The Confession

18

On Monday morning, we found Markus Feder chain-smoking in the corridor outside his lab. He didn’t stop as we approached. “Rough weekend?” Emil asked.

Feder put a hand to his red hair as if he’d forgotten something. A few passing colleagues looked at him. “Comrade Inspectors,” he began, “what do you know about this body already?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Bound wrists and ankles. Burned in the Canal District. I’ve got a shoe in the car, but I don’t know if it’s the victim’s.”

Feder dropped his cigarette and stepped on it.

There was a lump on the examining table that he didn’t uncover. He washed his hands in the sink and talked loudly over the water. “It’s a man, all right. The bone structure’s clear enough.” He shut off the faucet and went for a towel. “Height, five-nine, average. I’d guess he was balding, but can’t be sure. He was killed about a week ago.” His hands were dry now, so he turned to us. “Inspectors, both his arms and legs had been broken.”

“By the heat?” asked Emil.

Feder shook his head. “The victim was tied and gagged. Then his legs and arms were broken. Probably with a simple household hammer. And then the victim was dragged a long distance by his broken, bound arms. The way the bones are separated and the muscles stretched, I can’t imagine how far he was dragged. Very far. And, finally, the poor bastard was doused with benzene. And lit. There are carbon monoxide particles in the lungs-he was burned alive.”

We stared at the lump on the table. There was that smell again, though the ventilation kept it to a minimum.

“He couldn’t roll over,” I said. “Into the water.”

“Your victim’s arms and legs were useless. All he had was jelly and bone shards.” Another cigarette hung from his lips, unlit.

Emil looked a little sick.

“What about his shoes?” I asked.

“His left shoe,” said Feder as he lit his cigarette and started for the door. “It melted into him.”

“His right shoe?”

Feder shrugged and passed through the swinging doors.

Emil suggested we stop for a coffee, and over our cups we said nothing, thinking of muscles contracting uselessly and bones crunching. I could feel it too, in my legs, and this is the imagination that had made me believe I could write; this was how I could feel Stefan’s weight on Magda’s dry skin, could see his twisted face at the moment of climax.

The first cobbler, an old professional with half-moon glasses, turned the shoe over in his hand. First the heel, which was worn at an angle (he disapproved of this with a shake of his head), then the mold of the toe, the sewing around the lace holes, and finally the compressed insole. He handed it back to me. “I don’t know this work, and I don’t think I want to.”

“But it’s not a factory shoe, correct?”

“Absolutely not. Unskilled work, but hand-made.”

The second cobbler was a young man on the other side of town. He wore a tailored jacket and wide red tie. His name was Petru Salva. “Comrades, this shoe was not made in the Capital. You may be assured of that.”

“Can you be certain?” asked Emil.

Salva held the shoe up on his fingertips and touched a long nail to the toe, the laces, the border with the sole. “This threading is absolutely provincial. No doubt about it.”

“Which province?”

“Difficult to say, Comrades. Extremely difficult. Each village with its own cobbler has a style individual to that one cobbler. It’s idiosyncratic.”

“But you,” I said, “you’re very familiar with such things. You can find out?”

Petru Salva tugged the end of his jacket. “Of course, Comrades. I imagine I’m the only one in the Capital who can. I will make inquiries.”

“It’s much appreciated.”

“We all do our part.” He smiled. “The times require it.”

“The times do,” I said.

We did not get our answer until Thursday, and on Tuesday I suggested we help Leonek. “Another set of eyes is what I need,” Leonek told us. “I can’t see straight anymore.” He handed over a thick stack of pages.

They were interviews with Russian soldiers conducted in mid-1946. The questions were simple- Where were you on-? Where was Comrade Private-? When? The answers were direct. The bar, Comrade. Asleep, Comrade. Fishing in the Tisa, Comrade. After a while I couldn’t see straight either. Nothing pointed to anything; these were good boys who fished and slept and drank. Yet Sergei’s questions continued, as if he were filling in pieces of an outline, but could not find its shape.

Sergei had been an impressive militiaman. It wasn’t easy to trust a Russian, but with him it was possible. He was earnest and straightforward with everyone. He had a simple view of justice from which he never deviated. When the girls turned up dead in that synagogue, it crushed him. It was a Russian crime, and only a Russian could set things right-he told us all that. He went off on his own, feverishly plowing through interviews, then Leonek and I were on the foggy bank of the Tisa, and he was dead.

Emil drifted to sleep over his stack. I went back to reading. Buying cigarettes, Comrade. Fishing in the Tisa, Comrade. The Russian boys were all doing the same thing, day after day. Asleep, Comrade. The same things, no complications. The same words. The answers began to look as if they had been scripted. The bar, Comrade. Scripted and agreed upon and practiced until they were rote.

I handed Leonek the pages. “They’re all lying.”

“Of course they are.” Something crossed his face when he looked at me.

“What?”

“Nothing. Listen-I need to get to Zindel Grubin, Chasya’s brother. They’re ignoring my prison interview request. Do you think you could get me into Ozaliko? Moska would never help me. But maybe he’d help you.”

“Try him yourself. Moska’s not hiding anything from you. He even told me that.”

The look crossed his face again. Something like disappointment, or shame. “Forget it.”

My phone rang.

“Ferenc?” The line was staticky.

“Yes?”

“Ferenc, this is Kliment.”

I realized there had never been a need for me to struggle through Russian with him. “Good to hear from you. Tell me.”

“Without a hitch, Ferenc. She’s with her father now. There were a lot of tears.”

“You get all the money?”

“No broken knees. But it looked like she needed it more than I.”

I couldn’t quit smiling-not that day, or the next, as we continued our haggard reading of Sergei’s interviews.