EVIL DEEDS

EVIL DEEDS, PART I, Chapters 19-22

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Katrina Vulovich couldn’t calm the little boy. He didn’t respond to her Greek words, and the more she spoke, the more he cried. She thought he must be ill and called for the orphanage’s doctor. While she waited for the doctor to appear, she continued pacing her office floor, cradling the boy – her boy. Singing to him. Talking soothingly. She hugged him to her breast and remembered the baby she’d once had, so many years ago. The little boy she’d loved with all her heart. The child who’d died during the influenza epidemic because there wasn’t enough medicine in Bulgaria to treat all the sick children.

The office door opened and Dr. Petrovic stepped inside. Katrina shuddered at the sight of the bald, gnome-like physician. His legs were too short, even for his abbreviated body. His black unruly eyebrows matched the long black hair protruding from his open shirt collar. Katrina was reminded of a wolf each time she looked into his amber eyes.

“Doctor,” Katrina said, “look at him. He won’t eat. Hardly sleeps. He just cries all the time.”

“Comrade Vulovich,” the doctor said, after touching the boy’s face to see if he had a fever, “this child appears to be in excellent health. I suspect he misses his mother. That’s all. Give him time. He’s young; he will forget. Time will resolve your problem. A week and he will think you are his mother.”

“He’s just a baby, Comrade Petrovic,” Katrina said. “Doesn’t it bother you to see him crying?”

Dr. Petrovic shrugged and walked out of the room.

Katrina stuck a finger inside the high neck of her dress and extracted the jeweled cross she kept hidden there on a gold chain. She touched and kissed it, and said a silent prayer . . . for herself. So what if I know these children have been taken from their real mothers, she thought after she finished praying. I love them as much as their mothers could ever love them.

Katrina looked down at the sobbing boy in her arms and began walking around her office again. She softly sang a lullaby her mother used to sing. When he finally fell asleep, she put him on the office couch and covered him with her coat. And then her tears flowed. Taking a handkerchief from her dress pocket, she began to blot them away. The handkerchief was quickly soaked – and still her tears flowed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Bob slammed a file down on the dining room table. “Most of this stuff is crap. There are dozens of kidnappings mentioned here, but few of them are tied to Communists or Gypsies. And those that are, are based on conjecture, not facts.”

Liz came behind him and rubbed his neck and shoulders. “What about that Bulgarian agent the Greeks arrested? Let’s try to find his file.”

“It would be a lot easier if we knew the guy’s name.” Bob began checking the incident dates on the tab of each file. “Meers said the Greeks arrested him five years ago, 1966.”

He spread Meers’ files across the table until he found the ones from 1966. One file – the thickest of the 1966 group – caught Bob’s eye. It was labeled: George Makris. Bob read a few sentences from an interrogation report in the file and said, “This is it.” Then he read aloud. “Kidnapped by Communist guerrillas in 1946 at six years of age. Raised by an ethnic Greek family in southern Bulgaria. Trained as a Communist. Indoctrinated to believe his parents gave him up – that they sold him to the Communists. Taught to hate anything Western, non-Communist. Integrated back into Greece at twenty-six.”

“Does it say anything about where he is now, what he’s doing?”

Bob leafed through the pages. “Not that I can . . . wait a minute. Here’s something. His parents live on the Island of Evoia. They reunited with him after the Greeks released him.”