I swing the door open only a few inches and peek inside. There’s an old brown-and-gold-plaid couch, a coffee table made of tires and boards and covered in beer bottles, and a Formica kitchen table near the back piled high with what look like still-sealed iPad boxes. The smell of marijuana and cigarettes and beer follows on the stale air. I slip inside and close the door behind me.
There’s only a little light filtering through the small, dirty windows set high in the back wall, so I take out the flashlight on my keychain and bounce the beam around the room. Take-out food containers are littered everywhere, complete with skittering colonies of roaches. There are boxes lining the walls and stacked to the roof marked Johnnie Walker, Marlboro, Apple, Gucci. I shoot the beam through an open doorway into the next room and see even more boxes, scores of them. Whatever it’s all worth—authentic merchandise or bootleg—you don’t measure it in thousands, but in millions.
I step carefully through the trash on the floor, trying to be as quiet as I can, until I find a staircase connecting the ground level to both the upper floor and basement. It’s a question of odds, really: Where would you keep a prisoner, upstairs or down? I head down the staircase, my flashlight beam slicking over crushed-out cigarette butts and food wrappers and a mouse trap snapped shut around a mouse skeleton. There’s an open wooden door at the bottom of the staircase, and beyond it, more stacks of boxes.
I enter slowly, ears awake for any sound. The ceiling here is low, with wooden beams running overhead. In the spaces between the beams, fraying electrical wires and a few pipes snake their way around the room.
What I’m looking for I find in the farthest corner of the farthest room. At first, I assume it’s a large industrial freezer, the walk-in kind they have in restaurants, except the skin of this one is just squares and rectangles of scrap metal, rusty and welded into place. A door, also skinned with metal, hangs ajar from a single sturdy hinge that runs down its entire side, while a pair of sliding bolts and a massive clasp where a padlock would go are attached to the opposite side of the door. Judging by the construction and the size of the bolts, whatever was put in the room was meant to stay in the room. I pause with my hand on the door and correct my thought: It doesn’t look like a freezer; it looks like a gas chamber.
I pull the door open tenderly, somehow clinging to the idea that my dad will be inside, waiting. But of course he isn’t.
The walls and ceiling of the cell are lined entirely with old sofa cushions fastened with bolts. Suffocation is the aesthetic theme. Suffocation of screams, suffocation of hope. I find a light switch just outside the room and flip it on. A bulb in a cage is mounted at the center of the ceiling. The place sickens me, but I force my eyes to stay open, to stay cold and impartial. Observe and infer, I tell myself. Learn what you can.
Fact: Two metal rings—dull steel on top, shiny metal on the bottom—are screwed into the concrete floor approximately one meter apart. Inference: The shininess on the undersides of the rings suggests someone had been chained to them, pulling on them repeatedly and for a long time.
Fact: The only space on the walls not covered in cushions is the opening of a small vent near the ceiling where a PVC pipe a few centimeters in diameter runs through the wall. Inference: But for the vent, the place is airtight.
Fact: There is a metal drain in the center of the concrete floor with what initially appears to be substantial amounts of rust around the edge. Upon investigation—scraping at the rust with a fingernail—I determine it’s not rust, but blood. Inference: Prisoner was tortured and/or murdered in this room.
I am sure my father has been here. I can still smell him, or think I can, or imagine I can. The scent is mixed with fear and suffering, and I swear on my dad’s life and my mom’s memory that I will turn whoever did this into a corpse.
But I’m too close, getting too emotional to be objective anymore. So I wipe away the tears, exit the little cell, and begin scrutinizing the room outside. I pick up stacks of paper resting on top of a row of crates and scan, discard, scan, discard. There’s shipping manifests for truckloads of handbags, receipts for pizzas and beer, a magazine of Japanese porn, an instruction manual for a microwave.
But as I get to the bottom of stacks of papers, I notice the crates beneath them. They’re made of rough pine and so new I can still smell the sap. Stenciled on the top of each one:
?eská Zbrojovka Uhersky Brod
CZ 805 Bren 5.56x45
Made in Czech Republic
I rack my memory, trying to find why there’s something familiar about these words. Then it comes to me: the name of the manufacturer of the gold pistol I found in Paulus’s bedroom—made in the Czech Republic, limited edition, the sixty-fourth of one hundred. I remember the note, too: an expression of gratitude after the conclusion of a business deal, signed BK. Boris, or Bandar, or Buh-something.
There are nine more labeled exactly the same way—Bren, it’s a kind of gun, isn’t it? And two labeled Semtex—also apparently a product of the Czech Republic. After hanging around government types my whole life, I damn well better know what Semtex is. It’s a plastic explosive, and the go-to choice for demolition crews and armies and terrorists all around the world. In addition to iPads and Gucci bags and cartons of Marlboros, Paulus has hidden away an arsenal.
Above me, the floorboards creak, and I barely notice it until they creak again. I freeze in place, my ears cocked like a dog’s. A footstep. Then another. Someone’s here.
I kill the flashlight and look around for an exit, but there’s only the staircase. On the floor above, I hear the footsteps of someone trying to move silently. They’re slow and carefully placed, made by someone trying to remember where the floorboards squeak and where they don’t.
From the top of the stairs, a man’s voice calling in German-accented English: “Gwendolyn Bloom. Show yourself, please.”
*
Paulus needs no help navigating the basement in the dark. He knows the place intimately and steps through the maze of trash and crates with ease. He’s moving toward the only visible light, the feeble bulb burning in the cell. The door to the cell is wide open and inviting. Come closer, it says. Even closer.
He seems cool and unconcerned, carrying an excellent leather jacket over his right arm, his pistol still holstered under his left.
He stops a meter or so from the cell’s entrance and sets his coat carefully on the crates of assault rifles. With hands on hips, he says my name again. You have to dig deep into his tone to find the threat.
A pause as he listens for me, then two steps forward, just a few centimeters from the entrance to the cell. I wonder if he’s thinking that I’ve already left or questioning whether I was ever here at all. Paulus leans forward, sticking his head into the cell. The light from the bulb gleams off his precisely shaved scalp as he turns his gaze from one side of the cell to the other.