Annabella Jeritza, her orange hair covered by a black kerchief, took Megan’s arm and they walked out of the cemetery together.
“Is your baby coming?” the old woman asked.
“I think it is:”
“Yes, I do, too. But don’t fret. The first one takes his time. Come, I will introduce you to Miss Pia:”
Megan had lied to Corozzo. She had not been seeing a midwife, but rather she had relied on Annabella, who told her that when the time came she would produce one. It seemed the time had come.
“She is just there;” said the fortune-teller as they walked through the cemetery’s arched wrought iron gateway, ”there with Doro and her daughter at his car.”
While they waited for traffic to ease so they could cross the busy Avenue de Clichy, Megan stared at the trio Annabella had pointed out. Doro she had met and trusted. The two women were strangers. When they reached them, Annabella introduced Megan, and then began a conversation in rom with the midwife, a severe-looking woman of about fifty with a cocked eye and a mole on her upper lip. While they were talking, presumably about the delivery of Megan’s baby, Megan eyed the daughter—who was perhaps thirty and about Megan’s height—and was at once struck by two things: how fair she was for a gypsy, her complexion and her hair color quite close to Megan’s, and how frail she looked, her bones showing through her thin cotton dress and long wool sweater. Then Miss Pia and her daughter left and Megan and Annabella got into Doro’s car. They were joined by Doro’s friend Ephrem, who had been in a nearby shop buying cigarettes. As they neared home, Megan pulled Annabella’s hand over onto her stomach for her to feel what she believed was her next contraction. She and the fortune-teller were in the backseat.
“Yes;” said Annabella, ”Miss Pia will be stopping by in about an hour. I think the child is coming, but she will know for sure:”
“Will she want money?”
“Yes. She lives for gold:”
Megan had learned that this question was not crass in the gypsy culture. They loved money more than any material thing it could buy, and they spent a large part of their day discussing it. Only a gadgo fool did not look for the opportunity to turn any situation—tragic, comic, or in between—into a source of money.
“And the daughter?” Megan asked. “Is she sick?”
“Yes, she has a cancer somewhere. She will be dead soon:”
“How soon?”
“A week or two, maybe a bit more:”
Megan turned to stare out the car window, trying to rein in her racing thoughts. When Doro slowed to make a turn, she recognized the street. It was Annabella’s.
“Are we stopping at your place?” she asked.
“Yes. You will not be welcome at François’s any longer. Corozzo has asked me to take care of you until you are ready to travel. You and the baby. I know a family who has an extra room. You can stay with them. They will want money, too:”
“Where does Miss Pia live?”
“In the same building you will be staying in:”
“Her daughter lives with her?”
“Yes.”
“Has she been to a hospital? A doctor?”
“No.”
“What is her name?”
“Little Pia:”
“Why is she so fair?”
“No one knows. We think her father was
gadgo.
Miss Pia ran off when she was young and was not heard from for years. She returned with the red-haired child. People keep away from her. They think her cocked eye is a mark of the devil:”
“Is it?”
“She is a good midwife, but as I said, she is very greedy, greedier than most, and she has no friends:”
~31~
THE RIVER OHRE, JANUARY 7, 2004
Ephrem was knocked from the bow of the boat by a branch that nobody saw coming until it was too late. They watched helplessly as he was swept away by the current, and rushed to the waterfall about fifty yards ahead. They knew the waterfall was there because they heard it and because their skipper, a bearded, thick-set Hungarian gypsy, had anticipated that the dam on the outskirts of Cheb would be raised to prevent flooding in the small but densely populated city. Better to flood the forest for a half mile or so on either side of the river than to destroy homes and businesses and lives. The problem was that as he slowed and veered toward the left bank in the pitch dark, he did not know just how much of the forest had been submerged. The branch that swept Ephrem away was normally ten feet above dry ground. The small beach used by locals to launch their pleasure boats must have been flooded as well. They looked for it, but once they heard the falls the skipper steered sharply to starboard and, in the blink of an eye, Ephrem was gone.
The Hungarian, who had earned the five hundred euros Pat had paid him, went back upstream after off-loading his passengers. He would tie up to a tree and wait out the flood tide. With his passengers gone, he would be safe from official inquiry. Not so Pat, Catherine, Doro, and Steve Luna, Doro’s young colleague, the third gypsy boy they had met in Rambouillet but never been introduced to until tonight. There was a car waiting for them at a boatyard in Cheb, no more than three or four miles away. Getting there was the problem.
“We should search along the bank for Ephrem;” said Pat. ”He might have made it to shore:”
“No,” Doro replied, “there is no shore. The river is still rising. We have to move inland:”
They were standing in a small muddy clearing, all of them soaked hip-high, all exhausted from their hundred-yard trudge through icy cold, waist-high water to dry ground.
“There will be police around;” said Catherine. ”We cannot use the roads:”
“Whose car is it?” Pat asked. “We could call them and ask them to pick us up.”
“Steve bought the car today from a gypsy family. He parked it, and then he had to hire the boat. That’s why we weren’t at the carousel at six olock.”
“Thank God you were there when we got there,” said Catherine. “We were very lucky.”
“The captain insisted on leaving early. He knew the river was rising and didn’t know how long it might take:”
This was the first chance they had had to talk. Pat and Catherine had driven from the Waldsassen municipal parking lot, near their hotel, to the amusement park in under ten minutes. They were happily surprised to see Doro waiting for them at the carousel, but in too much of a hurry to do anything but blurt out their predicament and rush to the boat, which was another surprise, and a relief, until they actually got under way. The river was dark and swift and the boat, under very little power, raced headlong downstream. It had been Doro’s idea to stop and push the Peugeot into the river. As their boat was taking them away from the park’s dock, they could see that their ploy hadn’t worked. The car was hung up on some rocks. They could also see headlights approaching the carousel.
Once under way, Pat immediately paid the captain, who cursed and asked for another hundred euros when he was told by Catherine that he could not use his running lights. He sent Ephrem to the bow to look out for floating logs and other boat-sinking debris. The others huddled as best they could on the stern deck of the twenty-five-foot boat, watching the Hungarian skipper’s back as he handled the wheel in the forward cabin. They all stood up when they felt themselves going to the left and the next thing they heard was the thud of the branch knocking Ephrem into the river. A sound they wouldn’t forget for a long time, if ever.
“We’ll walk through the forest,” said Doro, “keeping close to the water. When we reach the city, I will go for the car:”
“There will be hounds,” said Catherine, “but the water and the mud will make it difficult for them. And no boat could reach us here:”
In the boat, Pat’s adrenaline had risen along with the tide. Now it was starting to ebb. But the cold and the possibility of hypothermia were not their biggest problems. In the distance, upriver, he heard the whir of a helicopter, or thought he did. And then it was gone and they set out.
~32~
CZECH REPUBLIC, JANUARY 8, 2004
At dawn, Pat and Catherine were kneeling at a low stone wall overlooking a small but steep valley through the center of which ran an unnamed tributary of the Labe River. Fifty yards or so away, at perhaps a fifty-foot-drop from their level, was a clearing cut out from the forest on the far side of the stream. At one end, the clearing was bordered by three pyramid-shaped piles of dark gray tailings. Here and there a glint or two of ore sparkled as the strange dense masses, three times as tall as a grown man, caught the first light of the sun rising over a series of low hills in the east. At the other end, a decaying two-story brick building squatted against a denuded hillside. The building’s two rows of windows were shattered and covered with odds and ends of plywood and other scraps of weathered lumber. Next to it gaped the timber-framed opening, perhaps ten feet high, to a long abandoned mine. On the hardpan near the building were parked six vehicles: a pickup truck, a box truck, and four passenger cars. The road in, at one time paved but now crumbling and overgrown with weeds, ended at the foot of the hill next to the mine building. The snow of the night before had barely reached this part of the Czech Republic, some twenty miles due east of Prague. A light dusting of it covered the clearing and surrounding countryside, just enough to make the abandoned mine compound look picturesque in the early light and the clearing look like a small but perfect stage that nature had prepared for its next important, secret event.
“Glasses would help,” said Catherine.
Confused, Pat did not immediately reply. They were sipping from cardboard mugs of hot coffee, and at first he thought she meant they needed coffee cups. Then, realizing his mistake, he said, “You mean binoculars.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got a good view here. We won’t miss them:”
They were waiting for Doro and Steve Luna to appear in the compound below. After trekking through water and mud for three hours and then driving through the night, they had found the fire road that led them to their current lookout about a half hour ago. Tired and wet, their shoes and jeans coated with mud, they were in need of hot food, dry clothes, and sleep. But the growl of helicopters and the howl of bloodhounds still echoed in their heads. They backtracked to a truck stop they had passed to pick up coffee and decided to make contact with the infamous Corozzo then and there. If Megan was in the camp below, she needed to be told that the world was closing in on her. And on her new friends as well.
“Look,” Catherine said, “someone’s awake.”
Below they could see smoke curling from a chimney in the middle of the roof of the mine building. The pale gray smoke cut through the cold morning air and then drifted gently west, chased away by the sun’s first heat.
“Our Arab friends may have been here already,” said Catherine, keeping her voice low and her eyes straight ahead.
Pat nodded, his eyes on the entry road near the piles of tailings, where he would have his first sight of the twenty-year-old Czech-made Skoda Favorit Doro had purchased in Cheb and that had miraculously transported them all here. They both knew that whoever had beheaded François Duval must have first tried very hard to extract Megan’s whereabouts from him. Which made it almost a certainty, the way things were going, that more Arab killers would pop up.
Megan,
Pat thought,
Megan. What did you do to draw such a nasty crowd?
“We are in a bind with Doro,” Catherine said.
“How?”
“You promised he could use Megan as bait to lure the Arabs:”
“I told him I would do my best to convince her.”
“Megan could be killed:”
“Not to mention you and me:”
“She may not agree:”
“I’ll talk her into it:”
Pat had not talked Megan into anything since she was in high school, maybe even grammar school. But this was not as hollow a statement as it would have been a few weeks ago. He was convinced that his one-of-a-kind daughter had laid down a trail for him, a trail through a minefield, trip wires everywhere. Having followed that trail to what he now hoped was its end, having passed her test, he
might
have the moral standing for once in his life to ask her to go on the line. For him, for herself, for her dead child, for Annabella Jeritza, for François Duval, for Daniel Peletier. For Catherine. These were big thoughts, but somehow not too big, not pretentious. This was where his life had led him, and Megan’s hers. He would see it through and was confident without really knowing why that Megan would, too.
“We’ll avenge Uncle Daniel,” he said.
“I see.”
They scanned the scene before them for a moment in silence—the smoke curling and drifting away, the hushed, snow-covered clearing, the stream rushing along and sparkling in the early sun as it went—then Catherine said, “He was alive, Patrick, wasn’t he?”
Pat nodded, keeping his head forward. He was about to speak when the front door of the mine building suddenly flew open. A second or two later a young man in jeans and a black, hooded UCLA sweatshirt was catapulted out headfirst. His forward motion was stopped abruptly when his shoulder slammed against the fender of the pickup. As he was rising, shaking his head, an older, taller, bulkier man, wearing a black eye patch, stepped through the doorway.