The Bridge of Sighs Page 25

  “Come on, Mama.” Leonek frowned at her, and she rattled an angry stream of abuse at him, her brows shifting, hands fluttering about her face. “You better take it before she does something crazy.”

  Emil held it in his hand. It was heavy.

  “Go on,” said Leonek, ignoring his mother’s shouts. “In your pocket.”

  Emil dutifully dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  Seyrana seemed to quiet a little, but the abuse continued, even as she collected the plates.

  “We could go through the paperwork,” explained Leonek, “but Christ knows how long that would take. It was faster to go to Roberto for your weapon.”

  Emil smiled, a sudden, unexplainable joy overcoming his despondency. It was the gift of the gun, the mother, and Leonek’s love for the old woman. He put his hand in his pocket, felt the cool barrel.

  “Good God,” said Leonek. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”

  He felt like laughing.

  Emil went home and took Janos Crowder’s 35mm Zorki from the shelf where Grandfather had displayed it beside the books. He walked a few blocks to a photographic studio that was still open, where a man in a white smock with a gold front tooth loaded it for him. He explained some of the details of taking photographs, emphasizing light. “If in doubt, more light!”

  He brought their electric lamp from the bedroom. Then he turned on the overhead bulb.

  “What the hell?” asked Grandfather when he came out of his bedroom into the radiant living room. It was almost eight, and the old man had been napping again. The spot on his jaw was pink. He went out to the balcony for a cigarette and watched suspiciously through the door.

  Emil used a book at each corner of the photograph to flatten it, shifting until the shadows from the books did not obscure the two men and their Iron Cross. He adjusted the focusing ring to the approximate distance between him and the photo. He raised the camera to his eye. The button the photographer had said to press was stiff, but finally he heard that click.

  He adjusted the diaphragm and shot it again. Again.

  When the roll was done, he sat down and smiled. This was the first smart thing he had done for as long as he could remember.

  Through the door, he saw the back of the old man s head, smoke rising from it. He got up and joined his grandfather on the balcony. There were seven women down by the six spigots, one waiting for her turn. Grandfather passed his cigarette over, and Emil took a drag, but didn’t give it back. He blew smoke over the railing, where it formed a loose cloud before sliding away. Grandfather cleared his throat. Emil said, “You’re going to have to talk.”

  Grandfather grunted. Neither acquiescence nor debate.

  “This will go on.” Emil didn’t look at him as he spoke because he didn’t want to pressure the old man. “It will get worse, and we’ll grow to hate each other. So you have to tell me because I don’t want it to come to that.”

  “It’s not your business,” Grandfather said finally.

  “Everything is my business.”

  They settled on that for a moment as more women and a thin man showed up with pails and others left. They heard metal striking metal, and water spilling to the cobblestones. Grandfather took out another cigarette and lit it. His voice wavered now and then, but it pushed on, reluctantly, to the end.

  “When we came back here from Ruscova, when you were still up there, abroad, the Capital was mad. You’ve heard stories,” he said. “The starvation, the violence. The Russians.”

  “I’ve heard a little.”

  “It’s all true, and you’ve only heard a fraction. For a while people really were starving. A month, I’d say. They hadn’t organized the distribution well, and nothing was getting where it was supposed to go. People were desperate. When they’re desperate, when they think they could die at any time, they act differently. Terribly.”

  The Arctic had been no different. He looked down on the fat women in the square who were the result of wartime starvation— they ate everything now. Grandfather said that on some days they couldn’t go out at all. There were gunshots outside, and they had to sit in the dark and wait for them to pass. Then, he would go out looking for food. “It’s hard to imagine now, but for a few weeks this is how the Capital was.”

  “I’ve never heard this before,” he said. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”

  Grandfather’s eyes were almost dry, and his thin lips moved spastically before his voice came: “Why do you think?”

  They rewrite history like if s their own goddamn Tolstoy novel

  He shrugged. “I’m sure you know about how the Russians were then. Mara likes to ridicule them, but she’s right in some ways. They stole everyone’s watches. They were like children listening to their ticking watches. In the street. Wherever. They took them off of dead bodies. And if it was a very nice watch, they might kill for it. They took what they wanted. I can’t make excuses for them,” he said, shaking his head toward the sky. “I know what they can be, both good and bad. They’re a people of extremes, Emil.”

  He looked out over the city, over the windows and clay roofs and women with pails and the broken fountain and the dogs sniffing around it. His voice was even and quiet, and he told the story to the city, not to his grandson. It involved two Russian soldiers. They came to the apartment when he was gone foraging for food. The soldiers came looking for watches. They banged on the door, and when Mara did not answer they kicked it in.

  Grandfather didn’t describe them, but Emil imagined the soldiers from the bar outside of town. Loud, scraping fabrics, nervous pistols, acne.

  Mara Brod hid her dead son Valentin’s watch in the wood stove, and gave the soldiers her husband’s broken wristwatch instead. One of them wound it and listened. He shook it and listened again. They were both very drunk. They smelled of cigar smoke. Then they raped her.

  The old man was welling up as he stared at the city, and his mouth kept slipping into nervous smiles. He squeezed and released the arms of his chair.

  “That’s when I came back. They had her on the floor. I saw her there and…I don’t know how to say it…I saw her seeing me seeing her. I couldn’t move. They were still…and I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. It was—I could only fall down.” He was crying now like he had then, shaking all over, the chair clicking against the balcony, saying, “You have to understand, they had guns. One to her head…”

  Emil was cold from head to foot.

  When they were finished, they gave Avram Brod a pint of vodka. “A thank-you, they told me. Then they were gone.” His weeping sounded choked and small, like a child’s.

  Women’s voices came up from the square.

  “I just want someone,” he began, then shook his head. He looked at the sky. “I just want someone to make it better. Worth living. You see?”

  Emil didn’t know what to say. He was praying the old man would not ask to see his father’s watch.

  “We have everything here,” said Grandfather. “And we have lost it all. You. You’re everything we have left.” He was finally looking at his grandson.

  He was so old, and Emil was still so young.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  *******************

  He locked the Zorki in his desk. He didn’t trust himself to unload the film without exposing it, so he left it inside the camera. When he needed the copies, he would have them taken care of. The original was folded inside his jacket, in the pocket opposite his pistol.

  It was a little before ten in the morning. Leonek watched as Emil locked the desk. “What’s that?”

  “Are we going, or not?”

  Leonek shrugged, then led the way.

  The waitress looked as though she had been in this café, doing this particular job, all her life. Her wavy hair settled over her low brow, and when they asked for coffees, she told them there was no milk.

  “It’s all right,” said Emil. “Just sugar.”

  “Saccharine tablets,” she said.

  Leonek w
inked at her. “Corina, can you tell Max I’m expecting a call?”

  Emil thought she was going to spit on them both, but she turned and went to talk with the slight man working the coffee machine. Max gave Leonek a knowing nod.

  “You know every café and bar in the Capital, don’t you?”

  Leonek smiled, pleased.

  They sat beside a wide, high window that faced tiny, brick-laid October Square. They did not speak—they had talked everything out by now—but stared at the busy market and listened to the voices that shot through the thin pane. It was cold, but bright. Vendors called for customers to look at their wares, and colorful Gypsy women lifted fabrics to see clearly while the men behind the tables watched suspiciously. Children appeared from somewhere—quick, hoarse shouts—and ran across the square. Stiff old veterans from the first big war sat on the benches they occupied every day, nodding heads, watching. Some uniformed police stood around eating off a fresh loaf of bread, and a woman with no teeth laughed beside the tallest one, then punched him on the arm. The Capital had always been cosmopolitan despite itself. Romanians and Hungarians and Slovaks and Poles and Ukrainians fell irresistibly into the mix. Fat and round faces, and faces of gradating shades. Emil was unexpectedly overcome.

  There was not a single Russian in sight.

  “Comrade Inspector!” called Max. Leonek looked up from his own thoughts. The bartender was holding the telephone in his hand, waving it.

  They stayed away from the station so that nothing would keep them from their appointment. They drank coffee in the morning, then switched to wine to get rid of the shakes. “This waiting is impossible,” said Emil.

  “Then think of something to do.”

  “I will.”

  But all that came to Emil was food, and once they were in front of their cabbage soups, he had no appetite. His stomach was shrunken and sore.

  “I’m getting tired.”

  Leonek pushed away his bowl. “Then we go back to coffee.”

  When they finished the coffee, it was time.

  They parked in the gravel lot at 8:30, and continued on foot. In the darkness, their slow path along footbridges, through narrow, wet passageways and across steps wrapping around crumbling stone walls brought them to a bridge that had snapped in mid- arch when the far side sank too deep. To span the distance, someone had laid boards that shifted beneath their feet. They heard fragments of bridge dropping into the canal, and smelled piss.

  It was called the Deeps. Here, the silted pilings beneath the stone houses and walkways had begun to crumble, and this corner of the Canal District was slowly sinking. In the thirties, most of the Deeps had been cleared out by the royal police, but during the Occupation, communists and Jews who could not flee to the mountains escaped here, to the higher, dry floors. When the Liberation came, German sympathizers disappeared here. Now and then, one emerged and, with great fanfare, was arrested. No one lived here by choice.

  The water on the other side was ankle-deep, and they had to maneuver using door stoops and blocks of wood set out like boulders in a pond. The windows were gaping black holes, and from everywhere came the sound of dripping and, sometimes, the labored mew of cats.

  Emil wanted to verify again the particulars of what Dora had told Leonek, where the exchange was to take place, what time exactly, but the cold, quiet streets necessitated silence. He had been to the Deeps only once before, during the weeks just after Filia had left him. The water level had been more manageable then, and some prostitutes lived in large attic apartments that had in drier days been home to fashionable bourgeois who had left their murals and bridal beds behind. Emil had met a dark hooker in the squares—not quite as dark as the American he’d seen in Berlin—and she’d led him back to her huge room. She was from Ankara, Turkey, and he never learned how she ended up here.

  “What’s that stinkF hissed Leonek.

  Open and collapsed sewers. Rotting vermin. Dead bodies.

  The photograph was stiff beside his heart, and the weight of the pistol in his pocket was unfamiliar. It made him fear losing balance.

  They turned and emerged into a water-covered courtyard where a church wall hung over them. It was a small square, no bigger than the canals would allow, and the tall church made it seem smaller. In a hollowed alcove stood the broken statue of a saint, without shoulders or head, only the vertical folds of robe. High up, a black, round church window was ringed by glass chips.

  He heard a rat swimming nearby, and jumped into a doorway, wavering slightly from the pain that burrowed up his leg and into his stomach. The steps were slick with moss. “This is it?”

  Leonek lit a match and squinted at his wristwatch. In the yellow, shifting light his hungry face was kinetic. “Five before nine,” he said. He leapt up beside Emil. Despite their efforts, their feet were drenched and cold. Leonek checked the door behind them—soggy double doors—and opened them a crack. Then he wrapped his arms around himself, squatted and rocked on his heels. The flat, chipped walls of the square seemed to slide in as the minutes passed, and in the black pool at their feet Emil thought he saw the ripples of distant movement. They both looked up at the black sky, framed by walls. “You hear something?” whispered Leonek.

  Emil did. Then he didn’t. Then he did.

  The stumble of feet in water, off to the left. Heavy breathing. The hiss of a curse. Leonek held a finger to his lips, then pushed the door behind them open further.

  Jerzy Michalec appeared first from the edge of the church, dim, red-faced, straining forward. His left arm was pulling something out of the gloom. A hand, then an arm. Then all of her was visible, fighting each inch.

  His whisper jumped out of him: “Lena!”

  “Emil!” It echoed along the waterways, her head twisting back and forth, then she found him with her eyes.

  They were on opposite corners of the little square, the inspectors half-hidden in their doorway, Michalec and Lena just beyond the church. She tried to shake free of him, but he threw her back into the water. A small pistol appeared in his hand.

  “You have it?” Michalec’s untraceable voice was weary. He was still catching his breath. There was nothing of the control and calm Emil remembered from his house.

  Emil unfolded and waved the photograph, though he didn’t know if Michalec could see it in the darkness.

  Michalec saw. He kept the pistol waist-high. “I’m surprised you mix with men like Dora, Comrade Inspector. That’s some lousy company you keep.”

  “Where’s the colonel?” asked Emil.

  Michalec made an expression of bafflement.

  “Herr OberstΓ Emil shouted.

  “Up here,” came the familiar accent. The German leaned out of the glass-toothed church window, waving what was no doubt another Walther in his white-gloved hand.

  Lena was against the far wall, wet and shivering. “Goddamn it!”

  Michalec had caught his breath. “Let’s make this simple. Just the photograph, and here she is. No one else needs to die.”

  Behind Emil, Leonek was saying shit beneath his breath, repeatedly, for walking voluntarily into this deathtrap.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” Emil asked, his fingers tightening on the photograph, his eyes just past Smerdyakov, on Lena’s frantic features.

  Michalec’s arms dropped to his sides. “What should I tell you, Inspector? That I’m a changed man? That I’ve grown fond of you through all this? Will that make you feel better?”

  “Shut up,” said Lena. Exasperated.

  Leonek was easing into the door behind them, which creaked as it slid open. The German still hovered in the dark window— his pale gloves were like fireflies.

  “I want to know we’ll get out of here alive,” said Emil.

  Leonek slipped through the door.

  “This photograph is the end,” Michalec smiled, opening his hands. “Don’t you see? We can get back to the living now.” He glanced at Lena, who looked scared against the wall, then stepped back and grabbed her arm. T
his time she came willingly. “Now,” he said to Emil.

  The photograph was in one hand, his cane in the other. He stepped down into the water. Trash floated against his freezing ankles. As they approached the center of the square, Lena looked into Emil’s face, and when they were close he could see the expression on her face was transparent. There was something behind her fear that made him forget the icy water, and he was suddenly sure that something was going to collapse, and he would lose her. He and Michalec were very close.

  “What about the colonel, then?” Emil tilted his head toward the church. “What does he get out of this?”

  Michalec’s mouth came to Emil’s nose. When he whispered, the smell of onions came with the words. “The colonel and I are of use to one another. We have a gentlemen’s agreement.” He held out a hand; his fingers gripped the air.

  When Michalec took the photograph, Emil didn’t let go. They held each side. “What if I turn you in?” he asked.

  “Without this?” Michalec jerked the photograph away and squinted at it. He gave Emil a smile without warmth. “I know where you live. I know your family, I know everything you love. I’ve killed you twice already, Inspector Brod. One of these days, it’s going to take.”

  It was cold again, cold right through. That long roll-call of corpses was on him again, with all the pain of this journey.

  Lena squeezed his arm while Michalec folded the photograph into his coat, nodding. The gun in Emil’s coat was heavy. He could barely hear her whisper Oh god Emil come on I love you let’sgo as he saw those dead boy-soldiers in Berlin, saw soldiers haunting the streets looking for watches, saw skulls crushed by the gears of the world that were run by Michalec’s hands. Then a cold deck, the work blade in his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut. Come with me come on. She was turning him around, and he felt like crying. Then he was crying, and throwing her off of him. He rushed into Michalec’s retreating back, the Marakov in his fist now, the barrel pressed against Michalec’s temple.

  They were both in the cold water. Michalec squirmed beneath him, shouting “Oberst!” weakly.