The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER FOUR

The war was winding down when he took the train, alone, from Ruscova, through the Capital, and farther north. Through sallow, crumbling cities: Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn. The ferry brought him across the Gulf of Finland. Soviet Russia had only recently stopped bombing, but Helsinki, compared to those others, was still a city in form and structure, waterborn and regal. It took his breath away.

He didn’t know the language, so like all foreigners he found his way to the little bars scattered throughout the islands like tiny, intoxicated nations. He found his own nation in the Carp, a dark, fetid place where they posted news of work and warnings to newcomers. A drunk countryman stumbled off his stool and told Emil about the fishing expedition into the Arctic. This is real money, he had said, nodding into his vodka. You come hack a rich man.

That hadn’t been quite true, but after four months of splitting open those heavy, gray creatures with his curved knife and washing their scarlet guts from the deck alongside bitter Slavs and Mediterraneans and lost Arabs, using German as their shared language, he returned to the Capital with enough money to take an apartment in the crowded Sixth District, where the proles emerged from their low, rented rooms and squeezed into trams headed for factories and shops in town.

On one of those trams he met Filia, a pale girl married to a soldier not yet back from the war. She was reading a magazine with Soviet dancers kicking legs high on the cover, and when he looked over her shoulder she asked him if he was always so rude. Thin, bitter lips and straw hair. At a cafe he explained that his family had recently returned from the southern provinces, he from abroad; her family, she told him, was dead. Her husband, who had marched off to war years before, was a question mark. Emil never saw her apartment, but she moved her clothes into his, and after they made love she told him stories about her childhood in the mountainous northern provinces. She spoke as though it were a paradise of honesty and brotherhood.

Why don t you go hack? he had asked her, and she only stared at him, as if he were mad.

She had sudden, unexpected moods, when her eyes became cold, dull stones that looked right through him. The squirming fear this provoked in him was always matched by desire.

They ate their meals on the living room floor-whatever was available at the market-and listened to the radio trials of Nazis and their sympathizers, and the reports of the coordinated rebuilding efforts. Russians and British and Americans, briefly, unified. They were rebuilding the Capital too. Russian engineers filled the city with their measuring equipment and cyrillics, and the Soviet soldiers who had arrived a year earlier did not leave.

Once, when she was in a mood, Filia said she only stayed with him because she was afraid of being raped by the Reds. You’re my protection against the Bolshevik drip. He looked at her stone eyes, hurt. Her smile came back and she asked why he had come back to the east, when he could have stayed in Helsinki, or gone on to London. Even America. She said America like an incantation.

Instead of answering, he told her his father had led a campaign through Warsaw that ended in a hero’s death. She didn’t believe him.

You’re telling the story with pauses and bursts; youre a bad liar. Her own husband was at the Front; she could see right through Emil. So he admitted he didn’t know anything about how Lieutenant Valentin Brod had died, nothing except Warsaw and a bullet, this knowledge culled from a sparely worded telegram addressed to his mother, who was by then dead as well. Was she satisfied? Hardly, Filia said, then asked again why he had come back from the west. He said because he needed to meet her. She laughed and said, Seriously.

He told her how his mother had died. Starvation. On the Front.

War and war. She had heard plenty of it, she said. But he told her anyway.

Maria Brod had been one of those nurses who followed their husbands all the way to the battle lines, then died. Stray bullets or disease or, if, like Maria Brod, they were unfortunate enough to become separated from their staff on those vast mountain ranges, they died of starvation and exposure. The Red Army soldiers who came across her body on a ridge of the Tatras mailed her papers back to the Capital, where a friend at their old address forwarded them on to Ruscova. But there was no word on what they had done to the corpse, and Emil imagined her still lying among the snow-stripped trees in the mountains, missing only her identification papers.

Filia didn’t ask anything more-this story, at least, was true. The following Monday morning she left for the factory, and did not return. By then the last of the troops were stumbling back into town, and her husband was no doubt among them. He was alone now, almost out of money, and his grandfather had moved from Ruscova to the Fifth District with a red card and a modicum of prestige.

“Today?” Grandfather asked when the silence of the table had stretched too long. “How was it?”

They were unbearable tonight. Both of them. It was no one thing they said; it was every word, every syllable. He plotted his escape. He would relocate near the water, maybe even the cleaner edges of the Canal District. Over boiled cabbage he did the math, knowing from the start the numbers were doomed, but following them hopefully to their predictable, lacking end. The pittance from the People s Militia would not earn his freedom; bribes, the government assumed, would make up the difference.

He’d had money once, but that had all been frittered away. On that girl.

“A day. Just a day.”

Grandmother frowned at Emil’s wrinkled, soiled suit. “You really must learn to take care of yourself. What’s that on your face?” She wiped the sore on his chin with a spit-damp finger.

He dreamed of seal boats cutting through the ice sheets of the north. A ship of nomads who thought nothing of risking their lives in the miserable cold. They had nothing to lose. They drank heavily and fought on the icy deck; by the time they reached the hunting grounds, the Croat was already dead, having plummeted, drunk, into the black waters. In his dream, when the dissatisfied Bulgarian pulled a knife on him over a card game, his stomach did not sink as it had in reality; it levitated. Then he floated up through the cabin ceiling. He dreamed of little fat bodies, gray and silver bundles sliding down ice slopes into the water, eyes like black coins with a woman’s long lashes. Their insides steamed when he cleaned them out; their red organs misted in the white snow. He dreamed of the Bulgarian who was found among the seal guts, facedown in the gore. Gored himself. Gutted and discarded on the ice.

When he woke his conviction of failure was somehow less inevitable. The night’s sleep, or the passage of time, had rejuvenated him, and he rushed through the alphabetizing of the chief’s files. He ignored its insignificance-the task was something he had to do as quickly and mindlessly as possible. Like the seal carcasses.

A few files fell open, and he scanned their contents. Criminals now locked away in prisons in the provinces, some working in the western swamps, raising land from mud, harvesting reeds. The records went back decades, and the prewar files had stamps with the icon of a crown. All that was over now. Some new files had symbols borrowed from the Soviets, while others-the hawk, primarily-were local. Wings pressed to its sides, its beak in

profile, talons extended. Hammers and sickles and stalks of wheat bent like parentheses. Above a star: 1917.

“Enter.”

He pushed the door open with the S-through-Z box and set it in the far corner. The chief watched as he brought in the other two, stacking them on the first. Then Emil stood before his desk. “Now,” he said breathily. “You have a case? For me.”

The boredom in Chief Moska’s eyes was overwhelming. “Those are in order?”

“Absolutely.”

“Maybe you should give them another look-over. To be sure.”

Emil’s face warmed. He closed the door and, after it latched, stood again in front of the chief’s desk. He spoke clearly and calmly, his jaw muscles tensed: “I don’t know what’s been going on here, why you and your men are acting like this. But I came here as a homicide inspector for the People’s Militia, and if you refuse to give me a legitimate case, I can’t be responsible for what follows.”

The chief leaned back and balanced a stubby pencil between his fingers.

Emil hoped his red face and boldness would give the impression of someone who might do anything if provoked, however reckless. It was the look a young man had to cultivate in the Arctic waters.

The chief brought the pencil to his mouth, his lips closing on it, and when he brought it away there was black residue. He spoke slowly, lazily. “Yesterday. Something came through and, well, I don’t want to waste my men’s time with it.” He was talking to the papers on his desk. His hands had given up on the pencil and were flicking through smeared, typewritten sheets. “Fourth District, a singer. No. Songwriter.” He licked his fingers with a fat, lead-blackened tongue as he searched through the pages. Emil made sure he missed nothing.

“This songwriter’s dead?”

“That’s how they come to us, Brod.” He held out a handwritten sheet.

Male, Janos Crowder, 35, dead in apartment, severe trauma to head. Liberation Street 12.

“Called in after hours,” the chief muttered. “District police station took pictures, samples, the usual. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

Emil opened his mouth. He wanted to ask what the usual meant, but nothing came out. His feet seemed to disappear from under him. He had his case. So quickly, easily.

“You need mobilization papers? Get going.”

Emil found his feet.

On the tram, he held on to a leather strap, a pendulum swinging between a woman taking bites out of a round loaf of bread and two laughing boys repeating damn and shit to one another. Emil recalled the dead man. At least one of his songs was very famous, something children sang in school. He’d heard them on their marches down the boulevards, looking smart in kerchiefs and buttons, but he couldn’t remember the name of the tune. Part of a lyric came to him as they left the First District’s mustard-colored administrative centers for the carved entryways and wrought- iron gates of the unbombed, still-prestigious part of the Fourth: There are White Guards in your heart that must be torn apart.

There was nothing left of Janos Crowder’s face for him to recognize.

The policeman who had been waiting for him-a boy little younger than Emil, with a loose-fitting blue uniform-let him in and nodded at the body. A wrench lay a few feet away, where it had stained the thick, white rug in a brown mess.

The melody would not leave-it revolved in his head. There are White Guards…

It was a lush, expensive apartment, and it had been ripped to pieces. The humid stench was everywhere. Upturned shelves lay on the floor, atop books and broken vases; the sofa cushions had been sliced open and ripped inside out. A baby grand piano filled a corner. Its lid was propped open, and on the carpet beside it lay framed pictures that had slid off.

It was the stink, Emil realized, of rotting meat. The musk of the country’s finest patriotic melody-maker turning to mold.

“Your chief said to leave it as it was.” The young cop held his cap in his hands, shaking his head. “Never seen anything like that before.”

The body was arched backward over a sturdy, coarse coffee table that looked like it had been made in the provinces. It was cracked and bent in the middle where the body had hit, but was not separated.

That was peasant craftsmanship for you…must be torn apart.

The wrench had been used to beat the face until it collapsed into pulp, then had been used on the back of the head, leaving tiny pink skull shards sprinkled over the carpet. Emil tried not to breathe through his nose.

He had seen plenty of dead bodies before-on the Arctic ship, in the fields and trains between Finland and here-but nothing quite like this. Not a corpse inside a wealthy man’s living room. The location separated it somehow, made it more appalling. Boats were for dead people. Trains and open fields. Not living rooms.

“Get some air in here, will you?”

The policeman opened the French windows. A hot breeze took some of the stink with it. Emil joined him and they looked out over the city, where clay and tin rooftops led into the distance.

Reluctantly, he went back and kneeled by the wrench. The steel was caked with blood, but there were no fingerprints, only gnarled threads. Once white, they were now a crusted brown. Gloves.

He went through the photographs that had slid off the opened piano. Behind framed, cracked glass was the Magyar face- prominent brow, gaping nostrils-he now remembered from clippings in The Spark. The dead man smiled broadly at a soiree with none other than General Secretary Mihai. Some of his best songs had been for their dashing partisan leader-now an overfed politician: a “thick Muscovite,” as they were called in private. The chubby arm of the interior minister hung over Crow- der’s shoulders in another picture.

Emil went through the other luminaries on the carpet, who presented the dead songwriter with star-shaped trophies and plaques which, despite the black and white, were plainly gold, their stars a glossy red. He wondered idly where these trophies were stashed, and how much they were worth. Shaking hands surrounded him on the floor, clapping hands and hands presenting valuable awards. And everywhere: big toothy smiles.

Then it came to him. A flush of understanding.

He had walked into a trap.

At first he didn’t believe it-the realization was too easy, too sudden. But he thought it through. It made more sense than he would have liked. Moska had given him this case to get rid of him.

He looked at the photo of the General Secretary again.

Janos Crowder was connected; he had friends at the very top. This simple fact made the case, by default, political. In political investigations, nothing was allowed to go wrong. At the first sign of a mistake, Emil would be ripped off his first case, maybe even kicked out of the department. The security inspector with the metallic gaze and peasant’s features would be handed the Crow- der case. He was probably sitting at his desk now, browsing through files, waiting for it.

His hands went cold, and the General Secretary, smiling, fell with Janos Crowder to the carpet. Emil patted his thighs to get the blood moving again. He stood up.

“Tell me about him,” Emil commanded the empty room.

The young policeman came out of the kitchen, licking butter off a finger. His peaked cap was set back on his head. Emil didn’t know how anyone could eat with this smell.

“Crowder. Tell me about him.”

“Comrade Janos Crowder,” the policeman recited from memory. “Songwriter of note, from Budapest originally, moved here just before the Patriotic War. An infantryman on the Front, suffered a shrapnel leg, Royal Medal of Honor. After the Liberation he produced a remarkable variety of songs honoring the country.”

“Remarkable variety?” asked Emil.

The policeman shrugged. “One hundred thirty-seven songs in two years.”

Emil nodded. “Remarkable. Anything else?”

The policeman sighed the last detail: “Married to Lena Hanic in 1945.”

“Has she been notified?”

“No, Comrade Inspector.”

“Good. I’ll do it myself. You’ve taken photographs?”

The policeman returned to the kitchen and came back with a large, cream-colored folder. It was heavy with prints.

“Who found the body?”

“Building supervisor. Aleksander Tudor. Was bringing up the mail.” He nodded at the vanity beside the door, where some envelopes lay. “Decided to leave them inside. This is what greeted him.”

Emil surveyed the demolished room, trying to remember what else to ask. In the Academy there had been simple checklists that alleviated the need to think things through, but he had gone blank. “Have the supervisor come up on your way out.”

“Youre done with me?”

Within the policeman’s voice, Emil thought he heard something like surprise. Surprise that the interview was so short. So incomplete, inept. “You have the wife’s address?”

The policeman paused, eyes shifting across the floor, deftly bouncing around the corpse.

“Call it into the station,” said Emil. “They’ll leave it on my desk.” Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure he believed it.

Three envelopes, all bills. He opened and read each in the vain hope that something would float to the surface, but the first two were nothing but the mundane finances of life. An expensive tailor on Yalta Boulevard had made Janos Crowder a suit and was waiting for his payment. A greengrocer two blocks away was becoming impatient for his fee. The third, though, was from the Aeroflot office down by the Tisa, the itinerary for a flight to Berlin that was leaving this morning. Emil checked his father’s watch- 12:40. A flight that had just left.

“Comrade Inspector?” A fat man stood in the doorway, his pink arms spilling from a white sleeveless shirt stained by cooking grease and sweat. When he breathed, Emil could hear it across the room.

“Comrade Building Supervisor Aleksander Tudor?”

The supervisor nodded, lips pressed tight as he edged his way inside, peering at the body. His nose flared involuntarily.

“Close the door, will you?”

He did.

Emil held up the envelopes. “Since when do building supervisors deliver mail?”

“Two days. The mail was just sitting there.” His voice had a pleading note to it. “They might have been stolen. I worried.” His eyes fell again on the body, as though gravity pulled him there. Emil stared at the supervisor s white face until the eyes flickered back.

“Tell me what happened when you discovered the body. Every detail.”

Aleksander Tudor tried to breathe steadily. “Yesterday. Night, yes. After dinner.”

“So you were in your apartment.”

“The dogs.”

“Dogs?”

Aleksander Tudor nodded eagerly. “They were barking outside my window. Like always, but this time.” He closed his eyes then opened them. “This time I went to shoo them away. That’s when I noticed. His box. Comrade Crowder’s. Full of letters.” His loud exhale sounded choked. “Two days. Very irregular. But there was no answer,” he said. “To my knock.”

“And you had heard nothing before this?”

“Only the dogs.”

“No noise? No sounds of struggle?”

Aleksander Tudor shook his head stiffly.

“And you just came right in?”

“I have the key, Comrade Inspector.”

“You couldn’t slide them under the door?”

The supervisor turned toward the gaping, drafty space beneath the door. He turned back to Emil, mouth working but forming no words.

“Comrade Supervisor,” said Emil, slipping into the authoritarian tone the professors had made him practice for hours. “You seem disturbed. Do I disturb you?”

“I-” he began, then faltered. He leaned his full weight against the vanity; Emil could see the other half of his sweating face in the mirror. He blinked at the corpse, ready to faint.

Emil led him into the hallway, where frying oils obscured the smell of rot. “Try again?”

Tudor steadied himself on the railing, and finally formed words: “I was curious, Comrade. That’s all. I wanted to see if he was gone, or…I don’t know.” He shook his head.

Emil reached into his jacket and retrieved his notepad and a small pencil. 25 Aug 48. Victim: J Crowder. Interview: Apt Super, Aleks Tudor-found body. Delivering mail. Nerves, a wreck. “Did you suspect this?” he asked. “Before you opened the door.”

“This?”

“Murder. You heard nothing?”

“No. Oh, not at all.” When he shook his head, his flushed, damp cheeks trembled. “I only… wondered. You see?”

“How long has Comrade Crowder lived here?”

“Six, seven months? I need to look it up.”

Emil pointed at the door across from Crowder’s. Someone had painted it a garish red. “The neighbor?”

“Polacks,” Tudor whispered. Then, with a wry smile and a halfwink: “Genuine proles.

“Comrade,” Emil said, his voice now very official again, “this is a nation of proles. The proletarians have succeeded with the generous assistance of our friends to the east. Proles is the name by which we all live.”

Aleksander Tudor looked ready to cry.