The second page listed upcoming trials. It was no longer like the days just after the Liberation, when the lists went on for many columns. But there were still some men and women accused of undermining the stability of their socialist state. There were a baker and three politicians and two tram drivers-which proved, according to a certain well-regarded Inspector Brano Sev, the democratic sensibility inherent in the instruments of criminal justice.
Around noon, he tried the smallest one. The wiry, dark inspector who sat beside the cold porcelain stove. He had a face that reminded Emil of the Jews who had appeared at the family dacha in Ruscova during the war. They had come in loose, hungry bands from over the Romanian border, muttering frantically about the Archangel Michael and their villages being burned to the ground. Their families, they said, had been chopped up by the Orthodox. This inspector had that same hungry, warrefugee look.
Emil spoke to him over the hand basins in the empty washroom. His voice echoed unexpectedly against the tile walls. “How long does this go on?”
The inspector stopped splashing water over the back of his neck. He looked at Emil in the rusting mirror, hungry brow furrowing.
Beneath Emils feet the decaying floor tiles wobbled. “The silence,” he said, trying to make his voice sound light, conversational. “Is this what everyone goes through? I think I know how this works. Initiation?” He twisted his lips into a smile. “Or are you trying to scare me away?” He almost added jokingly that this situation hadn’t come up in the Academy lessons, but thought better of it.
The inspector turned away, shook water off his hands and used a towel from a hook. His dark features gave away nothing, his eyes hard and small as he dried his neck. He gave Emil only a passing glance in the mirror as he hung up the towel again. Then he left. The creaking door echoed behind him.
They left the office singly and in pairs and did not return for hours. He assumed they were on cases. The Academy had taught two ways for a homicide inspector to receive a case. Either a switchboard operator sent a message to your telephone line, or the station chief emerged from his office and handed you one. All through the morning the phone on Emils desk did not ring, and the chief was never in. He got coffee from a workers’ cafe around the corner, returned, used the toilet twice, read the last pages of The Spark — all slowly, purposefully.
Around two o’clock, Chief Moska appeared in the doorway. He was another big man, in his fifties, who hiked up wrinkled, mud-spotted pants, rolled a cigarette in his lips, and took off his hat to mop damp, gray hair with a handkerchief. He stopped by desks and whispered to his men, and when they smiled Emil’s stomach shriveled. These men were tight, had been for years. They had probably even fought the Germans together-side by side, without his help.
The chief stopped at Emil’s desk and inclined his long, pale face. The smile was gone. He had the worn features of war veterans who believe they have witnessed everything this life could ever show them. “So you’re the new one?” His voice was no longer a fraternal whisper; it was deep and swollen for all to hear.
“Yes, Comrade Chief Moska.”
“Emil Brod from the Fourth District?”
“Fifth, Comrade Chief.”
“Where did you serve in the Patriotic War?”
“I was too young, Com-”
“Too young my ass!” he bellowed. “You were born in 1926, which made you of age in-what? — 1942, or at the latest ‘44.” He eyeballed Emil’s little hands on the desk. Emil removed them. “I have a neighbor who fought Germans when he was twelve. Remember who has your file, Brod.”
Emil spoke with as much authority as he could muster. “What I meant to say was that when I came of age, I was not in the country. I was-”
“You were fishing in Finland!” the chief erupted, his sudden, broad smile revealing two holes where teeth should have been. “For little seals y no less!”
Their laughter was loud, bouncing off the walls.
“A Finnish company, yes,” said Emil, recognizing a slight warble to his voice he hoped was only in his head. “But I hunted in the Arctic Circle.”
For an instant he was out of this hot room and back in the icy north, among men so much more dangerous than these.
“You speak Russian, I hear.”
“Yes. And German.”
“A scholar,” said the chief. “And now here you are, back at your mother’s tit.”
“In Homicide,” Emil replied, his voice clearing up. “And I’m ready to work. Here are my transfer papers.” He held out the folded pages.
The chief suddenly had the expression of a man about to retch. His nostrils, crisscrossed by a drinker’s red tributaries, retracted. Then he stuffed the papers into his blazer pocket. “Well, Comrade Brod,” he said through a heavy sigh, “don’t make trouble. If you do that, trouble might stay away from you.”
There were sprinkles of weak laughter from corners of the room Emil could not locate, because the blood pumping in his ears obscured their direction.
“I wouldn’t consider it, Comrade Chief.”
“And don’t comrade me to death, Brod. Makes my skin crawl. Can you manage that simple task?”
“Yes, Chief.”
They were all watching the exchange, their smiles fading in and out until the chief gave him one last miserable look, turned on his heel, and walked into his office. The door latched quietly.
Emil caught their amused faces as they turned away-the big typist, the refugee, the pumpkin-seed eater sweating in the back and the state security inspector with the peasant’s features that clicked in Emil’s skull, nagging at a memory that would not come.
First was the chair. Second, the drawing. Third was the homicide inspector with the face of a refugee who met him on the hot front steps at the end of that fruitless day. Down by the busy street, he smoked with some regular policemen standing in a semicircle around the head of a fly-nagged horse. Red-faced vendors sold wooden spoons and fabrics on the sidewalk, and a butcher hauled a bleating goose into his store. The policemen watched a pair of young women walk by, and hissed admiringly. When the embarrassed girls were no longer in sight, the inspector noticed Emil standing at the top of the steps. He patted the horse s nose, nodded at his friends, and began climbing toward him. The air was perfectly still.
Briefly, Emil felt a surge of the unreasonable hope that had buoyed him most of his life. It had brought him through the deaths of both his parents in the war and his months scraping out a living on the fishing boats of the frozen north. It had brought him through a brief love affair back here in the Capital, and the brutalities of the Academy. It had carried him all the way to these steps, where the concrete was remarkably bright after the gloom of the station. He sucked hot, wet air into his lungs, and blinked.
“Brod.”
“Yes,” said Emil, feeling the warmth of that hereditary hope. “Terzian, isn’t it? Your name? Leonek Terzian?”
Leonek Terzian was two steps down, squinting up at him. “I wanted to tell you something,” he said, his voice lacking anything Emil could call emotion.
“Of course.”
Terzian glanced at the crowd of smokers, who were not watching, and as he turned back threw a small, hard fist into Emil’s testicles.
There was the momentary shock as his body doubled over, just before the tide of gut-pain that ripped through his stomach, intestines, legs, then everywhere. The stink of horses overcame him as he dropped; the stone stairs dug into his ribs. He groaned; his eyes teared. He could smell the vodka but could hardly hear Terzian’s voice through the watery pain: “You dont know me, understand? You don’t know any of us.”
CHAPTER TWO
The walk home should have taken twenty minutes, but he stumbled for over an hour along the dusty, cobbled
