Downstairs the phone rang again. Pine waited for Vlado to return before answering, and they again shared the earpiece. It was Spratt, and both of them braced for a chewing-out. But Spratt swallowed his bureaucratic instincts. “The first thing you need to do is get the hell out of there,” he said. “Let a demining unit do the rest.”
“I’ve already called one,” Pine said.
“You also don’t know what other sort of greeting Matek might have planned for you. His goons could be waiting on the road to finish you off for all you know. Go back to Sarajevo and await further instructions. From here it’s going to depend on how Contreras reacts. My call would be to drop the thing entirely. Let international law enforcement pick up the chase, and get the hell out of the way. But from what I’ve seen of him so far, he’s liable to take this personally.”
“I sure as hell do,” Pine said.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t. So do I. But operationally you know our limits. The other bit of news, unfortunately, is that our sponsors still want a debriefing, and they’re waiting at the Holiday Inn.”
It took Vlado a moment to realize that Spratt was talking about Harkness and LeBlanc, the last people he wanted to see right now. He just wanted to board a plane and go home.
“Why?” Pine asked.
“They’re trying to pick up the pieces, too.” Vlado winced at the wording. “This was their baby, so they’ll want to know every detail about how it went wrong.”
“Just what we need. When do we meet?”
“I put them off until this evening. Seven. That should give you time to collect yourselves.”
“What about arrangements for Benny? Getting his body home?”
“Let me worry about that. You just get back to Sarajevo. I’m sending reinforcements for the meeting.”
“Reinforcements?”
“Janet Ecker. She’s catching a two p.m. flight. She’s the only one who’s seen the whole file. Depending on what’s decided in the meantime, you may need to know more. Either way she can help fend off Harkness and LeBlanc.”
“What makes you think we’ll have to fend them off?”
“Previous experience. Plus the entire way this operation has gone. Why should things get any easier?”
“Fair enough.”
“For now, get yourselves down the mountain safely. One casualty is more than enough, God knows.”
After hanging up, they decided to wait outside for the demining unit to arrive, but found themselves momentarily unable to leave the house. Neither said a word, both unwilling to simply walk out while Benny’s body still lay in the next room.
“Doesn’t seem right, does it?” Pine said.
Vlado shook his head. “None of this has seemed right from the beginning,” he replied. For him that included the past four weeks, all the way back to when Haris and Huso had arrived on his doorstep, bloody and grimy in the darkness. Now all the events seemed part of the same awful package, and he questioned his own role at every turn. The trail of bodies seemed uncanny, it was so diverse and multinational—you could even begin with a small boy from Sarajevo, dying of whooping cough; then a young thug in Berlin, and now a loud, likable cop from New York. Yet he remained standing, like a man walking unscathed from a plane crash, a freak of fate. A sudden wave of nostalgia for his old life—the one before the war, before everyone had become either a casualty or a refugee—rolled over him heavily, and he averted his face from Pine.
But Pine’s attention was elsewhere. He walked slowly into Matek’s ruined office and knelt by the legs. The smell of blood was stronger now. Vlado watched as Pine placed his right hand gently on the back of Benny’s leg, then bowed his head with his eyes shut tightly. He mouthed a few words, too quietly for Vlado to hear, then paused, still in a crouch. Finally he exhaled deeply and rose slowly. The UN vehicles were just pulling up outside.
“Okay,” Pine said calmly. “Nothing more we can do here.”
They left without another word between them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They were jittery for the entire ride to Sarajevo, flinching whenever another vehicle approached from behind or slowed down in front of them. Even a creaking farm wagon blocking the road seemed suspicious, part of a possible ambush, given Matek’s reach and connections along the valley road from Travnik.
As a result, they said little along the way, giving Vlado plenty of time to think. He decided on a plan for the afternoon, announcing his intentions as they finally reached the outskirts of the city. “I was thinking I might go by my old apartment,” he said softly, breaking a long, dazed silence. “To look for some old photos and family papers. Things my mother left me when she died. Not much. I just sort of glanced through it after the funeral and put it away in a closet.”
“Names and addresses?”
“That’s what I was wondering. If any of my father’s relatives are mentioned. Maybe some of them knew Matek.”
“Like the uncle you mentioned?”
“Uncle Tomislav. His wife was my father’s sister. Maybe Aunt Melania is still alive. But for all I know our old apartment is either gone or cleaned out.”
“Would somebody have moved in?”
“I can’t imagine it would have stayed empty. With all the refugees coming in, the government took back a lot of housing. Or else people just took things for themselves. Whoever took our place probably assumed we were dead. Maybe they sold everything. It’s worth checking, though.”
Pine shrugged. “Better than doing nothing, I guess.”
Vlado wondered how long it would take them to recover from the shock of the morning’s events. They hadn’t even had time to wash out the plaster dust from their hair. Pine’s right sleeve was still stained with Benny’s blood. An hour earlier Vlado had been ready to give up and go home. But now he was itching to do something, anything that might help track down Matek. He was still curious about the link to his own past, and now there was Benny, making Matek’s crimes more fresh and personal than ever, whether the tribunal was ready to drop the case or not. Pine had been silent on the subject so far, but Vlado was certain he’d feel the same. Both felt foolish, even guilty, for having underestimated Matek, a miscalculation that had cost a friend his life. Checking Vlado’s old apartment might not uncover a thing. But, like Pine said, it was better than doing nothing.
They checked back in to the Holiday Inn, which gave them a chance to shower and change clothes. With a few hours remaining before they were supposed to meet Ecker’s flight, Vlado set out on foot, retracing one of his familiar routes through the city, the old apartment key in his pocket. Jasmina had insisted that he bring it, hoping he’d have time for a look. He wondered what she and Sonja must be up to, back in Berlin. A fleeting thought of Haris crossed his mind like a small cloud, but the name troubled him more for its association with Popovic than with Jasmina.
Their apartment squatted in a block of fairly new buildings on a slight rise, overlooking the fields that led to the Olympic Stadium. The fields had once been playgrounds, but during the war they were pressed into duty as a cemetery, offering Vlado a daily census of the body count from the front window. The area had been vulnerable to shell fire from three sides, and Vlado had lived mostly in the living room, next to the kitchen, sleeping on a couch. With neither running water nor electricity during much of the siege, he’d tapped into a natural-gas line, bootlegging a supply into his house through a garden hose that he’d tacked to the wall. There had been a nozzle on the stove and another spouting from the wall, for light.
He supposed all that was gone now, but he had no trouble recalling the mood of the lonely nights, when there had been little to do but paint a set of tiny lead soldiers arrayed before him on a bench, tedious work that made the hours pass until he was weary enough to retreat into sleep. He didn’t wish to relive those times by any means, although they now seemed almost tranquil by comparison, the occasional shell bursts and sniper fire reduced in his memory to annoying background noise, like the dripping
of a leaky faucet.
Rounding the last corner, he was pleasantly surprised to see the building still standing. The windows to their apartment had been repaired. So had a small hole in the roof. New tiles marked the spot with a brighter shade of red.
He knocked, still not sure what to say, then was surprised to recognize the face of the man who answered. The last time he had seen it, the man’s beard was powdered with plaster, his eyes dazed. That was five years ago, a snowy morning when a shell had fallen on an apartment block next-door, scattering a refugee family that had moved in only a week earlier. Vlado had been jolted awake by the explosion. Then he had invited all six of them inside to recover from the shock.
Shortly after that Vlado had smuggled himself out of the city in the cargo plane. Now here they were again, this time on the other side of the door, if he could only recall their names.
“Konjic,” the man said, smiling as he refreshed Vlado’s memory. “Alijah Konjic. And you are Vlado Petric.”
“Yes,” Vlado said, hoping his sudden arrival wouldn’t be seen as a threat. Through the doorway he could already see the old couch, the one that had been his bed for two years. The Konjics had arrived in Sarajevo without furniture, so his abandoned home must have seemed like a godsend.
“Please come in,” Konjic said with genuine warmth. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm to usher Vlado across the threshold. “My wife, Nela. My children. Everyone is here, and we owe you so much.”
“Hello,” a woman’s voice piped from the kitchen, and Vlado turned to see Nela in an apron, a wooden spoon in hand. Two children sat on the couch, riveted to a small black-and-white television propped on an end table. A third, older child sat on the floor doing his lessons. Konjic had said everyone was here, but Vlado remembered six of them. The fourth and smallest child was missing, and he readied himself for another dose of what now seemed an endless supply of bad news.
Then a small voice spoke up from around the corner, and to Vlado’s immense relief he recognized the face as the boy trooped into the room, a good foot taller by now, yet still carrying one of the tiny soldiers Vlado had left behind. Vlado smiled, and Konjic seemed to realize why.
“Ah, your soldiers. Yes! He was playing with one of them the first time we met. After the shell landed. It was the first thing he went looking for when we came back.”
And here Konjic’s enthusiasm turned sheepish, as if he suddenly realized the implications of Vlado’s return. Pretty much everything in the room, except the small TV, had belonged to Jasmina and him before the war. By all rights everything still did, even if they now seemed like items from a museum—the couch, the chairs, the small oval rug that had been a wedding gift from Jasmina’s mother, the old photo on the wall of the Mostar bridge. It was like entering a time capsule, and Vlado moved quickly to put Konjic’s fears to rest.
“I am only here for a few days,” he said, seeing Nela relax. “We live in Germany now. My wife was able to take the most valuable items when she and my daughter left, two years before I did. I’m not here to claim anything. But I did want to look for something. An old box with photos and papers. Old family records. Some personal things that may have been left behind.”
“Yes,” Konjic said, effusive in his relief. “Yes. I know that box.
We’ve kept it. We’ve kept everything, you know. Some things because we’ve used them, of course, but all of your clothes and everything else, it’s all still here.”
“Please,” Vlado said, “just the one box. Keep the other things. Sell them if you want. The rest of the personal items I may come for later, if I bring my family back. But today there isn’t time.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Come. It’s back here.”
They walked to the rear bedroom, Vlado spooked by the familiar hallway, the smells, the rugs on the floor. Konjic ducked into a closet and raised himself on his tiptoes, tugging at a cardboard box. Yes, that was the one Vlado remembered.
“We thought that you had been killed,” Konjic said. “Someone told us you were a policeman, and we heard a policeman had been shot down by the river on the night after we met you. Later we heard that it wasn’t you, that maybe you had gotten away. There was nothing in the newspaper, and no one seemed to know much. So we decided to keep everything. In case you ever came back.” Konjic shrugged.
He seemed like a good man, Vlado thought. He was glad they’d ended up with the apartment, but he did wonder what his old neighbors—if any were left—must think of this tribe of peasants from a faraway village, bringing their country ways to the middle of the city.
“Some people did try to kill me,” he told Konjic. “Smugglers. They took a few shots, but they missed. It’s a very long story.” And one that keeps repeating, he thought. “But we’re in Berlin now. Maybe we’ll come back, maybe not. But not here. The place is yours.”
As if to seal the deal, he reached into his pocket for the key. He solemnly handed it over, the closest thing to a deed available. With that, Konjic’s relief was complete, and Vlado wondered how often the family must have dreaded this very sort of visit. If the trip accomplished nothing else, at least it would leave these people at peace.
Konjic set the box on the bed. “Take as long as you want,” he said. “I’ll be with the children.”
He shut the bedroom door behind him, giving Vlado his privacy. Only the muffled noise of the television leaked beneath the door, a faint sound of gunshots and squealing tires.
On top were old bills and receipts, instruction manuals for radios, a television, a small hand drill. There were photos, a few infant shots of Sonja. He set those aside, knowing he shouldn’t slow down until he found what he was looking for but unable to resist the occasional detour of memories. Their marriage license. Some photos of friends at a party, from ’89. A stack of handwritten compositions from his childhood that his mother had saved, then given to Jasmina just before they were married. He remembered sitting up in bed late one night—this bed—reading them while she laughed, a strand of her hair fallen across her face. Old magazines that he’d saved for one obscure reason or another. And then, about halfway down, there it was, a large brown envelope with his mother’s handwriting on top: “For Vlado.”
He remembered the short woman who’d been a friend of hers bringing it to him the day after his mother’s funeral, after he’d helped move the furniture out of his mother’s apartment. It had been a big Catholic service, the priest swinging a censer as he marched slowly down the aisle. He wondered what his mother had known about his father’s past. Had she, too, kept his secrets, or had she been fooled along with Vlado, believing in the man’s essential goodness and honesty—the quiet virtuous worker who made a living with his strong but gentle hands?
His mother hadn’t come from the same village or even the same part of the country. They’d married only a year after his father returned from Italy. She’d been a devout Catholic. He wondered now if she had known all along that his father was secretly a Catholic as well. Perhaps she, too, had been a sort of ethnic nationalist in her own quiet way, which would explain why she had later become so frustrated with her son, the nonbeliever who worshipped only soccer stars and his own future.
There wasn’t much inside the envelope, maybe twenty or thirty pages in all, which was pretty much the way Vlado remembered it. Part of it was a technical manual, old instructions for the equipment in the machine shop where his father had worked. There was a diagram of a metalworking lathe, with all the moving parts numbered, and Vlado could easily picture his father behind the machine, hard at work, the bright curly shavings collecting in the hair of his forearms.
There was an old soccer program, perhaps from the game in his dream, for all he knew. He scanned the photos of the players, most of whose names he’d forgotten, although they’d once meant so much to him. At the bottom of the pile were a few more photographs.
One in particular drew his attention. It was of four men in uniform. On the far right, propped against a giant oak, was his father.
Who were the other three, and where were they when this was taken? The fellow on the left looked familiar, and Vlado realized it must be Uncle Tomislav. Yes, that long face with the jug ears. Definitely. He closely scanned the other two faces, looking for any sign of the man he’d met yesterday. But neither of the other men was Matek. He turned the photo over, looking for an inscription, but there was only the stamp of the studio that must have made the print, with an address from Mostar, down in the southwest, the city closest to his father’s home village of Podborje.
The topography made it clear the photo hadn’t been taken anywhere near Jasenovac, where the landscape was flat and green. In the background were hills and more hills, and the men looked relaxed, at peace with themselves. There was no date, but he surmised it must have been taken early in the war, perhaps before anyone had even fired a shot.
But if this was indeed Uncle Tomislav, then maybe Aunt Melania in Podborje would know a little more about his father’s movements during the war. Vlado placed the other papers back into the box, then slipped the photo inside the envelope before gently placing it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He heard the door opening behind him, the noise from the television rising in volume.
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows Page 19