The Confession

49

Through the bad phone line Moska’s voice had no air to work with. “No, don’t say it.”

“Let’s get some people over here.”

“Immediately.”

The fifteen-minute wait lasted forever. I looked over the apartment again. There were dry crusts of bread beside two bowls of fish soup and a half-empty bottle of wine.

Who had been eating with Stefan?

I grabbed the phone and dialed. No answer. There was a telephone directory in the kitchen, and I flew through it, frantic, until I found Galicia Textiles. The shift head didn’t want to get her, so I had to become a brusque militiaman rather than a terrified husband.

“Ferenc? Ferenc, what is it?”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

I couldn’t catch my breath.

“Ferenc, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you tonight.”

I hung up and sat in the living room, heard the dry blood crackle beneath me, and rubbed my face in my hands. I hadn’t told her, because she would have to deal with it all day at the factory. I would tell her tonight and make it as easy as I could. I would tell her at night so there would be fewer hours to go through before the respite of sleep.

Looking at the body, thinking suddenly of Stefan’s guilt and the years of loneliness since Daria had left him, another wave of dread came over me. I squatted beside him and lifted the pistol to my nose. No smell at all-it hadn’t been fired. He had not taken his own life.

Moska arrived with Leonek and Emil. They were in almost as bad a state as I was. Leonek paced furiously from corner to corner, picking up crumpled greasy wrappers and overfull ashtrays, then setting them back down, disappointed that they gave him no answers. Emil crossed his arms by the door, speaking occasional mysteries- It smells like baklava, can you smell that? Stefan’s wrist is bent, what does that mean? Moska marched into the bedroom and emerged a while later shaking his head. “Can someone tell me what’s going on here?” No one touched the body.

When you’re faced with a corpse, you fight the instinctual urge to look at it by staring at the smoke-stained curtains, the frayed sofa cushions, the grime in the unwashed rugs. It would be a blessing if you noticed the sunlight or the bright colors of the quilt that Stefan had hung on the wall to remember his mother by. But the brain is clear enough to know such details are a lie. Somewhere in the room lies a dead man with a bullet in his belly. So what I remember from that day is the detrius of Stefan’s life, and because of that his bloated body is that much clearer.

After a while a kid from Materials showed up and took photographs. We watched him and drank the rest of the wine.

“Someone else was here,” I said. “Stefan had a guest.”

“Is that who killed him?” asked Leonek.

Emil was in the bedroom, grasping at more inexplicable details he would take with him to his death, but Moska was within earshot. He set his wine on the kitchen table, beside the soups. He and Leonek waited.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The door was open when I arrived, and Stefan’s behind it. Seems like Stefan opened the door for the killer. If his dinner guest had done it, he’d be dead in the kitchen-the meal wasn’t finished.”

“This Nestor Velcea came to the door?” asked Moska.

“Looks like it.”

“Nestor was hit, too,” said Leonek. “He left his blood on the stairs.”

“Or it’s the guest’s blood,” I said, rubbing my temples to try and clear my head. “But Stefan’s gun hasn’t been fired. If that’s Nestor’s blood in the stairwell, he and the guest were shooting it out.”

Leonek went over the details again. The uneaten food, Stefan lying in a different room, the open bedroom window. “Or Stefan argued with his guest. The argument took them into the living room, and that’s where it happened. The murderer left by the window to avoid neighbors in the corridor.”

“The blood on the stairs,” said Moska. “Somebody went out the front door with a bullet in him.”

“There were at least three people-that’s a fact,” I said, as we stood beside the photographer. Stefan’s skin, beneath the blood, was so white. “One of them left by the front door, and it looks like the other climbed out the window.”

“You don’t know for sure,” said Moska. He looked at me, then settled into a frown that suggested there were other ideas that had not been touched on yet.

“What?”

He shook his head.

A flash blinded everyone momentarily.

“I don’t know anything for sure,” I said. None of us did.

Emil emerged from the bedroom, nostrils wide. “What’s going on here?”

We watched Feder’s men cover Stefan with a sheet, heft him onto a stretcher, and precariously make their way down the stairs.

Sev was waiting in the station to offer his cool condolences. “I know you two were close. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” But his face was not cool-his lips were uncontrolled; they twitched.

Leonek and Emil waited for orders. I sent Emil to grill Stefan’s neighbors and told Leonek to keep a watch on Antonin’s old apartment.

I called Georgi. He listened in silence as I explained in detail why I needed to find Nestor Velcea. “Is Louis in town?”

“Still in Paris.”

“Try and get in touch with him. If they were friends, he may know something. And ask around.”

“I’ll try.”

“Try hard, Georgi.”

I had too much energy. I kept getting up from my desk to walk up and down the corridor, and ignored people who nodded at me. Then I returned to my chair and picked up the telephone. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment. I didn’t know where Stefan’s ex-wife, Daria, was now, but I knew his father had a telephone. The operator connected me with the Pocspetri number, not so far from Magda’s parents’ house.

“Yes?”

He was a heavy man like his son, and, like his son, he lived alone. “Franz? This is Ferenc.”

He paused. We hadn’t talked in a long time. “Ferenc Kolyeszar? Well how are you?”

“Not well, Franz. I’ve got some terrible news.”

He wept, and I pulled the telephone away from my ear and waited. The two of them had grown apart since Stefan’s mother’s death, and I suspected this was at the root of his tears. He didn’t ask many questions, because like most farmers he knew the details were unimportant-only the results mattered. By the time I told him that the funeral would be on Saturday, his tears were under control. “I wish I could make it. But if I don’t get these onions to the market, I’ll be dead, too.”

Around three the photographer showed up with shots of Stefan on the floor, facedown, the blood-soaked wall, food laid out for two, dirty stairs.