The Confession

13

Georgi woke me by shaking my shoulder. “Telephone.” He was in a thick beige robe that had his initials GR, on the breast. “Your oaf.” I knew then that it was Stefan.

“Magda said to try for you there. You’re no longer sleeping at home?”

“What’s going on?”

“Come see me at Josef Maneck’s apartment. Here’s the address.”

I yawned. “What is this, Stefan? The man killed himself.”

“Just get over here, okay?”

Georgi was frying eggs when I came into the kitchen. “Is the oaf requesting your presence?”

“Shut up, Georgi.” I sat at the table and started filing the playing cards back into their boxes. The empty wine bottles still lined the counter, and every surface was stained by red circles. There was a sour stink in the air. Georgi brought over two plates.

“Want coffee?”

I nodded.

“Then make it yourself, I’m going back to bed.”

I put some water on to boil and searched for the grounds.

“What do you think of Louis?”

There were enough grounds for a few cups. “He’s all right.”

“He told me that things here are looking pretty bad.”

“In what way?”

“Says this won’t last. This thaw.”

“What does he know? He’s a tourist.”

“No, he’s lived here before, and he’s visited a lot.”

“Well, then, he’s a foreigner.”

“Not really-his last name’s Rostek. His grandfather’s one of us, from one of those purges, you know, in the ’teens-if you could afford it, you went to Paris. His opa could afford it.” Georgi brought his empty plate to the sink. “I worry too much in the mornings.”

The water was boiling, so I added the grounds. The froth ran over, hissing on the burner. “Don’t worry so much,” I told him. “And don’t listen to foreigners. They mean well, but they know nothing about our lives.”

He considered that a moment, then got two cups out of the cabinet. “Give me one of those, will you?”

Josef Maneck’s apartment was in the old town, a three-room, high-ceilinged place that had been his father’s. Now it was no one’s. The old furniture was still here, dusty chairs and cabinets and trinkets collected over too long a life. On the walls were faded portraits in ornate frames, and a few empty frames stuffed recklessly behind the sofa.

Stefan was sitting on Maneck’s sunken mattress, reading a book. He showed me the cover-a state edition of poetry by someone I vaguely remembered-before throwing it on the dirty, knotted rug. “Josef liked his verse,” said Stefan. “Pretty uplifting stuff for a suicidal drunk.”

“Someone gave it to him. How long have you been here?”

“I spent the night.”

He leaned forward with his hands on the bed and lifted his weight with a grunt. He passed me on his way to the living room and took a notepad off the coffee table. The top page had been ripped out, but Stefan had rubbed a pencil all over the second page. Not all the scribbled letters were recovered.

A-TO-IN

K-R-5

2-2.-0

“Antonin,” said Stefan. “The rest, I don’t know-address and phone number, maybe. But I’m sure about the name.”

“So he knew someone named Antonin. Does it really matter?”

“It could matter.” His voice was trying to encourage me to believe, with him, that this suicide was more than it seemed. “I’ve been all over the place looking for an address book. Nothing. But I’ll bet that if we can find Antonin, we’ll learn something important.”

I doubted this, but got up with him and handed him his hat from the coffee table.