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 reality, 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,
