Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation, Vol. 2 (15 page)

“That’s a good word: friends. We were always friends. But our marriage didn’t work. It just didn’t work.”

“Why didn’t it work?” asked Jana.

Jeremy winced. “Let’s allow the lady her privacy on that subject, Jana.”

“I don’t mind answering,” Moira assured Jeremy. “We didn’t make love. He liked to entertain young men at home. Some of them were
very
young. He couldn’t stay away from them. And he was afraid that if I stayed with him, and we were still married, it would hurt me, hurt my career, hurt my social life. He urged me over and over again to get a divorce, so I did.” Tears started falling onto her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them away.

The waiter appeared and began to run through the dessert selection. No one had any appetite. They paid their bill and the group broke up. Jana watched as Jeremy gave Moira Simmons his arm, trying to lend her support as they walked away. Jana and Levitin went back to their hotel together.

“I was not prepared for that,” admitted Levitin. “Ordinarily I would place her on my list of suspects, if I had any, except that she is not Koba.”

“Who or what is the Koba of today: Male? Female? Who is in the game he plays, who is not?”

“You are the homicide detective. You tell me.”

“When I can, I will.” They walked through the hotel lobby, stopping at the desk for messages. There was one for Jana from Trokan. She called him when she got back to her room.

He told her one of her cats was sick. Trokan had brought them home to care for them, and one cat had some sort of convulsive seizure. The seizures had stopped. But, to be sure the cat was okay, Trokan had left him with a veterinarian. Trokan apologized. Like Trokan, maybe the cat didn’t care for his wife.

Jana laughed.

Everything would be okay, she told herself.

It didn’t work. She couldn’t sleep.

F
or the sake of convenience, the conference organizers had booked all the participants into the same hotel. However, it was still a surprise when Moira Simmons knocked on Jana’s door after midnight. It was a soft knock, hesitant, unsure. Jana pulled on her clothes. When she opened the door Moira Simmons was there looking like a little girl, her hair unkempt, her eyes big and pleading, her shoulders sagging. Jana stepped aside to let her in without asking why she had come. Her face was enough to tell Jana that she needed help.

Moira walked to the bed and, completely clothed except for her shoes, crawled under the covers. She lay there without talking, her eyes closed, her lips moving, soft, rhythmic sounds emerging. From what Jana could pick up, it sounded unlike any language she had ever heard. After some minutes, the woman opened her eyes, looking like she had experienced a nightmare and was pleading with Jana, with anyone, to stop her horrific visions.

Moira’s voice was childlike. “I pray in Gaelic for the bad spirits to go away. Even though I pray and pray, I’m still as frightened as I ever was. I’m lost. Seven years old. No! Please tell me I’m an adult. Please tell me I’m safe.”

Jana pulled the room’s only chair closer to the bed. “Foch’s death has taken a little of the adult in you away. Death, death of a close person, always does. To everyone. It’s part of what grief is.”

“I’m angry at him, dying like that on me.”

“If he’d had a choice, he would rather not have died at all.” Jana pulled her chair even closer. “People have a nasty habit of leaving us without our permission.”

Moira closed her eyes again. This time she lay so still for so long that Jana thought she had gone into an emotion-induced coma. Then her eyes popped open.

“I keep seeing him, the way he was killed, with that thing in his eye.” She turned her head, to look directly at Jana. “In my own apartment, all the while I am there, I watch the front door, afraid to look away. I think the door will be quietly opened without my noticing and a man will be there to kill me. I don’t want to die like that.”

Her voice had dropped in volume, and Jana was forced to lean over her to hear. She waited until she was sure that Moira was finished, then asked, “Who is this man who comes to kill you?”

“His name was Grosjean in Holland; Langlois in Belgium; Macht in Germany; Goncherov in Belarus. Many of them, all mixed into one face, one body, all of them in a single monster come to kill me.”

“You have not mentioned our Koba.”

“He is them, they are him, no matter what the name. The names I gave you are my older names, the monsters I first knew about. They’re the ones who haunt me in my dreams. I can’t sleep. I’m afraid to. That’s when they will come.”

Jana did not need to be a psychiatrist to realize that the woman was on the edge of a personal abyss. “You must think you are very important to these people for them to come after you. How do you threaten them? Is it enough to make them want to destroy Moira Simmons?”

“Foch couldn’t hurt them. Yet, look what they did to him. Poor, silly Foch.”

“We don’t know yet why Foch was killed. It is different now, tonight. Why do you think this might happen to you? What evidence do we have that they are coming after Moira Simmons?”

“I’m trying to stop them. That’s all they need to know.”

Jana thought about Moira’s rationale. “I think there is something else. You described monsters emerging from earlier in your life. When? How early?”

Moira reverted to her silent state. Then her right arm came up, pointing at the ceiling. “You see that spot? I will tell you a secret. I have the same spot, always there, like that spot on the plaster. Only my spot is much bigger. I cannot make it go away. I cannot lessen it, no matter how much I scrub my mind, no matter what I accomplish.”

She sat up in bed, pulling up the sheet and blanket, gathering them around her in a crumpled heap which she wrapped as closely as she could around her body. She ended up hugging the bedclothes to her like a lost little girl. Then she told her story.

“My mother was a working girl in a house of prostitution. They used the term ‘working girl’ instead of ‘whore.’ She worked for one of those men. His name was Walsh. First she worked in the house, then later, when she got older and couldn’t compete with the younger girls, on the street. Then Walsh found out about me. He had my mother bring me to the house to work.

“I was thirteen, just thirteen years old. She didn’t think much of me, did she, to take me there? To make me a whore like her.” Simmons laughed, an ugly laugh that came from deep in her throat.

“What did I know about men? About sex? Nothing. I was raped four or five times a night. They couldn’t wait to get their dicks in a young girl. For five weeks. It went on for five weeks, six days a week.

“Then I found a knife on one of my
customers.
He also ran the place. Walsh used me like the clients, except he did not have to pay. He had fallen asleep. It was a bread knife that he had honed so it was very slim and very sharp. When the house closed that night, the bouncers left.” She laughed again. “Then I walked up to him, casually, and stuck it into him. Just like they stuck it to me. Not just once. Maybe ten or fifteen times. He bled far more than I had bled.”

Her arms tightened around the blankets. “The psychiatrists in the court hearing said the number of knife wounds was typical of a rage killing. They said I was not responsible for my actions. I was not convicted of anything, not even prostitution. They wanted to help me. They placed me in a treatment facility. It wasn’t good enough. How could they help me after what I’d been through?”

Moira was panting for air. Jana waited until she had calmed herself. Jana could not find words with which to soothe the woman, so she asked a question, hoping that the right words would eventually come to her. “Walsh. You didn’t mention Walsh as one of the people coming for you. Why?”

“He’s dead. I killed him. He can’t come back. I’m safe from him.”

“Where did you get the other names?” Jana asked her.

“When I came to work here, I tried to put an end to the sex trade. I read and reread volumes of reports; I talked to the women who were sold and enslaved. The names of those men would come up. Other names, too. They are all still out there. Only Walsh got the death sentence he deserved.” The ugly laugh came again. “They know I’m after them. They want to get me first.” Her voice was becoming faint. She curled up in a fetal position, a little girl ready for sleep.

“Please, don’t leave. I need to rest. If you go, they’ll come back. Will you stay?” she asked.

Jana could not bring herself to refuse. “Not a problem. I’ve slept in chairs before. If those men dare to come back, I’ll beat them off.”

Moira smiled. “Yes, you would drive them away. We’ll work together to beat them.” Her breathing became more even, slowing until she slept.

After making sure she was asleep, Jana went to the closet and took down the spare pillow and blanket, tucking herself into the suite’s large armchair. She wondered if Trokan would think it was part of police work to stand guard against the phantoms in someone else’s mind. She rather thought he would, given the nature of these phantoms.

I
n the morning, aching from being compressed into awkward postures all night by the chair, Jana pulled her clothes from the closet, took a quick look at Moira Simmons, who was still sleeping like a child, then slipped into the bathroom to sponge-bathe and put on fresh clothes, a pair of Eastern European knockoff Levis, a heavy blue cotton blouse and, after a moment’s hesitation, the jacket from her suit. The only jarring note was her clumpy police shoes.

To hell with convention, she thought. I’ve given them my best imitation of a delegate. I am now going to be comfortable.

She returned to the bedroom. In the short time it had taken her to wash and dress, Moira Simmons had left.

Jana was relieved. The woman seemed half crazed, and Jana didn’t want to deal with Moira’s fearful past and neurotic present now. The woman needed professional help, and Jana was a cop, not a therapist. She decided to call Seges and deal with a more familiar source of stress: the busy morning telephone lines to Slovakia.

Seges was irritated when she finally got him on the line. He complained about the caseload building up while she was in Strasbourg. Seges never liked doing more than what he considered his share. He liked it even less when Jana told him to call the Irish police and have them pull the files they had on the killing of a man named Walsh and the person who had killed him. She carefully spelled out Moira Simmons’s name, making sure that he correctly spelled it back to her.

Most important for Jana were the cases that she had left behind. Their investigations had to continue on the right path, so they discussed the most urgent. A procurator was demanding additional investigation; she told Seges to do it. He had interviewed the niece of the man who’d killed his son. The niece had observed the son hit the father on at least two occasions, so maybe this was not such a cut-and-dried murder after all. Jana told him to put the niece on the witness list, and she would interview her when she got back to Bratislava. A new case had come in: A customer had apparently gone berserk in a bar and killed two people, both the owner and the bartender. Jana told Seges to check the killer’s background to determine if there was any intimation that he was employed in the business “protection” rackets so endemic in Slovakia.

Seges saved the most interesting item until last. The wine store owned by the “pimp” had burned to the ground. There were no immediate signs of arson, but the fire inspectors were combing the wreckage. They were searching for the bald thug. The address the man gave them had been vacated; no one there had seen him for months. Apparently he had some hidden bolt-hole which he’d crawled into.

The book with the codes, Jana reminded Seges. He told her that an expert in Slovakia had been recommended and they were going to give it to him. He was currently out of the country. Jana told Seges to make a copy for the Slovak expert and also to give it to the FBI’s agent in their Prague office. To tell them it was important, and that if the Americans needed to know how important, one of their embassy officers from Paris would talk to them. She gave Seges Jeremy’s name, smiling. She would have to remember to tell Jeremy that he might receive a surprise phone call from the FBI in Prague.

Jana was about to terminate her discussion with Seges when he remembered that she’d had a call from Ukraine, from Mikhail Gruschov. Gruschov had additional information, and she was to phone him between three and four that afternoon, his time. It was about a man who was a witness to one of the murders that had been committed in Slovakia.

“Which one?” asked Jana.

“He didn’t say,” replied Seges. “I didn’t ask, because he wanted you, not me.” Fine, Jana thought. For a change, Seges had surprised her: He was attending to business, and remembering to keep her appropriately apprised of events. On the other hand, there were other cases, and Jana couldn’t stifle the thought that he had probably botched one or two of them and simply wasn’t mentioning it. She finally thrust this worry out of her mind.

That left the matter of the tall Russian police officer with the large head, Levitin. She told Seges to inform Trokan that she had met the Russian cop. He seemed all right, but she wanted Trokan to obtain his dossier. The man was holding something back, and she didn’t want any future shocks when whatever it was ultimately came out.

Seges added a last comment. He’d had heard that one of her cats was sick and he was sorry the poor little thing was in pain. Jana was glad to end the call.

As she hung up, Jana noticed a note on hotel stationery which had been left on the chair she had slept in. Moira Simmons thanked her for her assistance last night, and informed her that the meeting previously scheduled for that day would be moved forward. It would start at 10:30.

Jana reflected on the note. Simple and precise. Perhaps even cold. Jana put it down to the break in Moira Simmons’s defenses. After last night, Moira had gone back to the formality that had previously characterized her. Jana guessed she had to, to keep her demons at bay.