“Smile,” he called out to me over his shoulder, as the woman peered in my direction.
I broke into an idiot grin while Brian laid out his most charming appeal.
I could see the woman hesitating, her mind contemplating the possibilities, these two obvious foreigners in a Spanish car asking to see her husband. It couldn’t have seemed right. And yet she turned toward the door and beckoned us forward.
The house was luxuriously toasty inside, heated to a near sub-Saharan warmth by an immense woodstove. Dinner was cooking in the kitchen, and the air was perfumed with the smell of long-simmered meat and baked apples.
“Divin’s in his shop,” Brian explained as the woman disappeared into the back of the house. “She’s going to get him.”
“Did you tell her why we’re here?” I asked.
“I said it’s about one of his old cases. I told her you’re an American, and that your sister was killed in a car accident. I said there’s a lawsuit pending and that there could be money in it if he knows anything that can help us get a settlement.”
“And she believed you?”
Brian shrugged. “As far as I could understand.”
There were excited voices from somewhere in the back of the house. Finally, the woman reappeared with her husband in tow. She said something to Brian, then left us and headed into the kitchen.
Stanislav Divin was a slight man, his trim but vigorous body in stark contrast to his wife’s wide hips and meaty hands. He was dressed simply, in worn jeans and a frayed work shirt, his forearms powdered with a fine film of sawdust. In his right hand was a wooden figurine, a beautiful and delicate rendering of a hummingbird in flight.
He smiled at me, and for a moment I was worried that he might recognize me, that if I had been in the car with Hannah he would surely remember, but his expression said nothing of the sort. He looked to Brian next, then motioned for us to sit. How many hundreds of cases, I told myself, and this one so long ago. Even I might not have recognized the girl I had been then.
“My wife says you’ve come about an old case of mine,” Divin said in barely accented English. He settled himself into an armchair near the woodstove and set the bird in his lap.
“Yes,” I said, slipping my coat off, taking a chair opposite him. It was hot near the hearth, unpleasantly so. “My sister,” I told him, following Brian’s lead. “She died in a car accident some years ago. I’ve been told you were the investigator.”
“An accident?” Divin mused.
“Yes. In December of nineteen eighty-nine. She was driving a white Peugeot with Austrian tags. A truck hit her on the Bratislava-Vienna road.”
“A white Peugeot,” Divin said. He put his hand on the bird’s head and turned his face up toward the ceiling, as if looking for the memory in the roof’s old wood beams.
“She was an American,” I offered. “Her name was Hannah. Hannah Boyle.”
The old man nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I remember. It was a nasty collision. The girl…” He winced, then looked at me. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s been a long time,” I said, showing him a thin smile, the dregs of grief. We were both silent for a moment while I tried to decide how to continue. A log shifted in the fire, the sound echoing in the stove’s iron belly.
“I understand you were a narcotics detective,” I said finally, taking a chance.
Divin shifted in his chair, glancing quickly from me to Brian. He said something to Brian in Slovak, and Brian answered back. Whatever Brian said must have been convincing. When they had finished their exchange, the old man turned back to me. “You understand correctly,” he said.
I smiled encouragingly. “It’s all right,” I told him. “My family is well aware of my sister’s problems.” I took another chance. “She wasn’t just a tourist, was she?”
Divin shook his head.
“Heroin?” I guessed.
“Hashish,” he corrected me.
“How much did she have in the car with her?”
“Several kilos,” Divin said. “I don’t remember exactly.”
“And the other girl, what happened to her?”
Divin looked down at the wooden bird. Gently, he lifted the figure from his lap and set it on the low table next to him. When his eyes met mine again, they were clear and steady. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What other girl?”
“My sister’s friend,” I tried. “She was traveling with another woman, an American.”
“Surely you’re mistaken,” the old man insisted. “There was no one.” He set his hands in his empty lap. “This lawsuit of yours? Who exactly is involved?”
I looked to Brian.
“Peugeot,” he said quickly. “There was a problem with their seat belts.”
Divin nodded. “Well, then,” he said, rising from his chair. “Surely I’ve told you everything I know that could help. The Boyle woman’s seat belt, as I recall, was still buckled when we got to her. Now, if that’s all, I believe our dinner is almost ready.”
“Seat belts?” I said as we climbed into the SEAT. “Was that the best you could come up with?”
Brian pulled the door closed behind him. “I’m not sure anything I could have said would have made much difference at that point.”
He was right, of course. Divin was no dummy, and our story was full of holes, but still I couldn’t help thinking there was a lot more to the car accident than the old detective had told us.
“You think it was you, don’t you? In the car with Hannah.” Brian asked as we started out the gate.
“Yes,” I told him.
“You know they don’t mess around with that kind of stuff here. The drugs, I mean. If that was you, you’d still be sitting in some Slovak prison.”
I stared out the dark window, at my own ghostly reflection, and the wedge of moon in the distance. “But I’m not,” I said, thinking about the Peugeot, the open passenger door, and the glass littering the asphalt around it, each shard shimmering like a diamond in the glare of the police flashbulb.
I pushed the image from my mind and tried to focus on what I knew, the order in which things had happened. In the summer of 1988, Catherine Reed was murdered in Pakistan. Some eighteen months later, during the frenzied fall of communism, Hannah Boyle died in a car full of hashish, and Catherine’s daughter, riding in the seat beside her, emerged unscathed. No, something didn’t add up.
THIRTY
The call from Werner came the next evening. Brian, Ivan, and I were having dinner at a Thai place in the Old City when Ivan’s cell phone rang. The conversation was short, the Russian all business.
“It was Werner,” Ivan said when he’d hung up. “He’ll meet you at the boat terminal at Devin Castle. Morning after tomorrow, ten o’clock. He said to tell you Stringer will be there.”
I set my fork down and looked to Brian, panic flashing in my eyes. As much as I trusted Werner to deliver Stringer, I couldn’t forget what had happened at the Casbah.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Ivan shoveled a forkful of fried rice into his mouth. “Werner’s a motherfucker,” he said, chewing while he talked. “But he doesn’t go back on his word. It’s all he’s got.”
I believed Ivan, but still, it seemed strange to me that Werner had agreed so readily to my request. And why, I wondered, would Stringer be so willing to meet?
“Don’t worry,” Brian assured me. “I’ll be there with you.”
Even on the bleakest of winter mornings the drive out to Devin Castle along the Danube was a pleasant one, the dark river mottled with sheets of ice, the gentle foothills of the lower Carpathians rolling northward. Snowbound and denuded as they were, stripped of all foliage, there was miraculously little sign along the Danube’s banks of the massive razor-wire fences that had scarred them for so long. Nor of the old guard towers, once spaced within sight of each other, the guards looking not outward to Austria, but in.