Angel in the Shadows Page 6

  Anya had met Viktor during one of her trips to Chechnya. His OMON unit had been deployed there for zachistka, mopping-up operations in which entire villages were surrounded and door-to-door searches carried out with the aim of locating and eliminating Chechens suspected of terrorist activities. At some point, Viktor himself had been ambushed by Chechen troops, captured and tortured. But, loyal to his unit’s motto – ‘Special forces show no mercy and never ask for it’ – he’d not given an inch. Eventually, more dead than alive, he was exchanged for Chechen prisoners. Anya’s article about how he’d narrowly escaped death in captivity made him a hero within OMON’s ranks. It was time for him to return the favour.

  That, at any rate, was Anya’s thinking.

  What Viktor thought about this was anyone’s guess, but the way he scrutinized Paul didn’t bode well. Dogs sometimes looked at you this way when they weren’t entirely sure whether to attack or to leave you be.

  ‘I expected you alone,’ Viktor said to Anya.

  ‘He’s a trusted friend.’

  ‘And an American,’ Paul added. ‘Would you like something to drink from an American?’

  ‘His blood,’ Viktor said.

  Friends for life, Paul thought to himself, and beckoned one of the waitresses, who looked like she lived at the gym and slept in a tanning salon.

  ‘It’s about a mutual friend and colleague,’ Anya said. ‘Whatever’s on that mobile can prove her innocence.’

  ‘I don’t care about any of that,’ Viktor replied. ‘I promised I’d help you. That’s all the reason I need.’

  Anya gave him a smile that Paul was only too familiar with. It involved curling the right-hand corner of her mouth, a bit like Elvis Presley did in the early days, when he sang ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Once upon a time, she’d reserved that look for Paul. And for him alone. Now she freely gave it to an OMON man, someone he also had to pay eight hundred dollars to. Obviously, Viktor needed these reasons as well.

  Eight hundred dollars was a lot of money for a second-hand iPhone – or the comparable dark rectangular model Farah thought the so-called terrorist had held in her hands – especially when you consider that people in Moscow threw away so many used mobile phones these days that the city’s sanitation department had set up a special recycling unit. But Paul was prepared to pay tenfold if necessary to retrieve the footage that was supposedly on it. Anything to prove Farah’s innocence.

  Viktor slowly pulled the envelope with the dollar bills towards him, all the while fixing Paul with a peculiar gaze. Then he downed the Old Boy he’d ordered, a mix of vodka, grapefruit juice and Thai chillies, and stood up.

  ‘When do you expect to be back?’ Anya asked. Paul detected a hint of nervousness in her voice.

  ‘No idea. You’d better wait here; this may take a while,’ Viktor said, and off he strode out the door.

  Anya looked over Paul’s shoulder in the direction Viktor had gone. There was scepticism in her eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said to Paul. ‘He’s a man of his word.’

  ‘He’s definitely a man of few words,’ said Paul, who noticed how apprehensive she’d become in the space of a few minutes. And, as he observed her, he felt something he’d rarely felt for her: a strange kind of compassion. It was a sentiment that had no place in their relationship, not even now that it was purely professional. In the days when he’d lived with her, there’d been a permanent electric charge between them. The sparks were always flying with Anya. Not only was she a passionate lover, but also a confrontational life partner. She gave herself to him with her heart and soul. And she expected the same in return. Together, they would fight the world’s ills.

  A fight she was destined to lose.

  And now that he was briefly back in Moscow because of Farah, now that he was sitting opposite Anya in a bar, she revealed an unexpectedly vulnerable side.

  ‘I still miss you,’ she said.

  The realization of just how unhappy she must have been since he’d swapped Moscow for Johannesburg more than eighteen months ago without so much as a word weighed on him like a concrete block.

  He tried to think of something to say, something to alleviate his sense of guilt without compromising his true feelings, but he was denied the chance. A punkish girl ran into the bar screaming, chased by two men from Viktor’s unit. Panicked guests fled and she tripped on an overturned table. The OMON men closed in, grabbed hold of the girl, and were about to drag her out when they were set upon by sympathizers who’d followed them inside. Smoke drifted into the bar, probably from a smoke bomb on the street.

  Paul and Anya escaped with the other customers, straight into the chaos on Ulitsa Petrovka.

  Opposite police headquarters, on a hastily improvised stage constructed of pallets, the heavily made-up lead singer of a punk-rock girl band yelled ‘Kiss a pig!’ A handful of other girls, with bared breasts and lips painted blood-red, charged at the surprised police officers, flung themselves around the men’s necks and tried to kiss them on the mouth.

  The hardliners of the ‘Kiss a Pig’ group, organized in protest against a new police law, used the OMON’s prompt arrival on the scene as an excuse for a battle.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Anya shouted.

  Paving stones and smoke bombs were flying about. The OMON were making a baton charge in an effort to clear the immediate surroundings of 38 Ulitsa Petrovka.

  Paul and Anya ran into a narrow side street. Back on Petrovsky Bulvar, Paul realized he’d not only lost his eight hundred dollars, but that their entire mission was becoming something of a disaster.

  The fighting was encroaching on them. Anya couldn’t get the car started. A fist pounded on the driver’s window. Then the emotionless face of Viktor came into view, his eyes hard as steel.

  He stuffed a jute bag through the hurriedly opened window.

  ‘No idea which one it might be,’ he said. ‘These are all the dark rectangular models.’

  With the flat of his hand he slapped the roof of the Škoda and disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.

  6

  Farah saw her haunting image again: the girl who’d fainted in Moscow. This time she was sitting at the foot of the rickety teak bed in the clammy hotel room near Jakarta’s old port. It was the same girl, except she was no longer begging for her life. She wasn’t moving – in fact, she didn’t even seem to be breathing – and her eyes were wide with horror.

  The young woman was just sitting there, like a frozen memory, while Paul’s voice boomed in Farah’s left ear.

  ‘Describe to me what she looked like.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’

  ‘You’re four hours ahead of us here … I’m sorry … but it’s important, otherwise I’d never –’

  ‘It’s okay, Paul. Good to hear your voice again.’

  ‘Even though it’s four o’clock in the morning?’

  She heard him inhaling. ‘Are you smoking?’

  ‘Yes, it keeps me awake. Whereabouts are you?’

  ‘In some shabby hotel, not far from the old port.’

  ‘Jakarta?’

  She produced an affirmative sound.

  ‘You made it.’

  She looked straight ahead, into the eyes of the motionless girl in front of her.

  ‘Do you hear me, Farah? You made it.’

  ‘Blonde … medium-length, straight hair …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘Oh, right. What about her eyes?’

  ‘Blue … hang on … red.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as red eyes.’

  ‘I reckon she’s a redhead, but she dyes her hair. Her skin’s pale, nearly translucent. She’s got freckles and a bit of a pout.’

  ‘Sounds like she’s from England or Scotland.’

  ‘Eastern European, I’d say. Maybe Russian. She was muttering to herself when she thought she was … It sounded Russian, certainly not English.’

  ‘Age?’

&n
bsp; Farah saw the girl’s perfect skin, the glassy eyes, the outline of her hunched-over shoulders, her cowering body.

  ‘Early twenties at most.’

  In the silence that followed, she heard him inhale again.

  ‘What’s wrong, Paul?’

  A deep sigh followed. She pictured him blowing out the smoke in a long, straight line.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘I’ll get you out of this, Farah, I promise.’

  ‘I believe you, but please tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘We found the woman, the terrorist, or, that’s to say, the woman who was supposed to pass for one …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘We don’t have her phone. We do have other shit, phones that …’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘I think we’ve been taken for a ride. The person who was going to smuggle the phone out of the depot turned up with a whole bagful – about thirty in total. We’re taking out the memory cards to read them. We’re still working on it, but so far … there’s nothing there … just rubbish. I don’t think …’

  As Paul took a strong drag, she could hear the soft, crackling sound of burning tobacco. When he resumed talking, he sounded different – less heavy.

  ‘All this time we completely overlooked the fact that we have a witness. We may not need those phones after all. You know what, I’m going to find that girl. I’m going to record her side of the story, consolidate it with my own account and the photos we already have, and then you won’t have to spend any more time all by yourself in some shabby hotel worrying. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve tracked her down. Hang in there.’

  Farah just kept listening to the dialling tone. The morning light crept in through the worn shutters. The girl dissolved in a cloud of whirling dust particles.

  You made it.

  In Moscow there had been first the numbness and then the relief at having survived being taken hostage. It was only now, now that she’d made it through all the immigration checks, now that she’d escaped the security services, only now in this grubby hotel room on the other side of the world, that the real fear set in.

  Hang in there.

  Through the chinks in the closed shutters, she could hear the buzz of frenetically honking mopeds, the sputtering of small wooden boats mooring and unmooring, and the hollering of men on the quay.

  Exhausted, she shuffled towards the bathroom. Keep moving, she had to keep moving. She had to get a grip on what was happening to her.

  It was the only way she could get back to work.

  She clutched the shower bar with one hand and turned on the tap with the other. Tepid, rusty water splashed over her head, dripped down her body and splattered on to the green, mildewed stone floor. Leaning her forehead against the tiled wall, she supported herself with both hands.

  Hang in there.

  With the water gushing over her back, she allowed the tears to flow freely.

  She unwrapped a small piece of soap and began to rub her body with it, as if she could scrub away all the misery from her memories.

  When the final soap suds had been rinsed off, she cupped her hands and splashed her face with the water. This she repeated, over and over, like the final step of a purification ritual.

  She’d stopped crying.

  7

  The concrete car-park slabs were flooded by the previous night’s heavy rainfall. The police headquarters was brokenly reflected in the puddles like loose pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As always, Radjen Tomasoa manoeuvred into a parking spot at too much of an angle and had to put his car into reverse to straighten it out. He thought of the sigh Elisabeth would have let out if she’d been sitting beside him. A sigh that would have said so much more than the long silences that stretched between them. A sigh that grated on the strapping bald man now staring at him in the rear-view mirror.

  He pulled back out of the spot, furiously shifted gears, let the engine roar and the wheels spin, pushed down on the accelerator as hard as he could and spun around on the concrete slabs. Brakes screeching. His headlights illuminated a metre-high spray of water that resembled a fountain lit from underneath. He felt a sense of satisfaction as he deftly slipped the car in between two other police vehicles.

  The usual activities were in full swing in his department, despite the early-morning hour. No matter the time of day or night, the station teemed with life: arriving via emergency calls, manifesting itself on the screens of search engines displaying criminal profiles and sending suspects to interrogation rooms, such as the widow of the man who’d supposedly hanged himself in the bluish reflection of his aquariums.

  Radjen took the stairs to the third floor and made a pit stop at the king-sized coffee machine, so familiar to him after all these years that their relationship had taken on almost human qualities. A slight kick against the right side, a caressing smack with the flat of his hand top left and a quick press on the next-to-last button gave him what he so desperately needed at this moment: a double espresso. And on the way to his office, as always, he burned his tongue taking the first sip.

  He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a file. This case had become even more sinister than it was already because of last night’s suicide. He laid the folder on his desk without opening it, sank into his leather swivel chair, took another sip of coffee and closed his eyes.

  He imagined the man in his silk garb, atop the kitchen stepladder in between the illuminated tanks, watching the fish listlessly swimming in never-ending circles. A crude kicking movement with his feet. The ladder clatters to the ground. Why didn’t anyone hear it? The man falls straight down; the taut rope cracks his neck. His head hangs down lifelessly.

  ‘Normally, I’d knock.’

  He looked up and saw Esther van Noordt entering his office holding two steaming mugs of coffee. He tried to force a smile, but his lips were too dry. She approached him, leaned over and placed one of the mugs in front of him on the desk.

  Beside the aroma of caffeine emanating from the mugs, he caught a whiff of the sea. As if he wasn’t at his desk at all but taking a morning stroll along the beach. He inhaled the scent and realized it was mixed with something else as well. It smelled like holding a Granny Smith apple close to your nose, one that had spent days in a cedar box. It couldn’t have been the scent of her shampoo, or her body lotion, because he would have noticed it before. He’d stood right beside her in the shed. Perhaps after installing Efrya Meijer in one of the interrogation rooms, Esther had gone back to her desk and from a small perfume bottle dabbed this scent on her neck and wrists.

  And here she was: one of his most talented detectives, who’d been on a three-week holiday because of all the overtime she’d accumulated. It was her first day back. Tanned skin, straight brown hair streaked from the sun, a small ring through her right nostril. Surrounded by the scent of sea and apples.

  ‘So what did you actually do for those three weeks?’ he heard himself asking.

  ‘Went to England.’

  ‘England’s a big country. Where?’

  ‘The Isles of Scilly.’

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘Gig-racing championships.’

  ‘What’s the attraction?’

  ‘Everything – the training, competitions, working together with your crew.’

  ‘Did you win anything?’

  ‘We’re just amateurs. We were up against women pretty much born at sea, who had oars shoved into their hands before they could even walk. We were fourteenth in our category.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter – it’s the glory of the challenge …’ Radjen raised his espresso in a toast. ‘To the challenge!’ Clichéd words of wisdom, perfect for a ceramic tile or mug. He removed a photo from the file and slid it towards her. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘A girl, seriously injured.’

  ‘I’d take another look if I were you.’

  Esther stared closely at the image. ‘A boy?’

  ‘Child slave, young whore, plaything for men, whatever you want to ca
ll it. Run down by a car on a deserted road in the Amsterdamse Bos. Left for dead. Undoubtedly smuggled into the Netherlands. Forensics found evidence at the scene of the accident that matches a dark-grey Mercedes-Benz E-200 Guard, the vehicle of choice for chauffeuring Dutch ministers.’

  Meanwhile, he’d pulled out a second photo and held it up in front of her. ‘Do you recognize her?’

  ‘They also have television on the Isles of Scilly, Chief. Isn’t that the journalist? Involved in the hostage-taking in Moscow? Farah … something or other …?’

  ‘Hafez.’

  ‘What does she have to do with this?’

  ‘Initially, nothing. The traffic police and forensics thought they had the case covered. Until she appeared on the scene. If you ask me, she should have joined the police instead of the press. She was the first to recognize that the type of clothing, the jewellery and the way the boy was made up are a traditional form of child abuse that apparently still takes place in certain parts of Afghanistan. Young boys are kitted out as dancers and forced to perform for men, after which they’re sexually abused. Bacha Bazi. Literally means “playing with boys”. From the moment this Hafez stepped in, everything quickly started to fall into place. She discovered an evidence trail near the site of the accident that led into the woods. She took us straight to a run-down villa, where forensics found shell casings, traces of blood and drag marks. The estate in question is owned by the Dorado Group. Or Armin Lazonder, owner of IRIS TV, Managing Director of De Nederlander newspaper and the man behind the New Golden Age Project: a huge development in Amsterdam, with offices, a marina, hotels and all the rest. Lazonder bought the place six months ago because his wife wanted to create some exclusive club there. Those plans never got off the ground. The villa is still empty; nothing has been done to refurbish it. Lazonder denied having any knowledge of what took place there that night.’

  He took a quick sip of his espresso. ‘A few kilometres from the villa we also found a vehicle, at least what was left of it after it’d been torched. Identifying the two occupants from the evidence we gathered wasn’t possible: no matching DNA in our database. However, the pathologist did find a match between the shell casings left at the villa and the bullets in the bodies of the two fire victims. You do the maths.’