Page 10 of The Nameless Ones

It was strange, Angel thought, how many people they had come to care about. It had not always been this way. He blamed Charlie Parker. Who knew that a conscience could be contagious?

‘Maybe we should try Parker,’ said Angel. After all, he reasoned, if anyone was likely to be in difficulties, it was the private detective. The man could attract trouble in a vacuum.

‘I did,’ said Louis, ‘while you were asleep. He’s safe; his daughter, too.’

Angel watched a police car pass. Ordinary people could turn to the law in times of need – well, as long as they weren’t minorities living in the wrong neighborhood, but nobody claimed the law was perfect, and even justice wasn’t colorblind. Men like Angel and Louis, on the other hand, were required to make their own justice, forging it in their image.

‘Could you be mistaken about this?’ said Angel.

‘No.’

Angel rubbed his eyes. He felt a lassitude that no sleep could relieve. Sometimes a man just became enervated by suffering. There seemed to be no end to it.

‘You need to rest,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be fresh when it comes.’

‘I’ll be there shortly,’ said Louis.

Angel returned to bed. When he woke again in the night, he was alone. He heard music playing softly from downstairs, but did not move. He closed his eyes, and waited for death’s inevitable approach.

Chapter IX

It was said that the Gestapo in Lyon, under their repellent chief Klaus Barbie, finally grew so frenzied in their torture and execution of prisoners that the floor of their headquarters at the École de Sainte Militaire could no longer accommodate the by-products of the butchery, and the very ceilings of the building began to bleed. Radovan Vuksan had thought it an exaggeration until he retreated to the kitchen of De Jaager’s safe house in the hope of avoiding what was taking place upstairs, only to find droplets of blood exploding upon his bare head and redness pooling on the table. He looked up in time to see fluids leaking through the floorboards and stepped aside to avoid any further misfortune. He lit a cigarette, and saw that his hands were shaking.

Unlike his brother and the rest of the Vuksan clan, Radovan had not fought directly in the Balkan conflicts – or principally the ‘War in Croatia’, as it was known to Serbs – although arguably his role had been more important, and lethal, than those of his comrades who had taken lives. Radovan had worked as a ‘senior advisor’ at the MUP, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, his role and title being deliberately unrevealing, even innocuous. The MUP was one of the most powerful ministries in the land, with responsibility for local and national law enforcement. With Radovan’s assistance, it became more powerful still, helping to arm civilians and local militias of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia, and secretly channeling funds to the RSK’s president, Milan Martic.

It was Radovan who had organized the support structures for the Bosnian and Croatian Serb forces during the wars; Radovan who had provided funding for the ‘volunteers’ recruited to fight in Serb-held territories in Croatia; Radovan who had personally supervised the handover of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Serbian criminal warlord Arkan, whom he had known of old; and Radovan, ultimately, who had arranged Arkan’s assassination in the lobby of Belgrade’s InterContinental Hotel in January 2000, when it became clear that it would be better for all, Arkan himself excepted, if he did not live long enough to be questioned about war crimes by the inquisitors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Without Radovan Vuksan’s efforts, the War in Croatia would have been significantly shorter and less genocidal than it was. Yet any blood on his hands was purely metaphorical. He was an organizer – a brilliant one – but with no taste for either committing or witnessing mass murder. Some might even have called him a coward, but they would have been wrong, for Radovan’s moral failings were deeper and more complex than the term allowed.

The blood continued to drip from the ceiling. The sound it made as it splashed on the table was unnerving to him. From the position of the spreading stain he thought the old woman, Anouk, was probably the source. She had a lot of blood in her, and the mattress on which they had placed her was thin. It was not a surprise that it had become soaked through so quickly.

Radovan took a handkerchief from his pocket, dampened it at the sink, and used it to clean his pate. The cigarette was calming him slightly, but then the girl, Liesl, began to make a high-pitched mewling noise that he could discern even over the music. Radovan had never heard a human being emit a sound like that. It was beyond any ordinary conception of pain, and he guessed the girl would not last much longer. He turned the music up a notch, and realized he would never again be able to listen to Schumann with quite the same pleasure.

Radovan had tried to talk his brother out of going after De Jaager. Andrej Buha was long dead, the memory of him lost to all but a handful of his contemporaries, and even they would hardly have recalled him with much fondness. Had De Jaager not hired someone to take care of him, the Zemuns would eventually have been forced to kill him themselves. They might even have entrusted the Vuksans with the task in order to avoid a blood feud. Buha had become unstable, which threatened to bring danger to them all. De Jaager, by Radovan’s reckoning, had done them a favor of sorts by solving the Buha problem, and the Vuksans had weathered the storms that followed until they, like De Jaager, were on the verge of retiring as wealthy men. They had lived as voluntary exiles for long enough, and home was calling. Concerns had been assuaged, bribes had been paid, and a place had been prepared for them in the new Serbia. In time, they would be laid to rest in its soil. This final act of vengeance for an unloved man was, in Radovan’s view, an unnecessary risk to take at such a delicate stage.

Radovan wondered, too, about the assassin De Jaager had employed to kill Buha. The gunman was an American, and his name – as they now knew, thanks to the legat Armitage – was Louis. According to Spiridon, this Louis was no cause for apprehension. He was a professional who had been hired to do a job, and whatever happened in the aftermath would be of no concern to him. Perhaps, if the mood struck, Spiridon might ask one of their friends in the United States to take care of him, but there would be little pleasure in it. Louis was undoubtedly lethal, and would therefore have to be dealt with quickly. He would die largely without suffering, possibly without even knowing the reason for his termination, and what would be the purpose of that? As Spiridon had indicated to De Jaager, only a dolt blamed a weapon for his agonies, cursing the blade that cut him or the gun that wounded him rather than the one who wielded the knife or pulled the trigger. If they did not trouble the assassin, said Spiridon, he would not trouble them. That was how such men worked.

But Radovan was not so sure. Armitage had informed Zivco Ilic – to whom she had first reached out, for reasons still unclear to the Vuksans – that Louis had returned briefly to the Netherlands and was met at the airport by De Jaager’s factotum Paulus, who now lay slumped and dead in the kitchen. In addition, the Vuksans’ contact in the AIVD, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, claimed that Louis and De Jaager had visited the Rijksmuseum together, and Louis might even have stayed for a time in this very safe house. Armitage had believed Louis and De Jaager to be engaged in some joint endeavor, one involving an American private investigator named Charlie Parker. This, to Radovan, did not look like the standard relationship between a hired killer and his one-time employer, but suggested a deeper connection. One might almost have said a friendship.

He increased the volume of the music still further, and lit another cigarette.

Chapter X

Special Agent Edgar Ross did not smoke, drank rarely, and socialized on a level familiar only to the dead. His life, or the productive part of it, revolved to a worrying extent around the private detective Charlie Parker and, to a slightly lesser degree, Angel and Louis. Ross’s affection for all three was minimal, although in the context of his largely solitary existence, this served to elevate them almost to the status of boon companions. But his respect for them exceeded his affection by a considerable magnitude, and it was partly this – or so Ross told himself – that led him to make the call to Louis.

Yet Ross, in addition to speaking with Conrad Holt, had also put out discreet feelers beyond Federal Plaza. In every situation, however grave, the question to be asked was: How may this be turned to my advantage? A distinctive duplicity was bred in the bone of those who monitored and investigated others for a living, and Ross was far from immune to it. He was aware that, sooner or later, Conrad Holt would attempt to feed him to the wolves. When this happened, Ross intended to make them fight for their meal.

In the meantime, he would continue to secure his position while sticking to his primary task, which was to identify and destroy a group of men and women known as the Backers. This cabal was powerful, corrupt, and mired in the occult, most particularly the search for an entity called the Buried God, which they believed to be a fallen angel, imprisoned deep below ground. Ross, for his part, didn’t much care what they did or did not believe: he knew only that they were a malign influence on the affairs of men, a contaminant, and needed to be rooted out. Ross was prepared to use any and all means toward that end, among them Charlie Parker and, by extension, Angel and Louis. If that meant protecting those men when required, so be it.

Ross was not entirely surprised when the phone was answered on the first ring. Only a select few were privy to the number, which was changed on a regular basis before the new details were carefully circulated. Until that moment, Louis had not even been aware that SAC Edgar Ross of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was one of those with knowledge of its latest iteration.

‘What the fuck do you want,’ said Louis, once Ross had identified himself, ‘and how did you get this number?’

‘To answer the second question first,’ said Ross, ‘I work for the FBI. It’s my business to know these things.’

‘Then I need to get rid of you or the number. The number might be easier, but it would give me less satisfaction.’

‘You are aware that threatening a government official of the United States is a felony under law?’

‘Then I’ll go to jail laughing,’ said Louis. ‘You still haven’t told me what you want.’

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