A young man standing at the fringe of the crowd took a cigarette from the pack in his rolled-up tee shirt sleeve. He put the cigarette behind his ear and rerolled the pack in his sleeve. He did not take the cigarette from his ear to light it. He left it there and continued staring at the smoldering building. The man was thin, with stringy black hair. He wore faded jeans and heeled boots like an American cowboy.
When the militia car with the woman inside drove off, followed by another militia car with the bicycle sticking out of its trunk, the young man walked slowly away from the scene. He went south on a side street of dilapidated, low buildings toward the sweet smell of jet fuel blowing his way from the airport. He turned in to an alley toward the airport. Within a grove of young chestnut trees planted along the airport fence, the man got into a tan Zhiguli station wagon parked in the shade of a mature chestnut tree, which must have been there prior to the planting of the grove. The shade had kept the car relatively cool in the late summer heat.
A young woman sat in the passenger seat of the Zhiguli. She was knitting something blue and green, but she put the knitting aside when the young man got in. She had red hair cut short and wore heavy makeup, her lips bright red, her eyelids charcoal gray. The woman turned and looked at the man but did not smile or acknowledge him in any other way.
Once inside the car, the man started the engine and turned the air-circulating fan on high. He pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his rear pocket, separated them, and handed them to the woman. The woman picked up a Russian Orthodox Bible from the floor of the car and inserted the gloves individually into the Bible, folding them and slowly closing the Bible as if each marked a passage she meditated on. Then she returned the Bible to the floor. When the woman spoke, her voice sounded young. A girl hidden beneath heavy makeup.
“I saw the smoke,” she said in Ukrainian.
The young man’s voice also sounded younger than he looked. “Two birds with one stone, as they say in America.” He turned toward the woman and grinned. “Before we return to Ukraine’s asshole, we will go somewhere to fuck.”
The young woman looked down, her head bowed as if in prayer. When she nodded, the young man retrieved a red baseball cap from beneath the front seat, put the cap on backwards, and drove out from the shade of the chestnut tree.
CHAPTER
THREE
Following the American Gypsy’s suggestion, the Ukrainian Gypsy named Janos traveled at night on deserted roads, moving from one camp to another while most slept and others, with murder or vengeance in mind, searched cities. Janos was alone in his caravan. Violins accompanied his journey, the caravan rocking and swaying as its diesel-fed horses propelled it across the mountains. Although diesel fuel was costly, his caravan was a small and efficient five-cylinder camper van. By using his handheld GPS, he was able to stay off main highways.
The mountains lit by a waning moon resembled the lower jaw of a monster. With Gypsy violins playing on the caravan’s CD player, he could have been anywhere in the world. Perhaps the Alps in Austria or the Rockies in America. But these mountains were toothless, without snowcapped peaks. And when the rapid tempo of a czardas ended and he reached across to the caravan’s dashboard to eject the CD, a news station from Uzhgorod blasted from the speakers, reminding him he was in Ukraine on the western slope of the Carpathians.
It was three in the morning, and Uzhgorod FM was the only powerful station on the air. He retrieved another CD from the console, inserted it, waited a few seconds, and felt a sense of nostalgia and satisfaction when the lilting violin of Sandor Lakatos coming over the front and rear speakers filled the caravan from stem to stern.
This was the second year in a row Janos Nagy, ex-Kiev militiaman, now owner and sole employee of Nagy Investigative Agency in Kiev’s Podil District, had rented a camper van. Last year he had traveled in spring, enjoying the Black Sea before tourist season. This year, he postponed a holiday because of bad economic times, but finally made an escape from Kiev for several days due to professional hazards.
He had been hired to investigate the bombing of a female clinic in the Podil District. While pursuing the case, he had come upon a possible connection between the source of the explosives and a local Orthodox Church leader. When the nature of his investigation leaked out, the summer heat was turned up.
“The Gypsy versus God’s children,” as one of Kiev’s tabloids put it. The Gypsy making a “baseless” link between Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza, a leader in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the bombing of a clinic that performed abortions. “A campaign of lies,” fellow clergymen were calling it. “No evidence of any sort,” Rogoza said during an interview on Kiev Radio, after which he asked men and women of all faiths to pray for him. Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza, who was once rumored to have had a lover other than his wife, but who turned the rumors around, making them seem part of an effort of the Kiev Patriarchate to destroy the obviously valid Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in which he resided.
A month later, after the Rogoza incident began to cool, came the fatal shooting of a female doctor in front of another Podil female clinic, followed a week later by a bomb through the Gypsy’s office window that filled his butt cheeks with glass and moved his office farther north in Podil. The bombing did not literally move the office, but it did convince Janos to relocate when his two-day hospital stay ended.
The bomb was not large enough to kill a man, unless he swallowed it. The Kiev militia laboratory technician called it a “double-base, single-base, nitrocellulose magnesium colloid,” sounding like a university lecturer as he explained its operation. None of this interested Janos, except its size. A table tennis ball had shattered his window, exploding on impact and making the glass into shrapnel, which penetrated his slacks where his posterior was exposed at the cut-out lower back of his cheap office chair. Except for the glass in his posterior and a few pieces in his calves, the rest of him had been saved by the backrest of the chair and by the fact that he was bent over asleep on his desk when the bomb exploded.
It was splendid advertising for the Nagy Investigative Agency: First, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church accuses him of being the anti-Christ; next, one of his clients, a doctor at a Podil female clinic, is murdered; finally, Janos gets bombed in the ass while he’s asleep at his desk.
As Janos drove through the darkness, he adjusted his position on the bucket seat and could feel the bits of glass still embedded in him. Even his ass was a Gypsy, unable to stay still more than a few minutes because of the stings biting him the way mosquitoes did the previous year at the caravan camp near Odessa when he and Svetlana made love on a moonlit picnic bench in the primitive area of the camp.
Lakatos played a slow piece now, the violin a voice crying from its E and A strings and moaning from its G and D strings. Voices in the night, the high-pitched ones reminding him of Svetlana’s laugh, the low-pitched ones reminding him of Svetlana’s moan as they made love.
Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, one of a handful of female investigators in Kiev’s militia. Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, who called him Gypsy while he was still a member of Kiev’s militia because of his mentor, Lazlo Horvath, who was also called Gypsy, was also Hungarian-Ukrainian, and also played the violin. Svetlana Kovaleva, who vacationed with him last year and made him feel years younger, especially the night she danced for him.
A waning moonlit night exactly like this. A deserted campsite near the Black Sea. A flickering campfire lighting up the bottoms of sparse trees and the side of the camper van. Janos, Gypsy Number Two, brings out his Chinese-made violin and, after a screechy start and the application of additional rosin, serenades Svetlana who sits, wrapped in a blanket, on a boulder near the fire. He plays a Hungarian folk song he has practiced for weeks. The first part of the song is slow and gentle with an ever-so-light touch of horsehair on strings.
Svetlana turns toward him, her curls black and skin bronze in the moonlight. “Gypsy music is so sad
when it’s played slowly.”
Halfway through the sad section, Svetlana stands and begins dancing about the campfire, arms extended, making her blanket into wings. Then, when the sad passage is ended and he launches into the exuberant czardas, Svetlana dances faster and faster, spinning about the campfire, throwing the blanket aside and revealing the fact she has removed her blouse and wears only tight, white slacks.
Svetlana in the moonlight, bronze on top and pure white from her waist down, a pair of disjointed legs dancing in the night until, during the heat of the czardas, she climbs atop the picnic table and removes her slacks. She is all bronze then, his sweaty fingers clinging to the violin as she dances for him in the light from the fire. All bronze like some of the icons in Kiev’s cathedrals. Later, when he says this to her, she laughs and says he is the one made of bronze.
After passing through a small village and putting on the high beams, Janos saw a figure walking on the shoulder of the road. As he approached he saw a man in an American-style cowboy hat carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder. The man walked briskly swaying from side to side, bow-legged like a Cossack.
Janos shut off the CD player and slowed the camper van, expecting the man to stick out a thumb. But the man kept walking. Janos reached into the door pocket beside him to be certain his Makarov 9mm pistol was butt up. He glanced toward the back where the sofa was jack-knifed out into a bed and pillows were stuffed beneath blankets to resemble someone asleep. When Janos braked to a stop, the man stood at the front corner of the camper van for a moment, smiling, then walked back to the door and opened it.
“Would you like a ride?”
“Yes,” said the man, removing his cowboy hat as he climbed in.
The man put his bag between the seats, glanced back, and when Janos held one finger to his lips, nodded, and spoke softly in order not to awaken the pillows stuffed beneath the blankets.
His name was Anatoly. When Janos asked if he was a Cossack, Anatoly laughed, saying he wished he had been born in the distant past. Instead, he was born shortly before the Chernobyl explosion in one of the villages closest to the site. Because he was a boy during the evacuation, he had been unaware of the danger. Like most children from the Zone, he had gotten plenty of iodine. But he wondered if he would live past his forties. The reason for this was his recent work salvaging parts from the condemned graveyard of vehicles near Chernobyl.
“Why did you return to the Zone?” asked Janos.
“Because there was no work in the village to which we were sent. Everyone simply sits in their Chernobyl boxes, drinking vodka, smoking cigarettes, and speaking of death. You were correct when you mentioned Cossack because my jobs in villages involve riding horses. My trip to the Zone was a short one, but not on a horse. I wanted to see the Zone once more before I traveled south. I move from village to village. Many fields are still plowed using horses. However, I might go to Nikolaev. They say there are jobs building ships.”
“Are the ship builders looking for Cossacks?”
Anatoly held his hat up. “This was a gift from the job at the vehicle graveyard. With this the sun will not add to my percentages of contracting cancer. It is useful in the fields, but shipbuilding will pay more. At least this is what I am told.”
Anatoly motioned with his head toward the back. “Your wife?”
Janos shook his head. “Her name is Natasha.”
Anatoly smiled. “I need only a short ride,” he whispered. “The next village will do. I work my way toward Nikolaev, and if I am lucky I will still be alive when I arrive. Also, Nikolaev is rumored to house smart Natashas who do not allow themselves to be trafficked abroad.”
Janos and Anatoly laughed quietly, and soon a village sign came into view—Lakas—and Anatoly bade farewell and went on his way. The time on the dashboard said four in the morning. Soon farmers would awaken, and perhaps one would offer a day job and breakfast to a Cossack.
Janos calculated the time difference between western Ukraine and central United States. Four in the morning here meant it was still early evening in Chicago. A perfect time to call Lazlo and tell him about the Cossack. A perfect time to discuss wanderlust, a tradition among Gypsy comrades.
Janos took his cell phone from the console, pushed a button, saw by the indicator that the village of Lakas had cellular service, prepared himself to speak in generalities, as he always did on his cell phone, and entered Lazlo’s stored number.
At dusk, when his cell phone rang, Lazlo knew it was Janos before he saw the display of the international number. He sat in near darkness, a reddish glow from the Humboldt Ukrainian Restaurant sign across the street visible on the far wall. He knew Janos would call tonight.
“Is all well, Janos?”
“Except for pinpricks in my ass.”
“You are on the road?”
“Yes.”
Lazlo switched to Hungarian. “I hear it in your voice. The road is smooth, not like Podil with its troubles. Web sites give the clergyman in question a long title: deputy chairman of the Synodal Department for Relations with Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies.”
“What your police call a snitch insists the man with the long title contacted an associate of an ex-family exterminator, as well as a Moscow explosives expert. I am accused by one journal of having a vendetta against orthodoxy. The article mentioned a Vatican Army. I would go to the nearest church to light candles, but they are locked this early in the morning.”
“You were wise to go on holiday.”
“Yes,” said Janos. “Yesterday at this time, a car followed me for some distance. When it finally turned off, you know what was playing on the CD player?”
“What?”
“‘A Cold Wind Is Blowing, Mother.’“
Lazlo laughed. “One of my favorites.”
“How does the wind blow in Chicago?”
“My niece left today. Perhaps when you return to Kiev, you can visit her.”
“There is something else in the wind. I hear it in your voice.”
Although he had tried to hide his misery, Lazlo gave in and told Janos about Jermaine, who wanted to be named Gypsy in his street gang. He told of the incident in a mix of English and Hungarian. When he finished all the details, including the funeral the next day, they were both silent, the cell transmitters and receivers waiting anxiously, a data-mining program on a super computer measuring the length of the silence, analyzing the use of two languages, and giving the conversation more meaning than it deserved.
“I am sorry, fellow Gypsy. This boy, Jermaine, is now part of God. I wish I knew more about death. I wish we could hug … Outside I see a canyon shaped like your nose.”
Lazlo laughed. “The last time we spoke, I assumed your nose would be mountain-sized because of what you poke it into.”
After a pause, Janos switched from English to Ukrainian. “Do not worry. My holiday trip will cleanse my soul.”
Lazlo also spoke in Ukrainian. “I remember before Chernobyl at headquarters. When Chief Investigator Chkalov assigned you to me, comrades immediately called us Gypsy Number One and Gypsy Number Two. We became father and son. Families have multiplied in Ukraine, Janos. Be careful. Contact Svetlana to test Kiev’s waters before returning.”
“Please give greetings to all aunts, uncles, and cousins.”
“You do the same,” said Lazlo. “Best wishes and blessings to all family … uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, every one of them.”
This is how Lazlo and Janos always ended their telephone conversations, as if they had dozens of family members, as if this were one of thousands of phone calls across the globe wishing the best to loved ones. However, earlier in the conversation, both Lazlo and Janos knew that when they referred to “family,” what they really meant was Mafia.
At dawn, Janos pulled into a campground just outside another village with cellular service. There was no one at the small camp office and only a few other campers scattered about. He parked at the east edge of the camp near a sm
all canyon to watch the sunrise. Morning sunlight spreading across gentle green hills made the canyon ominous, a crack across the face of the Earth separating him from everything and everyone he’d known. Inside the small camper van, he poured a Stolichnaya and, after drinking it down, felt better and went to bed.
He awoke before noon, made an omelet for lunch, took a folding chair and a Kiev newspaper outside, and ate in the sun. The campground was empty. Everyone else had gone while he was asleep. He stared at the horizon beyond the canyon where the blue of the sky met the green of the hills. The only living creatures he could see were birds swooping up out of the canyon and down again. There was no wind, and he could hear the river at the canyon’s bottom.
The Gypsy stirred in his seat, adjusted his position, and picked up the two-day-old newspaper he had brought with him from the camper van. The news was as usual. A minor mishap at Borispol Airport in which the wing of a plane clipped the tail of another; questions concerning whether the new sports stadium could be justified considering Ukraine’s terrible economy; a fire at a video store near Zhulyany Airport in which arson was suspected—the owner’s body and an unidentified body found inside. There was no news about the Podil female clinic bombing, or the killing of the female doctor, or the bombing of the Nagy Investigative Agency, or the alleged connection with Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza. Nothing.
Janos took his cell phone from his pocket. Svetlana answered on the sixth ring, her voice throaty as if she were still in bed, even though he had called her at Kiev headquarters.
“Janos. Is your foot still in your mother?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I was leaving for lunch, and you almost missed me. You are calling from Wild West?”
“There are mountains.”
“Are you alone?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Traffyck: The Thrilling Sequel to Chernobyl Murders Page 4