Dark Dreams

by Michael Genelin

  “I am glad it is all right between you and your grandchild.”

  “It may not be all right if she learns more about her mother and me.”

  “It was . . . bad with your daughter?”

  “Very bad, because of my relationship with her father at the end of my marriage. She was angry and blamed me.”

  “You and your granddaughter haven’t talked about her?”

  “I’ve told my granddaughter how much I loved her mother, and that she was a good girl and a bright girl and a pretty girl, with little anecdotes sprinkled in. As far as she knows, her mother was wonderful. That’s all.”

  “I don’t think it would have benefited you or her if you had told her anything else.”

  “You think I did the right thing?”

  “I know so!”

  Jana felt a wave of relief. “You’re a lovely man.”

  “I’m just a man who feels both love and admiration for the woman sitting next to him. Thanks for confiding in me.”

  “I had to tell you sometime.”

  Peter smiled. “That sometime is now officially over. One last question: Do I get to meet her when she eventually comes to Slovakia?”

  Jana stared at Peter, a weight lifting from her shoulders. He had accepted her past without rejecting her. She leaned over and planted a firm, lingering kiss on his mouth before settling back in her seat.

  “I liked the kiss,” he said.

  “I liked the kiss too; I like you,” Jana whispered.

  “You’re supposed to,” Peter insisted.

  “I’m going to see her soon in Switzerland.”

  “When?” asked Peter.

  “In six weeks. She has a break from classes then.”

  “I think she’ll look like you.”

  Jana found herself blushing. “It doesn’t matter what she looks like, as long as I can see her.”

  “So,” said Peter, “shall we go back to the hotel?”

  “Your room or my room?” Jana teased.

  “My bed is made up with two pillows, and it’s larger.”

  They walked out of the restaurant with their arms around each other’s waists.

  Chapter 16

  Jana was at home in bed when the body of the Guzak brothers’ mother was discovered near Nový Most bus station. Her younger son, Milan, was found lying in the garden of Saint Martin’s Cathedral, around the corner from the front entrance.

  A priest had telephoned after hearing shots just before a midnight mass. The officers who were dispatched to the location found the son first, lying face up, his arms outstretched, legs together, the blood on the body making it look as if he were a modern Christ, crucified on the ground. The mother was found during the police sweep of the area, her small frame crumpled like a sack of garbage in the bus underpass at Nový Most.

  As soon as the officers at the location reported the murders, Jana dispatched a forensics crew to the scene, and made sure the homicide investigators who were on night duty were experienced. When she realized that the name of the dead man was Guzak, she went to the scene herself.

  Portable lights had been strung up at both sites. The police vehicle’s headlights also had been left on to provide further illumination. Jana stopped first at the bus underpass, figuring that she would spend a short time there, then would quickly go to the church where the woman’s son had been killed. She expected to spend more time at the second location. The son had probably been the target. The man was too deeply involved in criminal activity not to be the primary objective.

  The bus underpass was eerie in the artificial light, support pillars casting huge, impenetrable shadows around the few illuminated areas. The officers had already marked off the murder site and were making a spiral search of the ground, commencing with the perimeter around the body. They could not do a wider search until daylight gave them confidence that they wouldn’t miss anything.

  Jana walked over to the woman’s body. The photographer had finished. She put on the regulation plastic gloves and, using her flashlight to give her added light, checked the corpse. Her clothes were sedate: she could not possibly have been mistaken for a streetwalker trying to pick up customers in the bus depot area. The woman had been in her early fifties, with nothing to distinguish her except the apparent cause of death: her throat had been cut, the slash so deep that the woman’s head was hanging by a thread. Jana looked closer at the wound.

  The cut was wide and clean, so the knife that inflicted it had been large and very sharp, with no obstructions on the blade such as scaling notches that might have torn the edges of the wound. Whoever had done the killing must have been very strong to create this kind of deep slash without any sawing, just a single blow.

  Jana checked the woman’s hair. There was a small patch missing from the top and just to the right side of her head, with a very small amount of blood on the scalp itself. The murderer had obtained leverage by grabbing a handful of hair, then pulled her head back to expose her throat. From the direction of the cut and the position of the missing hair and bloody scalp, the murderer had used his right hand to bring her head back, wielding the knife with his left. It was a small thing but might be an item in the chain of evidence.

  Jana scanned the woman’s clothing. It was not particularly disheveled, nothing was torn, the dress was fully buttoned, her shoes still on her feet. She pulled the woman’s dress up: panties intact and not pulled down, so there had been no sexual assault. Jana checked the wrists and fingers: no watch, but a wedding ring still there. There was no necklace. Jana checked the immediate vicinity to determine if it might have been jerked or cut off. A few feet away she found a small gold chain in a crack on the sidewalk. A very small pavé diamond pendant was still on the chain, the clasp intact. One of the links had been broken. Again, Jana thought, the murderer was very strong. She looked around for the woman’s purse. It was not there. This did not appear to have been a robbery, so the handbag should have been in the immediate area.

  “Do any of you have the woman’s purse?” she yelled at the working officers.

  One of the patrol officers held his hand up. “I do.”

  “I want it.”

  The man quickly trotted over to his vehicle, took out the woman’s handbag, and bought it over to Jana.

  “Was this by the body?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “You picked it up and put it in your car before the photographer got his shots of its position in relation to the body?”

  The officer thought. “I wanted to safeguard the contents.”

  “Commendable. Unfortunately, it interfered with the investigation. The next time, leave evidence where it is until the police assigned to investigate the homicide arrive at the scene.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  She went through the contents of the purse, which were relatively orderly. It was probable that the purse had not been searched by the murderer. The money was still there. She gave the purse back to the patrol officer. “Put this in the same spot where you found it. Have the photographer take a few pictures. Then have a detective make a note of what you have done, so it is clear in the written reports, and tell him I want the purse and its contents on my desk in the morning.”

  The man scurried off.

  Within a few minutes, Jana was at the scene of the second murder. This examination had progressed about as far as the other.

  Milan, the dead Guzak brother, was in his twenties. He had been shot several times. She rolled the body on its side, checking the wounds: once in the back, twice in the chest, and once through the head. The shot in the back had left no visible powder burns, so it was probably fired from more than three feet away. Jana tilted the body. There was one exit wound on his back; the bullet from the other shot was probably still in the body. She checked the ground under the body. A large slug, mashed beyond ballistics comparison, had gone through the body and smacked into the stones underneath. As the slug was on the ground under the body, the bullets in the chest probably had b
een fired straight down while Guzak was on the ground and helpless. Jana carefully replaced the body. She wanted to make sure that the bullet was recovered and not overlooked, so she told the crime-scene detectives that there was a slug under the torso of the corpse.

  Jana examined the head of the dead man. There was a contact wound in a tight ring of scorched powder, and, from what she could tell, burning inside the wound. Two bullets in the chest and the one in the back had not been enough for the killer. He wanted to make absolutely sure that his victim went to hell. It was an execution.

  Jana stood, perusing the surroundings. A priest was standing to one side being interviewed by an officer. The shots had occurred just before the midnight mass. The killings of both mother and son had to be related, so Jana could hazard a few reasonable guesses: The mother and son had intended to attend the midnight mass. It was a time that her son, a man wanted for questioning in connection with several crimes, would have felt it would be safe enough to leave whatever hole he had been hiding in. So, Jana conjectured, Mother Guzak had wanted to go to mass, and not having seen mama for awhile, and wanting to do the Slovak thing of protecting one’s mother when she went out at night, or perhaps even listening to her entreaties to save his soul, he had accompanied her.

  Unfortunately for them both, someone knew they were coming. Perhaps knowing that the sons were in Slovakia, someone had been watching the mother’s house and had seen her and one of her sons take the bus to the area under the overpass and get off to walk to the cathedral.

  The first contact with the murderer had been at the bus stop. The mother was quickly eliminated, probably so there would be no witness. It also meant it was possible that the mother had known the killer. The son had run, perhaps thinking his mother would not be harmed. He’d headed to the one area he thought might be safe: the cathedral where the mass was to be celebrated. He’d almost made it, but was cut down before he reached a place of refuge. Perhaps he had staggered a few feet, twisting, falling on his back, and the killer had come up to him, firing straight down into his chest. Then the killer had made damned sure that Milan Guzak would never get up and run away again by putting the gun to his head and firing the last shot.

  Jana thought about the huge old Webley that Giles’s bodyguard had displayed when she’d visited. Ballistics from the two slugs still in the body, the one in the chest and the one in the head, would give them an indication of the type of gun that had fired the slug. If they found the gun, they might get a match.

  In the scenario Jana had constructed, there were at least two killers. While one was killing the mother, the other had to have chased the son and caught up to him before he got to the safety of the cathedral.

  Could one of the men have been Giles? Jana thought about it for a second. Possibly. He could be violent. And he certainly was afraid of the Guzak brothers, and wanted them out of his life. But to kill, Giles would have had to be under enormous and immediate threat. If Giles’s bodyguard had been part of the murder team, and not Giles, the bodyguard could have worked with someone else, someone who would also be able to commit cold blooded murder. There were certainly enough criminals in the world to choose from.

  Jana sighed. She’d wait for the autopsy report and the ballistics reports. As well, she’d look through the mother’s purse in the morning to see if there was anything of interest inside.

  Then she went home to bed.

  Chapter 17

  The man who had called himself Salman Mehta in India was now going by Soros, a suitably Hungarian name while in Hungary. He had passed the time while waiting for his associate to arrive by visiting the Benedictine monastery on the outskirts of Györ; then he had walked around the slow-moving city center near the river before driving to the house that they had designated just outside the small community of Vac, north of Budapest and some ways east of Györ. His associate was to meet him there.

  It was irritating to wait, and the trip from Austria, to the northwest, had not been easy. Most of the roads were good, but icy, and after spending months in India, driving on the left, driving on the right now created additional stress.

  Soros found the house a few minutes before he was scheduled to arrive. He parked two hundred away and scanned the street. The few houses were widely scattered, so there were only a few people to worry about. There were no danger signs, not too much pedestrian traffic, nor indications of surveillance other than his own.

  He focused on the front of the house: a small porch, two windows with the drapes drawn. Good. He could not see within, but once inside no one would be able to see him. He checked the back of the house. Unlike the neighbors, it had no garden, just trees and large bushes which blocked any real view of the rear. Just like a petty criminal, Soros thought: the occupant had wanted a way to get out of the house safely without being observed if anything threatened him. No doubt he had a car in a lot or on the street somewhere nearby, which he would use to get away once he got out beyond the trees. They would have to take that into account.

  Soros saw another car approaching from the other end of the street. The vehicle parked. Almost immediately, his cell phone began ringing. Soros answered, knowing who would be on the other end of the line.

  “I saw you park. Wait about three minutes to allow me to get to the back, then walk to the front door and knock. Okay?” Soros hung up, took out a cigarette and lit it, then left his car, casually pretending to be a man out for a stroll, just a local smoking his cigarette without a care in the world.

  When he felt he was close enough, he cut through an empty lot, angling toward the house. He took off at a sprint when he heard the back door close. Their quarry had not run far when Soros caught him and dragged him back inside. The woman who had been called Rana in Nepal, and who now called herself Eva, was already waiting for him within. She had changed from her sari and head scarf into an inconspicuous ski jacket and heavy slacks. She now looked very Western, her hair carefully blonde-streaked.

  Eva eyed the man on the kitchen floor. “He knew we were coming,” she remarked.

  “He’s a thief. They develop a sixth sense for danger.” Without warning, Soros kicked the man on the floor, who let out a muffled grunt, skittering back to get as far from Soros as the small kitchen would allow.

  “How was prison, Vlad?” Soros asked.

  “Who are you?” Vlad got out.

  “Friends of Solti,” Eva answered.

  “Then where is Solti?” Vlad asked. He answered his own question, worrying his lip with his teeth. “Not a good question. I know what happened. He expected you; I expected you. You’ve already met with him.”

  “Congratulations on your assessment of the situation.” Eva’s pretended admiration mocked him.

  “I can see the pieces,” Vlad scowled at her. “How many of us are left?”

  “Why do you want to know, Vlad?”

  Eva moved to the small stove, which had a coffeepot on it. She touched it to feel if it was warm, then sniffed at the top of the pot, making a face. “Old. Undrinkable. If you’re to receive guests properly, the least you could do is to make a fresh cup.” She put the pot in the sink, running water over it, letting the water continue to run. “Cleanliness is next to godliness, right?” Vlad didn’t respond. “Would you rather speak to me, Vlad? Or would you prefer that my colleague speak to you?”

  Vlad shot a quick glance at Soros, then nodded at her. “You!” The word seemed to be forced out.

  “Wonderful, Vlad. I appreciate the confidence you have in me.” She unzipped her ski jacket, pulling out a small automatic from a clip-on belt holster, snapping off the safety, levering a shell into the chamber.

  “I’ll take a look around the house,” Soros announced, walking out of the kitchen.

  Eva waved her gun at the man on the floor. “You can see how much confidence my partner has in me by the fact that he’s left me here alone with you.”

  “You have a gun.”

  “It helps,” she acknowledged. “Tell me, how was prison, Vla
d?”

  “Like all prisons.”

  “I’ve never been. Actually, I’m just making small talk so you feel more comfortable.”

  “How could your being here possibly make me more comfortable?”

  “I’ll be going in a little while.”

  “Will I still be alive to enjoy your departure?”

  They heard the sound of breaking furniture coming from the front of the house.

  “My associate is very clumsy. It is always best to get out of his way.” There were more crashes. “As he ages, he just gets worse.”

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  “I don’t like the smoke.”

  “He smokes.”

  “I have to tolerate his habits but not yours. Perhaps a drink?”

  “In the cabinet.” He pointed.

  Keeping her eyes on him, Eva opened the cabinet, pulling out a half-empty bottle of red wine. She stepped back several feet, then placed it on the floor between them. “Pick it up slowly and uncork it. Drink from the bottle.”

  He uncorked the bottle, taking a long drink, then wiping his lips.

  “Can we talk?” he asked.

  “We are talking.”

  “I’ve already told everyone, your people, my people, that I don’t have what you’re after.”

  “I’m inclined to believe you. We’re just making sure.”

  The sound of additional breakage came from the other rooms.

  “If you don’t think I have it, why not let me live?”

  “You know why not.”

  “How can I help you so you’ll let me live?”

  “You’re absolutely sure you don’t have it?”

  He took another swig of wine from the bottle. “If I had the package, would I be staying here?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Good.” He thought for a moment. “I could help you with the others. I know some of them.”