by Blake Banner
I turned to Helen. “Stay here. I won’t be long.”
She shook her head. “No. Whoever they are, they are my friends and they were friends of my father’s. And what you are about to do is a crime in every civilized country in the world. If I can’t stop it, at least I will be a witness to it.”
“Don’t be stupid, Helen. This is dangerous. You could get hurt. Hell! You could get killed just getting to the house!”
Her face went rigid. “I was a police detective, David, and I do not intend to stand by and allow a murder to be committed just because you believe you have some divine right to ‘take out the trash’!”
I felt a surge of frustration and fought to control it. “I cannot get into a philosophical discussion about morality with you now, Helen! For crying out loud, just stay in the truck!”
I swung out of the cab and started an agonizing struggle up the hill, ankle deep in mud, slipping, sliding, falling to my knees and on my belly more than once. Pretty soon the tree cover started to recede and the wind and the rain were head-on coming in off the Atlantic. Now I could see the two trucks parked outside a large, ultra-modern house made of white concrete blocks and vast glass panels. It was fifty paces away across a stretch of what had been lawn but was now swamp. There was no cover of any kind and all I could do was drop on my belly and start a steady crawl through the mud and the slime, with the deluge crashing down on me. I crawled directly toward the house, placing it between myself and the ocean to act as a windbreak, but even so it was a thirty-second walk which took me an exhausting ten minutes of slime and struggle.
The front of the house was a massive white wall with a tower on the left. The tower had a vertical strip of glass that showed you the elevator shaft and a spiral staircase. The right-hand wall was featureless as high as the second floor, where the concrete was replaced by glass. Between the two there was a short flight of three large, square steps flanked by cactus gardens. They led to a huge, oak door that now stood open. I clambered to my feet, stood a moment letting the rain wash the mud off me, and ran awkwardly, with the wet clothes clinging to me, pulling at my limbs, up the steps to the open door.
The hall was large, cavernous and empty. I pulled the Sig from my waistband and stood very still, listening. At first there was only silence. Then it came to me like a barely audible hiss, a susurration of words on the edge of meaning. I sprinted to the angular stairs that rose to the second floor and found a broad living room with wild, spectacular views of the storm over the forest on my right, and over the sea on my left. There was furniture lurking in the shadows among amorphous objects, but to one side of the glass wall that gave onto the terrace which overlooked the ocean, there was a door. The door was open and electric light flooded out, making a grotesque stencil out of Constantino, in his huge coat and hat. In his hand he had a gun. I couldn’t see Milojević, but I could hear him. His voice was soft and quiet. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but Constantino raised his weapon and took aim.
Seventeen
“Freeze, Colonel.”
He spoke without turning, his voice issuing from the black hulk of his coated, hatted silhouette.
“So, you come.”
“Yeah, I come. Now drop the weapon and let’s see what you have in that room.”
He decocked the weapon and dropped it on the floor. I approached him and snapped, “Go inside. Take off your coat and hat, leave them on the floor.”
He didn’t react immediately. He stood staring down at the floor, then took a couple of ponderous steps into the room, where he stripped off his coat and hat and dropped them on the floor. I went in after him.
It was a large, rectangular room. There were no windows. The floor was tiled in white marble and there were display cabinets against the walls and running down the center of the room. Kostadin Milojević was standing at the far end of the room. He was drenched, his white hair was in rats’ tails over his face and his clothes were saturated. He jerked his chin at me and said, “Look at this museum. I am fighting to forget, but he is preserving his memories. These disgusting objects are his treasures. This…,” he jabbed his finger at the cases, “this is what he wants in his mind, in his memory!” He stabbed at his own head with his fingers.
Constantino laughed. “So, it is easy for you to judge now, uh, Mr. Killer? Easy for you to be judge, jury and executioner. Here is the proof. A man who has this in his house, this man is evil monster and we must kill.”
Milojević half screamed, “You deny it?”
Constantino ignored him, gave a small shake of his big, shaggy head. “Like Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum…” I went very still. He went on. “Like Auschwitz Museum…” He looked at me from under his brows. “Tell me, Mr. Killer, do you keep in your house a collection of trophies from all the people you have killed? No? It is not the perpetrators of monstrous crimes who want to remember, is it? It is the victims who want to keep memory alive. This…”
He pointed at a glass cabinet against the wall. In it was the torn, bloodstained dress of a girl, maybe five years old. “My niece. That—” He pointed to another, flat cabinet in the middle of the room. “My father’s hand, cut off before he was executed.”
Milojević started to shout, “He is lying! Liar! He is lying! This is my story, not his! This is my life! He is stealing my life!”
Constantino ignored him and continued. “This, a woman’s scalp. I find it beside her naked body. She has been raped and killed, the trophy dropped when the soldier was killed. All of these, some are my family, others are my bigger family of Yugoslavia. I keep them to remember, so that I never forget, what he did to Yugoslavia, to my people, to Vukovar, to my family, my wife…”
Milojević took a step toward me. “He is lying! I brought you here so you can see! These are not his family, his neighbors. These are my people! His victims! You cannot believe him!”
I scowled at him. “Shut up!”
I tried hard to think, but thinking did little to help. Then Constantine sneered and asked, “Why don’t you ask him to show you his birthmark?”
Milojević frowned. I remembered in the file there was mention of a birthmark, a circular, brown stain about an inch across, on Colonel Kostas Marcović’s left shoulder blade. However, it also said that the existence of the birthmark was probable but unconfirmed, and would not be conclusive. Constantino went on, pointing.
“He has round birthmark on left shoulder. Come, Colonel, show us now your left shoulder.”
Milojević stared at him like he was crazy. I turned to Constantino and shrugged. “How about we look at both your backs? Take off your jackets and your shirts.”
Constantino made a face of indifference and pulled off his jacket, then started unbuttoning his shirt. Milojević was ahead of him, stripping off his soaking shirt. He slapped it on the floor and turned his back on me.
“See!” He shouted. “No birthmark! I am not Colonel Kostas Marcović!”
Constantino spat and turned his back to me. The birthmark wasn’t there, either. The pale, aged skin of both shoulder blades was clear of blemishes. I laughed out loud. “So, what? Neither of you is Colonel Kostas Marcović?”
Milojević whirled, pointing savagely at Constantino. “It is him!” He flung his arm wide. “Look at his nightmare museum!”
Constantino sighed and lowered himself onto a chair by the door. He looked real old and real tired, and I began to wonder if the intel was wrong and truly neither of these men was the colonel. I wondered for one crazy moment if they had both come here looking for the bastard and he had outsmarted us all, and was now living in Belize.
Something, an impulse I could not explain, made me take my wallet from my pocket and pull out the photograph of Blanka. I showed it to Milojević and watched his face carefully.
“Do you know her name?”
He studied her a moment, then scowled at me and said, “Yugoslavia.”
I held it up and showed it to Constantino. He stared at it for a long moment with no express
ion. Then he reached under his chair, pulled out a Glock and shot Milojević through the heart. It was an expert shot. Milojević stood for a moment, astonished. He looked at me and frowned, then sank to the floor.
I stared at Constantino. He was staring at the photograph I still held in my hand. He drew breath, held it a moment and shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. When he spoke his voice was thick and wet.
“I don’t know her name. She is not alone.” His voice rose to a childlike squeak and he wiped his nose on his sleeve. “There are many babies in hell. God does not look after the babies.”
“You killed her, didn’t you?”
He gave his head a single shake, still staring at the picture.
“You were there. You watched it. You authorized it. Who killed her mother? Was it you?” His brows knit. He bit his lip and shook his head. “How many times did you stab her?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“Did you shoot the child? Was it you or did you order it?”
“I don’t know…”
“Stand up!” He stood. “Turn around.” He shuffled around until his back was to me, and there it was, subtle, almost invisible, but there. I said, “You can choose, Colonel, you can confess or die un-confessed. Your choice.”
Her voice came from the door. It said simply, “Constantino…”
I glanced at her bedraggled form clutching at the frame.
“Tell the truth. Go confessed to meet your maker.”
He turned to look at her, then looked at the wall and seemed to compose himself. His voice, when he spoke at last, was calm and cold.
“I am Colonel Kostas Marcović, I participated in the Vukovar hospital massacre, I killed the child in the photograph and her mother. I am responsible and I repent with all of my heart and soul. May God have mercy upon my soul.”
I snarled, “Yeah, the same god who sent you to Blanka and her mother.”
The 9mm slug punched a neat hole in the base of his skull, traveled up and sprayed his forehead across the wall. Helen gave a small scream and I turned to face her.
“I told you to stay in the car.”
She staggered away from the door, into the dark living room clutching at her mouth. I heard her wretch and took a few moments to photograph the room and the two men before going out to where she was sitting on a suede sofa in the darkness, with the wild storm in the background.
I said, “It’s over. I’m sorry about Milojević. I should have foreseen he might have a weapon hidden in the house.”
She didn’t answer. I saw a tray of drinks on a dresser against the wall and went to pour two strong whiskies. I handed her one. She looked at it for a moment, then took it and took a strong pull.
“I don’t think Kostadin would have had much reason for living once Constantino was dead. They seem to have been bound to each other in some strange way.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
She was quiet again for a while, then said, “You were right. I should have listened, instead of judging. You are brutal, but often God’s punishment is brutal. Sometimes it has to be.”
I sighed. “It’s not God, Helen. That’s the whole point. God doesn’t make us good, and the Devil doesn’t make us bad. We do all that all on our own. We don’t need to go to Hell, we are already there. What we need to do is try to get out of it.”
“The mind is its own place,” she said, staring down into her glass, “and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
I nodded. “Yeah, and in the end, Helen, it is better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
She raised her face to offer me a smile that was neither warm nor amused. “The eternally surprising Mr. Friedman. Will you please take me home?”
“Of course.”
I took the glass from her fingers and carried both into the museum room. There I pressed Milojević’s prints on one and Constantino’s on the other. Then I squeezed Milojević’s hand onto the Sig and fired a round so he’d have powder residue. When I stepped back into the living room Helen was watching me.
“You’re so cold.”
“I am also tired and hungry.”
“Dear God, how can you be like that?”
“It takes practice. Come on. Get up and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The journey back was tedious but uneventful. The storm had peaked and was now blowing over toward the Caribbean Sea. The winds were still gale force and the rain torrential, but it wasn’t the same wild madness as before. We didn’t take the Toyota. I didn’t believe it would make it back up the slope to the main road. So I took the Defender, and along the way as we ground down the path and turned onto the blacktop, we concocted the bones of a story where the Toyota was stolen and we had no idea how the Defender got there, because we had been at the Trade Winds all afternoon and evening. With a bit of help from the contents of my two sports bags, I was pretty sure we’d be OK.
We got back to San Fernando a little less than an hour later. There was no one on the streets and the bars were all locked up, including the Trade Winds. We parked in the town square outside the church, and I carefully wiped all our prints off any part of the vehicle we had touched. Then we climbed out and walked, hunched and huddled together against the gale, toward Main Street.
At the corner there was a crunching and creaking of wood and the rear, kitchen door of Old Joe’s pushed open. There was warm lamplight inside, and an unmistakable silhouette in the doorway. I heard Helen gasp. She let go of me and ran, the wind whipping her sodden clothes about her as she went. Maria stepped out and they both clung to each other. They held each other’s faces in their hands, a mere inch from each other, and spoke urgently, then clung to each other again, stroking each other’s hair and kissing each other’s faces.
Then they slowly came apart, clutching their arms, unwilling to let go. Finally their fingers slipped apart and Helen ran back to me. She leaned close to my ear and said, “We’ll go to your room.”
I nodded and we hurried across the road toward the pool complex where my room was, pushed through the door and up to the bedroom. I unlocked the door and I went in stripping off my wet shirt and jacket, dumping them on the floor. I turned to her as she closed the door.
“You want a hot shower? I can fix some drinks…”
She stared at me for an awkward moment. Her face was hard to read. “You need one as badly as I do.”
“I can wait.”
She swallowed hard. “We could share the shower…” I frowned at her. She gave a strange laugh. “We have shared just about everything else today.”
I don’t know why I said it, but it came out all on its own. “Even your girlfriend?”
“Even my girlfriend. I don’t mind. It’s better than Gonzalo.”
“I’m flattered.”
“You should be.” She came a few steps closer, like a nervous child. “It’s been such a crazy day. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I have never been so afraid…”
“Helen…” I shook my head. “Don’t do anything you’re going to regret.”
“Don’t patronize me…”
She stood in front of me and, without shifting her eyes from mine, stripped off her soaking clothes until she stood naked before me. Then she took my hand and led me to the shower.
* * *
A couple of hours later the rain outside had subsided to little more than heavy drizzle, though the wind was still strong and gusting to thirty or forty miles an hour. Through the windows that gave onto the balcony that overlooked the pool, I could see the clouds, now an ash gray, breaking over a dark sky where occasional stars were beginning to wink. Outside, in the streets below, doors were beginning to open, as were shutters, bars and restaurants, and voices were being raised in laughter and shouted conversation about the storm, and what damage it had done.
I was sitting up in bed, thinking about steak and beer, making my preliminary report to the brigadier, and getting off the island before the questions
started the following day. Helen was lying beside me, with one long leg on the outside of the white linen sheets. She ran her fingernails slowly down my left arm and said:
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Harry…?”
My skin went cold and the hair prickled on the back of my neck. I looked down at her and frowned, but it was too late. She had played it just right and she had seen my reaction.
“Harry?”
“Harry Bauer, right? From New York.”
“Who’s asking?”
She gave a small shrug. “Bloque Meta. They told Gonzalo to look out for you, draw you in and see what information he could get from you. You didn’t give him much of a chance though, did you? He was going to use Maria to seduce you if he had to. She asked me to do what I could…”
“So what happened?”
“You were a bit unpredictable. We didn’t know why you were here, and before anybody could put together a plan you went for Aguilera, then you had slaughtered all of Gonzalo’s men, and next thing you were after the last person on Earth anyone would have expected, Constantino.” She shrugged again. “Now everyone is dead.”
“Not everyone.”
“Are you going to kill me and Maria?” She looked up into my face. “She doesn’t know anything. She is not a danger to anyone…”
“Relax. I’m done killing. If Bloque Meta ever come back, it will be to a very different place. You know nothing and you saw nothing. I showed up, the Tipic burned down, next day Gonzalo had been murdered, then there was a storm and I was gone. That’s all you know.”
“They want to know who you work for.”
“I figured. I am very rich and I work for myself. And I am not Harry Bauer. Harry Bauer is dead. He died in New York a few days ago.”
“Did you kill him?”
I nodded. I swung my legs out of bed and stood, started dressing. “Look after Maria, Helen. She’s vulnerable. You have to keep her out of trouble, and for that you have to stay out of trouble yourself. We had dinner at the Tortuga with Gonzalo. You and Maria spent most of the time at the bar while we talked guy stuff. I showed up a couple of times at your bar, but we never really talked. Next thing I was gone.”