long silencer attached to it-and tossed it into the kitchen. I knelt beside the chair where I had left Agnes’s knotted rope and bound his hands behind his back. He wrinkled his nose when the rope passed near his face. “Damn, Ferenc. That thing smells like piss.” I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, watching him as I phoned Emil, but he made no move. When I hung up, he said, “This is it, then. You understand, right? Once I’m in custody, I’ll tell everything about November the sixth, and about Svetla Woznica. If you put me away, I’ll put you away. That will be the end of you.”
I sat in the chair. “Then we’ll go down together.”
88
All four of them arrived, Leonek and Emil with guns drawn. Kaminski smiled at everyone. I wanted more from him. I wanted some kind of pleading, something to let us all know that now he was finished. But he only smiled as I gathered the audiotape and Emil and Leonek lifted him and took him out to the car. Louis and Nestor sat together on the sofa. Louis said, “What about us?”
“What do you think?”
Nestor was tipsy-Lena had kept him drinking. He smiled grimly. “I suppose it’s time for me to pay back society again.”
Louis was a French national, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to charge him with anything. He was a fool, but that had never been much of a crime in our country. So I drove him back to the Metropol. He and Nestor hugged on the dark street, and Louis kept apologizing, but Nestor was serene. The alcohol must have helped.
As we got into the car, I glanced back at the hotel. A white-haired man in the lobby stood and approached Louis. Jean-Paul Garamond did not look happy.
Kaminski was already in a cell, and Leonek and Emil were waiting for me. They stood to the side as I filled out forms for Nestor’s detention, then Moska showed up. He was tired and confused and a little angry that he hadn’t been told what was going on. But he got over it. After Nestor was taken away we went to a bar. I wanted to be drunk, to gain Nestor’s serenity, but intoxication only made me feel sick. I couldn’t quite hear what the others were saying. One thing I did make out was Emil’s confusion over something Kaminski had said. “He told us that by tomorrow no one will give a damn about him, or Nestor, or anyone. He said tomorrow everything is going to be different.”
“What does that mean?” Moska asked.
Emil shrugged. “I wish I knew.”
Leonek wagged his head over his glass. “I don’t wish I did. I’m very glad not to know a thing.”
I felt the same way. I wanted to forget Kaminski’s last words to me- That will be the end of you — but memory and knowledge are the killers of serenity. Then, around one, when we were all too drunk to read a thing, a heavyset woman came in, red-faced, frantically waving a special late-night edition of The Spark.
“God, oh God,” was all she could get out, repeatedly.
Leonek swiped the paper from her, and as he moved it back and forth, trying to focus, he looked baffled. “It’s Mihai,” he muttered, maybe to us, maybe to himself. “He’s dead.”
89
It rained most of the drive. I had not had the patience to clean up the house; all I wanted was Agnes and Magda. I wanted them with me immediately; there could be no delay. I splashed through craters of rainwater and flew past hitchhikers stumbling through the mud, the sputtering radio teaching me more about the life of Mihai than I would ever have wanted to know. All I learned of his death was that lung cancer had taken him.
I ducked beneath my coat to stay dry and banged on the loose front door. Nora looked surprised.
“Where are they?”
“Inside, dear. Eating lunch.”
Agnes threw herself into my arms, weeping. It was strange to hold my daughter again, and I had to adjust my arms to accommodate her. Maybe she’d grown in the past week. But her tears weren’t for me. “He’s dead, Daddy! W-what can we…” She broke down again.
Magda was easier to hold. I sank my face into her shoulder and held her for a few seconds longer than she expected. Then she pulled back. “Are you okay?” She wiped my cheek.
“Me? Oh, sure. I’m fine.”
“Your hand is scratched.”
“It’s nothing. I’m okay.”
It took a while to relax, a meal that tasted better than any Nora had ever made before, and a long smoke with Teodor. We discussed Mihai’s passing and speculated without knowledge on what would follow. No one that week had any idea what would happen. “Agnes is a wreck,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”
“Maybe those Pioneer meetings had their effect.”
He asked about the case.
“It’s over.”
“And it went well? You got your man?”
“I got him.”
“And what about you two?”
“What about us two?”
“Mag told me she asked you to take her back.” He put out his smoke. “Are you going to do that?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
All five of us took a walk across the wet communal plots and greeted farmers who stood smoking in empty, long-harvested fields. We made it to the social club, a low wooden building where a couple men played guitars in a corner while drunk farmhands danced with young girls. I didn’t like it when one of them covered us with his atrocious breath and asked to dance with Agnes, but I was pleased when she declined.
At the farmhouse Magda and I took the room where she had once told me about Leonek. But this time she examined my hand with concern, then told me again how sorry she was. I kissed her to keep her quiet, and we made love in a way I’d not done for a very long time: simply, and without any motives other than love. Afterward she told me she could never leave me, because a man as pure and true as me was a once-in-a-lifetime find. “Pure?” I asked her. I was standing naked by the opened window, smoking.
She put herself up on an elbow, and in the darkness she might have been any woman. “I know you, Ferenc. Your impulses are pure. You’ve proven it to me all these years.”
“I’m not pure, Magda. I’m so far from that.”
“But you are.”
“No,” I repeated, then told her about Vera. I told as little as possible.
She was quiet for a moment, then whispered, “I knew something was going on. All those nights out.” I noticed her breaths were uneven. “But what else should I expect?” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t do it earlier.”
I flicked the cigarette out the window and latched it tightly.
90
Magda was disheartened by the apartment-I hadn’t cleaned a thing while they were gone-and peered closely at the bullet hole in the wall. Standing with her and seeing it through her eyes, shame overcame me. Agnes ran with Pavel to her room, and Magda leaned against the radio and sighed.
“Look,” I said. “I’ll help.”
