The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

Chapter IX

It was said that the Gestapo in Lyon, under their repellent chief Klaus Barbie, finally grew so frenzied in their torture and execution of prisoners that the floor of their headquarters at the École de Sainte Militaire could no longer accommodate the by-products of the butchery, and the very ceilings of the building began to bleed. Radovan Vuksan had thought it an exaggeration until he retreated to the kitchen of De Jaager’s safe house in the hope of avoiding what was taking place upstairs, only to find droplets of blood exploding upon his bare head and redness pooling on the table. He looked up in time to see fluids leaking through the floorboards and stepped aside to avoid any further misfortune. He lit a cigarette, and saw that his hands were shaking.

Unlike his brother and the rest of the Vuksan clan, Radovan had not fought directly in the Balkan conflicts – or principally the ‘War in Croatia’, as it was known to Serbs – although arguably his role had been more important, and lethal, than those of his comrades who had taken lives. Radovan had worked as a ‘senior advisor’ at the MUP, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, his role and title being deliberately unrevealing, even innocuous. The MUP was one of the most powerful ministries in the land, with responsibility for local and national law enforcement. With Radovan’s assistance, it became more powerful still, helping to arm civilians and local militias of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia, and secretly channeling funds to the RSK’s president, Milan Martić.

It was Radovan who had organized the support structures for the Bosnian and Croatian Serb forces during the wars; Radovan who had provided funding for the ‘volunteers’ recruited to fight in Serb-held territories in Croatia; Radovan who had personally supervised the handover of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Serbian criminal warlord Arkan, whom he had known of old; and Radovan, ultimately, who had arranged Arkan’s assassination in the lobby of Belgrade’s InterContinental Hotel in January 2000, when it became clear that it would be better for all, Arkan himself excepted, if he did not live long enough to be questioned about war crimes by the inquisitors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Without Radovan Vuksan’s efforts, the War in Croatia would have been significantly shorter and less genocidal than it was. Yet any blood on his hands was purely metaphorical. He was an organizer – a brilliant one – but with no taste for either committing or witnessing mass murder. Some might even have called him a coward, but they would have been wrong, for Radovan’s moral failings were deeper and more complex than the term allowed.

The blood continued to drip from the ceiling. The sound it made as it splashed on the table was unnerving to him. From the position of the spreading stain he thought the old woman, Anouk, was probably the source. She had a lot of blood in her, and the mattress on which they had placed her was thin. It was not a surprise that it had become soaked through so quickly.

Radovan took a handkerchief from his pocket, dampened it at the sink, and used it to clean his pate. The cigarette was calming him slightly, but then the girl, Liesl, began to make a high-pitched mewling noise that he could discern even over the music. Radovan had never heard a human being emit a sound like that. It was beyond any ordinary conception of pain, and he guessed the girl would not last much longer. He turned the music up a notch, and realized he would never again be able to listen to Schumann with quite the same pleasure.

Radovan had tried to talk his brother out of going after De Jaager. Andrej Buha was long dead, the memory of him lost to all but a handful of his contemporaries, and even they would hardly have recalled him with much fondness. Had De Jaager not hired someone to take care of him, the Zemuns would eventually have been forced to kill him themselves. They might even have entrusted the Vuksans with the task in order to avoid a blood feud. Buha had become unstable, which threatened to bring danger to them all. De Jaager, by Radovan’s reckoning, had done them a favor of sorts by solving the Buha problem, and the Vuksans had weathered the storms that followed until they, like De Jaager, were on the verge of retiring as wealthy men. They had lived as voluntary exiles for long enough, and home was calling. Concerns had been assuaged, bribes had been paid, and a place had been prepared for them in the new Serbia. In time, they would be laid to rest in its soil. This final act of vengeance for an unloved man was, in Radovan’s view, an unnecessary risk to take at such a delicate stage.

Radovan wondered, too, about the assassin De Jaager had employed to kill Buha. The gunman was an American, and his name – as they now knew, thanks to the legat Armitage – was Louis. According to Spiridon, this Louis was no cause for apprehension. He was a professional who had been hired to do a job, and whatever happened in the aftermath would be of no concern to him. Perhaps, if the mood struck, Spiridon might ask one of their friends in the United States to take care of him, but there would be little pleasure in it. Louis was undoubtedly lethal, and would therefore have to be dealt with quickly. He would die largely without suffering, possibly without even knowing the reason for his termination, and what would be the purpose of that? As Spiridon had indicated to De Jaager, only a dolt blamed a weapon for his agonies, cursing the blade that cut him or the gun that wounded him rather than the one who wielded the knife or pulled the trigger. If they did not trouble the assassin, said Spiridon, he would not trouble them. That was how such men worked.

But Radovan was not so sure. Armitage had informed Zivco Ilić – to whom she had first reached out, for reasons still unclear to the Vuksans – that Louis had returned briefly to the Netherlands and was met at the airport by De Jaager’s factotum Paulus, who now lay slumped and dead in the kitchen. In addition, the Vuksans’ contact in the AIVD, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, claimed that Louis and De Jaager had visited the Rijksmuseum together, and Louis might even have stayed for a time in this very safe house. Armitage had believed Louis and De Jaager to be engaged in some joint endeavor, one involving an American private investigator named Charlie Parker. This, to Radovan, did not look like the standard relationship between a hired killer and his one-time employer, but suggested a deeper connection. One might almost have said a friendship.

He increased the volume of the music still further, and lit another cigarette.