crazy.”
“She’s afraid?”
“Not of the Russians. Not that. She wants children.”
I looked into my empty glass, fearing for any child with that woman as a mother.
“We’ve been trying for years. Once it did work, but-”
“Miscarriage?”
“Four years ago. I don’t want her to go through that again.”
“What does this have to do with the Magyars?”
“Nothing, not really. She’s just feeling her mortality. She needs to give her love to someone other than me.”
“Watch out she doesn’t leave you.”
He went silent, so I looked over at him. He was staring into his glass. “Each of us has his own marriage, Ferenc.”
Lena showed up with a shopping bag on her arm and a smile on her face. “The very comradely Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar. How did Emil ever get you here?”
Her beauty was beginning to wear from her drinking, but there was still something about Lena Brod that gave the illusion of a woman in her prime. She glided over in a cloud of perfume, her dark hair stroking my cheeks as she kissed them. “You’re looking well, Lena.”
She winked at me, her mascara thick but precise. “When are you going to bring your extremely well looking wife over for dinner?”
“Soon. Very soon.”
“I hope. What are you drinking?”
I looked blankly at my empty glass, then at Emil.
“Martinis,” he said. “Here’s yours.” He was already pouring it.
The conversation turned to shopping. Lena had recently traveled to Paris, and it saddened her when she had to shop here. “That’s the tragedy of our situation, do you realize? Look at this material.” She showed us a black blouse she had found. “It’s so thin. And do you know how many colors I had to choose from? Two. Black and blue. Doesn’t that tell you something?” Then she began a monologue on the virtues of capitalist department stores, her hands turning continually in her lap until Emil put his own hand on them.
“I don’t think Ferenc cares too much about shopping.”
She touched a red nail to her chin and looked at me.
I shrugged.
Lena stood up. “I’ll let you boys discuss homicides, then.” She grabbed a bottle of vodka from the bar and marched into another room.
“She okay?”
Emil took a sip. “She’ll be fine.”
But there was nothing more to talk about. He fell into one of his unself-conscious silences, distracted by other matters, and it only made me self-conscious. So I reached for my hat.
I drove slowly and carefully through the early dusk. The apartment was empty. I lay down in the empty bedroom. It was still a lovely novelty: a bed. Its breadth was amazing, the even firmness of the mattress, the headboard. I breathed in deeply to cleanse my head, and caught a faint whiff. I was unsure. I rolled facedown and sniffed. I thought it was the drunk, webbed parts of my imagination, but no-this was a very definite, heavy stink: sex. I put my nose into the duvet, then pulled it back and smelled the sheets. Its strength went to my head. I’d slept with Magda those last couple nights, but we’d slept beside one another, touching only hands.
I considered, briefly, taking it all out on Stefan as I should have done before. Our years of friendship meant nothing in the face of this. I could drive to his apartment, whether or not she was there, and beat him until there was nothing left to love. But I used the only real weapon I had. I grabbed the spare pillow, took an extra sheet and blanket from the wardrobe, and made up my bed again in the living room.
When she saw it that evening, she did not say a word.
18
On Monday morning, we found Markus Feder chain-smoking in the corridor outside his lab. He didn’t stop as we approached. “Rough weekend?” Emil asked.
Feder put a hand to his red hair as if he’d forgotten something. A few passing colleagues looked at him. “Comrade Inspectors,” he began, “what do you know about this body already?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Bound wrists and ankles. Burned in the Canal District. I’ve got a shoe in the car, but I don’t know if it’s the victim’s.”
Feder dropped his cigarette and stepped on it.
There was a lump on the examining table that he didn’t uncover. He washed his hands in the sink and talked loudly over the water. “It’s a man, all right. The bone structure’s clear enough.” He shut off the faucet and went for a towel. “Height, five-nine, average. I’d guess he was balding, but can’t be sure. He was killed about a week ago.” His hands were dry now, so he turned to us. “Inspectors, both his arms and legs had been broken.”
“By the heat?” asked Emil.
Feder shook his head. “The victim was tied and gagged. Then his legs and arms were broken. Probably with a simple household hammer. And then the victim was dragged a long distance by his broken, bound arms. The way the bones are separated and the muscles stretched, I can’t imagine how far he was dragged. Very far. And, finally, the poor bastard was doused with benzene. And lit. There are carbon monoxide particles in the lungs-he was burned alive.”
We stared at the lump on the table. There was that smell again, though the ventilation kept it to a minimum.
“He couldn’t roll over,” I said. “Into the water.”
“Your victim’s arms and legs were useless. All he had was jelly and bone shards.” Another cigarette hung from his lips, unlit.
Emil looked a little sick.
“What about his shoes?” I asked.
“His left shoe,” said Feder as he lit his cigarette and started for the door. “It melted into him.”
“His right shoe?”
Feder shrugged and passed through the swinging doors.
Emil suggested we stop for a coffee, and over our cups we said nothing, thinking of muscles contracting uselessly and bones crunching. I could feel it too, in my legs, and this is the imagination that had made me believe I could write; this was how I could feel Stefan’s weight on Magda’s dry skin, could see his twisted face at the moment of climax.
The first cobbler, an old professional with half-moon glasses, turned the shoe over in his hand. First the heel, which was worn at an angle (he disapproved of this with a shake of his head), then the mold of the toe, the sewing around the lace holes, and finally the compressed insole. He handed it back to me. “I don’t know this work, and I don’t think I want to.”
“But it’s not a factory shoe, correct?”
“Absolutely not. Unskilled work, but hand-made.”
The second cobbler was a young man on the other side of town. He wore a tailored jacket and wide red tie. His name was Petru Salva. “Comrades, this shoe was not made in the Capital. You may be assured of that.”
“Can you be certain?” asked Emil.
Salva held the shoe up on his fingertips and touched a long nail to the toe, the laces, the border with the sole. “This threading is absolutely provincial. No doubt about it.”
“Which province?”
“Difficult to say, Comrades. Extremely difficult. Each village with its own cobbler has a style individual to that one cobbler. It’s idiosyncratic.”
