The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Prologue - Eastern Bosnia

  CHAPTER ONE - November 1998

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Acknowledgments

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ALSO BY DAN FESPERMAN

  Copyright Page

  For Emma and Will,

  the chairmen of the board

  ACCLAIM FOR DAN FESPERMAN AND The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

  “A wonderful book. . . . Timely, thoughtful and vividly written.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A new standard for war-based thrillers.” —Los Angeles Times

  “[A] keep-em-guessing plot, littered with hidden treasures, international intrigue, lusty old Croatian thugs, and late-night crypt openings.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A dark and morally complex novel.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “A haunting sense of place and enough twists and turns to make the reader giddy. . . . This is not an ordinary thriller, and this is enforced by the precision and the quality of the writing.”

  —The Birmingham Post

  “[An] ambitious, morally complex thriller.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “Fesperman tells his atmospheric tale with great elegance . . . [and] a sharp analytical curiosity.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “[A] fine follow-up to the equally fine Lie in the Dark.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “A well-paced tale of deceit, manipulation and double-crossing.”

  —The Spectator

  Awesome symbols, the Crescent and the Cross;

  their kingdoms are the realms of graveyards.

  Following them down the bloody river,

  sailing in the small boat of great sorrows,

  we must honor the one or the other.

  From the Serbian epic poem

  The Mountain Wreath

  PETAR PETROVIC NJEGOS, 1847

  Prologue

  Eastern Bosnia

  When they came to arrest the general he was polishing his boots, an orderly man to the very end. At least that’s what the soldiers would tell the debriefers and reporters, having found the boots on the bed with a blackened rag, the smell of polish still strong in the air.

  Earlier that morning it had rained, and when the soldiers first assembled in the trees some two hours before dawn the general was asleep. Lulled by the wet drumbeat on his bunker roof, he dreamed of marching, watching a nocturnal parade pass before him—his men, their men, everybody’s men, it seemed, the dead and the wounded among them. They wore bedclothes, he realized with a start, and their feet stirred clouds of dust that coated their skins in chalky gray. He wanted to look away but couldn’t, hypnotized by the tramping feet, row after row of everyone he had ever commanded or fought.

  Then the rain on his rooftop slackened. The sleepwalking legions faded. And when the tinny alarm on his watch sounded a few minutes later, at 5 a.m., the general awakened with the taste of dust sticky in his mouth. He climbed from the bed craving water, drinking straight from the tap, as if he were bivouacked in the field, crouching at some farmer’s spigot.

  The gray light of the mirror revealed a drawn face with bags beneath the eyes, deep creases framing loose jowls. Stubble everywhere. With luck it would be a full beard within a week, though he couldn’t say for sure, never having grown one. He had a high, jutting forehead, peaking with a thick shock of gray in need of a trim, brushed straight back and smelling of the pomade that forever scented his pillow. But the most striking feature was his gray-blue eyes, as clear and cool as stones in a stream, eyes that could convey either rage or resolve without a word being spoken. “Command eyes,” one colonel had called them, and they had watched dozens of offensives come and go before the guns had fallen silent nearly three years ago. It was only later, in the calm of peacetime, that people in other places had decided that his army had exceeded the rules— rules made in their lands, where no one knew the fears and histories that ruled his. And somewhere, he knew, in some room with maps and charts and file drawers stuffed more richly with information than any order of battle, others were still fighting his war. They were still assessing his movements and commands, clucking and shaking their heads, exercising a calm reason that one never had time for in the midst of battle.

  He remembered the heat of those five days that were now the subject of such scrutiny, the hardness of the roads on soles worn thin by four years on the move. Cicadas roared in the spiky underbrush while his men forded the thickets of scrub and low trees, calling out to one another, and to the enemy, too. The town in the eastern valley, so long a problem, had finally fallen, months of stalemate bursting like a worn belt in a tired engine, and during the first night thousands of the panicked foe had broken through to the forest, becoming a long, sinuous column in the darkness. By morning they were running, a herd cut loose with only fear to drive it, and his army joined the chase as if it were a hunt, the rattle of gunfire nonstop.

  The cleverness of his men had astonished him, a rustic ingenuity blooming in the elation of pursuit. Some donned blue helmets—the trademark of the UN “peacekeepers”—luring the skulkers from the trees by shouting through loudspeakers, pledging protection, food, water, a bed to sleep in. Others drove hospital trucks slowly down country lanes past patches of woods, beckoning the wounded out of hiding. We will heal you. We will save you. Give yourselves up and end the struggle. It worked more often than he would have believed.

  The roads were dry. There was nowhere to fill your canteen, and the dust was so heavy that by nightfall of the third day he and his men were coated, ghostly in its whiteness. Too weary to wash, they slept where they halted and swallowed dust in their sleep, and by morning it was the taste of death itself, so they rinsed and scoured with shots of brandy, passing bottles down the line. They grew giddy with the flush of alcohol and the promise of another easy chase; more fighting that would help bring this war to a close. Destroy a hundred of their sons and you saved a hundred of your own. It was an old formula, closed to debate. With any luck they would shut down the bastards for a generation. So they moved back onto the roads and into the trees, clipping their ammunition into place, a sound to get your blood going.

  Late in the final day a messenger arrived with new orders, and the general took fifty of his best men to an empty factory six miles to the rear. The torn innards of its machinery sat rusting on high grass out front, and the big building echoed with voices, a hollow sound leaking from high windows. Hundreds of the enemy were inside, stragglers and quitters, men and boys, eyes lit by fear and exhaustion. The general strolled indoors, and the stench nearly
gagged him, all the sweat and shit and grime mixed with the factory smells of metal and machine oil. The noise was unbearable, too, like the keening of newborn calves. A cordon of his troops stood on one side of the walls next to large sliding doors while an officer in a black beret walked the general to the opposite end. They climbed a cat-walk raised on a steel frame, draped with pulleys and chains, and as the general rose into view the crowd’s noise seemed to rise with him, a swell of echoes appealing incoherently for his mercy.

  “Listen to them, General Andric,” the officer in the beret shouted above the din. “They must think you’re the lord high executioner.”

  The general looked the officer over, scanning the pockmarked face. The man stank of brandy, and a belt of ammunition was draped across his torso like a sash, a risky stunt done only for style. The raked beret was smudged brown across one side. Popovic, his name was. Branko Popovic. A freelance, accountable to no one. The man did know how to fight, after a fashion. He could secure a village, clean it out, and keep moving, and you knew that nothing from that quarter would ever threaten your flanks again. But his methods were, at best, unorthodox, and the general kept his distance when he could, although lately that had become difficult. To his way of thinking, their fortunes had become far too enmeshed.

  The crowd quieted after a minute or so, the men jostling as they sat or squatted on the oily floor, spent from five days in the heat. Sunburned faces turned toward him as if he were about to deliver a speech, and he looked into the eyes of a few, seeing sons and fathers, the rough hands of plowmen and hay balers, the flab of shopkeepers. Boys who needed scolding and a firm hand.

  For a moment he wavered, and Popovic must have sensed it, for the man was suddenly bobbing at his side, gun at the ready. Colonel Popovic, it was, though God knows where the rank had come from. There was nothing about either the man or his unit that said “regular army.” The deep scars of acne and the croaking voice. Two days earlier the general had seen him in a burning village with a column of laughing men, their arms full of stereos, televisions, bottles of whiskey. Some hauled bulging sacks across their backs like Father Christmas, cheeks powdered by the unceasing dust.

  “Take them now, sir, and we’ll never have to fight them again,” Popovic urged. “Let us finish it, sir.”

  The general wanted to laugh at all of the “sirs,” as if suddenly Popovic considered himself a real soldier, and this was their usual way of fighting. For the slightest moment the man’s insolence was more distasteful than the thought of the rabble at his feet. But the orders were clear, so he nodded without turning, not giving the man the satisfaction of verbal acknowledgment.

  The men below must have been watching for a sign, because they began standing, eyes rolling, panic taking hold. Fathers clutched at their boys, and the wailing resumed. The younger men shoved, going nowhere in the crush of bodies. Then an officer shouted, Popovic perhaps, and the shooting began, close and rapid, with no place for the bullets to go but into the meat and the filthy clothes, the shrieking roar and clatter of all that death locked beneath the low metal roof.

  Most of the general’s memory of the moment had gone fuzzy. All that remained sharp was the image of a single face—some farmer or laborer who happened to stand out from the crowd for a split second, his mouth opened as if gasping for breath, then overflowing suddenly with blood, chin covered in red, a gargle of anguish. Everything else was unclear, a miasma of sound and stench. But his memory of the dust remained sharp, and he still tasted it every morning as clearly as if he’d swallowed a spoonful each night before bed.

  The general ducked beneath the faucet for another drink. Then he rechecked his watch—5:08. Timing was important. He mustn’t be late, of course. That would be the end. But acting too early might be fatal as well. He strolled to the high window, the one he always kept open no matter the season, anything to rid the room of the damp concrete smell of a prison. The sky was clearing, moonlight beaming through the tall, slender pines like searchlights. Nothing stirred but a cow, slumped low against a dim bank of underbrush. Even his sentries were quiet, their usual bee buzz of conversation stilled for a change, although he could smell their cigarette smoke, could hear the chirp of a lighter.

  He gazed at the stars, seeking omens in the deepness of the sky. There was no light from any of the houses in the valley, yet he sensed their presence, the red rooftops that climbed the gentle slope like a tile footpath. He inhaled deeply, smelling turned earth, the resinous bite of the pines.

  At times like these the general found it easy to imagine the hills were enchanted, a place where mere farmers and peasants slipped their skins by night to become ogres and knights, gliding into the trees to joust and thrust in secret, writing new chapters in the lore of the forbidden. There were treasures in these fields and forests, for those who knew where to look—old bundles in oilcloth, dormant beneath cabbages and pumpkins, or concealed in the darkness of stables. So much that was buried, not just in his valley but in all of them—plots and secrets just beyond reach of memory. Wait long enough, perhaps, and the moonlight would lay everything bare, melting the cover as if it were snow, at least until morning, when all would again be concealed in the white light of dawn.

  But a soldier would grow old and die waiting for the moonlight to do his work. And old soldiers didn’t die, he mused, nor did they just fade away, as the arrogant American had so famously said. They simply grew slow and fat awaiting the judgment of history, listening alone for the knock of the verdict upon their bunker doors.

  Not him, the general thought, as sure of himself as ever. Not him.

  CHAPTER ONE

  November 1998

  Down in the mud of central Berlin you never knew what you might find. Last week it had been an American bomb, as long and fat as a giant bratwurst. A poor fellow from Poland poked it with a shovel and the whole thing went up. Five more fatalities for the casualty lists of World War II, courtesy of a B-17 that hadn’t flown for half a century.

  Then there was the corpse, or the skeleton, rather, that rose from the ground on the yellow teeth of a backhoe. Probably nobody famous. Just a Russian from 1945 who never made it home, judging by the buttons, the boots, and the rusty helmet. Two efficient men in sport coats and ties hauled him away in a black plastic bag.

  Barbed wire turned up, too, on this landscape of accidental archaeology, but that was of a more recent vintage, left by the East Germans in the path of their long and formidable wall. And sometimes when Vlado Petric trudged through the ooze, he pondered all the German shepherds that had patrolled this narrow strip of land, day after day, year after year. Plenty of their leftover shit mixed in the mire, he supposed, and for all those reasons he spent ten minutes at the end of each workday cleaning the waffled soles of his boots with a screwdriver, prying loose the mud. It was the richest sediment of twentieth-century misery the world had to offer, and he had no wish to track it home. He’d tramped enough to his doorstep already, nearly five years earlier, as one of the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians who’d escaped their own war for some quieter venue across Europe’s sagging theme park of history.

  So, when Vlado and Tomas Petrowski mounted backhoes Monday morning to dig into the muck of Potsdamer Platz, they knew there was always a chance they would unearth some history, even though they were construction workers, not archaeologists. They were the merest of drones, in fact, two among thousands on a landscape that Berlin’s boosters were billing as the world’s largest construction site. Not since Albert Speer unrolled his blueprints for Hitler had the city witnessed such architectural hubris, and tourists with nothing better to do could pay a few deutsche marks to climb the stairs of a red building on stilts at the heart of it all. Indoors there were photos, maps, and charts to see. But the real attraction was out in the elements atop a switchback of corrugated metal stairs. It was a high viewing platform where you could stand in the wind and rain to marvel at it all, to watch the city be transformed from the inside out, as if an alien spaceship had uprooted
a massive high-rise shard of downtown Dallas, and dropped it onto the belly of Europe.

  If you stood there that Monday morning with a set of binoculars, you might have picked out Vlado and Tomas as they went to work, marching toward their backhoes, almost emulating a goose step as they picked their way through the slurping ooze, yellow hard hats bobbing. They were a few hundred yards from the green edge of the Tiergarten, Tomas a short and stubby Pole with the golden hair and beard of a Viking, Vlado of medium build and measured expression, clipped dark hair above deep-set brown eyes, a face that strived mightily to give away nothing. Each wore jeans and a flannel shirt bought from the battered metal stalls of outdoor markets on a gray Saturday morning, and each knew how lucky he was to be working for twelve D-marks an hour, with all the right papers and documents to make it legal.

  Neither spoke the other’s language, but both spoke enough German to grunt and nod their way through a day on the job. Their task was simple enough. Other men drove stakes and markers into the ground, then Vlado and Tomas dug trenches and holes between them, generally working straight through until lunch. At noon they carried brown bags to benches in some damp birch glade of the Tiergarten, as calm and green as an Alpine meadow, then ate their sandwiches and apples, watching rucksacked legions of young Germans glide past on bicycles.

  But this morning, if you’d been patient with your binoculars up there on the viewing platform, you might have noticed an interruption in their routine, shortly before ten, when they shut down their engines and dismounted.

  Tomas had found something.

  The jagged mouth of his backhoe had struck a slab of buried concrete, and out here that meant you’d made a discovery. The rules were clear on what to do next, and both were careful about knowing the rules.

  “Who’s going to tell them?” Vlado asked in his halting German.

  Tomas shrugged. Somewhere in the warren of trailers where the supervisors sat was a keeper of old maps who could put a name to what they’d found. And somewhere in a ministry nearby, in a room with rolled yellowed charts bearing faded swastikas, there was an authority on this subterranean history, an expert in naming and classifying every hibernation chamber where men in gray had once hunkered down for defeat. He was always the one who decided how to proceed, and so far his decisions had never varied: Rebury it and keep building.