The Iron Angel

by Edward D. Hoch

  “I came here to get Maksim out.”

  “You are tall. I like that. Yegor only came up to my chin.”

  Michael stepped away from her, his attention suddenly drawn to the street. “I think they’re down there.” The car had returned and parked beneath a tree. As they watched, the two men emerged and started across the street.

  “What will I do?” she asked.

  “Is there a back way out of here?”

  “Yes, into a courtyard that connects with the next apartment.”

  “Come on.” He took her by the hand and led her into the hallway. She directed him to a rear staircase and then down to street level. They went through an outside door and found themselves in an enclosed courtyard. By the light of a single weak bulb he could make out the entrance to the apartment next door.

  “Stop there!” a voice shouted. A spotlight hit them, pinning them like bugs. Then, shielding his eyes, Michael made out the figure of Lieutenant Ivan Vasili. He was holding a gun pointed at them.

  “What do you want?” Michael asked.

  “The woman. Surrender her and you are free to go.”

  “You’re working for Gogol. He wants her dead.”

  “I am working for the state.”

  Behind him, Michael heard the door opening. The two men in the black suits came around on either side of them. The one Michael had kicked in the shin was holding a gun. “He is just another Gypsy,” the man said. “I would know them anywhere. Let me shoot him!”

  But Vasili held up his hand. “I think we must talk, Michael Vlado. You do not fully understand the situation. My men were not trying to abduct Alexandra outside the Club Nikolas tonight. They were trying to arrest her. We searched her apartment this evening and found explosives there.”

  At his side, Alexandra gasped. “Did you have a warrant for the search?” Michael said.

  “Warrant?” the detective repeated with a smile. Then he said to his men, “Bring them both along. He may have been working with her.”

  In the early morning hours Moscow police headquarters was even more depressing than on his earlier visit. That time Maksim had been the prisoner. Now it was Michael himself.

  Seated alone in a holding cell while Vasili questioned Alexandra, he had time to consider the problem of Kizim’s murder. By the time the detective came for him, many things had become clearer. “She will not talk without a lawyer,” Vasili said. “Do you have anything to say?”

  “Let me see her,” Michael suggested.

  The detective lit a cigarette and frowned. “What good will that do?”

  “Can it do any harm? I’m sure you’ll be listening to every word we say.”

  “All right.” He unlocked the cell door. “She’s in the first interrogation room.”

  Alexandra stood by a small window covered with heavy wire mesh, staring down at the street. She turned as Michael entered, surprised to see him. “Have they sent you now to question me?”

  “No. I asked to speak with you.”

  She sat down at the long table, crossing her hands in front of her. “Do you think that I killed Oleg Kizim?”

  “I know that you killed him.”

  Her head jerked up. “What do you mean?”

  Michael began to speak, feeling lonely and sad as he often did when remembering his childhood. “I must have been around ten years old at the time. My mother took me to visit a man named Caspian in a neighboring village. His wife had recently given birth, and that was the reason for our visit. I remember they let me hold the child in my arms. It was the first time I’d ever held a baby because this was something boys rarely did. That baby was you, Sasha.” Her head jerked up at the name. “You are Caspian’s daughter and Maksim’s mother.”

  She was silent for a long time, twisting her hands as she tried to find words. “How did you know?” she asked finally.

  “You told me Yegor was gone many months before you started working at the club, yet tonight in your apartment you mentioned how short he was, that he only came up to your chin. If you didn’t work together you must have known him before. Then there was the business of Maksim’s mother and father making fireworks for the clowns when they worked at the circus. You had the know-ledge to make a small bomb, if you were Maksim’s mother. Sitting here thinking about it just now, I remembered how you greeted Maksim almost like a mother when he was released from police custody earlier.”

  “I suppose I should have admitted everything,” she said speaking in a tired voice.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Yegor and I split up when he insisted on taking Maksim to Moscow with him. He said there was no future for a Gypsy in Romania, especially a Gypsy dwarf. He’d heard everything was changing in Russia and there were opportunities in the capital. He was right, but those opportunities were in gambling and mob-related activities. I was so glad I’d taught my son how to read and write. He sent me letters from here, telling of their new jobs at the Club Nikolas. He made it sound like a glamorous place, which I suppose it is. The nightly rat races brought in much money for Oleg Kizim, especially after he started fixing the races by feeding the rats lead shot to weight them down.”

  “That was when your husband began blackmailing him?”

  She nodded. “And got himself killed. Leaving my son alone. Worse still, Kizim insisted he return the money his father had extorted. He refused to let Maksim leave the club until every ruble was repaid. My son became a virtual slave. That was when I decided to go to Moscow and be with him. I obtained the job as a barmaid and no one but Maksim knew I was his mother. Still, there seemed no way out for him. Even with my small income added to his, it would have taken us years to pay off my husband’s debt. Kizim had paid him thousands before deciding to kill him.”

  “What did your husband do with all that money?”

  “Maksim says he gambled it away, and spent it on drugs.”

  “So you killed Kizim.”

  She nodded. “Maksim knew I was planning something but he didn’t know what. I’d watched Kizim wind that clockwork rat many times and I knew exactly how he held it. I made certain the explosive charge was small enough that my son and the others in the room would not be harmed. I saw this as our way to freedom, but then Gogol took over as manager of the club and I knew that things would never change.”

  “What made the police suspect you enough to search your room?”

  “Lieutenant Vasili told me they found small traces of gunpowder in your locker at work. It must have come out of the bag in which I carried the toy rat to my apartment and back. It was there that I assembled the bomb.” She gave a weak smile. “Perhaps I am a better mother than I am a criminal.”

  “I’d like to get Maksim out of here, if you’ll allow it. Your father gave me money for two plane tickets back to Bucharest. I think now is the time to use them.”

  “Do it. Today if they’ll let you. Perhaps someday I can join him.”

  He left her then and spoke to Ivan Vasili in the outer office. “Am I free to go?”

  “Go” he said with a wave of his hand.

  “What about Maksim?”

  “Take the dwarf with you, but don’t say I told you that.”

  “Will Gogol try to stop me?”

  “I will handle him.”

  Michael and Maksim flew out of Domodedovo Airport on the afternoon flight to Bucharest. The rats stayed behind.

  THE STARKWORTH ATROCITY

  Unlike the traditional image of the Gypsy, Michael Vlado had never been a wanderer. He would have been quite content to live with his wife in the foothills of Romania’s Transylvanian Alps, breeding horses and working with the members of his clan, had not circumstances thrust a different role upon him. He became king of his tribe when just past forty years of age, at a time when European persecution of Gypsies together with political upheavals in Eastern Europe were changing his life in unexpected ways. Hardly a year passed now when he was not summoned to a faraway place to plead the cause of Romanies seeking political as
ylum.

  That was how he happened to be traveling by train through the Channel Tunnel on his way to England in late October of 1997. Thousands of Gypsies facing increased persecution in Slovakia and the Czech Republic had been encouraged to flee by a television program’s favorable portrayal of Canada as welcoming Romany immigrants.

  When Canada insisted on stricter entry rules, the focus shifted to Britain. Once there, the rumors said, it was easier to travel the rest of the way to Canada.

  Michael had answered a direct appeal from Colonel Jugger, an official of the European Union, to travel with him to Dover and examine the problem in person. Now, passing through the seemingly endless tunnel beneath the English Channel he listened while the colonel outlined the problem, speaking English with only a slight accent. “It is said that upwards of six thousand Gypsies are on their way to Britain. Most will arrive by the less expensive cross-channel ferries, but however they come, Dover is the most likely port of entry. They have a real problem there, compounded by the recent Dublin Convention on Immigration ruling that asylum seekers may apply for refuge in the country in which they wish to live. Britain can no longer simply send them back across the channel.”

  “The European Union is making many changes to the old rules,” Michael observed.

  “Too many, in the British view of things, which is why they’re resisting a full acceptance of the Union. But here we are, at last.” The train burst into the sunlight without warning, and Michael Vlado was on British soil for the first time in his life.

  They rolled into the station a bit farther along. Colonel Jugger, a slender man of military bearing who was taller than Michael by a couple of inches, had arranged for a car to meet them. He was a retired officer in the former West German army who’d taken the job with the European Union a couple of years earlier. His specialty was migration between various countries in the Union, which automatically made him an expert on Gypsies. It was men like Jugger who would change the map of Europe in the decades to come, for better or worse. Now, as Michael followed him down the steps to the waiting car with its small EU banners mounted on the front fender, he felt increasingly out of place. He didn’t belong here. He was no sort of politician.

  “There’s an unused nursing home at Starkworth about twenty miles from here,” Jugger was saying. “The government has pressed it into service to help provide emergency accommodations for Gypsies requesting asylum, at least until the courts can rule on their requests.” He gave the driver a route to their destination and the black sedan sprang into motion, traveling swiftly and silently up Marine Parade Road to the A2.

  “I’m not too familiar with the Romany population in Britain,” Michael admitted.

  “They’re often called Travelers, a term that includes both Gypsies and itinerant speakers of the Shelta language. We estimate that there are about fifty thousand in all, with another twenty thousand in Ireland.”

  “Shelta?”

  “It’s a private language based partly on Irish. Apparently it’s spoken only by Travelers in the British Isles. These are hard times for itinerant people hereabouts. In the past, Gypsies camped in the countryside, even in some distant corner of a large estate. They were out of sight and bothered no one, sometimes even proving useful as seasonal farm workers. But as the population grew and empty areas became less common, conflicts emerged. The new suburban communities did not want Gypsies on their doorstep. The Caravan Site Act of nineteen sixty-eight obliged local authorities to provide camping areas for them, but generally these were in the least desirable areas of town. Needless to say, this new wave of Gypsy immigration is not welcome here.”

  After a time, the car turned off the A2. They headed back toward the coast and through the country town of Starkworth. It was probably like many others, with a clock tower on the town hall and an old stone church dating from at least the last century, but it was the first one Michael had seen in England. Soon they reached their destination, a sprawling white building surrounded by a grove of trees across from a school. Until a year ago it had been the Starkworth Nursing home, Jugger explained. Unused since then, the county council had agreed to the government suggestion that Gypsy immigrants be housed there until their status was clarified. “How many can they handle here?” Michael wondered.

  “About one hundred, more if they installed cots in the recreation room. Right now I believe they’re around half of capacity.”

  The car pulled up behind a white MG, the only other vehicle in evidence. “I expect we’ll be about an hour,” Colonel Jugger told the driver.

  Jugger was a few steps ahead of Michael going up the walkway to the front door, so he was the first to spot the body sprawled in the doorway, its head and shoulders on the brick entryway. As he hurried to the young man, who was clad in a white jacket and pants, Michael looked beyond him into the front hall of the nursing home. He could see two more figures on the floor. “Something’s happened here!”

  Jugger turned the man over. He was alive but gasping for breath. “What is it? What happened to you?”

  The man opened his eyes for an instant. “Gas,” he muttered. “They’re all –”

  Michael’s hand was on the door but Jugger shouted a warning. “Don’t go in there! Something bad has happened here. Tell our driver to phone for police and ambulances!”

  What was to become known around the world within hours as the Starkworth Atrocity began to unfold with the arrival of the first police car and ambulance. Two officers circled the building, peering in all the ground floor windows, and came back to report that there were bodies everywhere. After that the local fire brigade was summoned and two men in rubber coats and gas masks entered the nursing home carrying gauges to measure the extent of impurities in the air. They returned almost at once and the firefighters set up a large exhaust fan in the doorway pointed towards the sky. On the opposite side of the building they smashed windows so that fresh air could enter and help dissipate the fumes.

  An hour later when they reentered the nursing home they brought back the stark statistics. There were fifty-three bodies of men, women and children inside, plus two women volunteers who had been tending to the immigrants’ needs. Only the male orderly had survived. In the basement of the building, near the heating ducts, two empty metal canisters had been found. When he learned of that, Colonel Jugger asked to see the canisters.

  Only the firefighter, and some police officers in protective gear had been allowed into the nursing home thus far, and Michael was still standing out-side with Colonel Jugger when one of them came out with the canisters. He thought the blood drained from the colonel’s face at the sight of them. “They’re the sort used at Auschwitz,” Jugger said grimly. “Cyanide pellets are dissolved in acid to produce quick working hydrogen cyanide gas.”

  “I know about Auschwitz,” Michael agreed. “Jews and Gypsies were gassed there routinely. Are you telling me that someone deliberately killed these people in the manner used at Nazi death camps?”

  The German hung his head. “I fear that a terrible crime has been committed here.”

  Though he’d planned to visit other immigrant sites during his stay, it was clear to Michael that the massacre at Starkworth took precedence over all else. Michael and Jugger made arrangements to spend at least one night at a hotel a few blocks from the nursing home. It was one of a popular chain of lodgings, five stories high, with a dining room and meeting suites on the top floor affording a sweeping view of the sea.

  Michael knew that whoever the killer and whatever the motive, the truth had to be uncovered quickly before the media had an opportunity to launch its own conspiracy theories. The rest of the afternoon was a blur of police questioning and phone calls from Jugger back to his superiors in Brussels. It was well after seven before they were able to avoid the press and sneak away for a light meal and ale at a nearby pub. By that time the television networks had interrupted their regular programming for coverage of what was already being called the Starkworth Atrocity.

  �
�Fifty-five men, women and children are dead,” the newsreader was reporting in an urgent yet somber tone, “and another is hospitalized in fair condition. Although autopsies are not yet complete, police believe they were victims of an attack by hydrogen cyanide gas introduced through the nursing home’s heating ducts. Recent arrivals in Dover of large groups of Gypsies seeking asylum here have strained the area’s resources and increased tensions, though there has been no previous act of violence against the new arrivals. Officials estimate some eight hundred European Gypsies have landed at Dover in recent weeks, and efforts are under way to provide emergency accommodations and education. Fears have been expressed in some quarters that today’s atrocity might be the beginning of a terrorist campaign targeted at Gypsy immigrants.”

  “Do you believe that?” Michael asked Colonel Jugger.

  “I’m trying not to. Terrible as it is, a single madman would be preferable to a terrorist campaign. That is, it would be preferable once he was captured and behind bars. Do you think you could help us with that?”

  Michael held out his palms in a gesture of helplessness. “I know no more than you do, Colonel.”

  Jugger lowered his voice just a bit. “The EU office supplied me with your dossier. You have been very helpful in the past, both in local criminal investigations and in events farther afield. They have a commendation from a Captain Segar, formerly of the Romanian government militia.”

  “Segar is an old friend.”

  “I hope we can be friends too. I need any help you can give me on this, Michael.” It was his first use of Michael’s given name.

  “Isn’t it a matter for the local police or Scotland Yard?”

  “The European Union has a large stake in the matter too. An un-punished terrorist act against a migrating people could encourage more such acts against Gypsies, Muslims, Jews, Irish, Africans, Asians, almost anyone! One of the goals of the EU is the free movement of goods and people between the various European states.”