infectious little man. He was always that. You do know we were separated?”
He shook his head.
“The organs of state security at work. I thought you knew everything.”
“I’m not state security,” said Emil, “and I’m not with the police. Homicide is a division of the People’s Militia, and we only know what people tell us.”
She accepted the drink Irma handed her and tested it with a frown. Her voice came out thicker, clotted. “Six months. That’s how long we were separated. Maybe a little more. Still married, yes, yes.” She waved her hand again. “That kind of thing drags on, but he lived in town, and I lived, well, here.” She opened her hands to display her world of oak cabinets and framed portraits and French lounge pieces.
“So, no enemies?”
“He had bill collectors, but as far as I know they just disappeared.”
“What kinds of bills?”
She shrugged. “ Living, what else? Food, drink, women”
“Women?”
“Suspicion, intuition. Nothing you would call hard evidence.”
“When did you last hear from him?”
She opened her mouth as if to let another casual remark spill out, something she might find funny and expect him to be amused by as well, or horrified by, but nothing came. She closed her mouth again. “A week ago,” she said. “He came to see me.”
Emil’s pencil was poised above paper.
She took another swill, then set her drink down. “What he said was he wanted to come back. To me.” She looked into her empty glass, eyes glazed. “That’s what he said. He said six months was much too long, and he knew now what he had always wanted. And that was me.” She pointed at herself with a finger that touched her chin. “Me. “ She smiled thinly.
“Didn’t you believe him?”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t have?” Her smile was gone. “You know, there was a time when I mattered to him. Sometimes that’s enough, just knowing you matter. He even used to show jealousy. He called me an unredeemable flirt.” She paused. “But then not even that mattered to him.”
“I-”began Emil.
She dropped the glass and threw her face behind her thin fingers, instantly sobbing. There was no transition, no warning, just a sudden plummet into tears.
Inexplicably, he almost cried as well.
Irma appeared out of nowhere, arm around her mistress, and whispered things Emil could not make out. But he was already standing and retreating to the door. He could think of nothing else to do; the Academy’s limits were becoming more apparent by the second. “I’ll be in touch later.” His voice sounded weak. “When it’s better.”
Lena Crowder did not look up.
Irma met him at the front door with his hat. The walls had muted the weeping. “Be easy on her,” she whispered, and Emil recognized her accent-the southern provinces, maybe near Ruscova. She had ruddy, loyal features.
“Where are you from, Irma?”
She held out the hat and blushed marginally. “You wouldn’t know. It’s south of Sighet. Vadu Izei. Just a village.”
“Of course I know Vadu Izei,” he said. “My family came from Ruscova.”
She blinked at him.
“See?” he said. “You think you come from a small village.” He accepted his hat and slid the brim in a circular motion with the tips of his fingers. “When did they call Comrade Crowder?”
Her face went serious again. “About Master Crowder? Yesterday.”
“Early? Late?”
She thought a moment. “Before dinner.”
He placed the hat on his head and nodded thanks before going out into what had quickly become a purple, breezy night. His hand in his pocket came up with his father s watch and its soft, soothing tick. The other hand held the black garter he had forgotten to show the widow. His hands, he noticed, were trembling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I nstead of returning the Mercedes to the station, he delivered peach and strawberry preserves to his grandmother. Her pink face flushed deeply as she turned the jars over, looking for clues. He placed the Zorki camera on a shelf. “How did you…?” she began. He told them he was taking them for a ride.
“A what?” Grandfather cupped his ears in a mockery of old age. Children were standing around the car, touching the fender and pressing noses to the windshield. Emil waved them off and opened the back door. Grandfather’s emotions raced unconcealed across his face and through his shaking hands, but Grandmother fell into a somber sobriety as she climbed inside. To bring out a smile, Emil explained: “A special car for a special case.” It worked.
Grandfather sat in the front, hands flat on his thighs, and gazed through the breezy open windows at the town passing by. His face lit up through the government center, past the Militia station steps that Emil tried to ignore, and the Central Committee building on busy Victory Square. They looked across to the Canal District’s gas-lit perimeter that cast an unreal glow, and Emil could sense the speech building inside the old Marxist humming beside him. Tonight, Emil felt generous-let the old man talk.
From the backseat, Grandmother said, almost to herself, “You remember,” and Grandfather nodded.
They drove along the Tisa to the unlit city limits and turned north into the half-built residential blocks.
“I heard Ivan Ilych even here,” said Grandfather suddenly. “Even then, you know?”
The speech was upon him.
“They said in the Party newspaper that Comrade Lenin was going by train,” he explained, rapping knuckles on the doorframe. “All the way to Moscow. But no one knew when. It was illegal, you know. The newspaper.” He opened his mouth and gulped the breeze. “The Petrograd strikers, they were my heroes. And Ivan Ilych, well, he was everything. So I told Mara. I said I was going to take part in a workers’ uprising in Russia. She didn’t believe me.”
“I believed you,” came her soft voice. “I just said you were out of your mind.”
“There was nothing to lose.” He flapped a knobbed hand in the rushing air. “What did we have then? We had nothing. We shared a room with two other families, and we had nothing to eat. We had education-the Brods always educated-but it’s worse for an educated man to be without space. Without necessities. He knows better.” Grandfather paused, and Emil turned the big steering wheel counterclockwise. They were on Union Street. “You’ve seen the Sixth District-they have so much more now than when we were there.”
“True enough,” said Grandmother. But she didn’t sound convinced.
“I remember,” said Emil.
Grandfather nodded. “And I knew that this was a piece of History I was living through.”
So in late October 1917, he and two other husbands from the neighborhood climbed on a livestock train heading east. When the stationmaster swung his lamp into the car, they crawled back and hid among the boars.
“The stink. It’s still in me.”
“Truly,” came the backseat voice.
“Woman.”
They changed trains in L’viv, then again in Minsk, and crossed into Soviet Russia at Krasnoe, a little west of Smolensk. When they arrived at the outskirts of Moscow three weeks later, they were just cold, hungry foreigners. The other two men depended on Avram Brod for his smattering of Russian as they begged off the kindness of the already starving peasantry.
In the city, they fell in with crowds that choked the grand avenues and chiseled away at the czar s facades.
