by Gary Haynes
He unwrapped one of the scrolls and stared at the writing. It looked simplistic and was indecipherable. There was a double X, an inverted R, a childlike b and backward 3. He recognized it as the Cyrillic script of Kalmyk Oirat.
Frustrated, he took out the cylinder and unscrewed the lid. He knew from experience that films had been made of the savage German advance into the Soviet Union, of the torture and murder of camp inmates and Axis traitors, too. The worst of the Nazis liked to watch them for ghoulish entertainment, the survivors had said.
He held a frame of the film up to the desk lamp and used the magnifying glass to get a better look. He saw the Kalmyk volunteer in his ushanka, or woollen hat, a Reichsadler adorning it. He was astride his Panje horse.
Now another Kalmyk volunteer, whose wild-looking hat was made of some long fur he didn’t recognize. This man had a merciless face, with an unkempt and drooping moustache, a bandana of cartridges slung across his uniformed chest. Kazapov’s breath quickened.
He knew the history of the Kalmyk people had long been one of violence. They had originated from Oirats, western Mongolians, who migrated from the steppes of southern Siberia to the lower Volga region of the then Russian Empire in the 1600s. They’d continued their nomadic lifestyle, living in felt yurts south of the Don River, and wintered on the western shores of the Caspian Sea.
They’d fought for the imperial tsars against Napoleon, against the British in the Crimea and the Turks in the Ottoman wars. Prior to the Russian Revolution, parts of their land had been overtaken by settlers, and some 200,000 had left for their ancestral home. The remainder had built fixed settlements, including Elista. But they’d continued their allegiance to the tsars and had fought for the White Army in the Russian Civil War. A few had escaped the Bolshevik backlash and settled in Belgrade with the Russian émigrés, where they’d constructed the first Buddhist temple in Western Europe.
For those Kalmyks that had decided to stay put, there had followed repressive years in which Stalin executed their leaders, desecrated their temples and burned their religious texts. They’d become impoverished peasant farmers. Monks and leading Kalmyks were deported to Siberia. Sixty thousand had died in the great famine of 1931–2. A time when the state had had to remind its citizens that it was a crime to eat their own children, or other people’s children.
When the Great Patriotic War had broken out against the Nazis, it became clear that some Kalmyks had never forgiven their treatment by the Bolsheviks. They had collaborated with the Germans, hoping for a degree of freedom, Kazapov guessed, although thousands more had fought for the Red Army. He knew it wasn’t uncommon for even ethnic Russian populations to be split in their allegiances.
In February 1943, three months after Kalmykia was ‘liberated’ by the Red Army and loyal partisans, Kazapov had gone there as part of the ChGK team investigating war crimes. He’d spoken with an elderly farmer, an eyewitness to some of the atrocities. The farmer had also informed him that he’d allowed a Russian woman and her three teenage daughters to hide in his barn. They’d been left behind by a small group of partisans. They’d been hunted by mounted Kalmyks allied to the Germans, and the females hadn’t been able keep up. They looked like Jews, he said. Kazapov had been only too aware that his mother and sister could be taken for Jews.
A squad of Kalmyks had searched the barn soon afterwards. The four females had been found, of course. They’d been put into one of the farmer’s own carts and had been pulled away by two of his own mules. The farmer had put up his hands and had shrugged when he’d been questioned further. He’d told Kazapov that he’d thought he was going to be shot, but for some reason they’d spared his life and left hurriedly. He’d guessed they were eager to molest the women.
Upon hearing this first-hand, Kazapov had puked up his breakfast in front of the farmer and had trembled to such an extent that the farmer’s toothless wife insisted that he rest awhile and drink some goat’s milk laced with vodka and eat some salted fish to rejuvenate him. Kazapov had wished then that Stalin had made corpses of every Kalmyk.
Later, he’d convinced himself that the women the farmer had spoken about were not his mother and sisters. Many mass graves had been uncovered in Kalmykia and the corpses exhumed had included numerous women, not all of them Jews. None had been identified as his mother or sisters.
He convinced himself of it still. There were millions of displaced refugees wandering around in Europe. They could be anywhere.
Now Kazapov put down the reel of film, his eyes moistening.
If he believed that, then why had he volunteered for the bunker detachment?
He reached for another cigarette, decided he needed vodka.
PART TWO
REVELATION
51
Virginia, 2015, the next day.
Gabriel had driven for nearly four hours. Darkness had fallen slowly, the cloud on the horizon ribboned and fiery. Carla had called him on the mobile she’d given him in Connecticut, and he said he had things to tell her and she said likewise. She’d asked him to meet her at her home a few miles from Arlington County.
He parked the sedan and got out. He walked over the flint-ridden path to the three-storey farmhouse, glancing at the apple orchard, silhouetted against the eastern skyline like a giant spider’s web. There was a little lake or slurry pit out there amid cattle pasture, and it was surrounded by a split-level fence. He could just about make out a patch of the oleaginous water, the moonlight playing on it.
He knocked on the oak door, feeling oddly nervous. The hall light went on. She was barefoot and wore a flowing white linen dress that all but hid her shapely body. Her hair was up, a few strands cupping her chin, and a gold crucifix hung from her neck.
‘Please come in,’ Carla said.
She led him through the hallway and he noticed a pendulum walk clock with Roman numerals, and the framed photos of, he guessed, Amazonian tribespeople. The living room was commodious, with dark-wood furniture and brass table lamps of irregular design. The room smelled of a mixture of rosehip and lavender water. They sat opposite each other on armchairs, the upholstery’s ornate embroidery pleasing to him.
‘Did you hear about the attempt to free Hockey?’ she said.
He nodded, morosely. ‘Yes.’
‘The officer is a psychological wreck. They haven’t found his wife yet.’
Gabriel breathed out hard. ‘I know.’
‘Have you told Hockey you can’t represent him anymore?’ she said.
‘No. But I will.’
She pulled the hem of her dress down. ‘So, what have you got for me?’
He told her about the snow lion emblem and the Tibetan demon mask. She said that she knew about those things, and she said it in a way that bordered on irritation. He gave her a summary of his talk with Boris Iliev, although he left out the part about Bronislaw Stolarski and his brother in World War Two. He wanted to speak with Stolarski first, if he consented and was up to it. In truth, he’d found the story questionable and wanted to confirm or reject that suspicion face-to-face. Then he realized he didn’t even know if he was still alive.
She grabbed her knee, awkwardly, as if she was suffering from rheumatism. ‘The girl in the DVD wasn’t your niece, was she?’
He winced. ‘No. I’m sure of that, at least.’
He knew that this was the main reason she’d allowed him to watch the DVD. It was the main reason he had watched it, too, if he was being honest.
‘Why would someone do that?’ he said.
‘There could be many reasons.’
There were a few seconds of silence between them.
She said, ‘I told you at Frank’s Place that if you helped me, I would help you. I meant that.’
She told him about her telephone conversation with Robert Dubois, stating that he was her counterpart in Brussels. She didn’t mention their love affair.
She stood up and walked slowly over to an antique drinks cabinet made of yew wood, as if she couldn’t take it all
in, or wasn’t inclined to. She unscrewed the lid from a bottle of red wine. ‘Drink?’
‘Thanks.’
She poured two glasses. She came back and handed him one. She remained standing in front of him.
‘Robert Dubois has asked me to meet him in Brussels. He has some information.’
Her tone had become coldly practical, he thought.
‘I’m hoping to meet with a man that might have some information too. It’s sketchy for now,’ he said, referring to Bronislaw Stolarski.
He’d half changed his mind. He wanted to give her some hope, but he wouldn’t say more about it.
She rubbed her temple with a palm, as if she was trying to extricate herself from an immersion in dark, inner thoughts.
52
New York State, the same day.
Charlene Rimes had checked into a thirty-dollars-a-night motel, with chipboard walls and orange curtains. It was situated on the outskirts of a little town called Alexandria in Jefferson County, a couple of miles south of the US–Canadian border. She knew that it wouldn’t be long before the feds identified her as the person who struck a deal with the Watson family after snitching on Johnny Hockey.
The Watson family lawyer had asked her to keep her smartphone on her until they were forced to reveal her name. She was concerned about that, but Billy Joe had assured her that he and Hockey had acted alone and had killed the Watsons for the possessions they’d stolen — and she’d believed him. There was no one else involved in the acts. He hadn’t rung her since. Hockey had been arrested. Why worry?
When the call from the lawyer did come, she figured she could evade the authorities by slipping over the longest border in the world, into southern Ontario. She could spend some time moving between the so-called Thousand Islands, a vast archipelago in the St Lawrence River as it emerged from the lake. It could take a year or more to find someone in there, and she guessed they wouldn’t waste their resources. She had no intention of entering a witness protection programme, to be wet-nursed by the US Marshals Service for the rest of her life.
She’d had a bowl of chili with rice in a restaurant about eighty yards from the motel, and was now walking back along a dirt track, which abutted the minor road, to avoid being struck by a vehicle. There were no streetlights, but the moon was as white as the belly of a flatfish, the sky brocaded with clusters of luminous stars. She felt good, having downed a carafe of Californian red with her meal.
If Hockey was convicted, the money from the Watson family would be transferred into a private bank on the Isle of Man, although she didn’t have a clue where that was. Like it mattered, she’d thought. They’d said their lawyer would form a company and she’d be authorized to draw on the cash via a secure online account. But she knew that depended on the emergence of more evidence against Hockey.
She’d only agreed to talk to the Watsons on the understanding that she wouldn’t have to testify. But the FBI had other plans, she knew. She’d been given 6,000 dollars to cover her expenses over the next few weeks, and felt like she’d won a lottery. But she was too cute to blow it on extravagant living. She still wore a retro leather mini-skirt, a faded denim jacket and scuffed gold trainers. She felt guilty about what her betrayal might mean for her now ex-boyfriend, Billy Joe. She consoled herself by thinking she was just taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had dropped, as if from Heaven, into her otherwise poverty-stricken hill girl lap. He was a vicious jerk, anyways.
She got parallel with a telephone pole and a white SUV passed her at speed but slowed down and stopped about ten yards ahead. She thought about running and then thought better of it. If the authorities had somehow tracked her this far, she figured she would have to accept her fate. She put her right hand on her hip as the SUV reversed.
When the vehicle was revving by her side, the electric front window came down. She saw a white woman about ten years older than herself in the passenger seat, a muscular young man driving. The woman turned her head and smiled. She wore what looked like a silk scarf around her neck and her blonde hair was in a ponytail.
‘FBI?’ Charlene said.
The woman nodded.
The back doors opened, and two cropped-haired young guys got out, wearing well-tailored suits. She hadn’t done time, but she’d been around white supremacists and felony offenders long enough to know instinctively that they weren’t FBI. They had a look about them that spoke of criminal brutality. There was a sugar beet field to her left. She’d never smoked and had even dreamed of becoming an athlete in her youth. She might have a chance. What other choice was there?
She took off at a sprint, heard the woman shout something. The earth was wet and slippery, from irrigation, she guessed. But the crop was short, the green leaves no hindrance. She got a full thirty-five yards before she tripped on something, something that sent her sprawling face first into the slushy topsoil. She tried to get up, but realized she’d sprained her ankle, or broken it. What was certain was that she wasn’t going anywhere. She heard the footfalls behind her and gritted her teeth, hoping that the woman would temper the aggression that had all but oozed from the young men.
Three seconds later, the woman and the three men circled her, as if they were African wild dogs surrounding felled prey.
‘Where is boyfriend?’ the woman asked.
‘What are you, Germans?’ Charlene said.
‘You stupid. Dress like whore.’
‘What did you say to me?’ Charlene said, screwing up her face.
She lay in the mud, among the sugar beet, looking at the woman who had bad-mouthed her. She’d removed her scarf, she noticed. She’s got the biggest neck for a lady, she thought. Compared to hers it was the difference between a pony’s neck and that of a thoroughbred racehorse. Like the ones she’d seen once down at the Kentucky Downs in Franklin. She wondered if the woman was in fact one of them filthy transvestites. But no. She was too damn beautiful.
‘Enough. Where is he?’
‘How did you find me?’ Charlene said.
Then she knew how. Her smartphone. Had the Watson family betrayed her? What the hell was happening?
‘Where?’
‘I dunno. Useful as a mink coat in the desert, anyways,’ Charlene said, referring to Billy Joe.
She saw the woman frown.
Charlene hadn’t been overtly threatened and no physical violence had been used against her, so she reckoned a slice of humour wouldn’t go amiss. It had worked for her before, when rednecks had gotten a little rough. But after the woman had said something foreign, the men moved forward. On her back, she flinched, her mood changing. She saw their pitiless eyes and recoiled like a beaten mongrel.
Crouching down, two of the men grasped an ankle each. She grimaced and cried out, the searing pain careering up her calf. Her ankle had swollen badly already, resembling half a tennis ball. The third man sat down behind her. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her arms back over her head, and manoeuvred his mud-streaked boots by her pierced ears. She felt them pressing into her shoulders.
Her body was straightened out. It felt as if she was on a human rack. In this vulnerable state, the fear of what might be visited upon her next eclipsed the pain in her joints, the agony in her ankle, even.
‘Don’t hurt me, please. Please don’t hurt me, lady.’
‘One more time, that is all. Where is boyfriend?’
‘He took off. He likely hates me now for the reward and all.’
Charlene watched the woman reach into her jacket pocket and take out a length of lead piping. From her other pocket, she removed a long, rusted nail, the type used on fence posts. She held them both up.
‘Choose,’ she said.
53
Gabriel looked over at Carla’s grey stone fireplace. There was a framed photograph on it of a young girl. He pointed to it.
‘May I?’ he said, anxious to change the mood.
‘Sure,’ she said.
He strolled over to it and picked it up. ‘She’s p
retty.’
Carla came over to him. ‘My daughter, Monize. Her father still sees her a lot, which is good.’
‘Is she with him tonight?’
‘Yes. Maybe you’d like to stay for dinner?’
She half laughed and shook her head, as if she’d embarrassed herself.
He hesitated. He couldn’t figure her out.
But said, ‘I’d like that.’
‘I’ll cook pato no tucupi. My grandmother taught me. She also left me this house, in case you were wondering how I could afford it on an FBI salary.’
He nodded, his mouth in a pout. ‘Food sounds good.’
‘You speak Portuguese?’ she said.
He shook his head as playfully as he could muster.
‘Then you haven’t got a clue what it is, have you?’
‘Actually, no.’
She smiled, weakly. ‘Boiled duck in a broth of scalded cassava.’
‘Right.’
‘You’ll love it. Besides, I can’t have you driving back to New York without feeding you.’
‘I’m staying over at a motel. I’m seeing Hockey tomorrow morning.’
‘That’s settled then. I’ll start dinner. Help yourself to wine.’
She turned and walked towards the doorway.
‘Just so you know I’m not hiding anything from you, I should tell you that I followed you to that bar in Far Rockaway.’
He had a feeling she was hiding more.
‘OK.’
*
They talked about the ongoing investigation throughout the meal. He hadn’t been able to stop the images of the dead Kalmyk girl from flashing through his mind. The fragments of the nightmare.
Now he forced himself to speak. ‘The duck was delicious.’
He reached for a glass of water on the bare wood of the dining room table.
‘And the cassava?’
‘Yes.’
