“What is that?” Sophie asked.
The fingers stilled, then were thrust into his pocket.
“Nothing. Do you want that piece of cheese?”
She shook her head. He seized the cheese immediately. She waited while he ate.
“There is a woman here,” Sophie said. “And a child. The woman's name is Olga, but I do not know the girl's.”
“A girl? How old?”
“She is sucking her thumb still, and she is very frightened by all of us. The woman is frightened, too, although she tries not to show it.”
“So the woman is not one of you?”
“I told you. We were not supposed to come here. The woman is a friend of Vaclav's. That is dangerous for her and probably for Vaclav, too,” he added.
“Dangerous how?”
The boy drew his finger across his throat. The gesture was all the more appalling for its casualness.
“But she's helped you!” Sophie protested.
“She had no choice. And now she will say anything to protect her little girl. Those who are afraid, lady, are like snakes under the heel. They strike as soon as you move.” Sophie was about to argue with him about to utter stupidities about the impossibility of hurting the innocent but the words died in her mouth.
“When I was young,” Jozsef continued, “I had two friends. Brothers. They lived on the street where I lived, and our mothers used to push us along the pavement together in our prams. Our mothers liked to talk. They shared things from their kitchens; they sewed together and drank coffee. When I had a ball or a toy, I shared it with the brothers, and they with me.”
“That's good,” Sophie said encouragingly when he stopped. “It's good to have friends, Jozsef. Have you lived all your life in Belgrade?”
“No,” he said doubtfully, “I do not think I have ever lived in Belgrade, or if I did, it was very long ago. My mother is there now. She is Serb. That is why my father took me from her. We are Croats. And at the time I am speaking of when I was a young boy we lived in Sarajevo.”
“And do you still have friends there? In Sarajevo?”
He shrugged.
“What happened to the boys? The brothers?”
“They were Muslim dogs.” His beautiful eyes met hers. “When the war came, my father knew that their father would kill us if he did not kill him first, and so Papa went in the night and cut his throat. Then he killed the boys one after the other as they lay in their beds, and showed their mother what he had done. He dropped their bodies at her feet.”
Sophie forced herself to speak.
“No one who had a boy of his own could do such a thing. No one.”
Jozsef's black brows came down, puzzled.
“But they were Muslims and we are Croats. If my father had allowed them to live, they would have grown up to avenge their father's death. I would do the same.”
“I cannot believe that.”
“Then you are very foolish, lady. Or you have not seen enough of the world.”
Sophie thought of the endless trips on Air Force Two, the succession of state visits and briefings and prepared speeches.
“Perhaps you're right, Jozsef. And your father? He told you that he had killed your friends?”
“He took me with him that night. I watched what he did.”
The boy's fingers were worrying the object in his pocket again. He drew it out, and she saw that it was a rabbit's foot a triangular bit of dirty white fur, pathetic.
“When she saw them lying dead, lady, their mother fell on her knees and tore at her hair.”
“I suppose your father killed her, too?”
Jozsef tossed his good-luck charm over his shoulder and caught it behind his back in one deft movement.
“A woman suffers more when she is allowed to live, lady. But Drusa that was her name was afraid of the suffering, I think. She twisted her skirt into a rope and hanged herself from the kitchen window.”
Sophie squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, Mian Krucevic stood in the doorway, staring down at her. His son's face was white as a bone.
“Get out,” Krucevic said.
Jozsef scrambled to his feet and darted around him.
“Mrs. Payne.”
She lifted her face and stared back at him. He handed her a newspaper. The headline screamed her own name.
“I require your assistance, Mrs. Payne.”
“Then you will have to unbind my feet.”
“That will not be necessary. Please hold the newspaper below your chin. Vaclav?”
Krucevic stepped back, and a camera lens took his place. Unconsciously, Sophie raised a hand to smooth her hair, and then caught out in a vanity so misplaced it was painful dropped it to her lap.
“This will be sent to your friends at the White House, Mrs. Payne, so I suggest you consider what you say. For the record I would like to state that you are still the prisoner of the 30 April Organization and that, true to our word, we have administered the Anthrax 3A antidote since our last communication. Would you describe your experience, please?”
“I'm still alive.”
“But unfortunately, we have no guarantee that you will remain so.”
“Most of us have to live with that uncertainty,” she said.
This seemed to give him pause. But only for an instant.
“Jack, Jack,” Krucevic said, with all the sorrow of a disappointed parent. “What were you thinking of? Alerting the Czech border guards? For shame. Under the terms of our agreement, you were to refrain from attempting to rescue Mrs. Payne. And yet, mere hours after the flag went up in your embassy garden, you've gone back on your word. Don't let it happen again, Jack. I require free passage throughout the region. I want that message sent to every head of state in Central Europe. And I do not want to be thwarted again.”
It was only a matter of moments, Sophie thought, before he produced another needle. But instead the camera lens zoomed in on her face.
“I won't use a hypodermic this time, Jack. If you fail me again, I will put a bullet in this woman's brain. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot bring people back from the dead.”
Six
Berlin, 12:06 p.m.
Caroline Carmichael reached Berlin at ten-thirty Wednesday morning, twenty-two hours after Sophie Payne's kidnapping.
Almost nothing was left of the city she remembered. She had visited twice during her posting to Budapest, when reunification was just a word and the movement of the capital from Bonn still years away. Bulldozers and cranes had taken root everywhere in the vacant lots, profuse as mushrooms after rainfall, and a trip across the city was an exercise in strategy, a meticulous ground campaign waged with map and mental compass. Equipment the color of sulfuric acid, pits that yawned a football field's depth into the earth, the halogen-lit midnights and clouds of exhaust — these were all that one knew of Berlin in the mid-nineties.
The West had decided the past must be regained, and if not regained, then rewritten. A political process, on the face of it; but emotional in its force, perhaps because it was so obvious and so physical. The Wall had divided families and consigned the most glittering of Berlin's neighborhoods — the haunts of kaisers and courtesans,
