didn’t matter.
As I waited, a drunk couple appeared at the end of the hallway, laughing. I tried not to look at them, but I was a peculiar sight: a bald, disheveled-looking elderly man standing beside a door, one hand stuffed tight into his blazer pocket. The man said, “Hey,” and I gave a brief smile. The girl opened her mouth, but I cut her off by crossing a finger over my lips, giving off a quiet shh. I pointed at the door and pantomimed surprising a good friend. The woman ahh’d and nodded; the man snickered. They went to their room a couple of doors away, and soon afterward I heard them having loud sex.
Then Michalec’s door clicked as he unlocked it and paused to look out the spy hole. I was out of its range. I removed the Walther from my pocket as the door started to open, then threw my shoulder into it with all my weight. There was resistance as he flailed on the other side, but he fell back. I pushed through, stumbled, and fell heavily on top of him. My shoulder hurt. I kicked blindly until the door slammed shut.
This close, in the dim light streaming in from the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, I couldn’t see the man under me. I could only smell him. He was scented heavily, probably something from France. I don’t know. I never asked.
As I raised myself from his chest, I heard him gasping for breath. I got to my knees, the pistol aimed, as my eyes adjusted. He wasn’t even trying to fight back. He just rubbed his face, took a long, phlegmy breath, then looked up at me, squinting. “Is that you, Brod?”
I almost couldn’t get to my feet; my knees hurt that much. “Yes.”
He rubbed his face again. “Wow. I never even suspected. You’ve changed.”
The real surprise for me was that he was unarmed. I expected to have to fight a pistol out of his hand, or quick-draw him before he got a chance to kill me, but during his years in France, he’d learned to put his safety in the hands of other people. Maybe that’s what living in the West did to people. Living in the East, one never felt that way.
I could see him better now, but the shadows on his face were deep. After locking the door, I turned on the overhead light. He blinked, shielding his eyes.
With age, anything can happen to a face. It can widen or narrow, showing off the skull inside; it can fatten like a plum or map out the torments of poorly lived decades. I seemed to find all those changes in Michalec’s face. I saw the deep purple creases under the eyes that pointed to heavy years, and the gauntness below the cheekbones, left over from years in a work camp. But he’d fattened along the jaw and neck, evidence of rich French food and too much influence, and his high forehead, still rimmed with white stubble, was creased like a worrier’s. He had the dark eyes of someone who’d seen more than anyone should have to.
All this came to me very quickly, in about a second of staring, and I suppose that all my interpretations were wrong. But again, it didn’t matter. I was here, he was here, and it was time.
Get up.
“Oh-kay,” he said slowly, with the kind of calm you use on very stupid people who might not know what to do with the gun they’re pointing at you. He propped himself up on his elbows, then rolled facedown and got up to his knees, facing away from me. As if realizing how it looked, like the executions we’d all seen in Italian and American gangster movies, he snatched at the bathroom door handle and pulled himself to his feet.
“The bed,” I told him and watched him move slowly toward it; just beyond, the lights of the square poured in. All my pains were coming into focus: my shoulder, knees, head, and heart. I tried to ignore them.
“Should I sit?” asked Michalec.
That’s when I heard it-the cocky tone I remembered from decades ago, the one that once plagued my dreams. He’d had plenty of years to cultivate his confidence. I wondered if he’d ever found himself in this situation before.
Since I didn’t answer, he sat anyway, turning to face me again. The bed creaked beneath him; he wasn’t the kind of elderly person whose body withered away.
“Just do it, Brod. I don’t want to have to listen to your explanations.”
“You might have to.”
“Well, make it quick.”
I almost smiled. He spoke as if he were holding the gun. I checked my watch-it was a little after two in the morning.
Despite having imagined this moment in the Capital, then in Ti-sakarad and Sarospatak, and again in Vienna, I never pictured it here, at the southern tip of Churchill’s famous Curtain, with my head throbbing. I cut off the overhead light to ease my pain. Everything dimmed.
“You know, Brod, this isn’t like you. I’ve kept up with your career from a distance. You’ve lived the life you were supposed to live. A Militia chief, a wife, no children-because you’re busy enough fathering your militiamen. You protect the rules. You don’t break them.”
“I’ve already broken a lot of them,” I said, looking at the high French windows and the wet lights outside.
He didn’t fill in the silence that followed, though I’m sure his mind was working hard, thinking up ways to stop me.
I was sweating, so I opened the window. I turned back quickly when I heard movement but was disappointed to see he’d only pulled himself farther onto the bed to lean on the headboard. That’s when I knew what I wanted from him. I wanted something to make this less cold-blooded. I wanted him to reach for a gun or a knife, or throw a distracting pillow, so I’d have some justification for putting a bullet in him. But Jerzy had always been able to read people. Like his son, he knew how to give them what they didn’t want.
I pulled up a flimsy desk chair and arranged it at the foot of the bed. I sat down and crossed my knees in an expression of ease, the pistol steady against my thigh, but all the blood in my body was swollen and sore, making me shiver. I said, “There are some things I don’t understand.”
“Like what, Emil?”
He’d finally used my first name, a touch of mockery. “All this. The killings. You’d already changed the files. Did you really think that people who knew about your past would be able to prove a thing?”
He cocked his head, and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he took a breath. “Emil, I don’t know what to think, not really. In the West, I wouldn’t have to worry. Every day, someone comes out of the woodwork to accuse politicians of fraud, of fathering their babies, of raping women, of snorting cocaine. Whatever. It’s all just background noise there. No one takes it seriously until it’s backed up by evidence. But the East is different. We’ve spent the last century being told lies. We all knew they were lies, so we started coming up with our own truths. We didn’t have the information to back up our truths, but we believed them anyway, because that’s all we had. It was a choice between official lies or unofficial rumors.” He shrugged; he’d obviously explained this to someone before. “Now, we’re suddenly handed democracy on a plate. How will anyone know what to believe and what not to believe? Our people have no practice separating rumors from facts.”
“But why7.” I insisted. “You had a good life in France, I’m sure. Why risk it by coming back?”
He examined his fingernails, which in the dimness he couldn’t have been able to see well. “Emil, you’ve got to let go of the past. You’re not the same man you were in forty-eight-clearly you’re not-and I’m not the same man either. I was. For a long time I was. But then, things happened that changed me.”
“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “Rosta.”
He pointed at me. “Exactly. You wouldn’t know this, but fatherhood changes you. Suddenly, without warning, you’re no longer the center of the known universe. I’d already arranged my escape to the West. I knew the right people, and, more importantly, I’d used my surveillance work to collect information about those people- information they’d rather keep quiet. I was still the center of my universe, with plenty of blackmail material to protect me. Then I heard that an old friend had died. I decided to stop in at her funeral. And there was Rosta.” He coughed into his fist. “You may not believe it, Emil, but I actually do believe in democracy and all that stuff. But I believe in the right democracy. You can’t elevate peasants to statesmen and expect a country to prosper. You have to keep those with experience in the right places, to make sure it doesn’t fall apart, and you have to bring in new blood that’s been educated in the West.”
“Which is what you did to your peasant son.”
Even in the darkness I could tell he was glaring at me. He didn’t want anyone to use that word to describe his son. He didn’t bother answering.
Again, I unconsciously looked at my wristwatch. Michalec laughed briefly, and I later realized why-I looked like the president of the court that sentenced the Pankovs to death. The irony got to him. I said, “Eighty years old.
