“Amazing what you can purchase a new Mercedes or BMW for in Ukraine. The last entry on her sheet was two years ago.”
“According to her son, she would return to Ukraine maybe twice a year,” Jana said.
“Probably. We just didn’t pick her up.”
“Did the man killed in the auto burning have anything to do with her or the dead prostitutes?”
“Ah, the man, Ivan Makine. Better known as Koba. Koba! An ugly name. Fitting. He picked it up from God knows where. You win the lottery with him. And with me.
“I met him once.” Grisko paused to savor the moment, enjoying the surprise on Jana’s face. “The most dangerous man I have ever encountered. Absolutely evil. A killer. He left bodies in his wake wherever he went. And we knew he traveled, so he left many bodies, whether he did the killings himself or had another person do it for him. The street knew he was responsible, and they would tell us.”
Jana felt excited. Finally, positive information on the man in the car. “You recognized him from the passport photos?”
“Who can tell from a shit passport photo? And it has been a long time since I saw him. But it looks a lot like him.” He laughed at himself. “Now you know why all police officers hate I.D. testimony from witnesses. Like me, they are never quite sure.”
“Tell me the circumstances of your meeting with Koba.”
“Patience, dear fellow officer.” He was enjoying his story, prolonging it. “He wanted people to talk about him. Fear! Fear was a tool for him. The crowds in the streets parted for him wherever he walked.” Grisko half closed his eyes, reliving the event.
“It was not your normal type of meeting. I was in a restaurant. The owner had not paid his protection money, and he was just brave enough and just frightened enough to talk to us. That’s why I was there. Koba walked up to the owner, while I was standing there, and drove an ice pick into the man’s eye. No talking; no bargaining. He simply killed the man in the cruelest, most public way where everyone could see, and so everyone would forever after be afraid of him.”
“You arrested him?”
“A very difficult thing to do. A young woman had a gun to my head. A pretty woman. The women loved Koba, or Makine if you prefer. I very quietly watched them leave.”
“Your police looked for them?”
“For both of them. I never saw either of them alive again. If any of my associates saw him, or her, they never reported it. Koba—poof—was gone.”
“Even the police were frightened?”
“Anyone would be. His reputation was so ferocious, he was reported to be impervious to bullets and knives. A fiction. He was very, very bright; he was at the center of the criminal world, involved in every type of depravity. He played with the police in Hungary, Romania, Russia, the Baltic states, for years.”
“How do you know, if no one ever saw him again?”
“Always the rumors.”
“I am interested in the woman who held a gun to your head.”
Grisko stared at the ceiling, going off on a tangent. “Maybe I should add a water motif to this place. All blue, with the moonlight gliding over the ripples. It would be pretty.” He looked back over to Jana. “What do you think?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I like rivers. Lakes also. It’s the soothing nature of water. Of course, I only like them in the summer. Too cold in the winter.”
He finally returned to the woman who had held a gun to his head. “We know nothing about her. Believe me, we turned the country upside-down. Nothing.”
“So you stopped looking.”
“When he died, there was no reason to look any further.” Grisko laughed. He watched the expression on Jana’s face, enjoying the fact that she didn’t quite comprehend what he was saying.
“You thought you had the first case in which he died. No. I did.” He continued watching her face as she tried to piece what he was saying together with the facts she had.
“Died? You mean in Slovakia?”
“Here. In Kiev. Seven years after the ice-pick murder. Near the monastery; everybody knows the place. All the tourists go to see those dead monks in the catacombs. You should go there. Quite a sight. I went there as a boy. Frightened me when I realized even holy men die.” He ran his fingers through his hair, patting a few strands down, then wiped the hair oil off his fingers onto the tablecloth. “He was killed in a collision with a fuel truck. The driver was killed as well. Bad fire. Identification by documents.”
“Just like the Slovak burning.”
“Maybe he was killed here? Maybe in Slovakia? I’ll tell you what: I’ll let your country have the credit.”
“Maybe he was not killed anywhere.” Jana thought about the crash in Slovakia, then came back to Ukraine. “Witnesses?”
“One, a monk from the monastery. Out on some errand for his patriarch. The monk saw the crash. The car came down the street, slid on the ice, and boom! Accident. The monk’s name is in the reports. He would seem to have been a reputable witness.”
“I can find him at the monastery?”
“He drank himself to death a short time after the crash. By mistake: He drank cleaning fluid.”
“A bad way to die.”
“All ways to die are bad.”
“You are sure he drank the cleaning fluid without being coaxed into it?”
“You know better than to ask that. There are no crystal balls in our pockets. I practice police work, not astrology. In this business, there is nothing sure.”
“Did you believe Koba was dead?”
“At first, I thought, possibly. I wanted him to be dead. After the monk died, not so much possible. Now, maybe no.”
Her business with Grisko was over. Not very satisfactory, but a piece of information or two. Koba was taking shape. Jana looked at the dance floor to invite Mikhail and Adriana back to the table. They were not there.
She quickly checked the rest of the club. The B-girls were no longer sitting at the bar; the waiters were gone. There were no other customers. The room was empty except for her and Grisko. A flicker of fear went through her.
“Grisko, get up!!” She stood. Grisko, a little bewildered, stayed seated.
Jana reached over and pulled him to his feet. “Everyone is gone, Grisko. No one is here but you and me.” She let him go, yelling for Mikhail and Adriana.
Grisko looked around, comprehension suddenly dawning. Frightened and wide-eyed, he came out of his seat as if he had been ejected. “Bad!! We have to get out.”
He started to go for the front door. Jana grabbed him. “Through the kitchen, not the front.” Grisko responded by bolting toward the kitchen, with Jana following him.
The pouter pigeon ran surprisingly fast as they scrambled through the kitchen area. Food was still steaming in the pots. There were no cooks. “Everybody is gone.” Grisko ran even faster, scuttling through the rear door.
The two of them skidded into a dark alley, Grisko caroming off a garbage can, sliding to his knees, scrabbling to his feet again as they ran toward the light in the nearest side street. As soon as they reached it Jana saw Mikhail and Adriana leaning against a car across the road. Jana ran toward them; Grisko followed.
“Up the street!! We need to go further up.”
Mikhail immediately reacted to Jana’s sense of urgency. He didn’t wait for Adriana to respond. The huge man picked up his wife and carried her an additional fifty meters, running. Finally, they all stopped, panting. Jana and Grisko looked up and down the street, then back to the club. They saw no one.
“Nothing,” Grisko said between gasps.
Jana stepped into the middle of the street, trying to find an angle that would allow her to observe a larger arc of space. “Where did the people go? Your waiters, cooks?” She turned back to Mikhail. “Why did you go outside?”
Adriana responded for him. “There was no music. Why stay there?”
“Adriana wanted to leave, so we left. She didn’t like it there.”
The fear had begun to ebb from Grisko. He looked at Jana accusingly. “You spooked me! I should not have left my own club like that. Undignified. There was nothing wrong.”
“There is still something wrong. I know it; you know it.”
“I don’t know any such thing.” Grisko’s ego started to reassert itself, puffing him up into his pouter pigeon stance. He started back toward the club.
“Grisko, where did everyone go?
Why
did they go?” She took a step after him. “Wait a little longer. Let’s make sure.”
“It’s my club. I am going back!” he called over his shoulder. He began to walk faster, swinging his arms, more and more the little Napoleon.
He had gotten half the distance back to the club when the place erupted in a huge ball of fire that curved up and around the whole structure which, for a moment, seemed to continue to exist, stable on its frame, until it erupted, in an eyeblink, into a shredding of plaster, brick, wood, tile, becoming part of a huge, shattering, burning tornado, the blast tossing cars parked by the club onto their sides, debris raining down like hot pieces of magma rejected by Hades, too hot even for Hell.
Mikhail covered Adriana with his body, fiery pieces bounding off him. Jana was thrown to the ground, the heap that was Mikhail and Adriana between her and the fiery debris of the explosion, saving her from its direct assault. She waited until the primary momentum of the blast was past, then picked herself up to stagger through the still-falling shards of wreckage toward Grisko.
The Ukrainian was sitting up, alive, soot-covered, his face blackened, clothes torn. He was no longer a pouter pigeon. His chest appeared to have sunk. Through the grime on his face, his skin had gone pale and a small trickle of blood descended from a bloody eyebrow. Grisko finally focused on Jana. “My club,” he got out, teeth chattering from fear. “Gone.”
“Gone,” she agreed.
Grisko wiped his eyes, thinking. Finally he said, “They were right. He is indestructible.” It took him a while to get his lips and tongue wet enough to spit his conclusion into the inhospitable air. “Koba is alive.”
They continued to crouch, watching the fire, as people began emerging from the surrounding buildings, awed by the blaze, coming closer and closer to the magnetic pull of the flames, staring wide-eyed at the conflagration.
Grisko eyed the bystanders, trying to satisfy himself that the bomber was not one of them, all the while checking his arms, his face, his legs, surprised that he was still a living creature, still whole. He muttered, repeating to himself: “They were right. The man is indestructible. Koba lives.”
Chapter 11
T
he fear that comes from being watched is contagious. It spreads like a virus whose symptoms are paranoia and anger, eventually becoming an epidemic that kills the spirit of everyone it contacts. Relationships disintegrate, nations break up, civilizations shake, all because of this contagion of human emotion. With Jana and Dano it was no different. They were not superhuman.
It began and ended with their friends.
Dano would come to her, smiling, saying he had met so-and-so, a budding playwright, a dramaturge who had a wonderful concept for a Schnitzler play. Or he had met an actress who was a leading lady in a film being produced in Prague, and she wanted them to meet the director. Or they were invited to a cast party for the close of a show, or a celebration in SNP Square, or a jazz concert where he knew several of the musicians. Maybe it was an old friend from school days who needed help, or his mother’s cousin, a Slovak who had produced a play in Moscow. All of them suddenly represented a possible danger.
Trokan had given her fair warning. And now, if they had reports on her, they had reports on Dano. The entries in the secret dossiers had to be stopped. The more paper, the more serious the charges would be. And that meant calling no further dangerous attention to themselves, an impossible task to demand of an actor.
The budding playwright was the one who first increased the pressure on them. Dano came home elated. One of the new writers—a friend of Vaclav Havel, the world-famous Czech author—had seen Dano as Hamlet, and the man wanted to write the lead character in his next play with Dano in mind. They would stage the play in Bratislava with a mixed company of Czechs and Slovaks. Czechs and Slovaks understood each other’s languages, so each would speak in his native tongue.
The play would be about unity: unity in the family leading to unity in the country and the world. It would fit in with the current SSR concept of a unified republic, and when the writing and staging problems had been worked out in Bratislava they would take the play on the road to Prague. It was the next step for his acting career, said Dano breathlessly, and he had invited the playwright to their apartment. Jana and her mother were to provide the meal.
It was a wife’s duty to help her husband, so Jana, despite the increasing caseload and responsibilities she was taking on in her own job, accepted the task. When the day came, Jana bought the wine and, with the rare good fortune that crime had taken a day off, she managed to get home early, in time to aid her mother. Together, they made a number of Slovak and Czech dishes to carry out the theme of the play.
Except that, when the playwright arrived, he came without Dano, but with an entourage of eight people whom Dano had neglected to tell Jana about. Adjustment time. She and her mother made do, her mother scrambling to the neighbors to borrow this and that, additional silverware and crockery to supplement their meager supply. All the while, their guests smoked up a visible, acrid haze which invaded every corner of the apartment. Every thirty seconds, Jana would run to the phone, trying to find out why Dano was not there.
He arrived an hour late, with two other actor friends in tow, as well as a man who claimed to be a director, and who was, in fact, Zibinova’s informant, the secret police officer from the cast party. Jana was angry with Dano for being late; she was more afraid than angry when she saw the director. Everything that was said or done that evening would appear in a report and become part of their dossier.