“So you do this a lot?”
She stretched an arm over her head. “Now and then. There are a couple guards I see regularly, but we all know I’m not the kind of girl to settle down.” She looked at me. “It’s too fun, isn’t it?”
“Fun, yes.” I poured the last of the wine into her glass and asked if she wanted to stay over.
“Think there’s enough room?”
There wasn’t, but I wanted to sleep with a warm body tonight. “We can make it work.”
The room was getting cold, so I checked the radiator, which didn’t seem to do a thing. Tania banged on the knob a few times. “This hotel is a joke.”
As she undressed, I noticed the black, shiny spot on her stockings, where she’d used nail polish to repair a hole. I turned out the lights.
It was difficult, but she curled up with her back to my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her. She talked steadily through the next hour, mumbling about how she’d had offers from men to take her out of this town, but she would never go. “Here I’m somebody. What would I be in the Capital? Just another peasant. Just another slut.” She said she’d even had offers from state security men. One of them sent her packages of Swiss chocolates on a regular basis. “He’s in love with me. That job must have screwed up his brain. You can see it in them, those security types are all a little off.”
“You should watch out for them.”
“Me? No, they should watch out for me.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Her hair shifted against my nose. “I’m serious. One told me that he was frightened of me.”
“A little girl like you?”
“I didn’t believe it either, but,” she said, then paused, trying to remember exactly. “He said he was afraid of my inability to commit to one man. Not that it scared him, not personally, but he said that more and more people were like me, and if you couldn’t commit to a single person, how could you commit to a state?”
“That sounds like state security.”
“I even get the occasional foreigner.”
“Foreigners?”
“Well, not many. So you remember them. The last one was French. Nice enough guy. Big and fat, but not so jolly as he looked. He was trying to get a friend out of the work camp. I could’ve told him it wouldn’t work.”
My arms around her twitched, but she didn’t notice. “Remember his name?”
“Louis. Yes-Louis something. Nice guy.” I felt her fingers grip my elbow beneath the covers, as if for support. “But he wasn’t such a gentleman as you.”
61
I drove home with the first light, having whispered a farewell to Tania’s sleeping form. I showered and changed, and by three was at the station. Emil was in, so I sat on his desk and took one of his cigarettes. He winked. “Got some interesting news for you.”
“Me first,” I said. “Watch out for yourself and Lena. Nestor found out where I live.”
“You saw him?”
“He tried to break in while I wasn’t there.”
Emil frowned.
“I took Magda and Agnes out of the city. You might consider the same thing for Lena.”
He nodded very seriously. “Okay.”
“Another thing: A Frenchman named Louis Rostek saw Nestor last spring at the camp. The commander won’t tell me anything, and the guards don’t know what it was about. But I think he told Nestor that Antonin had put him away.”
“A Frenchman?”
“Someone I know. Through Georgi.”
Emil dragged his fingers through his hair. “I think my interesting news will stand up to yours.”
“Tell me.”
“The lab came back with prints on Stefan’s bedroom window and those fish soups. Guess who his window- climbing dinner guest was.”
“Don’t make me guess,” I said, as his phone began to ring.
He reached for it and winked. “Nestor Velcea. Matched his work camp fingerprint card perfectly.”
I watched him lean into the telephone. Stefan and Nestor Velcea, sitting at the same table eating fish soup- why? Was Stefan involved in the crimes? No. Then who came to the door? I didn’t know how to put it all together.
Emil hung up. “Sorry, but that was Lena. She’s vomiting everything she takes in. And,” he said with a grimace, “she’s a little hysterical.” He got up and went for his coat.
I stared at the empty doorway after he left, then wandered slowly toward my own desk. Louis’s role made sense-the scene at the camp was of one man’s loyalty to another, of a friend who had put some clues together. I remembered that Antonin Kullmann’s paintings had even made it to Paris-his success enabled his downfall. But the scene in Stefan’s kitchen over fish soup-
On my desk was a phone message from Georgi.
I met him in the cafe attached to the opera house on the corner of International and V. I. Lenin. It was another of those Habsburg monstrosities that seemed not to have changed in the last fifty years, with the exception of its nonplussed waiters, who smoked in the back corner and watched you wait.
Georgi handed me a list of names of people who might know the whereabouts of Nestor Velcea. As I looked it over, he said, “They’re all writers. Nestor didn’t like painters.”
“So I heard.” I pocketed the list. Georgi was looking good. He had a new hat, something a friend had brought from Vienna-not Louis, though. “Tell me more about him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
It was a tough thing to ask, but Georgi was up to it. “I met Louis some years ago. ’Forty-seven, — eight? He was spending some time here at the expense of the Writers’ Union. He was thinner then, that’s for sure. The women went wild for him. French accent and all. You can imagine.”
“Sure I can.”
“My book had just come out, and they had me read a little bit. Louis was impressed. I can’t say I liked his poems-he was a little too didactic in those days.”
“In what direction?”
“You know, glories of world revolution and all that. He’s calmed down a lot since then.”
“Did he know Nestor Velcea?”
“Apparently they’d met each other during the war. ’Forty-four or so. I’m not sure. He knew Nestor was a basket case, but thought he was talented.”
“Did you think Nestor was talented?”
“I never saw his paintings, never met him until he came to my party.” Georgi gave an elaborate shrug. “Nestor was already in the camp when I met Louis.”
A waiter appeared and reluctantly took our order. Then he returned to the smoking group, the order still on the notepad he had dropped into his pocket.
“You should have seen it when they met again at the party. They embraced and cried like father and son.”
“Before I showed up.”
“Yeah. Before.”
I noticed my thick fingers were pulling at my rings, sliding them up a knuckle, then back. “What did Louis think about Nestor’s imprisonment?”
Georgi pulled out a cigarette. “He wasn’t in the country when they took Nestor away. He was supposed to
