“Adrian Martrich?” asked Gavra.
The young man shook his head and said something they couldn’t hear.
Gavra pointed at the key. “Open the door.” The young man did this.
“We’re looking for Adrian Martrich,” said Katja.
“Not me. Adrian’s in the back.”
Gavra put his hand on the door. “Well, then. Take us to him.”
He led them past the empty glass cases, in which Gavra noticed traces of blood still not wiped clean, and to a back door. He knocked.
“Yeah?” came a voice.
“Adrian,” said the young man, his voice weak, “some people to talk to you.”
“Okay,” said Adrian Martrich, and they heard papers being put away. By the time the boy had opened the door, Zrinka’s brother was at a clean desk. He stood and offered his hand, smiling congenially, as if he’d been expecting their visit.
Gavra felt a choking sensation in the back of his throat. Adrian Martrich was tall and handsome, similar to the way his dead sister was beautiful. As they sat, Gavra grew warm, looking at that well-formed face, pale blue eyes, and thin, coiffed sideburns beneath a wave of brown hair. This man took good care of himself. He looked like no butcher Gavra had ever seen.
From his smile, it appeared that Adrian Martrich wasn’t disappointed by what he saw, either.
All this, Gavra knew, should have been a warning.
“Comrade Martrich?” said Katja.
He answered her but continued to look at Gavra. “Yes?”
“We’re here to ask about your sister.”
Adrian blinked at her. “You know where Zrinka is?”
She began to shake her head but stopped short of lying. “When was the last time you talked to her?”
“Three? Yes, three years ago. When she was in the clinic.”
“Tarabon.”
He nodded.
“Did your sister have friends in Istanbul?”
“Istanbul?” Adrian snorted lightly. “Not that I know of.” Then he looked back at Gavra. “But three years is a long time.”
“It certainly is,” said Katja. “And you never wondered where she was?”
Adrian Martrich sized her up a moment. “Of course I wondered where she was. Some months ago, her old doctor, Comrade Arendt, sent me to a little town in the countryside. He said she was there. Rokosyn. But when I arrived I realized he was lying.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “there was nothing there. As far as I know, there’s never been a clinic at Rokosyn.”
Gavra leaned forward; Katja frowned. She said, “Did you talk to the doctor again after that?”
“Why should I? He obviously wasn’t interested in helping me.”
Gavra placed a hand on the desk. “Zrinka was on a plane three days ago. It was headed for Istanbul, but it was hijacked and exploded. She’s dead.”
“Dead?” said Adrian. A nervous smile crossed his face, then vanished. He placed his own hands on the desk, flat. “Zrinka?”
“We’re sorry to have to give you this news,” Katja said, and followed with words of sympathy, but it was obvious that the butcher was no longer listening. He was staring at his hands.
“You’re talking about that plane,” he said finally. “The one in the Spark. Flight 54.”
“Yes,” said Gavra, his voice now very soft. “We’re trying to find out what your sister was doing on that plane.”
Adrian breathed a few times, loudly, then looked at Gavra. “I wish I knew.”
Gavra drove again as they headed through the dim streets back to Doctor Arendt. Katja stretched, trying to get rid of the tension of a long day in the car. She said, “Okay. If we believe the brother, then the question: Why did Doctor Arendt tell him, and then us, that Zrinka had been sent to a nonexistent clinic?”
“Because he doesn’t want to say where she really went.”
The sun was low behind the doctor’s Fifth District apartment, and they had to squint to see well. The door to the building was locked, so Katja pressed Arendt’s buzzer.
Along the street, families were promenading after early dinners. Katja followed Gavra’s gaze and pressed the buzzer again. “They look satisfied, don’t they?”
Gavra didn’t answer. He was thinking of Adrian Martrich, the handsome butcher.
Then the door opened, but it wasn’t the doctor. It was an old woman with a tattered pink babushka tied around her head. When she noticed their dress uniforms, she froze in the doorway, eyes wide.
Katja gave her a smile.
“Potatoes,” the old woman said.
“I’m sorry,” said Katja. “We don’t have potatoes.”
The old woman raised a bent finger and pointed across the street to a vegetable shop, and Gavra stepped out of the way. She passed quickly. They caught the door and went inside.
As they took the stairs, they didn’t say a thing. It wasn’t worth discussing.
Gavra was the one who knocked on the doctor’s door. He was the one standing there when it opened on its own, from the pressure of his knuckle. Against the far wall, the open wardrobe spilled files all over the floor, a few covering the doctor, who lay in the middle of his living room, facedown, with a bullet hole in the back of his skull.
Peter
1968
He could not walk. The occasional soldier watched him jog past in the darkness, and a few even seemed to consider stopping him, though none did. Soon he was running through vacant streets, the evening humidity choking his nostrils and eyes, so that when he stopped at a doorway not far from where Jungmannova crossed Jungmannovo Square, he could hardly make out the large, flat facade of the Church of Our Lady of the Snows. Through the arched doorway leading from the church courtyard, shapes stumbled out, and beyond the thumping in his head he heard voices. Come on, you bastards. Hooligans. The sound of bodies being thrown to the ground. The crack of a truncheon against bone. One scream, but just one. By the time his vision cleared it was a surprisingly quiet scene. Two white trucks and a white Mercedes. Twenty gloomy students. Jan. Gustav. And a black-robed old priest. Josef was probably already inside the trucks the soldiers were leading everyone into.
Peter stepped back, farther into the darkness, and measured out his breaths. It helped to remember that Emperor Charles IV had built this massive church to remind him of his coronation. What an ego. Despite the humidity, Peter felt the August night turning cold.
When he looked again, the back door of the Mercedes opened, and that man stepped out to light a cigarette. He didn’t seem proud, not as proud as he’d seemed in the interrogation room or later in the cafe. He instead looked like a man at the end of a long day of factory work, the weight of repetitive motion bearing on him. But strong. Bald, tall, and strong.
“Now you look like you’ve been hit by a train. Where do you keep running off to?”
He tried on a smile as he sat down. “I’ve had enough beer.”
Stanislav folded the letter into his pocket again. “Listen, this is my last night to be foolish. Once I’m back… well, I’ll have responsibilities. You up for a final blast?”
Peter felt his special talent-the one the StB officer had been so impressed by-bring on a big, authentic smile. “I don’t want to let you down.”
So they bought a bottle of Becherovka liquor and began again to drink. “Did you fight?” asked Peter.
