Victory Square tyb-5 Page 4

  “See for yourself if you think I’m a liar,” said Jennifer.

  Gavra only wanted to follow Shevchenko. Confronting him in the middle of a schoolhouse was not what he’d had in mind.

  The door opened, and Lubov Shevchenko’s spectacled face peered out. He cocked his head and spoke in their shared accent. “Can I help you?”

  All reasonable plans were now figments of Gavra’s imagination. He answered in our language. “Please close the door. I’d like to speak with you a moment.”

  Shevchenko’s expression, at first confused, shifted. It was in the edges of his nose and the way his heavy eyes seemed to stretch just slightly. Fear, or repugnance. “How did you find me?”

  “I’m not here to bother you.”

  “You are.”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To talk. Please come out and close the door.”

  Shevchenko looked back into the classroom and said in English, “I’ll be right back. Everyone, quiet.” Then he stepped into the corridor and shut the door. Something occurred to him, and he raised a finger. “Tell them you can’t find me. Tell them I died.”

  “Tell who?”

  Shevchenko said nothing at first. Then: “What do you want to talk about?”

  That was the question for which Gavra had no real answer. So he said, “These kids are in trouble?”

  Shevchenko frowned; he nodded.

  “American kids, are they any worse than we were?”

  “Much, much worse. But you didn’t cross the Atlantic to ask me that.” Behind his glasses, a dew of sweat formed in Shevchenko’s thick eyebrow and rolled down his cheek. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you.”

  “I’m not going to kill you. I just want to talk.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Come on,” said Gavra. “We’re going.”

  “I have a job here.”

  “They can take care of themselves.”

  Shevchenko shook his head and tried to speak with conviction. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Gavra looked past the math teacher, down the empty corridor, then behind himself. Control. He had to keep in control. This was something that, more than a decade before, Brano had hammered again and again to into his pupil. Stay in control. Act, but never react. Once you start reacting, you’ve already lost.

  He took the P-83 from his pocket and shoved it into Lubov Shevchenko’s stomach, whispering, “Please don’t make me shoot you, comrade. I just want to talk. Walk with me.”

  “Comrade.” Shevchenko shook his head, but the fear was evident. “Never thought I’d hear that word again.”

  Gavra moved the pistol to the small of Shevchenko’s back and gripped the man’s elbow as they walked ahead, then turned left. Just before the exit stood the heavyset clerk he’d spoken to a couple hours before. She smiled brightly. “So you found him!” She winked at Shevchenko. “Lubov, your cousin wanted it to be a surprise!”

  Gavra dug the barrel into Shevchenko’s back, forcing a smile into the teacher’s face. “Yes…”

  “My cousin is always flustered by surprises,” Gavra told the woman as they passed. “The bad girl, Jennifer-she was right!”

  “Tell me about it,” the clerk said, laughing as she disappeared around the next corner.

  On the turnpike, Lubov Shevchenko began to weep. There was nothing gradual about it. One moment a frightened calm held him mute; the next, he covered his face with his hands and moaned, rocking back and forth. It was an unnerving sound.

  “Cut that out,” said Gavra, accelerating.

  Lubov wouldn’t stop. When he tried to speak, the tears flowed, glistening in the late afternoon sun; he coughed wetly.

  “I told you, I’m not here to kill you.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” Lubov managed. “You wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

  “You live alone?”

  The math teacher nodded.

  “Where?”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to your house.”

  Lubov, between fits, pointed him around a U-turn and then through a secluded side entrance to the woods of Brandermill. They looped around a flat-faced medical center, then took a left onto a tree-shaded street lined with the kinds of houses one saw in Hollywood films. Thornridge Lane. Each house had a paved driveway leading from the road, and along the curb five-digit numbers had been stenciled in green.

  “What’s your number?”

  “What?”

  “House number!”

  “Three five two-oh-six.”

  The house was barely visible through its wooded front yard. Gavra turned down the steep driveway and stopped in front of a bark-colored bi-level.

  “Teaching pays well?” said Gavra.

  “In Brandermill, this is part of the slums.”

  “Let’s not start our relationship with lies.”

  The math teacher swallowed. “It’s the truth.”

  Gavra opened the car door for him, the pistol always in sight, and took him to the front door, where Lubov fumbled with keys.

  Holding him by the elbow, Gavra walked through the house, trying to hide his amazement. From the landing they went upstairs into a high-ceilinged living room that opened onto a terrace with a view of the pine forest Lubov humbly called a backyard. The kitchen, too, was large, the tall, full refrigerator humming. A master bedroom, sparsely furnished, was four times the size of the bedroom Gavra shared with his roommate, Karel, and a smaller bedroom had been converted into an office.

  They returned to the landing and continued to the half-underground lower floor, with two more bedrooms, a long den, and an empty utility room with a door leading into the jungle of backyard.

  Convinced of their solitude, Gavra placed Lubov on the den sofa across from a massive television. “Don’t tell me you live alone in this place.”

  He shrugged, the fear apparently waning. “It’s what they gave me.”

  “Who?”

  Lubov stiffened, then mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I said, you know who gave it to me.”

  “Pretend I don’t.”

  This seemed to confuse the man. He opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “Who are you?”

  Gavra showed him the pistol again. “Right now, you talk. Afterward, I’ll speak. Okay?”

  “The Americans,” said Lubov. “CIA.”

  “They gave you this house?”

  “And the name.”

  “Why?”

  “It was part of the deal. I answer their questions; they give me a new life. How did you find me?”

  “From the beginning,” said Gavra, pulling up a chair. “Your real name.”

  “Lebed Putonski.”

  “That’s a good start. Where did you make the deal with the Americans?

  “Stockholm.”

  “Why were you in Stockholm?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “I want your version of the story. Why were you in Stockholm?”

  Lebed Putonski pressed his fingertips together, as if praying. “This was almost a decade ago. I was there to oversee things.”

  “You were the Stockholm resident?”

  Putonski shrugged. “Of course. There’s a reason the Ministry keeps watch on its own residents. We start to enjoy life. We start thinking maybe we’d have a better time somewhere else. And then we do.”

  “Why not just stay in Stockholm?”

  “I was recalled. I guess the Ministry wasn’t happy with my work, or maybe they suspected what I was thinking. Fair enough.” He shrugged again. “I was a desk man, been one all my life. Can’t say I really understood half of what I was doing. So…” He squinted at the pistol. “So I contacted the Americans, spent some weeks at Lang-ley, and then I moved here. Now, eight years later, you’re pointing a gun at me. Why?”

  Gavra didn’t understand it either. This was just another old man who’d gotten tired of th
e intrigues and breadlines. He wasn’t an ideological turncoat, and the information he, after prodding, admitted to giving the Americans was hardly explosive: the Central Committee’s position on its fraternal relations with Sweden, in-country troop sizes and distribution, and some real gross domestic product numbers. All Putonski had wanted was an easier life, and here he’d gotten it.

  The telephone rang.

  “You expecting someone?”

  Putonski shook his head. “Maybe it’s my girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Maureen.” He paused. “Everyone gets lonely.”

  “She’ll expect you at home, yes?”

  Another shrug, then a nod. “Detention was almost finished.”

  “Okay. Come on.”

  He walked Putonski back up the stairs to the kitchen and took the telephone on the seventh ring, holding it to Putonski’s ear and keeping his head close so he could hear as well.

  “Mr. Shevchenko?” said a man’s voice. American.

  “Yes?” said Putonski.

  “Mr. Shevchenko, there’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you. Your friends from the west need some information.”

  Putonski’s eyes went wide, and Gavra nodded at him to continue. “What’s this about?”

  “Let’s talk in person. You’ll stay at home?”

  Putonski interpreted Gavra’s second nod. “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” said the man. “We should be alone, understand?”

  “Of course,” said Putonski, then the line went dead. “I’ll bet it’s about you,” he told Gavra. “You better get out of here.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Who do you think? CIA. I haven’t heard from them in five years, then you show up, and suddenly they want to discuss something.”

  “You don’t know this man?”

  “Five years is a long time. They change personnel.”

  Gavra stared at Putonski a moment, thinking this through. His real purpose here, as he understood it, was to protect this math teacher. Yuri Kolev wouldn’t have spent the money and effort to send him to the other side of the world if the threat to Putonski weren’t real. Now an unidentified voice wanted to meet Putonski alone.

  “Come on,” said Gavra. “We’re leaving.”

  FOUR

  While Agota told Magda and Ferenc about her adventures photographing Tomiak Pankov, I sat with Bernard at his desk, Sanja on his knee. He fumbled with his daughter’s wispy blond hair and said, “Why are you driving her?”

  “What?”

  “Agi can take the train. You don’t need to bother.”

  “It’ll be nice to get out of the city.”

  “And go see Ferenc?”

  I shrugged in a pretense of stupidity, but I think he knew what I was up to. He also knew why I wasn’t going to discuss it with him. A couple of months after he and Agota married, a man from the Ministry for State Security arrived in the office. He was one of those small, petty clerk-types who sweat a lot. I was on the phone at the time and watched him go to Gavra’s desk, introduce himself, and then ask for Bernard Kovar. Gavra took him over to Bernard’s desk, where the little man congratulated him on his marriage. Bernard, unsure, thanked the man and then acquiesced to a coffee. The three of them were gone for an hour.

  I cornered Bernard that evening. He was scared but wouldn’t tell me what had happened, finally getting angry and telling me to keep to my own business. So, the next day, I cornered Gavra, who was more open. The Ministry was making a deal with Bernard. His father-in-law, Ferenc Kolyeszar, was of particular interest to the security of our socialist Utopia. Perhaps Bernard could share some of his insider knowledge with them, now and then.

  “He said no, right?” I asked Gavra.

  Gavra rocked his head from side to side. “They’ve offered passports for both him and Agota.”

  “So?”

  I was being naive, I know, because they weren’t just offering Bernard and his new wife the freedom to visit other countries; they were also promising not to harass them in the future. So, inevitably, Bernard made the occasional report to Yalta Boulevard. I knew it, Gavra knew it, and even Ferenc knew it, because I told him. Ferenc assured me that he and his son-in-law, despite their mutual annoyance, had come to an agreement. Ferenc wrote Bernard’s reports for him. In exchange, Ferenc promised never to tell Agota what her husband was up to.

  Despite this, I wasn’t going to burden Bernard with information he didn’t need to know.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “It’ll be nice to see Ferenc again.”

  “You think he can help on this case? I mean, the‘Time for a change’part.” He sounded very earnest.

  I took one of his cigarettes. “No. He won’t know a thing.”

  He knew I was lying, but didn’t press the issue.

  When his wife finished with my telephone, I had Bernard carry my box of old files to where I’d parked on Lenin Avenue. I followed with Agota and Sanja, wondering if she really knew nothing about her husband’s Ministry collaborations. At my Mercedes-bought, like everything, with Lena’s family money-Bernard kissed his family good-bye, promising to see them by the weekend.

  We soon reached Victory Square; then a side road put us on Mihai Boulevard, which followed the banks of the Tisa River-”Lifeblood of the Nation,” we liked to call it. The water reflected the gray winter sky, lapping stone ramparts. Recent storms had raised the water level enough to frighten those who lived near the river. Lena and I lived higher up in the Second District and had no fear.

  Many of the Habsburg buildings I remembered from my youth, which had lined the riverbank, had been demolished in the last decade. Tomiak Pankov, a great believer in the shape and look of socialism, returned from a 1978 visit to North Korea with a new vision for the Capital. Some said he was embarrassed by the provinciality of our city and raged whenever he came back from trips to Paris or London, but I’m not sure about that. I think he had a fastidious side to him, something that served him well under our first Great Leader, Mihai, when he was just a simple government bureaucrat in love with efficiency. Once he saw Kim 11 Sung’s rigid and clean society, and Pyongyang’s long, broad avenues and crowds in perfect, military formation, he felt he’d found paradise.

  Now, everything that smelled of the past was being erased. Churches were demolished, or moved brick by brick to hide behind modern towers, and the outer rings of the city were replanned to accommodate the influx of farmers reassigned as factory workers.

  We got on the Georgian Bridge, heading south, and on our left lay the ruptured skyline of the Canal District, full of cranes and half-finished block towers. Even the Canal District, that symbol of everything seedy and chaotic in the country, once home to prostitutes and drug dealers, was being turned into a New Town.

  When we reached the southern bank, also full of new towers, Agota said, “I spent all yesterday in a line. You know that? Trying to get an extra ration book for Sanja. Four hours, just to have the bitch behind the window tell me Sanja was missing her A-32 form.”

  “What’s an A-32?”

  “Far as I can tell, it’s to prove she exists. But there she was, crying on my hip. I don’t need a goddamned A-32. It’s a real laugh, isn’t it?

  First, the maternity laws say I can’t have an abortion, then they make sure I’m barely able to feed the kids I end up with.”

  “Want me to make a call?” I asked. I’d done this enough times before. As soon as the dietary laws started going through three years ago, specifying the forms required to get your food ticket booklets, the flaws became apparent. If you were missing a stamp on one of the four forms required-or on one of the sixteen forms needed to get those four primary forms-it meant you had to fall back on bartering with your neighbors or visiting the black market.

  “Taken care of,” she said.

  I wondered if this was why she was rushing off to Tisakarad. The farther you got from the Capital-and Tisakarad was forty miles away-the less the ration system
was followed. Local farmers had long ago realized the benefit of skimming off their Capital-bound shipments and bringing their pigs into the markets, where the city folk would trade anything for a bit of pork. I said, “I’m surprised Bernard let you go. Patak’s not safe, and I’ll bet Ferenc will drag you there with him.”

  “Think he has a say in it?” She turned Sanja to face her, switching to baby talk: “No, no! Daddy doesn’t have any say!” Sanja didn’t seem to have an opinion one way or the other.

  We’d just passed the last of the towers when the roadblock appeared. Two Militia cars were parked in the grass, and a makeshift gate-a long tangle of razor wire-had been stretched across the road. As I slowed to a stop, a big militiaman in a regulation blue overcoat tossed away a cigarette and came over to my window. I rolled it down, letting in the cold. He had fat sideburns growing from under his cap, and half his face was sunburned. “Where you going?”

  “Tisavar. What’s this?”

  “Turn around and head back. Traffic’s stopped today.”

  I handed over my Militia certificate. He cocked his head as he read it, then pushed back his cap with a knuckle. “Sorry about that, Comrade Chief.” He didn’t seem very sorry. “Orders from the top.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He squinted and rocked on his heels. “You know. Central Committee.”

  “To keep everyone in the Capital?”

  He nodded, then noticed Agota and Sanja. He gave them a smile.

  “Trains are down, too?”

  “Most,” he said. “First train they cut was the twelve thirty to Patak.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I think we all know what it’s about.”

  “But I can go through.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You’re not going to Patak, right?”

  “I told you. Tisavar.”

  He touched the brim of his cap, then stepped back and waved us on. Two younger militiamen with thick gloves dragged the razor wire aside so we could pass.

  We didn’t talk about the roadblock, or the fact that suddenly the Capital had become a prison. It had happened before, when the Central Committee overreacted to a bomb that destroyed a fertilizer plant in Krosno, back on November fifth-the thirty-second anniversary of the short-lived 1956 general strike that, in the end, led to Agota’s father’s internal exile.