Imre Kertész: Detective Story

The Salinas affair soon intruded itself. Too early, damnably early. At precisely the time when my headaches happened to be at their worst. So it intruded, but nothing could be done about that; I have not been able to escape it since. I have to speak out, therefore, in order to leave behind some testimony before I go … before I am sent on my way. But forget that; it is the last thing on my mind right now. I was always set to do this. Our line of work is hazardous; once you get started, the only way back is to carry on straight ahead, as Diaz was in the habit of saying (you know: the one for whom an APB has been put out, though to no purpose).

Let me see, how did it start? And when? Only now that I am ordering my recollections do I have a sense of how hard it is to remember those early months of the Victory, and it’s hard not just on account of the Salinases. Well, in any event we were already well past Victory Day, that’s for sure, long, long past. The banners over the streets had gradually slackened and drooped, the slogans of the Victory on them were soaked through, the flags had wilted, and the street loudspeakers were hoarse from hammering out martial music.

Yes, that was how I saw it every morning when I crossed town to go from where I lived to the well-known classical palace where the Corps had set up operations. In the evenings I noticed none of this; no, in the evenings all I noticed was my headache.

Things were being made very uncomfortable for us around that time. The honeymoon period was over; the populace was getting jumpy. The Colonel too. On top of everything, we had picked up intelligence about an impending atrocity. We had to prevent that, or at least ought to have, with every available means: our Homeland and the Colonel demanded it of us.

That infernal jumpiness and the associated fluster were at the root of it all. Rodriguez was let loose, and Diaz — the ever-unruffled and ever-soothing Diaz — raised not so much as a peep against him. In point of fact, I had only then begun to see where I was and what I had taken on. As I say, I was still the new boy; up till then I had not done much more than loaf around. I was trying to figure out and enter into the spirit of things in order to be able to do what I had to do. I am an honest flatfoot, I always was, and I take my work seriously. Of course, I was aware that a different yardstick applied here at the Corps, but I thought there was at least a yardstick. Well, there wasn’t, and that was when my headaches started.

Don’t think I’m making excuses; for me it’s now truly neither here nor there. But the fact is, you think you are being very clever in riding events out, and then you find that all you want to know is where the hell they are galloping off to with you.

That Rodriguez worried me most of all. He slowly became a mania with me. I wanted to be clear about him, figure him out, understand him like — yes, like Salinas his son perhaps. In another sense, of course, but with just the same investigative zeal. I say to him one day:

“Hey, Rodriguez, why are you doing that?”

“What?” he asks.

“Don’t play the innocent with me, you bastard,” I say sweetly. “Cut the whats !”

“Oh, that ,” he says, and smiles.

“Listen up,” I continue. “We polish them off, crack down, roll up, interrogate — fair enough, that’s our job. But why do you hate them?”

“Because they’re Jews!” he snaps back. I was so astounded, I all but choked on my cigarette. I suspected that the book he was constantly concealing — it was in his hands right then — had driven him loopy. Was I supposed to believe that Rodriguez could speak English? He had to, since the book was in English, an American edition — one of those nasty contraband goods. There was no way of knowing how he had laid hands on it. Maybe he had confiscated it in the course of a house search. The only word that I understood from the garish title was “Auschwitz,” and that isn’t an English word but the name of a place. I’d heard something about it, of course: it had been a long time ago and also a long way away, somewhere in that scummy Europe, in its eastern half. The hell if I could make out what it had to do with us, and how it entered into things.

“You crackpot!” I say to him. “There can’t be more than a few hundred, or maybe a thousand, in the whole country.”

“I couldn’t care less,” he says. “Anyone who wants something else is Jewish. Otherwise why would he want something else?” I just looked at him dumbfounded. Rodriguez had his logic, and no mistake. But once he had set off on the path of his logic, there was no stopping him. “Why?!” he bellowed in my face. “Why do they resist?”

“Because they’re Jews.” I tried to calm him down. I could see that his blood pressure was starting to rocket. I’d had enough of him. And then, however odd it may seem, what with me being a policeman, a member of the Corps — I was scared of him. His eyes smoldered. Rodriguez had the eyes of a leopard, only for heaven’s sake don’t look on that as any kind of compliment. It’s just that, like those stinking big cats, he had yellow eyes with longish lashes.

My efforts to calm him down were in vain, however.

“Why do they resist?” He grabbed the shirt on my chest. “We want what’s good for them, we want to pluck them out of the filth. We want order for them, so we can be proud of them!” Oh yes, that’s what he said: “so we can be proud of them.” I was just thunderstruck.

“And yet they still don’t want order.” He kept on tugging at my shirt. “They’re still resisting! Why? What for? Why?!”

A tricky question, indeed, as far as I was concerned. Seriously, why? I didn’t know. I still don’t know, not I. To be honest, I wasn’t much interested either. I have never given any thought to motives; I’ve made do with the idea that there are criminals on the one hand and criminal investigators on the other. As far as I was concerned, I belonged to the latter category. In the CID that had been perfectly adequate; any speculations would have been a waste of energy. But with the Corpsmen, of course, it’s different. There you need a philosophy, as Diaz put it, or a moral worldview, as they taught in the training course. I had neither: Rodriguez’s view was not at all to my liking, whereas I didn’t quite grasp Diaz’s.

Maybe Diaz himself didn’t take it seriously. With him you could never be sure. That sounds a little perplexing, what with Diaz being a serious man. Serious and deliberate, not at all the type cut out for wishful thinking. Once he happened to be leafing through some confiscated writings, the usual revolutionary tripe, a cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth, his inimitable smile in the other.

“Idiots!” He suddenly smacked the open palm of one hand down onto the document. “There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution!”

“Dern right!” Rodriguez concurred, with a guffaw.

“Idiot,” Diaz said quietly to him. There was nothing strange about that; it was something he used to say. This time, however, he seemed angry — if Diaz could seem anything at all.

Another time — I no longer recall what prompted it — he declared out of the blue, “The world would look very different if we policemen were to stick together.”

So I said, “But we do stick together, don’t we?”

“Not just here, at home, but throughout the world!” he growled.

“In every state, you mean?”

“I do,” says Diaz, elegantly crossing his legs, rocking his stocky, slightly squat upper body in his armchair, and shrouding his smooth, oily face in an enigmatic cloud of cigar smoke. It was getting into the afternoon; we were just taking a bit of a break, and the mood seemed cordial. At such times, it does one good to chat, even with the boss.