The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  The terrace itself was about twelve metres wide and twenty-two metres long, protected by a long balustrade.

  It wouldn’t take much to toss somebody over the railing, I decided as I walked across the paved surface to the south corner, where Yechenko had been standing. The railing was a metre tall, reaching to my navel.

  Here I am, I thought. Mikail Yechenko. I’m waiting for an American journalist. He’s my ticket to Brazil and freedom and my new life. I’m looking forward to his arrival, but I’m not looking in the direction he might appear because in this place you feel compelled to turn towards the river, towards the magnificent view across the channel of Lisbon harbour where the conquerors and colonizers sailed for America. And if I take in a deep breath I can sense the Atlantic, carrying an eternal scent of salt and dreams.

  I leaned over the railing, and there was the lane, twenty metres below. And the cobblestones. I shuddered and took a step back.

  He didn’t even notice them coming, I thought. They must have stood here, no more than a metre away from him. Yechenko, they say, and he turns around. Do they tell him hello from the boss? Do they say that Monsieur Thery sends his greetings before they heave him over the railing?

  What does Patrick see, on his way at that very moment to meet the man he calls Josef K?

  I quickly retreated to the outdoor café. How had Patrick arrived here? Presumably he’d taken the tram, wanting to hide in the crowd. But he had to be careful, so he gets off at the stop before this one. He walks the last short distance along the narrow pavement that runs past the whitewashed facades of the buildings. Excitement throbs in his body, all his senses are on high alert. He breathes in the air, and listens intently as he approaches. The screeching of the tram and the smell of grilled fish, cool shadows and music issuing from a bar somewhere. He is close to his goal now. But does he turn to look over his shoulder? Does he sense that he’s being followed?

  I looked down the slope as yet another tram appeared and then passed me. A stooped old man was trudging his way up.

  If they were following Patrick here, he should have managed to reach the terrace before the assault occurred.

  So they must have been waiting up here for him instead.

  Somehow they must have found out where Patrick was supposed to meet Yechenko. The Ukrainian had been trapped like an animal in a cage on the terrace, but they couldn’t wait until Patrick arrived. Tossing one man over the railing was simple. Throwing two men over the side was too big a risk.

  I went over to where the bridge ended, to the place where Jorge had hopped on his skateboard. This was where Patrick had stood when the men had pitched Yechenko off the terrace. He must have seen it happen. I imagined the shockwave striking him. He must have been frozen in place during the seconds it took for those two men to turn around and take off running, one of them colliding with the skateboarder before disappearing. Patrick had turned around to follow, and had looked straight into the lustful eyes of Marlene Hirtberger.

  And the two men must have seen Patrick. They knew he would be there. They knew he could identify them, maybe he even recognized them from Paris. They couldn’t let him get away.

  They must have had a plan.

  Young Jorge had seen one of them head towards Mouraria, the part of town on the other side of the hill.

  But what about the other man?

  An ordinary man wearing an ordinary suit.

  I leaned against the wall and watched the young female artist capturing the tiled rooftops on her sketchpad.

  What does Patrick do next? Seconds after the commotion started up on the terrace, all the witnesses are trying to find out what happened. Why are people screaming? Who is dead? But Patrick knows. He doesn’t have to follow the others, who are being drawn in horror towards the terrace. He runs in the opposite direction, and he chooses the closest escape route he sees: the long flight of stairs leading down from Largos das Portas do Sol into Alfama’s winding lanes. Right there, at the spot where the stairs begin, he encounters an old man walking his dog, a retiree who was born and raised in this neighbourhood and who thinks that a black man running is always the guilty party.

  What António Nery, age seventy-two, doesn’t notice, is that a white man wearing an ordinary suit is following the black man.

  Slowly I started down the steep steps. What was Patrick thinking when he saw his source lying dead at the foot of the stairs? Did he take the time to pause and lean down? He knew that the men who had killed Yechenko were close by, and there could be others. He must have taken off running, right into the maze of lanes.

  I sank down onto the bottom step. No trace of blood remained. I pictured Patrick racing like a doomed soul through the labyrinth of buildings and not finding a way out, like a spirit caught between life and death. I got up and took one last look at the terrace high overhead.

  Then I continued on down the lane, just as the inspector had instructed.

  Number 62 was located on a small square, or rather an area where the lane was a little wider. A small fountain was built into the wall, with water dripping from a lion’s maw. Up above, a woman leaned out of a window to hang laundry on a line. It would have seemed an idyllic setting if a couple of the buildings weren’t on the verge of collapsing. Number 62 was one of them.

  There were two doorbells, but neither was labelled. I pressed both at once and heard the bells ringing through the blinds covering the windows on the third floor. Through the slats I noticed movement. A moment later the lock clicked and the door opened a few centimetres.

  ‘Who are you?’ hissed a woman in heavily accented English. I could see only one eye and part of the full lips of her mouth. The stairwell behind her was in darkness. ‘Have you come to get me?’

  ‘Are you Vera Yechenko?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to talk about your husband.’

  ‘Is it about the rent?’

  A strong scent of perfume wafted towards me.

  ‘My name is Ally Cornwall. It was my husband that Yechenko went to meet when he died.’

  ‘My husband, your husband,’ said Vera. ‘And who is your husband?’

  ‘His name is Patrick Cornwall. He’s an American journalist.’

  ‘Right. So you say.’

  ‘I just want to talk to you.’

  ‘But I don’t want to talk to you.’ The woman coughed. ‘You tell them that. And get out of here before I tell somebody to drag you away.’

  ‘I know that your husband was murdered.’

  I thought I heard her draw in a breath, or maybe it was a gust of wind somewhere.

  ‘I think I know who did it,’ I said.

  The door opened a few more centimetres. She was wearing a bathrobe. On her feet she wore oversize slippers that her husband must have left behind.

  ‘I’m not dressed,’ she said, and turned on her heel. Her bathrobe fluttered around her as she climbed the narrow stairs. When I closed the door behind me, everything went black. Slowly my eyes grew accustomed to the dark. I climbed past a door with no lock or handle and continued up yet another steep flight of stairs. The door to Vera Yechenko’s apartment stood open, letting light into the stairwell. On the landing outside, a little refrigerator emitted a gurgling sound.

  ‘The police claim that Misha took his own life. But I know him better than that.’ Vera stood in the hall with her hands on her hips. Her hair was in curlers. I guessed she was in her sixties. Her skin was stretched tightly around her full lips. She had obviously had a facelift or two.

  ‘So who was it that sent the American? Was it the Slovaks? Or was it the Russians?’

  I was still standing in the stairwell, trying to figure out what she meant.

  ‘Patrick was not the one who killed your husband,’ I said. ‘He was supposed to conduct an interview. They had an agreement.’

  ‘Agreement!’ Vera raised her hand as if to deliver a slap, slamming it through the air. ‘He was supposed to conclude all his business deals and the tickets woul
d arrive and now here I sit. Like a bird in a cage. And where am I supposed to fly? Answer me that.’

  She motioned for me to come in.

  ‘Close the door,’ she said.

  I stepped inside the front hall. The woman was shorter than me and slightly pudgy. Like a Russian babushka, I thought, picturing in my mind those wooden dolls, those nesting dolls, one inside the other. But I reminded myself that Vera Yechenko was from Ukraine, and she wouldn’t like being called Russian.

  ‘I need to get dressed,’ she said, crossing her arms. ‘But first I want to know why you’re running around talking about Misha.’

  ‘I just want to find out what happened to my husband,’ I said, taking a quick look around. On the left was the bathroom, in which a tiny shower was squeezed in next to the toilet. Straight ahead was a tiled kitchenette in the corner. The door next to it, probably leading to the bedroom, was ajar. I listened intently but heard nothing to indicate there was anyone else here. Next to it was another door. The living room. All in all, the whole apartment was no bigger than our bedroom in Gramercy.

  ‘Do you know a man named Alain Thery?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean the Frenchman?’ said Vera. She drew her bathrobe tighter around her waist. She wasn’t fat, as I had first thought, but she had enormous breasts.

  ‘I think he’s the one behind all of this,’ I said. Then I gave her a quick, short version of what I thought had happened.

  Vera interrupted me in mid-sentence. ‘I told Misha this was going to end badly. Why did he have to make trouble? Business was good. We had a good life.’ She went into the living room. The wicker chair creaked as she sat down. ‘Where am I supposed to go now? Tell me that if you can.’

  I followed her, but stopped in the doorway to the room.

  ‘Did you know he was supposed to meet with Patrick Cornwall?’

  ‘He just said a journalist. An American.’ Vera shrugged. ‘Then we’d get the tickets and passports. He promised that we’d go to Brazil. What was I supposed to do there? We had a wonderful house. And then he didn’t come back. In the evening the police knocked on the door.’ She shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Stupid, stupid Misha. He’d written the address on a slip of paper in his pocket. He could never remember numbers and always got lost in the streets.’

  She gestured towards the other armchair. I went over and sat down. There was a stack of books on the coffee table, but otherwise it was an impersonal room, furnished by someone who had never lived in it. A lamp spread a yellowish glow that turned skin tones grey.

  ‘My husband was a poet. Do you understand? He had the soul of a poet.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, deciding not to comment. And I thought he was a slave trader.

  ‘Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol. He read them all. Even Pasternak. And Kafka, even though he’s not Russian.’ She ran her hand over the stack of books. The titles on the spines were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. She laughed to herself. ‘He joked that next time he would be named Pushkin. You know Pushkin, don’t you?’

  I nodded. A Russian poet, something of a national hero. But I had no clue about his writing style. Probably melancholy and grandiose.

  ‘We’re Russian, you know,’ she went on. ‘It’s not easy for us. The Ukrainians want to handle their own affairs, and they’d prefer to get rid of us. Nothing is the way it used to be.’

  ‘Your husband was supposed to give Patrick some documents,’ I said. ‘Did he take them with him when he left for the meeting on the terrace?’

  Vera abruptly got up.

  ‘It was my fault,’ she said, fluttering her hands. ‘It was my idea for them to meet there.’ She tore at her hair, pulling out a curler, which landed on the dirty, faded rug. ‘I told him he needed to choose a place that was easy to find. So he wouldn’t get lost. My poor Misha. He couldn’t even find his way around Kiev. He had no sense for … what’s it called?’

  ‘A sense of direction.’

  Vera shook her head and pointed towards the square outside.

  ‘All you have to do is turn right, I told him. Just walk along the lane, it will take you right there.’

  She began to sob as she buried her face in her hands.

  ‘It must have been so awful for you,’ I said.

  Vera looked up at me.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ she said, leaving the room.

  ‘More than you think,’ I said quietly to her back.

  As she clattered things in the kitchen, I went over to the window. Daylight filtered through the slats in the blinds, making stripes on the floor. It was close to five o’clock. I couldn’t see any fire escape outside. There probably wasn’t a single one in this whole medieval part of town.

  ‘Is it OK if I pull up the blinds?’ I asked when Vera came back.

  She was carrying a bottle of port wine and two glasses.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I forget to do that. I go out when it gets dark. I sleep in the daytime. It’s been like that ever since …’ She set down the glasses and poured a little into each. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, and again left the room.

  I pulled up the blinds. The windowsill was grey with soot and pollution. The woman across the way was shouting something to a man walking across the small square. He yelled a reply. A TV was blaring somewhere. Sounds from a soccer game. Why is she still here? I wondered. Why doesn’t she leave this city, which will for ever be associated with the place where her husband died on the cobblestones?

  ‘I want the agreement to be fulfilled,’ said Vera as she came back. She went straight for her glass and downed the port wine in one gulp. Now that she was dressed, she was transformed into a chic petite woman, as if right out of a tabloid about the rich and famous from England’s manors and estates. She had on a stylish suit with a tiny-checked pattern. A jacket and cropped trousers, with a scarf in two colours draped over her shoulders. I could have sworn her hair clip was solid gold.

  ‘I want a hundred thousand dollars. Or euros. It makes no difference.’

  She reached for the wine bottle and refilled her glass. The liquor was a deep golden brown, which matched her outfit.

  ‘You’ve misunderstood.’ I took a sip of the wine. A harsh taste on my tongue. A combination of old oak cask and sweetness. ‘I have nothing to do with all that. I’m just looking for my husband.’

  Vera Yechenko leaned forward and lowered her voice.

  ‘They think we’re dead,’ she said. ‘I can’t go back home. You can’t fool with death. That’s what my poor Misha found out. But I’m going to fool them all. Do you hear me?’ She downed her second glass of wine. ‘Now that Misha is gone, they’re going to dig up everything about him. All the lies they keep in their archives. But let me tell you, he was just doing his job. He was a devoted husband.’

  Vera grabbed the bottle and poured herself more wine.

  ‘He wrote everything down. Every number. Names. Everything. They never counted on that. Ha ha.’ She set the bottle on the floor. ‘He knew how to keep records, my Misha.’

  ‘Did he have the documents with him when he went to meet Patrick?’ I asked again.

  ‘Of course he did.’ Vera looked at me as if I were a total idiot. ‘The journalist wanted the papers. Misha would get the tickets, and we could fly away from here.’ She flapped her arms to underscore her words. Then she sank back against her chair. ‘And now I’ll have to go alone. Do you believe in fate?’

  ‘The police didn’t say anything about documents,’ I said. ‘The men who threw him over the railing must have taken them, unless …’

  I stopped in mid-thought and looked out of the window again. The sun had begun to set, and the colours deepened. Somewhere down below I could hear a plaintive song, as if someone were trying to force her heart out through her throat.

  Unless Yechenko refused to give up the papers, I thought. In my mind I pictured the scene in slow motion. The man plummeting through the air, clutching the documents to his chest, even as he fell to his death. A
nd seconds later, Patrick running down the stairs over to his body. He could have taken the documents. He was obsessed with getting the story. Obsessed enough to tear the papers out of the hands of a dead man?

  Then he ran, I thought, as I looked down at the little square where the lane ended and then continued fifteen metres further on, narrowing into yet another set of steps that meandered and disappeared from sight, curving around and becoming entwined with a thousand other lanes covering the mountain slope. They weren’t on any map, as the inspector had told me.

  They must have followed him.

  Faire d’une pierre deux coups.

  But Patrick had tricked them. He had taken the documents and fled.

  ‘The police called me,’ said Vera. ‘They said I can bury my Misha now.’ She pressed her hand to her chest. ‘Thirty-six years! And they want me to bury him here in foreign soil?’

  Earth is earth, I thought.

  And my next thought was: A person doesn’t just vanish.

  If they had killed Patrick here in the neighbourhood, the police would have found his body.

  I went over to my bag, which I’d set down next to my chair.

  ‘Patrick fled when your husband … He must have come this way,’ I said, taking out the photograph. ‘Did you see him? Did you let him in?’

  ‘What are you talking about? Nobody ever comes here.’ Vera leaned forward and squinted at the picture of Patrick. Then she gasped.

  ‘Are you married to a black man?’ The wine sloshed in her glass.

  I gritted my teeth and put the picture away.

  At least her surprise seemed genuine. Patrick hadn’t been here.

  ‘I want my ticket,’ said Vera. ‘I need to get away from here.’ The waning sunlight flashed on a hugely expensive gemstone on her finger as she twirled her glass, looking at the wine as if only now did she notice what she’d been drinking. The label said it was ten-year-old Tawny port. I knew nothing about fortified wines except that you were supposed to drink them in much smaller glasses.