The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  “Just as long as you decide to play him someday,” Pine said.

  LeBlanc turned toward Vlado. “It has been a pleasure, Monsieur Petric. And only the first of many meetings, I hope.”

  “My pleasure as well.”

  They watched him stroll away.

  “Kind of a prick, isn’t he?” Pine said. “But for some reason I like him anyway. Not that I’d trust him as far as you could throw him.”

  “I don’t think he trusts you, either.”

  Pine laughed. “Which I guess you wouldn’t be telling me if you didn’t trust me a little. Or maybe you’re just too tired to care.”

  It was a curious thing to say, Vlado thought, and he tried to get a read on Pine’s expression. It seemed almost wistful. Vlado sipped his drink and felt his face flush as the alcohol worked deeper into his system. He told himself to slow down. The weight of the day was settling into his legs, and there was still plenty to do, plus an early departure in the morning. In little more than twelve hours they would be landing in Sarajevo. He would be home. Home with uncertain company and a strange job to do, but home nonetheless.

  “Christ,” Pine said. “Now Harkness is heading this way.”

  “The one in the little bow tie?”

  “Yes. Likes to think he’s virtually British after all his years abroad. Says things like ‘chap’ and ‘old boy.’ ‘Petrol’ instead of ‘gasoline.’ When he’s in tweeds you’d think he’d just been shooting birds on a country estate. He’s no dandy, though. He’ll walk right into a firefight in eight-inch boots, like the Great White Hunter on safari.”

  Vlado watched the man approach. He would guess that the man was in his late forties, a little older than LeBlanc. His cheeks were red, and he tilted his nose into the air as if he were the most perspicacious of bloodhounds.

  “Hello, Calvin. Good to see you, old boy.”

  “Hello, Paul. Meet Vlado Petric.”

  “Yes, the last honest man in the Balkans. How does it feel?”

  “Like you’re having a little fun with me.”

  “Well parried. But merely my hyperbolic way of opening with a compliment.”

  By now Vlado was feeling a burst of spark and spite, having been under inspection for nearly an hour. “At least you haven’t given me the ancient-hatreds lecture about what’s gone wrong in my country,” he said.

  “Oh, ancient hatreds is quite passé these days, old boy. Now it’s all economic opportunism and the wrath of Milosevic. We Americans like to personalize our conflicts. Makes it easier to sell them to the vox populi. Stalin. Saddam. Slobodan. They all have a certain ring to them, don’t you think? And if old Slobo is ever in the dock, I’m sure we’ll come up with a new one. We’re gradually making the transition from Marx to Mohammad, which makes Bosnia all the more interesting, seeing as how we’ve thrown in our lot with the Muslims.”

  He had a good laugh at himself, going red in the face, then said, “You’ll have to get used to a more rustic sense of humor if you’ll be hanging around Pine much. North Carolina boy. Surprised you can even understand him through the accent.”

  “What Mr. Harkness is trying to say is that I’m not Ivy League. I’m public school, just not in the British sense.”

  “Easy, Calvin. LeBlanc must have gotten things off on the wrong foot.”

  Someone across the room began banging a fork against a glass. It was Contreras, resplendent in a dark suit with a red boutonniere, beaming at his audience.

  “If our dinner guests will please begin retiring to the dining room. And may I wish the rest of you a very pleasant evening.”

  The milling crowd split like an amoeba, one part shuffling toward their coats, the rest pulling slowly toward an opening of two sliding doors to another chandeliered room, longer and narrower, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto a garden gone dim in the night. As Vlado began scanning the table for his place card, a voice whispered into his ear from behind. It was Harkness, still hovering.

  “I’d like a moment with you later, if you get a chance. It’s about a mutual friend of ours.” His breath reeked of gin. “No need for Calvin to listen in, if it’s all the same to you. Enjoy your dinner.”

  The remarks unsettled Vlado, and it was a relief to finally tuck himself into a chair, where no one could buttonhole him for further conversation. He’d spent the past hour being reminded of what it was about his old job that he hadn’t missed. The office politics and maneuvering. Trying to say the right things while pondering the deeper meaning of offhand comments. Two days ago he’d only had to worry about getting his German right while ordering a wurst and fries. Now he was answering to lawyers and diplomats. He checked his flanks—the head of operations to his right, a prosecutor he hadn’t met to his left. The only person who could ambush him from the rear would be a waiter.

  The meal was excellent—roast lamb with potatoes, salad, and string beans—although Vlado seemed to be the only one eating with relish. The others seemed bored with such fare, but they hadn’t been living on a ditchdigger’s salary. But for all the billing as a working meal, the dinner was largely ceremonial, filled more with toasts than with operational detail. The names Andric and Matek weren’t mentioned once, although the subject of “the mission at hand” came up repeatedly.

  Every time Vlado looked around it seemed that either LeBlanc, Harkness, or Ecker was staring toward him, although only Ecker would break into a smile when Vlado returned the gaze. Pine, Vlado noticed, seemed always to be staring toward LeBlanc, Harkness, or Ecker. A curious bunch, to say the least.

  Contreras concluded his evening’s duties with a ponderous speech, flowery boilerplate about the common enemies of hatred and intolerance. It was his closing line that got everyone’s attention, when he remarked on “what a pleasure it was to know that the genesis of our current mission had been the diplomatic corridors of Paris and Washington.”

  Tribunal lawyers looked down or shuffled their feet in apparent embarrassment, but Contreras either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  The evening’s final toast was to Pine and Vlado. Janet Ecker proposed it. Her words seemed appropriate enough as long as you ignored the line about Pine’s “great rapport with the Bosnian people.”

  As the gathering emptied into the raw night air, Vlado emerged into the darkness with the relief of a student who has completed his finals. A poke here, a prod there, but overall not so bad. Then a cloud of gin materialized at his left shoulder, and the voice of Harkness rumbled up out of the gloom like a premonition.

  “Tell me, old boy. Something I’ve wanted to ask you all evening.” His tone was pitched low, conspiratorial. “How does a clever fellow who’s reduced to digging ditches end up mixing in the business of a shady operator like Branko Popovic?”

  Vlado was thankful for the darkness, because the shock surely must have shown in his face. He didn’t know what to say, and Harkness plowed on.

  “Perfectly understandable if you’re not up to discussing this just now. But he’s a friend of mine, you know. Or, more to the point, a valuable source. So give him a message when you get a chance.” He then seemed to hesitate. “Or do you even understand a word of what I’m talking about?” Harkness was now facing him, studying him carefully. His right hand grasped Vlado’s forearm with a squeeze that seemed to tighten by the second. They’d reached the end of the sidewalk, and others were walking past, hailing cabs and stepping into limousines.

  “I’m not sure I understand any of it,” Vlado said in a low voice, surprised at the steadiness with which he could lie.

  “Just as well,” Harkness said, his expression unreadable. “But if you happen to be lying, or worse, if you happen to be working for the man, then you can count on seeing me again, soon, and in more places than you’d like.”

  With a final squeeze, Harkness fell away, releasing himself into the current of the crowd. Vlado realized that the man had never said what his message was for Popovic, once he seemed to have second thoughts. Vlado looked around for Pine, n
eeding a familiar face. Suddenly he wondered if going back home was such a good idea. Peace treaty or not, he’d just been reminded that it was still a dangerous place, a landscape of mines, of grief, and of well-hidden interests.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Pine and Vlado watched Europe float distantly beneath them out the window of the jet. Even from the air the land seemed gridded and plotted, the countries backed up against one another like too many children in the same bedroom. Except now they’d all grown old, harboring their fears and grudges in the same, stale space.

  A question from Vlado broke the silence.

  “Tell me about this operation. How does this compare to your others?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “In organization, preparation.” He paused. “It’s just that this one seems sort of . . .”

  “Half-assed?”

  “Yes. Half-assed.” Vlado smiled. Even he could sense how funny the words sounded in his careful accent.

  “That’s because it is. I’d never heard of Matek until last Tuesday. I’d never heard of you until the day before I came to Berlin. Spratt called me and said go get this guy, we need him.”

  “Which I still don’t understand.”

  “Oh, it all makes a certain sense, I guess, when you consider that for our first couple years all we had was one Serb in the dock and two waiting. If you can’t do better than that, you might as well not be in business. Lately the pace has picked up, but it’s still not exactly what you’d call an overload on the courtroom side. So, we’ll take whatever we can get, especially when it’s somebody as big as Andric, no matter who puts the deal together or how they offer it up.”

  Meaning Harkness and LeBlanc, Vlado supposed, which reminded him uneasily of Harkness’s parting remarks the night before.

  “And you think their motives are strictly diplomatic. Tit for tat. Keep both sides of the fight happy while still showing that the West means business.”

  “Something like that. But with guys like them you never really know.”

  “What do you mean, ‘guys like them’?”

  “You met them. What did you think? Did you get a sense that maybe they operate on other agendas they never tell us about?”

  “To say the least.”

  He wanted to say more but was too worried about where it might lead. The last thing he wanted was another discussion of Popovic.

  “Then there you go. They’ve got their agendas, for whatever reason, and we have ours. And this time, at least, our interests coincide. So if we have to rush things a little bit more than we’d like—the half-assed part of it—then at least we’re getting what we wanted. Or that’s what Contreras would argue.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Hard to say. I’m leery of ever letting the political side get involved. Whether it’s a federal drug investigation or sending in a hundred French troops to arrest Andric.”

  “That’s how many they’re using?”

  Pine turned in his seat, glancing around to make sure no one was listening.

  “So I’ve heard. He’s out in the woods, near some cow town in the east. And if hauling in some old fart that the U.S. helped repatriate is what it takes to get the French to flush out Andric, so be it. The more you stay focused on that, the better you’ll feel about what we’re doing.”

  Pine spoke that part with true conviction. He did seem to believe in the tribunal’s mission. It had been true for just about everyone Vlado had met in The Hague.

  “You like this job, don’t you?”

  “Beats what I was doing before.”

  “A federal prosecutor?”

  “Assistant U.S. attorney for the district of Maryland. Narcotics, mostly. Sometimes it seemed like we were locking up half the high schools of Baltimore.”

  “Baltimore. I know Baltimore. Homicide. The TV show. You can see it in Sarajevo. Dubbed, of course.”

  Pine laughed. He liked the idea of Bosnians getting their first look at Baltimore in a TV show about murder.

  “Maybe they should film a show in Sarajevo,” Pine said. “Call it Genocide.”

  Now it was Vlado’s turn to laugh. “So what made you want to quit to come over here?”

  Pine shrugged. “Burnout. Office politics. A few other things not worth mentioning. Maybe I was just looking for a better class of criminal—a little more adult, a little more conscious of what he was doing. Seemed like a good way to get back my sense of mission.”

  “Kind of a strange cure for burnout, isn’t it? Investigating genocide to make yourself feel better about the world?”

  Pine smiled. “When you put it that way. But I’ve learned a lot. I mean, look at this.” He nodded toward the window. “Europeans don’t realize how small and cramped everything looks to an American. Even in the middle of the Alps you can’t go more than a mile or two without running into a Gasthaus and a busload of Japanese tourists. No wonder the Germans like vacations in Texas. All that wide open space.”

  But Vlado had to wonder about the trade-off Pine had made. The way he saw it, evil here was just like evil there. Only the motives changed. In America they killed you for your money, your car, maybe the way you looked. Over here, for the sound of your name, the church your father went to, the sins of your grandfather. And sometimes, in both places, they killed simply because they had nothing better to do, nothing but the grim boredom of a hopeless, hardened life in the middle of nowhere. So they were easily swept up in moments of collective passion, neighbors rising in common cause against a single household or an entire village. The call to arms could be seductive. Once a war was in progress, few bothered to ask who’d started it, or why.

  An hour later their flight crossed out of the snowy Alps, approaching Bosnian airspace.

  “Not much longer now,” Pine said, and Vlado leaned across for a better look. “Christ, what am I thinking. Let’s switch. You haven’t seen home in what, five years?”

  They shifted awkwardly, crushing against the forward seats. Vlado settled in and gazed down at Bosnia’s mountains. Some were dusted with snow, but mostly the scenery was gray, the forests leafless. Tiny streams of smoke poured from chimneys into valleys scattered with red-tile rooftops. Within half an hour the plane began its descent. They approached Sarajevo from the northwest, the suburbs of Ilidza zooming below, looking considerably better than he’d last seen them.

  Most of the houses were patched. People were in the streets. A glint of sunlight flashed from the river, reminding him of the cold water that he could still taste from his last day in the city. As the plane descended lower, they seemed to enter a huge bowl, sheltered by the hills, a comforting feeling he hadn’t experienced in far too long. The wheels bounced, the pilot throttled back, and they taxied to the small airport that had once been fortified by high walls of sandbags. Now it looked like any other terminal of Eastern Europe.

  Pine had arranged for a white European Union car to be awaiting them at the airport as part of their cover. A woman at the airline counter had the keys, and they found the sedan parked out front, next to where UN sentries used to be posted in case of sniper fire.

  Vlado had an odd feeling almost from the moment Pine opened the trunk to stow their bags. It didn’t take long to figure out why. This was the first time he’d been in a car since the night with Haris and Huso. It was as if he’d expected to see Popovic’s body curled in the dark space below, still locked in his fetal embrace with death. It must have shown on his face.

  “Don’t look so stunned,” Pine joked. “You really are home. It’s not a mirage.”

  “Yes,” Vlado said, forcing a smile. “I guess it just hasn’t hit me yet.” He slid into the front seat, taking in the surroundings, but for the first few blocks it was as if Popovic were still riding behind him with their luggage, awaiting disposal.

  Gradually the sights of the city stole back his attention. Vlado was dismayed to see so much that was still destroyed or abandoned. Some buildings were missing altogether, the rubble pushed aside by bu
lldozers. Others had been patched here and there. But the trams were running and the shops were full. The city was alive again, and the blank expressions of people in the streets suggested they’d even grown a bit bored with peacetime. Or maybe they were still worn out. He’d understand that, too.

  They arrived at the bright yellow façade of the Holiday Inn, camped on the main boulevard that had once been known as Sniper Alley. It was odd to be back at this building that had marked so many important times in his life. It had been a proud place during the Olympic Games in ’84, with its disco and its restaurants and its high atrium lobby draped with plants, a shining wonder from the West. But now it wore its scars openly, still defiantly facing the river where the siege lines had stared back from a mere three hundred yards. Shell holes had been patched and repaired. And now the place again had uninterrupted heat, water, electricity, and phone service, with real windows instead of the sheets of plastic that had been taped over the shattered frames during the fighting.

  Yet the lobby still smelled faintly of leaks and dampness, mildew and smoke, an enduring desolation that clung like rot. Or perhaps that, too, was Vlado’s imagination. The place had been cleared of all the journalists who’d stayed here during the war. They’d moved on to more active venues, and most guests now seemed to be business-people. The man behind him spoke German on a cell phone. Two Japanese stood by the elevators, next to an American.

  Pine and he checked in to adjoining rooms. After unpacking, Pine dropped by. He looked ready to launch a discussion of the job ahead, then seemed to think better of it and said, “You could probably use a walk first, before we begin. Get reacquainted with the place. I wouldn’t mind a little break, either. And there’s someone I want to meet.”

  “Ah. Your friend. The one Janet is so jealous of.”

  Pine reddened. “Why don’t we meet back here in an hour and a half. Then we’ll get down to business.”

  Vlado was surprised at how soon he felt at home in the streets, although every corner confronted him with a rush of powerful memories, some from well before the war but most of them from the siege. Places where he’d seen bodies in the streets. Alleys once piled with crumpled cars as a barrier against sniper fire. Some of the steel-and-glass towers that had been burned out and shelled still stood empty, but no one paid them the slightest attention. New trees sprouted near the stumps of old ones that had been chopped down for firewood.