Page 21 of The Nameless Ones
‘I’ll look after everything,’ said Mrs Bondarchuk as she fed pieces of sausage to the Pomeranians.
‘I know you will,’ said Angel. ‘Having you here is a weight off our minds.’
He meant it, too, and she knew he did. He patted her hand, and Mrs Bondarchuk grinned fit to burst.
And while Angel spoke with Mrs Bondarchuk, Louis again went over the documents passed to him by Ross, even as he understood that the knowledge they contained was insufficient for his purposes.
Five names.
He had no idea where these men might be. For all he knew, they could already be back in their own country, and Louis’s cursory knowledge of Serbian culture suggested that, if this was the case, a black man would have difficulty operating inside its borders without attracting attention. At the minimum he would be an object of curiosity, and that was before he began asking questions about Serbian criminals. A black American, meanwhile, might even be a lightning rod for overt hostility, given that US planes had helped NATO bomb some sense into the Serbs in 1999, killing over a thousand soldiers and police, and half as many civilians. If the Vuksans were in Serbia, Louis’s hopes of striking at them were minimal.
Only their lawyer, Frend, was immediately locatable, but it wasn’t as though Louis could pull up in front of Frend’s Viennese office, Sachertorte in hand, knock on the door, and ask after a bunch of Serbs. For the first time, Louis felt the futility of what he was attempting. He was already out of his depth. With the exception of a Dutch private investigator, everyone he knew in the Netherlands was now dead. He had a vague promise of assistance from Ross, a federal agent whom he did not trust, and an unknown intermediary in the Netherlands, courtesy of that same agent. From what Ross had said at the St. Regis, Louis guessed that the intermediary was, if not a serving spook, then a former one, and nobody could trust a spy.
Louis took the documents and photographs to his office, where he scanned them before emailing them to a secure dropbox. He then placed the paperwork in the fireplace and set it alight. From his armchair, he watched the faces of the five Serbs curl up and burn.
He would try, for the sake of De Jaager and the rest. It was all he could do.
Five criminals. Five Serb killers.
Unfortunately, government agencies are systemically unreliable.
Because unbeknownst to them, there was a sixth.
Chapter XXII
The Vuksans and their people headed first to Germany, avoiding the larger urban centers and keeping electronic communication to a minimum. The Serbs were deeply embedded in the German criminal underworld, mostly through prostitution and narcotics, and many were ex-military. While some might have sympathized with the Vuksans’ plight, they would be unwilling to endanger their own lives by offering help, even if – as was likely – Belgrade had not cautioned against it. If the Vuksans turned to them, they risked being betrayed.
But there were some on whom they could still rely, men whose loyalties extended back to the days of Tito, and so the Vuksans traveled to the farm of Gavrilo Dražeta near Kassel in Central Germany.
None of his neighbors knew Dražeta by his old name. Here he was István Adami, a Hungarian of German ancestry, although one with only the most distant of Teutonic relatives remaining alive, and they resided far to the east, or so he told anyone who asked. Thanks to his late mother, Dražeta spoke fluent Hungarian, which helped maintain his cover and hide him from his enemies.
Dražeta was a former security officer with the JNA, the Yugoslav People’s Army, who had fought the Croats at Vukovar in 1991, where fewer than two thousand Croatian national guardsmen, supported by civilians, were besieged by more than thirty-five thousand heavily armed Serb paramilitaries and JNA soldiers. The Croats held out for nearly three months before the city finally fell. Dražeta was among those who had supervised the executions and ethnic cleansing that followed, including the massacre of two hundred prisoners at Ovcara farm. It was said that it was he who had come up with the concept of ‘running the gauntlet’, whereby the prisoners at Ovcara, civilians and wounded among them, were forced to clear two rows of Serbs armed with chains, bats, and blades before being dispatched. Among those who had aided him in this endeavor was the late and largely unlamented Andrej Buha, aka Timmerman.
Dražeta technically remained a person of interest to war crimes investigators, and had long been under indictment by the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, before it ceased operation in 2017. He had avoided apprehension because his German papers were flawless, thanks to the efforts of Radovan Vuksan. It was the least Radovan could have done for his old partner, for it was Dražeta who had arranged the safe transportation of looted art out of the ruins of Vukovar, and Radovan who had organized its sale. Now Dražeta lived a dull but comfortable pseudonymous existence among dull but comfortable Germans, in a dull but comfortable house with a dull but comfortable wife.
‘Are you sure he can be trusted?’ Spiridon asked his brother, as their convoy pulled up in Dražeta’s yard.
Spiridon had never been convinced of the wisdom of aiding Dražeta’s retirement to Germany, not with the indictment hanging over him. It would have been better had he remained in Serbia, where he was less at risk of extradition. Here in Germany Dražeta had undoubtedly grown lazy and soft, and soft, lazy men were vulnerable to pressure when the authorities came calling.
‘If he was going to betray us,’ said Radovan, ‘he could have done so a long time ago.’
‘The morals of men can change,’ said Spiridon.
‘Not those of men like him.’
Dražeta seemed pleased to see his old comrades again. There were hugs and kisses, and the hint of manly tears. He fed them venison washed down with Samtrot wine, and played them the songs of Lepi Mica on an ancient turntable. They kept the conversation neutral, avoiding all references to the Vuksans’ current troubles, although Aleksej Markovic and Luca Bilbija said nothing at all. They were not sociable men, or not beyond the confines of campfires, bars, and gambling dens.
While the guests relaxed and waited for the strudel to cool, Dražeta’s wife took him to one side. Her name was Wilella, which she had always disliked. Her husband called her Willa, like the American writer Willa Cather. Dražeta’s wife had copies of some of her novels in translation, battered hardbacks of Frau im Zwielicht and Meine Antonia, but they had never been to her taste. It was enough for her to own the work of a famous namesake.
‘What about the other one?’ Willa asked.
‘What other one?’ said Dražeta.
‘I saw someone else in the first car. I think it was a child. Shouldn’t we take her something to eat?’
‘You’re mistaken,’ said Dražeta.
‘I’m not,’ said Willa, her voice growing louder. ‘There’s a child with them.’