“That’s assuming you even want to leave this place.”
“What, you think I’m starting to enjoy it here?”
“No. You just couldn’t bear to leave it behind. You’re too scared it might disappear in a cloud of smoke while you’re gone, and you’d come back to a big hole in the ground.”
“You know why I stay-as if I had a choice anyway. Leave now and a family of refugees will be living in my house by the time the war’s over. And with government approval. I’ll be out of a job and, by then, out of money. And probably charged with desertion on top of everything else. Besides, if I can make it through two years of this then I might as well go the distance.”
“For what? The privilege of living here after the war?”
“Why not. It’s my home. Yours too. And if it’s such a good idea to get away why aren’t you sneaking up through the hills?”
“Don’t believe I haven’t thought about it. But right now I’m making money. Real money. Deutschemarks and dollars. To get out I’d need to spend half of it, and wherever I ended up I’d probably have to spend the rest to keep living while I was looking for work. But if this war ended tomorrow I’d be out of here in a shot. Off to Croatia. Or Slovenia. Anything to get out of this place.”
“That’s going to be the time to stay, not leave.”
“You really think so? When’s the last time you took a good, slow walk around your neighborhood.”
“Nobody takes slow walks in my neighborhood anymore.”
“You know what I mean, and you don’t have to take a slow walk to see what I’m talking about. How many of your old neighbors have either been killed or have packed up and gone.”
Vlado shrugged. “Maybe a quarter. Maybe more.”
“Two thirds, more likely, and who moved in after they left? Rurals and refugees. Peasants. All with a chip on their shoulder and an ax to grind. Half of the women wearing headscarves and cursing anybody who’s not just like them. You’re a Catholic with a Muslim wife. Think there’s going to be much tolerance for that around here after the war? Take a look at our government if you’re interested in postwar demo-graphics. The upwardly mobile will be Muslim and politically active, I don’t care how much lip service you hear about a multiethnic society. That died with the first four hundred shells.”
“That’s now. When people don’t have to fight to live, or stand in line for water, or think their children are going to be blown to bits every time they step out the door, they’ll change again.”
“Don’t bet on it. And don’t think these refugees are ever leaving, either. They’ve got it too good. They’re taking all the best jobs, the best empty apartments. And they stick together. When one gets a job so do all his friends and family. Besides, you’re forgetting the way memory works around here. Talked to any old Partisans from the forties who have anything nice to say about the Germans? Or to any old Chetniks who have anything nice to say about Tito? Not to mention the good old fascist Ustasha. This city’s dead, Vlado, and so is everyone in it who sticks around after the fact.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m just too stubborn to admit it.”
“Not stubborn. Sentimental. You’re one of those people who’s dug himself deep into his own little bunker and gone to sleep, thinking that if you can just survive the shelling and the sniping then you’ll be able to wake up in a few years and the sun will come out, your family will come home, and you’ll pick up right where you left off.”
“Not right where I left off. I’m not naive. I know things will be different. I won’t be able to speak the same language as my daughter for one thing.”
“That you can fix. That you can repair in a few months, maybe less. But maybe Jasmina had better be wearing a scarf on her head when she comes back. And if you still have any friends over in Grbavica then you better write them a good-bye letter now, ‘cause they’ll either be moving or they’ll be living behind a wall, one running down by the river with a checkpoint at every bridge. If we’re lucky we’ll be the new Berlin, if we’re not we’ll be the next Beirut.
“You’re one of those poor deluded souls who thinks he’s got this figured out, Vlado, who believes that survival is really all there is to it. That as long as you keep your head down, stay off the bottle, and shave every now and then, you’ll come through this just as you were, with nothing worse than a few bad memories to trouble you in the blissful years of peace that lie ahead. That’s you all over, Vlado, painting your soldiers in the dark and running after your petty criminals.”
“So I should drink, then? Or stop doing my job and join the army? Or maybe whore my way around the city every week or so to let me ‘live’ again. Those are your cures for people like me?”
“You should do anything, is all I’m saying. Any act of temporary insanity will do. Anything that will convince me you don’t really believe you’re still the safe, careful man you thought you were at the beginning of this war. Self-control is a virtue, not a religion. Because in a place like this, any move you make-any move-can get you killed, so why not choose a few with some meaning, some passion. Then maybe you won’t wake up some morning ten years from now and discover you’ve buried yourself alive and there’s no one left to dig you out.”
As Vlado fumbled for a reply the office door opened from the darkened theater, and the ticket-taker’s head popped in. “Your scene’s coming up, Goran.”
“Thanks. Be right there.”
Vlado assumed a quizzical look, in welcome for the interruption, feeling awkward, unsettled. “Your scene? You doing a floor show now?”
“A food scene,” Goran answered sheepishly. “It’s part of the movie, and, well, I never like to miss it. Comes right after the shootout. A huge meal for an American holiday. A bird the size of a hatchback Yugo, glazed and brown. Tureens of hot soup, potatoes, vegetables, pastries. Wine, drinks. It’s only a minute or two, but the whole crowd swoons. You can practically hear the drool splattering on the floor. After that who cares about the plot. I’ve seen it nine times already and I still haven’t had enough.”
He rose abruptly to his feet. “But, listen, I’ll run down this Neven tale and get back to you.”
As he moved to the door Vlado remembered something else.
“One other thing,” Vlado said. “Do you remember hearing anything about Vitas’ mother. Where she is. What she’s up to?”
Goran stopped, a hand on the doorknob.
“Yes, she’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be without having seen the body”
“That’s not much assurance, coming from the expert who once said the war would be over in three months. How reliable’s your source?”
“Pretty reliable. Vitas told me.”
“When?”
“Must have been about a year ago. He’d come round here doing something a little bit like you are, searching the family tree of one hood or another. I asked after his family and he mumbled something about his late mother. Said she’d died a few months earlier. Old folks die, you know, even when there isn’t a war on. Especially when they’re bored and lonely, like you. Please, Vlado, don’t forget to call next week or I’ll come pull you out of your flat myself. And I’ll step on some of those little men while I’m there. Now, off to the dining rooms of New York.”
He opened the door to the sound of squealing tires and Hollywood gunshots, which sounded nothing at all like the sharp crack of a sniper rifle. These were soft little pops, the sound of children making believe.
By the time he left Goran’s it was probably too late to catch Damir at the office, and chances were the phones would be down as well, which rankled because now he had plenty to discuss. They’d have to remap their strategy now. If Glavas was able to deliver as promised, they’d have scores of leads to check out around the city from the transfer files, looking for lost paintings.
When he reached his apartment he was cold and bone-weary, the first time in weeks he’d felt so tired, a sensation he might even
welcome if a hot bath awaited. Instead there was only a dead phone line. The temperature indoors seemed even colder.
He threw open the oven door and turned the knob for the gas, hearing the weak hiss, then lighting it with a match. He made a mental note to scrounge up some more matches. There were fewer than a dozen left in his box.
A feeble blue ring of flame sprang from the burner. As more families tapped into the pipes the pressure continued to drop, and the supply was prone to frequent interruption, sometimes for days at a time. At this rate it would be twenty minutes before he could boil a pot of water, longer still before he’d actually heat even a corner of the apartment.
He walked to the workbench in the corner of the narrow kitchen, fumbling for a few moments with some half-painted soldiers, but his hands were still too stiff for any detail work.
He sliced a piece of the butcher’s meat and chewed slowly, wrapping the rest back in the rough paper, then swigged some water from a plastic milk jug and tore at a stale heel of bread.
He pulled his bed next to the kitchen door, hoping to capture as much of any heat as possible, and decided to leave the oven on all night. It was a risky proposition. If the gas supply was cut the flame would go out, and if the gas were then turned back on, he’d either suffocate or go up in a ball of flame. One or the other event happened about once a week in the city these days, either from a faulty hookup or from a gamble just like this one. It didn’t help that the local utility had long ago exhausted its supply of the additive that gave gas its tell-tale warning scent, nor would the Serbs be sharing any of theirs any time soon.
Vlado mulled the facts of the case as he pulled down an extra blanket from a closet shelf. It was easy enough to figure where the transfer file must have gotten to. Zarko’s people, with connections to General Markovic and God-knew-who-else had carted it away. Perhaps they were even running competing operations. But how had Vitas gotten a card? Was he a part of it, too? Or had he turned up a card in his own investigation. Maybe he’d gotten it in the October raid on Zarko’s headquarters. Neven Halilovic would know the answers, but he was dead. Everyone who seemed to know anything, in fact, was either dead or on the wrong side of the city. The gallery director, Murovic, would be no further help for at least a month, when the UNESCO grant kicked in. Unless Glavas came through, Vlado would be facing a dead end. And as much as Vlado had taken an instant dislike to Murovic, perhaps he was right about Glavas. Maybe all Vlado would end up with would be an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
But why the stories from the butcher and the cigarette man. And why the show of muscle at his shakedown. They fit with each other but with nothing else. Were they simply opportunists trying to make a few marks, and had Kasic been taken in? Perhaps he, too, was in over his head on this case. The word had always been that Vitas was the brains behind the Interior Ministry, and maybe it was true. Goran had made a worthy point. Kasic had always scored higher marks for style than substance. When all was said and done perhaps he was no sharper than Garovic, just another bureaucrat trying to tread water. The initial reports from the undercover men had seemed like a promising path to a quick finish. He was doubtless under plenty of pressure to wrap this one up in a hurry.
Vlado’s teeth chattered as he climbed into bed, stiff and sore. Tonight there was no radio playing next door. One night of fun and then back to conserving the batteries for more vital purposes. He turned his head on the pillow, peering through the kitchen doorway into the open oven, where the ring of blue flame glowed like the footlights of a darkened theater just before the show danced onto the stage. He drifted off to sleep still waiting for the performance, and soon was dreaming of a woman’s face staring at him from a stage, prim and pale, with heart-shaped lips done up a bit too brightly with lipstick. It was a sweet face, but insinuating as well. It was the woman from Glavas’s apartment, in fact. Or was it a mask? No, it was a face, but suddenly it turned a shocking white, and now it stared up at him from the bottom of a stairwell, emitting a muffled watery sound that was too garbled to understand. Yet, he felt, she had a message for him, if only she could articulate it. The woman pursed her lips, then pressed a finger to her mouth, either in mischief or in warning, while he backed away uneasily, uncertain whether to smile or to show concern. Instead he merely kept moving, as if guided by remote control, moving farther up a stairway that grew colder with every step.
CHAPTER 12
A huge explosion jarred him awake. He opened his eyes to a sunny morning and the tremors of an aftershock, something like the rumbling conclusion of a distant thunderclap. He felt for a moment as if someone had sat on his stomach, and he heard objects dropping to the ground outside.
A wave of cold air stole across him, and he saw why when he sat up and looked across the room. His last intact window had been blown in, and was now a pile of gleaming fragments on the living room floor. Several shards had been driven into the opposite wall. Others protruded in clusters from an old blue armchair, like the quills of a porcupine.
He got up to look for a spare roll of plastic stashed in a kitchen closet, and promptly cut his left foot on a shard by the kitchen door. He looked back at his bed and saw that a few pieces had landed across his blanket, but none with enough strength to pierce it. He checked in the bathroom mirror and plucked two or three slivers from his hair.
That’s the way it worked here, he told himself He’d gotten up in the middle of the night to shut down the gas, prodded awake by some deep, urgent fear of being consumed by either suffocation or explosion. Then an explosion had come along anyway from the outside, as if to remind him that precautions didn’t matter. It was all odds and luck, and there was no way to outmaneuver them.
Looking out the gaping window, his hands already numb and his teeth chattering, he surveyed the damage out front as he taped up a sheet of plastic. A neighbor’s apartment was torn open. It had been vacant until the week before, when a family of six had moved in, another wandering band of refugees from some small, overrun town in the hills.
From the damage to the roof and to the front it was obvious a shell had slammed directly into an upper corner of the house-nothing of large caliber, probably only a rocket-propelled grenade, but big enough to do the job, wrecking the front room and blowing out every nearby window that had still been intact. With luck the family had been sleeping in the back. Looking through the opening Vlado saw no bodies, and his inclination was not to go looking for any in the cold, especially with more shells possibly on the way.
But he couldn’t pull himself from the window. There seemed to be no one up and about. He listened closely, cupping his ear, but there were no moans, no cries for help, only the stillness of an early morning with bright sunshine flashing on a new dusting of snow. A hot metallic smell mixed with the usual sharpness of woodsmoke and burning garbage.
He completed the hasty repair of his window, pressing the final strip of duct tape into place. There would be no more morning inventories of the gravediggers, and the thought unexpectedly filled him with a sense of relief, the lightness that follows the completion of any long-dreaded chore.
Then, standing back from his work, he thought again of the family in the next apartment. His window plastic billowed slightly with a fresh breeze, and he shivered. There was still no sound from next door. Someone else would sort it all out later, he told himself. But he decided to take another look, and as he peeled back the new strip of tape there was a voice, a man’s, telling someone to stay inside. Vlado rolled away enough plastic to see a disheveled man, his hair and beard full of plaster dust, walking unsteadily through the hole in the front wall into the snow.
“Everyone all right?” Vlado asked. The man turned robotically, and his eyes briefly fixed Vlado with a blank stare. Thin streams of blood oozed from each of his nostrils, but otherwise he seemed in one piece. The man turned back around without a word, and when another minute passed without a reply, Vlado retaped the plastic over the window.
He should put the water on to boil for c
offee, he told himself, as he turned toward the kitchen. Should tend to his cleaning, should shave and prepare for work. They would be fine out there, whoever they were. And if not, then the hospital would be far better equipped than he to set them right.
A few days earlier he had seen the two smallest children in the family playing out front, a boy and a girl, cooing and laughing as they tugged at a small raggedy doll. He turned toward his door and walked into the snow.
The man he’d seen earlier was visible through the opening of the apartment’s blown-out window. Vlado strolled across the courtyard and over the threshold, and saw that the man was shaking, on the verge of collapse. Vlado grasped him around the shoulders and lowered him into a chair covered with dust and chunks of plaster. A second explosion followed, perhaps a block away, and down a hallway a small child began to wail. Now he could see that there was also a large, ragged hole in the ceiling.
“Come on,” Vlado said sternly. “Those shots are coming from the north, and there will be more of them. You’ve got no protection here, now. Bring your family next door with me until this is over.”
The man still didn’t speak, but he seemed to stir himself, and he walked unsteadily down the hallway toward where the wail had come from a moment ago. He emerged at the head of a straggling column, with his wife trailing the children. They were all as quiet as the father, the four children staring with wide eyes, the mother seeming only weary, as if she’d finally given up.
“Come. Quickly,” Vlado urged them, more to get their muscles moving than from any fear of imminent danger. Often these “bombardments” consisted of no more than two or three shells at a time, flung like scattershot toward random points of the city. Then, having made their statement for the hour, the gunners grew bored and went back to their naps or their card games.
But the sooner this bunch was up and about, Vlado figured, the sooner they’d purge the shock from their systems.
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