The Confession by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online Page B

been drifting apart for a long time. “This is a load of crap,” I said.
    He started nodding very quickly, his second chin quivering. “Crap is right, Ferenc. You’ve crapped on our friendship for a long time. You’ve crapped on me. And now I’m going to crap on your future. Are you ready?”
    I didn’t know how to get ready.
    “When you were at the Front,” he said, “I slept with Magda. I had sex with your wife, and I wouldn’t trade that single night for anything in this world.” He tapped his head. “I keep it up here always. Why do you think I was so eager to get you this job? Misplaced goddamned guilt. I still valued our friendship. But I had your wife in your own bed, and I hope that knowing this ruins what little joy you still feel when you look at her.”
    He stood rigidly on the steps, his chin up, waiting. He was expecting what I would have expected: a fist. His resolution fluctuated as I watched him, his eyes blinked, his nostrils flared as he breathed loudly, the sweat now coursing past his ears, but I did not move. I wanted to. I wanted to throw myself on him and break his bones. I wanted my fist, with each of its five rings and a story for each, to crush him. It would have been an easy thing. But I just looked at him, then past him, to where the city kept moving along the narrow street, pedestrians and automobiles and a few horses pulling emptied, dirty carts.
    “Well then,” I heard him say. He took a step farther down, nodded briefly, and joined the traffic down below.

17
     

     
    I don’t know why I didn’t hit him. He would have respected me for it. But the anger wasn’t upon me yet—it was only shock. Maybe it was simply the residue of our decades of friendship, and that for a long time he had been so good to me—because of guilt or some other weakness. Or maybe I knew he was right: Ever since the book had come out I’d stopped calling him, stopped working to maintain our friendship.
    I went back into the station, where Leonek and Emil and Brano were standing around Brano’s desk again. Kaminski was talking, and they were all smoking, a soft cloud hovering above their heads. My phone was ringing.
    “Daddy?”
    “Yes,” I said, for a moment unsure who it was. “Yes?”
    “Mother wants to know—”
    “What does she want to know?”
    “When you’ll be over for dinner. With this friend of yours. That’s how she said it— that friend of his .”
    My watch took a second to focus. “Tell her seven. We’ll be there at seven.”
    “Daddy?”
    “Yes?”
    “This friend of yours, he’s a cute one?”
    It was a joke, I knew, but I couldn’t rise to it. “I’ll see you at seven.”
    “Here,” said Kaminski, as I approached. He held out a cigarette. I took it, noticing the small pin on his lapel. A red rippled flag. “I was telling the guys about the Komsomol.”
    “The youth brigades?” I asked. I didn’t care what he was talking about. I just wanted some noise.
    “You know them,” he said. Everyone knew about the Komsomol. Even The Spark carried articles of their industrious exploits in unclaimed regions on the other side of the Empire. “I went to the virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan after my years here, to help farm. Such good soil. Terrible climate, but what soil!” He held his gangly hands out, palms up. “You know what it’s like to work with your hands like that? It’s a dream. That’s what it is. I coordinated the work, and I ate with these fine young people in the fields, then we all went back to work, such hard work, and at night we ate around a campfire and sang revolutionary songs. You have to imagine it if you weren’t there. Fifty, a hundred passionate young people singing songs about their hopes and dreams for the future. No, I don’t think you can imagine it.” He shook his head. “Over here, maybe it’s different. But in the Motherland, we’re in this together. We build everything from nothing. That’s socialism. It’s the collective