The Bridge of Sighs Read online

  They were both staring at Emil, their faces expectant, as if waiting for an answer. But Emil didn’t understand the question.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  *******************

  Leonek Terzian was plainly uncomfortable with Emil driving, so Emil drove recklessly. He swerved around wagons loaded with sweaty farmers sleeping off their predawn chores and made sudden hard stops at intersections. Terzian s face was awash in shades of red.

  The Unity Medical Complex—a fresh, concrete model of modern uniformity, built on the foundations of a bombed-out, fourteenth-century church—lay where the First District sank to meet the Second. Terzian led the way inside, through institutional glass doors and gray corridors with moaning peasants covering the dirty floors beside gaunt chain-smokers in robes and slippers. They stepped around a dry pool of brown blood. There were no doctors in sight.

  On the far side of the empty nurse’s station, they went through another door and down a stairwell to the medical examiner’s floor. He was a short Uzbek who smoked in the corner of his examining room, ashing in the sink, while around him four low steel tables with wheels held bodies covered by white sheets. “Leon,” he said. The coroner’s shoulders, Emil noticed, were misaligned, so that in all his movements he looked ready to sit down. He turned on the faucet to extinguish his cigarette and wiped his hands on his soiled smock. “You’re the new one?”

  Emil stuck out a hand and the Uzbek shook it. Cool and dry.The nails had been pared meticulously, and the room stank of medicinal alcohol. “Emil Brod.”

  The coroner rubbed his hands together in mock appetite. “Let s take a look, shall we? The freshest first.”

  They followed him to the mound on a table beside three iceboxes, and Emil noticed how the absence of windows, more than the medical equipment scattered around, gave this concrete room an antiseptic feel.

  The Uzbek drew back the sheet. Aleksander Tudor lay puffed up like an overfed seal. His wide, naked girth was colorless, his genitals sucked inside his groin. His toes and neck were blue, and across his marbled, egglike chest and stomach was a wide, Y- shaped autopsy slice that had been roughly sutured shut.

  Again, the face that was no longer a face. But this one had been washed clean by the Tisa, the red remnants drained to a white pulp.

  This was yet another kind of corpse—different than a body in a home, or on a boat. The antiseptic smells, the Uzbek casually pressing a finger into the half-mouth to see inside, the postmortem stitches—he again felt the instinct to vomit, but brought it under control when he heard Terzian choking down his own convulsions near the door.

  “The bullet holes?” Emil managed.

  The Uzbek lifted the head, his clean fingers holding the back of the skull, where there was still some structure. He nodded at two black-and-blue holes on the round, hairless scalp. “Shots one and two.” He let the head drop. A soft thud. He pointed to where a chin had once been. “Exit here. The second got stuck in his jaw.

  In the far corner, Terzian breathed loudly through his mouth, echoing glassily.

  “Make?” asked Emil.

  The coroner picked up a typewritten ballistics report from the counter. “PPK, Walther. German officer s gun. The continent s littered with them these days.”

  Emil had owned one also. Briefly, in Ruscova. They were cheap and efficient, like most things German. Small and light, easy to conceal. But he’d never shot one—he’d hidden his, and finally bartered it for train fare to Helsinki. “What was he wearing when he came in?”

  The little man crossed his arms, which was a peculiar look at his slant, like a poorly constructed building on the verge of collapse. “Low-quality fabrics, worker materials. Empty pockets. No money, ID, nothing. Leon,” he said, cracking a smile at the other side of the room. “You ever going to find a better line of work?”

  Terzian looked up suddenly, pale, his bloodshot eyes glistening, and stumbled out of the room.

  The Uzbek’s laugh was high and thin, and as he wiped the faint sweat from his cheek Emil made a connection. “What about Janos Crowder’s body? Slugs?”

  The Uzbek’s smile held as the amusement turned into pride. He tapped his skull. “Didn’t see any the first time around, but we weren’t looking, were we? Saw no need for an autopsy. One finely obliterated head. But after this one, I went back.” He held up an index finger. “One slug, same direction. Slanting down from the rear of the cranium. No word yet, but I’ll bet my bone saw it’s a PPK.”

  The bloated navel bulged out, a knot of blue flesh. Emil stared at it, then the battered head. There was still half a face to it. “Somebody wanted to hide the gunshot.”

  “But ran out of time,” said the Uzbek, finishing his thought.

  “Or someone interrupted.”

  He looked at the Uzbek’s bright eyes. This was a smart man who had chosen to hole himself up in a gray bunker where he talked only to dead men and militiamen. It was a strange, incomprehensible choice, but maybe no stranger than his own decisions. The little man covered the body and loped back toward the door. “Tell that Armenian slob to quit eating before he comes here. He’s a good guy, Leon, but a little stupid.” He tapped his forehead again, and the movement that once signified his own powers of perception now stood for another’s ignorance.

  The Polish children were in the entryway with a wooden ball, and they recognized Emil right away. The small, dark girl smiled at him.

  “Marie?”

  She nodded, blushing, and he squatted beside her.

  “Did you know you’ve got the same name as my mother?”

  She didn’t.

  He winked at her. “Can you tell me where the supervisor’s apartment is?”

  “The dead one?” Marie asked, then pointed to the second floor.

  Terzian made a huffing sound that might have been amusement.

  There was an official notice nailed to the door, warning away the curious, but the wood frame around the lock was splintered and split, as if kicked in. Terzian instinctively took a pistol from a shoulder holster and pushed the door with his foot, exposing a demolished living room. The sofa cushions had been cut open and the books torn from their shelves. Cabinets had been upturned and rugs pulled and tossed over a small table near the kitchen door.

  “This is almost a surprise,” said Emil, then nodded at Terzian’s hand. “How do I get one of those?”

  Terzian followed his gaze and made the connection, then grunted noncommittally. He holstered the pistol.

  Emil concentrated on the kitchen, where dishes had been pulled from their shelves; shards cracked beneath his shoes. The cutlery had been tossed in a pile against the wall and the drawers pulled out until they had dropped to the floor. When he opened the icebox, water spilled out over his feet, and he cursed, jumping back. There was nothing inside that told him a thing—except, perhaps, Tudor s final meal: a half-eaten bowl of borscht moidering on the center rack.

  He found nutmeg in the cabinet alongside three matches in an unmarked box, and beneath the sink a dirty tin of sunflower oil. He reached into the cabinets, feeling with his fingertips, but only came up with dirt and rat turds.

  Then he remembered the twine.

  He tugged at the icebox until it scratched across the tile. He looked behind it. Again, twine. It bound two pieces of cardboard together like a sandwich, and tied it all to the iron pipes. Emil used a knife from the floor to cut it loose, and when the sandwich dropped into his waiting hand several small photographs slipped out.

  He glanced at the empty doorway. Terzian was still out there, in another room, moving things around.

  The photographs were each the size of his palm, white- bordered. They were taken from a fair distance, at night. In each, two men stood in an empty street, talking, shaking hands, putting hands on their chins in thought. He recognized neither of them. Some pictures were blurred because of the photographer’s shaking hand, but the simple story the pictures told was clear: Two men meet in an empty street, talk and agree to something,
then leave separately. A ten-picture tale.

  Glass crashed in the apartment, just before Terzian’s “Shit!”

  Emil slipped the photos into his breast pocket. It was an unconscious movement, but, once completed, he knew he would keep them hidden from his reluctant partner.

  Terzian was in the bathroom, standing in front of the shattered mirror over the sink. Shards of reflection lay on the floor, throwing light everywhere, and Terzian was gazing at where the mirror had been. He reached into the wall. “What is it?”

  Terzian’s hand came back with a cardboard box from a hole dug into the plaster. Through an open flap he saw rows of large bills.

  They brought it back to the living room, where Terzian settled on the ripped sofa and began to count, laying the bills on the righted coffee table.

  “Aha,” said Terzian, but Emil was staring at the stacks of money, a slow, leisurely fantasy building inside him; it included train tickets and hotels and places far away from here. He looked up finally at Terzian, who held up the empty box to show the address typed on the outside, topped by j. crowder. The fantasy slipped away.

  Deliver the mail, indeed.

  “That fat, thieving corpse,” said Terzian. A big, broad smile emerged despite all his considerable efforts.

  No one answered at the red Polish door. The children had been cleared from the entryway, though their scuffed wooden ball remained, lodged in a corner. Emil imagined their fear—or at least the mother’s—when little Marie told them about the homicide inspector who had asked where the dead supervisor was. He felt the mother’s worry—Germans, police, relocations—and could imagine her low whisper as she told the children and grandparents to hurry, they were going out to the park.

  He wanted to talk out the details of the case, but once they reached the Mercedes, Terzian remembered that Emil was anathema, and closed himself into the silence again. So Emil spoke silently to himself as he cruised the narrow streets choked with sweaty horses and workers and the occasional broken-down automobile; disabled Russian models were slowly filling the city.

  Someone had sent Janos Crowder over fifteen thousand koronas (accounting for some of Aleks Tudor’s inevitable expenditures since the August 18 postmark, and some bills probably in Terzian s pocket). The money was then intercepted by the building inspector. About August 24, a week later, someone killed Janos Crowder and searched his apartment. Two days after that, someone—presumably the same person—killed Aleksander Tudor. Again, a search. For the money? An imperfect search, if that was the object. And why was Crowder receiving the equivalent of a year s salary in a box? Why too—this was perhaps most important—were photos of two men hidden behind the icebox?

  There was a German, maybe a plumber. He could have nothing to do with any of this, but he was the only other person to come up—at least until these photos.

  A simple theory would be that Aleksander Tudor had killed Crowder for the money. Someone else—maybe the German— had learned of the money, killed Tudor, and bungled the search for the box. Most crimes, a lecturer had once said, were committed by idiots. Stupidity is a tool of the trade.

  But this was more than stupidity; it didn’t quite make sense. Emil had seen Tudor standing in the same room as Crowder’s corpse. He wasn’t the kind of man who could throttle a skull like that.

  “Watch out!” Terzian shouted as Emil swerved around three Gypsy children who showed him their fat, red tongues.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “What?” Terzian squinted at the noon light and brought down his visor.

  “This. Our case.”

  “It’s your case, not mine.”

  “But you have some thoughts.”

  “I have nothing,” said Terzian, still squinting. He turned to his side window. “I’m a man completely devoid of ideas. You can report that.”

  There was a scribbled note lying beside the paper-wrapped wrench on his desk. Roberto was quick—Emil didn’t know how men like him made their ways so smoothly—and beneath the wrench’s distributor address he had signed his name with a flourish to the t that, in some circles, would have been considered positively decadent.

  Leonek Terzian, sinking into his chair on the other side of the room, watched. Emil read the note, looked around, then wandered over to Terzian, waving the paper. “The wrench. You want to come?”

  Terzian opened his desk drawer and rummaged until he had found a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. He pocketed it and got up. His words were preceded by a low belch. “I’m driving.”

  The equipment distributor’s shop lay on a back street in the northern Sixth District. It was a hectic prole area that had been severely damaged during the war, leaving brick shells and partially demolished blocks. The Brods had lived here before the Occupation, barely making ends meet.

  They drove past the building many times before finding it, Terzian growing progressively more furious at the irregular street numbers. The top floor had been razed off completely. The white door that said in stencils third state equipment vendors, sa was set low into the sidewalk, so they had to descend five steps to reach it. The clerk was a ghost—milky, translucent flesh hanging from his skull, his eyes invisible behind the reflection of fluorescent lights on his round glasses. He stood behind a long counter that was empty, save his pale fingertips, as if he had been expecting them all afternoon. His quiet Good afternoon was delivered with an indistinct nod, and his hands sank into the pockets of his white coat. His nostrils expanded pleasurably as he sniffed the lemony air—some new disinfectant—and waited.

  Emil unwrapped the wrench and placed it on the counter. Roberto had cleaned it off well. “Can you tell us who you sold this to?”

  “Perhaps,” came the quiet answer. The beginnings of a smile creased his lips. Then he looked past Emils shoulder and his smile faded. Terzian was holding out his Militia certificate. “Comrade Inspectors,” he began again, louder. He squatted behind the counter and pulled out a thick book filled with writing: dates, names, numbers. When he spoke, his uneven teeth flashed. “Do we know when the tool was purchased?”

  “Before the twenty-fourth,” said Emil.

  “Of this month?” He sounded vaguely disbelieving. “Between sometime and the twenty-fourth of August? Any time?”

  Emil shrugged.

  The ghost sighed and bent over the book, lining up the wrench so he could read the raised ten-digit number on its handle. He used a long fingernail to scrape part of the number clear.

  Terzian leaned close. “I see there’s still blood on that thing.”

  He withdrew his finger as if burned, breathing shallowly through his mouth. But he wiped his hand on the side of his coat and went back to it. Another nail drew down the page, checking sales, one by one. Terzian lit a cigarette and wandered to the far wall beneath a framed picture of General Secretary Mihai, colored lightly by fading paint. It was an older portrait, pre-1945. Back when he was still thin and handsome, thick eyebrows and romantic stare—one of the early Moscow portraits.

  “I do know some things,” the clerk whispered after a while. He turned a page.

  Emil was leaning on the counter. “You know something?”

  He raised his head and rested on his elbows, then took off his glasses. Even his tiny eyes had a translucence about them, the lids pink. “In a store, you hear talk. Not that you’re listening, but this is a small place. It’s unavoidable. Then it becomes a duty. You follow?”

  “Spit it out,” said Emil.

  “Counterrevolutionary talk.” His voice gained volume as he straightened, hands on either side of the book. “They come in here, buy pipes. Metal pipes. What for? They don’t tell me.” He put the glasses back on. “Then they make a joke about the Comrade General Secretary. A joke once about Smerdyakov.”

  “The Butcher?” asked Emil.

  “Not very funny jokes, if you understand me. Even a joke or two about the Comrade Chairman.” He shrugged sadly. “I have names.”

  Emil didn’t know what to say.
It had occurred to him that he might receive reports like this—half the neighbors in town, one suspected, had such information and were willing to give it out. But even his own family had had some fun at Mihai’s expense— Grandfather still had his humor about him. This was not his area. Emil had joined Homicide in order to deal with the clearest and least ambiguous issue of social conscience: murder.

  Terzian put out his cigarette on the floor, and Emil noticed the smoke had overpowered the lemon in the air. He could feel the other inspector’s eyes on him. He felt the expectation, but didn’t know what he was expecting.

  “Talk to state security,” Emil said finally. “There’s one in our station.” He turned back to Terzian. “What’s his name?”

  The dark face stared through the smoky gloom, and Emil had no idea what would come out of his mouth. Leonek Terzian blinked. “Sev,” he said quietly, then raised his voice. “Brano Sev.” He gave the phone number.

  “Inspector Brano Sev?” The clerk was fidgeting now; he glowed. Emil recognized the name too: from The Spark, the inspector commenting on the democracy of socialist justice.

  The round peasant’s face, little black eyes, thinning hair. The vulture. That nagging familiarity finally had a name.

  “You mean the German hunter?” asked the ghost.

  Famous, even. Brano Sev, named a Hero of Socialist Endeavor a year ago for his part in the arrest of a band of ex-SS hiding out in the Canal District. Nine men had been rounded up at once, accused of horrible war crimes, given speedy trials, prisons and executions. This moderately famous man sat across from Emils desk, waiting to pluck the Crowder case from him.

  Terzian was unimpressed by the clerk’s knowledge. He pointed at the book. “Get the name of our fucking suspect, or I’ll take you in for destruction of state property.”

  Another smile: thin, yellow teeth separated by shadows. “But I’ve destroyed nothing.”