Page 72 of The Nameless Ones

‘Maybe we brought it with us.’

‘We always seem to have some to spare,’ said Angel. He paused. ‘I liked Hendricksen.’

‘I liked him too.’

‘We’ll make them pay, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Louis. ‘Every one of them.’

Chapter LXI

The French prison system was, by general consent, a mess: a collection of overcrowded, underfunded institutions, with a significant Muslim population that was ripe for radicalization. Baba Diop had spent time behind bars in his native Senegal, most notably at the notorious Rebeuss Prison in Dakar, but even by those standards Fleury-Mérogis, Europe’s largest penal institution, was a grim environment in which to be incarcerated. If Diop was seeking straws at which to clutch, he had at least avoided La Santé. A cousin of his had spent three years there before emerging convinced that the place was both cursed and haunted, a consequence, he believed, of having provided a home for the guillotine until the 1970s.

Diop had passed the days since his capture at Gare de Lyon in a series of French police interview rooms. This had not been a happy experience, not least because he had proven unable to provide his interrogators with the intelligence they required, namely any deep insight into the channels through which Islamic terrorists were making their way into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. All Baba Diop could tell the French was that he had been hired by Aleksej Markovic to escort two Syrians – whose names he had never learned – from Port-Vendres to Paris. He had done similar work for Markovic in the past, although on those occasions he had been shepherding human cargo from the Serbian border to Paris.

As Diop understood it, most of these individuals were respectable middle-class citizens – doctors, businessmen, accountants – seeking to escape the turmoil of war and persecution in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, even Pakistan, by buying themselves a new life in Europe. Sometimes they brought their families with them, although only the wealthiest could afford to do so since the Serbians charged $50,000 per head to move illegal immigrants through Serbia and on to France, and did not offer discounts for bulk. Another arm of the operation worked with poorer cargo, the kind that was transported like cattle in the backs of trucks, there to live or die according to the vagaries of heat and cold, and the relative availability of essentials such as food, water, and oxygen. Baba Diop preferred not to involve himself in that kind of haulage. He found it depressing, and incompatible with his Christianity.

As for the two men killed at Gare de Lyon, Diop informed the police that he had been ignorant of their terrorist backgrounds. His policy had always been to ask as few questions as possible. He trusted Markovic to share with him all the necessary facets of an operation; anything more, Baba Diop was better off not knowing. Yes, he was aware of the Vuksans, but only peripherally through Markovic, because he had never met the brothers himself. He thought that Fouad Belkacem, his colleague who had also been present at Gare de Lyon on that fateful afternoon, might have had some dealings with the Vuksans directly, but he could not be sure. He and Fouad did not talk very much, Diop told the police solemnly. They had little in common, Fouad being a Muslim, a drinker, a smoker, and a fornicator, while Baba Diop was none of these things.

Oh, and Fouad was also apparently a traitor. He had betrayed Baba Diop, Aleksej Markovic, and the two Syrians, which meant that Baba, the police stressed, should feel under no obligation to withhold information in order to protect him. Fouad was one of their assets, and had already told them a great deal. Baba Diop’s testimony was required only to corroborate certain details, they said, but he should be careful not to lie because, thanks to Fouad, they would know if he was dissembling, and would punish him accordingly.

But Baba Diop did not believe all of this. He had served for a number of years with the Senegalese National Gendarmerie before his arrest for gross corruption – the reason for that involuntary three-year stay at Rebeuss – and had participated in his share of interrogations. He suspected that whatever information the French might have got out of Fouad Belkacem, it had not been enough to satisfy their curiosity.

And so the questioning had continued until, having deprived Diop of sleep, restricted his access to food and water, and beaten him a little, his interrogators decided that he had told them all he could, and it was time for him to languish in a cell until the courts got around to trying him as an accessory to terrorism. Only as he was being taken to Fleury-Mérogis did Diop learn of Fouad Belkacem’s murder. He already knew that Markovic had been shot and killed. The police had appeared curious to learn who might have been responsible, which surprised Diop since he had assumed that the police had themselves killed Markovic. Now, it seemed, Fouad was also dead. Baba Diop found this troubling because he recognized that, depending on the culprits, he might be next in line.

All of which explained how Baba had come to be confined in Fleury-Mérogis. After being brought before an investigating judge, he was remanded to a supposedly secure unit of the prison’s maison d’arrêt des hommes, where he was likely to remain for the foreseeable future. Following his eventual trial, the end result of which Diop could gloomily predict, he would most likely end up back at Fleury-Mérogis, or even be given the opportunity to find out for himself whether La Santé was, in fact, cursed, or if its refurbishment had succeeded in banishing the hex. This was how Diop saw the next decade or so of his life unfolding. It made him sad. He was not a wicked man. He had tried not to hurt people unless absolutely necessary, but it had been his misfortune to fall into bad company on many occasions, and in at least four different countries.

Diop was not unalarmed at the prospect of incarceration in Fleury-Mérogis. He was aware of its large Muslim contingent and its reputation as a font of radicalism. Amedy Coulibaly, the Malian who murdered a policewoman and four Jews in Paris in 2015, and Chérif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who shot twelve dead at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, had both been radicalized by their time at the prison. Diop, one of his fellow detainees warned him as they were placed in the van, would be entering an environment that was unsympathetic at best to non-Muslims, and policed by unarmed guards who preferred not to risk their lives by stepping into the exercise yard when the prisoners were at liberty there.

Baba Diop spent the final thirty-six hours of his life at Fleury-Mérogis. At 11 a.m. on the second day, he was stabbed in the throat with a sharpened comb while being led under escort to the governor’s office. His murderer was a young French-Algerian named Ahmed Beghal, who declared that he had taken Diop’s life as revenge for his part in the deaths of the ‘martyrs’ at Gare de Lyon. Beghal, with no previous history of violence, and not yet on the watch list of firebrand inmates, declined to say whether he might have been ordered by another party to kill Diop. He also refused to share with police or prison staff the source of his information about Diop, whose identity had been kept secret in order to protect him against just such an act of retaliation.

And in Vienna, the Vuksans felt the noose tighten another inch.

Chapter LXII

The official term is ‘identity management’; the unofficial one is ‘passports for sale’. It’s a lucrative trade, worth about $3 billion annually, and shows no signs of abating in this age of isolationism, Brexit, tax evasion, and terrorism. Basically, if you’re wealthy enough, any number of countries may be willing to provide you with a passport. The most valuable of these documents offer visa-free access to most of the world, including those European territories in the Schengen Area. For this reason, poorer Caribbean island nations are particularly popular, aided by their status as offshore tax havens and their desire to attract outside investment. The price, generally speaking, is quite reasonable: $100–$200,000 for an Antiguan passport; $100,000 for a Dominican; $150,000 for St. Kitts and Nevis, or Grenada. European passports are more expensive: an Austrian passport will cost the buyer upwards of $3 million, a Cypriot passport $2 million, a Maltese $1 million. In addition, fees may have to be paid to a broker, which can add as little as $20,000 or as much as $500,000 to the final cost.

The attraction of such passports is plain for respectable businesspeople from countries with restrictions on access to leading economic markets, but even more obvious for disreputable individuals seeking to avoid the attention of the authorities. On paper, the nations involved in these sales are committed to due diligence, investigating – or claiming to investigate – all applicants thoroughly, and refusing to sell to anyone suspected of altering their identity or those who might be the subject of a criminal investigation.

But the reality?

Well, that’s more nebulous.

In Simmering, just beyond Vienna’s southern limits, lies a small, rarely visited cemetery. This is the Friedhof der Namenlosen, or the Cemetery of the Nameless, and it is the final resting place of more than one hundred people, the majority of them unidentified. For centuries, the Danube’s currents caused the corpses of those who had drowned in the river, or whose remains had been thrown into it for disposal, to wash up on a nearby stretch of the bank. In 1939, the construction of the Albern grain dock altered the currents, and the Danube’s dead were forced to make landfall farther down the river.

The old cemetery, which accepted corpses until 1900, is now hidden by forest and marked only by a sign among the trees. The new cemetery contains 104 bodies, their plots marked, for the most part, by identical crucifixes, some with candles or wreaths placed there by well-wishers or the fishermen of Albern, who gather to remember these unfortunates each All Saints’ Day. The named – Gutman, Molner, Kochinger, Behnken (‘aus Hamburg 11.12.1860 – 15.3.1923’) – repose largely on the left side of the cemetery, as though to distance themselves from those who remain anonymous – Unbekannt, Namenlos. A little church, the Chapel of the Resurrection, sits above the graves. To its right rise silos and industrial buildings, and to the left is a patch of wilderness, a place of weeds and dead or dying trees. Behind, but now some distance away, flows the Danube.

Anton Frend had never before set foot in the Friedhof der Namenlosen. He made a point of avoiding graveyards, and had last stood at a graveside seven years previously when his father had been interred in the family plot at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. He had not visited the grave since. If there was a next life, which he doubted, then the best of his parents was at peace there; if there was not, they were nowhere. Either way, he saw no point in making obeisance to moldering bones.

He had not slept in the apartment above his office the night before, but had elected to stay at a small hotel in Hackengasse. Frend tended to dismiss talk of sixth senses or bad feelings, but as he approached his office building after leaving Zivco Ilic and the girl, he had spotted a car parked within sight of the entrance, and observed, from behind, two men in the front seats. The driver was entirely concealed by shadow, and Frend could see only the side of the passenger’s face: dark hair, a beard, and a sallow complexion accentuated by a white dress shirt buttoned to the neck. Spiridon Vuksan, Frend thought, would have described him as a Turk. The passenger was smoking a cigarette, which he finished while Frend watched. The butt was dropped from the open window to the street below, where it came to rest near three others. Almost immediately, Frend had experienced the strongest urge to run, but controlled himself sufficiently to retreat round the corner and walk to the nearest U-Bahn station, all the time glancing over his shoulder, anticipating the sight of the bearded man in pursuit; but he was not followed and made it onto the train without incident.

Once he had arrived at the hotel, he called his wife and stressed to her again the importance of not returning home or using her credit and debit cards until the current crisis was dealt with. Then, because he wanted to hear her voice, he tried his daughter’s cell phone. It went straight to messaging. She usually simply rejected the incoming call if she recognized his number. Once every year or two, she might connect to speak a few monosyllables to him in person.

But not that evening.

Finally, he had contacted Radka, his mistress. She wanted to know where he was. He told her he was staying at a hotel, although he did not share the name with her. She offered to join him. He was tempted to say yes, if only for the company – his sexual appetite had diminished in inverse proportion to the escalation of the Vuksan problem – but decided it would be better if they were to remain apart for the time being. He asked about any suspicious activity, or any odd inquiries made concerning him, but she could recall none. He advised her to lock up the shop for a few days, or leave it in the care of her assistant, Sophia, but Radka only laughed and informed him that Sophia would have the business run into the ground within twenty-four hours, and what was he so worried about anyway?

Frend tried telling her, but without mentioning the Vuksans by name. He advised her of delicate negotiations, of men who might or might not have been watching his office, and others who were probably doing the same thing at his home. He spoke of sending his wife away to safety. He told Radka that he did not want anything to happen to her, but there were those who might attempt to use her to get to him. By the end of the conversation he was no closer to convincing her of the need to absent herself from the store, but she had at least agreed to exercise some caution, whatever that might mean.

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