Emil said he didn’t know-he hadn’t thought of it-but Ferenc didn’t believe him.
“Kid like you, it’s all you really want.”
Once the cigars had burned down, Ferenc stood up-his own wife and daughter (that was a surprise to Emil) were waiting for him, and Stefan, also standing, teased him. “Tell your old bitch to sit down and wait, for once in her life.”
Ferenc laid an arm over his shoulder. “You’ve just proven my point.”
They gave Emil a comical salute and pronounced him the finest cadet they’d ever met. Stefan thought the rhyme was funny, and laughed the whole way out.
Leonek’s silence was hard to ignore.
Emil looked past him to the short bar, where men just off of work sat in their blue coveralls, drinking silently. The bartender, a man with blue-veined features, knew them all.
“Where were you?” asked Leonek, and Emil turned to him again. His dark face was covered in black spots where blood beneath the surface had collected.
“When?”
“The war-wait!” He raised a finger. “ Finland.”
Emil hadn’t realized how drunk Leonek was.
“The ovens. Did you see them? In your travels?”
He shook his head. “I was in the south. Ruscova, a village.”
“So you didn’t see it. Nothing.”
Emil drank the metallic pineapple juice. He was still, after three weeks, thirsty. “We saw some refugees,” he remembered. “From Romania. They said it was some kind of mania. Whole villages turned on them. Some stayed at our dacha.”
Leonek spoke loudly: “ My people. They did it to my people first.” He took another swill and banged the glass on the table. Beer spilled over.
Armenian, Emil remembered the Uzbek saying. Terzian was an Armenian name.
“In my family’s village the Turks took a whole family. Ten, I think. Yes. I was seven, and there were ten of them. The soldiers tied them together with rope. You know, from the back. Hands back here,” he said as he demonstrated with his own hands behind his back. “All of them connected so they couldn’t see each other. Their faces.” His hands were in front again, clutching his glass. “I watched from a ditch. They tied them so they couldn’t move, then pushed the family into a lake. One whole family. Sunk like a rock. First they screamed, then they were underwater.” He took another drink.
“And you?” asked Emil.
“Look at me!” He opened his arms and let them fall by his sides. “I’m here, right? They tattooed my father and took him away with the other fathers. We thought they were going to prison, but as soon as they were out of sight we heard gunshots. On our way out of Armenia we saw Turkish soldiers using knives. You know. Casually. Like cutting fruit.”
He slipped back into his silence. There were voices building in the front of the bar, jokes and sporadic laughter. Leonek’s black face was sweating.
“You all right?” asked Emil, leaning closer.
A tight, glistening smile. “What are you doing here? This job will eat you up.”
Emil opened his mouth, groping for an answer. Then he realized-with cool shock that drained into his arms and legs-that he had been let into this man’s head.
This story was the basis of Leonek Terzian. It was the root of all the choices he had made since that day when he was seven and watched a family drown, or saw his father grimace at the burn of a tattoo. It was the same as Ester watching her mother be dragged through the streets of Iasi. It colored everything that followed. It was why Leonek was devotedly living with his mother, and why he worked in Homicide, where the stink of death and the misery of humanity was thickest.
“Come on, then,” said Leonek. “Out with it.” His smile had become loose, more convincing.
Then he knew. For the first time. He had known it when he was in Finland and felt that need to return, when he saw the mauled woman on the street and knew it was too late to leave. He had felt it in all his love and hate for this city. He saw it in Lena Crowder s wonderful eyes when he closed his own. He tapped the table with his knuckles. “Because I want to be devoted.”
Leonek looked into his empty glass, then back at Emil. “What?”
He knew it all now, and the realization was a rush of pleasure like a clean, warm bath. “I want to believe in one place,” he said. “I want it in my blood.”
Leonek looked again into his glass, and smiled. “It’ll get into your blood, all right.” Then he did the unexpected. He leaned over the table and pinched Emil’s cheek, like a Ruscova grandmother wanting to make sure the sweet vision of boyhood in front of her was actually there, in the flesh.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Over the weekend, Emil went to a film alone. It was an old Soviet comedy, and he went in order to make himself enthusiastic. He thought that by looking at the pictures flickering on the screen, he might get a touch of that mania he had once known through those Soviet newsreels. But he couldn’t concentrate on the shadows shifting and talking on the screen, the man with the ludicrous mustache whose monocle kept dropping from his eye. And when the audience laughed, he lost track of the Russian dialogue. He left halfway through.
That Monday Leonek picked him up. Rather than the office, they went directly to the Sixth District and parked outside the newly named “Rosa Luxembourg” High School, and Emil waited behind the wheel, his cane between his knees, while Leonek sauntered inside. He watched the clouds through the windshield collect in the west in preparation for a storm, and almost jumped when Leonek popped open the back door and shoved in a fifteen- year-old girl. He slid in beside her. Although it hurt terribly, Emil turned to face her.
“Meet Liv Popescu,” said Leonek.
She was small and pretty with a round, bright face. “You know about your friend?” asked Emil.
She didn’t say anything. Her gaze was fixed outside the car, on the houses lining the street, at the sky.
“Liv?” he tried again. “Do you know?”
“Alana?” she asked, and looked at him. Her cheeks were smooth and unblemished.
“Thats the one.”
Liv shrugged and looked at clouds.
“There s someone out there killing your friends,” said Leonek, his voice softened by a transparent attempt to soothe the girl. “You understand? This person kills them, maybe vomits on them, and tosses them in the bushes.”
At the mention of vomit, Liv Popescu looked at him.
“But the problem,” he continued, “is that when we talk to you there’s not an ounce of worry on your face. Nothing. Which leads us to believe…Emil? What does it lead us to believe?”
The handoff was unexpected, but easily taken. “It leads us to believe that you, Liv, are involved in your friends’ demise. Both Alana and Ion.” His left lung was burning badly at this angle; each word was a little fire inside him. “That you know something, or you did something. Is that what you imagine, Leon?”
Leonek nodded and placed an arm on the seat behind Liv’s head. The cushion squeaked as he settled. “I imagine this has something to do with Ion Hansson,” he said. “The handsome young man with the ax in his neck. I’m not too far from the truth. Am I, Liv?”
Liv Popescu made no move, no sound. Her hands were wedged between her knees.
“Do you know what a crime against the state is?” asked Emil. “It is something which interferes with the smooth operations of the federal and legislative bodies that govern our workers’ state. Would withholding information about her friend’s murder rank as a crime against the state, Leon?”
“Absolutely.”
Emil looked away momentarily to ease the pain-just a brief instant-and when he looked back she was crying. At some point the fear had dissolved her confidence in her own silence. Emil had doubted she would have much to
