men, creating a diffused glow. He squatted beneath a window and rose slowly until he could just make out the forms. Men around a table. A voice said, “Cucumber-you’re dead!”
Laughter followed, and a few moans. Pavel Jast said, “That’s fifty-two koronas… and that lousy mule!”
Brano used the tip of his finger to rub a corner of the window clean. Five men sat at a table with faceup cards. Jast; Mother’s assistant, the hyperactive Eugen; Zygmunt; Juliusz; and a fat man he didn’t recognize. Jast collected the cards spread over the table and began to shuffle them like a satisfied pro. Eugen was smiling, drunk, and Juliusz was serene. Zygmunt looked sick; perhaps he was the one who had just lost fifty-two koronas and a mule. Yes-Jast set down the cards and leaned over to kiss Zygmunt’s cheek. Zygmunt pushed him away.
The fat man he didn’t recognize sucked on a cigarette and put it out in his vodka, then laughed. Behind Jast’s large right ear was the German ballpoint pen with its naked woman.
He crept back across the field, tripping once, and made his way back home. Mother was asleep, so he drank headache powder with water, then took a glass of Lucjan’s vodka to bed. He rolled his face into the pillow, closing his eyes, but not even his brother-in-law’s concoction could help him sleep.
11 FEBRUARY 1967, SATURDAY
Mother was already awake. She crouched beside his bed, touching him lightly on the wrist. “Brani?” He opened his eyes to her large features close up and felt momentarily like a child.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Brani, there’s someone here to see you.”
“Who?”
“That captain,” she whispered.
“It’s okay. He just needs my help.”
She pressed her dry lips together and stood up as Captain Rasko appeared in the bedroom doorway, hat in his hands.
The blanket fell from Brano’s thin, pale chest when he reached to the foot of the bed for the shirt he’d folded the night before. “Good morning, Comrade Captain. Can you give me a minute?”
Rasko nodded and left. Mother still looked concerned.
“What is it?”
She glanced back at the doorway. “He asked if you were planning to leave. I said you weren’t. You aren’t, are you?”
“No.” He finished dressing and put a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you let me talk with him alone.”
She went to her bedroom.
Rasko, in a chair, was still holding his hat as Brano sat on the sofa. His hair looked dirty. “What is it, Captain?”
“This is difficult, Comrade Sev.”
“Then do it quickly. That’ll make it easier.”
“You see,” he began, shifting his feet, “I went through the evidence Juliusz gave us. In that bag. The handkerchiefs found on Jakob Bieniek.”
“The ones used to silence him.”
“Right.” He passed his hat to the coffee table. “Well, there was something inside the handkerchief. The one that was inside his mouth.”
“What was it?”
He clutched his hands between his knees. “A matchbook.”
“Excellent. That’s more than we had before.”
“It was from the Hotel Metropol. From the Capital.”
Brano leaned back. He struggled a couple of seconds with what to say next, remembering Juliusz’s hesitation when they met. Then he knew there was nothing to say. He could point out that other villagers made trips to the Capital, but they both knew none of them could afford a night in the Metropol, nor a drink from its bar. And even if they could afford it, the coincidence of his arrival from the Capital and the matches in a dead man’s mouth could not be ignored by any responsible investigator. So Brano asked the captain what he would like to do.
Rasko cleared his throat. “I’d like to search the house for evidence.”
Brano stared into Rasko’s dark eyes until the captain blinked. “Be my guest,” he said.
While Rasko went through his room and the others, followed nervously by Mother, who cried out for him not to be clumsy, Brano waited on the sofa, turning over the one thing he was sure of. Pavel Jast had used his matchbook to frame him for the murder of Jakob Bieniek. Either he had returned after they discovered the body, or he had been involved in the actual murder and had stuffed Brano’s matches between Bieniek’s struggling teeth, encased in a wad of handkerchief. But why?
“Any luck?” he asked when Rasko came back, flushed, wiping sweat from his forehead. Mother stood behind him with crossed arms, silent now, utterly disgusted.
“Can you give me the keys to your car?”
Brano stood up. “It’s unlocked.”
Rasko first checked the trunk but found only a spare tire and a jack. He searched the backseat, which Brano had cleaned meticulously before leaving the Capital, then under the driver’s seat. He reached beneath the passenger’s seat and made a face. It wasn’t elation, nor was it defeat. It was somewhere in between, and the expression remained with him as he drew out a crumpled white shirt with large splotches of reddish brown. Brano suppressed an involuntary shout as Rasko flattened the shirt on the seat, eyeing the bloodstained slices, each between a couple of inches and a foot long.
Brano looked up at the house, where his mother had opened the curtains, her fat fingers tapping her chin.
Rasko exhaled. “Well, I suppose you know what’s next.”
“Of course I do.”
Brano walked behind his Trabant to the passenger door of the white Skoda. Rasko said, “You want to tell your mother where you’re going?”
She was still in the window, her hand now covering her mouth. “I think she already knows.”
On the drive to the station house, his palms together between his thighs, Brano was not overly troubled. Surprised, yes, but many times in the past he had been faced with inexplicable turns of fortune. It had been an inexplicable night in Vienna as he was arranging the final hours of Bertrand Richter. The last thing he’d expected was interference from Bertrand’s girlfriend, the tarot-card reader. And then, when he’d woken the next morning in the Volksgarten, a blow to the head briefly relieving him of the burden of memory-who could have predicted that? As he had then, he now calmed himself by measuring the length of his facts. Pavel Jast, the one man in town who was to assist Brano, had arranged a murder conviction for him. Check. Which could only mean that Pavel Jast had his own agenda in this larger investigation of Jan Soroka.
Which meant, most likely, that Pavel Jast was assisting Jan Soroka by making sure Brano would not hinder his and his family’s escape.
But was Jast really so shortsighted? Once the truth came to light, Jast would find himself in a work camp, or in the eastern mines. Jast was too much of a survivor for that. He was the sort of operative that hangs on for many years, always a step away from being caught or being made redundant. His kind, the small-town informer, was as resilient as the cockroach.
Jast wouldn’t wait to be caught. He would leave with Jan Soroka’s family while Brano was in jail, perhaps in the backseat of that GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates, heading westward.
“I’ll need to make a call,” said Brano.
Rasko parked in front of the station. “I already called Yalta. I wanted to clear this with them.”
“You knew you’d take me in?”
“I wanted to know what I could and couldn’t do. The man I talked to told me to do what I felt necessary, and someone would call later.”
“What was the man’s name?”
