The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER FIVE

The Polish proles included a mother, father, three children and three grandparents. The door opened noisily, the thin, blond father shouting back for one of the children, a Marie, to shut up. But when Emil unfolded his green Militia certificate, a silence dropped over the household, as though even those out of eyeshot had seen an alarm blink in the other rooms.

“Come in,” said Tomislaw, the father, wiping a hand on his pants and then waving Emil inside.

There was the dense, familiar smell of boiled cabbage and overused sunflower oil in the fabric of the home. All three grandparents ushered him to a lace-covered dining table and served hot tea, while Tomislaw changed into a clean shirt. The grandparents-two of them women-stood against the stained, floral wallpaper and stared at him, smiling nervously, while the heavy, dark-haired wife herded the children into another room. But the whole time there, Emil could make out the children’s shadows beyond the cracked door.

Tomislaw appeared at another door, a fresh, brown shirt hanging from his bones. He smiled as he sat down. “What happened to Master Crowder,” he said, using the title a peasant would and simultaneously mauling the language with his accent. He pressed his lips together in a tight frown, shaking his head. “This city, it will get you.”

“Tom,” warned his wife. Her sturdy face looked unaccustomed to taking chances.

“But you heard something? From next door, I mean.”

“In this apartment?” asked Tomislaw, looking to the grandparents for support. All three faces nodded vigorously. “With the dogs outside and the kids in here, how can I hear a thing?”

The whole room was in agreement: it was an unassailable point. When Tomislaw smiled, his high, acne-speckled cheekbones became pronounced.

“Where do you work?”

Tomislaw sat up straight. “I assemble kneading machines. Huge.” He opened his arms wide. “For factory bread.”

“And how long have you lived here?”

“Two years,” the wife said quickly. “We were told to transfer, we have our papers. We were as surprised as you that we ended up in such a place.”

“Of course,” said Emil. But the inside of this aristocratic house, cluttered by their stout Polish furniture and water stains on the walls, no longer resembled anything aristocratic. He smiled reassuringly and opened his notepad. “I just wondered if you knew your neighbor.”

“Sure,” said Tomislaw, pointing to the door with an oil- darkened thumb. “Sometimes, we sat out there and had a vodka, maybe some brandy.” He used his thumb and forefinger to measure the height of a shot. “Just a little. Or his wine. Bull’s Blood. From Eger.” He raised his brow proudly. “He told me about his songs. You know his songs? There’s a right in the might of the valley!” he sang in a tuneless march, but Emil recognized it-again from kerchiefed children’s throats. He could hear the little ones in the next room giggling at their father’s performance. Their mother shot a silencing look at the door.

“What else did he talk about?”

Tomislaw ran his fingers through a pack of cigarettes, finally coming up with a twisted, loose one. Tobacco peppered the tabletop. “Money, what else? He said he could spend more than anyone he knew. Even with all those songs. Can you imagine? He always ran out.”

“He was broke?”

“Broke? I don’t know. To me he lived pretty well.”

The two grandmothers crossed themselves, and Tomislaw’s wife shifted in her chair.

“What about visitors?”

“He lived alone,” said the wife.

“I saw no one,” affirmed Tomislaw.

“No girlfriends?”

Tomislaw shrugged. “Maybe a hooker-one time, twice.”

“You saw them?”

He shook his head, almost sadly. “But no steady girlfriend, not this one. That I’m sure of.”

“How do you know?”

“You know,” said Tomislaw, smiling again, cheekbones high in his masculine knowledge, and the others nodded their agreement. “There was that one, though-”

“Girl?”

He shook his head.

“That was nothing,” his wife said. She cleared her throat significantly.

Tomislaw shrugged.

“What?” asked Emil.

“A plumber, I think.”

“Yes?”

“Is nothing,” said the wife.

“Is nothing,” he agreed, frowning and shaking his head.

Emil looked between them a moment, knowing that nothing more would come of the subject, then looked back at his notepad. “Did he say anything about Berlin? That he was flying there?”

“Berlin?” Tomislaw thought a moment, squinting. “Where they’re…” He raised a flat hand over his head and whistled an imitation of a plane flying over. “No,” he said finally. “Nothing.”

“How about enemies? Anyone who might waiit to hurt him?”

Tomislaw squinted in memory, and Emil noticed his wife’s gray eyes measuring her husband’s face, as if by these measurements she could predict, and stop, a mistake. Tomislaw turned his palms toward the ceiling. “But everyone loved him! He was like a prince. A very elegant prince.”

Emil turned to the wife-he wanted to include her. “Where are you from? In Poland.”

“Not Poland,” she muttered. She looked back at him coolly. “We’re from Brest.”

“That’s Polish,” said Emil.

She shook her head. “For a long time, yes. Then one day it wasn’t. When the war was over someone told us we were living in Belarus.” Then she blinked, as though waking up. She raised herself in her chair, back straight, and gave him a tight smile. “We live here now, and that’s all that matters.”

Tomislaw walked him to the door, and Emil touched his elbow to lure him outside. The thin man glanced back fearfully as he closed the door.

“Tell me,” said Emil. He held his pencil like a pointer.

Tomislaw furrowed his brow.

“This plumber. What’s the story?”

He shrugged. “Really, she’s right. It’s nothing. Just some fellow. She’s crazy-she worries because the plumber had an accent, German. Germans scare her.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like a German, what else? Blond, sure. Tall.”

“And he was a plumber?”

“I don’t know,” said Tomislaw, raising his hands as though he had finally learned his wife was right-you give an inch and they’ll take a mile. “Plumber, carpenter, how should I know? All I know is he came a couple times and they argued. Money, I think.” He placed a hand on his doorknob.

“Do you remember anything they said? In particular?”

Tomislaw shrugged, leaning into the door, twisting the handle. “Really, I don’t know anything else.” When the door opened, his wife was standing there, pulling him inside, giving Emil a hard, suspicious glance before shutting the door and slamming the bolt into place.

He took a meticulous walk through the mess of the apartment, looking beneath overturned cabinets and sifting through smashed dishes for anything. There was a Russian camera in the corner, a Zorki, empty of film. He pocketed it. In a bureau full of clothes, he found a gold medal-a circle etched with a hammer and sickle and rays of sunlight, the words lenin and music in Cyrillic beneath. He lifted it-heavy, pure gold-and considered it.

This was the beginning of everything. He had a real sense of this. This was a new start, and it had to begin correctly, or not at all. But hadn’t it already been sabotaged by the chief, by everyone?

He dropped the medal into his pocket.

He found a folded sheet of paper behind the piano with lyric notes and, under a shredded sofa cushion, a woman’s black garter. The kitchen produced jars of fruit preserves-peach and strawberry-that the police had not yet taken themselves. This could only mean that there had been a lot more, so much that they had run out of pockets. Behind the icebox, tied to a thin pipe, was a short length of twine that had been cut with a knife. He didn’t know why. In the bathroom he found French soap. He pocketed everything, then wrapped the bloody wrench in a copy of The Spark. That’s when he realized he was humming. There are White Guards in your heart…

He squeezed the murder weapon under his arm, then returned Janos Crowder’s gold medal to his drawer, buried it among crumpled underwear.

He would start yet again.

He used Janos Crowder’s private telephone-white, bulbous- to call the medical examiner’s office.

The photographs were overexposed, but clear enough. Janos Crowder bent back over his peasant table, arms spread wide. His legs lay limply, knees together, so that his feet rested on their arches in the plush carpet. His fingers were long and thin and tapered. These were not factory hands. His speckled neck was bloated where it began to curve into the soft mush of jawbone and human pulp that had once been a mouth, nose, eyes.

A German. A German who looked like a German and argued about money. Tidbits filled his pockets: a garter, camera, twine.

The brutality made no sense. Janos Crowder would have been dead long before the abuse was over. A manic rage, perhaps. Or an attempt to hide something. But what? A face wasn’t needed to identify a body. A simple thief would have taken the camera. A German with a meticulous eye toward money would have found the medal made of gold.

There was a close-up of the head, where an ear had dislodged.

Emil was on the tram, leaning against a pole, and he heard a gasp. The woman looking over his shoulder had finally realized what she was seeing.

He was surprised and somewhat pleased to find on his desk a slip of paper with Lena Crowder’s address. The same childish letters he’d seen his first day. No one claimed responsibility for the note, and no one looked up when he dropped the paper-wrapped wrench loudly beside the typewriter. Some were preparing to leave for the day, shrugging into jackets or loosening ties and unbuttoning collars. The security inspector was eating an apple, and when Emil sat down he came over and, very quietly, wished Emil luck on his case. “This is your first one, I’m correct?” His voice squeaked unnervingly.

“My first, yes.”

“Well, good luck,” he repeated, and as he wandered back to his desk, Emil felt a cool, focused hatred for this vulture.

The typewriter worked like a song. Emils preliminary report noted the details he had learned of the victim’s life, his occupation and marital status, his rumored economic situation and Party affiliation. He said nothing of the portraits with General Secretary Mihai. He listed the names of those he had interviewed, and pointed to where he expected to proceed next. Lena Crowder, and the vendor of the murder weapon, for which he had the ten- digit manufacturer’s number. He would also talk to the coroner, but didn’t expect anything to come of it. No speculations, at this point in the investigation, were warranted.

Emil unwrapped the bloody wrench on the counter beside Roberto’s crossed ankles. The Argentinean’s lazy eye righted itself as he dropped his feet.

“How do I trace this?” asked Emil.

Roberto settled back into his chair, regaining his composure bit by bit until he was deep within his easy worldliness again. He sighed audibly. “It’s a poor nation, no? Bureaucracies are limited, they crawl.” He gazed at his thumbs. “Could take, say, weeks to trace this machinery.”

“There’s a book somewhere? With this information? A file cabinet? I’ll do it myself.”

“The clearance,” said Roberto sadly. He picked at his dry lower lip. “Months, I’ve no doubt.”

Emil was slow sometimes, he knew this. He had been like this with Filia at the beginning, in that bombed cafe in the Third District. All her advances had gone in one ear and out the other. He was only receptive to those who, like the mute Ester in Ruscova, had no time for indirection.

Emil leaned forward and covered the wrench with the paper again, as if to hide their transaction from it. “To know by tomorrow,” he said slowly. “How much?”

Roberto smiled toothily. “Only two!”

“Enter.”

The chief was caught in mid-reach, one sweat-stained arm sliding into his jacket sleeve, when Emil dropped the typewritten pages on his desk.

“What s this?”

Emils hands meeting behind his back was instinct, and once they touched he wished he could control his instinctual subservience. “Daily report, Com-” he began, then: “Chief.”

Chief Moska had both his arms in his wrinkled, gray coat, and with one hand he lifted the report and separated the three sheets like cards. “You haven t done anything, Brod. Until you do, there’s nothing to report. I don t want this.” He held out the pages.

Emil folded his arms. “Regulations. Article fifteen, sections twelve through sixteen-communication between levels of service.”

“Don’t quote to me, Brod. It’s disrespectful and ugly.” The chief’s face was hard when he said this, but he seemed genuinely surprised by the quotation. Emil accepted the report back. He folded it and creased the edge, but did not leave.

“I need some things.”

“Things?”

Emil ignored his look. “An automobile, first of all.”

“Why?”

“Interviews.”

Chief Moska took a slow step back, as though considering sitting down again. “There are trams, Brod. They’re very cheap. You’re too good for them?”

“My interview is outside of town. Janos Crowder’s wife.”

“Talk to the garage.” He stepped forward again.

Emil held up a weak hand. “A gun. I haven’t been issued one yet.”

The chief’s brows came together, and the sweat on his forehead, disturbed, rolled down his cheek. He was such a large man, bigger the closer one came to him, and his breath seemed to heat the office. “You need a gun to interview a grieving widow?”

“I’m investigating murder, Chief.”

“It’s the last thing,” Chief Moska began, then paused. “A gun is the last thing you want to touch. It’s a dangerous thing to have too soon.”

Emil said, “But-” then stopped. The chief was already out the door.