“The dead man was American,” Adrian told her. “We don’t get many Americans in this neighborhood.”
“Dead man?” Katja said as Gavra flung open the door and came out in his socks. Katja, sitting on the couch where Adrian had kissed him, looked up with a confused expression. “Gavra, what the hell happened?”
“There was an incident. I’m going to look into it now.”
“Yes? And? ”
“An American was killed,” Adrian added unhelpfully. “You didn’t know?”
Gavra glanced at him without kindness and began slipping into his shoes. “Yes, an American. He entered the building and was killed.”
“Killed by that man,” said Adrian. “What was his name?”
“Not important,” said Gavra.
The confusion in Katja’s face was shifting into anger. “What do you mean-”
“Later,” Gavra said as he reached for his hat. “We’ll talk later. See you.”
He drove through the morning traffic, trying not to worry about what Adrian might be telling Katja. He’d made a mistake, he knew, sleeping with someone involved with this case-a grieving brother, no less-and felt the unfamiliar queasiness of regret.
The Hotel Metropol was very familiar to him. He’d often come with Brano Sev for meetings in its nondescript rooms, usually to speak with foreign contacts. Gavra knew that in its lobby at any moment were at least three watchers, one of them a young woman well suited to seducing foreign businessmen. The only thing that separated Tania from most prostitutes was that she had a remarkable memory for anything her johns muttered and knew ways to make them mutter almost anything. She was smoking on a padded chair when he entered; she watched him cross directly to the elevator. Gavra spun Timothy Brixton’s key on his finger and stepped inside, turning to see Tania rise as the doors slid shut.
Timothy Brixton’s room was tidy, cleaned by a maid that morning, with a sheaf of papers on the desk. He went through them, but they were only forms from the Foreign Ministry’s Trade Council, requests for trade concessions to bring American televisions into the country. All requests had been denied.
He’d searched a lot of rooms during his apprenticeship, and Brixton’s was exceptionally clean. He very much lived his television-salesman cover. Gavra found color brochures for the new twenty-five-inch color set, with young blond women posing as if they came in the box as well.
He rang the front desk and asked for a list of telephone numbers called from this room to be prepared, and when he hung up he noticed the hotel stationery pad. It was clean, but the top page was indented from an earlier note. Using a pencil, he rubbed over it and found the words
Gavra continued through the room, but there was nothing else. So he locked up and showed his Ministry certificate to the desk clerk and asked for the list. While waiting, he noticed that Tania, the hotel’s best informer, was no longer around. The clerk handed over a list of five calls, with times and dates beside them. All the numbers were identical, except the last, placed the previous morning at ten, just before Timothy Brixton left the hotel for the last time.
Gavra pointed at the phone on the desk. “May I?”
The clerk shrugged and walked away. Gavra dialed that final number, and after two rings heard a vaguely familiar male voice. “Yes?”
“Uh, who is this?”
The man on the line sounded amused. “Please, Comrade Noukas. If you don’t know who you’re calling, then why are you dialing the number?”
Gavra choked a little, and when his voice came out it was a whisper. “Ludvik Mas.”
“Hang up now, Gavra.”
Gavra did as he was told, and held on to the counter.
An American spy named Timothy Brixton telephoned Ludvik Mas, who gave him the work address for Adrian Martrich. Brixton had no doubt been nearby as Gavra drove Adrian from the butcher shop to his apartment. The American was after Adrian, to learn something, perhaps. But Ludvik Mas had followed the both of them and killed Brixton before he could speak with Adrian.
Amid the confusion, Gavra knew one thing. Adrian Martrich had information of interest to an American spy, and perhaps of interest to Ludvik Mas as well.
There was no doubt: Last night had been a grave mistake. Adrian was hiding something, and his reticence could kill him, or Gavra.
He marched out of the lobby and pushed through the revolving doors, but before he reached his car a short man with a round, flabby face stepped up to him. He had a pistol in his hand.
“Comrade Noukas,” he said. “Please come with me.”
Katja
Istvan dresses quietly, but I’m awake by the time he’s knotting his tie. He gives me a bright morning smile. “Well, hello!”
“Morning,” I say with a clotted voice, as if I smoked too many cigarettes the previous night, though I didn’t.
“Are you doing the Sultan Ahmet Camii today?”
“The what?”
“Blue Mosque,” he reminds me, and grins. “I have a feeling you’re not one of the world’s most fastidious tourists.”
I wipe my eyes. “When will you be back?”
“I’ve got a meeting in an hour, another one at lunchtime, and then another at four.” He shrugs. “Six or seven. You’ll be here?”
“Of course, Istvan.”
After he leaves, there’s a knock at the door. I wrap myself in a hotel robe and face a tall man in a uniform holding a box. “Your audio machine, ma’am?”
He places it on the desk and pauses at the door, clearing his throat. Only after he’s gone do I realize I was supposed to tip him.
In the Militia we sometimes use these machines, but as I thread the audiotape through the play heads into the take-up reel I fear I’m doing it wrong, that when I press PLAY the tape will shred and whatever lies on it will remain a mystery. But I’m not as clumsy as I suspect, and soon I’m sitting on the thick carpet in my robe, listening to a tinny conversation through the speaker. Two male voices in a hollow-sounding room. The first voice is plainly Brano Sev’s-seven years have changed little with him. The other is a voice I haven’t heard for that many years, the slow drawl taking me back to a black month that I have, for years, tried to erase from my daily memories. But here it is again, that voice, and it’s telling everything just as I remember it. He makes no excuses. He simply tells the facts as he sees them. He explains that he killed the soldier named Stanislav Klym in order to save himself, that he then moved into Stanislav’s apartment and one day opened the door to find Katja Uher, the girlfriend Stanislav had told him about. So he pretended to the girl; he made up stories of his friendship with the boy she loved, saying Stanislav had given him the keys to his apartment and would arrive in another week or so. She had no reason to doubt it, because this was the kind of guy Stanislav was-he’d give his keys to a stranger just to be hospitable. At one point he even laughs and says, I couldn’t believe she believed me. Can you believe it?
People will believe most anything, Comrade Husak.
Two hours later, after listening to it twice through, I pick up the phone and dial.
“This is Sev.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
He lowers his voice. “You’re there?”
“It was you. You. You knew what he’d done, but you let him stay free. You’re a cretin, Brano Sev.”
For a moment there’s just the hiss of the phone line. “He was useful to us, Comrade Drdova, But now he’s served his purpose.”
“He’s served your purpose.”
