“Yes, of course,” Harkness said, reddening. “I guess I’m just not used to including locals on matters like these. No disrespect intended, Vlado.”
“None taken, Paul,” Vlado said, lingering on the name. “After all, it’s only our country.”
LeBlanc bowed his head, suppressing a laugh.
“Now that we’ve settled that,” Pine said, “what does any of this have to do with Popovic, other than his status as a material witness against Andric?”
Harkness looked across the table to LeBlanc. “Guy, you want to take a shot at that? While being careful, of course.”
LeBlanc shrugged. “He’s done work for both of us. Apart from whatever he’s offering the tribunal.”
“He’s given us some pretty good stuff,” Harkness said. “Help with military targeting. The latest word on the thinking of Yugoslav leadership. He’s become quite the turncoat. For a price, of course.” He stared at Vlado. “And it could certainly cost him his life if word ever got out. Assuming it hasn’t already.”
“You think he might be dead?” Pine said. Vlado pressed his hands together beneath the table.
“It’s a possibility,” Harkness said.
“Unless he’s dropped out of sight in order to help Andric,” LeBlanc added. “Another possibility. Maybe Andric outbid the tribunal for the man’s services.”
“Wouldn’t make sense,” Pine said. “Not if turning evidence against Andric was really his ticket to freedom.”
Harkness and LeBlanc exchanged glances, Harkness with what appeared to be a look of warning.
“There are other factors,” LeBlanc said. “But I’m afraid I can’t share them just now.”
Pine turned to Janet. “Do you know what the hell they’re talking about?”
She lowered her head. “No.”
“Sure about that?” he said testily. “Given your connections with ‘the community’?”
When she looked up, she was clearly angry. “Positive. And don’t question my word again, especially with regard to my so-called connections.”
Vlado was still trying to put the pieces together when he looked up to see Harkness chuckling at him.
“You’re looking a bit flabbergasted, old boy,” Harkness said. “Welcome to the wilderness of mirrors.”
“Wilderness of mirrors,” Vlado repeated. It was an interesting phrase.
“A paranoid old spy said that once about the intelligence community,” Janet explained. “Mostly because he never learned to tell the difference between the real images and the reflections. Pretty much sums up this situation, I’d say.”
“As long as we’re on the subject of bewilderment,” LeBlanc said, “in my opinion, all three of these disappearances may be connected. Matek’s included.”
Harkness shot him a dark look. “I believe we’re talking out of school now, Guy.”
“We do all want the same thing, don’t we, Paul?”
“You tell me. But as long as that cat’s out of the bag, may I offer some more advice?”
“Why not,” Pine said, “since you’re going to tell us anyway.”
“Wherever you go, watch your step. You’re fooling yourself if you think Matek doesn’t have any international reach. You’ve already whistled past the graveyard once, gentlemen, and look where that got you. Blunder into Italy, and it might be worse. So why not leave it to the professionals?”
“I thought we were professionals,” Pine said.
“You know what I mean. Besides, it might be more productive looking for Popovic first. And from what I know of the man, there are already plenty of good leads in Vienna. In Zurich. But especially in Berlin. You’re a Berliner, Vlado. You must have some contacts in the Yugo community there. Surely someone would have spotted Popovic by now, no matter what name he’s traveling under.”
Vlado wondered if he was the only one in the room who thought Harkness’s smile suddenly seemed predatory. Who should he fear more, he wondered—Matek or Harkness? Yet he was about to further entangle himself with both, drawn deeper into their interests by the tether to his father’s past. The challenge was to keep the tether from becoming a noose.
“I have a better idea, Paul,” Janet said. “How about if you show us how the pieces fit, then we’ll be able to help you even more. Seeing as how you think that’s our job.”
“We’ve already offered more information than I’d wanted,” he said, glancing pointedly at LeBlanc. “But if you can be specific about what you want to know, maybe I can help.”
It was the old bureaucrat’s trick. I’ll tell you what I’ve got as long as you already know. But Janet called his bluff. “I’ll be very specific. There is a piece of Matek’s security file I can’t get my hands on. His repatriation documentation from ’61. Apparently you’ve seen it, but every request I make comes back empty.”
“That’s not ours to deliver, I’m afraid. You’ll have to ask the Yugoslavs.”
“Well, maybe you should make a little better effort to free it up, especially if Belgrade still wants old Ustasha criminals like Matek taken care of.”
“I didn’t say they hadn’t delivered it. I said it wasn’t ours to deliver to you. Some things are given to us conditionally. With certain restrictions.”
Her face was rigid. “That’s nonsense.”
“No. It’s called diplomatic protocol. Happens all the time.”
“You know damn well there are ways around that kind of protocol. Especially from where you sit. And I’m not talking about your desk at the Department of State.”
Well, at least someone had finally stopped dancing around the subject, Vlado thought. Harkness was clearly displeased, although LeBlanc wore a prim smirk.
“No need to make this personal,” Harkness replied coolly. Then, leering at Pine, “You, of all people, Janet, should know not to make things personal. Clouds your judgment.”
Janet went scarlet, Pine as well. LeBlanc shuffled through some papers, his expression as bland as if he’d just sat through the world’s most uneventful meeting.
“Well, then, ladies and gentlemen,” Harkness said with a note of triumph, rising suddenly from his seat. “We seem to have covered the necessary ground. Best of luck in your misguided pursuit, however far afield you might stray. And cheers.”
He raised his water glass as if toasting the end of a cricket match with champagne.
No one joined him in the gesture.
“Well, that was an experience I could have lived without,” Pine said a few moments later, still steaming. He, Janet, and Vlado were in the hotel coffee shop. “Do either of you have any idea what they meant about connections between the suspects?”
Janet shook her head. “But it’s bound to be in the files somewhere. Or maybe Fordham knows. Why else would Harkness want to steer us away from Rome? I’m betting Popovic is nothing but a dead end.”
He was certainly that, Vlado thought darkly, wanting only to change the subject. “Tell me,” he said. “Harkness and LeBlanc aren’t just diplomats, are they?”
Pine smiled. “They’re spooks, you mean.”
“Spooks?”
“Spies. Intelligence. Or in the case of Harkness, CIA, with diplomatic cover.”
“Yes. Spooks, then.”
“Maybe. It’s always been the assumption, even if nobody talks about it.”
“Why doesn’t anyone just come out and say it?”
Janet laughed. “You mean, ‘Hello, I’m Paul Harkness, CIA’?”
“No. But one of you might have told me.”
“I guess you get used to dealing with people like them when you work in places like this,” Pine said. “Besides, you never know for sure.”
“So you just deal with them the same way you would with any outsider,” Janet added. “Even if they’re straight-up diplos, they’re going to have their own agenda, and believe me, some of them are every bit as devious as any spook. So we cooperate when we have to but otherwise keep to ourselves.”
“But you’re both America
ns. So you must be on Harkness’s side. At least a little.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Pine said.
“Just think of it as us, the tribunal, versus everybody else,” Janet said.
Vlado shook his head. Everyone on the same side, yet all of them working for someone else. Perhaps this was Bosnia’s future, a conflict that would mature from a bludgeoning match to a sneaky and surgical meddling. “You were right, Calvin. Our politics are nothing compared with all of this.”
“So, tell me more about Robert Fordham,” Pine said. “Is he really a lying windbag?”
“If so, then he’s the most reluctant windbag I’ve ever come across. It took me a good half hour to convince him I was legit. He even called to verify I was on the level. I guess his reliability depends on how good his memory is. But he’s about the only person left from Matek’s Roman days. Strange bird. Bit of a hermit. Was a foreign-service brat growing up—that’s where he learned his Italian—but didn’t move to Rome full-time until six years ago, after his wife died. In ’44 he made it to Rome the hard way. Landed at Anzio with the U.S. Fifth Army, then slogged his way north. When the war ended, his State Department daddy wangled him a posting to an army counterintelligence outfit. The 428th. The rest is in here.” She handed them a cream-colored folder stuffed with papers.
“What did Harkness mean when he said Fordham had washed out?” Vlado asked.
“In ’46 he seems to have run afoul of his superiors. The details are hazy. He also didn’t get along too well with Angleton and some of the early CIA people.”
“Who’s Angleton?” Vlado asked.
“Funny you should ask,” Janet said. “He’s the guy who came up with ‘wilderness of mirrors,’ mostly because he ended up lost in it. He was fighting the cold war before most people knew it existed. By the end of his career he was seeing double agents under every bush. Anyhow, I guess in Angleton’s view Fordham didn’t exactly graduate with honors. Went back home and became a banker. Wanted to join the foreign service but flunked his security clearance. Probably due to Angleton.”
“So he has an axe to grind,” Pine said.
“Possibly. But it’s him or nobody.”
“There is one other thing,” Vlado said. “Maybe it’s a lead, maybe it’s not.”
He pulled the old photo from his coat pocket and told them about his Aunt Melania.
“If she’s still around, she might be worth talking to. Her house is in Podborje.”
“Interesting,” Janet said, studying the photograph. “Where’s Podborje?”
“Two-hour drive at the most, even on bad roads.”
“You think she’s still alive?”
“These farm women are pretty tough,” Vlado said. “There’s an old joke about Herzegovinian women. ‘Why do the husbands always die before their wives? Because they want to.’ ”
Pine laughed loudly, Janet less so. But they agreed that the trip was worth a try. Vlado and Pine would make the drive in the morning.
“Okay, then,” Janet said, bringing the meeting to a close. “Then you’ll be heading south before I’m up. Just make it back in time for your flight to Rome. Then we’ll see how far you can burrow into Matek’s past.”
Vlado smiled grimly. He’d never been to Rome, but the past was becoming familiar territory.
“Time travel,” he said. “I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They left before the sun was up, driving through the darkness into high mountain passes where dirty piles of snow lined the roadside. But by the time they reached the turnoff south of Jablanica, steam was rising from the pavement into the early light of what would be an unseasonably warm day.
“From what I remember, it’s a stretch to even call it a village,” Vlado said. “A few farms and houses, pretty scattered. But I do remember you can see my uncle’s place from the top of a hill, just before the road goes into the valley.”
After they turned off the main highway, the roads were more like glorified goat paths, all dirt and gravel, even more rutted than the one to Matek’s compound.
“Jesus,” Pine shouted as the Volvo scraped its undercarriage on yet another hump of stone. “Hope the EU doesn’t mind investing in another exhaust system.”
A few turns later, Vlado shouted, “Stop!” and Pine brought the car sliding to a halt at the edge of a hairpin turn. Vlado climbed quickly from his seat, stepping onto the grass verge of an overlook above a deep, narrow valley. Pine joined him, taking in the view. The morning breeze was soft in the rising heat.
“There. The second rooftop. See?” Vlado sounded as enthusiastic as a small boy. The morning had the feel of a fresh start, the beginning of an adventure, especially with Rome awaiting them at day’s end. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I remember this exact view. My father made us all get out of the car. I think he even took a picture.”
“Let’s just hope your aunt’s still down there.”
“Oh, she’s there,” Vlado said, smiling broadly. “Look at the chimney.”
Wisps of white smoke swirled from one end of the red rooftop.
“Maybe it’s somebody else,” Pine said.
Vlado shook his head. “Not in Podborje. When people die, there’s nobody else to move in. No one moves to places like this anymore. Let’s go.”
The descent took fifteen minutes. They hadn’t passed another car for at least an hour. They pulled up in front of a plastered brick house with a red-tile roof. Just to the right was a weathered wooden barn. Beyond were brown fields, stubbled with weeds and the remnants of last summer’s corn. The valley was quiet, no sound but the wind across the fields, and the air smelled of smoke.
Snow still covered some of the small lawn, melting fast. From the barn came the slapping sound of a wooden door, and they turned to see a short, stooped woman in a long skirt emerge with two steaming pails of milk, one in each hand. She eyed them skeptically, these visitors with their white European car, but she never stopped walking toward the house.
It was her, Vlado realized, although he’d remembered her face as smooth and brown. Now it was creased and collapsed, yellowed and spotted, like one of those handicraft dolls made of dried apples. But there was still strength in her movements.
“Aunt Melania?” Vlado ventured tentatively.
She stopped, carefully setting the pails in the mud, squinting into the morning light.
“Vlado?” she croaked, in a high but strong voice. “Is that you, boy?”
Vlado nodded, and she dropped to her knees as if shot, rapidly crossing herself and muttering words they couldn’t hear. They rushed to her side, but she was smiling.
“Please!” she gasped. “Careful of the milk.” Then she stood, wrapping Vlado in a wiry embrace before stepping back to look him in the eye as if he were the eighth wonder of the world. Pine watched dumbstruck while a rooster strutted forward, clucking nervously as it inspected the intruders.
“I never thought I would see you again,” she said. “Especially when I heard your father was dead. He must have told you how much he never wanted to see us again.”
“No,” Vlado said. “He never did. But I do remember coming here.”
She continued peering at him, as if searching for signs of falseness. Appearing satisfied at last, she said, “Come inside. I have something for you, but first I’ll make coffee. And I am baking bread. You will eat.”
Once inside, Vlado introduced Pine as his “friend from America. He won’t know anything you’re saying, though, so don’t worry.”
She laughed. “It will be just like your father, then. He never understood what I was saying, either, or pretended he didn’t. Your mother, though, she always knew I was talking sense.”
The house smelled of warm bread. She seated them by a rough table, built much like the one Konjic had made, and pulled a brown steaming loaf from the mouth of a huge oven. Then she put a pot of coffee on to boil, making it the Turkish way, from a grind finer than dust that left a mudd
y sediment in every cup.
“Me and the woman at the next farm, we bake for each other,” she said. “She’s a widow, too. We live a mile apart, so we take turns making the walk. She won’t be here for another hour, so we have plenty of time to talk. But first, some eggs. Come.”
They followed her back outdoors, trooping past the barn with its smell of manure and damp coldness to a weathered henhouse, where she stooped among the birds, their wings flapping as she pulled an egg from each of six nests. Returning to the kitchen, she took a blackened iron skillet from a hook on the wall and began scrambling the entire batch. She lay plates and forks before them, seating herself at the end.
“I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised to see you, coming across the mountains with the sun barely up. And with an American, no less.” She smiled, eyes gleaming with mischief. “You were always going to be an explorer, you know. A traveler on the seas. Or that’s what all your books were about when you were a boy. Is that what you’ve become?”
“I’d forgotten all that,” Vlado said, laughing. “Wasn’t Magellan my favorite? Because he was the first to go around the world?”
“Yes. You wanted to be the Yugoslav Magellan. You said you wanted to sail for Tito. You should have seen your father’s face when you said that. It was all he could do not to shout at you, but he held it inside. Your mother and I had a good laugh and just egged you on. We were terrible.”
“And Uncle Tomislav?”
“Oh, he didn’t worry about those things anymore.”
Vlado paused long enough to interpret for Pine, who had been silent up until then. That prompted a question from Aunt Melania. “I saw the EU symbol on your car. Is that who you’re working for?”
When Vlado told her they were working for the war crimes tribunal, her eyes widened. She reappraised Pine with greater scrutiny, then asked, “Is that the reason you’re here? War crimes?”
“Yes, but it’s very complicated.”
“Those things usually are.”
She was looking down now, cradling a coffee cup in her lap. “How much did your father ever tell you about the war?” she asked.
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows Page 21