Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

“I would never ask you to give up one of yours, Herr Yunis, particularly after enjoying your hospitality. I never repay kindness in that way.” She held up the tea glass again, a toast to their shared attitude.

  He held his up in return. “With that promise, I give you my word that Yunis listens to your every syllable.”

  Jana plunged ahead, relating the events that had occurred in Slovakia.

  “One of the killings I’ve come to you about caused a national uproar in my country. It was a very public assassination, initially thought to be an attempt to kill a well-known person. Instead, his wife was killed. Later, in another location, a second man was killed. He was a Turk. We now believe the killings may have had wider implications. So I’m here as an emissary from my country, speaking to Herr Yunis, who has his own important place in the world. We feel Herr Yunis is the man who has the influence and command to help us determine why these events took place. We need your help.”

  Jana sat back, waiting for Yunis to absorb what she’d said. He tapped the side of his tea glass, thinking, studying the tawny liquid at its bottom, and then set it down on the table.

  “What was the name of the Turk who was killed?”

  “Murat Tabib.”

  “Murat Tabib, eh?” He repeated the name several times, rolling it around in his mouth as if savoring a morsel of food. “Yes, a Turk. I think I know that name. However, names are repeated often in our culture. It might or might not be the same man. There is also the possibility I may know his family. If I do, I will send them a condolence, a remembrance gift. When a family member dies, one must help fill the void that’s left.”

  “That would be kind of you.” Jana paused, finishing the last of her tea, studying the bottom of her glass. “Do you think you might aid us in another way? Perhaps set up a conversation for me with the men who were with Murat Tabib before he died?”

  “They were with Tabib before he was killed? Or during the killing?”

  “We don’t know how much time elapsed between their meeting and when the murder took place. But we know they met before the event.”

  “And the killing that caused the national uproar is tied together with the killing of Tabib?”

  “We think so. I would also point out that there were others at the meeting who were involved in the first of these killings, including a man whom we have yet to identify. The two men we think are here in Berlin may be able to help us with that as well.”

  Yunis poured himself a second glass of tea, then filled Jana’s glass. He also noted that Konrad had merely sipped a small amount of his tea. When he set the carafe back down on the table, he somehow made the gesture of a rebuff to Konrad for outwardly rejecting the hospitality of the tea service.

  “And how was Murat Tabib killed?” Yunis asked. “Perhaps his family will want to know.”

  “They most likely will.”

  “If they’re here, and if I can find them,” Yunis hastily added.

  “Understood.” Jana waited a moment to give her statement full effect. “Tabib had an ice pick driven through one of his eyes.”

  Yunis visibly jerked, spilling tea. He tried to recover, wiping ineffectually at the few drops that had fallen on his pants. He shouted something in Turkish, and the man who had served the tea came in with a small towel. Yunis grabbed it, wiped his hands, and threw it on the table. The tea server gathered the towel, the remaining glasses, and the tea carafe, waiting for a brief second for Jana to take a last sip and then recovering her glass as well before quickly exiting.

  “My apology, Commander; my apology, Herr Konrad.” Yunis gave them each a sad smile, his best attempt at an act of contrition. “The human condition is often defined by clumsiness. I try to keep those moments to a minimum.”

  Both of the police officers remained quiet, trying to minimize Yunis’s perceptible embarrassment. The man was upset that he had lost his composure and control, both of which were very important to him. Eventually he settled back in his seat, able to slow his breathing, trying to pretend that he’d never been upset.

  “The men you want to talk to: their names, please,” he queried.

  “One is named Akso; the other is a man named Balder,” Jana told him.

  A pen and a small pad had materialized in Yunis’s hand, and he scrawled a few notes on the pad. “Yes, Ajda Akso and Balder.” He put the notepad on the table, looking at Konrad. “You know Envers?”

  “The hubbly-bubbly place?”

  “The two will be there in one hour. There is to be no attempt to arrest these men. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Konrad agreed.

  “They will answer all your questions about the murder of Murat Tabib, and the murder of the woman, at least all the questions they know the answers to. What was the woman’s name? And her husband?” In a floral handwriting, Yunis wrote down Klara and Oto Bogan’s names, reciting them back to Jana to make sure he had them right. When he’d finished, Yunis stood, polite but now distant, shook hands with both police officers, wished them well, and called for the man who had brought their tea. The man led Jana and Konrad through the bakery and into the street without saying a word.

  They walked to Konrad’s car. All four tires on the vehicle had been slashed. Konrad spent a full minute cursing, enraged that this would happen.

  “Kids. Maybe gang members. Some of the Yunis people, maybe. Juvenile stuff,” Jana suggested. “They recognized it as a police vehicle.”

  There was no question in either of their minds that the people who lived in the area had no small amount of hatred for police.

  “I hope every one of them dies tomorrow,” Konrad snarled. “Tortured to death using a red-hot poker to liven it all up a bit.”

  Still fuming, he called headquarters for a tow truck. While they waited, the people on the street gave them a wide berth. The attention and avoidance of the locals gave the two police officers an even more intense feeling that they were in a very unfavorable environment.

  The experience with Yunis had been odd for Jana. It was not her usual way of dealing. However, a number of things had come out of it. She began to mull over what she had deduced from the meeting. Yunis had immediately identified Akso and Balder. He also knew where they were staying; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been comfortable declaring that they’d be ready for questioning within an hour. How could he know that with such certainty unless he’d had recent dealings with them?

  Then there was his exaggerated care in making sure that he had the Bogan names right. Too much pretense. He knew about the murder of Klara and attempted murder of Oto Bogan. Even more telling was his response to the way Murat Tabib had been murdered. A man with his criminal background and wide experience with street ways shouldn’t have reacted that strongly when Jana told him about the ice-pick murder. He had been shaken by the specific combination of the weapon and the way it had been used. Ayden Yunis believed that Makine’s signature was on the killing. And Yunis had, through his response, revealed that he was afraid of the man. Why would Yunis be so deeply fearful unless he was himself involved in the events surrounding the ice-pick victim’s death? There was also one other major issue that had to be determined: which side was Yunis on?

  The police flatbed hauler arrived in thirty minutes, which was fairly quick; but by the time Konrad’s car had been loaded aboard, the two officers only had a short time to get to Envers to meet the two men who might have information on the Bratislava murders. They squeezed into the cab of the truck, the driver slowly tooling the cumbersome vehicle through the streets.

  Konrad passed the time by pointing out the businesses and people they passed on the road that were either fronts for one of the Yunis enterprises or allied with him in the criminal world: a man walking down the street who ran the Yunis loan-sharking operations, a secondhand clothing business used for narcotics importing, a building-supply store that was a front for cigarette smuggling. There was the bank that Yunis had an interest in, which was suspected of financing hundreds of other criminal enterpris
es. They passed a money-changing establishment that was, in fact, a currency-laundering operation. All of them put money in the Yunis coffers. Konrad ultimately finished with a flourish, waving his arm to encompass the entire neighborhood.

  “All of these people, Greeks, Turks, Hansels and Gretels, all of them, whether they know it or not, are serfs in the service of their master, Mr. Yunis.”

  “Be thankful, Albrecht. Most captains of industry, especially his industry, are not that amenable to seeing police officers on short notice.”

  “I did him a big favor once, so he sees me.” Konrad seemed discomfited. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it. I found out a young man was going to assassinate Yunis for using his sister as a prostitute. I made the mistake of telling Yunis. End of story for the young man, although, as a ‘gift’ to the family, Yunis took the girl out of the house where she was servicing the male population of Berlin and got her a job at a stationer’s. That job lasted one month before she decided she liked it better out on the street.”

  “We all do idiotic things.”

  “Maybe I should have let Herr Yunis go to his god? Who knows what’s right and what’s wrong at times?” He thought about his blunder in getting the young man killed, looking a little disgusted with himself. “Mistakes are mistakes. You put them behind you. At least I got the trust of Yunis, and I go to him when I need him. Or he asks me to come. It’s worked out.”

  “It never works out with these men. They always keep the balance on their side,” Jana cautioned.

  Konrad directed the driver to drop them in front of the place where Yunis had said he’d set up the meeting. “Envers,” he announced to Jana.

  The truck slowed to a stop in front of the building. Konrad shouted a danke, vielen Danke to the driver as he drove away while Jana checked out the area. Bookstores, junk shops, cafés, record shops, down the street what appeared to be a small cemetery, a few Prussian-façaded buildings with their straight rooflines on the other side.

  The building they’d disembarked in front of had a modern façade, ugly in its concrete simplicity except for a portion of the lower floor of the building, which had a brick frontage which Jana thought might have been part of an older structure that the building had been constructed on top of. She hazarded a guess that the original building had been bombed in the Second World War and the property owners had erected the new building cheaply on the old foundations. The front of the structure had a sign that spelled out ENVERS in green neon. Stairs led up to a large door, which was propped open.

  “What’s a hubbly-bubbly place?” Jana asked, remembering what Konrad had said when Yunis directed them to come here.

  “A coffeehouse, except it’s mostly tea. They come here to smoke nargilas, water pipes, which most of the kids call hubbly-bubblies now. Eat a snack, talk to your friends, smoke a hubbly-bubbly, socialize. This place also deals a little hash on the side. Lots of Envers’s customers think the pipe tastes better with dope than tobacco.”

  They walked up the steps and through the door into a smoky environment. More than half the tables were filled, most of the customers men over forty, a few younger ones sprinkled throughout, the majority of them smoking nargilas, a few eating or drinking tea, all of them talking as much as they were smoking.

  Jana scanned the faces. None of the men looked back at her. She realized that she had very little idea of what the two men they were here to see looked like. She worried for a moment, then became conscious of the fact that she was the only woman in the place. It would be easier for the men who were coming to their rendezvous to identify her than for her to identify them.

  “They’ll have to find us,” she mentioned.

  “They will.” Konrad pointed to a table in the rear of the café. “We just sit. A waiter will ask us to choose a flavor for the tobacco from the list on the table, then they’ll bring each of us a hubbly-bubbly.”

  Konrad led the way. They eased into chairs, Jana not quite comfortable with being the only woman in the room, particularly in such a completely different culture. Both of them shifted their chairs slightly, Jana so that she had an unobstructed view of the front door, Konrad so he could see the entrance to the kitchen–restroom area. They read the tobacco menu on the table and Jana picked one with a fruity-sounding name. The waiter came over and Konrad ordered for both of them. A few minutes later the pipes were set on the floor next to them, the waiter placing a charcoal ember over the tobacco. With a touch of flair, he then handed them the hoses fitted with mouthpieces so they could smoke.

  To put an acceptable face on their presence, Jana decided she had to at least take a few puffs. She expected the smoldering tobacco to burn her throat. Instead, it was surprisingly cool. Jana even enjoyed the slightly euphoric feeling that it gave her. The minutes ticked by, passing quickly, until a full half hour had passed. Still no sign of Balder or the emasculated Akso. Yunis had said that the two men would be there. Their failure to appear made Jana progressively more uneasy. They wouldn’t dare to disobey Yunis. Unless they were dancing to someone else’s tune.

  “I think we should pay up and get the hell out of here,” a very nervous Konrad eventually suggested.

  Jana didn’t have to be convinced. She threw money on the table, and the two of them started for the front door. Before they stepped outside, Jana grabbed Konrad’s arm.

  “A wonderful setup: the two of us walk out of the door, which puts us at the top of the stairs, framed for a clear shot in the midday light.”

  The two turned as one, heading for the kitchen area and a hoped-for back exit. No one paid any attention to them as they hurried through the kitchen to the rear door. A large padlock on the door prevented them from opening it.

  Jana had seen this kind of thing before. “They keep the door locked to prevent the kitchen help from stealing food out the back.”

  She pulled out her gun, which she’d tucked in a small holster hooked inside the back of her pants.

  “You’re not supposed to carry a gun in Germany,” Konrad protested, at the same moment coming out with his weapon.

  “I guess you’ll have to report me.” She stepped back toward the center of the kitchen, found the man who was giving the orders to the other help, put her gun to his head, and demanded the key to the door. Without the slightest hesitation, the man gave her the key, and she hurried to the door and unlocked the padlock. She and Konrad dashed outside and started down a metal staircase. They hadn’t gone three steps when the first shot struck Konrad in the back.

  Jana was unable to stop him from tumbling down the stairs. She took the short route to the ground by jumping over the railing and dropping the two and a half meters to the alley below. The next shot was fired while she was still in the air, the bullet passing so close to her head that she could feel the air being disturbed by the bullet’s passage.

  Jana grabbed Konrad’s shirtfront and jacket and dragged him into the shadow of the wall opposite the stairs, crouching to make as small a target as possible. She quickly examined the German cop. He had been hit in a spot that should have been fatal, almost directly above where his heart would be. Seeing the entry wound, Jana was amazed that he was still breathing, although shallowly. There is no accounting for the ability of people to remain alive when they should be dead.

  Jana looked up. A man was coming through the rear door of the hubbly-bubbly place, a gun in his hand. Jana didn’t vacillate; she fired at him immediately. The shot hit the man, the force of the bullet driving him back into the café, discouraging anyone who was with him from chancing another attempt at coming out. Just to be sure, she fired two additional shots into the door, then frantically searched through Konrad’s jacket until she found his cell phone. She hunted through his contacts, found the number for his office, and called it.

  It took her a long minute to convince the German police that what she was telling them was true. She had to wait ten more agonizing minutes for them to arrive. Konrad was in an ambulance and on his way to the hospital five minutes af
ter that.

  Chapter 31

  There was no difficulty in identifying the man Jana had shot. Her bullet had hit him in the abdomen, the upward trajectory taking the slug through the aorta, killing him almost instantly. Even though he had several contradictory identifications on his person, the police were able to immediately identify him because, to the surprise of the ambulance attendants, his scrotum had been excised. In fact, there was not much of his sexual organs remaining. It was Akso.

  All’s well that ends well, reflected Jana. There would be no real loss to the world because of the death of this man.

  Shortly after they arrived at the police building, the German police took Jana to their offices and began going over the events of the shooting in excruciating detail. The questioning was intense, continuing for three hours. At some point, the Kriminalpolizei contacted the BKA people, and several of them arrived to participate in the interrogation. Eventually Truchanova and Jakus showed up to throw in their own two cents. The end result was the police sending men out to Kreuzberg to bring Ayden Yunis in. But the attempt proved to be futile: Yunis had slipped into obscurity amidst the warren of buildings comprising the Kreuzberg area.

  Jana’s primary concern was Konrad. She insisted that she be kept apprised of his medical condition. At last, word came in that Konrad was off the operating table. The bullet had missed his heart by less than a centimeter, exiting through his chest. Konrad would probably survive.

  When the police ultimately told her that she could go, Jana asked where she could find Truchanova. The officers who had questioned her informed Jana that the prosecutor was in a meeting one floor down. With some reluctance, they also told her that the prosecutor was in conference with senior members of the Kriminalpolizei and the BKA people on the larger ramifications of events. As a courtesy, one of the interrogators escorted Jana to the room where the meeting was taking place, wished her well, and then left without going inside.

  Jana entered just as the meeting was breaking up, the participants stuffing papers in their folders, a technician turning off a slide projector. Truchanova was one of the few people still sitting at the table, filling up her briefcase with her notes. She looked haggard, the grind of the meeting seeming to have affected her, sapping her energy. Jakus stood in a corner of the room, off to one side of Truchanova, a supernumerary merely taking up space.