Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

  He told his son that people had lied about him. They’d claimed that he’d assisted the Germans in suppressing the national uprising against them, that they’d seen him actually killing people whom his group had rounded up. They’d made up falsehoods built on other fabrications, his father assured Jindrich and his mother, making him out to be a terrible man, which was simply not true. And, like most wives, Jindrich’s mother, through both good and bad times, supported her husband, and now they were all running and hiding for their lives.

  The cabin had been in the family for many years, but they’d only come here on a few occasions since Jindrich’s father had become involved in the cause. As he’d patiently explained to his son, dedication to one’s country, under trying circumstances, was the mark of a man, and he had done his part. The fact that times had changed for the worse did not mean that his father had made the wrong decision. People simply had not understood the position he’d taken and how Czechoslovakia, and the Slovaks in particular, had benefited from his activities until the war had turned against their allies, the Nazis. History would redeem his beliefs and the actions he had taken on them.

  Now they were back in their family cabin, pretending that they were on a vacation. His father assured them, in the warmth of the cabin fire, that when the Soviets left and their country came back to its senses, the family would prosper again—but, for the moment, survival was the basic rule governing their lives.

  One morning, Jindrich and his mother had gone into Roznava to get supplies. It was some distance from where they were staying, but Jindrich’s mother came from Roznava and a few of her relatives were still there. It would be safer for them to make their purchases in the small town where his mother could use her maiden name and depend upon the close-knit townspeople to protect one of their own than to go into Levoca. It was a hard trek for the horses through the snow, with the trip to Roznava and back taking most of the day. It was not until they were getting near the cabin that Jindrich’s mother sensed that something was wrong.

  It was not the quiet that seemed to envelop them on the road, because winter always makes for quiet on mountain roads. It was the birds that told her, suddenly emerging to fly in a high circle over the hills to the west. The birds were so far away that they could barely hear them. It was their activity that concerned her, much more activity than even a marauding predator would have created.

  Jindrich’s mother pushed the horses harder, their already-depleted stamina reflected in their continued plod through the snow. Finally, the wagon reached the top of the hill overlooking their cabin. His mother, even more worried by the continued unusual activity of the birds, insisted on driving the horses into a surround of trees and demanded that Jindrich stay hidden with them while she warned his father. Jindrich watched her slog through the deep snow, down the hill into the little glen that housed the cabin. Nothing seemed out of place as she went through the door; but at the moment she entered, Jindrich heard the roar of engines.

  The birds truly had warned them. Two trucks with Russian markings came from the direction of where the birds were circling, steaming over the hill much faster than Jindrich would have thought possible given the depth of the snow, heading directly for the cabin. Someone had informed on them.

  Jindrich could only watch, his mouth agape, as the trucks pulled up to the house and soldiers jumped off of them, kicking the door of the cabin open and storming in. Jindrich could not hear any sounds from inside the cabin over the noise of the engines, which the drivers revved continually to make sure they would not freeze up in the cold. Every few seconds, soldiers would come out of the cabin, some of them laughing and gesturing for others to go inside. Pieces of furniture occasionally flew out of the door. Jindrich grew detached, watching a scene that seemed like a bizarre, slow-motion happening. As time passed, Jindrich fell into a semi-stupor from the bitter cold, and from the fear.

  Eventually, they brought his father out.

  The soldiers carried him, his arms and legs dangling at abnormal angles. His face was bloody, seemingly even redder than blood, edged in dark crimson against the contrasting background of white snow. The soldiers dumped him in the back of one of the trucks and piled into the vehicles. The trucks roared off. Jindrich waited until they were out of sight before he began his slog down to the cabin, his legs stiff with cold, not obeying his commands very well. He slipped and fell, then willed his arms to push him erect, only to walk a few more meters and fall again. When he got to the cabin door, Jindrich hesitated, afraid of what he would find inside. There was no alternative: he had to go in, because he knew he’d freeze to death if he stayed out in the cold.

  Inside, the cabin had been savaged, the furniture all broken, his mother just another piece of the broken furniture on the floor. She was half-dressed, her legs splayed apart, blood on her thighs. Jindrich, even as young as he was, recognized what had happened. His mother had been raped by the soldiers and, somewhere along the way, angry and perhaps ashamed, they’d killed her.

  Jindrich didn’t quite know what to do. His mother was dead in the corner; his father had been taken away to be killed, if he wasn’t dead already. The boy stayed frozen, as aloof and detached as the hills around the cabin, until instinct, the final resort of all wounded animals, pulled him out of his stupor.

  He prepared to leave.

  There was nothing much that he could salvage from the house: a little money that the soldiers had overlooked in his mother’s discarded purse, a keepsake photograph of himself and his friends from the youth group he’d been in, an old blanket to wrap himself in for further insulation against the cold.

  The last item Jindrich took with him had been hidden under a loose floorboard. Jindrich was forced to move his mother’s leg to get to it. He told himself not to mind too much, because she was dead and couldn’t feel it anyway. The item he pulled from its refuge was his father’s prized possession, one that he’d taken out and gloated over from time to time, telling both his wife and son that it would be their saving grace one day when the times and events were right to make use of it. Jindrich carefully wrapped it in some of the clothes strewn on the floor of the cabin, then tore a strip from one of his father’s shirts to use to tie the bundle together.

  The next question he faced was what to do with his mother’s body.

  Jindrich knew he was supposed to bury her in the ground. That was what people did with the dead. But the ground was so frozen that he couldn’t possibly dig out a space big enough to hold her. He finally decided that the easiest course of action was to burn the cabin. He pulled his mother’s body to the middle of the room, then piled everything in the cabin that could be burned on top of her. There was still a small amount of kerosene left in the fuel container of the overturned stove. Jindrich poured it over the pile. He then scrabbled through the debris on the floor to find a match. He carefully lit it, then ignited the funeral pyre.

  Jindrich watched it flame into life, standing near the pyre, warming himself with the accelerating flames. It was nice to be warm, even for a little while. When the roof of the cabin caught fire, Jindrich knew it was time to leave. Clutching the items he’d retrieved, he slogged up the hill to the horses. There were provisions in the wagon that would feed him for a while.

  Jindrich couldn’t think of any friends who cared for him, or for his mother or father. This didn’t bother him much. He’d never really cared about anyone, not his relatives— or, when it came down to it, even his mother and father. He hoped, despite that, that one of his relatives in Roznava would take him in. After all, Slovaks took care of their families, no matter who they were or what they’d done.

  He turned the horses around, starting back to Roznava. He never looked back at the burning cabin. It was unimportant. That part of his life was over.

  What had happened had taught him that survival was all that mattered. The means that he used to survive did not.

  Chapter 18

  The primary targeting of Klara Bogan during the shooting intrigued
Jana. Unless they were political figures, women weren’t usually the targets of assassinations. However, in this case, killing both Oto and Klara Bogan, husband and wife, had clearly been the objective of the shooters. Investigating the death of one of them required attention to both. Jana decided to focus on the financial assets of the Bogans. With a murder carried out by hired killers, there was invariably money involved, so Jana commandeered the best accountant from their major fraud unit, Lubos Papanek, and put him on the task of ferreting out the Bogans’ finances.

  Papanek started the “follow the money” game with the small bank in Vienna that Bogan had recently acquired. Unfortunately, as with most tracking procedures involving finances, it would take time for the accountant to complete his inquiry, so Jana focused her own investigative efforts on the Bogan family itself.

  The Bogans’ son, Zdenko, was at the top of her list, but he was in Berlin and she hadn’t yet managed to contact him. That meant her initial approach would be to deal with the family members who were still in Slovakia. She dug into every record she could think of: births, deaths, phone accounts, land records, tax returns, military files, corporate listings, media coverage, even simple census name registries. Odd. From what Jana could find, neither of the Bogans had any living relatives in Slovakia, although both listed themselves as having been born in the country. Klara’s maiden name was Zuzulova; but Bogan or Zuzulova, there was still no family. Also odd, although the birth records in some rural areas were occasionally listed only in church registries, neither of the Bogans was accounted for in any municipal birth registries.

  Government records that both Bogans had filled out as adults indicated that their parents were dead and that they had been born near each other in central Slovakia. The two listed no siblings. They’d moved to Bratislava, although in different years, as young adults, apparently meeting again in the capital. The one indication that they had anything like another living relative was that Klara had been briefly married to another man just before she came to the capital. He was listed as the prior spouse on the Bogans’ civil marriage application. The man’s name was Radomir Kralik.

  On an impulse, Jana checked for Kralik’s name on the list of people invited to the studio party. It was there. She then checked for it on the list of the actual partygoers that the police had compiled. He was not on that one. The man had still been on good enough terms with his ex-wife to be invited to the party, but had apparently chosen not to come. Jana ran Kralik through government records. He was now a resident of Vienna.

  It was a simple matter for Jana to then have the Austrian police run Kralik’s name through their system. They quickly tracked him, informing her that he was living just outside the Ring limits, on Gumpendorfer, near Alfred Grunwald Park. Jana knew the area. Clean, fairly high rents. Most people who lived in that neighborhood near central Vienna were in the upper income category. The man’s recent Austrian job registration was at the Internazionale EuroBank as a vice president in charge of foreign investment.

  The IEB was the bank that Bogan had recently bought the majority interest in. It was strange that Bogan would invite Kralik to his party, and even stranger that Bogan had enough confidence in his wife’s ex-husband to use him as a bank officer. Then again, as Jana had so often seen, the world was an odd place, and things frequently only seemed abnormal if you didn’t know the circumstances that surrounded them. Jana simply had to examine the circumstances. She called Kralik at the bank, getting a secretary who was very Austrian-proper and businesslike on the telephone, and after a brief moment off the phone to get Kralik’s approval, the woman made an appointment for Jana to see him that afternoon.

  Jana took the train from Petržalka Station, just across the Danube, and in less than an hour she was in the Südbahnhof. She caught a cab and directed the driver to swing by the address that Kralik had listed as his home. He would be at the bank, waiting for Jana to keep their appointment, which was good. You often found out more about people when they were not at home to receive you.

  It was older but well kept up and still respectable, a gray stone-and-concrete building that one could easily believe a bank executive might live in. Jana told the taxi driver to park and wait for her, then got out of the vehicle and looked up at the building. According to the government records, Kralik lived on the sixth floor. Jana counted the stories. He lived on the top floor in lofty splendor. After doing a visual check of the area, she walked to the entrance to check the mailboxes just inside the building. There she had a stroke of luck: the building’s cleaning woman was mopping the tiled entrance area.

  Jana pressed the apartment buzzer listed under Kralik’s name, and the cleaning woman checked Jana out as she stood pretending to wait for an answer from the apartment.

  “He’s at work,” the cleaning woman told her in an accent that suggested her German wasn’t native, her speech inflections acquired in a classroom across the river in Slovakia. Jana answered in Slovak, and the woman immediately brightened, responding with a dobry den. The woman’s presence here was not unusual. Slovaks came to Austria to get work, mostly menial jobs like this woman’s. The job paid substantially more here than she could have earned in Slovakia.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Kralik,” Jana said. “He was supposed to supply me with a package.”

  “No package.” The woman spread her arms to take in the surrounding space, showing that there was no package in the area. “He didn’t leave anything with me.”

  “He actually said he’d leave it by the door to the apartment. Do you think I might go up and look for it?”

  “I’m not supposed to let anyone in,” said the woman.

  Jana showed the woman her Slovak police identification. “Police.” Jana waited while the cleaning lady took a hasty look at the credential, then smiled reassuringly at her. “I promise not to loot the apartments if you let me inside the building. I do need that package,” Jana assured her. “It’s vital for an investigation.”

  “You’re not an Austrian officer. This is Austria.”

  Jana decided to try another tack. She made a big show of going through her purse, eventually finding a pair of two-euro coins. You stayed low if you were going to give a person a gratuity. Offering too much money would suggest that she was very anxious to get inside the building, possibly with an unsavory reason for wanting to gain access.

  Jana pressed the coins into the woman’s hand. “For your brief inconvenience. I just need a minute upstairs, and I’ll come back past you on the way out so you’ll know I haven’t taken anything.”

  The woman eyed Jana, ultimately deciding that she was dressed too presentably to be a thief. Besides, she did have a police credential, and she was a Slovak. Most of all, nearpoverty makes for greed. The woman opened the inner door for Jana to go inside.

  “Five minutes. If you’re not down by then, I call the Austrian police. Understood?”

  “No problems.”

  “Five minutes,” the woman called after her, tucking the coins away and going back to her work.

  Jana took the elevator to the top floor. As soon as she stepped out, she was confronted by a single large, polished wood door leading into the lone apartment on the floor. A single apartment on the top floor! Quite posh. Exclusive. Upmarket. The opportunity to see the interior of the apartment was too much for Jana to resist. She had the lock picked in less than a minute and was inside the apartment a second after that.

  It was even bigger and better furnished than Jana had anticipated. The décor was a little more modern than Jana’s taste, but everything was polished, the wood gleaming, the couches soft leather, the rooms painted in attractive pastel colors. However, it was the display of photographs in the main room that caught her eye.

  The same two people appeared in almost all of them: Klara and a man who could only be Kralik. The photos showed them in a variety of cute poses and relaxing locations. Always smiling, lovingly feeding each other at a restaurant, in bathing suits with their arms around each other at some re
sort, posing with tennis rackets.

  Surprisingly, Oto Bogan was also with them in one of the photographs, the three of them seated on a couch, smiling at the camera, all looking very comfortable with each other. Even more strangely, they all were wearing contemporary clothes in that photo, and Klara had a contemporary hair style. The snapshot had to have been taken in recent years, long after Kralik and Klara had been divorced. And yet there they were—Oto Bogan, Klara, and Kralik—looking like three companionable friends.

  Jana made a quick foray into the huge master bedroom and opened a vast wardrobe closet near the bed. Women’s clothing filled it. Jana checked the sizes. They would have fit Klara. And in the master bathroom, with its huge step-down bath, women’s toiletries were arranged for use next to one of the two sinks, a man’s toiletries next to the other. Cozy his-and-hers. Klara and Radomir Kralik had still been a twosome, even though they were divorced and Klara was married to Oto Bogan.

  And from the photograph taken of all three of them, it looked like Mr. Bogan was aware of the continuing relationship between his wife and Kralik and was untroubled by it. Sometimes abnormal situations remained astonishing, no matter how much they were explained. This was one of them.

  A few minutes later, Jana was on her way to see Kralik at the bank. She wondered how he’d shed light on the situation.

  Chapter 19

  The Internazionale EuroBank was a block behind St. Stephen’s Cathedral on Wollzeile, a street that appeared to specialize in nondescript businesses. The bank had a contemporary storefront, with a multi-angled window facing the street, giving the impression of studied risk without loss of stability. The place, once entered, was quiet, a deep pile rug dampening any footsteps. There was one teller window with a solitary customer, and a small number of working executive desks spread around the floor bearing the names and titles of their occupants, most of whom were on the phone. The bank did not seem to encourage walk-in traffic, rather catering to a select few businesses in the Vienna area and a clientele suggested by its name: people and firms interested in international banking.