Yalta Boulevard by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online

said. “Why here? ”
    He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “It’s home.”
    “You realize that everyone in town knows about you.”
    “What about me?”
    “What you do for a living.”
    “What I did for a living.”
    “It doesn’t matter to them. No one here trusts you.”
    “I don’t see why they shouldn’t trust me. My job was only about uncovering the truth.”
    She flicked ash off her cigarette. “Come on, Brano. They don’t want to end up another Tibor Kraus.”
    “Who?”
    “You know. That man from Dukla, the butcher.”
    “I don’t know him.”
    Klara sighed. “It was in The Spark . He’d been using one of those machines for making meat pies. What are they called?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, he adjusted the gears so it made them with an ounce less dough. Then he sold the extra dough on the side. Made some money.”
    “He was caught?”
    She nodded.
    “Good.”
    “He was executed, Brano. Because of meat pies.” She waited, but he didn’t say a thing. “This is what I mean about the villagers here. You scare them. You know you do. Hell, what you did to Father is almost a legend.”
    “I helped him.”
    “You’re the only one who believes that, but it doesn’t matter. You know what they think, and that’s why you never visit. It’s not relaxing to be in a place you’re not welcome.”
    “So I’m not welcome here?”
    “In this house, yes. But in Bóbrka …” She waved the smoldering cigarette in a circular motion and let go of her skirt. “Who knows?” She stood up. “We’ll see you tonight?”
    When he walked back into the village, the eyes that fell upon him had a different effect than they’d had an hour before. He had known he was not welcome, but Klara saying it aloud had made the idea flesh. A mutt behind a fence barked maniacally at him, and in the eyes of passersby he saw not only a lack of welcome but actual hostility. The old women were musing over how to fit him into their wood-burning ovens, and the men were wondering where on his body a shotgun blast would best end his untrustworthy existence.
    The bar in the center was only large enough for three small tables and a short counter. One table was taken up by two old men playing cards on either side of a half-full bottle of rye vodka, and behind the bar a young man with a monobrow beneath his ashy mark bent over a case of Žywiec, counting bottles. Brano waited until he stood up. The recognition flickered and then steadied in the bartender’s eyes. “A beer?”
    “Sure,” said Brano.
    He removed a warm Žywiec from the box, uncapped it, and slid it over, then returned to his counting.
    “And a paper?”
    The man looked up. “What?”
    “Do you have a copy of The Spark? ”
    The bartender took a coffee-stained copy of the day’s paper from behind the counter. “Anything else?”
    The two older men took a break in their game to watch Brano sit on a stool by the lace curtains, sip his beer, and begin to read.
    On the front page, General Secretary Tomiak Pankov looked back at him from behind a podium in a slender suit, his bald head ringed by a thin patch of gray, talking of peace. When Pankov took power a decade ago, his first preoccupied year had been spent purging the Politburo and security apparatus of anyone too loyal to his dead predecessor, Mihai. Brano had survived that purge by sticking close to Colonel Cerny, whose ability at sidestepping the hammer was almost famous. Once his power was secured, Pankov became what he’d always been, a Party bureaucrat who made speeches on industrial levels and agricultural output; he focused on the numbers. But after a heart attack in early 1965, his focus changed, and he reinvented himself as an enlightened man of peace. The Spark reported that twenty-six nations had been present at the most recent international summit, called “The Doves of Peace”—Pankov was not known for his original titles.
    Brano glanced up from the paper and peered out the