Border Angels

by Anthony Quinn

  “Please, I don’t want to go down that path.”

  Daly understood the request and said nothing. His instinct told him he had more to lose by aggravating her at this early stage in the investigation.

  “Jack made his mistakes, but he always told me everything,” she said. “I helped him confront his demons. That woman tried to get her claws into him, but he broke free.” Pain etched an almost vulnerable human face on her hard features. “We were married for over ten years, but Jack liked to be carefree. Deep down he still thought he was twenty-one. That’s all I can say for now.”

  Afterward, Daly returned to his office and contacted the duty inspector in Monaghan, the nearest Garda headquarters. He suspected that with her lover dead under mysterious circumstances, Lena Novak might have escaped across the border into a different police jurisdiction.

  He did not recognize the inspector’s name, but he had a friendly voice. Daly introduced himself. He described Fowler’s girlfriend and found himself poring over her photograph. He took in the curves of her long body leaning back in Fowler’s oversized jacket, the slack features of her bored but pretty face, the tilt of her half-closed eyes, and the glimmer of what might have been vengeance or fear in her dark pupils. What made her so different from the other women Fowler had met in the course of his high-powered life? Daly thought he could detect the fatalistic attraction, the air of detachment in her face coupled with a lonely vulnerability that must have made Fowler’s imagination take flight. In an unsubtle way, Lena Novak could be summed up in one word. Risk.

  Daly was glad he was a policeman and not a gambler like Fowler. His brain had grown sharper and more perceptive to the dangers such adventures posed. He was also glad he had not invested in the property market or sold his father’s run-down cottage when even disused sheds commanded six-figure sums. His chances of growing rich had passed him by. Poor men could not afford to take risks, which made them unadventurous lovers but better citizens.

  When Daly described Lena, the policeman on the other end of the line paused. “Pretty girl?” he asked.

  “Yes. We believe she was trafficked from Croatia.”

  “A prostitute?”

  “She’d been forced to work in a brothel.”

  “I’ll put out an alert for her, but don’t count on anything. A girl like that will have disappeared like smoke. She won’t need to worry about picking up a lift. Is her English good?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her.”

  “What has she done?”

  “Nothing. Yet. But we believe her boyfriend might have been murdered.”

  “Lena is a popular name among Croatians. So too is Novak. As common as Murphy or Kelly.”

  “Are you suggesting she’s using an alias?”

  “I’m only telling you it’s a common name.”

  Daly put the phone down. He had no way of knowing if Lena was her real name. In fact, her entire identity was as nebulous as a ghost. The only hard evidence of her existence was this photo and a set of footprints in the snow that had melted away. They were like the first clues in an interesting game of hide-and-seek. He stared at the photo, examining her image closely, her slender slouching shape, the body that was hers but somehow not her own. In his mind’s eye, he saw her half-sleeping eyes open wide and her face lean forward to mouth the words Shall I take off the jacket now?

  He put the photo away, feeling tense, as though he had opened a door that could not be closed. The darkness of her eyes had threatened to pull him down into a deep river rushing through the night.

  9

  When Lena awoke, the first thing she felt was anger at men, and in particular her lover, the businessman who had promised to rescue her from her violent pimp but had succeeded only in opening the door to more dangerous enemies. Then she remembered she did not have a lover anymore. Nor a home, or any place she could regard as a safe refuge.

  She slid her arm from under the blanket and checked her watch. 7:15 a.m. She began to organize her thoughts. Each time she had awoken in the past six months, the second feeling that invariably followed her anger was one of overwhelming homesickness. This morning was no different as she stared at the crystal chandelier dangling above, glittering in the early morning sunlight. Despite its closeness, the chandelier belonged to a distant world. The unattainable world of mortgages, well-paid jobs, and nine-to-five respectability.

  She had a bunch of keys in her purse and could have chosen any of a dozen houses to spend the night in, all of them still smelling of fresh paint and varnish and furnished with every comfort she needed. Everything, that is, except the security and warmth of a home. This house with its crystal chandeliers was not her home. That place lay somewhere deep in her past.

  The keys belonged to her dead lover, Jack Fowler. They represented what was left of his property empire. The doors themselves and everything else about the houses belonged to the banks. She owned the keys now, but in financial terms, they were worthless to her.

  A couple more days and I’ll be away from all this, she told herself. All she had to do was get to Dublin, purchase a false passport, wait for Jack’s money to come through, and then book the first flight home. True, there were obstacles to be surmounted, and events had taken a dangerous turn for the worse. She was a fugitive now, on the run from not only her torturer and pimp, but also the police and all those to whom Fowler owed money.

  Carefully, she made the bed and plumped the pillows, ensuring no trace of her presence remained. At 7:25 a.m., she slipped out the back door of number 84. She ran like a guilty party guest past the neat lawn, the clipped foliage, and the For Sale sign. There was no other evidence of human life on the street. Rows of identical houses stared blankly at their mirror reflections, each with its own collection of tired-looking For Sale signs. She had become an invisible woman hiding in an estate of empty homes, a ghost estate.

  A taxi waited for her on the main road. She climbed in and gave the driver directions. It was not the first time she had directed a taxi to take her by Fowler’s mansion, but it was most likely the last. Previously, her secretive excursions left her feeling foolish and excited as she succumbed to the recurring daydream of a settled life with her lover. In her mind she kept looping over the same fairy tale—that she was his Cinderella and he was her Prince Charming. She had hoped that some day she could just enter his life, right at the happy-ever-after ending.

  However, this time she had returned to make sure the fairy tale was over. She scanned the tree-lined drive, the side gardens, the front of the house, the double doors that she always suspected would never open for her, in spite of Fowler’s promises. Everything looked as she expected. However, she still wanted to make sure. She counted two police cars, what she took to be a forensics van, and four private cars. She knew the swimming pool lay at the rear of the house. She asked the driver to switch off the engine and wait for a moment. She said good-bye to the mansion where her lover had led his normal family life, tucked in his children most nights, drank a glass or two of wine before climbing into bed beside his faithful wife, while, unbeknownst to her, his libido was pulling his life in an entirely different direction.

  She rolled the window down a chink and leaned back, lowering her body slightly. The wind smelled of the first wild blossoms of spring fed from the hedgerows. Men and women in white forensic suits bustled around the house, carrying bags and different types of equipment. Everything was silent. Not the usual silence that hung over the house and its grounds. This time the silence was different. Deeper. No matter how expert the forensics people were, she doubted if they would ever be able to fathom the depths of that silence.

  A window opened on the second floor. It was as if the house had suddenly woken up and blinked at her. A young girl stared out. She appeared to be looking straight at the taxi. Lena slid down farther and asked the driver to move off.

  She had found out about Jack’s death b
y accident. He had not rung or answered her calls, and then in a supermarket she saw his face staring from the front page of a newspaper. She did not understand all the words, but worked out he had drowned in his swimming pool and that either suicide or foul play was suspected.

  In shock, she bought a bottle of vodka and stepped onto the street. Cars raced by and she trembled. Behind her, she could hear the patter of quick feet. She sensed the press of pursuit and wheeled around, but all she saw was a group of schoolgirls giggling together. Her dress fluttered in the wind of a lorry hurtling past. She was alone again. She resisted an urge to ring Jack’s home number and fire questions at whoever answered. Her deepest fear was that Mikolajek had found Jack and murdered him in revenge. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to make inquiries about his death without drawing attention to herself, and doing that was the last thing she wanted.

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around.

  “Is this yours?” One of the schoolgirls stood with a purse in her hands.

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you.” The purse lay open, displaying a picture of Jack.

  “Is something wrong?” The girl waited, hesitant.

  “Not me. Him. Yes.”

  Concern and curiosity showed in the girl’s face. “Do you need someone to help you home?”

  “I don’t know where home is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lena tried to smile. “I have no home.”

  “How can you not have a home?”

  Lena walked away quickly. At least Jack had made it home, she thought with sudden bitterness. Even at the moment of his death, as he toppled toward the water, he would have been able to raise his eyes and take one final look at the house he had built for his wife and children.

  She went back to the flat he had rented for her and packed what she needed. Over the sink, she cut her hair. Soon the bowl was brimming with loose black strands. She did not wait to get it right. She just wanted it as short as possible. Her hair fell like a set of curtains over the final moments of the old Lena and all the disappearing dreams of her future.

  After the taxi pulled away from the mansion, she directed the driver to the town’s ATM machine. However, a mound of rubble surrounded by police tape and an abandoned JCB digger greeted them. The driver informed her that a gang of thieves had been ripping out the machines in towns all along the border. “Someone must have trouble remembering their PIN,” he quipped.

  Determined to get her hands on as much cash as possible, Lena asked him to drive to a garage on the road south. She remembered the assistant at the till, a sleepy-looking, overweight young man. Each time she went in to buy cigarettes he had hitched his jeans up, smoothed back his hair, and followed her movements around the shelves.

  This time, his eyes locked on her as soon as she entered. She did not feel nervous. She convinced herself the life she was moving through was someone else’s. She forced herself to return his lustful stare and watched the tremor of foreboding that briefly clouded his features as she drew closer. She placed the credit card bearing Jack Fowler’s name on the counter, and he glanced down at it with a strained look.

  Without a trace of emotion, she asked for one hundred boxes of cigarettes. King-size.

  He scratched his neck and glanced briefly at the manager’s office. Then he looked at the card, shrugged, and put it in the chip reader. When the machine verified the PIN, he began packing the cartons in several large bags. She was relieved to see that the card still worked. When he had finished, he looked at her and frowned. He appeared reluctant to hand over the bags.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  His frown deepened. “Don’t you know smoking is bad for your health?”

  She relaxed. “Everyone needs a vice.”

  He breathed out a sigh. “Now, that’s the truth.”

  Afterward, she took the cigarettes to a house in the town. A woman with an anxious face opened the door.

  “Lena!” she said, in surprise. “You can’t come here.”

  “I wasn’t expecting an invite.”

  “If you want to get yourself killed, do it on someone else’s doorstep.”

  “This is business, Martha,” she replied. “I need cash.”

  She pushed the bags of cigarettes at her. The woman looked inside and nodded.

  “You’ve left a big mess behind,” she warned. “It doesn’t look good for you, but I’ll give you the money for these. That’s all I can do.”

  Afterward, Lena walked to the bus station. For the first time in a couple of days, she felt good. Untouchable. In charge of her own destiny. Stuffed into an empty cigarette box in her purse were more than five hundred euros in notes, all flying the flag of the European Union.

  A bus was due to leave at 6:00 p.m. for Dublin. She bought a ticket and boarded it. The city would be less oppressive than this lonely border country, she told herself. In a few hours, she would step off the bus and disappear into Dublin’s noisy streets, leaving behind her cramped fears forever.

  However, as the bus began to pull out of the station, she was seized by a feeling of uneasiness. She stared blankly at her reflection in the window, her shorn head hanging over the darkening countryside like a fading image from an unfinished dream. The bus trundled down the road. It was not the memory of all that had happened to her that preoccupied her, but the thought of all she had left undone. She realized she was not yet ready to leave this border country; it had become part of her. She carried a secret knowledge of the men who had visited her. Their inner lives were etched into her consciousness. Her mind churned through their stories, their fears and complaints, the miserable little crosses they carried on their backs. The sense of revulsion inside her grew strong. The border country had turned her into its prey, and she could not bear the thought that in some way she had been its victim. Her eyes clouded over. Her fantasies of escape dissolved, and in their place, a darker and more desperate plan returned to preoccupy her mind. She had to put things right before she departed.

  Grabbing her bag, she ran to the front of the moving bus and told the driver she was feeling sick. He pulled in at the next lay-by and opened the door.

  She jumped out before the vehicle had fully stopped. Life was a parachute jump, she told herself; you just had to hold your nerve.

  10

  On his way to his ex-wife’s house in the city, Daly stopped at a florist’s and bought two dozen freshly cut daffodils. He hoped they would remind Anna of the spring they had met, when the flowers bloomed in wild profusion along the banks of the river Lagan.

  A young man opened the front door with a fixed smile and blank blue eyes.

  “Hello,” said Daly. “I’m Anna’s ex-husband.”

  “Oh, yes. She’s expecting you.”

  “Brian is it?”

  “No, Tom.”

  “What happened to Brian? You change so often.”

  “Anna’s needs are very complex.” There was a slight hint of reproach in his voice.

  “I’m well aware of her needs,” said Daly coldly.

  “You’ll find her in the living room.”

  Anna had just had a massage. She lay on a bed in the middle of the room. The smell of lavender oil hung in the air. She was asleep. Daly placed the flowers in a vase and peeked at the rest of the house. The walls had been painted white and the blinds removed from the windows. Most of their furniture was gone. He wondered how she could live in such a blank space. The layout of the rooms had also changed. She had installed a bathroom downstairs and lowered the worktops in the kitchen. Anna had reorganized her life completely. He glanced into the study, which had been formerly his refuge, the place where in the evenings after getting back from work he would stretch out on the sofa and play his music. She had converted the room to a laundry. The cozy house in which they had spent ten years of married life and whose walls contained man
y happy memories was gone forever.

  He went through the other rooms of the house, his eyes scanning every horizontal surface and corner as if he was searching for a clue, or a missing household object. All the time his mind raced through his memories. He was about to climb into the attic and start loading up his boxes when he heard her stir. By the time he came back down the stairs, Tom had brought in a wheelchair and was positioning her for a lift. He slung her arm around his neck and swiveled her to the edge of the bed. Daly tried to help but next to Tom’s expert movements, his efforts were blundering, inexperienced. His hands grasped at her lower back, but she brushed him away.

  “Tom’s the nurse, not you. I can manage without your help.”

  “Of course you can,” he replied. He noticed that her hair had been cut short, spiky at the top. Her clothes were different, too. More casual and tight-fitting, the high sleeves of her blouse revealing her toned muscular arms. She noticed his gaze and touched her hair self-­consciously as if trying to smooth it down. He suspected her new image was a way of making a fresh start, as if she had to adopt a disguise­ to escape the pain of the past.

  She wheeled herself into the kitchen and began putting away the dishes and pots from the dishwasher. She swung the wheelchair about the room with a determined vitality as though making a show of how well she could cope. She had convinced herself that apart from the assistance of the nurses, she was competent and independent. And he had done the same. It was a game they had played, to delude themselves into believing that nothing had changed after the car crash. But, of course, everything had changed. When she learned she would never walk again, she built a barrier of privacy around herself, one that was breached only by medical professionals. He thought her disability would make her more vulnerable, but the loss of her legs had hardened her heart. Six months after coming home from the hospital, she became the executioner of their troubled marriage.