Depraved Indifference

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Another transformation. Cindy’s face grew hard, her fine jaw tightened, and her blue eyes popped with anger. Her voice grew loud, strident. “What do they know? They don’t know anything about it. You don’t know anything. It was discipline. A fighter has to be perfect. I did everything for him. I became a Catholic. I learned the language, the history, hours and hours, listening to him talking. And then I had to give the right answers, perfectly. Sometimes I couldn’t, I was still too soft, a soft, materialistic American baby-girl. But I deserved it. He did it where it wouldn’t show. You can’t understand what it was like—he was making me a perfect hard tool of the struggle. And I was, I was perfect.”

  “I see. And your affair with Pavle Macek, was that part of the struggle, too?”

  A shadow of fear crossed her face. “I never did! How did you … I mean, what are you talking about?”

  “Come on, sister, you haven’t been exactly discreet. That little expedition to the john on the airplane? Does your husband know?”

  “No! It’s nothing with Macek. It’s just something that happened. Macek is a tool of the struggle, also. And he was a hero in the war, with Djordje.”

  “OK, now it seems to me that despite this perfect discipline, the tools of the struggle are a little blunt. You screwed up the hijack, you blew up a cop, and now you’re in jail. Did Karavitch plan this mess?”

  Cindy shook her head and a pitying smile appeared on her lips. “You think we failed? You have no idea, no idea at all. We are martyrs. We lit a torch for the Croatian people that will never go out. In Croatia they sing ballads about heroes who fell against the Turks five hundred years ago. They’ll sing the same kind of songs about Karavitch five hundred years from now, and about all of us. You think they’ll sing any songs about you, Miss Ciampi?”

  “I never gave it much thought. Who had the idea of rigging the bomb with a booby trap? Was that Karavitch, too?”

  She became wary. “You said I didn’t have to say anything against my husband.”

  “No, you don’t. But Macek, the things were made in his shop. He must have done the actual work.”

  “We all did. We all did it together,” she declared proudly.

  That’s a lie, Marlene thought, everybody in your little cell was playing a different game. She closed her notepad and said casually, “Well, Cindy, thank you for your cooperation. I think that will be all for now. Oh, by the way, has it ever been suggested to you that your husband is someone other than Djordje Karavitch, the Croatian hero? That he might be a German SS officer named Josef Dreb?”

  The reaction was explosive. Cindy Karavitch came out of her chair like a parting steel cable, her face white with rage. “That’s bullshit!” she cried. “Bullshit! Why are you fucking with my mind?” She turned to the startled Evans. “I’m tired of this. Get me the fuck out of here!”

  Then her face went bright red and she brought her hand up over her mouth. “Oh, my God, my language. Oh, God, he hates me to use bad language.” She looked pleadingly at Marlene. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

  “No, dear,” Marlene said gently, “your secret is safe with me.”

  “So what do you think?” Karp asked after Marlene had given him a quick briefing on her interrogation of Cindy Karavitch. The two of them were huddled in the hallway outside the interrogation room, waiting for the guards to bring in Pavle Macek.

  “What do I think? A nut case, is what I think. Christ, Butchie, it was like Three Faces of Eve in there. She’s got her whole life built around this sado-maz relationship with the old man. He tortures her and she takes it, because it’s for the struggle. She went batshit when I suggested that Georgie the K. might not be Mr. Croatia. I don’t think she knows, and if she suspects, she’s buried it deep, about two feet under Rosebud. Another thing—she might rat out Macek, but she’s tied to the old man solid.”

  “Yeah, as long as he’s who she thinks he is. Does he have the scar?”

  “She says yes.”

  “OK, that’s great, I can use all that. See you later.”

  When Karp came into the interrogation room, Evans was whispering in Macek’s ear. Whatever he was saying was not making Macek any happier. He looked like a caged wolf with an ingrown fang. Karp went through the usual preliminaries, then said, “Mr. Macek, just for background, could you tell me how you first met Djordje Karavitch?”

  Macek glanced nervously at Evans, who nodded. When he spoke, his voice was a slow growl. “It was during the war, in 1943. I was a schoolboy. This was in a little town outside Glina, in Croatia. My father was an important man, a leader of the Croat Peasant Party. One night there was an attack by the partisans, the communists. They took over the town and sent squads to the homes of prominent people, those who supported the Pavelic regime. I woke up to hear voices from the parlor downstairs, shouts. I heard my mother screaming. There were shots, explosions all around. I was frightened and hid under the bed. When I came downstairs I found my mother dead in the doorway. My father had been shot against the wall and thrown into the farmyard. Our pig was eating him.

  “The ustashi troops came and drove the partisans away. I went to the town square to find someone to bury my parents. The ustashi had captured some communists. They were beating and kicking them around the square and stabbing them with their knives. Then they started to cut their throats. I went up to one of the ustashi officers who were watching this, and I said who I was and what had happened in my house, and could they help me with my parents. One officer said he would send some men. Then I asked if I could kill one of the communists. The officer laughed and said if I had the balls for it I could, and gave me his knife. That was Karavitch.

  “I took the knife and cut the communist’s throat. I felt nothing for him, I just thought, here might be the one who killed my mother. Afterward, Karavitch put his arm around me and said I was now a child of the Croatian nation, and he would take care of me. From that day to this day, we have been together.”

  “Uh-huh. OK, let’s bring it a little closer to the present. Who was responsible for planning the hijacking of Flight 501?”

  A slight hesitation. “We all were equally.”

  “Including Raditch? I think he would have a hard time planning which shoe to put on first.”

  “No, not Raditch, but the rest, all of us were equal.”

  “Really? I thought Karavitch was the leader.”

  “Of course. Yes, he is the leader.”

  “So it was his idea.”

  “He led and we all contributed our parts.”

  “And your part was manufacturing the bombs?”

  “No.”

  “The fake bomb on the plane and the real one that was booby-trapped to kill a policeman?”

  “I don’t wish to answer this question.”

  “OK, let’s try something else. You must really admire Mr. Karavitch, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, he is the greatest man I have ever known.”

  “How about Mrs. Karavitch? Do you admire her too?”

  “She is a fine woman.”

  “I’m sure she is. Does the great man know you are sleeping with her?”

  “That is a lie!”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t, Mr. Macek. There are witnesses to your carrying-on while aboard Flight 501, and the relationship has been confirmed by Mrs. Karavitch herself not ten minutes ago. Mrs. Karavitch was, in fact, quite forthcoming with my colleague. She said that you, and you alone, manufactured the bomb that killed the police officer.”

  “That is a lie! It was—” He stopped and pressed his mouth tightly into a white line under his fierce mustache.

  “It was who, Mr. Macek?”

  “I do not wish to answer this question.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Macek. We know you built the bomb, and we know where, and what with. You were with Karavitch during the war. You were a bright kid, it shouldn’t have been hard to learn how to rig a RDO1Z booby trap. It would have been nothing for you to attach it to the pot bomb you made wi
th the Soviet hand grenade you got from the Cubans at Tel-Air. No, we know all that. What we don’t know is why. Why would a guy like Karavitch with a nice little terrorist network of his own, surrounded by worshipful supporters, pull a stunt like hijacking a jetliner and killing a cop? Got any ideas on that, Mr. Macek?”

  As Karp spoke, Macek’s jaw had been dropping by millimeters, until his mouth was nearly wide open. Karp could see his large yellow teeth. His amber eyes were wide and his forehead was slick with sweat. “You know all this? How do you know all this?”

  “How? No problem, Mr. Macek. Your girlfriend and her husband decided that you were the disposable side of the triangle. They’re singing like birds and you’re being set up to take the fall on this. Now, you understand that all parties to a felony murder are equally culpable, but in practice we usually single out the trigger man for special treatment. And that’s you. No, don’t look at Mr. Evans, Mr. Macek! He can’t help you. There’re only two people in this room who can help you: me and yourself.”

  Evans cleared his throat. “Mr. Macek, you are under no compulsion to answer any questions.”

  Way to go, Evans, Karp thought. Just getting on the record to eliminate the possibility of a legal malpractice suit. “Shut up” is always good advice. Now let’s see if your client takes it.

  “Mr. Evans is correct, Mr. Macek,” he said. “How about it? You want to let things stand as they are? Or would you like to straighten out my impression?”

  Macek licked his lips and shook his head, as if to rattle his thoughts into order. “It was her,” he said, grinding the words out like hard grain. “It started … she came to me in the shop. She knew I wanted her, I wanted her from the first time he brought her around. He would beat her with a strap, and later she would show me the marks he made. On her thighs, her back, and lower down. She would let me touch the marks. I would sympathize. I would say, you should leave him, but always she would go back. He was like God to her. So we started together.”

  “Did he know?”

  “Did he know? Of course, he knew. He knows everything. He came to me, he grabbed my throat, he would have killed me, but then he remembered. If I should die like that, they would find papers that I have hidden with someone. A secret that would destroy him, the great Croatian national hero.”

  “You mean that Karavitch is really Josef Dreb?”

  “My God! You know this?”

  “It’s all over town. The question is, how come he let you live so long knowing that secret? Why didn’t he kill you back in Trieste? Come to that, why did you hang out with him so long?”

  Macek said, “Please, I must have a cigarette.” He lit one with trembling fingers, sucked the smoke deep, and blew out twin plumes from flared nostrils. “First, you must understand, as I was to Karavitch, so was Karavitch to Dreb. Dreb was a Croatian with the power of the Germans behind him. They used to talk for hours about the world after the war. Over maps they would talk about a Greater Croatia, from the Adriatic to Bulgaria and up to the Danube. Karavitch was a big frog in a small pond, but Dreb was the biggest frog any of us had ever seen. He knew Heydrich, he had talked with Himmler, he dealt with Pavelic as an equal.

  “When it started to collapse, Karavitch could not bear it. He was a dreamer, and only that. Dreb had great dreams, but at the root he was a survivor. Karavitch wanted to die in Zagreb, fighting the partisans. But when the partisans broke through the Srem front, Dreb made him escape with the SS. He began to drink. He was useless. When our column was ambushed by the partisans, I had to drag him into the truck. Of all the ustashi in the column, only we two escaped. Dreb made the contacts with church groups, using Karavitch’s name. They knew him, you see. We had travel papers, Karavitch and I. We parted in Hungary and we thought we would never see Dreb again.

  “Karavitch and I wound up in Trieste. We had a tiny room, a little bigger than a closet, and we were lucky to get it. He would lie in bed all day ranting and drunk. I would try to find food for us and grappa for him. Steal it, usually. I found out I was a survivor, too. One day I come back to the room. Dreb is there and Karavitch is lying on the bed with his throat cut. Dreb tells me he found him like this. I believe him. People in those days would kill you for a pair of shoes, a half kilo of cheese. Also, if I don’t believe him, if I believe he killed Karavitch himself, then he will know it, and he will kill me too. I was sixteen and I wanted to live.

  “So, he says he will take Karavitch’s papers and we will escape together. They look very much alike, did I mention that? They could have been brothers. He says he has a contact with the U.S. Army. We will go away and work for them and have lots of food and clothes and not have to run any more. But first he must tattoo numbers under Karavitch’s arm, where all the SS have them. Then they will think the body is Dreb. He has the equipment. I don’t know where he got it, but he has it, and he does the job. Underneath his own arm there is a bandage. He has taken off his own number.

  “So then I realize, he is not going to kill me. He needs me. Who can vouch for Djordje Karavitch better than his little shadow, Pavle Macek? I tell him everything about Karavitch, so he can pass better, and I know a lot about Karavitch: his mother, his father, his schools, he is allergic to milk, everything. Karavitch likes to talk about himself, and I am always there, like a dog at his feet. But with such a man as Dreb, it is a good thing not to be too trusting. So when we come to America I write a paper, and I give it to someone I know, someone important to Croatian affairs here in New York, and say if I die, to open it and tell everyone what is inside.”

  “That’s interesting. Is this just a letter, or is there documentary proof that he isn’t Karavitch?”

  “There are no documents, only my word, but that is good enough.”

  Yeah, thought Karp, it was before you started balling his old lady. Now your word isn’t worth shit. “OK, go on,” he said. “How come you’re still with him?”

  “As for that, you should also understand that what I have felt for Karavitch, so now I feel for Dreb. But Dreb is no longer Dreb—he becomes Karavitch. He does all the things Karavitch would do, among the Croatians here in New York, but better even than the real Karavitch would have done. He is stronger, more powerful. And I follow him, and things go well, until her.

  “Now he is getting old and she is so young and beautiful, an American, a girl from the West. But he cannot bear such a free creature always around him. So he must break her to his will. And how does he do this? As he learned in Keinschlag, in the SS school there. Discipline. Political lectures. History. We are going back to Croatia, we will crush the reds, the people will rise to welcome us, and so on, year after year.

  “And he succeeds. She is on fire to liberate Croatia. To strike a blow. She is tamed, but she is no lapdog. He has made a wolf. He beats her—she loves it, she laughs in his face—‘Make me hard,’ she says, ‘to fight for Croatia.’ I am a Croatian, and he is half Croatian, and she never saw Croatia, but she is more Croatian than the two of us together.

  “Now she starts to taunt him. You know how emigrés are all the time talking, talking about what they will do, how to make the revolt, how it will be when they are in power. Especially Rukovina, chatter, chatter. She is at all the meetings. Afterward, she mocks us, Karavitch and me. Of course, she speaks Serbo-Croatian, so it’s even worse. She says we are not men, that we are chattering grandmothers. We are too fat and comfortable, she says, to really do anything. We are afraid of a little blood. She says this to us, we who have walked to our knees in blood.

  “I see it working on him. The Croatian people, the honor, the glory, all he taught her. You see, now he has forgotten he is Dreb. He is really Karavitch. And this plane, this bomb, this is what Karavitch would do, the mad gesture.”

  “And he got you to make the bomb?”

  “Me?” Macek laughed, an unlikely high cackle. “He built it. In my shop, as she looked on. She handed him the tools. He had saved this timer switch from the war, and his skill was still what it was. I wished many t
imes as I watched him that he would slip, and we would all be blown to Hell.”

  “So who did it? Macek or Karavitch?” Marlene asked as they waited in the hallway for Karavitch to be brought up from the pens.

  “Damned if I know. Not that it matters. We got the story now and we got our shocker. He’s dead meat.”

  “Get ’em, tiger.”

  The man who called himself Djordje Karavitch smiled broadly after Karp had laid out, point by point, the case against him. “Come, now, Mr. Karp, you must try something better than that. I have also interrogated prisoners in my time, and of course, the game is to convince one that the others have betrayed him, so that he will in turn betray them. I compliment you; you have learned a good deal about the construction of this bomb you claim has killed a policeman, and you may have convinced my wife and Macek to say that I made it. But what is that good for? Do you believe a man in my position would risk all to construct a booby trap with the sole purpose of killing a policeman? And you say it was to impress my wife?

  “And yet you know my wife has betrayed me with this man. Will anyone accept the evidence of these two lovebirds against me? I would not need the services of so distinguished a law firm as the one Mr. Evans represents to make a fool of you in court.”

  “Yes, but it’s not likely that you will have the services of Arthur Bingham Roberts much longer.”

  “Oh?” Karavitch looked toward Evans, who shrugged.

  “Uh-huh. Because the Church put up the money to pay for defending Djordje Karavitch, who is a kind of hero in its eyes. And you’re not Djordje Karavitch.”

  The old man barked a laugh. “That is insane. Has someone been filling your head with nonsense about me?”

  “Nope. I figured it out all by myself. With some help from the Mossad. You know about the Mossad, don’t you? You’ve probably felt their breath on you from time to time.” Karp reached into his briefcase and pulled out the Yugoslav poster with the young Karavitch’s picture on it. “Would you examine that, please?”