ink, but no camera. He reached back, sliding his hand around. Nothing.
Under the fluorescents the chief’s expectant face had a subdued, greenish tint. Behind him the others were beginning to arrive-Ferenc and Stefan together. Brano Sev was not around yet. The chief looked at Emil’s white face. “Something wrong?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The planes stopped in Berlin. It took months and miles of newsprint, but in May the Comrade Chairman touched his mustache and let the British and American trucks through the barricades. Emil didn’t realize how much the whole business had been affecting him until it was done, and when Lena brought him the news he shouted involuntarily. Grandfather shook his head. We’re living through History, and we don’t even know it. Grandmother said that now that there was hope for the world, Emil and Lena should get married and have children. Grandfather claimed to have no opinion on the matter, but advised Emil to eat more garlic with his meals; it would stimulate both virility and fertility.
There were cases. He worked often with Leonek, but when Leonek came down with a debilitating flu that January, he worked with Stefan, who was quicker than he appeared. He joked a lot, said his wife had had it with his eating. He’d been thin before the war, he claimed, but after seeing all those bright young men blown up, and then getting shrapnel in his own leg, his joy at living had been so strong that he couldn’t help himself. He ate whatever tasted good.
In March they tried unsuccessfully to investigate the death of a German national named Teodor Schiffen found floating in the Canal District. He was a tall man, blond, and had been, as an official search of his apartment unearthed, a Wehrmacht colonel.
Someone had gone through the apartment before they arrived, and there was nothing left to tie the colonel to anyone in the Capital, in particular the missing person of Jerzy Michalec. The best they could figure was that Teodor Schiffen, after the war, had ended up on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. A bad place for any ex-German soldier; a man in that situation, Emil reflected, would need friends-voluntary or coerced. On a hunch, Emil rang Berlin to see if there was more information on him in the Tempelhof files, but Konrad Messer, after making inquiries, informed him that the crates of papers had finally been transported away-maybe to Washington, maybe elsewhere.
The Uzbek had a good laugh when Emil first saw the body, and vomited.
Lena sold the family house in April. She had never hired anyone to take Irma’s place. She called distant relatives in Poland and Austria with names other than Hanic, but no one in the extended clan was in a position to take on such an estate-it was the same all over Europe that year. A Central Committee member finally bought the house without much haggling, and after it was gone she heard rumors that it had been purchased for General Secretary Mihai. A privacy fence was put up a month later, so when she drove by, she could not find out if this was true.
In June, Emil suggested they marry. They were by now sharing a large apartment in the Fourth District, near the Tisa, and lived as a couple. She laughed. “You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to buy the cow.”
“But I want to,” he insisted.
“No, you don’t.”
So they lived, as Leonek called it, in sin. Grandfather grandly called it a modern socialist arrangement.
The trials started again, in earnest. They were broadcast on the radio just as they had been after the Liberation, filling the airwaves. Titoists on the national scene, like their dangerous Yugoslav model, were trying to lure their People s Republic into the decadence of the West. These conspirators were ferreted out and put on trial. With wobbly voices they asked the forgiveness of the working classes. The bourgeoisie, they admitted, had hypnotized them.
In August 1949, two weeks before the Comrade Chairman tested his first atomic bomb, they heard Jerzy Michalec on the radio. It was a weak voice, marred by coughs and strange hesitations, and hearing him admit to collaboration with Hitlerite forces brought Emil surprise, but no satisfaction. He admitted to murders in both the East and the West, and claimed he had long been a counterrevolutionary agent for the Americans. He was a Titoist, an opportunist, a Fascist, and actively undermining the structures of socialism in the country. Not once did they identify him as Smerdyakov, the Butcher, or a war hero. There were more admissions and presentations of documents and photographs as evidence-they went on for an hour-and when a judge broke in angrily and said he had heard enough, this man should be shot, the eager applause was deafening. Then a confused silence. The accused, apparently, had begun to shake all over like a madman. His eyes had rolled themselves white.
He listened with Leonek and Ferenc and Stefan to the live broadcast from Ferenc’s radio in the station house, and even the chief stopped, briefly, halfway to his office, absorbed. It was a miserably hot day-not even the new ceiling fan made much difference.
“Did they want you to witness?” asked Emil.
Leonek shook his head. “No one asked anything.”
“Me neither.”
Brano Sev came in from the corridor. He nodded at them as he settled at his desk.
Leonek had taken some brandy from his drawer, and they were all drinking. Emil took only a little-his stomach had never quite healed.
The judges returned after ten minutes’ deliberation and sentenced Jerzy Michalec to death by firing squad.
“Justice,” called Brano Sev from his desk. They all stared as he took off his leather coat. Underneath, he wore a finely tailored dark jacket. Green shirt and brown tie. He picked something off his desk and walked it over. He set the Zorki down on Emil’s desk and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.
Leonek looked at the camera, at Emil, then back to the security inspector, confused. Emil had an impulse to rip open the Zorki, but the film, he knew, was no longer there.
Brano Sev nodded at the radio. “Don’t worry about him. In a week he’ll be commuted to hard labor. He’ll be digging in the swamps the rest of his life. This,” he said with disdain, “is modern correction.”
He lit his cigarette and returned to his desk. Then, with the elegance of those who know they are being watched, he took a file out of his drawer and began to read.
