his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where
he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping
around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and
a hard place.
‘The night of January fourth,’ I said. ‘Did you commit a
crime?’
His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime
than shooting Brubaker in the head?’
He said nothing.
‘Did you go up to Washington D.C. and rape the president’s
ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I’ll give you a clue,’ I said. “Where you’re sitting, that would be
about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head.’
He said nothing.
‘Tell me.’
‘It was a private thing,’ he said.
‘What kind of a private thing?’
He didn’t answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her
map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had
been, chances were it wasn’t Columbia, South Carolina. She
looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His
handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs.
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he asked.
‘That depends on what you did,’ I said.
‘I got a letter,’ he said.
‘Getting mail isn’t a crime.’
‘From a friend of a friend.’
‘Tell me about the letter.’
‘There’s a man in Sofia,’ he said.
He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair
legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed
it, he made it sound like he thought there was something
uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn’t, really. It was a
story that could have been told by any of us.
229
There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister
had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour
of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States.
She had gotten married to an American. She had become
a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote
about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters.
There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation.
The sister’s life was hell. The communist censors had passed
the letters, because anything that made America look bad
was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town
who knew his way around the city’s dissident network. The
friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North
Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident
network before he skipped to Turkey. The friend had packaged
up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who
bought machine parts in Austria. The machine parts guy
had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its
way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January 2nd, early in
the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.
He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what
was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships
compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it
was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The
woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov
thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had
gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out
where it was.
His next available free time was the evening of January 4th.
He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centred around
the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends
within driving distance.
‘Still got the letter?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘But you won’t be able to read it, because it’s
written in Bulgarian.’
‘What were you wearing that night?’
‘Plain clothes. I’m not stupid.’
‘What kind of plain clothes?’
230
‘Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. AJerican. They’re all the
plain clothes I’ve got.’
‘What did you do to the guy?’
He shook his head. Wouldn’t answer.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s all go to Cape Fear.’