The Unquiet Dead (37 page)

Harry pressed his face into the back of her neck. “Don't,” he sobbed. “Please don't tell them.”

“We've come to it,” she said gently. “Don't you see, Haki? We've come to it.” She stared straight at Rachel. “What do you know of any of this, Sergeant Getty? All you've thought of is justice for Christopher Drayton.” Rachel choked at the unfairness of this. It wasn't for Drayton she had shed her tears, sorted through testimony that would haunt her nightmares forever.

Mink continued her story in a monotone, rain beating against her head. “My sister told the Chetniks if they spared me, she wouldn't fight them. And Nole helped me escape from that room. ‘Be clever,' he told me. ‘I'll get Selmira.' And he did. When she came back to the base, she was covered in blood. They had torn away her clothes. One of our neighbors tried to clean her. Selmira said we were no longer girls—we would never be girls again. And then she stroked my hair and told me to rest. She said we would find Nesib—isn't that what she told me, Damir?”

“It is, Yasminka. You don't have to do this.”

“I do. They need to understand.” She drew a deep breath. If she was crying, Rachel couldn't tell her tears from the rain. “In the morning, the Chetniks came to take the boys from the base, all the boys, the young boys. While they were taking them, I lost sight of her. The Dutch were pushing us to the buses, it was a terrible crush. I was looking for Selmira, I was frantic. I forgot to look out for the boys, forgot to ask where they were going. Then our neighbor said, ‘She's in the woods outside. Someone found her there. Don't go there.' But I went.”

They had arranged themselves in a circle, the circle of survivors: Damir Hasanović, Avdo and Hakija Osmanović—and at its center, Yasminka Sinanović.

“She was hanging there. She had hanged herself with her own scarf, the scarf one of the Chetniks had nearly strangled her with. I couldn't recognize her face but I knew her scarf. I asked our neighbors to cut her down but they said we didn't have time. They said I had to get on the bus before the soldiers came back. It was my only chance or the soldiers would come for me again. Mrs. Obranovic—she rubbed dirt on my face to make me ugly. And I got on the bus. I didn't see my sister again. I don't know where she's buried. Her bones were never identified. All I have is the button from her sleeve and the sight of her body hanging in those trees.” She rubbed her own sleeve self-consciously. “Why have you come here?”

Esa wiped the rain from his face with trembling hands. “Your name is Yasminka Sinanović?”

“Yes.” She stared back at him with the eyes of a stranger.

“You wrote those letters to Christopher Drayton? It was you who sent them?”

“To Dra
ž
en Krstić, yes. There was no Christopher Drayton.”

How little he had known her. How little he had understood the motivation behind her warmth, her instant closeness.

“Did you plant the lilies?” Rachel asked. “The Bosnian lilies in Drayton's garden?”

Aldo stepped forward, drawing Mink toward him. “That was my gift to Drayton. A gift from the Bosnian people. A reminder. That what he killed didn't die.”

“Then which one of you killed him?”

They had drawn together in a little circle, sheltering each other from the cold gusts of the wind and the rain that slashed at them all.

Esa looked at Mink as if he were waking from a dream, a look composed of horror and betrayal. “You killed him.”

Mink ignored him. She nodded at David Newhall.

“No,” he answered. “He fell to his death.”

“But you did something,” Rachel said slowly. “For two years, you stalked Dra
ž
en Krstić. He must have felt terrorized.”

Newhall laughed, a short, sharp bark. Crowded together in the darkness, the Bosnians arranged themselves like a crumbling wall.

“Terrorized?” he spit at her. “You don't know what terror is. Talk to me when you've spent three years strangled and starved by Serb guns, when every member of your family has been taken to an execution site, bulldozed into a grave, and then excavated to a secondary grave, their bones scattered over your homeland to disguise the monstrosities committed against them. Try a month in Banja Luka when your mosques are bombed back into history and your leaders are sent to a death camp to be murdered. Or a week subjected to every form of rape imaginable in Fo
č
a, or a day in Br
č
ko where they toss the bodies of the people you love into a furnace. A few letters sent to a man like Krstić do not terrorize. He promised we would be knee-deep in blood. He reveled in it.”

A sick feeling rose in Rachel's stomach. “You must have wanted him to feel the things you're describing to me,” she said. “These two years of your campaign were leading somewhere, but what was the catalyst that brought about his death?”

Mink stared at Nathan, her gaze unflinching, and suddenly he knew.

“It was the opening of the museum, the opening ceremony for Ringsong. You never planned to take Drayton's money. It was the attempt he made to attach himself to the ideals of Andalusia, its culture of pluralism. It was too much for you to bear.”

“I'm sorry, Esa,” Mink said to him, abruptly. “You could never understand. Look at your position. You worship at any mosque you choose, and none of your neighbors would dream of saying to you that your minarets are a blight, the symbol of an execrable enemy. Your identity is a gift. It's a badge you wear with honor, and this girl”—she gestured at Rachel, then at Nathan—“and your friend, they respect you for it.” She tried not to look at him and failed. “In Bosnia, identity is a curse. In Srebrenica, it was a death sentence. So do not pretend to know us. Please, just do not pretend.”

“Did you kill Christopher Drayton?” he asked, his voice tight.

“Dra
ž
en Krstić fell to his death.” Despite the rain and the cruel roar of the wind, her voice was even.

Rachel slicked her wet hair behind her ears. “Why did you mention Fo
č
a, Br
č
ko, and Banja Luka?” she asked David Newhall.

“I could name you a hundred other places,” Newhall sneered. “Have you heard of Omarska, Trnopolje, Manja
č
a?”

The Bosnians exchanged silent looks, huddled closer. A primal certainty electrified Rachel's nerves. She had guessed. Nearly everything, she had guessed.

“The night Drayton died, you went to see him. All of you. I couldn't understand the wax on the floor until I arranged the letters and photograph in a circle. The wax your candles left behind—they fell in a circle around Drayton's chair. It was a vigil—or maybe you saw it as a circle of justice. You must have planned that moment of confrontation, it was too well-rehearsed. But why was his gun on the floor? I've made sense of everything else—the lilies, the photograph, the letters—but I can't figure out the gun.”

They looked at each other but didn't speak until Newhall took the lead.

“He was drunk. He was always drunk on Slivovitz in the evenings. It was easy to get him in the study. We told him the time had come to pay for Srebrenica. It was laughable in a way, how shocked he was when we told him our names, when we spoke in our language. We told him who we were and he sobered up quickly. He demanded we get out of his house. He pretended his chest was hurting.”

“Maybe it was,” Rachel argued. “Maybe he suffered an attack from the confrontation.”

“He suffered nothing except our hatred,” Mink said coldly. “We told him he was free to go at any time. We asked him if he wanted us to pronounce the sentence he had evaded for so many years.”

“What sentence was that?”

“We knew he kept a gun in his drawer. We asked him to use it on himself. An execution. Like he had executed our families, our friends.”

“The gun wasn't loaded,” Rachel said cautiously.

“Yes.” Her lips sketched the parody of a smile. “We knew a man like Krstić would never choose the honorable course. He told me I was a choice piece and that his men would have enjoyed me in the halls of Srebrenica. He said my sister killed herself because she wasn't good enough for them. He aimed the gun at me and pulled the trigger.”

“And when the gun didn't fire?”

“He said his chest was hurting. He pleaded with us to go.”

*   *   *

The smoke from the candles rose in spirals around him.

“Please,” he gasped. “Acquit me.”

The people gathered before his chair made no move to touch him. The gun fell from his nerveless hand to the floor, his eyes darting frantically about the circle, cowed by the pitiless faces.

They were chanting at him in Arabic, the language of the
balija,
the prayers of the Turk. They were asking God to bring down His retribution. To chain him to the fire forever. His eyes searched out the lovely young girl. With a feeble effort, he reached out his hand to her. The girl with the soft face and kind eyes, surely she would acquit him, show him mercy. He would tell her—he would pretend he knew where the bones of her sister lay buried and what he would say would buy him absolution, a day, an hour, a moment to escape.

His skin was clammy. He could feel the color drain from his face, the loss of motor control in his hands. The gun hadn't fired. Why hadn't the gun fired? What had been done to him?

“Please,” he said again. “Absolve me. Let me go.”

The girl raised her hand yet didn't touch him. She made the three-fingered Chetnik salute in his face, the salute Serb children gave the survivors of Srebrenica when they came to bury the bones of their loved ones.

“Absolve me,” he cried piteously.

“So did our brothers plead before their murderers.” Her cold eyes studied him. Had he ever thought her gentle, kindhearted? Had he fantasized about conquering her in bed?

“Beg,” she said. “And remember them now.”

The last thing he heard before the world went dark was the language of the enemy—Andalusia's golden idiom, the sacred name of Allah.

*   *   *

“He fainted,” Mink said simply. “And so we left him there. If he chose to go to the Bluffs, it was God who held his reckoning at the last.”

“You threatened him anonymously for years and then confronted an elderly man in a state of extreme agitation with a gun,” Rachel contradicted.

David Newhall shook his head. “It was his gun. The only weapon in our hands was the truth. We asked him to admit his name, his nature. Did that endanger the butcher of Srebrenica?”

Rachel didn't argue. She hoped Khattak would say something. As a police officer she knew something needed to be said—this couldn't go unchallenged. He stood by, mute, silenced by the weight of so much deception.

“Come out, come out,” Harry sang out. They turned to look at him. “Come out of the woods. Come to your families, your fathers. Come out of the woods.”

But every man or boy who had ceded his hiding place in the woods had ultimately found his destiny in a ditch, in some cases after digging it himself.

His brother cradled him in his arms. “We didn't come down again, Haki. Remember? We stayed in the woods. We took the road to Tuzla. We found our mother.”

“My brothers were not as fortunate,” said Mink. “Neither was my sister. I am the sole survivor of my family. And he thought he could touch Andalusia, honoring not its glory but the calamity of its end. Tainting it with his name and his money. This from the man who destroyed Andalusia.” She spit on the ground. “You take something beautiful, you raze it to the ground, and then you claim you didn't know what you had? You try to rebuild it and assure your status as a patron of things that are priceless and holy like the Sarajevo Haggadah, like the National Library of Sarajevo, when you burnt our history to ashes around us? Erasing us, erasing memory.”

“You called it a memory palace,” Rachel said. “You said the museum was a memory palace like the great cities of Andalusia.”

“This is what we have now, the peaceful people of Bosnia. Palaces of memory. Everything else is lost or destroyed. A hundred thousand people are dead—and the women. Will you weep for the women of our country as we do? Will you help us? You couldn't even bring Dra
ž
en Krstić to justice.” She broke free from the others to back away to the edge of the Bluffs. Rachel froze in place.

“Please,” she said. “You can't give up.”

Mink laughed, the sound acrid in her throat.

“I am not like these men who pretend to long for the country they destroyed. Momir Nikolić wants to serve his sentence and return to his home in Bratunac to live there in peace and harmony ‘such as prevailed before the outbreak of the war.' Why don't they call it a slaughter?” She asked the question of herself, poised on the edge. “While my people are scattered across the globe, denied any semblance of justice.”

“Mink, be careful!” She had been down this road before. In Waverley, where Miraj Siddiqui had died. That final moment when Rachel could have saved a life, could have foreseen the truth and had failed utterly at both. She still dreamt of it. She couldn't face that outcome again.

“Please,” she whispered.

“Bratunac,” Harry whispered, jerking at his brother's arm. “We stayed on the bus in Bratunac. They didn't take us into the school.”

“No,” Aldo said patiently. “We stayed on the bus in Bratunac, Haki. It saved our lives.”

“The bus is life,” Harry repeated, as if he had memorized it. “The school is death.”

“Haki.” Mink's voice broke. Harry covered his ears. A wild keening rose above the wind.

“They're shooting,” he sobbed. “They're killing everybody.”