CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was a sharp connection: his head against concrete. His hands wobbled out to the sides, somewhere, his knuckles scratched. Tires burned against the road. Carbon monoxide and hot rubber. The sky fuzzed over and was visible again, and his thumping heart obscured all sounds. The buzzing was gone; only the backbeat of his blood remained. He could not even hear the yell- shaped mouth of the dark, hungry face bent over him. The name came to him in a flash: Leonek. Leonek’s mouth made long ovals as he yelled at the crowd forming around them. Wide- brimmed fedoras and women’s shoes, vivid, red-painted nails emerging from white leather straps. Breathing was forced labor; there was soon nothing in him. He tried to raise his head to swallow the air, but something was sitting on his chest, maybe Leonek, or the Bulgarian, but he couldn’t know. He couldn’t see a thing except blue sky, then nothing. He was sinking in a warm, watery pain, an angry bathwater covering him in blackness.
A mountain range, high grass above the treeline, tired soldiers poking through the underbrush, looking. They evaporated to white and faded into an angry, violent crowd with large, flat rocks in their hands. They threw in silence. Then came the hard-edged ache behind his eyelids. He opened them to let it out, but light spilled in, cutting into his brain. His thoughts were porridge. The light would not form into shapes. The smell of human sweat and warm decay was inescapable. Voices hummed around him like flies, louder, and when he tried to swat them, fresh pain erupted and he gasped, gripped by it, his whole body seizing up, crying. He saw the calm, everyday expression on that face, but the details, the features, were unclear- Comrade Emil Brod? — then the pistol emerging slowly, more slowly than possible. He could almost make out the slow bullet in the air pocket that burned around it, hot waves rippling along the slug. Then the moment of impact, cracking through ribs, soft tissue, organs. The pain was terrible. Through it a woman’s voice said there was and Comrade Brod. But he was already out again, warm rivulets filling mouth, nose, eyes.
The hospital room was high-ceilinged and airy, and when he shifted his head, sore neck creaking, he saw a plain-looking nurse in the corner, knitting. She looked up from her needles to his bloodshot eyes, and he thought that in the midday light she was beautiful.
“You’re up?” She set the needles aside.
The pain returned when he tried to move. It scratched through his guts and chest. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a whisper: “Water. “
She shook her head. He said it again, trying to wet the inside of his mouth with a dry, heavy tongue. But she was firm. The doctor forbade it. “You have holes down there. We don’t need you leaking all over the sheets.” He saw the knitting in her hand. Something blue and small and soft, for a baby. “You’ve been out a week, you know?” She put the knitting in her pocket and felt his face for fever. “We almost thought,” she began, then smiled and left the room.
The windows were covered by a translucent white drape so thin he could see the crowns of leafy trees and white-spotted sky. The walls hummed like a machine.
So he was alive.
It surprised him that he couldn’t think it with more enthusiasm. All he could imagine were innumerable days ahead forming a long line to his eventual death. Days of working and fighting, or days of inertia. He didn’t even have a job now. He wasn’t even an inspector.
It was almost funny, but not enough to test his body with laughter. Only a week into his job, and someone had blown a hole in him. Three holes.
A young doctor with a buzzed head looked into his eyes while holding the lids open with his thumbs, then removed the bandages that covered his chest and stomach. Emil almost screamed. The doctor winced with him, as though he could feel his patient’s misery. Then the bandages were off, and Emil-with an extra pillow behind his head-looked down on the white expanse of sickly flesh and sewn holes. It was as if he were looking down on a different body, one uncovered by the gleeful Uzbek coroner. Only the pain reminded him it was his own, each time the doctor touched the puckering, swollen seams stitched by black thread. There were three gashes: one along the edge of his right breast, another just below his left breast and heart, and the last in the center of his soft gut. The doctor affirmed that his survival was a miracle.
“A scientific miracle,” the doctor specified. He looked at a watch while he held Emil’s wrist. “Feeling up for visitors?”
He felt up for nothing. The doctor’s hand was covered by a thin mask of black hair.
“Inspector?”
“Sure,” Emil croaked. “Of course. Watch?”
“Pardon?”
Emil pointed at the doctor’s wristwatch, then at himself. “My watch?”
The doctor settled his patient’s hand back in the sheets and rummaged through the things on the bureau. Pushed past the photos, lifted the garter with a wink. Then he found the chain, and lowered the watch into Emil’s hand. “We’ll wait a few hours for water.”
He felt the ticking in his palm. Steady and even.
“They’ve been calling every day.”
“My grandparents?”
“Yes,” the doctor nodded. “Them too.”
Chief Moska came as sun was falling and the tree outside was just black silhouette. Holding a copy of The Spark in one big hand, he rapped on the doorframe with the other. Emil felt an urge to mutter enter in the chief’s resolute way, but words were making his thirst a desperation. The chief had a lumpy expression of bafflement, and when he pulled a squeaky wooden chair beside the bed, he left his jacket on. He sweated the whole time.
“Brod. You’re feeling well.” It was almost a command.
“I’m awake.”
“That’s something,” Moska agreed. “We made sure you got your own room, a ward didn’t seem right.” He looked at the sheets. “They say it’s a remarkable recovery.”
“Scientific miracle.”
The big man’s hat was in his hands, squeezed and released repeatedly. He settled back in the chair and blew through pursed lips. His eyes focused on the far wall, the bedside table, the framed amateur painting of the Georgian Bridge at twilight, then back to the sheets. Emil’s hands lay there, beside the newspaper. The chief cocked his head to the side. “I wanted to talk to you. About the case,” he said. “Your case.”
Emil’s voice lowered. “No case. For me.”
“We agree there,” the chief said quickly. “But we both know, don’t we? Who did this to you.”
He nodded.
Moska looked at the sheets, then his hat in his lap, the light fixture in the ceiling, and squinted. “Youve been treated unfairly, Brod. We know this now. There were… misunderstandings.”
Emil waited.
The chief’s squint tired. He blinked and wiped his cheek with a hand. “This is the nature of bureaucracies. Large bureaucracies. Lack of trust. Before the war it was different.” His voice wavered slightly, as if he were about to cry. But he wasn’t. “Before the war we didn’t even need a homicide department, you remember? We were all just police. Then it grew. Everything grew. The Militia, the divisions, state security. I don’t know anyone outside my little department anymore.”
He seemed genuinely saddened by this, but Emil was still unable to understand. He almost asked for clarification, but the chief was on his feet again.
“It’s insidious, this situation. Yet we have to make it work.” His large, long features twisted as they forced out the words. “Apologies all around, Brod. It’s what I’ve come to say. I’d prefer you didn’t resign. The others too. They feel the same. We’ve all been shamed by this.”
Emil opened his mouth to ask for something more, some detail he knew he was missing-some why — but the chief was already out the door.
The tree had gone indistinct against the night sky by the time his grandparents arrived. She patted her tear- stained cheeks with a musty handkerchief, and the old man stood in various corners of the room, as though ascertaining all possible avenues of escape. She opened a package of bread and hard cheese and told him to eat it slowly, because that was what the doctor had told her, that the hole in Emil’s stomach would require slow eating.
