“So he knew someone named Antonin. Does it really matter?”
“It could matter.” His voice was trying to encourage me to believe, with him, that this suicide was more than it seemed. “I’ve been all over the place looking for an address book. Nothing. But I’ll bet that if we can find Antonin, we’ll learn something important.”
I doubted this, but got up with him and handed him his hat from the coffee table.
14
Cafe-bar #103 had just opened, and the bartender, when he saw us come in, said with sudden, false brightness, “Comrade Inspectors, you’ve returned!” He set two somewhat clean glasses on the counter. “What will it be?”
Stefan climbed onto a stool while I stood beside him. “This Josef Maneck,” he said. “Did you ever see him with other people? Someone named Antonin?”
The bartender’s smile faded. “Not much business lately. Won’t you have a drink?”
“We’ll just take some answers,” said Stefan.
“Give me a coffee,” I told him.
“Coffee? Come on, Comrade Inspector.”
“Palinka,” I said.
He grabbed a bottle of apricot brandy from the shelf behind him. As he poured, he said, “Well,” then corked the bottle and set it beside my glass. “The nut only came in alone. He was that kind.”
“What kind?” asked Stefan.
“A friend of nobody. You know what I mean.” The bartender pushed his eyeglasses up the arch of his nose, then leaned an elbow on the counter. “He came in alone, ordered his drinks quietly, but as he got drunk he ordered them louder, like I couldn’t hear.” He shook his head. “We could all hear him.”
I picked up my brandy. “So he always came in alone.”
“Of course he did. No one would spend time with that guy, except maybe Martin. But Martin only did it for the drinks. Martin will do most anything for a drink. Sometimes I get him to clean up the toilet for a drink, and he does a hell of a good job.”
“But did he ever talk to you?” said Stefan. “About anyone he knew. An Antonin?”
He put away the second, empty glass. “If he ever did, I wasn’t listening.”
The brandy was coarse; it burned my tongue. “What about Martin?”
“What about him?”
“You said Josef Maneck talked to Martin.” I placed some koronas on the counter, more than the drink cost.
He looked at the money. “That’s what I said. But I don’t know what they talked about.” He placed his hand over the coins.
Stefan looked at me, at the drink beside the bartender’s hand, then at the bartender. “Where does this Martin live?”
He slid the coins off the counter. “That, I can tell you.”
Around the corner, down an alley, and through a misaligned side door that did not shut all the way. There was a short, dark entryway that led to a curtain of beads missing half its strings. “Martin?” Stefan called through the beads. “You in there, Martin?”
We heard a horrendous, wrenching cough.
It was an old storage room, with a couple rusted shelves in the corner. I wondered for an instant how someone could end up in a hole like this, in a time of assigned housing. Then I saw Martin on a thin mattress, his back against the stone wall, trying to light a cigarette, but the matches wouldn’t catch. No paperwork, that’s how you ended up here. Lost, or sold for a drink. From a high barred window enough cold light came through to see the cockroaches scurrying from our entrance. Here, beneath the surface of the Capital, lived the lumpenproletariat-or, as The Spark would put it: the underworld criminals, antisocial shirkers and prostitutes. The place stank of feces.
We stayed on our side of the room. “Having a rough morning, Martin?”
Martin’s face was swollen and red-veined. He dropped the matches, then leaned to pick them up again. “You got a light?”
“We’ve got questions, Martin.”
I saw on the rusted shelves his only possessions-a pair of lopsided shoes, a frayed jacket, and an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol. I threw my lighter; it landed beside his bare foot. When his eyes focused, he made something like a grin and took it.
Stefan stepped forward. “Just a few questions.”
He lit the cigarette and drew on it deeply, his whole body rising, then coughed again, lips wet.
Stefan squatted to his level. “Remember your friend, Josef Maneck? He talked to you, didn’t he?”
Martin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took another drag. He nodded, maybe in answer to the question.
“Did Josef tell you about his other friends, Martin? Did he tell you about a friend named Antonin?”
The lighter was no longer in Martin’s hand. I didn’t know where it was.
“Surely he told you about Antonin. That’s his oldest friend. Did he talk to you about his friends, Martin?”
That’s when I noticed the source of the stink. In the corner, behind the shelves, were a few fresh turds. Martin had been too drunk to make it outside last night, or this morning.
“Stefan,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.
“Tell us about his friends, Martin, come on.”
“I don’t know,” Martin said. He sat up a little, as if to look dignified, and took another drag. “He talked, yeah, but he didn’t tell me nothing.” His voice was strangled and labored, and I wondered how a man like that could keep taking breaths.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Stefan settled a little lower, on his haunches. “So what did Josef talk to you about? He bought you drinks, he talked to you. What about, Martin?”
“Nothing nothing. I didn’t listen.”
“You’re not that rude, Martin. He told you about his friends, maybe, or how he used to be an art curator. Surely he talked about that.”
Martin squinted, then nodded slowly. “Yes, art. He wouldn’t shut up. Art.”
“Of course he did. And he told you why he stopped doing that. Why he stopped being a curator.”
Martin’s next drag was aborted by a fit of angry hacking that turned his face purple and ridged his neck with fat veins. Stefan looked away finally, and I caught his eye and nodded at the door. He shook his head and turned back.
“Why did he stop working in the museum, Martin? You know the reason. It was a good job, why give it up?”
“And you’ll leave me alone?”
“Sure, Martin. Then we’ll leave you alone.”
He squinted again, trying to think it over. His eyes were red all the way through. “He couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what?”
“Couldn’t live with himself.”
“Why couldn’t he live with himself?”
“Because.”
I cleared my throat. The stink was making my eyes water.
“Because why, Martin?”
“He was terrible,” said Martin. “A terrible person.”
“How’s that? How was he terrible?”
I stepped forward, and it shot out of me: “Because he was a goddamned drunk, for Christ’s sake!”
They both looked at me, Martin with some hesitant surprise, Stefan clearly angry.
