The Polish children were in the entryway with a wooden ball, and they recognized Emil right away. The small, dark girl smiled at him.
“Marie?”
She nodded, blushing, and he squatted beside her.
“Did you know you’ve got the same name as my mother?”
She didn’t.
He winked at her. “Can you tell me where the supervisor’s apartment is?”
“The dead one?” Marie asked, then pointed to the second floor.
Terzian made a huffing sound that might have been amusement.
There was an official notice nailed to the door, warning away the curious, but the wood frame around the lock was splintered and split, as if kicked in. Terzian instinctively took a pistol from a shoulder holster and pushed the door with his foot, exposing a demolished living room. The sofa cushions had been cut open and the books torn from their shelves. Cabinets had been upturned and rugs pulled and tossed over a small table near the kitchen door.
“This is almost a surprise,” said Emil, then nodded at Terzian’s hand. “How do I get one of those?”
Terzian followed his gaze and made the connection, then grunted noncommittally. He holstered the pistol.
Emil concentrated on the kitchen, where dishes had been pulled from their shelves; shards cracked beneath his shoes. The cutlery had been tossed in a pile against the wall and the drawers pulled out until they had dropped to the floor. When he opened the icebox, water spilled out over his feet, and he cursed, jumping back. There was nothing inside that told him a thing-except, perhaps, Tudor s final meal: a half-eaten bowl of borscht moidering on the center rack.
He found nutmeg in the cabinet alongside three matches in an unmarked box, and beneath the sink a dirty tin of sunflower oil. He reached into the cabinets, feeling with his fingertips, but only came up with dirt and rat turds.
Then he remembered the twine.
He tugged at the icebox until it scratched across the tile. He looked behind it. Again, twine. It bound two pieces of cardboard together like a sandwich, and tied it all to the iron pipes. Emil used a knife from the floor to cut it loose, and when the sandwich dropped into his waiting hand several small photographs slipped out.
He glanced at the empty doorway. Terzian was still out there, in another room, moving things around.
The photographs were each the size of his palm, white- bordered. They were taken from a fair distance, at night. In each, two men stood in an empty street, talking, shaking hands, putting hands on their chins in thought. He recognized neither of them. Some pictures were blurred because of the photographer’s shaking hand, but the simple story the pictures told was clear: Two men meet in an empty street, talk and agree to something, then leave separately. A ten-picture tale.
Glass crashed in the apartment, just before Terzian’s “Shit!”
Emil slipped the photos into his breast pocket. It was an unconscious movement, but, once completed, he knew he would keep them hidden from his reluctant partner.
Terzian was in the bathroom, standing in front of the shattered mirror over the sink. Shards of reflection lay on the floor, throwing light everywhere, and Terzian was gazing at where the mirror had been. He reached into the wall. “What is it?”
Terzian’s hand came back with a cardboard box from a hole dug into the plaster. Through an open flap he saw rows of large bills.
They brought it back to the living room, where Terzian settled on the ripped sofa and began to count, laying the bills on the righted coffee table.
“Aha,” said Terzian, but Emil was staring at the stacks of money, a slow, leisurely fantasy building inside him; it included train tickets and hotels and places far away from here. He looked up finally at Terzian, who held up the empty box to show the address typed on the outside, topped by j. crowder. The fantasy slipped away.
Deliver the mail, indeed.
“That fat, thieving corpse,” said Terzian. A big, broad smile emerged despite all his considerable efforts.
No one answered at the red Polish door. The children had been cleared from the entryway, though their scuffed wooden ball remained, lodged in a corner. Emil imagined their fear-or at least the mother’s-when little Marie told them about the homicide inspector who had asked where the dead supervisor was. He felt the mother’s worry-Germans, police, relocations-and could imagine her low whisper as she told the children and grandparents to hurry, they were going out to the park.
He wanted to talk out the details of the case, but once they reached the Mercedes, Terzian remembered that Emil was anathema, and closed himself into the silence again. So Emil spoke silently to himself as he cruised the narrow streets choked with sweaty horses and workers and the occasional broken-down automobile; disabled Russian models were slowly filling the city.
Someone had sent Janos Crowder over fifteen thousand koronas (accounting for some of Aleks Tudor’s inevitable expenditures since the August 18 postmark, and some bills probably in Terzian s pocket). The money was then intercepted by the building inspector. About August 24, a week later, someone killed Janos Crowder and searched his apartment. Two days after that, someone-presumably the same person-killed Aleksander Tudor. Again, a search. For the money? An imperfect search, if that was the object. And why was Crowder receiving the equivalent of a year s salary in a box? Why too-this was perhaps most important-were photos of two men hidden behind the icebox?
There was a German, maybe a plumber. He could have nothing to do with any of this, but he was the only other person to come up-at least until these photos.
A simple theory would be that Aleksander Tudor had killed Crowder for the money. Someone else-maybe the German- had learned of the money, killed Tudor, and bungled the search for the box. Most crimes, a lecturer had once said, were committed by idiots. Stupidity is a tool of the trade.
But this was more than stupidity; it didn’t quite make sense. Emil had seen Tudor standing in the same room as Crowder’s corpse. He wasn’t the kind of man who could throttle a skull like that.
“Watch out!” Terzian shouted as Emil swerved around three Gypsy children who showed him their fat, red tongues.
“What do you make of it?”
“What?” Terzian squinted at the noon light and brought down his visor.
“This. Our case.”
“It’s your case, not mine.”
“But you have some thoughts.”
“I have nothing,” said Terzian, still squinting. He turned to his side window. “I’m a man completely devoid of ideas. You can report that.”
There was a scribbled note lying beside the paper-wrapped wrench on his desk. Roberto was quick-Emil didn’t know how men like him made their ways so smoothly-and beneath the wrench’s distributor address he had signed his name with a flourish to the t that, in some circles, would have been considered positively decadent.
Leonek Terzian, sinking into his chair on the other side of the room, watched. Emil read the note, looked around, then wandered over to Terzian, waving the paper. “The wrench. You want to come?”
Terzian opened his desk drawer and rummaged until he had found a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. He pocketed it and got up. His words were preceded by a low belch. “I’m driving.”
The equipment distributor’s shop lay on a back street in the northern Sixth District. It was a hectic prole area that had been severely damaged during the war, leaving brick shells and partially demolished blocks. The Brods had lived here before the Occupation, barely making ends meet.
They drove past the building many times before finding it, Terzian growing progressively more furious at the irregular street numbers. The top floor had been razed off completely. The white door that said in stencils third state equipment vendors, sa was set low into the sidewalk, so they had to descend five steps to reach it. The clerk was a ghost-milky, translucent flesh hanging from his skull, his eyes invisible behind the reflection of fluorescent lights on his round glasses. He stood behind a long counter that was empty, save his pale fingertips, as if he had been expecting them all afternoon. His quiet Good afternoon was delivered with an indistinct nod, and his hands sank into the pockets of his white coat. His nostrils expanded pleasurably as he sniffed the lemony air-some new
