Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation Read online

  “You were stealing from the mail. The communists would have charged you with an act against the state if I had arrested you. You would have gone to prison and they would have thrown away the key. Prison for a man with a young family to support was the greater of two evils, so I hit you.”

  “You should have let me go.”

  “Then they would have punished me.”

  “They would never have found out.”

  “You would have been caught eventually by another police officer, you would have sought a favor, a lesser sentence to save yourself, and you would have told them about my letting you go. Not something the communists would have liked. So the deeds, present and future, required punishment. Your wife thanked me.”

  “She was stupid.”

  “You were the stupid one. She doesn’t have a scar on her forehead.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I heard. Last year. You were not at the funeral.”

  “We were separated.”

  “Now your daughter is dead.”

  The clown swayed just a little as if the wind had picked up and changed direction.

  “You saw her dead?” He had to make sure. “No question it was her?

  “No question.”

  “How?”

  “A car wreck.”

  He stared at her as if waiting for the next blow. “You keep giving me scars.” He thought for a minute. “You have more?”

  “She was working as a prostitute. Who was her pimp?”

  He shook his head, then shrugged his shoulders to indicate he did not know. “I haven’t seen her in a year. She would not work. She would not go to school. She left.”

  “You threw her out.”

  “Maybe.”

  Jana held up the passport she had taken from Seges, opening it to the photograph of the dead man, holding it up in front of the clown’s face.

  “Who is this man?”

  He looked at the photograph, trying to decide what to disclose. “Are you putting me in danger if I tell you?”

  “Clown, your daughter is dead. Who is the man?”

  He considered his options, finally deciding that the present danger of not giving her the information outweighed any future threat.

  “I think he owned the wine bar across from the English pub.”

  “You saw him with your daughter?”

  “Never. He asked me to do my cat act for him at his bar one evening.”

  “Who was there?”

  “No one I’d seen before or since.”

  “Slovaks?”

  “All foreigners.”

  “I am sorry about your daughter.” She put the passport in her pocket. “I remember her when she was little.”

  “She had become a whore.”

  “And you were a thief.”

  He shook his head stubbornly. “She slept with anyone who paid her. A whore.”

  “At least she gave something in return for what she got.” Jana looked down at the cats. “Show me one of them.” The clown hesitated. “I will leave you with another scar if you don’t show me the cat.”

  Reluctantly he bent down and picked up one of the cats, handing it to her. The cat did not move. Jana examined its face, petting the red and brown patchwork head.

  “Poor thing. Poor little thing.” She stepped closer to the clown, almost nose to nose. “It’s blind. They’re both blind, aren’t they?”

  “So they’re blind. As long as the spectators are blind as well, who cares? They’re just cats.”

  “They can’t see, so they must stay where they are, clinging to you, to each other, hoping you won’t drop them.”

  “I feed them. They would be dead otherwise.”

  “How did you blind them? A pin in each eye when they were kittens? Just half a centimeter into each pupil, right? Blinded as children so they would not know any better.” She paused. “They are your children so you can do what you want with them, right? Did you sell your daughter to the Albanian?

  “I am an honest man.”

  “Never.”

  Jana reached over to the platform and scooped up the other cat, then walked away carrying them both.

  “Where are you taking my cats? They belong to me. I own them.”

  Jana kept on walking.

  “You are taking my livelihood away.”

  “Maybe you don’t deserve to live.”

  She continued out of the square. The passersby wondered why a police officer was carrying a pair of cats.

  Chapter 3

  Back when the communists were in charge, there was no Easter. No Christmas. Religious holidays ceased to exist; people could not celebrate. The communists delighted in denying reality, substituting mirages, false celebrations created specifically for what they perceived was the state’s benefit. All false; everything distorted. Bureaucrats ruled the world. And, for the common man who had to eat, he who did not steal from the state stole bread from his family. That was the only rule the people could follow to fight back.

  Communist Slovakia. A strange time and place for her to decide to become a police officer. Then again, maybe not. In a land of distorted values, it at least offered some certainty as long as you stayed away from the political side. She had tried, and look where it had gotten her, even under the new rule of winner-take-all capitalism: She was just another gray bureaucrat in a cubbyhole.

  Jana looked around her office: dull, drab, paint peeling, an old cabinet for police procedural publications, a few never-framed dusty pictures on the walls depicting bucolic scenes. She had hoped they would add freshness and light. But as soon as she put them up, they had taken on the characteristics of the room, becoming overcast themselves.

  The two blind cats she had rescued from Jurai were curled up in a corner on two-week-old newspapers she had culled from the visitor’s room. Jana had found a small bowl for water and shredded some lunch meat, laying it out on a cracked saucer from the coffee room. The cats had sniffed at the meat, one of them taking a small bite; then both of them had gone to sleep. They had not made a sound during the whole time she had them. When cats are blind, she asked herself, are they also deprived of the ability to make sounds?

  No. Blindness has nothing to do with speech. To be blind was to simply not see. Unseeing and unseen. You looked in a mirror and still saw nothing of yourself, of your future. When she had first met Daniel, she had been blind.

  Daniel had also been sightless. But his lack of sight had been assumed as part of a role he was playing at the National Theatre. He was performing Hamlet, the youngest Hamlet in the history of that theater, and in his interpretation of the tragic prince he was playing the role as if the young Dane were blind, a boy turning into a man who makes his life mistakes not only because of his own emotional incapacities but due to the actual failure of his sight. And it had worked. Oh, how it had worked.

  That night, everyone in the theater felt for that slender, dark-haired man on the stage. His limpid brown eyes showed such pain and anguish, even though the eyes were unseeing.

  How incredible he was when he moved; how sensual he was when he touched things; how he walked from object to object on the stage supposedly not knowing they were there, yet reaching every destination using an actor’s artifice that was completely accepted by the audience. Dano, as she later called him, was even believable in the play’s denouement, the dueling scene, somehow conveying that he could hear the blade coming at him, parry, than slash back at his unseen opponent. And, finally, when he was about to succumb to the poison administered by the scratch of his opponent’s blade, every man in the audience believed they had seen the ultimate ennobled prince, and every woman was dismayed that she was about to lose her heroic lover before their romance had reached its fulfillment.

  In his penultimate dying speech, to the last person in the last row, everyone in that audience died a little.

  If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

  Absent thee from felicity awhile,

  And in this harsh world
draw thy breath in pain

  To tell my story.

  With the play’s final sigh, the audience sighed with him, No. It can’t be over. Let us have more. We love you! The applause that greeted the final curtain, and the appearance of Dano, was a huge wave that resounded through the aisles. The subsequent rhythmic, synchronized clapping that is so characteristic of Eastern Europe continued for a good ten minutes. They were all Horatios and Ophelias, promising not to forget him.

  Jana had come to the theater with Monika, a friend who was, even before this performance, in love with Daniel. And, as usual with Dano and women, he had already moved on to his next conquest. There was never any animosity on the women’s side when these brief romantic dalliances ended. The women he blew a farewell kiss to were always convinced they were parting because of an uncontrollable set of circumstances, their love now to become a deep friendship which, in actuality, soon faded away.

  Monika, who led Jana backstage to meet the blind hero, was now going through the end of the deep-friendship phase with Dano, still wanting to maintain a modicum of closeness by showing up after the play to at least kiss the man of her past dreams on the cheek.

  Dano was surrounded by well-wishers. Monika ran over to embrace him and congratulate him on his wonderfully felt and interpreted performance. After a moment, ever so gracefully, she was gently ushered aside to allow the next courtier to greet the prince.

  Jana had lagged behind, not wanting to mix with the royal heir’s entourage. She was interested in what Daniel was really like, but this was not the place where anyone could find that out. So she focused on the surroundings that had created the illusions of the play: the false walls that conveyed the strength of Elsinore Castle, the flats, the throne itself. She even picked up one of the rapiers the prop master had not yet collected and, for a moment, engaged in an imaginary duel, thrusting and parrying with her unseen enemy, stopping only because she realized that the stage had become silent.

  Jana turned, and there was Dano staring at her, his league of admirers behind him, all of them waiting to see what their hero would do.

  He continued to look at her, not eyeing her up and down, simply watching her face. In turn, she stared at him: tall, face even more expressive up close, his hair darker, his eyes deeper. He finally gave her a slow smile; she smiled back.

  “I think I like you,” he said softly.

  “Impossible.” She shook her head, smiling anyway. “Too early.”

  “I wish we had met sooner.” He said it as if he truly meant it. “We will be friends.”

  Jana felt her smile getting even wider, happy with his attention, but unsure how to respond. She knew she was pretty, with an athlete’s trim figure, but women police officers, even in civilian clothes, have a look and a posture that tends to drive suitors away. So she was not quite prepared for a Dano in her life.

  Their next meeting was at police headquarters. Jana had just finished working up a background on one of her defendants, a farmer who had killed his son because the boy had disrespected him. The mother, in hysterics, had related how her husband had hit her, then hit her again. Their son, a fourteen-year-old, had stepped between the two to stop any further injury to his mother. The father wasted no words. He went to his bedroom, came out with his shotgun, and killed the boy. The mother still had blood spattered on her clothes and kept patting the spots, gently rubbing them, as if her son could feel her touch and be comforted by it.

  So Jana was not in a great mood when she saw Dano standing outside the doors to the building. Her bad mood gave way to surprise, then surprise turned to pleasure at seeing him.

  Dano was too busy acting out a part for the police officers stationed at the front door to notice her at first. She watched him continually changing characters, first by pretending to be a Golem, his next role; then transforming himself into seventy-year-old King Lear; then into the gangster Mack the Knife in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. He was in the middle of singing the opera’s signature theme song when he saw Jana.

  Dano danced over and finished his performance of the song for her. When she told him she was too busy to see him that evening, he pretended to cry, then wandered around the lobby acting the part of a distraught country swain begging for the support of the other police officers in the lobby, all of them eventually urging her to give in.

  The chorus of support was so loud that Jana finally agreed to go for coffee. Dano held out his arm to her, the rest of the cops applauding and shouting approval as the two walked down the steps together. Dano charmed her into pushing the farmer’s wife and her son’s tragedy into the back of her mind. And, despite his reputation, Dano kept his distance during the evening they spent together. Jana drove him home and he only kissed her on the cheek.

  Their next date was at least planned. The two of them went rollerskating along the Danube, both laughing and giggling at their awkwardness on skates, finally stopping several kilometers upriver to sit on a cold bench that required them to bundle together for warmth.

  And always they talked, nonstop. Dano was filled with the idea of leaving the National Theatre and starting his own company; Jana spoke about her cases, Dano taking an intense interest in them. The two worlds mixed and matched, very different but both intense with action, with pathos, with sudden passions of love lost and regained, with tragedy lurking at every intersection of people’s lives. And with joy. How wonderfully surprising it was to them both that their worlds, so different, could be so alike.

  Jana brought Dano home to meet her mother, who had seen Dano onstage and was already talking to her friends and neighbors about the growing liaison between Jana and the most promising actor in Bratislava. The older woman went out of her way to cook halushka and to bake up a storm so that Dano would see the kind of hospitality he could expect as a son-in-law.

  The courtship lasted one month. They were married without fanfare in a civil ceremony. Jana was rapturously happy, married to the handsomest man in Slovakia. She knew about his past reputation, his romantic grand passions. He swore they were over. And she believed him. She did not care about the government, the world, politics, and certainly could not predict what would happen to them.

  Chapter 4

  The phone rang. Jana quickly picked it up, afraid its insistent clamor would wake the cats. “Yes, right away, Colonel Trokan.” She hung up and reached into the top drawer of her desk to pick up the decedent’s papers that Seges had left for her. She walked to the door just as Seges came in without knocking. He was still doing things the wrong way.

  “You didn’t knock.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m going to see Colonel Trokan.” She went past Seges. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it can wait.”

  Seges followed her into the hall. “All the men are talking about the blind cats. They think they should be put to sleep.”

  “I’ll decide that.” She began walking toward Trokan’s office. “No one lays a hand on them except me.”

  “Naturally, Commander Matinova.” He followed her for a few steps. “The coroner wants the papers of the decedent. He keeps phoning me, citing office regulations.”

  “Tell him to call me. I’ve dealt with him before. Not a problem.”

  “He says that’s why he called me. I think he’s afraid of you.” He waited until she was almost at Trokan’s door. “I found out where the Albanian lived. I am going there.”

  Jana stopped at the colonel’s door, raising her voice just enough so that Seges would hear the no-nonsense quality of the command. “You will wait until I finish with the colonel! Understood?”

  “I can toss the place myself, you know.”

  “You are to wait.” Everything with Seges had to be repeated twice. “Or I will feed you to the department dogs.”

  She knocked on the door, waited a full five seconds, than went into the colonel’s office.

  Stephan Trokan had been a colonel of police for ten years now. Three months ago, he had been put up for promotion to general by the mini
ster of the interior. Unfortunately, the president, who approved all promotions at that level, disliked the minister of the interior because of an imagined slur he was thought to have uttered about the president’s party in Slovakia’s coalition government. So he refused to sign the promotion, sealing Trokan in his colonel’s rank until this government fell or the president died. Since the president was a born survivor and the next government might be even worse for Trokan, he had decided to stop being ambitious, at least for the moment.

  Not that Trokan, a robust man despite his bureaucratic responsibilities, was disheartened enough to become angry or frustrated, or ready merely to let the years go by until he retired. He shrugged it off as a part of life and decided to enjoy the job he had. Which was good for everyone he supervised: No anger was directed their way. Although a fearsome reputation as a martinet continued to follow him, his subordinates were now surprised to discover that he had a sense of humor. Jana walked into an example of it when she entered his office: He had a London bobby’s cap perched on his head.

  She took a seat, ignoring the cap, as Trokan pretended to finish something he was writing until she noticed. Finally, to break the stalemate, Jana reached over and took the cap, putting it on her own head.

  “It’s mine,” Trokan mumbled, pushing the papers away. He looked up to take in her appearance wearing the cap, then gave her a fleeting smile. “It came from a British cop who is over here with the EU to tell us how bad our police practices are and how we have to become more like the English, or the Italians or the Germans, in order to catch more criminals.”

  Trokan leaned back in his chair, ogling her. “Women do look better in hats than men. However, if one of our officers should walk through the door, they would begin inventing stories about us to explain why you look a little strange.”

  She took the hat off, carefully laying it on the desk. Trokan immediately put it back on his head.

  “Police colonels are allowed to be a little strange.”

  “The face below the hat is too Slavic. You would never pass as British.”

  “Nothing wrong with looking Slavic.”