The Confession

20

He didn’t trust us to deliver the news properly, so he closed his shop and led us. He would only say that Antonin was a good man who lived in the Capital but still remembered where he came from. He would never trust one of those overpriced cobblers. Then he fell to muttering, shaking his head and sucking on his gums. People paused to watch us pass, and a few greeted the cobbler, but he didn’t hear them. The housing blocks watched over us as we turned onto a dirt road lined with face-high metal fences. We stepped around puddles like lakes. The cobbler entered the fifth gate on the left and kept moving up the front steps. “Beatrice!” he called, then knocked.

A fat woman with squinting eyes and red hands opened the door. “Frederik.” As she kissed his cheeks she noticed us at the bottom of the steps. A curt nod.

“I need to talk to you, Bea.”

She pulled back to look into his face. “Come in, then.”

Frederik followed her, but before he shut the door he held up a finger. “One minute.”

Behind him, the muted sound of Antonin’s mother: “ What, Frederik?”

Emil kicked the dirt. “I’ve never gotten used to this.”

“It’s hard.”

“More than that.” He took a deep breath. “I feel like I’m giving myself the news for the first time. I’ve seen the body, I know it’s dead, but only through someone else can I feel it. Does that make sense?”

I was looking at the twisted rose branches that lined the house. Dead branches: Winter was fast approaching. “Yeah.”

“Leonek is very cool about this. I let him take over and do the talking.”

“Then, if you’d prefer-”

“I would.”

This was one of the many things I liked about Emil: Unlike me, he wasn’t afraid to broadcast his weaknesses to the world.

The door opened, and Frederik, chewing on his gums, nodded us inside.

It was what one would expect from an old woman living alone: claustrophobia. Insecure tables and bureaus and porcelain-filled shelves, and walls of family photographs with hazy borders. A jigsaw of rugs covered the wood floors, and through a door I saw a pile of wet clothes in the tub, more hanging from a line. In the living room, where Beatrice sat on a sofa staring at the wall, there was a waist-high marble sculpture of a naked woman with an arm stretched over her head. I wondered how that had gotten there.

“Sit down,” she muttered.

There were enough chairs to accommodate one of Georgi’s get-togethers. Frederik sat next to her and put his hand on the hands clenched between her knees.

“How?” she said. “How did my son die?” It was impossible to judge her face or voice. Her deep-set eyes rested on Emil. “You must tell me.”

Emil looked at me.

I spoke: “First let me give our consolations, Comrade Kullmann. We understand how difficult this must be.”

“Don’t tell me you understand. This is regular for you. Just tell me how my son died.”

“He was burned,” said Emil.

She looked at him again, as if she knew it was hardest for him. “It wasn’t an accident, was it? Tell me!”

Emil opened his mouth. His no was too quiet to hear.

But she heard it, and asked me, “Why was my son burned? Do you know this? Old ladies in the provinces are harder than the ones in the city. You can tell me.”

“We don’t know anything yet. That’s why we’re here.”

Frederik shook his head, sucking. “They don’t know anything.” He squeezed her hands tighter.

“Did you hear from your son much?” I asked.

“Hear from him?” Her head popped back. “He was my son, Inspectors. Look around you. Everything you see is from him. He knew about family. Antonin had his faults, but ignoring his mother wasn’t one of them. Let go of me, Frederik.”

The cobbler returned his hand to his own knee.

“Then perhaps you can help us out.”

Maybe it was my size, or the way I chose to hold her gaze, but she shifted on the sofa to face me. Despite the others, it became a dialogue. “He called me a few weeks ago, Inspector. Not a rare thing, but unexpected. It worried me.”

“Why did it worry you?”

“Because he didn’t have a reason. He only called to say he loved me.”

“He didn’t do that usually?”

When she smiled, her eyes shut and her cheeks swelled. “He always said he loved me, Inspector. He usually called for other reasons. He liked to give his mother things.”

“So you heard from him often.”

“Let me tell you about Antonin.” She leaned back into the sofa. “He’s a good boy. He reveres his mother. He works hard-you probably don’t even know what he does, do you?”

I shook my head.

“He’s the most important painter in the Capital.”

I noticed that Emil was recording everything in his notepad. “Go on.”

“Do you know how he became so important? No? He worked for it. Out here, he got no education at all, and everyone expected him to be a cooperative farmer like his useless father. Or a factory worker. But my Antonin is better than that. He loved art. And when you love art in Drebin, you had better leave. So that’s what he did. He left, with my blessings, at the end of the war-he and his wife-and after only a few years he had his very own shows. Can you believe it?”

I had been on the periphery of the arts in the Capital for a long time now, and the name Kullmann did not ring a bell. But Antonin…“He was married?”

Her face settled. “Zoia Lendvai. That tramp left him the same year as his first show-nineteen and forty-eight. For a clerk. You can bet she kicked herself once my Antonin became famous.”

“Do you know the name of the clerk she married?”

“I don’t care. My Antonin survived her treachery, that’s all that matters. See that?” She pointed to the marble nude. “Antonin made it for me. And here.” She pointed at a small framed painting. It was peculiar-a simple image of tree branches, black winding lines on a white surface, and where the black and white met my eye could not quite focus. “That’s an early one, when his genius was first apparent. He’s still big, no matter what they say, certainly bigger than that big-headed friend of his, Vlaicu.” She put her hands together. “My Antonin.”

Then it hit me. Antonin: the repetition dug deeper into my memory. The name on Josef Maneck’s notepad. “Tell me,” I said. “Do you know Josef Maneck? He used to be a museum curator.”

“Know him? Well, of course. I haven’t talked to him in years, but he was the one to recognize my boy’s genius. He put up my son’s paintings-that’s all it took. The rest, as they say, is history.”

My hands were cold as we shook her hand at the door and nodded at Frederik.

“Catch my boy’s killer, Inspectors.”

“We’ll try,” I said.

“And say hello to Josef for me.”

“We’ll do that,” said Emil.