The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  Gabriel nodded rather sullenly. ‘When did that stop?’

  ‘Officially — in 1913. But severe lashings and judicial mutilations are documented up to the date of the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950.’

  Iliev smiled, revealing gaps in his teeth. He eased his head back and breathed out. He remained silent for a few seconds.

  ‘Often a single example speaks loudest, does it not? In 1934, Tsepon Lungshar, a not insubstantial Tibetan official, was blinded for advocating political reform in his Buddhist homeland. The untouchables tightened two yak knucklebones onto his temples by means of leather thongs attached to the bones, and a stick above the crown of his poor head, which they simply twisted. The pressure was too much for one of his eyes. The other was gouged out. His empty eye sockets were cauterized with boiling water.’

  Gabriel thought Iliev sounded as if he was describing something as innocuous as how to tie a cravat. Maybe it was just the way his accent jarred, the way it seemed to lack any intonation, any compassion.

  ‘The Chinese invaders weren’t any better, of course,’ he went on. ‘I’m merely pointing out the reality. It was no Shangri-La.’

  Images from the DVD and the blinding of the Tibetan official jostled for dominance in Gabriel’s mind, and he felt a strong urge to hit a bar and order a double Jack and Coke. He wanted to drink so much that he would lose himself in it. But he managed to remain outwardly objective.

  He said, ‘And what about the Kalmyks? Is their Tibetan Buddhism any different?’

  ‘Historically, many Kalmyk monks trained in Tibet. They established portable monasteries and travelled with the nomadic people. Human rights weren’t a priority.’

  Based on what Iliev had said, the fact that he had portrayed the history of Tibetan Buddhism as a history of violence, Gabriel felt anxious, not least because it had substantiated what little he did in fact know.

  He said, ‘Is there anything in Tibetan Buddhism today that could explain the torture and murder of a young Kalmyk woman by someone dressed as a monk?’

  Iliev shook his head a little. ‘No. I’d say not. There is some controversy around a text called the Kalachakra Tantra, which is an apocalyptic vision. There are certain references to sex magic rites, wherein women are perceived as energy donors. But most academics regard these as allegorical in nature. Is there a record of human sacrifice in the last century? Or in this one? Absolutely not.’ Iliev drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘What I’m trying to say is that being a Tibetan Buddhist does not mean that you are from a pacifist tradition. But the culture of Kalmykia is no longer what we might term medieval.’

  He paused, as if lost in thought, as if he was running an imaginary finger down the pages of an arcane document.

  Gabriel rubbed his thigh, agitatedly. ‘There was a ritualistic element in the DVD. At least that’s what it seemed to be, to me.’

  ‘I see.’

  For some reason Gabriel found difficult to understand, he just couldn’t bring himself to explore that any further.

  He said, ‘So the murderer could be a Tibetan Buddhist, a Kalmyk?’

  Iliev’s mouth formed a sphere. He said, ‘Or an orthodox Jew, or a Roman Catholic. An atheist, perhaps. I’m not an expert on such things, Gabriel. Are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Iliev’s mobile rang. He took out an old model and made an apologetic face before answering it.

  ‘Of course, my dear. No, I won’t be late tonight. And yes, I’ll pick up some milk on my way home.’ He put his hands up. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, Gabriel.’ He waved across the books and papers in front of him. ‘Got to get a little more work done before I leave.’

  ‘I understand. You’ve been very helpful. Thanks, Boris.’

  Gabriel stood up to leave. Iliev looked up at him, his eyes squinting. He put his forefinger beside his head and it vibrated there. He looked a little vexed.

  ‘I was giving a series of lectures at Harvard, a couple of years back. The influence of the Kalachakra Tantra on the Chilean diplomat and founder of Esoteric Hitlerism, Miguel Serrano, and the place of Tantric paraphernalia in ritual and magic. The last lecture was on a short history of Tibetan Buddhism in Kalmykia. An old man attended that lecture, though not the others, he confessed. We spoke after the lecture. We had coffee. He said his elder brother had told him that he saw something akin to the items that the Chinese had put on display in the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace after the invasion. The so-called Tibetan chamber of horrors.’

  Gabriel nodded, knowing the reference.

  Iliev sneered. ‘Crude propaganda. The Chinese were just trying to justify the unjustifiable through fostering ignorant prejudice.’

  Iliev dismissed it with a flick of his long hand.

  ‘The old man said his brother had seen these things taken from a bunker in Berlin at the end of World War Two. He said that his brother had been one of several Poles that were ordered to carry out the gruesome task of loading the waiting trucks with the contents of the bunker. His brother was sent to the Gulag to keep him quiet and it killed him, he said.’

  He paused. He grimaced.

  ‘Does the DVD show the severing of limbs? The nose and ears?’

  Gabriel hesitated. Then said, ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘As I said, such things were typical punishments in pre-1950 Tibet for common criminals or those deemed enemies of the state. But in 1945 the victims were Red Army soldiers fighting Nazis in Berlin,’ Iliev said. ‘It was an unusual way to kill someone, though. In your DVD was the cranium severed and filled with smooth stones?’

  ‘The same,’ Gabriel said. His left leg began to vibrate involuntarily.

  Iliev nodded, as if to himself.

  ‘Is it a case you’re working on, Gabriel?’ he said, as if he was hoping it wasn’t personal.

  Gabriel knew that the world of commercial television, let alone social media, was simply of no interest to Boris Iliev. He’d likely never heard of Jed and Esfir Watson or Johnny Hockey.

  ‘Yes,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Thank God.’

  Iliev made a face that confirmed that he was glad to be immersed in matters some concerned esoteric and irrelevant.

  ‘Does the old man live in the US?’ Gabriel said.

  ‘He did at that time, or so he said.’

  Gabriel knew that any other form of torture or the mutilation of a corpse could have been replicated perhaps twenty times. But this was different. If what the man had said to Iliev was true, it might be a lead. He had to believe it. And yet men had been the victims. Red Army soldiers. Not Kalmyk women. But he felt there had to be a link. Besides, he had nothing else to go on. Not a damn thing. If he didn’t feel so desolate, he would have been excited.

  ‘He only agreed to speak with me if I agreed to contact him if I came across anything like it,’ Iliev said. ‘I thought, why not? But that is odd. No?’

  It is, Gabriel thought.

  ‘I will speak with him. I’ll tell him about the DVD, within reason.’

  Boris Iliev nodded a fraction. ‘OK, Gabriel. His name was Bronislaw Stolarski.’

  ‘Do you have his address or phone number?

  ‘No, he refused to give me them. That’s strange too, I suppose. I never saw him again. He could be dead. He looked half dead then, come to think of it.’

  ‘Could the DVD be part of an ongoing punishment for a crime? An old crime? A lingering dispute perhaps?’ Gabriel said, thinking about the missing Kalmyk girls from New Jersey.

  ‘I don’t know, Gabriel. I really don’t know.’

  Gabriel saw Boris Iliev look at him with a mixture of sympathy and incredulity, as if he couldn’t understand why a fellow intellectual would want to become involved in such a thing. Gabriel repeated the name, Bronislaw Stolarski, in his mind. An old Jewish man, he thought.

  46

  Twelve feet behind Carpenter, Johnny Hockey knew that the heavy bolts securing the back doors had released. No doubt about it. The wind had eased the doors open just enoug
h for him to see two guys running from the back of an SUV. One had a gas-powered metal cutter in his hands, like those used by firefighters, the other, binoculars and a radio. They were dressed in khaki fatigues, black ice hockey goalie masks and military boots. The two prisoners on either side of him shook their cages and jumped up and down like aroused apes. Hockey stayed silent and motionless, his shackled hands in his lap.

  The man with the cutter let it hang down in one hand as he used the other to swing open the doors. He scrambled into the back of the van, saying nothing. Hockey felt the warm air, smelled the bilious sweetness of the corn.

  ‘The steel’s not that thick,’ he said, finally.

  He heard the engine of the station wagon in front start up, then it took off. He couldn’t make sense of it. But now he saw the flickering LED lights on the road to the rear, the faint noise of the siren, like a hog chased on a farm.

  The second masked guy, who was still outside the van, spoke briefly into the radio before laying the binoculars on the floor. He pulled a piece from an ankle holster; a small revolver by the look of it, Hockey thought. He held it barrel up and fidgeted agitatedly, staring at the fast-approaching state trooper’s black and gold vehicle. He put the radio to his ear briefly and turned and shouted at the man with the cutter to abort. Hockey felt the urge to swear, like someone afflicted with Tourette’s, but instead he just concentrated on his breathing.

  He saw a third person exit the SUV at speed, dressed as the other two. But he noticed the end of a ponytail jutting out from the collar of the plaid shirt worn under the fatigues. Ponytail walked purposely towards the man with the revolver and, grabbing the wrist of his gun hand, jerked him forward and drove a knee into his groin. He doubled over, gasping. Ponytail, still holding the wrist, slid a boot behind his right ankle and drove the free palm into his right shoulder. He fell backwards. But Ponytail didn’t let go of the wrist and twisted it viciously as he toppled. There was a sickening crack, a branch snapping, and the revolver was snatched away deftly before he was halfway to the uneven aggregate. The man howled.

  Ponytail crouched down, putting a knee onto the man’s chest. The action seemed to stifle his writhing. The mask was yanked off his face, the trigger cocked, and he was shot through the forehead with his own weapon. A little grey smoke, a louder crack. The revolver had bucked a fraction. The man’s head had bounced off the dusty surface as the round impacted. Blood spurted out from the entry wound like water from a drinking fountain, subsiding after a second or two.

  It drenched his face now, the blackened wound like barbequed meat. Ponytail and the guy with the cutter walked back to their vehicle, with a nonchalance Hockey knew most would find disconcerting. He saw Ponytail take one last glance at the police cruiser before getting back into the SUV.

  A couple of seconds later, the remaining vehicles screeched away, fishtailing as puffs of blue tyre smoke rose about the wheel arches. The two prisoners opposite Hockey slumped down on their metal seats, dejected.

  Hockey inhaled the fecund smell of the farmland, the dry air almost burning the back of his throat. He nodded, accepting the events that had transpired.

  *

  Fury had arranged for two vehicle changes in the hour that had elapsed since the aborted mission, leaving the redundant cars in isolated barns. She’d thrown the revolver out of the open window, into a drainage ditch. The Russian driver of the white SUV they were now in pulled off the road at a gas station that had four pumps positioned under a roof supported by flaking cream-coloured pillars.

  The wooden shop to the left was painted a drab green. There were no other vehicles. Dusk had fallen, the temperature had dropped by almost six degrees already. The Russian driver parked up next to a pump and Fury got out. She told the three Russians not to move until she got back. She strolled over the cracked and dirty forecourt to a payphone and rang the American that had worn the mask in the video of Fran Carpenter, the pregnant woman.

  ‘She OK?’ she said.

  ‘No physical harm has come to her. What now?’

  ‘End it quick,’ Fury said.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The woman had seen her face and it was always going to end this way. Fury replaced the receiver before checking her make-up in the shiny stainless steel around the handset, as if she’d merely ordered a takeaway.

  She dialled César Vezzani’s number next and reported all that had transpired. He expressed his disappointment but told her that they had located the brunette called Charlene Rimes. He gave her an address and she heard him hang up. They’d used the code names that Vezzani had put in the flight bag at the Morning Inn, although she thought they were so basic that he must have made them up in less than a minute while he was shaving, or something similarly mundane. Hen. Rooster. Pullet. And so on. Maybe he’d been watching a documentary about chickens at the time, or was just fond of them. Maybe he like the taste of chicken meat. What did it matter?

  Surfer’s death was an irrelevance to her. The guy that had pulled the revolver was a liability. She’d killed him because he’d disobeyed her direct order. She decided she’d only use her own people from now on. The state trooper was random and sheer bad luck, she decided. If there’d been a leak, the roads would’ve been choked with FBI vehicles, the sky filled with the sound of their helicopters before they could make good their escape.

  She walked back to the SUV and an attendant came up. He was about thirty-five, with a huge gut and a patchy beard. He wore a stained red T-shirt with a profile portrait of Marilyn Monroe on it. He had a half-eaten doughnut in his hand. She remained outside the vehicle.

  ‘Hey, buddy. You gonna use the pump or what?’ he said to the driver.

  Fury noticed his overcrowded teeth and weak jaw, the scar that indicated he’d been born with a harelip.

  ‘Yрод,’ the driver said, leaning towards him. A real ugly man.

  She knew he was pissed off at their failure to rescue Hockey and had wanted to take it out on someone. But she rebuked him in Russian: ублюдок. A real bastard.

  Turning to the open-mouthed attendant, she said, ‘All men are pigs, yes. But not you. You are not pig.’

  He stood there, his expression changing from gratitude to one of mild concern, the way men looked when they registered her physical strength, its jarring juxtaposition with her facial beauty. He was silent for a few seconds. Nothing seemed to move, as if there was a fissure in time.

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m no pig.’

  She walked over to him and stretched out her hand and he flinched, his head titling back, but there was no threat in it. She touched his lip lightly, almost tenderly, with two of her fingertips.

  ‘My cousin in Omsk has lip like you.’ She half smiled. ‘We do not need pump. OK?’

  He trembled a little and walked away, turning back once after he’d gotten a few feet from the door of the shop, his face betraying his bemusement and anxiety.

  She turned to the driver, who looked to be sulking. ‘Cheer up, Afanasy. We’re going a long way north to play with a bitch pindo,’ she said, referring to a slutty American woman.

  He grinned.

  Then they all started grinning.

  47

  Berlin, 1945, the next day.

  The NKVD major general’s office dwarfed Kazapov’s, with a French First Empire chandelier in lacquered bronze at its centre, the supporting chains attached to the necks of the nine gold-plated imperial eagle heads. There were decanters of the finest Godet cognac, and exquisite rugs worth more than it cost to construct a house in pre-war Moscow. All of it stolen goods. It smelled of cigar smoke and sandalwood aftershave balm and had been previously occupied by the Waffen-SS commanding officer, a Prussian count. A man who died at Stalingrad.

  The general’s uniform was of fine khaki cloth, trimmed in blue silk and embroidered with the insignia of the internal troops of the NKVD. The tunic had gold buttons and an erect collar, edged with crimson where it reached his fleshy chin. He was examining the brass casket that
had been retrieved from the bunker. Kazapov had purposely replaced the padlock with another, which he’d blackened with a cigarette lighter.

  The general crouched over it now, with his hands on the rim, his legs slightly bent. He’d refused to allow Kazapov to place it on his antique desk when he’d entered the office a few minutes before. He’d pointed to a bare patch of the polished wooden floor, about three feet from a Louis XV console table that was pressed against the wall. The table had a photograph on it of what Kazapov guessed was his family back in Georgia; a stern-looking wife, her black hair in a bun, and five teenage children standing in front of a wood-panelled dacha beside a frozen lake. Kazapov had recognized the general’s accent as being the same as his own mother’s, and smarted a little when he’d first heard him speak.

  The general was a small man with ample cheeks. Below his bald, suntanned head, his eyebrows were thick and wiry, his nose short and broad. But his rank demanded respect from everyone but the highest members of the Party. Kazapov knew that the general had arrived in Berlin from Moscow a couple of days ago. He suspected that Comrade Beria had sent him. He knew that Beria, and more importantly, Stalin, liked their own kind in places of power, especially after the purges.

  The general straightened up and placed his palms on his lower back.

  ‘Mutilated Red Army soldiers. Macabre items. That mummified woman. This mysterious box,’ he said, pointing his round chin at the casket. ‘Major Volsky says he won’t find out anything else from the German officer and that he should be handed over to the experts.’ He raised an unkempt eyebrow.

  Kazapov remained silent and still, conscious that the general could be testing him.

  The general shook his head before walking over to his fine desk. He placed his right palm there, raising his chin into the air imperiously.