Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation Read online

  He placed the cap on a shelf behind him, in line with a number of police caps he had collected from other countries. “The English always look too prissy.” He swung back to face her. “They know they can’t bribe me with money, so they try to get me to change by offering these little gifts I have to take.”

  She eyed the shelf of caps. “Dust catchers.”

  “Spoken like a housewife, not a police officer.”

  “I’ve not been a housewife for a long time,” she reminded him.

  “I know.” He cleared his throat. “How is our daughter Katka?”

  “My daughter is still my daughter.” Trokan was not her daughter’s father, but he had seen so much of her when she was in her pre-teens that he liked to pretend she was his.

  “You haven’t heard from her in a while?”

  “A year.”

  “No cards, letters, phone calls?”

  “One, from her husband, when she had the baby. I sent presents. I called. She wrote back once, a standard store-bought thing with her name written under the printed ‘Thank You.’ I think her husband forged her signature. Americans are very polite. The family is in France. He’s the American consul in Nice.”

  “Very warm in Nice; sunny most of the time. Good sea air.”

  “They eat lots of fish.” Jana hesitated, then asked, “How is your wife?” It was no secret that his wife and Trokan did not get along.

  “Always a madwoman.”

  “Too bad.” She laid the papers, collected from the bodies that had been in the burning van, on his desk. “I thought Seges would have filled you in on the details of the case by now. And informed you, because of all his brilliance, how he was close to clearing it.” They both knew that Seges had come to her with a reputation for going behind his supervisor’s back and claiming credit for other people’s successes. ”I suppose a medal would be in order for him, from his perspective, of course.”

  “He told me everything from his perspective,” Trokan amiably agreed. He looked a bit uneasy. “We both know he is a sneak. Since I don’t trust his perspective, I thought I might ask you.”

  “Why do you have to assign all the problem people to me?”

  “I gave a problem child to a problem child. That way, I only have to focus on one place to determine where grief is coming from.”

  “When was the last time I gave you trouble? Are you complaining about the way I do things?”

  “Of course. Everything is a major event with you. At least that’s what Seges implied.” His belly jiggled as he chuckled gleefully. “I think he said you were making mountains out of molehills.”

  “You want to give the case to someone else?”

  “No.”

  They always had this argument at the beginning of a case. Trokan took pleasure in needling her. He would have come up with a reason to do so even if Seges had not complained. She took it in good humor, because it always ended up with Trokan letting her have her way.

  “You can’t complain about the results,” she reminded him.

  “It’s my job to complain.”

  “As long as it’s only a little bit.” She eyed him, knowing he had something more to tell her. “What else?”

  “One working girl dead, no problem. Two dead, a sigh but good riddance. Three dead, a little uncomfortable. Four, and we are sweating. Five, and the building is falling down. Here there are six of them. Time for the government people, the newspapers, everyone, to run to an insane asylum and take lessons from the inmates. Throw in the man and there are major earthquakes, particularly with the Western community. The EU is already asking questions.”

  “All the women were probably prostitutes.”

  “That is your call.”

  “Not for sure yet. Seges was supposed to run the records. He told you; he didn’t tell me.”

  “He’s busy scoring points. He knows the Interpol man in Lyon. They did a hurry-up job for him. All the women were prostitutes. Most from other countries.” Trokan paused, then smiled very broadly. “That Seges does like to suck up to me. In a way, it is very comforting. He makes me feel like I am important. You should try it once in a while.”

  “Too late for me.”

  “It never hurts.”

  “If they were all prostitutes, it means it might be a trafficking case as well. Perhaps part of a motive for the killings?”

  “All murdered?”

  “I have begun to think so.”

  She went to the door.

  “And get rid of the blind cats,” he threw after her.

  “Is that an official order?”

  “I just make suggestions.”

  As soon as she walked out, Trokan got on the phone to the minister. “I spoke to her, Minister.” He listened. “I know. Pressure from the UN; pressure from the EU; pressure from the Americans. We did sign the Rome Treaty on Human Trafficking.” He swiveled in his chair, absently taking the bobby’s cap from the shelf and slipping it on again. “I think she will have to be the person we send.”

  He pulled a small mirror from a desk drawer and peered at his reflection wearing the hat. “No. Those are not the types of waves she would make.” He put the mirror down, than slipped the hat back onto the shelf. “Who cares what the French say? Less? Even less, who cares what the British say? They are not Slavs.” He settled back in his chair. “I know, the EU is important. Yes, the treaty. Yes, the UN.” He took a deep breath waiting for the minister to finish, smoothing the hairs back that had been dragged out of place by the cap. “Yes, Minister, I will push this. Thank you, Minister.”

  Trokan dumped the phone back onto its cradle, then picked up the mirror, studying his face, this time without the cap. “English is okay; Slavic is better.” Satisfied, he put the mirror back in the drawer.

  Chapter 5

  Jana and Seges were unable to locate the landlord of the “pimp’s” third-floor apartment on Strakova. They assumed that was what he was, as he had been in the car with six probable prostitutes. Unfortunately, there were no keys to the apartment among the dead man’s possessions. And no landlord meant no passkey, and that meant they had to use a crowbar to snap the double lock combination on the heavy door. Not a problem by itself, but the neighbors had to be assured that they were police officers on official business.

  As usual in Slovak culture, no one ever gives information to the police unless their lives absolutely depend upon it. Once the obligatory identifications were made, immediately after their denials of ever seeing anyone living in the pimp’s flat, the tenants’ doors shut. As far as the neighbors were concerned, the apartment had never been rented.

  Inside, the place was filled with the cheap modern furniture sold by places like IKEA to furnish the expensive rentals in Slovakia. In the cheaper rentals all you got were heavy furnishings, dark remnants of the prior Eastern bloc status, which hulked about in a grim way to remind the user that any place else would be more cheerful.

  “Expensive.” Seges nodded his approval at the look of the apartment. “Must be a thousand dollars, maybe twelve hundred dollars a month.” The landlords all took their tenants’ money in dollars or Euros, cash only, so they wouldn’t have to declare it on their income tax. Ownership was an attractive investment for those who could afford the initial cost. “I’d like to have a few rentals like this. Give up police work and live the easy life.”

  “You would be an instant target for the Tax Police. Ex-police officer, no other source of income. And then they’d ask where you got the money to buy the properties in the first place. Good-bye apartments, hello prison.”

  “Hell,” Seges complained. “Half the force is taking graft.”

  “Consider it carefully. They get away with it; you wouldn’t.” She finished her first look around, then took a quick tour through the apartment: living room, kitchen. Seges followed her, oohing and ahhing at the conveniences.

  Everyone hides things in the bedroom or the kitchen. This time the bedroom was their first choice. Seges searched the clothes in a
freestanding armoire; Jana took the dresser.

  Neat and tidy. So neat and tidy, it bothered her. There was nothing out of place, socks were paired neatly, shirts arranged by color; every piece of underwear bore the same label. All the brand names were foreign. She smelled the drawers’ contents. No cologne scent, no aftershave. She checked the collars on the shirts. No abrading or discoloration. Everything was new or nearly new. She walked over to the armoire as Seges finished.

  “Anything?”

  “Good-quality clothes. Italian suits. They cost money.” He shrugged. “My dream life isn’t this good. Tonight I’m going to shake things up, make my fantasies richer.”

  “Richer doesn’t mean better.”

  “You could fool me.”

  “His expensive suits didn’t keep him alive.” She reconsidered her conclusion. “If they were indeed the dead man’s clothes.” She checked the cuffs on the trousers of the suits.

  “No wear. Again, new or nearly new.” She inhaled. Unlike the drawers, there was a faint bouquet of cologne in the closet. She checked each of the jackets until she identified the one giving off the aroma. She pulled the jacket and matching pants off the hanger, laying them on the bed. From inside the breast pocket she took a single coin, from Croatia. All she knew about that country came from a Dubrovnik woman who bragged about how nobody in the world could cook fish like the Croats and told elaborate stories about the beautiful Dalmatian coast and its islands.

  Seges began stripping the bed as Jana walked through the living room into the kitchen. She began searching through the drawers and cabinets. Again, everything was neat. Nothing in the sink, not even a glass left out to dry. Detergent under the sink, never opened. Full bottles of this and that, still sealed. This was a person who ate out all the time. Her last stop was the refrigerator.

  She could hear Seges begin to toss the living room as she opened the freezer compartment. Frozen food was piled up in a haphazard way. Not like the contents of the rest of the apartment. Jana began pulling out the boxes of frozen food, dumping them in the sink, finally emptying the freezer. Nothing.

  She stood back and eyed the refrigerator, both of its doors open, wondering what she had missed. The only item stored on the shelves of the refrigerator door was a small kielbasa in clear plastic wrap.

  Jana pulled a knife from one of the drawers and cut herself a small piece of the sausage, chewing it as she walked back into the living room. She had a sudden pang of memory: her daughter, Katka. Always snacking on little pieces of sausage in the kitchen. Now she was grown and gone. Jana pushed the memory away.

  Seges was on the floor in the living room, the couch upside down. He was pulling at a small notebook that was taped to the underside of the sofa, finally tugging it loose from the fabric.

  He grinned, satisfied with himself. “How about a piece of sausage for this book?”

  Jana cut Seges a piece, passing it to him in exchange for the notebook. Then she sat at the dining table and carefully opened the cover. Seges leaned over her shoulder, chewing loudly on the sausage as she slowly leafed through the pages.

  “You like the sausage?” she asked offhandedly.

  “Very good.”

  “He’s not Albanian.”

  “The sausage maker?”

  “The dead man or whoever put the sausage in the refrigerator.”

  “You can tell from the notebook? The clothes? The apartment?”

  “The sausage. It’s pork. Albanians are mostly Moslem. Pork is forbidden.”

  “He could be part of the Christian minority.”

  “Perhaps. Except Christians from there don’t eat it much because it offends their neighbors. So, when they leave Albania, they haven’t acquired a taste for it. They continue not to eat it. Habit.”

  She went back to her focus on the book: columns of numbers, names, sums. But nothing that had a point of reference to allow her to give it meaning. Seges pointed to one page’s entries.

  “Truck, table, table, vegetables, stone. A shopping list? No,” he answered himself, his speech a little slurred from the kielbasa he was chewing.

  “Nobody tapes a shopping list to the underside of a couch.” Jana opened the book’s rear cover, touching the inside, holding it up to the light. “It’s water-stained. Still damp. It was taped to the couch recently. Not long ago enough for it to dry out. Our man in the car died a few days ago. Unless he was resurrected in the morgue, he could not have taped it there.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe it was the man who had the jacket with the coin in it? I think the book was originally in the freezer. Frost got on the cover, then melted when it was removed from the refrigerator.”

  “Why would the man put it in the freezer in the first place, then take it out and hide it under the couch?” He thought about it. “Maybe the fellow was afraid we wouldn’t find it in the freezer,” he joked, “so he taped it under the couch knowing we would look there.” Seges laughed at his own silliness.

  Jana silently noted Seges’s response. He was too easily convinced he was wrong, even when he was right. She decided to give him a pat on the back. “Good for you, Seges. Maybe he was afraid we wouldn’t find it in the freezer.”

  “I’m right?” Seges tried to conceal his surprise with false jocularity. “You see, you will have to listen to me from now on. I’m a certified genius.”

  “Absolute genius. The Einstein of the Slovak police.” She continued to study the contents of the book. “Can you decipher the writing?”

  “It’s in code.”

  “Brilliant, Seges. I will have to rely on you more and more.” She got up, handing the book to him. “We must find someone who can decode the thing. Maybe the Americans in Austria? The FBI in Prague?” She tossed the sausage to him. “Rewrap the kielbasa and put it in evidence.”

  “It will smell up the file.”

  “They have a small refrigerator in the evidence room.” She tried to keep a straight face. “Tell the custodians that it’s poisoned so they won’t eat it.”

  Jana took a last look around. No ashtrays. Not an ashtray in the entire apartment. No smoking inside. Unusual for a Slovak household. She walked over to the French doors leading to a balcony, stepping outside.

  Seges was right about one thing, at least. The apartment, by Slovak standards, was a jewel. The wind had died down and there was a clear panoramic view of Bratislava: Maria-Theresa’s castle on the hill to her left; the tall Soviet war memorial on the hills across the valley celebrating the Russians driving the Nazis out of the city in the Second World War; Michalska Gate, the last gate standing of the old city’s defensive wall, directly in front of her. And below, the winding streets with their air of decay almost hidden by coats of snow. And the occasional new building, with the hope it represented, stretching up out of the soiled snow.

  Jana looked down. There was a man at the corner gazing up at the building. From the angle of his head, Jana could swear he was focused on this apartment, on her. The man turned, then went around the corner and out of sight. For some reason, Jana visualized the man wearing the jacket with the cologne smell and the coin from Croatia. No proof, but for some reason she thought it was his. She shrugged it off. Just a feeling; nothing to act on.

  Seges stuck his head outside. “You ready to go?”

  There was a large planter on the balcony, the ice-covered vegetation it contained long dead. Jana checked the dirt. No cigarette butts. People sometimes came outside to smoke, then put their cigarette butts in a planter. Here, nothing. Again, lack of real habitation, the apartment almost like a stageset built to fool the audience. Jana was ready to believe there was a stage manager orchestrating events. Except, the dead bodies were real, Jana reminded herself.

  “Too many people to track, too many dead bodies, too much of nothing,” Seges grumbled. “Where’s the writing on the wall?”

  “The writing is there.”

  “Invisible ink, then?”

  “We find out how to make it visible.”


  They left, Seges still grumbling. More problems, he thought. This case was going to wind on and on and on. Working the pickpocket patrol was better. Even if they did try to put their hands in your pockets, with them things came to a quick conclusion.

  Chapter 6

  The call rang on Jana’s mobile when she was eating a late lunch at Hrubulas, the small soup and sandwich place she frequented. The proprietor shrugged at her in sympathy. She was always being interrupted. His shrug was even broader, accompanied by a roll of the eyes, when the minister’s black BMW sedan, one of the ubiquitous BMWs that ministers in Slovakia have a penchant for, picked her up.

  As she left, the owner added a nod of approval to his shrug. Jana was moving up in the world. “Next, a helicopter,” he yelled after her, as the sedan roared off.

  Government cars get to places very quickly in Slovakia. They simply dare pedestrians to get in their way. When it is a minister’s car, the chauffeur’s hubris is intensified, the driver appearing to aim at pedestrians who even look like they are going to cross in front of “his” limousine.

  The interrupted lunch and the near-suicidal jumping of the traffic lights by the chauffeur did nothing for Jana’s spirits. So, arriving at the Ministry, she was already irritable when she was directed to a conference room, and became just a touch angry at not being told about a scheduled meeting which she had had no time to prepare for.

  Jana entered the room to find the chairs at the conference table filled, forcing her to edge around several cameramen, taping the proceedings for public consumption on some dull news day, to find a seat along the wall. She felt superfluous, an afterthought on the agenda of a session that had evidently been going on for a good portion of the day before they even thought of summoning her.

  Jana tuned into what was happening. Nothing vital. Some bureaucrat from an isolated department was doing what so many of the Eastern European government cadres did when they had to give a talk: reading in a monotone from a paper that he had spent a week writing and which had then been cleared by all his supervisors. The man was afraid to leave out a word of the approved script. Democracy had not changed the embedded legacy of mediocrity in which the communists had buried the nation.