burned every house. As an added touch, Major General Karloff Messerstein arrived on crutches to personally supervise the delivery of two truckloads of Hungarian salt, which were spread over the embers.
All of this was in our history books, and people in the region never forgave the Ukrainian minority its role in the event. The irony, which the textbooks never mentioned, was that a week after the massacre, Messerstein died naturally of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Now, all that was left was a memorial in the middle of a swath of barren earth. It was placed here by Mihai during a 1951 ceremony, filmed by camera crews from all over the world. A statement on a bronze plaque attached to a
stone pedestal, followed by a few lines from our national poet, Rikard Pasha: HERE MARKS THE SPOT WHERE TISAVAR WAS DESTROYED BY THE FASCIST MENACE ON 8 OCTOBER 1942.
A world like leaves of the impossible creation from God’s mind.
All we can hope for is a dream made clear before we die.
No one, not even Ferenc, had ever been able to tell me what those two lines of verse were supposed to mean.
He was waiting for us in front of the plaque, gloved hands clasped behind his big form, gazing down. Ferenc was just as huge as he’d always been, and though he’d recently turned seventy, he still didn’t look like a writer; he looked like a retired thug. When we parked, he turned to face us, and I noticed his lumpy nose was a little bigger and redder than before. When he saw his daughter and granddaughter get out of the car, he lumbered over to hug them, grinning madly.
Perhaps unconsciously, Agota had chosen in Bernard a man who was just like her father-huge, moody, and surprisingly astute at times-and this was perhaps why the two men couldn’t get along. They hated to see themselves reflected.
When we shook hands, I smelled palinka on him and wondered if he was drunk. “Still trying to figure that out?”
“Mihai,” he said, nodding at the plaque. “He was a mysterious man.”
“Let’s walk.”
Ferenc handed his keys to Agota and asked her to wait in his beat-up Russian flatbed truck. We walked across the salt-dead ground through the cold wind from Anti-Fascism Hill, which was dotted with crosses and bundles of dead flowers. “So you’ve got a lieutenant general’s corpse,” he said.
“Poisoned. Someone laced his cocaine with pure heroin.”
“Ballsy.”
I agreed. “By now, Feder has filed his autopsy, so it’s official. I don’t have much choice-I’ll have to press on with the investigation. I just need to figure out how I’m going to do it.”
“And you think I can help?”
I looked at him, hands deep in my pockets. The wind was making my eyes water. “You’re at the center of things these days. You’d know if someone wanted Kolev dead.”
“We don’t want people dead,” he said. “Those are the kinds of people we’re fighting.”
“Remember fifty-six?” I said.
He frowned. “What about it?”
“You may not want to execute anyone, but that doesn’t mean someone on the fringe hasn’t decided to go that route.”
“And you think I’d know.”
“I’d ask Father Meyr instead, but I don’t know where he is.”
Ferenc scratched his rough cheek, then turned to look back at the truck. We couldn’t see his family through the dirty windshield. “You’re right-it’s possible some angry kid got it into his head to kill Kolev. Though I imagine he’d use a gun instead. If so, I don’t know about it. But I think you’re looking in the wrong direction.”
“Am I?”
He nodded, then sniffed; he sounded congested. “End of last week, your dead lieutenant general came to Patak.”
“How do you know?”
“How wouldn’t I know?” he said, smiling. “When you’re preparing to march against the government, you become as paranoid as you can. You notice everything. And we noticed Yuri Kolev.”
“He came three times over the last week,” I told him. “Under a fake name.”
“Yeah. Ulrich Lipmann.”
“What was he doing?”
“Not what you’d think.” He switched to the professorial tone he’d gotten accustomed to among his wide-eyed student revolutionaries. “Kolev didn’t go to the regional Ministry HQ. Instead, he went to the other side of town, to a bar where some of our guys hang out. He met with a Russian.”
“Russian?” I said dumbly. I do that sometimes.
My surprise pleased him. “Now, this was something I didn’t know about until after it happened. A couple of our worker bees watched this going on, saw Kolev leave again, get into his pretty BMW and drive back to the Capital. But the Russian stayed to finish his vodka. They followed him into town to a small one-room apartment. Then they jumped him.”
“Jesus.”
Ferenc shrugged. “What can I do? They’re brash kids. But that’s how they learned he was Russian. They questioned him, but not too roughly. Best they got was a name off his passport-Fyodor Male-vich. Then they looked around. Guess what he had in a box in the wardrobe.”
“Tell me.”
“A colonel’s uniform. Not Russian, but our army.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. The boys called a friend of mine, but by the time he arrived, old Fyodor had escaped. He knew what he was doing. He took on the boys one at a time, knocked them out, and fled-with the uniform. The kids’re fine; they just got headaches.”
I didn’t know what to make of a Russian masquerading as one of our colonels, but it was all Ferenc had to offer. At least, it was all he was willing to offer me. We had a long-standing friendship, but he’d been a militiaman during some of the darkest years and knew how, despite a man’s desires, it was easy to be cornered, or blackmailed, and made to give up what you knew. His son-in-law was a textbook example. Ferenc’s reticence protected both of us.
It was also disappointing. I’d hoped that Ferenc might be able to shed light on Kolev’s murder. If it had turned out to be committed by one of his friends, my job would have been, ironically, very simple. I would have whitewashed it. Pin the murder on the next corpse that came in, or start asking for access to files the Ministry wasn’t willing to give me; then I could throw up my hands and admit defeat. There were many ways to get rid of work you didn’t want to do.
Walking back to his truck, he told me to keep my eye on the news. “Change is in the air.” He reminded me-as if I’d just come back from the moon-that all around us democracy had defeated totalitarianism, and he said that there was nothing Tomiak Pankov could do. Change was inevitable. “You should get involved, Emil. You’ve got a responsibility to the next generation. We’re bringing Democracy for them.”
I grimaced.
When people use those capitalized abstracts-Democracy, Freedom, Totalitarianism-with such conviction, I’m always left unnerved. It reminds me too much of life just after the war, when everyone was encouraged to speak like that. I said, “I’m just trying to survive long enough to get my pension.”
“You’re the last one who needs a pension,” he said, thinking of Lena’s family money. “Besides, that’s the kind of thinking Pankov depends on.”
He was right, of course. I told him to keep safe and make sure Agota and Sanja made it through the changes unscathed. He smiled and, unexpectedly, kissed both my cheeks. I, too, had been right; he was drunk.
By the time I reached the Capital again, it was dark. Sensing a blood-pressure headache coming my way, I took two more Captopril. I found a new, fresh militiaman at the roadblock. He was sterner than the first had been, so I was sterner with him. I showed my Militia certificate, emphasizing my rank, and told him that if he didn’t let me through, Colonel Nikolai Romek of the Ministry for State Security would have a chat with him. It worked.
