Secrets of the Dead

XIX

Pristina, Kosovo – Present Day

ABBY CROSSED THE railway tracks at the bottom end of town and started climbing the hill opposite. The streets were quiet that early on a Sunday morning: no children playing, no traffic. Low cloud pressed over the valley and rendered the air milky white. She’d spent the night in a hotel, one that wasn’t much used by internationals, biting her lip each time the lift next to her room made a sound. As soon as she could pretend it was decent, she’d slipped out the back entrance.

. OMPF was the Office of Missing Persons and Forensics – or had been, until it was rebranded as the Department of Forensic Medicine a year ago. Michael had never been one to take notice of bureaucratic reshuffling. Levin, she guessed, was Shai Levin, Chief Forensic Anthropologist. Abby had met him a dozen times over the years, different encounters in different parts of the world, though she doubted she’d left much of an impression.Levin, OMPF, Michael’s diary had said

She’d been to a party at his house with Michael back in June. He lived in one of the freshly painted villas that climbed the slope opposite the main town, where the foreign proconsuls lived and lorded it over the city they administered. The higher you went, the nicer the houses got and the more elaborate the embassies became. At the very top of the hill, tucked behind the ridge out of sight of the diplomats, stood the ultimate authority: Camp Film City, headquarters for NATO’s mission keeping peace in the restive province. No one could mistake the hierarchy.

Abby walked past the diplomatic cars parked on the kerb, climbed the steps to the private villa and rang the bell. She hoped it was the right door.

‘Can I help?’

Shai Levin stood in the doorway, wearing an untucked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, cargo trousers and bare feet. He had olive skin, curly dark hair and soft dark eyes that gave no hint of the horrors he witnessed every day. His manner was mild and polite, his English faintly accented. Among international aid workers, he was something of a legend. People who didn’t know better often called him a saint, to which he invariably smiled and pointed out he was Jewish.

‘Abby Cormac,’ she introduced herself. ‘I work in Justice.’

She’d wondered how far her notoriety had spread. The look on Levin’s face told her everything she needed to know.

‘You were together with Michael Lascaris, from Customs, right? I’m so sorry – I heard what happened.’

What else did you hear? A grey KFOR helicopter flew low overhead, circling in to land at Film City. Abby edged closer to the door.

‘I was looking through some of Michael’s things. I think he met you not long before he died.’

Levin nodded. ‘I guess that’s right.’

‘I’m trying to find out why he was killed.’

A shadow crossed Levin’s face, the look of someone receiving a long-expected diagnosis. He seemed to hesitate a second, then opened the door wider.

‘Come on in.’

He led her into the living room, modern and open-plan, with hardwood floors and full-length windows giving an uninterrupted panorama down on to the city. She admired it from a leather sofa while he made tea. Even to an uninvited guest, the room exuded calm.

He laid two cups of tea on the mahogany coffee table. ‘Have you been to see the police?’

‘I will.’ Lying to Levin felt like swearing in church. She only really knew him by reputation, but that was plenty. Cambodia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq – wherever bodies lay buried in inconceivable numbers, Levin was the man with a shovel in the mud, piecing them together, making them human again.

‘What did Michael want to see you about?’

‘We were friends from Bosnia. Back in ’98, there was a landowner who wouldn’t give us clearance to excavate on his land, even though we were pretty sure there was a grave there. Michael turned up and made it happen. We crossed paths every so often after that, different postings, different places. It’s a small world – you know how it goes.’

‘And what did he want the last time you saw him?’

Levin looked uncomfortable. ‘Abby, I know this must have been hell for you, but – you need to speak to the police.’

‘They think I was involved. I wasn’t,’ she added. ‘I got shot. That was about it.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Did the police speak to you?’

‘Just a few questions. I told them he was a good guy. I didn’t know him well.’

‘But he went to you just before he died.’ How many ways do I have to say this? ‘All I’m doing is trying to find out the truth. I thought you might help.’

Levin had been staring out the window at the panorama below. Now he looked up, meeting her gaze with sad, sympathetic eyes.

‘Michael came to see me at the lab. He had something he wanted my advice on. Professionally.’

She knew what Levin’s professional interests were. ‘A body?’

‘I shouldn’t say.’

‘For God’s sake,’ she pleaded. ‘You’re supposed to be in charge of finding dead people. Giving answers. You must get widows and orphans like me every day wanting to know what happened. Just treat me like one of them.’

‘There are channels,’ Levin murmured, but more for his own sake than hers. He stirred his tea, then stood, as if a decision had been made.

‘It’s easier if I show you.’

He drove her down the hill and across town to the hospital. Even on a Sunday morning, traffic was heavy.

‘You probably don’t remember, but I was in Iraq at the same time as you. Mahaweel.’ Shyly, the plain girl talking to the captain of the football team. ‘We met a couple of times.’

‘I remember. You were on the war crimes team – I heard good things about you. Now you’re pushing papers with EULEX. What happened?’

It wasn’t a new question, and she had a good stock of answers. A new challenge, time for a change, fresh opportunities. But she knew Levin wouldn’t buy it. She didn’t want to insult him with platitudes.

‘I gave up.’

‘Iraq?’

She shook her head. ‘I could deal with Iraq. It was such an epic disaster it was hard to blame anyone for what happened. Anyone who was there, I mean. Politicians, you expect to screw things up.’

He was waiting for her to say more. To her surprise, she found she wanted to. It was easy talking to him.

‘It happened in Congo,’ she said softly. She stared out the window at the triangular tower of Radio Kosovo, the well-dressed young Kosovars heading out for their Sunday strolls in the surrounding park. ‘A village called Kibala. I was there when a Hutu militia arrived one night. It’s a big mining area – lots of rare metals. The militias try to control the trade to fund themselves.’

Levin nodded.

‘Anyway, this militia decided the villagers hadn’t been paying them enough tribute. The UN knew there was a danger. They’d sent a battalion of Korean peacekeepers to keep an eye on things. I went to their base – I pleaded with their commander to go and secure the village. He turned me down point-blank. Then he told me to stay in the compound – said it was too dangerous to be out there.’ She heard her voice rising, shaking with the emotion. ‘For God’s sake, those men were trained and armed to the teeth. All the militia had were machetes and cocaine. Those peacekeepers could have run them out of town in five minutes. Instead, they left the villagers to their fate. Mostly women and children – all the men were off working in the mines. All I could do was listen to the screams.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Levin. ‘No one ever heard about it.’

‘Some people said it was economic. The metals from that part of the world go into a lot of mobile phones, apparently. Maybe the Koreans had orders not to disrupt the supply chain.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe not. After the fact, people get so hung up on why something was allowed to happen. But there are always a million reasons not to do anything. You don’t have to be corrupt, or cowardly, or inept. You just stay in bed and lock the door. When you’ve done that once …’

‘… it’s hard to ever leave again,’ Levin finished. ‘I know.’

He turned right. Abby glanced in the wing mirror to see if anyone had followed them.

‘How do you do it?’ she asked. ‘Keep going. There’s so much evil in the world, and whatever we do to hold it back, it just keeps coming. Doesn’t it ever get to you?’

Levin stared at the road and didn’t answer.

‘Come on,’ she pressed. ‘I told you my story.’

‘I haven’t got a story.’

‘Your secret, then.’

‘No secret. I guess it’s just …’ He pulled over as an ambulance fought its way past them towards the hospital. ‘If you don’t bury the dead, they stick around.’

‘Are we talking about ghosts?’

She’d meant it as a joke. To her surprise, Levin answered seriously.

‘Not like kids on Halloween in white sheets. But if something exists in the mind, then it exists, right?’

He frowned, unsatisfied with his answer. ‘If we don’t bury the dead properly, with reverence and dignity, then they haunt us. Check back through history. We’re the first great civilisation that doesn’t know how to deal with its dead. For us, it’s just a logistical problem, making sure they don’t take up too much space. Land’s valuable, right? But a person doesn’t just exist in his own body. There’s a piece of him in everyone who knows him, that doesn’t die with the body. And it’s those fragments that stay to haunt you if you don’t give them a proper burial.’ He laughed softly. ‘I sound like I’ve been drinking. Short answer: if you’re working with the dead, you don’t fool yourself the work’s ever going to finish. I guess that’s how I keep going.’

The Department of Forensic Medicine was one squat brown building among many at the sprawling hospital. Abby got out of the car and looked around. Her old office, EULEX headquarters, was just down the road, on the other side of a straggle of trees. Even on a Sunday morning she was nervous about being so close. A couple of doctors in white coats walked past, and she turned her head away. Levin saw, but didn’t comment.

He led her inside and down a flight of stairs into the basement. A knot began tightening in her stomach. It was all too familiar: the blistered paint, the scuffed tiles, the smells of nicotine and disinfectant leached into the walls. Her breaths came faster as she remembered waking up in Podgorica. From somewhere in the depths of the hospital she could hear the monotone beep of a cardiac machine like a dripping tap. Or was that just her imagination?

If something exists in the mind, then it exists, right?

Levin opened a strong steel door. The swimming-pool tang of chlorine blew out at her. At least the EU had paid for a refurb here. The tiles were gloss white, the ceiling lights painfully bright after the dim corridor. On one wall a bank of metal doors like bread ovens hummed quietly.

Levin pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He spun open one of the doors and slid out a long, stainless-steel tray. Abby fixed her eyes at a point on the wall, then inched her gaze down until she could see what lay there.

It wasn’t what she’d expected. A skeleton lay full length on the slab, its arms at its sides and its skull staring at the ceiling. The bones were dry, aged caramel brown. It looked more like a museum exhibit than a war crime.

‘This is what Michael brought you?’ A nod. ‘Did he say why he had it?’

‘He just wanted to know what I could tell him about it.’

‘And?’

‘The body belonged to an old man, probably in his sixties or seventies when he died. About six foot tall, well built. And murdered.’

A chill went through Abby. For a second she imagined Michael’s skeleton laid out on a slab somewhere, a pathologist describing his murder as just another fact to be recorded.

Levin didn’t notice. He leaned over the skeleton and pointed to the ribcage. ‘You see here? Sharp force trauma. The fourth rib’s been snapped off – you can see the break.’ He poked a rubber-gloved finger through the chest cavity. ‘There’s a linear defect on the back of the rib where the blade cut the bone on its way out. Went right through him.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Most likely that he was stabbed through the heart. From the front, based on the direction of the cut, with a big knife or a sword.’

With a shock, she realised Levin was smiling. ‘Is that funny?’

‘Not for him, I guess. But we’re not going to open a case on him any time soon.’

She still didn’t get it. ‘Why not?’

‘Because he died something in the order of seventeen hundred years ago.’

Levin walked over to the wall, pulled off his gloves, and washed his hands. When he turned back, the smile had gone and there were no answers in his eyes.

‘Michael brought you a skeleton he’d found that was murdered over a thousand years ago?’ Abby repeated.

‘I got curious, so I ran some common isotope analysis on his molars and his femur. According to the chemical signatures, he grew up around here, but spent his later life somewhere around the eastern Mediterranean, near the sea. Varied diet, so probably rich.’

He pointed to greyish patches of bone on the skeleton’s legs and arms, not smooth but mottled, like coral. ‘That’s woven bone – it grows in response to wounds or bruising. This guy lived a violent life, but always recovered. Until someone stabbed him through the heart.’

Levin crossed to a steel filing cabinet and extracted a folder. From inside came a sheaf of papers and a small brown object in a plastic bag.

‘There was this, as well.’ He slid out the object and laid it under a magnifier on the workbench. ‘It’s a belt buckle. Take a look.’

Abby put her eye to the glass. All she could see was a mottled brown blur, like a bed of autumn leaves. She moved the magnifier up and down until the image became clear. Letters had emerged from the background, crusted and incomplete, but still legible.

‘LEG IIII FELIX.’

‘It’s the name of a Roman legion,’ Levin translated. ‘The “lucky fourth”.’ He caught her surprise. ‘I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, they were based in Belgrade, so not so far from here. If you look underneath the writing, you’ll see the legionary crest.’

Abby squinted at it. Again, rust distorted the image, but she could make it out. A lean lion, proportioned like a greyhound, with a dreadlocked mane hanging over its shoulders.

‘The NATO guys aren’t the first occupying troops in this part of the world,’ Levin said. ‘I guess this one got unlucky.’

She remembered something he’d said. ‘Why did you say murdered? If he was a soldier, and stabbed with a sword, couldn’t he have been killed in battle?’

‘Sure, I guess. I thought it would be unusual for a guy in his sixties to be on a battlefield, and the wound’s so clean and deep he probably wasn’t wearing armour. It’s just a hypothesis.’

She looked up from the buckle and back at the skeleton on the table. Dead eye-sockets stared up at her. A scratch on the forehead made it look creased in thought, as if having been pulled from the darkness he was squinting to see her.

Who were you? she wondered.

Who are you? the skull seemed to reply.

‘Did Michael say where he found the skeleton?’

‘He said he’d been up north, near the Serbian border. Bandit country. I didn’t ask why he was playing Indiana Jones there. Must have needed protection, though, because he arrived in a US Army Landcruiser. An American soldier helped bring the body in.’

‘Did you get his name?’

‘He left his autograph. Michael made him sign the paperwork, said it was better if his name wasn’t on the docket.’ Levin shuffled through the documents in the folder. ‘Here – Specialist Anthony Sanchez, 957th LMT.’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘As far as I know, all the Americans are down at Camp Bondsteel, by Ferizaj.’ He could see what she was thinking. ‘Have you got a yellow badge?’

Yellow badges were what admitted you to KFOR bases. They were supposed to be limited to NATO personnel, but Michael had had one, somehow. He used to drop in on the bases to buy duty-free cigarettes and alcohol at the PX’s. Is that appropriate for a customs officer? she’d asked. Michael had just laughed.

‘Did you tell the police about this? After Michael was killed?’

‘I showed them the body, just in case it had anything to do with Michael. When they found out how old it was, they didn’t want to know – told me to send it to the cold-case squad. I didn’t mention Specialist Sanchez. I didn’t think it would do him any good.’

The clinical smell in the enclosed basement was beginning to make Abby light-headed. She desperately needed air.

‘Thanks for everything, Dr Levin. I hope I haven’t got you in trouble.’

‘I’ll be fine. Just make sure you don’t end up back here on my table. The sort of questions the police were asking when they came here …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You might not want to know the answers.’

‘I need to know.’

‘I know.’ Levin locked the file back in the cabinet. ‘You have the look in your eyes. I see it all the time.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The look of someone chasing ghosts.’

Two-handed, Levin pushed the drawer back into its steel mausoleum and slammed the door shut.