The only course of action Jana could think to take was immediate and drastic. No one was looking at her, so she put her finger down her throat to provoke a gag reflex. The bad wine she had been drinking helped, and Jana threw up on the table, everyone scattering to get out of the way. Dano, standing, looked down at her, shocked at the suddenness of the event.
He took her home, disappointed at not having his evening of fun. Still the newlywed, solicitous about her health, he helped her get her clothes off and put her to bed. She lay there, unable to sleep, reviewing events over and over again, obsessing over every conversation at the table, trying to determine if one of them had said or done anything which could be construed by the Secret Police as a cause for action.
Two days later, she was called to Trokan’s office. He was polite, referring to a folder on his desk from time to time. “I understand you went to a party and got sick.”
“I appreciate my commander’s expressing sympathy for my being sick.”
He looked up at her, a sly smile on his face. “You recognized her?”
“Who, Commander?”
“The lady at the table, Zibinova. Just before you got sick.”
Jana paused, as if to reflect. “Ah, that’s who she was. I thought I knew her, but I wasn’t sure.” Jana adopted a rueful expression. “She must think I can’t hold my wine. Not good for a police officer to have that kind of reputation.”
He looked down at the notes in the folder, trying to hide his broadening smile. “The fact that she is a comrade in the Secret Police had nothing to do with your becoming sick, did it?”
“Nothing whatsoever, Commander.”
He was now trying to suppress laughter. “She wrote in her report that she believed you might have problems being an alcoholic and that we should monitor you for possible excess drinking, particularly on the job.” He finally got control of his laughter, managing to wipe the smile off his face. “It’s not good to get on the bad side of these people.”
“I agree completely, Commander.”
“Rest easy. There is nothing in the report that implicates you or your husband in any form of illicit or anti-government activity.”
“I didn’t think there would be, Commander. Thank you for telling me anyway. If I had recognized who she was, I would have been very worried.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “So would I, in your shoes. It’s not good for a police officer to be involved in a hotbed of the disaffected.”
“Is it a hotbed, Commander?”
“It always is, with theater people. They are all malcontents, otherwise they wouldn’t be actors. At least that’s what the Secret Police think.” He snapped his fingers, as if remembering something. “Ah, your husband, he’s an actor. Yes, a good one, too.” Trokan’s voice hardened. “Keep him out of trouble, if you can.”
“I will, Commander.”
“As to Zibinova, and this conversation, it never took place. Understood?”
“Absolutely.”
He waved her out of the office. Jana managed to get back to her desk, pulse rate elevated, sweat staining her blouse, and, unlike the night at the party, truly feeling sick to her stomach. She was grateful to Trokan for giving her the information in the report, and for the warning. She had been cautioned: Stay away from theater people. Except that her husband was a theater person. And his friends were theater people. How could she keep him away from them? How could she keep herself away from them? She could not see any clear path; she had no answers.
Chapter 8
T
he body was found wedged against a Novy Most bridge pylon on the Petrzalka side of the Danube. The woman still wore a flowered dress. The dyes in the flowers had run together, creating a dark, impressionist tent shape over the obese mountain of flesh it still attempted to shelter. The woman had one hand missing, severed at the wrist. The other wrist still had a weight attached to it, although it had also been partially severed by the thin wire connecting it to the weight.
Stomach gas, perhaps more than usual because of her bulk, had bloated the corpse until she became so buoyant that she carried the weight with her when she popped up to the surface to lodge against the foundation of the bridge, the last bridge to be built in Slovakia by the communists before they finally floated into history.
When the body was turned over to the coroner, the patrol officer, who knew her son, had already put a tentative identification tag on her which included the son’s telephone number. The coroner called the son. Jana and Seges were waiting for him when he entered the coroner’s waiting room.
After briefly introducing everyone, the coroner led them all to the autopsy area. Apologetically, he explained that they would ordinarily have put her into one of the body storage drawers, but she was so bloated that she might jam the drawer’s mechanism. Instead, his assistants had merely laid her out on a table, after stripping away her clothes and covering her with a rubberized sheet.
The coroner asked the son if he was ready. The son, a maintenance man who worked for the city government, finally understood what the coroner was asking and nodded. When the sheet was removed from her face, the man merely nodded again without changing expression. After the rubberized sheet was replaced over the face of the woman, the son gave the coroner the needed preliminary information: full name, address, Ukrainian nationality. She had married his father in Bratislava a year after he was born.
The man shifted from one foot to the other, momentarily stumped about his mother’s age, finally figuring out that she would have been 63 next month. He supplied the coroner with his mother’s maiden name. As Jana and Seges walked the man back into the hall, the coroner called after them, telling the son when the remains of his mother would be available for any funeral services that might be planned.
The man continued to talk in a monotone to the two police officers. “Yes, she traveled to Ukraine, to Kiev, several times a year.” There was no emotion in his voice, no sorrow, no love for the woman in the morgue. He was already beaten by life to the degree that nothing really mattered except survival. “No, I don’t know the friends she visited there. My mother and I did not talk much any more. She owned an apartment that she rented out and lived on the proceeds.”
He looked back at the door of the room where his mother’s body was lying, a sudden look of comprehension, then release, upon his face. She was dead. He was free; a burden had been lifted from him. “She had a terrible temper. Always hitting, screaming. I tried to stay away.” And, no, he had no idea who the tenants were who were renting his mother’s apartment.
They let him go, promising to get in touch with him if they heard anything about who had killed her. Just before he walked out, he asked them when he could claim his mother’s apartment. His face changed with the pleasant light of awareness, the promise of deliverance, of compensation for his years of tolerating the woman on the slab. “It’s mine now. The furniture, her bank account, everything. Right?” They told him to get a lawyer and walked back into the examining room.
The coroner had removed the sheet from the body, quickly going over the salient points. “One hand gone. Torn off. She was weighted at the wrists, the body’s bloating created a strong pull, the wire cut into her wrist, chemicals in the river didn’t help, and the hand was severed from the wrist.”
“The wrist was not cut off?” Seges wanted to be sure.
“It was torn off. Jagged. No knife, no saw, no question.” He turned the head to one side, pointing to a hole behind the ear. “A small bullet in the back of the head. She was almost certainly dead before she was tossed into the Danube. I will know absolutely when I examine the lungs, but it’s a reasonable assumption, I think.” He pulled the sheet back over the head.
“The man who was brought in from the car wreck. Have you finished that autopsy?” The doctor walked to a body drawer, Jana following him, Seges a step behind her. “I want fingerprints.”
“No fingerprints. Burned off in the car fire.”
“In the car fire, or before?”
“Can’t tell. Many broken bones, chest caved in. His face went through the window. Also fire-damaged.”
He pulled the sheet away where the man’s face would have been. There was not much left. “The women are in a little better shape.” He scratched at his bald head. “What’s to know about the bodies? Nothing that couldn’t be caused by the accident. I will send you fingerprints of the females after the technician takes them. Also a complete set of photos of the bodies.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Jana nodded. “Very professional.”
“We are all professionals here. Even the dead are professionals at being dead.” He chuckled at his little joke. Jana wondered how often he told it. “None of them have ever tried to pretend to be anything other than what they are: carcasses.”
Chapter 9
T
rokan didn’t like it. And after he told the minister what the investigation seemed to be suggesting, the minister liked it even less. They now had one definite murder of the woman pulled from the Danube, and seven possible murders from the car holocaust, all requiring investigation, and all on their plates. Knowing the Slovak penchant for blaming everything on corrupt officials bribed to cover things up, and with the EU and the UN looking over their shoulders, they had no alternative but to listen with open minds to Jana’s request.
Identification had been made of the remaining dead prostitutes. Aside from the Slovak, there were four from Ukraine, and one from Moldova with a last known address in Ukraine. From what they knew of the driver, he was either from Ukraine or Albania; the woman who had been shot behind the ear and tossed into the Danube was originally from Ukraine. Too many coincidences, Jana argued with the minister and Trokan. She had to go to Ukraine.
The minister was very definite in his response. “Too expensive. We have mutual legal assistance treaties with them. Use the telephone. Use the fax. Use e-mail. Have
their
officers investigate.” Jana sat without moving, looking at him. “So?” he finally asked.
“The militia in Ukraine is up to their balls in criminality themselves. The ones who are not corrupt are notoriously slow in doing anything about their own cases, much less another country’s.” Unblinking, she continued to stare at the minister. “Only through personal, face-to-face contacts, which I have established over the years—”
“Nonsense!” the minister got out.
“—which I have established over the years, will we get quick, relevant information.” She not so subtly added, “Strasbourg is going to want to know a little more than that we have positively identified six dead bodies. One of their secretaries could have done that with a few well-placed phone calls.”
The minister slumped in his seat, caving in. He couldn’t afford to take another beating in the press, considering the current shaky state of the coalition government.
The minister authorized the expenditures, and blamed Trokan, in front of Jana, for not being able to control his subordinates. When they finally left the office, Trokan was so angry with the minister that he was grinding his teeth. Trokan’s mood became even worse when Jana indicated that she had brought her bag to the office in anticipation of being given permission to go to Ukraine. She was leaving at once to catch her plane.
“Leave! Leave!” he growled at her. “But you better come back with something.” He thought about it. “Anything!”
The building had a rotating elevator with open cubicle platforms that never stopped descending, one cubicle quickly dropping after the other. Trokan jumped on one of the moving platforms, yelling that he was going to have to leap from the top of Michalska Tower if she returned from Ukraine without something solid. He then kicked at one of the walls. Her last sight of him was his descending head mouthing something that could only be a promise of more violence, this time directed at her.
She was not troubled. Trokan recognized the necessity for her to go to Ukraine. He would eventually forgive her for the minister’s behavior.
To get to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, you must fly either Aeroflot or one of its affiliated airlines. Singly or combined, they have one of the worst safety records of any airline, and they appear not to encourage their passengers to think that they are trying to improve that record.
Jana tried to take her mind off the flight by going over the facts of the case. Unfortunately, she was constantly distracted by a low level of panic generated by the rough air pockets the plane went through, and by the way the flight attendants constantly took smoking breaks with the passengers on a non-smoking flight. Someone had a cat, which kept yowling from fright in its carrying case. As well, Jana’s seat belt was missing, the windows were scratched to opaqueness, the upholstery was torn, and, finally, there was the dive-bomber approach by the pilots to the Kiev airport as the striking climax to a very interesting flight. The only thing she had to be happy about was that Mikhail Gruschov met her when she walked down the steps to the concrete passenger disembarkation area.
“Janka,” he thundered from his 190-centimeter height, his militia uniform adding to his authority and bulk. Everyone exiting the plane gave him a wide berth. Mikhail’s generally grim police face was for once modified by a huge grin. “I love you, Janka.”
Mikhail was the only person she knew who still used her nickname. He grabbed her in a bear hug, almost smothering her against his chest. “Janka, I am so glad we could see each other again.”
Jana took a deep breath when he finally let her come up for air. “Me too, Mikhail.” He looked like he was going to hug her again, so she thrust the box of candy she had brought from Bratislava into his hands. “For Adriana. Milk chocolate with nuts.”
“She will love them,” he bellowed. It was the one characteristic of Mikhail that Jana always had problems with: He refused to speak below a roar.
Mikhail swept Jana through customs ahead of everyone else and without an examination, then to a car waiting for them at the front entrance to the terminal. “We rented the apartment downstairs for your stay. The woman, reliable, I’ve known her for years, has a nice place. Clean. A big bed. Better to sleep there than on our couch.”