Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

  “You can’t make out features from this distance.”

  They crossed a small arched bridge over the seal pond, cutting to the left around the penguin house, approaching a refreshment area where there were food stands and a bathroom.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Em informed Jana.

  “Try to hold it,” Jana said.

  “I have to go now,” Em complained, quite emphatic in her demand.

  Jana checked to see how close the two men were. As they had done yesterday, the two were keeping their distance. If they maintained that gap, there was no danger; and since they were after Jana, there would be even less danger to Em if she were in the shelter of the WC.

  “Quickly, then,” Jana told her.

  Em trotted over to the bathroom, Jana keeping a cautious eye on the men behind her. They had stopped, but the man keeping track of the other two watchers appeared to have moved closer, slipping through the crowd, using it as cover. The men he was closing in on still had no idea that they were themselves the subjects of surveillance.

  Em came out of the WC smiling, unafraid, taking Jana’s hand. “I’m hungry. Let’s get a sausage.”

  “You ate a huge breakfast.”

  “I’m a growing person.”

  “Okay, but we walk to the gate while we’re eating.”

  “Walk and eat?” Em complained.

  “Walk and eat,” Jana insisted.

  “Actually, any time is a good time to eat sausage, walking or whatever.”

  They ambled to the other side of the building, where refreshments were served. Jana ordered a sausage and two sodas. Just as she was handed the sausage, she saw Ayden Yunis with one of his bodyguards from the bakery next to him. Both men were staring at her and Em from not more than six meters away. Jana dropped the sausage and, purely by reflex, swept a protesting Em behind her, reaching for her gun. Even as she was pulling out her weapon, Yunis shifted his attention from her. The two men who had been following Jana had come around the corner of the building with their guns out.

  Yunis and his bodyguard darted for cover, drawing their own weapons. Jana pulled Em to the ground, covering her with her own body as gunfire began, the two watchers engaged in a firefight with Yunis and his bodyguard. The people in the refreshment area went wild, running, screaming, trying to drag their children to safety, even crossing the line of fire, not sure where the bullets were coming from, all of them desperate to get away. Jana held her fire, afraid she would hit bystanders, hoping that it would end with her police watchers winning the fight. A stray thought crossed her mind: if her apparent guardians kept up this kind of firefight, they might kill an innocent person. All police are trained not to shoot under circumstances like these. They were ignoring their police training.

  In the flickering chaos of people running, shots going back and forth, and screams of panic, Jana thought she caught a glimpse of the man who had been tailing them all, looking very contained, almost aloof, slipping through the crowd with his own gun in his hand.

  Then, as if an on-off switch had been thrown, the firing stopped.

  Jana was still holding Em close, the two of them face to face. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Em said, no fear in her eyes, just excitement. “Did you shoot anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Why too bad?”

  “I could talk about it to people I know. It adds to the story.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t shoot anyone.” Jana was amazed at the girl’s continued lack of fear. “You’re not afraid?”

  “I knew we’d be all right,” she explained. “It’s nothing to be panicked about. I have a guardian angel.”

  “I’m not a guardian angel,” Jana told her.

  “You’re not a guardian angel,” Em agreed, without the slightest change of affect.

  “Stay down,” Jana told her. “I’m going to see what’s happened.”

  Jana got to her feet, tucking her gun away. Guards from the zoo began running into the square, coming to everyone’s aid just a few minutes too late. Jana moved slowly, checking out the area. Yunis and his bodyguard were dead, both facedown on the ground. A short distance away from them were the two men who’d been tailing Jana. They had also both been shot, one of them dead, the other coughing up blood, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Jana bent closer to see if she could give him any aid, but he died before Jana could do anything for him.

  Three bystanders had been shot, two women and a man, all of whom had been bringing their children to the zoo for the first times in their lives, each woman with a child, the man with his three sons. The two women had superficial wounds; the man shot in the side was bleeding badly. Jana took a scarf from a protesting bystander and shoved it under the injured man’s shirt over the wound and used his belt to keep the scarf tight against him. As soon as she had finished tending to the man, she heard ambulance and police sirens approaching.

  Jana looked around for the shadow man, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  A moment later, the police began arriving en masse, the ambulances a few moments after that. Jana walked back to Em to wait for the police to get around to questioning her.

  “Shouldn’t we leave?” Em suggested. “If we stay, they’ll only arrest us.”

  “They need to know what happened. I can tell them.”

  “It won’t help them find the reason.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Do you know the reason for the fight?”

  “No …”

  “Then how can you help them?”

  “If I can’t help them, maybe they can help me.”

  “Maybe.” There was a strong sense of doubt in Em’s voice. “If you talk to them, they’ll find out you have a gun.”

  “So?”

  “They’ll take it away from you.”

  “Probably.”

  “Then you might want to give it to me to hold. They won’t search me.”

  “I thought you had given up crime.”

  “Umm, I guess I forgot.”

  “Stop forgetting.”

  Ten minutes later, Jana talked to the police, and ten minutes after that the two of them were being transported to the main police station. Em was right: Jana’s gun was taken away from her.

  It did not make her happy.

  Chapter 36

  Jana and Em spent the first two hours with men from Die Kripo, the criminal police; the next two with the BKA; then they were questioned by both agencies together. The police separated Jana and Em, questioned each of them, then brought both of them into one room to confront them with “inconsistencies” in their separate statements. The differences in their statements turned out to be minuscule. The questioners of both agencies tried to make Jana out to be a party to the shootings, suggesting that perhaps she had lured Yunis to his death. But Jana’s gun hadn’t been fired recently, and there was also the undeniable fact that the two men who had shot it out with Yunis were German police officers, police officers who had not been detailed to follow Jana or the now dead Turks. The dead officers were from Munich. When the Munich police were called, no one in the department had known that they had been in Berlin for the past two days, nor did they have any idea what they were doing following Jana.

  The Germans became more polite over the course of the day, particularly after Jana suggested some leads to follow up on. Even the BKA listened eagerly to what she had to say. There is nothing like a shootout in a public zoo, a place crowded with families, with parents shot and children being put at risk, to create an outcry and media frenzy. The media would focus on the police and their failure to protect the public. The fear of this imminent attack propelled the police into trying avenues they would ordinarily ignore, even if they were Slovak avenues.

  Jana began talking about what needed to be done.

  “Yunis had a bank and unquestionably accounts in the bank. Get the records on them. Track any financial connection between him, Balder, Akso, and M
urat Tabib, the Turk who was killed in Bratislava. Also, see if there were any transactions between any of them and the Bogans or Radomir Kralik. Where have the dead Akso and the still at-large Balder been over the course of the past month?”

  Jana continued in this vein, an investigation manual for the other officers. Did Akso or Balder have credit accounts? The accounts might give them a clue as to what the two men were involved in. Most particularly, Jana suggested, see if they had purchased any rifles. Also, the two Bogans had moved from Berlin. They either had accounts in France, or would be establishing accounts in France soon. The German police had to find them and track where all their payments and receipts went. Jana also strongly suggested that they connect with Lubos Papanek, her fraud investigator. He was working on the Viennese bank and might have found something.

  Jana didn’t wait for their agreement on this, immediately calling Papanek and informing him that he was to cooperate and exchange information with the Germans.

  “Time to communicate with each other, gentlemen,” she advised, all of them listening to the exchange with Papanek on a speakerphone. After the initial exchange of information, and the task allocations that ensued, Jana pointed out an issue that all the Germans were trying to ignore.

  “Your two Munich cops who were killed at the zoo were dirty, gentlemen. Both of them bought and sold. They were there to kill either me or the Turkish godfather. Take your pick on the target. I’d opt for the Turkish godfather, since we have two dead Turks and one live Slovak police commander. But, examine both possibilities.”

  There was a general mix of foot-shuffling, downcast heads, and angry murmurs, all from the German police, all of them agreeing on the same conclusion: the dead German officers had probably come to the zoo knowing the Turk was going to be there, planning to kill him.

  Jana felt a surge of anxiety. How had they known Ayden Yunis was going to be there? And, just as intriguing, why had Yunis even been at the zoo? Jana had no answers to either question. She hoped that the follow-up investigation the Germans were going to perform might fill some of the gaps left in her own investigation.

  As the meeting wound down, Jana made one more attempt to get the piece of information that the German police and Truchanova had refused to give her before. She told the Kripo officers and the BKA that she had concluded that something was being withheld from her on the Bogan case. What had happened in Berlin was related to what had happened in Bratislava. Now that all the agencies involved had agreed to cooperate, wouldn’t it be nice if they gave her the information they were withholding? She wanted to know what it was.

  The criminal police looked blank; the BKA officers looked evasive. No question, the BKA was withholding information, and no amount of threatening, cajoling, or just plain pleading would get it out of them. Jana gave up. She would have to find the information on her own.

  Besides the coordination between Jana’s team and the German agencies, there was one other positive thing that came out of the long afternoon: the police returned the gun Jakus had loaned her. It had not been involved in a crime. They would close one eye to the fact that she should not have had a gun in her possession in their country. However, as to her own gun, they apologized profusely, informing her that it was still evidence in the assault on Albrecht Konrad, as well as in the death of one of the assailants, so they would continue to hold on to it. Jana was going to have to buy herself a new gun when she got back to Bratislava.

  Jana and Em were released a short time after that.

  They started back to the hotel, Em now hungrier than ever, complaining that all she’d had to eat while being held by the police was one stale pastry and a vending-machine chocolate bar. They stopped at a small restaurant near the hotel. It was a decent-looking café with thick wood furniture and chintz curtains on the window, somewhat better-looking than the plastic-on-plastic places nearby. The restaurant had a typically hearty mid-European menu posted next to the front door.

  Em ordered a huge meal.

  They were seated in a booth, Jana facing the entrance, the first course of the meal being placed on the table, when she caught a glimpse through the front-door window of a man just as he was turning away. He could have just been a potential customer who had decided not to eat at the restaurant after all; but he resembled the phantom shadow who had been trailing her for days. Given her state of mind, that was all Jana needed to propel her into action. She jumped to her feet, pulling out her gun at the same time, and ran to the door, losing precious seconds having to push her way past a couple who were just coming in.

  Jana checked up and down the street, and even ran into traffic to get a longer, clearer view of the early evening crowd. There was no one even approximating the look of the man who had been following them, the last man standing in the shootout at the zoo. Jana quickly tucked her gun away, then walked back into the restaurant, taking her seat across from Em, who was very busy devouring her food.

  “He wasn’t there, was he?” Em said, her words barely audible through her mouthful of food.

  “Who wasn’t there?” Jana asked.

  “The other man who was following them.”

  “No, he wasn’t there,” Jana acknowledged.

  Em stuffed a large piece of veal into her mouth.

  “You’re going to choke on your food,” Jana warned.

  “No, I’m not,” Em got out between chews. She swallowed most of the food in her mouth, easing it down with a few gulps of water.

  “Are you going to shoot him when you see him?” Em eyed Jana over the rim of her glass. “The police won’t like it if you do.”

  “I don’t shoot anyone unless I have to.”

  “Like the man the police said you killed the other day.”

  “They told you about that?”

  “They asked me if I knew anything about it. I told them I didn’t.”

  “He was trying to kill me,” Jana explained. “There was no other choice.”

  “Of course not.” Em stuffed a large chunk of potato pancake into her mouth. “I just wanted to know if you would kill the man who followed us if he didn’t have a gun and didn’t try to kill you or me.”

  “It wouldn’t be right to kill him under those circumstances,” Jana told Em.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I’ll be sure to tell him the next time I see him.”

  Jana stared at Em, not quite sure if she was serious or not. The girl had an impish look on her face, enjoying Jana’s reaction. She began to chuckle. Then she laughed louder, the strength of her laughter forcing some of the food out of her mouth.

  “I was only joking,” Em finally got out. “Just being funny.” She cleaned her face off with a napkin, then wiped her plate with the last of her pancake and filled her mouth with it. “I lie great, don’t I? I’m just a great pretender.”

  Jana nodded. “A great pretender.”

  Jana realized she wasn’t very hungry. Days like today had a way of destroying appetites.

  Em ordered a double serving of ice cream to finish off the meal.

  Chapter 37

  You can’t do business unless someone wants to do business with you. So businesses advertise, or do other things to create product awareness. Customers have to know about what’s being offered. It’s the same with banks and their services.

  Jana went to several German banks to determine if they had heard of any effort to set up a credit card system for banks. Everyone she talked to denigrated the concept, all the bank representatives informing her that they had never been approached by the Bogans’ banking venture about their credit card system. None of them had any idea that the business even existed. One of the bank representatives suggested that Jana consult the Bankenverband, the Association of German Banks. Their main offices were located in Berlin just a short distance away. They would know everything that was going on in the German banking business.

  Jana and Em enjoyed the walk between the last bank they’d visited and the bank association headquarters, window-shopping at th
e clothing stores along the way, chatting about the fashions and Em’s particular interest in earrings. Jana was happy. She and Em seemed to be bonding, and Jana was thinking that she might even have a permanent presence in the girl’s life, and Em in hers. She was somewhat sorry to reach the headquarters of the Bankenverband on Bergstrasse. The walk and the closeness between herself and Em had given her a lot of pleasure.

  The people at the association were even more cooperative than the people at the individual banks, sensitive to any issue involving criminality that might reflect on the association’s members. They’d never heard of the credit card program. They even insisted on calling the European Banking Federation in Brussels to see if the central organization had ever been made aware of the concept. Again, they knew nothing.

  “What have you learned?” Em optimistically inquired as they left Bankenverband. “Have you figured out why everyone is being shot?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “There are too many possibilities. The Bogans’ company may not have its basic premise developed enough to be marketed. It may be in the process of being marketed to small institutions that aren’t informing anyone else in the business about what they’re doing. Then again, it just may be just some kind of cover for another practice.”

  They began walking along the street, window-shopping again.

  “What kind of practice?” Em asked.

  “Criminal practice.”

  “Like stealing money?”

  “Criminals steal money,” Jana affirmed.

  “I know that’s true,” Em commented, sounding sage.

  “Did you steal?”

  “Once or twice. Except it was bad for my business, so I stopped. People, even thieves, need to trust someone. I couldn’t be a traveler, running chores from one place or another, if they didn’t trust me. Besides, if you cheat criminals, they get mad.”

  Jana did one of her visual checks of the street. Em recognized what she was doing.

  “The man who was following us at the zoo isn’t there,” Em said. “I’ve been checking.”