“How much?”
“Ten million,” I say.
A long pause, silence of a certain kind. “Lila…”
“Do it, Naz. Today. Right now.”
“It’s very … generous of you.”
“Naz?”
“Yes?”
“Are there any—has anyone left a message?”
A sad breath. “A message,” she says. “I’m sorry, no.”
Pedestrians on the street below stream across the bridge toward the mosque. Long robes. Burkas. Jeans. Bare, blond heads. I wade through another few moments of polite small talk with Naz, small talk for which she’ll no doubt bill me, until we both hang up.
Ten million. How easily the sum had been said, like ten million grains of salt. It was the other sum mentioned—no messages, zero messages—that hurt. I push back from the balcony railing, shut the doors, draw the curtains.
Marike Saar’s apartment had a balcony like this balcony, had curtains like these curtains. How quickly they’d been exchanged, that room for this one. Budapest for Sarajevo. Carlo Frei for no one. I sink into the bed in the darkened room, close my eyes, imagine alternate had-I-stayed me beside alternate had-I-stayed him. Marike and Carlo, maybe having coffee in Marike’s apartment. Marike and Carlo, maybe kneeling on the floor, Carlo’s photos spread out on Marike’s IKEA coffee table. I’d mm and hm as I finally got how the artist’s eye sees, and by the end, Marike would perceive the world just as Carlo does, all the little dramas and walk-on characters that make life so interesting and beautiful.
But I didn’t stay. And now Carlo is alone in his alternate free-jazz-Budapest reality where there’s a melody underlying the chaos if you look for it. A logic underlying the chaos, and therefore justice, and therefore safety. Good people leading good lives; why should anything go wrong? I purge the Marike-Carlo fantasy from my mind with a long wince, then flop onto the mattress, press a pillow over my head. The sheets smell faintly of chemical detergent and cigarette smoke. Marike’s smelled like lavender.
* * *
The night passes like a time-lapse movie, black sky turning blue, traffic lights ticking off the seconds, the marble mosque dialing up its radiance. All this I observe from a chair I pulled onto the balcony when I realized sleep wouldn’t come. It’s only at the sound of the hotel phone (get out get out get out get out) that I move, stumbling on numb legs into the room. I clutch the receiver to my ear. “Yes?”
It’s a visitor, the clerk on the other end says. Someone waiting for me in the lobby. The clerk knows more but doesn’t say more.
I brush my teeth, wash my face, comb my hair, and find Dragoslava waiting for me on a couch next to the front desk. The clerks, the bellmen, are rigid with respect. She rises when I appear at the bottom of the stairs, and we walk out the front door together.
“How did you find me?” I say.
“I know everyone in Sarajevo,” she says. “It wasn’t hard. You should be more careful with your aliases. Svetlana Petrov. Might as well have registered under Jane Smith.”
We cross the street and start down the sidewalk beside the river.
“Did you receive it, the money?” I say.
“You thought you could bribe me?”
“It’s for the hospital,” I say. “Unconditional. Whether you help me or not.”
“Ten million,” she says. “We needed a burn center, now we’ll have one. What should we call it?”
“Anonymous Donor Wing,” I say.
“Not the Lila Kereti Wing?”
I look at her, but Dragoslava shows nothing.
“It was the name on the accounts,” I say. “Was she—was she a real person?”
“One of my father’s girlfriends. His favorite. They had a son together.” Dragoslava stops at the low stone wall running beside the river. “At least someone can make use of what she left behind. Since she can’t.”
I’m about to ask for more, but something stops me, an instinct that this is unwelcome territory.
Dragoslava gestures to the other side. The buildings there range from the very old and traditional to the very new and defiantly modern. “Serbs were over there, all the way to the shore. We were trapped here.” She turns, points to an intersection. “The snipers on their side would aim for civilians on ours. When you came to a place where the street was open, you ran like hell. Children first, before the snipers could react. Then the parents.”
Dragoslava folds her arms in front of her, the memory so old and scarred over she doesn’t flinch at it anymore. “I went first, then my mother. The bullet caught her in the stomach. They did that sometimes, the snipers, avoided the kill shot. So it lasted longer. So they could watch.”
I stay silent for a moment, images of my own mother flashing across my vision, all of which stop before her final moments, which I had been lucky enough not to see.
“And—what did you do?” I ask after a time.
She looks at me from the corners of her eyes and shrugs. “I watched it, too. A few men, they dashed out to try to carry her out of the intersection, but the sniper got excited, started shooting everything in sight. So someone threw out the end of a chain. She was too weak to hold on.”
I extend my hand tentatively, squeeze her forearm. She tries to smile.
“Three hours,” Dragoslava says. “That’s how long it took her to die.”
I can only nod, look back at her with wet eyes.
Dragoslava lets out a sigh, then shakes her head. “What you said yesterday. About the Israelis.”
“It was true. You’ve been cleared. That’s what they told me.”
She pushes away from the wall, straightens her shoulders. Meeting over. “I’ll call the sheikh this afternoon,” she says. “In the meantime, you’re staying with me.”
Thirty-Nine
Bullet holes stitched across the exterior walls remain unpatched, and jagged sections torn from the roof are covered with plastic tarps that rustle and snap in the wind. A woman in a maid’s uniform who introduces herself as Blanka greets me at the front door and shows me past construction scaffolds and pods of workers, up a grand staircase with its railing missing.
There’s a hole on the floor of the second story to match one in the roof, and Blanka glides effortlessly around it, calling a warning as she goes to be careful, especially if I’ve been drinking. My room is in the back and overlooks a yard with a stable and guesthouse and long shed that I assume is a kind of dormitory for the Zoric family army that I see patrolling the grounds with assault rifles and regal German shepherds. Dinner, Blanka says, will be served in the dining room at seven. I thank her and, when she disappears down the hallway, close the door.
Once—a decade ago or a hundred years ago—the walls had been painted yellow. Now plaster flakes like dandruff onto scuffed wooden floors. My bed, however, is a wrought-iron masterpiece of comfort with white linens and a fat eiderdown folded down the center of the mattress.
The groan of drills, the rapping of hammers, the whine of electric saws, all sound far away now, a floor below and all the way across the expanse of the mansion. The floorboards creak with every step, and I notice a rectangle of paint on the wall that appears nearly fresh, as if a dresser had stood there for a long time. Who had been here before Dragoslava had taken it over, and what had happened to them?
I don’t believe in ghosts but will make a one-time-only exception for this place. Bloody feuds going back to Alexander the Great. Burnt churches. Burnt mosques. Burnt synagogues. All the ghosts of the last century wander a road that leads back to Sarajevo. I lean on the windowsill, the curtains to either side of me dancing listlessly in the breeze, and stare at the lush, gorgeous green minefields beyond.
* * *
Dragoslava is working late, so it’s dinner for one in a dimly lit dining room. Patties of meat in a thin, spicy tomato sauce, along with a salad of cucumbers and tomato and onion peeled into narrow ribbons of white and pink.
“Hvala vam,” I say slowly as Blanka sets the plate in f
ront of me. Thank you. My first words in Bosnian, carefully memorized.
Blanka restrains a chuckle and smiles. “Nema na čemu,” she says, enunciating each syllable for my benefit.
“You’re welcome,” says a woman’s voice behind me.
I turn to see Dragoslava silhouetted in the dining room entrance, a dark, tired shape drooping at the shoulders, leaning against the doorway for support.
“I know,” I say.
“No, I’m saying you’re welcome.” Dragoslava peels off her pumps with her toes and pads into the room, stopping at a battered sideboard and pulling the cork out of a half-empty bottle of wine. “For letting you get this far. Against my better judgment. You want some?”
“I’m fine with water, thank you.”
She sits in a chair opposite me and takes a long sip. “Lovrenc is skiing,” she says.
I blink at her. “Skiing?”
“You know, mountains, snow, uncomfortable boots.”
“I know what it is.”
Dragoslava twirls the wineglass, looks inside idly at the whirlpool. “Aspen, maybe. Or wherever there’s snow this time of year. It’s what he does. It’s all he does.”
“Sounds—nice.”
Dragoslava closes her eyes, inhales slowly, the exhaustion coming off her in waves that are almost visible. “A woman came in today. Her nine-year-old daughter needs medicine that costs three thousand euros a month. State won’t pay for it. Says she’s terminal.”
“So you paid for it,” I say. Not a question but the obvious answer.
“You did,” Dragoslava says quietly. Her eyes open, and they’re suddenly sharp and alert. “Do good things, Gwendolyn. With your money. Don’t waste it on bar tabs in Aspen. People died for what you have.”
I nod that I understand, that I’ll do as she says.
“I reached him, by the way,” she says. “The sheikh.”
My silverware clatters against the plate. “And?”
The corners of her mouth creep upward, a reluctant smile. “You can talk to him tonight. After dinner.”
“Talk to the sheikh?”
“Talk to your father.”
* * *
I stand on Dragoslava’s patio with her enormous satellite phone pressed to my ear as the call goes through. My father’s voice answers in English, a tentative “Hello?”
“Dad.”
I actually hear the smile crackle across his face. “Hi, kiddo.”
Silence for a long moment, or as silent as an encrypted line connecting two phones to a satellite can be. Whirs and chirps and harmonic tones drift in and out like electronic clouds passing through the signal. I think of Terrance, or the voice I thought was his. My body stiffens.
“Kiddo? Can you hear me?” the voice on the other side says.
“My guppies,” I say. “When I was nine, remember?”
A crackling pause, then, “Yes.”
“What were their names?”
“Monkey and—was it Lollipop?”
I close my eyes. “That was two of them. What about the third?”
Another pause. “Stinkface,” he says.
I tighten my grip around the phone. “There was no third guppy,” I say flatly.
“Wait—yes there was, kiddo. Lollipop died first, remember? I got you Stinkface to replace her. Then I used the wrong cleaner on their bowl, and, you know.”
I laugh silently, remembering now. Monkey, Lollipop, Stinkface—that tragic trio who had no idea what they’d mean to me a decade later. I manage to choke out, “Dad!”
He laughs genuinely, a sound I recognize, and just as good as dead guppies for confirming it’s him.
He switches to Spanish and, even then, speaks quietly and indirectly. “I’m getting fat, kiddo. You won’t recognize me.”
I reply the same way. “They’re feeding you, Dad?”
“Muslim hospitality, you know how it is. The sheikh and I, you were here once, remember? Eid? The lamb?”
“Yes. I remember. So—you’re a guest. Not a…”
“No. I mean, yes. I’m a guest.”
“We had a duress code, do you remember it?”
“Sure. I remember her very well. I haven’t thought about her in ages, though.” Another long silence, the whir and hum of distance over the line. His voice tightens around the words as he speaks. “When you left, that was—the hardest thing.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing back tears. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I know. For me too. They held me, Dad. For four months. Did you know that? Four months.”
His breath shakes, and I’m certain he’s picturing it, the details foggy but the important parts clear enough. “Baby,” he says. “My baby, I’m sorry.”
“But I won, Dad. I won. You remember the thing we talked about, just before I left?” I have to restrain myself from saying too much.
“Yes?”
“I got the—the person whose papers you left for me. At the inn. You know?”
“Yes. The papers—they were supposed to be an insurance policy.”
“Well, it worked, Dad. It worked. Lots of—we’ll be eating doughnuts forever. As many as we want.”
“Doughnuts are what makes the world go round, right?” He chuckles sadly. “I’m proud of you, kiddo. I want you to know that.”
My eyes feel like they’re shriveling, and I bite my lower lip. “I tried to tell you. You didn’t answer.”
“The e-mail was compromised. I couldn’t get in touch. It might be how…”
“How they found me,” I say. “I know, Dad.”
“But I got away, Gwen. Our friend, with the American haircut, you know? He got me out. Then I came here.”
“The man you’re with, he’s a good guy?”
“The best.” I can tell from his voice that he means it.
“I think I—I think I’d like to come there. See you.”
Another pause. “Yeah. I think I’d like that, too.”
“Very soon.”
“Okay.” He lets out a sigh. “I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
“See you soon?”
“See you soon.”
Even after the connection is dead, I keep the phone pressed to my ear. He did it. He actually did it. He lived.
* * *
It’s only when Dragoslava sets her wineglass on a stone table behind me that I become conscious of her presence. I turn and catch her face half-illuminated by the light coming from inside the house, a single brow raised inquisitively.
“Well?”
The words come out in a hushed tremble. “He’s fine,” I say. “He’s fine.”
It’s the unscarred side of Dragoslava’s face that’s visible, and a soft crescent of cheek rises up in satisfaction. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’ll go to the airport tomorrow. Maybe be in Doha by nightfall, if I can catch a connection.”
“Or I can take you,” she says.
“Take me?”
An embarrassed chuckle. “My father left us a plane. Tacky thing. Looks like a flying strip club. I can’t bring myself to sell it.”
“You’re sure?”
“For ten million, it’s the least I can do.” She touches my shoulder, her fingers lingering there. “Get some rest. We’ll leave in the morning.”
* * *
More ghosts, the night air stirring them up. I can hear the German shepherds growling at them as they whisper through the perfect trees in the minefield. What had Midho said when we arrived from Belgrade? That Dragoslava stayed here out of loyalty. But it’s not to the ghosts; it’s to the living. To the legless teen and the terminal nine-year-old. To their parents. To a city struggling to stay breathing.
In my life, I’ve only ever trusted a few people. If I thought about it, I’m pretty sure I could count them on one hand. But, foolishly, Dragoslava is among them. I can’t point to a list of reasons, but I can point to the totality of her and the absurdity that of all the people in the world I could entrust
my life to, it’s the daughter of a gangster who only months ago had been asked to kill me.
Snuggled beneath the eiderdown in the room, I close my eyes and listen to the howling of the wind through loose slats in the wall and gaps between windowpanes. He wouldn’t have understood, Terrance. He wouldn’t have accepted the logic of the absurd. That’s what it comes down to, I think. Being okay with the idea that none of this makes sense and will never make sense. He scrabbled together a life for himself, the name Carlo Frei and a job that would allow him to make beautiful things.
So long as he never looks up from his work, the illusion can persist. But see how quickly it had been snatched away from us in Zurich.
Tomorrow, I’ll head to Qatar. And the day after that—there’s only a blank page, something absurd yet to be discovered.
* * *
The jet is unmarked except for the tail number, and the interior smells of old cigarette smoke and cologne. Everything that’s not fake wood paneling and black leather is plated in gold, with the initials VZ engraved liberally throughout.
Dragoslava settles into the seat across from mine, cracked taupe leather, sweat-stained on the armrests, and pushes a duffel bag toward me. I haul it into my lap and open it. Bricks of cash wrapped in plastic and new iPhones still in their boxes.
“A gift for the sheikh,” she says. “It’s a million dollars—the nice round number matters—and phones for his grandchildren. He has fourteen. Remember that.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I say, embarrassed suddenly I hadn’t thought of it myself.
“Of course you will,” Dragoslava says as the plane starts to taxi. “Nice suit, by the way.”
I look down, brush a piece of lint from my right arm. “I got it in Zurich,” I say.
She leans forward, rubs the fabric, watches as it turns from blue to black. I ask her about her own suit, and just like that we’re discussing clothes like two old girlfriends. It’s the first conversation of its kind I think I’ve ever had.
As the wheels lift off the runway, I’m pressed back in my seat and feel the rush of giddy nausea creeping from my stomach into my veins. Only a few hours left now. The duffel bag slides across the floor and I brace it with my feet. How kind Dragoslava had been to loan it to me, how kind she’s being. I find myself studying her, the contours of her scars, the way her jaw is set, and her eyes, always focused, always perceptive, drilling through the plane’s window to the world outside. She understands its dangers. The cowardice and awfulness of the people who inhabit it. Yet the orphan girl turned gangster’s daughter who has every reason to hate chose something else instead.
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