The Unquiet Dead Page 6

  That’s not the only reason, Esa, you know that. You’re not detached, pretend as you must. This is about identity. Yours. And his.

  The phone call corroborated his fears. He’d told Rachel not to use up resources, not to widen the circle, but he’d sent a picture of the gun to Gaffney. And now Gaff had told him what some still resistant part of himself didn’t want to know.

  “Bring those with you. You said you were hungry,” he said to Rachel.

  “Sir—”

  It wasn’t an evasion. He had never meant to keep her in the dark this long.

  “I’ll answer your questions while we eat.”

  And Rachel, ever loyal when she should have been screaming at him, bagged the evidence without a word and followed him to the car.

  Evidence? What evidence? A man fell to his death.

  If he kept repeating it to himself, it might prove true.

  He chose a restaurant near the marina, familiar to him through colleagues at 43 Division. And through Nate. He and Nate had eaten here all the time. The food was good, the views abundant.

  His salad arrived swiftly along with Rachel’s grilled chicken sandwich.

  She tossed the bag of letters beside his plate.

  “Talk,” she said.

  Glad of the excuse not to meet her eyes, he turned his attention to the bag. A disjointed phrase slipped toward his salad.

  Not one of our leaders remain. No one returned from Omarska.

  Rachel was already putting pieces together.

  “Who called you from Justice, sir? Who asked you to find out if Christopher Drayton really fell from the Bluffs?”

  His salad tasted dry in his mouth. This was Rachel. This was going to be a nightmare for every branch of government involved, but Rachel he trusted. She had more than proven her loyalty in Waverley, but it wasn’t loyalty alone that had shown him her real worth. Rachel had a dogged commitment to the truth that outstripped her pride and ambition alike.

  “Tom Paley,” he said at last. “He’s a friend.” There was no point delaying the truth further. “He’s also the Chief War Crimes Historian at Justice.”

  Rachel’s mouth fell open, disclosing an impressive amount of chewed-up chicken.

  She was bound to know Paley’s name. Every now and again, his Nazi-hunting endeavors surfaced in the press.

  She swallowed with difficulty, setting down her sandwich so she could count off her fingers. “The map Drayton marked. It was of Yugoslavia. The code to the safe—it was Drina, like the river on the eastern border.”

  “Like the Drina Corps,” Khattak amended. “Like the gun. It’s a Tokarev variant, the M70 model. Standard issue for the Yugoslav National Army—or the JNA, as it was known.”

  “What are you saying, sir? That Drayton owned a Yugoslav army weapon? Where would he have gotten it?”

  “Not Drayton.” Khattak looked at her steadily. “Dražen Krstić.”

  She stared back unblinking.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Dražen Krstić was the Chief of Security of the Drina Corps of the VRS in 1995. He was General Radislav Krstić’s direct subordinate. He was a superior officer to the security organs of the Drina Corps brigades. He also had a unique relationship with the Military Police and the 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Main Staff.”

  “Hold up,” Rachel said. “I’m lost. Main staff of what?”

  “The VRS.” He folded his hands to cover the letters. “The Bosnian Serb Army.”

  There was a deadly little pause. It had never bothered Rachel that Khattak was a decade older than she, but she could see now that it had its disadvantages. He spoke of a war he had witnessed, whereas she had been a child during the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

  Memories of news coverage began to filter through. The secession of a republic known as Bosnia Herzegovina. A UN force on the ground. Shrill politicians. Hand-wringing. Yes, there had been plenty of hand-wringing.

  “Did you say 1995?” she whispered. He nodded, his expression not quite impassive.

  “And the Drina Corps’s area of responsibility?”

  “It was Srebrenica.”

  Srebrenica.

  Now the dread had meaning.

  So too the letters.

  “And Drayton?”

  “Tom thinks Drayton may have been Dražen Krstić.”

  The notorious war criminal at large. One of the chief perpetrators of the executions at Srebrenica, where eight thousand Muslim boys and men had been murdered near the endpoint of a war that had seen Yugoslavia dissolve into flames. Eight thousand dead in less than a week.

  Their hands tied, their bodies smashed, bulldozed into mass graves in an attempt to obscure the war’s greatest slaughter. An act commonly described as Europe’s greatest atrocity since the Second World War.

  Overlooking the rape, terror, and destruction that had characterized the three long years before the culmination of so much death.

  Khattak could never hear the word Serb without thinking of its dark twin, Srebrenica.

  And he could not think of Srebrenica without remembering his younger self, a self whose ideals and vocation were nearly lost to him now. The younger self that had participated in a student network against genocide, brave or foolish enough to accompany a humanitarian aid shipment to the once exquisite city of Sarajevo.

  On Tuesday there will be no bread in Sarajevo.

  He heard the cellist’s melody again: mournful, insistent, accusing. It had sounded as a requiem in the streets of Sarajevo.

  You failed us.

  And then you watched us die.

  The shipments had been no more than a bandage. Inadequate, deficient, robbed at airports and checkpoints by the same guns that had wiped the history of Bosnia from the map. The theft of United Nations fuel had supplied tanks and convoy lines, enabling the war to continue unto a world without end.

  Memory itself erased.

  A fig leaf in the end, for stone-faced passivity in the face of mass murder and the camps created for the purpose of torture and rape. The names indelibly stamped in memory: Omarksa, Manjača, Trnopolje, Keraterm.

  It wasn’t passivity that had defeated the Muslims of Bosnia. He thought now that such merciless slaughter could never have been possible without the international community’s intervention. Forestalling air strikes. Appeasing the architects of the war while military units with names like the White Eagles and Drina Wolves pillaged and burned. Equivocating over “warring factions,” eager to accept the fiction that a people under threat of extinction had fired mortars upon their own marketplaces to generate international sympathy or to provoke military action.

  Action that couldn’t be provoked, no matter the horrors on the ground.

  Until Srebrenica.

  Srebrenica that crystallized a truth acknowledged far too late.

  The obliteration of Bosnia had been a slaughter, not a war.

  Enabled by an arms embargo that had left its victims helpless in the face of VRS tanks, guns, propaganda, and hate.

  The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever.

  Just as it haunted Khattak. Too many dead, too little done for the innocent. He still believed in a community, an ummah; in his best moments, he saw himself as a guardian. If he failed to discover the truth about Drayton, would he still be able to think of himself that way?

  It had never been a question of ethics because nothing his work required of him had been in conflict with the truth. His counterterrorism work had been a requirement of faith, not an abjuration.

  During its three-year siege, Srebrenica had known terror enough for eight thousand lifetimes.

  He read the letter he had covered with his hand.

  Lt. Colonel Dražen Krstić,

  It took some persuasion to convince my Serb neighbor with whom I had lived my whole life that I was suddenly his enemy and that I was to be killed. And yet you managed it.

  “Unless someone identifies him as Krstić, how can we really know?”

  “Is that why you
left me in the dark? You hoped it wasn’t going to be Krstić?”

  “There’s a fairly significant Bosnian community on both sides of the border. How do you think it will play that a war criminal managed to acquire Canadian citizenship?”

  “Does that matter?” Rachel pushed back. “If Drayton was Krstić, isn’t it far more important we confirm that he’s dead?”

  “It will matter like hell to the Bosnians. They’ve a mosque not far from where you live, Rachel. And it’s largely a refugee community.”

  Rachel pulled the bag of letters back toward herself, smoothing the plastic with her fingers.

  “Sir,” she said, carefully. “Did Tom Paley ask you to look into this for the purpose of covering it up? Because the biggest storm this will unleash will be at CIC.”

  Canadian Immigration and Citizenship. If they had granted Drayton his papers.

  “Justice will take its share of opprobrium too. No, Rachel, that’s not it. If they wanted it left alone, Tom could have left it alone. He didn’t need to call me. He wouldn’t want this on his conscience, and no one at CIC would have wanted Drayton in the country. He might have come across the border with forged papers, we’ll find out eventually. What matters is that someone knew who Drayton was. Someone was sending him these letters. And then Drayton died.”

  “A fall,” Rachel countered, playing devil’s advocate.

  “A fall,” he echoed, a tightness in his chest. “Was it a fall? If this was Dražen Krstić, there are thousands of people who’d want to see him dead.”

  “Wouldn’t they rather have justice? See him exposed and paraded in front of the press before he’s locked up for good? That’s what I would want.”

  Muslims, you yellow ants, your days are numbered.

  Khattak couldn’t be quite as confident.

  A flush rose in his face, the moment of confession upon him. “They tried, Rachel. That’s why Tom called me. For nearly two years, he’s been receiving letters about Drayton. Anonymous letters. Someone’s been asking him to investigate. Persistently. Tom meant to do it, he always meant to. Time got away from him.”

  “And now Drayton is dead.”

  “It’s not all on Tom. In seventeen years, very few of these men have been apprehended, even fewer convicted. In the towns and cities of Bosnia, victims see the men who abused them walking free every day. Profiting from their crimes while the crimes they perpetrated can never be undone. Rapists. Sadists. Torturers. Thugs. And the missing—”

  He ran out of words.

  * * *

  Rachel tried to understand. She’d read enough of history to appreciate the destruction of Yugoslavia for what it was. A bloodbath. Overseen by an intractable, perhaps even complicit, United Nations. As a police officer, she didn’t have an ounce of Gandhian blood in her. She scorned those who genuflected at the temple of nonviolence, their voices ringing with praise of the defenseless victims of butchery while they sat on their hands when the gods of carnage came calling.

  And she’d followed a bit of the general’s war crimes trial.

  General Ratko Mladić, commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, in the dock at the Hague’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

  Charged with crimes so monumental they had required the formation of a separate court to hear them.

  Genocide. Complicity in genocide. Crimes against humanity. Violation of the laws of war. Deportation. Murder. Extermination.

  Seventeen years the survivors of Srebrenica had waited to see Ratko Mladić account for his actions.

  On the day he had faced them in court, Mladić had drawn his finger across his throat.

  In a recorded statement of guilt, VRS officer Momir Nikolić had confessed little more than: “I am aware that I cannot bring back the dead.”

  Whatever hatred these men had spewed had consumed them, unable to recognize the civilization they had destroyed.

  There was never a place called Bosnia.

  We deny the existence of a camp called Omarska.

  We deplore this time of war and hatred.

  We are working for peace, peace is what we want.

  All were sentences glimpsed from the letters.

  “What was the letter writer doing, sir? What does it all mean? Was Drayton being threatened?”

  Neither one of them had finished their lunch. Rachel had been starving. Now her stomach was unsettled, protesting any thought of food.

  Khattak raised his hands, as she had sometimes seen him do in prayer, and brushed them over his face.

  “God knows.” He said it seriously. “Perhaps reminding him of his crimes. Perhaps documenting them.” He turned the bag over, sifting through more of the letters. “It’s not as if these are threats.” Through the plastic, his fingers measured first one line, then the next. “It’s testimony, Rachel. These letters are testimony.”

  “From what? War crimes trials? You said yourself, there haven’t been many.”

  “Not just the trials. These read like statements of witness. To the war itself. Perhaps reminding Drayton of what he and his confederates so pitilessly wished to obliterate.”

  A place of belonging for all of its people.

  “Muslims weren’t the only victims of that war,” Rachel said, a trace of worry in her voice. She’d come to believe in Khattak’s utter impartiality.

  “No,” he agreed. “But they were the only victims of Srebrenica. The only people of Bosnia under threat of extermination.”

  He pushed one of the letters at her.

  The mosque in Foča burned for days. They danced the kolo over its embers.

  “Foča?” she asked.

  There was an expression on Khattak’s face that she’d never thought to see. Haggard, haunted, almost without hope.

  “A town in southeastern Bosnia. After the war, it was renamed Srbinje. The destruction of the Aladza was the least of its tragedies.” He hesitated. “You could find out more from the witness testimony at the trial of Dragan Zelenović. There are a few others who have been tried for crimes at Foča as well. It’s not—easy reading.”

  Rachel swallowed.

  “So this is not just about what Krstić did at Srebrenica.”

  “There’s been a tendency for history to cling to Srebrenica like a touchstone while ignoring the crimes that transpired before.” He shook his head, his dark hair disarranging itself across his brow. “Srebrenica wasn’t the beginning. It was the end.”

  He seemed to be taking a largely forgotten conflict much too personally, which worried Rachel.

  “You’re not Bosnian, sir.” Her attempt at subtlety. “You seem rather—invested.”

  Khattak smiled. He always smiled when she expected him to take offense, something that continually caught her off guard. Not to mention the smile itself. Disconcerting at the best of times.

  “You’re not a Muslim girl. And yet, you were rather invested yourself in the death of Miraj Siddiqui.”

  Their last case and the first time she and Khattak had worked together to solve a murder. Miraj Siddiqui had been a young woman from a small Ontario township. They had caught the case because her death had been flagged as an honor killing.

  It was a fair point. How to respond?

  “I’m just saying—look, your background is South Asian.”

  “Pakistani,” he added helpfully. “Don’t beat around the bush.”

  She glared at him. “That didn’t require security clearance, did it, sir? It’s just—you seem to know an awful lot about this. You seem to care an awful lot about this.”

  “Empathy,” he said easily. “The reason we work so well together. You have it in spades.”

  “I was a kid when Yugoslavia fell apart. I had no reason to know or care anything about it.”

  At once he became serious. “If it had fallen apart, I don’t know that I would have cared much either. But it was severed, Rachel. By gangsters on the ground and cowards at the Security Council.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talki
ng about. Who carries that kind of conviction around in their heads?”

  “I wasn’t a child then.” He ate the last few bites of his salad. “Let’s talk about this more later. We should be getting to the museum.”

  Prevarication.

  She was the queen of prevarication, so she had no trouble recognizing it.

  If Christopher Drayton was really Dražen Krstić—a man who had butchered Muslims in their thousands—that might be a reason to call upon the head of Community Policing, especially if that head was also an old friend.

  Her gut told her there was more to it—more about Khattak that she didn’t know, which was no surprise. She hadn’t known about Laine Stoicheva until he’d taken the time to tell her. She definitely hadn’t known about Nathan Clare or she would have read all of his books by now. Especially the one he’d mentioned to her boss—Apologia. She made a mental note to hunt it down. She was pretty sure there was something more here—something about the war that was more personal to him.

  Khattak rarely shied from the truth. In her working experience with him, what he asked for was time to ascertain the nature of the truth. He was cautious, thorough, and eventually, the truth came to light.

  Her own skills in this department were of no little assistance. She made connections quickly, leaps of intuition that were somehow in her blood. She liked to pound ahead wherever they took her, and Khattak usually let her.

  This time he asked for patience.

  She wanted to see the museum as well. Spanish history wasn’t her strong suit, but she’d always wanted to visit Barcelona. Each fresh winter that rolled by, she cursed herself for not having purchased a ticket. Maybe this year.

  She’d rather think of Spain than of Krstić, but her bloodhound instincts were up.

  What would a man like Dražen Krstić have wanted with a museum on the history of Moorish Spain?

  8.

  All my life I will have thoughts of that and feel the pain that

  I felt then and still feel. That will never go away.

  It was Tuesday night. It had taken them all day in the blistering heat to walk the four kilometers to Cinkara. It was no uglier than any of the other buildings. It had the same pockmarked face and shattered windows of all the concrete blocks. They had made munitions here once. Maybe, maybe there would be weapons of some kind, a gun she could hold. Maybe there would be food or clean water. One thing she knew was that there would be people. The road was full of them, everyone hungry, everyone frightened, everyone hot.