The adrenaline had faded, and he was getting a pain in his shoulders from looking up, so he backed against a wall. “My name’s Brod. Inspector Emil Brod. Do you think you can remember that?”
“Inspector Emil Brod,” she repeated. “I’m very bright.”
He wasn’t sure if she was making fun of him. “I work in Homicide. Our station is in the First District.”
“I’ve seen it,” she said. Very seriously.
“If you need anything, you come to me. Okay?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Hanna? Can you remember that? Anything, whatever. I’ll try to help.”
She nodded, still very serious. Her brow was stitched tight. Then she looked back into the room and disappeared. Dora took her place. Sadly, there was nothing left on his face of the punch, though Emil’s knuckles were still sore. “Get out of here, Inspector!”
Leonek was stepping sheepishly down from the front door.
Emil showed Dora his teeth, then growled.
“Christ, Brod. What the hell is going on?”
Chief Moska glared from his side of the desk. Someone had partly repaired the radiator, and it hissed in the corner, a thin line of steam shooting from a loose bolt. The window had been opened to air the office out.
“Nothing, Chief.”
“What’s t/ns?” He leveled a thick finger at Emil’s bruised face.
“A fight, Chief. Happens all the time.”
Moska settled on his elbows. He lowered his voice. “What about Berlin? You went?”
Briefly, Emil wasn’t sure what to say. “I made a visit.” He knew the man wanted to know as little as possible.
“And how was it?”
When Emil spoke it came out as a long exhale: “It’s a city that makes you think, Chief.”
A smile finally cracked his features, and he leaned back again. He looked ready to laugh. But instead, he scratched his scalp, fingers knuckle-deep in his gray mess. “There’s a whole world above you, Brod. You know that, right?” He dropped his hand to the desk. “That’s why I’m here. I’m the one who has to listen to their worries. They say, Why do we have complaints from a politicos about your new inspector? I have to have an answer. I tell them what I can, and sometimes I even ignore them. But they’re not the bad guys, Brod. They’re just like me. Someone above them is asking questions, wanting answers. So when they come to me I must have answers, or at least promises.” The chief paused to look at him, and blinked once, slowly. “They say someone in the Central Committee wants a rookie on this dead songwriter case, don’t waste time with good men.” He touched his chest. “I say okay. Later, they say the same committeeman wants that rookie off the case, wants the case closed. I promise, because I’m a loyal servant, that this will be done. I haven’t lost you in all this, have I, Brod?”
Emil shook his head.
“Good. Because sometimes I make promises for other people. You. I promise you’re no longer involved in this case. It’s a promise I can keep, isn’t it?”
The chief had given him everything he needed-had asked him a question and given him the answer. So Emil nodded soberly. “Yes, that’s a promise you can keep.”
Moska’s tongue rummaged around in his mouth. They did not misunderstand each other. “Go on, Brod. Go do your job.”
His job consisted of waiting. Dora would not get back to them until the next day, Tuesday, when they would wait in a cafe for his phone call. Dora would contact the people he knew, the ones who knew Michalec, and either it would happen or it wouldn’t. Emil wasn’t sure what he would do if the deal wasn’t accepted. He floated through the afternoon indecisively, and during long bouts of silence had the uneasy feeling that he might be near the end of his life. He was a young man, but if Lena was dead he felt an obligation to follow through with certain measures that would certainly be fatal. And he realized then that he had achieved what he had told Leonek he truly wanted: He had achieved devotion.
Leonek brought him home for an early dinner. The house was a low, two-room shack on the edge of the city, just before the farmland, with an outhouse and a well. It had once been a servants’ quarters to the large house Emil could just make out on the horizon, beside a black stretch of woods, but after the Liberation the land had been chopped up and redistributed. There were other hovels peppering the field, and a few makeshift tents where families lived until they could build. It reminded Emil of the Tiergarten.
Seyrana Terzian wore her long past on her face. Emil thought he saw the roads of Armenia in her cheeks, and the other countries she’d had to go through to get here. She said only the obligatory greetings to Emil and served them a lentil-and-apricot dish she called mushosh, which he ate ravenously. This pleased her, and she finally smiled. She listened as the men talked. Emil told them about Helsinki, the Arctic, and Ruscova. He said his life was not something you could base a movie on, and Leonek said that their life-Emil noticed he never said my life-was a movie that couldn’t be made. Armenia to Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Italy and here. Poverty and violence all along the way. The life of a refugee was not photogenic.
“Then you came here.”
Leonek nodded. “After a few more countries, yes. You go where they’ll take you. The king was feeling liberal the month we arrived. He even let me go into public service.”
Seyrana nodded a steady agreement, occasionally wiping her eyes.
“And here you are,” said Emil.
“A simple life.”
“Not so simple.”
“Extremely,” said Leonek. “It’s just me and mother.” He smiled at her, and she patted his hand on the table with her own shriveled hand. “Look at the others,” Leonek said to him. “Ferenc is writing his novel, can you imagine?”
“A book?” Emil had trouble imagining it.
“You didn’t know?” Leonek grunted and raised his eyebrows. “Why do you think he’s typing all the time? Those aren’t reports he’s working on. He’s been writing that book as long as I can remember. And Stefan is a magician at rebuilding engines. Any time you have trouble with the car, bring it to him. Astounding work. Even the chief.”
“The chief?”
“He paints. I guess you couldn’t know that. Landscapes. Really very beautiful. But me? All I do is sing. Sometimes. And not very well. And I’m a detective. Not the best, but I make do. And there’s you.”
Emil didn’t answer. He was wondering as well.
“For you, Her Highness.”
“Who?”
“Madam Crowder.”
Emil smiled, but then there was no energy to sustain it. He looked at his empty plate.
They discussed the case while Seyrana was in the kitchen. Emil told him what he had learned, the details of Janos’s blackmail. “This went on for a while. Six months or so. With his money he left his wife and got an apartment in town. But along the way something happened-maybe excess greed, I don’t know. Michalec felt he had to kill him.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Leonek, his hand on his rough, dark chin. “You saw how much money they were dealing with. Who’s stupid enough to screw that up?”
“Whatever happened, Janos was scared they were going to kill him, so he booked a flight to Berlin.” Emil smiled at Seyrana coming back to sit down, and decided to avoid mention of Janos’s sexual tendencies. “There is one possibility, though, for what screwed all this up for Janos.”
“Aleksander Tudor,” said Leonek.
Emil nodded. “Tudor knew about the boxes of money. He was that kind of supervisor. And he could get inside the apartment whenever he wanted. Maybe he had found the picture, or at least those ten pictures Janos had taken of Michalec meeting the German colonel. Maybe he wanted something out of it.” He shrugged. “Too many people in on a conspiracy, and it starts to crumble. Janos was killed, and Tudor knew he was next. I thought he was just a nervous man when I met him. But he had reason. He knew he was going to die.”
“Please,” said Seyrana. Emil enjoyed the heavy sound of her accent. “No more death at the table,
