The Confession

16

By Friday we were fully staffed, except for Kaminski, who had mercifully disappeared. But even in his absence I had the feeling he was in some other room in the Capital, trigger finger flicking, calculating my demise. Kaminski’s eyes-Brano Sev-worked at his desk, silent, his back toward us, but he was aware of everything we did. He knew that each of us wanted to smash his head against his steel file cabinets for what he’d made us do at that demonstration. But none of us touched him.

Emil had developed the pictures in his darkroom at home, and Leonek joined us to look them over in a cafe, far from Brano Sev.

Our first choice was still closed, its metal blinds pulled down, so we went a couple streets farther to a crowded, smoke-congested bar on October Square. We leaned on the counter as Emil passed around the photos. “Bad light, a little blurry. But you get the idea.”

We did get the idea. Leonek squinted the blackened human mass, and the smell came back to me, cutting through the living bodies all around us.

There were photos of empty corners, the dry well, and fragments of decadent Roman life underwater, “It’s an empty crime scene,” I said.

Emil drank his coffee, “Except for a shoe.”

“It was outside the scene. And I’m not walking all over the Capital with just a shoe, not when half the stores are still closed.”

“Then we wait for the coroner.”

A table became free, so we took it. Emil asked Leonek how his investigation was coming.

“Not well.” Leonek leaned close, arms on the table. “But I’ve learned a lot. Sergei kept good records of his interviews, and I’ve got a list of names. He had tried to talk to the families of Chasya Grubin and Reina Westreicher, the two dead girls, but they wouldn’t tell him anything.” He frowned at this. “Why would they? He was Russian. So I looked them up. The Westreicher family got out soon afterward, to Austria. The Grubin family-only the brother and the grandfather are still here. The grandfather’s a little crazy, I can’t get much out of him. And Chasya’s brother-Zindel-is in Ozaliko Prison. He’s in for political crimes-a societal menace, they told me.”

“Can you talk to him?” asked Emil.

“I filled out the paperwork two weeks ago, but now-now, I don’t know.” He coughed into his hand and waved to the woman behind the counter for another coffee. “Corina!” he called, but she didn’t notice him. “Sergei interviewed a lot of Russian soldiers, but that was a decade ago. They’re all back home. So, like you, I wait.”

“What about Stefan?” My voice cracked. “Is he helping you?”

He tilted his head from side to side. “Now and then, yes. He’s still working on that suicide.”

“Looks like a suicide to you too?”

“Stefan hasn’t convinced me otherwise. He’s talked to a lot of people, but none of it seems to lead anywhere.”

“But why is he so convinced?”

Leonek blinked at me, as if he’d said too much already. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” He went to the counter and ordered another coffee.