scrape of baby carriages and bricks. When he came to splits in the path he made intuitive guesses-slow, stupid presumptions. Once, he stopped, opened the door and vomited clear liquid. Finally the rubble ended, and he turned onto a cracked, paved road. A truck filled with Soviet soldiers drove by, their faces tired from late nights out. A few jeeps with stern senior officers followed. No one noticed the bruised, achingly slow man in the scratched taxi, who, every time he shifted, felt the adhesion of blood holding him to the seat.
More guesses. Vague remembrances. He appeared at the far end of Unter den Linden, but could hardly see the peak of the Brandenburg Gate because of speeding delivery trucks that filled the broad avenue. The city was going on as it had yesterday, and the day before. As though everything in Emils life had not just collapsed. After a few more streets, he was clear enough to find The Last Cat. The bar was closed. The taxi s clock said it was just after noon.
He parked and opened the windows to let out the stink. His hands, his feet, his face-everything shook. When he closed his eyes there were bodies.
Some women with carriages noticed him. They gasped and looked away quickly. Their pace increased. He saw other women, mothers and grandmothers and daughters. Their faces all reminded him of one. Affected faces, faces that have lost their girlhood. A grandmother with long gray hair braided at the neck asked if he needed some food. She seemed to talk so quickly that he had trouble understanding, and when he did understand, he could not make his mouth move fast enough-” Thank you, no, thank you,? m waiting for a friend.??? he all right. “
“The Americans did this to you?” It was Konrad Messer, standing a few hesitant feet from the window.
Emil groaned and opened the door. Everything was stuck, then it was unstuck. “Just let me in.” He hobble toward Konrad s grimace. “Please?”
The dark and cool, stale air of the club was soothing. He stripped and washed, using the kitchen faucet in the back while Konrad went to move the car away from his club. He came back shaking his head, then went to retrieve a spare suit he kept in the office for emergencies. It was a little large, but better than anything Emil had ever owned. No worker materials here.
Konrad handed him something sweet with gin. “You’ll need a few of these.”
Emil almost declined, he needed to make a call, but his hands shook too much, and he knew he couldn’t make sense yet. He threw the drink back. His stomach would have to take it. He leaned against the bar and began muttering about what had happened. He’d thought he would just tell a little, but when it began he couldn’t stop. Konrad nodded continuously to prove he was listening, but his expression never changed as he made gin drinks for them both.
“What are you going to do?”
He blinked into his glass. “Do you have a telephone?”
“In the office.”
He took a fourth drink with him. The world was beginning to slow. He talked to three operators in as many languages-their voices sped and slowed with the rhythm of his drinking-and then he waited for the callback. Konrads office was covered with yellowed photographs from before the war, men on stages. Showbusiness shots, vaudeville. Men standing next to other men who were dressed up like women. The telephone rang.
It took two more operators to patch him through to the station. He was told by a curt woman that Leonek Terzian, along with the rest of the homicide department, was not in the office. It was Saturday. He asked if there was a home listing for Leonek. “Who are you?” she demanded.
He read off his Militia identification number and told her this was an emergency. She made him wait while she conferred with someone else. Finally she returned and unhappily gave him the telephone number.
More operators, another wait for the callback. Then a woman’s faint voice: “Yes?”
He asked for Leonek Terzian.
The hiss on the line grew louder as he waited. Leonek’s voice was difficult to hear. “Emil? It’s you?” He was shouting. “Emil, listen.” A pause and a whisper directed at his mother to get out of here. “Emil?”
“Yes?”
“She wasn’t there.”
“What? She wasn’t- what ^ 7.” He had known it before, had known it in his bones: his premonitions had been astute. But hearing it aloud was entirely different.
“I went to Ruscova,” he said. “You didn’t tell me I’d have to get there by horse. But I made it. I went to that woman’s house. Irina Kula?”
“Yes yes, that’s it,” said Emil. Everything was being said too slowly.
“She wanted me to tell you it wasn’t her. She says it was Greta, her friend. She said you’d know her.”
Emil remembered a fat, frizzy-haired woman full of smiles.
“A man came for Lena. That’s what she said.”
“What?”
“She asked you to forgive her. She feels terrible.”
“Whatman?”
“I don’t know. Short, dark hair. That’s all I could get. Rude.”
Emil couldn’t speak. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He could smell Lena’s cigarettes and feel the shape of her ribs through the summer dress she wore in Ruscova. She had been crying then.
Something garbled came over the lines, ending with “dead.”
“What?”
“That maid. Irma? In the hospital-suffocated!”
Konrad brought Emil another drink and exited discreetly.
“You there?”
Emil wasn’t there. He was sitting at the desk, the telephone to his ear, but his body had contracted and convulsed, sending his thoughts elsewhere, to some desperate escape. Part of him wanted to cease right now. To turn off his head and call it quits. This was too much for one young man.
“Emil?”
All he could think to say was “I’m coming home.” He hung up.
A pile of twenty-three boys in a shattered Berlin apartment. Three bodies in the rubble. One in a living room, one in the Tisa. A girl in a hospital room, a pillow over her face. God, how they piled up. And Lena-yes, Lena-was just another. But why not me? Why was he not dead among the broken bricks?
He clutched his stomach and leaned over the floor, but this time nothing came.
He called the Schonefeld Aeroflot office. A shockingly friendly and perky Russian woman told him the next flight home wasn’t until four in the morning. Emil reserved a seat and finished his drink. He floated back to the bar. Konrad looked at him sympathetically and made a joke about his walk. Emil put his empty glass on the counter and asked for another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The bartender arrived around three. Large, burly, peasant stock. He cleaned off the bar and replaced the corks with spouts for easy pouring. He had the look of workers who appeared on posters-strong, Soviet-with sleeves neatly rolled up and a wrench in their hands, bringing forth the future by way of railroads, dams and bridges. Or the worker statue in Victory Square, sharing a stone torch that lights nothing.
Konrad sat across from Emil and started speaking. It was a kind of nervousness. He didn’t know what to say, so he touched his broken nose and talked about the bartender’s obsessive cleanliness. Like no one he had ever seen. It was the last refuge of civility left in the big man. Konrad slid his glass over to Emil, smiling. “You need this more than I do.”
“What about Janos?”
“What about him?”
Maybe it was the drinks, or the despair, or their brutal combination, but Emil was suddenly very sure of himself. “Janos told you Smerdyakov- Graz — was a friend. I can’t believe Janos lied to you about him. Maybe at first he did, but he couldn’t follow through with the deception.”
“Why couldn’t he, sweet Comrade Inspector?” Konrad’s hands were on the table, flat, on each side of his
