The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan Page A

Nathan. He’s amazing. And he gives the best parties.”
    â€œThat’s all right, Marco. And yes, it’s true. Nathan loves the piano. He’s quite proficient. He often loans us music.”
    On the other side of the courtyard was a colonnade of arches through which Rachel glimpsed fountains that seemed to drop through the air to the lake. She very much wanted to explore further but could think of no reason to stay.
    â€œShall we go then, sir?”
    Khattak caught her glance, moved away from the table. “I’d like to take a closer look at the exhibits. You’ve been up early, call it a night.”
    Rachel cleared her throat. Had the museum and its proprietor so bewitched him that he’d forgotten? “You’re my ride, sir. I’ll need a lift to the subway at least.”
    He straightened quickly. “Of course. Then I’ll return later, if I may.”
    The words were said somewhere in the vicinity of Mink’s burnished hair. Her blue eyes encompassed Khattak, acknowledged a private communication.
    In the car, Rachel said, “A blonde, sir? Really?” And left it at that.

 
    10.
    Easily predictable events have been proceeding inexorably in the cruelest, most atrocious fashion.
    For more than a week now, Rachel had been asked to do nothing further on the Drayton investigation. She’d resumed her regular workload with Dec and Gaffney, saying little about the previous week’s excursions, wondering when Khattak would show up at their downtown office again. She had a few ideas about what they should do next and found Khattak’s silence troubling. Had he ruled out the idea that Drayton was Dra ž en Krstić? If so, based on what evidence? Or had he found something that cemented his certainties? Was he even now reporting to his friend at Justice? He’d told her to keep the letters, and she’d spent her evenings digging into the history of the Bosnian war, trying to find out more about Krstić.
    Initially, she’d thought that the letters spoke from the perspective of a survivor of the war with a very specific axe to grind, but Khattak had been right. The letters weren’t just about the massacre at Srebrenica. They were far more wide-ranging, as if the letter writer was making a darker point, outlined in blood.
    Sarajevo, did you hear my warning?
    The sun on your face looks like blood on the morning.
    She hadn’t been able to trace either the letters or the source of those words. The only prints on the letters had been Drayton’s. The words she had just read were conceivably from a translated poem or song. And Sarajevo wasn’t the only name she had found in the letters. There were others, all of them, apart from Srebrenica, unfamiliar to her. Gorazde, Bihac, Tuzla, Zepa.
    She’d looked them up. All six cities had been UN-designated “safe areas,” under United Nations protection. All six had come under siege, repeated bombardment, the destruction of religious and cultural monuments, and the recurrent targeting of water, electricity, and food supplies.
    The letter writer encompassed it all.
    Today a funeral procession was shelled.
    Charred bodies lie along the street.
    The whole city is without water.
    Srebrenica, like Sarajevo, had suffered a three-year siege. In Srebrenica, civilians kept alive by a trickle of UN aid ultimately became victims of genocide. In less than twenty-four hours, safe area Srebrenica had been depopulated of its Muslim inhabitants: women and small children forcibly evacuated under the eyes of the Dutch battalion stationed there, men and boys murdered in their thousands.
    Nearby Zepa escaped the massacres but suffered the same depopulation.
    All at the hands of the logistically efficient killing machine known as the VRS or Bosnian Serb Army, supplied materially and in all the other ways that mattered by the reconstituted Yugoslav National Army.
    We will not reward the aggressor with the