Requiem for a Gypsy

by Michael Genelin

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  She started out of the office, the colonel’s voice stopping her again.

  “You didn’t think I’d forgotten about the little girl, did you?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “You said she was one of the best leads in the case and that you couldn’t do it without her.”

  “I need more time to work on that, Colonel.”

  “You’re telling me the absolute truth?”

  “The absolute truth, Colonel.”

  “Careful with her, Jana.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.” She paused, a wry smile on her face. “The Rostov Report. There are so many things that go on in even a small government that we need to know about but don’t. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  She walked back to her office, all the while thinking about the Rostov Report. Whatever it was, Colonel Trokan had told her it was a secret. Something very big. The colonel would have given it to her, even taken the chance of slipping it to her “under the table,” if it hadn’t been a major state secret that even he didn’t have access to. Whatever he’d picked up about the report must have been minimal, but enough for him to know that she needed it. He couldn’t tell her what it contained, but he’d given her enough to go on.

  Rostov was a Russian name. If it was Russian and related to Slovakia, then it was probably linked to the Soviet occupation after the Second World War. The Russians had never been the great report writers that the Germans were, but winners like to bathe in their victory by rehashing, in print, their conquests and the spoils they get from them. They had written thousands of reports, examining every aspect of the dark era of the German occupation and the days that followed. Then, as with all government reports, they’d filed them, dossier after dossier, most of them never even opened for the public when Slovakia and the rest of the Eastern bloc had gone the way of the Berlin Wall. So if the Rostov Report was one of those files, it had been buried in the detritus of the years that followed, a mass of information that even the Russians had a hard time penetrating.

  What would the report analyze or recount? What specific act would it storyboard? Who would be the players on the pages of the history it related?

  If the report was connected in some way to the Bogan killings, then it was probably related to Jindrich Bogan, the man who had been killed in Paris. He and his parents had come from that period. Jana remembered the tattoo on Jindrich Bogan’s arm. The Hlinka Guard. She had to find someone who could tell her more about that period of history.

  The thought of the report and digging into the past made Jana think of another problem issue. She hadn’t focused enough on Klara Boganova, or rather the young Klara Zuzulova who had married Kralik and then divorced him to marry Bogan. Why had she done that and then taken up with Kralik again? Why the bizarre charade? Whatever it was, obviously Klara and Oto Bogan had spent their life together cultivating it.

  There was one person who might give her some of the information she needed. She called Comenius University. An hour later, she walked up the stairs into the half-rotunda of the front entrance.

  Chapter 39

  Comenius University was like a small baby that suddenly had become a giant: it just grew. With few other universities available, Comenius had thousands of students stuffed into one large building, several small ones nearby, and even smaller buildings scattered around the city. All of the buildings were old and crowded, and there was no funding available to ease the need for space. Anyone roving the halls had to be careful not to be crushed by the mass of humanity that filled them when the classrooms emptied.

  This was one of those times, with the students cramming the halls. There was nothing Jana could do but force her way through, murmuring apologies if she pushed too hard. She got to Milan Denka’s office by using her shoulders and elbows just like everyone else did, happy to finally slip through the outer door of the cramped suite. She made her way to Denka’s cubbyhole office, pausing for a moment to fix her disheveled appearance before she went inside.

  Denka was short, his clothes a little too big for his body, his features roseate, his once-thick red hair turning into thin pink wisps. His appearance belied the fact that he had one of the best legal minds in Bratislava. In addition to his duties as a professor of law at Comenius, he had a lively private practice that regularly placed him on the pages of the newspapers. He had also been Klara Boganova’s lawyer and was now in charge of her estate. Denka took his glasses off, standing up to greet Jana, the barest hint of a smile on his face.

  “It’s been a year or two, Commander. Since I defended our mutual friend Kamzik, the multiple murderer.”

  Jana remembered. Denka had almost delivered a miracle acquittal. Almost.

  “Professor-Doctor, thank you for seeing me.”

  He gestured her to a chair, sitting behind his desk again, pushing the books and papers that he’d been working on to one side to create a small open space between them.

  “I’ll write Kamzik and tell him you dropped by. He likes getting mail in prison. There’s not much else for him to do there but read.”

  “Better than killing people.”

  “True.” He looked her over. “I expected you to be running the police department by now, Commander.”

  Jana shook her head, pleased by the compliment but not entertained at the thought. “I have enough administrative duties as is, without having to take on more. I prefer what I do.”

  “I know what you mean.” He sighed to emphasize how difficult administrative work was. “Nobody likes paperwork, particularly trial lawyers.” He cleared his throat, becoming more businesslike. “I have a class soon, so I have a limited amount of time. How can I help you?”

  “I came to talk to you about Klara Boganova.”

  Denka’s eyes showed a flicker of interest. “I didn’t know you were still involved in the case.”

  “Just in a small way.”

  “It was no tragedy. I didn’t like the woman.” Denka enjoyed the surprise he saw in Jana’s face. “She’s dead. In the privacy of this room, I can now tell the truth about Klara Boganova.

  “She was extraordinarily mean-spirited, totally self-centered, determined to get her way, abusive to everyone around her. To know her was to loathe her. If she didn’t like you, she would do anything and everything to hurt you. The lady was a destroyer. Klara was my client, and I worked for her. But I stayed away from her as much as I possibly could.”

  “You weren’t there during the party when she was killed?”

  “My choice. I worked with her; I didn’t have to play with her.”

  “And her husband?”

  “A big, handsome, photogenic man with a toothy smile and a glad hand who did what she told him to do.”

  “And her son?”

  “I saw him a few times when he was young. I told you I stayed away from her as much as possible. In my profession, I mix with enough miserable people to know enough not to put myself through more of it in my off-hours by socializing with them.”

  “An aggressive woman who told her husband what to do. That suggests that she was also the business head in the family. Are you saying that?”

  “A controlling person. She was the boss, in everything. Everything!”

  “It would seem she was very successful at it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did she get her money from? Her family? Perhaps it was her husband’s money?”

  “You look at the basis of every great fortune and you’ll find a crime.” He smiled. “So I never ask that question. My clients might tell me something I don’t want to hear.”

  “They were into the banking business. I’m aware of the bank in Vienna. They also had a German operation. What else?”

  “You think the shooting was wrapped up with the banking business? Bankers kill people with debt, not with bullets.”

  “I’ve always thought bankers got their money using any means that they could.”

  Denka went into a desk drawer, pulled
out a thick folder, and began going through it.

  “You have the Vienna bank. There is also an interest in a bank in Berlin.” He read off the name. It was the bank that Yunis had owned the majority stock in. Denka closed his file. “I heard from another source that they were also negotiating for a bank in Moscow. It was not my brief, so I didn’t inquire. I know there was opposition to the purchase, but there always is from some stockholder or another.”

  Jana thought about the last time she had seen Klara, just before she was killed. A driven woman with all kinds of secrets, her financial acumen hidden; her relationship with her lover Kralik also concealed. Indeed, a wily person. But all her deviousness had not helped her when she ended up on the cement floor of the soundstage, a lump of bloody flesh.

  “Klara was a ‘distinctive’ woman,” Denka concluded, a pejorative note in his voice.

  “I would agree with that. Did you participate as their attorney in the purchase of the bank interests?”

  “No. They used attorneys in the countries where the acquisitions took place. They would know the law of that country, so it was good business to use them instead of me.”

  “Did the money come from Slovakia?”

  “Some of it, but not much.”

  “And the rest?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There had to be a very large amount of capital involved.”

  “There had to be.”

  “Professor, I have evidence that Klara Boganova took part in the planning of the shootings the night she was killed. It was her orders that set up the place where the murder weapons were stored.”

  Denka eyed her, the skepticism apparent on his face. “That’s hard to believe, particularly since she was the one who got killed.”

  “Bear with me on this for a moment. Assume she did what I’ve just told you. Assume, also, that there were two shooters. What would account for her being shot by the murderer when she had set it up?”

  Denka considered it. Before he could answer, Jana responded to her own question.

  “The murderer had his own agenda which Klara didn’t know about, or the shooter changed his mind about the target at the last minute, or there was another person we haven’t yet identified who was to be killed.”

  “Why do you think there was another person who was to be killed?”

  “Two shooters.”

  He thought about it for a moment, eventually nodding his head. “I concur. If there were two shooters set up by Klara, then there were two targets. One was Oto Bogan, who was only saved when Colonel Trokan took the bullets meant for him. And since his wife participated in setting up the killing, the intended second target would not have been her. It would have been someone else.”

  Jana thought about the intended target. It would have been the person who tried to warn Oto Bogan. Not Sipo, but the man who controlled Sipo, the fifth man at the meeting with the Turk. Jana was sure she now knew who the target was: the man she had seen at the party who had left early. He’d left knowing he would be a probable target if he stayed. It was the man Jana had chased. The man she thought was Makine.

  Klara believed she was going to dispose of her husband. She had also thought she would kill Makine.

  Only Makine was a hard man to kill.

  Moreover, there had also been an abrupt change of plans. The question was, who had changed the plans?

  “Anything else, Commander?” Denka asked. He put his file back in its drawer, signaling the end of their meeting. “I have to prepare for my class.”

  “You’ve helped.”

  “Being on the other side as a defense counsel doesn’t mean I’m a bad person and won’t aid the police when I’m asked.”

  “Would you have helped me if your client had been alive?”

  “Never.”

  They both knew where the other was coming from, each of them enjoying the knowledge of their difference.

  “My last request, Professor. Have you ever heard of the Rostov Report?”

  He ran the name through his mind. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Is there anyone at the school that you can think of who specializes in the history of the Soviet era? I’m looking for a professor who focuses, perhaps, on fairly recent history with particular focus on World War Two. Maybe with an emphasis on the factors that affected Slovakia’s postwar recovery.”

  “A surprise request coming from a police officer.”

  “All kinds of things surprise us in murder cases. Death is just another one of our larger surprises.”

  Denka suddenly snapped his fingers in remembrance.

  “There’s one person. His name is Professor Pechy, first name Henrich.” His face took on an annoyed look. “Sorry, he’s not in town. He is, I think, in Germany doing research.” He held a finger up indicating that she should wait, dialed a number on his desk phone, and almost immediately began speaking. “Where is Pechy doing his research?” He wrote the information down on a pad, hung up the phone, and handed the note to her.

  “I was right: Germany. He’s in Bad Arolsen. Doing research work at the International Tracing Archive. He won’t be back for at least a month. His cell number is on there.”

  She thanked him and walked out into the hall, prepared to do battle with the students again. But the halls were almost completely empty. It was class time.

  Chapter 40

  Jana drove back to the office and called the number Denka had given her for Pechy. She got a recorded answer and left a message for him to call her.

  She now had time to ease into a cup of coffee and catch up on the work she’d neglected while she was in Germany. On her desk were the Slovak newspapers she hadn’t read while she’d been away. She quickly went through them, skimming until she came across a small article on the second page of one of the papers. Georg Repka, the man who’d betrayed his schoolmates, the man who had given the speech excoriating the gypsies, dehumanizing them, calling for their deportation and perhaps through that process their destruction, was being considered by the current government for appointment as the Minister of Minorities. Impossible, thought Jana. They had forgotten, or chosen to ignore, what the man was.

  And what he was yesterday was exactly what he would be today: a man without scruples, a betrayer of ideals, a ruthless man who would go to any length to serve his self-interest without regard to the effect those actions would have on anyone else.

  Jana sat thinking, trying to decide what to do. She had confronted Repka when he had first railed against the Roms. Her mother had been aghast, and the fallout from their arguments about Repka had almost sundered their relationship. At the time, that confrontation had been all she could do about Repka. In retrospect, it had not been enough. He might soon be the minister in a department where he could, and would, wreak havoc on the minorities he would be pledged to protect.

  Jana had to take the responsibility to try and stop him.

  There was a small opening. Small, but maybe enough. There was a way to influence the other parties or people who might be concerned about his appointment, to call the problem to their attention in a way that would make them pay attention. Jiri Smid, the jailer’s son, was the one who could help her with this. Jana called him and told him that she wanted to employ him for something that wasn’t police work but was personal to Jana. His bill was to come directly to her.

  Then she told him exactly what she wanted.

  Jana continued with her other work and was on her second cup of coffee when she got the telephone call from France. Jobic Masson, the French detective, had found the Paris apartment where the man who had been killed by the hit-and-run driver had been living. He had been using the name Pascal Dionne. However, there was also additional identification in the man’s Saint-Paul apartment that told Masson that the man was, indeed, Jindrich Bogan. Masson rattled on and on, telling her enough about the apartment and its contents for Jana to realize that she needed to go to Paris.

  When she hung up, she called Colonel Trokan and told
him what she had learned, and, after their usual skirmish about how Jana was being profligate with Slovak police funds, he authorized her trip. She made reservations on an Austrian Air flight leaving the next day out of Vienna International Airport, then booked herself into a small Paris hotel on rue de Rivoli halfway between rue Saint-Paul, where she had been told that Jindrich Bogan’s apartment was, and Le Meurice, where his descendants were living. She was preparing to see three generations of Bogans, two living and one dead.

  Jana made one additional phone call, to the father of the gypsy boy. His wife came on the line and told Jana that her husband was in the northeast and would not be back until the following day. When the woman started to carry on again about her son, Jana quietly informed her that she hoped to have additional information on the case soon; but, in the meantime, she would be out of town herself and would call again when she got back to Bratislava.

  After she had hung up, she told Jonas and Grzner to find the two Roms who had been with the youth when he was shot in the throat, and to bring them in. The young men were in her office within two hours.

  The two sat in the small interrogation room for thirty minutes while Grzner and Jonas listened and recorded their conversations, waiting for them to talk about the death of the gypsy youth. It was an exercise in futility, the two of them not saying anything except when one sponged a cigarette off of the other, and to briefly complain about the room being cold.

  Jana reviewed the reports, including the toxicology on the dead youth. No question about it in Jana’s mind now. She went into the interrogation room, Grzner and Jonas taking up positions behind the youths, Jana sitting at the table in front of them.

  She laid the toxicology report down on the table and told them to read it. One of them picked up the report, glanced at it, a blank look on his face, then quickly put it down. The other made no attempt to even pick it up. Both of them stared at her, not even trying. It was obvious: they couldn’t read.

  It was not unusual for Jana to run into this with gypsies. The two young men sitting in front of her were the product of gypsy poverty and distrust of the gaje. They wouldn’t mix with the surrounding Slovak community. They had probably never been to public school because of that distrust. Jana didn’t blame them for this distrust. The Roms had been betrayed too many times before not to have had it deeply ingrained in their belief system. Jana sat back and told them what the report said. They looked at her blankly.