Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  More silence. “He knows.”

  “How can he know?” asked Petrovic.

  “If he didn’t before, he does now.”

  “And if you’d told me before, I would never have put him on the job.”

  “Since when do you dictate what we do and don’t share with you?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying, Petrovic.”

  “Best not to use my name over the telephone.”

  “Best not to show your face around here until you have some better news.” There was a note of apology in the weary sigh. “I should have killed that old fox years ago.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him—both of them. They can’t stay hidden forever.”

  “Oh, they won’t. I have a feeling you’ll be hearing from Borodin before too long.”

  “You think?”

  “He knows what he has in his hands, he knows its value, and for the right money, he’ll part with it.”

  “He’ll never get to spend the money.”

  “I doubt he assumes we intend to let him,” came the dry reply. “Never underestimate an old fox. It’s not by chance that they live as long as they do.”

  Chapter Seven

  “What’s in the syringe?” asked Borodin.

  “Nirvanin. It’s an anesthetic.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “The bullet is lodged deep in your external oblique muscle.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “It will when I start digging around in there.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Borodin.

  He was stretched out on the examination table, propped up on his elbows. Zanotic laid the syringe aside in a metal tray on the trolley beside him. “Listen to me. Our friendship ends tonight, and we both know it. But I don’t want my last memory to be of you mistrusting me.”

  “It’s not about trust.”

  “No, it’s about living or dying. There’s material from your jacket and shirt in the wound. It’ll become infected if it isn’t properly cleaned out.”

  “So clean it out properly and stitch me up. I’ll be on my way and you’ll have earned a month’s salary in an hour.”

  “I don’t want your money. I don’t even want to know what happened to you tonight. It’s nothing I haven’t suspected about you.”

  They conversed in the Dalmatian dialect they had both grown up with, not that they had known each other back in the old country. It was quite possible they had passed each other in the streets of Ragusa, or even caroused in the same bars, but they’d had to wait more than twenty years before their lives finally collided on the far side of the continent—two displaced Croatians thrown together in a humble restaurant in Pigalle by a shared craving for the food of their homeland.

  Borodin had been dining alone, Zanotic at the next table with his French wife, Lucille—petite, coldly attractive, and wary enough of her husband’s past to have played almost no part in the relationship that sprang up between the two men after that first encounter. They would meet not quite in secret, sometimes for lunch, more often for drinks, trading memories and stories and debating the plight of the nation both had abandoned, with that mix of vehemence and doe-eyed sentimentality peculiar to exiles the world over.

  Zanotic had happily agreed to become Borodin’s doctor, which until tonight had involved little more than the odd checkup and the prescription of a mild opiate whenever Borodin’s troublesome hip flared up.

  “Maybe I want to feel the pain,” said Borodin. “Maybe this old man needs to sharpen his mind and his resolve.”

  “And maybe this younger man doesn’t need his wife and two daughters woken by your screams.” Zanotic’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling.

  “That’s what you’re really worried about?”

  “Of course. I couldn’t care less if you live or die.”

  Borodin smiled. “Nirvanin, you say?”

  “A local anesthetic. You won’t feel a thing. You can even watch the maestro at work.”

  This wasn’t an idle boast. Zanotic probably knew as much about gunshot wounds as any man alive. Qualified as a doctor just at the outbreak of war in 1914, he had found himself, like many Croatians, drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army against his wishes. He was assigned as a medical officer to the Slovenian front, where the Italians were trying to punch their way eastward into the heart of the empire. The brutal standoff across the milky waters of the Soca River lasted two and a half years and cost half a million young men their lives.

  Zanotic once joked to Borodin that the experience had literally left its mark on him. The deep lines scoring his face were the chasms, rifts, and gorges of the Julian Alps, as if the place had laid itself across his features like some crude veil, a reminder of the hell he had known.

  “Okay,” Borodin conceded. “Stab me with that thing and let’s see how good you really are.”

  He didn’t watch—didn’t have the stomach for it. Lying on his back, motionless for the first time since swinging his legs out of bed this morning, he felt strangely restful despite the dull prod and probe of the instruments.

  He hadn’t consciously cultivated the friendship with this moment in mind, but he wondered whether a shady second self hadn’t somehow known that one day he might have to call on Zanotic’s surgical expertise. He set great store by that kind of instinct. Other animals lived by their intuition, so why shouldn’t man? Although there was nothing in science to support it, he was convinced that the sensation of being observed was both real and palpable for those attuned to it—a defense mechanism buried away by nature in everyone. Admittedly, his own had let him down earlier in the day, but that was hardly surprising under the circumstances.

  From the moment he had started tailing Hamilton at the gates of the British embassy, he had been so distracted by the wild theory taking shape in his head, he failed to register that he, too, was being stalked. He had almost paid the full price for this lapse, and he would have been a lot tougher on himself if he were wrong about Hamilton’s true identity. Their exchange in the Spanish pavilion, however, had only confirmed his suspicions.

  Again, instincts. No hard-and-fast evidence, just vague whispers from another time and place: something of his mother in the slant of his large dark eyes; the same long, stooping stride as his father’s; the deep timbre of his voice, just like his grandfather’s.

  “It’s out,” said Zanotic. “Do you want to see it?”

  “No.”

  Borodin heard the hard clatter of lead on tin.

  Why had they come for Hamilton now, having already spared him twenty-five years ago? What possible threat could a person ignorant of his true place in the world pose to them after a quarter of a century? And why had they not simply allowed him to live on in ignorance? It didn’t make sense.

  “There’s a fair amount of damage. You’re not going to heal overnight, not at your age.”

  “Just do your best.”

  He knew that the answers were out there, just as he knew that he should put them from his mind and concentrate on the serious business of staying alive while securing a fat nest egg for himself. Now was not the time to let curiosity prevail over common sense.

  “It’s quite something.”

  “What?” asked Zanotic.

  “How I came to be shot.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “That’s a pity. The story would appeal to you. It’s right up your street.”

  “Don’t think you can hook me with your abstruse replies.”

  “I know you far too well to even try,” Borodin replied. He let the silence stretch out. “Imagine not knowing who you are.”

  “Everyone knows who they are.”

  “Not if you were abducted, say.”

  “Abducted?”

 
; “As a baby. Kidnapped, then transported from one end of Europe to the other and left with people who knew nothing of where you came from.”

  Zanotic kept fiddling away, cleaning the wound. “Why was the boy kidnapped?”

  “Revenge.”

  “For what?”

  “I thought you weren’t interested.”

  Zanotic ceased his bloody ministrations and peered at Borodin over the top of his spectacles.

  “I’ll hear your nonsense out if it makes you feel better.”

  Borodin smiled up at his old friend. “I’m going to miss you, Nikola.”

  “Yes, yes. Just tell me the story before you croak.”

  Germany

  Chapter Eight

  Cordell Oaks was a big man, both tall and well fed, but there was a curious delicacy about him. He sat upright and almost perfectly still in his seat, his large hands folded on his lap, picking his words carefully before delivering them in a high, fluting voice.

  They had struck up a conversation as the train was pulling out of Strasbourg station—two foreigners thrown together in a first-class compartment and recognizing each other for what they were. Luke had made the first overture, eager for the distraction—anything to take his mind off the imminent border controls and the pistol. At Fautrier’s instruction, he had wiped it clean of fingerprints and hidden it at the bottom of the bin under the washstand in the toilet down the corridor.

  The border crossing proved to be a surprisingly straightforward affair. Two uniformed German officials sporting swastika armbands made a cursory examination of their passports before politely inquiring in perfect English about the purpose of their visit: tourism for Luke, business for the big American. Recent talk of a British rapprochement with Hitler, at the expense of Mussolini, may well have contributed to the guards’ contained courtesy, but even if they had chosen to search Luke’s suitcase, they would have found nothing to contradict his story. It was now neatly packed with clothes and other accoutrements befitting a gentleman traveler: everything from semiformal evening wear to a French edition of Baedeker’s guide to Germany. There was even a Zeiss Ikonta camera and half a dozen rolls of 120 film. All had been bought this morning in Strasbourg—again, according to Fautrier’s thorough instructions.

  The sleeper from Paris had pulled into Strasbourg shortly before seven o’clock in the morning, and Luke had killed an hour at a café in the station, with a copy of Le Petit Parisien, waiting for the city to stir, before taking a short tram ride into the center. The purchases made barely a dent in the Reichsmarks that Fautrier had furnished him with. Fully equipped, he had then returned to the station in time to catch the 10:20 to Konstanz, his head by now thick with exhaustion.

  Despite the privacy and luxury of his own sleeper compartment, he had hardly slept a wink the night before. Even the double cognac he had ordered from the porter around midnight hadn’t been enough to nudge him over the edge. Instead, he had lain on his back in the darkness, immune to the hypnotic rattle of the steel wheels, trying to make sense of the cataclysm that had so abruptly torn his existence apart.

  All he could say for certain was that Fautrier had saved his life before giving him a pistol and a considerable sum of money and sending him on his way. These were the bald facts as known and witnessed by him. Everything else was conjecture, and he had spent seven interminable hours wrestling with the bedclothes and searching for some kind of logic or pattern to the chaos that engulfed him.

  The letter from his father informing him of Sister Agnes’ death had landed on his desk like a curse, a contagion, infecting his life with the same savagery by which Agnes had met her end. He had tried to tease out a connection between the two events—a bungled burglary in England and a failed assassination in France—but nothing even remotely plausible had presented itself.

  Agnes and he had only ever been bound together by good things. She had treated him from the very first with a sort of tender hauteur, both mocking and affectionate—her way, he now suspected, of preparing them both for the inevitable wrench of separation, for when he finally left St. Theresa’s. Fortunately for them both, his new parents, Lorna and Ramsay, had seen immediately that the nun and their new son held a special place in each other’s hearts, and they had gone out of their way to foster the friendship over the years. Agnes, a regular guest at the house, had attended Luke’s university graduation as well as his passing-out parade at Cranwell RAF College, weeping at both and hating herself for the cracks those tears had revealed in her usually cast-iron composure.

  No, there was nothing in the intertwining of their lives to suggest a common cause for the violence recently visited on them both. Besides, Fautrier’s talk of mistaken identity made considerably more sense, even if it did stir up a hornets’ nest of further questions: Who had they mistaken him for? And how could they have gotten it so wrong?

  It was true that his job in air intelligence involved a certain degree of subterfuge—the Germans weren’t exactly going to hand over details of the Luftwaffe’s first-line strength—but Luke was a minor cog in the machine. Not even. More like a lubricating squirt of oil. Most of his time was spent gathering and collating data from various sources about the rapid acceleration in aircraft production taking place in Germany. It was Wing Commander Wyeth, in his capacity as air attaché, who drew the conclusions and shaped the reports that were then enciphered and dispatched to the Air Intelligence Directorate in London.

  The notion that he had been mistaken for a German agent seemed utterly absurd. If anything, he was far warier about Hitler’s true intentions than Wyeth, who blithely believed that air parity with the British was a Nazi pipe dream. Any data contradicting this private intuition was given short shrift in his reports.

  It was at this point, in the early hours of the morning, that the idea had lodged itself in Luke’s head. What if he had been mistaken for Wyeth? Wyeth, the anchor dragging in the sand, forever calling into question the intelligence, or dismissing it as irrelevant to their brief. One incident in particular stood out. Earlier in the year, two Royal Air Force officers on holiday in Germany had somehow talked a friendly Lutwaffe squadron into letting them pilot a Junkers 88 bomber. Hurley and Atcherdy’s account of the aircraft’s capabilities had never found its way into the hands of the bigwigs back at Whitehall, because Wyeth had deemed it immaterial to the more pertinent matter of aircraft numbers, on which the two airmen had been unable to furnish any worthwhile information.

  Gross ineptitude on Wyeth’s part, or subtle sabotage? In his eagerness for an answer, Luke had found himself leaning toward the latter, recalling further examples of Wyeth’s obstructiveness, which now began to look like rank treachery. Then again, it was a theory rooted in what Fautrier had told him, and he wasn’t convinced that everything Bernard Fautrier said should be taken on trust. He hadn’t answered Luke’s questions so much as parried them away with a string of vague and cursory explanations that didn’t stand up to scrutiny now that the immediate danger, the quaking terror, had passed.

  Was it really possible that a professional assassin would question his orders based on a brief conversation about fascism while standing in front of a painting? And why had Fautrier’s momentary hesitation brought the wrath of his own people down on his head? Was that the way things really worked in his business: do or die, like an officer summarily executing a foot soldier for refusing to go over the top in the trenches?

  These were some of the questions that had swirled through Luke’s head, robbing him of sleep, and they hovered there now at the fringes of his thoughts as he listened to Cordell Oaks hold forth on the challenges of large-scale milk production in the modern age.

  The American was attending the World Dairy Congress in Berlin next week as one of twelve delegates from the United States—an honor he had earned as head of the dairy division at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. He was going to be presenting a paper on thermoduric bacteri
a in pasteurized dairy products, but he was keen to point out that his real fields of expertise lay in butter aroma and the various treatments to alter the viscosity of pasteurized cream. A few years ago, he and a colleague had patented a new procedure for the production of cream cheese, and something coy in his manner suggested that they’d both done rather well out of it.

  Like all the best bores, Cordell Oaks had absolutely no idea just how dull he was. He asked a question from time to time, but it was generally an excuse to forge ahead with his favorite subject. (“What do you make of the new trend for foil bottle tops?”) This was fine with Luke. All he had to offer in return was a bunch of lies, and he didn’t feel like lying to Cordell Oaks, who seemed to be a good man, genuinely devoted to his family and the cause of feeding the masses while keeping them safe at the same time.

  Who could possibly have foreseen a few days ago that Luke would be winding his way through the Black Mountains while being lectured on the antipathogenic benefits of high-temperature, short-hold pasteurization over low-temperature, long-hold? His life, neatly stacked like a deck of cards, had been hurled high into the air and scattered to the four winds. This thought gave him pause, for there was something in it that appealed to the person he used to be.

  For as long as he could remember, right back to those early days at the orphanage, he had dreamed of adventure. The wild fantasizing probably sprang from the fact that most of the other children knew something of their stories, their origins, whereas he had landed from nowhere, abandoned by a stranger, both his name and his birthday assigned to him by the nuns.

  This had counted against him at St. Theresa’s, where even among the ranks of the unwanted there was a clear hierarchy. Bastard. By-blow. Son of a whore. Then there was his coloring: the black hair and the olive complexion. Coon. Nigger. Gypsy. Pickaninny. The nuns had tried their best, but what could they really do once they’d taken to their beds at night? In the darkened dormitories, at the end of every day, a new regime held sway, and you quickly learned to find your place in it, picking your friends and your battles with care. He had also learned that the best refuge was to be found in his thoughts, where he was free to travel off and explore new worlds, trying them on for size.