The Confession (15 page)

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.

Petru Salva
called Thursday morning. Perhaps for our benefit, he had attached his Party pin to his lapel and dusted his portrait of Mihai. He held the shoe—cleaned now, and polished—by the heel and the toe as he spoke. “The inquiries have been made, Comrade Inspectors. The verdict is in. Notice this, please.” He turned the toe to face us. “The corners of the leather are uneven. Very sloppy. And this.” He raised it so we could see the bottom of the heel. “Nine nails to hold the heel in place. Wear this shoe for six months, it will fall off. Guaranteed.”

“But where is it from?” asked Emil.

Salva placed the shoe on the counter. “There is a cobbler in the Fifth District. A friend of mine. He has had much experience touring the provinces in order to nationalize the means of shoe production. But provincial cobblers are a notoriously uncooperative bunch, if you get my meaning.” He was smiling again. “My friend has seen this work before—once you see such terrible work, you don’t forget it.”

“Where?” Emil repeated.

Salva’s smile spread. “There were hundreds of possibilities. You see, each village is like a little pompous ego. But my friend—”

“The village,” I said.

His smile went away.

Drebin was an hour out of town, its sign half-buried in the long grass, just past an enthusiastic billboard that said in large red letters:
THE PARTY’S POLICIES EXPRESS THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE WHOLE WORKING NATION
!

It had once been a farming village, then, after collectivization, a tractor factory was built in one of the fallow fields and workers were moved from the Capital to run it. The blocks constructed to house them—two identical concrete towers—overlooked the tin-roofed village homes and Orthodox church. Earlier that day, a rain had turned the white walls gray. Along the main street lay all the stores—bakery, bar, grocer’s, butcher, post office, and cobbler. The tiny cobbler’s workshop was filled with leatherworking tools hanging from hooks. Scraps of leather covered the floor, and the old cobbler sat at a wide wooden table covered with finished shoes. He took off his glasses and smiled toothlessly. “Morning.”

“Morning.”

“What size?” he said, looking at the shoe in my hand.

“We haven’t come for that,” said Emil.

“Repair, then? Here.” He reached for the shoe, and I let him have it. He replaced his glasses as he turned it over. “My work,” he muttered, then tapped the heel on the table and examined it again. “What’s the trouble, then?”

We pulled out our Militia certificates. “Can you tell us who you made that shoe for?”

The cobbler chewed the inside of his mouth.

“We’re trying to identify a dead man,” I said. “He was found in the Capital, but his shoe was from here.”

The cobbler went to a low shelf where some cheap notebooks lay. “In the Capital, huh? Size forty-one,” he muttered, then opened a notebook on the table.

Emil eyed a hand-drawn poster with the shape of a cow’s hide, like the tanner’s sign in the Canal District. I read the labeled sections over his shoulder—
the back, the bend, belly, side and double shoulder
.

“Oh Lord,” said the cobbler. He was shaking his head over his notebook. He checked the shoe again, then went back to the page. His face had lost its color. “Oh poor Beatrice.”

“A woman?” I asked.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his nose. “Beatrice is the boy’s mother. Antonín,” he said. “Antonín Kullmann. That’s whose shoe this is.”

He didn’t
trust us to deliver the news properly, so he closed his shop and led us. He would only say that Antonín 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 Antonín’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. Antonín 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 Antonín.” 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 Antonín 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 Antonín…“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 Antonín became famous.”

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

“I don’t care. My Antonín survived her treachery, that’s all that matters. See that?” She pointed to the marble nude. “Antonín 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 Antonín.”

Then it hit me.
Antonín
: 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.