Blood Count

by Robert Goddard

‘You’re a man of your word, Edward. Of course I’d trust you.’

  Incredibly, Vidor seemed to be trying to flatter Hammond into compliance. But flattery was hardly necessary. ‘All right. I’ll do it. Where is he?’

  ‘South America.’

  ‘You are going to be more specific than that, aren’t you?’

  ‘Certainly. But only when we meet.’

  ‘Why do we have to meet? Just tell me where Gazi is and I’ll do the rest.’

  ‘I have my reasons for preferring to do this face to face. It’s the only way you’re going to learn more.’

  Hammond sighed. ‘All right. Where and when?’

  ‘Tomorrow. In Buenos Aires.’

  ‘You’re in Buenos Aires?’

  ‘No. But I will be when you arrive. I’ve booked you on a flight out of Heathrow at nine fifteen tonight that’ll get you there at nine thirty in the morning.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m going to travel halfway round the world at your say-so, Stevan?’

  ‘Because you want Gazi out of your life and off your conscience. And that’s what I’ll give you. But only if you do as I say. You’re not going to stop now, Edward. You’d never have left Belgrade if you weren’t determined to see this through to the finish. So, you’ll be on that plane. I know you will.’

  Hammond had promised to phone Miljanović that evening, but when he did it was not with the news his friend had been hoping to hear.

  ‘You’re going to Buenos Aires?’

  ‘Yes, Svetozar, I am. I’m close to the answer now. I have to take this last step.’

  ‘How do you know it is the last? Vidor said you’d get the answer in London. Now it’s Buenos Aires. Where next – Honolulu?’

  ‘Vidor was involved in setting up the escape, so there’s good reason to think he knows where Gazi escaped to. He insists on telling me face to face, probably so he can persuade me it wouldn’t be in my best interests to tell ICTY he was my informant. Well, I’m willing to be persuaded if that’s what it takes to nail Gazi.’

  ‘He lied to you before, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. But there’s no reason for him to be lying now. He’d only be wasting his time as well as mine.’

  Miljanović’s sigh was audible on the line. ‘You generally only find out why a lie is told after the event, Edward. Often long after. You know this. It is a crazy risk to go. But you’re going, so … all I can do is wish you luck … and hope you don’t need it.’

  Hammond could not have denied that what Miljanović had said was simple common sense. But nor could he have denied that Vidor was a credible source of information concerning Gazi’s whereabouts. He had played his part in the conspiracy cynically and capably, but was clearly no zealot for the cause of Greater Serbia. He had done what he had done for money and if, for whatever reason, he had not been paid what he considered his due it seemed somehow characteristic of him to respond in just the way he was now doing.

  Besides, the truth was, as Miljanović had intuited – and Vidor, for that matter – that Hammond could not ignore the chance to put Gazi back where he deserved to spend the rest of his life: prison. The burning sense of his own stupidity he had felt while watching the CNN report of Gazi’s escape that day in Lugano had faded over the eight months since. But it had not gone away entirely. To be judged, as ICTY’s investigators had judged him, a dupe rather than a villain was no kind of commendation. And it was not a judgement he wanted to go on living with.

  He slept better than he had expected to on the plane, waking only when the descent began to São Paulo, where there was an hour’s stop before the flight continued to Buenos Aires. There he found a message from Vidor waiting for him on his phone when he switched it on after clearing customs. ‘Evita’s tomb noon.’ Vidor had wasted no words.

  He had travelled from a European autumn into a South American spring. The taxi from the airport – where the tourist information booth had supplied him with a city map and the location of Eva Perón’s tomb – dropped him near the main entrance to Recoleta Cemetery. Warm sunshine had attracted numerous customers to the pavement tables of the cafés opposite. Hammond had the best part of an hour to spare before his rendezvous and spent most of it sipping coffee and mineral water in circumstances that would have been idyllic – sweet-scented air, gentle thrum of nearby conversations, trees in full green leaf, sunlight falling mellowly on terracotta roofs, a soporific undertow of jet lag – but for the urgency of the occasion.

  Even that failed to stop him lapsing into a reverie. He had never been to Buenos Aires before and was surprised by how Parisian the city seemed. He was reminded of a spring fortnight he and Kate had spent in Paris in the first year of their marriage. They had stayed in a small pension in Montparnasse, quite close to the cemetery. Their anniversary had fallen halfway through the holiday. It was at a pavement café very like this that Kate had presented him with a gift – a heart-embroidered white cotton handkerchief for their cotton anniversary. He still had it somewhere, stowed away in a drawer. Quite how, within ten years, they had allowed their tender love of those times to disintegrate, he could not in that memory-laden interlude even begin to imagine. ‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he heard himself murmur. ‘Truly sorry.’

  Vidor could not have known how apt his choice of meeting place was. Kate’s ghost walked with Hammond along the alleys that criss-crossed Recoleta’s walled city of the dead, past grandiose marble mausolea and soaring statues of mourning angels. So many things had gone wrong in the thirteen years since he had lost her – and with her a grievous portion of his own past. It was time – high time – to shore up one right thing against them.

  Eva Perón’s tomb was a relatively modest memorial by the standards of many of its neighbours, but the cluster of tourists eager to be snapped beside her final resting place made it easy to find. Vidor was not part of the throng, but Hammond was content to wait patiently for him to show himself.

  Vidor, however, had other plans. A short, paunchy figure in a crumpled linen suit and floppy-brimmed trilby materialized with eerie stealth at his elbow. ‘Dr Hammond?’ He had a round, jowly face and dark, twinkling eyes. He looked like a local, though his English was only faintly accented. Hammond would have put his age at sixty or so and guessed that, though well-educated, his occupation was not entirely conventional.

  ‘Yes, I’m Hammond,’ he responded cautiously. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Enrique Dobson.’ He plucked off his hat, revealing a bald crown, over which greased strands of bottle-black hair had been ineffectually trained. ‘My, er, grandfather was English,’ he said, apparently feeling his surname required explanation. He extended his free hand in greeting and Hammond found himself shaking it. ‘Señor Lazović sent me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He said he had arranged to meet you here.’

  ‘I arranged to meet a man called Vidor.’

  ‘A … Serbian gentleman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then … I believe your Vidor must be my Lazović.’ Dobson smiled and cocked his head, lowering his voice confidentially. ‘I have never met Señor Lazović, doctor, but the subject of the enquiries I have carried out for him means it is quite possible – very possible – that Lazović is not his real name.’

  Any more than Vidor necessarily was, it occurred to Hammond. He did not say as much. Dobson’s expression suggested there was no need to. ‘What’s your line of business, señor?’ Hammond asked.

  ‘I used to be a journalist. I still am, when anyone is willing to pay me for an article. When they are not, I … freelance in other … capacities.’ As clear as mud, thought Hammond. ‘Señor Lazović asked me to meet you here and 1 … set out the results of my enquiries. Why don’t we move … somewhere less crowded? There is a tomb a little way from here I need to show you, doctor.’ He gestured vaguely towards the next alley on the right. ‘Shall we?’

  It was a curved black marble panel, with a weeping Grecian woman draped around one edge, clutching a garland. Inset in
the panel was a photograph of a good-looking dark-haired boy, smiling fixedly. The inscription read:

  NIKOLA ALEXSANDR GAZI

  21 MAYO 1980 – 25 SEPTIEMBRE 1993

  PARA SIEMPRE BELLO, PARA SIEMPRE JOVEN

  ‘For ever beautiful, for ever young,’ murmured Dobson.

  ‘Touching, I’m sure,’ said Hammond. ‘But why do I need to see it?’

  ‘Nikola Gazi died in a motorcycle accident, doctor. You probably don’t know the details. He was a pillion passenger. The rider of the motorcycle was an eighteen-year-old called Carlos Rueda. His father, Ernesto Rueda, was a former friend of Dragan Gazi. They first met in Chile in 1973. There’s evidence they both worked for the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police, running torture centres and carrying out assassinations. They moved to Argentina together in 1977 when the DINA was closed down and appear to have provided the same sort of services for the military junta here during la Guerra Sucia – the Dirty War, when thousands of so-called enemies of the state disappeared, never to be seen again. After what you would call the Falklands War in 1982 it was obvious the military would have to restore democracy, so Gazi went back to Yugoslavia, leaving his family behind, and Rueda opted for a quieter life as a businessman.

  ‘The twenty-fifth of September 1993 was Carlos Rueda’s eighteenth birthday. The motorcycle was a present from his father. There was an all-day party at the Rueda residence in San Isidro. Carlos tried out his new bike, naturally. Everything was fine. Then, just as it was beginning to get dark, he went for a longer ride on the machine and took Nikola with him. The boy begged to be taken along, apparently. He was not wearing a helmet. Carlos went too fast, also naturally. There was no other vehicle involved in the crash. Carlos simply lost control on a bend. Nikola was thrown headfirst against a wall.’ Dobson clapped his hands together. ‘Muerto. It must have been instantaneous.’

  ‘And Carlos?’

  ‘Nothing worse than cuts and bruises. A lucky escape for him. Or so it must have seemed. At the funeral, Nikola’s mother, Isabel Nieto-Gazi, made a point of forgiving Carlos for causing her son’s death. Dragan Gazi was not there, of course. He was too busy killing Muslims in Bosnia. But, if he had been present, we can be sure he would have forgiven no one. A few weeks after the funeral, Carlos disappeared on his way to college. He has never been seen since.’

  ‘You think …’

  ‘Executed on Gazi’s orders. That is what everyone thinks. The body would have been secretly disposed of. It was probably dropped from a helicopter into the Río de la Plata – an old Dirty War tactic, as Ernesto Rueda would have known well. The lack of a corpse to bury was part of the punishment for the family. Gazi had struck, as Rueda must have feared he would. Revenge mattered more than friendship. Rueda’s wife died of cancer three years later and he returned to Chile – a broken man, as they say.’

  ‘Very interesting. But it’s not exactly news to me that Dragan Gazi is a bloodthirsty bastard.’

  ‘Señor Lazović instructed me to tell you the Rueda story. He said it would … help you understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  Dobson shrugged. ‘I do not know. But … you should hear the rest of what he instructed me to tell you. Perhaps … you will understand then.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘Gazi married the actress Isabel Nieto a few months after arriving in Buenos Aires in 1977. A whirlwind romance, you could say. Or Gazi’s bid for some glamour in his life. There was certainly nothing glamorous about what he and Rueda did for the junta. Their experience in imposing a reign of terror was invaluable. And the work kept them busy for the next five years. As for Gazi’s marriage, it didn’t work out. Isabel refused to leave Argentina in 1982 and Gazi refused to stay. So, they parted. They’re still married, of course. Isabel is a good Catholic and wouldn’t contemplate divorce.

  ‘She lives on an estancia about a hundred kilometres from the city. She runs it as a hotel as well as a ranch. There’s a surprisingly large number of people willing to pay for a taste of gaucho life. She dropped Gazi from her surname after he was indicted for war crimes. I don’t think she has any fond feelings for him. Maybe the Rueda business was just too much for her.

  ‘The same doesn’t seem to be true of her daughter Ingrid, whose own marriage, to the son of a department-store owner, collapsed, it’s said, because of her insistence on standing by her father. She came out of that with quite a lot of money and owns an apartment in one of the city’s smartest blocks. It’s actually not far from here. Her property holdings don’t stop there, though. The most difficult and time-consuming part of the enquiries I’ve made for Señor Lazović has been finding out how much real estate she owns. I’ve established that her lawyers have used complicated trust arrangements to make several purchases on her behalf in recent months: a ski-lodge in Patagonia, a beachside apartment at Punta del Este over in Uruguay and a vineyard near Mendoza. None of them came cheap. I don’t know why she bought them, of course, but I suspect Señor Lazović suspects they’re being set up as places where she can spend time in secret with her father. I doubt ICTY’s investigators are aware of these properties. I had to pull a lot of strings to get hold of the information.

  ‘Chile under Pinochet; Argentina under the generals; Serbia under Milošević: Gazi’s record as a servant of brutal regimes is hard to beat, I’d say. You’d think it would be impossible to love such a man even if he was your father. He has the blood of thousands of innocent Chileans, Argentinians, Bosnians and Kosovars on his hands. But still Ingrid wants to shield him from justice. What a woman, no? I wish I had a daughter who was half as loyal.’

  They had left Recoleta Cemetery and walked north towards the National Museum of Fine Arts as Dobson related what he knew. Vidor – or Lazović – had told him he would meet Hammond at Floralis Genérica, a gigantic steel sculpture of a flower, with petals that opened by day and closed at night. It stood in Plaza Naciones Unidas, on the other side of the road behind the museum.

  ‘I will leave you here, doctor,’ said Dobson, pausing breathlessly at the roadside. ‘Señor Lazović said you should wait for him alone.’

  Hammond squinted ahead through the bright sunlight. No one was loitering by the huge metal flower. ‘Do you know why I’m here, Enrique?’ he asked, without looking round at his companion.

  ‘I think so. I make all sorts of checks when people hire me. For my own protection, you understand. Your name cropped up in connection with Gazi’s escape. I can put two and two together.’

  ‘And make what?’ Hammond turned to face him.

  He was met by Dobson’s broad, well-practised smile. ‘Nothing, of course. I got through the bad times here in the seventies and eighties without being “disappeared” or getting strapped to a table on the orders of bastards like Gazi and Rueda and having my cojones wired up to a generator. I managed that by adding things up … but never shouting about the results.’ He offered Hammond his hand. ‘I wish you good luck, doctor.’

  Hammond watched from the other side of the road as Dobson wandered off in the direction of the museum. Then he turned and headed along the path that led across the lawned plaza to Floralis Genérica. There was still no sign of Vidor. He took a slow turn round the sculpture, lingering in the shade of one of the towering petals as he puzzled over what Vidor had hoped to achieve by sending Dobson to meet him at the cemetery. Hammond needed no convincing that Gazi deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison. Surely his presence in Buenos Aires proved he was willing to play his part in bringing that about. All he needed—

  His phone started ringing. He snatched it from his pocket. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Good to see you, Edward.’ It was Vidor.

  ‘Where are you?’ Hammond glanced around, half expecting to see the man skulking behind a bush.

  ‘Turn to your right and look south. See the tall building in the middle distance with the blue ship at the top?’

  Hammond turned and looked, as directed. He saw the building at once, decorated with the bright-blu
e likeness of a sailing ship. ‘What about it?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m on the top floor, watching you through binoculars. I’m glad to see you’re alone.’

  ‘Is all this cloak-and-dagger stuff really necessary, Stevan?’

  ‘Very. I’m running a lot of risks to meet you.’

  ‘You are going to meet me, then?’

  ‘Of course. This building is the Hotel Goleta. I’ve booked you a room. Come on over and check in. Then take the elevator down to the parking garage. Sub-level two. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  The Goleta was a mid-rise mid-market establishment that looked as if it catered mostly for business travellers on an adequate but by no means lavish budget. An escort to his room was not part of the package, so Hammond was free to go straight down to the garage.

  As the lift doors opened on to a dimly lit cavern of concrete pillars and parked cars, he asked himself whether he was now running the same risks as Vidor, whatever they were. If the gang responsible for Gazi’s escape had somehow got wind of Vidor’s intentions, they might both be in grave danger. But it was a danger he knew he had to face. He had come too far to turn back. He had to go on. To the end.

  A pair of headlamps flashed from a distant corner of the sparsely occupied garage. He headed towards them. They belonged to a vehicle strategically parked midway between the pools of sallow light cast by widely spaced fluorescent tubes. It was a large hard-top pick-up truck, with grilles over the headlamps and thick layers of mud and dust on the tyres and bodywork. The only glass visible in the windscreen was in the arcs scraped clear by the wipers, through which Vidor gazed out expressionlessly.

  He looked thinner than Hammond remembered – unshaven and hollow-eyed, like a man who had been driving himself too hard for too long. He was no longer wearing glasses. And there was a recent scar over his left cheekbone. He signalled with a twitch of his head for Hammond to get in and only then released the door locks.

  Hammond climbed into the passenger seat. As he closed the door behind him, Vidor re-engaged the locks. ‘You ought to know,’ Hammond began, ‘that I—’