His guess had been correct. The driver said something Jason didn’t understand and pointed to the meter mounted on the dash: 16.90. Jason reached over the seat to hand him a twenty. The reaction, a smile like a picket fence missing a few palings, told him he had been overgenerous.
If the outside of the station had been busy, the inside was chaos. Gypsy women, many suckling babies as they sat on the floor, beseeched passersby for money with raucous cries. Men and women in farm clothes clutched tickets as they formed lines for no reason Jason could discern. A group of perhaps a half dozen women in hijabs and head scarves reminded Jason that this part of the Balkans had been part of the Ottoman Empire and that Moslems, though now a small number, were a recognized minority. Part of the reason for the “ethnic cleansing” that had taken place in November 1992 when Bosnia and Croatia had become civil war battlefields. Orthodox Serbs had attacked Roman Catholic Serbs with both attacking the Moslems. Centuries of ethnic suspicion, hatred, and jealousy, suppressed by Communism’s iron fist, had boiled over. Had it not been for intervention by the United Nations, with strong U.S. support, the countryside would have been littered with dead men, women, and children. Although subsequent war-crime trials revealed thousands killed, most defenseless citizens, the true number would never be known.
Thankful that the signs above the ticket windows were in Roman as well as Cyrillic letters, Jason edged his way through the mob to stand in line in front of the one reading Gospić, Lika, his destination.
The train could have been any of the electric variety common in Europe. But there was nothing common about the scheduled arrival time posted in electric lights above the track: four hours plus. Jason rechecked his iPod. Sure enough, the distance was only 185 kilometers.
“But it’s two hundred and thirty-two by rail because of the turns going through the mountains,” a feminine voice informed him.
He whirled around to look into a pair of laughing blue eyes in a round face. A knit cap covered the rest of her head, other than a renegade strand of blonde hair that reached the collar of her suede overcoat.
She slipped off a glove and extended the hand. “Natalia Čupić, frequent rail rider.”
Jason returned the iPod to his coat pocket and shook. “And mind reader.”
She tinkled a laugh, showing nothing of the poor dentistry for which Eastern Europe was infamous. “Not really. I couldn’t help but notice your iPod. Then, I saw what was on the screen. Did you know you make a grunting sound when you are disappointed? Or is it when you are surprised?”
Jason climbed the three steps up into the railcar, pulling himself up with one hand on one of the vertical chrome rails beside the door installed for just that the purpose. Without them, boarding the train would have been difficult for someone burdened with heavy baggage. He extended a hand to help her manage her one bag. “Do you make a practice of reading other people’s screens?”
She swung up into the car, the move of an athlete, holding on to his hand a full second longer than necessary. “Only those of interesting-looking men, and only when I am faced with a long, boring journey. And that is the last bit of information you get until I know your name. I do not have conversations with strange men.”
He was in front of her as they walked past groups of seating, two facing two with a small fixed table between. “Even interesting ones on long boring trips?”
“A girl has to have some sort of rules.”
Jason shoved his bag in the overhead. “Seat twenty-three, that’s me.” It took a split second to remember who he was. “George Simmons.”
She tossed her bag next to his and sat. “I’m right across the table, number twenty-five. Now that we are properly introduced, might I ask what an American is doing traveling to such an out-of-the-way place as that to which this train is going?”
Jason was instantly on guard but kept his tone jocular. “The train makes a dozen stops. Just how did you know where I’m going?”
She looked up at one of the several signs depicting a smoking cigarette in a circle with a line drawn through it. “That’s new, that no smoking sign. Croatia is following the West in getting into the health police business. Bad idea, don’t you think?”
Jason sat, his knees nearly touching hers. “I think you ought to answer the question I just asked: If you’re not a mind reader, how did you know where I was going?”
She gave that musical laugh again as she swept off her cap, freeing a cascades of golden hair, “I didn’t.”
“But you said…”
“I said you were going to an out-of-the-way place. Take a look at the train’s route. There’s not a stop on it that has ten thousand people living there. So, what is an American doing in places like that?”
Jason relaxed. “Visiting relatives, actually. Or, rather searching for them. My mother came from the town of Gospić. As long as I was in the country on business, I thought I’d spend a little time seeing if can find a cousin or two.”
“More like five or six. Families in the mountains are large. There is not much else to do. What sort of business?”
Jason held up a hand, palm out, stop. “Whoa, Natalia! You’ve just about heard my life story and all I know is your name. For starters, how did you learn such good English?”
The car clanked forward with a jolt and trains on adjacent tracks seemed to slide by with increasing speed.
“I was fortunate to have an excellent teacher in school, an American. My parents paid her for four years of extra tutoring. Satisfied?”
Not entirely.
Natalia was thirty, perhaps thirty-five. Her schoolgirl days would have been, when, in the late ’70s, early ’80s? Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, of which Croatia had been a part, died in 1980, and the Communists remained in power until 1990, when the country fragmented like a hand grenade, creating not only Croatia but Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and one or two countries that might include Disney World for all Jason could recall. It was doubtful an American, particularly one teaching English, would have been hired in the state-run schools of a Communist country. At least, not the schools open to children of ordinary people. Possible, but not probable.
The train was reaching speed now, accelerating smoothly.
Jason stood. “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.”
Heading toward the end of the car where the toilets were located, he turned back to watch her as she looked out of the window. When he was fairly certain she wouldn’t turn away, he took his iPhone from his pocket and snapped her picture. He would have preferred a full, rather than partial, face shot, but this was the best he was going to get without alerting her.
Once in the tiny toilet, reminiscent of those aboard aircraft, he locked the door, pulled down the seat, and held the iPhone in one hand while the fingers of the other typed a text message. Then he sent Natalia’s picture.
21
Nikola Tesla was eccentric. Like Howard Hughes, he had an obsession with germs, washing his hands constantly. He could be easily identified in a restaurant by the stack of eighteen napkins upon which he insisted so he would not have to use the same one twice. He meticulously calculated the volume of each dish he ate and consumed only food that had been boiled. He was fascinated with numerology, demanding that the number of his hotel room be divisible by three.
He was particularly fond of the pigeons in Central Park, ordering special birdseed for them. One, a white female with gray-tipped wings, was his favorite. He told of her flying into his hotel room one night, her eyes “shining with a light the like of which I had never before seen” before she died in his hands. He took this as an omen of his own death.