The Missing Piece (18 page)

Grotzky seemed to have slipped since June. Maybe it was the flight from Budapest, maybe it was the imminence of the trial, maybe it was the sight of the courthouse earlier today. Grotzky's command of English had totally evaporated.

“Tell me about that day,” Pinter said in Hungarian.

“Karolina asked me to drive her to meet her son,” said Grotzky. “He was being released from prison. Three years for burglarizing a jewelry shop. I found her in her kitchen writing a letter. She took the letter and a book and an old suitcase, and we went out to the car. I put the suitcase in the trunk, and she used the book as a lap desk to finish the letter as we drove.”

“To the prison?” said Pinter.

“No. She had arranged to meet her son at Koponya. I told her no one goes to Koponya, but she said that she did.”

“Koponya? The abandoned military base?” said Pinter.

Grotzky nodded.

“So you drove to Koponya. Did she say anything about the letter?”

“She told me it was addressed to her two sons. The younger one was getting out of prison. The older one had been gone for a while.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere west,” said Grotzky. “Spain, maybe, or France.”

“Then what?”

“We reached Koponya. I stopped the car and saw someone step out from the big boulders at the front gates. Karolina and her son embraced and spoke and got back into the car. I drove to Keleti Station in Budapest. I opened the trunk and got back into the car while they said their good-byes. Then he went off to the train.

“I drove Karolina back to her home. Then I went to mine. Sometime later, I needed to look in the backseat and saw the letter lying on the floor. I drove to Karolina's house. It was quiet. I knocked. There was no answer, so I opened the door and went inside. I found Karolina hanging from a rope in her kitchen. She was dead.”

“Why did you hold on to the letter for all these years?” said Pinter.

“There was no one to give it to,” said Grotzky. “I had no address for her sons.”

“Didn't they return for their mother's funeral?”

“No. As far as I know, no one in Polgardi ever saw or heard from them again.”

*   *   *

McQueen was easy to tail, Ivan thought, as he peeked around a corner and saw the officer heading for the door to the C stairwell. McQueen had a stupid certainty that left no room for imagining that an underling, especially an immigrant custodian, would have the brains or the balls to observe him. Ivan waited for the stairwell door to close behind McQueen, then hurried to the B stairwell. Both the B and C stairwells descended to the county clerk's file room in the basement, and Ivan, lighter and quicker on his feet, was waiting in the file stacks when McQueen finally landed. McQueen hitched his belt, made a lousy attempt at joking with one of the file room workers, then clomped down a set of circular stairs to the subbasement. Ivan approached slowly, waiting until he heard the last of McQueen's footsteps ringing on the metal stairs before heading down himself.

The subbasement occupied the same hexagonal footprint as the courthouse above. But instead of a central rotunda, there was a physical plant where the engineering crew worked the steam and water and electricity behind locked metal doors. Instead of a lobby, there was a courtyard of sorts with orange painted walls. Instead of courtrooms and back offices, there were oddly shaped rooms painted a flat white that had faded to dingy gray. Many were empty except for broken brooms and damp wads of paper and had the word
clear
scratched into the paint. Others were filled with painting supplies, custodial supplies, huge sacks of rock salt, metal shelves sagging under the weight of file boxes stuffed with stenographer notes or old court papers.

One room, the largest and darkest, was marked with grimy civil defense signs. Inside stood wooden desks with disassembled radios, cots without mattresses, and rolling chalkboards with detailed survey maps. This had been a fifties-style fallout shelter, then the city's first emergency command center, then the bunker where Ike or JFK or LBJ would ride out a nuclear attack if they were in the city when the Reds pushed the button. Now it was a relic, perpetually musty from the underground pond that regularly rose through the cracks in the concrete floor. Few people who worked in the courthouse knew this piece of history existed.

Ivan did. He watched from behind a corner as McQueen came out of the bunker and unfolded a sheet of paper to orient himself. After McQueen fixed his position, he struck out with a purpose. He moved quickly from room to room, switching on the lights and, it seemed to Ivan, noting which rooms were empty and which were not. It took him almost half an hour to cover every accessible room before he returned to a room with many shelves of steno notes. Water covered the floor. McQueen tiptoed on a crude path made from wood scraps, plastic tiles, and soggy newspapers. He reached the first shelf, peeled the lid off a file box, and poked his hand inside.

Ivan backed away from the door. If he had any doubts, they were gone now. The plenum and the subbasement were places a court officer rarely tread, especially a court officer as lazy and unadventurous as McQueen. He took one more look at McQueen elbow deep in a file box. But the futility of McQueen's search wasn't the point. The point was that he was snooping in all the right places.

Ivan backed away from the door, climbed the circular stairs to the basement, then took the C stairway to the third floor. He closed himself into his supply closet and turned the deadbolt. He sat on the sink and allowed himself only shallow breaths so as not to make any sound, so he could dissipate, disappear, merge his molecules with the air. Just as he had done the day the men came.

*   *   *

The subbasement wasn't as skeevy as the plenum. It was big and it was bright and, even though he couldn't see them, McQueen knew there were other people around. Somewhere. But the water gave him the creeps because he knew it wasn't water that leaked from old rusted pipes, but ground water that welled up from the old Collect Pond that once occupied this area of New York and, even with all the pavements and buildings, never quite went away.

He heard footsteps from outside, then saw two guys from the engineering crew in the doorway.

“Need any help?” said one.

“I'm good,” said McQueen.

But he wasn't. His feet suddenly felt cold, and he looked down to see the water was over his soles. He stepped onto a plastic tile.

“Shit,” he said.

He didn't like rooting around in all these boxes. He couldn't drop them onto the floor because of the water, so he had to search them in place. Many were over his head, so he couldn't see inside and his arms quickly tired. After the first dozen boxes, he just lifted the lid and ran his hand across the top. If he didn't feel anything metal—and he didn't feel anything metal—he lowered the lid and moved on to the next one. After a dozen of those, he didn't bother with the lid. The boxes were all the same size, all stuffed to the gills with blocks of steno notes. They all weighed the same, give or take an ounce or two, so he began to lift them off the shelf. If the urn was inside, the box would feel lighter. Or maybe it would feel heavier. He didn't know and he didn't care. He just wanted to get done with this room and get the hell out of here.

Gary never would know the difference.

*   *   *

The sun sank lower, and the evening shadows filled the light court outside the supply closet window. Time crawled past. At five minutes to five came a gentle rap on the door, a tiny jiggle of the knob, a soft whisper of his name. Ivan held his breath, feeling Jessima linger and then walk away slowly. He waited another half hour before slipping off the sink and shouldering his backpack.

Ivan knew where all the security cameras were and also where they weren't. They weren't in the courtrooms or in chambers because the judges refused to have anyone spying on their business. But they also weren't in the catwalks, they weren't in many of the stairwells, and they weren't in the airspace over the rotunda.

He checked the entire third floor. All the courtrooms were locked up and dark. No one walked the corridors, no one waited for the elevators. On the third floor, the inner circular corridor was eye level with the rotunda dome. The windows were large and set almost five feet above the corridor floor, so Ivan dragged a bench into place. The window wasn't locked because its weight was enough to insure no one would open it. After some pounding and shaking and prying with a screwdriver, Ivan loosened the window enough to fit his palms under the sash. Then, imagining himself a weight lifter, he pressed upward. The window resisted, then squeaked, then steadily rose one foot, then two feet, then three. That was enough. Ivan took a deep breath and swung his leg over the sill.

“Hey!” someone yelled. It was a court officer. “What the hell are you doing?”

Ivan pulled himself back down onto the bench.

“Oh, it's you,” said the officer.

“I need to check the purge fan,” said Ivan.

“Now?” said the officer.

“Forgot to do it earlier,” said Ivan.

The officer slid beside the bench and peered out the window, down at the dome and up at the sky.

“Better you than me,” he said.

The officer moved on, and Ivan swung back over the sill. Going out the window seemed dangerous, but the dome filled the entire space so there was nowhere to fall. A set of metal stairs began at the sill and followed the curve of the dome to a narrow ladder that ran straight up the cupola. At the top of the cupola was a cylinder that housed a purge fan that would kick on and suck air out of the rotunda in case of a fire. Attached to the cylinder was a square box with a pull-down handle. The fan was cleaned and tested once a year.

Ivan locked an elbow around the top rung of the ladder. The sky had turned a dusky gray, and the lights inside the third-floor corridor burned brighter. The court officer was long gone; no one was watching. With his free hand, Ivan grabbed the box handle and pulled.

The urn stood inside the box.

Ivan stuffed the urn into his backpack. He climbed down the ladder, descended the stairs, and went in through the window. A camera blinked in the ceiling, but he knew it caught nothing but him going out the window with his backpack and returning with his backpack. Nothing in between.

He closed the window and replaced the bench. He saw no one in the corridor, no one in the A stairwell. On the 3M landing, he unlocked the door to the plenum. The hinges squeaked like a scream in the silence.

He closed the door behind him and, turning on his penlight, swiftly negotiated the ducts and broken furniture until he reached the scattered pieces of wood that marked the limit of McQueen's search. He lowered the backpack to the dusty floor, crouched beside it, and swept the thin beam of light back and forth. For an instant, pinpricks of light flashed back at him. He made hissing sounds with his lips. From the darkness came tiny scratchings.

Ivan opened the backpack and pulled out the urn. He knocked aside the pieces of wood, stood the urn against the wall, and used the wood to build a campfire around it. Not the greatest of hiding places, but McQueen already had looked here once and Ivan knew he never would look here again.

He heard more scratchings and turned the penlight beam toward the sound. Three feet away, the rat he had named Bors reared on its hind legs. Ivan reached into the pocket of the backpack. The cellophane crackled as he loosened a peanut butter cracker.

“Here,” he said, holding out the cracker.

The rat lowered itself and crept up to Ivan's fingers.

“You be a good boy, Bors,” Ivan whispered. “You protect my treasure.”

*   *   *

Out in the street, Andreas shivered. He had rushed here after getting a call from Luis, and on the shaded street his thin jeans and light windbreaker were no match for the rapidly cooling air. A police cruiser tooled past, and Andreas feigned a sudden interest in the faded menu curling in the glass case beside the door to a bar. He had been waiting damn near forty-five minutes and worried that everyone on the street had noticed.

It was much later when Grotzky came out of the building with the lawyer named Pinter. The breeze had calmed as dusk settled. The traffic on nearby Church Street passed uptown with a whisper. Andreas watched from beneath the scaffolding as the two men shook hands and then parted ways. Pinter headed east and Grotzky west. For a big man, Pinter was light on his feet, while Grotzky, thin as a stick, walked with excruciating deliberation, his right foot dragging. Andreas, who walked only at one speed, gave him a long head start.

Eventually Grotzky crossed the busy West Side Highway into the relative quiet of Battery Park City. He limped past a line of new but quaintly designed brick town houses, then out to the promenade that ran along the Hudson River. He stopped there and gripped the metal railing with both hands. The sky over the river was fuzzy with gray early evening clouds. The sun, descending toward New Jersey, was red.

Andreas watched Grotzky for a while, then joined him at the rail. Grotzky did not turn, did not react to Andreas's proximity in any way. But Andreas knew the old man sensed him.

“
Jó estét
,” he said. Good evening.

Grotzky lifted one hand off the rail and shifted his entire body to take in Andreas. His eyes searched for a moment before stiffening into recognition and then ultimately softening into a glaze of profound sadness.

“How did you find me?” he said in raspy Hungarian.

“We are all like moths to a flame,” said Andreas.

Grotzky replaced his hand on the railing and focused on the red sun.

“I have something for you,” he said.

“I know,” said Andreas.

“It is in the apartment where I am staying,” said Grotzky.

They walked back past the town houses and turned down a street lined with high-rise condominiums. As Grotzky limped, Andreas struggled against his urge to drag the old man along with him. In front of the building, the doorman crouched in front of a toddler's stroller and twisted a long white balloon into the shape of a dog. Inside the lobby, the concierge shouted into a phone. The elevator opened immediately. Grotzky pressed 16, and the doors closed. As far as Andreas could tell, no one had noticed them, though of course there would be cameras. There always were cameras.