Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Just do it, Brod. I don’t want to have to listen to your explanations.”

  “You might have to.”

  “Well, make it quick.”

  I almost smiled. He spoke as if he were holding the gun. I checked my watch—it was a little after two in the morning.

  Despite having imagined this moment in the Capital, then in Ti-sakarad and Sarospatak, and again in Vienna, I never pictured it here, at the southern tip of Churchill’s famous Curtain, with my head throbbing. I cut off the overhead light to ease my pain. Everything dimmed.

  “You know, Brod, this isn’t like you. I’ve kept up with your career from a distance. You’ve lived the life you were supposed to live. A Militia chief, a wife, no children—because you’re busy enough fathering your militiamen. You protect the rules. You don’t break them.”

  “I’ve already broken a lot of them,” I said, looking at the high French windows and the wet lights outside.

  He didn’t fill in the silence that followed, though I’m sure his mind was working hard, thinking up ways to stop me.

  I was sweating, so I opened the window. I turned back quickly when I heard movement but was disappointed to see he’d only pulled himself farther onto the bed to lean on the headboard. That’s when I knew what I wanted from him. I wanted something to make this less cold-blooded. I wanted him to reach for a gun or a knife, or throw a distracting pillow, so I’d have some justification for putting a bullet in him. But Jerzy had always been able to read people. Like his son, he knew how to give them what they didn’t want.

  I pulled up a flimsy desk chair and arranged it at the foot of the bed. I sat down and crossed my knees in an expression of ease, the pistol steady against my thigh, but all the blood in my body was swollen and sore, making me shiver. I said, “There are some things I don’t understand.”

  “Like what, Emil?”

  He’d finally used my first name, a touch of mockery. “All this. The killings. You’d already changed the files. Did you really think that people who knew about your past would be able to prove a thing?”

  He cocked his head, and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he took a breath. “Emil, I don’t know what to think, not really. In the West, I wouldn’t have to worry. Every day, someone comes out of the woodwork to accuse politicians of fraud, of fathering their babies, of raping women, of snorting cocaine. Whatever. It’s all just background noise there. No one takes it seriously until it’s backed up by evidence. But the East is different. We’ve spent the last century being told lies. We all knew they were lies, so we started coming up with our own truths. We didn’t have the information to back up our truths, but we believed them anyway, because that’s all we had. It was a choice between official lies or unofficial rumors.” He shrugged; he’d obviously explained this to someone before. “Now, we’re suddenly handed democracy on a plate. How will anyone know what to believe and what not to believe? Our people have no practice separating rumors from facts.”

  “But why7.” I insisted. “You had a good life in France, I’m sure. Why risk it by coming back?”

  He examined his fingernails, which in the dimness he couldn’t have been able to see well. “Emil, you’ve got to let go of the past. You’re not the same man you were in forty-eight—clearly you’re not—and I’m not the same man either. I was. For a long time I was. But then, things happened that changed me.”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “Rosta.”

  He pointed at me. “Exactly. You wouldn’t know this, but fatherhood changes you. Suddenly, without warning, you’re no longer the center of the known universe. I’d already arranged my escape to the West. I knew the right people, and, more importantly, I’d used my surveillance work to collect information about those people— information they’d rather keep quiet. I was still the center of my universe, with plenty of blackmail material to protect me. Then I heard that an old friend had died. I decided to stop in at her funeral. And there was Rosta.” He coughed into his fist. “You may not believe it, Emil, but I actually do believe in democracy and all that stuff. But I believe in the right democracy. You can’t elevate peasants to statesmen and expect a country to prosper. You have to keep those with experience in the right places, to make sure it doesn’t fall apart, and you have to bring in new blood that’s been educated in the West.”

  “Which is what you did to your peasant son.”

  Even in the darkness I could tell he was glaring at me. He didn’t want anyone to use that word to describe his son. He didn’t bother answering.

  Again, I unconsciously looked at my wristwatch. Michalec laughed briefly, and I later realized why—I looked like the president of the court that sentenced the Pankovs to death. The irony got to him. I said, “Eighty years old. Didn’t you think it was time to retire?”

  He rubbed his nose. “We’re all too old, Emil. You, me, Brano— even the young ones, like Gavra.”

  I laid the gun across my knee and settled back in the chair. “How’s your condition?”

  “What?”

  “Your epilepsy.”

  He nodded, as if he’d forgotten his disease. “Oh, that. Medical science is a wonderful thing. In the sixties I started taking an English drug, Tegretol. Not perfect—the side effects made sure I wouldn’t be making any more children—but getting rid of the seizures was worth it. Then, a few years ago, I switched to a new one, Frisium.” He paused. “I guess it doesn’t matter now, but Balint was carrying my medication.”

  “Balint?” I said.

  “The man you shot in Vienna.” He shook his head. “Balint was a good bodyguard, too. Just dumb luck you’re still alive.”

  I nodded. “I’m out of my medication, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hypertension.”

  Michalec nodded. “Getting old is hell.”

  “You have anything to drink?”

  “What?” He didn’t seem to understand the question.

  “Alcohol. Do you have any?”

  “Need some Irish courage?”

  I’d never heard that phrase before but got the gist of it. “Not that. I thought you might want a last drink.”

  “Or cigarette?”

  I took my packet out of my pocket and tossed it onto the bed.

  “No,” he said. “I quit years ago. My lungs couldn’t take it.”

  I didn’t know if this was a joke or not. “You think it matters now?”

  “It might. No need to defile the temple.”

  His blase attitude was infuriating. So I stood up, rather stiffly, took aim, and shot him in his left knee.

  The blast rang in my still-numb ears. He went rigid, shouting, reaching for the wound. I stuffed a pillow into his face to muffle him. Then I placed the barrel against the pillow. But I only wanted to keep him quiet. One gunshot would wake the other guests; with two they would realize it wasn’t a car backfiring.

  After a while, I removed the pillow. I could have smothered him, I suppose, but I wasn’t ready yet. I felt cold from the air blowing in through the terrace, but I liked the chill. It woke up my nerve endings so I could be alert through all of this.

  His purple face was covered in sweat. He wasn’t able to glare at me anymore; the pain made that impossible. All he could do was squeeze his eyes shut and bite his lip, grunting out his frustration. He could hear me, though. I knew that.”If you scream, I’ll put the next one in your skull. And you never know. I might change my mind at the last minute. You should endeavor to be around for that.”

  Of course, that was a lie. I only wanted this to last.

  I don’t know about other people, but when I stepped over, sometime back in the Capital, or maybe later in Brano Sev’s guest bedroom, I knew things were different because time lost its regularity. That’s the best way I can describe it. An hour was no longer an hour, but I couldn’t call it something else either. Sometimes it was longer, sometimes shorter; sometimes it was gone in the blink of an eye. And when time became completely unmoored from real
ity, it could even move backward.

  That’s how it felt then. Time jumped back, and I hadn’t shot Michalec in the knee. I had—he was feebly clutching his thigh—but it just didn’t feel like any of that had happened. When you go mad, these discrepancies no longer bother you.

  Then I heard Lena’s voice. I don’t think it was really the madness. I think she actually was there, speaking, but standing somewhere in the darkness I couldn’t find. Like a very talented spy. She said what she’d said a few days before, but by other people’s clocks she’d said it four decades ago, when I first met her. She was making fun of militiamen: “When you breed in equality, you breed out manners. That’s a scientific fact.”

  I started to laugh.

  “Bastard,” Michalec said through his teeth. “You’re fucking crazy.”

  I wiped my damp eyes and looked at him. He had an expression I don’t remember ever seeing on his face before. He was scared. He knew now that I was one step beyond manipulation. I’d been touched by too much in the last week, and there was no way for him to predict the results of his words. He couldn’t endear himself to me, and he couldn’t anger me into taking care of this quickly.

  For the first time, I was in charge. That only made me laugh more.

  When I went to the window again, it was because I’d started to see the first inklings of sunrise. I didn’t want to miss that. I don’t know what time it was then, because I wasn’t bothering with my watch anymore. From behind me, he said, “What the hell are you waiting for?”

  I really didn’t know. Sometimes in life you’re given the keys to something you’ve always desired, but you dawdle at the door for longer than you should. Despite the stink of his blood, I was happy to stay a while in this place. The air in Trieste is clean and fragrant, and the rooms are beautiful simply because of where they are. We don’t have a coastline in my country; it’s something we appreciate more than Italians.

  With the sun, the sweepers appeared in the square below, shuffling along, pushing away dew-covered paper cups and broken glass and other detritus of human life. To my left, the water glimmered yellow. It was really very beautiful. I slipped the Walther into my jacket pocket.

  Down below, I heard voices and saw another American couple crossing the square. Soon they weren’t alone, and Italians crawled out into the light, scooters buzzed like insects, and the Yugoslav and German and French tourists, clutching guidebooks with chilled fingers, went about their business. The marble beneath their walking shoes was wet; the sun glistened off it. I smelled something being fried somewhere. The city was coming to life.

  That’s when I remembered what I’d known all along, that thing about old people, and that another one gone was nothing. Just like Ministry officers.

  I sniffed, then realized I was weeping. All the moments started to come back to me, in a sudden burst of irresistible memory. I remembered an old war that I’d run away from, up north to the Barents Sea,a hot fishing-boat cabin full of sweaty exiles from all over the world, drinking, smoking, laughing, and fighting. Hot, red-cheeked faces and rough voices shouting over cards. Tough men stuck on a tough sea with the backbreaking work of catching and killing seals. I remembered a few years later, first walking into Lena Crowder’s extravagant house after her husband had been killed and I’d been given the case, my first. How she lay on her sofa, drunk, looking like something out of a film. A femme fatale, which is what she’d always been to me. I remembered taking her back from the cretin now in the room behind me, all of us in a shattered, flooded square in the Canal District, and a gunfight that injured my friend Leonek Terzian. Leonek, who would later become proud of his Armenian ancestry and insist on his birth name, Libarid, then die on a plane taken over by Armenian terrorists. The ironies of existence are astounding. He was the first militiaman I grew to love. Ferenc would never be forgotten—I knew this—but I remembered him as well because I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. He was a man too full of love—for his country, for his family, and for himself. Only now could I understand; he and I were the same. Bernard and all his flaws, and Agota, who was as angry as her mother, Magda. Such incredible people. Enigmatic Katja and her prophetic Aron.

  It didn’t matter what the years had done to us, how they estranged us or crippled or killed us, because in that moment I remembered them all with such heartache that I felt I was dissolving in the breeze. I gripped the rail.

  I wasn’t making sense, but I had to hold on to this feeling, because it was the most beautiful thing I’d known, or would ever know. I even forgot about Jerzy Michalec. Maybe he’d escaped; I didn’t really care. Then I did.

  When I sat again at the foot of the bed, the room was bright with yellow sunshine. He groaned again, and the floral pattern on the bedspread was hard to see because of all the blood. I said, “Okay, Jerzy. I’ll finish it now.”

  Maybe my words brought on the seizure. He finally left the knee to its own problems and stretched rigid, shouting out the pain. His problem right now wasn’t me. It was the disease inside him. He trembled with the falling sickness, his teeth snapping shut, his flabby jaw suddenly tight.

  I didn’t want to sit with him through the whole thing. I got up, took the pillow from where I’d dropped it on the floor, and pressed it against his face. His hands, unable to reach me, were shaped like claws. I pressed the pistol into the pillow and pulled the trigger twice in succession.

  It’s true that pillows muffle the sound of gunshots, but they were still loud. I felt them in my head. His body didn’t relax; it was as if he’d been overcome by rigor mortis while still alive, death catching up afterward. I pulled my hand away from the pillow, but by then the blood had soaked through and stained me. I didn’t bother washing up.

  I set the gun on the bedside table and dragged the chair over to the window to watch all the activity beneath me. It was breathtaking. I couldn’t even feel my heart anymore; that’s how beautiful it was.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  •

  Two hours after the carabinieri took me away, my extended family collected in the Seventh District cemetery back home. I heard about this later; it was Markus Feder’s doing. Despite a revolution in the streets, filling his body shop with corpses, Markus kept his head and made the arrangements for Lena’s funeral. He was troubled that he couldn’t track me down, but that didn’t discourage him. He made calls, pulled in a few favors, and spread the word through Katja.

  Twenty-five mourners attended my wife’s funeral. Among them were Ferenc and Magda, who’d come to the Capital for the first time in thirty years, bringing along Fyodor Malevich. The three of them were on their way to a meeting with Rosta Gorski in the old Central Committee Building but took the time to say good-bye to Lena.

  Gavra and Karel were also there, because, as Gavra told me later, he finally broke. It was Karel’s fault. On Sunday night, Karel’s constant pestering made him want to slap his friend. He kept saying, “Someone has to stay. Someone has to make it right.” Finally, if only to shut the man up, Gavra shouted, “Okay!” They snuck out of the airport, avoiding anyone who might recognize Gavra, and stole a decent-looking Karpat. Since I wasn’t home, and they couldn’t go back to their place, they went to Katja and Aron’s in the Seventh District, where they slept on the couch.

  Katja and Aron drove Imre Papp’s widow, Dora, and ten-year-old son, Gabor, to the funeral; Bernard and Agota brought Sanja.

  I wish I could have been there with them. The ceremony was run by a Catholic priest, because Markus Feder was Catholic. Though neither Lena nor I was religious, I don’t think she would have minded. They stood in the crabgrass cemetery, bundled tightly against the cold. When the ceremony was finishing, Gavra noticed a black ZIL saloon with tinted windows and government plates parked some distance away. He broke away from the mourners to check on it. As he neared, the back window rolled down. Rosta Gorski stared back at him.

  “Gavra Noukas,” he said flatly.

  “Yes,” said Gavra. He wore Katja’s Makarov in his belt
and considered using it, but the car was also occupied by two large bodyguards.

  “I’ve gotten some word about your friend.”

  “Yes?” He didn’t need to hear my name to know who Gorski was talking about.

  “He’s killed my father.”

  That surprised Gavra. In fact, the news surprised everyone except Brano Sev and Magda Kolyeszar. “Where?”

  “Italy.”

  Gavra took a breath of cold air and glanced back at the mourners. “Why’re you telling me this?”

  “I want you to recognize that it’s over.”

  Gavra was surprised that there wasn’t any real anger in the man. His father had just been killed, but there was no sense of loss. Then Gavra realized why: Jerzy Michalec’s death actually protected the son. With a few bullets, I’d saved Rosta Gorski’s political career. No one would go digging into a dead father’s past. This was why Brano Sev had insisted the old man remain alive.

  There wasn’t anything Gavra could say in reply, so he said nothing. He wandered back to the funeral as it was breaking up. The ZIL drove away.

  Later, the funeral party moved to Max and Corina’s, which had just reopened. Cardboard covered the shattered windows, but the electricity still worked, and the brandy was cold. Gavra told the others what he’d learned, and shocked silence followed. Magda said she was only surprised I hadn’t ended up dead myself. “He seemed dead when I last saw him.”

  Ferenc disagreed, and they argued over me.

  It was then that Ferenc decided to put my case into his negotiations, which is what he did an hour later while sitting across from Rosta Gorski.

  29 DECEMBER 1989-

  20 MARCH 1990

  THIRTY-NINE

  •

  The fact is that no one knew what to do with me. Brano had gotten my passport, through Ludwig, from the Austrian Interior Ministry, so it wasn’t fake, but it wasn’t quite authentic either. In his rush to put it together, Ludwig had skipped many of the required signatures. This was a favor to Brano he would always regret, because it left a black mark on his record that was hard to live down.