She wasn’t in the lobby. The clerk, who had likely been suffering through the roughest days of his professional life, didn’t bother giving us a smile. “Yes?”
I showed my Militia certificate, though I didn’t know if it would help. “We’re looking for Gisele Sully. French journalist. She’s staying here.”
“All the journalists are staying here,” the clerk said as his phone rang again. He pointed off to the right. “Mademoiselle Sully is in the bar.”
We followed the path of his finger down a short, carpeted passage into a bar I’d been to a few times before. Since my last visit, it had been redecorated in black leather and glass. The effect was seedy, and nothing like the labored Habsburg elegance they previously tried and failed to achieve. There were just a few customers, all foreigners, sitting with glasses of beer and wine. A table of four erupted in laugher, but Sully wasn’t there. She was alone at the mirrored bar, talking quietly to the tall bartender, who didn’t bother looking at us when we approached.
“Gisele Sully?” I said.
She swiveled on her stool, clutching a glass nearly empty of red wine. She was less attractive than she’d seemed on television, or perhaps she just looked drunk. “Who’s asking?”
I again showed my Militia certificate. She took it from me, tilting it in the dim light. “A chief, huh? Congratulations.” She handed it to the bartender. “Is it fake, Toman?”
Toman looked at it, rubbing a thumb over the Militia seal, then handed it back to me without a smile. “It’s real enough.”
She looked past me at Karel, who was staring at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Sully said, “What can I do for you, Chief?”
“Can I buy you another?”
“Only if you join me.”
I climbed on the next stool, while Karel took the seat beside me. “Three more glasses,” I told the bartender, and he uncorked a bottle of dry Tokaj red. I turned to Sully. “You speak our language well.”
“Flattery and wine won’t get me in your bed, Chief.” She sniffed. “Certainly not before you’ve had a bath.”
I felt myself reddening. She was right; I stank. “What I mean is, you’re familiar with our country. I imagine you’re also familiar with our emigres living in France.”
Sully didn’t bother answering. She nodded at Toman as he set down three glasses of red wine. She lifted hers. “To getting rid of the old.”
Karel and I joined her toast.
She set down her glass. “I just came off a forty-eight-hour shift, and now I’m trying to drink myself to sleep. Don’t be surprised if I’m not much help.”
“I understand,” I said. “We’ve had a hard time ourselves.”
“I bet you have,” she said. “It’s amazing the things I’ve seen in the last two days. I try to put them into words, but they just can’t fit. You’ve got men shooting into crowds and other men in the army fighting demonstrators, then changing sides. The funny thing is, I’ve seen more dead women than anything else.”
I remembered the dead woman we’d seen yesterday morning.
Sully raised her glass again. “To men.”
I let her drink that toast alone, but Karel joined her. I think he just wanted the wine. I took out Michalec’s 1979 visa photo. “I’m looking for information on this man, Jerzy Michalec. Do you know of him?”
She lowered her glass slowly, then sighed. “I’m beginning to doubt you’re just a little policeman, Chief. What do you care about emigres? That sounds like a question straight out of the Ministry for State Security.”
“Want to see my badge again?”
“Come on,” she said. “If you were Ministry, you could get one of those, no problem.”
I turned to the bartender, who was leaning on the counter, listening to everything. “Do you have any copies of The Spark7.”
That seemed to confuse him. He straightened and looked around. “I don’t know.”
“Yesterday’s,” I said. “It has to be yesterday’s.”
He disappeared behind the counter, going through a shelf of old newspapers. He reappeared holding crumpled pages. “Here.”
I found the front page and flattened it on the bar. Rings of moisture bled through the picture of my demolished Mercedes. “There,” I said. “Read.”
Sully leaned closer and squinted, mouthing the words to herself. Partly to avoid looking at the picture again, I opened my certificate and placed it beside the paper. She saw my name in the article, then compared it to my certificate. She sat back.
“Hey,” she said, almost tenderly. “I’m sorry about your wife.”
“Thank you.”
“But Michalec has nothing to do with those Patak revolutionar-ies. They’re their own band of renegades. They don’t take orders from anyone.”
I shook my head and tapped the paper. “This is a lie. They had nothing to do with the murder. It was Jerzy Michalec and someone named Rosta Gorski.”
“Gorski?” she said, surprised.
“You know him?”
“Why would Michalec and Gorski kill your wife?”
“Because they were trying to kill me.” I said this with enough conviction that Karel, behind me, cleared his throat nervously. “Please,” I said. “I need you to tell me about them.”
Sully looked at the bartender, then grabbed her bulky leather purse and said, “Let’s get a table.”
We went to a U-shaped booth beside a tinted window that looked out onto Yalta Boulevard. An army truck rolled past, the one I’d seen being filled with Ministry files. Sully went into the booth first, and we sat on either side of her. She was either drunk or trusting-she didn’t seem to feel trapped by us.
“I know Jerzy Michalec,” she said. “I met him in Paris at one of those emigre conferences a few years ago. Eighty-six. He spoke better French than half of them, so he became an unofficial spokesman for his group, Le Comite de la Galicie. The Galicia Committee. They added‘revolutionary’to their name only recently.”
“What did they do?” asked Karel.
She looked at him. “Hard to tell. Largely, they networked with other emigres around the world. They weren’t as vocal as, say, the Palestinian emigres, but they had good contacts in the French and American governments. Their public persona was gentle. They raised money for orphans and lobbied to have Pankov cut off from the international community. And they succeeded in that. Jerzy always told me their final aim was the usual rigmarole- democracy and freedom-but gradually. Before this year, before the Berlin Wall, they never advocated revolution. I think that was Rosta’s doing.”
“Rosta Gorski,” I said.
She nodded. “Berlin, Prague, Budapest-seeing those, he felt revolution here was inevitable. So they started smuggling people into the country last month to establish networks. Set up printing presses. That sort of thing.”
I sat back and watched her a moment. “Gorski was a farmer. He was just a kid who got into trouble now and then drinking. Then he left, with Michalec, in 1979. Did they know each other?”
Sully looked surprised. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Rosta Gorski is Jerzy Michalec’s son.”
“S-son?” I stuttered, not unlike Tomiak Pankov during his final rally.
Sully shook her head. “No, you didn’t know.”
The pork and cabbage in my stomach began to make noises. Far back, in 1948, trying to convince me to stop looking into his past, Michalec had said, We don’t make the rules. Others make the rules. We can only try to live by them.
This personal logic had led him to the Gestapo, where he was awarded for his enthusiastic executions of Russians, British, and French. Then, in crumbling Berlin, he became a Soviet war hero by killing those twenty-three Hitlerjugend boys who’d been put under his command, boys who trusted him. After the war, it justified him killing
