The Old Bridge

by Andrew Turpin

  “Okay, read the message I’ve just sent you. And now listen.” Watson spent the next ten minutes carefully going through a series of instructions with Edwards before ending the call.

  Thursday, July 12, 2012

  Mostar

  Boris had just finished packing his small suitcase at the Hotel Mepas. He had been in a bad mood since late the previous night, when he had learned that Tomislav had come off worst in his encounter with Johnson.

  He was still muttering to himself when Marco burst into the room.

  “Job done. The American bastard’s leaving for New York,” Marco said.

  “What?” Boris asked.

  “That guy Johnson, he’s booked himself on a flight back to the States, leaving Dubrovnik tonight.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Just had a message from Tomislav. He says Filip again called in to see Omar, you know, Tomi’s boss, to say he was heading back to Split, and thanks for his help. Filip said—you’ll like this—that Johnson had been attacked down near the Stari Most and was heading back to the States tonight. Filip is driving him to Dubrovnik Airport, apparently.”

  Boris grimaced as he tightened his leather belt, then let it out a notch from its usual position. His frame was becoming increasingly padded by surplus flesh now that he was into his late forties.

  “Hmm,” Boris said. “I doubt Tomi’s responsible for his departure—he didn’t exactly emerge from last night unscathed, did he?”

  “Well, no.”

  “But anyway. If Johnson’s going, then Tomi’s probably earned his money. What about the woman?” Boris asked.

  “Don't know about her.”

  “Hmm, we’ll see. All sounds way too neat.”

  “If he’s gone, he’s gone,” Marco said.

  “Yeah, let’s see. I’d like to keep a track on the woman, though, and on Filip. How can we do that?”

  “Could get Tomi to do it, or one of his cronies.”

  “Yes, definitely, get him on it. I want to know what she does, where she goes. She’s obviously working with him. Same goes for Filip,” Boris said.

  “Okay, I’ll have a chat with Tomi.”

  “Now, what about those land mines. Have you spoken to the supplier? I want to get moving with them,” Boris said.

  Marco leaned against the doorframe. “Yes, I’ve talked to Ratko. It’s all under control. He’s going to have them in the next couple of days. He’ll take them to the site, and we can meet him there. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Okay,” Boris said. “As long as we get them before Monday. Remember I’m flying back to London on Tuesday, so we either need to put them in place Sunday afternoon or make an early start Monday. I’m also going to have to do some work at your place for the next couple of days, research for the interviews I’ve got coming up.”

  “I’m more interested in what we’re going to do about Johnson and Simic,” Marco said. “My gut instinct is to have another go at eliminating both of them.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Friday, 13 July 2012

  Astoria, Queens, New York

  Johnson yawned deeply, feeling exhausted after less than three hours sleep on the flight to New York.

  He knocked at the battered green front door for a third time, then stood back and waited. The paint around the lock was partly scratched away by years of contact from fingernails and keys.

  There was no answer.

  Johnson grabbed the handle of the screen door, from which the protective mesh was missing, banged it shut, and went back through the rusty front gate. Aisha was nowhere to be seen.

  Johnson had decided not to make contact in advance, for fear of being rejected before he could even meet her. Instead he planned to rely on the well-practiced doorstep charm that had served him well over many years.

  He checked his watch. It was five in the afternoon. Maybe he should just sit it out.

  Across the road, next to the graffitied steel door of a car repair company, stood a few cinder blocks. Johnson crossed the street, turned two of the blocks up vertically, placed another across the top to form a seat of sorts, and sat down to wait under the shade of a large tree.

  He tapped out a long secure text message to Vic’s private cell phone to update him on the inquiry and explain his visit to New York to see Aisha.

  A few minutes later, Vic replied, expressing his surprise that Johnson was back on US soil but liking his progress.

  Three doors down, where 38th Street met 34th Avenue, Johnson noticed a café, Ćevabdżinica Sarajevo, with a bright green frontage and a gaudy yellow and red sign. Maybe this Bosnia neighborhood in Astoria was as close as Aisha could get to a home away from home in New York.

  A young couple emerged from the café, hand in hand, and passed him before disappearing into another house down the street.

  Then at just after six o’clock, a woman wearing sunglasses and with dark hair that fell past her shoulders walked around the corner past the café. She paused and peered inside, holding her hand above her eyes to reduce the glare, then continued down the road and turned into the gateway of number 12C.

  Johnson sat up straight.

  The woman removed a key from her jeans pocket, unlocked the door, and let herself in, closing the door behind her.

  Aisha Delić. It had to be.

  Johnson waited for ten minutes, smoked a cigarette, then turned on his phone’s voice recorder, casually got up, and walked across the street.

  The woman opened the door a couple of inches on a robust-looking security chain, almost before he had finished knocking. “Hello?” she said, raising her eyebrows. He could see her recoil fractionally, probably due to his somewhat battered appearance. Johnson had been focusing so hard on his task that he had almost forgotten his bruises.

  “Hello, are you Aisha?”

  She recovered her poise. “Yes . . . and who are you?”

  “I’m Joe Johnson,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but I’ve just come from Mostar. I’m a war crimes investigator and I was hoping you might be able to help me with something regarding an inquiry I’m working on, if you could spare a few minutes.”

  Her dark eyes scanned him up and down, a sympathetic look on her face. “An investigator? Did you get into a fight in Mostar?”

  “There was an incident, as you can probably see, but it’s a long story.”

  “Okay, well, tell me briefly what this is about. I’ve had a long day at work.” She smiled for the first time.

  “Yes, and I appreciate your time. I was hoping I could speak to you about someone you know, or did know.” Johnson said. He hesitated, then added, “It’s actually about your former husband, Franjo Vuković.”

  The smile vanished. Aisha stood motionless for a couple of seconds. “Can you show me identification or something?” she asked.

  Johnson handed her a business card and explained that he used to work for the OSI but was now an independent investigator. He reached into his pocket and took out his passport, which he held up at the photo page.

  She eyed him steadily.

  “You’d better come in,” Aisha said eventually. She unclipped the security chain and opened the door. He stepped inside and realized the scruffy exterior of the house belied its interior, which was tidy and minimalistic, with freshly painted walls and sanded wooden floorboards. Johnson glanced around approvingly. “Nice place you have here.”

  She nodded but said nothing, then walked to her kitchen table with two easy chairs, next to patio doors that led to a small rear garden. She indicated to the chairs, and they both sat.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I bumped into an old friend of yours, Ana, in Mostar.”

  “Ana’s in Mostar? Don’t think so. She’s in London.”

  “Yes, but she’s in Mostar doing a project, on bridges, architecture, that kind of thing.”

  Aisha scratched the top of her head. “I think you’re wasting your time, but go on.”

  “Why do y
ou think I’m wasting my time?”

  “He’s dead, I’m certain of it. He vanished off the planet twenty years ago, and as far as I’m concerned he can stay off the planet. What is this about?”

  “Okay, I was approached by someone who asked me to investigate him for alleged war crimes. This man believes he’s alive, that he changed his identity and is living another life somewhere,” Johnson said.

  Aisha raised her eyebrows. “Alive? Where? Is that true? Who told you that?”

  “Well, I can’t say who approached me, but I was hoping you might be able to help me with the other questions, like where he’s living.”

  “Sorry, I can’t. Anyway, which war crimes are you focusing on, out of his many?”

  “The ones we think we can get him on involve the treatment of Bosnian Muslim prisoners at the Heliodrom. Several of them died,” Johnson said.

  “Yep, they did. I know all about the Heliodrom. Every Bosnian does.” She paused and swept her hair back, her eyes focused intensely on Johnson now. “It really was awful what they did to the Bosniak prisoners in there. We all knew what was going on.”

  Johnson could see that Aisha’s eyes had moistened. She was visibly biting her bottom lip.

  “I’m sorry. Bad memories,” she said. “It just suddenly hit me.”

  “It’s fine. I’m sorry for stirring them up.”

  “Is it just the Heliodrom, or other things? There were quite a lot.”

  “Such as?”

  “How long do you have? What about the Old Bridge?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “He blew it to pieces. Nobody ever pinned that on him.”

  “Tell me more,” Johnson said.

  “He was in charge of the guys in the tank that knocked down the Stari Most. It all went out on worldwide television. I think he did it on purpose when the cameras were there—I wouldn’t be surprised. They were on Stotina Hill, shelling the bridge for a day and a half before it finally collapsed. The cameras filmed the lot. Nobody knows about that but I know there are witnesses who would give evidence if he’s ever found.”

  “That would be exactly what I’m looking for to build this case, assuming we find him,” Johnson said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard a lot about the bridge,” Johnson said.

  “Everybody adored that bridge,” Aisha continued. “It was where I kissed him for the first time in 1987. It was the traditional meeting point between Croats and Bosniaks, Catholics and Muslims, west and east. There were lots of couples like us back then. We married two years later. But during that war my husband turned into someone else, a monster I couldn’t even recognize. I hated him by the end.”

  Now a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “I honestly think he’s dead. No one has heard from or seen him since the end of ’93. If he actually is alive and you find him . . . well, if you get to Franjo before I do, just let me know,” she said.

  “It must have been difficult. I’m sorry to bring it all up again,” Johnson said.

  Aisha shook her head. “I’ll send you something I wrote. It’s easier than me trying to sit here and talk about it. It’s too hard, way too hard. I put it all down in words, in my journal. I’ll send you a few pages. The only issue is, it’s written in Croatian. I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to read it?”

  Johnson smiled and broke into Serbo-Croat. “Well, I can speak some Croatian, so it’s not a problem.”

  Aisha looked surprised, then replied, also in Croatian. “Very impressive. How did you learn that?”

  Johnson, feeling somewhat self-conscious, switched back to English and explained that he had done a stint in Bosnia and Croatia in 1999 while working for the OSI and had studied hard to learn the language at the same time.

  “Also, do you have any photographs of Franjo?” he asked. “I haven’t got one, and I really need to see what he looks like. Doesn’t matter if it’s old. It will still give me an idea.”

  “There are a couple, tucked away in a box somewhere, that I can scan and email to you,” she said.

  “Thank you for that and for your time. Seems like a great little neighborhood you’re living in here,” he said, transitioning them to less emotional ground now that he knew she couldn’t help him find Franjo.

  “Yes, it is,” Aisha said. “There were hundreds, thousands of us Muslims who came here from Bosnia in the ’90s. I’m kind of grateful to the US government for making it happen.”

  “There’s a couple of other things,” Johnson said. “I’ve also been asked to try and locate some important documents that went missing at that time, ones that were linked to Alija Izetbegović’s office in Sarajevo, where I believe your father worked.”

  Johnson detailed part of the background to his search and said that Ana had remembered Aisha being upset one day over some documents, claiming it was Franjo’s fault. But he omitted telling her that the request to find the documents had come from the CIA.

  Aisha folded her arms and looked at him unblinkingly. “Missing documents? Ha.” She snorted. “Who asked you to find those?”

  “Oh, just someone linked to the investigation I’m doing.”

  Aisha pursed her lips. “I haven’t talked about this before,” she said. “In fact, nobody’s asked me. But my father’s long dead, so I guess it doesn’t matter. Ana’s correct. One of the biggest arguments I had with Franjo was over some documents that I’m 100 percent certain he stole from my father’s study in Mostar. That’s another reason I can’t stand him. It caused my father a lot of problems.”

  Johnson felt his heart rate pick up sharply.

  “Franjo stole them from your father? How?” Johnson asked.

  “We were fairly certain it was one day when he came to my father’s house looking for me, but nobody was in. He had a key because he was part of the family. He let himself in and probably just stumbled across them in my father’s office. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to work out what they were about.”

  Johnson stared out the window. “But why did your father have them in Mostar?”

  Aisha shook her head. “Honestly, my father should not have had them. In fact, he took them, stole them, from Izetbegović’s office. They were foreign ministry documents that Izetbegović told him to destroy, but he didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He realized their significance.”

  “And what was their significance? What were they about?”

  “That I can’t tell you—for a couple of reasons, one of which is that my father swore me to secrecy after they disappeared. But they are dynamite. Politically explosive.”

  “Dynamite? In what sense?”

  Aisha leaned back. “Well, if the contents of those documents came out, half the White House from that time, from the president downward, would be hit by flying shit, and we Bosnians living here would be scapegoated.”

  She pointed toward an American flag hanging on her kitchen wall next to a nighttime photograph of a floodlit Stari Most. “And I don’t want to have to leave here—I like it. It’s home, despite all the sectarian anger that certain politicians, like Patrick Spencer, keep throwing around.”

  Johnson sat up straight. He felt like a ball of wool was slowly unraveling.

  “How do you mean? Tell me—what’s in these documents that is so damaging?”

  But Aisha just shook her head. “Another time.”

  Johnson furrowed his brow. It was time to change the subject. Maybe he could get her back to the documents later.

  “That’s fine, I appreciate all this, especially after you said you had a tough day at work. Who do you work for here?” he said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” She glanced at her watch and stood. “You’re going to have to go now. I’ve got a date this evening, and I need to get ready.”

  “But hang on—”

  “No. No, we’ll stop there.” She stood and motioned toward the door. The discussion was over.

  She ushered Johnson out into t
he street and said a brief goodbye.

  He wandered back along 38th past the café, now feeling extremely uneasy, yet energized. So she believed Franjo was dead, and that he’d stolen a set of politically explosive foreign ministry documents from her father.

  What the hell? Could they be the same documents that Vic’s looking for?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Saturday, July 14, 2012

  Manhattan

  “How am I doing? Well, I found her last night, at her house. I think I’ve made a big breakthrough regarding the documents. She’s told me that Franjo stole a highly politically sensitive dossier from her father’s study, which he in turn had taken from Izetbegović’s office. But then she wouldn’t give me the details of what was in it,” Johnson said.

  “Dossier? Could it by chance be the same set that Vic’s asked you to track down?” Jayne asked.

  Johnson leaned back on his bench in the southern corner of Central Park, near the zoo. “I’ve no idea. I mean, how many dossiers and documents would there have been in Izetbegović’s office at that time? But she did say that these documents are dynamite and politically explosive. She says if the papers surface, all the Bosnians living here would be scapegoated and half the White House from that time would be hit by flying shit, from the president down.”

  “What? That all sounds very over the top.”

  “Yes, I know, I know. That’s what I thought. She wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me what was in the actual documents, and she says she doesn’t know where they are. So we’re not much further forward. She also seems convinced that Franjo’s dead.”

  “But she doesn’t know for certain?”

  “Correct, she doesn’t know. Just guessing as he’s been off the radar since ’93.”

  It had taken Johnson fifty minutes to walk from his hotel, the Vetiver in Astoria, across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, and up East 60th Street to the park.

  He propped his phone between his shoulder and his left ear, wincing at the pain that kicked in from the bruise on his torso. He took out the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket.