The Unquiet Dead (19 page)

She would tell him, she decided. This mucking about in the dark was pointless. It was getting them nowhere. “The chief got a call from a friend at Justice, from the War Crimes division. There's some suspicion that Christopher Drayton was actually an alias. We think his real name was Dra
ž
en Krstić.”

Nate stared at her, perplexed. “Dra
ž
en Krstić?”

“An indicted Serb war criminal. One of the logisticians of the massacre at Srebrenica.”

“
That's
why they asked Esa to dig around?” He lost a little of his color. “They think that Chris was Krstić? That's simply not possible.”

“Why not?”

She was curious as to how Drayton had submerged his true identity so thoroughly.

“His English was perfect, for one thing.”

“He spoke several languages fluently. Why not English?”

“No. He was a patient man, immensely kind and vigorous. He had an appetite for life. He loved teaching kids. He loved beautiful things. He threw himself into the museum—my God, the museum!”

Rachel waited. She was finding this most instructive.

“A man like Dra
ž
en Krstić would have had absolutely no interest in the Andalusia project. It would be antithetical to his sense of himself—to the ideology that fueled the Bosnian war.”

“You know something about it, then.” She filed away the troubling contradiction of the museum for later consideration.

“Of course I do. When Esa went to Sarajevo with his student group, I was the one he wrote to about the siege.”

“You didn't go with him?”

“I couldn't. My father was a diplomat. It would have embarrassed him. I did what I could to help Esa from this end.”

Rachel tried to remember her student years. She'd been hungry to learn, but her risk-taking had taken another form.

The cops turned their backs on us, Ray. How could you want to be one of them?

I don't, Zach. I won't be anything like them, you can trust me.

She hadn't begun to come to terms with the knowledge that she no longer needed to carry the burden of guilt and dread that had defined her life for the past seven years. She didn't know if she felt lighter or merely empty. She wondered what Drayton had thought, venturing too close to the traitorous edge of the Bluffs. Had he jumped? Had the ghosts of Srebrenica haunted his peace too fully? Was his support for Ringsong meant to be an absolution? Had he accepted the things the letter writer had said about him?

I would like to appeal to you Mr. Krsti
ć
, whether there is any hope for at least that little child that they snatched away from me, because I keep dreaming about him. I dream of him bringing flowers and saying, “Mother, I've come.” I hug him and say, “Where have you been, my son?” And he says, “I've been in Vlasenica all this time.” So I beg you, if Mr. Krsti
ć
knows anything about it, about him surviving somewhere …

Were there tears in her eyes, or was it mist from the lake that spread below them?

If she had received such a letter—a mother begging for the whereabouts of her missing son, one body among the thousands in Srebrenica's mass graves—she knew she would have found herself standing at the edge of a precipice, praying for the ghosts to leave her in peace.

But the man whose hands and brain had overseen so much death—how would such a man be moved by a letter? By a mother's agonized plea?

“Drayton was receiving letters addressed to Dra
ž
en Krstić. Letters that knew what he had done.”

“Blackmail?” Nate asked, threading his fingers through the swoop of his straw-gold hair.

“Reminders, the boss said. I think they're accusations. We took them to an imam at the Bosnian mosque and had him look at them. There was an arms embargo, it appears.”

“Yes,” Nate said. “It made my father furious, I remember. The matériel of the Yugoslav army remained in the possession of Greater Serbia while the Bosnian territorial units were disarmed in preparation for the war. The international arms embargo prevented any hope of self-defense. My father observed that it was the first time the United Nations had actually supervised a genocide.”

“Too harsh a condemnation, surely.”

“‘The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever,'”
he quoted, his voice soft.

“Where's that from?”

“The UN report published after the war. My father used to wonder if the war could have continued quite as long or reached such a violent conclusion without the role that the UN played. Do the letters speak of it?”

Defend us or let us defend ourselves. You have no right to deprive us of both.

She supposed they did.

“I just can't believe it of Chris. It would have been too great a charade. The thing he loved best was time in his garden. You could find him there in the evenings, chatting with his lilies. People who create such beauty can't possibly possess such ugliness within them.”

Of course they could. People were full of contradictions, bewildering even unto themselves.

She'd seen her Da at the marina with Zach, his face alive with joy. And she'd seen her Da take his belt off and beat Zach bloody with it. And when she'd worked the Miraj Siddiqui case with Khattak, she'd seen sides of the human mind she hoped never to see again. Death and loss and betrayal, wound up in each other.

There was a fragile thread of connection between herself and Nathan Clare. He'd opened himself to her within days of knowing her. He'd directed her to
Apologia
. She wondered if she could say anything to him.

“Isn't that what you thought of Laine Stoicheva?”

His head whipped round toward her, his gold eyes like flinty coins. And then he smiled. “Yes, you're quite right. I should know better as a writer. I'm either observing contradictions or inventing them. It's just that Chris was—too normal, too human. And then, why the museum?”

Rain began to spatter lightly over their heads. They turned back.

“Maybe it was a form of atonement.”

Nate neither agreed nor disagreed. He struggled to twist his thoughts around this idea of a dual identity. He fell into step with Rachel, conscious of the solidness of her beside him, the fixed, dependable nature of her movements. She moved quietly, without fuss, her ponytail bouncing behind her.

“You'll need to keep this information to yourself, though I wondered: do you think any of the people that you know, perhaps someone you invited as a guest to one of your parties—could one of them have been the letter writer?”

Nate considered this, his steps careful and sure on the precarious surface of the Bluffs.

“I honestly can't imagine so. Perhaps if I went back over my guest lists, something might stand out. Have you studied photographs of Dra
ž
en Krstić?”

Rachel glanced at him sideways. “Yes. I've looked at everything I could find. We're a bit restricted as to resources because the boss is keeping things quiet for now. The pictures I've seen are some fifteen years old. If it's the same man, he's greatly changed. Heavier. Older. We found a gun at his house. A JNA army pistol.”

“A gun? Chris didn't own a gun. He abhorred them.”

“Krstić didn't. They were second nature to him.”

Her phone rang. The call was from Khattak. She listened, then turned to Nate. “I've got to go. There's been a break-in at Drayton's. If you could just try to remember if there's anything at all about Drayton that seemed strange or would suggest he had something to hide, that would be helpful.”

“I could come with you.”

“It's more important that we establish a break in Drayton's cover. He must have slipped up somewhere if he was Dra
ž
en Krstić. Think about it and let me know.”

That wasn't the reason she had asked him to show her the path through the Bluffs. And she didn't think it was the reason he wanted to accompany her now. In fact, she knew why.

With his writer's instinct, or whatever it was, he'd recognized a fellow screw-up.

 

19.

How is it possible that a human being could do something like this, could destroy everything, could kill so many people? Just imagine this youngest boy I had, those little hands of his, how could they be dead? I imagine those hands picking strawberries, reading books, going to school, going on excursions. Every morning I cover my eyes not to look at other children going to school and husbands going to work, holding hands.

Allah knew why this was happening. Only Allah knew. Only Allah could say why He had reached down His divine hand and touched them with the mark of the believers—the mark that cursed them. They had lost everyone else. His father, the brave ammunition courier, killed on the road to Tuzla. His grandfathers deceased from starvation. His uncles, cousins, brothers, and friends—some had stayed in the woods. Some had been executed inside the white house in Srebrenica. Some had been shot point-blank not far from the base at Poto
č
ari. Some had been beaten by axes and truncheons, or had their throats slit in the night, during the long wait for deliverance. Some were on trucks and buses that had materialized swiftly from nowhere and just as swiftly disappeared to unknown destinations. He had seen them take the boys from the line that separated the men and women. He knew they would take him, a skinny fourteen, just as they would take Hakija, at ten years old, the baby of their family. They would not say, “These are children, leave them.” They would say, “These are prisoners. We will exchange them.”

But there would be no exchange.

If they could take the baby that was crying from want in the unmerciful heat and shoot him in the head, why would they leave Hakija and himself? They would not. They would call them out as Turks, as
balija
. They would say, “Fuck your Muslim mothers.” They would make them sing Chetnik songs.

Then they would tie their hands behind their backs, drive them away to a school or warehouse as they had done to others at Vuk Karad
ž
i
ć
, and murder them all. They would lie there dead, forgotten, the last men of their family. Their mother would never find their bones. In time, she would forget the shape of their faces.

*   *   *

The Chetniks were coming.

There were rumors of more than just the Drina Wolves.

Someone had seen Arkan and his Tigers.

He kissed his mother, three times, four, and on the last kiss, he jerked Hakija's hand away from hers and whispered fiercely, “They are going to kill us. I will take him to the woods. I will find you again at Tuzla.”

His mother had wept, pleaded, begged to take Hakija with her on the bus to Tuzla until she had seen just ahead of her in the line, Mestafa wrenched from his mother's struggling grasp.

“We need to question him,” the Chetnik said. “He must be screened for war crimes.”

Mestafa, Hakija's classmate, was eleven.

She let them go. Pressed her last bit of bread into their hands.

“Take this, my Avdi, my prince, the last hope of our family. Come back to me in Tuzla, Allah keep you safe, Allah bless and protect your road.”

They melted away from the line, dodging the Chetniks, dodging the Dutch who were helping them. He saw that not every boy or man had been lucky enough to kiss his mother or wife or daughter farewell. Already, they looked like skeletons to him. He didn't want to be one of them. He would find his cousins in the woods, find a way to reach the column that had broken out for Tuzla. If he was crafty and careful—and how else had he stayed alive all this time—he and his brother would cross the divide into the free territory where they would be welcomed like heroes. There was food and water in Tuzla. His father's men were in Tuzla. His mother, Allah keep and protect her from the animals, would be there waiting. And this nightmare would be over.

He tucked Hakija's hand into his own, placed his other finger on his little brother's lips.

“No matter what they promise us, we don't talk now,” he warned him.

Haki had always trusted him. He kissed his mother sweetly and left the line without protest.

Not knowing then that they would be hunted like animals with just as little chance of survival.

*   *   *

Before, there had been other words. A possibility of hope, of survival. He had heard it on the radio. They would send the airplanes. They would all be saved. The former meaning of all good things would be restored. Green fields no longer a killing ground where men he had known all his life collected their ammunition for this purpose. Animals peacefully at pasture, food fresh and plentiful, water sweet as nectar. And all of it a lie.

They were milling around in circles in the heat.

No one knew the way.

No one had a weapon.

They were trapped on all sides.

“Come down from the hills,” the Chetniks said. “We will give you a ride. We will give you water. Why do you suffer for no reason?”

There was nothing to do, no one to ask. They hadn't found any member of their family. They didn't see any of their neighbors. It was just this writhing, dislocated circle of men. Boys, too. Others like himself and Hakija, their eyes desperately searching the faces of their elders. Should they go down? Should they surrender? A man had tried to run and been shot. Lazily. Easily. By a soldier adjusting his rifle on his shoulder.