A man like a fir tree who is the sacred oak of our glory
The mountain that protects the country
A well of living water
Then the Great Leader spoke. “Don’t look at me like I’m a fucking animal. Cretin!”
Gavra remembered that hunting trip in the Carpathians, and the boisterous, deluded, but in the end strangely endearing man who hunted with the aid of expert sharpshooters, perhaps the same sharpshooters who now ran across rooftops, firing into crowds.
“Well?” said Pankov. His voice was sharp and dry. “I need my diabetes medicine, and both of us need real food!”
In the other cot, covered in layers of gray army blanket, Ilona Pankov stirred at the noise. Her husband lowered his voice to a high whisper. “Find my chef-I’m on a diet prescribed by my doctor.”
Gavra couldn’t take it anymore. He straightened and stepped back, involuntarily wiping his eyes. The small passageway was blurry, and he was having trouble getting air.
“You’ll get over it,” Michalec told him.
“What are you feeding him?”
“Army rations. It’s what we all eat.”
“Get me out of here.”
“Don’t have any questions for the Sweet Kiss of the Land?”
“Please,” said Gavra.
“Come on.”
Outside, he couldn’t feel the cold anymore. He leaned over a low shrub bordering the walkway, breathing heavily.
“You had to see that,” Michalec said with a tone of sympathy. “It had to be done.”
Gavra wiped his mouth but didn’t rise. “Why?” Michalec didn’t answer, so he turned to look up at him. “Why did I have to see them?”
“Because,” said Michalec, as if the question were a surprise, “you’re the one who’s going to execute them.”
NINETEEN
I don’t know if Gisele Sully believed me or if, as a good journalist, she just smelled a story, but she suddenly raised her hand, called to the bar, and asked Toman to make her a double espresso. As he worked on it, she said, “What’re you planning to do?”
“All I can do. Find Rosta Gorski and Jerzy Michalec.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding. “I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not. I’m not getting you killed.”
“The snipers are few and far between now, and no one’s going to kill a foreign journalist. They need us.”
Karel made a noise, and we turned to him. “What about Gavra?” he said.
I’d forgotten.
“Gavra Noukas?” said Sully.
We stared at her. “You know him?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Yesterday, he ran in here like a madman. You saw that car by the front door? That was him. He drove up during the battle with the snipers.” She reached into her purse, pulled out an envelope filled with photographs, and started going through them. “Here.” She handed one over. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone, just ran through us, but I met a soldier who knew his name, said he was Ministry. Is that true? Is he Ministry?”
It was Gavra. He looked haggard, his eyes bruised, and he was running through journalists, toward the camera. I handed the photo to Karel. “Why was he here?”
“I don’t know. A few of us waited, but we never saw him leave. And the car’s still on the curb.”
“Oh Jesus,” muttered Karel.
“Gisele,” said Toman, raising an espresso cup.
When she went to get it, Karel gripped my wrist. “Maybe he’s still in the hotel.”
There were other exits from the Metropol, ones that the Militia and Ministry were familiar with, and that’s what I told him. I didn’t tell him my deeper worry, that Gavra was still here, in one of its three hundred rooms, dead.
From the look on his face, Karel had found that possibility on his own. “You think he’s all right?”
“He can take care of himself.”
“I need to look. He might need my help.”
“Okay,” I said. “You stay here, but I need to go. All right?”
I was pleased that he agreed to this. He handed over the car keys. I slipped them into my coat pocket, beside Gavra’s Makarov. “But take care of it,” he said. “Gavra will be pissed if it doesn’t come back in one piece.”
Sully was impressed by the Citroen. She asked about the paint on the side, but I didn’t bother answering. “We going to the Central Committee Building?” she asked.
“Unless you’ve got a better idea.”
She didn’t. As I drove, she took out a handheld tape recorder, pressed RECORD, and held it between us. “You’re a Militia chief, then?”
“Yes,” I said, then remembered the truth. “Actually, no. Yesterday was my retirement.”
“Well, congratulations,” she said. “How did you originally meet Jerzy Michalec?”
“Just after the war.” I turned onto Victory Square. “He’d killed a songwriter, and then more people, because he was covering up his war crimes.”
“War crimes?”
I sensed disbelief in her tone. “He worked for the Gestapo. Then, when the Soviets arrived, he killed the soldiers under his own command. That’s how he became a war hero. By killing his own men.” I rubbed my lip, afraid of sounding like a fanatic. “Anyway, the songwriter was blackmailing him.”
“Who was the songwriter? Would I know his name?”
“No one remembers him. Janos Crowder was my wife’s first husband.”
She lowered the recorder as I pulled up on the sidewalk and parked at the foot of the Central Committee steps. “You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was.”
We got out and mounted the steps as a soldier trotted down, his rifle bouncing off his backside. Before he reached us, I told Sully not to say a word.
“You shouldn’t park there,” he told us.
I wasn’t going to be thwarted because of illegal parking. “We’ll just be a minute.”
“Where are you going?”
“We need to see Rosta Gorski.”
“Who?”
I spelled the name for him, then showed my Militia documents, while Gisele pulled out her camera and took a few shots of freezing smokers standing between the columns.
The soldier turned out to be more helpful than I expected. He went with us up the steps and into the vast marble entrance that was full of activity. Young men and women in wrinkled clothes walked quickly from and into marble corridors holding stacks of papers, pencils lodged behind their ears. So unlike the old days, when I’d sometimes be brought in to join a large assembly of Militia chiefs and suffer through the lecture of some Interior Ministry bureaucrat who wanted to remind us of our political responsibilities.
The soldier took us directly ahead, to where a long folding table had been set up in front of the huge marble sculpture of our national hawk, which matched the bronze hawk in the Ministry foyer.
