The Magician's Accomplice

by Michael Genelin

  “You’re the police officer Saris was having a fling with.”

  Jana had to stop herself from acting on her impulse to slap the woman.

  “We planned to be married.”

  “If he was planning to marry you, why did he have the other woman stay here?”

  This question drove Jana back a step.

  “Surprised you, no?” The woman’s face had a malevolent glow. “Women should know better when it comes to men. None of them are faithful.”

  Jana took a breath, remembering what the woman was: a troll posing as a human being. She contained her anger.

  “I’m here to look over the apartment.”

  “It’s not your apartment. Why should I let you in?”

  “Because I’m here as a police commander on an official investigation. So get out of my way.”

  “A whole bunch of them already investigated.”

  “Then one more won’t matter. In case you didn’t understand, I said get out of my way.”

  The woman tried to outstare Jana, finally realizing that Jana was going to come in whether she liked it or not, and grudgingly stepped aside.

  “You’re not going to move the furniture around again? I’ve spent all day putting everything back where it belonged, and I won’t stand for you making another mess.”

  The woman droned on, whining about the inconvenience and the extra work that she’d had to endure over the last week because that “man” had gotten himself killed. Except for an occasional twinge, Jana went about her business, managing to block out most of the woman’s litany of complaints.

  The rooms had changed. Nothing personal was left; everything had been boxed up and taken away by Peter’s relatives or the police. It was as if Peter had never lived there.

  The landlady could sense what Jana was thinking.

  “They took all there was of his to take. I don’t know what you expect to find. They carted every last piece they could out of here.”

  “I see,” Jana murmured.

  “Every drawer in the place was pulled out. Cushions had been yanked off the couch and chairs and sloppily piled in a corner. All the silverware was dumped in the sink. They took the paper I lined the cabinets with and crumpled it up when they didn’t find what they were searching for, simply tossing it on the floor as if this were a garbage dump. All police are the same. They don’t care that we have to get on with our own lives. We work, too, you know.”

  “The police try to make people’s lives safer. Unfortunately, searches are often part of the process. Unfortunately, it’s a shoddy business”

  The woman glared at her. “How much more time do you plan to spend here? I need to finish my business.” She pointed to a broom in the corner near a small pile of dust devils culled from under the couch mixed with scattered pieces of detritus picked up from the corners of the rooms. “One more thing: who is going to pay me for back rent? He was three days into the new month. I tried to get him to pay me, but he was never home. And then the police closed the apartment down until they were finished, so more days passed before I could lease to a new renter, and I am out of pocket.” A sly smile suffused her face. “I can make a deal, if you want.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “My rent for the picture in the silver frame of you and him. It would be a shame to throw it away.”

  Jana had remembered the photograph on her way over to the apartment. She and Peter had picnicked on a bench along the Danube, brown-bag lunches they pretended were a feast. They’d bought both a small bottle of wine and a camera. The wine had made them both slightly giddy. Peter had asked a passerby to take their picture, rewarding the man with a plastic glass of the wine. The photograph was not a professional one, but it had captured the magnificent mood the two had been in as they toasted the camera with their raised plastic wine glasses.

  She looked the landlady over; now she had something to work with. There was only one way the woman could have come by the photograph. She must have taken things from the apartment before the police came, including the photo. It was in a silver picture frame. The woman thought it was costly, so she’d stolen it, along with any other items of value she could get her hands on.

  “How much do you want for the rent?” Jana could see the landlady doing a quick calculation of how much she could ask for. “Be careful; I won’t stand for being taken,” Jana warned the woman.

  The landlady rubbed her large nose. “All I want is what’s just. That’s all!”

  “Three days’ rent,” Jana suggested.

  “They kept me out of here for a full week. I couldn’t even clean up,” the woman said. “How could I rent it if they wouldn’t let me in?”

  “Three days,” Jana repeated. “I was not a member of the group that searched the apartment. I can’t be held responsible for that. I’m paying Mr. Saris’s debt, nothing else.”

  “I could make more selling the frame.”

  “I told you to be careful. Now I’m angry, and my offer has gone down. The price is presently fixed at two days’ rent.”

  “What?” yelped the woman.

  “You heard me. In a second, it will be down to one day.”

  The woman’s eyes enlarged as she found her possibility of gain diminishing.

  “No more time left,” said Jana.

  “I’ll take it,” the woman blurted out.

  “Good.”

  The woman led Jana down to her own apartment on the ground floor, complaining all the way that she was being cheated, that the state was taking advantage of a poor widow, that the world was unfair, that she had gone out of her way to be a good landlady to Peter, and he would want her reimbursed for everything she’d lost. She kept walking, opened the door to her own apartment, and, after a brief hesitation about letting Jana in, both of them entered.

  The landlady trotted into her bedroom, coming out almost immediately with the photograph in the silver frame. Jana examined it, touching Peter’s face in the photo, then looked up at the landlady.

  “You took other things.”

  “How dare you!” The words popped out of the woman’s mouth. “I would never steal.”

  “But you did. That’s why you took this photo: for the silver frame.”

  The woman’s voice became faint. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “What else did you take?”

  “I would never—”

  Jana interrupted her by raising a hand. “We’ve already settled that you did. Now, I want to know what else you took. I hope you will tell me. If you don’t, or I find out you’re lying, you go to jail. Do you understand?”

  The woman nodded, fear written on her face.

  “You have one minute.” Jana looked at her watch, counting the seconds. Finally, she looked up. “Everything you took. Now!”

  The woman nodded, her head bobbing up and down. “Just the frame, and the toaster, and a small radio that was by his bed. Also his old camera. And a picture of that woman I saw with him.”

  “There were other items,” Jana insisted. She forced herself not to change expression at the mention of this other woman.

  There was a long pause, the woman’s eyes searching Jana’s face.

  “Another small item.”

  “What?”

  “His electric razor…. And a food mixer.” She stopped, waiting for Jana to speak. Then, “I swear that was all. Everything. I haven’t held anything back, I promise you. Nothing.”

  “He always kept cash in his drawer.”

  The woman blanched, her voice pleading. “I swear there was not anything in his drawers. No money. I promise, not a cent.”

  Jana watched her for a long moment. The woman was trembling, her breath coming in gasps. She thought she was going to jail.

  “I want the razor and the camera. They were personal things of his. Also the photograph of the woman you said you’d seen him here with. The rest will be enough to pay you for any rent that was owed, and I’m being generous.”

  The landlady
scurried to do her bidding.

  Jana walked out of the building with the photograph still in its silver frame and the razor and camera in a plastic bag she had acquired from the landlady. She also had the photograph of the unknown woman. When Jana got to her car, she checked the items. The only object she was concerned with now was the photo of the woman. It had been taken by some type of digital camera, and on its lower right-hand corner was a date, one month earlier. Peter’s camera did not log dates on photographs. She checked it; it was a cheap simple instrument that had only one purpose: taking candid photographs. No photographs remained in it.

  She looked at the photo of the woman again, a plain enough woman with nothing about her face or hair or dress to distinguish her. She wore simple clothes. There were no marks or moles on her face. She stared at the camera, waiting to get a chore over with. As for the photographic paper, it appeared to be plain word-processor paper. The photo had been printed from a computer. It was not a photograph like the one that she and Peter had had the passerby take, the one in the silver frame. There was the dreariness of necessity about the posture of the woman, an absence of joy in her expression, none of the cheeriness that most people adopt for pictures, and the shot itself was straight on, no attempt at creating anything but an image for identification purposes.

  Why would Peter have this photograph? And why did Peter interview this woman in his apartment? Jana felt that she knew Peter well enough to know that he would not have had a secret love affair which he was concealing from her.

  She hoped.

  Jana drove back to her home.

  Perhaps she was ready to report to Europol after all.

  Chapter 5

  Jana sat in her living room, staring at the walls. Just before she placed the silver frame atop her living room mantel, she checked behind the photograph itself on the off chance Peter had written a note there, left some token, or perhaps hidden something between the photo and the frame. There was nothing.

  She decided she’d have to resign from the police force and continue her investigation of Peter’s death. Jana retrieved a scratch pad from her desk and began to write a resignation letter. What she wrote was all very civilized. She did not argue about the injustice of the restrictions placed on her, or the fact that she had been given an assignment that would take her away from Slovakia. Rather, she wrote a paragraph about how much she had enjoyed the work, her comrades’ dedication, and public service, segueing into an explanation: “circumstances” dictated that it was time she changed the direction of her life.

  Jana didn’t finish. She crumpled the letter, dropping it to the floor, and then stamped on it in frustration. She could not leave the police force. It was her life, what she had trained for, and what she was good at. There still might be something that she could do before she was forced to leave for The Hague. Although what that might be was beyond her present ability to reason.

  Jana still had Peter’s electric razor and camera sitting next to her in a bag. She had given Peter a small closet near the kitchen in which to store garments and other personal items. That way he could come and go as he pleased and still have fresh clothes without having to go home if he wanted to spend the night with her. Jana carried the two items to the closet.

  She opened the door with some trepidation, not knowing what her reaction to seeing Peter’s clothes might be. The shock she got was greater than she anticipated: there was nothing inside the closet. All of Peter’s belongings had been taken. Someone had come into her house when she was away and cleaned it out. She looked again, just to assure herself that the closet was empty, then looked through the house to verify that everything else that should be there was in its place.

  Nothing else was missing. Nothing was out of place, the windows were not broken, the locks had not been tampered with. Jana had a habit of leaving the front door unlocked. After all, who breaks into a police commander’s house unless they have a suicide wish? So they had had easy access, not needing to force entry. One thing Jana could conclude was that the burglary had been a targeted event. Whoever had entered had come only for Peter’s things, not Jana’s. What had they been looking for? Not just his clothes. That wouldn’t make sense. Perhaps Trokan had sent officers to find any effects Peter had stored with her?

  Jana had been so startled by finding the closet empty that she realized she was still carrying the bag with the razor and camera. She went back to the closet that had held Peter’s things, turned on the closet light, then placed the bag on the top shelf. She had begun to back out when she realized there was a gap in the side panel immediately adjacent to the inside of the doorjamb. Jana knew her home. It had been her mother and father’s house before they’d died. She had been brought up here. In all those years, she had never noticed this gap. She knelt next to the space, barely able to get the tips of her fingers inside, realizing she would have to use additional force if she wanted to pry it from the wall.

  She retrieved a hammer from under her sink, then went back to the closet. She was in no mood for finesse. She smashed the panel over and over again until it was just shards of plaster and wood barely clinging to the wall, then quickly slipped her hand inside the space.

  Jana almost missed the envelope. It was a standard business size, blank on the front, containing several sheets of folded paper. She took it back into the living room, sat next to a lamp and went through the pages one by one. They were not good copies. Apparently, they had been made using old carbon paper and were barely legible enough for her to make out the text. The writing was in a language Jana was not familiar with. It was not a Slavic tongue nor a western European one Nor was it written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Interspersed with the narrative in the report were also two very small faded diagrams, marked with symbols, numbers, and alphabetic designations which, along with the words, held no significance for Jana.

  She would have to get someone to translate it. Who could she get? Not someone with the police department, at least not right now. Who could she trust?

  The doorbell rang. Jana put the report behind the couch cushions and went to the door. Surprisingly, Colonel Trokan was standing on the steps.

  “Jana, how are you?”

  “You just saw me this morning, so you know how I am.”

  “Can I come in for a moment?”

  She stood aside to let the colonel enter. She gestured toward one of the overstuffed chairs.

  Trokan shook his head. Standing in the middle of the room, he said, “Jana, I clearly informed you that you were off the case involving the murder of your special friend.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Apparently not. You went over to his apartment.”

  Jana hesitated before she answered. “I was getting a few personal things from the landlady.”

  “Jana, you and I know you were not there just to get personal things from a thieving landlady. Please, no lies to me, Janka.”

  “She called you?”

  “After you left, she was afraid she would be arrested for having some other items still in her possession, so she called and told us about them, explaining she had only kept them to pay the overdue rent. She also told us you had been there.”

  “Have you come for the electric razor, the camera, or the picture in the silver frame?”

  “I came for none of them. Instead, I came to give you something.” He was holding a bulging manila folder, which he handed to her. “Here is an itinerary, initial instructions, the hotel where you are booked for the next few days until you can find a satisfactory apartment, and an airplane ticket to The Hague. When you’ve digested it all and spent a day or two acclimating in your new job, you are to call me for a further briefing. The minister and I have accelerated your departure date. The plane leaves at eight hundred hours tomorrow morning. If you are not on it, Janka, the minister and I have also agreed that you are no longer on the Slovak police force.”

  He saw the shock in her eyes and reached over to hug her. “I told you, Janka. At times it is all or
nothing. Make the right choice. Be on the plane.”

  He affectionately kissed her good-bye on the cheek. Jana tried once more to change his mind. Her words came out as a complaint rather than a persuasive argument.

  “Martin Kroslak is already stationed at Europol for us. He has all the experience necessary for a police officer in that position. What’s the use of two of us being there? I will be like a third shoe: worthless.”

  “Ah, I almost forgot. Kroslak disappeared four days ago. Vanished into space without telling anybody. The director of Europol called the minister, who called me, and now I’m informing you. Take over his duties, but most of all find out what happened to him. His file is in the papers I’ve given you. You now know all we know.”

  “Did you have a crew take Peter’s clothes from my closet?”

  “Jana, I would not invade your privacy in that way.”

  “So who did?”

  She eyed Trokan. He had no answer. The question came back to her: who could she trust?

  “This is all crazy, Colonel.”

  “True. I congratulate you on your perceptions. You have just discovered a small part of an important fact: the whole world is insane. Good luck, Janka.” Just before he left the house, he turned and winked at her. “I’ll send you the Slovak newspapers so you don’t get too lonely.”

  He walked out.

  Early the following morning she was on the plane to the Netherlands.

  Chapter 6

  The plane, which had been booked from Vienna’s flughafen, was due to arrive in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in two hours. The flight was full. Jana’s seat on the aisle gave her a little leg room and space to move her papers around. She began examining the briefing papers that Trokan had left with her. The first described the city of The Hague itself; most of its information Jana already knew. The Hague—Den Haag—was the actual seat of government of the Netherlands, containing all the government ministries one would expect. It was also the site of the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and a myriad of other national and international agencies. Most pertinent to Jana, it was the home of Europol, her new but unwanted assignment that took her away from her real work.