Страница 28 из 84
The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand—the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.
“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.
“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Da
“Your car stolen?”
“No, my car isn’t stolen.”
“A friend took your car?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Da
When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.
That confusion cleared, the chief invited Da
“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.
“But—”
“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”
“I—”
“Come, come. Not far.”
The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Da
It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Da
“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”
“He was an American,” said Da
“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”
“Like brothers.”
“And brothers with America.”
“I hope so, yes.”
“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”
“Allies, brothers—whatever words.”
The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.
“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”
The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Da
“I was a young officer then,” he told Da
“I see.”
“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”
“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Da
“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon—it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think there were any survivors.”
“Would you know where they were taken?”
“The bodies? Buried.”
“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”
“One was. But the others stayed.”
“Why?” asked Da
The chief shook his head. Da
“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Da
“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that di
It was dark by the time they were finished di
He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.
The chief insisted on ru
According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years—the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.
“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.
Da
Da
If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.
Would that make it survivable?
He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.
“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.
The police chief described the process—they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.
“Three?” asked Da
“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”
There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Da
“Then what happened?” asked Da
“To the cemetery.”
Da
“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”
The cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.