Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

  “I’m glad you’re being cautious.”

  “I learned that lesson once.”

  “What happened?”

  “A man followed me. I didn’t check. He grabbed me and pulled me behind a building.”

  “What happened?”

  “You know what happened. I don’t have to say.”

  Jana looked at Em’s face. There had been no change in her expression. She still appeared cheerful, happy with what she was doing, comfortable with herself. Not an appropriate emotional response for a child talking about being injured in the way Em obviously had been. The fact that she was remembering the event could have been reflected in her face, her posture, some physical change, even a small one. It wasn’t there.

  “What did you do afterward?” Jana asked.

  “Watched while my client hid the body.”

  The answer to the question jolted Jana even more than what Em had said before that.

  “Your client killed the man?” Jana asked, just to be sure.

  Em nodded. “He apologized to me.”

  “Your client?”

  “Yes. He lost sight of me for a minute. Then he had to go hunting for where I’d been taken. I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t because of my job. I was just on the street when the person who did it to me was looking for a victim.”

  “A terrible thing. All of it must have been horrible for you. I’m sorry.”

  “He made up for it.”

  “Who?”

  “My employer. He gave me a big bonus.”

  Jana stopped, putting her hand on Em’s shoulder; then she hugged her.

  “Why did you do that?” Em asked, looking puzzled. “I told you I was okay.”

  Jana tried to explain. “The attack, the murder, had to be frighteningly horrible for you, ugly beyond belief. I understand your attacker was killed. I don’t blame you for being glad he was dead. But those are moments in life that had to scare you. Horrible events like that lodge in the corners of our minds. They don’t get cleaned out very easily. We carry them with us. It hurts, and it may keep on hurting.”

  “I’m not hurt. I don’t get hurt. I can’t ever get hurt.”

  “Everybody gets hurt, Em.”

  “I can prove I can’t get hurt.”

  “How?”

  The girl whirled around and ran straight into the oncoming traffic of the busy street. It happened so quickly, Jana couldn’t grab her. Em was suddenly in the middle of the street, running between and around the cars. They swerved to miss her, sliding sideways, some of them screeching to a halt, bumpers hitting bumpers. Vehicles drove onto the sidewalk to avoid collisions, pedestrians darting out of the way. The street became one massive jam of cars. Through the gaps between the cars, Jana could see Em reach the other side of the street and then turn to wave triumphantly at her.

  Jana walked across the street after Em, in no danger herself from the stalled traffic, but very angry at what the girl had done. She warned herself to control her temper, although her anger was fueled by the blaring horns and the people coming out of their vehicles to yell at each other. Reaching the other side of the road, Jana found Em smiling as if nothing had happened.

  “I told you I can’t get hurt,” she bragged.

  Jana grabbed Em by her shoulders and shook her as hard as she could. She wanted to do more than shake her, but she was constrained by the thought that there was a serious problem with the girl. Her judgment was unsound. She needed help. Em had a personality disorder, some glitch that blocked her from realizing what was acceptable in human interaction.

  Jana’s anger began to diminish as she tried to put everything in perspective. The girl had been trying to show Jana how brave she was. She wanted attention, approval, admiration. Jana had to try to be tender and understanding. A stray thought crossed her mind: Em needed a leash. Jana pushed the thought away. At least she could see that the cheerful look had vanished from Em’s face. There were even tears in the girl’s eyes.

  Em’s voice had a touch of uncertainty when she spoke. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You were mean to me.”

  “A response to what you did. I’m sorry. I should have had better control.”

  Em wiped away the tears, her lips quivering. “I want to go home now.”

  “Slovakia?”

  “Any place that’s nicer to me.” She thought about where she wanted to go. “Just back to the hotel room for now.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  They took the bus, avoiding each other’s eyes, the ambiance of the afternoon gone. Jana forced herself to ask Em a few more questions, trying to bridge the gap between them and, at the same time, get a few needed answers.

  “Your client followed you the day you were attacked. Is that usual in that business?”

  There was a long silence, Jana forced to prompt Em by asking the question again. Grudgingly, Em answered. “Once in a while. They don’t want to be caught, so they use me. Except, they want to make sure I do what I’m supposed to do. So they come along behind me and watch.”

  “The man who kept an eye on you when you were attacked—was he the man who’s been following us?”

  Em shrugged. “They’re all the same. Who cares?”

  Jana persisted. “Is he the same man, Em?”

  “I can’t talk about my clients.”

  “Em, our lives may depend upon your answer. Make an exception this time. I’m not asking for his name.”

  Em took so long to answer the question that Jana thought she was going to refuse. Then, very reluctantly, the word “no” rolled out of her mouth. They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride back to the hotel.

  In the lobby Jana went to the desk, checked for messages, and picked up her key. Em headed straight for the elevator, taking it up without waiting for Jana. When Jana went upstairs she expected to find Em waiting for her at the door. She wasn’t there, or inside the room. Jana called the desk and asked if they had seen Em leave the hotel. When they told her they had not, Jana felt she had no choice but to search the hotel. She went through it floor by floor, checking the utility closets, the stair landings, working her way down to the main floor. The girl had vanished.

  Jana went back to her room, wondering if she should report Em as missing. She decided that in this kind of a big city, there would be little hope of the police having much immediate success in finding Em. There was nothing to do but wait.

  An hour later, Em knocked on the door. Jana let her in, neither of them saying anything until Em began talking, happy again.

  “I know how to disappear, don’t I?”

  “You do.”

  “I’m a professional,” she complimented herself. “You can hire me sometime, if you want.”

  Jana called the airlines and made a reservation for herself and Em. They would be flying back to Bratislava the next day.

  Chapter 38

  Mr. and Mrs. Seges met them when they landed. Jana thought of them as Mr. and Mrs. rather than as her warrant officer and his wife because of their attitude toward Em. They both greeted Jana formally, but Mrs. Seges was so affectionate with Em that an onlooker would have sworn that the girl was her child. Seges, although he hung back, made it clear by his body language that he was happy to see Em. He even gave her a peck on the cheek. The Segeses were more a couple with Em than without her. She was a bridge that allowed them to be comfortable with each other after so many years of bickering. For her part, Em was affectionate with the two of them also, particularly Mrs. Seges, she and Segesova going off hand in hand to drive home in the family car while Seges chauffeured Jana back to the police building.

  Jana immediately went into meetings, first with Lubos Papanek to find out if anything further had developed in his cooperative venture with the German police. It had. The Berlin bank in which Ayden Yunis had owned the majority stock interest had made large transfers of money to the Bogan bank in Vienna and to a small, privately owned bank in Paris. There
were also transfers from Oto and Zdenko Bogan from the Vienna bank to that same bank in Paris. The transfers, which had taken place over the last month, added up to nearly fifteen million euros.

  “A large amount of money.” Jana had a hard time imagining people who could blithely ship that kind of money from bank to bank, country to country. “I want you to keep on going as far as you can in tracking those funds.”

  “I’m on it. I didn’t want to alert everyone that we were investigating the bank accounts. I’m trying a roundabout way of getting the information on them, using the bank’s regular examiners as a screen for looking into the accounts instead of a police query. Give me some time and we’ll have it.”

  “Anything on the directors or stockholders on the company the Bogans set up in Berlin?”

  “Both of the live Bogans are on the papers, as well as the dead Klara. They own it all, except for a few shares owned by Radomir Kralik, the vice president at the Viennese bank.”

  “Check the ownership on the French bank that the money went to.”

  “We’re doing that as well. Again, more time needed.”

  “I need it quickly, Papanek.”

  “When I get it, you get it.”

  “Good.”

  Jana called Colonel Trokan, and a half hour later she was in his office, briefing him on the events in Germany. Midway through the briefing, he stopped her.

  “Four attempts to kill you over the last week, one in Vienna, three in Berlin. What the hell is going on?”

  “Three attempts,” Jana corrected. “One in Vienna and two in Berlin. I may have been the catalyst for the shooting in the zoo, but I don’t think it was meant for me.”

  “The catalyst?”

  “They may have been following me. Or someone else.”

  “You think they might have been after the little girl you’re squiring around?”

  Jana had left out any mention of Em in her reports of the Berlin events.

  “The Germans called me,” Trokan informed her by way of explanation. “They couldn’t quite understand why she was trailing along in your wake.” He leaned across his desk, a mocking look on his face. “Are we playing mother here? Police commanders have other responsibilities.”

  “I didn’t take her to Berlin.” Jana heard the defensive tone of her voice and consciously tried to change it. “I left her with Seges and his wife. The little lady found her own way to Berlin.”

  “You had nothing to do with it?”

  “Absolutely nothing. She was on a business trip.”

  The colonel looked dubious.

  “She has a commercial venture which took her to Berlin. She’s a courier for criminal undertakings.”

  The colonel’s face went from dubious to disbelieving. “She’s how old? Thirteen?”

  “We’ve both seen children used before. Thirteen-year-olds have babies. They fight in wars. They sell narcotics. She’s a courier.”

  “We have an appropriate place for her, then: a cell.”

  “We have no proof, except what she’s told me. And she’s also told me that she has given the criminal business up.”

  The colonel eyed her skeptically.

  “Once in that business, not very often out.” He sighed. “Jana, you’re not a social worker. You’re not her favorite teacher. You’re not a family member. What you are is a police officer.” He tapped his chest several times with his right hand. “I, on the other hand, am your longtime friend and colleague; I have shared many problems with you, both yours and mine. I’ve pulled you out of difficulties, as you have me, and you and I work together as colleagues most of the days of the year. I’m also your colonel.

  “Bearing that in mind, particularly the last part—you know, my being your colonel—I am giving you twenty-four hours to get rid of that girl.”

  “I don’t think you should order me to do that, Colonel.”

  He stared at her, beginning to become angry, prepared to lose his temper.

  Jana went on before he could show his displeasure in more obvious ways.

  “If I ‘get rid of her,’ I’m convinced we will lose one of the best leads we have for solving this case.”

  For a second, Trokan wondered if Jana was lying to him. But just for a second. Jana Matinova might shy away from telling him about an event or tiptoe around a subject she didn’t want to discuss, but she would never out-and-out lie to him. He relaxed, sitting back in his chair, waiting for her to explain.

  Jana went into the details.

  “Examine the shooting in the Berlin zoo. Why was Yunis in the zoo in the first place? The thought of the godfather of the Turkish community going to the zoo is ludicrous, unless he was there for a reason other than to see the penguins. He was there to further his criminal interests. He was standing, not walking and not eating, when the attack began. He wasn’t sightseeing. Yunis was waiting. It seems clear that he wasn’t waiting for those men, who had obviously come there to kill him. So he was waiting for someone else. Who?”

  Trokan sat even further back in his chair. “I assume you’re going to tell me in due time.”

  “It’s more fun making you guess.”

  “I don’t want to guess.”

  “Okay, don’t guess. Just listen.”

  “Don’t order me to do things.”

  “It wasn’t an order.”

  “It sounded like one.”

  “Can I go on with my reasoning?”

  “What do you think I’m waiting for?”

  “The men who came to kill me in the hubbly-bubbly café were told that I’d be there by Yunis. He told them because he wanted them to talk to me, not murder me. If Yunis didn’t tell the men to ambush me, then he would later know they’d disobeyed his order. He would never tolerate that sort of challenge. So they had to have been willing to confront his retaliation, to think they could do it and then get away with it. Why did they think so? Because they knew that there was someone else in this violent game of theirs who would save them. There was an individual or individuals who would take care of Yunis for them. Subsequently, Yunis is killed, not by his own people but by outside killers. My conclusion: I think we have multiple sides in what appears to be a continuing conflict.”

  “With one side represented by two rogue policemen who are brought in,” Trokan muttered. “Yunis on the other. And someone else as well.”

  “Right.”

  “Fighting over land, or rackets, or …?”

  “Money. Lots of money.”

  “The bank money?”

  “The bank money; maybe the banks themselves. We’re still probing. The big question now is this: how could those two men, the two men who were following me in Berlin, have known Yunis was in the park to begin with? They had to have been guided there. What, or who, brought them to that spot?”

  Trokan followed on with his own train of thought. “They were following you the day before; they picked up your trail again, trailing you to the zoo. You were careless when you thought they had given up their surveillance of you.” Trokan was immediately concerned with how his words sounded, not wanting her to think he’d launched a criticism. “Not your fault. You were in a strange city. You had no support. It could happen to the best of us.”

  “I know, Colonel.” She paused, satisfied that he had walked into the mousetrap she’d built. “Except I wasn’t careless. I frequently checked for anyone following me, on the U-Bahn and off, all the way from the hotel to the zoo, and often in the zoo. They weren’t there. Then, bang, they were. Someone else had told them we’d be there. They came because of information they’d received. And then they picked us up in the zoo, following us until we ran into Yunis, and then they began the attack.”

  “Who told them you’d be there? That Yunis would be there?”

  “That’s the big question of the day. There was another man who also followed me. I think that the two cops who had gone bad were killed by that man, after they killed Yunis. I think he arranged the whole business at the zoo. It will show up i
n the ballistics. I think the Germans will find that the two cops weren’t killed by the Turks.”

  “When will the Germans have ballistics?”

  Jana checked her watch. “They put a priority on it, so they should have at least a preliminary report by now.”

  He pushed his desk phone over to her side of the desk. “Call them.”

  Jana dialed the BKA’s number in Germany and got one of the investigators she’d interacted with in Berlin. The ballistics preliminary was done. The two men who had been trailing Jana and Em hadn’t been shot with the Turk’s guns. There had been another shooter at the scene. Jana hung up and nodded to the colonel.

  “The other man who had been shadowing you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We need to know who that man is.”

  “I’ll do my best to find out.”

  “And your best is always the best.” Trokan sounded satisfied. “Always,” he added, just to emphasize his feelings.

  She got up and started to the door. “I have more work to do.”

  He waited until she put her hand on the doorknob.

  “Have you ever heard of the Rostov Report?” he asked.

  Jana paused, looking back at him. There was a tone to the question that indicated that if she hadn’t heard about it, it would be a good thing if she found out what it was.

  “Anything you might tell me about it, Colonel?”

  He shrugged, as if he knew absolutely nothing about the report. “I heard someone in the ministry mention it, but it was unfamiliar to me, so I thought you might know about it.”

  “Why would I know, Colonel?”

  “You generally know everything else that goes on in the government.”

  “Just some of it. I’ve never heard of a Rostov Report.”

  But now she had. The colonel had been doing his own homework. He had told her something that was connected to her investigation on the Bogan case.

  “Hmm, I must be mistaken then,” Trokan said, his look and tone of voice indicating that he wasn’t mistaken. “Probably a report everyone is trying to keep secret. Secret reports have a way of sneaking out, don’t you agree?”