Olen Steinhauer - The confession

“Ferenc?”

“I’m here.”

“Can you…”

“Can I what?”

“Can you forgive me?”

I hadn’t thought of that before. There had been no reason to. All I’d known was that my wife was leaving me, and that there was no decision to make. I could either accept it or go crazy. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You’re right. We can talk about it later.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Dad has a key to the cooperative office.”

“Oh.”

“Goddamn.”

“What?”

“Do you have a number where I can reach him?”

“I’ll get him to call you. How about that?”

“Thank you.” Then she started to cry again.

I wondered afterward if it had been a dream. Almost two in the morning-it seemed impossible that this had just happened. There was no evidence, except the sweat on my palm.

I showed up at ten the next morning under a clear sky, and as Leonek left I told him to call Magda. He stopped at the door. “Magda? You want me to call her?”

“She’s been trying to get in touch with you. I’ll give you the number she’s at.”

He held up a hand. “I’ve got it. See you at noon tomorrow.”

I had brought coffee and rolls, and as we ate, Louis said he would write an epic poem about this. “It’s quite a story, isn’t it? I mean, are the paintings any more or less valuable because they’ve got the wrong signature on them? I wonder what the galleries in Paris would say.”

He was talking again the way I remembered him. “Does it matter, Louis?”

“Sure it matters.” He brushed crumbs off his shirt. “Though Antonin didn’t send Nestor to the camp for his paintings, he could have. So is a painting as valuable as a man’s life? For that matter, is anything as valuable as a man’s life? Or is everything that valuable?”

I wasn’t in the mood to listen to this. It made me wonder what was equal to Malik Woznica’s life, and I didn’t want to think about that.

“What do you say, Ferenc?”

“I don’t say anything.”

Louis grunted. “You were more engaging at Georgi’s party. Maybe we need to get you drunk.”

“Did you know Georgi was interrogated at Yalta Boulevard?”

Louis’s smile faded, and he gave a sharp nod. “I heard.”

“What if he didn’t come back? Would you still be asking if a painting was as valuable as a man’s life?”

Louis patted the air. “Point taken. No more, okay?”

I finished my coffee.

“Tell me about those, then.” He nodded at my hand. “You never told me about those rings before. It’s a lot for any one man.”

I flexed my fingers. “They’re from the war.”

“Most people get medals.”

“Well,” I said, then touched the one on my left index finger. “This one belonged to Friedrich Schultz, captain second-class. He was born in Hamburg in 1915. I killed him on 28 April 1939.”

Louis leaned back. “You- all of them are from Germans you’ve killed?”

I nodded at my hand, touching Hans Lieblich, Franz Muller and Heinrich Oldenburg. “Except this,” I said, and touched my wedding band, which had its own story.

“Forgive me, Ferenc, but that’s pretty morbid.”

I crushed my coffee cup. “Sometimes I need the reminder that I won’t live forever.”

We shared the bed that night and I lay on my back, hands on my chest, staring at the ceiling. I wanted to be home in case she called again. I wanted to hear her voice. I was sick of this world of men who loved revenge and other men’s wives. I didn’t want to puzzle through bloodstained walls or the shallowness of love. But it strikes me now that that is the only world there is, and all I wanted to do was lie and dream.

In the morning, I called the front desk for more coffee, and as we drank it I said to him, “You were an informer, weren’t you?”

He looked up from his cup. “What?”

“After the war, when you came here. You informed on your friends.”

“What makes you say that?”

“When you found out Nestor had been sent away, you went directly to Yalta Boulevard. Most people would go to the Militia office and file a complaint. But not you. You went to the heart of state security and demanded your friend be released. Georgi said you were tough, but you’re smart, too. You wouldn’t walk into Yalta Boulevard unless you thought you had some pull with the people inside.”

“I,” he began, then set his coffee on the bedside table. “I knew they wouldn’t do anything to a French citizen.”

I shook my head. “A lot of spies were being arrested back then, a lot of foreigners. And I’ve never heard of a foreigner, other than a Russian, being allowed in there. No. You knew someone at Yalta, and thought that because of your services you could get your friend out. He wasn’t political, after all, and you thought they would trust you. So you went directly to the Office of Internal Corrections. But you were wrong. They wouldn’t even see you, would they?”

Louis got up and took his tie from a door handle. He put it around his neck and began to knot it. “They made me wait in the front room for two hours. I left them my name, and periodically went to the desk to ask what was going on, but they told me nothing. I had to give up.”

“Who were you going to see?”

“Just the office. I only knew the field operatives I’d meet in the parks around town. I’d never been in Yalta Boulevard before.”

I looked out the window to the busy street. “And when Nestor was picked up, he was waiting in the train station to meet you.”

“But I didn’t show up,” he said, fixing his tie in the mirror. “I couldn’t get past Hungary.”

“You told Yalta Boulevard that you were coming. They knew, didn’t they?”

He left his tie alone and turned to me. “Yes.”

“And when you came back last September you talked to them once more. You gave them a description of Nestor for their files, and used the code name ‘Napoleon.’”

He looked at me, his mouth chewing air, and I felt close to something big. The Office of Internal Corrections had stalled Louis when he came to plead for Nestor a decade ago. It was the one office that knew when he would come to meet Nestor in the train station, and it also had the power to stop Louis at the Hungarian border. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Leonek.”

“Oh,” he said. Then: “I talked to Magda.”

“What did she want?”

“You know damn well what she wanted.”

“We’ll talk about it later. Before you come over here, try and get hold of some files-Brano’s and Kaminski’s. They should be over at the Central Committee.”

“Kaminski?”

“He’s been out sick,” I said, but didn’t elaborate on my suspicions.

He arrived early, while Louis was in the bathroom. He hadn’t gotten any sleep, and it showed in his red-rimmed eyes and slack mouth as he handed over the file. He seemed to be laboring over the words before they came out: “I’m still shaken up about this.”

“The files?”

“No.”

I took out two cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head.

“I don’t know exactly what to say.”

I took the files to the bed and settled down. “There’s nothing to say.”

His eyes were focused on nothing in particular. “Maybe not. I wasn’t lying before. I love her. I love them both. I always will. But if she’s made her decision, then it’s done.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“Can I have that cigarette?”

I lit it for him.

Because of the nature of their work, both men’s files were minimal: Yalta Boulevard would store the details of their own men. These files contained a brief biography, photos, associations, and a page that listed assignments. Brano’s assignment had been our own Militia office for the last decade, but Kaminski’s listings gave me pause: Chief of the Office of Internal Corrections of the Ministry for State Security, March 1946 to December 1948.