The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  An absurd vision of the scene sprang to Vlado’s mind, a twisted parody of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam—outstretched hands meeting in midair—and the thought made him laugh, dragon smoke bursting from his nostrils as the New Yorker receded, grinning as if he understood and approved.

  “I’m Benny,” he whispered, cupping a hand over the mouthpiece. “Welcome to the zoo.”

  Then he resumed his verbal assault. “Yeah, yeah. Yeahhhh. Well, if that’s the case, then you tell your boss . . .” A pause, then he shook his head impatiently. “Then you tell your captain, you tell him we’re not just a bunch of scared-shitless bureaucrats rolling over at the first sign of more paperwork, or every time some local warlord waves a gun at us, and that we’re coming after this little shit down in your sector whether you’re with us or not.”

  By now sweat was beading on Benny’s forehead, reminding Vlado of condensation on an overworked refrigerator, which seemed appropriate enough because, for all his bluster, Benny struck him as a cool customer, someone who’d be imperturbable in the field. Vlado would love to see how he dealt with stubborn checkpoints, or paper-stamping officials who tried to slow him down.

  Pinned on Benny’s desk under his right elbow was a thick document with a bright blue cover. The boldfaced word INDICTMENT printed at the top. He folded open a page as Vlado scooted closer for a look, able to read a paragraph at the bottom:

  The accused, often assisted by camp guards, usually shot detainees at close range in the head or back. Often, the accused and camp guards forced the detainees who were to be shot to put their heads on a metal grate that drained into the Sava River, so that there would be minimal cleanup after the shootings. The accused and guards then ordered other detainees to move the bodies to one of two disposal areas where the bodies were piled until they were later loaded onto trucks and taken to mass graves.

  Benny saw Vlado looking and slid more papers his way, with a quick nod that said “Get a load of this.”

  WHEREABOUTS was the heading. It was a list of indicted suspects not yet in custody, a sort of scorecard put together by some group calling itself Balkan Watch. There were six pages in all, covering about forty men. Vlado read the first one:

  CESIC, Nenad. Crimes against humanity, murder, rape. Frequents the Club Markala restaurant in Zvornik. Lives at home, works for local reserve police. Shares red Honda motorbike with cousin, also under indictment. Both often seen riding through town.

  He flipped to another page:

  GOJKO, Dragan. Crimes against humanity, torture. In June 1998 was working as a police trainer in school in Prijedor. Owns the Express bar, where Momcilo Zaric (also indicted, see below) often drinks.

  He found Zaric a few paragraphs later.

  Crimes against humanity, murder, rape. Nicknamed “Juka.” Drinks rakija every morning around 10 o’clock at Krsma bar. Can be seen in town driving blue VW Golf. Passes local International Police headquarters every day on his way home.

  Vlado glanced at Benny to make sure he wasn’t watching, then scanned the pages until he found the entry he sought. Just reading the name made his pulse quicken.

  POPOVIC, Branko. Genocide, crimes against humanity, torture. Commander “Popi’s Lions” paramilitary unit. Believed in Kosovo. Often seen at bar of Hotel Grand, or driving black Toyota Land Cruiser. May live in military barracks in Pristina, but also has home in Belgrade. Frequently travels in Europe. Confirmed sightings since January ’98 in Zurich, Augsburg. Unconfirmed sightings in Vienna, Berlin.

  The Berlin reference made him flinch. But there was nothing more. No mention of witnesses, addresses, or a possible disappearance. He checked the date on the front. The report was two weeks old, and who knew how old the sightings were? Whoever had visited Haris’s apartment had done so since this report had been updated.

  Benny was raising his voice again, seemingly working himself toward the finale.

  “You wanna be at his house? Then be at his fuckin’ house. You wanna sit on your ass at a checkpoint and listen for gunshots? Then you do that. ’Cause we’re coming, SFOR or no SFOR, and all the military industrial ass draggin’ in the world ain’t gonna stop us, okay? . . . I said, Okay?” Pause. “Hello?” He squeezed his eyes shut, then roared, “Christ! These fuckin’ phones! How these people ever gonna have a country if they don’t have decent phones? Man!” He slammed down the receiver, shaking his head. “Five minutes of prime reaming-out wasted. I think I even had the guy on the verge of ordering up an operation for us. Or at least thinking about it.” He sighed. “Either way, I feel a helluva lot better than I did five minutes ago.”

  Then he looked up with an exasperated grin that said he’d loved every minute. “Benny Hampton,” he said. “You must be Pine’s Bosnian. Not that I’m supposed to know or anything. But, hey, I am team leader, so I guess I ought to be able to find out a few things around here. Although if Spratt hears about that last conversation, I may not be team leader much longer.”

  By then Pine had returned, throwing his jacket on the back of a chair and placing two steaming cups of coffee on the desk.

  “Benny, Benny, Benny,” Pine said with some affection, the accent sounding mild after two minutes of hearing the New Yorker. “How many times do you have to be told? SFOR is our friend. Just like IFOR was our friend, and UNPROFOR before them.”

  “Yeah, the army of a thousand names,” Benny muttered. “Give ’em another year and they’ll change it again. They oughtta call’em WHAT-FOR, then maybe somebody’ll figure they’ve been doin’ nothin’ all along. Sitting around all day watching our suspects have a beer.”

  Vlado knew the acronyms well. During the war the troops wore blue helmets and drove white armored vehicles, working for UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force. After the peace agreement they painted their helmets and vehicles green and were joined by twenty-four thousand better-armed Americans, renaming themselves IFOR, the Implementation Force, which in a year or so shrunk by a few thousand soldiers and became SFOR, the Stabilization Force.

  “You know how it goes, Benny,” Pine said. “We’re just not a vital part of the mission statement. Oh, and Vlado, sorry, but no smokes up here. This is World Health Organization territory, not the Balkans. You’ll have to snuff it out or take it to the canteen.”

  “Fuckin’ SFOR,” Benny was still muttering. “Fuckin’ NATO. Biggest and baddest army in Bosnia and they can’t even get it up to roust a hungover old Serb in his pajamas. The guy hasn’t had a bodyguard for two years and he’s still listed as ‘at large.’ He must pass through a couple of their checkpoints a day, and all they do is wave.”

  “Then you go roust him, Benny.”

  “Hey, I aim to. That’s what I was telling them I’m gonna do. He probably knew I was bluffing, but with this new mandate from Contreras, who knows? Maybe I’ll even get the chance. Can’t be any worse than goin’ into some project in the Bronx. I’ll handcuff him and drag him halfway to Budapest if they let me.”

  “Which they won’t. Contreras talks a good game, but he’s no more likely to run a cowboy operation than the others. If he starts a firefight where SFOR’s got to ride to the rescue, they’ll never lift a finger for us again.”

  “Lotta difference that would make.”

  “But never mind that, Benny. Say hello to Vlado Petric. Vlado, meet Benny Hampton, who thinks he’s still banging heads back in Brooklyn.”

  “The Bronx, for Chrissakes. Yeah, we sorta met, but this makes it official.”

  Vlado grasped his outstretched hand. It was hot and springy, like a warm ball of dough.

  “So you’re the guy who pissed off half of Sarajevo on your way out the door. And you let this backwoods yahoo Pine talk you into going back?”

  “Thanks for making my life easier, Benny.”

  “Well, if you need help while you’re down there, give me a shout on the cell phone. I’ll be in the field for the next week or so, if you end up anywhere near Vitez.”

  “That’s Benny’s little way of trying to find out
what we’re up to and where we’re going. But we’ll keep your offer in mind, Benny.”

  Pine steered Vlado toward his own office, in an opposite corner.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Benny called after them. “Get out the secret decoder ring and I’ll just move on. What are you guys up to anyway that even the team leader can’t know? I’ve been hearing all week that something hinky was in the works.”

  “Hinky?” Vlado asked.

  “Screwball,” Benny clarified. “Something that’s not quite right. For one thing, I hear even the French are involved. Those lovely guys who let Mr. Karadzic get away last year.”

  “Is that true?” Vlado asked, amazed to hear that one of the biggest suspects of all, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs, had even come close to capture.

  “Maybe,” Pine said, glaring at Benny. “But we’re really not supposed to talk about it, are we?”

  “But we will anyway, now that you’re one of us,” Benny muttered. “There was a raid planned, but it never came off ’cause some French major tipped Karadzic. Late summer of ’97, and talk about the shit hitting the fan.”

  “May have tipped him off,” Pine said. “And there may have been a raid planned.”

  “The French were supposed to court-martial the major. Instead they posted him to a desk in Paris. Not bad, huh? And now I hear you guys are actually going to work with them. Can’t wait to see how that turns out.”

  “Loose lips sink ships, Benny.”

  “Tell that to the French major. Sounds like his ship made it home okay.”

  Pine shot Benny another look that said he’d been talking out of school long enough.

  “The file you need to see is on my desk,” Pine said, steering Vlado toward his door. “Go ahead and use my office awhile. We won’t be here long enough to get you a desk of your own. Suspect’s name is still confidential as far as anyone else is concerned.”

  He glanced significantly at Benny, who grinned and offered a parting shot. “Don’t worry, Pine. I get the message. Good to meet you, Vlado. If we don’t have time for a cold one before you hit the road, maybe we’ll meet up in-country.”

  Vlado stepped through the door. Like Benny’s desk, Pine’s was a jumble of files and papers. Pine had a window, with a view of tram tracks and a narrow brick street. Posted next to the window was a bright blue calendar with pictures of smiling young men above a basketball schedule for the University of North Carolina. The grinning players faced directly across the room to an opposite wall, where a row of unsmiling men from Bosnia stared back in black and white. It was a wanted poster of five suspects, enough to form their own basketball team. Pine noticed Vlado looking at it.

  “My biggest case,” he said. “Massacre in the Lasva Valley in April ’93. Two in custody, three at large. But for the moment”—he opened a manila folder on the desktop, revealing a few single-spaced sheets—“here’s our man. This is just the summary. There will be more to read later. Army-intelligence files, old diplomatic cables. Some of it’s still beyond even my security clearance for the moment. But this will get you started.” He checked his watch. “You’ve probably got half an hour.”

  Vlado eased into Pine’s chair and relaxed. Reading case files used to be drudgery. Now it seemed like a privilege. He’d never much cared for paperwork, as if anyone did, but he had always enjoyed spreading the facts before him late at night as an investigation unfolded, watching characters and plots take shape by the light of a single lamp in an empty office, looking for patterns and anomalies, feeling the excitement of moving toward a solution while the city around him slept.

  He took the sheet of paper in his hands and eased back into his past as if he were seated at his old desk, up on the fourth floor, a brown glass building on the south bank of the Miljacka River, a cup of Husayn’s terrible coffee steaming at the ready. He looked up, glancing at Pine’s calendars and notepads, as if to reassure himself he hadn’t really slipped through some time warp. Then, smiling to himself, a little giddy, he began reading, happily back at work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The suspect’s name was Pero Matek, and his recent history sounded all too familiar. He was your garden-variety wartime thug and profiteer, quick to recognize opportunity amid war and chaos. Vlado had seen them by the dozen in Sarajevo during the siege, so he already viewed this one with weary distaste.

  It was the man’s earlier history that fascinated him. Vlado, like most of his generation, had been taught only broad-brush treatments of World War II, set pieces of Titoist heroism and selfless sacrifice by the People and the Partisans, a united front of Communist rebels battling Nazis and a few scattered traitors, mostly local fascists and royalists, the Ustasha and the Chetniks. If the recent war had taught him anything, it was that the truth was usually a lot more complicated.

  Matek was born Pero Rudec in a remote section of Herzegovina in March 1923. That would make him seventy-five. He grew up on a farm, attended public schools, and at age sixteen enrolled in a military academy training officers for the federal army.

  Matek was a Croat, and during his teens he joined the nationalist Ustasha movement, the tinhorn fascists who eventually threw in their lot with the Nazis. Hitler was their ticket to statehood, and at age eighteen Matek was among the thousands of cheering people in Zagreb on April 10, 1941, to welcome the declaration of Croatian independence under puppet dictator Ante Pavelic. By then Matek had joined Croatia’s Home Defense Army, and he was soon promoted to lieutenant during action in early 1942 in the Kosarev Mountains, a brutal campaign of killing and burning in northern Bosnia, notorious for its forced conversions of thousands of Muslims and Orthodox Christian Serbs to Catholicism. On a few occasions, Serbs who remained unconvinced had been burned alive in their churches.

  In the spring of 1942 Matek was wounded in the right shoulder, putting him out of commission for a month and resulting in a transfer to lighter duty at Jasenovac, the infamous concentration-camp complex on the Sava River. There he commanded a squadron of guards who distinguished themselves, if that was the word for it, as particularly brutal and efficient, not only in their duties at the camp but in raids on nearby towns and villages, looting and killing and rounding up the usual suspects. In 1945 he was promoted to major. His trail became murky in April, the last month of the war.

  One report said he’d headed north with several thousand other fleeing soldiers and civilians, a group that suffered heavy losses to ambushes and outright massacres by Partisans and Soviet troops. Other reports placed him in a convoy of trucks that left Zagreb with weapons and certain “assets of the State.” This version branched into three further trails, like a legend that has grown and become embroidered in years of retelling. One variation had him and a pair of others making it safely to Wolfsberg, Austria, with their cargo, sheltering in a monastery before being taken into custody by the British. The second said they abandoned their vehicles at a mountain pass near the Austrian town of Liezen. The third said Matek had been one of the few to survive a Partisan ambush near the Slovenian town of Maribor.

  Whatever the case, after four months on the run he ended up in Austria, where the British sent him to a displaced-persons camp in Italy near the town of Fermo. With him were some twenty thousand other temporarily stateless people, mostly from Croatia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The DP camps were way stations for the millions of Europe’s homeless, people who’d been shoved aside by armies or freed from concentration camps, and the living conditions were notoriously bad. The camps were also popular hiding places for war criminals, officers and administrators who shed their uniforms and identities to try to blend with the masses.

  The risk of this strategy was that you might be lost and forgotten for months at a time, susceptible to disease and malnutrition. Or someone might recognize you, or discover something among your papers that would give you away, unless you had friends who could come up with new documents or a way out.

  Matek apparently had such help, although it was slow in arriving. He spent nine months a
t Fermo before being released to Rome, into the custody of the Pontifical Relief Commission for Refugees. In Rome he took a job in the offices of the Confraternita di San Girolamo degli Illirici, where a Croatian brotherhood of Franciscan priests ran efforts to assist their wandering countrymen, with a headquarters on the right bank of the Tiber, only a mile or so from the walls of the Vatican.

  The priests there were anti-Tito, anti-Communist, anti-anyone who might want to dig up old secrets about their friends. They secured a new set of identity papers for the newly named Matek, who shed his old name of Rudec.

  He stayed in Italy until 1961, a few years after Pope Pius XII died. Afterward, it seems, many of the more questionable Croatian émigrés began to wear out their welcome. Matek repatriated to Yugoslavia under his new name. He apparently made it across the border without incident, resettling in the central Bosnian town of Travnik, quite a distance from where he’d grown up, and well away from anywhere he’d served during the war. And that’s where he remained, having done well for himself in the interim. There was no reference to how his true identity had suddenly surfaced after all these years, but apparently his neighbors were still none the wiser.

  The recent war had afforded him unprecedented opportunities for expansion of his various enterprises, and he now owned a string of gasoline stations and had managed to win several UN and EU reconstruction grants—some $200,000 worth to date—with some of it actually going toward the rebuilding of homes. A Norwegian grant intended to help rebuild a local soft-drink distributorship had somehow been diverted to help rebuild a local beer-and-liquor distributorship—the largest in the region, in fact, owned by Mr. Pero Matek. And practically none of a year-old World Bank economic-development loan of $100,000 to stimulate local employment had yet been spent on its intended purpose. World Bank officials were now convinced that the borrower would default. Too much overhead and red tape, it seemed. Too many unrealistic expectations. Though the borrower was doing all he could, of course.