The Unquiet Dead (35 page)

“What is?” She found both his tea and his manner soothing.

“It's not only Damir the community has lost—we still don't know why or where he went. He was invaluable to us.”

“Who else?” Rachel prodded.

“The others who worked on the memorial. Survivors like those you wish to meet.”

“Survivors of Srebrenica?”

“Yes. Of the killing fields, there are only a handful of men who survived. Damir arranged to bring Avdo and Hakija here.”

Rachel stared at him, dumbstruck.

“What is it, my dear?”

“I'm sorry, Imam. What names did you say?”

“Avdo and Hakija. Osmanović. They were to be executed at Grbavici. By some miracle, the boys escaped when the executions were halted for the night. They made it through the woods to the safety of Tuzla.”

“Your gardens are beautiful,” she mumbled through lips that felt numb.

The imam quirked an eyebrow at the irrelevance of her remark. “I think you need more tea, dear Sergeant.”

She handed him her cup without protest. She wouldn't have objected if he'd added a shot of whiskey.

“Yes, that is Avdo and Haki's work. It's good that they came here—thanks to Damir, they were able to build productive lives, even with Haki's condition.”

“What condition is that, sir?”

“The boys were buried under a mountain of bodies. That's how they escaped. Avdi had a plan, it seemed. He knew they would end up at an execution site. From the moment he was loaded on a bus, he plotted their escape.” Asaf's voice marveled at it. “I don't know how he did it, how he managed. He's very resourceful. Sadly, by the time he found their mother in Tuzla, Haki was catatonic. After that, it was a simple matter for Damir to arrange their evacuation. And Haki's had wonderful, ongoing treatment in the city. It's helped him a great deal, although it's doubtful he will ever fully recover.”

“No,” Rachel agreed, thinking of Harry Osmond. “I can't imagine what that would be like.”

Asaf made a reassuring noise in his throat. “If you are interested, their testimony is available on the Web site of the tribunal. It has been used in several of the Srebrenica convictions.”

“And these were the people who worked with Damir Hasanović on the memorial?”

“Tirelessly. Damir tried to bring the Sinanović family as well. The boys were killed in the woods—some have said by chemical weapons. Their bodies have been identified. Selmira, their sister, died on the base.”

Rachel was having trouble assimilating the information.

Everything she had imagined was true.

The music, the photograph, the lilies, the gun.

Her voice husky, she asked, “She was killed?”

Asaf's face clouded over. He lifted a Qur'an from the desk and placed both hands over it as if to calm himself.

“I don't know if I should speak of it, dear Sergeant. I'm not sure I have the right.”

Rachel wasn't trying to trick him when she said, “We would like to do her justice.” She produced the photograph of the girl hanging from her scarf in the darkling woods of Bosnia. “Is this Selmira?”

Asaf's gentle face crumpled.

“I seek refuge in Allah,” he whispered. “Where did you get this?” His fingers gripped the Qur'an.

“Tell me about Selmira,” she said. “Did they kill her at Poto
č
ari?”

He shook his head from side to side. Like Imam Muharrem, he murmured prayers under his breath.

“She was fourteen years old when she took her own life. She was taken by the Chetniks and raped. It was Damir's dearest wish to place her name on the memorial, but the rape of our daughters is something the community struggles with. The shame is a lasting stigma. It was why Selmira hanged herself.”

“Shame and horror,” Rachel agreed.

It was what Audrey Clare had taught her, well-versed in the trauma endured by rape victims through her work with her organization, the work she had lightly dismissed. Rachel had remembered Nate's description of his sister as a human rights advocate.

The photograph had been her first clue. When she had paired it with the lines of one of the letters, she'd understood.

Keep the good ones over there. Enjoy yourselves.

“You said Damir Hasanović tried to bring the Sinanović family here. What did you mean?”

He poured more tea for them both, his hands trembling on the samovar.

As she listened to his explanation, she irrevocably understood why Khattak had defended Hasanović from the heart.

*   *   *

The music, the photograph, the lilies, the gun. The clues arranged in a circle on Nathan's table. The words that whispered their damning indictment.

On Tuesday, there will be no bread in Sarajevo.

The besieged city of Jajce has fallen to the aggressor.

They are shelling Biha
ć
.

They are shelling Gora
ž
de.

They are shelling Tuzla.

They have shelled Srebrenica.

They have killed Avdo Pali
ć
, the defender of
Ž
epa.

They assassinated our prime minister while the French troops watched.

Everything around us is on fire and we ourselves are nearly smoldering.

The National Library is burning, it's burning. Will no one save it, save us?

They will burn us all.

They will burn us all.

*   *   *

Rachel left the sanctuary of the mosque and stood outside, breathing deeply. The thunderheads massed on the horizon echoed her own turmoil. The words meant something. They were chosen for a reason. They directed Drayton to a revelation, an accusation.

A revelation she feared. Especially because Khattak was nowhere to be found.

The rain that had been so mild during her interview with Audrey picked up, muffling the sound of her phone ringing. She hoped it was Nate, the one person who could reach Esa.

The number was unfamiliar. Three rings later, she registered it as Zach's. When she answered the phone, the first thing she said was, “Zach, I love you. Not for a moment have I stopped. Whatever this is with Mum, we'll figure it out together, I promise. You won't have to choose. Just—don't stay missing from my life.”

Her brother made the awkward humming noise that substituted for tears with him. He mumbled under his breath.

“What was that?”

He said it again, this time more clearly. Rachel heard him out: his confession of love, his apology in turn, his promise not to disappear again. She told him about the missing and the dead, what it did to your heart and your sanity never to know. The emptiness, the terrible black hole of the pain and dread that consumed you. He whispered and cried and apologized all at the same time.

Then he gave her the information she'd asked him to check and as she listened, her breath blew out in a blasphemous whistle. “Holy saints of Heaven and Hell.”

Everything she'd feared had come true.

 

35.

The dead are not alone.

When Khattak still didn't answer, she called Nate.

“I can't find Esa.” His name slipped past her lips of its own accord. “Is he with you?”

“No, I'm sorry, but he isn't. You sound worried.”

Instead of using her earpiece, she was cradling her phone against her shoulder while the hard rain drilled her windshield.

“It's not like him not to answer his phone. He doesn't do that.”

“Unless he's at Ringsong,” Nate concluded. “Shall I find him?”

A rush of gratitude for his offer swelled up in Rachel's heart. It wasn't just the book he'd written; the roots of his friendship, once offered, ran deep.

“Yes. And get him out of there, if you can.”

“I think you might be blowing things out of proportion.”

“Trust me, I'm not. Please, Nate, go now.”

She let the phone fall into her lap and turned on her siren.

*   *   *

Nate found them in the flex room between the portico and forecourt. Mink was wearing a white smock over jeans and a T-shirt, a carpet vacuum beside her on the floor, a duster tucked into the pocket of her smock. A large clear jug filled with water suggested she'd been watering the plants. She'd been chatting with Esa but her smile for Nate was unambiguous.

“How lovely to see you. It's been much too long.”

From the look on his face, Esa didn't agree.

“You've had my books to keep you company,” Nate said.

Many of the books on Moorish history were from the collection at Winterglass.

“They were a donation, please don't forget.” Mink's delight in the words was obvious, just as it was obvious that her reaction brought Esa no pleasure. Nate frowned. He was unsettled by the tension Esa's body language communicated. Surely Esa didn't think that he was interested in Mink when he'd paid such unequivocal attention to Rachel.

“You've made wonderful progress since my last visit,” he said to Mink.

She grasped him by the elbow. “This is nothing. Esa knows, he's seen the great room. We've taken a more amateur approach to things, though I doubt anyone would judge Hadley's efforts as less than superb. I like the idea that we've done things with our own hands, like the craftspeople who bound books and built mosques of such immaculate beauty.”

“Still living in the past, I see,” Nate said.

She smiled, though for a moment her fingers bit into his elbow. “A historian's natural provenance, I'm afraid. Esa, are you coming?”

He followed them to a great room ablaze with light.

“I've just refurbished the lanterns,” she said. “I wanted to see what the effect would be on the exhibits.”

Her worktable was gone. In its place, she'd added numerous display cases and pedestals, some with modulated lights arranged above them to illuminate well-chosen treasures. Previously, where there had been photographs and manuscript pages, Mink had added woven carpet fragments, an ivory casket and a game box, stone capitals inscribed with Arabic calligraphy, a geometric panel from the Alhambra, glazed earthenware bowls, and swords beside their scabbards: artefacts that ranged from the tenth century to the fifteenth.

The pride of the collection was six folios from a blue and gold Qur'anic manuscript dated to the late fourteenth century. She hovered over the display.

“It's on loan,” she said. “Just for the opening. They've installed their own alarm system, so don't get too close.”

“It's breathtaking.”

On a single manuscript page on vellum, Esa painstakingly identified the Verse of the Throne. The majesty of it made him swallow. Nate read his emotion and tried to distract Mink with his passable recollection of Rachel's questions.

“I can't believe you pulled all this together in two years.”

“I had to call in a lot of favors.”

“Those regular meetings must have helped as well. Directors, donors. They need constant assuaging.”

Mink laughed, arresting Esa's attention. “An excellent description. It will be worth it in the end.”

“I hope Chris's death hasn't cast a cloud.”

Her eyes widened. “Does he know?” she asked Esa.

He nodded in response.

“It did at first. Chris was—if not a friend, at least someone I could interest in Ringsong. But now that I've learned who he was, although it sounds callous, I've no reason to miss him.”

“It isn't callous,” Esa reassured her. Nate watched his friend take Mink's hand in his own. The luminous warmth of her smile encouraged the gesture. No wonder Rachel was worried.

“Was there a meeting on the night that Chris fell? I think David mentioned it to me.”

“Yes,” she agreed, without looking away from Esa. “We did meet. David and I and some of the other directors. They wanted a progress report. We hadn't gotten this far then, so I missed my chance to impress them. However, we do have another meeting at the end of the week. It should put everyone's fears to rest.”

Nate pounced on the word. “Fears?”

“The usual, I'm sure,” Esa answered for her. “Deadlines, budget—will the museum open at the time and on the scale promised.”

“You've either been reading my mind or my literature,” Mink teased.

“How long have you known David?” Nate could see his questions were unwelcome, at least by Esa, but he kept them up.

“Two years? A little more? Ever since we began work on the project.”

He ambled through the room, trying to think of ways to attract Esa's attention, distracted by the exhibits. He enjoyed the great room in Ringsong nearly as much as the same space in his own house. The dark timber, the white stonework, the clerestory windows: they were a concert of loveliness.

Mink had kept personal touches away from the house's main floor. Presumably, she kept her personal effects and furniture in her own rooms. As he drifted from manuscript to manuscript, he realized he knew little of her beyond their shared passion for the finer things in life—music, art, books. She had appeared in his life at the moment he'd lost Esa, filling in the space Esa had occupied with their common history and interests. With Mink, he'd found a link to Esa through Andalusia. He'd known from the first what the museum would mean, the resonances Esa would find within it.

A place where pluralism thrived, where languages and lives intermingled.

He'd known Esa thought of Bosnia as a second Andalusia, with its Ottoman mosques and the library that housed the histories of its peoples. What he hadn't guessed was how largely Mink figured in Esa's thoughts. He'd assumed his friend would find a woman like Samina in time, a woman of his own faith and culture, whose view of the world harmonized with his friend's.