Nemesis (27 page)

Harry nodded. ‘Chinese general and military strategist. He wrote
The Art of War.
’

‘They
maintain
he wrote
The Art of War.
Personally, I believe it was a woman. On the surface,
The Art of War
is a manual about tactics on the battlefield, but at its deepest level it describes how to win conflicts. Or to be more precise, the art of getting what you want at the lowest possible price. The winner of a war is not necessarily the
victor. Many have won the crown, but lost so much of their army that they can only rule on their ostensibly defeated enemies’ terms. With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can’t learn that,
Spiuni
.’

‘Is that why you’re in prison?’

Raskol closed his eyes and laughed without sound. ‘I could easily give you an answer, but you mustn’t believe a word I say. Sun Tzu says the first principle of war is
tromperie –
deception. Believe me – all gypsies lie.’

‘Mm. Believe you? As in the Greek paradox?’

‘Well I never, a policeman who knows about more than the penal code. If all gypsies lie and I’m a gypsy, then it is not true that all gypsies lie. So the truth is I tell the truth and then it is true that all gypsies lie. So I’m lying. A circular argument which is impossible to break. My life is like that and that is the only truth.’ He laughed a gentle, almost feminine laugh.

‘Now you’ve seen my opening move. It’s your turn.’

Raskol looked at Harry. He nodded.

‘My name is Raskol Baxhet. It’s an Albanian name, but my father refused to accept that we were Albanians. He said Albania was Europe’s anal orifice. So I and all my brothers and sisters were told we were born in Romania, baptised in Bulgaria and circumcised in Hungary.’

Raskol explained that his family were probably Meckari, the largest of the Albanian gypsy groups. The family fled from Enver Hoxha’s persecution of gypsies over the mountains into Montenegro and began to work eastwards.

‘We were hounded everywhere we went. They claimed we were
thieves. Of course we were, but they didn’t even bother to gather evidence. The proof was we were gypsies. I’m telling you this because to recognise a gypsy you have to know he was born with a low-caste mark on his forehead. We have been persecuted by every single regime in Europe There is no difference between fascists, communists and democrats; the fascists were just a little more efficient. Gypsies make no particular fuss about the Holocaust because the difference from the persecution we were used to was not that great. You don’t seem to believe me?’

Harry shrugged. Raskol crossed his arms.

‘In 1589, Denmark introduced the death penalty for gypsy ringleaders,’ he said. ‘Fifty years later the Swedes decided all male gypsies should be hanged. In Moravia they cut the left ear off gypsy women, in Bohemia the right. The Archbishop of Mainz proclaimed that all gypsies should be executed without a conviction as their way of life was outlawed. In 1725, a law was passed in Prussia that all gypsies over eighteen should be executed without a trial, but later this law was repealed – the age limit was put down to fourteen. Four of my father’s brothers died in captivity. Only one of them during the War. Shall I continue?’

Harry shook his head.

‘But even that is a closed circle,’ Raskol said. ‘The reason we are persecuted and we survive is the same. We are – and want to be – different. Just as we are kept out in the cold,
gadjos
cannot enter our community. The gypsy is the mysterious, menacing stranger you know nothing about, but about whom there are all sorts of rumours. People of many generations believed gypsies were cannibals. Where I grew up – in Balteni, outside Bucharest – they claimed we were the descendants of Cain and doomed to eternal perdition. Our
gadjo
neighbours gave us money to stay away.’

Raskol’s eyes flitted across the windowless walls.

‘My father was a smith, but there was no work in Romania. We had to move out to the rubbish dump outside the town where the Kalderash gypsies were living. In Albania my father had been the
bulibas
, the local gypsy leader and arbitrator, but among the Kalderash he was just an unemployed smith.’

Raskol heaved a deep sigh.

‘I’ll never forget the expression in his eyes when he led home a small, tame brown bear. He had bought it with his last money from a group of Ursari. “It can dance,” my father said. The communists paid to see a dancing bear. It made them feel better about themselves. Stefan, my brother, tried to feed the bear, but it wouldn’t eat, and my mother asked if it was sick. He answered that they had walked all the way from Bucharest and just needed to rest. The bear died four days later.’

Raskol closed his eyes and smiled that doleful smile of his. ‘The same autumn Stefan and I ran away. Two mouths fewer to feed. We went north.’

‘How old were you?’

‘I was eight, he was twelve. The plan was to get to West Germany. At that time they were letting in refugees from all over the world and feeding them. I suppose it was their way of compensating. Stefan thought that the younger we were, the better our chances of getting in. But we were stopped on the Polish border. We arrived in Warsaw where we slept under a bridge with a blanket each, in the enclosed area by Wschodnia, the eastern railway terminal. We knew we would be able to find a
schlepper
– a people smuggler. After several days’ searching we found a Romany speaker who called himself a border guide and promised to get us into West Germany. We didn’t have the money to pay, but he said there were ways and means; he knew some men who paid well for good-looking young gypsy boys. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but obviously Stefan did. He took the guide to the side and they discussed in loud voices as the guide pointed to me. Stefan shook his head repeatedly and in the end the guide threw out his arms and gave in. Stefan asked me to wait until he came back in a car. I did as he said, but the hours passed. It was night and I lay down and slept. For the first two nights under the bridge I had been awoken by the screeching brakes of the goods
wagons, but my young ears quickly learned that those were not the sounds I should be on my guard against. So I slept and didn’t wake until I heard stealthy footsteps in the middle of the night. It was Stefan. He crept under his blanket and pressed up against the wet wall. I could hear him crying, but I squeezed my eyes shut and made no movements. Soon I could hear the trains again.’ Raskol raised his head. ‘Do you like trains,
Spiuni
?’

Harry nodded.

‘The guide came back the next day. He needed more money. Stefan went off in the car again. Four days later I awoke at the crack of dawn and saw Stefan. He must have been up all night. He lay as he usually did with his eyes half open and I could see his breath hanging in the frosty early-morning air. There was blood on his scalp and one lip was swollen. I picked up my blanket and went to the main station where a family of Kalderash gypsies had settled outside the toilets, waiting to travel westwards. I talked to the oldest of the boys. He told me that the man we thought was a
schlepper
was a local pimp who frequented the station area; he had offered his father thirty zloty for the two youngest boys. I showed the boy my blanket. It was thick and in good condition, stolen from a washing line in Lublin. He liked it. It would soon be December. I asked to see his knife. It was inside his shirt.’

‘How did you know he had a knife?’

‘All gypsies have knives. To eat with. Even members of the same family don’t share cutlery – they can catch
marime
, an infection. But he made a good deal. His knife was small and blunt. Fortunately, I was able to get it sharpened at the smith’s in the railway workshop.’

Raskol ran the long pointed nail on the little finger of his right hand across the bridge of his nose.

‘That night, after Stefan had got into the car, I asked the pimp if he had a customer for me, too. He grinned and said I should wait. When he came back, I stood in the shadow under the bridge watching the trains moving in and out of the station area. “Come here,
Sinti
,” he shouted. “I’ve got a good customer. A rich Party man. Come now, we
haven’t got much time!” I answered: “We have to wait for the Krakow train.” He came over to me and grabbed my arm. “You’ve got to come now, do you understand?” I was no higher than his chest. “There it is,” I said, pointing. He let me go and looked up. A procession of black steel wagons rolled past our pale faces as we stared up. Then the moment I was waiting for arrived. The screeching of steel against steel as the brakes bit. That drowned everything.’

Harry squinted, as if to make it easier to see if Raskol was lying.

‘As the last wagons rolled slowly by I saw a woman’s face staring at me from one of the windows. She looked like a ghost. Like my mother. I raised the bloodstained knife and showed her. And do you know what,
Spiuni
? That’s the only time in my life when I have felt complete happiness.’ Raskol closed his eyes as if to relive the moment. ‘
Koke per koke
. A head for a head. That is the Albanian expression for blood vengeance. It’s the best and the most dangerous intoxicant God gave to humanity.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

Raskol opened his eyes again. ‘Do you know what
baxt
is,
Spiuni
?’

‘No idea.’

‘Fate. Hell and karma. It’s what governs our lives. When I took the pimp’s wallet, there were three thousand zloty in it. Stefan returned and we carried the body across the rails and dumped it in one of the eastbound goods wagons. Then we went north. Two weeks later we sneaked onto a boat from Gdansk to Gothenburg. From there we went to Oslo and a field in Tøyen where there were four caravans, three occupied by gypsies. The fourth was old and abandoned, with a broken axle. That was our home for five years. That Christmas Eve, we celebrated my ninth birthday there, with biscuits and a glass of milk under the one blanket we had left. On Christmas Day we broke into our first kiosk, and we knew we had come to the right place.’ Raskol beamed. ‘It was like taking candy from a baby.’

They sat in silence for a long while.

‘You still don’t look as if you believe me entirely,’ Raskol said finally.

‘Does that matter?’ Harry asked.

Raskol smiled. ‘How do you know Anna didn’t love you?’ he asked.

Harry shrugged.

Handcuffed to each other, they walked through the Culvert.

‘Don’t assume that I know who the robber is,’ Raskol said. ‘It could be an outsider.’

‘I know,’ Harry said.

‘Good.’

‘So, if Anna is Stefan’s daughter and he lives in Norway, why didn’t he go to the funeral?’

‘Because he’s dead. He took a tumble from a roof they were doing up several years ago.’

‘And Anna’s mother?’

‘She moved south to Romania with her sister and brother when Stefan died. I don’t have her address. I doubt she has one.’

‘You told Ivarsson the reason the family didn’t go to the funeral was that she had brought shame on them.’

‘Did I?’ Harry could see the amusement in Raskol’s brown eyes. ‘Would you believe me if I said I was lying?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I wasn’t lying. Anna had been disowned by the family. She no longer existed for her father. He refused to mention her name. To prevent
marime.
Do you understand?’

‘Probably not.’

They walked into the police station and stood waiting for the lift. Raskol mumbled something to himself before he said aloud: ‘Why do you trust me,
Spiuni
?’

‘What choice do I have?’

‘You always have a choice.’

‘More to the point is: why do you trust me? The key you got from me may be like the one you were sent for Anna’s flat, but I might not have found it in the murderer’s house.’

Raskol shook his head. ‘You misunderstand. I don’t trust anyone. I only trust my own instinct. And it tells me you aren’t a stupid man. Everyone has something they live for. Something which can be taken away from them. You, too. That’s all there is to it.’

The lift doors slid open and they stepped inside.

Harry studied Raskol in the semi-darkness. He sat watching the video of the bank raid with his back erect and palms pressed together, not a flicker of an expression. Not even when the distorted sound of gunfire filled the House of Pain.

‘Do you want to see it again?’ Harry asked as they came to the final images of the Expeditor disappearing up Industrigata.

‘Not necessary,’ Raskol said.

‘Well?’ Harry said, trying not to sound excited.

‘Have you got any more?’

Harry had a feeling bad news was on the way.

‘Well, I have a video from the 7-Eleven diagonally opposite the bank, where he kept a lookout before the raid.’

‘Put it on.’

Harry played it twice. ‘Well?’ he repeated as the snowstorm raged across the screen in front of them.

‘I know he’s supposed to be behind other raids and we could have watched them, too,’ Raskol said, looking at his watch. ‘But it is a waste of time.’

‘I thought you said time was the only thing you had enough of.’

‘An obvious lie,’ he said, standing up and proffering his hand. ‘Time is the only thing I haven’t got. You’d better put the cuffs back on,
Spiuni.
’

Harry cursed to himself. He slapped the handcuffs on Raskol and they shuffled sideways between the table and the wall to the door. Harry grabbed the door handle.

‘Most bank robbers are simple souls,’ Raskol said. ‘That’s why they become bank robbers.’

Harry stopped.

‘One of the most celebrated bank robbers in the world was the American Willie Sutton,’ Raskol said. ‘When he was arrested and taken to court, the judge asked him why he robbed banks. Sutton answered:
Because that’s where the money is
. It’s become a standing expression in everyday American English and I suppose it’s meant to show us how brilliantly direct and easy language can be. To me, it just represents an idiot who got caught. Good bank robbers are neither famous nor quotable. You’ve never heard of them because they’ve never been caught. Because they are
not
direct and simple. The one you’re looking for is one of them.’