Olen Steinhauer - The confession

Georgi woke me by shaking my shoulder. “Telephone.” He was in a thick beige robe that had his initials GR, on the breast. “Your oaf.” I knew then that it was Stefan.

“Magda said to try for you there. You’re no longer sleeping at home?”

“What’s going on?”

“Come see me at Josef Maneck’s apartment. Here’s the address.”

I yawned. “What is this, Stefan? The man killed himself.”

“Just get over here, okay?”

Georgi was frying eggs when I came into the kitchen. “Is the oaf requesting your presence?”

“Shut up, Georgi.” I sat at the table and started filing the playing cards back into their boxes. The empty wine bottles still lined the counter, and every surface was stained by red circles. There was a sour stink in the air. Georgi brought over two plates.

“Want coffee?”

I nodded.

“Then make it yourself, I’m going back to bed.”

I put some water on to boil and searched for the grounds.

“What do you think of Louis?”

There were enough grounds for a few cups. “He’s all right.”

“He told me that things here are looking pretty bad.”

“In what way?”

“Says this won’t last. This thaw.”

“What does he know? He’s a tourist.”

“No, he’s lived here before, and he’s visited a lot.”

“Well, then, he’s a foreigner.”

“Not really-his last name’s Rostek. His grandfather’s one of us, from one of those purges, you know, in the ’teens-if you could afford it, you went to Paris. His opa could afford it.” Georgi brought his empty plate to the sink. “I worry too much in the mornings.”

The water was boiling, so I added the grounds. The froth ran over, hissing on the burner. “Don’t worry so much,” I told him. “And don’t listen to foreigners. They mean well, but they know nothing about our lives.”

He considered that a moment, then got two cups out of the cabinet. “Give me one of those, will you?”

Josef Maneck’s apartment was in the old town, a three-room, high-ceilinged place that had been his father’s. Now it was no one’s. The old furniture was still here, dusty chairs and cabinets and trinkets collected over too long a life. On the walls were faded portraits in ornate frames, and a few empty frames stuffed recklessly behind the sofa.

Stefan was sitting on Maneck’s sunken mattress, reading a book. He showed me the cover-a state edition of poetry by someone I vaguely remembered-before throwing it on the dirty, knotted rug. “Josef liked his verse,” said Stefan. “Pretty uplifting stuff for a suicidal drunk.”

“Someone gave it to him. How long have you been here?”

“I spent the night.”

He leaned forward with his hands on the bed and lifted his weight with a grunt. He passed me on his way to the living room and took a notepad off the coffee table. The top page had been ripped out, but Stefan had rubbed a pencil all over the second page. Not all the scribbled letters were recovered.

A-TO-IN

K-R-5

2-2.-0

“Antonin,” said Stefan. “The rest, I don’t know-address and phone number, maybe. But I’m sure about the name.”

“So he knew someone named Antonin. Does it really matter?”

“It could matter.” His voice was trying to encourage me to believe, with him, that this suicide was more than it seemed. “I’ve been all over the place looking for an address book. Nothing. But I’ll bet that if we can find Antonin, we’ll learn something important.”

I doubted this, but got up with him and handed him his hat from the coffee table.

Cafe-bar #103 had just opened, and the bartender, when he saw us come in, said with sudden, false brightness, “Comrade Inspectors, you’ve returned!” He set two somewhat clean glasses on the counter. “What will it be?”

Stefan climbed onto a stool while I stood beside him. “This Josef Maneck,” he said. “Did you ever see him with other people? Someone named Antonin?”

The bartender’s smile faded. “Not much business lately. Won’t you have a drink?”

“We’ll just take some answers,” said Stefan.

“Give me a coffee,” I told him.

“Coffee? Come on, Comrade Inspector.”

“Palinka,” I said.

He grabbed a bottle of apricot brandy from the shelf behind him. As he poured, he said, “Well,” then corked the bottle and set it beside my glass. “The nut only came in alone. He was that kind.”

“What kind?” asked Stefan.

“A friend of nobody. You know what I mean.” The bartender pushed his eyeglasses up the arch of his nose, then leaned an elbow on the counter. “He came in alone, ordered his drinks quietly, but as he got drunk he ordered them louder, like I couldn’t hear.” He shook his head. “We could all hear him.”

I picked up my brandy. “So he always came in alone.”

“Of course he did. No one would spend time with that guy, except maybe Martin. But Martin only did it for the drinks. Martin will do most anything for a drink. Sometimes I get him to clean up the toilet for a drink, and he does a hell of a good job.”

“But did he ever talk to you?” said Stefan. “About anyone he knew. An Antonin?”

He put away the second, empty glass. “If he ever did, I wasn’t listening.”

The brandy was coarse; it burned my tongue. “What about Martin?”

“What about him?”

“You said Josef Maneck talked to Martin.” I placed some koronas on the counter, more than the drink cost.

He looked at the money. “That’s what I said. But I don’t know what they talked about.” He placed his hand over the coins.

Stefan looked at me, at the drink beside the bartender’s hand, then at the bartender. “Where does this Martin live?”

He slid the coins off the counter. “That, I can tell you.”

Around the corner, down an alley, and through a misaligned side door that did not shut all the way. There was a short, dark entryway that led to a curtain of beads missing half its strings. “Martin?” Stefan called through the beads. “You in there, Martin?”

We heard a horrendous, wrenching cough.

It was an old storage room, with a couple rusted shelves in the corner. I wondered for an instant how someone could end up in a hole like this, in a time of assigned housing. Then I saw Martin on a thin mattress, his back against the stone wall, trying to light a cigarette, but the matches wouldn’t catch. No paperwork, that’s how you ended up here. Lost, or sold for a drink. From a high barred window enough cold light came through to see the cockroaches scurrying from our entrance. Here, beneath the surface of the Capital, lived the lumpenproletariat-or, as The Spark would put it: the underworld criminals, antisocial shirkers and prostitutes. The place stank of feces.

We stayed on our side of the room. “Having a rough morning, Martin?”

Martin’s face was swollen and red-veined. He dropped the matches, then leaned to pick them up again. “You got a light?”

“We’ve got questions, Martin.”

I saw on the rusted shelves his only possessions-a pair of lopsided shoes, a frayed jacket, and an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol. I threw my lighter; it landed beside his bare foot. When his eyes focused, he made something like a grin and took it.

Stefan stepped forward. “Just a few questions.”

He lit the cigarette and drew on it deeply, his whole body rising, then coughed again, lips wet.

Stefan squatted to his level. “Remember your friend, Josef Maneck? He talked to you, didn’t he?”

Martin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took another drag. He nodded, maybe in answer to the question.

“Did Josef tell you about his other friends, Martin? Did he tell you about a friend named Antonin?”