She hid her annoyance by returning to the balcony for another cigarette. I joined her. The bleached-orange rooftops of Skopje lay before us like a dirty old quilt tented by ranks of bony knees.
‘I think you are a straw, Captain Palatine, which Anna is clutching at,’ she said. ‘I have the saying correct?’
I nodded.
‘This makes me sad. I will call the priest now, before she wakes up.’
She found a notepad and biro and set it open on the wrought-iron chair, then went to the bathroom, came back, smoked another cigarette, and finally managed to sit down and pick up the phone. Her call was answered straight away. By Father Neil, I guessed. She spoke insistently and had to repeat her demand several times.
‘This is a serious matter,’ she said eventually. ‘The Order of St Hugh may not obstruct our search for a missing child.’
There was a short delay, then Eleni took down a number and read it back. I recognised it as the refuge landline. She thanked Father Neil and put down the receiver, lifted it again and dialled. Someone answered and they spoke in Albanian. The look on Eleni’s face confirmed what I already knew.
‘Katarina is not there.’
Eleni hung up and her handsome face crumpled. She looked forlornly about her. ‘The refuge is closed. They have not seen her. A horrible man. He did not listen. He said the children have gone and he could not help us. Then he put the phone down.’
‘Did he say where they’d gone?’
She couldn’t answer but simply shook her head.
When she had recovered a little, she tut-tutted at my travel-worn clothes and produced a sweatshirt and pullover of her Uncle Semyon’s from a chest in the hallway. He was a big man, evidently. She made coffee and we ate sweet rolls with cherry jam in unhappy silence, interrupted by Eleni observing several times that at least Anna was enjoying a really good night’s sleep. That was a luxury she hadn’t enjoyed since. . . She spilled jam on her cardigan and scraped it off with a buttery knife. I went to the bathroom, came back and straightened the sofa. She smoked another two cigarettes. After the second, she rushed straight across the sitting room and into the hallway.
‘Anna, Anna!’
I sat on the sofa, gripped by an urge to blunder from the claustrophobic apartment and lie alone with my sins somewhere beneath the yawning sky. The cries from the bedroom across the hallway wrapped themselves round my head like a skein of softest, stifling silk, tamping down my senses until a wailing darkness was all that remained. And the sound commingled in my mind with the keening noise that had filled the air outside the farmhouse and drawn us down to the scene of slaughter below. The sound of a mother’s anguish, bright and pure as the blood from a new-made wound.
‘If you want to go, you should. Go now.’
Eleni, standing over me, gripping her shoulders. I looked up and saw determination in the set of her mouth, anxiety fluttering in her eyes.
‘If you stay, you may not sit with your head hanging down like a cow at milking.’
I met Anna’s eye when she emerged from the bedroom. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ I mumbled. ‘I wish—’
She waved me aside. ‘I can’t talk about this now, James. I still believe you will help us – that’s all. Go to this house on Syrna Street and. . . I don’t know. Do whatever it is you do. Then come back and tell me, will you? Please?’
I promised her I would.
‘Eleni, do you have a spare key for James?’
Eleni fetched one from the sitting room and handed it over with a reproachful look.
‘Do you need money?’ asked Anna.
I admitted that I did. She reached for her handbag and found a couple of creased notes. I took them, thanked her, and quickly left.
32
I walked south, keeping to the backstreets parallel with Kemal Sejfula, then entered the Gazi Baba Park. It was another cold day, with skies the colour of a wet cotton sheet. There was no one about.
Eleni was right: I must stop moping and focus on finding Katarina. It was two weeks since I had left her in Syrna Street, but the trail would not have gone completely cold. I tried to sort out what I now knew about her abduction. The Bura gang had taken her in mid-January, Anna had said – an act of vengeance on a Roma village, because Katarina’s cousin had bared his arse at them. A petty insult, but bigoted thugs like that need no better excuse. They probably despised the Roma even more than they despised the Kosovars. Nor would they necessarily have known what they were going to do with her. They were Serbs with guns, and in the Kosovo of January 1999, Serbs with guns were inviolable. But then they had taken Katarina to the refuge and dumped her there. Why go to the trouble? If they didn’t want her any more, why not simply throw her out?
My thoughts were interrupted by a harsh smell of woodsmoke drifting through the trees, and voices – a low shout, a child crying. Ahead was a stretch of open grassland and there were people there, hundreds of them, encamped in little groups around makeshift tents and smouldering fires. Everyone was lying down, as if they’d been put under a spell, except for twenty or thirty who had formed a queue that didn’t seem to lead anywhere. On the far side of the field were three police vans surrounded by helmeted men with their backs turned. With their white vehicles and shiny black uniforms, they looked like a parade of aliens lined up between the patchwork of refugees in front of them and the drab woods beyond.
As I skirted the camp, some of the policemen climbed into one of the vans, which then swayed off across the muddy grass. Four or five people joined the pointless queue. An aeroplane toiled overhead, the disembodied moan of its engines dwindling in the shapeless sky.
I reached the eastern perimeter of the park and turned south again, using the regular thump of trains shunting in and out of Skopje to guide me to the railway track and the ribbon of scrub alongside it. When I came to the place where I had lain down beneath the brambles after killing the two men by the van, I hurried past like a man avoiding a posse of brawling drunks.
I took a side street that entered Syrna Street thirty yards from the house, walked to the corner, and bent as if to tie a shoelace. Everything was just as I remembered it: the fallen porch and broken-down wall, rustling plastic sheeting on the roof, satellite dish sprouting from the ruined pickup out back. A brutal, comfortless place. How could I have left Katarina here? I scanned the street for watchers. Nothing. I gave it ten minutes, before working my way round to a dirt track that ran along the back of Syrna Street. At the far end, three boys were throwing stones at the rusted carcass of a car. There was wooden fencing round the back of number 77, but it was an easy climb onto the corrugated-iron roof of one of the shacks that lined the yard.
The first thing I saw was the brindled dog, circling disconsolately at the entrance on Syrna Street. It heard me, started away, then emitted a ragged bark. I jumped off the roof into the yard and ran for the cover of the satellite dish. The dog skittered off round the corner and into the street, tail tucked between its legs. A window scraped open in one of the upstairs rooms. I squinted through the mesh of the satellite dish and saw a man looking down into the yard. His gaze fell on the dish and for a long moment he stared down at my scanty hiding place. I stayed stock still. A rough voice called from behind him and he turned back into the room.
In the back of the pickup was a plastic milk carton that had been cut in half and filled with nuts, bolts and washers. I stripped to the waist and filled my T-shirt with a handful of the oily steel lumps. Twenty seconds later, the back door opened and I heard footsteps coming towards me across the yard. I tucked in behind the tailgate of the pickup and braced myself, holding the sap so there was a foot of slack to swing and working out the steps I would take when the moment came to strike. He was alongside the cab now, but he’d stopped. Check beneath the pickup and he’d have a view of my shins. Three paces on and he’d see the rest of me. Forget everything, I ordered myself. Don’t hold back. His feet scrunched in the dirt. One pace, two. Three.
I swung backhanded and the steel-knuckled wr
ecking ball whipped through the air. If I’d let go, it would have flown fifty yards down Syrna Street. I didn’t. It slammed into his cheekbone. He gave a whisper of shock and dropped like a bag of sand off the back of a truck. I stooped to break his fall and dragged him under the pickup. I didn’t have time to do more. He’d been told to go down and check the yard, and the man who’d given the order would be waiting for his return.
I slipped through the back door and into a kitchen that was rancid with the smell of stale milk and old meat-grease. Across the room was a door to the hallway, where a narrow staircase led to the first floor. A TV was on up there, a smoothly garrulous voice, eruptions of insincere laughter. I hadn’t even reached the turn half way up the stairs when the TV snapped off.
The tread creaked beneath my foot. Footsteps in one of the rooms. I sprinted up the next flight, reached the landing, stopped. There was a man pointing a gun at me from the far end of the corridor.
I was expecting the boiler-suited troll who’d swung a length of iron at the back of my neck, but this one was smaller, about fifty, bald, with sharp little eyes and an expression of entrenched biliousness that suggested he’d have no qualms about shooting me.
‘I’m looking for a girl,’ I said, remembering that the troll had initially taken me for a misguided john.
‘You stop!’ He raised the gun, and said something I didn’t understand, indicating my right hand with a toss of his head.
A misguided john who happened to be bare-chested and carrying something heavy in an oil-stained T-shirt. . . This wasn’t going to work. How good was he with that gun? A small-calibre semi-automatic, a hurter rather than a stopper. I was level with a door to my left. It was open a crack. I dived.
No shots, just a bang as the door swung back against the wall. I rolled to my feet and sprang to the doorway. Silence, then the high-pitched blips of a cellphone keypad. Summoning help.
I stepped out and hurled the sap at his head. It was going to miss him by a foot, but he shied anyway. The phone clattered to the floor. I ran at him low, like a sprinter from the blocks. His forefinger torqued over the trigger. Still three yards away from the black O at the end of the barrel. I swerved, braced for the bullet.
A black shape lurched into the gunman from behind. He staggered. The muzzle flashed. The bullet whacked the plasterwork to my right and I had him, fingers clamped on his wrist, thrusting his gun-hand aside. I bounced him down and his head cannoned into the knees of the man behind him, who toppled against the wall and slid awkwardly to the floor.
The gunman struggled briefly, but the tip of my shoulder had crunched into his jaw and there wasn’t much fight left in him. I unpicked his fingers from the gun, stood, and drove the heel of my shoe into his groin. He curled like a salted slug and retched. I looked over at the black-clad figure propped against the doorframe, hands and feet bound with cable ties. Father Daniel Cady.
A film of sweat covered his face, which was deathly pale except for patches of puffy red around the cheekbones, where he’d been slapped.
‘More of them. . . On the way.’ He was in so much pain he could barely get the words out.
I picked up the gunman’s cellphone. The number was up on screen but he hadn’t had time to press call. I ran down to the kitchen and returned with a knife to cut Father Daniel free. As I helped him to his feet, his jacket and shirt rode up at the back and I saw a pair of dark bruises ripening over his kidneys. Heavy blows, well aimed. I left him leaning against the wall while I dealt with the gunman, who was still coiled over his groin. I searched his pockets and found more cable ties, which saved me the trouble of knocking him out.
I hitched Father Daniel’s arm round my neck and hauled him along the corridor. One of the rooms we passed had mattresses laid out round the walls, blankets and a few bedraggled items of clothing. Small, female things. . . A dormitory – but it looked abandoned. In fact, the whole house looked abandoned. We hobbled down the stairs and out through the kitchen door. The priest sat on the doorstep to steel himself for the next leg while I retrieved the clothes I’d left beneath the pickup. The gun felt cumbersome and incriminating, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. A Czech-made CZ 83, chambered for fifteen rounds – but when I pulled the clip I found only two. I wiped it down and dropped it in the back of the pickup.
Father Daniel was in no state to clamber over the roof of the shack, so we slunk out of the yard and across the road, back towards the railway track. Every time he put his left foot down, he gasped. I didn’t want to hustle him along in case he was bleeding internally; but neither did I want the more of them he’d warned me about to turn up while we were still dawdling along the pavement opposite the house.
I’d done plenty of damage to this gang, and they weren’t the sort to take it with a philosophical shrug. The troll had a brutish authority about him and, more than that, he was no fool: he knew I’d bested him in the fight out front when I’d broken his elbow, and he’d walked away, judging correctly that I would not pursue him. He had plenty of armed men at his beck and call, and I did not like the way they went about their work. There’d been something theatrical about the savagery of the Bura, something self-regarding and a touch neurotic. These men had no such flaws. For them, violence was a job – probably not even all that well paid. A Bura would never have carried a weapon loaded with only three bullets; but to the man I had taken out in Syrna Street, it was no more significant than having to do a day on a building site with a broken shovel.
I got the priest into the cover of a line of scraggy thornbushes alongside the railway track and lay him on his side to rest. He moaned softly for a while, then his breathing eased and he started muttering. I leaned in a little so I could hear what he was saying. ‘Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done. . .’ It brought to mind the puerile variation we’d chanted in the chapel at school: Our Father, Who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name. A bubble of laughter escaped my lips, and he turned his head and gave me a mournful look.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You able to talk?’
‘Sure. I think so.’
‘Did Katarina ever come back?’
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t been at the refuge for a while, I. . . I had to come here to Skopje.’
‘Syrna Street has nothing to do with the UNHCR,’ I said. ‘But I suppose you didn’t know.’
‘No, I’ve never seen the place before. They would have killed me. I thank God you came.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘I was looking for something, I don’t know what. To help me find out what happened to Katarina. It was a stupid idea.’
‘Is that why you left the refuge? The person who answered the phone said it was closed.’
‘It can’t be closed. There are still so many children there.’
‘Who did you leave in charge?’
His expression was blank and I couldn’t tell if he’d heard.
‘I tried so hard to help them,’ he said.
‘Did you see any sign that anyone still lives at Syrna Street? When I took Katarina, there was a girl of twenty or so, blonde hair?’
‘Just those two men. I think they saw me arrive.’
There was an ominous, empty, rolling sensation in my chest. Suppose they were preparing to leave Skopje and set up somewhere else, taking Katarina with them?
‘You better or worse than half an hour ago?’ I asked.
He sat up stiffly. ‘Better.’
‘Let’s go. I’ll be as gentle as I can.’
33
It took two hours to get him to Eleni’s apartment. On the way, I explained where we were going and said that since we weren’t absolutely sure what was going on at the house on Syrna Street, it might be better not to say too much about it to Katarina’s mother. He was too ill to protest.
I couldn’t fathom him out. He was clearly very naive – he hadn’t even changed out of his dog collar for his perilous visit to Syrna Street – and of fragile character
; but above all, it seemed to me, Father Daniel Cady was self-absorbed and inclined to self-pity. The look I had noticed when we’d talked outside the refuge, inviting you to feel sorry for him without knowing why, was now even more pronounced. Why had he deserted the children he was supposed to be looking after and come to Skopje on a quest which he must surely have known was beyond him? He’d denied that the refuge was closed – but hadn’t asked me what I knew.
Then again, he had just been beaten up. And given everything he’d been through – traumatised by his father, abandoned by his mother after a night of bloodshed in Lowestoft, and betrothed ever since to an eccentric little order of the Catholic Church – given all that, why shouldn’t he feel sorry for himself?
I stopped for a kebab and called Eleni on Father Daniel’s phone. She and Anna were at the UNHCR, being herded around like refugees, she said indignantly. I told her what had happened and she was there at the door of her uncle’s apartment when we arrived. She’d made up a sickbay in the bedroom, complete with Ibuprofen, a thermometer, bottled water, two clean towels and a plastic bucket. She seemed in awe of the injured priest, but by this time he’d taken another turn for the worse and couldn’t do anything but lie on the bed and pray. His devotion seemed touchingly familial, like a child reaching for a special toy or asking for a kiss.
Once we had him settled, Eleni went back to the UNHCR and I took a taxi to the Vegas Lounge. I wanted to find the sleepy-eyed girl again, see if I could get her alone. I was sure that, as long as she felt safe, she would tell me where I could find Katarina.
It wasn’t a brothel posing as a nightclub any more, it was a crime scene. The apron of tarmac out front had been cordoned off with red-and-white tape, bowing and clattering in the cold wind that had got up as darkness stole over Skopje town. The perimeter was guarded by half a dozen uniformed police, and the two unmarked cars next to their van suggested the detectives were out in force, too. The sign above the door had that grubby, disenchanted look unlit neon always has, and the two pointy trees by the front entrance now lay on their sides, displaying their dry brown underskirts.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 22