these days. “Just don’t put all the blame on him. I want to be fair.”
“Fair,” I repeated, then went in to say good-bye to the others.
Vatrina was forty minutes to the north and, entering the small farming town with its tiny train station, it was difficult to believe there was a work camp there. Old men dotted the side of the road, walking past fences and puffing on barely visible cigarettes, and three fat women with babushkas huddled around a well. The central square was small, with a grocer’s, a post office, and a modern hotel that didn’t belong-a wide concrete bunker with a sign that proclaimed HOTEL ELEGANT in peeling red paint. I first tried the post office, but there was a long line of young, sunburned men with slips of paper leading up to the one open window, where a woman with dyed black hair smoked and stared at them. So I went into the Elegant. A worn red carpet stretched to the end of the faux-marble lobby, past the entrance to a dark bar, to where a younger black-haired woman sat behind the counter, smoking and reading a paperback. I leaned beside the guest book. “I’m looking for the Vatrina Work Camp, number four- eighty.”
She held up an index finger, read for a second longer, and closed the book on her other finger. It was a novel by someone I’d met a few times at Georgi’s. “They don’t put work camps in main squares, idiot.”
She had a nice, round face with an expression that didn’t match what she’d called me. “I don’t have a lot of practice with them.”
She sighed and turned her book flat on the counter. “What business do you have there anyway?”
I started to reach for my Militia certificate, but instead patted my coat for cigarettes. I pulled one out and lit it. “My own business. That’s what business I’ve got.”
She rolled her eyes as if she’d heard this a million times, and that’s when I realized this was how she flirted. Stuck behind a desk in a dead-end town, you learn strange ways of getting a man’s attention. “And you think your own business is important?”
“I expect it’s more important than chain-smoking in a flea-infested hotel all day.”
Her face brightened, and she tapped the counter with a fingernail. “Tell me, come on. I know how to keep a secret.”
I leaned closer to her face. “How can I trust that?”
“You’ll just have to,” she whispered.
“But keep it quiet, you understand?”
She nodded again, seriously.
I told her I was a novelist researching a book on the history of the Vatrina Work Camp, number 480.
She leaned back again. “You’re giving me a line. That probably works on a lot of girls. But not this one.”
I shrugged. “What can I do if you don’t believe me?”
“You write any other books?”
“ A Soldier’s Tale. It was a few years ago.”
She hesitated, then smiled broadly. “Really? I read that! No.”
I showed her my transit identification papers to prove who I was, and she leaned close again, her voice back down to a whisper.
“I thought it was ex treme ly good. You know that? You’re a very good writer.”
I suspected she had never read it, but didn’t press. She told me to drive down the eastbound road six, seven miles. “It’s as plain as day. You staying the night?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’ll be chain-smoking here until six.”
58
It lay on the left-hand side of the dusty road, in a flat expanse of harvested wheatfield. The watchtowers were visible first-five wooden columns connected at their bases by barbed wire-and inside lay five long, low buildings. It was as basic as you could imagine, no signs, no indication of purpose. The towers were empty, but when I turned off the road and took a gravel path to the front gate, a guard in a heavy coat wandered out to meet me, patting his arms. He opened the gate and stuck his head in my window. “What can I do for you?”
His rancid breath quickly filled the car. His teeth were like over-thickened fingernails. “I’m here to talk with the commander.”
He looked around the inside of the car. “Are you from Yalta Boulevard?”
“I’m from Militia headquarters. This is part of an investigation.”
He licked his discolored teeth and inhaled deeply. I braced myself for the exhale. “Mind if I see some evidence?”
After I showed him my Militia certificate he waved me inside, closed the gate, and pointed to a space between two buildings. He walked me down to the back of the camp, where a muddy field opened up. In the far corner, beside another gate leading out of the camp, was a small building with a smoking chimney and a telephone cable connecting its roof to a tower. That, the guard pointed out, was the commander’s office.
I walked the rest of the way alone. The guard was the only person I’d seen, and the long buildings, which I assumed were used to house prisoners, were silent and, I also assumed, empty.
There was a muddy window on each side of the front door, and before I knocked I tried unsuccessfully to see inside.
“Enter,” came an unpleasant voice. For a moment I was confused.
Like Moska, the commander sat in a dim room at a disorganized desk surrounded by stacks of files. Some open steel cabinets revealed piles of letters that had been read and stored there. Against the back wall and beside a sooty Mihai, a small iron stove burned, its open grille revealing a few half-consumed papers on the coals. The commander was bald and surprisingly short-his jacket and slacks were too large on him. When he introduced himself as Comrade Captain Gregor Kaganovich, it was with a voice dirtied from a lifetime of cigarettes and shouting. A coal drawing of the captain hung on the wall-well-done, but severely romanticized.
“I’ve come to ask some questions relating to a case I’m working on.” I handed over my certificate.
He slipped on a pair of round glasses, turned the certificate in the weak light from the window, then handed it back. “What kind of case are we talking about?”
“A homicide.”
“One of my pets get killed?”
“One of them is doing some killing.”
He clucked his tongue, as though we were talking about one of his own children. “I’ve heard of this happening before. Some wolves just can’t help but follow their instincts. You can beat them as much as you like, but they can’t be domesticated. Some coffee?”
“I’m interested in a particular one. Nestor Velcea.”
He looked at me as he poured a cup, but I couldn’t catch his expression. “No, I’m afraid I can’t remember all my pets. But look around,” he said, waving at the files. “There’s bound to be something.” He handed me the cup and squatted among some stacks. “I tell you, the Comrade Prime Minister could have given us a little warning over this Amnesty, if you know what I mean.” His fingers flipped through the files at an alarming speed.
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, he announces it, and the next day-not in a week, not a month, but the next day — all my boys are out of a job. A lot of them are from the other side of the country, and were transferred here when we needed them. And we did need them. Then one day they weren’t needed.”
“Then they get transferred somewhere else.”
“That’s what you’d think, wouldn’t you?” He lifted a file to the light, opened it, then shook his head and closed it. “It wasn’t until the end of the summer they realized they hadn’t followed through on that small point. That’s a lot of men to suddenly transfer. My guess, though, is that they just didn’t know if they’d change their minds and need the boys all over again.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
He stopped searching and turned to me. “By the end of the summer they had put through transfers for all the camp guards throughout the region. But nothing for our camp. So I made calls, and after weeks of this, finally got
