Good As Gone (12 page)

My stomach didn’t think so. “All right then, where?”

She insisted on Pierogarnia, an informal eatery on Sławkowska. So we went there, sat across from each other on old wooden benches, hovering over an old wooden table. I ordered a bottle of Zywiec, one of the more popular Polish beers, and stared at the limited menu.

“You look anxious,” Ana said.

“All they have are pierogi,” I said. It was true. More than twenty distinct dishes, all pierogi.

How many different things can you stuff into a bloody dumpling?
I thought.

“What is wrong with pierogi?” she said.

“Nothing, it’s just I’ve never had one, and—”

She reached over the table and smacked me. She was genuinely angry.

“How can you never have pierogi?” she said. “You have been to Poland before, yes?”

I shrugged. “A few times. Mostly up north, near either the German or Russian border, for work.”

She reached over the table and smacked me again. “And you never tried pierogi?”

“No,” I said. “What’s the big deal? And stop hitting me, by the way.”

“It is a sin to come to Poland and not try pierogi.” There was a dead-serious look on her face, a fierceness in those green eyes.

I stared down at the menu. “Well, I guess I have no choice tonight, do I?”

“What do you mean, you have no choice? You can have them stuffed with meat, sauerkraut, mushrooms, fruit, cheese, anything you want. How can someone not like pierogi?” She was genuinely puzzled.

“All right,” I said. “You’ve made your point. You’re preaching to the converted. I’ll have mine stuffed with cheese and pretend I’m eating a ravioli.”

I could see she wanted to reach over the table and smack me again, but my look caused her to hold back.

“You must start with
barszcz,
” she said.

“Now what is that?”

“Beetroot soup with lemon and garlic.”

“Great,” I said. “My fantasy dish.”

The waitress came over and took our orders. Ana sipped her wine as I contemplated a table for one at Aqua e Vino.

“So, are you an only child, Simon?” Ana said a few minutes after the waitress took off.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you seem to need to get your way all the time.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “Are you out of your head? Projecting a little, maybe? We’re staying in a goddamn haunted house and I’m eating dumplings for dinner when I haven’t eaten a proper meal in over a week. How am I getting my way?”

“I did not say that you
get
your way,” she said with indignation. “I said only that you
need
to. So, am I right?
Are
you an only child?”

“I had a sister,” I said.

“Had?”

I lowered my voice. “My father and I moved to the States when I was five, left my mother and sister behind in London.”

“Why?”

“Because my father’s a shit,” I said.

“Well, what about your mother and sister? When is the last time you saw them?”

“I just told you. When I was five.”

Her eyes widened. “You have not contacted them since you grew up?”

“Why should I?” I said. “They never reached out to me.”

“This is terrible,” she said, shaking her head. “It makes me very sad.”

“Don’t be too sad,” I told her, watching our waitress step out of the kitchen. “Here come our pierogi.”

*

“Well?” Ana said as I took my last bite. “What do you think? Delicious, yes?”

They were, but I refused to give her the satisfaction. “They were all right.”

She was every bit as offended as if she’d made them herself. “Well, maybe we can find you a discarded hot dog lying in the street on the way back to the hotel.”

“Guesthouse,” I corrected her. “So, Ana, tell me. Were
you
an only child?”

“Of course not. I have an older brother named Marek. He is a politician in Warsaw.”

The waitress came by and asked if we’d like dessert. We both declined. Then we fought over the check. I eventually won, but it was a struggle—a struggle made worse when I told her it wasn’t my money but Vince Sorkin’s.

“The father of the missing girl?” She snatched the check out of my hand for the third time. “He cannot pay for our pierogi! The poor man.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “We eat pierogi, he gets his daughter back. It’s a fair deal.”

It was the first comment I’d made about pierogi that actually made her smile instead of reaching over the table and smacking me.

“Now that you’ve had some wine,” I said, “care to tell me about your relationship with Mikolaj Dabrowski?”

The smile vanished from her face. “I told you, it is compli—”

“Complicated, yes, I know. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get my mind around it, and we certainly have the time to kill.”

Ana sighed, swept her curly hair behind her sizable ears but the locks didn’t stay in place. “You are going to think I am this silly girl who has jumped into bed with every boss she has ever had since she was sixteen years old.”

“Well, have you?”

That earned me a dirty look, her eyes blazing in the candlelight. “No.”

“Then why in the world would I think that?”

“Because I jumped into bed with Mikolaj. I was a stupid girl, just out of university. I was eager to begin a life. But for an entire decade I stayed in this job, going to bed with him a few times every year and always hoping there will be something more.” She shook her head. “Still, I am stupid, I guess.”

I didn’t say anything.

Ana gave it a moment. “So you are not going to say anything?” she said, displaying that raw anger again.

I thought about my choices. Went with, “Sometimes it’s difficult to move on.”

She carefully considered my words, nodded. “And you? You are not married?”

“Widowed,” I said.

“I am so sorry. May I ask you what happened?”

“Suicide,” I said.

“Your wife, she was depressed?”

“Not always,” I said.

“Something happened to make her sad?”

“Our daughter was taken,” I said.

Ana drew a deep breath. I knew she was afraid to ask more questions. Most people were, once they heard those words. But she’d think about it. They all did. And I didn’t want that hanging over the rest of the evening. And I sure as hell didn’t want her thinking about it tomorrow morning when it was time to follow Dabrowski. So I told her.

“I was in Bucharest,” I said slowly, “to apprehend a fugitive. My wife, Tasha, and I were living in D.C. with our six-year-old daughter, Hailey. Beautiful girl, my daughter. Well, both of them were. Beautiful, I mean. Hailey looked just like her mother. Anyway, we lived in a house in Georgetown. A nice house, as nice as the one my father owned in Rhode Island, the likes of which I never expected to be living in again. Not as long as I was in law enforcement. But Tasha’s family had money. Real money. Old money. They insisted on buying us the house as our wedding present. I refused, but Tasha wanted it and she wouldn’t relent. So it was ours.

“My daughter was taken on a Saturday. I was in Bucharest Otopeni International at the time, waiting to board my flight out of Romania. Now the airport’s known as Henri Coanda, but back then it was called Otopeni. I had a brief layover in Frankfurt, but never bothered checking my phone. I didn’t learn a thing until I landed at Dulles.

“A friend met me as soon as I got off the plane in D.C. Told me Hailey was missing. I went weak in the knees. Almost fainted, saw white all around the edges of my vision. My friend got me some water, kept me moving. Drove me to Georgetown, to our house, that huge goddamn house, which was now surrounded by vehicles from the Metropolitan PD.

“Tasha, poor Tasha was a mess, her hair all frazzled, her eyes looking as though they’d been dipped in a pot of chlorine. There was snot all down her face, vomit on her chin. She couldn’t even stand on her own; one of the cops had to hold her to keep her on her feet.

“Tasha couldn’t really articulate what had happened. But she never once used the word
missing,
always
taken.
At first it made me think she knew more than she was telling the police, but as time went on, I started thinking the same thing. If Hailey had just wandered off she would have been found. Even if someone had found her dead, lying in the middle of the road, struck by a Metro bus, someone would have spotted her. But after a few hours, a day, two days, you know you’re not dealing with a lost child. How far can a six-year-old girl go on her own?

“Once we realized it was an abduction, we waited for the ransom call. You figure we live in a huge house, people think we have money. Maybe that’s why they grabbed her. You
hope
it’s why they grabbed her. For money. For money, not sex, not …

“Anyway, the ransom call never came. After a few days, you stop looking at the phone because the damn thing makes you sick just by keeping silent. By then, Tasha couldn’t leave the bed. Not even to go to the bathroom. I had to get her a bedpan from Walgreens. Her doctor put her on tranquilizers and sedatives. Painkillers and muscle relaxers, too, because the back of her neck was knotted into a gargantuan fist. She slept all the time. When she wasn’t sleeping she was dosing herself, dying to fall asleep again.

“One afternoon, a few weeks after Hailey went missing, she just didn’t wake up. She’d left a few pills in each bottle to hide what she’d really done. And whether the coroner fell for it, or her parents intervened, her death was ruled an accidental overdose, as opposed to what it really was—a suicide. Not that it mattered much how she died. She was dead. And I knew so was Hailey.

“There was never so much as a true lead, let alone a suspect. Our family and friends and neighbors all turned up clean. Whoever it was, it was a stranger abduction. Like Lindsay’s.”

I caught tears at the corners of Ana’s eyes, and I suddenly had a strong urge to reach across the table to comfort
her,
to assure
her
everything would be all right.

“Have you ever thought that maybe your daughter could still be alive?”

I felt my lower lip tremble.

“I lost hope that she was alive long ago, and I’d never want that hope back. Not in a million years. Not for one second. But I will forever be looking. In every shop, every café, every open home window in every city or town in every country on every continent. I can’t help myself. I want to know what happened to her and why. And I want to know who took her.”

I shook my head and swallowed hard as I thought about Ostermann knocking Dietrich Braun and Karl Finster out cold in the alley behind SO36 back in Kreuzberg.

“The violence I would do to that man, Ana, it can’t be put into words.”

Chapter 22

After dinner, Ana and I took a long, silent walk around Old Town. I was exhausted but knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It was cold and there weren’t many people on the streets. We began our stroll on the outer belt, along the poorly lit Planty gardens, then moved in toward the main square. From the corner of my eye I’d caught a band of skinheads loitering near the Straszewski Obelisk and kept my guard up until we were safely back at the guesthouse on Tomasza.

Inside, I followed Ana up the stairs to our floor. We stopped at her door. I leaned in to kiss her good night on her cheek. Her face was round and soft, as smooth as an ice sculpture and just as cold; yet, the brief contact warmed me to the core.

She looked me in the eyes and said, “You may stay with me if you like.”

I was tempted. Beyond, really. But I gave thought to the next morning. For the past four days I’d been operating solely on instinct with little food and less sleep. My hunger, my exhaustion, my frustration—all my desires combined—seemed to fuel me. They kept me alert, on edge. There was a certain comfort in remaining uncomfortable. When there’s nothing to lose, it’s far easier, far more
sensible,
to put yourself at risk for the sake of someone else.

But what if I woke at dawn with a full stomach in a comfortable bed, my well-rested body pressed against Ana’s warm flesh? It could make me soft, diffident. It could cause me to hesitate in a situation that didn’t allow for hesitation. Could I pull a gun on Talik just hours later? Would I be able to kill if I had to?

I couldn’t chance it.

“Good night, Ana,” I said warmly.

“Good night, then, Simon.”

I was just in the next room over. As I removed my suit I heard Ana’s shower turn on. My face flushed even though the room was cool, so I pulled back the curtains and opened the window, breathed in the chill. I visited what had happened in Georgetown almost nightly in my sleep, but not often while I was awake. I pushed that house away whenever I could with whatever I could, usually my work. It was why my cases became such obsessions and probably why I was so successful at retrieving children like Jason Blanc, the boy in Bordeaux. Rarely did I visit Georgetown with my words; the retelling of the story was just too damn painful. And it wasn’t a pain I could simply drink away. It was a pain that burrowed its way into every bone, carved out a home in every organ. A pain that couldn’t be relieved with narcotics or removed surgically, a pain that would cease only with my death. In times like this, even all these years later, I could almost comprehend Tasha’s reasoning for leaving, even if I couldn’t condone it.

As I turned from the window, I heard footfalls out in the hall. Heavy steps, made by more than one set of feet. Nothing to concern yourself over in a large hotel. But this was a six-room guesthouse, and the desk clerk had said that the four rooms not occupied by Ana and me were vacant.

I stepped back into my pants and grabbed the Glock. Glanced at the door but there was no peephole. Next door, the shower was still running. I pressed my ear against the wall.

I didn’t need to. Clear as a bell, I heard a key turning in the lock to Ana’s room.

I made for my door, swung out into the hall with my gun raised. Just in time to see Ana’s door close, immediately followed by the click of the lock, the slide of the chain.

I raced back through my room to the window. Stuck my head out and measured the ledge. Barely enough room for my bare feet. I’d need to hold on, so I stuck the gun into the back of my pants. Shirtless, I climbed out onto the ledge in the cold. Looked down three stories and remembered how damn much I hated heights.