Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

  Em’s lips tightened, her chin jutting in defiance. “I can’t say. Not even for you, Jana.”

  “Did the man tell you where I was staying?”

  “’Course not. Mr. Seges did. I telephoned him when I got here, and he told me.”

  “And you told the hotel employees that you were my niece, just as you did with my officers? They let you in the room?”

  “It worked once. So, you use it again. Find out what works. That’s how you get through life.”

  “You’re too young to be a philosopher.”

  “I think so too.”

  “What’s the name of the man who asked you to come to Berlin?”

  “He’s never given me a name. Ever! He just gets in touch. I know who he is. That’s it.”

  Jana didn’t believe a word of it. It was all part of a continuing lie. It was imperative that she now confront Em about what was rapidly becoming a very uncomfortable, unworkable situation.

  “Em, we’ve talked about this before. What you are doing is almost assuredly illegal. I can’t be your friend if you’re involved in unlawful conduct. And you can’t stay here with me.”

  “I know. That’s what I told the man. I made him promise me that this was the last time he would use me for this.”

  Jana was incredulous. Unfortunately, at the same time, she wanted to believe what Em said. The girl had found a chink, a weak spot in Jana’s armor, a vulnerability that Jana wasn’t quite able to protect. She kept asking herself why she was still hopefully standing on the edge of a cliff leading down to a big hurt when the girl had lied and manipulated her before and was doing it again. Her need to believe Em was so strong that only by main force was she able to compel herself to reject the girl’s claims.

  “We’ve been here before, Em. You’re a proficient liar. You’re so proficient at lying that I can’t accept anything you say as genuine. You’re here, sitting on that chair, except you’re not. You’re an impostor. And I can’t—and won’t—believe your hoax any more.”

  Tears began to flow down Em’s face. There was no sound, no sobbing, just the tears, Em all the while staring at Jana as if she had been unexpectedly brutalized or given up to an enemy by a person whom she would never have expected to be disloyal. Em had been ravaged, and Jana was the one who had done it. It was a pitiful sight.

  Jana was transfixed. Em’s tears would have captured anyone. Jana found herself walking over to the girl, putting her arms around her, holding her tight.

  When Jana pulled away from Em, she looked at the girl’s face, hoping to see the pain gone. Em was still crying. “I have to tell you what I think. It’s the way I am, Em. It doesn’t mean the end of my concern about you,” she murmured, trying to make the hurt fade for the girl— and for herself.

  Em nodded, hesitated for a second, then took out a pouch that had been hanging around her neck, concealed by her dress. She held it out to Jana. “Take it.”

  “What is it, Em?”

  “The money I was paid for coming to Berlin.”

  “Why are you giving it to me, Em?”

  The tears had slowed and the girl was attempting to wipe them away. “So you know I’m telling the truth. I don’t want you to think those things about me. I want you to like me. I want you to believe me.” She gave Jana a faltering smile. “If I give up the money that I was paid to come up here, then you have to know I’m telling you what I feel. So there you are. You have to trust me now ’cause you know how important money is to me.” The tears had completely stopped; Em was now hoping that Jana would give credence to what she’d said and believe that she would no longer involve herself with criminals.

  Jana opened the pouch. There were U.S. dollars inside. She counted them. She counted fifteen hundred dollars in the pouch. Jana tucked the money back in.

  “You get paid very well for what you do,” she observed.

  “For what I did,” Em corrected. “U.S. dollars. I always insist on U.S. dollars. You can spend them anywhere.” She puffed up with pride. “It shows you what the man who paid me that money thinks of what I do. Otherwise he wouldn’t take the trouble to pay me like that.”

  Jana knew, in her heart of hearts, that she was being manipulated. But an inner voice kept urging her to accept what the girl told her, to believe that Em was finished with the business of being a courier for criminals, that she would be honest with Jana. One more time, bullied the voice. Just this last time.

  “One more time, just this last time,” Jana told Em, echoing the inner voice. “No more chances after this.”

  “We won’t need any other chances,” Em giggled, wiping a last tear that had clung to her chin. “So, what do we do next while we’re both in Berlin?”

  “Why do you think there’s a ‘next’ thing?”

  “There has to be a next thing. You’re still working on the crime. I read the book. You’re the detective. You have things to do.”

  “Nothing tonight. We eat; then we go to bed. Then I decide what I do tomorrow.”

  “I want to go to the zoo.”

  Jana couldn’t quite believe that this was what Em wanted. She asked, just to make sure. “The zoo?”

  “I’ve never been to a zoo,” Em explained, shy now, a very little girl. “I want to see the animals.”

  “We’ll see,” Jana told her, realizing that she sounded like a harried mother with her small child. In a way, she was pleased with that picture in her mind.

  They went downstairs, ate in the hotel restaurant, then went back up to the room. They shared the bed. Before she drifted off to sleep, Jana decided, whatever else came up tomorrow, she and Em were going to the zoo.

  Chapter 35

  They both woke up early, Em declaring loudly that she was hungry. Before they went downstairs to the hotel dining area, Em noticed a red neck scarf with Jana’s clothing and decided to borrow it. She swung it around her neck, checking herself in the room’s full-length mirror. Jana pointed out that it was too long for the girl’s body. With a trace of hauteur, Em looped it around her neck one extra time, shortening it and, at the same time, giving it—and herself—the right touch of panache. Even her posture changed, Em’s face now bearing a prouder look, a bit of a strut in her walk.

  Em carried the look onto the elevator and into the dining room, modifying it only slightly when she went on a sampling expedition through most of the dishes on the food tables, piling items on her plate. Teenagers eat a lot, and Em was a living example of the species, eating far more than Jana thought could be humanly possible, especially considering the girl’s size. Em chatted away between bites, telling Jana about what she wanted to see at the zoo.

  Her highest priority was to see the tigers, then the hippos, then the poisonous snakes, with maybe the giraffes, lions, and elephants thrown in if there was time. She subsequently added the bears and the wolves to her list. Em also showed a remarkable knowledge of the Zoologischer Garten, as if she had studied its layout. In scholarly detail, she went on about the zoo’s architectural oddities, its 14,000-plus creatures, its magnificent aquarium, the Elephant Gate, blathering on until Jana felt like she was in the audience at a lecture. She began to eventually let the words go in one ear and out the other while she internally ran through the items that she needed to complete for the investigation after the zoo visit and before she left Berlin to return to Bratislava.

  Tracking the financial movements of the Bogans was now becoming paramount. She decided to call her fraud investigator and see what progress he’d made. If the Bogans were changing their business location, they would shift their bank accounts to give them easy, quick access to a cash supply. The movement of the accounts might also tell Jana the Bogans’ new residences. Banks require addresses and phone numbers for setting up new accounts. The Bogans wouldn’t take the chance of listing false addresses. If they were discovered, that would suggest the possibility of money-laundering, and the authorities would be sure to investigate. Jana also had to talk to the German police to find out if they had had any l
uck in tracking Balder, the dead Akso’s partner. Or in learning what Akso had been doing over the past weeks. Perhaps he and Balder had made ticket purchases, used credit cards, or written checks that might have been processed through a source usable for tracking.

  Jana had now been targeted twice by shooters, once in Vienna and then in Berlin. She was also sure that when the man with the chestnut birthmark on his face had come into the bar where she’d been sitting with Albrecht Konrad, it had been for the purpose of setting up another assassination attempt, which would have been triggered if she and Konrad had followed him out of the bar. The facts pointed to Akso and Balder working together with the birthmarked man. Jana had to talk to the Germans about that connection and the connections between those three men and Ayden Yunis, the Turkish godfather. There was also one festering sore for Jana, the one source that she was currently precluded from talking to—the BKA. She made a small emendation to that thought: she was also closed off from getting information from some of her own people. Truchanova had made that very clear.

  Em’s patter began to run down. Jana waited for her to finish, and then the two of them got up from the table. Jana suggested that they take a cab, but Em objected, a little huffily. As far as she was concerned, they could get there without spending their money on a taxi. She knew “exactly” how to get to the zoo, and she wanted to experience the underground. Besides, Em pointed out, it wouldn’t be traceable later if they took public transportation, and judging by what she’d divined from reading the murder book, it would be better for them not to leave too much of a trail.

  “You see,” Em said very proudly to Jana, “I’m helping. Maybe I’ll even be able to save our lives.”

  “I’m the police officer,” Jana reminded her.

  “Even police officers need partners,” Em retorted self-righteously.

  “Only when the partners are grown up,” said Jana, enjoying the irrational thought of the girl being her partner.

  They took the U-Bahn from the station near the hotel. Em was excited, finding it almost impossible to stay in her seat. The girl had been on trains before; she said she’d come from Slovakia by train; so it seemed odd to Jana that she took so much pleasure from riding the underground rail.

  “How come you wanted to go on the U-Bahn so badly?” Jana asked.

  “I just enjoy wearing colors.”

  The answer didn’t fit the question.

  “Colors?”

  “I’m not just on a train. I’m free today. I can do anything. I can wear bright clothes. I can talk and shout and scream if I want to. That’s what I mean.”

  She gave an experimental shriek, everyone in the train car jumping at the sound. Most of them stared at Em as if she were some type of lunatic, wondering if they should get off at the next stop to escape her.

  “See what I mean?” Em whispered. “Most times when I take trains or whatever, I have to watch how I act. Loud colors can’t be worn. Today I can do it all.” She flipped the ends of the bright red scarf on her neck to emphasize her point.

  Em watched the tunnel walls go by, mesmerized by their flow past the window. Then she began to talk again as if she hadn’t stopped, except the emotional tone in her voice was coming from another place, a place that was not happy.

  “You stay in your seat. You never make eye contact with people. You pretend like you belong wherever you are, even though you’ve never been there before. You can’t look like you’re lost or worried about getting where you’re going. You watch your hands. Keep them still. Act like you belong. You have to be like everyone else, except you’re hiding the real you inside yourself. It’s important to just be a continuation of them, one more gray person. If you’re one of them, you’re invisible.”

  “It must be hard.”

  “Some things are harder.”

  “Is this what you do when you’re ‘delivering’ something?”

  “Everyone has their own way to do jobs. Those are some of mine. Just tools.” She quickly modified what she’d said. “Well, they were some of my tools until I gave up the job.”

  “Who taught you your job?”

  “I’m not allowed to say.” Em suddenly became fascinated with the way the train was going around a curve, the cars ahead a long serpentine shape weaving its way through the S-shaped tunnel. “Look at the train. What it’s doing now is part of what you have to do all the time.”

  “What?”

  “If you want to live and stay alive in the world, you have to curve around and slip your way through.”

  “More lessons from the man who taught you?”

  “I never said it was a man.”

  “A woman? Your mother?”

  “From the woman who said she was my mother.”

  “Your father came for you in Bratislava. He was late, but he came. Or was the man who came just your employer? Would you have liked him to be your father?”

  Em was silent.

  Jana decided not to press the girl. “I guess we’ll have to figure out something else when we get back to Bratislava.” She didn’t want to articulate it, but it had to be understood. “You’ll have to think about it.”

  “Yes.”

  Jana took another approach. “You knew all about the zoo, how to get there and everything. You must have read up on it before you came to Berlin.”

  “If you’re a traveler, you have to know. So I found out.”

  “Gypsies often call themselves travelers. Are you a gypsy?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “I’m asking again.”

  “Gypsies don’t belong. I belong.”

  “To whom?”

  “To myself.”

  The train reached the station at the intersection of Budapester Strasse and Hardenbergplatz, near the hospital area where Jana had been the day before. It was at the rim of the zoo and its surrounding gardens, and a large number of passengers disembarked, jamming the station with foot traffic. The two of them walked up and out of the U-Bahn, Em twirling one of the ends of the red scarf as they made their way to the entrance of the zoo. Passersby smiled, amused at her joie de vivre and the pleasure she seemed to take in just being there. It was nice for them, as well as for her.

  Jana scanned the passengers debarking from the U-Bahn, then checked the area around them. There seemed to be no threats, no one following them. Maybe it had been a good idea to come to the zoo today, she told herself. She deserved a pleasurable day off. She’d been shot and even then hadn’t taken a day off. And, in Berlin, she had not allowed herself time to take a deep breath. It was time to breathe again, if just for a brief while, and this was a good place to do it. Everyone was here to have an enjoyable time. The sun was out and the cold abated to a degree, even the weather conspiring to make it a very agreeable outing. They reached the ticket booths and Jana paid their admission.

  “We’re going to have fun,” Em informed her.

  “Absolutely,” Jana agreed.

  They did have fun, taking in the hippos and the giraffes and the lions. Em was pleased that none of the caged animals gave them a mean look. The animals felt safe, away from people behind their bars; and Jana and Em, on their own side of the bars, were safe from the animals.

  But not safe from the humans.

  Jana saw the men watching them. It was the same two who had followed her the day before. Although she had relaxed, Jana continued to frequently eye-check the surroundings. Even so, she’d been careless, caught up in the fun of the moment, and hadn’t seen them. She immediately looked for escape routes, thinking she had to protect Em. Em would be at risk simply by being with her.

  Jana tried to maintain her composure. Even though Konrad had not heard about police officers being assigned to follow her, he had been in the hospital; considering the events surrounding his shooting, one section or other of the German police, or even the BKA, might have assigned men to keep tabs on her. That would explain the presence of the shadows.

  The two men were standing at a Y-juncture
behind them, effectively blocking the way to the south and the Elephant Gate entrance, as well as the way to where they’d come in, the Lowenter entrance. Going east was their only option; then they’d have to go north past the zebra compound and make a circle back to where they’d entered. Once they got out of the enclosed zoo area, Jana would feel a lot better: there would be room to maneuver.

  “Em, time to take a fast trip around the circle,” Jana said.

  She took Em’s hand, forced to pull the reluctant girl away from her enjoyment of the pandas. Em protested that she wanted to stay longer.

  “We have a problem, Em. There are some men behind us that I’m not sure about.”

  “Killers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Em didn’t show the slightest glimmer of fear. She glanced back. “The two ugly men?”

  “Yes,” Jana confirmed.

  “I always wanted to know what a murderer looked like. Can you tell what they are just by looking at them?”

  “No one can. If we could tell, we’d be able to stop people from killing one another.”

  Em appeared strangely excited that the men were following them, involved in a game that, as a child, she didn’t quite understand. She seemed to see it as a sort of hide-and-seek, with both Jana and her needing to find a hiding place from the men who were trying to tag them. She became the leader, pulling Jana along.

  “This is even better than I thought,” Em crowed.

  “Em, we may be in serious danger.”

  “Not yet. They’re not close enough.”

  Jana took a brief look back. The two men were keeping pace with them, just as they had the day before. And farther behind them, keeping pace as well, was their shadow, the man who had been trailing after the two men when they had tracked her the previous day.

  “There is someone else as well,” Jana told Em.

  Em sneaked a quick peek back. “I don’t see him.”

  “Stop gawking back at them.”

  “I’m not gawking,” she snapped, then realized she had been sharp to Jana, softening her tone. “What does he look like?”