The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  In Belgrade I learned there was no train direct to Sarajevo, what with the recent genocide having soured relations between the two capitals. I could get there through Zagreb, a twenty-hour detour, or hire a driver and car and be there in three. Outside the station I met Midho, who makes a living shuttling passengers between Belgrade and his hometown of Sarajevo in a well-cared-for VW hatchback he calls his Ferrari. I paid in cash, a hundred Swiss francs, and introduced myself as Sveta, a throwaway pseudonym.

  Midho flicks a finger toward the ruins of the building. “Sorry for the mess,” he says. “Maid’s day off.”

  I give him an uneasy smile, and he laughs in that way people who’ve seen too much tragedy laugh—the world is hell, no sense dwelling on it.

  Virtually every building older than I am bears scars, star-shaped wounds from shells, crudely patched over, seams of bullet holes from machine guns, too small to bother with.

  Then we turn a corner and an enormous mosque looms before us, white marble and gold. A muezzin has just started the call to prayer, and figures are streaming into the structure, men in simple white pants and long shirts that come almost to their knees, and women in hijab and full burkas.

  “Saudis,” Midho says, pointing to the mosque. “We need factories and schools, they give us that. Before the war, Muslims like me, my wife, we never wear stuff like that.” He shakes his head at the idea. “Only Zoric family makes work here now. Furniture factory, you know. And hospital, good hospital.”

  “You like them, the Zoric family?”

  “Viktor Zoric, he is killed since a few years.” Midho fumbles for another cigarette.

  “He was Serbian, no?”

  “A Serb, but Bosnian Serb, our Serb. Criminal, they say about him, but pfft.”

  He taps a finger to his temple. “His daughter, very smart. All that money, she could live anywhere. But she stays in this shithole. Loyal, like her father.”

  “There’s a place I heard about. El Gran Castillo. Do you know it?”

  “East, a little. Viktor’s hotel. Big gangster parties every night before he died. Now, nothing.” Midho exhales a jet of smoke. “His daughter owns, I think.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  * * *

  El Gran Castillo. The Grand Castle. An inexplicable Spanish name for an Austro-Hungarian hotel owned by a Serb in Bosnia. It sits away from the city by several kilometers in what Midho told me was, a century ago, a neighborhood for the old Austro-Hungarian authorities. When the Serbs retreated after the war, they took everything they could carry from it and burned down most of what they couldn’t.

  He drops me off outside the empty parking lot. Not many visitors to the hotel since Viktor’s death, Midho explains. But the area around it is a popular tourist destination among visiting Arabs from the Gulf, families used to endless stretches of sand seeking out the green and lush.

  What comes next will be a tricky play for me. When I’d approached Lovrenc and Dragoslava the first time, it had been as an adversary. Now I’m coming in search of their help. So I’ll wait to be noticed, make myself seen, no stealth. I walk down a muddy road next to the hotel, beneath an archway of unkempt trees, just surveilling the area. Every once in a while, an old mansion slips in and out of sight behind the foliage, the serious, down-to-business architecture losing the battle against weeds and rain and winter. Midho had been right about the looting. Windows aren’t broken and doors aren’t hanging ajar; the windows and doors are simply gone, leaving black rectangles garlanded with vines.

  Up ahead, I spot movement and hear children playing. They grow quieter as I draw nearer. It’s a Romani camp, a collection of sheds made with scavenged wood and metal, a few women hanging out on makeshift stoops in bright green and orange and pink dresses. The children approach me with curiosity but keep their distance as they size up the newcomer.

  The road turns right just at their encampment and continues to a shelled-out brick building with debris extending for twenty meters in every direction. When I come before it, a wave of desperation hits me suddenly, and I stagger back a step. The frames of children’s beds are strewn around, impossibly bent and mangled. The things of childhood—brightly colored chairs and low tables, teddy bears and plastic toys—are spread across the courtyard, barely recognizable beneath the char of the initial explosions and two decades in the open.

  The desperation is accompanied by silence, and I realize the Gypsy kids have vanished. Scared of ghosts, I assume. Then I see the real reason a moment later: a sign in four languages on a post: DANGER: MINES. I stare down, searching the ground around me, scanning the charred body of someone’s stuffed bear, the head of someone’s beloved doll, the hulk of a melted plastic car. I’ve stumbled into someone else’s war, bumped into someone else’s tragedy.

  I turn back, keeping to what there is of a little footpath, until I reach the road where the Gypsy kids are still gathered. They part as I approach, keeping away from the stranger who walked through the forbidden place, the place they’ve been told never, ever to enter. One of the mothers rises from the stoop and rushes toward me, hissing something, making some gesture with a contorted hand that looks very specific, very meaningful. A curse, I’m sure, and from her expression, not one meant to protect me.

  * * *

  Judging from the vacant parking lot of El Gran Castillo, the place is obviously closed for business. It’s only when I draw closer and catch sight of the dining patio, every place immaculately set with china and silverware, every ashtray and crystal goblet spotless, that I realize it’s just enormously unpopular.

  I enter the restaurant, where a waiter in bow tie and vest is standing at attention. He’d seen me, I suppose, and scrambled up from his chair and tucked away his newspaper. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s the way he always stands, on the off chance a customer might come in.

  The place is empty, not in the sense of having few customers, but in the sense of having literally zero customers, except for me.

  “Would mademoiselle desire for herself a table for dining?” he asks in proudly enunciated English.

  I nod that mademoiselle would. Absurdly, he checks a reservation book, dragging a finger over an empty page, before plucking a menu from a rack and showing me to a table for six with an excellent view of the parking lot.

  “Just a coffee,” I say.

  He bows formally and disappears into a room I assume is the kitchen.

  The place doesn’t stir the entire time he’s gone. Not a single figure enters the restaurant, and no one comes into the parking lot. The waiter returns twenty minutes later with a silver tray, a tiny china espresso cup, and an elaborate silver service consisting of a coffeepot, a pitcher of cream, a tray of cookies, a dish of jam, a glass of water, a bowl of various kinds of sugar, and a pair of silver tongs.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Where are the other customers?”

  “Weekday afternoons,” he says, shrugging amiably.

  I stir a cube of sugar into the coffee, the bitter Balkan kind, thick like river mud. “Has Dragoslava been in today?”

  His eyes actually flutter and he wrings his hands. “Dragoslava? Ah, no. No. Enjoy your coffee, mademoiselle.”

  It turns out I was wrong about how empty the place is. A moment after he heads into the kitchen, he appears again in the doorway, a man in a suit beside him who looks me over, gives the waiter whispered instructions.

  They leave me alone for a half hour longer, then the waiter appears with the check. “Will there be anything else, mademoiselle?”

  “Oh, I’m just waiting for a friend,” I say.

  “A friend?”

  “Dragoslava Zoric. I believe I mentioned her.”

  He sets the check down and heads off into the kitchen.

  A moment later, he’s back, carrying a mustard-yellow telephone, the cord trailing behind him. The man in the suit waits in the doorway, hands folded in front of him. “A call for you,” the waiter says, setting the phone on the table.

  I pick up the r
eceiver, press it to my ear.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Dragoslava. Unmistakably.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I say. “Thought I’d stop by.”

  “Stand up,” she says. “Look out the window.”

  I do, and I see a black Mercedes sedan pull into the parking lot and crawl to a stop.

  “A car just pulled in,” I say.

  I hear her breathe angrily. “Pay for your coffee, and get in.”

  * * *

  That there is no blindfold or bag over my head is cause for alarm. It means one of two things: The first is that secrecy is unnecessary because we’re headed somewhere public. The second, and more likely, is that secrecy is unnecessary because I’m about to be shot.

  The driver and the guard are new to me. They’re well-dressed versions of the bodyguards I’d met on the Erebus, thick men in suits and ties, and their demeanor is professional and efficient. There’s a quick frisk and search through my backpack, then the driver reminds me to put on my seat belt.

  I ask where we’re headed, but I am told only “To Dragoslava.” The car speeds through the city, and I find relief in the idea of meeting her in some crowded, public area. Then the Mercedes turns onto a winding road that leads into the surrounding hills, and my relief turns to unease.

  “Are we almost there?” I ask.

  The guard in the passenger seat turns his head. “Near the end now.”

  The car slows as a block of ruins comes into sight, shattered buildings that used to be three or four stories tall, blown open, exposing interior walls and doorways, a bulletin board, a sink dangling on a pipe. It’s not an office or apartment building—my mind scrambles to decode the subtle signals of its identity, not wanting it to be true. The furniture is institutional, and the walls at one time had been a certain kind of white, hospital white. I catch a scorched mural of cartoon rabbits and chipmunks playing in a meadow under a rainbow and watchful yellow sun. A cartoon doctor in a white coat. A cartoon nurse leaning over the bed of a cartoon child.

  “What is this place?” I say to the men in the front seat, first in English, then in Russian, the words coming out in a panicked gasp.

  “Dragoslava,” answers the driver.

  The sedan passes between two of the shattered buildings, creeping along pavement that is surprisingly new and smooth until it emerges on the other side. The road climbs to the top of a hill, where a new hospital sits, gleaming glass and clean white brick, people moving busily past the windows or lingering on the sidewalk. A man pulls a bald child in a wagon. A teen in a wheelchair smokes a cigarette. A mother and father walk patiently beside a daughter on crutches. The sedan pulls beneath the carport, and a woman walks purposefully from the lobby to the curb. A blouse and skirt, stockings and pumps, the scar covering the side of her face visible only when the wind rustles her dark hair.

  She opens the back door before the guard in the passenger seat has a chance to, smiling radiantly at me, an old friend. Only her eyes tell the truth, stabbing into me as I climb out and she pulls me into an embrace.

  “How dare you,” Dragoslava hisses, so close my ear is wet from her breath.

  I try to smile, but it comes out twitchy and unsure of itself. Dragoslava turns to the guard and driver, says something in Bosnian, and leads me away down the sidewalk with an arm over my shoulder.

  “I came for your help,” I say quietly.

  “Shut up,” she says.

  Only when we’ve cleared the hospital and the last of the patients on the sidewalk does she turn to me. The smile she hadn’t meant in the first place is gone.

  “Turn around,” she says.

  I do as she orders.

  “What do you see?”

  “A hospital,” I say.

  “Describe it,” she says.

  I swallow. “Large. New.”

  “Do better.”

  I close my eyes, try to imagine the words she wants to hear. “Useful. Important.”

  She shoves my shoulders hard. I stagger and turn back to her.

  “Life,” she says. “Hope. Goodness.”

  I nod as if I’m understanding what she’s getting at. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, all those things.”

  “Expensive,” Dragoslava continues. “Also, fragile. We opened seven months ago. And now a fugitive wanted by the CIA shows up in Sarajevo, asking for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought…”

  “The world is full of people who need help,” she says. “Not just Gwendolyn Bloom.”

  * * *

  We walk for a while in silence along the edge of the hospital property, cracked soil, patches of weeds. No matter which direction we travel, the ruins seem somehow always ahead of us, never out of sight.

  “It worked out for you,” she says eventually. “Switzerland. You got what you wanted.”

  I wonder how much to disclose. “Yes,” I say. “There was—something left.”

  “A lot?”

  “Yes.”

  Her pace slows for a moment, and I can tell she’s debating whether to ask for a figure, an amount, some gauge of her generosity.

  “You killed Bohdan Kladivo before he could kill me. So I paid my debt to you, and I have no intention of going back on my word,” she says. “But there was a condition, remember? That you never come near me again.”

  “If there were any other way…”

  “You’re not rich enough to solve your own problems now?”

  “It’s not that kind of problem,” I say. “It’s about my father. He’s with Sheikh Al-Saqqaf. In Qatar. He’s a guest.”

  “Need a ride to the airport?”

  “I need to get in touch. You did business with him.”

  “My father did business with him,” Dragoslava says. “I haven’t seen the sheikh in years. Why can’t you find out who his attorney is? Call his business office?”

  “How many months of voice mails, messages left with secretaries?” I stop, wait for her to face me. “A phone call, an introduction. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “The English phrase is ‘vouch.’ You need me to vouch for you.”

  “Yes. I need you to vouch for me,” I say. “Just like I did for you. With the Israelis.”

  She squints at me. “The message I asked you to pass on.”

  “They found me in Zurich, and I told them you were out of the arms-trafficking business. They found me again in Budapest and said they confirmed it.” I take a step closer to her. “You’re off their list. ‘No longer an active threat’ is how they put it.”

  “And you believed them?” she says.

  “They have no reason to lie,” I say. “That should be good for at least a phone call.”

  “Then why should I believe you? We don’t even know each other.” She tilts her head toward a grove of green just off the hospital property, a section of lush forest. “See those trees?”

  I nod.

  “Look what’s around them,” she says.

  Worn roads, flattened yards around decaying houses, the edge of a city abutting its opposite, unspoiled nature.

  “You saw that boy out in front of the hospital, in a wheelchair?” she says.

  The teenager off to the side, smoking a cigarette. “Yes,” I say.

  “He was trying to take a picture of a bird, wandered into a forest like that one. Now he’ll never walk again. He ignored the first rule every child here learns: Trust only what’s old and worn out. Because in anything green and pretty, the devil left land mines there.”

  The breeze picks up, the trees in the grove of land mines sway with it. I fold my arms over my chest.

  * * *

  Hawkers of polyester silk scarves and local trinkets made in China crowd the pedestrian arcades. Toy guns that look like the real thing beside dolls in Bosnian dress. Souvenir ashtrays from the ’84 Olympics, when shelled hospitals and ditches filled with bodies were still a few years off.

  The street empties into a cobblestone square bordered wi
th café tables. A boy of four or five slips his hand from his mother’s and races forward, scrambling a flock of pigeons airborne. They swirl like a cyclone around a bride and groom grinning for photos before a fountain, he staring at the camera with wide, nervous eyes, she gripping the strings to a bouquet of a dozen balloons. An orange one breaks free, and for a moment the entire square stops mid-step, mid-conversation, mid–coffee sip, to follow its progress into a cold gray sky.

  Are we meant to feel bad for the bride or happy for the balloon? For a few seconds, this is the single shared thought. Then the transition back to more important things happens just as quickly, chatter swelling, paces resuming. Only I and the child who scattered the pigeons are still watching the shrinking dot of orange, zagging across three dimensions that look like two. He’s imagining a grand voyage, a trip across a sea, a desert, a jungle, camels and tigers looking up with curiosity at the lucky adventurer.

  What marvelous things are possible when we’re free.

  I wander deeper into the neighborhood beside the square and find a hotel where a 100-franc note and a lie about a lost passport allow me to register under the name Svetlana Petrov. Visible from my balcony, just across the Miljacka River, is the white marble mosque Midho had pointed out to me on the drive into the city. I lean on the balcony railing, watching the traffic crawl three stories below me, and dial Naz’s office.

  She answers at once, a cheery hello for her favorite client.

  “I need you to look something up for me,” I say. “The English name is the General Children’s Hospital of Sarajevo.”

  I hear the keyboard click beneath Naz’s fingers.

  “Yes. Here it is,” she says.

  “Is there a charity associated with it? An organization, maybe?”

  Another pause, more clicking. “Yes. Run by—the Lovrenc and Dragoslava Zoric Foundation.”

  “And it’s—legitimate?”

  “Appears to be.”

  From the mosque across the street, the muezzin starts up, the call to afternoon prayer sliding outward from the minarets across the city.

  “I want to make a donation,” I say. “Use whatever account you think is best.”