The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

Chapter XXXII

The Vuksans had been advised to keep their heads down, and avoid leaving the suburban safe haven sourced for them through the efforts of the lawyer Frend. The kitchen was well stocked with food and alcohol, and the rear garden, although small, was secluded. There was a TV with a Netflix subscription, and a selection of fiction and nonfiction books – none in Serbian, but that was probably for the best. Had Frend instructed the intermediary to source some titles, it would rather have given the game away. In any case, of the three men destined to be sequestered in the house, only Radovan was a reader, and his English and German were both adequate to enable him to read in translation. Should he have been obliged to conceal himself alone, he would have been quite content with these quarters.

Unfortunately, Spiridon Vuksan had no patience, and disliked being contained for long. He did not value books, could watch television only in short bursts, and slept just four or five hours a night. Had he not been permitted to leave the apartment at least once a day, he would have torn it apart in the process of going crazier and crazier, driving his brother mad along with him.

So, barely fifteen hours after their arrival in Vienna, Spiridon was already out walking the streets, disguised as best he could and accompanied by a similarly camouflaged Zivco Ilić.

And shadowed by the Other.

Nahid Hasanović had been traveling to and from Heitzing, Vienna’s 13th District, for more than fifteen years, ever since deciding that Bosnia-Herzegovina was no longer a country in which he wished to live. He had tried to make a life there, but the memories of the conflict were too painful and the price he had paid was too high: he had lost two brothers, five cousins, three nephews and a niece, who had variously been shot by snipers, bludgeoned to death in ditches or, in the case of his niece, left to bleed out after multiple sexual assaults. This would have been ample cause for any man to leave his homeland – that, or take up arms until a bullet found a way to put him out of his misery – but Nahid had chosen to remain, if only for a while. He stayed, worked, prayed, and waited until the bodies of each of his relatives had been dug up and identified before taking advantage of ties in Austria to move his immediate family – a wife, two sons, and a daughter – to Vienna before someone decided to shoot, bludgeon, or rape them to death, too.

And, yes, a lot of Serbs had also made their way to the capital, because the Serbs had been migrating there since the nineteenth century, and the Habsburg Empire had once encompassed both Bosnians and Serbs. But the city also had a large Muslim population that had been in place for longer than the Serbs, dating back to the fifteenth century, when Vienna first became an object of imperial desire to the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire failed to take the city, but a more gradual, gentler Muslim influx had followed, and Muslims now formed about one-eighth of Vienna’s population, even if the memory of the Turkish assault on Vienna had never quite been permitted to fade from the Austrian collective memory, or from Austrian history books and school texts.

In Vienna, Nahid had rented a small apartment in the Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus area, where more than half of residents had a foreign background. With money borrowed and money saved, he set up a small laundry and dry cleaning business in the 13th District. The 13th was among the most desirable residential areas in the city, although not as expensive as some, with easy access to parks and gardens on one hand and the city center on the other. Those who lived in the grand Biedermeier and Jugendstil villas had no great desire to do their own laundry, and Nahid’s collection service meant they didn’t even have to leave their homes to drop it off. He soon expanded into repair work and tailoring, and now owned three satellite laundries along with a large central facility, but when possible he still preferred to operate out of Hietzing, where he kept an office and a couch on which to nap. He enjoyed the beauty of the area, and the fresh air. He liked the zoo in the grounds of the Schönbrunn Palace, to the extent that he retained an annual membership. He loved the smell of roses and freshly cut grass.

In all that he did, he was trying to forget, yet Nahid could never truly forget. He had watched two of his cousins being taken away while he hid in an outhouse. He had held one of his brothers, Adin, in his arms after he was shot by a Serb sniper while trying to flee Bostahovina, their village in the Srebrenica municipality, and could remember attempting to push a fragment of Adin’s skull back into place because his brains were leaking from the cavity. He had stood with his wife as a United Nations digging team showed them the remains of their niece, her schoolbooks preserved in the pink satchel that lay beside her in the hole, her name stitched clearly above the buckle.

Nahid did not hate all Serbs. Nahid tried not to hate anyone at all.

But sometimes, it was very hard.

Nahid himself had only barely evaded capture and murder. He had been traveling to Srebrenica with his wife, and what was then their only child, because they, like the other Muslims, believed that the UN-protected town offered safe haven from the Serbs. But as they drew nearer, it became apparent that the Serbs had blockaded Srebrenica. Refugees were still getting through, but to Nahid it smacked of entering a mosque before the doors were locked and the whole edifice was set alight. So he had turned his wife and daughter away from the town, despite the risk of having their throats slit by the Serbs, and had found sanctuary in the basement of a farmhouse owned by one of the few Quakers in the country. His brother and his family, along with two male cousins and their families, had continued into Srebrenica.

The men, and their older sons, were never seen alive again. Only in the years after did Nahid discover documentary evidence of their fate. A piece of news footage showed a group of Muslim prisoners descending from a truck and being led to a grove of trees. There, Nahid subsequently learned, they were tortured by their captors, members of the Serb paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions. Finally, they were dragged to a hole that had been dug by an earthmover, and there they were shot. From the film, Nahid had identified his brother, his nephews, and one cousin among the prisoners in the truck. Later, he had helped war crimes investigators locate the scene of the massacre, and worked with them to exhume the bodies for identification and reburial, because it was important that they should all have a name and a formal resting place.

No, he did not hate all Serbs.

But some he really hated.

Nahid watched a mother walking her toddler on the grass of the Schönbrunn, the woman crouching to hold the child’s arms as his chubby legs carried him, half-stumbling, along. What people often forgot when it came to violent death were the connections, the links not only to those left behind but also to lives and worlds that might have been. Nahid found some consolation in the theory of multiple universes, and the idea that in a parallel existence those he had lost continued to live and breathe. Children were born, then grandchildren, on and on for generation after generation. These were potential states of being that did not conclude in sexual torment, in torture and murder.

Sometimes he heard them, the local Viennese Serbs, as they spoke dismissively of Muslims and Croats, just as others uttered calumnies about Jews or Blacks, creating a hierarchy of misery and pain, a tacitly accepted list of those whose destiny it was to suffer and die. What the ignorant did not understand was that the executioners were always the same, and only the uniforms changed. In that sense, the identities of the victims – their race, their color, their religion – were irrelevant: reduced to bone, we are all identical. When it came to mass murder, any prey would do, and those who would kill one would kill all. They who remembered this, they who had helped to excavate from pits the bones of men, women, and children, could only keep watch in the hope of warning the world when the next batch of executioners made themselves known.

Two men, one older, one younger, passed across his field of vision, breaking his train of thought. They took a shortcut over the grass, and in doing so crushed the edge of a flowerbed beneath their shoes.

‘Hey!’ said Nahid, in German. ‘Watch where you’re treading.’

‘Fuck you,’ said the older man, not even bothering to look back.

‘Fuck me?’ said Nahid. ‘Fuck me? No, fuck you. Fuck you!’ He took out his cell phone to film the two men trampling the blooms. You could say what you wanted about the Austrians, but they placed a premium on law and order, and they really liked their flowers. Nahid planned to show the footage to the park authorities, and perhaps post it on the Internet as an example to others.

Nahid found himself lapsing into Arabic, as he often did when fury got the better of him, the Arab tongue being even more creative than German or Serbo-Croat when it came to insults. ‘Kess ikhtak!’ he shouted, and then, just in case the object of his ire didn’t have a sister, he added ‘Kess ommak!’, on the basis that he certainly did have a mother, and so could go fuck her instead. If she was living, all the better. If she was dead, he could dig up her corpse and fuck that.

The older man stopped, and now he did turn back, even as the younger one with him tried to steer him away.

‘Ya kalb!’ he screamed at Nahid. ‘You immigrant dog! You fucking Turk!’

The expression on Nahid’s face changed, and he lowered his phone.

‘I know you,’ he said, so softly that he might almost have thought that it had gone unheard were it not for the way the younger man’s head tilted slightly in response. ‘I know you. From the film …’

The man was older now, his face softer, his body thicker, but the more Nahid stared, the more certain he became. Here before him was one of those who had walked with General Ratko Mladić through the streets of Srebrenica after the surrender, preening for the cameras as they sat down over coffee to negotiate the terms of departure for the Dutch battalion, even as they were setting in motion the mechanics of the genocide to come. Fucking Mladić: a butcher who did not even have the guts to stay and supervise the slaughter he had ordered, but instead traveled back to Belgrade so he would have an alibi should the war turn against the Serbs.

In Mladić’s absence – physical only – the abandoned UN base at Potočari was used as a staging point for the thousands of Muslim men and boys bound for execution, and later still Potočari became a cemetery for those same dead as their remains were exhumed from forests and glades to be taken there for reburial, as though to haunt the Dutch forever. Now, in Vienna, the past had assumed human form in order to torment Nahid Hasanović too. This man, on camera, had forced Nahid’s male relatives from a truck in woodland and lined them up before a pit. He had watched as fathers were made at gunpoint to sodomize their sons, and old men were bludgeoned to death, before organizing the militias into firing squads. It was all that Nahid could do not to throw himself on this animal and sink his teeth into his flesh, to punch and kick him as he and his soldiers had punched and kicked defenseless civilians. But the other, younger man had already tensed, torn between wanting to silence Nahid but also to protect his charge, and Nahid knew that the moment he took a step forward, they would hurt him, and hurt him badly. Yet if Nahid could find a policeman, perhaps he could explain. Here was a war criminal. There was evidence on film. The United Nations was still looking for these people. They’d found Mladić and put him in the dock, and his puppetmaster Karadžić, too. One could still hope for justice.

Swiftly, Nahid began to walk away. He heard the younger man calling after him, and speeded up his footsteps until he was running, his right hand holding tightly to the phone in his pocket. He risked a glance over his shoulder, expecting to see at least one of the men pursuing him, but they were now continuing their journey through the gardens, although with perhaps a little more haste than before.

But Nahid had the footage on his phone. He could send it to the police, and if they did not provide satisfaction he would find a way to pass it to the United Nations, because he had aided them in digging up the bodies. He still had the names of some of the men and women he had met in the course of that work. They would listen to him, because they knew he was not one to tell lies.

So lost was Nahid in his thoughts, and so intent on the sight of the two men growing smaller, that he bumped into someone on the path. He instinctively apologized, and saw that he had almost sent a young girl tumbling to the ground. She was small, perhaps still in school, although she was not wearing a uniform.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nahid. ‘Are you all right?’

The girl nodded, and checked the front of her tan coat, as though worried that she might discover a stain upon it following the collision.

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘And you? You seem distressed.’

She spoke in heavily accented German, and her voice was deeper than he might have expected from someone of her age.

‘I had a bad experience,’ said Nahid, ‘but I will be okay. I think I winded myself, though.’

He saw that the girl was not as young as he had first thought – not a girl at all, in fact, but a woman, although one that had not grown to adult height. Her eyes were brown, the same color as her hair, and her skin was of an almost luminescent pallor, as of a creature bred in darkness.

Nahid’s stomach hurt. He must have taken her elbow in his gut, he thought. He ought to sit, but he needed to be on his way. He looked down at his belly and saw a stain spreading across the front of his white shirt. It was very red, like beet juice. The stain would be difficult to remove, but there were ways …

‘I think you should rest for a moment,’ said the woman, as she helped Nahid to a bench. He sat heavily and the pain caused him to cry out. The woman’s hand punched at him once, twice, and this time he felt the blade slice through his insides. Then she was searching his pockets and taking his cell phone from him. Finally, she wiped the blood from her right hand on his coat, and fastened the buttons.

‘What is your name?’ she said.

‘Nahid.’

‘Good. I like to know names.’ She tested the word in her mouth: ‘Nahid. Na-hid.’ When she had memorized it to her satisfaction, she said, ‘You can sleep now, Nahid.’

But Nahid Hasanović was already dead.