Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  “I ran into him the first time when he was in his mid-twenties. That was more than twenty years ago. He’s from Belgrade and started his criminal career as a soccer fan of Red Star, the professional Serbian club, which had recently received a big fine for violent riots during a league game. A policeman was attacked and seriously injured. Several of the club employees are suspected of having started the riots, so things haven’t changed much over the years.”

  Soccer and league games were not something Louise knew much about, and she had to admit that she’d never heard of Red Star Belgrade.

  “He became the lead fan,” Igli added. “Then in 1992, he joined up with Arkan’s Tigers. That was right after the election when Bosnia became independent, and he was behind some of the nastiest ethnic cleansing by the paramilitary unit, which caused thousands upon thousands of Muslim citizens to flee.”

  Igli gave her a very somber look.

  Suddenly Michael Stig was standing at their table without Louise having noticed him walk up. He said, “You guys shooting the breeze?”

  “I guess you could say that,” Louise said, irritated, as Stig got ready to join them. “Igli was just telling me about Bosko,” she explained and asked if they had gotten any more out of Arian or Hamdi during the questioning sessions the previous day. They’d still been going when Louise had left.

  Stig shook his head and eyed Igli with curiosity, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that Igli might know anything about the Serb.

  “They’re not saying a word. Just keep repeating that we should look into where Bosko was when the two murders took place. But then when we ask them to tell us any more about the Serb, they completely clam up, even when we try to explain to them that it makes it a little hard for us to get anywhere, if they don’t want to say anything.”

  Igli nodded as Stig spoke.

  “No one’s going to talk if Bosko is involved. But is there any reason to think he’s been in Copenhagen?” Igli asked.

  Louise could see the anxiety in Igli’s brown eyes.

  “Just what those two say,” Stig responded with a shrug of his shoulders. “And no one here seems to have heard of him—not even Mikkelsen, who otherwise is familiar with most of the rumors going around the neighborhood.”

  The interpreter shook his head again.

  “I haven’t heard anything about Bosko starting to be active in Denmark,” he confessed. “And I hope he doesn’t decide to turn up, either.”

  “I interrupted you in the middle of something,” Stig said, opening his soda bottle against the edge of the table. Louise nodded and asked Igli to continue what he had been saying.

  The interpreter sighed and took a deep breath, as if he would have preferred not to finish what he was saying. He glanced at his cell phone on the table, which hadn’t rung yet.

  “He got his own military unit, weapons, and trained people from the ultra-nationalist parties, who were interested in cleaning out the Muslims and claiming land for the Serbs. But that’s not how I ran into him again.”

  Louise could tell that Stig didn’t find Igli’s old wartime memories particularly interesting and that he’d been hoping their chat had been more closely related to the case they were working on.

  “Two years after the war broke out and was at its peak, Bosko realized how much money could be made if he used the situation to his advantage. That was during the siege of Sarajevo, when Serbian forces created a blockade around the city and stopped all supplies from entering. Residents were short on food, and emergency supply convoys were having a hard time making it in. That’s when Bosko started building up his smuggling business.”

  The look in Igli’s eyes made it clear that the memories were painful.

  “The Bosnian-Serb forces were shelling the city daily with mortars, and snipers were killing people in the streets, and they weren’t distinguishing between civilian and military targets. It was in the middle of all that chaos, while the city was in a state of emergency, that Bosko made his first millions.”

  The plate of chocolate chip rolls remained untouched, and the coffee in Igli’s cup had grown cold.

  “We think he brought in the first war tourists in April 1994, but he may have started even earlier than that. The route ran from Moscow to Budapest or Sofia, and then from there they were brought to Belgrade by car and on to Zvornik, which is the border between Serbia and the Serbian part of Bosnia, which is now called the Republika Srpska,” Igli explained. “From Zvornik, a team leader brought them to Pale, the little town up in the mountains, which has since become the capital of the Serbian territory. It’s about twenty kilometers from Sarajevo.”

  The cafeteria was empty now, and the employees were sitting at the other end of the room having a cup of coffee. It didn’t seem like it was bothering them that the last of the customers hadn’t left yet.

  “The war tourists were housed in some of the luxury hotels that had been built for the Winter Olympics in 1984. We thought it was mostly the newly minted millionaires from Russia and Ukraine he was bringing in when he arranged what we started calling his human safaris. They were the ones who could afford to pay the big money for an adrenaline rush that they could hold on to long after they’d returned home again.”

  Louise was staring at Igli in disbelief but didn’t interrupt, and Stig no longer looked like Igli’s story was boring him.

  “You bought a basic package, which covered the trip to Serbia and your room and board, and after that you could say the price depended on the level of danger or the size of the adrenaline rush you wanted.

  “The trips were broken up like this:

  “Tour Number 1 was the economy trip. Participants were allowed to fire mortars out over Sarajevo without a chance to see what they’d hit, or whether anyone was killed.

  “Tour Number 2 was more like coach. A guide would later take you down into the city so you could follow the fighting and see where the mortar shells you launched had hit and how many people you’d killed.

  “Tour Number 3 was the exclusive one. Here, a personal guide and a bodyguard would take you down into the city with a sniper rifle so that you could shoot people.”

  Igli paused for a bit.

  “Rumor had it that if you hit anyone, you got a discount on the price of the tour, but we never managed to confirm that, and the police only managed to figure all this out after the fact. We were just never anywhere near catching Bosko, even though he never hid the fact that he was the man behind the tours. People like Bosko are rarely caught, because men of that caliber are known by Serbs and Muslims, and there will always be someone willing to cover up for them.”

  For a second Louise thought what she saw in Igli’s eyes was respect, but then she realized that it was profound fear.

  “I hope for your sakes—and everyone else’s—that he hasn’t come to Denmark. Bosko goes wherever there’s a lot of money to be made, and he uses unscrupulous people to increase his fortune. Now I’ve heard that in the last few years of the war, he was trading in children, that he was trading in women and smuggling people over borders for big sums of money. But the truth is that I want to hear as little news about him as possible.”

  The cell phone on the table rang, and Igli quickly looked at his watch before answering it and arranging with his son that the boy would call again once he was home. Then Igli excused himself and said that he was going to go down to the monitoring room and see what was on the computer.

  Louise and Stig sat there for a bit without saying anything before Louise cleared the table and then took the full tray over to return it.

  “It’s not going to do any good for us to check the airlines’ passenger manifests around the time of the killings,” Stig said, once they were on their way back downstairs. “He can cross national boundaries freely by car, if he turns out to be the one who was here.”

  Once they got down to the second floor, where the homicide squad offices were, Louise proceeded down the hall and cautiously knocked on the door to the monitoring room.r />
  “Excuse me,” she hurried to say, as Igli pulled his headphones off. “Do you think your old colleagues might have a picture of Bosko that we could get them to e-mail us?”

  Igli thought about that for a moment, but was interrupted by his cell phone ringing. His son must have made it home, and the father’s shoulders noticeably relaxed.

  Igli folded his hands over his stomach and gave Louise a somber look.

  “I would really like to ask you to keep me out of this. I told you about Bosko because you sounded like you might need to know. But I’d rather not have any further involvement,” he said, an urgent look in his eyes.

  “Of course,” she said quickly, taking a reflexive step back, surprised by the intensity in his voice.

  “Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I subscribe to the idea that some people should be allowed to demand to be left in peace, but I swore to myself that I would never have anything to do with Bosko or his people ever again. Both of my brothers worked for the police. They were the ones, along with a couple of other people, who figured out the war tourism thing. When Bosko learned that they’d detected his smuggling business, he went looking for the four men who’d been working on the case. He went to their homes and gunned them down in front of their wives and children.”

  The pain was evident in his face as he gave a quick nod, as if to emphasize that that’s what happened when you went up against a man like Bosko. Then he turned back around to face his computer and reached for his headphones without reacting to Louise’s good-bye.

  44

  LOUISE STOPPED ABRUPTLY IN THE DOORWAY TO HER OFFICE WHEN she saw Camilla sitting there waiting for her with a mug of steaming tea in her hands.

  Lars had already been out to a private birthing clinic in Østerbro before lunch to pick up a list of the names of pregnant women who were due to give birth or whose due dates had just passed. The manager there had not been favorably disposed toward handing over the list even though Lars had a court order, but it did seem to mollify her when he offered to come pick it up in person so there was no risk it would fall into the wrong hands.

  “Hello,” Louise said, noting that her voice sounded a little lackluster. She was still mulling over Igli’s story, especially his own personal involvement in it. She took the electric kettle that had just boiled and got out a packet of green tea before she sat down to find out why Camilla had stopped by.

  “Markus and I had dinner with Pastor Holm and Jonas last night,” she began slowly.

  Louise tossed her tea bag into the trash, leaving a line of wet drips on the carpet, before she swung around in her chair and told Camilla that of course it was nice of her to stop by, but that she and Lars were in the middle of a monumental assignment since Willumsen had left it up to them to find the mother of the stillborn baby. So she didn’t have much time for tea parties.

  “Did you know that Jonas is missing the pinky toe on his right foot?” Camilla asked without paying any heed to Louise’s attempt to send her on her way.

  There was a pause as they each held their mug of tea and looked at each other.

  “No,” Louise said, shaking her head. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Henrik is totally convinced that the toe wasn’t amputated, that it just happened to be like that, but I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence. I just can’t tell if he has noticed the similarity, or if he’s really as clueless as he’s acting.”

  Louise set down her mug.

  “What do you mean by that?” Louise asked, eyeing Camilla expectantly, hoping she would fill her in on whatever idea had occurred to her. Obviously it seemed too absurd for someone to cut the toe off a newborn baby just because they knew the pastor’s son was missing a pinky toe, but Louise did agree that it didn’t sound like a coincidence. Especially since it was the same toe.

  “Maybe someone feels like Henrik has let them down, or that it’s his fault their child didn’t survive,” Camilla suggested, shrugging her shoulders at the lack of an obvious explanation.

  “But if that’s the case, then whoever left the baby in the church must be someone who knows that Jonas has that defect,” Louise said, picking up her phone and dialing Willumsen’s extension.

  “Yeah?” Willumsen said tersely.

  Louise realized how tired she felt as she asked if he had time to stop by her office.

  “I thought you had enough work to keep you busy,” he said sarcastically when he spotted Camilla in there drinking tea.

  Louise didn’t even have the energy to explain, just motioned toward Lars’s chair and asked Willumsen to take a seat.

  Camilla smoothed back a tuft of hair that had come out of her ponytail, and repeated what she’d just told Louise.

  Willumsen grunted slightly, while the two women watched him to see what his assessment was.

  “What does the pastor have to say about it?” was the first thing Willumsen asked, eyeing Louise. She had to shrug because she hadn’t spoken with Henrik Holm about it yet. “If this isn’t a coincidence, then it does kind of look like someone has decided to go after him. That there’s a personal motive, at least behind that last event.”

  Camilla nodded.

  “But he’s not saying anything,” Camilla said, watching Louise’s boss.

  Willumsen got up and paced back and forth a bit. Then he pointed to Louise.

  “You need to go talk to him. If it was someone trying to tell him something, then we’re going to have to start a completely different kind of investigation.”

  Louise agreed. She contemplated calling the pastor’s residence before she left, but decided to just hope he was home.

  “I brought my car,” Camilla said, offering her a ride out to the church. “It’s not far out of my way, after all,” she said as they walked down toward Otto Mønstedsgade, “but I’m not going in with you,” she hurriedly added before they climbed into the car. “It’s bad enough that I’ve been blabbing to you about his kid’s toes.”

  45

  LOUISE CLIMBED THE STEPS TO THE PASTOR’S KITCHEN DOOR AND tapped the knocker a couple of times. She smiled shyly at the tall, dark-haired woman who opened the door a second later. Camilla had told her about the housekeeper on their way out there, but now she realized she was interrupting them in the middle of a conversation. There were three girls sitting around the table talking softly in a language Louise didn’t understand. Now their conversation stopped, and they all looked down at the table a little uncertainly to avoid looking her in the eye.

  “Could I come in to speak to Henrik Holm?” Louise asked in English.

  The housekeeper pointed over to the church without saying anything, but her meaning was clear enough, so Louise smiled and thanked her before turning to walk back across the courtyard, where the sexton had just come into view.

  “He’s in the middle of a wedding rehearsal with a couple who’s getting married here this weekend,” the sexton said, squinting slightly at the sun as he turned and looked at the clock on the church tower. “I think they’ll be done soon.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. Then I’ll wait for him,” Louise said and walked over to sit down on a bench in the sun. It was positioned so she had her back to the whitewashed church wall and had a wonderful view of the cemetery, where the beechnut buds were just about to open.

  It still didn’t make any sense to her, that someone would remove the infant’s toe to harass or provoke Henrik Holm, but sometimes it didn’t take much to make people act based on emotion. Often it seemed like a trivial matter to other people, but to the person who felt like they’d been wronged, a relatively simple occurrence could cause their world to fall apart.

  A couple in their mid-thirties walked out of the church with the pastor. Louise watched them say good-bye and didn’t get up until Pastor Holm started walking toward the residence.

  “Hi,” she called, and apologized for coming by unannounced. “There was just one thing I wanted to discuss with you.”

  He turned around, surprised, and
smiled when he saw her. “No problem,” he assured her. “Let’s have a seat,” he suggested and they walked back over to the bench.

  Instead of getting right to the point, Louise said she’d just met his new housekeeper.

  “What does Jonas think of her?”

  “He hasn’t said much,” the pastor admitted. “But I think that’s a good sign. Tereza told me yesterday that for the last month she’s been the leader of a network that tries to help Eastern European woman who’ve been forced to come to Denmark and work as prostitutes against their will. The network tries to help them get back home safely.”

  Louise listened with interest and thought about Pavlína. A network like that would be great for her.

  “There are already a number of people involved, and I got the sense that there would be even more. So I gave them permission to meet out here, where they can talk in peace.”

  Louise sensed a new dedication in his voice and was sure it hadn’t been there during her last visit. But his eyes seemed tired and kept darting around the courtyard anxiously and over toward the parking lot, as if he was having a hard time concentrating.

  “If they’re not already familiar with The Nest and Stop Trafficking in Women, they might like to talk to them some,” Louise suggested. “They also have some resources that can be used to help victims get back home, even putting a little money in their pockets, so they can get by for a while and not be susceptible to being rounded up again right away,” Louise explained. She could tell that this was all news to him, but that he was clearly interested.

  Louise took a breath, which ended up being a little deeper than she’d planned, and then turned to face him and changed the topic.

  “You should have told us that Jonas is missing his right pinky toe,” she said, watching him to see what his reaction would be.

  When there was none, she continued:

  “It’s certainly possible that that isn’t significant, but that is a piece of information we’re going to need to include in our considerations as we investigate the case.”