Chapter 9: Slivovitz helps the Impossible Go Down
The hotel had every feature of a visit to a developing nation that Hermione was used to. The furnishings which looked like they were ten years out of date, the lavish bed, the superficial business suite with water damage to the ceiling. Threadbare curtains in questionable colour choices. Multi-plug sockets so travellers from different parts of the world could plug in their electronics, except they were all loose fitting and fell out as soon as you plugged them in. A loud minifridge filled with an indifferent selection of bottled water, fruit juice, beer (and, admittedly different from elsewhere) and kvass, all overpriced and ready to be charged to your room bill if you took one. The disturbing stains in the sink which suggested you might get heavy metals poisoning from drinking the tap water, but don't worry, the first two water bottles every day were complimentary.
She loved it.
Turning on the TV, Hermione quickly found there were four channels. One was the state television—TV PMR. It was showing a hokey music spot playing what sounded like a mixture of polka and rap while praising Igor Smirnov, at least from what her limited knowledge of Russian could tell, showing some scenes of fighting during the war mixed in with women offering him food and his visiting events. There was also a private station and local variety channels for Tiraspol and Bendery, apparently. Hermione had never been in to TV, and even if the bizarre experience of watching it here would be entertaining, she wasn't drunk enough for that, and like it always did, work beckoned.
After sending off a text message to assure Ron that she was fine (there WAS some cell service), Hermione flopped down in her pyjamas at the desk and took out her quill from her bag-of-holding, writing furiously at her notes for the mission so far. The AC sort of worked enough to keep her from sweating, and Larissa had already taken her to a store where she had gotten her pack of kvass for much cheaper, thank you kindly. There was enough room in the minifridge to chill it, and so Hermione had a somewhat authentic experience, a few of her books drawn out in front of her as references.
Valeria was absolutely right, the FSB officer did want to disrupt smuggling through the state. As she had put it, 'it is an important demonstration of state legitimacy'. Of course, she flatly denied that the authorities, even the muggle authorities, profited off of smuggling, but that was certainly because she was under orders. Larissa seemed a decent person like that. A consummate professional with a wicked sense of humour.
The young witch turned on her iPod for some music, and popped the lid off another bottle of kvass. Sometimes, it was healthy not to completely leave behind the muggle world, she thought, though this was one of her few experiences in it except holidays with her parents, since the Battle of Hogwarts.
This mission, though, was a hell of a lot less awkward than going to the Great Barrier Reef—her parents had refused to move back from Australia—and trying to explain to everyone why she didn't want to take her long-sleeved blouse off even in the middle of the Aussie summer heat. It just means you won't get skin cancer, Hermione thought wryly to herself. The colour of one's skin didn't matter for that, everyone was at risk.
Most of her work at the moment was using magic ink to make Venn diagrams. In one corner was the Mafiya, the crime lords who had the connections from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Balkans. Muggles, but if you paid them enough, they wouldn't try to open the package, and they were deterred from looking by the enchantments, anyway. So, you can use them as catspaws in the shipping phase. They were obviously present in this place; she had already noticed there were a lot of blacked out Mercedes sedans with Ukrainian plates in Tiraspol, blasting Slavic rap, and with how poor the territory was, the locals generally only had old Ladas; there were even a fair number of invalidkas still on the road.
Next was the Moldovan government. Both in the muggle and wizarding world, the corruption indices were high. She didn't have to look much further than the fact that their MinKol, which probably almost never actually used muggle automobiles, thought that a 'normal' muggle automobile was an armoured S600 'Pullman' Merc. The idea that someone in this entire process was just a regular Moldovan official taking a bribe was incredibly high. What were their motivations? Well, they'd want to humiliate the Russians and the Transnistrian government, but 'cash' was more likely to be the overriding motivation there.
After that was the Transnistrian Government. In fact, it wanted legitimacy, so insomuch as it had a state policy separate from Russia's, it was probably anti-smuggling. But Igor Smirnov's Government was not exactly a highly organised entity. His authority was highly personal. The state budget was mostly subsidies from Russia. Smuggling would be an enormous incentive to anyone in the unrecognised state's government—a means of augmenting their salary. But not MinKol in Transnistria. Hermione was convinced that was above board, because the salaries were paid in full directly by Moscow. Moscow MinKol was devious and underhanded and willing to pull off some dark shit to retain control over a situation, especially in the 'near abroad'-she'd been briefed—but it was actually far less corrupt at every level than the Russian government, let alone the Transnistrian government. So the interests of MinKol and the Smirnov Government certainly diverged.
She might find systemic corruption in the muggle side was being abused by wizard smugglers, but she expected she could count on MinKol to help with that.
Unless it threatened Moscow's position in the territory. In that case, she was certain the investigation would be shut down, and if she refused to let it be shut down… Well, that was unlikely, anyway. So how do you keep that from happening?
There is no rational reason that stopping the dragon egg smuggling requires humiliating Igor Smirnov's Government, Hermione wrote as a note above her Venn diagram.
The Russian peacekeeping force neatly intersected with Russian/Transnistrian Minkol. They'd be in lock-step here. Disciplined messaging, disciplined goals. The wounded bear, still able to project power in her 'near abroad'.
The Ukrainians? Their government was under Moscow's thumb and so their MinKol was literally integrated; so, they'd only be different insomuch as people and individuals in the system could be highly resentful. That made them easier to bribe.
A ny one of them could be involved, if it fit their core objectives. People are rationale, Hermione noted in another margin, then enchanted the diagram to hide it and the glowing, magical colours on it. She'd come back to it later, after letting it rest for a little while. She wasn't here to make arrests herself, but to issue reports, and help the locals to break up the ring. It didn't matter which side she worked with to do that.
There was a knock on the door. Hermione groaned softly and quickly grabbed her wand, tossed on her robe over her pyjamas for the sake of dignity, and hastened to the door, looking through the peep-hole.
Oh. It's Larissa. And she's holding a brown bag.
Hermione opened the door. The MinKol woman had popped a button at the top of her uniform and had a wicked grin. "Thank you, Hermione." She breezed in to the table, with an absolutely amazing smell of cooked meat escaping from the bag. Hermione obligingly closed the door and deadbolted it again.
Larissa whipped a little pen from her belt and put it out on the table. A tiny glowing magical image of a gnome gave her a courtly little bow, and then zipped around the room, sniffing at corners and disappearing into objects. Hermione watched before glancing back at Larissa with a quizzical expression.
"He's checking for bugs…"
A minute later, the little magical gnome returned to the pen, and came to attention and saluted. "The room's clear, Your Nobleness!" he declared before vanishing in a puff.
"That looks incredibly useful," Hermione admitted.
"Well, we take fieldcraft seriously," Larissa shrugged, and then reached down to pull a bottle out of the bag, along with a stick of Shashlik for each of them. "Slivovika. You'd call it Slivovitz, right?"
"Uhh, I've never seen it before," Hermione wrinkled her nose with confusion and moved to sit, producing the cups from the table. She knew she wasn't getting out of this—and she didn't really want to.
"Oh. Apologies. I thought you were Jewish, so I wanted to get you something you'd be familiar with. Well, plum brandy definitely has its charms," the Russian woman grinned.
"Heh. I have gotten that one sometimes," Hermione acknowledged. "But actually, one of my paternal great-grandfathers was an immigrant from Ghana in the old Imperial days. He served as a Gunner's Mate in the Royal Navy," Hermione explained as they ate.
"Oh, well." Larissa shrugged wryly, popping the lid on the bottle and pouring out the glasses. "As black as Pushkin, then."
"I love Pushkin," Hermione's brown eyes twinkled for a moment. "He was awesome. I really should learn Russian so I can read his works in the original language... I've started for this mission but I still know only a little."
"You should. Well then. To Pushkin!" Larissa raised her glass.
Slivovitz burned like nothing else going down. Plum brandy was intense. To put it mildly. Oh God, Hermione thought, and then grinned. "What of yourself?"
"Well, the Naryshkin are an old Tatar family, but that doesn't really matter here, and Tatar and Russian are all mixed up, anyway."
Hermione nodded. "Thank you, Larissa."
"Nonsense, you're going to be helping me," Larissa crossed her legs, and popped the buttons on her uniform jacket. "I want this problem dealt with. You're an experienced combat veteran, too, and we respect each other, even between different nations, so I had to have a drink with you."
Hermione immediately liked the fact that instead of treating her like some kind of heroine, she was called an experienced combat veteran. "I was a child at the time, you know…"
"That makes it more impressive. Well, I'll hold my opinions about it to myself…"
"Opinions?" Hermione was suspicious. Larissa was a pureblood.
"About Wizarding Britain using child soldiers," Larissa answered with a sniff.
"Oh, uhm. I guess I was one of those." Hermione sat her glass down, and it was immediately filled back up. "And you?"
"We had to deal with some Voldemort loyalists in the wake of the Wizarding War, who wanted to deliver Russia to him. After that, when Dolohov tried to find shelter, we dealt with him also. As a junior witch in the Uniformed Operations Division, I was fortunate enough to be involved in both. Then I volunteered for a tour in Chechnya, covering our muggle forces against local wizards that had joined the insurgency and making sure clean-up was done in a way to keep the muggles from knowing about it." She shrugged as she raised her second glass. "I saw some fucked up shit."
Hermione smiled that kind of smile which didn't quite reach one's eyes. But there was still perfect understanding between their eyes. "So did I. To Comrades?"
"To Comrades!"
The second one was easier, of course. The second glass was always easier. "My personal opinion," Larissa remarked, "is that the dragon eggs are being smuggled in by muggles who don't know what they are."
"I agree that the bridge in the smuggling chain is definitely muggles," Hermione nodded. "As much as I hate to admit it… Muggle-born wizards are the most likely originators of the ring. But I understand they're mostly well-integrated in Koldovstoretz and Russian wizarding society?"
"Yes. Of course, coming from families in the Soviet era, they have little money. Because we weren't purged, we still have our accumulated family wealth, and because of the policies during the Soviet era, we had very little to spend it on. So there is a very substantial gap in wealth between the old aristocratic families and the new families. And you know, our economy is only starting to recover from the cabbage winter."
Hermione knew she was referring to 1999, when the financial crisis slammed into the nascent Russian capitalist economy. "Literally a cabbage winter?"
"Yes, some people survived the winter on nothing but cabbage. I am not going to pretend," Larissa continued drolly, "that I was one of them."
"Fair." Hermione kicked back. "So, thinking about it, where do you think the connection is through here?"
"Geographically, Bendery is the most likely spot on the western side."
"I meant, in terms of the social sector."
"Oh, well, there is no criminal element in the wizarding community, which numbers less than a thousand," Larissa answered—as Hermione expected she would. "So, if the smuggling is being done by muggles, of course, there could be problems. We have had a new organisation appear in the past few years. It's being run out of Bendery and controls nightclubs in Bendery and Tiraspol, and invested in a distillery and winery, making wine and brandy. They also started buying up and running for-profit medical clinics lately. They do a lot of cross-border trade, and we're not sure where the original funds originated. They've tried to stay very quiet, but they do also engage in the usual political activities in the territory..."
Paying bribes, you mean, Hermione thought.
"...So we have gotten some images of them." Larissa reached into her now-unbuttoned uniform jacket, and pulled out a set of photographs, laying them down in front of Hermione.
Hermione flipped through the first few. Punk chick with blue hair, huh, why does everyone in the Romanian speaking world look kind of like Tonks. Some woman who looked much more Slavic—Hermione didn't recognise her at all— okay, more normal…
Hermione flipped to the next picture, which showed a short woman next to Igor Smirnov, the fat and mustachioed President of the unrecognised Republic. Then she dropped the picture on the table, feeling every muscle freeze throughout her body. Her body went cold, like her heart was pulling her blood back into the centre of her body. She couldn't even blink. She was rigid, tense, taut. Her thoughts were rapid and brutal, coming to her like staccato bursts of gunfire.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
That's Bellatrix Lestrange talking to the President of the PMR.
Bellatrix Lestrange is dead.
I saw her die.
Molly Weasley killed her.
That's Bellatrix Lestrange, talking to Igor Smirnov.
That's Bellatrix Lestrange.
Bellatrix Lestrange is in Transnistria.
But Bellatrix Lestrange is dead.
Larissa was looking at her quizzically like she could very well tell that Hermione was in some kind of dire straits. But Hermione just reached up and pushed at her glass. "Pour me another, please," she said, hoarsely.
"Hermione, you might have just as well seen a ghost. You know that woman?" But for all that, Larissa obliged. She poured out another glass of slivovitz, one for each of them.
Hermione grabbed it and knocked it back in one convulsive gesture. Her left forearm was hurting—was it just psychosomatic?-and she was staring at the picture on the table. Younger than she remembered. Paler. Hair in better condition. Features sharper, leaner, but the severe beauty of a Black was definitely still present.
Was it really her? It wasn't exactly her. She shouldn't have gotten younger. She should haven't gotten prettier, right? Since when was she pretty in your head? Hermione looked frantically to Larissa. "Have you run this image with magical law enforcement?"
"Yes – that woman is not a witch wanted anywhere in the world. Do you think she's even a witch? I mean, we haven't definitively seen any evidence of it."
"Well, she wouldn't be wanted anywhere in the world, because she's legally dead. We all saw her. She should be long buried at this point, and certainly not anywhere in eastern Europe investing in brandy distilleries and nightclubs and medical clinics in Transnistria."
"Really, what's her name?"
"Bellatrix Lestrange. Voldemort's foremost Lieutenant."
"You don't say," Larissa murmured softly. "Are you sure?"
"No. She shouldn't look exactly like that. It would just be a coincidence, younger, and…" Hermione trailed off. Do you actually know what Nymphadora Tonks looks like? I mean, really? There might be another, saner explanation here than a dead person running a business in Transnistria. "Actually, there are a few other possibilities," Hermione decided to back down from the 'crazy person' corner she was otherwise driving herself into. She needed to do some research and investigate a few hypotheses, that would be important, wouldn't it? "I admit, there are a few other possibilities. Bellatrix should look older than that, for one."
"Well." Larissa was silent for a moment. "Do you want me to do anything? I will say this, however; the Government regards foreign investment into Transnistria favourably. Slavka Chernova is the woman's name, as we know her, and because of that… Well, of course, if she is engaged in smuggling which is destabilising Transnistria, we will act. But I want to make it clear that we're sharing this information with you precisely because you don't have arrest powers, Hermione. We will make the determination on the appropriate course of action. This is the sovereign territory of Transnistria."
Hermione shook her head, forcing away the lethargy of shock. "I understand loud and clear, Larissa Sergeivna. Thank you, nonetheless. I will reach out to you very soon and let you know how I want to proceed and what determination I've made about this situation, all right?"
"Certainly," Larissa answered, and rose. "Take care." A pause. "You don't seem well. You fought this Bellatrix during the war, didn't you?"
"I did," Hermione agreed. The one that got away. The one who died. Hermione had been intensely interested in plans for rehabilitating the death eaters, and worked with Shacklebolt on many of the strategies. Considering that Narcissa's stand had saved Harry, and that Andromeda was a bedrock of the Order, even if she didn't actively fight, Hermione wondered what, precisely, had happened with Bellatrix to turn her into Voldemort's most loyal Lieutenant. A few visits with Minerva had supplied her with stories her time in Hogwarts, socially isolated and defiant, uncaring of convention and Pureblood respectability, but under enormous pressure to protect her younger sisters and to be the shining heiress of the House of Black, such an ideal marriage prospect.
But apparently her marriage to Rodolphus Lestrange had been awful. One time, she had intervened Mr. Lestrange in Azkaban, and gotten the impression that the only thing he shared with his wife was their absolute devolution to Voldemort. They appeared to have absolutely nothing else in common.
At least Ron had a sense of humour.
"Well, thank you, at least," Hermione offered, and showed Larissa out. "We will be in touch again. And soon, I am sure. I will move as expeditiously as I may."
"Of course. Have a good night." The MinKol officer stepped out, the door closed, and Hermione was alone, to come running back to the table, and now look at the pictures again without someone looking over her shoulder.
What if it's Tonks? Why would Tonks, if she survived, flee to Transnistria and set up a business? To be sure, it was a possibility. She had felt that she had encountered Tonks on the aeroplane. For all she knew, the appearance of one "Slavka Chernova" was actually what Tonks really looked like. She'd have to ask Andromeda, and that was not viable in the middle of this mission.
That meant the pictures of both the punk girl and of "Chernova" meeting Igor Smirnov were of the same person—Nymphadora Tonks.
Tonks is supposed to be dead too.
Option two was a really interesting one, and she desperately wished that she had access to books to research it herself. She didn't know if it was Teddy Tonks' family, possibly with Squibs in the family tree, or if it was Andromeda Black's family—that is, the Black family—that Nymphadora had inherited her metamorphmagus abilities from. Was it possible, because it was magical, but a completely different source of magic, that Tamara Tonks was actually a squib metamorphmagus? Unable to perform normal magic, but able to alter her appearance at will?
Now that was a tempting explanation, because someone like that could probably successfully navigate both the wizarding and muggle worlds and would be totally unstoppable by the muggle authorities. The problem was that gave absolutely no reason at all for Tamara Tonks to actually look like Bellatrix, whereas at least Nymphadora quite possibly looked like that as her veriform. So it was really rather impossible.
Hermione eyed the bottle of Slivovitz. The temptation to keep drinking was overwhelming. Because then there was the other option.
You're looking at Bellatrix Lestrange.
She really didn't want to deal with that option. Her mind frantically searched for others. What if it's another Black relative? A bastard girl? Hell, could Rodolphus and Bellatrix have had a daughter? In fact, if the Metamorphmagus talent ran in the Black family, that child might even be one. And the child of two prominent Death Eaters would have every reason to move herself to the absolutely most remote backwater she could find in the whole wizarding world.
Hermione went for some water, not caring how expensive it was, and forced herself to hydrate so she could start writing coherently. It was time to put together notes, and then reach out to see if the theory had any validity.
A nasty little part of her mind kept insisting she was just doing it so she could avoid facing up to the fact that Bellatrix Lestrange had somehow cheated Death.