Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  The house is Balkan vernacular, two storeys, rendered and painted off-white, steep, green-tiled roof. It should have matching green shutters pinned back either side of the windows and an ironwork verandah, then it could call itself a villa. There’s no sign of the burnt-out Toyota Invincible.

  ‘Let’s check the yard,’ I say, setting off for the back of the house. There’s a high wall and double gates topped with barbed wire. The gates are open. As I come level, I see it: the wrecked vehicle lolling on the tarmac. The flared wheel arches hang like batwings over the skeletal remains of the rear wheels. I can just make out the word TOYOTA embossed into its tailgate, and then in smaller letters on the right, Invincible. I taste the sweet, acrid smell of burnt rubber on my lips and without warning I’m tipping sideways into Eleni’s arms as the sky yaws overhead. She holds me by one arm and strokes my shoulders as I throw up on the pale grey tarmac.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  There’s a woman at the back door.

  ‘She’s not well, as you see,’ says Eleni.

  ‘Take her away. I don’t want to clean up her mess.’

  ‘So wait until it rains,’ says Eleni. There’s a hardness in her voice I haven’t heard before.

  ‘Fucking Albanians.’

  I straighten up and look at the woman. She’s about fifty, heavily built, hair tied in a square of black cotton. She holds a broom out to one side of her, like a soldier with a spear.

  ‘Who owns this car?’ I ask. ‘I have to speak to the person who owns this car.’

  ‘He hasn’t got much to say for himself, seeing as he’s dead,’ says the woman, and raps the railings with her broom.

  ‘What was his name, then? Did he have a snake tattoo on his neck?’

  ‘Burnt to death by ugly squareheads,’ says the woman, her eyes narrowing. ‘Why’re you here? I don’t like it.’ She looks back over her shoulder and shouts into the house. ‘Bojan!’

  ‘I must know whose car this is, this Toyota Invincible. I’m looking for my daughter. I’ve lost her.’ I walk rapidly over to the steps. ‘Can I just come in and look around?’

  She doesn’t answer. A slope-shouldered boy in his late teens appears in the doorway behind her.

  ‘Go tell Jacek there are two Albanian bitches here, asking questions and looking for trouble.’

  The boy’s small eyes dart around in his slack-featured face. I’m reminded of Inspector Jankovic, the sense of a man assessing the extent of his power over me, trying out scenarios in his mind. I’m half way up the steps when the woman upends her broom and jabs me in the stomach.

  ‘Bojan, go!’

  The boy runs back into the house.

  ‘KLA types,’ says the woman. ‘Come to gloat, have you? I reckon you know something.’

  ‘We’re leaving,’ says Eleni, taking me by the arm and pulling me back to the foot of the steps. ‘And we’re not making trouble but looking for my friend’s daughter. We think she was taken away in that car. She’s twelve, with black hair, pretty. Perhaps you’ve seen her?’

  The woman’s face is impassive as a slab of oak.

  ‘Not too pretty, I hope.’

  Eleni leads me back across the yard, out through the gates and up into the street behind the house.

  ‘We’ll search the town,’ I gabble. ‘Someone must know where Katya is. There are mothers here, they’ll understand. Go home if you like, Eleni. Go and get help. Leave me here.’

  Eleni takes me firmly by the shoulders. ‘Anna, we’ve found the car. . . Maybe we’ve found the car. Now we need to be careful and work out what to do. Otherwise, you’ll be arrested. Or worse.’

  ‘Because I want my daughter back?’

  ‘Because you’re an Albanian, in a Serb village that’s just been attacked by the KLA. Suppose they search the car and find the map?’

  The map. . . with local police stations marked in biro. And a picture of the exact same make of vehicle as was destroyed in the KLA attack. I can’t reply. Eleni is right. I moan and fall into her arms, the boiled wool of her Salzburg coat scratches my cheek. We hear footsteps clumping along the main street below. Booted men, coming to deal with the troublemakers. We flee back to the square and drive the wrong way out of town, and it feels like I’ve lost Katya all over again. I want to turn round and go back straight away and start knocking on doors. Eleni plays voice of reason, though she hates herself for it. I must talk to Inspector Jankovic again, she says, while she enlists the help of the UNHCR.

  ‘If we keep it official,’ she says, ‘with everything on the record, then they’ll have no excuse.’

  ‘There is no official.’ I’m shouting in frustration now. ‘They don’t need any excuse. There’s a war on and we’re the enemy.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure that was the pickup we’re looking for,’ says Eleni for the hundredth time. ‘And if Katya is there, we mustn’t give them a reason to take her somewhere else.’

  This thought torments me. The woman with the broom might be talking to the men fetched by Bojan right now. Get the girl out of here, those women are trouble.

  17

  I drive back to Kric next day – alone, taking a camera so I can photograph the wreck of the Toyota. The police-station gates are locked shut. The burnt-out pickup has gone. There’s a dog licking tentatively at the oval of dried-up sick. I go round the front and knock at the door, ready to confront the woman with the broom. No one answers.

  Back in the square I see a noticeboard by the church doors. It lists the times when services are held: Mass, evensong – and tomorrow at six the priest will hear confessions. This is where the Bura come to be forgiven. I’ll catch the priest when he’s finished, when the sins are fresh in his mind. I’ll look him straight in the eye and beg him to tell me what happened to Katya. I’ll fall to my knees and beat my breast. I’ll do anything he asks of me, if he will only part with the secrets of the confessional.

  It’s a plan, something to which I can pin my tattered hopes. I zigzag through the streets of the dreary little town, the cold squeezing at my heart. The River Pec runs alongside the main road, then bends away to follow the line of the valley. It is said that in this river lurk spirits that will snare the souls of passers-by and can only be quelled by the singing of songs sanctified by inclusion in a service of the Orthodox Christian Church. It’s not wide, but fast-flowing and powerful, its surface glassy black and full of unspecified menace. In ten minutes I’ve reached the far end and counted 137 doors. When I’ve knocked on them all, I will have found Katya. Or not. The prospect of failure makes me shrink inside my skin.

  The shut doors of Kric have big locks and curtained fanlights. I step up to the first and there’s no bell or knocker so I have to bang with my fist. It doesn’t sound right. It sounds feeble, uncertain. No one answers. I try another and a dog barks from within, I can hear its nails scrabbling at the letterbox. I knock, ring, bang along the street, but the locks stay locked and the bolts bolted. I haven’t even seen a curtain twitch.

  Half way along the next street, an old woman answers from within.

  ‘Wait, I’m coming. . .’

  I listen to her shuffling down the hall and fiddling with the lock.

  ‘Oh dear, I can never. . .’

  Finally it opens. She’s tall and bony and bent, with scabbed shins beneath the frayed hem of her dress. I show her my leaflet. ‘This is my daughter. I’m looking for her. I think she may be somewhere in Kric.’

  The old woman hands it back and shakes her head sorrowfully, then beckons me inside. I follow her into a sitting room. There’s a charred log smouldering in the grate and a washing-up bowl by her chair, which she’s been using to piss in. She points at a sagging sofa. ‘Will you sit down, please? I don’t get many visitors.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t have time. I’m looking for my daughter. If you see her, will you. . .’

  It’s pointless. I leave her standing there, stooped and sad. As I pull her front door shut behind me I hear a cry
from somewhere up behind the main square, and it jolts me like an electric shock. Katya! I’m sure of it! I heard her cry like that at the hospital when she dislocated her elbow and some clumsy old doctor tried to fit it back together. She cried out in just that way. A lilting wail of protest, ending in an intake of breath. I’d know it anywhere. I run down the street, convinced that in seconds I’ll turn a corner and find my Katya leaning from a window or climbing the fence of a backyard. She’s a good climber, determined and lithe. I come to the end of the street and look left and right but she’s not there. I stand panting and spinning on a patch of broken cobblestones. Call out again, my darling Katya, call again, my sweet child!

  Silence.

  ‘Katya!’

  My voice has a wild power, like no noise I’ve ever made before.

  ‘Katya! Katya!’

  Her name cannons off the rooftops, flounders in the heavy air.

  Silence.

  ‘Katya!’

  A car rumbles suddenly up behind me and blasts by so close it whisks at my coat. Hostile faces stare back at me from its rear window. I won’t be deterred. I feel in my heart that I’ve heard Katya cry out for me, but in my head the doubts insinuate themselves like little gobs of poison. The cries of children are not so distinctive. . . A woman, maybe, or a boy, or a dog. . . I’ll carry on knocking from here, where the cry came from, if it came from anywhere. The houses in this street have yards out back with makeshift shelters for chickens or pigs and workshops with oily tools lying about. I peer through broken fences and see hundreds of places where the abductors of children may hide their prey.

  Knock, ring, bang. A woman of my age opens her door, a baby tucked into the crook of her arm.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No!’ the baby repeats, brandishing a plastic spoon. The mother turns away and slams the door with the heel of her foot. ‘How would you feel if your baby was taken away from you?’ I ask the shut door.

  I keep seeing chainsaws: hanging from nails, resting on sections of tree trunk – there’s even one lying on the rear shelf of a car, where you might expect to see a box of tissues or a teddy bear. And I’m being tailed by a pack of dogs which bark and skitter away when I walk towards them, then slink up closer as I press a bell and listen to a cheery ding-dong that doesn’t get answered. After twenty more doors I’ve provoked nothing but an irritable shout and the sound of a window being clamped shut.

  By nightfall I’ve walked across Kric four times, looking for doors I might have missed, listening for cries I might have misheard. Why are the streets empty? Because it’s cold. Because the Serbs feel angry and ill-used. They lock their doors and grumble: they are decent, hard-working people, while the Albanians are lazy and dishonest. Several times I hear a car idling nearby, then see it flash across a junction. It’s a dark red Skoda estate. I’ve written down its registration number. I’m scared. I hurry back to the square. A wind has blown in and the sycamore trees rattle and shed bits of bark and broken twig.

  I get into the Fiat Frightful and drive out of town. As I pass the police station, I notice that the Skoda is following me. Its headlights slither around inside the car, illuminating my hair, my neck, my face as I turn back to look. The Fiat slows and slows on the hill and I have to drop down to second gear. When did I last get the oil changed? The Skoda comes up close, right up close so I can hear the bellow of its engine. In the rear-view mirror, I see that it’s full of men with watch caps pulled down low over their foreheads. They’re going to ram me from behind, shunt me off the road and down into the woods. The accelerator pedal is flat to the floor but still I’m losing speed. They’ll climb out of the car and come loping after me, pulling long knives from inside their coats. The radio hisses – you can’t turn it off, only down. My headlights yellow and flicker and I think they might give out. Then I see the top of the hill. I focus on the column of pewter sky between the trees and don’t see the windows of the Skoda wind down, arms reach out.

  Gunshots. I duck down and bang my forehead against the steering wheel. The Fiat slews across the road. I haul the steering wheel down in time to veer away from the ditch, but the car stalls, rolls back. Sharp cracks split the forested darkness. I’ve stopped breathing. Handbrake! I hear laughter. The driver of the Skoda leans on his horn and the ugly howl scoops every thought from my mind. I’m trembling so hard I can’t do anything to save myself. A bony-faced man with deep-set eyes appears at my window. He shakes his head from side to side, then draws his hand across his throat.

  He walks back to the Skoda. The car turns round and they head back into Kric. Twice on the way home I have to pull over and curl up across the front seats to get the trembling under control.

  ‘The pickup that was used to abduct my daughter is in Kric – or it was,’ I inform the duty sergeant with the cow-catcher moustache and flaky skin. ‘It’s the one that was destroyed in the attack there a few nights ago.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’ he asks sharply.

  ‘Nothing. I saw it on the news. The boys who were there when my daughter was abducted gave me a description of the pickup they were driving – there’s a picture in the pack I gave you. I saw it in Kric the day before yesterday. It’s the same one, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘You went nosing around in Kric, after what happened?’

  ‘Yes. I was asking if anyone had seen my daughter and these men attacked me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They shot at me. They drove a red Skoda estate – here’s the registration number.’

  He doesn’t touch the scrap of paper I push across the desk. ‘Any injuries? Bullet holes in your car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So they missed.’

  ‘They were shooting to frighten me, to get me out of town.’

  ‘They didn’t in fact attack you.’

  ‘That’s not the crime – the crime is that they took my daughter. You have to investigate this. You have to. . .’

  The words catch in my throat. I’ve steeled myself to be rational and composed so that my demands prove irresistible, but instead I am falling apart. I step away from the counter and arch my hand over my eyes to squeeze the tears away, then take a number of deep breaths.

  ‘I’m going back to Kric,’ I inform him when I’ve pulled myself together again. ‘You could advise me not to go, but that would mean admitting that I might be dealing with the people who abducted my daughter.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go into any town where you’re not known and stir things up with the locals. Especially after they’ve been attacked by the KLA. You have been warned.’

  ‘Oh, they know who I am.’

  The men of Kric scare me, but they cannot scare me off. I’m not a member of some impertinent rival militia, but a mother searching for her child. The church occupies one side of the square with the sycamore trees. I park and walk round it. It’s a puzzling building: pre-Ottoman, I would say, but most of it seems to have been destroyed and rebuilt without the flamboyance that must have characterised the original. Usually in such cases there’s a mosque nearby, built to overshadow the temple of the lesser faith in respect of scale, craftsmanship and grace. But Kric does not have a mosque, only this bare church. I push through the doors into the incense-haunted murk of the interior. It is colder in here than outside. My eyes adjust, and I make out a black-robed figure sitting in a large upholstered armchair by an incongruously small and plain beechwood lectern. His hands extend over the arms of the chair and one of them is flapping impatiently. He is muttering something, and I don’t think he has seen me. I walk up the aisle and when I’m ten yards away, he starts and holds out his hand.

  ‘Wait there.’

  His voice is sonorous, as if he is taking a service. I sit down on the nearest chair and he resumes the strange hand-flapping. His chair is not an ecclesiastical item, but an easy chair for the home. The church is like a junk shop, every wall a patchwork of pictures, icons, effigies, glass vases and candlesticks, crucif
ixes and items of tarnished silver. There are shelves stacked with torn brown envelopes, boxes of postcards and laminated service sheets. The priest mutters and nods his head, then makes an elaborate sign of the cross. His expression is hard, but his features have a drunk’s querulous laxity, his cheeks flabby and his eyes unable to rest.

  Suddenly I realise that the benediction was for me and the priest is waiting for me to approach and make my confession.

  ‘There.’

  He points to an embroidered kneeler on the floor in front of him, to the left of which is an icon propped against a stack of books. I kneel.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I need your help, Father. My daughter. . .’

  The priest’s tatty black slip-ons are parked by his chair. His wool-clad feet emit a rancid smell that cuts through the fug of stale incense.

  ‘You are here to confess. Get on with it.’

  ‘My daughter was taken from me and brought to this town. My twelve-year-old daughter. I came to ask if you’ve heard anything that might help me find her.’

  He is silent for a long time. The icon depicts Christ crowned with thorns, his head tipped down, his eyes raised heavenwards. His expression must be intended to portray suffering beatitude, but the artist has made him look like an imbecile. By contrast, much skill and effort has been devoted to painting the thorn-pierced flesh beneath the line of his scalp, the gouts of blood like jewels on his brow and cheeks. I feel unsteady on my kneeler.