some answers. Number four-eighty is going to reopen in the spring.” He smiled.
“So what are you doing in the meantime?”
“I’m cleaning up the old files to make room for new ones. But my boys, they’re the ones in a tough spot. They have to wait around in that hole they call a town until spring.”
“What kind of work did they do here?”
“The guards?”
“The prisoners.”
He tilted his head from side to side. “Everything, really. We’d take them into town to build things-you’ve seen the Hotel Elegant?”
“Yes.”
“Our work,” he said, tapping his chest. “We have them farm the wheat around the camp, and during the winter they work the gravel up at Work Site Number One.”
“The gravel?”
“Sure. About two miles away there’s a quarry, and my pets bash it to hell. But I’ve got some better ideas up my sleeve for when they return. Some digging.” He raised his eyebrows.
As he leafed through the files, I nodded at the cabinet of letters. “Mail from your admirers?”
He looked confused, then the smile came back. “Oh those! No. Just letters my pets wrote while we put them up. To the family and that sort of thing. Want to read some?”
I didn’t.
Velcea’s incarceration file was interesting. I had my own theory about how things had unfolded, but this at least settled a few facts. On 17 February 1947, an anonymous call to Yalta Boulevard reported that Nestor Velcea, a painter, had been seen handing out an underground broadside called Independence. On 25 February, a handwritten letter arrived at Yalta Boulevard, unsigned, claiming that one Nestor Velcea had been overheard at a party criticizing Comrade Mihai’s foreign policy initiatives in particularly disturbing and violent terms. Then, on 1 March, another call came through. This one said that Nestor Velcea would, on the evening of 3 March, go to the central rail station to meet with an agent of foreign imperialism in order to give away sensitive national information.
Armed with this knowledge, state security agents waited in the station on 3 March. According to the report, Nestor Velcea arrived at 7:12 P.M. and sat on one of the benches near the ticket windows. He did not purchase a ticket, and he regularly looked around at arriving passengers. At a quarter to eight, he got up to leave, and that’s when he was arrested.
The rest of the file contained signed transfer documents and arrest paperwork, and some reports on his behavior in the camp over his ten years. Other than various instances of falling ill, his behavior had been exemplary. The final sheet was his amnesty certificate, a form letter with his name scribbled in a blank space, signed and stamped by the camp commander sitting across from me.
“So what does this tell you, Comrade Inspector? If I can ask.”
The file told me that Antonin Kullmann had framed Nestor in as methodical and precise a way as he kept his old letters. “Not a lot. I was told he’s missing a finger, that it was cut off by a guard.”
He winked at me. “They like to spread stories. It gives them a thrill.”
“What do you remember about him?”
“I’ve had a lot of pets here, it’s hard to remember the quiet ones. The ones you remember are the ones who shout all the time, and keep returning to this office for their reprimands.”
“It looks like Nestor was all right, then.”
The captain shook his head. “None of them is all right, Comrade. And what he’s done on the outside just proves it.”
I took my hat from his desk and stood up. “Thank you, then.”
When we shook hands he held on to mine a little longer. “You get him, now. Make sure you get him alive so we can have him back.”
“You want him back here?”
“I’ll make up a bunk for him today. I like to have all my pets back at home…who wouldn’t?” Then he frowned. “Hey-you didn’t touch your coffee!”
59
It was only four, but I needed a drink. I’d heard enough about the work camps to know I had walked across soil with a heavy blood content and had talked to one of the most brutal sons of bitches that state security could find-because that’s who you put in charge of work camps, the ones who could stomach it.
Along the road to the center there were more bars than anything else, so I parked and entered one at random. Young men leaned against high tables and cupped their shot glasses with thick fingers. The bartender smiled thinly at me. “You need a coffee?”
“Palinka.”
He poured it and looked me up and down. “You one of the new ones?”
“The new what?”
“You know. The new guards.”
I sipped my drink. “New guards? I heard there were plenty already.”
He leaned close so he could whisper. “That’s the word. New guards are being shipped in any day now. What are these boys going to do?” He nodded at the drinkers. “They’ve waited long enough as it is.”
“Well, I’m not one of them.”
“That’s good for you,” he said with a wink.
I leaned on a free table and gazed at the photographs that covered the wall. Shots of “old Vatrina.” The only difference between old and new Vatrina, the photos told me, was the Hotel Elegant, and the camp.
A thick man with a close-shaved head set his drink next to mine and looked up at the photos, as if unaware of my presence. The back of his neck was swollen with wrinkles where his excess flesh had collected, and his puffy cheeks were riddled with gray pockmarks and stubble. “You come in from the Capital?” he asked the wall.
“Yeah.”
“Horia says you’re not a guard.”
Horia watched us from behind the bar. “That’s true.”
“It’s all right if you are,” he said to a photograph of a woman and a horse in front of the feed store. “We’re not vindictive here. Everyone’s in the same boat.”
“I’m still not one.”
“Then what are you?” He turned to look at me. His eyes were light blue, and below one of them was a scar.
I said it before I could think it over: “I’m a writer.”
“What do you write?”
“Novels.”
“You mean, stories you make up?”
“That’s it.”
He considered this as he finished his shot, walked back to the bar, and returned with two more. He put one in front of me.
We raised our glasses to each other.
“So why aren’t you in some cafe in the Capital right now? Why are you on the stinking edge of the world?”
“Research.”
“Working on a story about this town?”
“About the camp.”
His mouth opened, but then he closed it. He noticed someone at another table. “Hey, Krany!” A little dark- haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth looked up. “Krany, come over here.”
Krany sauntered over with his glass and leaned on our table without looking at me.
