14 DECEMBER 2005
ANNA ROSEN EMERGED on the escalator from the underground railway platforms into the vast hall of Den Haag Centraal. Prepared for the cold, she was wearing black gloves and her narrow-waisted black coat with the high astrakhan collar. Over her shoulder was the black leather bag that contained her laptop, a hard-cover notebook, Blackberry, passport, wallet and a comprehensive guide to The Hague. In her wake, she wheeled her newest possession, a Briggs & Riley suitcase in matching black. She moved fast, an elegant ink smudge under the halogen lights.
She looked up at the large wall clock. 3.50 pm. The sneltrein from Amsterdam had delivered her to the capital in just over thirty minutes, but she was so tired after the interminable journey that she repeated a mantra to herself: Lose that bag and you’re a dead woman.
At a station kiosk, she bought a tram strippencaart, a city map and a short espresso in a paper cup. Balancing the coffee, she carefully made her way out to the tram stop. Soon the Number 1 to Noorderstrand rolled smoothly towards her, sparks crackling on the overhead wires in the dim light. She hauled her chattels aboard, punched the journey into the strippencaart and sat down, keeping one hand on the luggage.
Lose that bag and you’re a dead woman.
Anna felt a small surge of alertness as she sipped the espresso, a faint echo of what could have been achieved by, say, a line of powdered Benzedrine. The thought prompted a metallic taste in the back of her throat. Her mind wandered. She caught herself floating in a daydream and quickly grasped the handle of the suitcase.
Lose that bag …
The tram hummed across a bridge, past statues of dead kings and their palaces, past lakes and parliament buildings and courthouses and down wide streets lined with skeletal elm trees. Snug inside the warm capsule, Anna liked the look of this civilised, orderly city.
She gazed with envy at the endless stream of elegant old mansions set back from the traffic. Floating alongside the tram, cyclists kept up an easy pace through the city’s prosperous old neighbourhoods. She followed the procession of place names on the route map as a woman’s recorded voice announced each stop on approach, warning people to alight safely.
Kneuterdijk, Adriaan Goekooplaan, Frankenslag, Duinstraat, Keizerstraat …
This last leg of her journey, from the city centre to Scheveningen, should take about twenty minutes. According to her guidebook, the ancient fishing village had been transformed into a popular nineteenth-century seaside resort before being gradually absorbed into the capital’s sprawling development. There on the map was Scheveningen with its boat harbours and long beach, and on its eastern edge, clearly marked out, across the road from sand dunes and horseriding trails, was the prison. Anna had imagined the place isolated like a leper colony in a remote coastal wilderness, but there it was—nestled in the suburbs.
She thought of him alone in his cell, the resurrected Mr Katich. Or, rather, Mr Maric. How long had he had that name? What had he become? Was he coarsened with age, hardened by bitterness and violence? Would she find him repulsive, or would there be some trace left of the boy she had known?
No, she was drifting again. Marin Katich had not been a boy back when she knew him. That would imply a lightness of spirit, an unformed soul, and he was never that. His self-possession was one of the things that had drawn her to him. Her previous lovers had been spoilt children by comparison, known quantities, whereas he had come to her out of the shadows.
Anna’s eyes flicked open. She castigated herself; surely she must be delirious to entertain such thoughts. She reconsidered the wisdom of sending that thirty-five-year-old photograph to him, worried that he might take it as some kind of romantic gesture. She shook her head. No, he couldn’t possibly think that. Her own memories of him were of loss, betrayal, disbelief and anger. This man had not defined, and would not define, her life. Except in the one, crucial thing that bound them together, whether she liked it or not—their daughter, Rachel. She was Anna’s overriding reason for coming here.
On the long journey, mostly cramped and sleepless in pressurised cabins, Anna had continued to agonise over what to tell Rachel. The sudden death of Marin Katich in Bosnia in 1992 had made it easier to keep the promise she made to her mother to never reveal the truth. But his incomprehensible resurrection changed everything.
Anna had considered going straight to Rachel, but she knew the edifice of lies she had built was insurmountable. Examining her own motives, she realised that keeping her promise to Eva had never been entirely selfless—it had just taken the decision out of her hands. It had let her off the hook. Now she was forced to reconsider all the arguments she had made to herself and she found she was focused on one question: What possible good could come from burdening Rachel with the knowledge that her father was a murderer?
•
On the plane, Anna had read the sealed war crimes indictment that Pierre had sent her. As if designed to quash any doubts she might have, the formal juridicial nature of the document seemed to add weight to the allegations:
Anna was intrigued when she saw the alias Illija Lovric. She recalled that a man by the same name had been one of the twenty Australian-trained insurgents who infiltrated Bosnia in 1972 to try to foment a rebellion against Tito’s communist regime. Young Marin Katich had been the last recruited, the twentieth man, and the only survivor of that doomed mission planned by his father. She wondered now if he had assumed Lovric’s identity after the man was killed; she certainly knew well enough the nom de guerre Cvrčak. Indeed, she had gone to Bosnia in 1992 to track down General Cvrčak, on the strong suspicion that his true identity was Marin Katich.
There were eight counts in the indictment, but the detail contained in the first one was especially chilling:
Reading this for the first time on the plane, Anna had puzzled over the vague dates for these terrible offences: Between about June 1992 and at least August 1992. That would mean at least some of this had been happening when she was in Bosnia with Pierre. She searched back through her notes from that time and found that they had discovered that General Cvrčak had been killed on 15 June, shot dead in an ambush. Of course now she believed that he hadn’t been killed at all, but she still couldn’t understand why he and his men had constructed such an elaborate charade, a deception designed to fool two journalists who, in the prevailing wartime conditions, could simply have been refused permission to enter the area. The more she thought about it, the more implausible it seemed, but there was no doubt at all that Marin Katich was still alive at the time of these crimes. With a sense of dread, Anna read on through the rest of the eight counts in the indictment; all were charges stemming from the first overarching count:
Pierre had been right. The contents of the document left her sickened to her core. There was a small but diminishing part of her that clung to the hope that none of it was true, but she knew too much about the sins of his father, Ivo. If Marin really had come from the shadows, then deep in his darkest recesses lurked that man’s presence, a man beyond redemption, a man who had sought to shape his son in his own image.
She remembered her confrontation with Ivo Katich on the Harbour Bridge, when he had revealed himself as the monster he truly was. Anna knew better than anyone that Ivo Katich was guilty of the war crimes he had been charged with. She had made it her business to uncover the evidence that had been cleansed from his record before he came to Australia.
In 1941, as a young officer in the Croatian Ustasha, Ivo Katich had collaborated with the Gestapo as they rounded up the Jews of Sarajevo and sent them to their deaths; tens of thousands of them had been exterminated. For that murderous effort, the elder Katich had been rewarded by the high command of the Ustasha in Zagreb. He was appointed as a judge on Bosnia’s Mobile Court Martial—not that it offered any form of justice. The court was nothing more than a sanctioned death squad moving from town to town, murdering political opponents. As a further reward for his loyalty, Ivo Katich would later be promoted to the elite personal guard of the Croatian Führer, the Poglavnik Ante Pavelic, a man whose authority to command the puppet state flowed directly from Adolf Hitler.
When the Nazis’ power disintegrated in 1944, the Pavelic regime collapsed along with it. By then, Ivo Katich was so steeped in blood that it should have drowned him, but he was able to escape from the wreckage of Croatia by claiming to be a refugee from Tito’s communists. After the war, while resident in an Austrian Displaced Persons camp, Katich had been indicted for his many crimes, but was rescued by Western intelligence agents who recruited him and other Nazis with the potential to become valuable assets in the Cold War. The Western spies made many deals with many devils. In the case of Ivo Katich, his recruiters cleansed the war crimes from his record. They allowed him to escape justice and, in due course, allowed him to migrate to Australia.
And now Anna could barely comprehend the irony that, a generation later, his son Marin would be the one to face a war crimes trial. Anna had been a rationalist all her life, but it was hard to shake the feeling that fate was playing a role in Marin Katich’s life, and perhaps her own. Before she left Sydney, she had pulled from her bookshelves Jean Anouilh’s retelling of the Antigone myth. During the endless night on the plane, she had thumbed through the play until she found the passage she had been trying to remember: ‘The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job. Anything will set it going …’
•
Above the hum of the tram, a Tibetan temple gong rang from Anna’s shoulder bag. An ancient Dutchman sitting opposite gave her a hard stare as she fished out her Blackberry. She found a text from PierreMob: Welkom bij Den Haag. I’m in the neighbourhood. Meet you at the Kurhaus Bar in 45? P x
Relief crowded out both embarrassment and fatigue, and she texted back: Yes. Wonderful. See you there soon, Anna.
The machine was in perfect order, she thought, the spring uncoiling of itself. No need to lift a finger. Then came again the harsh recorded voice, cutting through the over-heated air in the stuffy cabin.
Scheveningseslag halte.
Anna peered out the windows, expecting a view of the North Sea. The map showed she should be on a wide boulevard running along the coast, but the sea was hidden behind a barricade of cheap hotels and holiday apartments. The next stop, Kurhaus, was hers and she struggled from the tram, dragging her luggage into a cold drizzle. She put her head down and raced for shelter, stopping halfway to look up at the massive edifice of the Kurhaus Hotel, looming over her like a baroque cathedral. Fine rain wet her face and she wiped it out of her eyes.
The building glowed surreally in the dusk, its central dome and cupolas already lit by floodlights. She recognised it from old photographs, but the palatial nineteenth-century hotel had now been hemmed in by shoddy modern construction and encroached upon by ugliness—a grand dame jostled by street thugs.
In the sheltered forecourt was a brightly lit ice rink, a stubborn remnant of the old world, and she paused to watch skaters wheeling around the frozen space, graceful gliding couples and teenage racers bent at the waist, beginners left skittering in their wake, clutching at the outer railing. She recalled her mother’s stories of skating on frozen ponds as a girl and of a fairytale world of snowdrifts and horse-drawn sleighs and winter markets. Eva had always refused to let the rise of the Nazis and the horrors she survived in Ravensbrück redefine her childhood memories. She had never forgotten how her world was before it ended.
Anna had none of those nice memories, and her own thoughts always leapt, as they did now, to the dark winters when bodies were stacked like firewood in the bloody snow while Jews were forced to dig their own burial pits in the frozen earth.