Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

The cortege was stop-and-go, the streets lined with solemn spectators. In the twenty minutes it took to arrive at the cathedral’s gargantuan compound on the Kaptol hill — the southern Kremlin, some called the former archbishop’s palace — Chambers, with eerie serenity, had occupied himself with a second rosary, fingers pinching along the beads, lips moving, an occasional phrase of Latin escaping into silence. Otherwise, he didn’t say a word and his withdrawal began to bug Eville, the silence like a door left open for his thoughts to wander out where they didn’t belong, nosing around in rubbish piles of melancholy and rage, here he was at a fucking funeral with the undersecretary and where the fuck was his daughter, his daughter’s funeral? The son of a bitch never had the decency to let him know and he wanted to ask but wouldn’t. Fuck him. Fucker.

Scarecrow nodded to a voice in his earbud and said into his collar mic, Roger that, and reported to his passengers, Three minutes out. Crowd estimate five-point-five-k. Then he glanced over his shoulder and said, Burn, you copied that, right? They have facial recognition on your guy, and Eville said, Yeah, I heard. Tan corduroy sports coat, black crewneck sweater, left side, press area. I’m going to step away and let Bill come forward with you. What do you think?

Don’t get lost, dude.

Bill, you okay with that?

Sure, said Bill. What do I need to know?

Cockblock, said Scarecrow. Some pest.

We should be okay, said Burnette.

Then they were ascending the hill and Chambers perked up, kissed the rosary’s crucifix and tucked it back into his pocket and returned to the nostalgia of here and now. These walls, he said, shaking his horny index finger at the ancient crumbling fortifications outside the windows on Eville’s side, these walls were constructed to protect the cathedral when the Ottomans invaded at the end of the fifteenth century. You get my point. I walked here many times with my mother.

At the top of the hill they inched along as the limousines ahead of them dropped off passengers at the plaza beneath the cathedral’s soaring Gothic spires, the crowd split in the middle by a wide channel of metal barricades like bike racks, lined with heavily armed police facing the people and two parallel rows of soldiers facing one other, standing at attention in their dress uniforms with shouldered rifles, and the towering cathedral rising like a sheer solitary Alp at the far end of this temporary avenue, its entrance somehow forbidding and ominous, an open black mouth. The undersecretary told a story about the former archbishop buried now under the cathedral’s flagstones. Stepinac, he said, my father’s cousin. Burnette half-listened, readying himself for their infil, Tilly’s voice in his ear saying, You’re scoped, Burn. The story was something about a tea biscuit, something about refugees.

Then the doors were open and they were out in the moist bone-aching air and organized into the procession behind the president and his cabinet and generals, the undersecretary flanked by Crow and Bill, Burnette a few steps behind, his head on a swivel, scanning the ranks of Zagreb’s citizenry, Tex and Tex’s detail and the special envoy behind him and behind them the ambassador and the rest of the American delegation and behind them a divided world.

From within the mass of bodies Burnette heard muted applause and lamentation, an occasional outburst of bellicose emotion, patriotic slogans or cursing — he couldn’t tell. His vision swept past a grandmother weeping, small rose-cheeked children riding their fathers’ shoulders, grizzled old veterans in partisan garb, young bucks in black leather jackets, decommissioned paramilitaries in camo, chic young women not inclined toward despondence. About twenty meters from the entrance Tilly was in his ear again, saying your guy’s on the left, five meters up, and Burnette spotted Tom Harrington and radioed back to say once he had the undersecretary inside he was turning around. Which is what he did, turning and just walking straight back to where the unsuspecting Harrington stood in the media pack behind the cordon next to a woman with a clipboard speaking to a cameraman and he walked past them a ways to a cop and flashed his ID and cracked open enough space between two sections of barricades to squeeze through and with as much politeness as he could manage muscled his way through and tapped him on the shoulder saying, Tom.

Tom, can I speak to you for a minute?

Yeah, what is it? said Harrington, his upper body twisting around until he could see who was talking and what he saw drained the color from his face although it was apparent to Burnette that Tom did not recognize him, a stranger behind the beard and sunglasses and dressed up like some bad-ass prince. What’s this about? asked Harrington, his face wary, struggling for an answer that seemed just out of reach, behind a veil.

Funny thing. Going to a funeral carrying a briefcase.

What business is that of yours?

Will you come with me for a minute?

Why would I do that?

I don’t know, said Burnette, pushing up the Oakleys to rest on his brow, squinting. For old time’s sake, maybe.

Holy shit, said Tom.

Holy shit, Tom. Long time no see. I take it you’re a friend of the deceased?

Did I see this right? Was that you bringing in Chambers? I mean, it’s hard to distinguish one heavy from another. But what else would you be doing here?

Let’s get out of this crowd for a minute.

Hell yes, Top. There’s some questions I’ve wanted to ask you, man.

Me first, said Eville, but when they found themselves at the rear of the crowd and stopped in a newborn patch of sunlight, Harrington beat him to the draw.

All right, Ev, goddamn it, you tell me something.

Wait a minute.

I want to know who’s buried out there in the Mirogoj cemetery.

What?

Right next to the grave for the bastard they’re putting in the ground today.

I’m not following this, said Burnette.

The marker says Dorothy Kovacevic. It’s right between this new hole for Starevica and a marker that reads Marija Kovacevic. That’s Chambers’s mother. He excavated her coffin from a churchyard in Pittsburgh and buried her here in 1995, after Operation Storm. Ever heard of that? The final assault? Ethnic cleansing? Have you talked about that with the undersecretary’s buddies? The generals inside the cathedral.

Wait a minute, said Ev, flustered. Hold on.

One day these guys are going to end up at The Hague. You know that, don’t you?

We’ll discuss that in a second. What’s this you’re saying about Dorothy Kovacevic?

You tell me, Top. When I first came here last August — the fifteenth? sixteenth? — I was told by my minders, oh, too bad, you just missed Kovacevic, he came to bury his daughter in Mirogoj but now he’s gone.

What? said Burnette. Wait a minute. Slow down.

So look, come clean with me. Who’s in that grave? I’m thinking nobody. I’m thinking someone besides me was poking around and came too close and suddenly there was a necessity for a gravesite. Somebody like Jack Parmentier.

I don’t know anything about this, said Burnette.

I hope whatever she was doing for the government was worth the cost of hooking up with a scumbag like Parmentier.

Tom. Look.

And who do you work for these days, man?

I can’t talk about that.

Okay, said Tom. Let’s talk about Jackie. Let’s talk about Renee. Let’s talk about Dottie, Dorothy. She’s alive, right?

I can’t confirm that.

Harrington mentioned discrepancies and Burnette mentioned due diligence and they stared at one another until Tom shook his head, visibly saddened.

You’re in Croatia with her goddamn father. What do you think we’re talking about here? I’m talking about a human being, a woman, someone I knew, okay. And I’m talking about Haiti, someone’s life. I’m not asking for the Agency’s jewels. I really don’t give a flying fuck what the game was.