“Who?” Kateryna said, scanning the image. “Who is it?”
“Oh Jesus,” Cindy cried, her right hand coming up to cover her mouth. She extended a shaking finger toward the picture’s edge. There, an attractive teenage girl held the hand of a young boy. It was Tanya.
“That’s it,” Brody said, striding into the room, the glee in his voice unmistakable.
Ernie and Cindy spun around.
“Hey, hold on,” Brody said, backpedaling at the anger evident on their faces. “I’m not overlooking Owen, but this is the break we need.”
“Wait a second, who’s—”
“Patience,” Ernie snapped at Kateryna. “As for you,” he said to Brody. “I expected much more.”
“Don’t you understand?” Brody said. “Tanya’s the key. We grab Owen, we get her. We get her, we got Karlovic. We take him, and I blow this case wide open.”
“Using my best friend as bait, is that it?”
“Relax, we’ll get him if for no other reason than this,” Brody patted his holster. “Plus, what Annie Oakley over there is packing,” He pointed at Kateryna, who was chewing on her fingernails. “Then the rest of you are on a flight home and I use Tanya to get my suspect.”
“You still can’t see ten feet in front of your face,” Ernie said, looking like a teacher who had caught his prize pupil cheating on the final exam. “For all the talk about fighting what’s wrong in this world you’re so excited to drag your prize back to the people enabling the crimes you obsess about. For what? Stop and think about why this is happening.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” Brody said. “I could give a shit about what my boss thinks. If I show up at the Bureau with Karlovic in a cage I don’t just win my career back, I write my own ticket.”
“Then what?” Ernie said. “You’ll turn down the partnership at the Wall Street law firm that will be dangled in front of your nose. You’re too honest of a man for that. Even so, do you really think you can transform a culture of corruption? Let’s say you get a task force investigating Wall Street. What then? Sure, you’ll take a few token scalps, maybe some lower level bankers, but then they’ll cut your budget. You’ll be pushed off into a back office, doing nothing.”
“What are you? A fucking fortune cookie?” Brody said. “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
“Your job is to bring justice to this world,” Ernie said. “Whether you want to admit it to me or not that banker Donnelly was a big part of whatever’s going on with you. Let it go. Or deal with it, because this is bigger than all of us. Until you figure out what justice means, nothing will change.”
“Don’t push your baggage on me. You might be here for more reasons than you like to let on, but I’m just a lawman working a file. Nothing more, nothing less, and I sure as hell ain’t the man you seem to think I am,” Brody said.
“You have to be,” Ernie said. “You don’t have a choice. People like Donnelly play for keeps. They want it all. They always have. They always will. They’re the apex predators of our society, and there’s only one way to stop them.”
“You’re wrong,” Brody stated. “I had my chance and blew it. So as much as you may think I can or will do something, I can’t. I respect the hell out of you Ernie, but what life means for me is my business. Not yours, nor is it anybody else’s.”
Ernie stared hard into Brody’s eyes before turning away.
“You sure you’re ready,” Brody said to Kateryna, his heart racing at the thought this might require more of him than he ever considered possible.
“I can handle it,” She said, staring at the book. “Now, who is this Tanya?”
“She,” Ernie rasped, still corralling his anger. “Is our purported comrade, my best friend’s lover, and someone who contrary to what you see in that picture will, when you meet her, appear no older than possibly forty years of age.”
------------------
Almost two hours later Brody stopped walking and wiped the back of his hand across his brow. He was trying hard not to think of what Ernie had said, and failing miserably. He unclipped his water bottle from his waist and drank deep. The path through the woods had once more turned into a dusty trail clinging to the side of a cliff. The overhang projected above the forested valley floor several hundred feet below. In the distance, the river glinted next to Dibrovno’s rooftops and the castle towers. Above him the path finally reentered the tree line, leading to the flat plateau marking the location of Tanya’s house. Higher yet, the jagged ridgeline rose in the distance.
Though in the pension he had glibly spoken of “bagging” Tanya as easily you would a shoplifter, just prying Owen away from her would be hard enough. A crucial part of convincing Tanya to give up peacefully depended upon Kateryna. He hoped she was ready. The plan was for him to scout ahead, make sure there were no surprises. After Owen and Tanya passed by on their way to the meeting point he would create a diversion so that Ernie and Cindy could separate Owen from Tanya. From there he and Kateryna could intimidate Tanya into surrendering.
As he took another pull of water he thought about the plan and grimaced.
It was a crappy plan.
But it’s all he had.
------------------
They clambered along the trail, moving slow under the pitiless sun. Ernie stopped and held up his hand, a pained expression on his face “Is it okay if we take five?”
Kateryna walked off and plopped down onto a felled tree trunk. Ernie bent over, hands on his knees to catch his breath.
“Should I speak with her?” Cindy said, squinting at Kateryna.
“Let’s see if she works through it on her own,” Ernie said. He figured Kateryna’s fiancé must have died somewhere nearby, and he wanted to give her space.
“Good, because I don’t care anymore,” Cindy said, surprising Ernie with the vehement tone in her voice. “I don’t care about Brody’s case, curiosity, science, or Dibrovno. What are we doing out here, Ernie? We aren’t trained for this.”
“It’s different for me. You know that,” Ernie said, looking past Cindy at the deepening purple hue on the mountains, the crimson splashes of sunlight illuminating forested slopes enveloped by deep shadows. The late afternoon had always been one of his favorite times of day. He wondered when it would be again.
“We’re betting everything on Brody,” Cindy frowned, noting that Ernie had that same glazed look in his eye as he had on the drive into Lviv. “One way or another they will know we’re a part of it, and if they’re real what makes you think the government or whoever else can protect us?”
Before Ernie could respond a crunching noise came from up the rocky trail.
Footsteps!
To their left was the drop off. To their right a thin layer of bushes and trees clung to a vertical sloping rock and dirt wall. Forty feet further along the trail bent into the trees. Tanya and Owen stepped around the corner.
“Hi,” Tanya said, smiling in a way that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Owen charged forward.
“Thank god you’re all right!” Ernie embraced him, relieved.
Owen pulled away smiling broadly. He turned toward Cindy, his smile falling from his face.
She was eying Tanya like one would a crocodile drifting close to their canoe.
“Don’t move, bitch!”
Owen twirled around, gasping in surprise. Not ten feet before Tanya stood another woman. She was brandishing a semi-automatic pistol, the big gun awkward in her tiny hands.
“I know what you did,” Kateryna said.
Tanya smirked.
“Put the gun down!” Cindy commanded.
“Why? I would be doing everyone a favor,” Kateryna said, her voice cracking.
Tanya shot a glance at Owen.
Ernie’s heart skipped a beat as he caught the look exchanged between them.
My God, he knows.
“Owen,” Ernie pleaded. “Please, come here. We can help you.”
“What makes you think I want to be helped?”
“You need to forget whatever she’s told you,” Ernie said. “Tanya didn’t just ruin that woman’s life, she killed my father.”
Chapter 27
March 1944 – The Western Ukraine
“Run,” Her father commanded.
In one way or another Tanya had been running her entire life. Years prior her family had hid from the commissars by passing themselves off as poor woods folk and not farmers to be worked to death on the kolkhozy. Most of her extended family hadn’t survived the purges, nor did seven million other Ukrainians. Then the Germans came.
Tanya drifted into town one morning shortly after the Germans arrived. Not a soul could be found on the street. Posters on buildings warned Jews and dogs to stay off the sidewalks or depicted hideously large nosed and beady eyed Jews holding bags of money taken from Slavic homeowners. The sound of large engines pierced the silence.
Tanya backed away from the road, watching as a fleet of German staff cars and bulky army trucks roared into the town square. The men that spilled out bristled with machine pistols and rifles. Nevertheless, their uniforms were different from the regular German army gray. They were festooned with a variety of SS tunics & insignia, police uniforms, piping, collar tabs, green shoulder boards, and caps in lieu of helmets. Most of the men had lined faces, some had gray hair. All had hard eyes.
Tanya slipped away. Later that afternoon her father came home. He took her mother by the arm and directed her into the bedroom, asking Tanya to watch her little brother. She snuck down the hallway instead, pressing her ear to the door. She heard snippets of her father’s voice, “Einsatzgruppen and the police…they rounded up entire families…”
Tanya couldn’t bear it. She ran from the house and past the old oak tree at the edge of the clearing. She didn’t know how long she ran, but it was only when her breath began hitching that she finally slowed to a shambling walk, and then stopped altogether. Mosquitos hovered in the thickening air as dark thunderheads gathered in the distance. She looked around to find herself standing on an offshoot of the main road into town.
Gunshots rang out.
Tanya dove for the ground, hugging tight to the soft earth until she realized the shots were not directed at her. Brushing off leaves and dirt she sat up, listening. The gunfire came from over the next rise. Curiosity trumping fright, she climbed up the hill’s forested slope. Just before reaching the crest she crawled under the low hanging branches of a sheltering spruce tree. Hidden amongst the heavy boughs she peered down the far side. What she witnessed would remain seared in her mind for as long as she lived.
In a narrow hollow a group of about thirty men, women, and children were lined up, all Jewish and all naked or in various stages of undress. Shirts, pants, belt buckles, wooden toys, blankets, hats, and more scattered about. Tanya’s stomach clenched up at the sight of the wide-eyed children clinging to their parents, crying infants pressed tight to their mother’s bosom.
A long ugly gash rent the ground. Bodies lay within; arms akimbo, faces staring blankly. Stacked shovels leaned against a German army truck parked astride a dirt track. German soldiers and Ukrainian auxiliaries wearing white arm bands stood about smoking and talking. Some took pictures. The Germans were the same one’s she had seen pull into town, the one’s her father had been talking about. These Einsatzgruppen stood near the pit’s edge, executioner’s eerie eyes conveying a religious zeal. Motion from left of the pit distracted Tanya.
A Jew she didn’t recognize was shaking his head “no” as a tall German soldier leaned on a shovel, pointing at the Jew’s gold teeth. Receiving yet another “no” the German shrugged. In one smooth movement he swung the shovel up into the air and slammed it down into the Jew’s head. The man groaned and crumpled to the ground.
The German swung the shovel again, and again, and again.
With the fourth blow the moaning stopped.
At the fifth blow the man’s skull came apart.
The German leaned down, peeling open the dead man’s mouth and punching his dagger inside. He pried each gold tooth from the jaw, wiping the blood off on his pant leg, and then holding his treasure up so the sun would glint off the shiny metal, smiling approvingly as he dropped it into his pocket.
As Tanya fought back the urge to vomit she caught sight of an old Jewish man gesturing angrily at a teenage Ukrainian auxiliary. She recognized the man, a lump swelling in her throat. It was the town doctor, standing in nothing but his underwear, berating the boy by name. A sneering German officer looked on. He was dressed in black but for his immaculately shining SS runes. Without saying a word the German raised his arm, a small pistol in hand. He pulled the trigger. The doctor fell in a spray of pink blood.
A young woman clutching a baby boy screamed and ran to the dead doctor. Another shot rang out. Her lifeless body tumbled to the ground. A burly looking soldier grabbed the wailing infant and threw him in the air. Multiple gunshots echoed off the surrounding trees, the high velocity bullets ripping the baby apart. Tanya stared in horror, transfixed by the sight of a bloody stump of an arm hanging in a low hanging branch. One of the Ukrainian auxiliaries strode over and reached up with a shovel to knock the baby’s arm into the pit.
A Jewish teenager screamed in anger and rushed the nearest Germans. A bullet dropped the boy before he got within ten feet of the nearest soldier. The other Jews ran for their lives. Gunfire exploded from at least a dozen weapons. No one escaped. The gunfire stopped.
An eerie silence fell over the killing field.
Ukrainians and Germans dragged the corpses to the pit and grabbed their shovels. They pitched great clumps of black soil onto the horribly torn bodies, some still moving as they were buried alive. Tanya’s mouth was so dry she had to work her throat several times to produce saliva. In spite of every instinct screaming at her to run for her life she slid back down the hill an inch at a time, the sounds of genocide reduced to that of a banal work crew.
A low grumble of thunder was followed by the first patter of heavy rain drops. The sky opened at the same time Tanya hit the bottom of the reverse slope. With the rain masking her movements she ran, great wrenching sobs stealing her breath. By the time Tanya stumbled through her front door dusk had fallen. Her mother rushed to her, face pale with worry. Her father hugged her between them, somehow knowing better than to admonish her for leaving. That night Tanya couldn’t sleep. She fantasized about having superpowers that would protect her family and friends.
The next morning she awakened as powerless as ever.
In the weeks that followed the Germans finished murdering the Jews they could find and robbed everyone else. The town’s population, who had endured such horrible deprivations at Stalin’s hand, starved again. Many resorted to digging up dead horses and cattle. Others remembered that pine needles boiled in water could provide the Vitamin C needed to stave off scurvy. Occasionally, she would see Jewish survivors drift into their homestead. Her father, who had carved out a garden hidden deep in the woods, fed the wraithlike ghosts and allowed them to hide in the barn for a few days at a time. Tanya also learned to hide, but for different reasons.
She had blossomed into a physical beauty, her swelling breasts and curving hips impossible to hide under even her loose work clothes. No matter how much dirt she smeared on her face, how raggedly her hair hung down from under a cap, her attractiveness was a dangerous beacon to the gangs of soldiers and militia roaming the town.
Her father built a shelter near the secret garden. Well stocked with clothing, basic medical supplies, food, water, and an old pistol, it could hold them all quite comfortably for short periods at a time. Nevertheless, it only ever held her. Tanya spent hours on end there, alone in what became her woods. Within a matter of weeks her overnight appearances in the f
orest hardly caused a ripple in the behavior of the animals.
In turn she felt secure in their presence, even when one night two glowing eyes stepped from the inky blackness and into her fire lit clearing. The wolf had stood in the light for over a minute, ears alert, his tongue lolling like he was smiling. For some reason she had smiled back. Then the great beast disappeared into the night as quietly as he had come.
It was late in the war’s third winter, with the Red Army finally driving west, that the German soldiers called on her family once more. Though her father had ordered her to run to the shelter, shortly after entering the forest she had slowed to a walk. Something felt different; a feeling that danced its persistent beat around the edges of her mind. She had stopped. The anticipation of spring hung in the air, but winter was not ready to let go. She turned back, moving quickly, her heightened anxiety pushing her on.
As she approached the forest’s edge she heard the godawful sound that changed her life forever - a sharp explosion. Shaking like a leaf, she had dropped into a crouch and crept forward to the forest’s edge. There she peered around a tree. Her heart crumpled at the sight that greeted her.
The twin doors of her home’s cellar had been wrenched open, mangled by the blast. A lone finger of smoke twirled into the sky and a German soldier stood at the cellar entrance, his machine pistol dangling loosely in one hand as he stared inside.
Tanya’s lower lip trembled.
Oh please no. Poppa, Momma, Brother - please no.
“These things happen,” A soldier with a cruel scarred face said as he emerged from the wreckage.
“Are they?”
“What do you expect?” The older man said, shaking his head. “A fragmentation grenade in that tiny space…”
The soldier stared in shock.
“Don’t look so concerned. Wait until the SS ropes us into one of their actions. After this nonsense slaughtering a bunch of Jews will be a piece of cake.” The older man said, and then raised his voice. “Move out.”
Apex Predator Page 19