The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER TEN

Leonek Terzian was not at his desk when Emil sauntered in, though his jacket was draped over the chair and his worn leather bag lay on the floor. Emil waited at his own desk. Despite the aching muscles and joints, the burning forehead and throat, and the fact that he’d gotten no sleep, he wanted to get moving. He wanted to see Lena Crowder again. He wanted to hear what she had to say when she wasn’t a drunk, grief-stricken widow.

He went through his sparse case notes, trying to assemble facts. Two bodies. Money. Ten photographs. A German. A Walther PPK.

The speculations…he had them, but this wasn’t the morning his sleepy head would put them together.

A half-hour later, Terzian still hadn’t appeared. The others had been doing an admirable job ignoring Emil, even Brano Sev, who was back in his files, making occasional phone calls and glancing everywhere but at him. Emil said to the room, “Where’s Inspector Terzian gone?” The only reply was a squealing pig and the smell of sawdust from outside.

He went through the notes again, slowly.

The money in Janos Crowder’s cardboard box, found in Aleks Tudor’s apartment. Fifteen thousand…payment…for what?

A possibility floated to the surface.

It helped that he was feeling terrible. He could concentrate on the pain that rippled up and down his body with each step toward Brano Sevs desk. He stopped beside it, a shoulder against the wall, then squatted so his face was just above its edge. Sev looked up blankly.

“Comrade Inspector,” said Emil. “I was wondering.” A sharp pain trembled behind his eye, then went away. “Do you have a file on Janos Crowder?”

Sev looked down at the open side drawer. “Your dead man?” His voice squawked. “ That Janos Crowder?”

Emil nodded. “I’d like to rule something out.”

“His loyalty?” The question was snapped back. No hesitation.

Emil opened his mouth to say yes, his loyalty and patriotism were in question, but couldn’t spit out those kinds of words. “Do you have a file on him?”

Brano Sev closed the files on his desk, one at a time, and leaned close. He had a mouth of half-digested garlic that fumigated the air between them. “These files are for suspected traitors.”

“You’ve told me. Thus my question.”

The flat face puffed as he chewed the insides of his cheeks. He leaned back and spoke firmly. “A public figure such as Comrade Crowder is by necessity examined very closely. We have no evidence of his involvement in traitorous activities. Do you?”

Emil stood up, his knees cracking. He had at least ruled out the Queen of England from his list of suspects. “Thank you, Comrade Inspector.” He paused. “Do you happen to know where Terzian is?”

The small eyes blinked up at him. “Try the interview room.”

It felt like weeks had passed since he had wandered these corridors looking for a typewriter. The room he wanted was beside the toilet, its scratched wooden door the only one without a glass panel. He leaned his head against the stenciled interview and listened. Voices-two men, words unclear-then laughter that dissipated when he knocked. The handle wouldn’t budge. The sound of his knuckle striking wood provoked the beginnings of a fullfledged hangover. The lock was fooled with, and the door opened a fraction. Leonek Terzian s dark features appeared: “What is it, Brod?”

He could see nothing past his face except hazy walls covered by more scratches. He hadn’t thought through his words. “What are you doing? On the case. Let’s compare notes.” Emil took out his notepad to make his intentions clear.

“Not now,” said Terzian. “Later. Maybe.”

“Who are you interviewing?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s something.”

Terzian sighed heavily and opened the door enough to slip out into the busy corridor. His voice was a high whisper: “ Never interrupt me when I’m interviewing. Understand?”

“Who is it?”

“No one. An informer.” Terzian’s hard, weathered face would not give Emil anything but eyes, nose and mouth.

“For our case?”

“ Your case, Brod.”

“Well?”

Terzian nodded at a pair of Militia in dress uniform. They muttered a familiar greeting back at him. Once they were gone, he said, “A witness. He may have come across Aleksander Tudor’s killer.”

“Let me talk to him.”

Terzian’s features became harder, the bags under his eyes deeper. Anger was easy to read. “You don’t talk to him, Brod. And the fact that I hate you has nothing to do with it. He’s a regular. He’s my boy. No one else ever talks to him.”

“It’s my case.”

“If s my case” Terzian whined back. “You’re a fucking infant, Brod.” He said, “This is the way.”

Emil remembered the last time he had heard that phrase, on an icy boat in the Arctic, a drunk Bulgarian accent making a mess of the words. He felt the chill of that hard deck, and when he returned, the door to the interview room was closing again. He heard the lock drawn into place, and felt the hangover come upon him like an animal: fully, hungrily.

He drove first to Liberation Street to find out if Tomislaw recognized anyone in the photographs. But the family, the new building supervisor-a severe, forty-year-old spinster-told him, had left for their summer holiday. So he went where he truly wanted to go: westward. Past the one-room bar-in the morning light, it was more dilapidated than it had looked last evening-and past the low, muddy riverbanks to where the driveways led back over small hills. The morning lit Lena Crowder’s home particularly, and the windows glowed like those in the Canal District, reflecting sharply into his aching skull.

Irma made him wait in the entryway, where he cradled his head in his hands and gazed up at the painted men with thick white Tolstoian beards, echoes of some family fortune that predated everything he knew. Grandfather had, with the blush of joy, described invading abandoned mansions with the Russian hordes, turning over expensive vases and crapping on portraits. Emil picked up a long, blue vase covered in angular, gold etchings. Grandfather said that these people held an ax over the heads of the working classes. Equality was a blade away. The vase was heavy in his hands.

“Don’t break it,” Lena Crowder commanded. She stood in the doorway with her hands joined in front of her white nightgown. Its draped form accentuated rather than hid the easy lines of her body. She seemed never to dress. “My dead father’s in there.”

Emil put the vase back, using both hands to keep it stable.

She placed a cigarette in her mouth and waited for him to stumble over and light it. She sniffed at his face, her small nose wrinkling. “The Comrade Inspector s been drinking this early?”

“Last night,” he admitted.

Her eyes roamed his face, hair, shoulders, his hand that held the lighter. “Too bad,” she said. “I admire early drinkers. It’s a rare honesty.” She smiled suddenly. “But last night? That makes you unclean. You want a bath?”

“No,” he said, hesitated, then repeated: “No.” He wasn’t quite convincing himself. “I just have some more questions.”

She turned up her cigarette hand-a kind of shrug-then led him back into the lounge. Long sofa against tissue-thin curtains. The chair where he had watched her slide to the floor in a widow’s intoxication. Now she was tall and lithe, and the billowing hem of her gown made her seem to float as she swooped to the sofa and settled down. She was a different woman, almost, but no less impure.

“How are you?” he began.

She stopped in mid-drag to frown at him. “This is part of the investigation?”

“Could be.”

She completed the drag. “Then I’m fine, my dear Comrade Inspector.” She placed the ashtray on her bony knee, where it wobbled. “Today I’ve been thinking of my poor father and his weak heart. Do you realize that in the space of a month I’ve lost both my father and my husband?”

She had a look of surprise on her face, as if only now, while saying it, she had learned the news. “I,” he said, “I didn’t know.”

She wiped a thumb beneath her eyelid and sat up. “You don’t want to listen to a rich girl’s blubbering. No,” she said, “you want to know about my husband. You want to know, for example, that Janos and I were not very close in the end. You want to know that he used his little apartment in town for his girls, and I did what I pleased out here. A marriage in name, but more of a business proposition.”

Emil’s notepad was on his own knee, but he couldn’t bring himself to open it. “I don’t understand. You were with Janos for money?”

“Me?” she said in disbelief. “Did you see those men in the hall? With all the hair? My great- and granduncles. Industrialists living off the wage slaves. Coal All the time. Coal and coal” she said, echoing War and war in Emil’s head. “That songwriting ponce came from a long line of mud-eaters. Peasants, all. Everything he has he got from me.”

“Had,” corrected Emil involuntarily, and she looked at him as though she didn’t understand. Then she did, and the look became unkind. Emil said, “This apartment in town. With your money?”

“Why should I pay for his lifestyle when he treats me like a prole? No offense to our comrade workers,” she added, flashing a nervous smile. “When we married, I gave Janos a modest allowance. When it became clear I wouldn’t give him more, or less, he had no reason to speak to me anymore.” She looked around. “It’s a big house; you can miss each other if you try.” She was smiling at him again, but with Lena Crowder, he didn’t know what a smile really meant. “Seven months ago the bastard moved out. Are you thirsty?”

His mouth was a ball of cotton.

Irma brought big iced scotches, and Lena made sure he drank his. “Don’t go around smelling like a drunk unless you actually are.

“But your husband,” said Emil, setting his half-empty glass aside. “How did he get money? If he wasn’t assigned his apartment, he had to pay for it. It wasn’t cheap.”

“Maybe he was writing songs. That was his business.”

Even Emil knew melodies never earned boxes of cash. “What about these women you mentioned?”

“His whores?”

“Were they really that?”

This smile seemed to be a weary apathy. “I’ve no idea. I never saw one, he never talked about them, but I’m still enough of a woman to see through a man.”

He finally opened his notepad and leaned back.

“Your drink,” she said, and pulled her feet up beneath herself again. Her toes were as white and the nails as polished as before.

His ice was melting. “You said before that you last saw him a week ago. What happened?”

She moved her tongue quickly inside her mouth. “He had come back a week before then, two weeks before… it. He tried to patch things up. He’d heard my father had died. Wanted to console me.” She gave a small, tight smile.

“Your father?”

“My father. Elias Hanic. Heart attack, I don’t know. While riding a horse.” She nodded, muttering, “The last Hanic.” Then: “I still need to take his urn out of here. To Stryy.”

Emil waited while she mulled over that trip with her father’s ashes. Then he prodded: “Janos came back.”

She woke up. “Yes. Janos got word of my father, and he came like a prince. What should I have done? I was still angry about the women, and how he treated me-like some money tree- everything. I kicked him out. But he came back the next day, apologetic. And he came back the next. This is the dumb persistence that makes the weak inherit the Earth.” She took another swill, and even in this dim room Emil could see the wet glaze over her eyes. “He had the key, he’d always had it. He could come and go as he pleased. On the fifth day I gave in. Women get stupid for the men they’ve married, it’s a fact. I think one of our Comrade Soviet scientists proved it.”

When she smiled at him his scalp tingled pleasantly.

She gazed into her glass and drank the last of it. “Irma!” She looked at him. “But something was clear to me after, I don’t know, the second day we were back together. According to the inheritance laws, everything of my father’s was supposed to go to the state. But Elias Hanic was no imbecile. He had found a way to give most everything to me. The house, the land, the money from the old coal shares.” A grim smile. “This is what Janos had learned, the little mud-eater. That’s why he came back. That much money was so good that even staying with me was worth it.”

Emil was genuinely surprised-not by Janos Crowder’s behavior, but by the Hanic estate. “You can do that? Pass your money on?”

She leaned forward and put a cool hand on his hand, the one that held the notepad on his knee. “Dear, with money you can do anything.”

“And you,” he began, hesitation stalling him. “You kicked him out?”

“Like a White Guard,” she said, leaning back and flicking her fingers in a swatting motion. “Right out of my heart.”

Irma arrived with two more drinks. He finished his first quickly-it chilled his teeth and made a cavity ache-and handed the empty glass back. Irma was silent and efficient and soon gone. Emil reached into his inside pocket. First, his fingers touched the garter, then moved on to the photographs. She looked interested as he handed them over.

“Do you know these men?”

“Sit over here.” She touched the sofa with her thin hand. “We’ll see.”

He brought his drink with him and sat so he could look over her shoulder at the pictures, but it was awkward. His arm was in the way. So he stretched it over the back of the sofa, behind her head. She didn’t notice, or pretended not to. She went through the ten shots, the simple story of the meeting. He was surprised that she didn’t smell of liquor. She smelled fresh.

“I want to apologize,” he said under his breath.

“For what?” She was also whispering. Their proximity demanded it. Her eyes were very big, their brown speckled details clear.

“Your father, first of all. I didn’t know about him.”

“We don’t mourn the rich,” she said, and he couldn’t find the sarcasm that should have been in her voice. “Second of all?”

“The phone call. I told our people not to call you; I’d wanted to deliver the news in person. They’re a bunch of fools.”

“But you’re not, are you?”

She had said this softly, her eyes very serious, and he couldn’t answer.

“It’s all right,” she shrugged, and he finally caught a whiff of the morning’s scotch. “Though they were surprisingly rude about it.”

“Rude?”

“Abrupt. The man said, This is the Militia. Your husband’s been killed; we’ll be there soon. That was it. I thought it was a joke. This is the level of humor in the country now. But then I was sure someone was watching me. You know the feeling. Eyes in the windows. It was frightening. It made me think of my uncles-my father’s brothers. They were shot in Vienna in ‘forty-two. Executed in the street. They were rich too, all the brothers were. But that didn’t save them.” She frowned and shook her head. “At first I was scared, but by the time you arrived I was just angry.” A pause. “I’m sorry about that.”

He was filled with a sudden, hard hatred for the entirety of the police division, the People’s Militia, the state.

“You’re all right?”

“What about the pictures?”

She pointed at the taller of the two men. “I don’t know him, but this one, the shorter one,” she said, shifting her manicured finger. “He’s a friend of Janos. Was!’ She brought the finger to her lower lip, tapping. “Well, I don’t know about friend. Acquaintance. They met when we went to his house for a dinner party. Hateful stuff,” she said. “Those people are all bravado and asskissing. They both spoke Hungarian, I remember, Janos and him, so they got along. A politicos, that’s what he was. An untouchable in a society built on equality. Nice!’ She smiled, and her finger- he was watching it closely-came away from her lips damp. “What’s his name? Jerzy. Yes. Jerzy Michalec. Lives not too far away, a few miles farther west. Did you know he was Smerdyakov?”

He thought he hadn’t heard her right. “Smerdyakov? The war hero?”

“I’d never met a hero in my life,” she said. “Janos told me. Michalec doesn’t advertise it. A politicos likes to be quiet, not raise too many heads on his way to the top. He’ll only use his nom de guerre when he needs it.”

He opened his mouth, not knowing what to say. The man was almost a figment of his imagination by now. He hardly believed he existed. Now he was celluloid in a dead man’s apartment.

She was looking at him, and when she spoke all levity had disappeared. “I wasn’t just thinking about my father today, Inspector. I was thinking about you.”

He started to say Me? but didn’t.

“I’ve lost two men, and I’ve never been without one. And when I look around at all the men I know, there’s only one I can see clearly. It’s funny, I don’t understand it. There’s only one man I want to trust.” Their foreheads almost touched, and her face emanated warmth. “Are you sure,” she whispered, “you don’t want a bath?”

He did. He wanted that bath more than anything in his life. A bath and a thick, fresh towel on the upper floors of this magnificent house. He wanted her most of all. He didn’t know what to make of Lena Crowder, if he should be ashamed of his desire for this widow or this unexpected desire for him. No-he knew. He should feel shame and self-hatred-she was weakened now by all her losses, and he was just an animal-but he only felt the pleasure of her coarse, broken life beside his.

“I’d like to,” he began, then pursed his lips and shook his head, trying still to convince himself. “Another time.”

“Maybe there won’t be another time.” She smiled and touched his cheek with her cool fingertips.