“Whatever you say, sir,” said the gendarme, clicking his heels and looking the lieutenant straight in the eye, clearly half drunk.
They set out for the house where they had left off the day before, just as the darkness began to dissipate over the ice-covered snow and a truck rumbled up to the corner and let out a roundup patrol.
“I want you to keep your mouths shut,” the lieutenant said, turning to his men. “Just watch for my sign. Then out with the ones I point to.”
But as luck would have it, all the houses along Aleksa Nenadović Street turned out to be inhabited by people with valid identity papers and a disproportional number of Hungarians and Germans, and whenever he tried to make insinuations about people in the neighborhood, the only response he got was a frightened “We don’t know anything bad about them.”
At about nine o’clock they heard a few shots, followed by a volley of fire. Géczy went out and saw that both truck and patrol had disappeared. He called over the younger gendarme — the older one’s eyes were all bloodshot — and ordered him to find out where the truck had gone and where the shooting was and why, then he went on with the searches, though thinking more about the shooting, which did not let up, than about the documents and people.
“The truck’s two hundred meters from here,” said the gendarme, running up to him. “It’s in the square around the corner. And the soldiers are doing the shooting.”
“In the street?”
“Yes, in the street.”
The lieutenant took the men to the next house, but what he really was concerned about was what was going on in the square. Not because he was eager to see blood but because he had a feeling that what he would see would solve his problem. And what he saw after searching the house at the very end of Aleksa Nenadović Street and turning into Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, what he saw through the bare trees of the small, snow-covered park was the large, dark shape of the truck surrounded by small, randomly placed groups of men in olive uniforms or gray civilian clothes. Shots were still being fired, loud and clear now that there was nothing to block the sound, and a chorus of wailing voices rose in response. He saw several civilians trip and fall and men in uniform bend over them, their guns spitting fire at the earth. Two contradictory thoughts flashed through the lieutenant’s overwrought mind: “Everything is settled” and “Everything is lost.” Then the two merged into determination and confidence.
“Follow me!” he ordered. From the first house — Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, number 11—he hauled out a young Serbian woman living in the courtyard who was unable to show how she earned her keep; from the next, a family of seven headed by a Slovak watchmaker who pleaded with him in broken Hungarian, acquired, as he kept saying, in the Austro-Hungarian army. “Take them over there, all of them,” he ordered the two men he had designated as guards, pointing impatiently to the far end of the square.
His confidence reached new heights when he got to the Blams: their papers showed them to be Jews. He gave their frightened and what he judged to be cowardly faces a stern look and said, “Get your coats on!”
“But our papers are in order, sir,” said Blam, playing for time.
“Silence!” Géczy shouted in the voice the general had used on him the night before. “I don’t need instructions from you, understand?”
He left the two guards to watch the couple putting their coats on and took the two gendarmes with him to the widow Csokonay’s. There he learned that her subtenant had a work permit but no police registration papers. He told him off — a Hungarian and failing to comply with the regulations! — then drew him aside and asked about the people in the main house. At first the man tried to wheedle out of it, but he finally gave in to the lieutenant’s frown.
“You know the type. Rolling in money. Don’t care much for us Hungarians. Lost their daughter not too long ago gunning down some gendarmes.”
The lieutenant nodded curtly and went outside with his men. The Blams were standing in front of the glassed-in veranda wearing hats, thick winter coats, and high rubber snow boots. The soldiers guarding them had to stamp their feet to keep warm.
“That’s it for here,” the lieutenant called out. “Lock up the house. We can go.”
He waited for the command to be carried out, then went out into the street with his two gendarmes, pausing for a moment to watch the four figures — two in formal black, two in uniform — moving across the square. He was impatient — they seemed to be moving inexcusably slowly — but at last they reached the truck and disappeared among the olive uniforms. Two shots rang out. Géczy waited for his men to emerge from the crowd, and when they saw him waiting, they started running. He made a sign for the others to follow and knocked on the door of the next house to be searched.
The house in Edouard Herriot Street, where Janja’s family lived, was also in line for an identity check and search on the first day of the raid. The patrol in their part of town was led by Police Lieutenant Aladár Szalma, two well-trained policemen, and two members of the reserve forces: a shop assistant from Budapest and a strapping young peasant from northern Hungary. Szalma was a lawyer with a checkered past. Unable to find employment in his field because of the Depression, he had spent most of the thirties moving from one small town to the next as a private tutor to the children of shopowners and landowners and learning to drink on the sly and seduce the more attractive of his charges. When the borders of Hungary were expanded to include Slovakia, he began working for the police. When the borders came to include a part of Romania, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Though calm and collected on the surface, he was in fact quite depraved. Still, he realized at once that the instructions “more a purge than a routine identity check” would end in a massacre, and his besotted but penetrating brain told him that he might one day be called to account for his part in it. As a result, he decided to place as great a distance as possible between himself and the dirty mission at hand and, insofar as he could, to keep his two men from it. As always when they were on a field mission, he instructed them to keep both canteens full and to take over the inspection of the citizens’ documents — his eyes had a tendency to blur, he told them — though he assumed the documents would be in order. He left the searching to the older of the reservists, the Budapest shop assistant, whose overeager, doglike enthusiasm and crazed impatience for the raid to begin showed him to be mentally unbalanced. Thus Szalma devised a double plan: the identity check run by himself and having virtually no consequences and the shop assistant’s hysterical search through every nook and cranny of every house and resulting in either nothing suspicious or in the discovery that under a bed or wardrobe, or in an attic behind some old furniture, there was a pistol or rifle or a whole cache of weapons. The moment the shop assistant deduced from Szalma’s conspicuous laxity that all decisions about guilt would be his and his alone, he began seeing himself as a champion of the truth. Having served one master or another since his youth, he seized this long-awaited opportunity to get even with the high and mighty. He also took revenge as a spurned suitor, separating or destroying young couples still basking in the warmth of conjugal bliss or exacting their gratitude for pardoning them on account of their newlywed status, depending on whether he felt they had had enough of each other or were still desirous of pleasure and possession. And so it happened that the owners of the house where Janja’s family lived, a well-to-do, flamboyantly mustached farmer and his rosy-cheeked, buxom wife — as well as the lame carpenter and his wife and child from the courtyard — were hauled off, while Janja’s mother, brother, and younger sister were spared. But when the patrol reached the neighboring Margetić Street the following evening, Janja’s elder sister and her twenty-year-old electrician husband were accused of harboring weapons and sent to the roundup patrol, and the roundup patrol took them to the cemetery with hundreds of others and executed them.