Dark Dreams

by Michael Genelin

  Seges was so involved in his search that he didn’t see her at first. When he did, he snapped upright, his face contorting with the effort of controlling his shock at being observed going through his supervisor’s desk. He took one step back, then one step to the side, as if trying to distance himself from the scene of his crime.

  “Find anything incriminating?” Jana asked

  She took off her greatcoat, slinging it onto the antlers of her clothes tree, which teetered slightly from the force and weight of the coat, its legs jittering on the floor before it decided not to fall over. Jana checked out the top of the desk before she sat. Seges used the opportunity to sidle to the front of the desk, growing more nervous as he watched her go through its drawers.

  Jana was surprised. At least Seges had left them neat, perhaps even neater than they’d been. She would have expected a mess, like the one he made of his case reports, which meant that he had placed importance on conducting his search with care, more care than was required if he’d just been afraid she’d find out what he had done. Her guess was that he had been put up to it by someone. Except, what sensational find was there to be made in her desk?

  She stared at Seges, wondering what was going through his mind.

  Since Seges had been posted as her aide against her will, he had proved incompetent: reports were not written, he neglected to interview witnesses, he avoided making decisions, and whatever he did was done badly. She’d tried to get rid of him a number of times, but it was always a matter of regulations and much red tape before a liability like Seges could be transferred. No one wanted him. They’d fight tooth and nail to keep him away. It would be even harder to get the man dismissed. He was like a fungus that you tried to scrape away or kill with a spray; no matter, it kept coming back. That was a good way to think of him, she thought: a fungus, and this fungus was standing in front of her.

  “Tell me,” she ordered.

  “Tell you what, Commander?”

  Her voice got louder. “The desk!” She slapped its top, taking some small satisfaction from seeing him jump. “Why were you searching through the drawers?”

  He hesitated, his face betraying his struggle to come up with an answer.

  “You were searching my desk.” She managed to control her volume. “I want to know why.”

  “The colonel wanted me to find you,” he finally blurted out.

  “So?”

  “I called. Your cell phone was off . . . I think.”

  Jana hesitated, then pulled her cell phone out of her bag, checking its setting. “It’s on, ready to receive calls.”

  “I thought you might have a . . . new . . . number,” he stammered. “So I was looking for it.”

  “Let’s see if it has been changed.” She picked up her desk phone and dialed her cell number. Almost immediately the cell phone rang. Jana put it to one ear, the desk phone to the other. “Have you heard that Seges is a liar?” she asked, speaking into the desk phone. “Yes, I heard. There is no question about it.” She replied, “Thank you for your information.” She hung up both phones.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked Seges. “My goodness! Both said you were a liar.”

  “No, Commander,” he got out.

  “All you had to do was call Communications to find if I had been assigned a new number.” She put her cell phone away. “If I catch you going through my papers again, I will make sure you never forget it.” She tried to relax, finally noticing the dampness of the clothes clinging to her body. Even her galoshes had not kept water from seeping into her socks. And she was now tired.

  “What did you learn at the scene of the crime?” Seges asked, trying to make small talk, hoping she would forget his transgression. She had been investigating a death while he had been ransacking her desk.

  “A suicide. Not for us. I left it for the patrol officers to report and the coroner to make his own finding.”

  “Good,” said Seges. “That means our caseload stays the same.”

  “Too much work, Seges?”

  “We all work hard, Commander.”

  “I have a little more work for the hard-working man that you are,” she said, keeping a straight face. “Relieve Jarov at the building entrance. You have a two-hour shift. Dress warmly.”

  “Me?” He looked aghast.

  “You,” she agreed. “Now!”

  Seges scrambled out of the office.

  Jana smiled to herself, shaking her head at Seges’s idiocy. If he had not been so incompetent, he might have been dangerous. She checked her appearance in the small wall mirror, then walked to the colonel’s office.

  The door was ajar, inviting visitors, so she tapped on the metal frame before entering.

  Trokan was going through a stack of papers. He looked up briefly, then wagged a finger at her to close the door, following with another waggle that invited her to sit. He took a last look at his papers, then moved them to the corner of his desk. He was wearing a Chinese police officer’s cap, whose bill jutted out aggressively. It was part of his collection of police headwear from all parts of the world. Most of the caps sat on shelves around the office.

  “Why are you wearing that cap?” she asked. “Thinking of transferring to China?”

  “It cuts down the fluorescent light glare, so I don’t go blind.”

  “Do you like Chinese food?”

  “Who doesn’t like Chinese food?” He took the cap off and laid it on his desk. “Where were you?”

  “With someone.”

  “With ‘someone,’ as in sex?” He gave her a fake leer topped with an eyebrow twitch. “No, you don’t look satisfied enough. You were with your friend, the member of parliament. What’s her name?”

  Jana studied Trokan. He knew about her meeting with Sofia. How? The meeting was not a secret, but the arrangement had been last-minute. If he’d been aware that she was going to meet with Sofia, and wanted more information, he would simply have asked, knowing she would answer him truthfully. No, he hadn’t been notified about the meeting before she’d gone to the café. Trokan was her superior, but also a friend and a longtime supporter. Someone had to have been concerned enough about the two of them having tea together to tell Trokan.

  “Don’t bother telling me the name of your friend. I know it. She’s the one who’s the current illicit sex interest of the nation.” He twitched his eyebrows again. “Okay, so I’m making bad jokes.”

  “How did you know I was with her?”

  “I’m a colonel in the Criminal Police, remember? I have informants everywhere. They tell me everything.” He thought about that for a moment. “Okay, so I don’t get told everything.” His scratched his head, studying her. “You look upset, too upset for it to be about me knowing you were meeting the M.P.”

  “I walked in on my adjutant, Seges, going through my desk.”

  “Naturally. He’s spying on you.”

  Jana shifted, uneasy in her seat. “Why would he do that?”

  “Our anti-corruption crew opened an investigation of your politician friend. They had a watcher across the street when you two sipped your tea together. They called me to warn me about your conduct.”

  “Conduct of mine?”

  “That you were meeting with her, naturally.”

  “Wonderful. Now I’m a co-suspect.”

  “I think not. Just a friendly warning to me. So I told Seges to find you. When he couldn’t, I told him to call you. I did it knowing he would use the opportunity to try to find anything that was suspicious in your office.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew he would find nothing, and he’d tell them that, which is what I wanted. It’ll make them feel better and less aggressive toward you.”

  “How long has he been working for them?”

  “He wants to get out of here just as much as you want him out. Except the shitface wants to land in a cushy job. He picked the anti-corruption unit, and they called me when he got in touch with them, and. . . .” He waved his hands in the air to
show it had progressed from there. “It was okay with me. I know their spy. They know I know. That way all of us are covered.”

  “This is getting to be too devious a business.”

  “It always was.” He looked her over. “You look like a drowned rat.”

  “I feel like one.”

  Trokan checked his watch. “It’s late enough for the men not to feel too put-upon if you go home a little early. Go home, take a bath, and change into something warm, but nicer than a police uniform.”

  Jana got up and went to the door.

  Trokan called after her. “What did you do with ‘Seges the Spy’ after you found him searching your desk?”

  “He’s doing relief guard duty outside the building in the snow.”

  “Good.” Trokan smiled. “At least it’ll stop him from going through your desk drawers.” Trokan tapped his forehead. “I just remembered the other reason I wanted you. The Guzak brothers have left Ukraine. They’re supposed to be either en route back to Bratislava, or already here.”

  “More trouble.”

  “A bad pair. We’ll look for them at the borders. Except they know how to get in and out under the radar. The older one is psychotic, a genuine madman. You remember the case with Giles?”

  “I remember the case. I was going to see Giles anyway. I’ll warn him,” Jana said.

  The colonel nodded, returning to the papers he had been studying as Jana walked out the door. Trokan hummed tonelessly. After a moment he stopped going through the papers, picked up the Chinese police officer’s cap, buffed the bill with his sleeve, then put it back on his head.

  A satisfied look on his face, he bent over his papers again.

  Chapter 9

  Jana returned to her small house in the Rusovce District after buying a few cherries from a street vendor nearby. She waved at a neighbor, Mrs. Miklanova, who ducked her head, pretending that she had not seen Jana.

  Jana had stopped Mrs. Miklanova’s husband from beating her up some years back. The husband had to spend a few days in the hospital, which she had never forgiven Jana for. Jana opened her door, wondering if the woman had ever considered what would have happened to her if she hadn’t stopped him. Mrs. Miklanova had already been bleeding from a broken nose and a scalp wound when Jana intervened. And, to Jana’s knowledge, he had never beaten his wife again. After all, the police officer who’d put him in the hospital was still living across the street; he only enjoyed beating his wife when there was no one to stop him. Jana had thought briefly of moving, but she was not going to be forced out by a cowardly wife-beater, or by the anger of his victim.

  She walked through her unlocked front door.

  At first she didn’t know what was hanging from a red ribbon tacked to a ceiling beam in the middle of the room. It swung slowly back and forth in the air current. Jana slowly closed the door behind her, stepping closer to the object. A simple necklace of gold links was dangling from the ribbon. Hanging from this chain was a diamond. The diamond was the size of a small candy egg. Jana turned a lamp on, moving closer to the necklace to examine it.

  The facets glittered sharp and bright, demanding to be looked at, with a piercing luminosity that seemed to grow sharper and brighter as she focused on the gem. The stone looked even larger from up close. It seemed to consume the light in the space around it. It had its own life, demanding to be looked at.

  Jana managed to pull back, forcing herself to look away. Someone had been in the house, and perhaps was still there. She snapped her holster open, ready to use her gun if she had to, cautiously but quickly going through the house to make sure she was alone. Then she walked back to the gem.

  The diamond was still there.

  It was hypnotic. It said, “You want me. You need me. We are meant to be together.”

  Jana was amazed at the effect the diamond had on her. First, greed and lust. Then came a feeling of unease at her reaction. It was followed by dread that she might so easily be corrupted by such a thing. It was crazy, and wrong.

  Why had someone hung the diamond in her home?

  Jana pulled the stone and its gold chain off the ribbon. It felt cold in her hand. She now wanted to cast it off, to throw it away. Anything to get rid of it. Her fear increased. She was a police officer. Whoever had put it in her home had placed her in jeopardy.

  How could such an inanimate object be so threatening? Not only the diamond, but what it represented. Danger. Personal danger. It had been hung in her house for a reason. The stone was too expensive to be a gift. It meant . . . something else!

  Hide it! She started toward her couch, thinking to conceal it under a cushion, then halted. The ludicrousness of hiding the diamond under a cushion jolted her. What was she thinking? She forced herself to stop. Yes, her own department might be kicking down her door at any moment, ready to arrest her for corruption, or theft, whatever crime the diamond would implicate her in. But this was no way to deal with the issue. Jana calmed herself.

  She would get out of her wet clothes, take a bath, let the hot water soothe her. She had to think. The cherries were still in her other hand, half crushed. She took them with her into the bathroom, laying them next to the tub, then ran a hot bath. Knocking sounds began emanating from the hot-water heater as if someone imprisoned inside the tank was demanding to be let out. It had been repaired twice before by Brod, the handyman, the man who did repairs for everyone. Unfortunately, he also jury-rigged failing parts so he didn’t have to buy expensive new ones, and sooner, rather than later, the item he serviced would break down again. She listened to the sounds, focusing on them, trying to take her mind off the diamond.

  Jana had purchased a small bottle of bath oil in a little town just over the Austrian border. She poured the remaining contents of the bottle into the tub, regretting for a brief moment that she had none left for her future baths, her regrets vanishing as she slipped into the water. She tried to luxuriate in the heat, 1ying mostly submerged, eating an occasional cherry, safe from the snow-turned-to-sleet outside. The bath oil would smooth her skin, which Peter would like . . . and she wanted Peter to like it.

  Jana tried to forget, to think only of the evening ahead, seeing Peter of the dark, dark eyes and the contrasting pale skin waiting for her outside the opera just a short two hours from now. Peter, the only man she had been this attracted to since her husband’s death.

  Jana had met Peter by chance when she had been asked to address a small committee of legislators at the parliament building. The minister of the interior had told Trokan he wanted her to speak in favor of a bill to prevent human trafficking that the government had ordered its members of parliament to pass. Some of them had misgivings because the penalties attached to the bill went beyond the limits imposed by EU treaty and UN conventions. She was to convince the swing votes that dealers in human flesh would keep their trade out of Slovakia, or at least limit it, when they became aware of how much more severely Slovakia would punish them than the surrounding, less-punitive states. Also, it was a good bill to pass just before an election, and played well in the more conservative parts of the country.

  Unfortunately, the day she met Peter was also the day she saw Kamin again.

  Jana had been sent over to parliament at the last moment. She met Sila Covic, known to all as the Red Devil, at the front entrance to the great lobby of the parliament building. The woman handled public relations and logistics for parliament. Covic was very short and dressed in conservative clothing, and would have seemed undistinguished had it not been for her deep, raspy, penetrating voice that forced everybody in the immediate vicinity to look at her.

  Sila had gotten her nickname because she had once been a communist activist, and still often mouthed communist dogma even though she was now an avowed democrat. There was another reason as well: when she got angry, her face was suffused with a startlingly red flush. And Sila Covic got angry very often. So everyone tried to steer clear of her, except when business forced them to deal with her.

  The Red Devi
l did not bother with amenities when she met Jana, hustling her toward the staircase leading to the parliament’s meeting rooms.

  “I wish you had come earlier,” Sila rasped, her irritation apparent. “You could have had individual meetings. Now, you will face the four members who control the committee. One is with the SDL party, so he’s probably lost anyway, no matter what you say. The other three are vacillating; they’re the ones you have to focus on. They sent over a man from the attorney general’s office, their chief trial lawyer. He can talk about legality if they raise any questions.”

  “Did this prosecutor write the bill?”

  “He had input. You have a brief moment to discuss it with him. Brief!” she warned, her voice becoming even more penetrating. “They’ve made changes.”

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  “He’ll inform you. That’s his area anyway.”

  They walked through the halls toward the meeting room, turned a corner, and Jana almost immediately bumped into Peter Saris, who was sipping a mug of coffee. The collision slopped coffee on both of them. Each immediately offered apologies; each tried to wipe the coffee droplets off the other and became embarrassed upon realizing they were touching a person they hadn’t even met, a person who was terribly attractive.

  “This is Procurator Peter Saris of the attorney general’s office.” The Red Devil indicated Peter. “And this is Commander Jana Matinova.” Sila surveyed the two of them, goggling at each other. She snickered, and then, after a second of silence, said, “I think the spilled-coffee routine worked.” Her voice took on an acerbic edge. “You can repair to the nearest hotel room later. Talk about the statute now.” She laughed, her voice like the braying of a mule. “In here.” She pointed to the meeting room. “Two minutes.” She entered the room, leaving them standing in the hallway.

  As soon as the Red Devil left them, Jana and Peter realized they were still staring. Both tried to bring themselves back to business. Jana’s heartbeat was so loud, she thought that he must hear it. She felt the urgent need to reach out and touch his face and repressed the impulse with difficulty.