Flashback (32 page)

“Don't we all,” he agreed. Then he looked at Brian. “I will call Ivan in the next day or two.”

“We'll be waiting,” Brian said.

Werner nodded and turned from us. It took him a while to cross the plaza, his heels kicking snow as he went. Alone, against the stark white plaza, with the monument and its monolithic pillar looming in front of him, he looked tired and defeated, just an old man on a winter morning. When he reached the memorial, he stopped and looked back at us, lingering briefly before disappearing from our view.

“Do you trust him to make this meeting with Stringer happen?” I asked Brian, as we started back toward where we'd parked the SEAT.

“Do you?” Brian asked.

“Yes,” I told him.

He nodded. “So do I.”

*   *   *

Ivan was already up and gone when we got back to the apartment, but he appeared almost immediately with breakfast supplies: fresh eggs, pastries, a loaf of bread, and a brand-new bottle of Russian vodka.

I'd been hard asleep and hadn't heard him come in the night before, but from Ivan's wan face and shaky hands I could tell he'd had another late night. There was a dark red bruise on the side of his neck, an oval the size and shape of a woman's lips. I could see why some people found Ivan annoying, but there was also something fundamentally endearing about the Russian. There was an honesty to him, an unapologetic glee to his self-destruction that just made me like him.

“How did your meeting with the big guy go?” he asked, setting the food down, taking his coat off. “Everybody get what they wanted?”

“I hope so,” I said.

One of Ivan's best qualities was his discretion. He hadn't asked either of us why we'd wanted to meet Werner, just as he hadn't pushed me on Hannah Boyle, and I was grateful to him for it.

“You got any plans for the next couple of days?” Brian asked.

Ivan shook his head. “I don't have a flight until next week.”

“Good,” Brian told him. “We have some more business with Werner. He's going to call you in the next day or two.”

“No problem, boss.” Ivan smiled, but I could tell he wasn't at his cheery best. He set the pastries on a plate, put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and slumped down at the kitchen table with a cigarette. “I think I'm getting too old for this crap,” he admitted.

Brian laughed. “I think that happened a long time ago.”

Ivan's cell phone rang, and he reached into the pocket of his coat to answer it, flashing Brian the middle finger of his free hand.

“Ivan,” he grunted into the receiver. A garbled voice crackled back at him.

Ivan mumbled something in Slovak, then got up and opened one of the kitchen drawers, pulled out a pencil and a piece of scrap paper, and scribbled a hasty note. A brief conversation ensued, with much laughter on Ivan's side; then Ivan snapped the phone shut and turned to us.

“Got it,” he said triumphantly.

“Got what?” I asked.

“Stanislav Divin,” he said. “I talked to my friend at the police department while you guys were out. That was him calling back with Divin's address. Apparently, he's retired to the countryside, bought himself a little farm.” He handed me the piece of paper. “Some shithole outside of Kosice.”

I looked down at the paper, at Ivan's barely legible scrawl. “Where's Kosice?”

“Eastern Slovakia,” Brian offered. “Near the Hungarian border.”

“Can we get there by tonight?” I asked.

Brian looked at his watch. “There and back, if we leave soon.”

TWENTY-NINE

Catherine Reed.
I said the words to myself as I peered out the SEAT's back window at the fallow fields rushing by. The snow was thick and downy, the land beneath sculpted into shallow ripples by the last pass of the plow. Off in the distance the ghostly peaks of the Carpathians rose up through the ever-present Slovak industrial haze.

If all else failed, at least I had the name. That, coupled with what little else I knew, that Catherine had worked for CNN in Islamabad, that she'd died there in the summer of 1988, would surely be enough to find out more. Someone would know what had happened to her daughter, what had happened to me.

What did people do in situations like that? There would have been grandparents, aunts and uncles, a father. The same people who were taking care of the child I had left behind. Though I would have been old enough to take care of myself, I thought, calculating the best guess at my age against the timeline of history. I would have been somewhere around nineteen or twenty in the summer of 1988.

A truck passed us, barreling down the highway, spewing snow across the front windshield of the SEAT, and I felt my heart power up into my chest. The little car shuddered, pushed sideways by the truck's wake. For an instant I thought of the Peugeot, the body crumpled like an aluminum can. But there was more to my fear than the fear of dying.

I could find her, I thought; not the little girl at the Cluny abbey, not this shadow daughter of my imaginings, but a real child. A real person, out of whose life I had walked one day, into whose life I somehow expected to return. She was out there, some part of her no doubt having forgotten, some other part waiting for me.

“Maniac,” Brian swore, struggling with the wheel as the truck disappeared down the highway.

*   *   *

Stanislav Divin's farm was some twenty kilometers outside of Kosice, a ragtag little homestead nestled in the foothills of the Low Tatras. The address Ivan had given us was vague at best, and it took some time to make our way through the villages north of Kosice, stopping occasionally so that Brian could ask directions in his imperfect Slovak.

It was nearing sunset when we turned through Divin's battered gate and started down the unplowed drive to the house. The property was worn but tidy, the outbuildings patched and repatched. It wasn't much in the way of a farm, just a chicken coop, a small barn, and a couple of broken-down Skodas, but it was exactly the kind of place a city cop would dream of retiring to. I could only imagine it in the summertime, with the mountains green in the distance and the smell of freshly mowed hay.

Not wanting to scare Divin off, we purposely hadn't called in advance, and I was relieved to see lights on in the house and a thin line of smoke snaking up from the chimney. As we pulled up to the house, the curtains in one of the front windows opened and a gray face peered out at us from behind the glass.

“I guess they know we're here,” Brian said as he cut the engine and we climbed out of the SEAT.

The front door opened, and a woman in a wool shirt and pants appeared on the porch. She was close to Divin's age, or what I would have guessed his age to be, a robust seventy-something, stocky and self-reliant. His wife, most likely.

Brian started toward the house, calling out in Slovak as he went, his tone light and genial.

“Smile,” he called out to me over his shoulder, as the woman peered in my direction.

I broke into an idiot grin while Brian laid out his most charming appeal.

I could see the woman hesitating, her mind contemplating the possibilities, these two obvious foreigners in a Spanish car asking to see her husband. It couldn't have seemed right. And yet she turned toward the door and beckoned us forward.

The house was luxuriously toasty inside, heated to a near sub-Saharan warmth by an immense woodstove. Dinner was cooking in the kitchen, and the air was perfumed with the smell of long-simmered meat and baked apples.

“Divin's in his shop,” Brian explained as the woman disappeared into the back of the house. “She's going to get him.”

“Did you tell her why we're here?” I asked.

“I said it's about one of his old cases. I told her you're an American, and that your sister was killed in a car accident. I said there's a lawsuit pending and that there could be money in it if he knows anything that can help us get a settlement.”

“And she believed you?”

Brian shrugged. “As far as I could understand.”

There were excited voices from somewhere in the back of the house. Finally, the woman reappeared with her husband in tow. She said something to Brian, then left us and headed into the kitchen.

Stanislav Divin was a slight man, his trim but vigorous body in stark contrast to his wife's wide hips and meaty hands. He was dressed simply, in worn jeans and a frayed work shirt, his forearms powdered with a fine film of sawdust. In his right hand was a wooden figurine, a beautiful and delicate rendering of a hummingbird in flight.

He smiled at me, and for a moment I was worried that he might recognize me, that if I had been in the car with Hannah he would surely remember, but his expression said nothing of the sort. He looked to Brian next, then motioned for us to sit. How many hundreds of cases, I told myself, and this one so long ago. Even I might not have recognized the girl I had been then.

“My wife says you've come about an old case of mine,” Divin said in barely accented English. He settled himself into an armchair near the woodstove and set the bird in his lap.

“Yes,” I said, slipping my coat off, taking a chair opposite him. It was hot near the hearth, unpleasantly so. “My sister,” I told him, following Brian's lead. “She died in a car accident some years ago. I've been told you were the investigator.”

“An accident?” Divin mused.

“Yes. In December of nineteen eighty-nine. She was driving a white Peugeot with Austrian tags. A truck hit her on the Bratislava-Vienna road.”

“A white Peugeot,” Divin said. He put his hand on the bird's head and turned his face up toward the ceiling, as if looking for the memory in the roof's old wood beams.

“She was an American,” I offered. “Her name was Hannah. Hannah Boyle.”

The old man nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I remember. It was a nasty collision. The girl…” He winced, then looked at me. “I'm sorry.”

“It's been a long time,” I said, showing him a thin smile, the dregs of grief. We were both silent for a moment while I tried to decide how to continue. A log shifted in the fire, the sound echoing in the stove's iron belly.

“I understand you were a narcotics detective,” I said finally, taking a chance.

Divin shifted in his chair, glancing quickly from me to Brian. He said something to Brian in Slovak, and Brian answered back. Whatever Brian said must have been convincing. When they had finished their exchange, the old man turned back to me. “You understand correctly,” he said.

I smiled encouragingly. “It's all right,” I told him. “My family is well aware of my sister's problems.” I took another chance. “She wasn't just a tourist, was she?”

Divin shook his head.

“Heroin?” I guessed.

“Hashish,” he corrected me.

“How much did she have in the car with her?”

“Several kilos,” Divin said. “I don't remember exactly.”

“And the other girl, what happened to her?”

Divin looked down at the wooden bird. Gently, he lifted the figure from his lap and set it on the low table next to him. When his eyes met mine again, they were clear and steady. “I don't understand,” he said. “What other girl?”

“My sister's friend,” I tried. “She was traveling with another woman, an American.”

“Surely you're mistaken,” the old man insisted. “There was no one.” He set his hands in his empty lap. “This lawsuit of yours? Who exactly is involved?”

I looked to Brian.

“Peugeot,” he said quickly. “There was a problem with their seat belts.”

Divin nodded. “Well, then,” he said, rising from his chair. “Surely I've told you everything I know that could help. The Boyle woman's seat belt, as I recall, was still buckled when we got to her. Now, if that's all, I believe our dinner is almost ready.”

*   *   *

“Seat belts?” I said as we climbed into the SEAT. “Was that the best you could come up with?”

Brian pulled the door closed behind him. “I'm not sure anything I could have said would have made much difference at that point.”

He was right, of course. Divin was no dummy, and our story was full of holes, but still I couldn't help thinking there was a lot more to the car accident than the old detective had told us.

“You think it was you, don't you? In the car with Hannah.” Brian asked as we started out the gate.

“Yes,” I told him.

“You know they don't mess around with that kind of stuff here. The drugs, I mean. If that was you, you'd still be sitting in some Slovak prison.”

I stared out the dark window, at my own ghostly reflection, and the wedge of moon in the distance. “But I'm not,” I said, thinking about the Peugeot, the open passenger door, and the glass littering the asphalt around it, each shard shimmering like a diamond in the glare of the police flashbulb.

I pushed the image from my mind and tried to focus on what I knew, the order in which things had happened. In the summer of 1988, Catherine Reed was murdered in Pakistan. Some eighteen months later, during the frenzied fall of communism, Hannah Boyle died in a car full of hashish, and Catherine's daughter, riding in the seat beside her, emerged unscathed. No, something didn't add up.

THIRTY

The call from Werner came the next evening. Brian, Ivan, and I were having dinner at a Thai place in the Old City when Ivan's cell phone rang. The conversation was short, the Russian all business.

“It was Werner,” Ivan said when he'd hung up. “He'll meet you at the boat terminal at Devin Castle. Morning after tomorrow, ten o'clock. He said to tell you Stringer will be there.”

I set my fork down and looked to Brian, panic flashing in my eyes. As much as I trusted Werner to deliver Stringer, I couldn't forget what had happened at the Casbah.

“It'll be okay,” he said. “Don't worry.”

Ivan shoveled a forkful of fried rice into his mouth. “Werner's a motherfucker,” he said, chewing while he talked. “But he doesn't go back on his word. It's all he's got.”