“Ma’am,” Emil said loudly. Everyone looked up. “Do you know Irina Kula? I’m looking for her.”
The widow frowned deeply. “Of course I know Irina. Who are you?”
“From the Capital,” said the farmer with the mustache.
“I’m Emil Brod.”
The second, smooth-faced farmer stood up, and Emil thought his face was familiar. “Valentin Brod’s son!”
The others looked at the grinning farmer, then back at Emil. The widow began to laugh.
Irina Kula’s two-room house was as near as everything in Ruscova-a few houses down, then back through someone’s garden-and Irina glowed when she saw Emil. She pulled them both inside with her hands on their backs and called for her friend Greta, who was waiting in the kitchen. They were two fat, aproned women with sunburnt smiles. Their short hair had gone frizzy and useless years ago. Irina served plates of baked apples, one after the other.
“Tell me,” she said, watching them eat. “Your grandmother- how is she?”
“She works now, in a factory. Textiles.” “Shirts?” asked Greta.
“Slacks and jackets.”
“Factory pants,” Greta muttered disapprovingly. “And that red husband of hers?”
“Still red.”
He told them about his travels in the north, the cold Arctic, the cold Finns, and admitted to the massive beauty of Helsinki. Lena, he noticed, listened closely to all of it.
“But you came back,” Irina said, smiling.
“Where would I go?”
Greta slid a soft mound of apple from her wrinkled fingers into her mouth. “You came back and married.” She smiled at Lena as she chewed, and, after a moment, Lena smiled back.
Emil avoided as many details as possible, only enough to make them understand the severity and secrecy of his request for a room. “Just a few days. For her safety.”
Irina glowed. “She’ll live here forever if she likes-such a beautiful girl! Don’t you think?”
“Indeed,” said. Greta, nodding.
Irina gave a wide smile that was short on teeth. “She can be my daughter.”
“I thought I was your daughter,” said Greta haughtily, and both women laughed.
After a late dinner of pork-stuffed cabbage, Emil smoked on the front porch, watching two shadowy horse- forms grazing in a black field across the road. They moved in increments, holding their bowed heads to the crabgrass, unaware. There were other small homes farther along, some with high fences blocking them from sight. Irinas home and a few others had no fences, and he could see straight through to the low beginnings of the Carpathians.
The door groaned, and Lena squatted beside him. She blinked, adjusting to the darkness. “You’ve got a nice little town.”
“Not mine,” he said. “Not much, either.” He pointed. “Some houses, fences and mountains, like I told you. The occasional horse.” He wondered how long she’d be able to take living in the sticks without her scotches and American cigarettes, in a hard bed, surrounded by the clumsy handcrafts of the peasantry. “Is Irina still up?”
“She’s listening to the radio,” whispered Lena, and Emil realized they had both been whispering all along.
As if on cue, tinny voices drifted through the window, submerged in hisses, then rose again like a swimmer struggling in the middle of an ocean.
“Only one station, she told me. And only sometimes.”
Emil pressed his palms against his knees. He reached for his cane. “A walk?”
They made it to the road without speaking, then crossed into the field where the horses cantered nervously away. Lena twisted long grass into a knot. “When I was in Stryy again, I was reminded what it means to be alone. It’s not good.”
Emil knew, and said as much.
“It’s hard to find someone,” she said. “To trust, I mean. It’s rare.”
He didn’t know how to answer that. The breeze was chilling him, but he hardly noticed.
She looked at the mountains, then back at the village. There were no lights. “How long are you going to be gone?”
“A week. If I take longer, I’ll send someone to get you.”
“You’re going to Berlin?”
He squatted, trying to get rid of the ache in his stomach that had pestered him since the train. Lena Crowder was no fool.
“You’ll fly?”
“I’ve never been on a plane,” he admitted. “I’m terrified.”
“You shouldn’t go. You could get killed.”
He wondered, amid her innuendoes and his own mounting confusion, if she understood how much danger she was in. Two old women could do nothing to protect her.
When she walked, her skirt moved with the breeze. “I’ll write you a check. You can’t afford the trip.”
“I’ll find a way.”
He heard her exhale a soft, weary laugh in the darkness, but couldn’t see her smile. “Not the People’s Militia. They won’t pay a single korona.” She was a little ahead of him in the grass, standing with her legs apart. She was so quiet he could hardly hear her, even this close. “You’re not sure about any of this, are you?”
He squatted again as the pain shot through him, and when he looked up she was right there, standing over him, shaking. The airy smell of her perspiration filled him. From the sound of her breaths, he knew she was crying. He stood up quickly, unsure, and held her shoulders. He slid his small, flat hand across her back and felt her ribs shaking against his chest. His cheeks were wet from her tears, and her short, hot gasps warmed them. His cane slipped from his grasp, and now both hands were on her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
She kissed him first, lightly on the neck, and when he kissed her salty lips it felt as if they had done this all their lives. There was no Janos Crowder, no People s Militia, no one. His legs gave out, and she fell with him into the grass. It had been such a long day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
On the train he tried to ignore both his aching back and stomach, and his fears for Lena. He tried to focus on the facts.
February 1948, Janos Crowder made a trip to Berlin. This was before the present Russian blockade and Allied airlift.
Soon after Janos returned to the Capital, he had enough money to take an apartment in town and leave his wealthy wife.
(His wife, Emil thought. In the field last night, she kissed his scars.)
Six months later, in early August 1948, Janos made a halfhearted attempt to get back together with Lena, and after a week was kicked out.
One week after that — August 18-Janos was killed.
Then his building supervisor was killed in the same way.
Emil had few doubts: Jerzy Michalec, alias Smerdyakov, was his man, and Smerdyakov used an unknown German to do his work. For Emil it was not a question of who murdered these men, but why. Presumably, they were killed over an object that Janos Crowder and Aleks Tudor had in their possessions. Something that could fit into the pages of a book.
(He felt the blades of grass cutting into his palms as he held himself over her moist face.)
He again looked over the photograph of Jerzy Michalec and the tall German who had shot him three times. Certainly these photos couldn’t be the objects that had killed two men? A meeting at an automobile. Nighttime,
