The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  Vlado shook his head at the waste and folly. He was nearly as outraged by Matek’s recent behavior as he was by the man’s past. Otherwise you might chalk him up as another bent old man playing chess and trying to forget, wanting to be left alone with his grand-children. This one had never married, never raised a family, and had stayed up to his elbows in the rough work of making money from hardship and corruption. And now Vlado was going to meet him, was going to dangle before him the carrot that he apparently craved most—entrée into the lucrative business of demining.

  Vlado flipped to the last page, an update from only a week ago. Matek seemed to be in excellent health, based on the account of a World Bank official who’d paid him a call to inquire uneasily about the state of the grant. It now seemed he was Internet-ready, if still a bit rough around the edges in his countrified manner, offering great quantities of charred meat and strong drink. Glass after glass of rakija. His security people seemed to have made quite an impression—several men with large guns, a guardhouse at the gated entrance—and he was seldom seen in Travnik without a bodyguard, unless he was meeting women. One woman in particular, the wife of the mayor from a neighboring village, seemed to have drawn most of his recent attentions.

  Vlado stretched, checking his watch. The half hour had come and gone, and through the glass he saw Pine with Benny, in deep discussion. He put the report back in its folder, leaving it on Pine’s desktop and opening the office door.

  Benny saw him first, looking up with that glint of mischief that Vlado had already decided he liked.

  “So, ready to join up?” he asked.

  Before Vlado could answer, a commanding voice interrupted from another direction.

  “Pay no attention to him. He’ll have you believing we’re nothing but a bunch of misfits. Welcome aboard, Vlado. I’m Phillip Spratt, head of investigations.”

  Another hand to shake, as Vlado tried to puzzle out the accent.

  “From Australia,” Spratt said without prompting. “Volunteered. Like pretty much everyone in the building. Fifty-six countries and most every wart and flaw of their legal systems, all under one roof. And, yes, I know the rest of you have heard this little speech, but Vlado hasn’t.”

  Spratt had a wide face that looked hard enough to cause mortal injury if you were to run up against it, a grooved oaken forehead beneath a widow’s peak of coppery bristle. Pine, only half joking, had told Vlado that the only reliable indicator of the man’s mood was the patch of skin beneath his ears—tiny thermometers where the color rose whenever he was building to a boil. For the moment they seemed to be at midlevel red. The crowd around him had gone silent.

  “Has Pine given you the grand tour yet?” Spratt asked.

  “Haven’t had time,” Pine answered.

  “You should take a look at our courtrooms while you’re here. Quite impressive.”

  “And both of them look like the bridge of the starship fucking Enterprise,” Benny piped up, “only with wood paneling.”

  Everyone laughed uneasily. Benny seemed to be the only one who could get away with such an interruption. But before Spratt could respond, another voice rang out, a sharp fluting sound like the most reckless sort of music. Vlado spotted the rising flush below Spratt’s ears and correctly surmised that the big boss must have arrived.

  “Ah, there you are, Mr. Petric. Freshly arrived, I trust. I’m Hector Contreras, the chief prosecutor. Almost as new to this place as you.”

  Vlado’s immediate impression was that Contreras was a gentleman of means, yet also a gossip and an intriguer. He would have been hard-pressed to say exactly why. There was something of the rake in the man’s glance, which came at you from an angle, a slight tilt of the head, as if he’d been looking at something to your left and swiveled his eyes just in time to catch you red-handed. He couldn’t have been dressed any snappier, in a tailored navy suit with lapels and pockets cut like racing stripes, set off by a red handkerchief peeping from the front pocket. He wore a small mustache—a gigolo’s mustache seemed the only way to describe it, again, for reasons Vlado couldn’t name. By now a few others had drifted over from their desks for the show, and ten faces were turned toward Vlado, awaiting his response. Hardly what he was used to at the construction site.

  He blushed, then blurted a muffled “Honored, sir,” feeling self-conscious, as if his English had suddenly stiffened into the worst sort of Balkan caricature.

  Contreras responded with quick grace and warmth. “The honor is mine. A good man in a tight spot, and incorruptible into the bargain. That’s what I’ve heard so far, and I’m only expecting to hear more of the same. You’ll be coming to dinner tonight, of course?”

  “Of course.” Vlado tried to hide his surprise. Pine looked shocked. Then Spratt, whose ears had gone tomato red, spoke up.

  “Sir, I was just about to invite them. I only got word myself in the past hour.”

  Vlado saw Benny smirking.

  “No matter,” Contreras said. “All’s well now, and I trust I’ll see the three of you at seven for cocktails. Drinks will be an open affair, with assorted members of the diplomatic community, the sort of people we have to keep happy if we’re to pay the light bill. Then we’ll shoo them away and shut the doors for the need-to-know crowd, everything off the record. Sort of a combination debriefing and get-acquainted session. I decided it would be just the right atmosphere for kicking off, well, such a grand event.”

  “Grand event, huh?” said Benny, who apparently would cut in on anyone’s conversation. “Tell us more.”

  Contreras beamed his rake’s smile while Spratt glared at Benny. “All will become clear soon enough. It will be part of the new order around here, and down there as well. But for the moment, I’m sure the rest of you know enough to say nothing of these matters outside this building. Understood?”

  There was a round of small nods and muttered assents.

  “Very well.”

  Contreras turned on his heels and strolled away, in the manner of a particularly flamboyant butler. It was no surprise he’d been a judge, for he obviously enjoyed performance. Vlado could easily imagine him playing to a jury or a press gallery.

  The investigators straggled back to their desks, but Pine was in a panic. “Did you bring a suit?” he asked Vlado.

  Vlado shook his head. “I thought we’d be traveling light.”

  “You figured right, but we’d better get you one.” He scanned the room for possible donors, then checked his watch. “C’mon. We’ll hop a tram into town. We’ll expense-account it. Contreras can put it on his goddamn party budget. Got a white shirt?”

  “One.”

  “One’s enough. Let’s roll.”

  They headed for the heart of town. Every seat was taken, so they held the overhead straps, swaying with the turns and bumps while Vlado stooped to look out the windows. It was charming, in its way, this toy-town layout of bricks and bicycles. There were cheese shops brimming with red waxen wheels the size of bus tires, greengrocers with taut bright awnings, and the curtains of every home were thrown open boldly to the evening, lamplight pooling on the sidewalks out front. But the sense of order was almost unnerving— every brick in place, all those black bicycles wheeling in sync. Most of the faces in the street seemed as humorous as the glowering statues in the park, seeming to disapprove of all they beheld. He wondered how Pine fit in here, a sprawling American with his unruly hair.

  They reached their stop, walking a few blocks to a men’s shop where Pine said he sometimes bought shirts. Pine employed his halting Dutch to explain their shortage of time, and a high-strung clerk quickly measured Vlado while fretting that this was no way to buy such a fine suit. He laid out a few choices on a counter while Pine thumbed through a rack of ties.

  “I better get you up to speed on what to expect at this cocktail hour,” Pine said. “Haven’t seen the guest list, but it will probably be a minefield. Here, this tie ought to do.”

  It was a bold red with gold paisley. Vlado frowned.
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  “Trust me. Go with red. Power color. Half the people there will want to pigeonhole your politics within the first five minutes, and the ones who disagree will try to eat you alive. How much have you been keeping up with the state of play back home?”

  “In Bosnia?”

  “Not Germany, that’s for sure.”

  “A little. Sounds like it hasn’t changed much since I left. Same parties with the same stupid views.”

  “I was talking more about the people really running the show. The high representative’s office. The EU. NATO. All the NGOs and internationals. You know?”

  Vlado didn’t.

  “I’ll give you the short version. At the top you’ve got the high representative. Mostly a Euro perspective and bureaucratic as hell. He’s supposedly just overseeing things, letting the national governments and parties do their stuff. But his people control a lot of hard currency and tell the NGOs and aid agencies what they can and can’t do, so who’s really the boss now? Here, try the blue one.” He’d grabbed a dark blue suit from the rack, tossing it onto the other three. Vlado saw the old salesman blanching at the brisk treatment of his merchandise but biting his tongue. Guilders were guilders.

  “Then there’s SFOR. Benny’s feelings are pretty representative on that topic, but they’re still the biggest army. The international police force is around, too. Powerless. Might as well not be there.

  “Then you’ve got local police, your old employers, but with three separate ethnic breakdowns, and with the civil side and the Interior Ministry side, the old MUP people who will still lock you up for your politics if you’re not careful.”

  Vlado glanced up, shaking out his sleeves. This one would do. He nodded to the clerk while Pine continued.

  “Somewhere at the margins of all this you’ve got the private investors, all trying to make a buck while looking as altruistic as possible, and yes, I know I’m going fast. Here’s a tie you can live with. Red and boring, perfect. Strap it on. What’s that one cost, sir, sixty guilders?”

  The salesman nodded without a word, not wanting to interrupt the flow of commerce.

  “Nationality matters, too. The French don’t trust the Americans, the Americans don’t trust the French, and any Yank will run like hell at the slightest whiff of anyone from Iran, Afghanistan, or Morocco, the old suppliers of the mujahedeen forces who technically aren’t supposed to be there anymore, even if everyone knows the holy warriors never went away completely. The Scans are pretty much everywhere, doing good and keeping quiet in the usual Scan way. All the Germans want is to get in and out without having any soldiers caught painting swastikas, which has already happened, so too bad for them. The French want to give the Serbs an even break but without upsetting the balance next-door in Kosovo. The Brits want to make it look like they’re independent from the Americans, only without pissing off the Americans.”

  “And the Americans?”

  “Oh, the Americans ask very little. We only want the greatest amount of influence for the least amount of money and aggravation. Anything complicated is the high representative’s problem, and the lower you go down that food chain the more likely you’ll find one of their people hanging out with local bureaucrats, the kind who always have their hands in somebody else’s pockets. So things get murky. Sometimes even dangerous. Three people dead behind a gas station and you don’t know why. Then a week later ownership papers change hands on a dozen local storefronts. And one of the new owners is somebody like our guy Matek. Throw in a few dozen leftover warlords with various cuts of the black market, plus some rabblerousers who didn’t get quite enough of the war, then overlay that with the usual thieves and drug barons, including a few radical Muslims and some interlopers from the Albanian heroin trade, and that pretty well sums up the state of play. Homesick yet?”

  “Sounds like business as usual in the Balkans.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Vlado pulled his own trousers back on. The shopkeeper had pinned the new pair and handed them to a tailor in the back, where you could hear the thrum of a sewing machine. A few minutes later the tailor, pins in his mouth, hustled the suit back up front, where the dizzied clerk waited to be rewarded with a tribunal credit card.

  “Okay,” Pine said. “We’re cutting it kind of close. Better catch our tram. You can change at the hotel, and I’ll swing by and get you at quarter to seven.”

  “That should give me just enough time to check in with Jasmina.”

  “Which reminds me,” Pine said, suddenly looking sheepish. “No outside calls. They’ve put a stop order on the phone in your room. Operational security. Which I know must sound pretty lame with all the blabbing you’ve already heard. But no calls home till we’re done.” Then, in a softer tone: “I really am sorry.”

  Vlado felt a flush of anger. The last thing he wanted to do was make Jasmina worry. “You might have told me earlier. Jasmina will assume the worst.”

  “Spratt told me not to, until now. I can have one of the secretaries call. She’ll tell Jasmina everything’s okay but that she won’t hear from you for a while.”

  “What else haven’t you told me?”

  Pine frowned. “Not much. But by late tomorrow you’ll know everything.”

  Vlado, holding the new clothes across his arm like a valet, knew that this should set off alarms. He’d heard these kinds of assurances before. Nothing good ever came of them. But he felt powerless to protest.

  “Look, I’m not happy with this part of it, either,” Pine said. “If it were up to me, I’d have outlined the whole thing for you back in Berlin. You’ll just have to trust me.”

  Vlado had taken that kind of advice before, too. The last time it had nearly gotten him killed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Contreras had found himself a big brick home on the edge of a park, the grandest residence to date of any of the chief prosecutors, and he liked to show it off. This would be Pine’s third visit. The first two were for staff cocktail parties, where the investigators and prosecutors turned themselves into genteel drunks, padding about on Oriental rugs while immigrant waiters replenished their drinks. No one seemed to know quite how to react to these events with their crystal glasses and bottomless booze, but with every sip they uneasily hoped the tribunal wasn’t footing the bill. The smart money said the Peruvian embassy was paying the freight, gratified to have their man in such a high-profile position. But some believed it was Contreras himself.

  The story on Contreras was that he’d married into a rich family, a wealth that not only bought him into the Peruvian judiciary but also kept him living in grand style. The tale had assumed enough heft and substance to keep the staff drinking without guilt. But for most of them the novelty had worn off.

  Vlado would rather have spent the evening locked in a room with files and briefing papers, reading more about their suspect. Instead he was strolling up a brick walkway in his new suit, smelling the resin of the tall pines in the raw November evening.

  The red-and-white flag of Peru was hanging out front, as if this were a consular home and Contreras its resident poo-bah. A waiter opened the door, bowing slightly and gesturing toward a large room to the side where Vlado glimpsed white tablecloths and silver platters. Already there was a buzz of conversation, the tinkle of ice cubes in glasses. Brushed and bald heads gathered beneath the shimmer of a grand chandelier.

  Vlado felt calm enough, considering. He gave a final tug at the knot of his tie. The suit did wonders for the general impression he made, it seemed. Already people reacted as if his IQ was forty points higher than when he wore the mud and denim of Berlin.

  “If anyone asks who you are, say ‘staff’ unless I introduce you,” Pine muttered. “Try to stay close by. And if the waters get too deep, just smile a lot and laugh at their jokes.”

  Vlado doubted one could get into much trouble here. The scene struck him more as an overly stuffy reception, something that an archbishop might put on, or some government official who’d just been promoted beyond hi
s capabilities.

  A deep voice came at them from behind.

  “Calvin, you’re starting to look bored at these things already.” Pine tensed, and Vlado turned to see Spratt, who seemed just as stiff as he had in the office. Unwinding didn’t seem to be part of the man’s repertoire. “So, all squared away for tomorrow?”

  “More or less,” Pine said. “A little more time to prepare Vlado might have been nice.”

  “I suspect he’ll do fine. And you’ll have more time to bring him up to speed once you’re in Sarajevo.”

  Vlado thought he saw an odd look pass between them, and he wondered what it was all about. Having missed lunch, he grabbed a handful of peanuts from a nearby bowl. A waiter swooped in to pour wine; Spratt waited for him to depart, then glanced around for eavesdroppers and lowered his voice.

  “Now, if the French will just hold up their end with Andric,” Spratt continued, “we’ll be in business. You boys can do your bit and be back in a matter of days.”

  “So, you really think it will be that easy?” Pine asked.

  “The way we’ve got it sketched it would seem to be a foolproof operation.”

  “I just hope we’re not underestimating the old man.”

  “Not as long as we get him away from the bodyguards. Which is where you come in, Vlado. That’s what makes you indispensable. I’m more worried about rounding up all our witnesses on Andric. We’re still holding out for Popovic as the star, but apparently nobody has seen the man in more than a month.”

  Vlado nearly choked on a peanut at the mention of Popovic. He half expected Spratt and Pine to turn toward him to spring the trap, demanding an explanation. But if this exchange was for his benefit, they were disguising it well.