The Confession (29 page)

It lay
on the left-hand side of the dusty road, in a flat expanse of harvested wheatfield. The watchtowers were visible first—five wooden columns connected at their bases by barbed wire—and inside lay five long, low buildings. It was as basic as you could imagine, no signs, no indication of purpose. The towers were empty, but when I turned off the road and took a gravel path to the front gate, a guard in a heavy coat wandered out to meet me, patting his arms. He opened the gate and stuck his head in my window. “What can I do for you?”

His rancid breath quickly filled the car. His teeth were like over-thickened fingernails. “I’m here to talk with the commander.”

He looked around the inside of the car. “Are you from Yalta Boulevard?”

“I’m from Militia headquarters. This is part of an investigation.”

He licked his discolored teeth and inhaled deeply. I braced myself for the exhale. “Mind if I see some evidence?”

After I showed him my Militia certificate he waved me inside, closed the gate, and pointed to a space between two buildings. He walked me down to the back of the camp, where a muddy field opened up. In the far corner, beside another gate leading out of the camp, was a small building with a smoking chimney and a telephone cable connecting its roof to a tower. That, the guard pointed out, was the commander’s office.

I walked the rest of the way alone. The guard was the only person I’d seen, and the long buildings, which I assumed were used to house prisoners, were silent and, I also assumed, empty.

There was a muddy window on each side of the front door, and before I knocked I tried unsuccessfully to see inside.

“Enter,”
came an unpleasant voice. For a moment I was confused.

Like Moska, the commander sat in a dim room at a disorganized desk surrounded by stacks of files. Some open steel cabinets revealed piles of letters that had been read and stored there. Against the back wall and beside a sooty Mihai, a small iron stove burned, its open grille revealing a few half-consumed papers on the coals. The commander was bald and surprisingly short—his jacket and slacks were too large on him. When he introduced himself as Comrade Captain Gregor Kaganovich, it was with a voice dirtied from a lifetime of cigarettes and shouting. A coal drawing of the captain hung on the wall—well-done, but severely romanticized.

“I’ve come to ask some questions relating to a case I’m working on.” I handed over my certificate.

He slipped on a pair of round glasses, turned the certificate in the weak light from the window, then handed it back. “What kind of case are we talking about?”

“A homicide.”

“One of my pets get killed?”

“One of them is doing some killing.”

He clucked his tongue, as though we were talking about one of his own children. “I’ve heard of this happening before. Some wolves just can’t help but follow their instincts. You can beat them as much as you like, but they can’t be domesticated. Some coffee?”

“I’m interested in a particular one. Nestor Velcea.”

He looked at me as he poured a cup, but I couldn’t catch his expression. “No, I’m afraid I can’t remember all my pets. But look around,” he said, waving at the files. “There’s bound to be something.” He handed me the cup and squatted among some stacks. “I tell you, the Comrade Prime Minister could have given us a little
warning
over this Amnesty, if you know what I mean.” His fingers flipped through the files at an alarming speed.

“No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, he announces it, and the next day—not in a week, not a month, but
the next day
—all my boys are out of a job. A lot of them are from the other side of the country, and were transferred here when we needed them. And we
did
need them. Then one day they weren’t needed.”

“Then they get transferred somewhere else.”

“That’s what you’d think, wouldn’t you?” He lifted a file to the light, opened it, then shook his head and closed it. “It wasn’t until the end of the summer they realized they hadn’t followed through on that small point. That’s a lot of men to suddenly transfer. My guess, though, is that they just didn’t know if they’d change their minds and need the boys all over again.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

He stopped searching and turned to me. “By the end of the summer they had put through transfers for all the camp guards throughout the region. But nothing for our camp. So I made calls, and after weeks of this, finally got some answers. Number four-eighty is going to reopen in the spring.” He smiled.

“So what are you doing in the meantime?”

“I’m cleaning up the old files to make room for new ones. But my boys, they’re the ones in a tough spot. They have to wait around in that hole they call a town until spring.”

“What kind of work did they do here?”

“The guards?”

“The prisoners.”

He tilted his head from side to side. “Everything, really. We’d take them into town to build things—you’ve seen the Hotel Elegant?”

“Yes.”

“Our work,” he said, tapping his chest. “We have them farm the wheat around the camp, and during the winter they work the gravel up at Work Site Number One.”

“The gravel?”

“Sure. About two miles away there’s a quarry, and my pets bash it to hell. But I’ve got some better ideas up my sleeve for when they return. Some
digging
.” He raised his eyebrows.

As he leafed through the files, I nodded at the cabinet of letters. “Mail from your admirers?”

He looked confused, then the smile came back. “Oh
those!
No. Just letters my pets wrote while we put them up. To the family and that sort of thing. Want to read some?”

I didn’t.

Velcea’s incarceration file was interesting. I had my own theory about how things had unfolded, but this at least settled a few facts. On 17 February 1947, an anonymous call to Yalta Boulevard reported that Nestor Velcea, a painter, had been seen handing out an underground broadside called
Independence
. On 25 February, a handwritten letter arrived at Yalta Boulevard, unsigned, claiming that one Nestor Velcea had been overheard at a party criticizing Comrade Mihai’s foreign policy initiatives in particularly disturbing and violent terms. Then, on 1 March, another call came through. This one said that Nestor Velcea would, on the evening of 3 March, go to the central rail station to meet with an agent of foreign imperialism in order to give away sensitive national information.

Armed with this knowledge, state security agents waited in the station on 3 March. According to the report, Nestor Velcea arrived at 7:12
P.M.
and sat on one of the benches near the ticket windows. He did not purchase a ticket, and he regularly looked around at arriving passengers. At a quarter to eight, he got up to leave, and that’s when he was arrested.

The rest of the file contained signed transfer documents and arrest paperwork, and some reports on his behavior in the camp over his ten years. Other than various instances of falling ill, his behavior had been exemplary. The final sheet was his amnesty certificate, a form letter with his name scribbled in a blank space, signed and stamped by the camp commander sitting across from me.

“So what does this tell you, Comrade Inspector? If I can ask.”

The file told me that Antonín Kullmann had framed Nestor in as methodical and precise a way as he kept his old letters. “Not a lot. I was told he’s missing a finger, that it was cut off by a guard.”

He winked at me. “They like to spread stories. It gives them a thrill.”

“What do you remember about him?”

“I’ve had a lot of pets here, it’s hard to remember the quiet ones. The ones you remember are the ones who shout all the time, and keep returning to this office for their reprimands.”

“It looks like Nestor was all right, then.”

The captain shook his head. “None of them is all right, Comrade. And what he’s done on the outside just proves it.”

I took my hat from his desk and stood up. “Thank you, then.”

When we shook hands he held on to mine a little longer. “You get him, now. Make sure you get him alive so we can have him back.”

“You want him back here?”

“I’ll make up a bunk for him today. I like to have all my pets back at home…who wouldn’t?” Then he frowned. “Hey—you didn’t touch your coffee!”

It was
only four, but I needed a drink. I’d heard enough about the work camps to know I had walked across soil with a heavy blood content and had talked to one of the most brutal sons of bitches that state security could find—because that’s who you put in charge of work camps, the ones who could stomach it.

Along the road to the center there were more bars than anything else, so I parked and entered one at random. Young men leaned against high tables and cupped their shot glasses with thick fingers. The bartender smiled thinly at me. “You need a coffee?”

“Palinka.”

He poured it and looked me up and down. “You one of the new ones?”

“The new what?”

“You know. The new guards.”

I sipped my drink. “New guards? I heard there were plenty already.”

He leaned close so he could whisper. “That’s the word. New guards are being shipped in any day now. What are these boys going to do?” He nodded at the drinkers. “They’ve waited long enough as it is.”

“Well, I’m not one of them.”

“That’s good for you,” he said with a wink.

I leaned on a free table and gazed at the photographs that covered the wall. Shots of “old Vátrina.” The only difference between old and new Vátrina, the photos told me, was the Hotel Elegant, and the camp.

A thick man with a close-shaved head set his drink next to mine and looked up at the photos, as if unaware of my presence. The back of his neck was swollen with wrinkles where his excess flesh had collected, and his puffy cheeks were riddled with gray pockmarks and stubble. “You come in from the Capital?” he asked the wall.

“Yeah.”

“Horia says you’re not a guard.”

Horia watched us from behind the bar. “That’s true.”

“It’s all right if you are,” he said to a photograph of a woman and a horse in front of the feed store. “We’re not vindictive here. Everyone’s in the same boat.”

“I’m still not one.”

“Then what are you?” He turned to look at me. His eyes were light blue, and below one of them was a scar.

I said it before I could think it over: “I’m a writer.”

“What do you write?”

“Novels.”

“You mean, stories you make up?”

“That’s it.”

He considered this as he finished his shot, walked back to the bar, and returned with two more. He put one in front of me.

We raised our glasses to each other.

“So why aren’t you in some café in the Capital right now? Why are you on the stinking edge of the world?”

“Research.”

“Working on a story about
this
town?”

“About the camp.”

His mouth opened, but then he closed it. He noticed someone at another table. “Hey, Krany!” A little dark-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth looked up. “Krany, come over here.”

Krany sauntered over with his glass and leaned on our table without looking at me.

“This guy wants to know about the camp. He’s a writer.”

Krany put out his cigarette and frowned at the lingering smoke. “Why’re you writing about that, Comrade?”

“Because somebody’s got to.”

The thick one nodded his agreement, but Krany still wasn’t convinced. “What are you going to say about the camp?”

“I’ll know when I learn more.”

“You some scaremonger who’s going to say we’re a bunch of thugs who like beating up on people?”

“Are you?”

He smiled then, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I offered them to the guards and left the pack on the table.

Krany, it turned out, was primarily a tower man. He had spent his days, summer and winter, up in one of the boxes overlooking the camp and the farmland surrounding it. He was one of the best shots in the camp, and once killed an escapee from a distance of five hundred yards (though his friend disputed that figure). “And he went down. I wanted to get his leg, just stop him, but it ended up going through his head.” He took another of my cigarettes.

The first guard’s name was Filip. He worked down in the mud with the prisoners. Each morning he would herd them out of their cots and march them to the quarry. “It was all about following orders,” he told me. “They were ordered to walk, and if they didn’t, we would hit them. Usually in the stomach and chest, because we didn’t want to break their legs.”

“Come on, Filip,” said Krany. “You broke some legs. I could see you just fine.”

“So you get carried away.”

“It was easier up in the tower. You didn’t have to smell them, you didn’t have to do that kind of work.”

I bought another round and asked if they knew Nestor Velcea. Krany shook his head, but Filip thought it over. “A small guy? What was he…an artist?”

“That’s the one.”

“Sure, I knew him. An okay kid. He thought we didn’t know about all those charcoal drawings he did. But when prisoners clean up a wall, you notice. The wall’s dirty already, and then you’ve got this big clean spot.” He smiled grimly. “Some of them were real idiots.”

Krany nodded. “Yeah, the artist. The one who did Gogu’s portrait.”

“Who’s Gogu?”

“The commander,” said Filip, and I remembered the portrait on the captain’s wall.

I passed out cigarettes, emptying the pack. “But Gogu said he didn’t remember Nestor. Does that make any sense?”

“Of course he remembers Nestor,” said Filip.

“He was pulling your leg,” said Krany. “He damn well knows who Nestor is.”

“But there were a lot of prisoners. Why would he remember Nestor?”

Krany looked at Filip, as if asking something. Filip shrugged. “What does it matter?”

Krany turned back to me. “Last spring, this gray Citroën comes up to the gate. Cosmin checks it, but the driver doesn’t have the right paperwork to come inside.”

“Who’s Cosmin?”

“No one. Another guard. Pay attention, okay?”

I nodded.

“So Cosmin won’t let him inside. And this guy gets out—a big guy, kind of oily hair—and starts shouting for Nestor through the fence. Only it’s daytime, and all the prisoners are off at Work Site Number One. He was a foreigner, maybe he didn’t know any better. So he’s shouting to an empty prison.”

“What kind of foreigner?”

“Don’t know,” said Krany. “But you could tell there was an accent. What a hothead he was. Finally, Gogu had to come out and deal with him.”

“I heard about it that evening,” said Filip.

“We all heard about it,” said Krany. “And this is why Gogu will swear he doesn’t know Nestor. Because the foreigner bribed him with a stack of koronas the size of my fist. Gogu tried to cover it up, he told him to put it away, and they went back to the office to take care of it. But we all saw it. Bribing’s no big deal, just as long as you keep it quiet.”

“So what happened?”

Filip said, “I brought Nestor back from the work site and into Gogu’s office. Gogu stepped outside for a few minutes to leave them alone. Then Nestor went back to work, and the foreigner left.”

“But—what was it about? What did he want?”

Filip finally lit the cigarette I’d given him. “No one knows. We asked Gogu, and he told us to keep out of his business unless we wanted to end up as one of his pets.”

“And Nestor, too,” said Krany. “He wouldn’t say a word, would he, Filip?”

“Not a word. I punched him a few times because I was so curious, but the lump just wouldn’t speak.”