Venice Black (Alex Polonia Thriller Book 1)

by Gregory C. Randall

  Ehsan’s friends said something to the police. All she heard the police say in response was “Chetate! Shut up.”

  Javier carefully reached into his jacket, extracted his credentials, and handed them to one of the policemen.

  The policeman’s pistol remained pointed at the four of them. Alex smiled, but the man did not return the gesture. The senior officer looked at the photo ID and then Javier’s face. A flurry of conversation in Italian began between Javier and the police. The senior officer spoke into his shoulder microphone. More Italian. From up the canal, Alex heard the wailing of a siren. Obviously, the officers had summoned reinforcements.

  The two policemen told the men kneeling on the paving to stand. As they did, they put their hands on their heads. Two police cruisers pulled up to the vaporetto stop. In seconds the plaza was filled with police. If Alex were a bystander, she would have been impressed, but right now all she was sure of was that the two of them were in serious trouble. Across the piazza tourists held up their phones, clicking photos.

  Javier, tense and exasperated, turned to Alex. “What’s in the bags?”

  “Laundry. It’s their goddamn laundry.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Alex and Javier weren’t allowed to leave the police station until late afternoon. As they left down the steps outside, Alex turned and noticed the sign over the door, “Questura.”

  “‘Questioning’? That was fun,” she said.

  “It says ‘Police Station,’” he said.

  “One and the same in my line of work.”

  At the bottom of the steps, an officer in a small police cruiser waved to them. They were to be escorted to Alex’s hotel, just one of two options offered by the upset police commander. The other involved a night in jail.

  “Just shut up,” Javier said. “If you hadn’t yelled ‘Bomb!’ we would have been just fine. I had it under control.”

  Alex grabbed a handhold in the cruiser’s cabin. She looked down the narrow canal as they motored; ahead lay the larger Grand Canal. “We were set up,” she said.

  “You think? I should have seen it from the beginning. You heard the police commander when he called the woman at the Palazzo Grassi. All they were doing was picking up information on the venue for a future meeting. That was bullshit. They wanted to find out if someone was tailing them and we walked right into it. That’s why they were released—they were as innocent as lambs.”

  “Yes, it was bullshit,” Alex said, brushing back her hair as the boat increased its speed. “But they are planning something, I feel it in my bones. Lambs? More like lambs wearing suicide vests. This proved it. Why go through this charade just to call us out? Because they are planning something.”

  “I’m going to catch hell from Milan and Washington. I can handle that. But Washington is going to want you a million miles from this thing. And I can’t disagree.”

  “You never said anything to Washington about last night, did you?”

  Javier looked out to the water.

  “You have got to be kidding me. That’s it, isn’t it? They don’t know about our little adventure with Kozak. The CIA wants to know everything its people do, and you have kept it from them. Don’t worry; it is definitely a secret I can keep. Good God, I have a hundred reasons, that’s for sure. And today? I went with you, remember? And after last night, it’s the least I can do to keep you and Mr. Nox out of trouble.”

  “Me? I’m the one getting you out of trouble. You have been nothing but a pain in the ass since the minute you landed.”

  “Dammit, Javier. I’m the innocent bystander here. My crap is four thousand miles away, just waiting for the right moment to screw me over. My knight in shining armor . . .”

  They were quiet for the rest of the trip as the rain started falling again. The police cruiser stopped at the landing near the hotel’s front door.

  “Are you always this difficult?” Javier asked.

  “This is one of my better days.” She turned to go into the hotel, then came back to Javier and kissed him. “You owe me dinner. I will be ready at eight. Don’t be late—and pick a nice place.”

  Then she disappeared into the hotel.

  CHAPTER 27

  Marika stood at the window of her hotel room and watched the rain. For a moment, it obscured the view down the canal. Its sound, even through the double-pane glass, filled the canyon of brick and stucco. It was good to be with her son—their efforts left little time for the two of them.

  She lit a cigarette and slumped into the chair. One more day and it would be over. She needed to move on. She knew that her obsession was taking its toll, but for now, there was no alternative. She was doing this for the dead; she was doing it for the survivors; she was doing it for her son. For her, twenty-five years seemed like yesterday.

  Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1993

  Marika and the boy scurried along Zenica’s Kulina Bana Boulevard and into the Hotel Internacional. It was just past eight in the morning. The Bosna River, across the boulevard and full of spring runoff, cut its way through the heart of the ancient village. Sounding like thunder, rumbles from howitzer shell fire echoed and rolled from one side to the other across the valley.

  “Does the bus for Zagreb stop here?” she demanded at the receptionist desk.

  The woman looked at the two disheveled figures and shrugged. “Yes.”

  “What time?”

  “Maybe three o’clock, but no one knows. He yours?”

  She didn’t have an answer. The question was always on the edge of her mind since she pulled the child into the woods and away from the execution squad in Ahmići. The boy? What was she going to do with him?

  “Yes, he’s mine,” she blurted. “We were hiking and heard the artillery. Ended up here.”

  “Artillery? Where?”

  “Over the hills toward Ahmići,” she answered.

  The clerk looked at the dark-haired boy and then at the young blonde woman. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Marika said as she shifted the camera bag slung over her shoulder. Her small knapsack with a change of clothes was a memory, left under a tree somewhere in the hills above Zenica. She looked at the child. “Are you hungry?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Do I buy the ticket here or on the bus?”

  “On the bus.”

  “Thank you.”

  She took the child into the women’s restroom to clean his hands and wash his face, then cleaned her own. Afterward, feeling somewhat better, she led the boy across the lobby to the restaurant. She saw an empty table at the window, waved at the waiter, and pointed. He looked suspiciously at her and the boy, then shrugged.

  The boy never fussed, never cried. He was maybe seven or eight, an age where every other sentence was a question, but he hadn’t asked a single question since they left the valley. When she had asked his name, he said Ehsan. When she had asked how old he was, he only shook his head. During the long night that she had wrapped the boy in her coat to keep him warm, he never complained.

  The waiter, a young man not yet twenty, returned with a menu, coffee, and milk for the child. As he stood waiting for Marika to order, three military vehicles roared past, and the building’s windows shook. The waiter looked nervous, as every Muslim male in Zenica did.

  Marika flashed her American Express card, and the waiter shrugged.

  “What would you like for breakfast?” she asked the child.

  He looked around the restaurant and then out into the street. Another short convoy of the military trucks thundered by, sporting a wolf’s head insignia stenciled on the doors. The child’s hands began to shake.

  “It’s okay. You will be all right. I’ll protect you.” Marika wasn’t sure how she’d accomplish that after what she had seen the past day, but she was positive no one was going to get to this child.

  They spent the rest of the morning in the hotel’s lobby. Gunfire could be heard in the hills. The child shook whenever a howitzer shell exploded. The bus arr
ived at three thirty; they had to stand in the aisle. The driver, an impatient Croat, demanded kunas. He looked down at the boy, then her. She paid three times what she thought their fares should be.

  As the driver drove uneasily along the two-lane highway, dozens of military vehicles passed them, heading into Bosnia. Their luck held. They were not stopped until they reached the newly established and very fluid Croatian border. The passengers were ordered off the bus. The guards casually glanced at the papers Marika offered, a two-hundred-kuna note folded underneath. When one of the guards asked about the boy, she said he was hers. He nodded and then stopped at two young Bosnian men who nervously offered their papers.

  The sergeant looked at the papers, then the men. “Over there,” he ordered. “These papers are false.”

  “No, they are good, see, they are stamped by—”

  “I don’t give a damn who stamped them. Stand over there, Turk!” The sergeant looked back at the rest of the people standing against the bus. “Welcome to Croatia. You can get back on the bus.”

  As they left the checkpoint, Ehsan climbed into a seat that a young Croatian man had offered Marika. The boy put his face against the window and, with Marika, watched as the soldiers escorted the two young Bosnian men toward a corrugated-iron building. She lost sight of them as the bus made a wide turn into the road.

  They arrived in Zagreb late that night and went straight to her apartment. While the boy took a bath, she made a late meal of eggs and potatoes. Dressed in one of her T-shirts, Ehsan crawled into the bed she’d made on the couch. She sat drinking tea as the exhausted boy fell asleep. Soon she also fell asleep.

  Marika learned later that after they had escaped Zenica, a mortar shell fired by Croatian HVO forces fell in front of a department store, killing sixteen civilians and injuring dozens more. The shelling began a year-and-a-half siege of Zenica by Croatian forces. During that year and a half, hundreds of trapped civilians died from bombardments and starvation. A couple of years later Ehsan asked Marika what had happened to the two men who were taken off the bus—she had no answer. More than a decade would pass before the historic village of Zenica would recover from this ethnic cleansing.

  Marika raised the child as her own. Once he was situated at a Catholic boarding school in Zagreb, and her software business was doing well, she attempted to discover his family name. A nervous peace had been established in the devastated region of the Lašva Valley, but still no one trusted anyone. She talked with an old woman in the rebuilt village of Ahmići, the small community of stucco homes and red-tile roofs a short walk down the hill from Ehsan’s home. The woman looked questioningly into Marika’s blue eyes.

  “Why would you want to know?” the woman said. “Leave this all alone. Go away.”

  Marika persisted. “They lived up there.” She pointed, the scenes as fresh in her memory as if from yesterday. “A small cluster of homes and outbuildings. The road ends a little farther on after it.”

  The woman shook her head. “No, nothing is to be gained. The worthless Blue Helmets came through here sometime after the soldiers left and long after the bodies were buried.”

  “The United Nations . . .”

  “More like fools and asses. Worthless. No one said anything to them. We knew nothing would be done. This has happened before, many, many times. Why? We have done nothing.” The woman started to walk away.

  “Please, all I am trying to do is find the name of the family for this boy.” She held up a photo. “I helped him escape that morning.”

  The woman spun on her worn black shoes. “You took a boy? An eight-year-old boy?”

  “Yes, he was about that age. The soldiers were killing everyone. The boy escaped out the back of the house, just before his family was—”

  “Murdered,” the woman said. “We looked everywhere for the child. Eventually, we believed he was dead, lost in the fire that consumed their home. He was my grandnephew. His name is Ehsan Abdurrahman, an old family name that goes back to the time of the great Suleiman—it means ‘servant to the mighty.’ My heart breaks when I think of that day, that time. Many were murdered, and many were to die later—shot by cowardly snipers. The worst were the children who starved. This valley became a prison . . . I must go. I beg you, please bring our child back to us—to visit. There is nothing for him here now, but a man must know his roots and his history.”

  Marika looked up the stony path that led to a cluster of newly tiled roofs at the edge of the forest. “Yes, I will bring him back.”

  After dumping the almost-full ashtray in the trash, Marika lit another cigarette and sat back in the chair. She was still sore from the manhandling by Kozak’s men, and the side of her neck, where she had been injected, was swollen. If there was one thing she would do before this was over, she would make the son of a bitch pay—pay for what he did to the Bosniaks, what he did to the people of Croatia, and what he did to her.

  She would never forgive the authorities for not bringing Kozak to justice. The same authorities who’d given her hell when she’d first brought Ehsan into Zagreb. When they’d asked his name, he said “Ehsan,” and that’s when Marika had first seen brightness in the boy’s eyes, a deep-blue brightness—cerulean windows into a sharp mind. She had been surprised that he did not ask about his parents or what had happened. It would be two years before he would inquire about his family, or why he was different from the other children in his school, or why his name was different from Marika’s. When she had told him, all he said was that he understood.

  Since then, they’d talked about that day many times. He’d grown into a strong and handsome man. He had learned languages, and to many he looked Italian, from the northern part of the country, where blue eyes were common. He seldom said otherwise or corrected the assumption. That is, until they heard his last name, Abdurrahman. One moment a business acquaintance, a potential friend; the next a Muslim—one of those causing trouble in the world.

  In time, he left his mother for Oxford. Soon after Marika sold her software business, Ehsan finished his law degree in Milan. He helped with the legal aspects of the sale. His shares of the company allowed him, even with his excellent job, more freedom to pursue other interests. Over the past few years, he’d explored dozens of ancient Muslim sites throughout the vast Ottoman Empire. Marika was pleased that he had found another outlet for his curiosity, though she was uncomfortable with his enthusiasm. There was in her heart an uneasiness growing about Ehsan.

  After the sale of the business, she returned to journalism. She wrote for travel magazines, about the old country of Yugoslavia, about Slovenia and Croatia. She added stories to her own photo spreads on Dubrovnik and Split that showed the beauty of the beaches and the mountains. Her feature on the vineyards of coastal Croatia made the travel section of the New York Times and was picked up by a dozen other international papers. People wanted to read about the magnificence and splendor of the Balkans. But when she wrote of the mass graves, the dead Bosnian Muslims, the Croatian corpses dug from the dark valleys, no one wanted those articles. It was all in the past. Nothing could be gained by embarrassing the people of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. She even received death threats.

  One morning, while composing an article about the rebuilding of Croatian Catholic churches along the Bosnian border, she found herself studying the photos she had taken the day she saved Ehsan. In one photo stood Colonel Attila Kozak—now presidential candidate—next to a Croatian HVO Humvee. The Humvee was stopped on a narrow lane in front of a burning house with three bodies lying on the ground. Kozak was pointing at the next house. A puff of smoke rose from the soldier’s rifle that was pointed in the same direction. When she followed Kozak’s finger and the tip of the soldier’s rifle, it stopped at a man with his arms raised, a portion of his face obliterated.

  CHAPTER 28

  Alex quickly loaded dozens of e-mails on the phone Javier had given her. Only two were from Bob Simmons, which had come in during the last hour. She called Simmons and
let it ring.

  “Anything new?” she asked once he picked up.

  “Why are you calling me?” Simmons asked. “I thought we were going to e-mail.”

  “This is quicker, and the phone is untraceable. Any news?”

  “Nothing, not even a half-assed sighting. Didn’t you get my e-mails?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m calling.”

  “Your ex even has the weather on his side. It is supposed to turn to crap later today, which will make it even harder to find him. Maybe he’s wandering in the woods. Maybe he’ll freeze to death and save the state a bunch of trouble. The captain figured I knew where you were. You need to call him.”

  “Is he there?”

  “No, he’s meeting with the state troopers, who are taking the lead. He said he wants the department—and you—to stay as far away from this as we can. He said it isn’t his problem if the state can’t manage their prisoners. He’s got his own problems to deal with.”

  “He hasn’t changed. Tell him I called. And that I have not heard from Ralph and hope to God I don’t. I do not want to get involved—tell him that too.”

  “The guy from the Cleveland FBI field office mentioned that your CIA friend is quite the ladies’ man.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Oh nothing, just after the past year . . .”

  “It is a lot more complicated than I want, and I didn’t want any of this. By the way, did the captain get a call from the Venice police?”

  “Now, why would . . . Alex, what the hell are you into?” Simmons asked.

  “Why?”

  “Let me think . . . the CIA, FBI, DEA, Muslims, Venice, and a budding romance in the air.”

  “Shut up, Simmons. It’s winter, it’s raining, and it’s cold. And it’s none of your damn business.”