Inspector, am very close to the Politburo myself.”
“Look at the photographs.”
The smile disappeared, and Michalec pressed his fingers to his cheeks. “I’m giving you good advice, Inspector.” His voice had lowered an octave. “We don’t make the rules. Others make the rules. We can only try to live by them.”
Emil tapped the desk. “The photographs.”
Michalec put up his other foot and crossed his ankles.
Emil picked up the photos, one at a time, his impotence burning inside him. He saw everything at once, like a mystic: the two dead men in the city morgue and the dead soldiers in Berlin, twenty-three in a pile; he saw the hatred and suspicion and ignorance, the wars and the marching little children singing their inane political lullabies; a Bulgarian on the ice. He put nine photos back into his pocket. Busted bodies, bodies kicked in the mud. The tenth photo remained in his left hand. Hookers and pensioners and soldiers and Jews-and Lena-all nothing to the ferocious gears of this world.
With his right hand, he snatched an ankle and threw it high, so that Michalec spilled back with his chair. He rolled on the rug, stunned and silent, then Emil was on his chest. He wanted fear. A little terror. But there was only dull shock in Smerdyakov’s eyes, then contempt.
Emil slapped him hard, three times. Both cheeks were red, the eyes wet.
“Again,” said Emil, forcing the words through his teeth. He held the photo to Michalec’s face. “The name.”
Michalec’s blinking eyes focused on Emil’s, then past them. He trembled; his eyeballs shivered. Emil drew back. Michalec’s head jerked sideways; his eyes rolled back into his skull. White eyes riddled with fat, red veins.
A sputtering groan came from Michalec’s throat, and his whole body seized up, shaking, blue cords rising from his neck.
A hand on Emil’s shoulder tugged him back, and he saw a flash of Radu’s furious face, then a black stick coming down.
Pain snapping in his head and neck, trickling like cold water, reverberating.
It did not put him out, but made him briefly senseless. Radu was over his master, stuffing something into his mouth, holding an arm over his chest.
Emil closed his sore eyes and saw bright lights.
When he opened them again, Michalec was wiping his forehead with a hand, eyes closed, and Radu was returning to Emil, swinging the club. He threw up a hand, wanting the strength of his anger back, but it was too late. The club hit the side of his head, burning bright sparks in his skull.
Pulled to his feet. Heard come on as he was pushed forward, stumbling. Get out came through the hazy noise in his head, and he wanted to stop and turn around and throttle someone, but couldn’t make it happen. There was another thump on the back of his head halfway down the staircase, and it felt like something had cracked.
For a moment he was still awake-suddenly clear-headed and thinking-and then he wasn’t.
He was lying in the hot front seat of the Mercedes. His skull felt shattered. Eyes open. Eyes closed. Open. He sat up. The low sun burned his brain. There was blood on his hands, on the passenger’s seat, and in the mirror his tender mouth was crusted with blood. He could smell his own bile and sweat in the stuffy car. He was parked at the beginning of that long drive, by the main road. The light spiked his eyeballs. Poplar trees led up to the rise, and off to the right the bearded peasant swung his scythe in long, low arcs.
They were staring. His right eye was already puffing up, and he had patted down his hair in an unsuccessful attempt to cover the red scratches around his neck and ears. His head was about to explode. They all could see plainly what had happened, could read everything in his wounds, but he didn’t care. He was as loathed here as he was in Smerdyakov’s house. But it no longer mattered. Nor did his grandfather, not even Lena. For the moment, there was no one else in the world. The beating and the shame were nothing; he would be willing to suffer so much more if there were some sense to it all. But there was no sense. There was nothing here for him.
No hidden gazes now.
They watched him stop at his desk and sit down, swivel, and shake his head. It was difficult to ignore them. Pain rippled behind his eyes and throbbed across his skull. From the drawer he took the pen tips, ink and cigars, and found pockets to hold them. He moved his father’s watch to his breast pocket. He left the stamps behind.
Leonek Terzian was standing in front of Emil’s desk, fingertips spread on the surface. His face showed something approximating compassion-or was it a trick of the light? It was certainly the buzzing in his skull that added compassion to Terzian’s voice: “Michalec called. Angry.” He shook his head. “You attacked Smerdyakov?”
It wasn’t compassion. It was amusement. Hilarious bruises. Funny, broken boy.
He tapped the chief’s door, and before he could say enter, Emil was in, closing the door with his backside. The air seemed to compress in that hot, small room.
“There you are.” Moska hung up the telephone.
Emil took out his Militia certificate. Not much different than Michalec’s, only green instead of red, with the word militia. He tossed it in front of the chief.
“What’s this?”
“Resignation.”
The word contained within its syllables so much relief that he almost dropped to the concrete floor and cried. But he wanted to make it out in one piece.
“Now wait, Brod.”
But Emil was already back in the station house. There was nothing else to take with him, so he passed the inspectors-it was strange, even after only a week, to no longer call himself one. They looked surprised, even big Ferenc, hovering over his typewriter, but Emil didn’t know why they should feel surprise. This moment had been preordained from the very start. Terzian was calling something to him. Asking him to wait. Emil had waited too long already.
He passed into the corridor that echoed his footsteps and Terzian’s voice behind him-”Hold on, Brod, wait!” Emil stepped onto the bright concrete steps. He wondered if Terzian wanted a repeat of that first day.
By God, he’d give it to him. He was in just that sort of mood.
“Brod!”
A car at the corner laid on the horn to get some horses moving, and a band of Gypsies carried heavy sacks on the opposite side of the street. People shouted, but the buzzing was so loud that their shouts were like whispers. He was on the hot, cracked sidewalk, walking nowhere. Some uniforms looked up-more laughers, no doubt. What a funny town.
He wanted to take a bath at Lena Crowders grand house, among those paintings. Long beards of history. He wanted Lena Crowder to use her white, intoxicated fingers on his back and his bruised eye. He would go see her. Yes. Get a ride. A taxi.
“Brod!” Terzian whispered back there.
Another car, blue, driving beside him-a small, sleek make he didn’t know-honked. It was like a whisper too. The buzzing was a river in his head.
But when he longed for Lena Crowder he remembered her husband’s crushed skull. It was all sickness and disease anyway, and he might as well search for a hooker with stubby workers’ fingers and a low price. Young, old- it no longer mattered.
The blue car moved ahead a short distance and stopped. A tall man in a light-colored overcoat stepped out. Another familiar face, but from where? Over the noise of his skull he could hear the man’s accented voice saying, “Comrade Emil Brod?”
The man had curved smile lines that connected his lips to his eyes. Emil stopped. “Yes?”
The smile lines deepened as the man pulled out a pistol with his white-gloved hand. There was an instant in which Emil’s mind did the work very quickly and identified it as a Walther. Probably a PPK. Officer’s gun, German- German, like his accent. But as soon as the identification was made, it fled his mind.
The man emptied three rounds into Emil, jumped back into the car, and swerved away.
