The Unquiet Dead

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  Which was an interesting history lesson, and Rachel could see that the librarian was moved by it, but it still didn’t explain Christopher Drayton’s interest.

  Or maybe it did. Khattak, who as far as Rachel knew had no particular attachment to Moorish Spain, was listening to Mink with the fervent attention of the masses in Saint Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday. Maybe this idea of a vivid, elastic pluralism gave spark to magic. The kind of magic that opened wallets and turned serious men into dreamers. Or maybe it wasn’t Andalusia at all, but the woman herself.

  “What was Christopher Drayton’s interest in the museum? We’ve learned that he was to make a significant financial contribution to it.”

  Mink took a moment to slip the photograph of the synagogue into the steel frame she had prepared. When she looked up at Rachel, her face was composed.

  “Chris was a neighbor and a friend.” She lowered her voice. “I think he was a little lonely and the idea of the museum was something that intrigued him. People who know nothing of Spain beyond Madrid and Barcelona are often captivated by their first venture into its Moorish past. By what the wonderful writer Maria Menochal has called palaces of memory.”

  Rachel scowled. Was this a second dig the quiet librarian had aimed at her? Or was Rachel just being sensitive because she’d imagined herself on a sunny Mediterranean beach?

  Her answer was overloud. “How could he be lonely with a bosom companion like Melanie Blessant?” She was quite pleased with the emphasis she’d laid on the word bosom. Until she saw Hadley and Riv’s heads come up.

  Mink shrugged, her face tight, searching for other work at the table to occupy her hands. They fell upon a small book of poetry, its author Arab, its title The Neck-Ring of the Dove. Fascinated by it, Khattak took it from her.

  Her voice lowered further, she said directly to Khattak, “There are other needs men have beyond what Melanie offered. Understanding. Communication. A certain sympathy of thought.”

  Khattak held her gaze without comment.

  Rachel scratched at her neck. Her boss was being decidedly unhelpful during this interview, neither asking his own questions nor following up hers. Mink Norman was clever, but she was also ordinary to a fault: where was the distraction?

  “Are you saying you possessed this sympathy with Mr. Drayton? Was that why he planned to make such a large donation?” Rachel asked.

  “We never intended to be too ambitious with Ringsong. We hadn’t expected the kind of budget that would permit us to purchase manuscripts and so on. I’m not a curator of objets d’art. I’m a librarian. I wanted to tell the story of a civilization of the word. A civilization in love with language and learning.”

  “Would Mr. Drayton’s money help with that or not? One of your directors, David Newhall, said that it came with a steep price tag. You’d have to rename the entire project after Drayton.”

  Mink stiffened, bracing her hands on the table. Hadley and Riv looked up again, sensing that the mood had changed.

  “We hadn’t decided about the donation. As far as I knew, there were no strings attached. We’d already named the house, and the house is a public trust. We built it with a great deal of grant assistance.”

  “We?”

  “The Andalusia Society. We’ve over two thousand members.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “The house has a set of private rooms. That’s part of my arrangement as librarian. Should I leave the job, naturally I’d leave the house.”

  There was a thrust and counterthrust to her conversation with Rachel, a suppressed antagonism, as if she recognized in Rachel a cunning, obstructive enemy. There was something wary about Mink Norman, some powerful emotion tamped down beneath a calm exterior.

  “If, as you say, there were no strings attached, why the hesitation? Surely the money would come in handy.”

  “I have no fund-raising agenda,” she replied with dignity. “There’s a process by which new members are vetted. The same is true of donations. Christopher did wish to help us, but we had to weigh this against his request to come on board as a director.”

  “So there were strings attached.”

  It was the obvious conclusion. Drayton wanted more than the indulgence of a passing interest in a history entirely unrelated to himself. He wanted a role in directing the museum itself.

  Rachel looked through the windows to the courtyard. Maybe it wasn’t the museum he’d had an interest in. He’d chosen to live in an unprepossessing home on a pretty street with magnificent views. Maybe what he wanted was the house.

  If Mink were no longer librarian, maybe a man of his independent means could talk his way into some form of guardianship.

  House, kids, adulation, and Melanie.

  The perfect life.

  She changed tack.

  “Did you see Mr. Drayton on the Bluffs on the night of his death?”

  “No.” She answered exactly as Nathan Clare had. “You can’t see the path to the Bluffs from these windows.”

  But was it true? Rachel would have to get out there and walk it to discover just what could be seen of the museum and Winterglass from the Bluffs.

  If everyone had liked Chris Drayton and no one had seen him on the night of his death, what did his death really signify? And yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Mink was holding something back. Perhaps an affair with Drayton. Was she the reason he’d dragged his feet about Melanie’s plans for an over-the-top wedding? Hadley and Riv were whispering to each other across the long table, the boy’s hand caressing the girl’s neck, another gesture Hadley ignored. She was watching the three of them with canny, glittering eyes.

  The conversation was at a dead end. Unless Khattak had something to offer, Rachel couldn’t think of anything else to add that seemed remotely connected to Drayton’s death. Unless she simply came out and stated: “Do you have any reason to suspect that Christopher Drayton was a Bosnian Serb war criminal?”

  She was tempted, but she didn’t want to tip her hand too soon. It was hardly something Drayton would have advertised if he were Dražen Krstić. And that was another thing—what rational reason could a man accused of exterminating Muslims and eradicating Bosnian history have for his attraction to the Andalusia museum? Weren’t the two ideas fundamentally opposed? One a civilization of pluralism and tolerance, the other a culture of hate?

  If she’d understood Mink’s little lecture properly, the Andalusians had created something beautiful out of their divergent identities. In the hands of the Bosnian Serb Army, difference—whether Muslim, Catholic, or Jew—had meant destruction and death.

  There were no personal items in the museum area of the house that could offer further insight into the character of Mink Norman and her association with Christopher Drayton. Rachel tried anyway.

  “You mentioned your sister, Ms. Norman. Where is Sable now?”

  Mink smiled with genuine warmth at the mention of her sister.

  “The music you see everywhere? It’s Sable’s. She studies piano at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg. She’ll be home again for Christmas break.”

  One sister a librarian, one sister a musician. An educated family. Rachel envied their opportunities.

  “Your parents?”

  “It’s just the two of us, I’m afraid.”

  Another field of inquiry dried up. The only sensible thing to do was to begin a comprehensive investigation into Drayton’s real identity. Without that information, there was little point to harassing those Drayton had known passingly or well.

  The music reminded her of Winterglass and Nathan Clare. She mentioned him to Mink, watching her guarded face.

  “Come on,” Riv said from his side of the table, his dictionary abandoned, one hand on Hadley’s knee. “Everyone from here to Timbuktu knows Nathan. He’s amazing. And he gives the best parties.”

  “That’s all right, Marco. And yes, it’s true. Nathan loves the piano. He’s quite proficient. He often loans us music.”

  On the othe
r side of the courtyard was a colonnade of arches through which Rachel glimpsed fountains that seemed to drop through the air to the lake. She very much wanted to explore further but could think of no reason to stay.

  “Shall we go then, sir?”

  Khattak caught her glance, moved away from the table. “I’d like to take a closer look at the exhibits. You’ve been up early, call it a night.”

  Rachel cleared her throat. Had the museum and its proprietor so bewitched him that he’d forgotten? “You’re my ride, sir. I’ll need a lift to the subway at least.”

  He straightened quickly. “Of course. Then I’ll return later, if I may.”

  The words were said somewhere in the vicinity of Mink’s burnished hair. Her blue eyes encompassed Khattak, acknowledged a private communication.

  In the car, Rachel said, “A blonde, sir? Really?” And left it at that.

  10.

  Easily predictable events have been proceeding inexorably in the cruelest, most atrocious fashion.

  For more than a week now, Rachel had been asked to do nothing further on the Drayton investigation. She’d resumed her regular workload with Dec and Gaffney, saying little about the previous week’s excursions, wondering when Khattak would show up at their downtown office again. She had a few ideas about what they should do next and found Khattak’s silence troubling. Had he ruled out the idea that Drayton was Dražen Krstić? If so, based on what evidence? Or had he found something that cemented his certainties? Was he even now reporting to his friend at Justice? He’d told her to keep the letters, and she’d spent her evenings digging into the history of the Bosnian war, trying to find out more about Krstić.

  Initially, she’d thought that the letters spoke from the perspective of a survivor of the war with a very specific axe to grind, but Khattak had been right. The letters weren’t just about the massacre at Srebrenica. They were far more wide-ranging, as if the letter writer was making a darker point, outlined in blood.

  Sarajevo, did you hear my warning?

  The sun on your face looks like blood on the morning.

  She hadn’t been able to trace either the letters or the source of those words. The only prints on the letters had been Drayton’s. The words she had just read were conceivably from a translated poem or song. And Sarajevo wasn’t the only name she had found in the letters. There were others, all of them, apart from Srebrenica, unfamiliar to her. Gorazde, Bihac, Tuzla, Zepa.

  She’d looked them up. All six cities had been UN-designated “safe areas,” under United Nations protection. All six had come under siege, repeated bombardment, the destruction of religious and cultural monuments, and the recurrent targeting of water, electricity, and food supplies.

  The letter writer encompassed it all.

  Today a funeral procession was shelled.

  Charred bodies lie along the street.

  The whole city is without water.

  Srebrenica, like Sarajevo, had suffered a three-year siege. In Srebrenica, civilians kept alive by a trickle of UN aid ultimately became victims of genocide. In less than twenty-four hours, safe area Srebrenica had been depopulated of its Muslim inhabitants: women and small children forcibly evacuated under the eyes of the Dutch battalion stationed there, men and boys murdered in their thousands.

  Nearby Zepa escaped the massacres but suffered the same depopulation.

  All at the hands of the logistically efficient killing machine known as the VRS or Bosnian Serb Army, supplied materially and in all the other ways that mattered by the reconstituted Yugoslav National Army.

  We will not reward the aggressor with the carve-up of Bosnia, redrawn along ethnically purified lines.

  And yet they had.

  Many of the post-1995 online commentators on Bosnia used the satiric term unsafe area Srebrenica. Rachel couldn’t fault them. It was a compelling history lesson: how quickly the violent ideals of ultranationalism led to hate, how quickly hate to blood. If Drayton had been Dražen Krstić, his hands were bloodier than most.

  The letter writer wanted to remind him of this. More than anything, he or she intended to disrupt the idyllic latter stage of life Drayton had constructed for himself: peaceful home, lovely garden, voluptuous fiancée, made-to-order family.

  Had there been a ring on Melanie Blessant’s finger? Rachel couldn’t remember.

  Another line of inquiry to follow up. There was the will to consider, the insurance policies—if Drayton hadn’t yet made a bequest to Ringsong, it was possible that his will left everything to Melanie. If Melanie had known as much and if the wedding was slow to proceed—if Mink Norman was somehow seducing Drayton’s wealth to fund what she had called a passion project—Drayton’s death might have nothing to do with the identity of Dražen Krstić at all.

  The letters may have been intended merely as torment, the need of a clever and isolated individual to maintain control over Drayton.

  She made a list of things to check out: the disposition of the will, whether the wedding had been confirmed, Drayton’s relationship with Mink Norman, the identity of the letter writer.

  She was ready to chase down all possible leads as to Drayton’s true identity, including a visit to view the body: she was waiting for Khattak’s call.

  She glanced up from her desk to the glass doors of his office. Still empty. She could see his bookshelves on the wall, nearly all police business except for a few personal selections, one of which was Apologia. Would he notice if she borrowed it?

  She slipped into his office and helped herself to the book. Its black and white cover held an undertone of midnight blue. It featured a wrought-iron bench shaded by a tree in a desolate garden. Singularly uninformative.

  She flipped through the first few pages until she found the dedication.

  To EK, whose friendship I valued too little, too late.

  Her intuition had been right. There were deep waters to traverse between Esa Khattak and Nathan Clare. She slipped the book into her bag, closed the lights, and made for home.

  11.

  All my joys and my happiness up to then have been replaced by pain and sorrow for my son …

  She walked up the porch steps to their dark two-story in Etobicoke. She noticed, as she always did, that the stairs needed sweeping and that the paint on the porch was peeling badly. Her Da was retired from the service, but he spent most of his time in front of the television, often cursing at it. In the evenings, he went to the local pub where he traded the same war stories that had been doing the rounds for the last thirty years. He was a heavy drinker. His drinking had defined her whole childhood: it had made a victim of her mother and driven her brother, Zachary, to the streets while still a teenager.

  Zach had been fifteen the last time Rachel had seen him.

  Ray and Zach, they’d been to each other during those good days. Ray-Ray, she’d been when Zach was little. A seven-year age difference had separated them, but Zach had been the light of her world, the baby she’d done her best to raise. Her father’s rages and her mother’s efforts at making herself disappear had been successful. There’d only been Rachel for Zach. And that less and less, as Rachel put herself through school.

  She and Zach had shared the same dream. She’d get an education and a job, and she’d make a home for herself and Zach. A home away from the paralytic rages of Don Getty and the helpless murmurings of Lillian, his wife. No matter how much she longed for closeness with her mother.

  But as Zach had shot up and filled out, it had been harder and harder for him to wait. He’d fought back against their Da, usurping Rachel’s role as his protector. Her Da had been prepared to use his hands on his boy. Rachel, he’d never touched. She’d been the one to calm him down, usually with a dose of sharp-tongued humor.

  When Rachel was the protector, Zach had gone untouched.

  When Zach stood up for himself, everything had changed.

  She’d called the cops round a couple of times, but the men who’d come by had been friends of Don Getty, friends who knew hi
s wife, and when asked by them if everything was all right, Lillian had flapped her hands at her sides and apologized for calling them out. No one had mentioned Rachel.

  As a child, she had judged her mother for it and held her accountable. As a police officer with years of training behind her, she knew no one was more to blame for the turmoil in their home than Don Getty.

  “You better watch it, Da,” Rachel had said. “You’d better not touch Zach again.”

  “He’s just a boy,” her mother had felt brave enough to add.

  “He’s got a man’s fists. If he uses them, he’ll get what a man’s got coming.”

  In some twisted way, had Zach been proud of that? His father finally acknowledging him? Rachel didn’t know. All she knew was that the decision had hardened inside herself. All over the city there were families like hers, kids like her and Zach who needed help and were scared to end up at Child Protective Services. The cops were supposed to help kids like her and Zach. They weren’t supposed to look the other way when one of their own used his fists on his kid.

  She wasn’t going to be that kind of cop. She was going to be the kind that stood in the way of the fists, the kind who took on a guy twice her size, soaked in alcoholic rage, the kind who beat him down, cuffed him, and offloaded him into her car. The kind who talked to vulnerable women who couldn’t protect themselves and kept the promises they made to help them.

  She’d told all this to Zach, but he hadn’t understood.

  “You want to be like Da?” he’d raged at her, already a foot taller than she was, betrayal in his copper-brown eyes.