by Gary Haynes
There were a few vehicles scattered about, but apart from a middle-aged woman placing a bag of groceries into the boot of her small car, he seemed to be alone. He decided to make a call before driving home via an off licence. He’d drink a few beers and go to bed early. He lived with his wife of ten years, Trudi, and their two daughters, in a spacious, three-bedroom apartment on the edge of a recreational park in Berlin.
Watching the woman get into her car and reverse, he took out his smartphone from a back pocket. Trudi and his girls had gone hiking in the French ski resort of Chamonix. He and Trudi had a good marriage. Trudi was a devoted mother and their sex life had gone from eager to experimental, which pleased him. He considered himself a fortunate man.
Now his wife’s smartphone was answered.
‘Hallo,’ Trudi said.
‘How’s it going there?’
‘Fantastic. You should’ve come with us.’
‘Are the girls missing me?’ Finkel said.
‘Of course, darling.’ She snickered. ‘They have little crushes on one particular Italian tour guide. Don’t tell them I said that.’
‘Can’t wait to see you all.’
She put the girls on and he told them he loved them, and they kissed down the phone. The call ended with all three of them saying ‘Tschüss’ to him in unison.
A small bird landed about ten feet from him. A sparrow, its wing injured, the primary feathers touching the ground. It hopped about in the sunlight, attempting to fly, but only managed about three yards before falling to the ground. He suddenly felt alone. He turned, pressed the key fob and strolled towards his red sedan. He pulled on the door handle, bent down to get in.
‘Don’t turn round. If have concealed weapon, lose it.’
It was a woman’s voice. Eastern European. Likely Russian, he thought. It was a serious voice. He knew when to take someone seriously and when to call their bluff.
He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans, so he guessed she could see he didn’t have a pistol.
‘I have a pocket knife,’ he said.
‘Lose it.’
Feeling the first tendrils of panic, he put his hand in his front, right-hand pocket and took out the small knife, its steel blade folded into the handle, and with it the object he’d acquired in Potsdam after his meeting with Robert Dubois.
He tossed the knife to the side and, as it landed, he coughed and put his hand to his mouth and swallowed. He immediately put his hands up and said he felt faint, hoping that she hadn’t seen what he’d done and wanting to appear timid.
‘You Western cops. Pussies. Yes?’ she said.
He breathed slow and hard. He still hadn’t seen her face or how many others might be with her. He guessed she had others with her or was armed herself.
‘Hands on roof. Wife and girls be home soon. So, no hero. OK, cop?’
He gritted his teeth and nodded.
91
The farm, near Potsdam.
Finkel had been bundled into the back of a silver van at the parking lot, his hands and feet secured with nylon flex-cuffs. Black gaffer tape had been wrapped several times around his quivering mouth and a hood that had smelled of rotten apples placed over his sweaty head. His shoes had been removed, his watch, smartphone, key fob, wallet and wedding ring all taken.
By the time he arrived at his unknown destination, he’d calculated that he’d been driven for less than an hour. Upon arrival, someone had dragged him by his extended arms across what felt like cobblestones. A door had banged open, then another. He’d been flung to the floor and pulled by his feet over a cold surface before yet another door had opened loudly. They’d thrown him down a flight of steps then, and he’d lost consciousness when his head first hit the natural stone.
*
A cold sweat covered his naked and trembling body now. He heard someone enter the room, which he couldn’t discern in any meaningful detail. His mouth tasted of metal, his head throbbed. His cracked skull had, in fact, shifted to an abnormal position, such that it protruded from his forehead, giving him the grotesque look of an extinct humanoid.
‘You look older. Uglier.’
He recognized the voice as the woman at the parking lot, but he struggled to understand what had been said. She squatted down by his head and jabbed one of her fingers into the pressure point under his Adam’s apple, where the trachea passed just under the surface of the skin. He gasped and panted. The shock of the sudden pain kick-started his senses, as he guessed was its purpose.
She stood up. She wore a red sports vest that showed her biceps and forearms lined with visible veins, as if she’d wrapped them in ivy leaves. Hands akimbo, her beautiful mouth cracked a lazy grin.
‘I keep you alive for whole week with blood transfusion and drug. Then your wife and daughters suffer same. I promise you this, cop.’
Finkel heard her even as he heard a grating noise inside his head, as if his cranium had become active tectonic plates. The fact that she knew about his family, that she’d threatened to torture them, terrified him and he became almost immediately compliant. All this was unnecessary. He’d tell her what she wanted to know. He’d tell her anything, now.
The woman took a long pair of scissors from her back pocket and bent down again.
‘Close eyes,’ she said.
*
The cellar smelled like a rodent’s cage. Finkel lay in his own half-congealed blood, barely conscious. Before Fury had taken his lips, he’d said he had no idea of the old man’s name, except that he was known by some as Snow Lion. A serial killer that had never been prosecuted for a crime. He lived in Berlin, the Chechen had said. He confessed that he’d given an up-to-date photo of the Chechen to Robert Dubois, a Belgian police officer, to hand on to Carla Romero, an FBI agent. Dubois’ investigation wasn’t linked to any international organization like Interpol, he’d said, adding that their work hadn’t been sanctioned by any cross-border initiative. They were acting out of moral outrage, he’d said, and alone.
An intended plea for his life had been reduced to a mere muffled word that had degenerated into a pitiable wheeze. A thought of remarkable clarity, given the state he’d been in, had risen above the maelstrom: he would die here, in his own filth.
What had been left of his rational mind had deserted him then. He’d felt something on his throat. He hadn’t known what it was. It had pressed harder. It had not relented. His starved lungs had felt as if they would burst out of his sternum. He’d dry retched. His final sensation had been of a petrifying descent into oblivion.
*
The old man had told Vezzani to order Fury to dismember Finkel’s corpse, weigh down the body parts and dump them in a local freshwater lake that he knew of. The lungfish and catfish it was stocked with were voracious carnivores, it was said. There’d be nothing left to identify by means of DNA before long. He couldn’t afford to have the corpse disposed of at the farm. He didn’t want cadaver dogs finding it in the forest. In the circumstances, he’d deemed the lake the best option.
Finkel had been the fifth person he’d murdered by proxy in just a few days. The risk of Hockey remaining in prison had been too high. As Vezzani had said, he could have chosen to speak out. He’d doubted it, but he could have. He had been Vezzani’s choice, but one he himself had agreed with. Another smokescreen to hide his identity. Fury had said that Hockey’s Russian murderer was already serving multiple life sentences, and it would be his family that would benefit from the payments that Vezzani would organize. The young woman, Charlene Rimes, had little more worth than a domestic animal.
But he considered now Billy Joe Anderson and the motorcycle thug, Jim Saunders. The neo-Nazis. They were dead too, Saunders by a recent hit that Vezzani had arranged. His body had been chopped up and had buried in Arizona. Or had it been New Mexico? He didn’t know the details. He didn’t need to. It was just part of a clean-up, which hadn’t finished yet.
The neo-Nazis were odd beings, he thought. He regarded them as ridiculous sha
dows of those they wished to emulate. The Nazis had killed with a scientific purpose, with a spiritual intensity, with a craving for death that he’d not seen since they sought to rule the earth. With the proliferation of nuclear weapons, he doubted their malign ambition would ever be replicated. Total war in the modern age meant destruction for all combatants and their families, after all.
92
Brooklyn Heights — Washington DC, the next day.
Gabriel was still worried about the call from Robert Dubois, not least because of what he’d said about Carla, and the fact that the FSB had stated that Joseph Kazapov had died seventy years ago. He wondered who’d been lying and why. Was the FSB protecting Kazapov out of some misplaced loyalty? Had Barbara Murray been duped? Stolarski too? And what was the breakthrough in the investigation? Had Dubois been convinced by new evidence that Joseph Kazapov had survived the war, that he lived still? Had he been found? Was Dubois luring him into something? Had Sangmu been found?
He was catching an early flight to Brussels the next day and rather than waste the intervening time asking himself the same questions, which after all he couldn’t answer, he’d decided to try to find out the answer to the one question that didn’t present any conflicting evidence. There wasn’t any evidence at all, in fact. That question was, what was the motivation for the killing of young Kalmyk women? Following the success online that Berne Lange had enjoyed, Gabriel decided to check what other online sources there might be.
Sitting in his study area, he viewed on his laptop a black and white film of Kalmyks in Germany in the 1950s, likely collaborators and their families that had escaped from the Soviets, he thought. The films showed unique and fascinating footage of their daily lives and Buddhist worship. He’d wondered, briefly, if he’d been watching a victim of Snow Lion.
Due to his discussions with Bronislaw Stolarski and Barbara Murray, together with his own rising suspicions, he was as sure as he could be that the historic disappearances of the Kalmyk girls, including his niece, Sangmu, weren’t the result of a random hatred. Something personal had happened to the murderer, decades ago. He had more than an inkling now that it was linked to something earlier than the 1950’s, that something had happened during World War Two. So many terrible things had happened then that it seemed like a good place to start.
Now, he clicked on the website of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. After a rudimentary search, he read an extraordinary fact that made him sit up and shake his head.
The museum had obtained documents from the Kalmyk Republic of the Russian Federation. The reports detailed seven previously unknown mass executions of Jews and other Russians in the republic during World War Two. The massacres had been conducted by Einsatzgruppe D, during the republic’s occupation by German and Romanian armies between August and December 1942. The documents had been held previously in the Kalmyk state archives.
Gabriel read that the archives included a list of names of victims, eyewitness testimonies and exhumation reports of mass graves. The site also stated that before World War Two, only a few Jews had lived in Kalmykia. Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, hundreds of Jews had fled there, seeking refuge. But the Nazis had been as tenacious in their desire to exterminate European Jewry as they’d been grimly efficient. An estimated 700 Jews had been murdered by the Germans and their collaborators in Kalmykia.
The museum’s library and archives were available to the public in set-aside reading rooms. Gabriel thought he had the option of searching further online or paying for an in-situ research assistant. But after accessing the relevant webpages, he realized that the details were limited.
The reading rooms were on the fifth floor of the museum building and were open to the public on weekdays from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm, he read. It wasn’t necessary to make an appointment, but he rang ahead as suggested and asked one of the reference staff to reserve the specific materials he wanted to view. He’d decided to drive down to the capital and do the research himself.
He’d learned from the site that there was no single list of civilian victims or survivors of the war, and normally tracing an individual through the Holocaust entailed searching through a variety of sources, beginning with the name of the town the person had resided in before the war. At least he didn’t have that to contend with, he thought.
He decided to change his airline ticket, to fly out of Washington instead of Boston on a direct Lufthansa flight.
*
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was America’s national institution for the study and dissemination of Holocaust history, and served as the country’s memorial to the millions of victims murdered and otherwise oppressed during that period. It opened in April 1993, since when the museum had been visited by more than 15,000,000 people, all of whom were encouraged to reflect upon the moral issues in the context of their own lives.
The museum was adjacent to the National Mall in the south-west of the capital, its entrance a neoclassical portico on Fourteenth Street. Upon entering, Gabriel completed a form and showed his photo ID in the form of his driver’s licence.
The interior was evocative of those dark times. There was a replica of a freight wagon used to transport Jews to the death camps, a shaft of light cutting through it. There was the Tower of Faces, showing Jewish women in evening dresses and their everyday lives before their annihilation, an image that was devastating in its simplicity.
The museum had hundreds of staff and volunteers, almost 13,000 artefacts and 40,000,000 pages of archived documents. Gabriel sat at a table with a fixed reading light. He had located four relevant video and document archives under the search for ‘Kalmyk’. One was a film of the Germans advancing towards Stalingrad, although the exact location was unclear. Another was a foreign language oral history interview, documenting, among other things, the increased use of violence by the Kalmyks in 1942. The second film focused on the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union at the outbreak of the war, including Kalmyks. The fourth archive, which he’d seen referred to online but had been limited there to a summary, was entitled: Selected Records of the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission to Investigate the Crimes Committed by the Nazis and their Collaborators on the territory of the Kalmyk Republic during WWII. This was the document that had recently come to light. The researcher he’d rung had stated that the hard copies contained lists of both Jewish and other Soviets who had perished or had gone missing.
The woman who brought the three files wore conservative clothes, spoke in whispers and had the palest skin he’d seen in years. He began looking for one surname — Kazapov.
After a short time, he found what he was looking for. He checked it twice. He even took a photo of it on his smartphone. Four women with the surname Kazapova, the female form of Kazapov, were recorded missing in Kalmykia. The person who’d documented their names was Lieutenant Joseph Kazapov of the NKVD, attached to the state commission in Kalmykia.
Gabriel knew from his experience as a trial lawyer that sometimes people claimed to have seen things that in fact, they hadn’t. They said people had told them things, when they hadn’t. Sometimes they were simply mistaken. Sometimes they were simply lying, for whatever reason. So, in his business, he always needed at least two pieces of unconnected evidence to verify a fact. But the translated words of Joseph Kazapov alone were enough in this regard, he decided.
No one had made the connection but him, he knew.
His mouth felt parched, his stomach ached. He remained seated at the wooden desk, with his palm to his bowed forehead. He didn’t congratulate himself. He didn’t even want to move. He sat there for five minutes or more, wondering what it all meant for Sangmu — if in fact Kazapov was alive.
In truth, he didn’t doubt it now.
93
Washington DC — Brussels, the same day.
Sitting exhausted at a low-slung table in a hotel lobby at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Gabriel looked down at the envelopes in front of h
im, which he had placed like a span of outsized playing cards on the glass table top. They looked like relics, from a time before email.
One was addressed to Abe Murray, the NYPD officer who’d told him about the DVD and had been involved in the initial unsuccessful investigation into Sangmu’s disappearance. Another was for Sam Cartwright, the private investigator. Another five envelopes were addressed to lawyers and academics he knew well. These five envelopes were accompanied by an explanatory note asking the lawyers and academics to pass by hand the envelopes they had received from him onto someone they knew well enough to trust. The only other criteria for choosing whom the lawyers and academics would pass their envelopes onto was that they weren’t also known to Gabriel. They had to be strangers to him. The explanatory note stated that this was essential. It also stated that the lawyers and academics should ensure that their chosen recipients of the envelope should be instructed not to open it under any circumstances. They were simply custodians of it. The final instruction on the accompanying note was that if he, Gabriel, died or didn’t contact them by telephone within one week, then they should retrieve the letters from their chosen recipients and read the contents themselves.
He took a gulp of red wine, wiped his mouth dry and wondered if the contents of the letters were in fact a harbinger of his own death. The conversation he’d had on the mobile phone with Robert Dubois unnerved him still. He couldn’t say why exactly, except that he hadn’t met the man and surely Carla would have tried to contact him personally, if she’d been able, despite what he’d said? Maybe it wasn’t possible.
Carla had never shown him a photograph of Dubois. After Dubois told him that she’d gone to a safe house, he’d tried to find a picture of the Belgian online, without success. He’d guessed that was because Dubois was a federal police officer; it would’ve been foolish to have his face online, where anybody could find it easily.
