The Unquiet Dead

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “A terrible naïveté,” Khattak countered.

  “It was the Bosnian spirit. We’d lived together so long, intermarried so deeply, spoke the same language. We imagined ourselves a people of the most enlightened pluralism. The Orthodox and Catholic churches, the synagogues—they were part of us. And thirty thousand Serbs resisted the siege of Sarajevo by our sides. Across all these boundaries the fascists insisted upon between us, we kept our belief in the spirit of our nation.” He set down his glass again. “And we paid for it.”

  “And if I told you that one of the men responsible for these crimes was at large here in this city, what would you say?”

  The imam’s eyes shot to his. He straightened in his seat. “Is that why you have come? Such a man should be denounced. He must be brought to justice at once.”

  “He’s met his justice. He fell—or was helped—to his death.”

  “That is not justice. We need these people to answer for their crimes. Whom do you speak of, Inspector Esa? What is this about?”

  Khattak showed him the photograph of Drayton again. “Are you certain you do not recognize this man?”

  Now the imam tried harder, studying the photo with greater care. From his desk drawer, he removed a magnifying glass and scrutinized it further.

  “Could this be Krstić? A commander of the Drina Corps? The international forces said they were never able to capture him. How do you know this is him?”

  “That’s why we came to you. We don’t know. We know this man as Christopher Drayton. Ten days ago, Drayton fell to his death.”

  The imam’s fingers tensed around his glass. “I wasn’t in Srebrenica, so I wouldn’t have seen Krstić personally. But some of our congregants are refugees from the enclave. Shall I ask them? The Drina Corps commanders mixed with the people at Potočari. Someone will have seen him. Someone will know.”

  Khattak contemplated this option. Rachel knew he would rule it out.

  “Will you give me a little time, Imam Muharrem? I have a few other leads that may confirm Drayton’s identity. I would prefer to be certain before this news becomes public to the Bosnian community. And I have something else to show you, something you may be able to help us with.”

  “You would not plan to keep the truth from us?” The imam’s gaze was searching.

  “We would not have come to you were we not committed to finding the truth.”

  Imam Muharrem pressed a hand against Khattak’s cheek then let it fall.

  “Then show me.”

  On cue, Rachel removed the letters from her bag. She removed their covering and passed them to the imam.

  “These are letters that were hand-delivered to Drayton, as far as we can tell. Can you tell us anything about them—maybe help us to understand them?”

  “These are typed,” he said in surprise. “In English. It is not my best language. Let me find my glasses.”

  He produced them from the same desk drawer that held the magnifying glass. One at a time, he shuffled the letters between his fingers. He read several phrases aloud, phrases Rachel had been unable to trace.

  I have just been informed that the besieged city of Jajce has fallen to the aggressor.

  Massive air attacks continue in Bosnia today. We cannot defend ourselves yet no one is coming to our aid.

  For having uttered a wrong word, people are taken away or killed.

  The camps remain open.

  The enemy ring around the city is being strengthened with fresh troops.

  For the past three days, Serb forces have been conducting a fierce offensive against the town of Bihac.

  Today Serb forces shelled the city of Tuzla. While writing this letter, the city centre is under heavy mortar attack.

  The famous National Library has been set on fire and is still burning.

  He came to a halt, his breathing heavy and removed his glasses. He looked at them both curiously. His long, well-shaped hand rested on a letter that contained a single sentence.

  On Tuesday, there will be no bread in Sarajevo.

  “You do not know what this is?” Their silence answered him. He studied the letters again. “These are statements made by our government before the United Nations Security Council. Our country was burning while they insisted on negotiating their imaginary peace, deaf and blind to the scope of the evil confronting them.”

  Khattak jerked in his chair.

  “Ah. You do not like that I use this word, Inspector Esa? Yet in your work as in mine, you must see its face, you must know that evil exists in the world.”

  He showed them another letter as he laid the Qur’an by his glasses.

  Defend us or let us defend ourselves. You have no right to deprive us of both.

  “That was our president, doing his best to rescue us. Somehow, it reminds me of the Divine teaching.”

  He held up a translated verse of the Qur’an.

  If Allah helps you, none can ever overcome you; but if He should forsake you, who is there after Him that can help you? In Allah, then, let the believers put their trust.

  “To hold on to our trust in the aftermath of such evil has been the hardest test of faith one can face.”

  Uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken, Rachel cleared her throat. “What about the rest of the letters, sir? Are they government statements? Some of them don’t appear as if they are.”

  “I cannot be certain. They sound to me like fragments of testimony from those who survived. If these letters were sent to the man from the photograph, does this not prove he was Dražen Krstić?”

  “It’s a strong indication,” Khattak said, “but it isn’t conclusive. We need more.”

  At his signal, Rachel gathered up the letters and returned them to her bag.

  “There is one thing,” said the imam. “A sister who is part of the mosque community relayed a story from her mother. She saw Krstić at the gates of Potočari. She said he was more fanatical than most.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If this man you’ve come about is Dražen Krstić, there will be a tattoo on his hand. It was common among the paramilitaries, but Krstić had it also.”

  He sketched it for them on a piece of paper tucked into his Qur’an.

  Four letters that resembled the Cyrillic s written as a c filled in the spaces above and below a Serbian cross. Beneath it, the imam had transliterated a phrase.

  Samo sloga Srbina spasava.

  “Only solidarity saves the Serbs,” Khattak translated.

  “You know of it.”

  “As you said, Imam, it was common to the paramilitaries.”

  “A man named Christopher Drayton would never mark himself this way. If you find it on his hand, he will be Dražen Krstić.”

  13.

  No one knows what will come tomorrow

  and no one knows in what land he will die.

  Rachel pulled in at the morgue and flashed her ID. She was expected. This was the second meeting Khattak had promised for the afternoon, a viewing of Drayton’s body. He’d stayed behind at the mosque to attend the Friday prayer. He’d more than fulfilled his CPS mandate if the imam who regularly presided over services was a friend.

  The first time Rachel had seen Khattak pray, she’d been embarrassed for them both. Religion figured very little in her life, though she supposed she was a lapsed Catholic. But Khattak was comfortable in his faith, pragmatic: he made so little of it that her feeling of discomfiture vanished. He didn’t preach and she didn’t listen, a good enough partnership.

  She understood the imam’s feelings. God had never helped her with her search for Zach, and she wasn’t willing to falter her way back to trust. But then again, perhaps God would surprise her.

  Witness the body she was studying on the table. A better-looking man than she’d expected, with a face more youthful than his years indicated. There was bruising about his forehead, yet nothing about his expression indicated terror or pain, nor even the mild surprise she had come across with other bodies that sh
e tried not to think of as corpses.

  Lash was the Urdu word Khattak had taught her for corpse.

  It seemed right: each dead face she studied was like a whiplash across her consciousness.

  She reached for Drayton’s right hand and turned it over.

  The thumb and forefinger were heavily callused.

  From a gun grip? she wondered. What had these hands done? Were they responsible for deeds so dark that Drayton had chosen his fall from the cliff?

  And then her questions were put to rest. She found the tattoo, the cross divided by Cyrillic letters.

  Only solidarity saves the Serbs.

  She waited for the Friday prayer to end, and then she called Khattak to tell him what she’d found.

  “I need something else from you,” he said.

  Startled, Rachel wrote down what it was.

  14.

  Somewhere life withers, somewhere it begins.

  The blue rain sank against the mullioned windows of the pub. The temperature had dropped. It was a good night to be indoors, drinking warm ale that nourished the throat as it spread its warmth to his toes.

  “You’re nervous,” his sister said.

  “I am,” Nathan admitted. “I didn’t expect Esa to say yes. I’m not sure I know what to say to him.”

  “I still can’t believe I missed him at the house.”

  They turned together to wait for the pub’s door to open, each of them cherishing different hopes for this reunion. Nate, an end to the two-year severance of a friendship that had meant everything to him. Audrey, the return of the security she hadn’t known since the death of her parents. Nate was to blame for where the three of them had ended up, yet Audrey couldn’t hold it against him, couldn’t hold anything against the brother who had raised her in the absence of their parents and kept her safe.

  There was a fire in the grate, a warm bubble of conversation from patrons divesting themselves of steaming raincoats, and a faint light that anchored it all. The door inched open, bringing Nate to his feet. He’d brought Audrey with him as a buffer in the hopes that the sight of her would melt Esa’s reserve. Esa had never been able to withstand her.

  Instead, the door disclosed a rain-soaked Rachel Getty, her dark hair plastered to her head, her mascara describing inky configurations about her wind-reddened cheeks. He held back a smile; she looked so lost and disconsolate. Esa needed his own buffer, it would seem, but at least he’d agreed to come.

  He went forward, grasped Rachel’s hand, and dragged her back to meet Audrey. He was unprepared for the strength and smoothness of her grip. His hand tingled as he let hers go, watching as she and Audrey sized each other up. Was there something between Rachel and Esa? Would she view Audrey as a potential rival? He didn’t think so, not for all the diligently recorded “sirs” that peppered her conversation. But there was a warmth there, a trust. Observing others was the habit of a lifetime, and Esa he knew as well as he knew himself.

  Esa liked Rachel Getty. Very much. So he was prepared to do the same.

  The door opened again, and this time it was his friend.

  Khattak’s eyes searched the pub for Rachel. When he found her, he visibly relaxed. It made it easier for him to come forward and grasp Nathan’s hand. Not what he would have done in the past, but maybe Nate was getting too old for that thunderous back clap anyway. He would take what he could get—a friend who tentatively ventured the customs of friendship again.

  And then Esa saw Audrey, who flung herself at his neck.

  When he saw the broad smile that chased the last trace of diffidence from his friend’s face, Nathan found himself smiling as well.

  * * *

  Rachel’s eyes widened at the sight of the small, gold whirlwind that launched itself without ceremony at her boss.

  Who was she? Nathan Clare’s sister, fair enough, but what was she to Khattak that she could wrap herself so confidently about him and he—instead of starching up and shaking her off—draped one arm over her slender shoulders?

  She was everything that a strong, square-built, hockey-playing female police officer most definitely was not. Pretty, petite, girlishly feminine without being cloying. Chic, expensively dressed even for a night at the pub, her russet scarf and body-hugging dress a perfect complement to her figure and coloring. Instead of the babyish tones her squeal of delight had seemed to indicate were at hand, her voice was low-pitched and sweet.

  Rachel hated her on sight.

  She was wet and disheveled and afraid that she stank of the morgue. Between her lumbering awkwardness and the other woman’s easy grace, no greater contrast was possible.

  “There’s absolutely nothing you can say to make up for your total and utter neglect,” Audrey scolded Khattak. “Two years? Two years without a word and everything I’ve learned has had to come through Ruksh? Is this because of that hijab thing?” Her quick sputter of laughter was as appealing as everything else about her. “Because I thought we were past that.”

  Rachel studied the trio, bemused. Nathan and his sister, the masculine and feminine poles of all that was privileged and charming, with the same fine-boned faces and golden grace; Khattak, leanly exotic and entirely at home in the company of his friends.

  What was she bringing to the party? Why had he insisted on her presence with that note of entreaty in his voice? She’d said yes because she owed him, and if she was honest with herself, because she didn’t want to spend another night of turmoil speculating about the possibility that she might have found her brother. She didn’t take her honesty far enough to admit that she drew comfort just from Khattak’s presence.

  She sipped at her lukewarm Molson Canadian, letting the warmth of the others’ conversation wash over her. She was tired. The search for Zach had been long and filled with disappointments, the imam’s stories not easily set aside. The day’s revelations chipped away at her. Even on a dead hand, the Serb tattoo menaced her.

  In death, Drayton’s face was unrevealing. Could this have been the man to send so many innocents to their deaths?

  There was no art to the mind’s construction in the face. She couldn’t tell. There was no way to know what kind of mind or soul had breathed beneath that invariably brittle arrangement of bones.

  Khattak’s interaction with Nathan Clare was stilted, but Audrey’s presence seemed specially designed to dilute the uneasiness. Maybe she’d been invited for the same reason as Audrey: to preserve a barrier between the two men.

  “We’re ignoring Rachel,” Audrey said, laughing. “That’s really rather odious of you two. First you drag her out here after a long day’s work and then you don’t even ask if her drink needs topping up.”

  “I’m fine,” Rachel said quickly. “I’m driving home in the rain, so this is my limit.”

  “And where is home?” Audrey persisted. “Surely you can’t mean to drive across town at this hour. There’s traffic closures everywhere, it will be a nightmare.” Her voice was genuinely friendly, genuinely interested—genuinely everything that was affable and good-natured if Rachel had had the patience for it.

  “All part of the job.” Her eyes met Khattak’s. “I should be going now, sir.”

  “Sir?” Audrey hooted. “How long have you two worked together, did you say? Ruksh says Esa always calls you Rachel.”

  Rachel didn’t know who Ruksh was. She fought down the swift bubble of pleasure that her name was ever mentioned in any context outside of work.

  Suddenly abashed, Audrey must have realized how she sounded. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I didn’t mean to presume. I know what police work can be like.”

  How? Rachel wondered.

  “First, let me tell you some of the things that Inspector Khattak may be too tight-lipped to divulge. Esa has a sister my age—we grew up together. Her name is Rukshanda. Naturally, as the much younger sisters of two devastating men, we developed a tendresse for each other’s brothers. We grew out of it, of course.”

  Her face was aglow with laughter in the soft light o
f the fire.

  “Though not before I attempted a religious conversion and started to wear a headscarf. Unfortunately, my lack of flowing tresses made me no more attractive to what I then determined was quite a dim-witted federal investigator.” She made a moue of distress, inviting the others to laugh. “Ruksh was equally foolish about Nate, which was the only thing that prevented me from retreating to the attic to die of mortification. I’m sure Esa kept all my love poems, though. Unless Samina disposed of them?”

  A swift glance at Rachel’s confusion and she added, “Samina, Esa’s wife. I hope you don’t mind me telling Rachel, Esa. She’s your partner, after all.”

  Khattak held up his hand. “Yes, Rachel’s my partner, sprite.” He turned to her, his face grave. “I should have mentioned her before. We were married very young, and then some years later, my wife was killed in an accident.”

  “I’m very sorry, sir.” She didn’t know what else to say, taken aback by the information. There was more than pain in his face. There was guilt. Was it the reason he’d never shared this with her before? Or was it simply that he was more unguarded around his friends?

  “She was the loveliest person, Rachel,” Nathan said. “You would have liked her very much.”

  Despite herself, she felt touched. This was a gathering of old friends—she was the outsider. Yet everyone was taking so much trouble over her. She knew it could only have been because of the way Khattak had spoken of her. She felt valued, respected, a feeling she rarely experienced at home. The only thing Don Getty had taught her was how to be tough. Kindness she had learned from Zach, and in rare stolen moments from her mother.

  When she overlooked her outsider status, she realized the story Audrey had confided was actually quite funny.

  “Er … how old were you during this headscarf incident?”

  Audrey seized her hand in delighted response.

  “You won’t blackmail me with that, will you, Rachel? It really was too dreadful—here I was convinced that anointing myself with new religious credentials would make me irresistible to my very first deathly crush—” She took a moment to squeeze Khattak’s hand. “And instead he looked at me as if I’d grown another head. Too, too devastating. If it wasn’t for Ruksh, I’m convinced I’d have thrown myself into the lake, painfully itchy headscarf and all.”