him to report. I treated Bernard the same way. “Don’t worry about him,” I said. “Did you hear about Lena?”
“What about Lena?”
So I told him. I spoke with the same distant, unsettling calm he had first used to tell me about the shootings in Sarospatak. When I finished, he was silent a moment. “I don’t know what to say,” he managed. “I loved that woman.”
“Not just you.”
“Who the hell did it?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you find Tatiana Zoltenko?”
That seemed to confuse him. “Well… yes. I mean, we found her, but she’s dead.”
“What?”
“Doesn’t look suspicious, though,” said Ferenc. “She ordered her unit to fire on some demonstrators, and one of the soldiers turned around and shot her. A Ministry corporal. The guy’s a hero now.”
I almost collapsed.
I never did find out if the hero-soldier-who I later learned was a Ukrainian named Dubravko Ilinski-shot Colonel Tatiana Zoltenko out of moral conviction, or because he’d been paid to do it. Either way, the list of endangered senior citizens had shrunk to only three: myself, Brano Sev, and Jerzy Michalec. As of seven o’clock the previous evening, at least, Brano was still alive. Alive enough to call Gavra. I had no idea about Michalec.
To fill the awkward silence, Ferenc told me that Sarospatak was nearly theirs. The army in that region had not yet turned to their side, but it wasn’t confronting them either. The soldiers had retreated to their barracks on the northern side of town. Twice, he used the phrase “the Soft Revolution,” and that marked my introduction to the term-but, like the mysterious quote on the memorial to Tisavar, I’d never figure out what it meant. “Fantastic,” I told him.
He could hear my lack of enthusiasm. “I don’t expect you to feel it now, Emil, but it really is.”
By the time I hung up, Ferenc had told me five times how sorry he was about Lena, but his pity left me cold. When I came out, Gavra was slipping into his coat, which I noticed was covered with dry red paint.
“He thinks he’s going to Yalta,” said Katja.
“No,” I said.
Gavra wasn’t waiting for my permission. He took his Makarov from his pocket and checked the cartridge. “It’s the only place I can get an international phone line.”
Despite being a little drunk, I could register how dangerous this was. “Weren’t you listening to the radio? The army’s out there. They see you going into Yalta Boulevard, they’ll check your papers. They’ll lock you up, or kill you.”
“I have to get in touch with Brano. I’ll lay odds he’s the one who sent me to the States.”
“I thought you were in Yugoslavia.”
“I lied, Emil. It’s my job.”
Karel crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s not your job anymore.”
“Then I’m going with you,” I said. I wasn’t sober enough to care about my own safety. Nor did I care about my fatigue. It was late, and I’d been squeezed out like a cleaning lady’s sponge. A fresh headache flickered around the edges of my brain.
“No, you’re not,” said Gavra.
“Don’t argue.”
Katja broke our stalemate: “What about the files?”
We looked at her. I said, “What files?”
She looked at me as if only now, after all these years, had she recognized what a stupid man I was. “It’s a straight shot up Friendship to the Eleventh District. No one’s watching the Central Archives. We get in there, we can find out who authorized Rosta Gorski to take out those files. Then we follow up on it.”
As usual, she made the most sense.
Aron wanted to come with us, but Katja took him aside and whispered a convincing argument against it. By the time she finished, his face had reddened; I wondered what she’d said. Karel, almost unconscious now from the half bottle of scotch he’d put away, didn’t ask to come. He only grabbed Gavra’s sleeve in a particularly affectionate gesture and told him to come back soon. Gavra promised he would, then gave Karel the keys to his Citroen. “Just for emergencies. Don’t leave the house. Okay?”
We took the stairwell, and at the second floor a door opened. My elderly neighbor, Zorica, peered out. Her husband had been a major during the Patriotic War, surviving with a chest full of medals and scars to match, but ever since his death in 1982 she’d lived alone off his pension. She often brought us food, because it was no secret that Lena was a lousy cook. Zorica clutched her robe shut at the neck and whispered, “Emil!”
I stopped by her door as the others went on.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just stay inside.”
“You must know. You’re a Militia chief.”
“Pankov is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone ^ 7.”
I didn’t really know what it meant either. A president takes a helicopter from the Central Committee Building and flies away. That only means he’s left a building, not that he’s gone for good. “I’m sorry, Zoka, I don’t have time. Listen to the radio. It’s all there.” I didn’t want to tell her about Lena; that could wait.
The three of us piled inside the Militia Karpat Katja had used to drive me home. I felt claustrophobic and hot in the passenger seat, wishing I’d brought along my Captopril. It was nearly one, and this section of Friendship Street was vacant, but we could still hear voices from the south, in the direction of Victory Square. We drove north, the street lit only by the car’s headlights.
From the Second District, we crossed into the Sixth, where I lived just after the war with my grandparents. Back then, it had been a prestigious neighborhood, where Friends of the Liberators were given Habsburg houses cut up to accommodate many families. My grandfather, a communist since before the Russian Revolution, had been given a place with a view of Heroes’Square. In 1980, though, Pankov’s massive reconstruction of the Capital started in this district, and my old home, as well as the whole block and even Heroes’Square itself, was plowed into the ground and replaced with more socialist-friendly concrete architecture.
We came across marauding groups of drunks who seemed as confused about the situation as Zorica. Unlike Zorica, they weren’t kept indoors by their confusion. Some climbed through the broken window of a grocery store, stealing bags of flour and canned goods. Another group of five men tried to wave us down with dim flashlights-our blue-tinted license plates gave us away as government-and Katja swerved to get around them.
“Aron was right,” she said.
“What did Aron say?” asked Gavra from the back.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
Once we reached the Eleventh, Friendship was quiet again, and we stopped at the high stone wall surrounding the Central Archives. Through the bars of the gate we saw a small, unlit pillbox with a guard inside. Our headlights woke him, and he came out squinting. I got out of the car and approached.
“I need you to open up,” I said.
He shook his head. “We’re closed.”
I showed my Militia certificate, but that didn’t change his mind. He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “I’m under orders, Comrade Chief. That’s all there is to it.”
Gravel crunched behind me as Gavra walked up. “Any trouble?”
“Maybe. This man says we can’t come in.”
“Oh?” Without hesitation, Gavra took out his Makarov. “Comrade Guard, please open up.”
The guard also had a sidearm, a bulky Czech CZ-75 in a leather holster, and he considered it.
“Don’t,” said Gavra. “I don’t want to kill you, but it’s really been a very long day.”
Heinrich-the name he gave us when we asked-let us in, and we brought him with us across the parking lot to the high yellow-brick cube that held the archives of the People’s Militia. I’d been here often over the decades, spending endless hours among stacks of yellowed files, tracking down the identities of suspects and victims.
They’d bought a roomful of IBM mainframes last year and were going through the agonizing process of shifting the records to floppy disks, but with four floors of files and a socialist work ethic, this would take
