The Enemy

“Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment,” I said. “You know, to the army. So we wouldn’t necessarily want to pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go home and be a patriot.”

“It was you who killed Carbone,” he said. “People are talking about it.”

“People are wrong,” I said. “I wasn’t here. And I didn’t kill Brubaker. Because I wasn’t there either.”

“Neither was I,” he said. “Either.”

He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at Summer’s map. Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward accent.

“Wait,” he said.

“For what?”

“No,” he said.

“No what?”

“No, sir,” he said.

“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.

“You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?”

“You think you didn’t?”

He went quiet again. Looked down.

“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.

He looked up.

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say It wasn’t me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe Trifonov was too. There was something about him. I was starting to get a very bad feeling.

“You’re going to have to prove it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“You’re going to have to. Or they’ll throw away the key. They might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren’t going to let Brubaker slide.”

He said nothing.

“Start over,” I said. “The night of January fourth, where were you?”

He just shook his head.

“You were somewhere,” I said. “That’s for damn sure. Because you weren’t here. You logged in and out. You and your gun.”

He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and didn’t speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on 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.

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 second, 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.