25
I had never been in the Red Hat Café before. It is one of the few publick houses in Boston still with larger than life signage. It would serve as my office for the evening as had so many lounges, pubs, park benches, parking lots and coffee bars before this.
The Red Hat’s evocative name, or perhaps its location on the western edge of the late, lascivious and legendary Scollay Square would suggest an ambience. I conjured up my aunt Mary at the Red Hat. She’s right at home in the stinging blue haze, lounging on red leather in a black-on-black dress, parrying wide-lapelled hipsters with her throaty laugh. With the same hand that holds her Pall Mall she is stirring a thin high ball with a paper straw.
Scollay Square, and most of Boston’s West End, was flattened in the 60s by the impatient steamrollers of urban renewal, big-money real estate developers, I-know-a-buck-when-I-see-one politicians, and naïve social reform. The Red Hat is now a family place. It sits on the Charles River side, the Government Center and Bowdoin Square side of Beacon Hill. There was no red leather except for Miljenko Boban’s tasseled loafers.
Boban and I sat on adjacent corner barstools. Triangulating us was a three-dollar mound of ten-cent chicken wings. The wings were good. Boban was tall.
Over a silk t-shirt Boban wore a Brooks Brothers pastel v-neck sweater against the evening’s unsteady swirl. It must have come from their long, lean and loaded collection. His too-big college ring and his cuffed linen trousers over silk socks extended the aura of possession.
“Mr. O’Keefe, I wish that everything we exchange to be mutually confidential between us, if my clumsy sentence construction makes sense.”
“You wish me to agree that what I say stays with you and what you say will stay with me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m sure you can see that if I cannot share tonight’s conversation - or the conclusions and hunches I draw from it - with other people I cannot get additional information from them.” Boban looked perplexed.
“If you ask me to protect you as a source I can and will…”
“Yes, yes, that is what I meant.”
“Fine, that part’s a given. Now, this is all contingent on my sticking with this case, too, right?”
“Yes. Of course it is.”
I decided I would keep the money and the options Ivana provided me, the parts of the note I had not read him on the phone this morning, to myself.
“Please, call me Fintan.”
“Of course, Fintan. Call me Bo or Bobo. Everyone does.”
Although I was grateful that I had been absolved of having to get my eyeteeth around Miljenko, this guy was unlike any Bo - never mind any Bobo - I have ever known. Anyone called Bobo and not a monkey wearing a plaid vest should have a well-worn and immediately accessible catcher’s mitt.
“I came here, to the States, to go to Bates College, class of ’90.” Boban lifted his ring finger ever so slightly. “ ‘Bobo’ is how the guys up there helped me fit in. It stuck.”
Bo or Bobo Boban – and is Shirley Ellis listening? - was drinking my aunt’s highball, stirring his with a plastic two-channeled straw. I was nursing Harpoon India Pale Ale from a thick, handled cut glass mug.
The chicken wings were being reduced to a heap of exposed bones, some – his - still joined by softer tissues and some – mine – their cartilage gone. All were tossed on a plate between us. Boban threw his napkin over them when we finished.
“How did the finger food industry get along before these little beauties?” Boban asked as he dabbed the corners of his mouth with a moistened towelette.
“I think I remember them arriving in earnest concurrently.” I answered as I cleaned between my fingers.
“Perhaps.” Boban settled back against the spindles of his stool. Employing the armrests, he drummed his fingers on the ends for just a moment. He rotated his stool scanning the room. He began to speak a second before his gaze returned to me.
“I received a call from a fellow Croat ex-pat I know who lives in Ireland, the northern part, the part that is British. He asked me if I might have a way to get two Croats into the US or Canada, where I also do some business, without, shall we call it, any notice.” Aside from the fact that Boban was rubbing the tip if his left index finger against the edge of his thumb, he sat remarkably still.
“I told this man I thought I might be able to do it, but I told him I have no interest in helping people who were fleeing justice, justice of any kind. There are a number of kinds of justice in that part of the world, Fintan.” Boban used the straw to stir his drink.
“My Northern Ireland acquaintance assured me these young women were not. If anything they were fleeing injustice. I asked him ‘how?’ He said he did not know the whole story, but that someone in the old country was trying to silence them. The caller had convinced him the women needed protection from someone in Croatia. They were worried, and it seems with good reason, that they had been discovered in Northern Ireland and had to move.”
“Seems they were right,” I said.
Boban nodded, sipped his drink and looked around the room once more. I had the distinct impression this was the end of act one.
A young couple with a sleeping infant in one of those front-loaded papoose contraptions took the table at the end of the bar. They smiled at us.
“Hey, hon, check it out.” He was sliding out of his windbreaker as he spoke; spoke with that center-of-the-country accent that can’t make up its mind if it’s Chicago or Little Rock. “ Look, the Cards are on TV. That’s something, ain’t it?”
“May I ask what business you are in, Bo?”
“I own a school to teach languages here in Boston, on Boylston Street. Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Romanian… dialects of the region. Other regions as well. And English to those here who need that. We also have provided translators for those whose international language needs are better met that way.”
“And that would allow you to bring to this country speakers of those languages?” The end of tonight’s first intermission was indicated by a nod.
“Yes. With short term, job specific work visas I’m able to get native speakers of all those languages and others here quickly as need arises. It is too bad.”
“What is?”
“Under other conditions I would have been able to bring these women here quite quickly through normal channels. Our services extend to government officials and diplomats and people who work for NGOs, as well, so we are treated very well by immigration authorities here in the US.”
“NGOs?”
“Non-governmental organizations. Like the Red Cross, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Doctors Without Borders, those people. Many have interests or a stake in places where they need to know the language or travel with someone who does.”
“Interesting. But these two women…?”
“ Apart from my business, I have helped people from the region needing a haven, though I would never acknowledge this. It is good that I… this way can help others who need it and…I am happy to do it when conditions are right, or perhaps conducive to… ” Boban chose his words carefully. He delivered them clumsily.
“And the conditions with Mislava and Ivana were right?”
“It appeared they were. So I arranged things from this end.”
“Mislava was carrying some of Ivana’s ID when she was found,” I said. I told him about Niko Matulich and his identifying and claiming the body. “Ivana was carrying some of Mislava’s, too. They seemed to think there was some benefit for them to have people, including me, think that each was the other.”
“I did not know that… I don’t know why.”
“And the name Matulich?”
“I do not know that name, in this country at least. It is not an uncommon name among Croats, however.”
“It seems that Matulich and the guy who hired me might not have known the women from one another either.”
“ Implication, then, is he was merely hired?” Boban raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. He held his glass up towards the bartender.
“Another beer, Fintan?” Boban told me as much as he asked. Act two had come to a close.
“Bo, have you been here long enough to develop a taste for baseball?” I raised my head toward the close-captioned TV that held the attention of the family to my right.
“How long does one have to be in New England before that affliction sets in, eh? I was the student-manager of the team at Bates for a couple of years.”
“Were you?”
“A nice title for the water boy and the butt of the team’s practical jokes. My fraternity brothers played on the team. They taught me not just to watch the game, but also to observe it, to find patterns. I like the game very much. When I discovered Roger Maris and Mickey Lolich were famous ballplayers and Croat…”
“Roger Maris?”
“Yes. He anglicized his name. It was Mar as’.”
“Hmm. Maras? I can see why. Here’s to Roger…” I lifted my new beer. “…and tragic heroes everywhere.”
“Zhavali, to life,” Miljenko Boban said softly.
“May I ask you a few more questions Bo?” Let chapter three commence.
“Of course.”
“How did the women get to Portland?”
“One of my students… a Bates guy… we became friends. When he went off to Rwanda…”
“Sorry? You teach African languages, too?”
“French. It’s widely spoken in central African countries. So, I had worked out a sublet of this fellow’s condo in Portland in lieu of tuition when I knew these women to be coming. He knew nothing of his renters other than they were connected to me. He still does not I imagine.”
“He will at some point. Both the New York PD and I have kept the Portland PD apprised.”
“Hmm. He’ll be unhappy with me.”
“Yesterday when we spoke on the phone you said something I thought odd.”
“Oh?”
You said that perhaps Ivana’s and Mislava’s deaths were for the better, or something like that.”
“Oh, yes… I am sorry, Fintan. I assumed you knew. Both women were HIV positive.”
Boban was slowly shaking his head. He sipped his highball.
“Ivana showed symptoms from time to time, at least from how she was described to me,” he added.
“Really?” HIV would explain the weight loss evident in the photos. “Does that mean you never met her?”
“Yes. Neither of them. It’s always best if I do not. Their HIV was another reason that they wished to come here… without notice. They were concerned their it might complicate or slow down more conventional entry methods.”
“Bo, do you know a guy named Ante Bukovats?” One more try to find the guy who hired me to locate Ivana Grdesic. Boban seemed startled.
“Ante? Sure. He is one of my teachers. He works for me. Why…how do you know Ante?”
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