“Tell him that,” she said, reaching for the door. “Not me.”
I grabbed her shoulder. “I need to go in, but you don’t. Just wait here.”
She gave me a hard expression that wasn’t uncommon for her, then she smiled. “Someone’s got to watch over you, old man.”
We showed our documents to the front-door guard, but he was the same one I’d talked to yesterday, so he didn’t bother looking at them. He nodded down the street. “It’s gone.”
“What?”
“The BMW.”
I found the spot where Kolev’s car had been, now filled with a Karpat Z-20. “Where is it?”
“Ask the Comrade Colonel,” he said. His voice was full of envy. I wondered how Romek had moved the car; the keys were still in my desk.
Remarkably, this was the first time I had ever passed through Yalta’s oak double doors. I’d been at its threshold more than once, but never stepped through. We entered a cavernous, wood-paneled foyer with too little light. At its center stood a wide oak table in front of a large bronze sculpture: the national hawk, wings folded, head turned to the side. At the table, two women in gray uniforms sat in front of dusty computers. One, with a pretty face marred by a harelip, looked up at us.
“Yes?”
I flashed my Militia certificate. “I’m here to look at Comrade Yuri Kolev’s office. Colonel Romek knows about this.”
She looked at a clipboard beside her computer keyboard. “He’s in a meeting. You can wait in 209.”
“We don’t need to see Romek,” I explained. “We’re just here to look at Kolev’s office.”
She smiled, the crease in her lip spreading. “You do need to see Romek first. He said you’d be coming. Room 209. Comrade Sas will show you the way.”
Comrade Sas was another uniformed guard, a big man with a boxer’s nose who materialized from the shadows. He opened a hand toward a doorway off to the left and nodded for Katja to go first. I followed, and he walked behind us.
It wasn’t like the old days, when a summons to Yalta Boulevard was often a precursor to a man’s disappearance. Those days had passed with the Prague Spring, which had reminded leaders throughout the socialist world that there were limits to what you could do before your citizens snapped and set fire to tanks in the streets.
Nonetheless, the Ministry for State Security still had the same powers it always had. If the Ministry had relinquished its magic acts of making holes where people once stood, it was because the Ministry had made that decision. Decisions could be reversed at any time.
The institutional green corridor was lined with doors, each marked by a number on an opaque window. Number 209 was four doors down, on the right. It was unlocked. Inside, a secretary sat at a desk under an old portrait of President Pankov, from when he still had hair. Beside her was another door. She hung up the phone and nodded at three cushioned chairs against the opposite wall. Without a word, we sat and waited. Comrade Sas left us to our fate.
From behind the closed door, Colonel Nikolai Romek spoke to someone we couldn’t hear. A telephone conversation. The colonel said, “I don’t care what those motherfuckers say. If they don’t get their fucking journalists out of our country, Belgrade can kiss its coal shipments good-bye. See how they fucking like that!”
Silence followed, broken only by the colonel’s, “Uh huh. Uh huh. Right in the ass, yes.”
I looked at Katja. The one-sided conversation only deepened her terror, and it wasn’t helping my blood pressure at all-my veins throbbed. I squeezed Katja’s hand; she squeezed back.
We heard the phone bang down. The intercom on the secretary’s desk buzzed. She smiled at us. “The Comrade Colonel will see you now.”
I took Katja’s elbow to help her up, and we walked through to the small office where Romek, at his desk, was frowning at a little metal box with five colored buttons and a speaker grille. He pressed buttons, cursing to himself. “Livia? Livia?”
The secretary’s staticky voice came through the grille. “Yes, Comrade Colonel.”
“Three Turkish coffees.”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”
Romek looked up as if just realizing we were there. “Please, please,” he said, half standing and gesturing at two chairs facing his desk. As we sat down, he pointed at the intercom. “Can’t ever figure this thing out.”
“They’re difficult,” I said, then immediately regretted speaking. Perhaps it sounded like I was mocking him.
Romek didn’t seem to notice. He gazed at Katja. “I see you’re in better company today, Comrade Brod.”
“Lieutenant Katja Drdova,” I said.
“Of course I know,” said Romek, touching his thin mustache. He came around the desk and took Katja’s hand, bringing it to his lips. Katja’s face was blank, as if she’d been drugged. He kissed her knuckles and said, “The first woman in homicide. You’re an example for the whole country, Comrade Lieutenant.”
When he released her hand and returned to his desk, I noticed Katja wiping her knuckles clean on the side of her pants.
“So,” said Romek, sitting again. He clapped his hands together, as if in prayer. “You’re here to look at Yuri Kolev’s office. No?”
I nodded.
“Despite what I told you yesterday?”
Again, I nodded.
He took a long breath through his nose. “Well, I’m afraid that’s going to be pointless.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. Katja was still comatose.
“Of course you don’t. You’re busy working hard to save individual citizens from criminal death, and that’s of course commendable. But over here we’re more interested in saving the citizenry as a whole.”
Despite myself, I was getting irritated. I leaned so my elbows touched my knees. “What are you telling me, Nikolai?”
“I’m telling you that I gave you this little task, which you’ve bungled mercilessly. You upset Comrade Aspitan from the Archives, and now I hear that your coroner’s actually filed some ludicrous murder theory concerning heroin. So now I’ve taken back this simple job. It’s done, Brod. I filed the paperwork this morning.”
“What?” Katja had found her tongue.
Romek gave her a winning smile. “Comrade Drdova, I imagine you’re aware-that you’re both aware,” he added, acknowledging me, “of last night’s debacle in Sarospatak. I wish I could say that’s the end of the story, but I can’t. Just this morning, I received word that demonstrators are on the move right here, in the Capital. They haven’t reached the streets yet-they’re collecting in various apartments.” He shrugged. “It’s a smart scheme. By the time we’ve searched all the doors, it’ll be too late.”
Without warning, I’d learned what my morning’s phone call had set in motion. My cheeks were hot; my heart made thumping noises.
He continued. “My point to the two of you is, whether or not you realize it, your case is going to end by tomorrow morning however things develop. Either martial law will go into effect, and the law will be taken over by divisions of the army and the Ministry, or-and this is of course extremely unlikely-the agitators will have their day, and you can be sure that a dead lieutenant general won’t be their concern. There’ll be many, many more corpses to take your attention.”
“Katja,” I said.
She looked at me, as did Romek, surprised by interruption.
I reached into my coat and handed over my key ring. “Please wait for me in the car.”
“But, Chief, I-”
“Now,” I said, in a tone I’d never used with her before.
Flustered and embarrassed, she got out of her chair and mumbled, “Excuse me,” to Romek.
He resurrected that shining smile and nodded at her.
As she left, closing the door tightly behind herself, I didn’t take my eyes off of Romek. When I was a young man, I’d had trouble controlling my features, but years in the Militia, dealing with killers, had made this easier. He
