Flashback

TWENTY-SEVEN

I’ve said that some new memories are to be savored, and it’s true that certain sensations, felt again for the first time, are like unexpected gifts. It’s also true that there are some experiences we all wish we could forget. The feeling of waking up in Ivan’s living room, my throat dry, my gut churning, my head reeling from my first hangover, was one of those experiences.

“Why do people do this to themselves?” I asked Brian as we stumbled toward the kitchen table, drawn forward by the smell of strong coffee.

He laughed weakly. “It’s a kind of amnesia, I guess. You tend to forget just how bad it was.”

“You guys look like shit.” Ivan grinned, setting two mugs of coffee on the table, pouring a water glass of vodka for himself. “You want?” he asked, offering the bottle to us.

I shook my head, stomach reeling at the smell.

Ivan laughed, then turned back to the stove. Anchoring his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he opened one of the kitchen cabinets, pulled out three large plates, and piled a generous helping of eggs, potatoes, and sausage onto each one.

“Good news,” he said as he set the plates on the table in front of us, then slid into a free chair. “I called Werner this morning. Whatever this is about, it must be important because I thought he was going to piss himself when I told him you two wanted to meet.” He stubbed his cigarette out, then laid a napkin across his bare legs. He had a tattoo on the right side of his chest, a faded dragon and a woman in chains. Just beneath the woman’s feet was a large, starburst-shaped scar.

“He agreed?” Brian asked.

I lifted a forkful of potatoes to my mouth. It felt good to get something in my stomach.

“He’s flying up to Vienna this afternoon,” Ivan said. “I wasn’t sure how you wanted to work this, so I told him I’d call him back to arrange the details.”

“Thanks,” Brian said. “When you talk to him, tell him he can meet us at nine tomorrow morning at the war memorial on Slavin Hill. Tell him we’ve got what he wants and we’re willing to bargain.”

Ivan nodded, then touched his scar, the movement unconscious, automatic.

“And tell him to leave his goons at home,” Brian added.

“How long have you been in Bratislava?” I asked Ivan when we’d finished eating and Brian had gone to take a shower.

The food, combined with three cups of coffee, a liter of water, and some aspirin had given me half my brain back, and I was starting to think about Hannah Boyle, wondering if she’d been like those expatriate girls at Charlie’s Pub or the woman I’d heard whispering at Ivan’s the night before.

“Since ’ninety,” he said.

“I had a friend,” I told him, “an American girl. I was wondering if you knew her. Her name was Hannah. Hannah Boyle.”

Ivan thought for a minute, then shrugged. “There have been one or two Hannahs, but your friend, I don’t know.”

“She died. In a car accident. It was a long time ago. Ten years at least.”

“Sorry,” Ivan offered.

“Brian says you know a lot of people here,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

Ivan’s pectoral muscle flexed, and the dragon moved its tail. “It’s my business to know people,” he said.

“She was a good friend of mine, you see, and I’ve never been able to find out what exactly happened. Surely there’s a record of the accident. With the police, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“We have the afternoon,” I said. “Is there somewhere I could go, someone you think I should ask?”

Ivan narrowed his eyes at me, his look saying he knew I was bullshitting, and that he wanted me to know it, but he would do this for me anyway.

“There are some people,” he said. “I will make a few calls.”

After Brian got out of the shower, he and I left Ivan and walked over to the Tesco department store. The clothes Brian had bought off the Spaniard for me were well past road-weary, reeking now of sweat, cigarettes, and plum brandy, and I was desperate for some clean essentials.

“I asked Ivan to do some snooping around for me,” I said as we crossed the tramway and headed for the giant store.

“Snooping about what?” Brian asked.

“Hannah Boyle,” I told him. “I’ve been here. I can feel it. And according to Helen, this is where Hannah died. If I can find someone who knew her…” I shook my head at the absurdity of it. “I don’t know, but there’s a reason why I chose that name in Tangier.”

“If there’s anything to know,” Brian said as we merged with the crowds and pushed our way through one of Tesco’s front doors, “I’m sure Ivan will find it.”

Needless to say, living at the convent had taught me little about fashion. What clothes I’d always had, mostly hand-me-downs, were picked for practicality, for warmth in the winter, function, and ease of care. Not so with the racks upon racks of leather miniskirts and spangled blouses in the Tesco ladies’ department. If I’d been alone, I might have given up and gone back to Ivan’s empty-handed.

I stood there for a moment, paralyzed by the selection, before Brian took over, navigating me toward a rack of blue jeans. An hour later we emerged victorious onto Spitalska Street, our bags stuffed with two pairs of jeans, some plain knit shirts, a sweater, several changes of underwear, socks, black boots, and a dark wool pea coat.

Ivan was waiting anxiously for us when we got back to the apartment. He’d changed from his bikini and slippers into black jeans, a black sweater, and a pair of shiny black cowboy boots.

“I found your friend,” he said when we walked through the door.

“Already?” I asked dumbly, setting my Tesco bag down.

“Well, not her exactly, but the police report. I’ve got a friend who works in the municipal archives.” Ivan beamed at his success. “She wants us to meet her in an hour,” he said, glancing at his watch. He looked from me to Brian and back again, then cleared his throat. “I should bring her a gift, perhaps. For her troubles.”

Taking the hint, I crossed to where I’d set my leather bag and pulled out a fifty-euro note. There was, I was starting to think, nothing one couldn’t buy.

Ivan glanced at the note, then shook his head. “Inflation,” he explained sadly, while I produced a second bill.

I’d thought the one hundred euros would be more than sufficient, but on the way to the archives Ivan insisted we stop at a perfume store in Kamenne Square for a bottle of knockoff Chanel.

“So as not to be tacky,” he explained, slipping the euros inside the black-and-white box. “She’s a classy lady, my friend.”

At first glance, the Bratislava municipal archives seemed a model of modern record keeping, a civic office like any other, sustained by all the comforts of technology, computers and fax machines and multi-line telephones. It was only after we’d met Ivan’s friend, Michala, and descended into the building’s bowels that the true nature of the archives was revealed. Down underground stretched the vast vaults of the pre-computerized era, room after room of metal shelves buckling under the weight of boxes and files, a dusty monument to the beast of Soviet bureaucracy and the sheer amounts of paper required to feed it.

Ivan may have been a cad with bartenders and waitresses, but he obviously knew when a relationship was too valuable not to coddle. Whether it was flattery or sincerity, I couldn’t be sure, but he treated our hostess with a charm and tact I’d yet to see him exhibit.

I wasn’t sure classy lady was a term I would have used to describe Michala. Like many aging civil servants, eager to proclaim their individuality, she dressed with a gusto that veered toward bad taste. Her cantilevered breasts were squeezed into a bright pink sweater, her thighs sheathed in black leather. Here was a woman who was no stranger to the racks at Tesco.

Brian and I followed behind as Michala and Ivan led the way through the dimly lit passageways, Michala’s heavy key ring jangling like a tambourine as it knocked against her wide hips, her singsong Slovak echoing through the empty halls. Finally, she stopped in front of a blank door and began sorting through her keys.

“The files do not leave,” she announced in English as she slipped the correct key into the lock and put her hand on the doorknob. “Understood?”

“Of course.” I nodded.

She looked at Brian as if for emphasis, then pushed the door open and pressed the light switch, illuminating several rows of shelves.

“Police reports,” she explained as we entered the room. “From post-revolution until the divorce.” Then, noticing my confusion, she added, as if to a small child, “From the fall of the Communist system until our split from the Czech Republic.”

She started forward, her heels tap-tapping at the concrete. “This way, please.”

We followed her about halfway down a row of shelves, then watched while she reached deftly up and pulled out a thin file folder. “Hannah Boyle,” she said, the name strangely Slavic in her mouth.

“Thank you,” I said, opening the folder and scanning the report’s unintelligible writing. In several places sections of text had been blacked out with a dark ink pen.

There was a photograph paper-clipped to the first page, a picture of a crumpled white Peugeot. The car had been hit in such a way that the driver’s side was completely obliterated, the engine thrust back against the steering wheel, the dash shoved back into the seat. The passenger’s side, however, had been spared the full force of the trauma. The door was open slightly, as if someone had gotten out and neglected to close it. On the back windshield was an oval sticker identifying the car’s home country as Austria.

The picture had been taken at night, and the background, outside the glare of the flash, was pitch-black, as if the world consisted entirely of the car and the thin border of glass-spangled asphalt, and nothing else, but I was aware of each object in that dark beyond as clearly and fully as if I were standing there. To the right, outside the frame, was the truck that had hit us, its bumper dented only slightly, its headlight smashed and broken, a tiny figure of St. Christopher on the dash. To the left was the ambulance, the emergency workers smoking cigarettes while Hannah’s body lay lifeless inside.

It was a cold night, the air crisp with the smell of coming snow. Cars whipped by on the roadway behind us, some slowing to rubberneck, some too preoccupied with the upcoming border crossing to care. The broken glass crunched under the soles of my shoes. I shuddered at the crispness of the memory.

“Ouch!” Ivan said, glancing at the photo over my shoulder, his voice wrenching me back to the dusty basement room.

“Can you tell me what it says?” I asked Michala, offering her the file.

She opened the pair of gold reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck and slipped them on, then took the folder.

“December twenty-one, nineteen eighty-nine,” she read, her finger sweeping across the text as she went. “Head-on collision on the Bratislava-to-Vienna road. It says here the driver of the lorry was drinking. The driver of the Peugeot, Hannah Boyle, an American, was killed at the scene.”

She hit one of the blacked-out passages and stopped, knitting her eyebrows together as if puzzling through a complex problem.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “A mistake, perhaps.” She skipped over the black ink and flipped forward, reading silently. “The rest is technical,” she explained. “Speed, force of impact…”

“And the parts that have been crossed out?” I wondered. The neat obliteration of the words seemed far too deliberate for the correction of an error, unless the error had been putting the information in the report in the first place. I suddenly wished I could read Slovak.

Michala shook her head. “I can’t tell. I’m sorry, I really don’t know.” She seemed genuine in her apology, aware that the information she was providing was less than complete, and I believed her. “Now, this is funny.”

“What?”

She motioned toward the signature on the last page, the name typed neatly underneath it. “Stanislav Divin,” she said, “the detective who signed off on this. You see these letters by his last name?”

I nodded.

“It’s not appropriate,” Michala said, with the confused indignation of someone used to extreme order. “It’s not normal for him to investigate an accident like this.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

She put a laquered fingernail to the man’s name. “This is simply not his department. He’s a narcotics detective.”

Stanislav Divin. I read the name to myself, then read it and reread it again, committing the spelling to memory. If I couldn’t take the file, I told myself, I’d at least take this.

“Divin.” Ivan mulled the name as we made our way out the front door of the archives building.

“Do you know him?” I asked, reaching up to shade my eyes. Even thinned as it was by winter’s smog, the sunlight seemed unbearably bright after our time underground.

Ivan shook his head. “He must be retired.”

“Can you ask around?” Brian said.

Ivan took a long pull off his cigarette, exhaling loudly. “Sometimes, man,” he growled, glancing at his friend, “I wish you hadn’t saved my life.” Then he reached into the pocket of his leather coat and pulled out his cell phone.

Whoever Ivan was trying to reach had evidently gone home for the day, but the Russian assured us he’d left a message and that we’d hear something the next morning. It was late when we got back to the apartment. I got cleaned up and changed into my new clothes; then we went out for an early dinner at a place called Montana’s Grizzly Bar, an American burger-and-steak house bizarrely situated in the medieval tangle of streets that lay in the eastern shadow of the castle.

“Montana!” Ivan remarked as the waitress delivered our food. He waved his fork at the campy decor, the mangy stuffed animal heads and American beer signs, then looked at me. “What part of America are you from?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Ivan stopped for a moment, his fork plunged into his bloody T-bone, his knife in midair. “What the fuck?” he started to say, but then he looked at Brian and whatever glance they exchanged said to leave it at that.

We left Ivan at the bar after dinner, our early departure softened by the arrival of three British flight attendants, and walked back to the apartment.

“We meet Werner in the morning,” Brian reminded me as we crossed Hlavne Square, our feet marking the dusting of fresh snow that had fallen while we were in the restaurant. The burghers’ houses that ringed the square were tucked in for the night, eaves edged in icicles, windows aglow. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

I shook my head and took a breath of the cold, dry air.

Brian turned his face toward me. “We need a plan,” he said. “We’ll make a plan.”

“Yes,” I told him, but in truth I wasn’t thinking about Werner or the meeting. Instead, I was thinking about Hannah Boyle’s white Peugeot, about the way the car’s passenger door had been slightly ajar, and the long black ink stains on the police report. I was close to something, I could feel it, close to the place where all this had begun.