Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

  Bogan shrugged. “I’m trying not to believe it. Who comes to a man’s celebration to murder him?”

  “If I were going to kill you, this would be a perfect place to do it,” the colonel snapped.

  Jana edged closer to Bogan. “All that we ask is that you keep a low profile until we find out what’s happening.” She waved around them at the intense luminescence. “And get out of this spotlight.”

  “This isn’t the night for me to keep a low profile,” Bogan muttered between smiles to his guests.

  “This is Oto’s night,” his wife said. “You can protect him later.”

  They neared the cake, the spotlight they were moving in about to merge with the floodlight around the huge iced confection.

  “You’re one very large target when you stop moving. You’ll be lit up like a supernova, perfect game for a shooter,” Trokan warned, his tone becoming more urgent.

  “Oto is a supernova,” said Klara.

  “I always listen to my wife.” Bogan leaned over to kiss her as they continued, leading to cheers and more applause from the onlookers. “You see how they love her?”

  Jana’s instincts were on full alert, roaring at her to take action, telling her that despite the lack of concrete evidence, there was going to be an attempt on Bogan’s life any minute now. She looked just ahead of them. If there was going to be an assassination try, it would be made shortly after the two circles of light joined when Bogan presented himself in all his vulnerable glory. She leaned toward Trokan.

  “We have to keep him out of there, Colonel.”

  “The name-day boy is not going to be dissuaded.”

  “A little force might discourage him.”

  “I love the fact that you’re directing your colonel to get on the bad side of one of the chief supporters of his minister by making a stupid move.”

  “We’re saving a life.”

  “Maybe …”

  “Given time, he’ll thank us.”

  “Never. People like that don’t ever thank anybody. They’re chosen by God.”

  “We didn’t join the police to be liked.”

  “Thank you for the reminder, Jana.”

  Everyone in the huge room was now moving toward the joining spotlights, both officers fighting to maintain their position, forced to push through the throng of people getting in their way.

  Just as Bogan reached the center of the merged spotlights, Trokan and Jana lunged into him, the force of their weight pressing him down and to one side. Bogan let out a bellow of protest, but it was submerged almost immediately by a series of shots. Trokan was bludgeoned to one side by the force of two bullets striking him; Klara, also shot, was dead before she hit the floor. Jana climbed on top of Bogan, trying to shield him with her body. Pulling out her automatic, she tried to determine where the shooter was so she could get a shot off at him and stop him from targeting Bogan again.

  The crowd erupted in fear, people screaming, trying to get away, clambering over each other in the dark, fighting to clear a path for themselves, clawing at anyone who got in their way. Men and women fell to the floor, trampled in the rush. There was a moment of additional shock when the lights came back on and the general carnage became visible. The crowd froze for a second, and then the panicked exodus began again, this time with more purpose.

  Within minutes, the huge soundstage floor had emptied, leaving just the people who had been trampled and those who had been shot. The stage floor looked like a film set arranged as the aftermath of a battle in which the combat had been one-sided, the wounded and dead littering the ground, the sound of sobbing heard somewhere offscreen.

  Chapter 4

  Trokan was out of the hospital after a week, convalesced at home for another two weeks while slowly going crazy, then decided that his “recuperation” had gone on long enough—despite the doctor’s orders—and went to work. His wife was glad to see him go, and he was even happier to see her disappear behind his front door as he was driven to the office. They made each other angry and anxious when they were together and less angry and less anxious when they were apart, so they welcomed separation. It was as if a burden had been lifted.

  The colonel’s office had been decorated with a large welcome sign, and the heads of various divisions were waiting for him when he arrived. The welcome-back celebration ended when Trokan growled that all of them still had the business of crime to attend to. Everyone quickly evacuated the room. Trokan eased his sling around to one side so he could sit without bumping his arm and shoulder, then immediately telephoned Jana Matinova. Jana had been conspicuously absent during the brief celebration of his survival. She was in his office five minutes later, laying a small pastry container on his desk before sitting down. He gave her a jaundiced look. “Bullets aren’t enough? You’re trying to kill me with sweets.”

  He undid the small ribbon around the box and opened the top. There were two pastries inside, along with a distorted bullet round sitting on top of one of them. He laid the spent slug next to the box, then handed her one of the pastries, taking the second one for himself. They both took bites of their confections, quietly chewing as they enjoyed a peaceful moment together.

  Trokan’s voice was slightly accusing. “You didn’t come to the welcome-back party.”

  “I decided not to show up. You can’t have personal moments at parties.”

  “True.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better.”

  “The shoulder?”

  “Getting there. The X-rays showed that the doctors lined up the bone properly. The bone ends are together, giving it the right length, so I’m fine. Except the pins give me aches and pains when it’s going to rain.”

  “You can hire yourself out to the weather people. Extra income.”

  “I don’t need the money that badly.” He smiled. “The metal comes out in maybe a month and a half.”

  “And your side?”

  “That aches without pins.” He picked up the spent bullet and rolled it around in his hand. “They told me they gave you the slug they dug out of the bone cavity. I take it this is the little beast?”

  “I thought you might want to put it on a key chain. Perhaps have it mounted?”

  “Did you do ballistics on it?”

  “Too distorted. Nothing except the probable caliber. We couldn’t find the other bullet that went in your side. It was a through-and-through wound, so we figured the stampeding crowd must have swept it somewhere along with them.”

  He nodded, looking the slug over once again. “Thank you for the memento.” He opened a drawer in his desk and put the bullet inside. “The next time you suggest we do something impetuous, I’ll open the drawer, look at the bullet, and be able to tell you no.”

  They each took another bite out of their pastries. Trokan talked while slowly chewing on the small piece he’d bitten off. “The minister put you up for a medal. It was the photograph in the newspaper of you protecting Bogan with your body that did it. You are now the Saint Joan of Arc of Slovakia.”

  “I don’t quite picture myself as a saint.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Good.”

  “Update me on the case.”

  “You’ll have to ask the special investigations group that’s looking into the shooting.” Jana made sure that her tone conveyed her displeasure. “I’m a victim and a witness, so they’ve left me out of the loop.”

  “Bad decision.” He thought about it. “I haven’t seen anything about Bogan in the news since his wife’s funeral. The media had their fun with it. Then they moved the event to the second page; then smaller and smaller followup stories.” His voice took on a quizzical resonance. “I expected more noise and fury from the man.”

  “Bogan’s gone to ground. He’s in a burrow somewhere.”

  “Do we have anything at all on the killers?”

  “I told you, I’m not in the loop.”

  “Then get in the loop. Find out.”

  “Everybo
dy’s informed me, not so very kindly, that I’m to stay away from the investigation. Maybe they think I’m angry because the shooting took place right under my nose. Maybe they think I was careless. Perhaps they think I’m going to be raging around, stepping on people’s toes?”

  He considered what she’d said. “Maybe nobody wants to associate with Saint Joan of Arc.” He drummed his fingers on his desk in irritation. “We both realize that you and I couldn’t stay away from this investigation if our lives depended on it. And for all we know, they may. We think the target was Bogan. We think our actions in pulling him out of the line of fire saved his life. We think I was shot—twice, mind you—because I stepped into the line of fire. But I want to know. And I’ve decided it’s your job to find out.”

  “I have my division to supervise.”

  “Handle it.”

  “I’m to ignore what the president of police has ordered? And the minister?”

  Trokan hesitated. “Yes.”

  Jana smiled. “If I disobey them, I may not get my medal.”

  “Is the medal that important?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get a bulletin out on the possible sighting of Koba?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think he was involved in the shootings?”

  “I find it hard to believe that—if he was there—he had nothing to do with the events of the evening.”

  “Maybe you didn’t really see him.”

  “You said that before.”

  “So I did.”

  They munched on their confections for a while longer. Finally, Jana took the remainder of her pastry and dropped it into a trash can.

  “Too much butter and fat in that thing,” she pronounced.

  Trokan’s face took on a slightly mocking look. “Exert yourself more. It will take off the extra ounces.”

  “Sweets are for colonels. Time for me to pay attention to business.”

  “Good.”

  “Watch my back if I step on anyone’s toes.”

  “And you be circumspect and subtle, and try not to offend the wrong people.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I know.” He finished his pastry. “Thanks for the special welcome.”

  “Glad you’re back, Colonel.”

  “So am I.”

  Jana walked out of the office. Trokan waited a moment, then opened the desk drawer containing the bullet and pulled it out.

  “You are a miserable little shit,” he said, examining the slug. Then he held it by two fingers, as if it were a dead bug, and dropped it back in the drawer. “I hope you’re afraid of the dark.”

  He closed the drawer with a satisfying thump.

  Chapter 5

  Jana went to the soundstage. She had called ahead, so the watchman was at the main entrance to let her in. He unlocked the two built-in locks and a padlock that was on the door, hustling in ahead of her to turn on the lights. They came on with an audible thunk, revealing the remnants of the party still in place in the huge room. The trays of food and the unopened bottles had been removed, but the tables were still set, covered with dirty linen, empty and overturned glasses and bottles strewn around. The bunting and signs hadn’t been removed, although the one praising Mrs. Bogan was now hanging from one end. Scraps of various kinds littered the unswept floor, and chairs and service tables were askew all over the room. Prominent in the middle of it all was Bogan’s huge ruined name-day cake.

  The watchman waited by the entrance as Jana walked around the room, first studying the small catwalks above. The gunmen had to have been up there, their line of fire unobstructed by the crowd of people. It would have been a clear, relatively easy shot to get Bogan. Jana turned back to the watchman.

  “How do you get up to the catwalk?”

  He pointed to a curtained alcove highlighted by a NO EXIT sign in the corner of the soundstage. “There.”

  Jana strode to the exit and went through the curtain. A metal stairway led upstairs to the rafters. Jana took the stairs two at a time, quickly reaching the catwalk above. From there, the whole soundstage could be seen without obstruction. She began walking around the catwalk, circling the room, studying the floor below as well as the catwalk itself.

  Then she stopped, the glint of a metal object in one of the braces that supported the catwalk catching her eye. Jana reached into the brace and pulled out a shell casing. She checked it, noted the caliber, and then smelled the front of the casing. It still carried the acrid smell of expended gunpowder. Jana put the shell casing in her pocket and continued her catwalk trip around the interior of the building, eventually returning to the area near the stairs where she had begun.

  She surveyed the huge room again, remembering the mass of people that had occupied it, all of them gathered to celebrate the hubris of Bogan and his wife. It reminded her of Richard III, the play she’d seen the week before at the National Theater. It was all about people’s ambition, pride, jealousy, greed, lust, willingness to do anything and everything to achieve their goals—all universal sins no matter what language they’re in. And the title characters who display those attributes in both fiction and real life usually wind up dead. Mr. Bogan had just survived his brush with the grim reaper; his wife Klara had not.

  “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” King Richard had screamed, trying to save himself while locked in combat. The line echoed in Jana’s mind as she looked over the “battlefield” below her, but the words were transmuted to “A gun! A gun! My kingdom for a gun!” Where was the gun that had been used in the shootings?

  Jana put herself in the killer’s place. Any competent would-be murderer had to know that a pistol would not have done the job, given the distance between assassin and victim. It was a long shot from the catwalk down and across the room. The murder weapon of choice in this building, and with that crowd, would be a semiautomatic rifle with a telescopic sight. Jana was off the case; but given her position in the police department, she would assuredly have known if the murder weapon had been found and sent to the forensics laboratory for analysis.

  A rifle could have been broken down and hidden under an overcoat, or perhaps in a carryall, when the shooter had completed his attack. Except that there would have been very little time for a murderer to break his rifle down into its component parts after the shooting, particularly in the dark. And all the assassin would have been thinking about immediately after the shooting was how vulnerable he was up here on the exposed catwalk. He’d want to flee as quickly as possible. The killer had to have done something else with the gun.

  A short distance from where Jana now stood was a door leading off the catwalk and out of the building. There was obviously a stairway on the outside of the structure. She went over to the door and examined the lock. It was a standard built-in key lock that bolted inside to the surrounding door frame. Jana tried to open it. It was solidly fitted and secured.

  Jana ran through the scenario of the shooter’s escape. Rifles are bulky. They’re not an item you want to carry when you’re running. In this case, no matter which way the gunman had fled, he wouldn’t have escaped unnoticed if he’d been carrying a rifle. As a hypothetical, Jana first tried assuming that the man had run down the stairs from the catwalk and into the crowd below, mixing with the people streaming through the exits. Jana took a deep breath and rejected the hypothesis. If he’d been carrying a rifle, the man would have been apprehended. That night, after the shooting, when Jana had been there with the other police who had come to the scene after the killing, there were no reports by anyone of men seen fleeing with guns. No question: the man had fled down the outside stairs leading from the catwalk. A point of evidence against that hypothesis, however, was the fact that the door leading directly to the outside—and to the ground below—was locked.

  Did that mean the gunman had used a key? And where was the rifle?

  Jana went downstairs and walked to the area where Mrs. Bogan had been shot. The vague chalk outline where her body had fallen was st
ill there. Blood had stained the floor both where she had been killed and where Colonel Trokan had dropped to the ground after being shot. Jana looked back at the catwalk where she’d found the shell casing. The positioning of the bodies in relation to the angle of fire bothered her.

  Jana eyed the ruined cake. She could use that as a fixed position to orient herself in relation to the events that had occurred on the night of the killing. She measured the distance from the cake to the area where she had pulled Bogan down. In her mind, Jana saw the colonel being hit. Two bullets in him; two in Mrs. Bogan. Jana mentally marked off the distance between the spot where they must have pulled Bogan down and the chalk outline that showed where Klara had fallen. She looked at the position of the cake again to be sure of her estimate of the other positions.

  It was impossible for Klara Boganova and Colonel Trokan to have been hit by the same shooter at the same time.

  Even allowing a second or two between the shots, one man would have to have been a magician to have hit them both. But had there even been that much time between them? Jana thought back to the moment of the shootings, focusing on the sound itself. The sound of the shots had of course been distorted by the size of the room, the noise created by the mass of people, the playing of the orchestra, and her own focus on saving Bogan. But even taking these things into account, she remembered that the shots had almost overlapped each other. That reconfirmed her prior conclusion: there had to have been at least two shooters.

  Jana checked the distance between the bodies again and noticed something even odder: Klara had clearly been several feet in front of her husband when the shots were fired. The newspapers had implied that Klara had been hit by shots intended for her husband. Jana had thought the same thing. But the physical evidence refuted that conclusion.

  The colonel had taken the bullets probably intended for Bogan when they pulled him down. But, given the victims’ positions, the shots that killed Klara could not have been aimed at Bogan. It looked very much like the shooters had been trying to get two people and had succeeded in getting one of them: Klara. She had been a primary target for the shooters—perhaps even the primary target.