Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation

by Michael Genelin

  The play would be about unity: unity in the family leading to unity in the country and the world. It would fit in with the current SSR concept of a unified republic, and when the writing and staging problems had been worked out in Bratislava they would take the play on the road to Prague. It was the next step for his acting career, said Dano breathlessly, and he had invited the playwright to their apartment. Jana and her mother were to provide the meal.

  It was a wife’s duty to help her husband, so Jana, despite the increasing caseload and responsibilities she was taking on in her own job, accepted the task. When the day came, Jana bought the wine and, with the rare good fortune that crime had taken a day off, she managed to get home early, in time to aid her mother. Together, they made a number of Slovak and Czech dishes to carry out the theme of the play.

  Except that, when the playwright arrived, he came without Dano, but with an entourage of eight people whom Dano had neglected to tell Jana about. Adjustment time. She and her mother made do, her mother scrambling to the neighbors to borrow this and that, additional silverware and crockery to supplement their meager supply. All the while, their guests smoked up a visible, acrid haze which invaded every corner of the apartment. Every thirty seconds, Jana would run to the phone, trying to find out why Dano was not there.

  He arrived an hour late, with two other actor friends in tow, as well as a man who claimed to be a director, and who was, in fact, Zibinova’s informant, the secret police officer from the cast party. Jana was angry with Dano for being late; she was more afraid than angry when she saw the director. Everything that was said or done that evening would appear in a report and become part of their dossier.

  Dano, making up for being late, was even more charming than usual. He apologized to everyone individually, claiming that the artistic director of the National Theatre had insisted on talking to him about their new season, indicating the roles he thought Dano was suitable for. Dano said he had laughed at the man. Time for me to think of Prague, he had informed the artistic director; time for me to develop my own vehicles. He left the man, Dano said, with his own vision, the one that Dano held of his personal future. He was now no longer sure that he would take any of the roles the National Theatre had just offered since, as Dano put it, he was the “premier young actor in Slovakia.”

  His apartment audience, particularly the Czech playwright, cheered Dano on, all of them gabbling about the need for change in the system, a change that would give the actors more choice of the roles they were asked to play and of the plays themselves.

  While Dano and the others talked, Jana watched the agent provocateur, knowing he was taking mental notes of who was saying what and who was agreeing. The fat weasel would nod, and smile, stimulating more and more extravagant statements.

  Jana could no longer tolerate her anticipation of the terrible mischief that might be generated by the viper they had taken into their apartment. She pulled Dano from his audience, not an easy task with an actor who has had too much to drink.

  She half-dragged her husband into the bathroom, locking the door. Dano misunderstood her actions. “If you are still angry with me for being late, I apologize again, my sweet, sweet wife.” He began giving Jana little kisses on the forehead, mouth, ears, eyelids, neck, shoulders, and hands, only stopping when she pushed him away. “Look at us,” he joked. “All alone in the bathroom. A wonderful opportunity for us both, and my wife pushes me away.”

  “You know I love you?” Jana said. Dano started to come closer. She held him off with a straightarm. “Listen to me, Dano. I need a promise from you.”

  “I promise never to be late again.” He tried edging around her arm, then used her arm to pull her closer. “I’m trying to make up.”

  “What I tell you now, you have to promise to tell no one else at this party, or afterward.”

  Dano only half-listened to her, preoccupied with his friends in the other room. “I have to get back to the party. They will be asking for the host.” He tried to unlock the door. Jana held it shut.

  “I need that promise, Dano.”

  “Promises, promises, always promises.” He touched his forefinger to his lips, then the same finger to her lips. “For you, I promise.”

  Jana relaxed slightly at his seeming willingness to keep his word. “You will say nothing?”

  Dano was now impatient. “I promised. When have I ever broken a promise to you?” He tried to push past her and out of the bathroom. Jana held up her hands, palms out.

  “All right, Dano.” At that moment she wished she had never become a police officer. “There is an informant here.” Dano looked at her not quite comprehending. “There is a Secret Police informant here among our guests.”

  Comprehension set in. Dano pulled away from her, his face registering both anger and fear. “Why here?”

  “Why not here? They are everywhere.” She again tried to impress on him the necessity of keeping the informant’s presence a secret. “The Secret Police are aware that I know him. If you do anything to let on that you know, or tell anyone else, or try to do anything to him, they will take measures against you, and me. And my mother. You understand?” Dano’s eyes had lost their focus. Jana shook him to emphasize the seriousness of his promise. “You know nothing!”

  When they returned to their guests, things seemed to go well at first. The playwright was holding forth on the concept of his play; Dano let the man hold center stage. But Dano’s silence and his heavy, continuous drinking were not like him. She could see the tension building. Only when Dano left the room could she relax, even if for a few minutes. Good, she told herself; they would get through the evening without more damage. The tension would ease overnight, and she and Dano could discuss their circumstances and how to deal with them in the morning after they’d had their night’s sleep and were fresh and open. But when Dano walked back into the room, he held Jana’s service automatic in his hand.

  Before Jana could do anything, Dano had walked over to the agent provocateur and put the gun to his head. There was a silence, then nervous giggles, a few of the guests thinking this was a part of a performance. The little man with the gun to his head was initially a statue, afraid to move, afraid not to move. Then a tremor began building from his legs, his feet jiggled, then tremors went through his stomach, chest, shoulders, and up to his eyes, which began to tear. The longer Dano remained silent and the longer the gun was held to the man’s head, the more pronounced the fat man’s trembling was and the more his tears flowed.

  Jana slowly rose, preparing to walk over to Dano and take the automatic from his hand, when he cocked the gun. She froze, as did everyone else, all of them becoming aware that this was a real-life event and not a piece of theater. Their focus was now on the pistol, eyes fixed on Dano’s hand, waiting for his finger to pull the trigger.

  Dano placed his face close to the informant’s. “Get up.” The man struggled to his feet, wobbling and weaving, his body shaking more than ever. “You are to walk to the door. When you get to the door, you are to leave this house, this city, and the theater. There is no place for you.” Dano waited a moment, to let the words sink in. “You understand?”

  The agent provocateur nodded, managing to take a few little steps in a jerky start, than began a staggering run to the door, and out.

  Jana slowly walked over to Dano, who had not bothered to look up when the little man had left, took the gun from Dano’s hand, and uncocked it.

  Eventually, he looked at her. “I broke my promise, didn’t I?”

  Chapter 12

  The plane was late arriving in Bratislava. Nothing new. However, this one was long past its estimated arrival time. They had bumped through the air pockets, the pilot trying to make up time. As usual, the late arrival was due to a delayed departure from Kiev. The passengers had been forced to sit in the plane on the runway at the Kiev airport while additional defrosting of the plane’s wings and engines was completed. The wait had given Jana time to think.

  Mikail had told J
ana that Grisko had gone into a melt-down worse than the one at Chernobyl. His club being destroyed was secondary to the belief that he had now been targeted by Koba. All the man could think of, as he raged through police headquarters, was that he could no longer walk down the street for fear he would get an ice pick in his eye or a bullet in the back of his head.

  Grisko had remembered other stories about Makine, the man who had become the legend called Koba, some of them so vividly related by Grisko to Mikhail and passed on to Jana that they now came up again and again in her own memory: Koba had dismembered one of his rivals, cutting off an arm, a leg, his nose, all while the man was still alive; another, about cutting off one his prostitutes’ breasts when she tried to hold money back from him; the third, about Koba walking into a rival’s apartment, and when he came out the man’s infant son and two-year-old daughter had both been raped while his rival was forced to watch.

  What kind of a man had Koba been? No, what kind of a man was he still? A man? No, a creature bred from the netherworld whose sole task was to make people regret that they were alive. Was this creature still living? Still robbing the world of its security, its sanity? And where was he now, this minute? On the plane with her? Even though the seat next to her held an old woman in a babushka, Koba’s spoor contaminated that seat, and the one in front and in back. And why had Koba chosen to reappear and follow her to Ukraine? How had he known she was going there?

  The day after the attack, Grisko slept in his office in police headquarters with the door locked. Even after Grisko’s subordinates informed their chief about their boss’s crazed behavior, Grisko refused to open his door to his supervisor. It took an hour-long plea by the man to convince Grisko that he was not an agent of Koba.

  The hysteria did aid the investigation in one way: The other officers were moved sufficiently to give a semblance of help. They brought in those who were believed to be former associates of Koba, all of whom were shown the photograph of the man and asked to identify him. Each one reacted with fear. They yelled, cried, growled, and squealed that they had never seen the man before, never heard his name before, and had no information they could give to the police.

  No additional leads were developed, and no further evidence resulted from the inquiries, with the exception of the belief that Koba had been some kind of dread presence in their lives and still existed inside them in a twisted, monstrous way.

  Some cities are just dirty. Others are more than dirty, they are unclean in a spiritual way. Jana was convinced Kiev was now one of the latter, the cracked, grimy buildings sinking deeper into a dreadful swamp that was rising up to engulf every part of it. And its inhabitants were warped people, shuffling through the grubby streets, becoming more and more like the ruins they trudged through.

  Jana was glad to be out of there, glad to be returning to Bratislava and the fresh, clean snow on the airport tarmac. Trokan was waiting for her in the terminal. He immediately caught her mood, and they sat in silence for most of the drive to the city. About halfway there, she realized that he was taking her home instead of to police headquarters.

  “I thought you wanted me to write up my report.”

  “Sleep, then the report.” They continued to sit in silence until they glided to a stop in front of her house. “I am now taking care of your blind cats.”

  “My brilliant aide was supposed to feed them.”

  “He is sightless himself. Besides, he knows nothing about cats, much less blind ones,” Trokan allowed. “Animals need nurturing.”

  She smiled. “What do you know about cats?”

  “Nothing.” He thought about it for a moment longer. “They remind me of you, so better in my hands than his.”

  They reminded him of her? A new Trokan riddle. Always surprising her; always surprising his other troops. He liked to keep them slightly off-balance before making his point. “I may not be blind,” she pointed out. “However, I may be obtuse. Please explain the comparison.”

  Trokan waited until they were fully parked, then he emphatically hit the automatic trunk release preparatory to retrieving her luggage. “The cats, they never saw my office before I took them there. But they are beginning to find their way around using smell, hearing, touch, memory.”

  “So, on this case I am feeling my way around? Bumping into the furniture? The bombing of the club is like the cats crashing into your desk chair? If so, just a little bump.”

  “A large bump.”

  “Okay, a large bump.”

  “Did it frighten you?”

  “Bombs scare everyone, me included.”

  “Good. You are still in touch with yourself. So are the cats when they go bump in their perpetual night. Despite the bumps, the cats keep trying, and so do you. I am amazed at them; I am amazed at you.”

  “Bumps are a part of being a police officer. A part of life. We both know this.”

  “I can take you off this case. Do you want that?”

  She shrugged. “Like the blind cats, I want to continue.”

  In Trokan’s mind, victims deserved at least a small reason, an explication given for their murders. Some deaths required more of an explanation, required a more complete investigation and a more competent, caring investigator. The bombing had not destroyed Jana’s desire to get to the bottom of all these deaths. Jana was still whole. She was still the investigator for this case.

  Trokan relaxed. “Maybe you are not a blind cat after all; then again, maybe it is not so hard, being blind.” He exited the car, pulling her bags from the trunk, placing them at the beginning of her walk. Jana continued to sit in the car, staring down the block. Trokan checked to see what she was looking at. There was nothing unusual to see, so he walked over to her door and opened it.

  “Time to stop thinking and go to bed. Sleep is good for the soul, and your soul has been up for a few days too many.”

  Jana finally focused on Trokan. “We questioned the employees, the bar girls, the musicians. The manager said he had received a phone call from Grisko before he came to the club that night. Grisko was suffering from a cold, so his voice was hoarse. Grisko, or the man pretending he was Grisko, told the manager to have all the employees, everyone, leave the club when he came to my table to talk with me.

  “The manager said he knew enough not to question Grisko, so that was exactly what he had everyone do. Grisko swore he’d said no such thing. I believe him. He was too frightened to be lying; I also believed the manager.”

  Jana slid out of the car, again looking down the block, checking the street, looking for anyone performing surveillance on her house. Trokan, trying to reassure her, joked, “I don’t think the mad bomber is spying on this street right now. Too many nosy neighbors. The broom brigade would be after him in minutes.”

  “I want to try an experiment with you.”

  “It depends on the nature of the experiment. I am getting too old to try certain things.”

  “I would like you to run to the middle of the next block as fast as you can.”

  He eyed her, skeptical about her motives. “I am a police colonel. Have you noticed the fat around my middle? It comes with my desk. People expect me to live at my desk. If I do what you ask, they will think I have gone crazy and will report me to the minister.”

  “Okay, then. I want you to time me. Start when I say ‘Go.’ After that, wait until I raise my hand and yell. I want you to note the time from beginning to end.”

  “I hereby declare you officially crazy. However, I will humor you, Matinova.” He focused on his watch. “Any time.”

  Jana took a breath. “Now!” she yelled, and started running, reached the corner, crossed the street without looking, and ran another ten meters. Then she turned around, crouching, her eyes shut.

  Trokan began silently counting the minutes off. At two and a half minutes Jana was erect again, taking a few steps, slowly at first, then striding, before she suddenly stopped. Her arm went up and she shouted “Time” to him. Trokan checked his watch as Jana jogged bac
k to him.

  “How long?”

  “Three and a half minutes. So, the reason?”

  “Grisko and I ran out of the club to where we stopped, then waited. Then Grisko began to walk back to his club. Then came the explosion.”

  “And the reason for timing the actions?”

  She picked up her bag. “Why did the blast come after we left the club?”

  “Bad timing when they set the bomb.”

  “I disagree. Grisko is notoriously late. So, there could be no way to predict when he would come. There could be no accurate timer on the bomb. Therefore, the bomber had to set the bomb off in person. Whoever it was, was there, watching.

  “There is more. Whoever set off the bomb had to have the time to plant it. Which means the bomber knew well in advance that Grisko was going to meet me, and where. Probably it is someone Grisko works with.”

  “A police officer?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Grisko told everyone at the station he was going to meet the Slovak officer. Theoretically, it could be anyone.”

  Trokan eyed her. He thought about the events. “Why set the bomb off after you ran out?” He answered himself. “The bomber wanted you out of there when it exploded.”

  “They wanted to make sure everyone got out, including Grisko and me. Then, when Grisko started back, the bomber triggered the explosion. Not to kill him; to frighten him. He didn’t want to kill; otherwise, why get rid of the employees?”

  “To frighten you as well; maybe to warn you off.”

  Jana walked to her front step, carrying her bags. “There is an inconsistency here. Was it to stop my looking into the death of Ivan Makine, our Koba, if in fact he did die? Or to make sure we started looking for him if he is still alive? I do know one thing: Whoever set the explosives and blew up the building is involved with the man or his legend, one way or the other.”