put his hand on a set of double doors but didn’t open it because Michalec had stopped and turned to face Gavra. He pursed his lips and crossed them with his left index finger, a gesture of silence.

  They stepped out into the early morning cold. A wind raged across the barracks, where jeeps and trucks were parked in a disorderly

  VIC TOR Y SQUA R E 191

  fashion and freezing guards with Kalashnikovs paced along the high stone wall. Out here, the barracks seemed to be going through a regular, quiet day, but the guards were alert, peering often through small steel doors in the wall. The cold bore through Gavra’s paint-stained coat.

  They took a covered walkway down the edge of the building and through another door to where it was again warm, and thick with moisture. “They still haven’t fixed that radiator,” said Michalec.

  Balint grunted some kind of agreement.

  The steel doors here were small and unlabeled, with locks on the outside and barred windows to see inside. At the far end of the narrow passageway stood two guards who stiffened as they approached. “How are they?” Michalec asked the younger of the two, a corporal.

  “She’s sleeping,” said the corporal. The fear Gavra had sensed in the officers was all over this boy’s face. “He wants his insulin.”

  Michalec nodded, and the two guards stepped to the opposite wall so the visitors could better reach the locked door. Michalec peered through the bars, nodded, and stepped back. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Even knowing what he would see couldn’t prepare Gavra for the shock. He leaned close, blinking in the musty darkness of the cell, and found President Tomiak Pankov, the Astrakhan hat still on his head, sitting on a cot, wrapped in an officer’s greatcoat. That famous face stared back at him with angry pink eyes.

  Nearly all Gavra’s life, this man had been the Great Leader. He was too young to have known the exhilaration of Pankov’s predecessor, Mihai. For him, there was only Pankov and the many names he went by, titles that by now seem ludicrous but once meant something grand:

  General Secretary and President

  The Conductor

  The
First Worker of the Country

  The Architect

  That reliable leader and father and friend of young people

  The Sweet Kiss of the Land

  Our Polar Star

  The Lighthouse

  A man like a fir tree who is the sacred oak of our glory

  The mountain that protects the country

  A well of living water

  Then the Great Leader spoke. “Don’t look at me like I’m a fucking animal. Cretin!”

  Gavra remembered that hunting trip in the Carpathians, and the boisterous, deluded, but in the end strangely endearing man who hunted with the aid of expert sharpshooters, perhaps the same sharpshooters who now ran across rooftops, firing into crowds.

  “Well?” said Pankov. His voice was sharp and dry. “I need my diabetes medicine, and both of us need real food!”

  In the other cot, covered in layers of gray army blanket, Ilona Pankov stirred at the noise. Her husband lowered his voice to a high whisper. “Find my chef—I’m on a diet prescribed by my doctor.”

  Gavra couldn’t take it anymore. He straightened and stepped back, involuntarily wiping his eyes. The small passageway was blurry, and he was having trouble getting air.

  “You’ll get over it,” Michalec told him.

  “What are you feeding him?”

  “Army rations. It’s what we all eat.”

  “Get me out of here.”

  “Don’t have any questions for the Sweet Kiss of the Land?”

  “Please,” said Gavra.

  “Come on.”

  Outside, he couldn’t feel the cold anymore. He leaned over a low shrub bordering the walkway, breathing heavily.

  “You had to see that,” Michalec said with a tone of sympathy. “It had to be done.”

  Gavra wiped his mouth but didn’t rise. “Why?” Michalec didn’t answer, so he turned to look up at him. “Why did I have to see them?”

  “Because,” said Michalec, as if the question were a surprise, “you’re the one who’s going to execute them.”

  NINETEEN

  •

  I don’t know if Gisele Sully believed me or if, as a good journalist, she just smelled a story, but she suddenly raised her hand, called to the bar, and asked Toman to make her a double espresso. As he worked on it, she said, “What’re you planning to do?”

  “All I can do. Find Rosta Gorski and Jerzy Michalec.”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not. I’m not getting you killed.”

  “The snipers are few and far between now, and no one’s going to kill a foreign journalist. They need us.”

  Karel made a noise, and we turned to him. “What about Gavra?” he said.

  I’d forgotten.

  “Gavra Noukas?” said Sully.

  We stared at her. “You know him?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Yesterday, he ran in here like a madman. You saw that car by the front door? That was him. He drove up during the battle with the snipers.” She reached into her purse, pulled out an envelope filled with photographs, and started going through them. “Here.” She handed one over. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone, just ran through us, but I met a soldier who knew his name, said he was Ministry. Is that true? Is he Ministry?”

  It was Gavra. He looked haggard, his eyes bruised, and he was running through journalists, toward the camera. I handed the photo to Karel. “Why was he here?”

  “I don’t know. A few of us waited, but we never saw him leave. And the car’s still on the curb.”

  “Oh Jesus,” muttered Karel.

  “Gisele,” said Toman, raising an espresso cup.

  When she went to get it, Karel gripped my wrist. “Maybe he’s still in the hotel.”

  There were other exits from the Metropol, ones that the Militia and Ministry were familiar with, and that’s what I told him. I didn’t tell him my deeper worry, that Gavra was still here, in one of its three hundred rooms, dead.

  From the look on his face, Karel had found that possibility on his own. “You think he’s all right?”

  “He can take care of himself.”

  “I need to look. He might need my help.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You stay here, but I need to go. All right?”

  I was pleased that he agreed to this. He handed over the car keys. I slipped them into my coat pocket, beside Gavra’s Makarov. “But take care of it,” he said. “Gavra will be pissed if it doesn’t come back in one piece.”

  Sully was impressed by the Citroen. She asked about the paint on the side, but I didn’t bother answering. “We going to the Central Committee Building?” she asked.

  “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  She didn’t. As I drove, she took out a handheld tape recorder, pressed RECORD, and held it between us. “You’re a Militia chief, then?”

  “Yes,” I said, then remembered the truth. “Actually, no. Yesterday was my retirement.”

  “Well, congratulations,” she said. “How did you originally meet Jerzy Michalec?”

  “Just after the war.” I turned onto Victory Square. “He’d killed a songwriter, and then more people, because he was covering up his war crimes.”

  “War crimes?”

  I sensed disbelief in her tone. “He worked for the Gestapo. Then, when the Soviets arrived, he killed the soldiers under his own command. That’s how he became a war hero. By killing his own men.” I rubbed my lip, afraid of sounding like a fanatic. “Anyway, the songwriter was blackmailing him.”

  “Who was the songwriter? Would I know his name?”

  “No one remembers him. Janos Crowder was my wife’s first husband.”

  She lowered the recorder as I pulled up on the sidewalk and parked at the foot of the Central Committee steps. “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was.”

  We got out and mounted the steps as a soldier trotted down, his rifle bouncing off his backside. Before he reached us, I told Sully not to say a word.

  “You shouldn’t park there,” he told us.

  I wasn’t going to be thwarted because of illegal parking. “We’ll just be a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “We need to see Rosta Gorski.”

  “Who?”

  I spelled the name for him, then showed my Militia documents, while Gisele pulled out her camera and took a few shots of freezing smokers standing between the columns.

  The soldier turned out to be more helpful than I expected. He went with us up the steps and into the vast marble entrance that was full of activity. Young men and women in wrinkled clothes walked quickly from and into marble corridors holding stacks of papers, pencils lodged behind their ears. So unlike the old days, when I’d sometimes be brought in to join a large assembly of Militia chiefs and suffer through the lecture of some Interior Ministry bureaucrat who wanted to remind us of our political responsibilities.

  The soldier took us directly ahead, to where a long folding table had been set up in front of the huge marble sculpture of our national hawk, which matched the bronze hawk in the Ministry foyer.

  The soldier did the talking for us, bending down to speak with a tired-looking girl in her early twenties. “These people are looking for Rosta Gorski. Any idea who that is?”

  “Who are you?” she asked me.

  I didn’t tell her who I was, instead motioning toward my companion. “Gisele Sully. She’s a French journalist. Gorski told her to come by for an interview.” Gisele started to open her mouth, but I cut in. “I’m her translator.”

  “You know French?” She looked doubtful.

  I didn’t—German was my language—but I said, “Oui,” with my best accent. Luckily, she didn’t speak it either.

  She pulled over a folder and went through a stack of pages listing names and numbers. “Here it is. Room 214.” She pointed at one of the corridors. “Down there and up the steps.”

  I thanked her and the soldier, then took Gi
sele’s elbow as we walked away.

  “Why’d you say that?” she said.

  “What?”

  “That you were my translator.” She sounded insulted. “I’m fluent.”

  “Because I need a reason to be here, and it’s better for you if they think you don’t understand.”

  She’d been a foreign correspondent long enough to know this was true—she could listen in on what people didn’t want her to hear. At the end of the corridor, we took a circular staircase to the second floor, where it was quieter. At the opposite end of this corridor, I knew, was a second exit—a service stairwell that I and the other chiefs used when we wanted to make a quick, unnoticed escape from one of the Interior Ministry lectures.

  “Where’s your recorder?”

  She took it out of her jacket pocket.

  “Just before we go inside, turn it on. Okay? But don’t take it out.”

  She nodded, grinning vaguely. The intrigue appealed to her.

  It didn’t appeal to me. My heart was thumping again, loudly, and I considered taking more Captopril, but held off—I only had ten left.

  Room 214 was halfway down, on the left. We paused outside the door to listen but heard nothing. I pointed at her pocket, and she reached in to turn on the recorder. Then I opened the door.

  Rosta Gorski had been given an exceptional office above the fray. It was large and marbled, with antique oak cabinets and a large desk where a thirty-two-year-old, clean-shaven man with a shock of very black hair sat reading papers through bifocals propped halfway down his nose. Behind him, from high windows, you could see the entirety of Victory Square.

  “Yes?” he said, looking up. He removed his glasses and squinted at me, as if he knew me but couldn’t place my name.

  Rather than give his memory the leisure to work up an answer, I closed the door and brought out Gavra’s Makarov.

  “Merde,” said Gisele.

  Gorski didn’t seem frightened by the gun. His memory caught up with events, and he raised a finger, wagging it at me. “Chief Emil Brod. You hardly look like your picture at all. It must be an old one.”

  “Gisele,” I said, switching to my labored English, “sit down.”