The Unquiet Dead (31 page)

“Newhall?” Nate tilted his head up to the ceiling, lost in contemplation of its whimsical cornices. “Why on earth would he need an alias?”

“Do you remember a man named Damir Hasanović? The translator for the UN at their base in Poto
č
ari?”

“I remember. He testified before the international tribunal.”

“He's been living here as your neighbor. You've entertained him in your home.”

“Damir Hasanović?”

“David Newhall.” Before Nate could object, Khattak asked, “Is it possible?”

Nate thought about this. Twilight softened the lines at the corners of his hazel eyes. From his pocket, he took a Waterman pen that he tapped against the table.

“It seems ridiculous to have been so blind. First Chris, now David. I thought of these men as my friends.”

Rachel wanted to tell him she thought the friendship was sincere, but how would she know? Maybe they had each used Nate for their own ends or as a means of getting to each other.

“Hasanović was one of Dra
ž
en Krstić's victims. He lost his family to the Srebrenica massacre. I think he moved here to keep an eye on Drayton. He says he met him at your house and recognized him at once.”

“It's true. Mink asked me to invite him as a board member of the museum. That was a little over two years ago. He met Chris that night.”

“And moved here when?”

“A week later? Maybe two?”

“He was stalking Drayton,” Rachel said. “Once he'd seen him, he had to make sure Drayton didn't disappear.”

“And he changed his name so Chris wouldn't know.” Nate slapped a hand on the table, making them jump. “The letters. David wrote the letters?”

“He didn't admit it, but it's the obvious conclusion.”

“Are you saying David had something to do with Chris's fall? That he planned for his death?”

“He says not. He also told us he loves to walk along the Bluffs.”

“And you think—what? This can't have been coincidence?”

Khattak looked at his friend. His enthusiasm didn't mean that he viewed Drayton's death as an intellectual puzzle dependent on the cleverness of a solution. Nate well understood the human cost, the toll in blood and agony—who better? His warmth and interest expressed his desire to reach out, to offer Khattak his support.

He hadn't been to Winterglass in two years. Nate's openness, his close attention to Rachel, were meant to bridge that distance. Khattak couldn't fault him. He no longer had the appetite to shoot Nate down and watch him suffer.

He knew that Damir Hasanović would have given anything for another moment with his brothers.

He would give anything now to know where Ahmo and Mesha lay buried.

Perhaps he had tried, despite what he'd told them. Tried to wring a last confession from Krstić, a man who knew neither weakness nor remorse. And in that reckless moment of anger, he'd shoved the older man from the cliff, sending him to his death, just as Krstić had condemned so many others.

“It's not coincidence,” he said to Nate. “He moved here because he wanted to bring Krstić to justice. He notified the Department of Justice as soon as he recognized him. When his letter-writing campaign proved fruitless, he could have turned to the media. He must have feared that with the first hint of exposure, Krstić would slip away and would never have to account for his crimes. Newhall—Hasanović—would never learn where his brothers lie buried.”

“Then you do think he killed him.”

“I think he wrote the letters. I think he planted the lilies in Drayton's garden. I don't know if fate intervened and Drayton fell before he could see his plan through, or whether Drayton's fall
was
his plan. We'll check his movements, of course, but that's bound to be inconclusive.”

“Like everything else about this case,” Rachel said glumly.

“Will CPS be making an announcement about Krstić?”

“With the Department of Justice. Once we've given them an answer about Krstić's death.”

“What if there is no answer?”

Khattak's fatigue was evident. “I don't know.”

Nate had known him long enough to know what he was really saying. “You don't want David to have done this.”

“I wouldn't blame him. Who would? But no. That's not what the people of Bosnia deserve.”

Rachel was more prosaic. “Say you do everything by the book and a man like Krstić still walks free. How could we expect Newhall to take that quietly?”

It wasn't an argument for vigilantism. It was Rachel's habit of getting inside the skin of a case, the skin of another's pain.

It was what Khattak most respected about her.

“It's not who Damir Hasanović is. I don't want his life's work to be reduced to Krstić's death.”

*   *   *

As he said it, Khattak knew it came down to the same thing it had always been about. Identity. His. Theirs. The victims of genocide.

And what had been different? Only religion.

In Sarajevo, twenty years ago, people had refused to believe in the war at first.

Different? What do you mean, we are different? We are the same people. We speak the same language, share the same culture. We marry each other, we celebrate Christmas. How are we different?

The greatest general of a Sarajevo under siege had been a Bosnian Serb.

We are one people, the Bosnians.

Until the fascists had killed the enlightenment, burned the countryside, sundered the nation.

Those who hadn't believed in the war had died anyway.

Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.

Yes, yes, and yes.

He had felt it then, as a student in a besieged city. He felt it now again: the hot flare of rage and futility in his stomach.

Was this what they were? The new Jews of Europe with Bosnia a slaughterhouse whose bloody imprint had faded in memory?

Everywhere the radical right was rising: Sweden, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland. While a steady stream of vitriol drifted north of the U.S. border.

The war had begun with a program of hate and the steady administration of incendiary propaganda.

You Muslim women, you
Bule
, we'll show you.

You will see, you Muslims. I will draw a cross on your back. You will all be baptized.

We will burn you alive.

And in fourteen days, Srebrenica will be gone.

*   *   *

Damir Hasanović was a man admired and respected the world over, a man whose only mission had been justice. A man who'd sacrificed everything to that end.

For his reputation to be torn down at this last when Dra
ž
en Krstić had known nearly two decades of prosperity was something Khattak couldn't bear. It was something he wouldn't do.

One part of him knew that no matter the provocation, Hasanović couldn't have caused Krstić's death. But from a hollow place within himself, the place where identity folded back upon itself to reveal rawer, more vulnerable layers, he acknowledged a more insidious truth—the part that wished he had done it himself.

*   *   *

Rachel waited for Khattak to speak, unable to dispel her sense of disquiet. Little things were tugging at the edge of her awareness. Things she had seen or heard yet failed to understand. Maybe it was the night she'd spent reading about Ratko Mladić. Maybe it was the eerie watchfulness of her mother or the newfound sobriety of her father. Maybe it was Zach's continued absence from their lives.

She was missing something—brittle, intangible, and just on the edge of discovery.

She lined up the photographs she had taken from Hadley across the bronze table. She included everything they had collected during their first visit to Drayton's house. Personal papers, the holdings of his filing cabinet. The letters she had read that haunted her like the poetry of the damned. The things the imam had interpreted for them.

Nate came to look over her shoulder.

“You need a cup of coffee,” he said. “And then I can help you tackle this.”

“I need three.”

She was grateful for his support, for his kind eyes and steady hands, or maybe grateful wasn't the word. She chose not to question her strange kinship with Nathan Clare. He was the part of Esa Khattak that opened up to her, sharing himself as an equal. She didn't complain about her relationship with Khattak, she knew they were an excellent team, just as she knew there was something of himself he held back.

Which was fine with her, because there was plenty she was holding back herself.

*   *   *

Khattak stirred from his reverie, shifted the papers on the table. His long fingers pushed a folded sheet of paper toward her.

“What's this? I don't remember seeing it before.”

Rachel flattened it out on the table's smooth surface. “Piano music? I found it in Drayton's house. Maybe Nate or Mink gave it to him.”

Nate appeared behind her shoulder with a tray of coffee.

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “Chris didn't play, as far as I know. And I don't think it is piano music.” Rachel studied the minute notations on the five-line staff as Nate set down his tray.

“You're saying this isn't music? It's some kind of code? Something someone sent him?” It reminded her of a spy novel she'd read.

“No, it's music. It's just not arranged for the piano. Look at this. It's written in treble clef. The piano accompaniment below it links two staves: treble and bass.”

“What is it then?”

“An arrangement for the violin. I can play the melody for you if you like.”

“I don't know that it matters,” said Khattak. “Did he play the violin?”

“No. If he were a musician, he'd likely have offered music lessons instead of languages.”

Rachel's interest sharpened. “So why did he have it, then?” She'd gotten it from the back of his filing cabinet, crammed in with the first batch of letters she'd found. “It could have been sent to him like the letters. Maybe it means something.”

“Shall I play it and see?”

They followed Nate into the great room.

“This will be a bit rough.”

It wasn't. He transposed the notes easily, his foot on one of the pedals. It was slow, insignificant. Until it became relentless, urgent. Thick with heartache. A layered anguish inhabiting the room, swelling out from the piano to the upper gallery. Nate's fingers lingered over the keys. The music built to its intolerable climax.

Just imagine this youngest boy I had, those little hands of his …

Mummy, I've come. At last I've come.

Where have you been, my son?

I waited for you to come through the woods. Each passing day was an agony. Until there was no hope left that you would come.

I never believed that people could do this.

*   *   *

Her heart was breaking. The music was breaking it.

“Stop,” Khattak said.

Nate lifted his hands, placed them in his lap. His face paled at the expression on Khattak's face. “You recognize it.”

“Did you give it to Drayton?”

“No. It sounds familiar but I can't place it.”

There was a sickness beneath Khattak's skin. “The Adagio attributed to Albinoni. Vedran Smailović played it on his cello in the streets of Sarajevo.”

For citizens of a fallen city.

“Do you think Drayton knew what it was?”

“I think a man like Krstić would have made a point of finding out.”

“You were right then, sir. It wasn't just about Srebrenica.”

“Perhaps there's some symbolism here,” said Nate. “Srebrenica was the final movement of the war.”

His words hung on the air with the closing notes of the music.

Rachel forced herself to take up the photographs again. It was too much. All of it was too much, the letters, the music, the silenced voices of the missing and dead. Something in the case had to break.

“What are these?” Nate asked, his voice hushed. “A specialized form of pornography?”

“They're from the war. These women may be dead, for all we know.”

“I think this one
is
dead. This isn't a photograph, is it? It looks like a color photocopy.” He pointed to a grainy image on a faded page. The figure in it was clothed. The body hung from a tree. Dark gold hair framed the face. The pink scarf that spilled down its neck had been used to hang the body.

“These others are prints, this one isn't. Why?”

“It's not from his collection.” Khattak's voice was harsh.

Rachel hadn't noticed the photograph before, the disturbing image buried by others even more graphic.

“This is just a girl,” she said. Images revolved in her mind. “A girl like Hadley or Cassidy. Look at the way the paper is folded. It was sent to him, like the letters. They murdered women as well?”

“Ten thousand women died in the war. I'd guess the girl in this picture hanged herself.”

They looked at each other grimly.

“Someone wanted him to know this. David Newhall?”

“It may have been his cousin or his niece. Perhaps a friend.”

Rachel shook her head. This was something else. Something out of place, like the music, the gun, the residue of the candles. A connection she wasn't seeing.

“Drayton had a gun,” she said slowly. “He was threatened with exposure. Someone sent him the letters, the picture, the sheet music. The Bosnian lily was planted in his garden. Doesn't it seem like momentum was building against him? He wanted Hadley and Cassidy, but Dennis Blessant stood in his way. He was pressured on all sides: Melanie, Dennis, the letters. He took a walk along the Bluffs at night, the same night he had the argument with Dennis, yet he didn't take the gun. Why not? Why did he leave the gun on the floor surrounded by puddles of wax?”