Radovan Vuksan had used his new passport to travel to Malaysia, where he vanished. Inquiries unearthed rumors of a man fitting his description living for a time in Malacca, in an apartment not far from St. Paul’s Church, but by the time these tales reached New York, the individual in question had already left the country, and under yet another name.

But Louis was patient, and had favors to call in. Too many people were searching for Radovan Vuksan. He could not entirely disappear. And Zivco Ilić, by his final act, had condemned Radovan to death, for Spiridon’s charred body had eventually been brought back to Serbia and interred in a family plot, the keratinous fragments of Radovan’s nails now inseparably a part of his brother’s remains.

At night, Radovan would wake to the sound of Spiridon’s voice calling to him, and a room filled with the stink of burned flesh.

At the Cemetery of the Nameless, an attendant arrived to check on the graves and clear away the trash. The discovery of a woman’s body in the chapel some weeks earlier had, for a time, drawn the wrong kind of people – television cameras, reporters, gawkers – to this place that he tended so lovingly, but he had faith in the capacity of the living to forget. Only the dead remembered.

As he took the path to the cemetery, his eye was drawn to a shape lying amid the leaves and fallen trees on the waste ground to his right. It resembled a bundle of discarded clothing, but the attendant had spent too long in the company of the deceased to mistake it for anything other than what it was.

Slowly, he descended to the corpse. Its hands and head had been removed, and its feet were bare. What remained was dressed in a suit that looked expensive, and a once-white shirt set off by a silk tie that was still knotted, a flamboyant gold tie pin holding it in place. The attendant crossed himself, before reluctantly taking his cell phone from the pocket of his overalls. All those terrible reporters would now return, and his realm would again be temporarily devoid of peace, but what else could he do? An effort would have to be made to identify this man, if only for the sake of his family, but should that effort fail, a place would be found for him, and a cross set above it. He could rest assured of that, and he would not want for company.

After all, were not all men destined at last to join the ranks of the nameless ones?

Chapter LXXXVI