The Nameless Ones: A Charlie Parker Thriller. A Charlie Parker Thriller: 19 Read online

  About the Author

  John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. His debut EVERY DEAD THING swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent Charlie Parker novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which he edited with Declan Burke, was the winner of the 2013 Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Awards for Best Non-fiction. He was the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award, and the first Irish writer to be awarded the Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America.

  www.johnconnollybooks.com

  Also by John Connolly

  The Charlie Parker Stories

  Every Dead Thing

  Dark Hollow

  The Killing Kind

  The White Road

  The Reflecting Eye (novella in the Nocturnes collection)

  The Black Angel

  The Unquiet

  The Reapers

  The Lovers

  The Whisperers

  The Burning Soul

  The Wrath of Angels

  The Wolf in Winter

  A Song of Shadows

  A Time of Torment

  A Game of Ghosts

  The Woman in the Woods

  A Book of Bones

  The Dirty South

  Other Works

  Bad Men

  The Book of Lost Things

  he: A Novel

  Short Stories

  Nocturnes

  Night Music: Nocturnes Volume II

  The Samuel Johnson Stories (for Young Adults)

  The Gates

  Hell’s Bells

  The Creeps

  The Chronicles of the Invaders (with Jennifer Ridyard)

  Conquest

  Empire

  Dominion

  Non-Fiction

  Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels (as editor, with Declan Burke)

  Parker: A Miscellany

  Midnight Movie Monographs: Horror Express

  THE NAMELESS ONES

  John Connolly

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Bad Dog Books Limited 2021

  The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 529 39837 3

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 529 39834 2

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 529 39835 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Jack Dennison

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by John Connolly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Part II

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Part III

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  Chapter LI

  Chapter LII

  Chapter LIII

  Chapter LIV

  Chapter LV

  Chapter LVI

  Chapter LVII

  Chapter LVIII

  Chapter LIX

  Chapter LX

  Chapter LXI

  Chapter LXII

  Chapter LXIII

  Chapter LXIV

  Chapter LXV

  Chapter LXVI

  Chapter LXVII

  Part IV

  Chapter LXVIII

  Chapter LXIX

  Chapter LXX

  Chapter LXXI

  Chapter LXXII

  Chapter LXXIII

  Chapter LXXIV

  Chapter LXXV

  Chapter LXXVI

  Chapter LXXVII

  Chapter LXXVIII

  Chapter LXXIX

  Chapter LXXX

  Chapter LXXXI

  Chapter LXXXII

  Chapter LXXXIII

  Chapter LXXXIV

  Chapter LXXXV

  Chapter LXXXVI

  Chapter LXXXVII

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  For those who may be too young to remember, or who have chosen to forget, a series of conflicts took place in the Balkans between 1991 and 1999 following the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. That communist state was an uneasy federation of six republics, comprising Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks), Slovenes, Albanians, and other smaller ethnic groupings, all held together by the will of Yugoslavia’s ruler, Josip Broz Tito.

  Following Tito’s death in 1980, the old tensions – some of them dating back to World War II, when the Catholic Croatian Ustasha had sided with the Nazis – began to manifest themselves once again, exacerbated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, and immediately found themselves under attack by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) – which was dominated by Serbs – and Serbian paramilitary groups, leading to the death and displacement of thousands before a cease-fire was brokered by the United Nations in 1992.

  Meanwhile, Bosnia was also seeking independence, but the Serbian minority in the territory resisted. Once again, elements of the Yugoslav army – operating as the Army of Republika Srpska, or VRS, commonly referred to as the Bosnian Serb Army – intervened, commencing a program of ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Croats in an effort to create a Serbian stronghold. UN intervention failed, and the death toll rose, most infamously at Srebrenica, whe
re more than eight thousand Muslim men and boys were tortured and executed after the town surrendered to Serbian forces led by General Ratko Mladić. Finally, NATO resorted to bombing the Bosnian Serbs, enabling Muslim and Croat forces to mount a counteroffensive. A peace agreement resulted in an independence referendum in 1992, and the subsequent international recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state. (The Bosnian Serbs, meanwhile, also declared their own version of independence, calling their region the Republika Srpska.)

  But conflicts in the former Yugoslavia continued. In 1995, Croatian forces took control of previously Serb-dominated areas of Croatia, and in 1999 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo won a bloody war against Serb forces to obtain their independence. By then Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro had also either severed ties with Belgrade or declared independence, and Serbian ambitions of creating a new Balkan empire from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia lay in tatters.

  At least 130,000 people died in the wars, more than a million were displaced by ethnic cleansing, and up to fifty thousand women and children, mainly Bosniaks, were raped, with Serbian armed forces and militias bearing overwhelming responsibility for these atrocities. As one Serb put it during my research, ‘A lot of bad things happened, and most of them were our fault. Most,’ he emphasized, ‘but not all.’

  I

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Requiem’

  Chapter I

  The two figures were by now a familiar sight, if only to a select few, for even ones such as these, who guarded their privacy so assiduously, must inevitably become known to some of their neighbors. For a time, they had not been seen out together, and only the black man, generally believed to be the younger, was noticeable on the street and the surrounding blocks. It was rumored that the other, the older (marginally) and less elegant (by a more considerable degree), was ill, or perhaps recovering from illness, although questions directed, however discreetly, to Mrs Evelyn Bondarchuk, the woman who occupied the first floor apartment in their building, were met with a stony silence from the lady herself, and the disapproving yaps of her assorted Pomeranians.

  According to local lore, it was Mrs Bondarchuk herself who owned the property, although she carefully concealed her interest through the use of shelf companies, a series of lawyers at least as tight-lipped as she, and a Dickensian amount of paperwork – not that anyone was unduly troubled by this minor act of deception, which had long ago mutated from suspicion into fact. After all, this was New York City, and more specifically Manhattan, where various levels of eccentricity, reinvention, and even downright criminality were, if not a given, then at least quotidian.

  But the truth of the matter was that Mrs Bondarchuk was merely a tenant, albeit one who functioned also as a watchdog, since her chair by the bay window of her apartment offered a clear view of the street in two directions. (Mrs Bondarchuk’s bark, it might have been said, was probably worse than her Pomeranians’ bite, although it was a close-run thing, and none of the neighbors were in any hurry to test the hypothesis. The Pomeranians were nippy little beasts when the mood took them, but Mrs Bondarchuk possessed an undeniable solidity, and all her own teeth.)

  A few years earlier, there had been some unpleasantness at the property involving a man with a gun, but it, and he, had been taken care of. Since then, Mrs Bondarchuk had committed with even greater acuity to her role as first line of defense. She now understood it was more than a sop from her landlords, a pointless task offered out of pity to an old woman, or a well-intended effort to endow her twilight years with a sense of purpose. No, Mrs Bondarchuk was essential to them, and she loved them for making her so. She had even inquired about the possibility of being given a gun, although this suggestion was politely rebuffed. Mrs Bondarchuk’s feelings were not hurt, though. She had asked more out of interest than actual desire. She did not wish to own a gun. In her youth, her father had retained a seven-shot Nagant M1895 revolver from his period of service in the Soviet military. He had kept it clean, well-oiled, and concealed beneath a floorboard in the bedroom. Mrs Bondarchuk had used it only once, when a vagrant entered the house and attempted to rape her mother. Mrs Bondarchuk – or Elena Tikhonov as she was formerly known, before the changes to her name wrought by emigration, anglicization, and marriage – shot him in the chest, and later helped her father and mother to bury the remains in the forest. She was twelve years old.

  Then, as now, she was untroubled by what she had done. The vagrant was bad, and had she not acted as she did, he would undoubtedly have hurt or murdered her mother, and possibly Elena, too, before going on to commit further degenerate acts. And, yes, the sixth commandment declared ‘Thou shalt not kill’, but Mrs Bondarchuk had always believed that Moses, in returning from Mount Sinai, had neglected to bring with him a final tablet, the one containing all the fine print, possibly because his arms were already full.

  Mrs Bondarchuk had never shared with another soul outside her immediate family the details of the killing: not with her late husband, whom she had loved dearly, and not even with the two men who owned the building in which she lived, although she was certain that they, at least, would have understood. There was, she felt, no particular benefit to be gained from raising the subject. The vagrant, after all, was dead, and a confession was unlikely to alter that fact. Mrs Bondarchuk was also in possession of a clear conscience on the matter, and while she might, in the years that followed, have occasionally contemplated shooting someone else – certain politicians, for example, or particularly patronizing shopgirls – she had managed to resist the temptation, helped in large part by not being in possession of a suitable weapon. All in all, it was probably for the best that her landlords had not agreed to provide her with a gun. Shooting someone in extremis might be forgivable, but one shouldn’t make a habit of it, regardless of provocation.

  And here they came now, Mr Louis and Mr Angel, these two men whom she adored like errant sons, the first tall and black, the second short and, well, whiteish. He had lately been so ill, her Mr Angel, and he had already suffered so much; this, Mrs Bondarchuk had always intuited from his face and eyes. He was recovering, though, even if he was now slower than before. His partner, too, regarded him differently, as if the sickness had reminded him that, in no time at all, one of them must inevitably be parted from the other, and whatever days remained to them were better spent in accord.

  But at least they were not alone. They had friends. There was the private detective, Mr Parker, who brought her candy from Maine; and the two brothers, Tony and Paulie Fulci, who were so gentle for such big men, and whom she could not imagine hurting a fly – other people possibly, perhaps even probably, but not a fly.

  And they in turn had Mrs Bondarchuk, who prayed for Mr Louis and Mr Angel every night. She prayed that they might have a good death, one marked by ritual and a proper burial, and therefore the salvation of the soul; and not a bad death, an interment in some pit without a blessing or a marker, in the manner of a wandering rapist. Death was the inescapable path. One’s thoughts were over the mountains, but death was always behind one’s shoulder. Death was an old woman who slept in hell, and took her instructions from God. She was inevitable, but not implacable. She could be spoken to, and negotiated with. Amuse her, interest her, and she might move on.

  Mr Louis and Mr Angel, Mrs Bondarchuk believed, greatly amused Death.

  Angel waved to Mrs Bondarchuk as they approached the stairs leading to the door of their building.

  ‘Do you think Mrs Bondarchuk has ever killed anyone?’ he said.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Louis.

  ‘No doubt in your mind?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘I thought it was just me.’

  ‘No, she’s killed someone for sure. Shot them, is my guess. Remember that time she suggested we give her a gun?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Angel. ‘She was kind of matter-of-fact about it.’


  ‘Maybe we should have let her have one.’

  ‘We could always give her one for Christmas, if her heart is still set on it.’

  ‘She’s Orthodox. We’d have to wait until January.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Angel, ‘might be best to stick with candy and a Macy’s gift card.’

  ‘Still, it’s something to keep in reserve in case she gets bored of candy.’

  Angel paused to watch a crow alight on a nearby tree.

  ‘That’s sorrow, right?’ he said. ‘One for sorrow, like in the rhyme.’

  ‘I don’t think it counts where we’re concerned,’ said Louis.

  ‘No,’ said Angel, ‘I guess not.’

  Mrs Bondarchuk had also noticed the crow. She crossed herself before offering up a brief prayer of protection. She remained constantly heedful of auguries – the appearance of owls, ravens, and crows, the births of twins and triplets – and kept note of her dreams, waking up in the night to add the details of them to the little writing pad by her bedside, leery always of visions of bread and bees, of teeth falling from gums, of church processions. She had yet to give a watch as a gift, eat from a knife, or mark a fortieth anniversary. She sat down before going on a journey, even if only to the store, in order to confuse any evil spirits that might be lurking, and never put out the garbage after sunset. On the wall by her front door hung a cross of aspen, the cursed wood, which possessed a talismanic power against evil, just as the potency of a vaccine relies upon the element it contains of its target disease.

  But perhaps more than any of this, Mrs Bondarchuk believed that death, rather than marking an end, represented only an alteration, if a fundamental one, in the nature of existence. The dead and the living coexisted, each world feeding into the other, and the next realm was a mirror of this one. The dead remained in contact with the living, and spoke to them through dreams and portents.

  One had to learn to listen.

  And one had to be prepared.

  Angel fumbled for his keys. Louis appeared distracted, even weary.

  ‘You look tired,’ said Angel.

  ‘You say.’

  ‘I have an excuse. Cancer beats all hands.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep so well last night,’ said Louis. ‘Comes with getting old.’