She stood up, not knowing what else to say, and met her mother’s gaze. All the fuzziness and weakness of will she’d associated with her mother evaporated under that gaze. What she saw was a woman, wretched and determined. For a moment, she couldn’t speak.
Nothing made sense.
No one made sense.
She grasped at her game like a lifeline. “I’d better go up and change.”
Her father brushed a hand over his eyes. He straightened his shoulders and turned the television back on. “You get ready, girl. I’ll take you. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you play. Left wing, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, Da. Are you sure?”
“Sure as sure.”
As she turned to the stairs, she caught sight of her mother’s reflection in the mirror above the console.
She mouthed six words at Rachel, each as clear as daylight.
You don’t know what you’ve done.
Shocked, Rachel flew up the stairs to her room.
27.
When I close my eyes, I don’t see the men.
In fourteen days, Srebrenica will be gone.
Rachel parked in the driveway of the blue and white house at the corner of Sloley Road and Lyme Regis. It was a plain two-story with a double garage, its shutters painted periwinkle blue, its white siding crisp and fresh. The maple that bordered the sidewalk was still aglow with autumn loveliness. The lawn was covered with unraked leaves.
A wreath hung above the letter slot on a plain blue door.
She paced the sidewalk waiting for Khattak. Dec and Gaffney had compiled a first run of background information on David Newhall for her; the house on Lyme Regis belonged to him.
She considered its geography off Cathedral Bluffs. Here was another neighbor of Drayton’s. A neighbor of Winterglass and Ringsong. The house was a little further back from the escarpment. A neighborhood or two away from Melanie Blessant. A small stage for the actors of this drama. Significant? She couldn’t tell.
David Newhall was a legal name change, unlike Christopher Drayton’s alias.
She understood now that Newhall’s clipped manner of speaking had been an attempt to mask his accent. He’d come to Canada just after the fall of Srebrenica, legally, as a Convention refugee. He’d changed his name two years ago. Around the same time he’d moved into this neighborhood. Before that, he’d lived alone in a small apartment not far from the mosque.
If their last visit with Imam Muharrem hadn’t ended on such bad terms, she would have sat him down for a lengthy discussion on the true identity of David Newhall.
Masks, she thought. First Drayton, then Newhall.
It struck her that in the short time since she’d met Nathan Clare, whom she viewed as a touchstone, she’d been the audience to a pantomime. Players moving together and apart in a complex orchestration.
That was one thing she’d learned from studying Damir Hasanović’s file.
Newhall was the one who’d sent the letters.
* * *
She gave a slight wave as Khattak pulled up on the driveway beside her. They’d talked on the phone in the morning. She’d given her report on Newhall, he’d told her what Justice had found. Justice had a statement prepared. They were holding off on the announcement until Khattak’s investigation turned up a result.
Time was definitely not on their side.
If Drayton had been pushed, she hardly expected Newhall to own up to it.
If he had assisted Drayton to his death, sent the letters, planted the lilies, she couldn’t say she blamed him. Newhall’s account of survival was harrowing, his losses inestimable.
When the Serbs took Srebrenica, they wiped from the earth three generations of men.
She envisioned grandfathers, grandchildren. Rows upon rows of exiguous green coffins, wept over by the wretched. The resting place of the men of Srebrenica.
The unquiet dead and those who mourned them.
How had she become one of them?
Her Da had always said of her that her problem wasn’t that she thought too much. Her problem was that she felt too much.
As well as she could, she understood Newhall’s anger, his terse dismissal. He’d not only had something to hide—he’d had to suppress his tragedy in its entirety.
The young boys were crying out for their parents, the fathers for their sons. But there was no help.
She understood the letters with perfect clarity now, the chronicle of the fate of Newhall’s family. Zach had been resurrected after seven pitiless years. Newhall held no such hope.
“This doesn’t feel right, sir.”
“I know, Rachel, but we need to see this through.”
He moved to the door and rang the bell, his elongated shadow falling across the lawn. Rachel’s steps crunched over the leaves.
When Newhall opened the door, she had the same impression of jittery energy as before. He ushered them into a parlor with the jumpy movements of a cat, nervy and quick-jawed. The room was simply furnished with a white chesterfield and a pair of suede armchairs placed beneath two windows. Late-afternoon light threw shadows upon a worn Turkish rug with a geometric pattern. Newhall took a seat in the corner that left him in darkness. He didn’t offer refreshments.
He focused on Rachel.
“Have you learned anything?”
This time she caught it. The hint of a foreign pattern of speech: she would have guessed it as Russian.
“We’ve learned a great deal, sir. We know who you are, for example.”
He straightened in his seat. Beyond his shoulder, she glimpsed a dining table piled high with stacks of file folders.
“What do you mean? I’ve told you who I am.”
“Your name is Damir Hasanović, isn’t it?”
“If you look at my driver’s license, you will see my name is David Newhall.”
“You’re denying it, then?”
“There is nothing to deny. It was a perfectly legal name change.” He leaned forward and placed his hands on his knees, composed and at ease.
He’d been waiting for this moment, she realized. Anticipating the confrontation.
Khattak spoke. “Mr. Hasanović, you changed your name to Newhall two years ago. Why?”
“It was a fad. It seemed to be going around.”
Rachel sucked in a breath. “Then you knew about Drayton.”
“Christopher Drayton, Dražen Krstić. I knew the moment I first laid eyes on him. So?”
“When was that, sir?”
“At Clare’s house. Two years ago. Before I moved here.”
“And why did you move here?”
He shrugged. “I like the Bluffs. I like to walk along the escarpment.” He threw down the words like a challenge.
“Did you ever confront Mr. Drayton with your knowledge?”
“I did not. Next question.”
“Why not?”
“I thought there were other avenues. As a Canadian, I imagined I might have some recourse to justice.” He stressed the last word.
“You sent the letters to War Crimes,” Rachel concluded.
“Yes. Nothing came of it.”
“Yet you never accused Drayton directly.”
“I did not wish to precipitate his flight.”
“He might have fled if he’d known who you were.”
He flashed them a wolf’s smile, his teeth small and dangerous. “It was one of the wonders of Potočari. Thousands of people desperate for security. How could Krstić notice them all the way we noticed him? He had no reason to know me. We’d never met.”
“But you knew him.”
“Wouldn’t you like to ask me how?”
Rachel cleared her throat. “Will you confirm that he was in fact Dražen Krstić?”
Newhall laughed. “Does my confirmation matter? Have you not seen the tattoo on his hand? Are you asking me if Krstić was there? In Srebrenica, at Potočari? Is that what you want to know?”
She looked at Khattak. He motioned her on.
“Was he?”
“Ah. You are asking me how I recognized him. Was it from his Chetnik tattoo? His military haircut? His thick, squat neck? Was he there when they ordered my mother and father from the base at Potočari? Did he give the order to shoot my brother Mesha? Was he there when they took Ahmo away for questioning? Was it he who guaranteed our safety if our weapons were surrendered? Was it Krstić who promised a prisoner exchange?” He stared into the distance. “They gave us no prisoners, just bones. But not Ahmo’s bones. Not Ahmo. No one can tell me where his bones lie.”
“Mr. Newhall—”
“Call me Damir, dear Sergeant. It must be confusing for you. Christopher, Krstić. David, Damir. I think on the whole I prefer my Bosnian name. They’ve erased everything else. But you haven’t come about that, have you? You want to know how I recognized this man who lived here so safely, so sweetly undetected. Was he there at the base, is that right? Do I recognize him from the gate? Or is it from the execution sites that I remember him? Was he at the famous white house for the torture and beatings? Or was he with the bulldozers they brought in to cart away the corpses? Or at the factory during the night, smoking and laughing when they took away the girls for the evening rapes? Did I recognize him? Yes, I knew his face. I will never forget his face. What does any of it matter now? Didn’t he fall from the cliffs? After his successful retirement in this safest of havens?”
How could we know that the little towns would fall and we would run out of these sacred havens?
Without a doubt, Newhall was the letter writer. She couldn’t think what to say, so she left it to Khattak to ask, “Did he, Damir? Did Dražen Krstić fall to his death? Or did you help him?”
“I would not help him to anything.” His contempt was obvious. He’d said his piece. The energy drained out of him. He leaned back in his chair, his hands limp upon his lap. Rachel noticed a photograph on the table beside the lamp.
She gestured at it. “May I?” Newhall flicked the switch. He handed her the photograph.
An elderly couple sat on a sofa surrounded by their painfully thin sons. The father wore the kind of cap she’d seen Khattak wear at prayer. A kerchief was knotted over the woman’s faded hair. The boys were watchful, hollow-eyed.
“My brothers. The last photograph. The last I have of anything. The bones of my parents were identified in 2010. I went home for the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre to organize their funeral prayers. You could see the green coffins for miles, it seemed. The earth was thick with them.”
He said it without blinking. His eyes were dry.
“Of Mesha and Ahmo, I have only this photograph. Their bones are cold. Where were they murdered? How were they killed? Where do they lie? This photograph cannot answer me. Beside my father and mother, their graves are waiting. Do you think Krstić knew? Do you think he could have told me?”
Is there any hope for at least that little child they snatched away from me, because I keep dreaming about him?
Why was she crying when Damir Hasanović wasn’t?
“Did you ask him?”
He seemed surprised at her tears.
“He wouldn’t have known. He gave orders, he supervised execution sites. He wouldn’t have known a single one of our faces. Balija were all the same to him.”
She palmed her face with her hand, deeply embarrassed. “You wrote him letters,” she said. “In your letters, did you ask him?”
All the men of our family were killed. I can read you the list of their names.
I realized then that nothing good was in store for us in Potočari.
“What letters?”
“You sent letters to Dražen Krstić. Dozens of them. And you planted the Bosnian lily in his garden to remind him.”
“Ah. His garden. His small, safe haven.” When Newhall smiled his knife-blade smile, she felt her blood run cold. “Do you think a man with his finger on a trigger that killed thousands of Bosnians needed a reminder? Did he feel haunted? I doubt it, Sergeant.”
“You’ve admitted you sent letters to the Department of Justice.”
“Justice.” He rolled the word over his tongue. “How swiftly such a word loses its meaning.”
“Look, sir. I know you’ve spent nearly twenty years trying to get justice for your people. I know you’ve testified in case after case at the Tribunal. We know about your work with the Mothers of Srebrenica. You’ve brought lawsuits against the Dutch government. How could you throw that away for one man? Especially a man like Dražen Krstić.”
“Your government was never going to see justice done. You preached peacekeeping at us while practicing cowardice. We remember your secret pact to evacuate your battalion from Srebrenica by stealth, leaving my people defenseless. It was your representative, Mr. MacKenzie, whose claims about ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ satisfied so many. Let the savages fight it out. Except they wouldn’t let us fight. They tied our hands and left us to die.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
“The arms embargo,” he said wearily. “What else would I mean?” A brief hint of calculation appeared on his face. “Or is it possible you think I meant something else? The day of the fall. The day that dawned without the airstrikes the UN had promised when the Serbs rolled their tanks into ‘safe area’ Srebrenica. The day the killing began.”
Where are the planes? When will they strike?
What further proof did she need?
“You sent the letters to Krstić.”
“Did I? Can you prove such a thing?”
“Are you denying it? Everything you’ve told us comes straight from those letters.”
“Does it? Do the letters mention Ahmo and Mesha? Do they tell you that Ahmo was only thirteen years old?”
“Well, no—but everything else.”
Hasanović shrugged. “As far as I’m aware, Christopher Drayton fell from the Bluffs, a dangerous place to walk at the best of times. I can’t help you with anything else.”
“You moved here two years ago, is that correct?” Khattak interjected.
“Yes. As I said, I like this neighborhood.”
“Just after Drayton moved here,” Khattak noted. “Why did you leave the Bosnian community? You were heavily involved with the mosque in the past.”
Hasanović paused. “There’s no law I’m aware of that requires Bosnians to live in ethnic ghettos or religious cantons. At least, not in this country.”
“Please answer the question.”
Hasanović sized him up, his hooded eyes sharp. “My community has rebuilt. They’ve found a place for themselves—a way to struggle back to some form of happiness. I have nothing to rebuild.”
“Where were you on the night that Drayton fell?”
“At a meeting about the museum. At Ringsong. Anyone will tell you.”
“Why did you change your name? Was it to hide your identity from Dražen Krstić until you could find an opportunity for vengeance?”
Hasanović stood up and took the photograph of his family back from Rachel. “Do you think my life’s work has been about vengeance? That I feed myself on the same delusions as the fascists?” Misery twisted his mouth. “I changed my name so I could forget who I am. For some, memories are a homeland, a palace. For me they are a prison—a graveyard.” He touched his fingers to his youngest brother’s face, his dark gaze turned inward. “It’s my curse not to forget.” His face crumpled. “Will you go? Please just go.”
They left him in the shadows, the photograph clutched in his hands.
* * *
Rachel’s hands shook as she let herself into her car. Khattak paused by her window.
“Was he telling the truth?” She looked up, but Khattak’s face was in the shadows. “He never confronted Drayton? He never told him who he was?”
“The man I know Hasanović to be would not stand idly by if he learned a war criminal was living down the street from him. The name change suggests he was biding his time, hiding from Krstić.”
“He denies sendin
g the letters.”
“I’m not sure that I believe him.”
“What about the lilies?”
“He didn’t deny that.”
“He called the garden a haven. It wasn’t his only use of the word.”
“He was mocking us. The same way he kept saying ‘safe area Srebrenica.’ One of six safe havens.”
“Christ.”
“Indeed. We can’t talk here. And we should talk to Nate about what we’ve learned.”
She perked up at once. She wanted to see Nate again, to see if that nebulous connection she’d imagined between them was anything more than wishful thinking on her part. She glanced sideways at Khattak, assuming a neutral expression. He wanted to say something to her, she could tell. And then her hopes were dashed as Khattak took a call, his shoulders tensed against the news. From two blocks away, she heard the sirens.
“Change of plans,” he said. “There’s been an incident with Melanie Blessant.”
28.
Any rape is monstrously unacceptable but what is happening at this very moment in these rape and death camps is even more horrific.
Two cars were parked on the road outside the Blessant house. One belonged to Dennis Blessant. The other was a police cruiser. Khattak went over to talk to their colleagues. Melanie stood just outside the front door that hung askew in its frame, her arms crossed over her overflowing chest.
Dennis Blessant and the girls waited by his car with Marco River. There were scratch marks on the man’s face, but he wasn’t in handcuffs. Hadley stood in an unconscious imitation of her mother’s posture, wrinkling the rose-colored dress she wore. Her hair was pinned up. Cassidy was similarly attired in blue. Both girls looked lovely.
“What’s going on?”
“You’re cops? Why do we need more cops?” Dennis Blessant asked them.
“We’re here on another matter. We’re investigating the death of Christopher Drayton.” She took note of Hadley’s pallor, of Cassidy biting her knuckles. “You’re Dennis Blessant?”
“I try not to acknowledge it on days like these.”
“Your wife called the cops on you? Did you get physical with her?”
“Good God, no.” He hesitated. “Just with the house.”
The Unquiet Dead Page 21