The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter XXXIII
It was Radovan Vuksan’s opinion that one could account neither for the vagaries of fate nor, if one were a believer, for the possibility that God appeared to have a sense of humor, although one that, like so many of His ways, passed all human understanding. Yes, Radovan had advised his brother not to leave the apartment, and to maintain instead a low profile while overtures were made to Belgrade and Frend went about his work. Yet short of narcotizing him, there was little Radovan could do to prevent Spiridon from seeking exercise and fresh air. But that he should have been spotted by a Turk capable of identifying him represented misfortune on a grand scale, a calamity that had been heightened by the killing of said Turk, and further underscored by leaving the body on a park bench.
‘What were we supposed to do,’ said Ilić, ‘carry it back with us?’
‘Not killing him might have been a start,’ said Radovan.
His ambivalence about Ilić – no, call it what it was: his dislike – was hardening with every hour. That Ilić had certain talents was undeniable, but like all sadists, he lacked self-control, and his loyalty to Spiridon meant that he was unable or unwilling to rein in his worst impulses. Radovan was convinced that Zivco Ilić was the wrong man to be acting as his brother’s right hand under these circumstances. Unfortunately, he was the only man currently available.
‘The Turk was shouting,’ said Ilić. ‘The police would have come.’
‘And by the time they came, you would have been gone.’
‘You can’t say that for sure,’ said Ilić. He was unhappy at being upbraided by Radovan, but if he reacted with anger both brothers would turn on him, because only Spiridon could censure his brother, and vice versa. ‘Anyway, I didn’t kill him. The vedma did.’
Radovan winced at the use of the word, but did not contest it. He tried to have as little as possible to do with Spiridon’s shadow, but he knew what his brother and the rest of them thought of her. While not a superstitious man himself, Radovan understood the advantages of cultivating the superstitions of others. If Ilić was convinced she was a witch, he would not contest it. It bothered him more that Spiridon was similarly credulous, because it was one thing to indulge – even exploit – the gullibility of others, but quite another to fall prey to it oneself.
But Radovan could not deny the oddness of Zorya, to use her given name – or the name by which she identified herself, which was not necessarily the same thing – since little about her could be confirmed, and all of Radovan’s meticulous yet discreet inquiries had yielded hardly any useful knowledge about her. He knew only that she came from the country of the Vlachs, an ethnic minority of Romanian descent that inhabited small communities in the harsh, isolated landscape of eastern Serbia. The Vlachs had long been associated with both black and white magic, even after adopting Orthodox Christianity, or some version of it that permitted them to invoke Jesus and the Virgin Mary alongside whatever other non-Christian deities they also worshiped. The more sensationalist Serbian newspapers and media outlets occasionally ran stories ascribing blame for murders and ritual killings on Vlach witches, all of them nonsense. Like most allegations of witchcraft since the dawn of time, they were largely aimed at elderly women living in communities that sometimes lacked even the most basic of support structures for the more vulnerable, whether medical, psychological, or emotional.
The Vlachs, often marooned in countryside dotted by abandoned or barely functioning mines, frequently mired in poverty and, like many in Serbia, watching their young folk leave to seek better lives elsewhere, were forced to rely on one another, and so a people with their own dialect and traditions became more anomalous still. Their name was derived from the Old High German word meaning ‘walh’, or ‘foreigner’. They were perennial outsiders in a nation that was suspicious of strangers, yet still they survived. During the conflicts that had followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, their close familial bonds kept money flowing into the country from abroad, and they had shared some of that modest income with their non-Vlach neighbors. Radovan would never have considered describing his Serbian brothers and sisters as tolerant of those unlike themselves, but it was as good a word as any to describe the texture of their relationship with the Vlachs.
Spiridon had discovered Zorya living rough in the Braničevo District of eastern Serbia. How long she had been living there she would not say, or why she had been ostracized, because it was clear that the locals wanted nothing to do with her, given that she was enduring a solitary existence. Within sight of the home she had made for herself in a rocky hollow lay a village, accessed by a stone bridge over a stream. In Vlach culture, Radovan knew, a boundary existed between the realms of the living and the dead, and the dividing line was often running water. Caves, too, were associated with the next world, but while the Vlachs would visit those places to leave gifts of supplies for the souls of the dead during their seven-year period of wandering the earth, they did not live in them. Zorya, whether coerced or by choice, had made her dwelling in an umbrous region. It was the opinion of one of Radovan’s sources that perhaps Zorya was not Vlach at all, but something stranger, something older …
None of which was sufficient to explain Spiridon’s decision to bring her back to Belgrade with him, and then on to Amsterdam after the Vuksans had allied themselves with that particular faction of the Zemun clan. No, Spiridon had finally embraced Zorya following two warnings given by her, exhortations that turned out to be true. The first, that Spiridon was the target of a Bosniak hit squad seeking to avenge the massacre at Srebrenica, had resulted in the killing of three Sunni Muslims from the Croatian town of Bakar and an end to that threat. The second, that a UN war crimes investigation team was closing in on Spiridon, based on testimony from five witnesses, led to the demise of the witnesses in question, crippling the inquiry. Spiridon took care of the Bosniaks personally, but it was Zorya who had dealt with the witnesses – three women, two men – all of whom died from poisoning.
After that, Zorya became Spiridon’s own guardian goddess, just like the Auroras from whom she took her name. Without her, Spiridon would have been dead long ago, although even Zorya had tried to dissuade him from targeting De Jaager. When that failed, she had attempted to have him limit his rage to the old Dutchman, leaving the others unharmed, but lately it seemed that Spiridon’s taste for blood exceeded even her own.
Now here was Ilić, with a sly look on his face, acknowledging his belief in Zorya’s eldritch nature, and inviting Radovan to deny it, thus angering his brother. Radovan elected to end the conversation. All they could do was hope that no eyewitnesses emerged. Ilić was convinced that he and Spiridon had not been followed from the park, and Radovan was inclined to believe him.
As for Zorya, wherever she now was, woe betide anyone who dared to follow her.
Zorya paused at the Zollamtsbrücke, the green metal bridge over the Wien that connected Vienna’s Innere Stadt from Landstrasse, and watched a train traverse the U-Bahn crossing beneath. The Wien trickled below, but all rivers were as one to her, and the name of this one barely registered in her consciousness. She wore the hood of her jacket raised, which concealed her unsettling appearance, and the steady rain encouraged the passing Wieners and tourists to keep their heads down.
Not surprisingly, the discovery of Nahid Hasanović’s body had made the news, and although his death had not been observed, police were eager to talk to a girl dressed in tan or brown who was glimpsed in the vicinity of the park at the time. Zorya had since changed her clothing, and it was not as though the police were suggesting that a child might have been responsible for the killing, not yet, but caution would be required for a while. She always dressed in layers, whatever the weather, because it disguised the curvature of her spine. Scoliosis: that was the medical name for her condition. There was no cure for it, but its severity could be reduced by surgery in more serious cases in order to prevent further deterioration and alleviate pain. But Zorya was not about to submit herself to a surgeon’s knife, and her condition was relatively mild. Also, since she no longer grew, her deformity did not worsen; the pain, she could live with.
If Radovan Vuksan attributed Spiridon’s encounter with Hasanović’s path to bad luck or some strange act of God, Zorya, by contrast, believed it to be part of a deeper pattern of tribulation that included the assassination of Nikola Musulin, with an inception that could be traced back to the murders of De Jaager and his kin. She felt a profound sense of enclosure, of darkness encroaching, but had not yet spoken of it to Spiridon. He was already acting incautiously, and she had begun to suspect that his natural belligerence and his tendency toward cruelty were degenerating still further into a form of dementia. Reasoning with him had always been difficult, but he had followed her counsel more often than not. Now, though, he heard her out but did not follow her guidance, even as his faith in her abilities to protect him appeared to grow. Yet this trust was likely to be shaken by recent setbacks. If they continued, it would surely be only a matter of time before he began to question her usefulness to him. When that happened, she would be faced with a difficult choice: to stay or to run; to remain or to begin again with another whom she could mold.
Zorya looked over the river to Landstrasse, the ornate decorative tops on the pillars of the bridge like skulls against the sky. Crossing was always hard because an ancient, atavistic part of her fought against the impulse. She had to will her feet to move. Even then, they advanced only reluctantly, as though her body were resisting this flirtation with dissolution. The air became colder as she advanced, and Landstrasse grew fainter instead of more distinct. By the time she had reached the far bank, its buildings had vanished entirely, and Zorya stood alone in a featureless gray landscape across which shadows moved like the drifting contours of unseen clouds.
Except clouds did not move in such patterns or with such agency, and they were not drawn to the living.
The lands of the quick and the dead were distinct territories, but overlapped at the margins. If one knew the paths, and could see what others did not – because most people remained barely conscious of their immediate surroundings, never mind those that lay beyond simple perception – then it was possible to move between them. But the journey came at a price, because the living did not belong among the dead, and they left behind a little of themselves each time they crossed.
And if one lingered too long, and fell prey to the lassitude that was a prelude to the final sleep, well, then one would remain among the dead. In the ordinary world, the world of bridges and trains, of rain-filled gutters and baroque architecture, a body would be discovered, perhaps still warm and without a mark on it. Its heart would simply have stopped beating because sometimes hearts just gave out. No questions would be asked and no mystery would attach itself to the death – or none beyond the mystery that follows every death, which is the matter of what comes after, and to that a body cannot testify.
But Zorya could have answered, had she wished. She could have spoken of wandering souls, and the whispering of angels – or worse. She might have talked of a lake, barely glimpsed through mists, and the endless host of the dead in a state of constant subsumption by its depths and the sea beyond. Sometimes she thought she perceived the distant figure of a girl by the lakeshore, facing the water, but Zorya had never approached her to investigate further. It was better to pass through this terrain unnoticed, to find out what one came to discover and depart without being seen.
But this girl both intrigued and frightened Zorya because she, like Zorya, did not belong here. She was dead, yet she chose not to follow the rest. Instead she waited, and Zorya sensed that whatever knowledge she herself might have possessed of this land paled beside the intensity of the other’s cognizance. But if the girl was aware of Zorya’s presence, she gave no indication of it.
Or had not done so, until now.
As the lineaments of the realm of the dead grew more apparent to Zorya, she saw the girl’s head turn in her direction. The girl was interested in her, and Zorya sensed that the girl knew who she was, what she was.
Then the girl spoke.
‘Jennifer,’ she said.
The girl was dangerous.
‘My name is Jennifer Parker.’
Very, very dangerous.
‘Come closer. Let me see you.’
But Zorya remained within sight of the bridge, and the crossing back to her own world. This was far enough. From here she could see all that she needed to see, because the shadows in this place were not only those of the dead but also of those who brought death with them. Zorya glimpsed them now: two men, radiating purpose.
And approaching fast.