The Josef Slonský Box Set

by Graham Brack

  ‘I see,’ said Dvorník. ‘And what might make it necessary?’

  ‘Well,’ Slonský answered, ‘a detective might run amok if he’s asked any more stupid questions. We’re going to search a warehouse, and there may be some people there who object to having it searched.’

  ‘I see. And what are we looking for?’

  ‘A Bosnian girl. And don’t ask me what she looks like. If we find any women tied up there, whatever they look like, we’ll assume they’re what we’re looking for, all right?’

  ‘Crystal clear,’ agreed Dvorník. After a brief pause he continued. ‘Shooting to bring down or to kill?’

  Slonský bit his tongue. ‘Use your initiative. If they’re unarmed and no threat, it’s probably best if you don’t kill them.’

  Navrátil drove them across town to the alleyway, where Peiperová was waiting at the end nearer the café. With the car parked, the three detectives joined her to walk to the old gate.

  ‘Navrátil, I think you and Peiperová should go round to the other side of the building. There may be another entrance.’

  ‘I’ve already looked, sir,’ replied Peiperová. ‘There’s a roller door where trucks can back up but it’s not wide enough to let them reverse inside.’

  ‘Good work. But we still need to cover it in case there are people inside who try to escape. Dvorník, I’d feel happier if you went first.’

  ‘You’re leading the investigation,’ Dvorník answered. ‘Shouldn’t you go first?’

  ‘If you think I’m letting you walk behind me with a loaded gun, you’ve got another thing coming,’ responded Slonský. ‘Get in front where I can keep an eye on you. And let’s all keep as quiet as we can, shall we?’

  Peiperová and Navrátil walked off, and after giving them three minutes to get into position Slonský pushed the gate open. There was a crash as a metal bin toppled over.

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘No sign of a response,’ Dvorník noted. ‘Nobody came to look out. We may have it to ourselves.’

  There were steps leading up to a door one floor up. When the buildings were erected they were probably flats, and this would have been the way to the middle floor. The door opened outwards, but it was locked.

  ‘Shall I smash the glass?’ Dvorník whispered.

  ‘No need,’ Slonský replied. ‘Just watch for inquisitive bystanders. We’re a bit visible here.’ He produced a set of skeleton keys from a pocket of his coat and jiggled them in the lock. ‘Bless them,’ he said. ‘Preserving a nice simple nineteenth-century lock like this. There we are.’ He nudged the door further open with his shoulder.

  ‘Is that strictly legal?’ asked Dvorník.

  ‘No, but we don’t have a warrant,’ Slonský replied, ‘so it doesn’t much matter how we get in, does it?’

  ‘Just asking,’ Dvorník shrugged. ‘No skin off my nose.’

  ‘Hush and keep walking. Let’s see what there is to find here.’

  They sidled along the corridor in the gloom. It was easy to see why a wider exit to the warehouse was needed, because it would be very difficult to bring anything substantial in this way. After about twenty paces there was a semi-glazed door, though the glass was so dirty it might as well have been frosted. Cobwebs laced the frame and Slonský could picture Věra feeling the need to give the place a good scrub before going any further.

  He motioned Dvorník to keep quiet and they listened at the door. There were no sounds of movement, so Slonský lifted it slightly to prevent it scraping along the floor and eased it open.

  The room was large, spanning the whole width of the building, and there was a pulley fixed to a beam which presumably allowed items to be lowered to the floor below. A sling dangled from the pulley, and a guard rail at the far side of the hatch prevented anyone falling from one side. Except that it could not be a rail, because a guard on only one side of a hole made no sense, and someone was slumped against it.

  Slonský ran forward while Dvorník crouched with his gun ready, his senses sharpened by the threat he felt. The slumped person was a naked woman, dirty, kneeling at the edge of the hatch with her feet over the drop and her arms fixed to the cross-beam with cable ties which had bitten into her flesh. Her face was bruised, purple, swollen, and her mouth was bloodied where some teeth had been knocked out. She was still breathing, but not strongly.

  ‘Get an ambulance,’ Slonský barked.

  Dvorník dialled the number and made the call, keeping his back to the wall and his gun raised throughout. ‘What’s that beside her knee?’ he asked.

  ‘Her left ear,’ said Slonský. ‘God knows where the other one is.’

  Chapter 12

  Peiperová could hardly grasp the cup. Her hands shook, and she did not know whether it was fear or rage, or a bit of both. ‘How could they do that?’ she hissed. ‘What had Daniela done to them?’

  Slonský bit into his párek. ‘Because they’re criminals. Criminals do that sort of thing. And she threatened them. If she just walked away without suffering for it, why would any of the girls stay? They can’t lock them up, and they could just walk out of the club, so how do they keep them penned up? They keep their passports, tell them they’ll be arrested by the likes of us, and beat up the odd girl to keep the others in check.’

  ‘It’s barbaric.’

  ‘It’s life. Get used to it. People do things like that. Or worse.’

  Navrátil stared into his cup. ‘Did the surgeon say…?’

  ‘He can’t reattach the ears, but he’s taken a mould off each and he says the cosmetic surgeon can build her new ones from cartilage and skin and you’d never know. It’ll take a few months, though.’

  Peiperová stifled a sob by pushing her handkerchief into her mouth.

  ‘Let it out, girl. But the most useful thing you can do for her is to punish the people who did it.’

  ‘Savović and Brukić.’

  Slonský swilled beer round his mouth to dislodge adhesive pieces of sausage. ‘A bit of evidence would be nice before jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘Who else?’ asked Peiperová.

  ‘Unfortunately, lass, the courts don’t take kindly to “Who else?” as a prosecution argument.’

  Navrátil pushed his plate away untasted.

  ‘Eat up, lad,’ ordered Slonský. ‘You’ll need that this evening.’

  ‘I’m not really hungry, sir.’

  Slonský patted the grease from his lips with a napkin. ‘Let me explain why you should eat. It’s late afternoon, and shortly we’re going to go to the red brick building to arrest Nejedlý. Let’s hope he’s in, because this is carefully timed for maximum impact. We’ll make a lot of noise about it so it’ll get back to his associates. Then we’ll bring him to the station and start questioning him. We only have to feed him after he has been with us for six hours, so he won’t get anything to eat or drink until around eleven tonight, whereas you and I will be nicely fed and watered, provided we eat all our tea now. That gives us an advantage, Navrátil, and I want to keep it that way, so don’t let me down. Get stuck in.’

  ‘Can I help, sir?’ Peiperová chipped in.

  ‘We can only have two doing the questioning, but you can come on the arrest if you like. If he has a secretary you can tell her in lurid detail what we suspect her boss has been doing. She may have some interesting details of her own to add.’

  The doorman half rose when they entered, but when he saw who they were he resumed his seat and decided to keep out of it. Slonský bounded up the stairs and pushed open the door of Nejedlý’s outer office.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ the secretary screeched.

  ‘No, but I’ve got one of these,’ Slonský responded, waving his badge and nodding to Peiperová to stay in the outer office with the secretary.

  Nejedlý was riffling through the files in a cabinet when they entered. ‘And you are…?’ he asked.

  ‘Your worst nightmare,’ came the answer.

  ‘I’m not saying anything till my law
yer gets here,’ Nejedlý repeated yet again.

  ‘Who’s asking you to say anything?’ Slonský replied. ‘Have I asked you a single question yet?’

  ‘No,’ conceded Nejedlý, ‘but why am I here if not to answer questions?’

  ‘Identity parade.’

  ‘Identity parade? At this time of day?’

  Slonský shrugged. ‘If the crime was committed at night…’ he began.

  ‘What crime?’

  ‘The crime you’re accused of.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’m not telling you till your lawyer gets here. Two can play at that game.’

  Nejedlý fidgeted a bit, folding and unfolding his arms. The silence continued for a while as Slonský read the newspaper and Navrátil stared into space.

  ‘I suppose we’re waiting for the others to get here,’ Nejedlý offered.

  ‘The others?’

  ‘For the identity parade.’

  ‘No, you’re the only one.’

  ‘How can you have an identity parade with only one person?’

  ‘The law just requires that I have a sufficient number of others. And since I know you’re guilty zero seems like a sufficient number to me.’

  ‘Guilty? Of what?’

  ‘I told you,’ said Slonský. ‘I’m not answering questions until your lawyer is present.’

  ‘I’m entitled to know what I’m being accused of.’

  Slonský pondered for a few moments. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘Let’s start with trafficking women for immoral purposes. That should put you away for a generation or so. Sentences average out at twelve years but you’ve done a few runs and since your associates are nasty people a bit of their sentences will probably rub off on you. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t get a twenty year stretch. Don’t you agree, Navrátil?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Nejedlý puffed out his chest. ‘Let’s see what evidence you’ve got for this trafficking guff, then.’

  Slonský raised the thick folder in front of him. ‘Sworn statements from the trafficked girls, video footage of your vehicles crossing borders, sale of motorway toll coupons, and of course photographs of one of your warehouses with a half-dead naked woman tied to a beam while your friends cut her ears off.’

  Nejedlý was shaken. He tried to regain his composure but it was obvious that he had not known about Daniela’s injuries.

  ‘You didn’t know about the ears, eh? So what did you think they wanted to borrow your warehouse for? Playing doctors and nurses?’ Slonský bellowed.

  ‘I’m not saying…’ Nejedlý began, cowering under the verbal attack.

  ‘…any more till your lawyer gets here. We heard. We hear it all the time. But people do. You see, you can’t afford to wait until your lawyer gets here. I wouldn’t mind betting that your associates know you’re here by now. They attacked Daniela so she couldn’t speak to us, and she had nothing very useful to say. Imagine what they’ll do to you once I let you go. There’s probably a big black car on its way now. Waiting for your lawyer pretty well guarantees that they’ll get here in time to practise their carving skills. Even better, your lawyer may insist on your being released until your trial. So all in all, we’re happy to sit tight and wait.’ Slonský inspected his watch. ‘Oh, it’s our coffee break. We’ll leave you to think for a minute or two.’ Slonský ushered the uniformed officer into the room and carefully closed the door. ‘Sergeant Salzer is a good man. He has one great quality — he barely speaks. I like that in a policeman.’

  He peered through the observation port. Salzer had emphasised his unwillingness to engage in conversation by pulling his chair away from the table a metre or two and was staring out Nejedlý in the manner of a heavyweight boxer at a weigh-in. Slonský had ensured that Salzer knew exactly what Nejedlý was being accused of, and Salzer, who had a daughter of Daniela’s age, was going to do nothing except transmitting contempt through the air. Twenty years ago Salzer might have given Nejedlý a little tap with a clenched fist just to emphasise his feelings, but in the modern, democratic Czech Republic where there was a rule of law, he would content himself with throwing the little worm into his cell with undue force a bit later. Of course, there was the added pleasure of not offering the accused a sip of water for five hours and fifty-nine minutes, so Salzer had set the alarm on his watch to ensure he did not inadvertently offer it earlier.

  ‘Well, that went well,’ Slonský pronounced.

  ‘Did it, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘What was in the folder, sir?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, it’s Doležal’s personnel file. Can’t think what that was doing on my desk. Now on to phase two. Klinger is waiting upstairs for his turn to question the suspect, so perhaps you’d like to go and fetch him, Navrátil. An hour or so cloistered with Klinger and Nejedlý will know what true terror is.’

  Klinger was impressive, conceded Slonský. He had never sat in on a financial crime interview before and was quite fascinated, not to say baffled. Klinger rattled off the questions briskly with no change of tone, so it was impossible to tell whether the answers were satisfactory or not, and he kept up a sharp pace, hitting with a question precisely as the last answer tailed away.

  Before long Slonský was fairly convinced it all hinged on Nejedlý’s answer to question 101a on form 54 — or perhaps it was question 54 on form 101a — and why it did not tally with the answer he had given to question 27 on some other form. This must have been important because Klinger had highlighted it in orange on his photocopy, and if you knew Klinger’s method you knew orange was always bad. So was green, but a different kind of bad. And you never wanted to see pink on one of your forms.

  With a jolt Slonský realised that he must have nodded off briefly because Klinger was now going through the import regulations as they related to Serbian fruit, jotting down numbers on a pad of squared paper and clicking on a calculator before adding figures to a column. In the end the hour with Klinger ran to two hours, eighteen minutes.

  ‘Satisfactory?’ asked Slonský as they left the room.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Klinger answered. ‘I think we can demonstrate a very large unpaid tax and duty liability there.’

  ‘How large is “very large”?’

  ‘All his worldly goods and then some. The vehicles are leased, and some of the buildings are rented, so he doesn’t actually have a great deal. Or, more accurately, not a great deal that we can’t confiscate as ill-gotten proceeds.’

  ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer man. He didn’t want to wait for his lawyer, then?’

  ‘I don’t recall it being mentioned. Anyway, I’ll just write this up, then I’ll come down and charge him, then you can hold him until his first hearing, and fraud hearings are notoriously slow in coming up.’

  Slonský beamed. ‘I do enjoy co-operating with other branches of the police service. We’re all here to serve the public, after all. Well, must let you get on. And as soon as Navrátil gets here we’d better ask a bit about the abduction and trafficking.’

  ‘Yes, where is young Navrátil?’

  ‘Gone to get us a couple of hot bacon rolls and some coffee. The rules say the prisoner can be kept without food for six hours but it doesn’t say that the same is true for detectives. I thought if we eat them in front of him it may help him work up an appetite.’

  Peiperová was employing more subtle questioning skills. Nejedlý’s secretary had been struck dumb by the story Peiperová had unfolded for her, so the young officer had suggested a brandy might be just the thing to steady her nerves. One brandy had become three, while Peiperová sipped a glass of mineral water.

  The secretary’s name was Petra. She was a matronly lady of about fifty who had been with Mr Nejedlý for about four years, having previously worked as an administrator for a theatre company that lost its funding. If she hadn’t been desperate she would never have taken the job with Nejedlý who, she said, struck her all along as a wrong ’un, though she could not reall
y say why.

  ‘There were his friends, of course. A man is known by the company he keeps,’ she explained.

  ‘My mother used to say that,’ Peiperová agreed.

  ‘Mine too. They were rough types. Uncultured. I was surprised, because Mr Nejedlý was a theatre-goer, you know. Comedies, mostly. But not the sort to mix with hooligans like that.’

  ‘Did you see any evidence of girls being trafficked?’

  Petra shook her head emphatically. ‘No. never. Well, when I say never, I mean hardly ever. He came in one day with a pink handbag he said had been left in one of the lorries. I asked why there would be a handbag in one of our lorries, and he said the driver must have invited a woman into his cab. Well, that was strictly against the rules, but the driver wasn’t disciplined for it, so you have to wonder, don’t you?’

  ‘But you didn’t mention this to anyone?’

  ‘There’s no-one to mention it to, dear. There’s me and there’s Mr Nejedlý. The drivers and warehousemen rarely come in.’

  ‘There’s no Mrs Nejedlý?’

  ‘Well, there is and there isn’t. I’ve never met her, but she used to ring in if her monthly payment didn’t turn up, so I think they must be divorced. That wasn’t happening so much lately, but there was a time when it was going on most months.’

  ‘So things were getting better?’

  ‘I didn’t see how. There wasn’t much more business. Of course, from what you’ve said I can see how it might be. Mr Nejedlý was running out of space to keep all these plums he was importing. He gave me a load of tins and he donated some to a homeless shelter, but he kept bringing them in, even though they weren’t selling. At least, not as fast as they were arriving. But I suppose you can’t ship girls in empty trucks, can you? They need something to hide behind. I blame those foreigners downstairs. I bet they got him into this.’

  ‘So can you give us a statement describing what you saw?’

  ‘I didn’t really see anything. I can’t help you.’

  Peiperová dipped in her bag and produced a photograph. She passed it wordlessly to Petra, who gasped and clasped her hand over her mouth.