Perhaps it was only Emil’s hereditary hopefulness, but it sounded like the chief was reading reluctantly from a script that had been prepared in other offices, in the Central Committee back rooms. His words came out stiffly and without proper conviction. Emil shifted to take pressure off his stomach. “You’re right, Comrade Chief. I’ll drop the case right this minute.” The lie was a breeze.
“What about this?” He lifted a maroon passport from his desk and held it between his thumb and forefinger.
Emil didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not an absolute fool,” said the chief. He opened the passport, turning pages until he had reached the German visa. He shook his head. “You do realize, don’t you, that outside our border, your badge is worth nothing?”
Emil nodded.
Chief Moska closed it again and stared at the cover, thinking. Then he handed it to Emil. “Brod?”
“Yes, Chief?” He stood.
Moska looked at him. “Sympathy will only take you so far.”
The others were arriving, clutching coffees and blinking tired eyes. Brano Sev was already at work in the corner, speaking into his phone. His whole body tilted toward the wall in a position of urgency.
Emil waded through some clutter that had built up over the last couple days-an informative proclamation on the tense situation in Berlin (When all nations allow Germany to he a nation again, all nations will deserve their annihilation), two notes from yesterday asking that he return his grandparents’ calls, and a sealed envelope marked by typed capitals: brod. The words cut into the thin paper. 7 October 1948, Thursday
Comrade Inspector Brod,
Regarding our exchange of last evening, the following facts have been ascertained from Berlin:
1. On 10 February 1948, J. Crowder arrived in Berlin by Aeroflot #34B. From Schonefeld, he took a taxi to Wilhelm Strasse 14, the residence of Konrad Messer, owner of a nightclub called “Die Letze Katze”-or “The Last Cat.” Messer is originally from Heidelberg. 2. Comrade Crowder stayed overnight and in the morning crossed into the American sector at the Brandenburg Gate. Our Berlin comrades followed him as far as the end of the Tiergarten, but for various reasons lost track of him. 3. At 20:30, Comrade Crowder returned to the Soviet sector and took a room in the Hotel Warsaw. In the evening he had drinks in the lounge, and a search of his belongings came up with nothing of interest. 4. He was allowed to leave Berlin without questioning. He returned on 12 February, Aeroflot #29.
It is my sincere wish that this information is of service to your investigations.
Respectfully,
It ended with a scrawled flourish of signature.
“Still here?” asked Leonek. He was crossing the room, feeling his pockets for change. “Get some coffee?”
But Emil didn’t look up. This was exactly what he had wanted from Brano Sev, but now that he had it in his hands, the intricacy of the details disturbed him. They kept names upon names in the Russian MVD files, and he suspected his own-since he had traveled outside the country-was relatively thick.
“Emil?” Leonek said.
Brano Sev had hung up the telephone and was staring at him. Emil nodded his recognition. The security inspector turned his simple, peasant’s face back to the paperwork on his desk.
“Some coffee?”
He blinked at Leonek and knew, finally, that he had made a mistake. He had suspected it before, ever since they sat in the station waiting for the Sighet train, but now it was undeniable. There was no place to hide in this country; there was no place out of reach. He had left her in a little village, unprotected, and anyone with his file would be able to figure it out in five minutes. Michalec had a whole universe of files at his fingertips. He could send any number of shadows into the countryside to close in on Lena Crowder.
“Leonek,” he said, deciding everything as the words came out. “You have to get her for me. Forget everything else. You have to protect her.”
Leonek began to make a joke about only wanting coffee, but changed his mind when he saw Emil’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The rain-wet blacktop stretched unnervingly into the darkness-this midnight flight had been the earliest available. He imagined slick rubber tires skidding forward, then the explosion amid the pine trees at the far end of the runway. The Soviet stewardess, a pretty Georgian in a long, straight skirt, told him to hurry. He turned back to the fat Aeroflot plane and mounted the steps. His feet were numb.
Through the window he saw the propellers kick and begin to spin. The vibration shook the whole cabin. Businessmen and government men-all the shades of Slav-cracked jokes among themselves. The stewardess made sure he was strapped in, and he noticed her hair was tied tight beneath a blue cap that reminded him of his nurse, Katka, in her medical cap. Hospitals.
Again, violent deaths. Explosions.
She smiled very close to his face-some musky scent from Moscow department stores-and he tried to relax, thinking of the field in Ruscova, of Lena, but he only saw men in tall grass, converging on Irina Kula s fenceless house.
The takeoff was shaky and insecure, but no one else seemed concerned.
He could tell the government bureaucrats by the smug way they called the stewardess over and tapped her ass to send her on her way. The businessmen were the ones who laughed loudly; the bureaucrats supplied the jokes. He’d heard there was big business to be done in Berlin-supplying a decimated city always took work. And these days, with all supply trucks cut off from the western half of the city, some westerners migrated east during the day to buy the goods the Americans and British hadn’t yet dropped from their planes.
He’d only seen pictures of Berlin: flattened residential buildings and fire-gutted churches. Some newer news clips showed women and children wrapped in gray blankets, crowds huddling around military transports full of bread. Three years after the defeat, and Berlin was still crippled and hungry.
When he felt flush he waved at the stewardess and she brought a paper cup of tepid water. She held it to his lips and whispered something he could not hear above the whine of the engines.
Then the cabin became very cold. For those without heavy coats, she retrieved blankets, and, covered by his, Emil turned to the window, where black clouds merged into black, starless sky. He wondered what the pilots could be using for navigation. He felt like a peasant facing a locomotive. Everything was beyond him.
Emil was astonished by how solid the chilly earth at Schonefeld felt. The Russian customs officer, a severe young soldier, looked him up and down and jotted his name in a notebook. A second guard stamped passports between yawns. It was three-thirty in the morning.
A taxi driver approached him, and Emil shared the ride with a fat bureaucrat he thought he recognized as one of the famous “thick Muscovites,” but wasn’t sure. He had a dramatic mane of wavy hair rising from his forehead. “Hell of a town,” he said, nodding at the shadowy ruins passing them by. “Been here before?”
Emil shook his head.
He stuck a thumbnail between his lips and picked at his front teeth. “But you can’t sleep here anymore. This trash with the Allies. Blockade, airlift, Christ — planes all hours of the night!” He cracked his window and let the cold hiss inside. “The Germans are remarkable people. Like slow-witted insects who don’t get it. They just turn up the jukeboxes and dance!”
He laughed at his own observation, and Emil noticed the taxi driver looking at them in the rearview. He was a thick-jowled man who steered with one arm. The other sleeve was pinned flat. A veteran, maybe. A one-armed veteran forced to listen to foreigners’ views on his people. The bureaucrat opened the window the rest of the way, and they could now hear the far-off murmur of airplanes.
