Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation, Vol. 2 (29 page)

“You only knew her through Pavel?”

“Where else? When Pavel died, poor Foch and I lost track of her. I’m glad to see that she is in such good health and apparently able to take care of herself. I always used to feel that there was a childlike quality about her, that she needed to be taken care of. I think that was what Pavel responded to.”

Jana pursued the issue. “Ms. Simmons, has the United Nations an interest in the ball, or are you hunting as well?”

There was a quizzical half-smile on Simmons’s face. “There’s no big game to hunt here. I want to have fun.”

“Without an escort?”

“My escort is Russian. He had to leave. I stayed to view the people show.” She turned back to the dancers and the stage. Jana followed her eyes. She was watching Sasha, and Sasha was watching her.

“The lady on the throne recognizes you,” Jana informed Moira.

“We got along well when she was living with Pavel. And see how she has come up in the world, a princess dispensing grace to her subjects.”

“Truly a princess,” Levitin agreed.

“One would not know it from her fairly recent history,” Moira Simmons murmured, just loud enough for Levitin to hear.

His mouth tightened, his voice took on a warning note. “She is my sister.” His look was angry. “Careful what you say.”

“I meant no harm.” Moira finally took her eyes off Sasha, and glanced at the table where Katka and Jeremy were now seated. Katka took a quick sip of her champagne. Then Jeremy led Katka onto the dance floor again. They blended in with the other whirling dancers. “People look so graceful when they dance.”

They watched the people gliding around the floor. Moira moved closer to Jana. “Your daughter is angry with you.”

“ . . . Yes.”

“You have a lovely granddaughter.”

“ . . . I’m happy to hear that.”

“I don’t know if I can help moderate your daughter’s feelings about you; but if you wish, ask me and I will try.”

“It is between the two of us.”

“As you wish.”

The music ended for the moment, the dancers drifted off the floor. Katka and her husband were one of the last couples to leave.

Jana was overcome by the need to talk to her daughter; the urge to bridge the gap between them welled up inside her. It was impossible to wait any longer.

Jana barked an order at Levitin. “Stay here, please.”

Moira Simmons was already moving toward the edge of the dance floor. Jana caught up to her in three steps. “She is my daughter. It’s time I talked to her.”

“I would wait,” Moira advised.

Jana paid no attention. She had gotten within ten feet of her daughter when Katka saw her. Jeremy noticed Jana at the same time and took a tentative half-step forward as if to stop her.

“Katka, isn’t it time for us to sit together, to finally talk again?” Jana blurted out.

Katka heard only sounds; she shut out the meaning of Jana’s words.

“Stay away from me, Jana!”

“Katka, I did nothing to your father. I loved him.”

Katka’s husband stood mute, not moving a muscle.

“You are the criminal, Jana. You are a killer!” Katka spit out.

“Katka, just ten minutes together.”

She tried to take her daughter’s hand. Katka pulled away. The two woman formed a brief, silent tableau, one in a rage, the other in shock. Oh, God, thought Jana.
She hates me now far worse than she did before.

Katka moved first, turning to the other people attending the ball, many of them already staring at the scene. Yelling as loud as she could, Katka forced everyone to pay attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce all of you to my mother, the murderer. To save herself, she shot and killed her husband, my father.”

She stepped close to Jana, flushed, an avenging angel. “See her in all her glory. A killer who, by her murderous act, maimed and destroyed a little of everyone dear to her!”

With that, she slapped Jana across the face as hard as she could. Everyone was watching. In the quiet ballroom, the sound of the blow carried to every cranny of the hall. The echo seemed to last forever.

“I
t looks smaller,” Katka murmured as they entered the house she had left so many years before.

“Everyone says that when they come home again. You were smaller; it looked larger to you then.”

“It looks older,” Katka kept repeating, walking from room to room.

“It needs a coat of paint,” Jana explained, following her. “The furniture should be polished. And the rugs are worn.”

Jana wondered if Katka thought she had failed to maintain her patrimony, had fallen down in her guardianship of the house. “Too much work in my job. You’re right. I need to do more here. I did take care of the garden in back,” Jana mentioned. She had placed small bouquets of garden flowers around the house hoping to make it cheery and welcoming. Katka paused to sniff at one of the bouquets, then passed on without comment.

Her daughter sat in the living room. She was breathing a little unevenly. However, aside from that, she appeared to be calm.

Odd, thought Jana, trying to examine her own emotions. She was feeling sad and happy at the same time. Jana could see the little girl inside the grown young woman, and felt tender and proud and loving and anxious, and a million other emotions. She was sure all of them were fighting for display across her face.

Katka’s appearance, her face, her expression showed some of what Jana was feeling. Her daughter was having an inner dialogue between her past and her present, between love for the house and anger at a past that had been taken away from her. The feelings flickered across her face, brief frames from a faded film. Then they were gone.

“Why are we bound to the house we grew up in?” Katka’s voice carried a subtext, as if to say that she didn’t feel any ties. She pulled one of the flowers from a vase on the small end table by the couch, rubbing it on her cheek as if applying rouge. “All those expectations. It’s disappointing to come back. Nothing could live up to what you want.”

“Everything lives up to it. Here we are, Katka and Jana, mother and daughter.”

“Is that good?” Katka asked. She did not seem to want an answer.

“For me, it’s so good that you’re here.”

“Thank you.”

Jana began to laugh.

Katka murmured, “Share it, if it’s funny.”

“You said everything looked smaller. Am I smaller?”

“No, bigger.”

“Fatter?” asked Jana, worried.

“No, bigger. That’s all.”

“Maybe if I had seen you more when you were a child, you would think I was smaller now. I wish I could have seen you all the time, but there was no way. Grandma and Dano, they had to care for you.”

Jana busied herself with making tea. Katka, hearing the water running, called out that she wanted coffee.

“Sorry. I only have tea.” She heard an echo inside of her.

Jana realized she was apologizing, in one way or another, over and over again. She felt guilty for her inadequacies as a mother, for not being small enough, for the house, the rugs, and now for having tea and not coffee. She paused to regroup.

“I baked cookies, like Grandma’s.”

“Good,” Katka approved. “When are we going to see Grandma’s grave?”

“Whenever you want.”

Katka stood, ready to go. “How about right now?”

Jana dried her hands. “The tea and the cookies?”

“We’ll eat the cookies there.”

“Okay.” She put the dish towel on its rack, then pulled her coat off the hook. Things were not going according to plan. Jana had practiced saying certain things for weeks. She knew what words to use about her mother. She was going to talk about her police work. And she would certainly not forget to ask Katka about her life in America.

Now they were off to the cemetery without touching on so many things: most of all, Dano. As they walked out of the house, Jana felt uneasy at leaving the one place in the world where she thought the two of them might be comfortable with each other.

The trip to the cemetery was short. During the drive, Katka was silent, staring out the window, not volunteering a word until they were among the gravestones.

Jana had tried to draw her out. “I tracked down some of your old classmates.”

“I’m sure we’ve all outgrown each other,” Katka replied.

There were a few other people among the graves, cleaning them, arranging fresh flowers, leaving food. But Jana’s mother’s grave had no one near it. They sat there, apart from the rest of the people at the cemetery. Jana kissed her own fingers, then transferred the kiss to her mother by touching the small headstone with her fingertips. Katka pulled a cookie out of the sack, breaking it into several pieces.

“For you, Grandma.” She spread the cookie pieces over the grave. “That’s for all the cookies you baked me.”

“The world is not fair,” Katka announced, some of the little girl she had been in her voice. “If it were fair, we would all be munching on these together: You, me, Grandma, and Dad.”

Jana nodded.

“Are you a fair person, Mother?”

“I hope so.”

“We both hope so.”

Katka’s tone had changed. It was now accusatory.

“Where are we going with this, Katka?” Jana deliberately kept her voice soft and non-threatening.

“To a place we should have gone years ago, Mother. Are you an honest person?”

The questioning raised warning flags for Jana. She had the odd feeling that she was being interrogated.

“I have reason to believe you may not be as honest as you pretend to be, Jana,” Katka went on.

An attack. Unmistakable, when she was addressed as “Jana” instead of “Mother.”

“I’m not pretending anything, Katka.” Jana waited for whatever would come next. Her daughter’s pent-up emotions were about to erupt.

“You have been concealing something from me, Jana.”

Whatever it was, was going to be bad.

“You murdered my father.”

Jana felt the blow.
Murder.
Her daughter was accusing her of killing Dano. Her thoughts scuttled around inside her head like a frantic animal trying to find an escape.

Katka was relentless.

“You killed my father. You shot him.” She launched the words like torpedoes, enjoying the explosions as they hit their target. “One shot, at close range. How could you do it?”

Jana tried. “No. I did not kill your father. And he was dead before any shot killed him.”

Katka stood up. “You lie.”

Jana thought about the statement. “I have never lied to you.”

“I learned the truth from my great-aunt. No,” she corrected herself, “my ‘real’ mother.” She observed Jana’s response. Satisfied with what she saw, she continued, “She housed me, she fed me, and she gave me all the news of Slovakia. The Slovak newspapers carried the details of your glorious deed. He came to you for rescue and you destroyed him instead.” Katka took pleasure from the pain she was inflicting. She went on, “He fought the communists. He fought for democracy. And you killed him.”

Jana stood, hurt, unsure what to say to heal herself, to heal Katka, to close the chasm that had appeared between them. “Katka, I loved Dano. We were divorced, but I still loved him. He had done terrible, stupid things, but I still cared. I would not do him any harm.”

“More and more lies.” Katka’s words spilled out of her mouth. “He loved me; he loved you. He loved the whole world.”

“Katka, how long have you lived with this idea? How long have you believed I killed Dano?”

“For years, Policewoman Jana Matinova. Everybody in the United States, the whole Slovak community, they knew. I lived with it, lived with all of them trying hard not to bring the subject up around me.”

“And you waited to come home to tell me?”

“I waited to tell you what I knew over my grandmother’s grave. I wanted to see how dirty, how ugly you were. I know it now. I hoped I was wrong. But I was not. You are not my mother. You were never my father’s wife. You were just a communist police officer.”

Katka walked away, leaving Jana, stunned, standing by her mother’s grave. She took Jana’s car back to the house, moved her things to a hotel, and left the car with the key still in the ignition on the street for the police to find. The next day she was on her way back to the United States.

Later, despite all the entreaties, the letters, the pleas sent by way of friends or relatives, Katka refused to see Jana again. With the new baby, there had been some hope of being allowed to see her new grandchild. It was short-lived. Jana received a note from Katka’s husband, with one word underlined: “
Impossible
.” Katka steadfastly refused to see Jana again.

Trokan was upset. “Tell the truth,” he ordered Jana. “Blame Dano. He pulled the trigger. Unless she knows that, your relationship with Katka will be over.”

“Have her find out that Dano killed himself? No. Not now; not ever,” swore Jana. Katka had to have something to believe in. “Her father is her belief; her anchor in life. A good illusion is better to live with than an ugly truth. Fathers cannot rob banks; fathers cannot kill themselves.”

“You have blinders on,” grumbled Trokan. “She has blinders on,” he added. “And neither one of you is interested in seeing anything except the black tunnel ahead.”

T
he ball dragged on interminably for Jana, only beginning to phase out around 2 A.M. A magnificent meal had been served on the grounds to the rear of the palace, then everyone drifted back inside anticipating Princess Sasha’s toast, followed by the formal toast to the Tsar. Sasha had been eloquent. Levitin was amazed at her showmanship and audacity. Sasha was in another world, cocooned by the people flowing around her, all of them beaming love and affection at her in their mutual fantasy. She was living the life of royalty.