The Old Bridge

by Andrew Turpin

  Marco raised his hands to indicate he had no idea.

  Boris took another deep drag from his cigarette, then eventually exhaled. He tapped the table with his fingers. “I’m just thinking, if that guy’s American and an ex-Nazi hunter, odds are that our friend over in Washington will be able to find out something about him and what he’s up to.”

  “Definitely worth a try.”

  Boris picked up his phone and dialed a number for a burner phone belonging to his contact in Washington, DC. After a few rings, it was answered.

  “SILVER, it’s RUNNER. I’m in Mostar with SUNMAN.”

  “I just need to speak to you urgently about something,” Boris said.

  “Make it quick then. Go on,” said SILVER, otherwise known as Robert Watson.

  “We’ve got an issue here. You remember I told you only the Simic brothers really know the truth?”

  “Yep.”

  “We found out that one of them was talking with an American war crimes investigator. SUNMAN has taken care of that brother, permanently. Now the other brother’s just come out of prison, and we’ve just seen him also talking to the same investigator, so we’re going to take care of that brother, too. They’re both here in Mostar. But it’s the American we have questions about.”

  “An American?”

  “Yes, the investigator’s American. Can you find out about him?”

  “A name might help.”

  “The guy’s called Johnson, Joe Johnson,” Boris said.

  There was dead silence for a few seconds. “Joe Johnson? Are you damn sure?” Watson said.

  “Yes, I’m damn sure,” Boris said. “What about him?”

  “I know that guy. I fired him from the CIA, way back. I also had a tangle with him at the end of last year. What the hell’s he doing in Mostar?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Boris said. He caught Marco’s eye and shook his head. “He was here for a war crimes conference in Dubrovnik, but I presume the Simic brother who SUNMAN shot must have approached him.”

  “And you think—”

  “If he’s a war crimes investigator and the brothers know about me, then you can reach a logical conclusion. So what do you know about Johnson?” Boris said.

  “Well, he’s a freelancer,” Watson said. “I’d say someone’s called him in—maybe these brothers as you suggest—and asked him to poke his finger into the pie to check it out. It’s probably just a fishing trip. This sounds damn typical of him.”

  “Okay. In that case, do you have any suggestions for how we find out what he’s trying to do?”

  Watson hesitated. “There is one route you could go down. He’s got a real weakness. I know that. It’s one reason why I fired the bastard.”

  “What’s that then?”

  “Women.”

  Boris listened while Watson explained what he had in mind.

  As soon as Boris had finished the call, Marco stepped onto the balcony. “Here, have a look at this. I meant to show you before,” Marco said.

  He took a front page clipping from Slobodna Dalmacija, one of the biggest Croatian daily newspapers, from his pocket and handed it to Boris. A large front page headline read, “Four Hikers Die in Land-mine Blast.”

  The story described how the hikers, wandering through the Moseć area, a rural part of Croatia sixty kilometers north of Split, appeared to have either ignored or not seen the warning signs. They had been blown up when one of the group stepped on a land mine.

  The report was accompanied by two photographs: in one, a blood-spattered corpse was being carried away on a stretcher by ambulance crews; in the other another a policeman was standing next to a sign warning of the danger from mines. The article continued:

  The four hikers were heading along a narrow footpath in the hills east of the village of Moseć when one of the party triggered the land mine. A farmer heard the blast from two kilometers away and realized what had happened. He drove to the scene in his tractor and discovered the remains of the four bodies.

  Police said they have identified the bodies from documents found in the hikers’ clothing.

  The death toll from land mines in Croatia now stands at more than 500. The Croatian government estimates that about 46,000 land mines are still buried in the country, all emplaced during the war of independence from 1991 onward.

  The on-going issue of deaths from mines so long after the war finished is causing international outrage. Slobodna Dalmacija understands that the BBC World Service is planning a one-hour radio documentary about the issue, to be broadcast next month.

  Boris finished reading the story. The BBC World Service. It momentarily took him back to when he worked as a subeditor and a producer for the iconic broadcasting unit in London during the 1990s, mainly on the now-closed Croatian service. It was where he had learned most of his skills and—as his English approached native fluency, helped by intensive voice training—had started to make a name for himself. From the World Service, he had moved to the BBC’s Brussels bureau, where he handled a series of increasingly complex, high-profile European stories and interviews across radio and TV. He did enough to be headhunted by CNN’s Brussels bureau and gradually evolved into a hard-punching political interviewer, doing a stint with CNBC before David Rowlands had headhunted him for his current job at SRTV.

  “Shit,” Boris said, glancing again at the newspaper and turning to face Marco. “Did you read this bit about the BBC? We don’t want them crawling all over it. That’s the fourth mine that’s gone off around the barn. Do we know if it was one of ours that was triggered or one from the war?”

  “I don’t know,” Marco said. “I suspect it was one of ours. The municipal people apparently were saying last year that they’d cleared all the wartime ones from that footpath.”

  Boris pursed his lips. “Yes, but they don’t know we’re putting them down. They just think they’ve missed a few from the war. The problem is, if it keeps happening, it’s going to leave gaping holes in our barn defenses. That’s the last thing we want, especially if Filip and Johnson are sniffing around. How far away from the barn was this one?”

  Marco unfolded a detailed map and pointed to a spot. “There’s the barn, and this is where the mine went off, just here, about two hundred meters away.”

  “Too near. Okay, I want to beef up the number of mines around it. I don’t want anyone getting near it. Can you order another batch and put them in place? We’ll reinforce the ring we have with another smaller ring inside it, and we’ll also make sure the footpath where these hikers got blown up gets a few more, okay? We want to make sure no one gets within range of it.”

  “Yeah, makes sense. I’ll get onto it.” Marco said. “The only thing is, this is a hikers’ footpath—”

  “So?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t start going soft, Marco. Just get on with it, okay?” Boris snapped.

  “Sure, I’ll sort it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wednesday, July 11, 2012

  Mostar

  The wooden black front door squeaked open a few inches, and an old man peered out, his ragged beard and white hair tinged yellow with nicotine, his lids drooping so far that Johnson could barely see his eyes.

  Johnson was intrigued. So this was Omar Terzić.

  He looked up. The house appeared almost as unkempt as its owner, with dark red paint peeling away from the window frames and white rotting shutters.

  The old man eyed Johnson and Filip, who wore a large white bandage over his elbow and upper forearm after the hospital patched him up a couple of hours earlier.

  Despite a phone call from Filip, Omar took a few moments to realize who was standing on his doorstep. He raised his hands and apologized, then pulled the door fully open and launched into a rapid exchange with Filip in Bosnian, gesticulating occasionally at Johnson, who understood enough to know that his presence was being explained.

  Omar switched to English, which he spoke surprisingly well, albeit with a strong
accent, and shook hands with Filip and Johnson. His sunken black eyes flicked between the two men.

  Behind Omar appeared a thick-set younger man with short cropped dark hair and muscled forearms. He leaned against the doorframe, folded his arms, and watched.

  Johnson immediately smelled the younger man’s pungent aftershave and momentarily cringed.

  Omar explained that he had lived in the three-story house on Drage Palavstre Street since 1961. He indicated to a house three doors farther up the street, where he said Aisha and her family had lived until the events of 1993.

  Johnson glanced in the direction he was pointing. Aisha’s former home, also three stories, was far better maintained than Omar’s. It was neatly painted in a pale terra-cotta, with a white door and an ornate first-floor balcony on which a small table and two chairs were arranged to look down over the street.

  Johnson faced Omar. He felt relieved that Jayne had decided to stay at the Muslibegovic. Three visitors would have been too many for this old man.

  Omar led the way down a dark passageway with a black-and-white checkered tile floor, like a giant chessboard, and through to the rear of the house into a large kitchen.

  The cupboard units were chipped and grimy and missing a couple of the opaque glass panes. The wooden countertop was laced with knife cuts, stains, and cracks. Only the microwave and the fridge, a large American-style affair, looked remotely modern.

  Omar indicated that Johnson and Filip should take a seat at the battered square oak table, then began to make coffee.

  The younger man with the dark hair sat on another chair in the corner, near the door, the smell of his aftershave now all-pervading. Johnson instantly disliked him.

  “This is my helper, Tomislav. He’s a Croat,” Omar said. “He drives, cooks, cleans, gardens, that sort of thing.”

  Omar poured coffee into three large cups and pushed one across the table to Johnson, one to Filip. Meanwhile, Omar switched back to Bosnian and held a rapid-fire conversation with Filip. Although Johnson picked up most of the conversation, he asked Filip to translate, to be certain.

  “I’ve told him we want to talk about the war, specifically how we’re trying to track down Franjo Vuković, and that we want to know what happened to Aisha and her father, Erol,” Filip said. “He hasn’t got a clue about Franjo. Says he just vanished off the face of the earth. He thinks Aisha went to the States, like I told you, to St. Louis, along with a lot of other Bosnians. But that was many years ago, and other than that, he doesn’t know.”

  Johnson sipped his coffee and asked Omar, in Bosnian, if he knew what work Erol had done for Izetbegović.

  The old man visibly jumped at the question.

  Old habits die hard, Johnson thought.

  The old Communist era and its secret police regime had bred a culture of secrecy and evasiveness that was doubtless difficult to cast off. But eventually, Omar relaxed a little and spoke at some length, frequently gesticulating with his wrinkled hands.

  “Erol was someone who rarely talked about his job, unless he’d had a few glasses of wine,” Omar said. “He had a senior job as a kind of fixer, a problem solver, in Izetbegović’s office in Sarajevo. He used to travel there early on Monday mornings and come back on Friday night, on the late train. Some weekends Erol didn’t come back at all, especially once the war started. Even when he did, he used to bring work with him and spend the whole time holed up in his study, going through piles of papers, files, and documents, and drawing up plans. The place looked like some kind of vault. He always looked tired.”

  Now Johnson felt even more intrigued. It sounded as though Erol Delić was more than just a fixer for his boss.

  “How close was he to the wartime decision-making processes? Was he part of that? Did he discuss things, hear things, meet key people?” Johnson asked.

  “Erol was right in the middle of it, though he was very low-profile publicly. But he was definitely a right-hand man to Izetbegović internally,” Omar said. “He once mentioned to me that he met all kinds of obscure and shady people who came into the president’s office: men from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, all coming to discuss how they might assist Izetbegović in his war effort, in his agenda to turn Bosnia and Herzegovina into a state that was more based on Islam. ”

  “Who were these shady people?” Johnson asked.

  “I don’t know names.”

  Johnson leaned forward and cupped his chin in the palms of his hands, elbows propped on the table. “Well, there must be a way of tracking Aisha down,” he said to Filip. “What about her old friends? I would guess she must keep in touch with at least some of them. You mentioned that girl Ana, who you had a fling with once. What about her family?”

  Omar sat back and said something in Bosnian about Ana to Filip, which Johnson didn’t quite understand. Omar lifted his forefinger in the air and wagged it several times in Filip’s direction. Finally, the old man smiled for the first time.

  “He says I behaved quite dishonorably toward that girl, and he’s just told me off for it,” Filip said to Johnson. “Maybe a bit late. More than twenty years too late. Anyway, he said she went to the UK to study architecture at university years ago and her relatives were either killed or left town. But listen to this—he’s seen her in town periodically over recent months, and he saw her walking down in Kujundžiluk, the market street down near the Old Bridge, only two days ago. He couldn’t catch up with her to speak to her, but he says he is 90 percent certain it was her.”

  “Let’s find her, if she’s here,” Johnson said, his voice rising slightly. “How can we do it, can you call around the hotels? Will she be with friends?”

  Filip shrugged. “We can try. Not sure what kind of welcome I’d get from her after so long. Not a good one, I’d imagine, given the way we broke up.”

  He glanced at Johnson. “If we do find out where Ana is, I can speak to the hotel reception people and leave a message, but it might be better if you actually go and do the talking. As much as I’d like to see her again, I’ll stay out of it.”

  Wednesday, July 11, 2012

  Mostar

  Immediately after Johnson and Filip had left the house on Drage Palavstre Street, Tomislav Novak went to the back garden and sat on a bench at the far end, next to a wooden shed, where he lit a cigarette.

  After a few moments, he took out his phone and made a call.

  “Hi, Bruno, it’s Tomi here. About your little request. You won’t believe this, but I didn’t need to make much effort to find Filip and the American guy Johnson . . . actually no effort at all.” He laughed.

  “Why’s that?” his friend Bruno asked.

  “Because they came to old Omar’s house an hour ago. Simic knows him from a long time back when he lived in Mostar.”

  Bruno was somewhat taken aback. “What were they trying to find out from Omar?”

  “Information about where Franjo is. They obviously don’t have any idea. They were also asking where Aisha was, and again they know nothing.”

  Tomislav took a deep drag of his cigarette and listened to his friend Bruno, whom he could hear consulting with two other men in the background.

  Then Bruno came back on the line and rattled off a series of instructions.

  “Yes, sure, my friend,” Tomislav said. “They are all staying at the Muslibegovic hotel, you know the one, on Osmana Dikića Street. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. I know exactly the right person for that job.”

  Wednesday, July 11, 2012

  Mostar

  Eight phone calls, and Filip had drawn a blank every time. None of the hotels he had rung in eastern Mostar had an Ana Dukić staying with them.

  He was sitting on a sofa, tapping his fingers on his thigh, clearly frustrated. “I’ll give this one a try,” he said, underlining another number in a directory.

  He glanced at Johnson, who was sitting at the other end of the sofa in the reception area of Muslibegovic House.

  Johnson leaned back and stared at the ce
iling, slowly shaking his head. A needle in a haystack, just like Vic said.

  But Filip’s next call, to the Hotel Pellegrino on the banks of the Neretva and less than a half mile from where Johnson, Jayne, and Filip were staying, drew a result.

  Yes, the receptionist said, she could take a message for Ana Dukić, to expect a visit from Joe Johnson around seven o’clock, but she couldn’t put the call through to her room now as she’d asked not to be disturbed. But if the gentleman would like to come along at seven and have a drink in the bar while he was waiting, he would be welcome.

  Johnson turned to Jayne. “It’s your birthday. Shall we go for dinner, or shall I go see this woman Ana? Your call.”

  Jayne hesitated. “You go. We haven’t got time to waste. We can have a few birthday drinks later.”

  Thus, later in the evening, Johnson walked around to the Pellegrino. He approached the front desk, asked the receptionist to let Ana Dukić know that he was here to see her, and settled into a comfortable armchair.

  Johnson glanced around, using the pretense of checking emails on his phone as a cover. The Pellegrino was a smart boutique hotel, with patterned marble floors, leather chairs, wrought-iron interior canopies, and attentive but unobtrusive staff. Whatever Ana was doing here, she was clearly not lacking funds.

  Ten minutes later, Johnson saw a tall, willowy woman walk into the reception area. She pulled back her shoulder-length blond hair and surveyed the lobby, glanced twice at Johnson and then finally approached hesitantly.

  “Excuse me, are you Joe Johnson?” she asked in a distinctly English accent.

  “Yes. You’re Ana Dukić?”

  The woman nodded and unconsciously straightened her black skirt. “I had a message from reception saying that you were looking for me?”