Читать книгу Ján Kuciak - Christoph Lehermayr - Страница 9

It’s ten kilometres from the station in Galanta to the couple’s home in the village of Vel’ká Mača. The route runs through flat and, in summer, extremely fertile land, where wheat, corn, sugar beet and vegetables are grown. The Danubian Lowland in southern Slovakia is coloured by the country’s Hungarian minority. Hungarian is the dominant language, especially in smaller towns, but mixed marriages are becoming increasingly common and tensions between the two ethnic groups have recently decreased noticeably. Kuciak and Kušnírová, both originally from the more mountainous part of Slovakia, moved here deliberately. Both of them grew up in the countryside, and they love nature and the sense of community in a village. The idea of living in a small, overpriced apartment in the urban canyons of Bratislava seemed less than appealing. It’s long been dark as Kušnírová starts the small service pickup truck at the station. The wind is sweeping over the flat countryside. The car speeds past fallow fields. The ground is frozen, and it’s snowing lightly. Frost-covered trees appear like ghosts in the beam of the headlights.

She drives the same route that two men in a Citroën Berlingo took shortly before. At 6:28pm this car stops at the edge of the village, just before the cemetery, right at the town sign. Underneath the sign, an extra panel in Slovak and Hungarian advises that the municipality is subject to video surveillance. One of the men gets out of the car. He’s a big, strong guy, muscular, with a shaved head. It’s clear from his appearance that he was once a professional soldier, working on missions abroad, most recently with the UN in Cyprus. After his discharge, he signed on as a security guard on one of the big container ships that cruise the oceans, and which need to protect their freight from pirate attacks in the Indian Ocean. He’s familiar with weapons, and so he knows how to handle the Luger pistol, model number P9R made by the Hungarian brand FEG, which is in his jacket pocket. It’s a nine-millimetre-caliber semiautomatic weapon, also used by the Hungarian police and military. The man acquired it last autumn, on the black market for €700. An acquaintance modified the pistol, filed the barrel, and attached a silencer.

Now the gun’s ready to go into action, for him, the contract killer. He gets out of the car wearing a black hood and makes sure that he immediately gets away from the main road. Nobody should see him now, remember him later or notice anything that could later be communicated to the police. He keeps his head down, stalks across the local club’s football field, and climbs through a hole in the fence back onto a road. It’s a shortcut that he’s scouted out. Together with his partner, who’s also his cousin, he first drove to the village about two weeks ago. They discovered the cameras monitoring traffic at the intersections, and worked out a way to get around them. Now it’s not much further to Brezová Street, and their target. In the village, smaller, older houses dating from the communist era stand next to newly built bungalows with paved driveways leading to garages in which big cars are parked. By now the man knows the way by heart. He’s studied it and internalised it so that now, when he’s under pressure and the adrenaline is pumping through his veins, he won’t make a mistake. The victim lives in the third house on the right, at the exact address given to him and his cousin. His cousin’s biography is similar to his own. He’s an ex-policeman who also went to sea as a security guard working on freighters off the coast of Africa. When he came back he bought himself a motorbike and set out on road trips that also took him to Austria. Photos on Facebook show him at a rest stop on the Semmering mountain pass. The two former public servants are known in their neck of the woods on the Hungarian border as “problem solvers”. They’re regarded as guys for shady jobs, the kind you call when nothing else helps. Together they’ve inspected Kuciak’s house. It resembles a concrete cube, straight from the building blocks of socialism. All over Slovakia there are houses from that era that look exactly the same: two windows on the front, a narrow recessed balcony at the entrance to the living room, and often a shed in the garden. Kuciak and Kušnírová bought their residence just a few months ago with the help of a loan. With their modest means and lots of work, they want to slowly transform it into an idyll. Altogether, the two men have checked the house over five times, very early in the morning, in the middle of the day and again at night. They used different cars for each trip, and checked whether the routines which had been communicated to them were actually correct. They wondered how and when they should best get rid of their victim. They spent an evening deliberating in a pizzeria. They considered first kidnapping Ján Kuciak and then murdering him later. His body ought to disappear afterwards so that it would never be found by the police. At least that was their mission. But they rejected the plan. There are cameras everywhere nowadays, said one. And what if the police stopped them and they found an unconscious person lying in the trunk, asked the other. The risk seemed too high, and the alternative was clear: Ján Kuciak had to be shot in his own house. Two days ago, the muscular man had already had his finger on the trigger and was ready to carry out his assignment – until he peeked through the window and saw a woman whose identity they didn’t know. So they postponed their mission. Until today.

The crime scene, the house in the village of Vel’ká Mača

Photo: Ricardo Herrgott

At the intersection there’s a small playground with a slide and a climbing frame on the left, and on the right a co-op store that supplies the people in the village with groceries. Opposite, there are two cameras mounted on an electricity pylon. At 7:03pm they film a small pickup truck turning the corner. They will be the last recordings showing Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová alive. The pair park the car in front of their house and open the gate to their yard. The icy wind bites their faces and the frozen ground crunches beneath their feet. They hurry past the shed to the door. At this moment their fate is sealed. The man with the shaved head and the pistol in his pocket is lurking in the shed. In the house, the couple take off their jackets and get changed. Kušnírová sips the tea she left standing when she drove to pick up her fiancée. Then she makes coffee and pours a cup for Ján and herself. It’s their familiar evening ritual. The killer follows everything through the window of the garden shed which gives him a direct view inside the house. Kušnírová chats with Kuciak’s sister. They discuss the upcoming wedding, the dress she’ll wear, and the church marriage preparation seminar that they’re due to drive to on Friday and where they’ll stay until Sunday. In the meantime, Kuciak carries the car battery into the cellar and connects it to a cable for recharging. At 7:51pm Martina Kušnírová sends her last message in Messenger. Half an hour later her mother tries to call her. The mobile rings. Nobody answers.

Meanwhile, three shots are fired in the house at 558 Brezová Street. Two people fall to the floor. Their bodies won’t be found by the police until four days later. When on the fifth day Slovakia, and soon after the whole world, finds out about the double murder, nothing will be as it was. It was only in October 2017 that the anticorruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in Malta by a car bomb. And now – a journalist and his fiancée executed in cold blood in their own house, in a country in the centre of the EU, 47 kilometres as the crow flies from the Austrian border.