by James Lepore
“Glasses would help,” said Catherine.
Confused, Pat did not immediately reply. They were sipping from cardboard mugs of hot coffee, and at first he thought she meant they needed coffee cups. Then, realizing his mistake, he said, “You mean binoculars.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got a good view here. We won’t miss them:”
They were waiting for Doro and Steve Luna to appear in the compound below. After trekking through water and mud for three hours and then driving through the night, they had found the fire road that led them to their current lookout about a half hour ago. Tired and wet, their shoes and jeans coated with mud, they were in need of hot food, dry clothes, and sleep. But the growl of helicopters and the howl of bloodhounds still echoed in their heads. They backtracked to a truck stop they had passed to pick up coffee and decided to make contact with the infamous Corozzo then and there. If Megan was in the camp below, she needed to be told that the world was closing in on her. And on her new friends as well.
“Look,” Catherine said, “someone’s awake.”
Below they could see smoke curling from a chimney in the middle of the roof of the mine building. The pale gray smoke cut through the cold morning air and then drifted gently west, chased away by the sun’s first heat.
“Our Arab friends may have been here already,” said Catherine, keeping her voice low and her eyes straight ahead.
Pat nodded, his eyes on the entry road near the piles of tailings, where he would have his first sight of the twenty-year-old Czech-made Skoda Favorit Doro had purchased in Cheb and that had miraculously transported them all here. They both knew that whoever had beheaded François Duval must have first tried very hard to extract Megan’s whereabouts from him. Which made it almost a certainty, the way things were going, that more Arab killers would pop up.
Megan, Pat thought, Megan. What did you do to draw such a nasty crowd?
“We are in a bind with Doro,” Catherine said.
“How?”
“You promised he could use Megan as bait to lure the Arabs:”
“I told him I would do my best to convince her.”
“Megan could be killed:”
“Not to mention you and me:”
“She may not agree:”
“I’ll talk her into it:”
Pat had not talked Megan into anything since she was in high school, maybe even grammar school. But this was not as hollow a statement as it would have been a few weeks ago. He was convinced that his one-of-a-kind daughter had laid down a trail for him, a trail through a minefield, trip wires everywhere. Having followed that trail to what he now hoped was its end, having passed her test, he might have the moral standing for once in his life to ask her to go on the line. For him, for herself, for her dead child, for Annabella Jeritza, for François Duval, for Daniel Peletier. For Catherine. These were big thoughts, but somehow not too big, not pretentious. This was where his life had led him, and Megan’s hers. He would see it through and was confident without really knowing why that Megan would, too.
“We’ll avenge Uncle Daniel,” he said.
“I see.”
They scanned the scene before them for a moment in silence—the smoke curling and drifting away, the hushed, snow-covered clearing, the stream rushing along and sparkling in the early sun as it went—then Catherine said, “He was alive, Patrick, wasn’t he?”
Pat nodded, keeping his head forward. He was about to speak when the front door of the mine building suddenly flew open. A second or two later a young man in jeans and a black, hooded UCLA sweatshirt was catapulted out headfirst. His forward motion was stopped abruptly when his shoulder slammed against the fender of the pickup. As he was rising, shaking his head, an older, taller, bulkier man, wearing a black eye patch, stepped through the doorway.
“Corozzo,” said Catherine.
The young man stood his ground, but did not resist, or was unable to, when Corozzo grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him around the pickup truck into the clearing. Still holding him by his sweatshirt, the older and much larger man struck the younger man a long sweeping blow to his face, a blow which sent the young man flying onto his back. Again the young man rose, and again he stood his ground, his body swaying from side to side like a puppet whose strings were being pulled in slow motion. Again Corozzo advanced, the balled fist at the end of his right arm swinging down by his knee. But before he could strike again, Doro pulled up in the boxy, Soviet-era Skoda. Both men stared at the car as Doro slowly looped around them in the snow, a what the fuck? look on their faces. Then Doro parked, facing the direction he had come from, exited the car, and approached the two men, his hands at his sides. Steve Luna got out as well, but he stayed close to the Skoda—which Doro had left running—his hands in his jacket pockets. In the cold morning air, steam was coming from the mouths of all four men as well as the car’s rusty exhaust.
“That must be Corozzo’s son,” said Catherine, nodding toward the young man who was the object of Corozzo’s blows, his face cut and bleeding above the right eye, “or possibly his son-in-law.”
Pat eyed the tall, barrel-shaped Corozzo as he greeted Doro. He was smiling, his domestic dispute, Pat supposed, put aside for conclusion at a later time. His gold tooth gleamed as the sun’s low slanting rays glanced off his face. He was wearing dark woolen slacks, a pair of sturdy boots, and an aging leather vest over a bulky red sweater. His long, unruly black hair spilled down his neck and over his ears. Though in his fifties, he looked much younger, more wholesome and more vibrant than Pat had pictured him. The gypsy leader’s smile vanished as Doro began to speak. He listened and nodded, listened and nodded, and then turned to the young man he had been pummeling, said something, and gestured toward the mine building. The young man walked to the building and went in. Corozzo and Doro continued talking for a moment or two and then both turned as someone—a person in an open overcoat, its hood up, came out of the mine building and walked toward them.
The walk was at once familiar to Pat: erect, poised, regal. Megan. When she reached the men, she drew her hood back and shook her hair out as Corozzo spoke, apparently making introductions. Smiling, she shook hands with Doro, who was staring at her as if he struck gold. The young man whom Corozzo was beating on did not reappear. Corozzo smiled as well, and the three fell to talking. As they did, Pat assessed his daughter: clean, healthy, her hair coppery bright but much shorter; in tight jeans and black fur boots, she looked as proud and defiant and in control as ever. Pat’s sigh of relief was audible.
“She looks well,” Catherine murmured.
Pat nodded, but did not speak or take his eyes from the scene below. He watched intently as Megan once again shook hands with Doro before turning and walking back to the mine building next to Corozzo, and Doro and Steve Luna got into the Skoda and drove away.
“She always looks good,” Pat said when the Skoda was out of sight and the clearing once again empty. “She refuses to ever look bad:” Pat smiled tightly as he said this, thinking of Megan in command of her situation, in charge, he would not hesitate to say, of that small group of men in the clearing. He could not remember the last time he had been proud of her.
Whatever went before and whatever happened now—and a bad death was a good possibility—he had found his daughter. He had done what he had to do.
Inside the mine building, the young man who had been on the receiving end of Corozzo’s blows was sitting on a slat-backed wooden chair while a young, black-haired gypsy woman dabbed a wet cloth on the wound on his swollen face. Nearby, a fire blazed in a wood-burning stove. Smoke, seeping from cracks in the stove’s ramshackle sheet-metal chimney, drifted around the large room. When he saw Corozzo and Megan enter, the young man pushed the black-haired woman away, knocking her to the floor with a sweeping shove of his arm. Rising slowly, the woman glared at Megan and seemed about to say or do something—spit at me, Megan thought, or lift her dirty wool skirt to curse me with her menstruating pussy—but did not,
held in check at the sight of Corozzo casting his one eye blackly in her direction.
Along the far wall, blankets hung on rope marked off the living quarters of the six or seven families who were wintering with Corozzo. Several of them stopped what they were doing to watch the scene near the stove. The men, mustachioed, unshaven, already started in on their day’s drinking, smiled. The women muttered and glanced at one another.
On the opposite wall were two glass-walled cubicles that had once been offices. Blankets hung behind the glass of the room on the right. On the naked glass of the room on the left the letters “URO;” in large grandiose Cyrillic script, were all that was left of the name of the mining company that the Soviets had abandoned long before the breakup of their bleak empire. Behind the “U,” Megan could see Sasha, the old crone who was her roommate, sitting in a rocking chair, her head down, quietly, steadily rocking, ignoring the scene in the outer room. Megan tried to catch her eye, but did not linger when Sasha did not look up. Sasha, a girlhood friend of Annabella Jeritza, had done her best to protect Megan, trading spit and Roma curses with the young women of the clan who resented Megan with the deadly passion that only gypsies can muster.
Megan slowly took off her coat and, placing it under her arm, surveyed the scene: the young man’s bruised, sullen face; his woman backing away from Corozzo as if under a spell; the plebes along the wall staring at her, the outré, arrogant American. She could smell the fear and hatred amid the unwashed bodies in the smoky room.
One more day, she thought, turning toward her room. One more day of these fucking wackos.
“You saw?” said Doro.
“Yes,” Pat answered.
“She is well:”
“Yes.”
“She will meet you tomorrow at noon. I am to pick her up and bring her:”
“Where?”
“I won’t know until tomorrow.”
“Why not right now?”
“It is Corozzo’s decision:”
They were standing on the dirt fire road near its intersection with the local highway, where Pat and Catherine had walked down to meet the Skoda. A mass of low clouds was now blotting out the sun and the air suddenly smelled of snow. They were hidden by the forest, but they could hear the occasional rushing sound of a truck or a car as it sped by on the paved road only fifty yards or so away.
“What was that fight all about?” Catherine asked.
“That was Corozzo’s son.”
Doro did not elaborate, as if this were enough.
“Gypsy fathers and sons always fight,” said Steve Luna, who was standing nearby listening.
“About what?” Catherine asked.
“Money, women:”
“Power,” said Catherine.
“Yes.”
Catherine knew what it was like to stir up lust in a man by doing nothing but existing. She wondered what the dynamic was like inside the old mine building, with the striking and self-assured Megan Nolan doing nothing much but going about her business. And possibly—likely—sleeping with one of the men. While the others watched.
“Corozzo says a fat Arab stopped by yesterday looking for Megan,” said Doro, “He showed him a picture:”
Catherine had expected this. After killing Duval, the Saudis, or whoever they were, would have had a thirty-six-hour head start in finding Corozzo’s camp.
“How did he handle it?”
“He laughed and said he wished he could have such a beautiful piece of gadgo ass:”
“We should go back and warn him,” Pat said. “They could attack the camp, or blow it up. They’re capable of anything:”
“Corozzo had the man followed,” said Doro.“He is being watched.”
“Where is he?”
“Corozzo would not say.”
“What did this Arab look like?” Catherine asked.
“Short, bulky, balding. Corozzo’s age:”
“We should go,” said Steve Luna, “before we get soaked again.” The first stray drops of wet snow had begun to fall.
“One more thing,” said Doro.“She gave me this.” He handed Pat a small mustard-colored envelope, the kind a druggist might put two pills in for a customer. Pat took it, tore open the seal, and extracted a small audio cassette and what looked like a miniature CD with black plastic borders. “What’s this?” he said, holding up the CD.
“It looks like a disk for a digital camera;” said Catherine. “I have one at home:”
Pat put the cassette and CD back in the small envelope and put it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket.
“Let’s go,” Doro said.“We can eat and dry out at the truck stop. Maybe rent rooms. We have no choice but to wait until tomorrow.”
Over the rise behind them, Catherine heard one of the vehicles in the mine compound start up and then backfire twice before driving off.
“Yes,” said Catherine, looking at Pat and seeing the frustration and worry on his handsome face. “We have no choice. Tomorrow will come soon enough:”
~33~
CZECH REPUBLIC, JANUARY 8-9, 2004
The first thing that Ephrem did when he left police headquarters in Cheb was to buy a cell phone. Max French, André Orlofsky, and Marcel Dionne, sitting in a car across the street, watched as the young gypsy made a call from the sidewalk outside the EuroTel store. André immediately radioed the Czech police to get the number of the phone and begin monitoring it. Also to find out the recipient of that first call. But that would take a while. The three agents then followed Ephrem as he walked the ten blocks to the train station. Inside, Orlofsky got in line several spots behind the boy. At the window, he discretely flashed his ID and asked for two tickets to the same destination as the gypsy boy with the red backpack. He then radioed Dionne, in the car outside, to start driving to Kolin. On the train, he and Max sat in the same car as Ephrem, five or six rows behind him.
“A rock concert, perhaps?” Orlofsky whispered as the train got underway. It had been Max’s idea to let Ephrem go, in the hope that he would lead them to Catherine Laurence or the men who had killed Daniel Peletier. They could have held the boy on any number of things, including the fact that he had three sets of identification in his wallet, all forged or stolen, along with Peletier’s cell phone number. Orlofsky had asked the youthful-looking Dionne to interrogate the boy, hoping that he could quickly strike a sympathetic chord. But the teenager, obviously much savvier than his years, wasn’t talking, and there was no time to bring in the experts with their psychological and physical methods of extracting information from recalcitrant suspects. And even if they did, who was to guarantee that that information would be any good? Orlofsky had agreed—their options were limited—but he did not forego the opportunity to take a few jabs at Max. His other suggestions as to where the gypsy boy might be leading them had included the circus and a day at a shopping mall.
“Perhaps he’s going to see the EU bureaucrat assigned to run his life,” Max replied, more curtness than sly humor in his voice. He had been thinking about Megan Nolan, her writing in particular, and wanted to return to her. He whispered also, although there was no need to, as Ephrem had not been able to see them through the one-way window as they watched him being questioned. Both men kept their eyes on the boy, who appeared to be sleeping. He had coughed up half of the River Ohře and was lucky to be alive. The guard at the border bridge had been peeing over the parapet and seen him climbing onto the cement footing of a pier below.
“Ah, touché,” the Frenchman replied.
With a quick sideways glance, Max caught the end of the acerbic Frenchman’s tight half smile. He remained silent. Max, who spoke four languages and had been a Rhodes Scholar, was neither surprised nor bothered by Orlofsky’s attitude toward him. He had left France because he had grown weary of the subtle condescension, the elusive deniable snobbery of the so-called French intellectual.
“Speaking of bureaucrats, did you talk to your people this morning?” Orlofsky asked.
“Yes, I did:”
“What did they say? Anything new?”
“They finally had a long talk with General al-Siddiq in Riyadh. There was never a Saudi operation in Morocco prior to the bombings. Which, as you know, the Moroccans confirm. As to one inside France, he laughed. Your Raimondi character had his own agenda. That’s al-Siddiq’s story.”