Homicide beat in a police state

AN old Russian proverb says, “The sun will shine into our yard, too.” In “Victory Square,” Olen Steinhauer’s final chapter in his quinary of novels about the progress of one fictional Eastern Bloc country, hidden bodies both actual and metaphorical find themselves dragged into the excoriating sunlight of truth and redress.

The real forces of equality reduce all people to corpses, and, even in a socialist utopia, corrupted remains are left behind. Far beneath lofty goals and aspirations, past the secret services and the snipers and the anarchists with their riots, there are still policemen who must attend to the basest of basics: crime, murder and thievery.

For homicide chief Emil Brod, the main character of Steinhauer’s “The Bridge of Sighs” (2003), the book that kicked off the series, it’s taken almost 40 years for his hidden bodies to resurface. He put a revolutionary leader in prison then, and now, on the cusp of his retirement, finds himself a possible target of a killer whose victims were involved in the revolutionary’s arrest.

The question remains: Is it the sun of truth that shines in Brod’s yard, or is it the warmth of an annihilating supernova as the Eastern Bloc collapses?

The book opens in 1989, as the Eastern Bloc was falling like dominoes and as agent Gavra Noukas (a character in 2006’s “Liberation Movements,” the predecessor of “Victory Square”) is sent to Virginia by Lt. Gen. Yuri Kolev to hunt down 1980s defector Lubov Shevchenko. One heart attack later and Kolev is gone, forcing Noukas to change plans as Murder Squad chief and impending retiree Brod is informed of the Kolev case.

Kolev, it turns out, was also on the cusp of retirement. Things begin to look less open-and-shut and more like a murder investigation. Brod consults about the case with his best friend, dissident author Ferenc Kolyeszar (the focal point of Steinhauer’s 2004 novel “The Confession”), and a chance conversation drops Shevchenko’s location -- as a teacher at a local high school -- squarely in Noukas’ lap.

Noukas kidnaps Shevchenko, an informant who’s now wanted by his CIA masters; back home, the militia fires into crowds of protesters while the country falls around them. “All I’ve ever had,” muses Brod as he lugs forgotten files, which might help him crack the case, up multiple flights of stairs, “is persistence.”

That dogged constancy, along with help from his wife and friends, proves to be one of the only inviolate standards in the disintegrating country. Noukas learns from Shevchenko that he and Kolev were judges rooting out “enemies of the state” -- and Noukas has to move quickly to save his own skin. These seemingly disparate paths converge when Noukas escapes an American spy sent to kill him and calls Brod to tell him about Shevchenko and how he and Kolev are connected.

Meanwhile, retired judges are dropping dead, and there are only so many times the Murder Squad can chalk it up to “lead poisoning” before a pattern begins to emerge. A missing file reappears that holds the name of Jerzy Michalec, who was Brod’s first case, from 1948.

Curiously, some of the names in the file are those of the recent murder cases -- more curious still that an old revolutionary like Michalec may have returned from the past just as a new revolution gets underway.

There is a distinct sense of relief in Steinhauer’s conclusion to his five-book meditation on what ostensibly stands as a slightly revised take on the Romanian revolution of 1989.

It would be a disservice to slot this particular series of books into the “spy fiction” genre, if only because so often spy fiction concentrates on a comfortable pastiche of heroes and neither the reality of the times nor the sense of consequence that shines through Steinhauer’s clipped, economical prose.

When one realizes that, at any given time, one-fifth of the country’s populace -- the real People’s Militia of Emil Brod -- was engaged in spying on one another, the romance of the spy novel fades into insignificance. This banality of evil rarely offers closure, because its appearance is so normal and its normalcy is inherently rationalized.

Steinhauer offers a concrete end to the sins of the past, but he’s too shrewd a writer to communicate anything other than this end as a necessary fiction. That’s the luxury of fiction, historical or otherwise: The ink ends on the final page, but the effects of these real-life events travel onward for many decades, the consequences of which only time will tell.

David Cotner is a contributing writer to LA Weekly.