People’s Militia, it’s hard to maintain such faith.
Around ten thirty, Bernard called and swore angrily that if anyone touched Agota or Sanja, he was going to blow something up. I suggested he not say this over the phone, but there was no stopping him. He finally made it around to what I knew, when I first heard his voice, he was going to ask: “Do you really need me here?”
“Go,” I said, hoping his Militia ID would get him through the roadblocks. “A dead Ministry officer, one way or the other, makes no difference.” I said that because I was foolish enough to believe it.
The foolishness stayed with me all night, even as I sat in bed watching Lena clean makeup from her hollowed cheeks in the vanity mirror. She’d listened in on my conversation, so she asked about the dead Ministry officer, and I told her about Kolev. She showed more surprise than I would’ve expected, lowering her hands from her face in shock. “You’re saying he was murdered?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Why did you run the tests? That colonel told you not to bother.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“You think he did it? Romek?”
“Maybe. But I don’t really know.”
She went back to her face, and I peered around for cigarettes but couldn’t find any. I looked back at my wife. It wasn’t just the stupidity that left me feeling calm. It was a kind of detachment. As I would a week later in Italy, I was thinking about something else, something to take me away from the moment, because the moment was frightening. I was remembering how thankful I was for the Afghan War.
All our life together, Lena had been an alcoholic. No- drunk is the better word. We twice separated because of her drinking, and her drinking led to two miscarriages and many, many hospital visits. Then, in 1983, Lena woke from another of her brief comas, this time triggered by a bottle of black-market rakija that had been mixed with methanol. The nurse smiled at her and laid a copy of the day’s Spark on her bedside table. After a couple of hours, she was finally able to focus enough to take in the front-page story about the Soviet troops who had been killed in the mujahideen’s most recent offensive in the Panjshir Valley.
Maybe it was the poison in her bloodstream, lingering even after the stomach pump of bad Serbian brandy- whatever it was, it had a lasting effect. On the third floor of Unity Medical, she cried uncontrollably.
Never the weeping sort, Lena nonetheless let forth at times with the hysterical weeping of the unbalanced; it was a sound that always troubled me. There in Unity Medical, though, it was as if someone else were crying, someone who understood exactly why she was crying, understood that if she’d had her wits about her, she would have been crying like this ever since she first picked up a bottle, sometime during her first disastrous marriage more than forty years ago.
She showed me the newspaper, and though I didn’t understand, I never admitted it. I didn’t want to undermine the vow she’d just made in a fit of emotion: As long as men were blown up in obscure corners of the world, she, Lena Brod, would not touch another drop of alcohol.
Now it was 1989, and she was seventy-two. A dry seventy-two. Her hands no longer shook, and when I returned home I no longer opened the door with apprehension, wondering about her unpredictable moods. In the winter of our lives she had given me something not unlike spring, and I was thankful.
Thankful for the floundering Soviet war in the deserts of Afghanistan, only recently ended, and for the cretin who added methanol to his batch so he could sell more of his black-market ra-kija to the alcoholics of our country.
Lena was staring at me, the light in the mirror shining against the large spectacles she’d slipped on to see me better. “What is it? You worried?”
“Not anymore,” I said. It’s amazing how the human mind can comfort itself.
FIVE
“Shell wonder, ” said Lebed Putonski.
Gavra pulled the beige Stop amp; Drop curtains shut, then parted them with a finger. He peered out at the parking lot and beyond the line of trees, to where headlights sped through the darkness. “Who?”
Putonski had trouble turning on the bed to face Gavra, because his arms were above his head, tied to the bedpost with a leather belt. “Maureen. She’ll come over and wonder why I’m not home. She’ll go to the school. She’ll worry-she’s that kind. Then she’ll call the police.”
“The school will say you’re with your cousin.”
“She’ll panic.”
“She won’t.”
It took Putonski a moment to realize this was true. “What’re you going to do with me?”
Gavra dropped the curtains. “I’m not sure.”
“Then let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re in danger.”
Lebed pressed his face into the motel pillow. “It’s starting to drive me crazy, you know.”
“What?”
“You’re not telling me anything.” He raised his head. “You’ve come all this way to find me, but you don’t tell me who sent you. You tell me I’m in danger, but you won’t say why. And then you tie me up. You expect me to not go a little crazy?”
“You hungry?”
“I’m more curious than hungry.”
“Well, I’m hungry.”
“Please.”
In the bathroom, Gavra washed his face. The lack of sleep was showing in his eyes. Or perhaps it was just confusion. He’d been sent to get hold of Lebed, and he had done this, but now Kolev lay dead in a morgue, unable to tell him what to do next.
He dried himself and sat on the corner of the bed while Lebed stared at him. “Okay,” he said. “I was sent by Lieutenant General Yuri Kolev.”
Lebed’s dry lips worked a moment. “Kolev? Jesus.”
“You know him?”
“Of course. What does he want with me?”
“He’s dead. He had a heart attack earlier today.”
“Heart attack?”
“Yeah,” said Gavra.
“So it’s finished. Let me go.”
I cant.
“You think I’m the cause of his heart attack?”
“Maybe. Indirectly.”
“A man like that has enemies. He’s got hundreds.”
“How do you know him?”
Lebed shook his head, unwilling to answer.
“Listen to me,” said Gavra. “Kolev wanted me to find you and protect you. His words. And if this wasn’t simple heart failure, then the people who killed him will want you next. I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Oh,” said Lebed, and Gavra looked closely at him because he’d spoken with the voice of a small child. “But I don’t know anything!”
“How do you know Kolev?”
“Long time ago. Before you were born, probably.” He paused. “Can you at least free my hands?”
“Tell me first.”
