With an effort, Dortlich’s father pushed himself up on his pillows.
The outside door dragged on the threshold as it was pushed open. He fumbled in the drawer beside his bed and took out a Luger pistol. Faint with the effort, he held the gun in both hands and brought it under the sheet.
He closed his eyes until the door of his room opened.
“Are you sleeping, Herr Dortlich? I hope I’m not disturbing you,” said Sergeant Svenka, in civilian clothes with his hair slicked down.
“Oh, it’s you.” The old man’s expression was as fierce as usual, but he looked gratifyingly weak.
“I came on behalf of the Police and Customs Brotherhood,” Svenka said. “We were cleaning out a locker and we found some more of your son’s things.”
“I don’t want them. Keep them,” the old man said. “Did you break the lock?”
“When no one came to the door I let myself in. I thought I’d just leave the box if no one was home. I have your son’s key.”
“He never had a key.”
“It’s his skeleton key.”
“Then you can lock the door on your way out.”
“Lieutenant Dortlich confided to me some details about your … situation and your eventual wishes. Have you written them down? You have the documents? The brotherhood feels it’s our responsibility now to see your desires carried out to the letter.”
“Yes,” Dortlich’s father said. “Signed and witnessed. A copy sent to the Klaipeda. You won’t need to do anything.”
“Yes, I do. One thing.” Sergeant Svenka put down the box.
Smiling as he approached the bed, he picked up a cushion off a chair, scuttling sideways spiderlike to put it over the old man’s face, climbing astride him on the bed, knees on his shoulders, and leaned with his elbows locked, his weight on the cushion. How long would it take? The old man was not thrashing.
Svenka felt something hard pressing in his crotch, the sheet tented under him and the Luger went off. Svenka felt the burn on his skin and the burn deep up inside him and fell away backward, the old man raising the gun and shooting through the sheet, hitting him in the chest and chin, the muzzle drooping, and the last shot hit his own foot. The old man’s heart beat faster and faster faster stop. The clock above his bed struck seven, and he heard the first four strokes.
59
SNOW ABOVE THE 50th Parallel dusting the high forehead of the hemisphere, Eastern Canada, Iceland, Scotland, and Scandinavia. Snow in flurries in Grisslehamn, Sweden, snow falling into the sea as the ferry carrying the coffin came in.
The ferry agent provided a four-wheeled trolley to the men from the funeral home and helped them load the coffin on it, getting up a little speed on the deck to bump up the ramp onto the dock where the truck waited.
Dortlich’s father died without immediate family and his wishes were clearly expressed. The Klaipeda Ocean and River Workers Association saw to it his wishes were carried out.
The small procession to the cemetery consisted of the hearse, a van with six men from the funeral home, and a car carrying two elderly relatives.
It is not that Dortlich’s father was entirely forgotten, but most of his childhood friends were dead and few relatives survived. He was a maverick middle son, and his enthusiasm for the October Revolution estranged him from his family, and took him
to Russia. The son of shipbuilders spent his life as an ordinary seaman. Ironic, agreed the two old relatives riding behind the hearse through the falling snow in the late afternoon.
The Dortlich family mausoleum was grey granite with a cross incised above the door and a tasteful amount of stained glass in clerestory windows, just colored panes, not figurative.
The cemetery warden, a conscientious man, had swept the path to the mausoleum door and swept the steps. The great iron key was cold through his mittens and he used both hands to turn it, the tumblers squealing in the lock. The men from the funeral home opened the big double doors and carried the coffin in. There was some muttering from the relatives about the Communist labor union emblem on the lid being displayed in the mausoleum.
“Think of it as a brotherly farewell from those who knew him best,” the funeral director said, and coughed against his glove. It was an expensive-looking coffin for a Communist, he reflected, and speculated about the markup.
The warden had in his pocket a tube of white lithium grease. He made paths on the stone for the feet of the coffin to slide on as it went sideways into its niche, and the pallbearers were glad when they had to slide it into place, pushing from only one side and unable to lift.
The party looked around among themselves. No one volunteered to pray and so they locked the building and hurried back to their vehicles in the blowing snow.
Upon his bed of art Dortlich’s father lies still and small, ice forming in his heart.
The seasons will come and go. Voices come in faintly from the gravel paths outside, and occasionally the tendril of a vine. The colors of the stained glass grow softer as the dust accumulates. The leaves blow and then the snow, and around again. The paintings, their faces so familiar to Hannibal Lecter, are rolled up in the dark like the coils of memory.