Dark Dreams

by Michael Genelin

  “I—,” he began, then stopped.

  “I think,” Jana began, and also stopped.

  They started to laugh.

  “We should talk . . . about the law,” he mumbled.

  “Yes, we should,” she responded. She thought about it for a moment. “What law?”

  “Cupid’s,” he suggested.

  “I didn’t know he made laws,” she murmured.

  “Oh, yes,” he got out. “And they can’t be broken.”

  “Well,” she finally responded, “we’re both in law enforcement, and it would look bad if we broke any laws.”

  “Absolutely!”

  “How about the other law?” she wondered. “You know, the one we came to discuss?”

  “Hard to care about it right now.”

  Jana felt the same way.

  The door to the meeting room opened; the Red Devil peered out.

  “Time to talk to the committee members.”

  Peter and Jana nodded and walked past Sila Covac into the conference room.

  “And keep your minds on the meeting,” she snarled as they went in. “Or you’ll deal with me later!” She hitched herself up to her full height and followed them in.

  The meeting went well, despite Jana and Peter having to try hard to keep their hands to themselves and focus on the bill. After it was over, they walked down the stairs together and left the building, going to the lot where Jana had parked her car. She offered Peter a lift. To her disappointment, he declined, explaining that he had business at the office. Dry-mouthed, Jana left wondering what she had done to drive him away. Was he married and doing the honorable thing before they became so besotted they’d both regret what would unquestionably have happened?

  As Peter left, Jana saw a limousine drive off. She recognized the passenger, which brought a chill to her. Almost in a daze, she got in her car and followed him. The limousine drove to a large house in the suburbs. Jana parked nearby, turned off her cell phone, and watched the house gradually fill with people arriving for a dinner party.

  Kamin, the man who had ravaged Sofia inside the limousine, had returned to Slovakia and was in that house. Three hours later the guests began leaving, couple by couple, and the lights were turned off. When the house was dark and Kamin hadn’t left with the guests, Jana knew she had found his home. Now she could leave. He’d be there when she came back.

  Kamin had evaded justice before. Jana wouldn’t let him get away again.

  Chapter 10

  Jana sat in the tub thinking about Kamin’s return until the water became frigid, her skin wrinkled from its long immersion in the water. She put Kamin out of her mind. The diamond was the issue she had to deal with now.

  Slowly toweling herself off, Jana mulled over the few facts she knew. The diamond could have been placed where it was by anyone. Jana usually left her doors unlocked. If she’d locked them, anyone wanting to get inside would force the lock. It would only take an instant. Or they would go to the rear and punch out a glass window and be inside just as quickly. Besides, everyone in the neighborhood knew that Jana was a police commander. Thieves were stupid, but not so stupid that they’d break into a police officer’s house.

  No, not a thief. What kind of thief would leave this kind of present behind him? Whoever had left the diamond knew that Jana lived there. And they’d hung the diamond up for her to see for a reason.

  Jana picked up the diamond, then walked into her bedroom, deciding to wear one of her uniforms. The evening’s social activities would have to be put on hold. She had to be a police officer for a while longer. Jana finished dressing and called Trokan’s cell phone.

  Trokan complained he had been sent out to a market by his wife, to pick up groceries. A demeaning job for a colonel! And who in the world needed green peppers after a hard day’s work, he grumbled. Trokan eventually suggested that they meet in the bus kiosk at the front of the market.

  Jana reached the kiosk first, just in time to watch Trokan trudge through the slush toward her. With a groan, setting his packages on the bench, he sat next to Jana.

  “Why are you still in uniform?”

  “I have a police problem, I think.”

  “Good police, or bad police?”

  “Bad police.”

  “So bad it could not wait until tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  He heaved a sigh. “This is probably going to be worse than the green peppers. Okay, tell me.”

  “I went home, and the problem was inside my living room.”

  He stared at her. “What did you find?”

  “This.” She pulled the diamond from her pocket, swinging it by its chain like a pendulum. After they both stared at it for a moment she handed it to him. “It was hanging by a ribbon from a beam in the room. Needless to say, I had never seen it before.”

  Trokan examined the diamond for a full minute, finally breaking away from its fascination. “A real diamond like this captures one’s attention, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s why everyone wants them.”

  “Did you want it?”

  “For a very brief instant.”

  “Now you want to get rid of it?”

  “It was never mine to keep.”

  “Well, don’t expect me to take it. What am I supposed to do, take it home to my wife? She would want it, too. Then what do I do? So you keep it for now.”

  “It doesn’t feel right for me to hold on to such a stone. It’s dangerous for a police officer to have it.”

  He thought about this.

  “In the morning I’ll write a report about your finding the diamond, seal it in an envelope, and give it to one of the secretaries to tuck away. That way, if anyone asks what you are doing with the diamond, we can show them the memorandum to prove I set up an investigation. You, on the other hand are a police investigator. So, investigate and find out how it got into your living room.”

  He tossed the diamond pendant back to her.

  “I give you one week, then we tell the corruption investigation team about it. You understand the need for that? It is called covering your colonel’s ass.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Your first move in the investigation?”

  Jana thought about it. “I’ll call Grosse at Europol. See if he can check on the diamond’s provenance.”

  “He’s a good man. Tell him you ran it by me. Have him link up with Interpol. Make a large sweep. One more step in covering our backsides. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Jana put the diamond back in her pocket. Trokan shook his finger at her. “Be careful with the stone. You don’t want to lose it. It’s your job if you do.”

  “Sure you don’t want to keep it for me?”

  “I didn’t have the misfortune to find it in my home.”

  They both got up.

  “You think this thing has anything to do with the internal affairs investigation? With Seges going through my desk?”

  “Maybe. Then again, maybe not.” He patted her on the shoulder. “At the risk of sounding sarcastic, have a good evening.”

  He picked up his groceries and trudged away through the parking area.

  Jana called Europol on her cell phone, then walked back to her car. She already knew what her next move was going to be.

  Chapter 11

  Giles lived and worked at his furniture store on Obchodná Ulica near Postová. They sold legitimate furniture at the store, but his real business was dealing in high-priced stolen antiques and anything else not nailed down by its original owner, from jewelry to high-end cameras to stolen luxury cars, particularly Mercedes.

  Jana had been involved in the only investigation that had ever taken Giles off the street and put him in prison for a time. A body had been found in the back seat of one of Giles’s stolen cars being shipped to Albania. Giles would send the cars there for corrective surgery: specialists would remove the vehicle’s real motor and chassis numbers, stamp false numbers on the car, and provide false registration, all t
o allow Giles to resell the car for a large markup in the Czech Republic, Austria, or Italy.

  In order to obtain a lighter sentence, at Jana’s urging, Giles had given the police evidence that proved who had committed the murder. The killer was the elder of the two Guzak brothers, both ordinarily smugglers with a penchant for violence that had resulted in the dead man in the Mercedes. Both brothers had run to Ukraine to escape prosecution. Both had vowed to kill Giles in retaliation, a threat not to be taken lightly when it came from one of the Guzaks, neither of whom was above practicing any form of brutality that had ever been thought of.

  Of course, the brothers were not the only ones who wanted to eviscerate Giles. Long-term criminals make lots of long-term enemies. And Giles had made so many of them that he lived in his headquarters above his furniture store, and left the premises only in the direst of emergencies.

  When Giles was released from prison, he had come back to his old haunts and begun his activities again. He and Jana had stayed on relatively friendly terms. Giles had refrained from violence, at least in Slovakia, and his other games were not played in Jana’s jurisdiction, so she had no urgent need to take him down. Besides, he was a good source of information. But every so often Jana was required to help him in return for his knowledge of the criminal world. As the saying goes, “One hand washes the other.”

  Jana drove to his block, saw the large sign over the store reading “Antiques of the Golden Ages,” parked the police car, crossed the street to the store, wiping her feet at the entrance, then walked through its baroque, carved-wood-framed doors into the shop. Jana’s eyes adjusted to the dim lighting as she threaded her way through its inventory of fake Louis Treize tables, Thonet chairs, Restoration chairs, Rococo framed mirrors, heavy Biedermeyer armoires, Empire busts, Art Nouveau lamps, mixed pieces from Limoges and a hundred other porcelain works, along with a thousand other exemplars of the faux antique business.

  The furniture occupied the floor space except for two narrow parallel paths that led through the objets d’art facsimiles to the rear of the store. Giles did not sell his genuine antique pieces with their questionable chains of title through the front door. They were reserved for people who had real money and were willing to spend it without asking questions to get the piece they wanted. That form of business was consummated upstairs, where Giles had his office and living quarters.

  Jana paused to admire a pair of pretty crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, wondering, for a brief second, if they were truly antiques, then laughed at herself for not knowing better.

  One of the two salespersons on the floor came over; then, recognizing Jana’s uniform, quickly pretended she did not exist and beat a retreat. As expected, Giles was not on the main floor. Jana walked to the back, avoiding the furniture encroaching on the aisle. A stairway led up to the loft area, the way barred by a gate that was ornate enough to have previously belonged at the entrance of a bordello. There was also a German-made steel-and-titanium U-bolt sealing the gate, which would have taken very heavy equipment to open if you did not have the lock combination.

  Spis, Giles’s bodyguard, a man of medium height with an incredibly thick-trunked body, stepped out of the shadows behind the stairs. He carried an old heavy-caliber Webley pistol in one hand; the other held a cell phone dwarfed by his large fingers. The cell was raised to a cauliflowered ear, the most apparent effect of one too many street fights. Spis grunted into the phone, then pocketed it, standing his ground, even more solid and formidable than the gateway he was protecting.

  “He told you to open the gate, didn’t he, Spis?”

  The tree trunk pretending to be a man continued to stare at her without moving. Jana opened her greatcoat to display her holstered Makarov.

  “I have a gun too, Spis.” Jana kept her voice low. “My gun is better. It comes with a license that allows me to kill people, particularly when they have a weapon. If I have to shoot you to get in, I will tell my supervisors that you were threatening to kill me, and they will thank me. But if you shoot me, you will go to jail forever—if one of my fellow officers doesn’t kill you first. Which I think would happen. ‘Spis Commits Suicide’ will be the headline. Now, open the gate, Spis.” She waited a second, then unsnapped her holster.

  Spis opened the gate.

  “Thank you, Spis.”

  Jana mounted the stairs, the gate closing behind her. At the top, she looked down. Spis was gazing up through the bars at her, wishing he had killed her. She made a pistol of her thumb and forefinger, pointing down at him. “Bang,” she said. “Spis is dead.”

  She strolled to the back of the loft where Giles’s office was located.

  He sat on an overstuffed red couch, a small table with a demitasse of coffee in front of him. He was a little man, his hands always moving, his appearance immaculate, even dandyish. He stared at Jana, stroking his carefully brushed-back hair, his too-big mouth simulating a smile, his slightly pop eyes peering a little uneasily at her through jeweled women’s glasses. The eyeglasses were a prop Giles had affected throughout the years Jana had known him. Giles was not gay. He made regular use of a steady stream of middle-aged prostitutes whom Spis would bring up to his office. When he had gone out in public, he had worn the bejeweled frames as an eccentricity to attract attention. It made up for his small stature and lack of a commanding presence.

  Giles carefully poured Jana a cup of coffee from a carafe, holding the cup out to her when she sat in one of the chairs across from him.

  “I assume you are bringing trouble? You always bring trouble, you know. It’s the essence of being a police officer, which is the reason most people don’t like them.”

  Jana nodded.

  Giles took a quick taste of his own coffee. “It’s always a milestone in my life, an event of importance . . . no, major importance, when you appear at the top of my stairs.”

  Jana nodded again, looking at his glasses. “Still wearing the spectacles. Add any new gems?”

  Giles got excited. “Yes, a new sapphire.” He took the glasses off, pointing to the sparkling blue stone mounted just above one of the lenses. “I got it from an old piece of jewelry that nobody seemed to know the value of, so it was a steal.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t just steal it?”

  He slipped the glasses back on, a little irked. “Of course not. Prison cured me of those bad habits. I do everything legitimately. I’m very careful about what I buy now.”

  They sat in silence, each sipping coffee. Giles liked to settle in with his visitors. When he put his cup back on the tray, it was a signal that he was ready to talk business.

  “How can I help you?”

  “First, a complaint: your man downstairs didn’t want to let me in. I told him I would kill him if he didn’t.”

  Giles shifted uneasily. “Forgive him. Police make him angry. He still thinks he’s a criminal gang member.”

  “He still is.”

  “But, he’s my gang member,” Giles half apologized. “I’ll talk to him about it.” He fiddled with his glasses. “You want information?”

  “Yes.”

  “I take it you are prepared to make it worth my while?”

  “As always.”

  “What’s the payment to be?”

  “You go into my ‘future favors’ book. When you are in trouble, and you will be, I’ll be there for you. Or you get a small piece of information in return now, and forget the future favor.”

  He thought about it. “I’m not into long-term investments. So, payment now.”

  “I want information from you first.”

  “You have no trust! A typical policeman. But go ahead. I’m magnanimous. I shall forgive you for not believing in me. Ask your questions.”

  Jana took the diamond out of her pocket, dangling it in front of the little man. The gem pulled Giles in as it had Jana. Giles’s eyes seemed to get even bigger, and he began gnawing on the knuckle of one of his hands. “May I . . . hold it?”

  Jana nodded, br
inging it closer to Giles. He took it, pulled a loupe from his jacket pocket, blew it free of lint, then inserted it in his eye socket, inspecting the diamond. “Lovely. A lovely thing,” he murmured to himself.

  He took the loupe out of his eye and held the diamond out above him, watching the jewel twist on its chain. “Look! It lights up the space. It’s as if the full moon has come into this room.” He let out a long sigh. “Are we at all interested in selling this piece of the heavens?” He hesitated. “By any chance, is it stolen merchandise? Less money, but for this one I am willing to make an exception. How much?” He took his eyes off the diamond, glancing at Jana, wincing when he saw the expression on her face. She was not going to sell him the diamond.

  “For this stone, I had to try,” he mumbled by way of an apology. “I will give you the particulars. It’s blue-white, clear, class G, no faults. Approximately five and a half carats, beautifully cut, about a hundred and seventy-five thousand plus in U.S. dollars.”

  Jana nodded, stunned by the price.

  “A very nice bauble.” Giles kept turning the gem over and over in his hands, an avid look on his face. Reluctantly, he handed the diamond back to Jana. “Another few minutes and I would probably be willing to murder you for it. A gem that cut and size, that color, with no faults . . . is rare.”

  “I would think so.”

  “Very high-quality goods,” he murmured. “So, why did you bring it here?”

  “Tell me about the gem market in this area of the world.”

  “Not much to tell. Diamonds like these are hard to come by locally. With some exceptions, they’re too expensive for Middle or Eastern Europe.” His face took on a wan look. “Surely too expensive for most Slovaks. Maybe one of the fine jewelry outlets in Austria? Vienna would be the place to ask.”

  “You think it came from Vienna?”

  He turned the question over in his mind, taking his glasses off to wave them in her direction. “Since you made my day by bringing me the diamond, you can now have an additional contribution from me for an entry in your ‘future favors’ book. It is my belief the chain is probably Indian. The weave is not European. The gold is too soft, probably 22 or 24 carat. Most Europeans would not want to use such soft gold for such a big stone. They would be afraid it might work its way loose. There is also a small flower mark on the clasp. I have seen it on goods that came from the East. It could have been cut and set in Europe, but I don’t think so.”