The Fall of the Stone City (16 page)

Shaqo Mezini seemed about to become a star at the precise moment in his life when it was of no use to him. He had known this instinctively as soon as he heard the radio broadcasts about the
plot, when the newspapers with their banner headlines arrived, and later, as he watched the German investigator striding across the windswept tarmac to the airport building. Later, fame seemed to
draw a little closer every day and came almost within his grasp, as it had on those heady evenings at the Dzerzhinsky Academy. Dozens of his student friends from Berlin to Ulan Bator were no doubt
at the same time investigating the same repellent case. But destiny shone more brightly on him than on anyone else. His dream of becoming the most famous investigator of the socialist camp was
about to become a reality: Shaqo Mezini, the thirty-year-old Albanian sleuth. There would be interviews, meetings with young pioneers and congress delegations. “Comrade Stalin, this is Shaqo
Mezini, who exposed the famous ‘Joint’.” Then Stalin would invite him to supper and perhaps even talk to him tête-à-tête.

His intoxicated imagination stopped short before this climax. He was content to leave the details vague. At times, the scene of another supper threatened to superimpose itself, Christ’s
perhaps. He knew about this from the Bible, which he had read and even underlined in red pencil while investigating Father Foti, the priest of Varosh. But more than anything else he remembered
Gurameto’s dinner, which had started it all. He saw himself present sometimes as the man who was to arrest the mysterious guest and sometimes as this very guest himself, the all-powerful
visitant from the grave.

Don’t give up, he thought. There is still hope.

It was 4 March and Stalin was still alive. Towards dawn they tortured Gurameto again. The operatives were sure he would sign.

The day was overcast with frozen clouds shot through with a deceptive light. The radio carried classical music interspersed with listeners’ letters and statements from meetings of workers
and soldiers. Wishes for a speedy recovery, threats to our enemies.

The verses published in the press all mentioned Stalin’s laboured breathing. Everybody thought he was at his last gasp.

Gurameto’s torture continued till dawn. The investigators no longer waited for anybody’s instructions. Late in the afternoon they searched his house again and seized his gramophone
and records. Among them they found Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”, mentioned in the statements. They played it while the torture continued.

For the prophecy to be fulfilled, the dead colonel’s words had to come true. “‘You’ll hear this music differently.’ Do you remember him saying that?”

Shaqo Mezini rambled as if in a fever. Arian Ciu listened to him impassively, alarmed by his colleague’s recourse to the Bible.

After two hours they both went to the hospital to fetch the surgical instruments that Gurameto had brought from Germany, each one with the initial “G” engraved on it. Arian Ciu did
not need his colleague to explain that they would torture Gurameto with his own tools, to fulfil the other prophecy, seen in his dream, that he would be operated on with his own scalpels.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The news of Stalin’s death was broadcast shortly before noon. Shaqo Mezini was lying half-dressed on his bed after a strenuous night in the Cave of Sanisha when he felt
his mother’s hand touch his shoulder. “Shaqo, Shaqo,” she said in a low voice. “Get up! He’s dead.”

He leaped to his feet, seized first his revolver from the bedhead and then his overcoat, bounded down the stairs in twos and threes and ran out into the street.

“Louder!” he thought, without knowing whom he might be addressing. His feet carried him instinctively to the office of the Interior Ministry. His mind was vacant. Then he realised
that he had been talking to the loudspeaker. It was not blaring as loud as it should, nor did the mountains of Lunxhëria look sufficiently sombre. “Bad news for me,” he
thought.

At the office his heartbeat steadied. All his comrades were there. With bloodshot eyes and without a word, they embraced each other as they arrived, as if at a funeral. He wrapped his arms round
Arian Ciu’s neck and could not suppress a sob.

A hundred yards away the same was happening at the Party Committee. Decorated war veterans, angrily red-eyed, stood in groups in front of the door. Couriers entered the building, only to emerge
with even grimmer expressions than before.

At one o’clock a collective wail from the children went up from the yard of the primary school. Many people could stand it no longer and fled, shutting themselves up in their homes. Others
who had taken to their beds during Stalin’s long illness struggled to rise from them.

That afternoon people gathered in public halls and courtyards to listen together to the radio broadcast of the rally of mourning from the capital. The announcer’s trembling voice described
the scene in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, where the nation’s leaders knelt in front of the dead man’s statue. In a halting voice the Leader swore eternal loyalty on behalf of all
Albanian communists.

Some people fainted and were carried to the hospital. By the post office, Remzi Kadare, roaring drunk, pointed a finger at the emergency entrance. Amid his sobs of despair, he was telling a
story that his listeners took to be about the big event of the day, but was in fact his recollection of the fatal poker game when he had lost his house.

On other streets could be heard the shouts of unfortunate people as they were dragged by the hair to the Interior Ministry, accused of having laughed at the memorial rally instead of crying,
although they swore blind they hadn’t been laughing at all but were as broken-hearted as everybody else. But for some reason their weeping had turned into a snigger. They were beaten all the
harder.

After the rally Shaqo Mezini told his colleague that his legs would not carry him any longer and he was leaving. They could call for him if necessary.

At home he collapsed into a leaden sleep. When he woke up it was dark. He had a momentary sensation of being suspended in a void, above a kind of abyss of grief and fear. Stalin was gone. He no
longer had . . . What else could he have? Speak!

He shook his head, assailed by a cruel and unexpected recollection of the white stomach of his fiancée and the dark regions beneath her garters. He felt a pang at having had so little
chance to savour them.

The pain ripped through his chest and the scream he suppressed was more violent than the one that came from his throat. His idol Stalin was no longer in this world; worse, his enemy Gurameto
still was.

What could be more unjust? Shaqo Mezini shuddered with a strange fear at the prospect of being left alone in this world of sorrows with this monster Gurameto. It was unthinkable. He imagined the
doctor’s cynical smile. “He’s gone, your little father’s gone, he’s left you all.” And his flesh crept again.

No, he thought. Never.

With uncertain steps he left the house. The streets were deserted. A street lamp flickered but refused to die. The Interior Ministry building was in semi-darkness. The guard on night duty looked
at him in pity. In the office he found a note from Arian Ciu, “I’m at home. Call me if anything happens.”

A short time later the two men’s boots were heard, scraping against the cobbles on the street up to the castle. Neither of them spoke; it appeared that first one man and then the other
were sleepwalking. They climbed for a long time, as if through clouds. Shaqo Mezini thought he saw the other man’s boots strike sparks, like the hooves of a horse he had once seen in
childhood struggling to climb the cobbled street.

The iron gates to the Cave of Sanisha creaked dolefully. Gurameto was lying just as they had left him, stretched out on the straw.

Shaqo Mezini touched his knees with the toecap of his boot. “Wake up, Stalin’s dead!” The prisoner’s expression did not change under the pale light of the torch. The
black patches and smears of dried blood gave his face the appearance of a crudely painted mask.

“This makes you laugh, eh?”

The mask did not change. Its expression could mean anything: laughter, grief, entreaty, anger, menace. (“When he heard the news of Stalin’s death, he laughed. Before my very eyes. I
lost it. I couldn’t control myself.”)

The investigator’s eyes wandered from his face to his bandaged hand. (“No, I was not trying to destroy evidence. I didn’t know his fingers had been cut off.”)

Silently he motioned to Arian Ciu and the two started to drag the prisoner by the feet.

The empty handcuff on the prisoner’s right hand clanged as it hit the floor.

“Where’s the other one?” Shaqo Mezini asked.

“Who?”

“The other one, I said. The little doctor.”

“There’s no other doctor.”

Shaqo Mezini stopped in his tracks. His expression had never looked so menacing.

“I mean . . . they’ve been separated for several days, you know.”

Their voices echoed indistinctly in the long vaulted passage. Where? How? Perhaps he was in the next chamber.

The superintendent of the cave joined them.

“He’s been in that room for a while. The young trainees beat him. You know better than I do . . . The first-year intake.”

In each chamber their voices sounded different.

“Maybe he was shot by mistake,” the superintendent continued. “There’s been a lot of confusion in the last few days, believe me.”

Some of the chambers were pitch dark. In one, two points of light danced like cat’s eyes.

“What are those sparks?” asked the investigators.

“It’s Blind Vehip,” the superintendent replied guiltily. “The lads were making fun of him. They stuck phosphorescent stones in his eye sockets.”

“How do they find time for things like that?”

“One of the cave guards was telling me about it. I think they just found this guy,” Arian Ciu said.

“He’s a goner,” the superintendent said, throwing the beam of his torch onto Blind Vehip’s face.

“It doesn’t look like him,” Shaqo Mezini said. “Never mind. Big deal. Put him in that other handcuff.”

“That needs a signature here,” the superintendent said in a voice of entreaty, stretching out a piece of paper.

Shaqo Mezini did not reply. His hands were still occupied.

When he felt the other man tied to his wrist, Dr Gurameto gave the first signs of life. He was trying to say something.

“Don’t get me into trouble, boss,” said the superintendent.

The investigator looked at him with contempt. “Stalin’s dead! Don’t you understand that? It’s chaos everywhere.”

“I know,” the superintendent replied in a sheepish voice. “But what’s a poor man like me to do? Rules are rules.”

They were close to the entrance to the cave, and felt the cold night air.

“Here,” the superintendent said, pointing to a place on the sheet of paper. “‘Reason for prisoner’s removal: visit to crime scene’.”

Much later Big Dr Gurameto’s final hours were reconstructed with considerable accuracy from the record of the autopsy, the two judicial files and the testimonies of
Arian Ciu, the superintendent of the Cave of Sanisha and the driver. The statements of Shaqo Mezini and Blind Vehip were not taken into account because of the confused mental state of both men.

All the facts agreed that towards dawn on 6 March 1953, more precisely at three forty in the morning, the prison car left the yard with five people inside: the two investigators, the driver and
the two prisoners. It passed through the yard and the main gate of the castle and took the road leading out of the city.

For a long time there was silence in the car and the prisoners gave no sign of life. Then the cold night air revived Big Dr Gurameto and he tried to say something. Because of his lack of teeth
his words were indistinct, so nobody paid him any attention. The other prisoner made no sound.

On the highway, when the car passed the cemetery of Vasiliko, Dr Gurameto came to life again. He tried to ask for something, more insistently than before, pointing with his free hand to the
cemetery wall. But still nobody listened to him. A few hundred yards further on, he gestured again. After that, nothing worth noting happened until they reached the sandbank by the river.

The experts went back countless times to the short period when the car sped along this stretch of road but could shed no light on this most mysterious moment of all when Gurameto was trying to
attract attention. All the witnesses reported him making incoherent noises but none of them could offer any explanation.

Of Gurameto’s three attempts to speak, the experts were able to interpret only the first. Probably the first thing that Big Dr Gurameto understood when he came round was that the person
handcuffed to him was not his colleague. Evidently he was trying to say so. “This isn’t the other doctor.” Or, “This man is dead.”

No explanation could be found for his other two efforts to communicate, when he had been even more insistent and almost violent, waving his arm in the direction of the cemetery. The answer to
the mystery seemed to lie in this gesture.

The statements described convincingly and consistently his final moments after the car reached the river at the place known as the Brigand’s Ford. The investigators had pulled the
prisoners out of the car while the driver dug a hole in the sand. They carried both prisoners to the edge of the hole and, although they suspected that one of them had been dead for some time, shot
both several times with their revolvers.

The trial of the two investigators was held towards the end of spring. Shaqo Mezini was sentenced to three and a half months’ imprisonment and Arian Ciu to two and a
half, both for “misuse of office”. The mitigating circumstances of the shock of Stalin’s death and especially their victims’ cynical response to this dreadful news were
decisive in reducing their sentences. Shaqo Mezini, because of his psychological imbalance, completed his sentence in the psychiatric hospital at Vlora, while Arian Ciu served his in the city
prison, not far from the Cave of Sanisha.

Both were later reinstated at the Interior Ministry, but only to work in the uniform section of the Procurement Department rather than the Office of Investigations.