“Well, not her exactly, but the police report. I’ve got a friend who works in the municipal archives.” Ivan beamed at his success. “She wants us to meet her in an hour,” he said, glancing at his watch. He looked from me to Brian and back again, then cleared his throat. “I should bring her a gift, perhaps. For her troubles.”
Taking the hint, I crossed to where I’d set my leather bag and pulled out a fifty-euro note. There was, I was starting to think, nothing one couldn’t buy.
Ivan glanced at the note, then shook his head. “Inflation,” he explained sadly, while I produced a second bill.
I’d thought the one hundred euros would be more than sufficient, but on the way to the archives Ivan insisted we stop at a perfume store in Kamenne Square for a bottle of knockoff Chanel.
“So as not to be tacky,” he explained, slipping the euros inside the black-and-white box. “She’s a classy lady, my friend.”
At first glance, the Bratislava municipal archives seemed a model of modern record keeping, a civic office like any other, sustained by all the comforts of technology, computers and fax machines and multi-line telephones. It was only after we’d met Ivan’s friend, Michala, and descended into the building’s bowels that the true nature of the archives was revealed. Down underground stretched the vast vaults of the pre-computerized era, room after room of metal shelves buckling under the weight of boxes and files, a dusty monument to the beast of Soviet bureaucracy and the sheer amounts of paper required to feed it.
Ivan may have been a cad with bartenders and waitresses, but he obviously knew when a relationship was too valuable not to coddle. Whether it was flattery or sincerity, I couldn’t be sure, but he treated our hostess with a charm and tact I’d yet to see him exhibit.
I wasn’t sure classy lady was a term I would have used to describe Michala. Like many aging civil servants, eager to proclaim their individuality, she dressed with a gusto that veered toward bad taste. Her cantilevered breasts were squeezed into a bright pink sweater, her thighs sheathed in black leather. Here was a woman who was no stranger to the racks at Tesco.
Brian and I followed behind as Michala and Ivan led the way through the dimly lit passageways, Michala’s heavy key ring jangling like a tambourine as it knocked against her wide hips, her singsong Slovak echoing through the empty halls. Finally, she stopped in front of a blank door and began sorting through her keys.
“The files do not leave,” she announced in English as she slipped the correct key into the lock and put her hand on the doorknob. “Understood?”
“Of course.” I nodded.
She looked at Brian as if for emphasis, then pushed the door open and pressed the light switch, illuminating several rows of shelves.
“Police reports,” she explained as we entered the room. “From post-revolution until the divorce.” Then, noticing my confusion, she added, as if to a small child, “From the fall of the Communist system until our split from the Czech Republic.”
She started forward, her heels tap-tapping at the concrete. “This way, please.”
We followed her about halfway down a row of shelves, then watched while she reached deftly up and pulled out a thin file folder. “Hannah Boyle,” she said, the name strangely Slavic in her mouth.
“Thank you,” I said, opening the folder and scanning the report’s unintelligible writing. In several places sections of text had been blacked out with a dark ink pen.
There was a photograph paper-clipped to the first page, a picture of a crumpled white Peugeot. The car had been hit in such a way that the driver’s side was completely obliterated, the engine thrust back against the steering wheel, the dash shoved back into the seat. The passenger’s side, however, had been spared the full force of the trauma. The door was open slightly, as if someone had gotten out and neglected to close it. On the back windshield was an oval sticker identifying the car’s home country as Austria.
The picture had been taken at night, and the background, outside the glare of the flash, was pitch-black, as if the world consisted entirely of the car and the thin border of glass-spangled asphalt, and nothing else, but I was aware of each object in that dark beyond as clearly and fully as if I were standing there. To the right, outside the frame, was the truck that had hit us, its bumper dented only slightly, its headlight smashed and broken, a tiny figure of St. Christopher on the dash. To the left was the ambulance, the emergency workers smoking cigarettes while Hannah’s body lay lifeless inside.
It was a cold night, the air crisp with the smell of coming snow. Cars whipped by on the roadway behind us, some slowing to rubberneck, some too preoccupied with the upcoming border crossing to care. The broken glass crunched under the soles of my shoes. I shuddered at the crispness of the memory.
“Ouch!” Ivan said, glancing at the photo over my shoulder, his voice wrenching me back to the dusty basement room.
“Can you tell me what it says?” I asked Michala, offering her the file.
She opened the pair of gold reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck and slipped them on, then took the folder.
“December twenty-one, nineteen eighty-nine,” she read, her finger sweeping across the text as she went. “Head-on collision on the Bratislava-to-Vienna road. It says here the driver of the lorry was drinking. The driver of the Peugeot, Hannah Boyle, an American, was killed at the scene.”
She hit one of the blacked-out passages and stopped, knitting her eyebrows together as if puzzling through a complex problem.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “A mistake, perhaps.” She skipped over the black ink and flipped forward, reading silently. “The rest is technical,” she explained. “Speed, force of impact…”
“And the parts that have been crossed out?” I wondered. The neat obliteration of the words seemed far too deliberate for the correction of an error, unless the error had been putting the information in the report in the first place. I suddenly wished I could read Slovak.
Michala shook her head. “I can’t tell. I’m sorry, I really don’t know.” She seemed genuine in her apology, aware that the information she was providing was less than complete, and I believed her. “Now, this is funny.”
“What?”
She motioned toward the signature on the last page, the name typed neatly underneath it. “Stanislav Divin,” she said, “the detective who signed off on this. You see these letters by his last name?”
I nodded.
“It’s not appropriate,” Michala said, with the confused indignation of someone used to extreme order. “It’s not normal for him to investigate an accident like this.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
She put a laquered fingernail to the man’s name. “This is simply not his department. He’s a narcotics detective.”
Stanislav Divin. I read the name to myself, then read it and reread it again, committing the spelling to memory. If I couldn’t take the file, I told myself, I’d at least take this.
“Divin.” Ivan mulled the name as we made our way out the front door of the archives building.
“Do you know him?” I asked, reaching up to shade my eyes. Even thinned as it was by winter’s smog, the sunlight seemed unbearably bright after our time underground.
Ivan shook his head. “He must be retired.”
“Can you ask around?” Brian said.
Ivan took a long pull off his cigarette, exhaling loudly. “Sometimes, man,” he growled, glancing at his friend, “I wish you hadn’t saved my life.” Then he reached into the pocket of his leather coat and pulled out his cell phone.
Whoever Ivan was trying to reach had evidently gone home for the day, but the Russian assured us he’d left a message and that we’d hear something the next morning. It was late when we got back to the apartment. I got cleaned up and changed into my new clothes; then we went out for an early dinner at a place called Montana’s Grizzly Bar, an American burger-and-steak house bizarrely situated in the medieval tangle of streets that lay in the eastern shadow of the castle.