Valley of Thracians (24 page)

Chapter
45

Katya opened the car window to take in
some fresh air and to try to clear her head. It wasn’t the thick cigarette
smoke that was bothering her. There was something about the way Boris and Vlady
were whispering in the front seat. Their short, half-finished sentences carried
a conspiratorial tone, and the fact that they never included Ralitsa or her in
their secretive discussions suggested that their scheme was well-advanced and
soon to be implemented. If she only knew what her brother and his friend were
really planning!

Their car was parked at the entrance of
the Belogradchik Fortress complex. The parking lot was nearly empty now. A
busload of noisy schoolchildren had just pulled away, the absence of laughter
almost palatable in its wake. Near the gateway to the site were three rickety
tourist stands with displays of trinkets and locally produced honey.
Bored-looking merchants sat on wooden stools drinking small glasses of muddy
coffee. Their only customers were the ubiquitous flies. High above, the mid-day
sun was bright against a cloudless sky.

“Maybe he’s already inside,” Ralitsa
suggested from her seat in the back next to Katya.

“Yeah, and maybe he’s in Montana after
all,” Vlady grunted.

“The hotel clerk said he was asking
about the fortress,” Ralitsa said. “Didn’t he tell you that?”

“Yes, but who knows if that was true,”
Vlady mused.

They had waited at the Montana bus
station earlier that morning, anxious for the bus from the village to arrive.
They stood side by side like a local welcome delegation, three of them erect
and one of them leaning forward in his wheelchair, but there had been no one to
greet. The bus pulled into its berth on time, allowing for some passengers to
disembark and others to store their luggage and board. A cloud of feathers
descended from the open bus door when one passenger emerged carrying two very
agitated chickens. Katya and Vlady climbed the steps and pushed past the
puzzled driver. They shoved their way up the aisle, acting with implied
importance as if they were ticket collectors on official business, sidestepping
the noisy travelers until they reached the back of the bus, but Scott wasn’t
aboard. They returned to the front, and Vlady spoke briefly with the driver. In
the end, convinced that their mission was unsuccessful, Katya and Vlady
rejoined Raltisa and Boris on the platform as the bus swerved around to begin
the next leg of its journey to Sofia.

“He was never planning to take this
bus,” Boris hissed at his sister.

“But he asked about the bus schedule!”
Katya protested.

“What other buses are there from the
village?” Vlady asked.

“He could have taken the northbound
one.”

“Where does that go?”

“It goes through Belogradchik to Vidin.”

“I think he was purposely trying to
throw us off his tracks,” Boris said, as his wife wheeled him back to their
car. “He asked about the bus to Sofia so that we would think he had headed to
the south. I bet he went to Belogradchik to spend the night.”

And that is when they decided to drive
to the northwestern town. Ralitsa suggested that they start their search at the
hotel off the main square, and this hunch had proven correct. Scott had spent
the night there and then left after asking the hotel clerk for information
about the
kaleto
. They were sure to find him at the famous fortress.

“Let’s go inside,” Ralitsa said from the
backseat of their parked car. “Why should we stay here when he’s probably
waiting inside, expecting someone to come meet him?”

“She’s right,” Boris said. “We need to
find him before anyone else arrives. Who knows who he has called? Maybe
Americans will come from the embassy.”

“It would take quite some time for
Americans to arrive from Sofia,” Vlady said. “I’ll go in and look for him.”

“I’ll come with you,” Katya said,
opening her car door.

“No, if he sees you, he’ll run,” Boris
said, twisting around in his seat to cast a stern glance at his sister. “After
all, you had him for what, three years, and he ran from you.”

“Ralitsa will come with me,” Vlady said
decisively. “The two of you will remain here. Call me if you spot him, or if
you notice any officials arriving.”

Two car doors opened and two car doors
slammed shut, and then only brother and sister were left in the vehicle. Boris
sat in the front passenger seat, staring through the windshield at the path leading
up to the fortress, while Katya remained in the back, staring at nothing more
than the back of her brother’s hairy neck.

Boris said something quietly, but she
couldn’t hear what it was. “What are you mumbling about?”

“If you want to talk to me, come into
the front seat,” her brother replied, flicking some ash from his cigarette out
the open car window.

Katya unbuckled her seatbelt and got out
of her seat. She went around and opened the driver’s door and squeezed in
behind the steering wheel. For a moment she regarded the dashboard as if it,
too, was to partner in the conversation, but when the silence became
overbearing, she turned to her brother.

“You must be furious with me,” she said,
offering him an opening that could result in a painful backlash, yet one that
was necessary to get past.

“Katya, I’m angry with you, I can’t deny
that, but you’ve also given me hope.”

“What do you mean?”

He sat there, dragging on his cheap
cigarette until it became a stub too short for his fat fingers to hold. He flicked
this out the window. She thought she spotted a tear in his left eye.

“Look at me,” he said, staring down at
his shattered, unmoving legs, manually positioned in front of him. “I’m not
much of a man anymore. Sometimes I don’t want to open my eyes in the morning
because it hurts too much, but I can accept who—and what—I am. What you’ve
done, as unfaithful and secretive as it was, has given me
hope—
hope
that someday I can repay them for making me a cripple.”

Katya knew what her brother was talking
about because she had been there with him on that fateful day. She had seen the
worst of it, and she still cringed when she thought about what had happened.
She couldn’t help but feel responsible for allowing Boris to reach this state.

It had been shortly after she had
surreptitiously brought Scott to the cabin in the woods, not far from the
village where her mother lived. Katya split her time, spending her days caring
for her aging mother and heading into the woods once or twice each week to
bring Scott supplies and the drugs that kept his mind blank and her control
complete. Her mother was an old-fashioned country woman, a peasant whose
clothing and habits were simple and her beliefs in time-honored traditions
strong. There was nothing modern about Katya’s mother, for like many who lived
in the
countryside,
her life remained captured in the
past. She still owned the same furniture and dishware that had graced her home
since the days when her Serbian-born husband, Katya’s father, had been alive.
Her only nods to modernity were a noisy and often erratic refrigerator and an
oversized radio that barely received the static-filled transmissions of a
distant Sofia news station. The home could have come straight out of a previous
century—or at least a previous generation.

Katya’s mother maintained a vegetable
garden in the backyard, and this was her pride and joy. For hours each morning,
despite her age and frail health, and with little regard for the weather, she
would bend her back to hoe, weed, or plant, her long, plain skirt dragging in
the mud. Each tomato bush and every pepper plant in the garden received her
delicate attention; every cucumber was personally groomed ahead of pickling.
There was nothing tastier than the long, homegrown sweet red peppers she
stuffed with rice and
sirene
cheese. Katya frequently returned from
visits to the village with a basketful of her mother’s crops and containers
stuffed with home-cooked dishes.

One day the old woman fell to the earth,
damaging—if not breaking—the bones of her right hip, and she was unable to rise
from the furrows of her plot. She lay there, biting her lip against the pain as
the summer sun bore down relentlessly, draining her strength and threatening to
snatch away her final breath. The twilight and then the star-filled night
renewed her grasp on life, the coolness relieving some of the pain but not
quenching her growing fear.

The next morning, following an overnight
trip to Sofia to pick up additional narcotics for her cabin-confined patient,
Katya discovered her mother sprawled atop the prized pepper plants. Scattered
pulpy remains of the red vegetables bore her mother’s tiny teeth marks. She
carried the frail woman into the house and laid her on the sofa, where her
mother remained wordlessly during the doctor’s visit and for nearly a week
until she regained some of her strength.

Boris, whose visits to the village to
see his mother were becoming less and less frequent, obliged to his sister’s
tearful request to show some concern. He drove up with Ralitsa one morning a few
days after the old woman’s fall to make a token appearance. Sitting with Katya
and his wife in the living room while gazing at his mother’s diminutive
wrinkled body on the sofa, he remained quiet, offering few words of
encouragement or sympathy. The entire time his mind was focused on escaping to
the
mehana
for drinks and discussion of the latest football matches with
Ivaylo.

Boris hadn’t realized that he had been
followed on his drive from Montana. As he sat with his family, his wife and
sister engaging his mother in meaningless conversation, two black utility
vehicles pulled up outside the house. Hearing the car doors, Boris glanced out
the window, and his eyes opened wide in alarm. Four men, dressed in black and
looking more sinister than agents of the long-disbanded
Darzhavna Sigurnost
secret service, were approaching. It
was too late to run.

“Boris Kotsev!” they called, pounding on
the front door.

“Who is it?” Katya’s mother whispered,
looking back and forth between her daughter and daughter-in-law for some
explanation.

“I better open the door,” Boris said,
rising from his seat in slow motion.

“We are here on behalf of Alexander
Nikolov,” the first man announced, as if this wasn’t already clear to Boris.
The man had a huge shaven head that bulged out from a black shirt that seemed
two sizes too small. He sported stud earrings and a sinister smile, as if
missions of intimidation were his bread and butter. “Mr. Nikolov believes that
you have not provided him with the services to which you were contracted,” he
continued, articulating his words. “A delivery did not arrive at its
destination as was agreed. Perhaps you have this article here with you at this
time?”

Unconsciously, a smile appeared on
Katya’s lips at this strange and somewhat formal language. She was fully aware
of the reason these despicable men had come to visit. They were thugs
associated with Nikolov and his crooked dealings, and this was not a courtesy
call.

It happened very fast. Boris was dragged
forcibly from the house, unable to fight off the overwhelming combined muscle
power of four men who were trained—and probably had experience—in handling the
protests of people who had done Nikolov wrong. Katya and Ralitsa attacked the
men with their bare hands; they kicked at them for good measure. Neither their
shouts nor an attempt by Ralitsa to bite one man’s hand could prevent them from
stuffing an overpowered Boris into the front car. Car doors slammed, and the
two vehicles sped off down the alley toward the village center.

“I’m going after them,” Katya said,
pulling her car keys out of her purse.

“They’ll kill you, too!” Ralitsa
screamed.

“Stay with my mother,” Katya commanded,
and she hurried to her car.

She drove blindly, not knowing which way
the cars had gone. Were they heading south to Sofia, or perhaps north toward
the border? Katya feared that Nikolov was waiting for Boris somewhere, ready to
kill him on sight if Boris didn’t provide him with the Thracian treasure. But
Nikolov’s real dealings had been with Vlady as well. Where was Vlady now? Had
Nikolov’s thugs already gotten to him? All of this was because Scott had not
delivered the goods in Varna. Everything that was happening was entirely her
fault! She felt extremely guilty about letting the American out of her sight
when he entered the hotel lobby. Scott had been beaten as a result, and now the
violence was about to reach Boris as well. She had to save him!

Far ahead on the winding country road, a
flash of black caught her eye, and she realized that it was one of the two
utility vehicles. Of all the routes leading out of the village into the
surrounding hills, thank God she had found their track! She pressed down hard
on the gas pedal, pleading for the old Lada to pick up speed.

The road twisted its way through a
forested mountain valley, with a bubbling stream to its left. The countryside
here, close to the Serbian border, was quiet except for the water cascading
over sharp rocks and the roaring engines of the racing cars. Katya pushed her
car to its limits. Her mind raced as she tried to recall where this rural road
led. Afraid that she wouldn’t be able to make the next curve, she braked
quickly.