The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  Gabriel felt a spasm in his stomach. His mind was reeling.

  ‘Gabriel Hall,’ the squat man said.

  Hearing the man call his name made Gabriel freeze, even though it wasn’t odd that he knew his name. The man was one of them, wasn’t he?

  He heard a car skid to a halt behind him, the sound of horns blaring. Turning, he saw a red SUV with tinted windows at the side of the road. The car’s back passenger door opened, and he squinted.

  ‘Get in, Mr Hall.’

  It was a man’s voice.

  Gabriel turned back around, feeling cornered. The squat man had reached the pavement. He looked to his left, and Gabriel followed his eyeline. Among the shoppers and businesspeople, a pair of police officers in blue fatigues and side caps, armed with submachine guns and holstered pistols, were walking towards them. The male officer was over six feet tall, the female officer broad at the hip.

  ‘You can see her. Your call, Mr Hall.’

  The voice, thickly accented, had come again from the car. The police officers turned down towards the small square Gabriel had just come from.

  He hesitated for perhaps four seconds before he walked forward, sensing the squat man move behind him. He ducked down and manoeuvred himself onto the back seat. The squat man shut the door and walked to the front passenger door and got in. The doors were locked remotely.

  The SUV drove out into the road and almost hit a black and gold delivery van. The bald van driver leaned out of the open window and snarled a tirade of curses. The SUV barrelled forward.

  The squat man turned around, his eyes reminding Gabriel of a snake’s. His heart was pounding and sweat broke out on his forehead. The squat man had a pistol in his hand, fixed with a bulbous suppressor. He didn’t say anything. He put on a pair of aviator sunglasses with his free hand.

  The SUV turned a sharp right down a backstreet, edged with natural stone warehouses and some derelict, three story buildings, with boarded-up mullion windows. The commercial bins that lined it were overflowing with black plastic bags, folded cardboard boxes and polythene sheets.

  ‘You shouldn’t have questioned him,’ the driver said. ‘He was wearing a wire.’

  Gabriel knew he was referring to the man pretending to be Robert Dubois.

  What did all this mean for him? For Sangmu? Would he see her again?

  ‘Now when I stop the car, the gentlemen with the pistol is going to give you a pill. You’re going to swallow it without a fuss. Got it?’

  98

  The farm, the same day.

  Gabriel’s eyes were stinging, his face swollen and bloody. He was nauseous, his stomach churning. His body felt drained of fluid. His head was bowed, his neck flaccid.

  He had a vague sense of dim light coming from behind him. He breathed with a disconcerting erraticism that sounded as if he’d contracted emphysema. He was naked apart from his long-sleeved shirt and boxer shorts.

  ‘Yes, you’re still alive, Mr Hall.’

  The voice had a slight European accent, the tone low and a little frail. He couldn’t see the man who’d spoken. But even in his depleted physical and mental state, he knew it was the old man, the serial killer. Snow Lion. He closed his eyes, a sense of desperation swamping him.

  ‘Look at me. Mr Hall. Look at me.’

  He heard faint footsteps behind him and a rough hand cupped his jaw and raised his head up. He blinked repeatedly. He wanted to puke, but he could not. With the hand still on his jaw, he felt a finger and thumb prise open his right eyelids and remain there.

  In the faint yellow light an image formed, just in something like silhouette at first. Then the image was moving towards him, lowering to his eye level. He saw the bald head, the folds of skin at the neck. The all but non-existent lips. The slits for eyes. The man resembled an ancient tortoise. Gabriel didn’t have the strength to grimace.

  ‘I have something to show you, Mr Hall.’

  The old man smiled.

  ‘You will know that Da Vinci was more acquainted with anatomy than the anatomical universities of the Renaissance were. But do you know that the Florentine painter, Antonio Pollaiuolo, was the first person to skin corpses? Do you know that, Mr Hall?’

  Gabriel did, but kept silent, his mind torturing him.

  ‘This was no macabre fetish. He did it to gain knowledge of the connection between ligaments, tendon and muscles. Six hundred years ago, he felt compelled to perfect the nude. I know a man of your education and sensibility appreciates that degree of dedication to his art.’

  How does he know about my love of art? Gabriel thought. He wondered if his house had been broken into and searched.

  ‘And it worked. Pollaiuolo’s engravings of the Battle of Naked Men is a lasting testament to that. Do you know the piece, Mr Hall? Do you?’

  Gabriel knew the piece. The nude warriors appeared almost flayed, their musculature displayed in heroic and idealized poses. It was both beautiful and morbid. He didn’t want to consider what that meant.

  As if reading his mind, the old man said, ‘I have recreated it, Mr Hall, for your critique and my amusement. César Vezzani will unveil it for us. But you must look, Mr Hall. You must. I insist that you look.’

  Gabriel’s jaw and eyelids were released, and he struggled to keep his head up and his eye open. The man behind him passed by and walked now to the left of the old man, a holstered pistol hanging down from under his right armpit. The man named César Vezzani was the squat man that had drugged him in the car. He switched on a bare lightbulb, revealing a white sheet that hung from a hook in the ceiling.

  ‘An out of work actor met with you in the Grand Place. He believed he was going to spend the next few months in Bali. Now he is in another place,’ the old man said.

  The old man put on his glasses and eased himself up. He turned and nodded to Vezzani. Vezzani reached up, his hand grasping the sheet about midway. He pulled the sheet down with a jerk.

  ‘Behold,’ the old man said, with a flourish of his arms. ‘The real Robert Dubois. What’s left of him.’

  Gabriel groaned.

  The corpse hung from a web of chains attached to several karabiners. The chains were arranged such that the corpse looked puppet-like. An arm was up above the head, a thigh pivoted sideways at ninety degrees, the calf and foot dangling. It was a reddened monstrosity of a thing. The skin that hadn’t been flayed fell loose and lacerated, exposing the muscle and other body tissues. Not one drop of blood dripped from the corpse. The head had not been skinned, but the visible tongue and lips were black, the eye sockets barren holes.

  ‘Do you believe in predestination, Mr Hall?’ the old man said.

  Gabriel spat bile and strained to arch his back.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  He realized that his ankles and wrists were tethered to a wooden, high-backed chair.

  ‘But I believe that we all must pay for our sins,’ he said.

  ‘And what sins have you committed, Mr Hall?’

  Gabriel could see now that the old man wore a loose-fitting, cream coloured shalwar kameez and a pair of tan slippers. He looked, what? Comfortable? At ease with himself?

  ‘No sins, Mr Hall? At least none you are prepared to confess.’

  He gestured towards the corpse with his hand.

  ‘Who or what is this now? It is no longer human, is it? No, how could you call that human? What makes us human, Mr Hall? Compassion? Hate? Revenge? Philanthropy? War?’

  He paused. ‘Happiness, Aristotle said.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Love, perhaps. Does love make us human? Is it the driving force of our piffling existence? Did love bring you here, Mr Hall? Did it bring me here?’

  He gestured to the corpse again, this time with his button chin.

  ‘Did it bring that here?’

  He interlinked his fingers, looked meditative.

  ‘What about freedom? Does that make us human? Goethe said people fear freedom, that they seek out every means to rid themselves of it. I think he was ri
ght. They join political parties. They adopt religions. They sign up for clubs, for ideologies. They spend their time watching or reading what other people are doing or have created. They live by rules, customs, norms, conventions, traditions.’

  He grimaced, and his hands went to his sides.

  ‘No, Mr Hall, a perceived sense of freedom does not make us human. It is only the will to act that makes us human. The will to act that does not know any bounds. That is unrestrained. That is vigorous and bold. That is what makes us human or life is nothing at all. The will to act. The will to do what you desire. To do what must be done. I have learned that in my life or I have learned nothing. Nietzsche knew this. Stalin and Hitler, too. I think you understand this, Mr Hall. It brought you here. It brought us both here. And, so, we are more alike than you would have imagined. Aren’t we?’

  The room fell silent and, in that silence, nothing else on earth existed.

  99

  The villa, the same day.

  Carla and Monize were sitting on a stained mattress, with a small gas lamp in the corner of an otherwise empty cellar. It reeked of damp, of something resembling stale cabbage water. Carla had wrapped Monize in a musty duvet. She’d heard at least two distinct footfalls above her.

  She’d named Finkel and Dubois to the old man, and had stated the motivation behind Gabriel’s actions too. She knew that Finkel had a wife and two girls and she’d almost vomited after she’d betrayed him. Following an initial reticence, the old man had seemed content. There hadn’t been a safe house. There hadn’t been any action by the FBI, simply because she hadn’t informed them of the attack by Jim Saunders, as he’d ordered.

  Monize had been kidnapped the night she’d been Tasered, and she had come here to Berlin after being told what would happen to her daughter if she hadn’t. She’d known that it hadn’t been an outrageous threat.

  She was questioning her judgment now, but decided morosely that she hadn’t had a choice. If things turned bad, at least she would be with her daughter when the end came, although that thought made her feel faint.

  The Russian woman guarding them had muscles that bulged against her light blue blouse and jeans. She stared hard at Carla, bunched her shoulders and moved uneasily from side to side, as if she was deep in thought.

  ‘How long do we have to stay here? I’ve done all that was asked of me,’ Carla said.

  The Russian walked over to her and crouched down. She smoothed Monize’s hair and Carla frowned. She saw the span of the woman’s powerful thighs. Then she put her large hands on Carla’s thighs, too high up to be comfortable. The woman’s eyes were vivid green.

  Carla shuddered.

  ‘My face scarred,’ the Russian said.

  ‘Is it?’

  Carla’s body tensed. She felt tears form in her eyes, although she held them back for Monize’s sake.

  ‘Men are pigs. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. If you say so,’ Carla said.

  ‘I do.’

  Carla flinched, suspecting the Russian would slap her but without knowing why, except close-up her presence bordered on malevolent.

  ‘My uncle did things to me when I was young girl.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what things. And he burn me with hot iron.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Carla said.

  ‘Awful, yes. I smash hot iron in face when he lie on floor. Again, and again. I lose count. His face stick to floor.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  Carla saw the woman put her hand in her back pocket and take out a pair of hairdresser’s scissors. She tapped them on Monize’s nose. Carla started to weep freely and placed her hands over her daughter’s ears, felt her shaking.

  ‘Maybe I take something from little girl. Maybe not.’

  Through her tears, Carla saw the woman scan her daughter’s body.

  ‘Maybe I take something, so you remember to leave it here. In room. It stays here. Yes?’

  ‘Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t.’

  ‘When it over, you forget me. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. I swear,’ Carla said, nodding involuntarily.

  ‘You forget?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Never speak of me.’

  ‘No. Never,’ Carla said, shaking herself now.

  ‘They say I Fury. They think I not know. But I know. When I play, it not nice. People die screaming. It stays here. Yes?’

  ‘I don’t know you. I won’t say anything. Just please don’t hurt my little girl.’

  ‘If it don’t stay here, you and daughter die. Slow. I come when it dark, wherever you are. You die in your own shit like cattle.’

  100

  The farm.

  Gabriel felt the tight nylon of the disposable restraints chaff his skin every time he shifted on the hard seat. He wanted to ask about Sangmu, but checked himself, unable in that moment to face the consequences of her death, if he’d been lied to by the man that had driven him here.

  The old man looked a little whimsical.

  He said, ‘I should tell you that Special Agent Carla Romero is in Berlin. She is my guest. Her daughter is my guest here too. A mother’s love, or should I say a good mother’s love, is so powerful that betraying transient acquaintances to protect the child is as easy as shooing away a cat from the dinner table.’

  Gabriel knew then that Carla had told the old man about his love of art. But what else had she told him? Everything?

  The old man smiled eerily and motioned to Vezzani to cover up the macabre remains of Robert Dubois.

  ‘Don’t hurt them,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘I don’t intend to. Not if the mother does as she’s told. But you’re pleading for yourself as well, aren’t you, Mr Hall? I know everyone pleads when confronted with the inevitable. That’s the great paradox.’

  The old man wheezed and scratched his throat.

  ‘You thought that your investigations would lead you to find your Kalmyk niece, Sangmu. Is that not so?’

  Gabriel sensed his body start to recover from its dulled state, the nerves tingling, the muscles twitching, his head clearing. Carla had betrayed him. He knew why. He decided to go on the offensive.

  ‘I know why you’re doing this,’ he said. ‘I know more than you think I know.’

  Vezzani walked towards him, his fists clenched.

  ‘Let him speak,’ the old man said.

  ‘A man I met said his brother remembered you from the Battle of Berlin. The bunker. Remember the bunker? The brother’s name was Icchak Stolarski.’

  The old man looked deep in thought.

  ‘Tell me what else he said.’

  ‘That his brother saw things. A mummified hand and a butchered corpse. He dropped a crate and you told him not to worry about it. But you sent him to the Gulag. His brother told me your name.’

  ‘Vezzani, leave us,’ the old man said.

  Vezzani’s face was edged with concern.

  ‘Leave us.’

  Vezzani walked from the room, a look of puzzlement replacing the worry.

  Gabriel knew that he’d gained the old man’s attention.

  ‘Why do you say these things?’ the old man said.

  ‘Carla and Monize. Tell me that not a hair has been touched.’

  ‘Not a hair,’ the old man said.

  Gabriel knew he had to face his worst fears now.

  ‘I want to know where my niece is.’

  ‘She’s almost eighteen. Is she not? Now tell me why you say these things. I will not ask you again,’ the old man said.

  Gabriel spat some green fluid onto the floor, raised his head and stared at the old man. ‘I’ve sent letters to lawyers with instructions to send them to other lawyers. There are strict instructions that if I die or go missing for a week, the letters are to be opened. I found connections.’

  ‘Letters. How quaint and anachronistic. Even if I believed you, as a lawyer you know you had no evidence against me when you wrote them. What use will they be?’

>   He walked towards Gabriel, his palms up.

  ‘And so, what are the connections you think you’ve found?’

  ‘You’re not German, you’re Russian,’ Gabriel said. ‘You kill Kalmyk girls out of revenge for what happened in Kalmykia in World War Two.’

  Gabriel didn’t know this for certain, but it wasn’t much of a leap. He knew Kazapov’s mother and sisters had gone missing there. What other logical explanation was there?

  ‘You were driven insane by it, by all the horrors you no doubt experienced as an officer in the NKVD. You’re Snow Lion. Your name is Joseph Kazapov. I came to find my niece, sure. But I came to stop you too, because no one else can. This has to stop,’

  The old man didn’t flinch.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all I’m telling you for now. Tell me where my niece is.’

  A faint grin passed over the old man’s all but lipless mouth.

  ‘She is here, Mr Hall.’

  101

  Bonn, the same day.

  The state police had agreed that the federal GSG 9 should be allowed to storm both the villa and the farm. One of their own had died, after all.

  The airborne operations sub group of GSG 9 was based in Sankt Augustin-Hangelar, five miles north-east of Bonn, and 370 miles south-west of Berlin. Twenty-four assaulters had received a hasty briefing there, including satellite imagery of the insert points.

  There’d been no time for the usual perusal of detailed situation maps and plans of the buildings. There hadn’t been any information with which to do the usual analysis of the target’s personality and threat assessment either; the special ops mission had been approved by the Federal Ministry of the Interior within minutes.

  The GSG 9 airborne assaulters were sitting now on red canvas seats, secured with belts to minimize the effects of downdraft, resting their Adidas military boots on the metal decking with exposed rivets. They tested their radios.

  They were travelling north-east in four black Bell UH-1 variant Iroquois military helicopters, known affectionately as the ‘Huey’. The high-pitch whines of the twin turboshaft engines had been muted by light but effective cladding, the staccato whop-whop-whop-whop of the whirling two-bladed main and tail rotors subdued by specialist engineers. All but essential items had been stripped from both the cockpits and the cabins, to allow the helicopters to reach their maximum speed.