The Confession

51

The next morning was a Friday. There was an abundance of housewives out in the street, stocking up for the weekend. I leaned into the fogged tram window and hated myself for not having woken up in the same bed as my wife.

Feder was in a subdued mood. He had left Stefan’s body in the drawer so that no one would have to look at him unnecessarily. He told me when I arrived that the other inspectors had already filed through his office-no one was willing to wait for anyone else. So he repeated his performance for me in his empty lab, without having to read from the clipboard in his hand. “Nine millimeter in the stomach. Two shots. I can’t be sure how long it took, but by the signs in the apartment, the smear of the blood, I’d say he was conscious for several minutes.”

“What about the blood on the stairs?”

“Stefan’s was B-this was O-positive. Couldn’t say whose it was.”

“And fingerprints?”

He looked at the clipboard. “Stefan’s prints on the outside and inside of the front door.”

“And the window?”

Feder frowned. “What about the window?”

“The bedroom window. It was open.”

He tapped his pencil on the clipboard. “Well I’m glad I’ve finally been told. All the lab did was the front door.”

“Have them do the dishes as well. Someone was eating with him when he was shot, and I want to know who.”

“Yeah,” said Feder. “I would, too.”

There was a note from Moska on my desk, and when I went to see him Sev was in the office. I waited outside until they finished, then watched Sev watching me as he left. “Enter, Ferenc.”

I sat across from him and told him what Feder had reported. “I want to see what comes of dusting for more prints.”

Moska stared at the pencil in his hand. He twirled it awkwardly. “Look, Ferenc. I’ve got to talk to you about this. It’s not something I like.”

“Tell me.”

“A month or so ago you attacked Stefan, didn’t you?” He was still looking at the pencil.

“In a bar,” I said. “Yes.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I’d rather not, unless I have to.”

He used the flat end of the pencil to scratch his scalp. “You don’t have to tell me anything, Ferenc. I’m just trying to clear things up. I’ve got a dead inspector on my hands, and I want to know who killed him.”

“And you think I killed him.”

He aimed the pencil at me. “Ferenc, don’t get self-righteous.”

“Is that why Sev was here? Is he investigating me now?”

“Just tell me: Why the hell did you attack Stefan?”

“Because he was sleeping with my wife.”

He dropped the pencil and inhaled. Then he shut his eyes and pressed them with his fingertips. “Damn,” he said. “Damn. Just get out of here, okay?”

I sleepwalked the rest of the day with Emil, helping him canvass the residents of Unit 21. A plumber accurately described Nestor Velcea entering the building around 6 P.M. Wednesday. “You notice a guy like that,” he told us. A nine-year-old boy verified the story. Only one gunshot had been heard by the neighbors.

“One shot,” said Emil, as we walked to a bar.

“When there were at least three bullets fired. Two for Stefan and a third into Nestor, who ran down the stairs.”

“Nestor was using a silencer. It’s the only answer.”

“So who shot Nestor?”

Over our silent drink no ideas came to us, and afterward I returned alone to Stefan’s spattered apartment to stare at the terrible walls. After a while, I lay down in Stefan’s bed and tried to sleep. The exhaustion was too much. The ceiling went in and out of darkness as I blinked, but when it went black I saw everything, in pieces. Broken shins and femurs, porridge, beaten faces, and bowls of fish soup. And I saw Stefan’s bleeding forehead and the cracked mirror I shoved him into.

Stefan never really recovered after Daria left him. The reason for the break was a mystery-he’d only said that a man can only get so fat before his woman searches for a thinner man. But what else could he have said? If someone asked why my marriage was crumbling, my answers would have been just as ludicrous. Such things cannot be paraphrased.

I rolled over and forced my face into his pillow. It smelled like him, or I imagined it did. Dirty. The smell of the east, as the Frenchman had said. We stink, and we mutilate one another. The clothes we wear and the words we speak are just masks. We take our revenge because we can’t let the past go. Because in the past we were no better-we ate each other like wild, starving dogs.

Maybe it was then. Maybe later, after I drifted off and woke from uncomfortable dreams about a genius painter who becomes, by way of betrayal, a mad killer. Sometime in that restless night the storyteller in me put it together. Antonin’s rise to fame with the help of Josef Maneck, nearly simultaneous with Nestor’s demise. Nestor, the eccentric who wouldn’t even sign his work. And the things Stefan had fretted over: Josef’s sudden conversion to alcoholism because, as Martin had said, he couldn’t live with himself, and Antonin’s shift into the banality of state art. Then I knew it. I knew, with utter clarity, why Nestor Velcea had killed Josef, Antonin, and Zoia. I knew it in a flash, like a vision from God. It was art. It was all about art.