The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Over the weekend, Emil went to a film alone. It was an old Soviet comedy, and he went in order to make himself enthusiastic. He thought that by looking at the pictures flickering on the screen, he might get a touch of that mania he had once known through those Soviet newsreels. But he couldn’t concentrate on the shadows shifting and talking on the screen, the man with the ludicrous mustache whose monocle kept dropping from his eye. And when the audience laughed, he lost track of the Russian dialogue. He left halfway through.

That Monday Leonek picked him up. Rather than the office, they went directly to the Sixth District and parked outside the newly named “Rosa Luxembourg” High School, and Emil waited behind the wheel, his cane between his knees, while Leonek sauntered inside. He watched the clouds through the windshield collect in the west in preparation for a storm, and almost jumped when Leonek popped open the back door and shoved in a fifteen- year-old girl. He slid in beside her. Although it hurt terribly, Emil turned to face her.

“Meet Liv Popescu,” said Leonek.

She was small and pretty with a round, bright face. “You know about your friend?” asked Emil.

She didn’t say anything. Her gaze was fixed outside the car, on the houses lining the street, at the sky.

“Liv?” he tried again. “Do you know?”

“Alana?” she asked, and looked at him. Her cheeks were smooth and unblemished.

“Thats the one.”

Liv shrugged and looked at clouds.

“There s someone out there killing your friends,” said Leonek, his voice softened by a transparent attempt to soothe the girl. “You understand? This person kills them, maybe vomits on them, and tosses them in the bushes.”

At the mention of vomit, Liv Popescu looked at him.

“But the problem,” he continued, “is that when we talk to you there’s not an ounce of worry on your face. Nothing. Which leads us to believe…Emil? What does it lead us to believe?”

The handoff was unexpected, but easily taken. “It leads us to believe that you, Liv, are involved in your friends’ demise. Both Alana and Ion.” His left lung was burning badly at this angle; each word was a little fire inside him. “That you know something, or you did something. Is that what you imagine, Leon?”

Leonek nodded and placed an arm on the seat behind Liv’s head. The cushion squeaked as he settled. “I imagine this has something to do with Ion Hansson,” he said. “The handsome young man with the ax in his neck. I’m not too far from the truth. Am I, Liv?”

Liv Popescu made no move, no sound. Her hands were wedged between her knees.

“Do you know what a crime against the state is?” asked Emil. “It is something which interferes with the smooth operations of the federal and legislative bodies that govern our workers’ state. Would withholding information about her friend’s murder rank as a crime against the state, Leon?”

“Absolutely.”

Emil looked away momentarily to ease the pain-just a brief instant-and when he looked back she was crying. At some point the fear had dissolved her confidence in her own silence. Emil had doubted she would have much to give them, but teenagers had a way of saying either nothing or everything. Some small lead, perhaps, would come out of badgering her. But now her twisted face fell into the bowl of her hands, and she blubbered what she knew in wet stutters: Alana’s father was to blame.

Over her head, Leonek nodded knowingly at Emil.

“He’s a brute, you understand? A long time- years. He’d been doing things to Alana. His own daughter. It, you understand?” She couldn’t say the word.

Leonek’s proud face hesitated.

Alana had been too ashamed to tell anyone other than Liv, her best friend. For a long time, only her. Then, later, she decided to tell the boy who had fallen in love with her: Ion Hansson. But she didn’t tell him at first. She wanted to, but then she couldn’t. She went back and forth daily. Then one afternoon she told Liv she would reveal everything to him that night. But she would only confess after she had let Ion do it.

“She was confused,” Liv insisted. “She didn’t know how he would react. He might be angry, you know? Or disgusted. Or just shocked. She thought if she gave herself to him, it would be easier for him to accept.”

The ax was Alana’s idea. It was the only weapon her father owned. She asked Liv to hold on to it and hide in the shrubs. In case her father burst onto the scene.

“She wanted you,” said Leonek. “In the bushes. Watching?”

“Protection,” said Liv, her tears under control now. “After that night, Ion could protect her. But until then, I would look over her.”

“And you were willing to do this?”

Liv looked at him with complete scorn. “You’ve never loved anybody, have you?”

Leonek opened his mouth, but could say nothing.

“Why in the park?” asked Emil. “Ion’s uncle was out of town. There was a bed, right?”

The scorn remained on her bright face as she showed her teeth. “Neighbors. Why else?”

Emil started the car and began to drive around the block to avoid prying eyes. He looked at her in the rearview. “Go on.”

It was a dark night, but she had been able to see it all from the bushes. She saw them have sex, and was surprised by how quiet it was, how calm. Afterward, they lay beside each other in the grass, and Alana told him everything. Liv couldn’t hear it all, but she had a clear view of Ion’s face as it settled into an expressionless, frozen look. He seemed to be taking it calmly. Alana was still speaking when he rolled over and vomited into the grass. Alana got up to see if he was all right, and he grabbed her scarf and strangled her with it.

“I couldn’t tell,” said Liv, the tears back with her. “Not at first. She wasn’t fighting at all. I didn’t know what he was doing. She just lay there and accepted it. I still don’t understand.”

But then, in the flash of passing automobile lights, she saw Alana’s head: it hung at an awkward angle, lips thick, her eyes bulging from their sockets. Ion was crying over her body.

Emil parked again in front of the school. Spots of rain appeared on the windshield.

“That’s when I did it,” she said, her voice cool once more, and measured. All her tears were gone now. “I watched myself do it. I walked up and raised it over my head and brought it down on him.” She looked at Leonek hovering over her, and his face was lost in a rare fear-complete terror. It was more than simple repulsion, and Emil found himself turning to start the car just to avoid seeing his face. Liv’s voice floated through the car: “It was like cutting wood. But softer.”

They brought in the girl because there was nothing else to do. On the way she told them she had thrown the ax into the Tisa, which swallowed everything. She was arraigned by a thin woman in uniform who seemed proud of the line of six stamps she had at her disposal. She stamped processed on Liv’s paperwork, and handed her off to another woman, who took Liv to the cells.

Emil stopped Leonek just outside their own office. A crowd of policemen swerved to avoid running into them. “What was that?” he asked. “Back in the car. You were…I don’t know. What was it?”

Leonek peered, frowning, into Emil’s eyes, then looked away. Everyone else in the building was going about his business. “It’s nothing,” he said finally. “Weren’t you bothered?”

“Not like that,” said Emil. “Not like you.”

Leonek held his hands up. “Can’t we have our moments?”

They let the father go. Cornelius kept tugging at his spotted, stretched collar, as if he couldn’t breathe. Leonek led him up from the cells and through the corridor to the broad front doors. But once he was on the front steps, where the drops were beginning to fall in earnest, he dropped his hands and smiled. He breathed the fresh air through his nose and looked back at Leonek and Emil. “Is the People’s Militia going to pay my taxi home?”

“You’re lucky I don’t break your neck,” called Leonek. “You worthless shit.”

Emil opened the door, and they left Cornelius Yoskovich to the rain.

There were two notes on his desk. One from Roberto, who said that if Emil stayed out of his equipment shop any longer, he would die of poverty; the second in an unknown hand: a phone message. A woman who would not leave her name. But he knew the number. He turned the yellow slip over to its blank side. Leonek was typing up the report. He turned Lena’s number over again-it felt like electricity on his finger.

He asked the operator for the extension and, after a moment, recognized the southern tones on the line.

“Irma? This is Inspector Brod. Comrade Crowder called?”

“Right away,” Irma whispered, then was gone.

Leonek yelled an elaborate curse as he ripped paper from his typewriter, crushed it and threw it at his wastebasket. It missed. He rolled in a new sheet.

Through the phone he could hear her faintly, shouting in another room: But how do you know if s him? Then footsteps echoed along the marble floors-he imagined the grain of the marble, the black, sharp heel striking it. A breathless voice: “Emil-is it really you?”

“Yes, Com-” he began.

There was only the sound of her breath against the receiver, and rain pelting the station windows. He noticed that his hand was sweating freely, then passed the phone to his other hand and wiped his wet palm on a knee. Typing began again in earnest.

“We have to talk,” she said finally. “To meet. Somewhere.”

I’ll come over.

“Not here!” She sounded desperate. He wondered if she’d been drinking. “Can you go to Victory Square?”

It s raining.

“You won’t drown?

When he hung up, Leonek was throwing away his second draft. “You’re going somewhere?” he asked as Emil slipped into his coat.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“Need company?” Leonek opened his jacket, pointing at the wide pocket sagging from a heavy metal flask. “Your first completed case, after all. God knows I could use a drink.”

Again he felt the incongruity: his life before and after the gunshot. A month ago, this man was shoving his fist deeply between Emil’s legs. But Leonek-and the others too-had fallen quickly into their new roles, almost without reflection.

“Another time,” said Emil, his cane ticking on the floor as he limped away. “When I’m allowed.”

“Dr. Terzian says tomorrow.” He winked, and closed the jacket.