Victory Square by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online

and Ferenc about her adventures photographing Tomiak Pankov, I sat with Bernard at his desk, Sanja on his knee. He fumbled with his daughter’s wispy blond hair and said, “Why are you driving her?”
    “What?”
    “Agi can take the train. You don’t need to bother.”
    “It’ll be nice to get out of the city.”
    “And go see Ferenc?”
    I shrugged in a pretense of stupidity, but I think he knew what I was up to. He also knew why I wasn’t going to discuss it with him. A couple of months after he and Agota married, a man from the Ministry for State Security arrived in the office. He was one of those small, petty clerk-types who sweat a lot. I was on the phone at the time and watched him go to Gavra’s desk, introduce himself, and then ask for Bernard Kovar. Gavra took him over to Bernard’s desk, where the little man congratulated him on his marriage. Bernard, unsure, thanked the man and then acquiesced to a coffee. The three of them were gone for an hour.
    I cornered Bernard that evening. He was scared but wouldn’t tell me what had happened, finally getting angry and telling me to keep to my own business. So, the next day, I cornered Gavra, who was more open. The Ministry was making a deal with Bernard. His father-in-law, Ferenc Kolyeszar, was of particular interest to the security of our socialist Utopia. Perhaps Bernard could share some of his insider knowledge with them, now and then.
    “He said no, right?” I asked Gavra.
    Gavra rocked his head from side to side. “They’ve offered passports for both him and Agota.”
    “So?”
    I was being naive, I know, because they weren’t just offering Bernard and his new wife the freedom to visit other countries; they were also promising not to harass them in the future. So, inevitably, Bernard made the occasional report to Yalta Boulevard. I knew it, Gavra knew it, and even Ferenc knew it, because I told him. Ferenc assured me that he and his son-in-law, despite their mutual annoyance, had come to an agreement. Ferenc wrote Bernard’s reports for him. In exchange, Ferenc promised never to tell Agota what her husband was up to.
    Despite this, I wasn’t going to burden Bernard with information he didn’t need to know.
    “Yeah,” I told him. “It’ll be nice to see Ferenc again.”
    “You think he can help on this case? I mean, the‘Time for a change’part.” He sounded very earnest.
    I took one of his cigarettes. “No. He won’t know a thing.”
    He knew I was lying, but didn’t press the issue.
    When his wife finished with my telephone, I had Bernard carry my box of old files to where I’d parked on Lenin Avenue. I followed with Agota and Sanja, wondering if she really knew nothing about her husband’s Ministry collaborations. At my Mercedes—bought, like everything, with Lena’s family money—Bernard kissed his family good-bye, promising to see them by the weekend.
    We soon reached Victory Square; then a side road put us on Mihai Boulevard, which followed the banks of the Tisa River—”Lifeblood of the Nation,” we liked to call it. The water reflected the gray winter sky, lapping stone ramparts. Recent storms had raised the water level enough to frighten those who lived near the river. Lena and I lived higher up in the Second District and had no fear.
    Many of the Habsburg buildings I remembered from my youth, which had lined the riverbank, had been demolished in the last decade. Tomiak Pankov, a great believer in the shape and look of socialism, returned from a 1978 visit to North Korea with a new vision for the Capital. Some said he was embarrassed by the provinciality of our city and raged whenever he came back from trips to Paris or London, but I’m not sure about that. I think he had a fastidious side to him, something that served him well under our first Great Leader, Mihai, when he was just a simple government bureaucrat in love with efficiency. Once he saw Kim 11 Sung’s rigid and clean society, and Pyongyang’s long, broad