36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  3 February 1967: Another surprise. Jan’s wife and boy have arrived, everyone in his parents’ house. What is this? I’m beginning to doubt the story of the mistress. Jan and Lia are not, as you’d expect, fighting. Through their window they look in love. I’d find their reunion union touching if the suspicion of something larger wasn’t getting to me. Jan drove his father’s car to the train station today. A green Volga GAZ-21 was parked outside as well. I don’t know whose it was, but the plates were from Uzhorod …

  6 February 1967: When Jan isn’t hiding inside his parents’ house, he walks the western road out of town and smokes in the fields. From my car I saw him talking to a cow. Insane? It’s possible. Perhaps I will speak with him. Perhaps I will not.

  Brano got the Trabant from his mother’s house and drove through Bóbrka, easily, as if he had nowhere to go. Just before the church he noticed the low gate and cream-colored two-story house, the tiled roof that needed repairs, the empty yard.

  He turned around at the bus stop on the other side of the church and drove westward out of town, into the fields. Split-rail fences, half blown over by old storms, lined the northern side of the road, and occasional clusters of blank-faced cows appeared, a few stopping their meals to look at him. Then he spotted a figure coming over a low hill to the south, beyond the cows, where the earth rose into the base of a mountain. The figure was approaching the road, but Brano did not slow down. He continued over a second hill and, once out of sight, turned the car around and waited. He looked at his wristwatch, counting the minutes, then drove back slowly.

  The man that walked alongside the road glanced back at him. Faint features, thinner than in his photo. Brano stopped beside him and rolled down his window. “Would you like a ride back into town?”

  Jan Soroka’s surprise was evident in the quick growth of the eyes, the tension in the lips. Jan looked at the empty path ahead of him, considering it.

  “A long walk back,” said Brano. “Come on.”

  Jan’s shoulders relaxed, as if he’d gotten rid of some weight. The bump in his long neck jumped when he spoke. “Thanks.” He had a high voice.

  They drove for a minute without speaking. Jan seemed content to gaze out the window as if admiring the landscape.

  “I’m Brano Sev, Iwona’s son. Aren’t you Jan Soroka?”

  Jan continued looking out the window. “I think we each know who the other is, Major Sev.”

  Brano felt momentarily as he had when his steering wheel had fallen into his lap in 1961. He feared he might swerve off the road.

  “Why is that, Jan? Why would we know each other?”

  Jan Soroka finally turned from the window, his eyes still damp from the cold winds. “Bóbrka is small. There’s a whole communications network for each new visitor.”

  “They don’t have a lot more to talk about.”

  “Exactly what I mean.”

  The village was coming into view. “Where have you been, Jan?”

  “Just wandering. I do that a lot. To think.”

  “I don’t mean now. I mean these last five months.”

  Red fingers grew into his pale cheeks. “Haven’t you heard? I got involved with a crazy girl in another small town. I suppose I wanted a little excitement. But I love my wife, Comrade Major. I love my boy.”

  “Dijana Franković,” said Brano.

  Jan Soroka watched a collapsed barn pass.

  “Funny, I used to know a Dijana Franković.”

  “Not so funny. It’s a common enough name in the Serb villages.”

  “But I didn’t know her here,” said Brano. “I knew her in Vienna.” He looked over in time to see Soroka turning his head fully away. “And besides, Szuha isn’t a Serb village.”

  “I was misinformed.”

  “You were. I’m not a major anymore, either.”

  “No?”

  “I work in a factory, assembling tractors.”

  “Oh?” Jan didn’t look like he believed that.

  “Have you heard about Jakob Bieniek?”

  “Bieniek?”

  “Turned up dead last night.”

  “Dead?”

  “In the woods. I’m helping Captain Rasko investigate it. If you hear of anything important …”

  “Of course,” he said, turning back to the window. “Of course I will.”

  Brano took him to his house without asking for directions. He said nothing more because there were stages to go through in this kind of situation. What he had told Pavel Jast was true—he believed Soroka’s plan was to take his family west. This could happen at any moment, but if Jan were planning to leave tonight, he couldn’t have maintained his calm. He would have sweated and shook like so many men Brano had quizzed in the past.

  The only risk was that, if he pressed, Soroka would panic and flee come nightfall, leaving Brano with nothing to give Cerny—nothing to assure his return to Yalta.

  He lunched with his mother and her assistant, Eugen, a thin boy of about seventeen who tapped his foot continuously. They had bread and cheese and salami from the store’s stock. Then he returned to Bieniek’s. He came across a single entry for Lia Soroka:

  4 February 1967: She and the boy cross the street and buy food for the house. She’s much too elegant for this town, or for that fool who ran off with a peasant slut. What is this loyalty she feels? What ties her to a man like that? I could never do such a thing to her. Even after all these years, I’ve never been unfaithful to Janica.

  There were two pages on Brano’s mother, and a sense of decorum made him lay the sheets to the side, unread, on the floor. But after learning more on people he did not know or care about, the decorum left him and he found himself reading of visits SEV, IWONA made, weekly, to Juliusz, the doctor. Bieniek speculated on the “carnal interests” of the doctor, whose wife spent much of her time in Krosno.

  Brano’s palms were sweating as he put down the pages, and he felt the beginnings of a headache.

  It was already dark, the cold was seeping into the house, and he had so little to go on. But there was one thing that, in his growing impatience, he felt he could look into right now. One person might know the name of Soroka’s contact, who drove a green Volga GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates.

  Pavel Jast’s house was on the edge of the woods, separated from the next house by a field marked by ruts and pits that, in the darkness, Brano had to be careful to avoid. The house was small, with two very bright windows. The murmur of muted voices rolled toward him.

  He approached from the back, along the tree line. The windows were fogged over by the breaths of many men, creating a diffused glow. He squatted beneath a window and rose slowly until he could just make out the forms. Men around a table. A voice said, “Cucumber—you’re dead!”

  Laughter followed, and a few moans. Pavel Jast said, “That’s fifty-two koronas … and that lousy mule!”

  Brano used the tip of his finger to rub a corner of the window clean. Five men sat at a table with faceup cards. Jast; Mother’s assistant, the hyperactive Eugen; Zygmunt; Juliusz; and a fat man he didn’t recognize. Jast collected the cards spread over the table and began to shuffle them like a satisfied pro. Eugen was smiling, drunk, and Juliusz was serene. Zygmunt looked sick; perhaps he was the one who had just lost fifty-two koronas and a mule. Yes—Jast set down the cards and leaned over to kiss Zygmunt’s cheek. Zygmunt pushed him away.

  The fat man he didn’t recognize sucked on a cigarette and put it out in his vodka, then laughed. Behind Jast’s large right ear was the German ballpoint pen with its naked woman.

  He crept back across the field, tripping once, and made his way back home. Mother was asleep, so he drank headache powder with water, then took a glass of Lucjan’s vodka to bed. He rolled his face into the pillow, closing his eyes, but not even his brother-in-law’s concoction could help him sleep.

  11 FEBRUARY 1967, SATURDAY

  •

  Mother was already awake. She crouched beside his bed, touching him lightly on the wrist. “Br
ani?” He opened his eyes to her large features close up and felt momentarily like a child.

  “Yes, Mama?”

  “Brani, there’s someone here to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “That captain,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay. He just needs my help.”

  She pressed her dry lips together and stood up as Captain Rasko appeared in the bedroom doorway, hat in his hands.

  The blanket fell from Brano’s thin, pale chest when he reached to the foot of the bed for the shirt he’d folded the night before. “Good morning, Comrade Captain. Can you give me a minute?”

  Rasko nodded and left. Mother still looked concerned.

  “What is it?”

  She glanced back at the doorway. “He asked if you were planning to leave. I said you weren’t. You aren’t, are you?”

  “No.” He finished dressing and put a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you let me talk with him alone.”

  She went to her bedroom.

  Rasko, in a chair, was still holding his hat as Brano sat on the sofa. His hair looked dirty. “What is it, Captain?”

  “This is difficult, Comrade Sev.”

  “Then do it quickly. That’ll make it easier.”

  “You see,” he began, shifting his feet, “I went through the evidence Juliusz gave us. In that bag. The handkerchiefs found on Jakob Bieniek.”

  “The ones used to silence him.”

  “Right.” He passed his hat to the coffee table. “Well, there was something inside the handkerchief. The one that was inside his mouth.”

  “What was it?”

  He clutched his hands between his knees. “A matchbook.”

  “Excellent. That’s more than we had before.”

  “It was from the Hotel Metropol. From the Capital.”

  Brano leaned back. He struggled a couple of seconds with what to say next, remembering Juliusz’s hesitation when they met. Then he knew there was nothing to say. He could point out that other villagers made trips to the Capital, but they both knew none of them could afford a night in the Metropol, nor a drink from its bar. And even if they could afford it, the coincidence of his arrival from the Capital and the matches in a dead man’s mouth could not be ignored by any responsible investigator. So Brano asked the captain what he would like to do.

  Rasko cleared his throat. “I’d like to search the house for evidence.”

  Brano stared into Rasko’s dark eyes until the captain blinked. “Be my guest,” he said.

  While Rasko went through his room and the others, followed nervously by Mother, who cried out for him not to be clumsy, Brano waited on the sofa, turning over the one thing he was sure of. Pavel Jast had used his matchbook to frame him for the murder of Jakob Bieniek. Either he had returned after they discovered the body, or he had been involved in the actual murder and had stuffed Brano’s matches between Bieniek’s struggling teeth, encased in a wad of handkerchief. But why?

  “Any luck?” he asked when Rasko came back, flushed, wiping sweat from his forehead. Mother stood behind him with crossed arms, silent now, utterly disgusted.

  “Can you give me the keys to your car?”

  Brano stood up. “It’s unlocked.”

  Rasko first checked the trunk but found only a spare tire and a jack. He searched the backseat, which Brano had cleaned meticulously before leaving the Capital, then under the driver’s seat. He reached beneath the passenger’s seat and made a face. It wasn’t elation, nor was it defeat. It was somewhere in between, and the expression remained with him as he drew out a crumpled white shirt with large splotches of reddish brown. Brano suppressed an involuntary shout as Rasko flattened the shirt on the seat, eyeing the bloodstained slices, each between a couple of inches and a foot long.

  Brano looked up at the house, where his mother had opened the curtains, her fat fingers tapping her chin.

  Rasko exhaled. “Well, I suppose you know what’s next.”

  “Of course I do.”

  Brano walked behind his Trabant to the passenger door of the white Škoda. Rasko said, “You want to tell your mother where you’re going?”

  She was still in the window, her hand now covering her mouth. “I think she already knows.”

  On the drive to the station house, his palms together between his thighs, Brano was not overly troubled. Surprised, yes, but many times in the past he had been faced with inexplicable turns of fortune. It had been an inexplicable night in Vienna as he was arranging the final hours of Bertrand Richter. The last thing he’d expected was interference from Bertrand’s girlfriend, the tarot-card reader. And then, when he’d woken the next morning in the Volksgarten, a blow to the head briefly relieving him of the burden of memory—who could have predicted that? As he had then, he now calmed himself by measuring the length of his facts. Pavel Jast, the one man in town who was to assist Brano, had arranged a murder conviction for him. Check. Which could only mean that Pavel Jast had his own agenda in this larger investigation of Jan Soroka.

  Which meant, most likely, that Pavel Jast was assisting Jan Soroka by making sure Brano would not hinder his and his family’s escape.

  But was Jast really so shortsighted? Once the truth came to light, Jast would find himself in a work camp, or in the eastern mines. Jast was too much of a survivor for that. He was the sort of operative that hangs on for many years, always a step away from being caught or being made redundant. His kind, the small-town informer, was as resilient as the cockroach.

  Jast wouldn’t wait to be caught. He would leave with Jan Soroka’s family while Brano was in jail, perhaps in the backseat of that GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates, heading westward.

  “I’ll need to make a call,” said Brano.

  Rasko parked in front of the station. “I already called Yalta. I wanted to clear this with them.”

  “You knew you’d take me in?”

  “I wanted to know what I could and couldn’t do. The man I talked to told me to do what I felt necessary, and someone would call later.”

  “What was the man’s name?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  This, he understood—the Ministry would want to pretend they didn’t know he was here.

  The cell was no more than a large closet with a lock on the outside, a small, high window, and a mop in the corner, the room Rasko had been stumbling around in when Brano first met him. A low bench below the window was the only furniture.

  “You want coffee?”

  “If you’re making some.”

  Rasko stepped out. Brano watched the door close, heard the lock slide into place, then wiped his hands dry on his knees. He climbed on the bench to look out the window but could see only patches of blue sky. So he settled on the bench again and, as he often did when in need of assurance, remembered her.

  He remembered their long walk back to her apartment that night, her drunken complaints about the zbrka of the modern world. He remembered that she had a long body, pale but dark around the eyes, and he remembered leaving her apartment after their sex, the kiss she had placed on his cheek, leaving damp marks he could not bring himself to wipe off. Brani, she’d whispered, this not the end from all for us, then drew back, smiling.

  Weeks after the Lieutenant General’s interrogation, he had begun receiving her idiosyncratic love letters with the apprehension of a man fearing the unknown, and sometimes on the way home from the factory he wondered if he’d find her at his apartment, waiting with a smile.

  I not knoing what you will to say when this getting to you. Maybe you are thinking I am little crazi, I dont kno. We have only 1 night—not I night but 2 hour!

  But no, dragi. I not kno what you was thinking, but that night it was for me very good. I am not so sentimental person, no. I more practic that what people think.

  She wrote, That night when we was together Bertrand he die. Police dont kno who kill him, but was no accident. He die in Volksgarten. It make me start to thinking. You kno death, it do this. I start to thinking why I am in
Vienna? I not like Vienna. I love in the world only 1 thing only. You, Brano Sev. Are you understand me? In the world this one thing.

  She told him that she was a Vojvodina Serb from Novi Sad, born in 1939. Her father, a professor of economics, was in prison from 1954 to 1957, though she couldn’t explain why. Was only what Tito say, if he think you enemy, you is in prison. Dijana studied economics as well, and in 1959 married Dusan Franković, a medical student who also played in a jazz quartet called “Sol,” or Salt. Two years later, her father died from injuries sustained in prison, and the following October her mother killed herself.

  I then 22. I sudden tired for econometrics. I stop talk with friends and I read on Carl Gustav Jung and on other things, like occult. That when I learn tarot first. Dusan, he not understanding why am I so quiet and not interesting, and we fight. So in 1963 I go. I start to thinking Yugoslavia is a country from losers, so I go. My husband he very sad, of course, but now is ok. He marry again.

  She told him everything, and he was surprised by the things he told her. He said that he would try to get back to Vienna, and if that didn’t work, he would get her a visa to visit him. He even believed the promises himself.

  Rasko brought two cups of coffee and sat with him a moment. They sipped in silence, pursing lips over the hot liquid and looking at the smoke-darkened walls. Brano said, “The other day, I noticed you talking with Lia Soroka.”

  Rasko nodded into his coffee’s steam.

  “Do you mind telling me about her?”

  He tilted his head from side to side. “What’s there to tell?”

  “Why she’s come back here.”

  “Because her husband is here.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “I take things as I see them, Comrade Sev. I’m a simple man.”

  “Have you talked with Jan Soroka?”

  “Of course. He registered when he arrived.”