Terzian’s features became harder, the bags under his eyes deeper. Anger was easy to read. “You don’t talk to him, Brod. And the fact that I hate you has nothing to do with it. He’s a regular. He’s my boy. No one else ever talks to him.”
“It’s my case.”
“If s my case” Terzian whined back. “You’re a fucking infant, Brod.” He said, “This is the way.”
Emil remembered the last time he had heard that phrase, on an icy boat in the Arctic, a drunk Bulgarian accent making a mess of the words. He felt the chill of that hard deck, and when he returned, the door to the interview room was closing again. He heard the lock drawn into place, and felt the hangover come upon him like an animal: fully, hungrily.
He drove first to Liberation Street to find out if Tomislaw recognized anyone in the photographs. But the family, the new building supervisor-a severe, forty-year-old spinster-told him, had left for their summer holiday. So he went where he truly wanted to go: westward. Past the one-room bar-in the morning light, it was more dilapidated than it had looked last evening-and past the low, muddy riverbanks to where the driveways led back over small hills. The morning lit Lena Crowder’s home particularly, and the windows glowed like those in the Canal District, reflecting sharply into his aching skull.
Irma made him wait in the entryway, where he cradled his head in his hands and gazed up at the painted men with thick white Tolstoian beards, echoes of some family fortune that predated everything he knew. Grandfather had, with the blush of joy, described invading abandoned mansions with the Russian hordes, turning over expensive vases and crapping on portraits. Emil picked up a long, blue vase covered in angular, gold etchings. Grandfather said that these people held an ax over the heads of the working classes. Equality was a blade away. The vase was heavy in his hands.
“Don’t break it,” Lena Crowder commanded. She stood in the doorway with her hands joined in front of her white nightgown. Its draped form accentuated rather than hid the easy lines of her body. She seemed never to dress. “My dead father’s in there.”
Emil put the vase back, using both hands to keep it stable.
She placed a cigarette in her mouth and waited for him to stumble over and light it. She sniffed at his face, her small nose wrinkling. “The Comrade Inspector s been drinking this early?”
“Last night,” he admitted.
Her eyes roamed his face, hair, shoulders, his hand that held the lighter. “Too bad,” she said. “I admire early drinkers. It’s a rare honesty.” She smiled suddenly. “But last night? That makes you unclean. You want a bath?”
“No,” he said, hesitated, then repeated: “No.” He wasn’t quite convincing himself. “I just have some more questions.”
She turned up her cigarette hand-a kind of shrug-then led him back into the lounge. Long sofa against tissue- thin curtains. The chair where he had watched her slide to the floor in a widow’s intoxication. Now she was tall and lithe, and the billowing hem of her gown made her seem to float as she swooped to the sofa and settled down. She was a different woman, almost, but no less impure.
“How are you?” he began.
She stopped in mid-drag to frown at him. “This is part of the investigation?”
“Could be.”
She completed the drag. “Then I’m fine, my dear Comrade Inspector.” She placed the ashtray on her bony knee, where it wobbled. “Today I’ve been thinking of my poor father and his weak heart. Do you realize that in the space of a month I’ve lost both my father and my husband?”
She had a look of surprise on her face, as if only now, while saying it, she had learned the news. “I,” he said, “I didn’t know.”
She wiped a thumb beneath her eyelid and sat up. “You don’t want to listen to a rich girl’s blubbering. No,” she said, “you want to know about my husband. You want to know, for example, that Janos and I were not very close in the end. You want to know that he used his little apartment in town for his girls, and I did what I pleased out here. A marriage in name, but more of a business proposition.”
Emil’s notepad was on his own knee, but he couldn’t bring himself to open it. “I don’t understand. You were with Janos for money?”
“Me?” she said in disbelief. “Did you see those men in the hall? With all the hair? My great- and granduncles. Industrialists living off the wage slaves. Coal All the time. Coal and coal” she said, echoing War and war in Emil’s head. “That songwriting ponce came from a long line of mud-eaters. Peasants, all. Everything he has he got from me.”
“Had,” corrected Emil involuntarily, and she looked at him as though she didn’t understand. Then she did, and the look became unkind. Emil said, “This apartment in town. With your money?”
“Why should I pay for his lifestyle when he treats me like a prole? No offense to our comrade workers,” she added, flashing a nervous smile. “When we married, I gave Janos a modest allowance. When it became clear I wouldn’t give him more, or less, he had no reason to speak to me anymore.” She looked around. “It’s a big house; you can miss each other if you try.” She was smiling at him again, but with Lena Crowder, he didn’t know what a smile really meant. “Seven months ago the bastard moved out. Are you thirsty?”
His mouth was a ball of cotton.
Irma brought big iced scotches, and Lena made sure he drank his. “Don’t go around smelling like a drunk unless you actually are.
“But your husband,” said Emil, setting his half-empty glass aside. “How did he get money? If he wasn’t assigned his apartment, he had to pay for it. It wasn’t cheap.”
“Maybe he was writing songs. That was his business.”
Even Emil knew melodies never earned boxes of cash. “What about these women you mentioned?”
“His whores?”
“Were they really that?”
This smile seemed to be a weary apathy. “I’ve no idea. I never saw one, he never talked about them, but I’m still enough of a woman to see through a man.”
He finally opened his notepad and leaned back.
“Your drink,” she said, and pulled her feet up beneath herself again. Her toes were as white and the nails as polished as before.
His ice was melting. “You said before that you last saw him a week ago. What happened?”
She moved her tongue quickly inside her mouth. “He had come back a week before then, two weeks before… it. He tried to patch things up. He’d heard my father had died. Wanted to console me.” She gave a small, tight smile.
“Your father?”
“My father. Elias Hanic. Heart attack, I don’t know. While riding a horse.” She nodded, muttering, “The last Hanic.” Then: “I still need to take his urn out of here. To Stryy.”
Emil waited while she mulled over that trip with her father’s ashes. Then he prodded: “Janos came back.”
She woke up. “Yes. Janos got word of my father, and he came like a prince. What should I have done? I was still angry about the women, and how he treated me-like some money tree- everything. I kicked him out. But he came back the next day, apologetic. And he came back the next. This is the dumb persistence that makes the weak inherit the Earth.” She took another swill, and even in this dim room Emil could see the wet glaze over her eyes. “He had the key, he’d always had it. He could come and go as he pleased. On the fifth day I gave in. Women get stupid for the men they’ve married, it’s a fact. I think one of our Comrade Soviet scientists proved it.”
When she smiled at him his scalp tingled pleasantly.
She gazed into her glass and drank the last of it. “Irma!” She looked at him. “But something was clear to me after, I don’t know, the second day we were back together. According to the inheritance laws, everything of my father’s was supposed to go to the state. But Elias Hanic was no imbecile. He had found a way to give most everything to me. The house, the land, the money from the old coal shares.” A grim smile. “This is what Janos had learned, the little mud-eater. That’s why he came back. That much money was so good that even staying with me was worth it.”
Emil was genuinely surprised-not by Janos Crowder’s behavior, but by the Hanic estate. “You can do that?
