The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  “We’ll speak in English, so she understands,” Dragoslava says to Sergei. “Now sit. And for God’s sake, relax. You’re not in trouble.”

  Sergei does as he’s told, clearing his throat and moving his eyes from me to her. His lower lip is trembling.

  “I’m told you’re Nikko’s best friend. Like brothers, everyone says.” Her voice is soothing, like an elementary school teacher gently trying to suss out the truth.

  “Yes, Dragoslava.”

  “So then he must have told you where he went on this vacation of his.”

  A long pause as Sergei works through the problem. “Back to Bulgaria. His father is sick.”

  Dragoslava nods slowly, then folds her arms over her chest and stares at him, her eyes unblinking through the long silence that follows. Sergei’s anxiety is painful to watch. His eyes shoot between her and me and a pack of cigarettes on the table. With each moment, he becomes twitchier to the point I’m almost rooting for him, hoping he comes up with something clever to defuse the situation.

  “Nikko is not with his father,” he says finally.

  “Ah,” Dragoslava says. “But you told me otherwise. So you lied?”

  “Yes.”

  Another long silence, then Dragoslava’s face brightens suddenly. “Well, you’re just protecting your friend, I suppose.” She leans forward, places her hand on his. “But I do need to know where he is, Sergei. It’s important.”

  “He’s—he took that job,” Sergei says quietly, eyeing the pack of cigarettes again and turning a lighter over and over in his one hand. “The Americans who came. When you said no, they went to him. A lot of money, Nikko said.”

  His whole body is shaking now, and he can’t even look at her. Dragoslava leans back in her chair and smiles at him. “Thank you, Sergei. I know that wasn’t easy.” She pushes the pack of cigarettes to him. “Go ahead.”

  Sergei fumbles one from the pack, nearly puts the wrong end in his mouth, then finally lights it. His shoulders relax, and he even manages to give a little smile back at her as smoke curls up from his mouth and nostrils. “I’m sorry, Dragoslava. Look, I was scared.”

  “Of me?” she says. “You were a loyal man to my father for, how long was it?”

  He coughs, ticks off time on his fingers. “Ten years, I think. Eleven.”

  Dragoslava reaches for the pack of cigarettes, pulls one out for herself. “You never need to be afraid of me, Sergei. Remember that. Lighter?”

  He slides it along the table toward her. She picks it up, then clumsily drops it to the floor. Sergei bends from his seat to retrieve it.

  The gunshot deafens me, sends me to my feet and staggering backward. Dragoslava rises, the pistol from her waistband held loosely in one hand, blood covering the front of her white shirt. She drops the unlit cigarette in an ashtray and pushes Sergei’s body over on its side with her foot. A pool of blood starts forming beneath his head, widening with every second.

  The door swings open and Obrad rushes in, followed by the others. Without a word, Dragoslava opens a closet door and pulls out a mop and bucket. The men need no explanation; this is just the way things are sometimes. One of them hoists the bucket into the sink and begins filling it. Two others lift Sergei’s body by the armpits and haul him toward the door as if he were merely drunk and needed to be put to bed.

  She says something to them in Serbian, the words close enough to Russian that I get the gist: Waters are strong here, so use a lot of weight.

  With the bucket full, Dragoslava sets to work, soaking up the blood and rinsing the mop in water that turns pink, then red. She says something else, a joke I assume, because the men laugh. One of them offers to take the mop, Dragoslava protests, he offers again, and this time she accepts. Another man hands her a towel when she’s done washing her face and hands.

  * * *

  The lights on the shoreline twinkle in the darkness like humble stars. There’s just a few of them, a little village, though how far away I can’t tell. Hard to measure distance on the water. Dragoslava and I are alone on the deck on the port side as the Erebus runs north. She’s leaning on the railing three meters down from me, while Obrad is off somewhere getting her a change of clothes for her blood-soaked shirt.

  She holds the pistol in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other. “Always be the first to pick up a mop. Those under you respect that,” she says. “It shows them you’re not too big to do the work yourself. You cold?”

  The air is frigid, but Dragoslava seems unaffected by it. I fold my arms over my chest. “A little.”

  “Here,” she says, holding out the bottle by the neck. “Put on your vodka coat.”

  I take the bottle but don’t drink. Just as with the cold, Dragoslava seems unaffected by what just happened, or by the body now making its way to the bottom of the sea. She had pulled the trigger without a second thought, in the midst of a comforting deception. More or less as she’s doing now with me. A drink together, a chat on the deck; it’s coming any minute.

  “These idiots, always testing you, always wanting to see whose dick is biggest.” She pushes back from the railing, turns to me with arms crossed. “Never let them doubt who’s in charge. Nikko, Sergei—they never would have pulled this shit when Papa was around. There’s a saying about power—walking a tiger or something. How does it go?

  I take a step closer to her. “Power is like riding a tiger. Hard to get on, even harder to get off.”

  “Not when the tiger’s dead. Then it’s the jackals you have to worry about.” She takes the bottle back from me. “Two months after they shot my father, a bomb blew up my driver. I was supposed to be in the car, should have been, but I wasn’t.”

  “The risks of the profession,” I say.

  “Not mine. I never chose this.” She takes a drink of the vodka, grimaces as it goes down. “My father’s death was the opportunity of a lifetime. Know who set it up?”

  “No.”

  “Bohdan Kladivo,” she says. “He was planning a second try when you killed him in Prague.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Her fingers tighten around the pistol. “Tell me something. After you killed Lovrenc, what was your plan? Go home? Or go to Switzerland, try to get your hands on those mythical accounts everyone’s talking about?”

  Once more, she knows the truth without my even having to say it. A little incredulous laugh sneaks out. “I didn’t think I was that obvious.”

  “It’s the desperate move; you’re a desperate woman.” Dragoslava shrugs. “For the record, my father pulled everything out of Switzerland ages ago. If there are any accounts there, it’s because they’re waiting for someone.”

  “Waiting for someone?”

  “You don’t give money to a prime minister or CIA bureaucrat directly. So you set up a company, make them a partner under some fictional new identity.”

  Exactly as my father described in his doomsday device. “So they’re already accounted for.”

  “Yes. And as far as I’m concerned, someone else’s problem. If only the greedy little jackal had asked nicely.” She takes a drink of the vodka and smiles at me. “It’s too bad about us. I kind of like you. We could have been friends.”

  I shrug. “Next life, maybe.”

  “Sure. We’ll get coffee.” Dragoslava’s eyes catch the moonlight as she says this. They’re strong and unwavering and go well with the calm on her face. It isn’t so different, what she’s been through and what I’ve been through. If not the same species, then at least the same genus. The things I could learn from her.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who pulls the trigger.”

  She looks down at the gun in her hand. “Too dangerous to keep you around. Then again, killing someone who saved my life. Some kind of special bad karma there.”

  Obrad appears on the deck, holding a folded sweater in both hands. Dragoslava slides the gun into her waistband and unbuttons her blood-covered blouse
. Her body is just as I thought, thick, with a layer of muscle just beneath the flesh that moves and shifts in the dim light as she balls the blouse up in her hand and tosses it over the side. Obrad hands her the sweater and she puts it on.

  A few words between them, and Obrad disappears again.

  The two of us are quiet for a time, Dragoslava looking out at the sea, keeping me just in her peripheral vision. A cluster of lights comes into view on the shore. She nods to it. “That town, I stayed at a little inn there once. Woke up at ten, ate clams and drank sangria. Went for a swim. Best afternoon of my life.”

  “Sounds—like a wonderful place.”

  “It was. Still is, I imagine,” she says. “Good coffee, too. Maybe that’s where we’ll go. In the next life.”

  I watch as we approach the lights. The town is on a little peninsula jutting from the coast. We’re about to pass in front of it, a hundred meters, maybe two. From here I can see the silhouettes of piers and bobbing boats, small buildings with yellow windows, strings of lights and moving people.

  I smile at her. “Why wait?”

  Dragoslava blinks. “Wait for what?”

  “The next life.” I pull the robe off, let it fall to the deck. “Let’s have that coffee now.”

  And then I’m over the side.

  * * *

  Breath explodes from my lungs in a silent cry of shock as the frigid water grates the skin off my body. My primitive dive breaks apart under the surface and I’m scrambling madly back up for air. Just as my lips open to inhale, a wave crashes over me and I suck salt water into my lungs.

  But panic will get me nowhere. I cough the water out, take a deep breath of air, and launch myself away from the looming black silhouette of the Erebus. I’m no swimmer, have never been a swimmer, and can brag only that it would take me a long time to drown.

  I thrash my legs madly, find some kind of rhythm, and manage a graceless backstroke toward the shore. Waves lap over me like nasty, icy surprises and it’s all I can do not to gasp each time one strikes. There’s another splash beside the yacht, and I lift my head just far enough to see Dragoslava coming toward me in a powerful crawl.

  Searchlights erupt from the boat, strafing the water, then land on us. Two more splashes into the water and shouting from the deck. Dragoslava pulls up beside me.

  She’s obviously a stronger swimmer than I am and, even without the gun, could easily overpower me. But instead, she’s in a backstroke beside me.

  “You insane bitch,” Dragoslava shouts. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Problem with killing,” I shout back just as a wave crests over my face. I choke through it. “It gets so easy after a while.”

  “Drowning is better?”

  “Coffee is better.”

  Dragoslava lifts her head, looking at some activity on the boat. “They’re lowering the motor launch. Obrad will have a rifle.”

  “So decide,” I gasp. “Coffee or that. Your choice.”

  * * *

  It takes forever to reach land, the motor launch gurgling along behind us the whole way. The certainty I’d felt that she was going to kill me has turned into certainty she won’t, at least not now. The bad karma, and the family resemblance: what certain kinds of trauma have etched into both of us. She’d seen that, too. I stumble out of the sea, exhausted and so cold I’m not even shivering anymore, just numb.

  Dragoslava sloshes out at the same time, clasps a cold hand to my shoulder. Like me, she’d stripped out of her clothes before jumping in and wears only her bra and underpants. “That hotel,” she says. “The restaurant better be open.”

  Obrad leaps from the launch, pulls it onto the beach, and two more guards climb out. Dragoslava turns to them, shouts instructions. One rushes to us with a pair of blankets. They’re thick, scratchy wool, and just the thing we need. My teeth start chattering.

  “This way,” Dragoslava says, pointing down the beach to a group of small two-story buildings. I follow her, and Obrad follows behind. The two other guards push the boat out to sea, heading, I assume, back to the yacht.

  Only three couples are on the patio when we shuffle in, barefoot and dripping from beneath our blankets. A waiter approaches, perplexed, as if we needed medical help.

  “Just went for a swim,” I say in Spanish, doing my best to smile at him. “Could we have a table?”

  He starts to tell me they were just closing up, then Obrad produces a sheaf of euros and suddenly they’re open again. So, a nice table for two next to the outdoor fireplace and a pot of coffee, black and strong. Obrad takes his at the bar.

  “Can’t very well shoot you here,” Dragoslava whispers.

  I take a sip from the mug, let it scald my throat all the way down to my stomach. “That’s the idea,” I say. “Something else then. We can arm wrestle.”

  Dragoslava leans forward, and I see her shoulders heave as if she’s weeping, then I hear her laugh. “So—how does this end? Do we hug? Promise to write?”

  My eyes are heavy with exhaustion and terror. I let them close. “I don’t want to die. Not for shit our fathers did. I’m tired of it.”

  A long silence and, when I open my eyes, I find Dragoslava looking at me.

  “You love him, your father?”

  It’s a harder question than I want to admit. “Yes,” I say. “Do you?”

  She stares down into her mug as if the answer were inside it. “He rescued me. Saved my life. So, yes.”

  “Rescued you?”

  “He was Serbian. But born in Bosnia and loyal to it. He found me in Sarajevo during the siege. I was an orphan. Do they teach about Sarajevo in school? Or is it just another far-off event?”

  “They mention it,” I say. “The Serbs shelled the city.”

  “And when there was nothing left, they shelled it again anyway. For four years.” She lets out a long, tired sigh. “I was half-starved, bleeding, covered in filth. Yes, Viktor Zoric was a monster. But once, for a single moment, in the winter of 1994, he wasn’t.”

  “And your biological parents, they died in the siege?”

  “My mother did. As for my father, who knows. In a ditch somewhere, along with the other Muslim men.”

  “I’m—very sorry.”

  She’s silent for a long moment, dragging a plum-colored fingernail through a long cigarette burn in the table’s surface. “But you know all about that, don’t you? The file the CIA showed us said your mother died when you were young.”

  I look down, then nod. “Algeria. I was seven.”

  She leans forward, meets my eyes. “We don’t need to die for our fathers’ sins, do we? Can we agree on that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I meant what I said. The Zoric family business is closed. You are not my enemy. And I’m not yours—and whoever you’re working for.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “For coming after you.”

  “If there’s anything left in Switzerland, you’re welcome to it,” Dragoslava says. “Compensation for Nikko. And a show of gratitude for killing Bohdan Kladivo before he killed me.”

  I look at her. The fearsome scar on her face glistening in the firelight. The fearsome gangster she is, or was, still there in the calm of her expression. But despite her power, despite her ability to have killed me at any moment in the past hours, here I am, still alive. Maybe she pities me, or maybe it’s something else, or maybe it doesn’t matter.

  A pair of newcomers enters the patio, and both Dragoslava and I raise our eyes to them. It’s the two other guards from the launch, and they hand Obrad my backpack and a small duffel bag, presumably clothes for Dragoslava. Obrad approaches us and sets both down on our table.

  “Time to go,” Dragoslava says, rising to her feet. “I have just one request.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Anything.”

  “That you never come near me again.” Dragoslava snatches the duffel bag and starts walking toward the door leading to the restaurant.

  I pull my jeans and a sweater from the backpac
k, then dress right there at the table.

  Seventeen

  My body is exhausted, drained of everything, but I need to keep moving, to get as far away as possible. Dragoslava letting me go was an act of generosity. Of sisterhood and benevolence. But decided then and there, on an impulse. The kind of decision one soon regrets, maybe within minutes. I put on my socks and boots in a little square a block from the hotel and start down a wide road that I hope leads somewhere I can catch a train.

  The town ends abruptly at a highway, and I walk along the shoulder for an hour before I hit the next town. It’s not a quaint seaside village like the one I just left, but a collection of prefab concrete shops closed for the night and a gas station where eighteen-wheelers chuff and snort as they pull away from the diesel pumps. So no train for me tonight, but maybe the cab of a truck.

  I enter the gas station and find an all-night snack bar with a few tables. I buy a coffee and a sandwich in plastic wrap. Avocado turning brown, yellow cheese, and some kind of meat that might be ham or turkey or a Frankenstein hybrid of both. From my seat, I appraise each person who comes in. I could handle myself with any of them when it comes to my safety, so what I’m looking for is someone who looks like they won’t ask too many questions.

  I put a new SIM card into my phone and log in to the encrypted e-mail I share with my father. The drafts folder is empty except for the two I’d sent him from Buenos Aires and the one I sent from the café table at the Valencia harbor. No replies from him, which means either there’s nothing to say or he’s been taken. I shiver, both from the cold and the thought, and leave a quick update: All OK 4 now.

  Sitting here has its own dangers, too. I’m getting sleepy, and the clerk behind the counter keeps eyeing me, waiting for trouble. A call to the cops, a problem with my passport, then it’s all over. I run my fingers through my hair and realize it’s dried into a snarly mess from the salt water. So I fish a comb from my backpack and head to the bathroom.

  In the mirror, I see any driver I might have approached would have been unlikely to take me anywhere. Besides my hair, the makeup I’d put on before going to the restaurant has run down my face and dried in black-blue streaks. So I bend at the faucet and wash as best I can, using hand soap as shampoo.