Leon looked at him. “Then you wouldn’t have to pay me.”
He used the agreed-upon three knocks.
“I brought you some food,” he said, handing over a bag, grease from the kebabs already beginning to stain through. “Everything okay?”
He looked around the flat, as neat as the night before, no clothes draped over chairs, uninhabited. Alexei was sitting before the miniature board of a travel chess set, the only thing that seemed to have been removed from his duffel.
“The plane? We have a time?”
“Not yet. We’re going to need to switch airfields. After last night.” The all-purpose excuse, nothing safe now.
Alexei grunted and got up. “You want some tea? It’s all I do, drink tea.” He coughed. “And smoke.” Puttering with spoons, lighting the kettle.
“I see you’re a chess player.”
“It passes the time.”
“You play against yourself?”
“You make a move, then you turn the board. And you know what’s interesting? When you’re on the other side, it’s completely different. You think you anticipate the move, but you turn and you see something different.”
“I’ll have to try it sometimes. Playing both sides.”
Alexei looked up at him.
“You’d better eat. It gets messy.”
“Did they find the body?” Alexei said, taking the food to the table.
“Yes.”
“So he was alone. Maybe I’m not so important. And now someone’s raising hell. Melnikov. Whose idea to send one? You’ll pay for this. It never changes.”
“You knew him?”
“Political officer,” he said, eating. “You know what that means? At Stalingrad? The Nazis in front of you, Melnikov behind. No cowards there. No Stalin jokes. He shot them on the spot. Easier than sending them back to the gulags. Less paperwork.” He crumpled up the bag. “But you have all that in Bucharest. His staff list. That was my deposit. You want to do that again? And then again with the tape recorder? Over and over until a slip, a name you forgot, or maybe didn’t forget. Well, everyone does it.”
“Save it, then. For the tape recorder. I’m not here to interrogate you.”
“No? What, then?”
“Just get you on a plane.”
“Ah, to be my friend. Easier to get them to talk. A little trust. So, you have a name? You never said.” Familiar, somebody at a bar. He got up to pour the tea.
Leon looked over, trying to imagine it, the abattoir, putting bodies on hooks. An ordinary man, making tea. “Leon,” he said.
“Leon?” Asking for the rest.
“Bauer.”
Alexei handed him a glass, smiling a little. “A German name. Farmer,” he said, translating. “Also pawn.” He opened his hand to the little board. “In the game. So that’s you, the pawn?”
“That’s everybody.”
Alexei looked up at him, pleased. “A philosopher. Something new. It’s different with the Russians. No sandwiches, either. Just fists.”
“When they interrogated you?”
“My friend, if they had done that you would see it,” he said, putting a hand to his face. “The bones. You see the prisoners after, their faces are different. They take pictures for the files. If they’re alive.”
“So you were lucky.”
He shrugged. “I ran. I knew what they were. That was my job, to know about them.” He took a sip of tea. “But you know that. And you’re not here to interrogate me.”
Leon looked over. A conveyor belt. People bleating. Now calmly lighting a cigarette. But Tommy had talked about old times while he planned to kill him.
“You have a wife?” Alexei said, running a hand across the top of his head, hair cropped so short it seemed to have stopped growing.
“Yes.”
“In America?”
“No, here. And you?” The obligatory response.
“Magda. Like Lupescu. But not so lucky. She was killed.”
“In the war?”
Alexei nodded. “Partisans. In Bukovina. Three years now. It’s a convenience, sometimes. To have nothing to lose.” He drew on the cigarette. “That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it? Can they use somebody? Keep me on a leash.” He shook his head. “There’s nobody. Just me. You didn’t know this before?”
“Why would I?”
“That’s right. Not the interrogator. What, then? A wife here. So there’s a cover.”
“Businessman.”
“At Western Electric?”
Leon raised his eyes. How many of Tommy’s people did they know? All? Even the freelancers?
“No.”
“Where then?”
“Dried fruit. Apricots. Figs.”
“Apricots,” Alexei said. “It’s a good business?”
“Now you’re interrogating me.”
Alexei smiled. “Just talking. Like you. We do it differently. Maybe better.” He leaned his head to the side, still amused. “Yes, I think so.”
“That’s because you don’t know what I’m after.”
Alexei looked straight at him, no smile now at all. “No. So it’s an advantage you have. What do you want to know?”
Leon hesitated, trying to frame it. “How it was, at Straulesti.”
A stillness, Alexei’s eyes locked on Leon’s, not blinking. After a minute he looked down at his hand, the cigarette burning to his finger. He rubbed it out, still quiet, a test of wills, his eyes neutral, sorting things out.
“We do that too,” he said finally. “Tell them you know the worst thing. So they think you know everything.”
Leon waited.
“Nobody asked me this before. Your people. So why now?”
“You were there.”
Another silence, calculating. “Your Romanian friend. He told you.”
Now it was Leon who was quiet.
“When did a Romanian not betray a Romanian? A national gift.” He reached for another cigarette. “Well, I’m one to talk.” He waited another second, then shook his head. “I had no part in that.”
“Just the rest of the Guard.”
He nodded. “That’s when I decided-”
“What?”
“That they were crazy.”
“They weren’t crazy before? Blood oaths?”
“But this. It was bound to call attention. Make them turn against us.”
“So you did.”
“That’s what you want to know? Why I turned against the Guard? That’s easy. Because I could see what was coming. The future was Antonescu.”
