Victory Square tyb-5 Read online

  Gavra continued past the waiting passengers and on through customs, where more bored men in blue uniforms-”navy” blue, he remembered-leaned on a white table discussing basketball scores. In the marble-tiled arrivals lounge he passed waiting families and crossed to a pay phone, lit a cigarette, and dialed the Militia station. On the first ring a breathless man said, “Yes?”

  “First District Militia?”

  “Yes, yes.” There was a cacophony of voices in the background.

  “Emil Brod there?”

  “Not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At home. Chief Brod’s at home.”

  “What’s going on?” he said, but the line went dead.

  He dialed my home number as he watched families greeting and hugging arrivals. On the eighth ring Katja answered. “Uh, hello?”

  “Katja?”

  “That you, Gavra?”

  “Where’s Emil?”

  “I’ve got him lying down finally.”

  “Lying down? Is he hurt?”

  “No, he-” She paused. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Lena. She’s dead.”

  The cigarette stuck to his suddenly dry lips. “How?”

  She told him everything, and he was stunned.

  The crowd of waiting families had left, and Gavra still saw no sign of Harold and Beth. He found them at the customs area. They stood, exasperated, by the long white table, their suitcase open and its contents spread down the table’s length. “What is this?” a young customs official said in heavily accented English, holding up Harold’s electric razor.

  “It’s my razor,” said Harold, his voice slow and measured. “I shave with it.” He pantomimed shaving his cheeks.

  When Gavra approached, Beth gave him a hopeful smile.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked in our language.

  The one with the razor gave him a drowsy look. “Official business, comrade. Shove off.”

  Official business, in this sense, meant that they were waiting for a bribe.

  Gavra took out his Ministry card and held it out for them to read.

  “Oh,” said the clerk. He placed the razor back in the suitcase.

  “Clean this up,” said Gavra. “And if anything’s missing I’ll have your head.”

  They got to it.

  He turned to the old couple and switched to English. “I apologize. Some of our customs people get a little overzealous.”

  “It’s no problem,” said Beth, smiling.

  Harold didn’t smile. “Well, that’s not the end of it.”

  “What?”

  “They left Beth’s suitcase in Frankfurt. I mean, all we did was change planes!”

  “Did you talk with the TisAir people?”

  He shoved a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing toward the luggage area. “She doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Moment.” Gavra marched off to deal with the luggage girl, whom he found flirting with one of the border guards. When he returned, having received a written assurance that the suitcase would be sent to the Metropol, his face was red from shouting. He was embarrassed by his loss of control. It was Lena’s death, he told me later. He didn’t know how much it was affecting him until he found himself shouting at all the wrong times.

  The American couple didn’t seem to notice. He carried their one suitcase out to the curb, where unofficial taxi drivers stood around smoking in the darkness. When they saw the couple, they rushed forward, saying, “Taxi, taxi?”

  A few stern words from Gavra, and they backed up again. He turned to Harold. “These guys will rip you off. I’ve got a car here. Please, let me drive you to your hotel.”

  “That’s too much,” said Harold warily.

  Beth knocked his arm. “We’d be much obliged.”

  They sped down the Ml in the beige Citroen Gavra had bought a few years before-he was proud of it. Beth sat erect in the backseat, gazing out the window at passing fields just visible by the highway’s lamps, while Harold worked up the nerve to say what was on his mind. “So, what was that back there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At customs. You showed them a card. I saw the look on their faces. They were scared.” He paused. “Really scared.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know it.”

  Harold was staring at him now, and Beth’s voice floated up. “Don’t pry, Harry.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Atkins,” said Gavra. “It’s a fair question.” He accelerated past an apple truck with Czech plates. “Fact is, I work for the Ministry for State Security.”

  “State security?” said Beth.

  “He means the secret police,” said Harold.

  “Those guys at customs were hoping you’d give them a bribe.”

  “A bribe?” said Beth.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Harold. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “You told me,” Beth said quietly.

  “You are taking us to the Hotel Metropol, right?”

  Gavra looked over at the old man, whose face was as stern as a schoolteacher’s. “Of course I am. I’m just trying to help.”

  Beth leaned forward so her face appeared between them. “Well, I, for one, thank you for it. God knows where we’d be with those Karpat taxis. Probably stuck on the side of the road.”Harold grunted. “Karpats.” “You have them in the States?” asked Gavra. Beth laughed, and Harold said, “You know what we call them in America?” “What?” “Crapats.”

  As they entered town, the streetlamps became less frequent, and the streets themselves were empty. Gavra didn’t like these indicators. Then, down Yalta Boulevard, he could just make out people in the darkness, filling the street where it ran into Victory Square. His stomach shifted when he noticed green army trucks parked at the edge of the crowd.

  “That’s your HQ, isn’t it?” said Harold, pointing at the oak doors of number 36.

  “How did you know?”

  “Fodor’s,” he said. “They don’t talk highly of it.”

  “I imagine not. Here.” Gavra pointed at the tall, cylindrical tower at number 20. “There’s the Metropol.” When he made a U-turn to park in front of the flags-of-all-nations awning, an old, mustached doorman came out, rubbing his hands against the cold. Gavra wres-tled Harold’s suitcase from the trunk and gave it to a bellboy, then took a slip of paper from his coat pocket-it was the receipt from Bob Moates Gun Shop for the P-83. On the back, he wrote his name and the phone number at his Militia desk. He gave it to Harold. “If you run into trouble, you call me here during work hours. Okay?”

  “You think we’ll run into trouble?” said Harold.

  Gavra shrugged. “Consider it insurance.”

  “Thanks.” Harold offered a hand, and they shook. “And about before-well, I apologize. You’re obviously one of the good ones.”

  Gavra winked at him. “Don’t be too sure. Just try to enjoy your stay in our country.”

  Beth surprised him by giving him a hug. Then she squinted into the distance toward Victory Square. “What’s that? Is it a party?”

  Gavra followed her gaze. He could now see soldiers standing along the edge of the crowd, just past the army trucks. “I suggest you both go inside.”

  “Come on,” said Harold.

  “What is it?” she whispered as her husband pulled her through to the glassed-in lobby, which was full of foreign journalists reporting on the country’s troubles from comfortable sofas.

  Gavra watched until they made it to the check-in desk, then cornered the doorman. Voices from the square reached them, a tumult of shouts. “What’s going on?”

  The doorman wiped his mustache. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “Pankov called it. He told the local Party leaders to get their workers out for a rally. He wants to speak to them. I guess that’s them down there, but they’re not alone. Once the word got out, all the students started pouring out
of doors along the street here and joined the rally. Go see for yourself. I’ll lay odds the workers are outnumbered two to one.”

  “Pankov called the rally?”

  “Yeah. Not smart, was it?”

  Gavra stared down Yalta Boulevard. “I’ll leave the car here a few minutes.”

  “Do what you like.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gavra felt the doorman’s eyes on his back as he walked down the cracked sidewalk toward Victory Square. It was a long walk, because here the blocks stretched out to accommodate more magnificent buildings, but his pace gradually increased until he was jogging. From beyond the trucks, the voices were loud, and he could make out halfhearted chants from the crowd. The strongest was Pankov, you’re starving your country — which in our language rhymes.

  Twenty yards from the edge of the crowd, a cluster of shivering foreign journalists with cameras and handheld tape recorders looked on. Gavra continued until an army captain told him to get back. He was a young officer, confused by the situation. Gavra showed his Ministry card. The captain squinted at him. “Are your men in place?”

  “What men?” asked Gavra.

  He paused, unsure. “On the rooftops. Comrade General Stapenov told us you guys would give us support from the rooftops. I just want to be sure.”

  “The Ministry put gunmen on the roofs?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  Gavra approached the line of soldiers’backs. Like the captain, they were all young, none older than twenty, clutching Kalashnikovs to their chests. They were scared. He didn’t need to show his Ministry papers for them to let him through; he only needed to tell them in a firm voice what he was. Between the soldiers and the crowd was an empty space five yards deep. A few students peered nervously at the soldiers, though most tried to ignore them, facing the far end of the vast square, where the lit columns of the Central Committee rose up. Gavra was tall enough to see over their heads.

  The size of the crowd was shocking. It filled the entirety of Victory Square, swelling up against the Central Committee steps-also guarded by a line of soldiers-and bold teenagers scrambled up the two statues: the Socialist Realist couple in the center, holding up a concrete torch, and the bronze Lenin in front of the steps, reaching out for the future.

  Gavra told me later that, standing in that crowd, he suffered a quick bout of amnesia. He forgot about the deaths of Yuri Kolev and Lebed Putonski, and the safety of the old American couple. Even Lena’s death slipped his mind. Most importantly, he forgot who he was, and that his job was to make sure things like this didn’t happen. He forgot he was supposed to be fighting all these young, enthusiastic, angry people.

  Like many of the soldiers that ringed the crowd, he was aware of the magnitude of this moment. Crowds this size were never seen outside official Party holidays and Tomiak Pankov’s birthday parade. But today they had come, on their own, a few days before Christmas. It was as if history had split from the hours and days that formed it. Time was snapping in half.

  A roar blew out from the warm, steaming center of the crowd. Gavra pushed on, knocking past shoulders and wild, grinning faces to reach the sound. Then he looked up at the Central Committee Building and found its cause: A few men had come out onto the high balcony to peer down at the demonstration. From this distance they were hard to make out, but Gavra thought he recognized Andras Todescu, Tomiak Pankov’s personal advisor. Todescu and a couple of men in blue work clothes were setting up a microphone in the center of the balcony. Another one carried a video camera with lines running inside.

  It was the beginning of the end.

  TEN

  I woke without having fallen asleep. My face was buried in my pillow, wet not from tears, because it would be a while before I could manage those, but from the cold sweat of sickness. The sheets and duvet were soaked as well, and from the living room I could hear the tinny horns that always preceded official announcements on television.

  I sat up feeling dizzy. I was naked but couldn’t remember undressing. Katja had brought me home, so I guessed she’d done it, and I was overwhelmed by a sudden, deep embarrassment. I don’t know why. I reached for the medicine bottle on my bedside table and swallowed two more Captopril.

  Through my closed window came voices, so I put on a robe and opened it. Yes-chants, many streets away. Then Katja’s voice from the living room: “Emil? You up?” She sounded scared.

  “Yes.”

  “Come look at this.”

  I stumbled through the door and found her on the couch, face bathed in the blue glow, mesmerized. I sat next to her.

  It all unfolded on television.

  A camera moved across a crowd that filled Victory Square, but without sound, so we couldn’t hear what they were chanting. Their fists were raised high.

  “So many people,” said Katja.

  “Yeah.”

  Then the camera turned to our Great Leader, Comrade General Secretary and President Tomiak Pankov, stepping out onto the Central Committee balcony, a hand waved in salutation. The old man’s heavy eyes were so familiar. Behind him appeared Ilona Pankov, his wife, the first deputy prime minister and chairwoman of the Academy of Sciences. She always stood near him. Tomiak Pankov’s bald head was covered in a tall black Astrakhan hat, and his fur-lined coat was buttoned to his neck. Even with the poor-quality video feed you could see his breaths in the cold air.

  He began to speak, giving comradely salutations to the Party faithful filling the square, then said, “The news is filled these days with lies coming out of Sarospatak, where hooligans and warmongers, supported by the American CIA, have been attempting to undermine our great workers’state.”

  It went on for a few minutes, and from the crowd we heard cheers. But then, when he said, “The anti-communist forces are betraying your heritage,” something else came from the crowd-loud, with abandon: boos and catcalls.

  It was the first time we’d ever heard such a sound at a Party rally.

  The technicians fixed the situation by piping in some prerecorded applause, but it was too late. Across the country, at the same moment, people in their homes heard the sound of Pankov being jeered. There was no way to make them forget it.

  He went on. I saw apprehension in Ilona Pankov’s face, but her husband appeared oblivious, saying that he was instituting changes “to raise the monthly food rations and increase the wages of factory workers in our great land.”

  Then it sank in. The canned applause was turned up to cover the rising tide of resentment from the square below him that even his microphone caught, and Pankov looked down with a stunned expression. “I promise r-raises across the b-board,” he stuttered.

  Then his mouth fell open, and he took a step back from the microphone.

  The picture disappeared, replaced by a red screen. At the bottom, in white letters, we were told that there were technical difficulties. We were asked to be patient.

  ELEVEN

  Gavra had met Tomiak Pankov only once, in 1985, when General Brano Sev brought him along to one of the Great Leader’s many hunting retreats up in the Carpathians. They joined his entourage of sycophants, and the old man related jokes he’d recently heard from King Hussein of Jordan. The jokes were funny, but Pankov didn’t deliver them well, so the laughter all around him was forced. The president didn’t seem to notice.

  Despite that, Gavra was struck by how personable the man was. He knew Gavra’s name and had personally asked Brano to bring him along as a reward for some recent work he’d completed with distinction. They all dressed in brown hunting clothes shipped in from London and went out to track deer. They had little luck, the deer by now used to the marauding group of Party faithful toting shotguns, so Andras Todescu, Pankov’s personal advisor, stepped away from the crowd and spoke into a radio. A few minutes later, three stout bucks went galloping past, and Pankov raised his shotgun, shouting, “This one’s mine!” He shot and missed. “Damn,” he muttered and started to run. Everyone followed, and Todescu again spoke into
his radio.

  Over the next hill they saw another deer-the woods were suddenly alive with game-and again Pankov aimed and shot wildly.

  From that distance, Gavra knew he’d miss. Amazingly, though, the deer stumbled a moment and fell.

  “Got that bastard!” shouted Pankov.

  “Superb,” said Brano, winking at Gavra.

  “Magnificent,” said Todescu.

  Knowing what was expected of him, Gavra also offered congratulations, but he saw what had happened. The deer had fallen toward the hunters, as if shot from the opposite direction, and as they approached the shivering animal Gavra scanned the trees. Up on the high branches of a pine, hidden by camouflaged clothing, a Ministry sharpshooter lowered a long, laser-sighted sniper’s rifle.

  This is what he remembered as he stood in the cold, staring up at Tomiak Pankov talking to the crowd. He couldn’t hear anything the old man said, because the air was saturated with angry noise. “Death to Pankov!” shouted some; others, “Patak murderer!” and “Down with the tyrant!”

  That memory was the only thing he could dredge up to explain why Pankov had been stupid enough to call this rally just after the killings in Sarospatak. Tomiak Pankov had for decades allowed himself to be tricked by his subordinates. They helped him believe that he was a world-class hunter and magnificent jokester. It was no surprise they could also convince him that his people loved and feared him.

  His assistants certainly knew better, though. Why would Andras Todescu advise him to speak on television? Had the years of devotion finally dulled the sycophants’wits as well?

  People jostled into him, and he pushed back. The amnesia slid away, and the exhilaration of the crowd lost its effect. He instead noticed the warm stink of so many bodies in the same place, then he saw what I saw on television: Pankov stopping in midsentence. Pankov stepping back from the microphone, confused.