The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

Chapter LXII

The official term is ‘identity management’; the unofficial one is ‘passports for sale’. It’s a lucrative trade, worth about $3 billion annually, and shows no signs of abating in this age of isolationism, Brexit, tax evasion, and terrorism. Basically, if you’re wealthy enough, any number of countries may be willing to provide you with a passport. The most valuable of these documents offer visa-free access to most of the world, including those European territories in the Schengen Area. For this reason, poorer Caribbean island nations are particularly popular, aided by their status as offshore tax havens and their desire to attract outside investment. The price, generally speaking, is quite reasonable: $100–$200,000 for an Antiguan passport; $100,000 for a Dominican; $150,000 for St. Kitts and Nevis, or Grenada. European passports are more expensive: an Austrian passport will cost the buyer upwards of $3 million, a Cypriot passport $2 million, a Maltese $1 million. In addition, fees may have to be paid to a broker, which can add as little as $20,000 or as much as $500,000 to the final cost.

The attraction of such passports is plain for respectable businesspeople from countries with restrictions on access to leading economic markets, but even more obvious for disreputable individuals seeking to avoid the attention of the authorities. On paper, the nations involved in these sales are committed to due diligence, investigating – or claiming to investigate – all applicants thoroughly, and refusing to sell to anyone suspected of altering their identity or those who might be the subject of a criminal investigation.

But the reality?

Well, that’s more nebulous.

In Simmering, just beyond Vienna’s southern limits, lies a small, rarely visited cemetery. This is the Friedhof der Namenlosen, or the Cemetery of the Nameless, and it is the final resting place of more than one hundred people, the majority of them unidentified. For centuries, the Danube’s currents caused the corpses of those who had drowned in the river, or whose remains had been thrown into it for disposal, to wash up on a nearby stretch of the bank. In 1939, the construction of the Albern grain dock altered the currents, and the Danube’s dead were forced to make landfall farther down the river.

The old cemetery, which accepted corpses until 1900, is now hidden by forest and marked only by a sign among the trees. The new cemetery contains 104 bodies, their plots marked, for the most part, by identical crucifixes, some with candles or wreaths placed there by well-wishers or the fishermen of Albern, who gather to remember these unfortunates each All Saints’ Day. The named – Gutman, Molner, Kochinger, Behnken (‘aus Hamburg 11.12.1860 – 15.3.1923’) – repose largely on the left side of the cemetery, as though to distance themselves from those who remain anonymous – Unbekannt, Namenlos. A little church, the Chapel of the Resurrection, sits above the graves. To its right rise silos and industrial buildings, and to the left is a patch of wilderness, a place of weeds and dead or dying trees. Behind, but now some distance away, flows the Danube.

Anton Frend had never before set foot in the Friedhof der Namenlosen. He made a point of avoiding graveyards, and had last stood at a graveside seven years previously when his father had been interred in the family plot at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. He had not visited the grave since. If there was a next life, which he doubted, then the best of his parents was at peace there; if there was not, they were nowhere. Either way, he saw no point in making obeisance to moldering bones.

He had not slept in the apartment above his office the night before, but had elected to stay at a small hotel in Hackengasse. Frend tended to dismiss talk of sixth senses or bad feelings, but as he approached his office building after leaving Zivco Ilić and the girl, he had spotted a car parked within sight of the entrance, and observed, from behind, two men in the front seats. The driver was entirely concealed by shadow, and Frend could see only the side of the passenger’s face: dark hair, a beard, and a sallow complexion accentuated by a white dress shirt buttoned to the neck. Spiridon Vuksan, Frend thought, would have described him as a Turk. The passenger was smoking a cigarette, which he finished while Frend watched. The butt was dropped from the open window to the street below, where it came to rest near three others. Almost immediately, Frend had experienced the strongest urge to run, but controlled himself sufficiently to retreat round the corner and walk to the nearest U-Bahn station, all the time glancing over his shoulder, anticipating the sight of the bearded man in pursuit; but he was not followed and made it onto the train without incident.

Once he had arrived at the hotel, he called his wife and stressed to her again the importance of not returning home or using her credit and debit cards until the current crisis was dealt with. Then, because he wanted to hear her voice, he tried his daughter’s cell phone. It went straight to messaging. She usually simply rejected the incoming call if she recognized his number. Once every year or two, she might connect to speak a few monosyllables to him in person.

But not that evening.

Finally, he had contacted Radka, his mistress. She wanted to know where he was. He told her he was staying at a hotel, although he did not share the name with her. She offered to join him. He was tempted to say yes, if only for the company – his sexual appetite had diminished in inverse proportion to the escalation of the Vuksan problem – but decided it would be better if they were to remain apart for the time being. He asked about any suspicious activity, or any odd inquiries made concerning him, but she could recall none. He advised her to lock up the shop for a few days, or leave it in the care of her assistant, Sophia, but Radka only laughed and informed him that Sophia would have the business run into the ground within twenty-four hours, and what was he so worried about anyway?

Frend tried telling her, but without mentioning the Vuksans by name. He advised her of delicate negotiations, of men who might or might not have been watching his office, and others who were probably doing the same thing at his home. He spoke of sending his wife away to safety. He told Radka that he did not want anything to happen to her, but there were those who might attempt to use her to get to him. By the end of the conversation he was no closer to convincing her of the need to absent herself from the store, but she had at least agreed to exercise some caution, whatever that might mean.

Unbeknownst to Frend, Radka had then made a call of her own, this one to Zivco Ilić, informing him that forces unknown might be closing in on Anton Frend.

Now Frend was in Simmering in the cold, gray light of morning. A taxi had dropped him at the entrance to the complex of factories and silos. He had elected to walk the rest of the way to the cemetery, following the direction indicated by a sign on the road, because the fewer witnesses there were to his ultimate destination, the better. He asked the driver to wait for him, but the man refused because Frend could not confirm how long he would be. He could always call another taxi, the driver pointed out. If not, there was a bus stop by the entrance to the industrial area, so he had a couple of options. Frend wasn’t so sure about that – two buses an hour would be a generous estimate, and who knew how long a taxi might take to arrive? – but he had little choice in the matter. In better circumstances, he would have driven himself, but his car was parked in a private garage by his office; if he was right, and his business premises were under surveillance, then his vehicle also might be.

He passed no one as he walked. The buildings were deserted, this being Sunday. Flocks of small birds rose above the silos before settling again, the pattern repeating itself three times. He could see no cause for the birds to be alarmed, but perhaps they sensed the presence of predators; that, or the fear of predation was now so ingrained that they were reluctant to stay in one place for too long. In either case, the metaphor was not lost on Frend.

He descended a short flight of steps that brought him under a railway line and within sight of the cemetery. A woman was standing among the graves, smoking a cigarette. She was entirely alone, apart from the dead. She looked up as Frend approached the little chapel, but did not acknowledge him, even as Frend descended to join her and the namenlos.

The woman was taller than Frend and ascetically thin, as befitted one who subsisted on coffee and cigarettes. Her silver hair was cut too short for his liking, although his liking, Frend knew, was of no concern to her. The frames of her large spectacles were clear, lending them a protective aspect, so that Frend felt her regard as a laboratory specimen might, the sharpness of her attention like a scalpel ready to cut. She was wearing a beige coat that flared slightly from the waist and ended just below her knees, her legs concealed by high leather boots of a reddish brown, like blood and mud mixed. She was, she claimed, a distant descendant of the painter Angelica Kauffmann, although this might have been a lie, for Hannah Kauffmann was adept at creating falsehoods.

‘Hannah,’ said Frend. ‘You look well, as always.’

Kauffmann flicked at the flattery with a fingertip, the movement causing a pillar of ash to tumble from her cigarette to the plot by her feet.

‘If you came out here to exchange compliments,’ she said, ‘your journey will have been wasted, because you, Anton, do not look well. Are you sure you’re getting enough rest?’

‘Not lately, but you may be able to assist with a solution.’

‘I can offer you pills. I have no shortage of them.’

‘I was hoping for something more long-term.’

She waved at the graves with her right hand.

‘Then you’re in the right place,’ she said.

Frend smiled without humor. He had not chosen this venue for their meeting. He would have preferred somewhere closer to the city, and less depressing, but Hannah Kauffmann had always indulged a taste for the dramatic. It might have been a consequence of her love of opera. She was a benefactor of the Vienna State Opera, which meant that she donated at least €10,000 per season. Frend could think of many better ways Kauffmann could have spent €10,000, among them getting her teeth fixed. She was an otherwise attractive woman, but her mouth was a ruin, the enamel stained from decades of caffeine and nicotine, with gaps in the upper row where she had lost molars to decay. Her grin reminded him of the skulls in the crypt of the Stephansdom.

‘I was going to ask why we were here,’ said Frend, ‘and not in more convivial surroundings.’

‘You don’t like cemeteries?’

‘Not particularly, but this one seems more cheerless than most.’

‘Really?’ Kauffmann frowned. She appeared genuinely surprised. ‘I don’t think that at all. Most of these people may be nameless, but they have not been forgotten. Every year, for one day, they are remembered. The fishermen leave flowers for them, and set a boat of wreaths adrift on the Danube. That is more than is done for many who have families to recall them, or who lie beneath memorials more lavish than a simple cross. And someday, we will be as they are. When there is no one left alive to recall us, no one for whom our mention causes even a flicker of recognition, then we, too, will have become nameless, whatever the stone above our head may say to the contrary.’

She finished her cigarette and stamped it out on the ground, which detracted somewhat, in Frend’s view, from the impact of her testimony.

‘Or,’ she resumed, ‘one could look upon it as a lesson in the transitory nature of identity.’

Ah, thought Frend, that’s more like it. Now we break through the bone to get to the marrow.

Kauffmann was a lawyer, specializing in banking and capital markets law, but she also maintained a lucrative sideline as a broker of passports, because some of her clients occasionally had need of such a service. From Austrian Bar gossip, Frend was aware that Kauffmann’s contacts in the Caribbean were second to none, although she had been forced to sever her ties with Cyprus and Malta following their inclusion on an OECD blacklist of countries believed to be facilitating tax evasion through their passports-for-sale schemes. There was also the case of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had been killed by a car bomb outside Mosta in 2017 while investigating Maltese government corruption, including the trade in passports. Her death had brought unwelcome international attention on the Maltese and the conduct of their affairs.

‘One should always be open to change,’ said Frend. ‘I currently have clients who share this view. One might even say they’re quite passionate about it.’

Kauffmann lit another cigarette. The tips of the fingers on her right hand were as yellow as her teeth. Frend imagined her body as a veritable petri dish of cancers.

‘I know the circles in which you move,’ said Kauffmann. ‘That’s why we’re meeting out here and not at Café Landtmann. There are rumors, Anton.’

‘There are always rumors. It would not be Vienna otherwise.’

‘These rumors come from farther afield,’ said Kauffmann. ‘Podgorica, for example.’

Podgorica, capital of Montenegro. Four hundred thousand dollars for a passport, give or take. Independent from Serbia since 2006, but still with deep ties to the old union. During the wars in the 1990s, the Montenegrins had bombed Dubrovnik for the Serbs and handed over Bosnian refugees to be tortured and executed. The Vuksans might once have had friends there, but not any longer.

‘And what do you hear from Podgorica?’ said Frend.

‘That your clients have overstepped, and a price has been put on their heads, not to mention the Interpol Red Notice currently in their names.’

‘Which is why they are seeking new names and new passports. An agreement has been brokered with Belgrade, but my clients have to leave Europe soon. A delay might be misconstrued as a prelude to hostilities.’

‘Some in Belgrade would contest the existence of any such agreement.’

‘Would Simo Stajić be among them?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kauffmann.

‘Stajić is a thug. It is Matija Kiš who speaks for Belgrade.’

‘A city from which you recently barely escaped with your life, if the tales are true. Do you really think that Kiš would have stepped in to save you had you not made it to Romania?’

‘Kiš is a gangster trying on a politician’s clothes for size – or perhaps it’s the other way round: one can never be sure with men of no principle. Whatever his true nature, any further bloodshed might damage his standing beyond repair.’

‘Kiš is a pragmatist,’ said Kauffmann. ‘If he gets blood on one set of clothing, he can exchange it for another. But my guess is that he would be clever enough to keep his distance from any carnage, and let Stajić do the butchering.’

Frend did not like the turn the discussion had taken.

‘Have you been warned against becoming involved?’ he asked.

‘If I had, do you think I’d be talking to you now? I’d like my skin to remain uncharred. For the moment, Kiš is probably prepared to forget about your clients as long as they leave the Continent. Later, though, who can say?’

‘Later is for providence, not for us,’ said Frend.

‘Because you want the Vuksans gone just as badly as Kiš does.’

She had consented to name them at last, Frend noticed.

‘More so. I’m at risk as long as they’re here.’

‘And not only from Belgrade,’ said Kauffmann.

‘More rumors?’

‘Facts this time, as indicated by a growing trail of bodies. Someone seems even more intent than Simo Stajić on wiping out the Vuksans. Even Belgrade is intrigued to know who that might be. Stajić thinks it’s Muslims, but then Stajić believes everything is a Muslim plot. Kiš isn’t so sure. You wouldn’t have any ideas, would you?’

‘No,’ said Frend.

‘I don’t believe you, but perhaps it’s better that I don’t know.’

‘From my proclaimed position of ignorance, I can only assume so. Can you help me, Hannah?’

‘It will be expensive. Traveling with baggage always costs extra, and the necessity for new identities may complicate matters. It would be cheaper and easier for you to bribe someone in Greece or Italy in return for documentation.’

‘I don’t have those contacts,’ said Frend. ‘Also, the passports have to be cast-iron, and come with guarantee of safe haven. My clients may be forced to reside in the territory in question until the Red Notice has faded to a soft pink.’

Kauffmann tired of the second cigarette and sent its butt to join the first.

‘I should have an initial response in twenty-four hours,’ she said.

‘And the cost?’

‘That depends. Jordan is probably out, given what happened in Paris. The Jordanians’ ties with France are too close, and they prefer to avoid inviting the attentions of extremists. Don’t look so shocked, Anton. I know about Gare de Lyon, too. Anyway, the Jordanians charge a million per document, and that’s before fees and overheads. With that in mind, I have a feeling your clients may be destined for the Caribbean. Given the complicating factors, I’d anticipate somewhere close to two hundred thousand per passport – and that’s at the lower end of the scale – plus my twenty percent.’

‘Dollars?’

‘I think we’ll make it euros. In cash. It’s just two passports, correct?’

‘Most likely three.’

Frend was not sure that Zivco Ilić had the necessary funds required to purchase a new passport for himself, but the Vuksans might be willing to fund him. They would not want to be trapped in unknown territory without someone they could trust to watch their backs. As for Zorya, he did not believe she would travel with them. According to Radovan, she wished to return to Serbia. He did not know why.

‘I need a definite answer,’ said Kauffmann.

‘I’ll check, but assume three for now.’

‘What about photographs?’

‘I have them ready to send. I just require an email address.’

Kauffmann consulted her phone and supplied a secure address consisting of random numbers and letters, which Frend knew would cease to exist after the image files had been downloaded. He sent the encrypted files from his own phone, and waited for Kauffmann to confirm that they’d been received safely.

‘Done,’ she said. ‘Now, I have somewhere to be. Is there anything else?’

‘No, I think that’s all.’

Kauffmann tightened the belt on her coat and took in the cemetery one last time.

‘Have you considered adding your name to that passport list?’ she said.

Frend shook his head. ‘I have a business here, and friends.’

‘I notice that you fail to mention a family. How is your wife?’

‘Elsewhere.’

‘Permanently?’

‘Probably.’

‘And your mistress?’

‘You are very well-informed.’

‘Just because you don’t parade her doesn’t make her a secret. Are you attached to her?’

‘I am fond of her, but no more than that.’

‘And your daughter remains in England?’

‘Yes, but we are estranged.’

Kauffmann laid a hand on Frend’s right arm.

‘Even should you succeed in getting the Vuksans out of Europe,’ she said, ‘they are leaving wreckage behind, and you will be swimming in it. Too many people know of your ties to these men, and they may refuse to believe that you have severed them completely. You have money, and property that can be sold. By all accounts your wife is a civilized woman who will behave honorably in the event of a divorce. You have fewer obligations here than you think, and a business is not worth a life.’

‘And what would I do in some Caribbean backwater?’ said Frend. ‘Drink too much, and seduce the occasional lonely tourist?’

‘There are men who dream of such a life.’

‘I am not one of them.’

She patted his sleeve.

‘I advise you to reflect upon it. Where did you park?’

‘I didn’t drive. I took a taxi.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘I was being careful.’

‘I’d offer you a ride,’ she said, ‘but—’

‘But you’re being careful, too,’ he finished for her.

‘Exactly.’

Frend watched her walk away. Her silver coupe was parked by one of the silos. He did not recognize the make, but then he had never been very interested in cars. He took one last look at the cemetery as Kauffmann drove off. He hoped never to return there, and God forbid that he should ever be laid to rest in such a desolate place. He used the steps to knock the dirt from his shoes before heading back the way he had come, leaving the dead to sleep on in peace.