She shrugged. “Norbert had to shoot the two best ones.”
“Oh?” The soldier stamped the passport and handed it back.
“Tuberculosis.” She shrugged again. “It happens.”
The guard nodded with sympathy, then smiled at Peter as he accepted his papers. “Coming from Prague?”
“I am.”
He flipped absently through the passport. “How’s it going up there?”
Peter wasn’t sure how to answer, and his hesitation earned a look from the guard. “It’s improving,” he said quickly, then shook his head. “Last week was hell.”
The guard pointed at Peter’s collar. “Yeah. It looks like it was.”
Peter touched the blood. “Earned this at the radio station. I’m lucky to get back with my life.”
The woman crossed herself.
“A lucky man,” said the guard. He squinted at the photograph in the passport. “You need to start eating.”
“You think so?”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight.” He showed the picture to the woman, who nodded her agreement.
“You’ll get sick,” she said as the guard stamped the passport and handed it back.
“My girlfriend will fatten me up,” said Peter. He slipped the passport into his jacket pocket, beside the stiff hunting knife marked by a hawk similar to the one on the guard’s shoulder patch.
He’d acquired so much in the past six hours that what he’d lost was barely a memory. Like a simple melody line that gains chords, a variety of keys, and counterpoint, developing into a grand piece, he had acquired a name, a knife, money, and an apartment. In the space of six hours he’d acquired a life.
The guard saluted Peter. “Welcome home, comrade.”
Katja
“A militiawoman,” Istvan says once we’re back upstairs. He’s in the bedroom, and I’m in the bathroom, removing makeup in the mirror. “You’re not on a case, are you?”
“I’ve got no authority outside our lovely country.”
“I see,” he says, then stands in the doorway. “You’re a very beautiful woman.”
I can see him in the reflection, and my face is up close. Perhaps he’s right-I have the requisite cheekbones, blond hair, dark eyes-but age is setting in early and I’m wondering what I’ll look like at thirty, thirty-five. I’ll look fifty, I know it. “It’s a temporary beauty,” I tell him.
“Where do you want to sleep?”
“In the bed.”
His smile is huge.
“And you’ll be a gentleman and take the sofa.”
He retains the smile another few seconds, but that’s only decorum. “Of course, of course. You want another drink? There’s a minibar in the cabinet.”
“I’m really tired.”
“It’ll help you sleep.”
I stop fooling with my face and turn to look at him. “Really, Istvan. Thanks, but all I want now is a proper rest.”
When I come out, he’s lying on the sofa in the other room, and I tell him good night as I close the adjoining doors. His Good night sounds distinctively frustrated.
Before turning off the light, I call down to the front desk and ask in stilted, stumbling English if they have a reel-to-reel tape player in the hotel. “I believe we do, bayan. ”
“I can use tomorrow?”
“Of course, bayan. What time?”
I returned to the Metropol bar an hour before my appointment with Brano Sev because I couldn’t stand the sunlight anymore. How can I explain it? The sunlight wasn’t a metaphor for anything. No. There are no metaphors in life, simply things. Things that undermine you or give you strength. The sunlight undermined me.
I drank two waters and was rude to one bearded man who tried to start a conversation. Disappointed, he returned to his dim corner table and watched from a distance.
Brano arrived at precisely five. Under his arm was a bulky envelope that he placed on the bar as he climbed onto his stool. He asked the bartender for a beer.
“Comrade Drdova.”
“Comrade Sev.”
He looked at the glass the bartender placed before him. “Comrade Drdova, this man you call Peter Husak no longer goes by that name. He was…well, he came to my attention in 1968, the year you knew him. But when I met him, he wasn’t using that name. He went by the name Stanislav Klym.”
Up until then I’d had my elbow on the table, my forehead resting in a palm. I dropped my hand slowly. “He used my Stanislav’s name?”
“This is why he came to my attention. The real Stanislav Klym had proved himself brave and steadfast during the troubles in Czechoslovakia, an intelligent young man, and I wanted to recruit him. I didn’t know, at the time, that he had died in Prague.”
“Recruit him for what?”
“For the kind of work I do.”
I waited.
“Once I learned Stanislav had returned from Prague, I visited his apartment and found this man who answered to his name. I made the offer of work, and he accepted.” Brano took a sip of his beer, then set it down. “The truth came out later, during a week-long interview session. It’s something we do to new recruits. We talk with them intensely over the space of a week to be sure they are the kind of people we can work with. This Husak was an adept liar-quite talented, you could say-but over days I began to see that elements of his story didn’t fit together. He knew nothing about Pacin, your and Stanislav’s hometown, and he could not accurately piece together his time in Czechoslovakia.” Brano shrugged. “So the truth finally came out. His real name was the one he gave you, Peter Husak, and he was a Slovak from the border region, which explained why he knew our language so well. He’d gotten into trouble during the counterrevolution and assumed your boyfriend’s identity in order to escape the country.”
“But,” I began, then paused. I looked in my bag until I found a cigarette, then stuck it in my mouth. I didn’t light it. “You mean he stole his papers off a dead man?”
Brano took a lighter from his pocket and lit my cigarette for me. He watched me suck on it. “Peter Husak killed Stanislav Klym. For his papers.”
His face, through the smoke, was so neutral, and at that moment I wanted nothing more than to press my fingernails into his eyes. But I spoke calmly. “What is his name now?”
Brano squinted. “This is something that remains between us. You understand?”
“Just tell me his name.”
“Ludvik Mas. After he joined the Ministry we gave him a new identity. We didn’t want the Czechs to know who he was.”
“Ludvik Mas,” I said.
“You’re not curious why I’m telling you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t care. Is he here? Is he in the Capital?”
“He’s in Istanbul.”
“Istanbul?”
“He left this morning.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
