One Minute Out

I shout now. “Who?”

And then, to my surprise, the meek little mouse shouts back at me. “My sister! I’m looking for my sister!”

I didn’t see that coming.

“Your . . . your sister?”

Talyssa Corbu nods, tears dripping into her lap. She looks like a child again as she speaks through sobs. “Roxana. She disappeared nine days ago. Her flatmate said she went to a nightclub in Bucharest, where she lives, and then she never came home. I flew in the next day. Local police were no help, even to me, a Europol analyst. They said she probably ran off to Germany or Italy or France like all stupid girls. But Roxana would never do that. I did everything I could to find her, but then the police tried to stop me. I reached out to my office for assistance, but they just told me I needed to deal with family issues on my free time. I had to take a leave of absence to continue looking for her alone.”

“That’s harsh,” I say.

“Then my mother received a phone call that I was later able to trace to Belgrade. She said the man had a Serbian accent, and this Serb said he found my mother’s number in Roxana’s phone. He wanted her to know he’d personally killed her daughter for meddling in the affairs of the Serbian mob.”

I blow out a sigh. She’s not looking for her sister. Whether she can admit it to herself or not, she’s looking for her sister’s body.

She keeps talking, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

“The man on the phone said he shot her in Belgrade and then threw her into the river. Her body hasn’t been recovered.” She looks at me, and her sad and exhausted eyes fill with hope for an instant. “Maybe . . . maybe she isn’t dead.”

It’s not my place to force her to face the facts. Instead, I say, “What did . . . what does your sister do for a living?”

“She is a student at the University of Bucharest.”

“That’s all?”

“Well . . . she is an actress, too.”

With an incredulous look I repeat her words. “An actress.”

“Yes. Some TV commercials. Some plays. Nothing that paid the bills.”

“But why was she in Belgrade? And why would she be involved with the Serbian mob?”

The young woman looks down at her hands. “I have no idea.”

She knows. Or at least she knows more than she’s letting on. But I let it go for now. “So what did you do?”

“I drove to Belgrade. I had this crazy idea I could get local authorities to help me because of my position, but Europol has no jurisdiction in Serbia. The cops there were okay at first. They searched the banks of the Danube River, said they’d make inquiries into the underworld. But after I kept coming back, kept pressing, they threatened to have me deported. In the end I used resources at Europol to trace the call my mother received. The caller was using software to prevent a trace, but I had a friend in the technical division find the origin of the number. It was the phone of the wife of a man who has been on a European criminal organization watchlist. He is a member of the Branjevo Partizans, the most dangerous mafia group in Serbia.”

“And . . . let me guess, you went, alone, to go spy on him.”

“I went outside his place of business, a pool hall in the Branjevo neighborhood. I was too scared to go in.”

Fear can be a healthy thing. “Keep going,” I say.

“When he left, I followed him to a bar, and from there he went with other men to a building near the river. I had downloaded hundreds of faces from the database of Serbian gang members, and I started matching them up. There were a lot of known gangsters from the database right in front of me.

“Doing research on the faces I saw, I realized some of them were involved in human smuggling. The local police had records of this, and I had access to the records.”

“Via Europol.”

“Yes. My work involves tracking the proceeds of organized crime, and the sexual slavery market is the third-largest criminal enterprise on Earth, behind drugs and counterfeiting, and ahead of weapons, so I do know quite a bit about that world.”

“The world your sister got herself involved in.”

Talyssa looks out the window for a moment. With a little anger in her voice, the first emotion I’ve heard other than fear, she says, “She wasn’t involved in that world. She was just a college student. A kid.”

I let it go. “Your work at Europol. You’re not a cop. You’re a bean counter?”

“I am a forensic accountant. A data analyst.”

“A bean counter,” I repeat. “And yet, there you were, following mobsters through a foreign city. Alone. Very brave.” I want to say it’s braver than she appears now, but I catch myself. I did just see her preparing to attempt a solo entry on the home of an armed police officer with two bodyguards, so I realize I should probably give her more credit.

She dismisses my comment with a wave.

“I was able to ID most of the men there, but there were a few not in the database. I took pictures of them, ran them through facial recognition, and discovered the identity of one of them.”

“Niko Vukovic, Mostar Police.”

She corrects me. “Captain Niko Vukovic, chief of the Mostar Police.” She wipes away the last of her tears. Either she is comforted to talk about this with someone, or else she is fully absorbed crafting a make-believe story for me.

“The next day Vukovic was back there, with a bus and some other men in cars. The bus had plates from Bosnia and Herzegovina. They all drove off on the highway to the west. I began to think maybe Roxana had been kidnapped by the smugglers and not killed. I thought that if this was about smuggling women, Bosnia is the next country to the west of Serbia. Perhaps this policeman was involved in whatever happened to my sister, and she was on the bus.”

With only half the doubt I’m feeling in my voice, I say, “You . . . a woman who didn’t see three big Hungarian hit men standing thirty meters from her. You . . . an accountant, no less, personally and single-handedly followed a convoy of vehicles all the way across two countries, for four hundred kilometers.”

“Of course not. I didn’t follow them. Instead I flew directly to Mostar and waited for Vukovic to show up back to work, which he did two days later.”

“Why did you do that if you didn’t know what was in the bus?”

A long pause now, then, “There were women in the bus.”

“You saw them?”

She looks away. It’s tough to tell if her distrust in me is what’s leading her delays in answering, or if she’s just making this shit up as she goes along.