Page 35 of The Nameless Ones

‘You’re going to London,’ said Louis. ‘You’re about to arrange a kidnapping.’

Louis, Angel, and Hendricksen ate that evening at Mama Makan, an Indonesian restaurant on the Spinozastraat recommended by Hendricksen. When they were done, Hendricksen took them to the house in which De Jaager and the others had died. There was no indication that anything untoward had occurred there, beyond a strip of red-and-white tape and a police notice in Dutch that Louis did not require a translation to comprehend.

‘You’re sure you want to do this?’ said Hendricksen. ‘There’s nothing to see, except blood.’

‘Then I’ll look at blood,’ said Louis. ‘What about an alarm?’

‘Deactivated since the killings.’

Angel took care of the new lock with his own pick set. Hendricksen stayed outside by the canal to keep watch, although little danger remained of the police or anyone else coming to investigate further. He simply had no desire to enter that building again. He watched Angel and Louis go inside, the door closing softly behind them, and felt a chill enter his bones.

The shutters were drawn, but both Angel and Louis carried small flashlights, the bezels wrapped with Scotch tape to narrow the beams, thereby reducing the risk of attracting attention. The bloodstains had turned to ocher, but Louis thought that he could still taste copper on his tongue and pick up the smell of a charnel house. The two men moved from room to room, first downstairs, then upstairs, concluding in the bedroom where the women had died. They exchanged no words, but instead bore silent witness. Theirs was an act of empathy, an attempt to grasp the depth of the suffering that had occurred here. The photographs might have been enough for some, but not for them. Sometimes you had to walk the ground. This they had learned from the private detective named Charlie Parker.

Finally they returned to the front door. Angel opened it slightly and waited for Hendricksen to confirm that it was safe to leave. He nodded once, and they joined him by the water.

‘So?’ said Hendricksen.

‘As you warned us: blood,’ said Louis.

‘I’d like to say that I’d never seen so much before,’ said Hendricksen, ‘but it would be a lie.’

‘I don’t understand it.’

‘Is there something to understand?’

‘All that pain,’ said Louis, ‘just to avenge a life as worthless as Timmerman’s.’

Hendricksen stared into the dark water of the canal. ‘Spiridon Vuksan may be insane. I hope so. It would be more frightening were he not.’

‘What about the men with him, and his brother?’

‘His men are rapists and butchers, and if Radovan ever had a conscience, it was extirpated a long time ago. So what now?’

‘I have some calls to make,’ said Louis, ‘and you need to book a flight.’

‘To where?’

‘Vienna.’

‘The lawyer?’

‘Yes,’ said Louis, ‘the lawyer.’

Chapter XXXII

The Vuksans had been advised to keep their heads down, and avoid leaving the suburban safe haven sourced for them through the efforts of the lawyer Frend. The kitchen was well stocked with food and alcohol, and the rear garden, although small, was secluded. There was a TV with a Netflix subscription, and a selection of fiction and nonfiction books – none in Serbian, but that was probably for the best. Had Frend instructed the intermediary to source some titles, it would rather have given the game away. In any case, of the three men destined to be sequestered in the house, only Radovan was a reader, and his English and German were both adequate to enable him to read in translation. Should he have been obliged to conceal himself alone, he would have been quite content with these quarters.

Unfortunately, Spiridon Vuksan had no patience, and disliked being contained for long. He did not value books, could watch television only in short bursts, and slept just four or five hours a night. Had he not been permitted to leave the apartment at least once a day, he would have torn it apart in the process of going crazier and crazier, driving his brother mad along with him.

So, barely fifteen hours after their arrival in Vienna, Spiridon was already out walking the streets, disguised as best he could and accompanied by a similarly camouflaged Zivco Ilic.

And shadowed by the Other.

Nahid Hasanovic had been traveling to and from Heitzing, Vienna’s 13th District, for more than fifteen years, ever since deciding that Bosnia-Herzegovina was no longer a country in which he wished to live. He had tried to make a life there, but the memories of the conflict were too painful and the price he had paid was too high: he had lost two brothers, five cousins, three nephews and a niece, who had variously been shot by snipers, bludgeoned to death in ditches or, in the case of his niece, left to bleed out after multiple sexual assaults. This would have been ample cause for any man to leave his homeland – that, or take up arms until a bullet found a way to put him out of his misery – but Nahid had chosen to remain, if only for a while. He stayed, worked, prayed, and waited until the bodies of each of his relatives had been dug up and identified before taking advantage of ties in Austria to move his immediate family – a wife, two sons, and a daughter – to Vienna before someone decided to shoot, bludgeon, or rape them to death, too.

And, yes, a lot of Serbs had also made their way to the capital, because the Serbs had been migrating there since the nineteenth century, and the Habsburg Empire had once encompassed both Bosnians and Serbs. But the city also had a large Muslim population that had been in place for longer than the Serbs, dating back to the fifteenth century, when Vienna first became an object of imperial desire to the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire failed to take the city, but a more gradual, gentler Muslim influx had followed, and Muslims now formed about one-eighth of Vienna’s population, even if the memory of the Turkish assault on Vienna had never quite been permitted to fade from the Austrian collective memory, or from Austrian history books and school texts.

In Vienna, Nahid had rented a small apartment in the Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus area, where more than half of residents had a foreign background. With money borrowed and money saved, he set up a small laundry and dry cleaning business in the 13th District. The 13th was among the most desirable residential areas in the city, although not as expensive as some, with easy access to parks and gardens on one hand and the city center on the other. Those who lived in the grand Biedermeier and Jugendstil villas had no great desire to do their own laundry, and Nahid’s collection service meant they didn’t even have to leave their homes to drop it off. He soon expanded into repair work and tailoring, and now owned three satellite laundries along with a large central facility, but when possible he still preferred to operate out of Hietzing, where he kept an office and a couch on which to nap. He enjoyed the beauty of the area, and the fresh air. He liked the zoo in the grounds of the Schönbrunn Palace, to the extent that he retained an annual membership. He loved the smell of roses and freshly cut grass.

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