The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  He turned toward Pine, angrily resigned to the inevitability. “You already know what I’m going to do, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

  “When were we supposed to make contact with Matek?”

  Pine frowned, looking away. “They just changed that part, as it happens. Tonight, they say now. The French were getting antsy, so they’ve moved up the Andric raid a day. They want us to adjust our schedule accordingly.”

  “So whenever I’m ready, in other words.”

  Pine nodded grimly. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “I want a drink first.”

  “No problem. Have two. As many as you want, long as you can still say the man’s name. We’ll go down to the bar.”

  “No,” Vlado said, now deciding on a different approach. “No drinks. Just the phone call. Let’s do it now. Then I’ll have the drink, but not with you. By myself.”

  “Look, if you want to—”

  “Just give me the phone number, okay? Then tell me what I need to say. Then leave me alone. I’ll tell you when it’s over.”

  “Whatever you say,” Pine said, holding out his hands as if pleading for calm. “It’s your show.”

  It certainly was, Vlado thought mordantly. A macabre cabaret from his father’s past, and he was about to take the stage. Lights, please. Then the script. Let the entertainment begin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Pero Matek loved the Internet, loved the whole idea that you could sit in a dump like Travnik and still command a world of contacts and information. At moments like this it always made him smile to look around his office. In recent years he’d taken particular pains to portray himself to outsiders as a provincial king on his rustic throne, barely schooled and barely presentable, a backwoods potentate who could be kept happy with a pat on the head and a generous cut of the action.

  So, when UN people and aid delegations came calling he always gave them the best show possible, from the décor to the drinks to his pose as an unpolished rube who simply aimed to please. The charade began with the herd of goats wandering the grounds, animals that almost invariably crowded around the cars of guests as they parked, trying to chew anything that moved, bleating and pawing at the scuffed grass as the visitors stepped daintily through the droppings. Once inside, the visitors stepped onto a brown linoleum floor in the entrance hall, with fluorescent tubes popping overhead. Then it was down the hall to his office, to be seated on bulky brown couches left over from Communist times. The windows were draped heavily with awful patterned curtains in orange and brown, and the wall-to-wall carpeting was threadbare and burned by cigarettes.

  The real show, however, was Matek himself, seated behind a varnished desk the size of a battleship. He was invariably clad in an oversized brown double-knit jacket. His trousers featured busy patterns chosen to clash with the ones on his open-collar shirts, where chest hairs proclaimed his enduring virility, a signal to remind them that along with the oafish charm came sterner stuff—this was his turf, his rough-and-tumble topography, where a false step could leave you wandering in God knows what sort of valley or village. The highlight of Matek’s ensemble, however, was his hair, still a lush full head of it, a salt-and-pepper shock styled in the pompadour wave customary among self-made Balkan lords.

  His office was in the back room of a farmhouse on a few acres of sloping land, cleared of everything but a few plum trees on a grassy scatter of slate and granite. The goats did the mowing. His compound—he always loved to hear the reports describe it as such— sat at the end of a twisting gravel road, halfway up the mountains that towered above the town of Travnik like a six-thousand-foot iron gate, shutting the north side of the valley tight. The view from his upstairs bedroom encompassed not only the glittering Lasva River far below but also long stretches of the main highway into town, as well as the road leading to his property. He liked seeing visitors before they saw him. Most of his enemies would never have the initiative, much less the stamina, to approach on foot through the trees. And while the internationals might not know it, his local reputation was that of someone who never let anyone take him by surprise, either in a business deal or in some more rudimentary form of confrontation. Those who tried tended to disappear.

  Even at seventy-five, Matek had kept most of his vitality, and he liked to show that off, too. He looked remarkably well for his age, still trim except for the slight poke of his belly, his face creased but not crinkled, and he was still handy with the women when necessary, which in his case was about once per week. At least one or two were always hovering nearby on trips to his favorite café, and they weren’t averse to a few moments with him later in more private quarters, so long as there was time first for a few shots from his bottle. He wasn’t so vain that he discounted the power of wealth in this equation, or of the bottle in steeling their resolve. He considered his bankroll merely another mark of his manhood, of his ability to beat the competition.

  Not counting his bodyguards, Matek lived alone. Long ago he had briefly tried marriage but hadn’t found it to his liking, and nowadays the occasional mistress suited him fine. No womanly clutter around the house. No voice at his shoulder telling him what to do and when to do it. He believed that was why the laugh lines around his eyes had remained jolly, not careworn. And he was still quick with a noisy joke or a belly laugh, his brown eyes still prone to twinkle at a good comeback or a savored memory. All of which came in handy when it was time to play the garrulous host for the outsiders who came grinding up the mountain with their money and their contracts. He found that meeting their expectations left them resigned to a certain level of waste, slippage, and overruns, and even some manner of fraud, but not in the sense that some accountant might understand it in Brussels or New York. And so, when they inevitably returned six months later with their bar graphs and flow charts, there was always an atmosphere of the parent-teacher conference, a sighing inevitability that they’d known all along this would be part of the bargain. So, instead of yanking the rug they would merely tug and whisk at its corners, letting him know they could still see his few signs of progress. And by then, of course, they’d taken note of his firm grasp on local needs and conditions, and the ways his enforcement could turn severe, even brutal, if necessary. So they tended to tread lightly, even in admonishment, and would gasp through their sips of his fiery home brew, a round of shots inevitably served on a Turkish tray of hammered brass, the glasses smudged just so.

  The great joke of this was that what Pero Matek really would have preferred was a calm sip or two of a Chianti Classico in shining crystal stemware. But those bottles were kept locked in the cellar, with humidity and temperature controls. Kept out of sight just like his Dell desktop computer with its twenty-one-inch Sony monitor.

  On the rare occasions when company could be coaxed to stay for dinner he would order up a big mixed grill just to set their teeth on edge and their stomachs into a roll—quivering Balkan meat fests of lamb, veal, and sausage, piled atop platters oozing with grease and char. Load their plates like troughs and watch them grin woodenly, knowing they’d compare notes later in their Range Rovers and Mercedes SLs, laughing at the hopeless rube. Perhaps his most important visitor ever, an assistant from the high representative’s office, had later called him “Pero the Barbarian,” and when Matek received the report from one of his secretarial spies he laughed about it for days, spreading the nickname through the village as if it were a promotional pamphlet, cementing his reputation for putting a not-sofine edge on things. One American investor who’d nosed about the valley for a week, an Oklahoman with tall boots and a big voice, had compared him to an Ozark moonshiner, albeit one who could be leashed and trained as long as he got his ration of skim.

  So he let them believe he was trainable, and housebroken, and kept getting his share, time after time, from just about any financier or do-gooder with currency to burn.

  The irony of this dynamic was that it had begun to make him legitimate, even in the eyes of some
of the more naïve locals. The back-channel thuggery of his wartime markets was slowly turning into a well-documented realm of signed contracts and foundation grants. His participation in the stolen-car operation, regrettably, had been a necessary casualty of the transformation. Too much law enforcement attention had begun to zero in, so he had quietly transferred control to a few obliging lesser rivals, who were thrilled at their sudden windfall of rolling stock from Germany and Switzerland via Poland and Ukraine, only to be dismayed when it all came apart a few weeks later with a well-informed bust of their open-air distribution market. By the time they suspected Matek’s role in the matter several were in jail, others were dead, and the car market was gone. It would be back, of course, an option that would always be available if Matek ever needed it. But for now the international spigot was running full-blast, and he was content to paddle in the lucrative broth of Europe’s alphabet soup, the NGOs and EU subagencies that ran this country in a manner befitting the Hapsburgs and Ottomans.

  In the case of his other illegal operations, why sell bootleg gasoline in wine bottles and plastic milk cartons when you could run six INA stations, supplied straight from Zagreb at subsidy prices? Why keep selling booze in back alleys when your distributorship in spirits and beer was now the largest in five surrounding municipalities? It had been so ever since the previous spring, when his biggest competitor drove across an antitank mine. Never mind that the man’s neighbors still wondered why he’d been driving off-road in that particular patch of woods. Out hunting, perhaps, for that was his hobby, although no one ever found out who might have invited him. And never mind that the property in question had supposedly been cleared of mines, or that it was owned by Pero Matek, although the deed had percolated through so many proxies and riders and silent partners that you could spend weeks poring over papers at the municipality’s hopeless little archives and not make heads or tails of it.

  Not that Matek ever worried about establishing his provenance, if need be. All the original documents were filed neatly in his safe, the hulking one in the corner of his office, behind the cabinet with the Dell, where Matek now sat hammering at the keyboard with his farmer’s hands, the pockety-pock rhythm putting him in a fine mood, as soothing as the ringing of a cash register must be for a village shopkeeper. This was the noise of commerce today, he thought to himself. “Even for a barbarian,” he muttered aloud, breaking into a laugh. You could check commodity prices and shipping rates, then plug them in to your budgets and your cost schedules. Type in a few serial numbers, plus a password or two, and your orders were updated, the status flashing at you from six different locations. Send an e-mail to Emilio in Trieste, a duplicate to Francisco in Madrid, a confirmation with a bonus porn photo attachment, just for fun, to a supplier in Bulgaria he knew only as Christo.

  All of them were people he had never met because, frankly, it was still a risk to travel abroad and perhaps always would be. It was his one great regret in life. Crossing the border would probably never be a sure thing, considering what they’d done with his papers and his passports all those years ago. He had others, of course, two different sets that were best kept out of sight, and neither carried his old name, his real name. There was no safe or strongbox yet built secure enough for that knowledge, so he kept it only in his head, well toward the back lest it show itself at inopportune moments.

  Rational judgment told him that he should be able to travel wherever he pleased, given the passage of time. Who could possibly recognize him now, all these years later? Nonetheless, he had stayed put, even if he still longed for those days of Italian villas and small towns in the hills, a sunny landscape where everyone sipped wine at midday with big bowls of pasta and platefuls of fish, then napped until three.

  A knock on the door interrupted his reverie. It was his assistant, Edin Azudin.

  “Yes, Azudin. Come in.”

  Azudin was pale and thin. Matek was always telling him to eat more, then laughing when the man would blush and squirm. Matek had decided long ago, simply by appearances, that Azudin must be homosexual. It was just as well. Fewer temptations, at least around this valley. You’d as soon be caught sleeping with a goat as another man, given the local attitudes, so Matek never worried about his quiet little assistant causing trouble. It was almost like having his own eunuch at court. Had Matek known the truth he would have laughed aloud; the meek, undersized Azudin kept two mistresses in Travnik, not so surprising when one considered the ready supply of hard currency he earned from Matek. But it was also his manner, a calm, mouselike obeisance, practiced daily, that placated the women in its quiet way, and he was discreet enough in his comings and goings to ensure that the affairs never got complicated. If you had secrets, they were safe with Azudin, which is why Matek valued his services.

  “There is a caller for you,” Azudin said. “He says it’s about a new demining contract for the municipality. He believes you may be the right man for it.”

  Matek perked up. “Does he, now? Well, leave him on hold then. For”—he mulled the timing—“for exactly ninety seconds. Then get back on the line and tell him I won’t be available for a while. But take his number. And an hour later you’re to call and arrange a meeting for tomorrow. In the morning. Ten, if possible. If he can’t do it then, you’re to check with me. And the meeting is to be here. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir, but . . .” Azudin halted, uncertain whether to exceed his usual responsibilities.

  “Go on.”

  “He insisted that I make sure you knew who you were doing business with. Vlado Petric, the son of Enver Petric.”

  And for the first time in as long as Azudin could remember, Pero Matek was speechless. Matek knew he must look a sight, sitting there with his mouth agape and papers dropping from his hand. He vaguely sensed Azudin scurrying to pick them up, but he shooed the little man away with a distracted wave of a meaty hand, then stood, pacing, barely aware of his surroundings, wondering at this strange and sudden shout from so deep in his past, not knowing whether to feel nostalgic or disconcerted.

  Matek had known about Vlado, of course. Had known that Enver, whom he still thought of as Josip, had married, had a son, and died without ever having made much of himself—not surprising, considering their past. The man had always been too earnest for his taste. His talents were effective only if you knew how to channel them, but otherwise the man had been too inflexible to be of much use. Enver’s son, Matek had heard, had become some sort of policeman, had even had to leave the country, something to do with smuggling and corruption. Had he been a dirty cop, or too idealistic? Probably an amateur, either way, like his father. But he, too, might be useful if channeled. Matek had heard rumors that a change was in the works in the management of the demining concessions, but the selection of a Bosnian seemed almost too good to be true. Suddenly he sensed new possibilities, even if the boy’s name made him uneasy. What vexed him most of all was how the boy could have found out about him, or his past connection to Enver. Enver and he had agreed long ago to go their separate ways, vowing no further contact. Yet, here was Enver’s son on the phone. It was puzzling, and more than a little worrisome. Had Enver blabbed something on his deathbed long ago, some father-son confession, complete with names and bodies? He doubted it. And at least the boy hadn’t referred to his father as Josip.

  “Shall I put him on hold, sir?” Azudin was still awaiting an answer, looking far too curious for Matek’s taste.

  “No. Put the call through. And why don’t you go down to see Silovic and pick up this week’s take. If he grumbles about doing it a day early, tell him this is a test. That I’m making sure he isn’t raking the till and juggling the books at the last minute, or taking midweek loans at my expense. Tell him it’s a pop quiz. Tell him whatever you like. And take your cell phone in case I need you.”

  There, Matek thought. Azudin hated chores like this. It would take his mind off this phone call. No sense piquing his interest in anyone named Petric. “Go now. And put the call through.”


  “Yes, sir,” Azudin said, departing with the helpless expression of a driver of a tiny car about to be crushed between two careening trucks.

  Matek returned to his desk, anticipation building to a boil and, he had to admit, his merchant’s sense of an impending bargain prickling as well. If the son of an old colleague was in charge of a new demining contract, well, that was good news on a front he’d been trying to make gains on for months. But the very fact that Enver’s name had been spoken over his telephone seemed alarming. Although, why worry? Azudin wasn’t in the habit of reading anti-Ustasha tracts that named names and dug up old history. He was twenty-six, and about as interested in history as any young man on the make, meaning not at all. Even if he had been, the most detailed published accounts available never mentioned young officers who’d been so far down the pecking order. Matek had checked the books and pamphlets himself, looking always for the names Rudec and Iskric, just in case, scanning with a frantic thump in his heart that was always pacified in the end.

  He could probably resume using his old name tomorrow without turning a single head, if he wanted. Well, maybe not. There were always the old heads to consider, the gray women in the streets or the men leaning on their canes. Funny how he thought of them as old when they were his contemporaries, and once or twice in his travels around the country he thought he’d noticed some of them eyeing him strangely—probably nothing but the idle curiosity of the rube, but you could never tell for sure. He remembered that American movie about the old Jews stumbling through the streets of New York, bony fingers outstretched, calling the name of some aging Nazi who tried to race away. A horror to have it end that way, which was one reason he seldom strayed beyond his region, and almost never journeyed to places where lots of Serbs lived. The war had made that easier, thank goodness, sending each side streaming for its own ghettos and enclaves, the crescents and the crosses once again penned in their own cantons. Now he could drive for miles without fear of meeting some unwelcome face from his past.