Page 15 of The Nameless Ones

Radovan didn’t bother to contradict any of the rumors. He understood what was happening. The soil was being sown with salt to prevent them from putting down roots, and the hearsay would multiply their enemies. But they could not stay in the Netherlands because it was only a matter of time before someone connected them to the killings at De Jaager’s safe house. Neither could he and Spiridon remain long elsewhere in Western Europe, not given the ease with which international arrest warrants could be served and extraditions arranged. They had to move.

No, they had to flee.

Chapter XVI

Hendricksen made the flight to Amsterdam with thirty minutes to spare, the imprecations of his spurned dinner companion still ringing in his ears. As anticipated, she had not understood the reason for his sudden departure. Then again, he did not completely understand it himself. He had no particular obligation to the American named Louis, beyond the fact that Louis had helped put an end to the man who was probably responsible for his colleague Yvette Visser’s murder in England. Visser’s body had still not been found, and was unlikely ever to be discovered now that her killer was dead. It was not even as though Louis had set out to uncover the truth behind her disappearance, or achieve some measure of justice for her. The culprit’s death had merely been incidental to a larger investigation.

But sometimes, Hendricksen thought, we encounter individuals who are beyond the norm, persons who inspire a loyalty and respect that can be neither analyzed nor quantified. If they ask a favor, they do so in the knowledge that another can, and should, be asked in return, and will not be refused. Hendricksen wasn’t sure that he would ever require the kind of favor Louis was capable of reciprocating. He certainly hoped he wouldn’t, because he suspected it would involve violent death, and Hendricksen was generally reluctant to involve himself in troubles of such magnitude.

He retrieved his car from the external parking facility at the airport Hyatt Hotel, dumped his bags at his apartment, and removed the Glock 17 from the safe in his closet. The Netherlands had some of the strictest gun laws in the world, with civilian ownership restricted to law enforcement, hunters, or those, like Hendricksen, who were members of gun clubs. Even taking one’s pistol to a shooting club required that it first be disassembled before being placed in a secure case. Open or concealed carry was forbidden. Hendricksen was a member of a club in Floradorp, but rarely visited the range. He disliked firearms. They held bad memories for him. Unfortunately, in his line of work he occasionally encountered men and women, but mostly men, who demonstrated no small disregard for the Netherlands’ gun laws – any laws, come to think of it. The Vuksans undoubtedly fell into this category, and therefore a weapon was advisable. Finally, Hendricksen took a small bag from the base of the closet and placed it in his backpack.

He drove to the Herengracht, parked two blocks from the address of the safe house, and walked the rest of the way, pulling on his gloves as he went. He made two passes of the property, the first from the opposite side of the canal to check for any obvious surveillance or activity in the vicinity, and the second by the house itself in an effort to spot lights or other signs of occupancy. No one appeared to be watching, no lamps burned inside, and the shutters were drawn on the upstairs and downstairs windows.

Hendricksen paused by the front door. He could see no bell. Knocking seemed mildly foolish, but less foolish than breaking in, which he hoped to avoid. He knocked twice, but received no reply. Option Two it was, then.

This stretch of the Herengracht was quiet, even for a Sunday evening in early winter. The sensible approach would have been to inform mutual friends in the Korps that some concerns had arisen for the well-being of Mijnheer De Jaager and his family, but this would have necessitated revealing the location of the safe house. Should De Jaager have decided to take a break in the country or in another European city, perhaps with Paulus and Anouk in tow, he would be most unhappy to return and find the location and nature of this redoubt were now familiar to the authorities. In such an eventuality, Hendricksen’s already fraught relations with the old fixer would likely suffer a terminal decline.

Hendricksen’s eye was caught by a mark on the otherwise pristine paintwork of the doorframe. He used his pocket Maglite to reveal it: a dark oval against the cream, fading to nothing, like a red flare passing over snow. It looked, to Hendricksen, very much like blood. Someone, it seemed, had been careless.

He checked the area one last time for police and found no trace of them. Across the canal, a man and woman were walking arm in arm. From the opposite direction, a small group of young people emerged from a basement bar. Hendricksen waited in the shadows until all had gone their separate ways before reaching into his pack and removing a snap gun and tension wrench. Picking locks was a craft, one that Hendricksen had never had the urge or patience to master. A snap gun did the job faster, although it was much noisier than a lockpick and tended to permanently damage the mechanism, which meant it was useless if one wished to enter someone else’s property without leaving proof of intrusion. But then Hendricksen was also carrying a concealed Glock, and so would have larger problems to occupy him if confronted by men and women in uniform.

He took a final look around, inserted the steel needle of the gun into the lock, positioned the tension wrench, and squeezed the trigger. The gun cocked, and Hendricksen increased the trigger pressure, causing the needle to snap into action. It made a sound like nails and concrete being mixed in a blender, but the lock didn’t open. Hendricksen adjusted the thumb wheel on the gun, jacking up the impact of the needle, and fired again. A light flicked on in an upstairs window of one of the houses to his right, casting a rhombus of illumination on the cobblestones nearby, but by then the steel rod had driven the lock pins into the cylinder. Hendricksen applied the tension wrench and felt the lock plug turn.

The front door opened, revealing a dark, undecorated hallway. A door to his right was closed, as was another straight ahead, to one side of the stairs. Hendricksen dropped the snap gun and wrench on the hall floor to reach for his Glock, easing the door shut behind him to prevent himself from being silhouetted against it: an easy target. If anyone remained in the house, the noise of the lock being broken would have brought them running, but no one emerged to investigate. Hendricksen smelled blood, and beneath it an odor ranker and more desperate, the involuntary purging of creatures at the end of their suffering.

The house felt empty. Still, he crouched and listened for five seconds, ten, twenty, just to be sure, before he stood tall again. He flipped on the flashlight for a second time. A thick trail of blood stained the stairs, with more blood on the floor of the hallway, where a body – perhaps more than one – had been dragged across the boards. From the pattern of the smearing, Hendricksen guessed that the remains had been brought down rather than up, and deposited behind the closed door to his right.

He stepped around the stain, being careful not to disturb it, and put his back to the wall. He reached across the door with his left hand, found the brass knob, and opened it with a single quick motion before pulling his hand back, his body tensed for the sound of shots. None came, only a stronger stench. Hendricksen tightened his grip on the Glock. He offered up a single short prayer and went in low, the gun in his right hand, the flashlight held beneath it in his left. Gun and light traversed the room together, but found no life.

Only death.

Chapter XVII

The lawyer’s name was Anton Frend, and his offices occupied two floors of a beautiful fin-de-siècle building in the Neubau area of Vienna. Even by the standards of remuneration available to lawyers of the most expert, mendacious, or downright crooked stripe, the location was enviable, and the rooms concealed behind its walls were worthy of the façade. The building had been in his family’s ownership for more than a hundred years, the Frends having provided legal advice to the great and the good – as well as, inevitably, the not-so-good – of Vienna since the early nineteenth century.

The common factor shared by their clients was money, the firm of Frend Rechtsanwälte being disinclined to deal with those whose tribulations extended to cashflow problems. Frend Rechstsanwälte specialized in the protection of the wealthy, and by doing so had enriched itself. The Frends had also proved adept at anticipating the direction of impending political and social winds, enabling them to survive not only the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ravages of World War II but also the various peaks and troughs that had followed over the succeeding three-quarters of a century, all while remaining impressively unremarked, except by those who availed of their expensive services. The Frends had this in common with Austria itself, a country that somehow managed to remain simultaneously part of, yet apart from, the larger European community, and with which most of Europe’s citizens would have struggled to make very many associations at all beyond white horses, Danube waltzes, and an unfortunate connection with the progenitor of Nazism.

Anton Frend could have sold the building, invested most of the proceeds, acquired a more modest property with the rest, and still have continued to practice in the most salubrious of surroundings. Alternatively, he could have entered into a comfortable retirement, being unburdened by debt or any familial complications beyond the norm. He was an only child, and an orphan to boot. Now in his sixties, and admirably well-preserved, he was in possession, to varying degrees, of a wife, a daughter, three properties – the others being the family’s city residence, and a summer-cum-winter retreat in the Tyrol – and a long-standing mistress whom he occasionally entertained in the apartment above his offices.

Yet retirement would have bored Frend. He enjoyed the law – or more correctly, he delighted in finding ways around it on behalf of his clients, and the money he earned as a consequence was a pleasant bonus. In this he resembled a certain type of gambler, one who takes pleasure in the moments during which the ball is in play on the roulette wheel, or the final card is about to be turned; for whom the anticipation is more pleasurable than the outcome, and who can therefore win or lose with relative equanimity. It helped, of course, that Frend was gambling not with his own money and future but with those of his clients. If he failed these men and women – which, the nature of human existence dictated, he occasionally must – he could only shrug his shoulders and apologize while attempting to limit the damage for all concerned, because there are always gradations of loss.

But Frend’s reputation, like that of any good advocate, rested on rarely losing, and for this reason his services were eminently saleable. He was in the enviable position of being able to choose his clients as much as, if not more than, they selected him. Some of those clients, of course, took their occasional reversals better than others; in the case of a very small number, it was best for all involved, Frend included, if they did not lose at all.

Anton Frend, like all gamblers, was in love with risk, and men who become besotted with hazard also grow accustomed to it. In this it resembles other vices: the practice becomes habitual, and what is habitual inevitably becomes dull, thereby requiring greater extremes of behavior in return for rewards that will, at best, plateau. For Frend, this behavior manifested itself as an ongoing immersion in criminal society, and so he resembled a man wading deeper and deeper into colder and colder waters, gradually losing all feeling in his limbs and numbing his senses on the way to an inevitable drowning.

Among the most enduring of Frend’s clients in this regard were Radovan and Spiridon Vuksan. Frend had known the Vuksans since the mid-nineties, when Radovan Vuksan had commenced diverting funds from clandestine bank accounts, set up to bankroll Serb-backed militias in Croatia and Bosnia, into safe financial havens where the money could rest and cool. Occasionally, the funds would arrive at Frend’s offices in the form of hard cash, delivered in cheap gym bags by associates of the Vuksans – grim-faced men with the eyes of carrion crows – or, if the opportunity arose, by Radovan himself, after which he and Frend would dine together at Griechenbeisl or, after a walk in the hills, Der Pfarrwirt, where they would talk of music and books.

After the end of the Balkan conflict, Radovan and his brother had entered into an association with the Zemuns, who had become aware of some, although not all, of the Vuksans’ financial activities. The Zemuns had by then already established footholds in Amsterdam and Paris, and suggested that the Vuksans might wish to enter into an alliance as junior partners, with a considerable upfront investment on the Vuksans’ part as a gesture of good faith.

The Vuksans had agreed, the alternative being conflict with the Zemuns that would undoubtedly have resulted in the deaths of Spiridon, Radovan, their families, friends, and anyone who might once have sold them a loaf of bread or given them the time of day, as well as the exhumation of their ancestors’ remains, the scattering of said bones on distant, hostile seas, and the destruction of the stones that once bore their names, so that the very memory of them would be erased forever from this world. But the Vuksans were shrewd and ambitious, and eventually outmaneuvered the Zemuns’ representatives in the Netherlands to assume control of the operation, assisted throughout by the best legal and financial advice money could buy in the form of Anton Frend.

In the beginning, when the Balkan wars were still ongoing, Frend had taken care only of the paperwork, negotiating the potential legalities and illegalities arising from the transfer of funds. He sourced compliant accountants, and bankers who had learned not to ask too many questions about deposits. He had no difficulty in separating Radovan Vuksan from the reports of rape, murder, and attempted genocide appearing nightly on his television screen. Radovan was not stripping victims of their valuables before sending them to the gas chambers, or mining gold from the teeth of the dead. This was not some modern version of Nazi atrocities, no matter what the liberals might have alleged. Radovan was simply claiming a small percentage of war capital as a reward for his efforts, as any good businessman did. In fact, Frend might even have argued that by redirecting money from the Serbian government, money that would otherwise have been used to buy weapons and pay militias, Radovan was actually saving lives. Such rationalizations were endemic to Frend’s profession, and explained why so many lawyers were destined to burn in hell.

Also, Radovan was an Austrophile who loved the writings of Stefan Zweig and the motets of Anton Bruckner. He had never killed or raped anyone, and appeared to find the savagery that was engulfing the former Yugoslavia deeply unpleasant. Frend, meanwhile, was sufficiently versed in twentieth-century European history to accept that the violence was a consequence of old enmities, held in check by the force of will of the dictator Josip Broz Tito before once again being exposed to the light following his demise in 1980. Frend nodded sympathetically when Radovan opined that it would be best if the struggle played itself out as quickly as possible, resulting in the redrawing of boundaries so that nationalities and religions were separated by clear, internationally recognized borders. This, said Radovan, could most efficiently be achieved by a resounding Serb victory, and Frend saw no reason to demur.

But when the Vuksans joined forces with the Zemuns, Frend was confronted with a clearer moral choice. Previously, he had been complicit in the dispersal and investment of cash illegally acquired from an internationally reviled regime, although the funds themselves were technically clean. Now he would be working with money that came from smuggling, narcotics, prostitution, people trafficking, kidnapping, and contract killings. A closer examination of his conscience might therefore be required.

Except Frend did not have a conscience, which made the whole process significantly easier for him. (In Frend’s opinion, a conscience was a poor companion for a lawyer, one that always took but never gave.) But just in case, by some miracle, a conscience began to assert itself, he had made it clear to the Vuksans – or more correctly, to Radovan – that he preferred to dwell in blissful ignorance of the more ‘colorful’ details of their operations, except on those rare occasions when Spiridon chose to join them for dinner and Frend permitted himself the indulgence of vicarious sadism by listening to the latter’s tales.

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