The neighbors were standing around her house under the streetlight, discussing something. There was an over-turned red wagon on the sidewalk. He recognized it as David’s. Most of the lights were on in the house, including in Leda’s room. Their front door was open. He began running again.
The collected neighbors watched him go by and into the house as if this were one of the expected developments.
The hall light was still on. Moths looped and staggered beneath it. One drawer of a small chest in the hallway was pulled out. One of the family photos atop the chest was tipped over and lying on its face. A corner of the rug was turned up.
He shouted for her and felt cold and terrified and ran from room to room. There was a half-filled suitcase on the kitchen floor. There were folded and unfolded blankets heaped on the table. He recognized empty spaces in the living and dining rooms, marked by faint outlines on the floor, and realized furniture was missing. On the dining-room table a black-and-gray spider the size of a child’s hand had centered itself on one of the dinner plates.
In her room he couldn’t tell how much was gone. Some drawers were empty and the dresser top looked bare. Her bed was unmade and the folds in the bedclothes formed a face. On the floor by the dressing table he found an abandoned blouse that kept the shape of her shoulders.
Outside one of the neighbors folded her arms and told him they were gone.
“Did they say where they were going?” Karel asked. He scanned the yard: a dishtowel hung from the prickly pear along the walk.
“No,” the woman said. “And neither did the police.”
“The police took them?” Karel asked. His throat felt closed.
They certainly did, the woman said. The whole bunch. Her companions murmured. He could see in her expression the beginnings of the notion that maybe this kid who was so interested was wanted, too.
He ran to the police station. He had to stop four different times, swaying and bent low, hands on his thighs, gasping for breath. Sweat stung his eyes.
There was an open-backed truck filled with darkness in front of the station. When he stopped to wipe the sweat from his eyes with both hands an upright piano skidded from the back of it and fell the four feet to the street. It landed with a tremendous noise and sprang open like a trick box. Two soldiers appeared where it had been in the back and threw out a full-length mirror. It pitched aerodynamically onto the piano and shattered with a spray of flashing glass. These were Leda’s family’s, he recognized them, and he rushed to the back of the truck and caught the leg of a soldier emerging from the darkness with an end table. The soldier kicked his hand away like a vine or rope and Karel grabbed for it again, idiotically, and the soldier holding the table looked down at him and he recognized then that the soldier could kill him and that that would be the end of it. He stood there, dumb with the knowledge, and while he did he could see the soldier formulate the decision not to. He understood from his expression that the decision represented what Albert used to call, when deciding which individual to choose when gathering specimens, a whim.
Someone put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around, and Kehr was standing there in full uniform. “Let’s leave our friend here alone,” he said. The soldier set the table down on the truck bed and saluted. Kehr nodded and turned Karel away, leading him with a hand on the back of the neck.
Very dangerous, very foolish, he said. He shook his head as if Karel had been caught climbing the roof of his house. Karel was still both astonished and relieved and was trying to formulate a question.
“Regular troops, recruited to help out,” Kehr said, leading him into the station. “Working under the assumption that the taking of souvenirs was allowed whenever they assisted in a mousetrap.”
“A mousetrap?” Karel said.
Kehr looked as if he’d been insufficiently discreet. A technical term, he said. Anyway, as Karel could see, they’d taken the news that the furniture was still the property of the state badly.
“Aren’t they going to return it?” Karel said.
“In some areas it’s wise not to push these types too far,” Kehr said. He signaled the sergeant on duty at the desk, and the sergeant opened the swinging gate to the rooms in the back. They were blocked by a woman with thin arms and sunken eyes who was trying to regain the sergeant’s attention. She asked him to check again on her little boy. Kehr excused himself, and when she stepped aside he brushed by her. Karel followed. The sergeant told her that there were no children here and that this was not a kindergarten.
At a blank door Kehr paused and looked down the hall at a corporal seated on a child’s chair and reading a magazine. Kehr waited for his attention and then pointed interrogatively at the door, raising his eyebrows. The corporal saluted, and nodded yes, that was the one. Karel could hear voices behind it.
Kehr mimed an “oh” and nodded thanks and then delicately turned the handle. He held the door open and gestured Karel through. He said he’d give him a few minutes. When Karel hesitated, Kehr reassured him with a puzzled look, as if to suggest he had no idea why Karel might hesitate. Once Karel was through he shut the door behind him with exaggerated politeness.
The Schieles were all in the room, with three suitcases and a bundle made from a bedsheet tied with rope. Two of the suitcases were open, and Stasik and another member of the Civil Guard Karel didn’t know were going through them, holding shirts and pants up, giving each a gentle shake at eye level and dropping it on the floor. Leda was standing against the wall. David and Nicholas were sitting beside her on a bench. Their mother was in a folding chair nearby. Leda caught his eye but didn’t change her expression, and he didn’t cross the room to her. Mrs. Schiele was looking at her suitcases as if someone were spitting in them or filling them with animal parts.
Stasik nudged the other Civil Guardsman and pointed out Karel, and they left everything where it was, and waited for him to get out of the way so they could leave the room.
Mrs. Schiele thanked God once the door closed. She’d been crying. She seemed to believe things had been turned around by his presence. “I told Leda your friend would help straighten this out,” she said gratefully. “I told her.”
“Be quiet, Mother,” Leda said. David waved a hello. He had a paper cup on the floor next to him, and a toy boat, and he was shaking iridescent water from the boat.
“What happened?” Karel said. He was talking to Leda. She was looking at him closely, and he was chilled by her expression.
“You tell me,” she said. “I took Nicholas for the walk and when I got him home your friend Kehr was already there. They had David and my mother and were loading the piano into the back of the truck.”
“More and more people kept getting into the truck after we did,” David said. “We kept having to move over.”
“That piano is an antique,” Mrs. Schiele said. “Do you think they’d just take it like that?”
“How’d they know so soon?” Karel said.
“What a good question,” Leda said.
“I didn’t do anything!” Karel protested. “I didn’t tell anybody!” He took a step toward her. Nicholas looked at him intently and then returned his attention to David.
Leda turned her head a little and kept her eyes on him. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not.