The Unquiet Dead Page 29

  “Don’t.” His brother covered his mouth. “Don’t Haki, it’s over. It’s over. We found our mother in Tuzla, remember?”

  Harry fought his way free. “Everybody is dead, everybody is dead.” He chanted the words in a helpless rhythm. “Get them off me, Avdi! Get the dead ones off me! The ants, Avdi! I can’t breathe—help me!”

  Aldo drew in his breath, sheltered his eyes from the rain, let his brother break away perilously close to the edge of the cliff. There was resolution in his face.

  “Lie still,” he said to Harry. “Lie still and don’t move until I give you the signal. Can you do that, Haki?”

  “I can do it. I’m doing it, Avdi.”

  Harry fell to the muddy ground and lay flat, burying his face in the mat of coarse grass.

  “I’m dead, Avdi,” he said. His brother’s strategy had worked. He’d removed himself from the edge of the cliff.

  “You’re dead,” Aldo agreed. “We’re both dead, Haki. That’s how we make it.” He looked at David Newhall. “Help me,” he said.

  “Mink,” Rachel said again. “You’re not safe there, please. Please move away.”

  Deaf to her words, Mink gathered her hair from around her face and twisted it into a rope. “Hold fast to the rope, Esa,” she said. There was mockery in her voice, a mockery that sliced at his heart. “You thought we were the same, and we aren’t. For you, Andalusia was an idyll, a golden dream. But it was real to us.”

  “Mink.” Her name was a plea on his lips. Rachel saw the hopelessness on his face, the painful entreaty.

  “My name is Yasminka Sinanović, and I am the last of my family. You cannot help me, Esa.” She turned her attention to Rachel, stepping away from the edge. “I am a witness to genocide. My work is not done.”

  She took David Newhall’s hand within her own. Together, they reached down to gather Harry Osmond’s body from the ground, boosting him to his feet. As a group they shouldered past Rachel and Nate down the path toward Ringsong.

  “Wait!” Rachel called. “How can you prove you didn’t follow Drayton that night? How do we know you didn’t take justice into your own hands?”

  Mink answered her by turning up her hands. “We called a meeting for the museum that night. We were all there, well into the night. And so were Hadley and Marco.”

  David Newhall paused on the path.

  “If there was one thing you should have learned from the letters, it is that we did not want what the fascists wanted. The destruction of all that we built together, the country that we shared. Our legacy isn’t death.” He shook his head at their inability to understand the simplest lesson in the world. Oblivious to Esa’s pain, he kissed Mink’s hand.

  “Believe it or not, it’s hope.”

  37.

  Nothing can give me resolution. Nothing can give me consolation.

  Nate passed Esa a towel. They were ensconced before the fire in his library, Rachel taking care not to drip onto the velvet sofa, despite Nate’s reassurance.

  “I’m all right.” She warmed herself by the fire. “We’re nowhere, sir. We’re no further forward.”

  “Would you leave us for a moment, Rachel?”

  He’d been too dignified to pursue Mink when her rejection was so complete. Something had broken between them; Rachel hoped it was irreparable.

  “I’ll help myself in the kitchen, shall I? How hard could your espresso machine be to work?”

  “A fine mind like yours will solve the riddle in no time,” said Nate. His face was serious despite the laughter in his voice. He watched her go. He stood by his friend’s side before the fire, warming his frozen hands.

  “Rachel told you?” Esa asked finally.

  “She went back to the Bosnian mosque. She met with your friend Asaf, who told her about David Newhall’s work—Hasanović’s work, I mean. And he told her about the other survivors. He recognized the photo of Selmira. The rest was Rachel’s doing. She kept talking about a circle and somehow—I don’t know how—she deduced that a confrontation had taken place the night of Drayton’s fall.” He was afraid to test his friend, until the thought rose in his mind that if he couldn’t say to Esa those things that had been natural and automatic in their friendship before, what point was there in continuing? “Do you believe what the Bosnians told us?”

  Esa nodded. “I’ve no doubt of it. Hasanović isn’t a killer.”

  “And Mink?”

  Esa turned to him, rubbing the moisture from his hair with an absentminded gesture. “I want to ask you something,” he said.

  “Anything.”

  “I need to ask for your forgiveness. Because I didn’t know. Until Mink, I didn’t know the power a woman could hold over your thoughts. Over everything you knew of yourself. For me, it was black and white: myself or Laine Stoicheva, I couldn’t see how you were torn. I didn’t know a person could be torn like that.” He laid the wet towel over the fireguard. “You tried to tell me, I know. You wrote Apologia and still—I couldn’t find it in myself to let it go. I couldn’t see how wrong I was until now.”

  He looked away from the pity in Nate’s eyes, the warm compassion.

  “Rachel was right when she accused me of having lost my objectivity. The clues were there for me to decipher—the letters, the lilies, the true identity of David Newhall. And yet it didn’t occur to me that the others were acting a charade as well. Who better to have planted flowers than a gardener? How was I so blind to the connection between Andalusia and Bosnia? How could I have asked Mink nothing about her family, her history? She didn’t need to lie to me. I gave her nothing to lie about. I was lost.”

  “You were caught,” Nate corrected. “Don’t blame yourself. I’ve lived with my neighbors for two years and never suspected that anyone was anything other than he or she pretended to be. As for Drayton, Mink had some sense that Hadley and Cassidy were in danger. I never did.”

  “Rachel made the connections.”

  “I can see why you chose her for your team. Her instincts are excellent. Be grateful she’s on your side. Because she is. She’s loyal to you. And maybe she guessed at all this because she knows what it means to lose a brother. She knows what a powerful driving force it can be. And since she didn’t know any of these people, she could sense it was a charade. She knew it wasn’t real. She also told me I should have read more as a child.”

  “Why?” Lightness tempered the grief on Esa’s face.

  “She said she finally made sense of the candles because of Murder on the Orient Express. It wasn’t about a single person with a singular motive. It was something the Bosnians enacted together to serve a common end. Mink wrote the letters. David Newhall helped her. The Osmonds planted the lilies. And then they faced Drayton together.”

  “Because of the museum.”

  “Not just that.” Nate pressed his friend’s shoulder, aware that the reason would hurt him.

  “Then what?”

  “Because the Department of Justice didn’t take them seriously. They must have felt they had no other choice.”

  Esa mulled this over. “Drayton would have disappeared,” he agreed. “Before anyone could do anything.”

  “And that would have been too much. Much too much for Mink and the others.”

  The sound of rattling teacups drew their attention to the door. Rachel entered, bearing a tray of miniature espresso cups in their saucers. The room filled with a woodsy aroma.

  “Don’t ask me where I found these,” she said.

  “My sister’s dollhouse?” Nate guessed.

  “Just drink before you catch cold.”

  She said it lightly, her concern for Esa evident. Her hair plastered to her face by the rain, her soggy clothes bunched about her body, she was still the most interesting woman Nathan had met in years.

  “Where does that leave us?” he asked. “Will you do anything further?”

  “I’ll advise Hasanović to leave the neighborhood. And I’ll recommend that Tom release his statement immediately.”
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br />   “You believe them, then,” Rachel said.

  “You don’t?”

  Rachel slurped her espresso, scowling when she scalded her tongue. “So much anger, so much hatred. Such practiced deception—I’m sorry, sir. I know you wanted her to be above this.”

  “I’ve no right to expect that of her,” he said quietly.

  “She had no right to lie to you. I can’t figure out what it is that I haven’t figured out.”

  Esa wasn’t listening to her. He’d braced himself against the table, his thoughts abstracted. “Rachel,” he said, “show me the photographs again.”

  Surprised, she retrieved the envelope from her bag and shook its contents out on the table. Esa sorted through them until his hand came to rest on the photograph of Drayton’s study. The chair surrounded by puddles of wax.

  She followed his gaze and his outstretched finger as he made his count.

  She saw it too. And now what Damir Hasanović had told them on the Bluffs rocketed into place, fusing the pieces of the puzzle together.

  “Great Holy God.”

  “I can’t help but think that’s appropriate.”

  * * *

  They knocked on the door of his living quarters, sequestered behind the mosque, hidden from view by the overhanging maples.

  He answered the door dressed in his customary long robes, his head bare, his beard neatly trimmed.

  “Damir said you would come.”

  Under the wild rain on the Bluffs, David Newhall had told her about terror.

  Banja Luka. Foča. Brčko.

  “Why did you mention Banja Luka, Foča, and Brčko?” she had asked Newhall, oblivious to the answer.

  They were the same cities Imam Muharrem had named. Rachel felt a momentary respite from horror as Nate squeezed her hand. Realization, sickeningly conclusive, tumbled through her thoughts. Why hadn’t the imam told them about Damir Hasanović, the highest-profile member of their congregation? Why hadn’t he mentioned the circle of Srebrenica survivors that had included Avdo and Hakija Osmanović, Yasminka Sinanović, and Damir? She had viewed photos of the genocide memorial online. She had read the long list of Osmanović dead, a list that seemed to trail down forever into history. So many men from one family dead, she had thought. And just these two boys to survive.

  “Today no man from our family is older than thirty,” Mirnesa Ahmić had said in her testimony before the tribunal.

  Why had the imam told them the entire grand narrative of the Bosnian war, yet left out everything that made it so personal? The worst part was that she knew the answer to her question. Her previous scenario of the confrontation had been catastrophically incomplete.

  Khattak had shown her the proof of it, counting out the number.

  “There are five spots on the floor. Five places for the candles. Who else was there that night? Avdo, Hakija, Damir, Yasminka—that only makes four.”

  She saw their faces again in the rain, the silent exchange as they clutched each other’s hands. Wounded as they were, none of the people poised at the edge of the Bluffs had set this plan in motion. And none of them had chosen to name him. The man who knew Srebrenica, knew Brčko, knew Banja Luka, knew Foča.

  “You were there that night.”

  Muharrem led them inward to his rooms. A prayer rug was spread out on the floor, the Qur’an at its head balanced on a small wooden stand. One wall in the room was decorated, the wall in front of a comfortable chesterfield. Facing them was a poster of the sixteenth-century Ferhadija mosque. “Shall I make us tea?”

  “We’d rather have the truth.”

  No one sat. After a moment, the imam gathered up his Qur’an and placed it on the coffee table.

  “It was you,” Rachel repeated. “You recognized Krstić from the moment you first saw him.”

  “And if I did?”

  “You told the others.”

  “Was that a crime? Was it not a greater crime that Krstić was here in your country, safe and happy, thriving at every turn? Did you ask how he gained immigration? Can you explain why your Department of Justice did nothing when we reported who he was? Or why you ignored our pleas for assistance?”

  There was nothing in his demeanour to recall the patience and forbearance of the man they had interviewed on two previous occasions. His bearing was proud, stiffly unapologetic. No suggestion of his former friendliness lingered about his eyes.

  “We are investigating now.”

  “Now,” he mocked them. “Two years later and only because the butcher himself is dead. We were prepared to wait for you to act. You chose to do nothing. And now you worry about your reputation, your government agencies, the black mark on your credibility as peacekeepers.”

  “Imam Muharrem—”

  “You are the worst of all, Inspector Esa. You pretended solidarity, promised me an answer, and yet what did you have your colleague do? Did you tell the world about Dražen Krstić? Did your government admit its mistake? Were you even aware that a man known for sexual sadism had children in his care?”

  “If you had told us what you knew, we would have been able to act more quickly.”

  “Well.” The imam shrugged. “I didn’t know there was such a person as the righteous Inspector Esa, defender of the Bosnians, did I? I knew of your War Crimes Commission, so we began there.” His bleak gaze encompassed Rachel and Nate. “And nothing came of it.”

  Rachel swallowed noisily. “So what did you do about it, sir?”

  “What did I do? What did I do? What did you expect me to do? I talked to you. I told you about Banja Luka, about Prijedor. I told you what happened in the rape camps of Foča. I told you what they did to my family in Brčko. Broken. Thrown into the furnace like refuse. What did you do?”

  “We tried to find the truth. We followed every possible lead to prove that Drayton was Krstić.”

  “His gun, his tattoo—they were not enough? The tattoo I pointed you to. The JNA-issued military pistol. Not enough?”

  “Then you were there that night,” she breathed.

  “Of course I was. It was my plan from the first. Did you think I would let my children face it alone? My poor Haki? My lonely lost Yasminka? Our beloved Damir, whose quest for justice has been blocked again and again? It is only because of Damir that Haki and Avdo made it to Canada. Why? Because when Avdi made it to Tuzla, he gave Damir his brother’s tennis shoes. Mesha’s body falling over Avdi was what saved him from the artillery fire. And Avdi—so young, so brave—made himself look at the body that saved him, made himself remember so he could tell one person what had happened to someone he loved. Damir will carry this debt all his life. And he saved Yasminka as well. Because of his efforts, she was able to bury her brothers and place their names upon the memorial. Did you think I would abandon these children to face the devil alone?”

  “What happened that night?” Rachel asked him. “The others said they confronted Krstić and he fainted. They say they left him alive.”

  “Did they also tell you that he rose from his chair, threatening us with his gun? And that when he fell back drunk, he said our people had died because they were weak—too weak to fight, too worthless to live. He boasted about his accomplishments in Srebrenica. He said he would pull the same trigger again. He fired at Yasminka but his gun was empty. We had checked it beforehand—that seemed to surprise him. We weren’t foolish enough to trust in his rehabilitation.”

  “Then where did you go that night? After the confrontation? Yasminka didn’t say you were at the meeting for the museum with the others.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Where were you, then?”

  He sat down in a single motion, balancing the Qur’an on his lap.

  “Was I here in my rooms, offering prayers of gratitude and perseverance to the Almighty Protector? Or did I walk along the Bluffs in the dark to see what the butcher would do? He didn’t have the strength or the humanity to point the gun at his own head, as we had asked him. Perhaps he chose another way.”

&nbs
p; Rachel bit back a gasp. “Are you saying he jumped? That Krstić committed suicide because you had tormented him for so long?”

  “Would he do such a thing?” His smile was bleak. “Perhaps it was the ghosts of Srebrenica who haunted him. Perhaps they followed him wherever he went, the way they followed Avdo and Haki from the killing fields of Grbavici. Isn’t that possible?”

  Rachel’s lips were stiff. “What did you really do, Imam Muharrem? Tell us the truth.”

  He caressed the Qur’an in his hands. “I did not begin hostilities.”

  “I’m asking if you finished them.”

  “Although he was a man who deserved death, I think you will find that my people are not murderers.”

  “And if you saw the men who murdered your family today? Marrying, having children? What would you do?”

  “I would hunt each one of them down if I could.”

  “Were you on the Bluffs that night? Did you follow Drayton?”

  “I’m very tired,” he said. “This day has been a long time coming for my people. I would ask you to leave me to finish my prayers.”

  “We can’t just leave it like this. Surely as an imam, you have a duty to the truth.”

  “No, my dear Sergeant. You had a duty to the truth and you failed it completely. I’ve fulfilled my responsibilities, one and all.”

  “With Krstić’s death?” Esa asked him.

  Imam Muharrem replaced the Qur’an on the table. He took up his stance on his prayer rug.

  “How formidable is your desire for simple answers, Inspector Esa. Was I there or not? Did I follow Dražen Krstić? Did I send him to his death?” He raised his hands from his sides to his ears, to fold them over his stomach, oblivious to their urgency. “Allah knows the answer. Shall we leave it with Him?”

  “If you’re guilty of this, Imam Muharrem—”

  “Then you will have to prove it.”

  * * *

  They crowded together in the shelter of the mosque, its slender minaret backlit by the moon.

  “Was that a confession?” Rachel asked. Her hands were trembling.

  “I doubt we’ll ever know.” Nate said it, and Esa didn’t contradict him.