فصل پنجاه و هشتم

Book three.

I’d yield me to the Devil instantly, Did it not happen that myself am he!

—J. W. VON GOETHE: Faust: A Tragedy

58

IT SEEMED TO SVENKA that Dortlich’s father was never going to die. The old man breathed and breathed, two years of breathing while the coffin draped with a tarpaulin waited on sawhorses in Svenka’s cramped apartment. It took up most of the parlor. This occasioned a lot of griping by the woman living with Svenka, who pointed out that the coffin’s rounded top prevented its use even as a sideboard. After a few months she began to keep in the coffin contraband canned goods Svenka extorted from people returning from Helsinki on the ferries.

In the two years of Joseph Stalin’s murderous purges, three of Svenka’s fellow officers were shot and a fourth was hanged in Lubyanka Prison.

Svenka could see that it was time to go. The art was his and he was not leaving it. Svenka did not inherit all of Dortlich’s contacts, but he could get good papers. He did not have contacts inside Sweden, but he had plenty on the boats between Riga and Sweden who could deal with a package once it was at sea.

First things first.

On Sunday morning at six forty-five a.m., the maid Bergid emerged from the Vilnius apartment building where Dortlich’s father lived. She was bareheaded to avoid the appearance of going to church, and carried a sizable pocketbook with her scarf and her Bible in it.

She had been gone about ten minutes when, from his bed, Dortlich’s father heard the footsteps of a person heavier than Bergid coming up the stairs. A clicking and a rasping came from the apartment door as someone raked the tumblers of the lock.

With an effort, Dortlich’s father pushed himself up on his pillows.

The outside door dragged on the threshold as it was pushed open. He fumbled in the drawer beside his bed and took out a Luger pistol. Faint with the effort, he held the gun in both hands and brought it under the sheet.

He closed his eyes until the door of his room opened.

“Are you sleeping, Herr Dortlich? I hope I’m not disturbing you,” said Sergeant Svenka, in civilian clothes with his hair slicked down.

“Oh, it’s you.” The old man’s expression was as fierce as usual, but he looked gratifyingly weak.

“I came on behalf of the Police and Customs Brotherhood,” Svenka said. “We were cleaning out a locker and we found some more of your son’s things.” “I don’t want them. Keep them,” the old man said. “Did you break the lock?” “When no one came to the door I let myself in. I thought I’d just leave the box if no one was home. I have your son’s key.” “He never had a key.”

“It’s his skeleton key.”

“Then you can lock the door on your way out.”

“Lieutenant Dortlich confided to me some details about your … situation and your eventual wishes. Have you written them down? You have the documents? The brotherhood feels it’s our responsibility now to see your desires carried out to the letter.” “Yes,” Dortlich’s father said. “Signed and witnessed. A copy sent to the Klaipeda. You won’t need to do anything.” “Yes, I do. One thing.” Sergeant Svenka put down the box.

Smiling as he approached the bed, he picked up a cushion off a chair, scuttling sideways spiderlike to put it over the old man’s face, climbing astride him on the bed, knees on his shoulders, and leaned with his elbows locked, his weight on the cushion. How long would it take? The old man was not thrashing.

Svenka felt something hard pressing in his crotch, the sheet tented under him and the Luger went off. Svenka felt the burn on his skin and the burn deep up inside him and fell away backward, the old man raising the gun and shooting through the sheet, hitting him in the chest and chin, the muzzle drooping, and the last shot hit his own foot. The old man’s heart beat faster and faster faster stop. The clock above his bed struck seven, and he heard the first four strokes.