Haven, page 6
He had one more chance encounter - except this one he contrived - with a man who dealt in information. Kessler told him the story which included, by then, his own future plans. As much as he mourned Elizabeth, he said, he knew that she'd want him to get on with his life. Eventually, he said, fate was kind. He met a fine woman with a ready-made family and this woman had consented to marry him. He had bought a ranch in South America - "Forgive me if I don't tell you where" - and would join her there as soon as he sold a few diamonds. These stories, he hoped, would help end the search for Elizabeth Stride and throw them off his scent as well.
But the man to whom he told this said, "Why bury yourself on a ranch? No one is looking for you anymore. Reineke the Fox is ancient history.”
This bit of news was not all that welcome. Truth be told, it wounded his pride. The dealer in information saw this. He said, "That is not to say that you're out of the woods, Martin. There are many who would like to get their hands on the money you took. They would go looking for this new wife of yours and grab her to extort a few million from you. But not the ones who were hunting you before. Those boys are back in power. The communists everywhere are getting reelected. Not only do they have all of Eastern Europe to loot once again but on top there's American aid." He said, "Believe me, they have no time for vengeance. Not even for those two who you stuffed down a sewer in Geneva.”
Kessler tried not to show his surprise. Those two were alive the last time he saw them. And what was this reference to extorting a few million? All Kessler had taken was that one bag of diamonds. Someone, and he thought he knew who, had given him far too much credit.
The important thing, however, was the last thing this man said. "With Elizabeth dead, God rest her soul, I think you can drop your guard and relax. With her it was the Muslims. They never forget. They could never forgive what she has done to so many.”
Kessler, on the whole, was pleased with himself. This man, this seller of information, had as much as confirmed that Elizabeth was officially deceased. But when a man such as this says that you can relax, that's the time to be more careful than ever. Sure enough, this man suggested that they meet again for dinner. Talk over old times and old friends. In fact, said this man, he knew of a buyer who would pay top dollar for stones of such quality. After dinner we'll go see him together.
Kessler made a date for the following evening and promised to bring the stones with him. He then got out of Europe immediately. He might have survived the dinner itself but he'd be hanging from a meat hook by the end of the evening. With the aid of a lamp cord applied to his testicles he'd be asked where's the rest of the diamonds. Anyway, he now had an excellent excuse to go back and bring the news to Elizabeth.
He flew first to Argentina. There, as insurance, he laid enough of a trail to keep anyone hunting him busy. Argentina housed thousands of expatriate Germans, a year's worth, at least, to sort through. From there he flew to Caracas where he boarded a cruise ship using one set of papers and walked off it in Fort Lauderdale using another. He rented a car and arrived that same evening on Hilton Head Island. His welcome, after all this, could be read on Elizabeth's lips. "Oh, shit," were the words that they formed. After that came the "Damn it, how did you find me?”
He booked a suite at the Hyatt Hotel on the beach of Palmetto Dunes. In the lobby shops he bought all new clothing so as not to stand out from the tourists. He also rented a second car because Elizabeth had already seen the first. He would use the new rental to follow her about and perhaps get a look at this fiancé of hers. It was childish and he knew it but he had come a long way.
Over the next two days, however, he saw her only with women. With some she went shopping and with some she had lunch. This in itself was remarkable. Unlike the tourists these women were all tanned and they dressed pretty much like Elizabeth. With these women Elizabeth was actually laughing. With these women Elizabeth was chatting. It is easier to imagine Joan of Arc making small talk or Lucretia Borgia making jokes. It was good to see all the same.
In the week that followed those two days, her doctor turned out to be real. But in that whole week he saw Elizabeth with this doctor only twice. Both times were in restaurants and both times were for lunch. Not once did he see this man's car in her driveway or her car in his. Some romance, he sniffed. Some engagement.
The first of those lunch dates was at a restaurant called Reilley's, located near the main gate of Sea Pines Plantation. Kessler watched as her car - a Ford Bronco of all things - turned into the restaurant's side lot. He saw a man wave to her from restaurant's side entrance but he couldn't get much of a look. Doctors, he reasoned, do not take long lunches and so he decided to wait. After forty five minutes they came out together, her smiling young doctor first holding the door
for her and then walking her over to her car. He opened the Bronco's door for her as well; his reward was a kiss on the cheek. He grinned like a schoolboy as he watched her drive off.
This doctor wasn't much, Kessler grumbled to himself. His last name was German but that's all one could say for him. It meant that Elizabeth's taste in men had not gone totally out the window. He seemed to be about Elizabeth's age but his hairline was already receding. And he was not very big. If Elizabeth had worn heels she'd be taller. He looked pleasant enough in a bland sort of way. What, he wondered, could they possibly talk about? Does he tell her at lunch between bites of his sandwich of the hernia that he repaired that morning? Does he draw on a napkin his technique for resecting a bowel? If so, Kessler had news for him. She's probably resected more bowels than he has. She could teach him a few things about throat surgery as well.
Their second lunch was much the same. Even the same restaurant, same kiss on the cheek, but this time he was so bold as to give her a squeeze in response. Having witnessed the replay of this sickening scene, Kessler decided that he could do with a drink. He waited until they both drove off and went into Reilley's himself.
The lunch crowd, now thinning, consisted mostly of middle aged men, all of whom were dressed in golfing attire and all of whom seemed to be discussing the round they had played that morning. Golf was also a part of the decor. Clubs and golf caps decorated the walls. Photos of foursomes. Autographed pictures of golf professionals. But there was also memorabilia from hockey, from basketball and several other sports. Another big theme was Ireland. Just outside the entrance was a sort of calendar whose only function was to count down the days that remained until the next Saint Patrick's Day. Reilley was said to throw a wonderful parade. The doors to the rest rooms said "Bfear" and "Mbar" which he presumed to be Gaelic for Men and Women. This last was a little too much for Kessler. He found a place at the bar and ordered a good German beer.
Nearby was a photograph of another golf foursome. Kessler found himself drawn to it. There was a man, standing second from the left, laughing at whatever the photographer was saying. The man seemed familiar. And he seemed out of place. Kessler tried to return to his thoughts of Elizabeth but the face in the photo seemed determined to intrude. He waited until his beer was served and asked if the bartender knew who that was.
“The one who's laughing? I think he's Tom Reilley's cousin or something.”
“You don't know his name?”
“Um...Jimmy...Jimmy Flood.”
“And is one of these Reilley?”
“On the left. Next to Jimmy. Are you new to the island, Mr...?”
Kessler chose not to fill in the blank. But implicit in the question was that everyone knew Reilley. Well, Martin Kessler didn't. And he couldn't place Jimmy Flood either. He sipped his beer and resumed his brooding. There was a time when everyone knew Elizabeth as well.
FIVE
She was already famous by the time he first met her. But her notoriety was limited to the Middle East back then just as his was largely limited to Europe. Their paths, in fact, should never have crossed. He first saw her name when it appeared on the guest list of an Embassy reception in Bucharest. Representatives of several different countries had been invited and they each were given copies of the overall list. Therefore everyone pulled dossiers on everyone else.
This was nine years ago, almost ten. She was only twenty-six at the time and already worth a million dollars dead. If her killer was a Muslim he would get the million now plus a guaranteed acceptance into Paradise later. Non-Muslims had to settle for the money. Kessler didn't know what she was doing in Romania. Perhaps the Israelis had brought her along to get her out of harm's way for a while.
The Israeli delegation, of which she was a part, had come to buy Jews from the Ceausescu regime. The Ceausescus would let their Jews emigrate for a base rate of four thousand dollars a head, twice that amount for doctors and triple for certain scientists. He, Kessler, was there buying ethnic Germans from Saxon Romania who wished to emigrate to the German Democratic Republic. For them, the price was much lower. That they wanted to move to East Germany at all said how bad it was for them in Romania.
The reception was at the Hungarian embassy because the Hungarians were buying ethnic Hungarians. At this rate Romania would have soon been empty except that the Ceausescus were stashing away many Romanians who might embarrass them too much if they were freed. The Hungarians thought it might be useful if all the buyers got together and swapped notes on where some of these people might be found. This was the point of the reception.
Elizabeth's presence with the Israeli delegation was all the more interesting because it seemed that she herself had been bought. Her dossier made fascinating reading. Her story, told briefly, was this:
To begin with, she wasn't a Jew. The couple who bought her - and raised her as their own - were Presbyterians. She grew up, eventually being told that she was adopted but not that her biological mother had been a convict in a Saudi prison. She learned that only after her adoptive mother's death when she sorted through some family papers. A year later, she traveled to Dhahran with the intention of learning who her birth parents were. That she did this caused Kessler to grumble even now. It's this same Elizabeth who is always telling him that he should know when to leave well enough alone.
She engaged a Saudi lawyer who learned the name of the man who was warden of the prison at that time and was now a police official. He said he would try to arrange an interview. Instead, he notified the official that this young women could be an embarrassment if certain of his sidelines when he was warden came under scrutiny. She was arrested the next day. Drugs and other contraband were "found" in her hotel room. She was imprisoned for eight months, kept in isolation, and was brutally interrogated. Kessler assumed, although Elizabeth had never really spoken of it, that she'd also been repeatedly raped. In the Middle East, rape and sodomy have long been a means of intimidating female prisoners. The sodomy is done with a metal tipped stick. They will often bring in husbands and brothers to watch in order to shame them as well. Rape is an especially effective threat in a culture where a man's worth is measured by his ability to protect the virtue of his women. Not so in Elizabeth's case, of course. She would simply have been given to the guards.
At the end of eight months they apparently concluded that Elizabeth had gone out of her mind. She was taken from her cell and thrown in a truck that was part of a convoy bound for Jordan. After a twelve-hour ride without food or water - locked up in what amounted to an oven - she was dumped half naked, no money, no passport, just past the last checkpoint of the Saudi-Jordanian border.
Some goat-herders found her, delirious, emaciated, and brought her to a woman they knew. This woman ran a literacy program through a local mosque. They thought she might speak whatever language poor Elizabeth was babbling. That woman's name was Rada Khoury. She took Elizabeth into her home and after two days managed to at least get her stabilized. She fed her liquids one sip at a time until Elizabeth could hold a cup by herself. She oiled her skin where the sun had baked it and bandaged her eyes with wet towels. When Elizabeth could speak with some measure of coherence, and it was learned that she'd been in prison, Rada Khoury was afraid that the Jordanian police might treat her as a criminal who had entered their country illegally. At best they might dump her back across the border because she was technically a Saudi by birth. At worst they might make her disappear. This last might seem preferable to finding themselves in the middle of an argument between the Americans and the Saudis.
She called the American consulate in Amman and asked them to send someone for her. No one came. The consulate officer had the same concern and didn't need this headache either. So Rada Khoury took Elizabeth to another woman, a doctor, who ran a nearby clinic and was trying to teach peasant women that not all pregnancies are the will of God and that most can be prevented. The doctor's name was Nasreen Zayed. There are dossiers on Khoury and Zayed as well but that's a whole other sad story. For the next several weeks these two women cared for Elizabeth until most of the physical damage was repaired. The damage to her psyche ran much deeper.
They finally had to move her because the clinic was attacked by rock-throwing men to whom family planning was heresy. Teaching women to read was almost as bad. Nasreen and Rada were severely beaten but Elizabeth was spared because they had hidden her down the clinic's well. Now it was Elizabeth who had to care for them but she was clearly no longer safe there. When Nasreen had healed sufficiently, she and Rada drove Elizabeth to Amman. Not trusting the American Consul, they took her to the office of Amnesty International where the two had friends who would help them. They left Elizabeth under that organization's protection and said their good-byes. Elizabeth begged them not to return to their village but they said they had a job to do. They said they will not be diverted from their much-needed work by a handful of retro-Muslim men who think this is still the 7th Century. She never saw them alive again. That's the sad part of their story.
During Elizabeth's stay with Amnesty International, she was debriefed by two visiting investigators and was treated by a psychiatrist. All three, it turned out, were Israeli agents. The Israelis had no real interest in Elizabeth but rather in who else she saw in that prison. But they were with her when word came back that Rada and Nasreen has been murdered by fanatics. Perhaps they saw the cold hatred in her eyes. Perhaps they saw that she had possibilities. They offered to help her trace her parents and suggested that in the meanwhile she would benefit in some training in the ways of the Middle East. That was how the Israelis recruited her.
She eventually learned that her real father had been a soccer player on the Romanian national team and her mother was a medical student who traveled with the team as a therapist and masseuse. When the mother got pregnant, she knew that they would never be permitted to marry and that the child would almost certainly be taken from her because that was the practice in Romania. They decided to defect while traveling to a game in Saudi Arabia.
They slipped away from their hotel in Ryadh, she in a stolen abaya, and made their way to the British embassy but were caught en route by the Mutawain - the Saudi religious police - who had spotted him holding her hand in public. They first beat them both with those canes that they carry. The father was turned over to the Romanian authorities who drugged him and flew him to Bucharest. He was executed a few days later as an example to the rest of the national team. The mother was tried in a Mutawain court on a charge of having sex outside marriage. The warden of the prison at Dhahran learned of her conviction and had her transferred to his custody. The baby, once weaned, had been promised to a merchant from nearby Bahrain but then the baby got sick. That's when Hannah Stride saw her and offered to double what the merchant had agreed to pay. In the end, however, no money changed hands because not all Saudis are like this warden and some, friends of Hannah's, made it clear that they'd see him in prison himself if he didn't turn over the baby.
One could only guess how the warden reacted. Such a man would surely have made someone suffer. God knows what he told Elizabeth's mother when her baby failed to return from the clinic.
But Elizabeth's mother, according to the Israelis, served only one year of a ten year sentence. The warden, it seems, had a taste for fair-skinned European women and found this one particularly exciting. This one even knew her soccer and the warden was a fan. Rape was always an option but the trouble with raping women is that you don't get much conversation about soccer out of them. Also if they happen to be as nice looking as this one, you can't get to show them off to your friends all beat up. He offered to have her released on the condition that she convert to Islam and agree to become his third wife for a while. She must also shave all the hair from her body, especially that clump down below. All Arab women are expected to shave. Arab men like their women smooth.
The mother accepted, intending to escape at her first opportunity and then try to learn what became of her child. Her chance came months later. She crossed into Bahrain and used gold that she stole to bribe her way onto a tanker then in port and bound for Brindisi in Italy. The bribe, apparently, was insufficient. The captain claimed a reward instead. The warden, the same man who one day would torture her daughter, took her back to Az Zharan prison. There he gave her to the guards and when they were finished he beat her to death with a length of chain.
Kessler knew this story from Elizabeth's dossier and some from details which she filled in much later. But he was never quite sure how much of it was true. It had come, after all, from Israeli Intelligence who had used it, remember, to recruit her. Months later they smuggled her back to Dhahran where, hidden under an abaya and wearing a niqab - a veil that covers the entire face - she stalked this man until she caught him having lunch at a sidewalk table. She approached the former warden from behind. As he raised a cool orange fizz to his lips, she reached under his arm and slit his throat.
