Cries of the Lost

by Chris Knopf

  “Eres un perro muy bueno. Muy guapo. ¿Me puedes decir cómo invadir su casa?”

  He seemed to like the compliments, but opted not to show me how to break into his house. Though he also did nothing to stop me when I used a glass cutter to remove a piece of windowpane and reach in to unlock a casement window. I patted him on the head once more before pulling myself up to the windowsill and slithering headfirst through the opening. I rolled onto my back and lay there, listening for threatening sounds.

  What I got was ten tons of dog when my new friend followed me through the window. The gouges in my arms and chest fortunately missed important veins, but the ballistic force of his weight crashing down made me fear for my ribs.

  “Holy crap,” I yelled, involuntarily.

  My recompense was an aggressive lapping by the bath towel-sized tongue, which I eventually resisted well enough to get back on my feet.

  “Man, you are a very persistent doggie.”

  I don’t think he heard this, because he was already prowling around the dark room, his nose to the ground and tail in the air, great baritone sounds emanating from deep in his chest. I realized he’d probably spent no more time in the big house than I had, and was keen on investigating this long withheld prize.

  I was in a little library, barely big enough to contain a pair of high-backed stuffed chairs and a love seat. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and books were stacked on a surplus of side tables. A shallow desk made of satin-finished fruitwood had a felt writing pad and a stand with a quill pen. But for the slightly fussy excess of the Provençale aesthetic, it was a nice room. I could live there, assuming broadband access.

  I searched the desk and poked around the bookcases for boxes or anything else that might contain papers, mail or documents. The Dogue rejoined me and I asked him if he liked the house. He shook his head, showering me and the environs with stringy saliva, which explained why he hadn’t spent much time inside.

  We moved on.

  A hallway led to other small sitting rooms, more than one would think normal people would need. “I’m tired of sitting in the blue room, Philippe. Let’s sit in the pink room tonight.”

  I searched each one without result. I next came across what I assumed was the principal living room, very large with a half-dozen seating areas. I could see that Madame could create a meaningful meeting space by switching out the furniture. I went back to searching every drawer and shelf and looking behind every picture frame. I wasn’t a professional at this by any stretch, and there was no time to check floorboards or tease out hidden panels. But I felt like I was doing the best I could under the circumstances.

  The Dogue offered little assistance, though I started to enjoy the company. He’d disappear on quests of his own, then reappear, his arrival signaled well in advance by the sound of tiger claws clattering across the floor. I learned to guide him into pressing against my leg, avoiding most of the torrent of slobber. As long as the crushing mass didn’t cause a compound fracture of the thighbone, it was a good approach.

  We worked our way to a large kitchen and separate eating area with a blocky natural wood table and chairs. Dozens of copper pots, bunches of wild herbs and oversized forks and ladles hung from wrought-iron racks attached to the ceiling. Open shelves screwed into clay-colored plaster walls were crammed with crockery and glass jars filled with grains, rice, pasta and coffee.

  I tried to figure out how to say, “Go fetch the secret documents. Good boy,” to the Dogue, but he was busy jumping up on the counters and center island seeking targets of opportunity.

  It wasn’t necessary. A desk built into an alcove directly off the kitchen had a woven basket filled with mail contained by a rubber band. I sat down at the desk and unbound the mail. All but two letters were addressed to Madame Fulgenzia Bolaños de Sepúlveda. These belonged to Domingo Angel. One was from the Dirección General de la Policía y de la Guardia Civil, the other was a plain envelope. The return address was on West 72nd in New York City. Apartment number, but no name.

  I put both letters in my pocket and searched the desk. Nothing.

  It took an hour to go through the bedrooms upstairs. Then the Dogue and I left the house and went to visit the outbuildings. The first was a huge barn, dark and filled with the stink of abandonment. I didn’t even try to mount a search, knowing it would take a full team of crime-scene investigators a week to make a dent in the possible hiding places. And given that the mail was dropped off at the desk, I thought, what was the point? They didn’t think they needed to hide anything.

  I checked the other building just for the hell of it, and finding nothing of obvious interest, decided to leave. The Dogue walked with me through the forest. Along the way I told him stories—all true—and he seemed to enjoy hearing them.

  When we reached the border of the property, he sat down. It didn’t seem possible that he was stopped by an invisible fence, given the property’s size. Somehow, he just knew. I scratched his gigantic head and thanked him for being such a good host.

  “Adiós mi amigo. Gracias por su hospitalidad.”

  He seemed to grin as I scrunched around his wrinkly skin a little more. Then I stalked off, focused on the smartphone’s GPS, which was busy delivering me back to my car, and subsequently our flat in Aix, and the wise and tender arms of Natsumi Fitzgerald.

  CHAPTER 12

  I texted Natsumi to tell her I was back in the car on the way to Aix. She wrote back, “Okay.”

  She was at the flat when I got there.

  “How’s Christian?” I asked.

  “He’s beginning to regret never getting that degree in philosophy from the University of Strasbourg.”

  “Existentialist?”

  “I don’t think he made it past Socrates. Find anything at the château?”

  “Mail.”

  We opened the official letter from the Dirección General first. It was a statement from his pension fund. We did some quick calculations, and estimated the colonel’s take-home to be about $125,000 a year. This helped explain Spain’s crushing indebtedness to its public-sector employees, but not the château in the woods.

  The other letter was far more interesting. It was a short note printed out on a single piece of paper, in Spanish:

  Domingo:

  Friends in DC place Rodrigo in Como area. Address has been forwarded to the field. Interpol friend reports the wounding of two terrorists in England.

  Joselito

  “Rodrigo,” she said.

  “One of the coordinates is on Lake Como.”

  “Good thing we have a decent travel budget.”

  “Should we assume the guys I shot in Surrey are still alive?” I asked.

  “We should. No reason not to.”

  “Are we flying or driving?”

  “I booked the car for six months.”

  “You’re becoming aerophobic,” she said.

  “More autophiliac. I’m an American. We like to drive.”

  This time we took La Provençale and hurtled across the south of France, crossing over the Italian border in fewer than three hours. La Provençale then turned into the Autostrada dei Fiori, and we noticed an immediate change in the relative condition of the roadway and a gradual evolution of the landscape. Natsumi slept off and on, and I thought about the Caymanian police officer who said, “You Americans think you own the world. But this girl and people like her are gonna take it away from you. One day at a time. They never gonna give up.”

  What the hell did that mean? Who did they think she was?

  Maybe I knew already, but didn’t know I knew. This was the type of paradox I often faced as a researcher. The information was there, but not a chain of logic, or a hierarchy of importance between chunks of data. It was rarely a failure of knowledge, but rather imagination. It was an affliction of the age—too much information, not enough wisdom to make sense of it.

  What I did have were two names: Rodrigo and Domingo. Men I’d never seen, much less met. And yet evidence of their
existence was the only tangible thing we had, though answering nothing. Even the questions felt hidden in shadow.

  The so-called “dirty war,” between ETA and the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion, or GAL—an extra-legal paramilitary group, essentially vigilantes—had ended in 1987. We gave up after page 400 of a Google search trying to connect the GAL with the VG, Los Vengadores del Guardia. If it weren’t for Professor Preciado-Cotto, I would have assumed the VG was a figment of the imagination of the Latino boys in England.

  ETA itself had declared what seemed to be a permanent cessation of violence in 2011. Defanged by successful, and apparently legal, Guardia Civil action in recent years and delegitimized by the loss of public support, even in the Basque Country, there wasn’t much of ETA left to make declarations.

  So maybe what seemed to make sense wasn’t sensible at all.

  “Do you think Christian Arnold will make the connection between our date and the house being broken into?” Natsumi asked, the morning after we’d rented a villa in Menaggio on Lake Como in Northern Italy. We were sitting on a balcony looking out over the lake through a scattering of cypress trees.

  “Probably.”

  “So it’s another exposure.”

  “It is, though would he reveal it to the Madame?” I asked. “No reason to. Just fix the window and lie about the mail.”

  “No other way for her to find out?”

  “Not unless Dogues de Bordeaux learn how to talk.”

  “I feel a little bad about Christian,” she said.

  “That’s because you’re a good person.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Not beyond improvisation.”

  “I feel like a cat, with about four out of nine lives already cashed in.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Any thoughts?” she asked.

  “We need to be more careful. The surveillance gear will be here tomorrow. I’m thinking we should switch cars. We can be reasonably sure the men in Madrid never saw your face. I’ll have to work a little harder on a disguise. Neither of us speak much Italian, so that’s a liability. Eventually, the cops on Grand Cayman will discover the phone tap. And the security company in London will find the video feed. No way to trace that stuff to me, now that I know how to completely obliterate serial numbers. A hard learned lesson. As usual, it’s impossible to know what other precautions to take when you don’t know who, if anyone, is looking for you, or for what.”

  “As usual for us.”

  “That’s right.”

  The house was modest, but tall, with three stories stacked on a relatively small footprint. It was an old stucco affair whose best feature was the third-story balcony. Though not at the high end of villa rentals, the interior was filled with fine art, silk fabrics and vases overflowing with white marguerites. It had plenty of bedrooms for sleeping and electronic gear—along with other standard living accommodations, including an attached two-car garage, added by the current owner, an American from Chicago, naturally. I loved this feature. The rental agent could have posted it as a key benefit—“Keep vehicles and equipment transfers hidden from the prying eyes of neighbors and potential terrorists!”

  We were about a half hour’s drive north of the city of Como, which was built at the narrow southern tip of the big glacial lake. At first I was struck by how many of the code’s coordinates were in congested urban neighborhoods, or resort areas, until I realized if you wanted to escape notice, you go to a place filled with transients, foreigners and temporary residents.

  It suited us as well, for many of the same reasons.

  THE COORDINATES were unambiguous. The safe house was off on its own, a few miles outside the village of Cardano, and surrounded by cultivated land. It wasn’t as much a fortress as the Château de Saint Sébastien, though it also had a long driveway running through stands of tall trees.

  I wasn’t ready to go down the long driveway just yet; I was more interested in the telephone pole. I spent a few nerve-wracking minutes cracking open the junction box and splicing in a tap, but there was no dial tone. Not surprising given the trend away from permanent landlines.

  So I spent the rest of the time mounting a video camera across the street from the driveway. I put the receiver and wireless router about a half mile away in a little ice chest that I covered with branches and brush. Then I drove back to our villa and called up the feed. I’d done this often enough at this point to make it routine. But there was always that moment of tension, fully relieved by seeing the hoped-for image pop up on the screen.

  I ran the video stream into an application designed for wildlife trackers that turned on the camera only when detecting movement. Otherwise, it went into standby mode, saving on memory and battery life.

  After that, I gladly returned to doing what I earnestly loved to do more than anything in the world. Research.

  A FEW hours later I emerged from the vast and labyrinthian immigration, tax and real estate records of New York City.

  The apartment building on West 72nd was built in the early twentieth century, and refurbished in 1976 and 2009. It was currently owned by Carrington Realty Holdings, which owned a number of properties in the city, though it was headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland.

  Apartment 8G had one bedroom, a living area and eat-in kitchen. The two windows looked out at the building across the street. Riverside Drive and the 72nd Street dog run were only a block and a half away. It had been occupied for five years by the current tenant, Joselito Gorrotxategi. Another Basque.

  According to the social media site LinkedIn, Joselito was an unmarried Spanish national working for an international corporate security firm called Context, who likely advised their clients to have a corporate name that bore no resemblance to their services. He had a master’s degree in forensic accounting from Rutgers, and previous experience with Interpol and the Guardia Civil. His other interests were hiking, Spanish art—in particular Goya and Velázquez—target shooting and international travel.

  His photo on the website showed a handsome, smiling man, about forty years old, in a dark suit and brightly colored tie.

  I’d learned a lot, but not enough.

  So I placed a call to Ekrem Boyanov, a.k.a. Little Boy, a Bosnian criminal presently living in the South End of Hartford and a friend of mine via the hunt for Florencia’s killers.

  “Hey, Mr. G!” he said over the phone, using the pseudonym he knew me by, “Long time no hear. I figured you for gangster food.”

  “No such luck,” I said. “I could figure you for the same thing.”

  “Nobody thinks it a good idea to bump off Bosniaks. We’re big on revenge. Start with their grandmothers, then work down from there.”

  “I’ve got a little project,” I said.

  “I’m listening.”

  I described Joselito Gorrotxategi, where he lived, what he did for a living.

  “I need to know everything I can about this guy. Work, play. Habits, good and bad. Friends, family, girlfriends, boyfriends. Cell number. Wiretap his landline, if possible.”

  “And what do I get?”

  “Ten thousand dollars. Flat fee. If you get access to his computer, and we can talk through a hijack, another five.”

  “Okay. And then you want this guy taking a little swim in the East River?” he asked.

  “No. Not now anyway. I don’t even want him to know we’re looking at him.”

  “Okay, Mr. G. This we can do. Where you been, anyway?”

  “A few places.”

  I asked about his family and business. He extolled the first and lied about the second. I pretended to believe him, which he knew I didn’t, and everybody was happy.

  “You need anything else, just let me know,” he said.

  “I’m good for now. Let me know how you do with Joselito. I’ll send you an email address to maintain communications. Once the connection is made, give me your bank account, and the bank’s routing number, and I’ll wire the money.”

  “Not a prob
lem, Mr. G. I know you’re good for your word.”

  “Don’t be too cocky with Joselito. He’s got credentials,” I said.

  “Hey, I can be completely Mr. Subtle, you know that.”

  “Information is the game here. You might consider a honey trap.”

  “I got just the right girl. Wild lady. Do it for thrills, though a little money go a long way,” he said.

  “Send the bill. And say hello to the crew for me. Something in Bosnian.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. G. They all remember the fun times.”

  “And don’t kill the mark. Please,” I said.

  “For you, we don’t kill nobody. Unless they get insulting about Muslims. You understand.”

  “I do. Then all bets are off.”

  “Nice to hear from you,” said Little Boy. “We do some business, eh?”

  “We do,” I said, and got off the line, feeling that our crouched and anxious covert world had just doubled in size.

  THE FIRST car showed up five days after that. I’d been alerted by a little ping on my smartphone. I woke up the computer and ran the freshly recorded footage. The camera had clicked on just as the Fiat mini-SUV made the curve into the driveway. I watched until it was out of sight and the camera clicked off again.

  I stuffed a handful of prosciutto and taleggio into a wad of bread from the platter Natsumi had just put out for lunch, kissed her, told her the chase was on and ran to the garage. I put the laptop on the passenger seat and drove like an Italian to the target house. Meaning I wasted little time getting there.

  When I was a few hundred feet from the driveway, I pulled off to the side of the road and waited. I budgeted an hour, the limit of my patience, recognizing the Fiat could leave at any moment, or theoretically, be there for weeks or months.

  The hour was almost up when the smartphone pinged at me again. I looked down at the computer and saw the Fiat coming down the drive. I started my Ford Galaxy, a trade for the Opel, and waited to see which way the Fiat was headed. Turned out to be away from me, so I pulled straight out and fell in a comfortable distance behind.