Victory Square (40 page)

The man just wanted to go home; maybe that’s why he went ahead and bought them from me. With four thousand lire in my pocket, I got out.

I spent half the money on a pack of cheap cigarettes from an all-night kiosk and smoked one on the street. It was warmer here, the temperate Adriatic wind full of salt. I walked to a street called Riva Caduti per I’Italianita di Trieste, where, on the other side, a concrete boardwalk ran alongside the black Adriatic. There were no stars out, but I spotted occasional pairs of lovers wandering by. They were pleasant to look at; they helped calm my flailing heart. But over the sound of waves lapping the ramparts, my ears started acting up again, humming. By then, I was sure he’d made it to his room. I returned to the hotel.

The Duchi D’Aosta’s lobby was spare and dimly lit. The rates were listed behind a wood-paneled desk in Italian, English, German, and Russian. The clerk, with his thin black mustache and oiled hair, looked like a cartoon Italian. He turned morosely from a small television, the screen the size of a hand, showing a muted soccer game.
“Mi dica.”

“I’d like a room,” I answered in German.

He seemed as irritated as the taxi driver had been, but he passed over a form for me to fill out. I used the information in my Austrian papers. He gave me a key to the third floor, and I said, “My friend arrived just a few minutes before me. Jerzy Michalec. What room’s he in?”

The clerk seemed to wake up a little. “You two travel light.”

“We’re funny that way.”

“I can call up to his room for you.”

I shook my head. “He’ll be asleep. I won’t knock on his door until he’s rested.”

“It’s against the rules to give out room numbers,” said the clerk, shrugging.

He was waiting for a bribe, but two thousand lire wouldn’t get me anything. I couldn’t even pay for the room. I leaned against the counter. “Can you at least tell me the floor?”

He sagged a little, realizing he wasn’t going to get anything out of me. He glanced at the game on the television and said, “Same as yours.”

I wasn’t rested enough; I knew this. And despite the shower at Brano’s house, I stank, and wanted another one. In the stairwell I prepared myself anyway. I took out the Walther.

After my fiasco at the Vienna airport, I was left with three rounds in the magazine, one in the breech. I paused at my door, number 312, checked to be sure the corridor was empty, and walked slowly past the other rooms, listening. Halfway down, on the left, at room 305,I heard it. My language, spoken softly into a telephone. It was loud enough for me to recognize the rhythm and inflection but too quiet to make out the words.

For a moment I stood there, inches from the door, staring. There was a small, bright spy hole in the middle of it. I wondered if he would check it before opening the door. Of course he would. I couldn’t just knock and wait for him to let me in.

I looked at the handle—a simple but effective lock. In movies, you always see men enter a locked room by firing a bullet into the lock. I’ve never seen it work in real life.

I heard him hang up the telephone, and then there was silence.

I returned to 312 at the end of the corridor and washed my face and hands and stripped off my dirty coat, leaving on my wrinkled blazer. My pulse raced, bringing on another headache, so I took my last two Captopril and tossed the empty bottle into the wastebasket. More than the money, this was the one sure sign I couldn’t go back.

The bed was alluring, but if I sat on it, I wouldn’t get up again. So I paced, walking to the high window that looked out on the narrow, dark Via Mercato Vecchio, trying to figure this out.

Then it occurred to me.

It was one in the morning when I called down to the lobby. The grumpy clerk said, “Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta.”

“Sorry to bother you,” I said in German. “I was just down there. Can you connect me to my friend’s room?”

The clerk didn’t bother replying. I just heard the
brr brr
of the phone ringing.
“Da?”
Michalec said abruptly.

I couldn’t find any air. It was the first time in forty years that I’d heard his voice, but there was something to that single syllable that reminded me of all the empty words he’d spoken to me in 1948.

“Yes?” he repeated, in English.

“Jerzy,” I said, and there was silence on his end. Perhaps he recognized my voice as well. I said, “Jerzy, you’re finished. I’m on the train behind you. We just stopped at Udine. I thought I’d give you fair warning. The kind of warning you never gave my wife.”

Though the words came out well enough, my tongue felt bloated and my cheeks were hot. But I knew he’d believe it. He would believe that I, like most everyone in our country, wanted to show how morally superior I was.

“Mr. Brod,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think you had it in you. How did you find me?”

“I’m clever.”

So you are.

“The conductor’s calling,” I said. “See you soon.” I hung up.

He didn’t come out immediately. Jerzy believed he had about two hours until my arrival, so he would use that time wisely. I stood to the left of his door, where it was hinged to the frame, and listened to him making telephone calls. He was louder now, but that wasn’t panic; he only needed to make himself heard and understood. “How fast can you get a plane to Trieste? Okay. Direct to the Capital. I have to leave this phone within the hour. Right… right.”

I wondered whom he was talking to. Perhaps his son, or some Italian collaborator, or a Parisian friend. It didn’t matter.

As I waited, a drunk couple appeared at the end of the hallway,laughing. I tried not to look at them, but I was a peculiar sight: a bald, disheveled-looking elderly man standing beside a door, one hand stuffed tight into his blazer pocket. The man said, “Hey,” and I gave a brief smile. The girl opened her mouth, but I cut her off by crossing a finger over my lips, giving off a quiet
shh.
I pointed at the door and pantomimed surprising a good friend. The woman
ahh’d
and nodded; the man snickered. They went to their room a couple of doors away, and soon afterward I heard them having loud sex.

Then Michalec’s door clicked as he unlocked it and paused to look out the spy hole. I was out of its range. I removed the Walther from my pocket as the door started to open, then threw my shoulder into it with all my weight. There was resistance as he flailed on the other side, but he fell back. I pushed through, stumbled, and fell heavily on top of him. My shoulder hurt. I kicked blindly until the door slammed shut.

This close, in the dim light streaming in from the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, I couldn’t see the man under me. I could only smell him. He was scented heavily, probably something from France. I don’t know. I never asked.

As I raised myself from his chest, I heard him gasping for breath. I got to my knees, the pistol aimed, as my eyes adjusted. He wasn’t even trying to fight back. He just rubbed his face, took a long, phlegmy breath, then looked up at me, squinting. “Is that you, Brod?”

I almost couldn’t get to my feet; my knees hurt that much. “Yes.”

He rubbed his face again. “Wow. I never even suspected. You’ve changed.”

The real surprise for me was that he was unarmed. I expected to have to fight a pistol out of his hand, or quick-draw him before he got a chance to kill me, but during his years in France, he’d learned to put his safety in the hands of other people. Maybe that’s what living in the West did to people. Living in the East, one never felt that way.

I could see him better now, but the shadows on his face were deep. After locking the door, I turned on the overhead light. He blinked, shielding his eyes.

With age, anything can happen to a face. It can widen or narrow, showing off the skull inside; it can fatten like a plum or map out the torments of poorly lived decades. I seemed to find all those changes in Michalec’s face. I saw the deep purple creases under the eyes that pointed to heavy years, and the gauntness below the cheekbones, left over from years in a work camp. But he’d fattened along the jaw and neck, evidence of rich French food and too much influence, and his high forehead, still rimmed with white stubble, was creased like a worrier’s. He had the dark eyes of someone who’d seen more than anyone should have to.

All this came to me very quickly, in about a second of staring, and I suppose that all my interpretations were wrong. But again, it didn’t matter. I was here, he was here, and it was time.

Get up.

“Oh-kay,” he said slowly, with the kind of calm you use on very stupid people who might not know what to do with the gun they’re pointing at you. He propped himself up on his elbows, then rolled facedown and got up to his knees, facing away from me. As if realizing how it looked, like the executions we’d all seen in Italian and American gangster movies, he snatched at the bathroom door handle and pulled himself to his feet.

“The bed,” I told him and watched him move slowly toward it; just beyond, the lights of the square poured in. All my pains were coming into focus: my shoulder, knees, head, and heart. I tried to ignore them.

“Should I sit?” asked Michalec.

That’s when I heard it—the cocky tone I remembered from decades ago, the one that once plagued my dreams. He’d had plenty of years to cultivate his confidence. I wondered if he’d ever found himself in this situation before.

Since I didn’t answer, he sat anyway, turning to face me again. The bed creaked beneath him; he wasn’t the kind of elderly person whose body withered away.

“Just do it, Brod. I don’t want to have to listen to your explanations.”

“You might have to.”

“Well, make it quick.”

I almost smiled. He spoke as if he were holding the gun. I checked my watch—it was a little after two in the morning.

Despite having imagined this moment in the Capital, then in Ti-sakarad and Sarospatak, and again in Vienna, I never pictured it here, at the southern tip of Churchill’s famous Curtain, with my head throbbing. I cut off the overhead light to ease my pain. Everything dimmed.

“You know, Brod, this isn’t like you. I’ve kept up with your career from a distance. You’ve lived the life you were supposed to live. A Militia chief, a wife, no children—because you’re busy enough fathering your militiamen. You protect the rules. You don’t break them.”

“I’ve already broken a lot of them,” I said, looking at the high French windows and the wet lights outside.

He didn’t fill in the silence that followed, though I’m sure his mind was working hard, thinking up ways to stop me.

I was sweating, so I opened the window. I turned back quickly when I heard movement but was disappointed to see he’d only pulled himself farther onto the bed to lean on the headboard. That’s when I knew what I wanted from him. I wanted something to make this less cold-blooded. I wanted him to reach for a gun or a knife, or throw a distracting pillow, so I’d have some justification for putting a bullet in him. But Jerzy had always been able to read people. Like his son, he knew how to give them what they didn’t want.

I pulled up a flimsy desk chair and arranged it at the foot of the bed. I sat down and crossed my knees in an expression of ease, the pistol steady against my thigh, but all the blood in my body was swollen and sore, making me shiver. I said, “There are some things I don’t understand.”

“Like what, Emil?”

He’d finally used my first name, a touch of mockery. “All this. The killings. You’d already changed the files. Did you really think that people who knew about your past would be able to prove a thing?”

He cocked his head, and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he took a breath. “Emil, I don’t know what to think, not really. In the West, I wouldn’t have to worry. Every day, someone comes out of the woodwork to accuse politicians of fraud, of fathering their babies, of raping women, of snorting cocaine. Whatever. It’s all just background noise there. No one takes it seriously until it’s backed up by evidence. But the East is different. We’ve spent the last century being told lies. We all knew they were lies, so we started coming up with our own truths. We didn’t have the information to back up our truths, but we believed them anyway, because that’s all we had. It was a choice between official lies or unofficial rumors.” He shrugged; he’d obviously explained this to someone before. “Now, we’re suddenly handed democracy on a plate. How will anyone know what to believe and what not to believe? Our people have no practice separating rumors from facts.”

“But
why7.”
I insisted. “You had a good life in France, I’m sure. Why risk it by coming back?”

He examined his fingernails, which in the dimness he couldn’t have been able to see well. “Emil, you’ve got to let go of the past. You’re not the same man you were in forty-eight—clearly you’re not—and I’m not the same man either. I was. For a long time I was. But then, things happened that changed me.”

“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “Rosta.”

He pointed at me. “Exactly. You wouldn’t know this, but fatherhood changes you. Suddenly, without warning, you’re no longer the center of the known universe. I’d already arranged my escape to the West. I knew the right people, and, more importantly, I’d used my surveillance work to collect information about those people— information they’d rather keep quiet. I was still the center of my universe, with plenty of blackmail material to protect me. Then I heard that an old friend had died. I decided to stop in at her funeral. And there was Rosta.” He coughed into his fist. “You may not believe it, Emil, but I actually do believe in democracy and all that stuff. But I believe in the right democracy. You can’t elevate peasants to statesmen and expect a country to prosper. You have to keep those with experience in the right places, to make sure it doesn’t fall apart, and you have to bring in new blood that’s been educated in the West.”