Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “Is Molly really your name?”

  “Is Ingrid really yours, ma’am?”

  “Tedic’s little name games.” Irena snorted. “Why doesn’t he hire ANC soldiers instead of you?”

  “African National Congress, ma’am?” This really was new for Molly, and he rubbed exquisite fingernails over his scrub of a beard. “I guess they’ve got jobs now. I’m at liberty. Besides, ANC guerrillas might have a hard time fitting in here.”

  “They’d be treated as heroes,” said Irena.

  “They’d stick out like giraffes in Siberia. I’ve worked for plenty of blacks, miss,” he added. “No problem.”

  “Brutal black despots,” Irena snapped. “I’ll bet you’ve rubbed a lot of blood off those pearly fingernails,” she said. “They look as if you polish them constantly. What’s the difference between you and the Nazis, anyway? Do you have a pat answer for that?”

  Molly tilted the dull green ammunition magazine toward Irena as if it were an empty cash box. He wanted her to see the strong spring pressing the edge to the top. “Yes, I do,” Molly said from behind the magazine. “Careful of that when you load bullets. Press down in the middle. Those springs have clipped many a pearly fingertip. The Nazis couldn’t beat the Brits, ma’am,” he added. “We did.”

  Irena held up one of the bullets. The body had a fine, glossy bronze color, and the hard tip was a glistening candy red. “Like lipstick,” she said.

  “My thought, too, ma’am,” Molly told her. “A nice shade, too.”

  THE REST OF Irena’s day with Molly was filled with the advice by which she was supposed to operate.

  “Climb like a monkey into your hiding spot,” he said, “but shoot like a slug. Go flat against the ground when you get there, or stay flat against a wall. Lying prone keeps you steadiest. It’s the hardest for anyone to see. But it’s also harder when you get up. You’re most exposed when trying to get to your feet. Kneeling is good. It cuts your body in half. Keep a sock in your pocket filled with small stones. Stones, ma’am, not sand. Sand leaks. The sock can hold your barrel like a tripod, and you don’t have to snap it open and shut. You can leave it behind. Standing is hardest, but best if you’re hiding behind a column.”

  He instructed Irena to stand and fire three shots rapidly into a target. “Boom, boom, boom!” he commanded.

  She squeezed the trigger three times quickly, like a pump.

  When the volley subsided, Molly trotted over to get the poster and showed Irena how her three shots had trailed down, like shooting stars, away from the heart of the target. “It’s not like shooting baskets, ma’am,” he told her. “Your first shot is your best. The rifle gets heavier in your arms within seconds. Keep it down against your belt, pick it up when you see your shot, and shoot within a second.

  “Stay calm, ma’am. That’s an order,” he said, unable to suppress a small smile. “Any anxiety you think won’t show because it’s bottled inside can catch your breathing and make your hands vibrate ever so slightly. Ask a violinist. Sour notes. Don’t stare where you’re supposed to shoot. When you stare, things move. Don’t move. A move could signal where you are. But also, don’t play a statue. Breathe. Otherwise, you’ll get light-headed. You won’t see and you’ll fall down.”

  Molly made his glittering fingertips twitter in the air between them. “Rain, snow, even fog will push down a shot,” he explained. “Heat can make it swerve, too. But we don’t have time or need for that lesson now. That’s for Zambia and Lesotho. You don’t get that kind of heat here. Not unless hell freezes over.”

  Irena returned a small smile of her own. “That happened here months ago,” she told Molly.

  MOLLY TOOK HER over to the serried rows of sugar sacks filled with sand, standing about a driveway’s distance from the posters of Karadzic, Milosevic, and Isabelle Adjani. He had her lie down and fire ten clips—about two hundred shots—into dark blue silhouettes inked over white paper. Irena’s bones thudded with her first five or six shots. She could feel a bruise begin to dampen her shirt faintly, but she felt it with satisfaction; she was playing hurt. Molly brought back a target and showed it to her: four shots were in the central oval that would have been a man’s heart and lungs; three were along the edge of a T shape that would have been his eyes and nose.

  “Take that last breath,” he advised, “and run it up the barrel. You know?”

  She did. She began to push her breath as she pinched the trigger and loosen her shoulder to clinch the kick of the rifle. After a few shots, she began to feel that her fingers had left slight indentations in the plastic stock. The gun was absorbing her touch. Molly ran ahead to fetch the next target, and came back smiling. Five holes had pierced the white T zone. The edges of each were singed a light brown; they smelled of fire.

  “Do I want to know what those would have hit?” Irena asked.

  “Two would be just below the left eye,” said Molly.

  Irena noticed that he had stopped addressing her as “ma’am.”

  “They would shatter the cheekbone and drive pieces into the brain. One shot would just about be in the right eye. Bull’s-eye. Instant results.” He poked the point of a black felt-tip pen through the last hole and wiggled it like a cartoon worm taunting a bird. “This would have shattered the teeth and jawbone,” he said. “Obliterated quite a bit of brain, too. The bleeding would be most terrible. The pain would be great. I should think a man might want to rip his head off.”

  When Irena said nothing, Molly lay his elbow across one of the sugar sacks and spoke in a low voice behind her neck. “You don’t shoot at an eye or a jaw, you know. Even I don’t do that. Maybe if you saw Milosevic, Mladic, or someone who was brutal to you. Then, it’s one right for the heart. But you shoot at a spot. You shoot at a target. You don’t see somebody’s blue or brown eyes. You don’t see a smile. You see a spot in your sight. A stain, a smear, a dot. That’s where you shoot.”

  “You don’t have to make things up for me,” said Irena.

  “Nothing I tell you is truer,” said Molly. “Hit the spot. What’s behind is not your business.”

  Irena emptied clip after clip into the blue figures against the brick wall. She lay down on the floor, feeling the stock settle into that spot on her shoulder where Pretty Bird used to sit. The rifle began to rock against her shoulder. She began to find the trigger guard by feel. She brushed her cheek against the stock and felt for a burst of heat from the gas port. She ran her breath into the barrel with each shot, as Molly had advised her, and saw it burst and heard it bellow. She felt power bristling in her hands, breath, and bones.

  “Make it happy,” Molly urged at her left ear, where he was crouched on his knees. “It’s just you and it. No one else. Make it hard, make it happy. Do it better than anyone does. You’re alone together. No one knows, no one is looking. There is no one else.”

  Irena’s shots screamed into the bricks, over and over, until her hands stung and sweat, or something like it, poured into her eyes.

  18.

  MOLLY STAYED ON his knees. By the end of her last clip, they could both see that Irena’s bullets had blown out the largest part of the white T in the blue head of the silhouette. There was a hole the size of her fist in the center of the figure’s chest. Irena turned on her ass to lean back on her elbows. She was breathless, drowsy, wound up, and unexpectedly sorrowful.

  “Oh shit,” she said to Molly. “It’s too much.”

  “What?”

  “I mean,” she began to laugh, “I need a fucking cigarette.”

  Molly had none. He squirmed around on his knees and took Irena’s rifle into his arms. “It’s not good for you,” he told her with teasing sternness.

  “But this so fucking is.” Irena heard herself talking in a kind of grave, astonished giggle. Her back bowed as she arched back on her shoulder blades.

  “You’re first-rate,” Molly told her.

  “Tell me I’m amazing. Tell me you’ve never known anyone like me.”

  “You’
re getting carried away,” said Molly, but nicely.

  “I’m pretty damn good,” said Irena. “Admit it.”

  “I do. But you can still learn,” Molly told her.

  “Oh, fuck yes, I know,” said Irena. “Show me, show me.”

  “Soon, soon,” Molly said. He had crooked the small finger of his right hand in the trigger guard. He pressed his left palm against the heat of the barrel.

  “Fuck,” she snapped back. “What do you know?” Her humor had turned suddenly surly. “You could be on the other side,” she said.

  “Quite a few old comrades are,” said Molly.

  “But it’s not your war. What do you care?” asked Irena.

  “But I do,” said Molly. “If you win, I get references.”

  “What does it matter?” Irena wanted to know. “You said it yourself—you could be on anyone’s side.”

  Molly finally dipped his fingers into a shirt pocket to find a small pack of French chewing gum. The name caught Irena’s attention: Hollywood.

  “I could like girls, too,” said Molly, upending three sticks into the palm of his hand. “I just don’t.”

  Irena let the avowal pass without remark. She turned onto her right hip and reached her left hand down onto the stock of the rifle. “If you were on the other side,” she began. “Not that other side. I don’t care about that. I mean on the other side of the river. If you worked for them. If they paid you, you’d shoot me.”

  “That’s too dramatic,” said Molly. He rolled the foil from a stick of gum between two fingers. “If they paid me, I’d shoot anyone. Besides”—he flicked the foil like a small soccer ball over Irena’s shoulder—“your side’s paid up. Besides, besides, besides—if I teach you well, you’d get me first.”

  MOLLY DELIVERED IRENA to Tedic that afternoon just as darkness began to spread across the delivery docks. Tedic stood at an inclined gray steel shipping desk that he had appropriated as a work surface. The surrounding shadows gave his perch the look of the lair of some observant bird. Irena cinched her hands against her hips as she walked toward Tedic. “Do you have many more like Molly?” she asked.

  “I knew you two would get along.”

  “I’ve heard you’ve got a couple of Americans,” said Irena. Molly had admitted to one. Mostly, though, it was Irena’s guess, and was meant to force Tedic to turn over his cards.

  Tedic answered by confirming nothing. “We get volunteers,” he said. “People show up from Bosnian neighborhoods in Detroit or Toronto. They weep bloody tears. ‘I want to help my people.’ I assume that Belgrade sends them. I tell them to dig ditches. Some of them turn out to be sincere. When they get hungry, they go home. That’s why I look for professionals.”

  “Professional assassins,” said Irena. “Molly—I’ve been trying to figure out his name.”

  “Professionals,” Tedic stressed, then softened his tone. “Old French legionnaires. They seem to be Ukrainians these days. South Africans who miss the good old days of guerrilla wars. Rummy old Brits who always hire themselves out to the next war going.”

  “They don’t know the neighborhood,” said Irena. She meant it as a metaphor.

  “Exactly.” Tedic seized on the word. “They aren’t neighborhood boys who get sappy about shooting into their old streets, schools, and coffeehouses, where they used to sip slivovitz. No high-school friends across the way. Most of these boys don’t have neighborhoods. Most of them don’t have friends. I’ve got a Kosovar Albanian who’s eager to settle scores with Serbs. I grant him his dream. I’ve got a Moroccan who I’m pretty sure is really an Israeli, sent to keep an eye on armed Muslims. But he does good work for us both. A Russian or two, of course.”

  “Russians are pro-Serb,” said Irena.

  “Russians,” Tedic said, smiling, “are pro-money.”

  “Any girls?”

  “A question my wife used to ask me,” said Tedic. But he went on. “Some of the best.”

  “And on the other side?” Irena asked. Tedic let a moment pass and twisted a paper clip in his fingers.

  “Much like us, I suppose,” he said.

  “Who do I shoot?” Irena asked finally.

  “We’ll tell you. We’ll go over maps, point out streets, show you where to look.”

  “But who, exactly?”

  “It’s not a matter of who,” said Tedic. “Often we’ll just want you to shoot out the tires on a truck. Sometimes, we’ll just want you to send a little love note through somebody’s office window. Or put a bullet through Slobo’s nose on a street poster.”

  “You cannot be training me,” Irena told him, “just to shoot at posters.”

  Tedic deployed his newest world-weary smile. “Sometimes it may be a who,” he said. “We look for uniforms—soldiers, police. We’ll show you how to recognize the police who are too cowardly to wear uniforms, and go about dressed like you or me. Possibly in something from your very closet in Grbavica.”

  Irena had let a cigarette between her fingers burn down to the butt. She held out her hand in sudden surprise, and saw two smudged brown shadows between a couple of her knuckles.

  “We don’t shoot civilians,” Tedic continued. “Let me revise that. We shoot civilians only when they are armed and mean to do us harm. The black-sweater brigades. Not exactly a boys’ choir, are they? But I think you know that.”

  Irena said nothing.

  Tedic rushed on. “Most of the work is mundane. It’s waiting, being quiet, and wanting to take a piss. You almost never see anyone over there to shoot. The Serbs have figured out those areas that are blind to us. That’s where they go about their business—the routine and the murderous. You make them worry. You make them restless. You make them lose sleep. You just shoot at a spot.”

  Irena bristled at Tedic’s inventiveness. But any retort she ran through her mind sounded hollow before it could reach her throat. “Bullets aren’t so predictable,” she finally answered. “We’ve all seen that. They hit, ping, and wind up God knows where. You can hit the turret of a Serb tank and the bullet bounces a block away, into the skull of some old lady picking roses.”

  “An old Serb lady,” said Tedic.

  “Oh shit,” said Irena. “That makes no difference.”

  “An old Serb lady,” Tedic continued, unfazed, “who stood by when her Muslim neighbors were dragged away, then went into their apartment and took their teacups and television set. Some other Serb lady who cheers Karazdic when he says Sarajevo must be cleansed. Or one of those enchanting Serb kids spraying slogans about rag-head girls on their classroom walls. Could a bullet meant for a Serb general skid off and hit such a person? Past the age of twelve, I call no one here innocent.”

  THE NEXT MORNING Tedic opened the door into a small storeroom in which a bright steel light screamed down on a set of gray overalls unrolled over three sacks of grain; stubby black shoes arranged in descending order, like a family of bears in a children’s storybook; a roll of paper towels standing behind on a box; and, in front of the towels, a dark blue oval shroud, slit at the center.

  “I need to tell you about each and every item,” Tedic insisted gently. “If you know the reason behind everything, you’ll be less likely to ques-tion it.”

  The smudged coveralls had dark letters sewn above the left of the breastplate: DRAGAN.

  “Specially made, you will notice,” said Tedic.

  “For someone else.”

  “All the same,” he replied.

  Irena sensed that Tedic was beginning to take pleasure in watching her discover and defuse his jokes.

  “The war closes down gas stations,” he continued, “and we get a bounty of uniforms. You get a gray one for camouflage among the beams and ruins. If we ever put you into a tree or on a hill, we have green and brown ones, too, depending on the season. Even quite a few blue ones we haven’t figured out a use for yet. Now, I know that you know this, but please listen anyway. You have Dragan’s outfit on at all times, and you keep it zipped over every part of you. We will
give you this charming ski mask as well. We will give you as many as you need or want, a different one each day if it is your whim. Bosnians have lots of ski masks. What else would we use them for right now? When you aim and fire, your hands will be held in at your chest. But any inch of your precious pink flesh showing can wave like a flag to our friends on the other side. It is the first thing they look for through their binoculars.

  “So, zip Dragan’s sleeves down to your wrists. Tuck his pant legs into your shoes. Zip the front up under your chin, and pull the neck of the ski mask over your throat and stretch it over your collarbone. We will help you. You must think of this uniform as a spaceman’s moon suit. An astronaut cannot roll up the sleeves of his moon suit a few inches without exposing his flesh to an atmosphere that would cause his body to pop. You must think of Dragan’s costume as being just as essential for life.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You will!” Tedic insisted. His tongue leaped and lapsed back suddenly. “I am a sentimental man,” he went on, “but it is not your safety alone that concerns us. If someone spots you in a place and shoots you, we cannot send someone back to that place for a time. I tell you the truth because I know you are a smart girl and would see through anything else. So, wear this uniform at all times. I usually have to tell girls to take care to tuck their hair inside the ski mask.”

  Tedic allowed himself a smile at the blunt, practical cut that Irena kept. She would be able to turn out of a pivot without signaling her direction with a flapping of curls. “Shoes, too,” he said. “Not those collector’s items you wear now, but something that might save your life. Size forty?”

  “Usually.”

  “We have a pretty good selection. Before the Indian troops left town, we made them a pretty good deal on their shoes. They would have sold us their underwear. Okay, so we have you in Dragan’s smock and an Alberto Tomba ski mask and Sayeed’s shoes. But remember, these costumes are not armor-plated. They might obscure you among the rafters and girders, but they can’t stop bullets. You can’t rely on garb alone.