At the meeting over the Chinese, sincerity was precisely what had been lacking in the delegates from the Party Committee. They had feigned outrage by pounding the tabletop and making their voices quaver, but it was manifest that their hearts were as cold as damp kindling. All the same, the terror that cold fury can arouse is no less fearful than others — the sort that is accompanied by oohs and aahs. But at the end of the meeting, when they were waiting in petrified fear for the sentences to be declared, the first rumors of the break with Peking began to circulate, and the campaign was stopped in its tracks, as if by magic.
Everything would be done by the rules, the minister went on with unchanging indignation. Apart from the autopsy, there would be a reenactment. A shot would be fired in the bedroom with the weapon that the victim had used. They would then verify whether the noise could be heard outside. In the garden, where the residence’s guards were on duty. On the landing. In the bedrooms where the other family members were sleeping. Everything would be carefully taken down. They would pick a stormy night with weather similar to that of December 14. Shots would be fired with a silencer, then without one.
The doctor’s eyes met the architect’s, without meaning to. What self-destroyer had ever fitted a silencer to the gun he was going to use? But instead of a glimmer of disbelief, what shone in the architect’s eyes was the same feverish euphoria as before.
Did he really understand nothing, or was that just a way of protecting himself?
“We’ll begin with the test with the silencer on,” the minister repeated, but, as if he could read the doctor’s thoughts, he added immediately, “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that this whole … business is strictly confidential.”
He was on the verge of saying explicitly that at the end of the story the Successor’s death would be shown to have been murder, that the man would be declared a Martyr of the Revolution, and that all the suspicions that had darkened his name like so many leaden clouds would be blown away there and then. That fact would lead directly to the punishment of those who had brought the Successor down.
“Be that as it may,” the minister went on as he glanced at the doctor with just an ounce of affection, “the key to the whole business is the autopsy.”
Of course it is, Petit Gjadri thought.
In his heart of hearts, he had always known that one day or another an autopsy would be his undoing.
Do you think your words fill me with joy? he responded inwardly to the minister’s remarks.
Obviously he knew what the score was. In times like these, any given autopsy could be interpreted and then reinterpreted on a whim or a change of wind. The results might be appropriate to the general climate on this day, and not at all acceptable the day after. Barely a few weeks ago, Kano Zhbira, a former member of the Politburo who had committed suicide quite a few years back, had been exhumed from the Martyrs of the Motherland Cemetery. It was his third unearthing! Every tack and turn in the political line exercised its primary effect on human remains, not on the national economy. Zhbira’s posthumous rheumatism — rheumatismus post mortem, a condition that does not yet afflict us — was a better indicator of political change than any analyst’s prediction. Immediately after his suicide (together with rumors that it had been murder, of course) he had been buried with full honors in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, he had been hauled up at the request of the Yugoslavs and transferred to Tirana’s municipal graveyard, signs of anti-Yugoslavianism having been detected in his file. A year later, after the break with Yugoslavia, he was dug up again so as to be put back in his original tomb in the national cemetery — as a herald of anti-Yugoslavianism. His third and most recent unburying, which took his body to the municipal graveyard once again, had been done almost on the sly, but no one yet knew why.
Cawing from above made the doctor raise his eyes. He smiled to himself, thinking that the Greeks must have been quite near the mark in divining political fortunes from patterns made by flocks of birds.
They were all washed up, the three of them, that was for sure. Including the minister, who headed their little group. But like the architect, he did not seem to have grasped the fact, unless the pair of them were putting on an act. Instead, they seemed to find the case entertaining; far from hiding this, they went in for larks and japes as if they were not a government minister and a senior architect but a couple of merrymakers. When it was over, before parting, they had a few words in private, then vanished together into the basement of the residence.
The doctor immediately put them out of his mind in order to concentrate his thoughts on the autopsy. That it was, at the very least, an autopsy of the first magnitude was not much consolation to him, but on the other hand he could have ended up like his colleague Ndré Pjetergega. A Gypsy from Brraka had lain in wait for him behind his door and, with a shout of, “Doctor? Bastard! Are you the one who said my daughter was pregnant?” he had beaten him to death.
The yellowing leaves in the park on the other side of the Grand Boulevard made him sigh. God knows why, but the refrain of an old homosexual lament, which he’d heard years before in Shkodër, kept running through his mind:
They say two candles were lit
At the Vizier’s yesterday.
Holy Virgin, for Sulçabeg we pray:
His throat a razor has slit.
In the corridor of the Successor’s residence, the doctor was suddenly seized by the vision of the young woman in a nightdress revealing the shape of her delicate, quivering limbs. It was her engagement, it was she herself who lay at the root of her father’s tragedy. And therefore at the root of a tragedy that would be their common lot.
As he was stepping inside the Hotel Dajti, a question began to form unobtrusively and gradually in his mind. Why had he, Petrit Gjadri, been chosen to perform this prestigious autopsy? But henceforth he should not try to answer that or any other question. He was under a stay of execution, and he had to try to use the time remaining to good effect. The coffee he was going to enjoy in a hotel set aside for the exclusive use of foreigners and members of the nomenklatura — a place he would have dared to enter previously only in quite exceptional circumstances — would be just a foretaste of the higher serenity that was slowly spreading through his being. The kind of freedom that humans call “the peace of the grave,” without really appreciating it insofar as they usually experience it only as they die, had, in this particular case, become available to him a little ahead of time.
He strode purposefully toward a table without even glancing at the customers at the bar. With an icy stare he turned to the waiter and asked almost casually for a double shot.
Six hundred feet away, the architect was hurrying home, with his chin buried in the upturned collar of his coat. His wife had been more adamant than ever: “As soon as you’re done, you come straight back. No café, no club, no ‘just ran into whatsisname.’ Is that clear? I’ll be waiting for you in fear and trembling. Can’t you imagine? Our lives, the lives of our children, everything depends on what happens today, doesn’t it?”
The architect looked at his watch. After the forensic pathologist had left the room, as he himself was about to bid the minister goodbye with a handshake, the politician had whispered to him, “Stay a while longer!”
Putting an arm around his shoulder, the way leaders do when wishing to indicate a degree of goodwill toward intellectuals, the minister asked almost in the same breath, “So what’s this story about an underground passageway? …”