36 Yalta Boulevard

(St. Martin’s Press)

By Olen Steinhauer

8 February 1967, Wednesday

He left the Capital that morning, and at ten stopped in Uzhorod to fill his petrol, then continued up into the mountains, alert to each curve hidden behind clusters of snow-sprinkled pines. A small suitcase and briefcase shivered on the passenger seat.

His name was Brano Oleksy Sev. He had reached his fiftieth year the previous month with fewer scars than he deserved, and owned the same white Trabant P50 he had bought ten years before. He had replaced so many internal parts that likely nothing inside it had come with the original car. Even the steering wheel had been replaced in 1961 (31 October, the same day Stalin’s sarcophagus was removed from its Red Square mausoleum), after he had taken a particularly sharp turn while trailing a suspect and found it sitting in his lap.

In Vranov he took lunch at the empty restaurant he knew from his last visit three years before, because this stop never changed. The waitress, a large woman with a cleft lip, frowned a lot at him. Then she leaned against the edge of the table, a faint odor of sweat misting off her cheeks, and asked if he was sure he didn’t want a drink with that. “We’ve got the best brandy in the region.”

Brano shook his head and watched her return, frowning, to the kitchen, then opened his briefcase and took out the case file with cold fingers.

Until last August, Brano had been a major in the Ministry for State Security, located on Yalta Boulevard, number 36. But for the last five months he had been a comrade-worker at the eternally noisy Pidkora People’s Factory, the third man down the assembly line, fitting electrical wires into gauges so that the machines of socialist agriculture would never fail. Then, yesterday, he felt a tap on his shoulder. His alcoholic foreman stood behind him.

Someone to see you, Sev! In my office!

Brano followed him through the jungle of machinery to the glassed-in box in the center of the factory floor. Behind the cluttered desk, holding a newspaper and smiling, sat the Comrade Colonel, Laszlo Cerny, wiping his unkempt mustache.

The foreman closed the door as he left, muffling the sound of machines. Brano.

Comrade Colonel.

Sit down, said the colonel, tapping the newspaper on the desk. Then he held up the paper, which was Austrian.