The Magician's Accomplice

by Michael Genelin

  Jana became uneasy. It did not feel right.

  “Her apartment, as quickly as possible,” Jana said.

  The two of them dashed out of the building. Paola quickly drove them to the woman’s apartment complex on the outskirts of the city. They went through the buildings, hurriedly searching, cursing the time that was wasted, eventually locating the right apartment on a corner of the first floor of one of the buildings, and knocked. There was no answer. Jana went to the next-door neighbor, inquiring if she was aware of any emergency repairs that had been done or needed to be done at her neighbor’s place. The neighbor had heard of nothing. Jana knew she needed to get inside the apartment. Paola agreed.

  Jana used her elbow to break the glass of a front window, reached inside the frame to unlock it, eased her way through, and then opened the front door for Paola. Together they searched the woman’s apartment.

  They found her in a clothes closet. She had been garroted. The woman’s tongue hung out, her face distorted from fighting both her attacker and her lack of air. Jana checked her pulse. Nothing. They laid her on the floor next to the closet.

  Paola called the Dutch police, told them about the murder, and, at Jana’s direction, asked them to get in touch with Investigator Jan Leiden. The Dutch crime-scene cops arrived very quickly, Leiden shortly after the first team’s arrival. Leiden found the two women outside the front door to the apartment. He nodded curtly at Jana, not pausing as he went into the apartment, saying, “I assume you brought a killer virus with you when you came from Slovakia.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Five minutes later, another investigator came over to them to obtain their statements. Thirty minutes after that, Leiden appeared from inside the apartment. He was not happy.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To talk to her,” Paola answered him. “That’s in the statement that the other officer took.”

  He looked directly at Jana.

  “I want you to tell me why you came here. I want you to tell me what you wanted to talk to her about. Then I want you to tell me who killed the lady, and why.”

  “We came to ask her why her photograph was found in the possession of a prosecutor who was murdered in Slovakia.”

  “You have this photograph?”

  Jana gave him the photo she’d had taken from Peter’s landlady in Slovakia. Leiden looked it over.

  “Why did the prosecutor have the photograph?”

  Jana believed she now knew the answer to why the photograph was in Peter’s possession.

  “I think the Slovaks needed a liaison between the prosecutor in Bratislava and Kroslak. They went to their cousins to the north, the Czechs, because they knew a Czech officer was working in Europol. I believe that person was our murder victim. I also think the Czechs introduced her to the prosecutor in Slovakia through this photograph. They put the date on it for verification. It would say to the prosecutor, when she introduced herself, that she was who she claimed to be so he would work with her without fear of retribution by the killers. Thereafter, she delivered information acting as a courier. I believe that she delivered documents I have in my possession from Kroslak here to the prosecutor in Slovakia. And I think it’s part of the reason the prosecutor was murdered and Kroslak went on the run.”

  Leiden still looked disgruntled.

  “I think you both had better explain in my office, with a tape recorder going.” He called over one of the uniformed officers guarding the scene. “Drive them to my office, and make sure they stay there. They’re not under arrest, so there’s no need to handcuff them. But if either of them tries to get away, you may shoot. A kneecap shot will do.”

  He walked back into the apartment.

  “Nice man,” Paola offered sarcastically.

  “I’d have done the same.”

  The officer led them to a patrol vehicle. When they got into the car, Jana asked him to make a short detour and pick up an old man who was waiting for them at Jodenbreestraaton, the Rembrandt house museum. The cop was reluctant. It took Jana two blocks to persuade him, the man agreeing only after she told him that if he didn’t pick up the little old man, the little old man would almost surely be killed. Then, of course, Investigator Leiden would blame the cop, and the newspapers would blame him and, eventually, the chief of police would blame him as well.

  The professor, looking a little tired, was waiting at the front of the museum. He was very surprised when the patrol vehicle stopped and the officer ordered him inside. But when he got in, he was very glad to see Jana. “I like your new limousine,” he said.

  They were taken to the station, and then up to Leiden’s office, a fair-sized workplace, redolent of long occupancy, with photographs on his desk and original artwork on the walls. It was a lot less grim than Slovak police headquarters. Jana focused on the professor, asking him to explain what he’d done during the day.

  “I followed your instructions exactly.” He eyed the paintings on the walls. “The man who owns this office has taste. Adventurous taste. He is not afraid of innovation. Not conservative at all.”

  “Is that good or bad for us?” Paola asked.

  “People who think are always good,” the professor decreed, looking pleased with himself.

  “Professor, I asked what you did today,” Jana reminded him.

  “Exactly as you ordered.” The professor beamed at her. “I kept on the move. Always looking, watching. I went from one busy place to another, never anywhere I would be alone. I even made up games in the big arcade behind your old hotel. I ducked behind counters, moved in one direction, then darted in another. It was exciting.”

  “You never saw anyone following you?”

  “Only once.” His face dropped slightly. “I kept trying to lose him, I’d think I had, and then there he was, back again. It was very discouraging.” His expression became brighter. “Then I ran toward an escalator, looked back, and I saw him leaving from an exit on the other side of the floor. Boom, he was gone. I did well,” he suggested. “Pretty good for an old man, no?” He looked to both of them for approval.

  “What time did he break away from you?”

  “I broke away from him,” corrected the professor, annoyed.

  “Professor, he only left you because he’d either completed his job or he’d been called off. You didn’t lose him.”

  His face fell again.

  “Well,” he consoled himself. “I stayed alive.”

  “You did your job, Professor.”

  “Staying alive?”

  “That, and keeping them occupied for a few hours. They weren’t sure of your objective. Why would I leave you alone for half a day, possibly put you in jeopardy, unless I had sent you to complete some task? It was enough to distract them, until they found out what it was.”

  “I was a decoy? Just a wooden duck on a pond?”

  “Everyone has limited resources, even the group that is coming after us. It was to thin them out, so I could do my job. And you did your work admirably, Professor.”

  He was placated.

  “Professor, what time of the day did he leave you?”

  “About eleven.”

  Jana turned to Paola.

  “Just about when we went to IMT 7.”

  Paola nodded.

  “You think he was called away to deal with the dead woman?”

  “There’s nothing to confirm that.” Jana mulled it over. “Yet they’d want to silence her before she could talk to us.” She shook her head, not happy with her reasoning. “How did they become aware that we were on to her?”

  “Damned if I know,” Paola said.

  Again, the hunters had been one step ahead of them.

  “Professor, please describe the man you saw.”

  He reflected. “He was tall, thin, dirty-blond. He wore a jacket and tie.” Sheepishly, he said, “Not much to go on. He was always too far away for me to see him clearly. I’ve got old eyes, and my eyeglass prescription hasn’t been updated for years.” He heaved a sigh. “I guess I d
idn’t do as well as I thought.”

  “You did fine, Professor. I have no regrets.”

  An hour later, Leiden arrived. He sat at his desk, still angry that another body had popped up in his jurisdiction and that Jana was, in one way or the other, responsible. Leiden wanted to know everything that Jana knew, from the very beginning of her investigation in Slovakia until the moment he had seen her at the dead woman’s apartment. He pulled out a tape recorder from a drawer and turned it on.

  Jana went over her movements and surmises, giving him a detailed explication of her investigation, omitting nothing. Whenever he felt that he needed clarification, he asked for it. Both of them raised possibilities for discussion. It took them two hours. The last thing Jana did was give him one of the remaining two copies of the report written in Romanian that she’d brought from Slovakia. He looked at it briefly without grasping the nature of its contents, and dropped it into a drawer.

  When her debriefing was over, Leiden had no more idea than Jana about the whereabouts of the conspirators. He agreed that they had to find Kroslak.

  Paola went home. Before she left, she offered to put Jana and the professor up for the night, but Jana declined. It was time to spend a safe night in a safe place, and Leiden had offered them cots in the police officers’ rest area. If they weren’t safe there, there was no place in Amsterdam that they would be.

  Jana walked Paola out to the stairs, reminding her that they should have gotten some reply to the queries they had made to other European police agencies with respect to the pattern of the two murders that had occurred in Slovakia. Paola informed her that there hadn’t been the slightest nibble. Nothing. She promised to get on it as soon as she got back to work.

  The cots did their job. At least Jana slept through the night. The next morning, they used the police showers and then shared the prisoners’ breakfasts. At eleven o’clock, Leiden arranged for a police vehicle to take them to the airport, and at 1300 on Sunday they were on their way to Prague.

  Jana was glad to get out of Holland.

  It had not lived up to its peaceful reputation.

  Chapter 26

  They flew out of Schiphol on Czech Air to Prague’s Ruzyn e Airport. The professor, who’d had a restless night, fell asleep as soon as the wheels lifted off the runway. Jana had brought with her the fairly extensive Europol personnel file on Gizela Dinova, the woman who had been garroted.

  Dinova lived in Prague before being sent by the Czech government to The Hague as part of their required contribution to Europol. Jana thumbed through her dossier, paying particular attention to certain subjects. The woman’s area of expertise was information security, with a focus on international liaisons with other countries. She was on loan from the Czech Ministry of the Interior. Her personal information indicated that she had previously been married to a man named Vilem Tuma during part of her tenure in the Ministry of the Interior; he was to be notified in case of medical or other emergencies. Apparently, she had stayed friendly enough with her former husband to so designate him. Not the usual arrangement when a childless couple gets divorced, and there were no dependents listed in the file so Jana assumed they’d had none. His address was in Dejvice, outside the immediate center of the city of Prague, to the northwest.

  One other item struck Jana as odd: Dinova was listed as speaking six languages, certainly an asset, but not what you would expect from a woman in what was essentially a routine technician’s job. Jana would have expected her to have held a more prominent position.

  The flight took an hour and a half. Jana reflected on Dinova’s murder during the entire time. One thing kept disturbing Jana: a number of the facts in the file did not match the lifestyle of the woman that Jana had been imagining.

  One other fact, not in the file, kept intruding on Jana’s thoughts: Gizela had been killed immediately after Jana discovered the connection between her, Peter, and Kroslak. That, in itself, was ominous. She pushed it out of her mind for the moment, promising to come back to it later. Gizela herself, and her activities, had to be Jana’s focus for the moment.

  Why put Dinova together with Kroslak and Peter? It had to involve their need to have a secure line of communication. It would have been easy to work with a Czech whose language was so similar to Slovak that members of the two neighboring nationalities could communicate with each other with ease. Jana became inpatient. She was still missing something.

  Would either man put his life in the hands of an individual about whom he knew nothing? There had to be something about Dinova that both men would have agreed on as safe and reliable. Gizela being a Czech civil servant would not, by itself, do it for them. There had to be another factor. The contents of the file did not give Jana a clue until just before they landed.

  There was a section on leisure pursuits. It listed Gizela’s hobbies as sports such as tennis, volleyball, and skiing. The woman was an athlete. That didn’t compute when Jana considered the picture of the woman in her personnel file. Gizela had been obese when she’d come to Europol.

  Jana went to Dinova’s birth date and did a rapid computation using Dinova’s starting date of employment with the Ministry of the Interior. She had been thirty-seven when she’d taken that position. No prior jobs were listed. However, she must have worked before the age of thirty-seven. Posts at the ministry were highly sought after. They were very picky over whom they selected and would have demanded some type of prior job references that would qualify her for the assignment. Gizela’s jobs, whatever they were, had deliberately been excluded from her file. Jana thought she knew what at least one of those jobs was: Dinova had been a police officer.

  An athlete would consider police work a satisfying career, an often physically demanding profession in a milieu where teamwork was emphasized, but rugged individualism accepted.

  Then Gizela Dinova had gone to fat.

  Why?

  Jana had seen it before, a police officer who was an athlete putting on weight at a desk job. The ministry, and then The Hague, had not been kind to her. It had almost happened to Jana when she’d been promoted from patrol work. She’d had to force herself to exercise regularly.

  When the opportunity came by for Dinova to go to The Hague, she would have jumped at the chance to get back to where the action was. The Czech Ministry of the Interior oversaw the police, so they could reach into their pool of officers for an individual who had the qualifications needed, a certain type of person who could fit in at The Hague. They would see her ability to communicate in six languages, and assume she’d blend well into an all-European force … except, what was she doing in information security? If Dinova was a cop, but working at The Hague in, what was, essentially, a technical position, she was working undercover. She was still a cop, acting as a cop, but none of the officials at Europol would be aware of this.

  So she was a part of a criminal investigation that had come to involve Kroslak and Peter as her allies. As a cop, Gizela would have Kroslak’s and Peter’s trust. They were working together. And the Czech government and Colonel Trokan had to know about it.

  Whatever crime they were investigating had Europol at its nexus. And, even worse, the criminals involved were at the very center of the police structure of Europe.

  Who would look inside an organization like Europol for criminal activity?

  It was the perfect cover.

  They landed. Jana put the file away just as the professor woke up. They waited until all of the other passengers had disembarked before they left the plane. Jana was thankful that there was no one there to greet them.

  Chapter 27

  Jana had an instinct as to where to go next. She trusted her decision. She had been right in the past; she was correct now.

  She couldn’t rent a vehicle. She didn’t want to be pinpointed, and car rental registrations and their associated computer entries were a quick way for searchers to pick up her tracks. So, even through she and the professor were now carrying small hand luggage not quite filled with underthi
ngs and toiletries provided free of charge by the Dutch police, she decided to travel by tram. Jana obtained a free city map from one of the hotels, located their destination, and asked the concierge at the hotel how to get there by public transport. She and the professor arrived at Vilem Tuma’s address in Dejvice in thirty minutes.

  Gizela Dinova’s ex-husband lived in a small, tile roofed house in a pleasant but nondescript area outside of Prague’s center. The house was undistinguished except for an elaborate tracery of blue vines and leaves painted around the edge of the white façade of the house. There were a number of people standing around the front of the dwelling, some dressed in mourning, somber-faced, making quiet conversation. The front door of the house was open.

  “They’re having a memorial service,” the professor suggested. “Not a good moment for us to intrude.”

  “Professor, we haven’t the time to pay attention to niceties right now. There’s no alternative but to intrude. Besides, I don’t think it’s a real funeral.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Without answering, Jana walked inside. Reluctantly, the professor followed. The place was well lit. A number of sedately dressed individuals were quietly talking, a few with drinks in their hands. Plates of food were scattered around the room, with many framed photographs of Gizela Dinova prominently displayed. There were also a number of uniformed police officers present, mingling as guests with the other mourners. Jana had been right. The woman had been a police officer. She looked around the room, hoping to identify Vilem Tuma. One of the guests, a woman, came over to a short, thin man who was beginning to go bald, and hugged him; then her husband extended a hand to the man, both of them whispering condolences. It had to be Tuma.

  Jana waited until the three were finished talking. When they stepped away, Jana moved over to the man and murmured, “Mr. Tuma, my sympathy on the death of your ex-wife.” She extended a hand, Tuma looking at her quizzically.