Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  And centuries of blood on their hands.

  The Bosnian security forces, however, did not see the doctor’s death as a time for reflection on the futility of war. A good man had died. But, rather more to the point, he had been shot to death in a spot that had been regarded as impenetrable by rifle fire.

  Tedic had been alerted to the doctor’s shooting when the hospital raised U.N. headquarters over a radio link. Tedic, bent over a street map in the basement of the brewery, dispatched himself to follow. When he arrived in the surgical room, the bright light of a headlight powered by a car battery was trained on a purpling stump. It took Tedic a moment to take in what remained of a man’s head after the blood and brains had spilled out.

  The presiding physician was a young man named Cibo. He had once been a student in one of Tedic’s algebra classes, had gone to medical school in Vienna, and become an orthopedist, whom Tedic would see over the years on habitual trips to the hospital when one of his basketball players cracked a tibia. Cibo’s black crow’s eyes were the only features by which his old teacher could recognize him; the younger man was shrunken.

  “You are looking good,” was what Tedic told him.

  “The war has been my spa.”

  “I must ask a few quick questions, Cibo, while we have time. Are there Frenchies around?”

  “Out in the ‘secured area,’ ” said the young doctor. “Looking for the bullet. And whatever is left.”

  “Good. Let Frenchies go out and wave the flashlights just after a sniper shooting.”

  The bright white light from the lamp curled the hairs on the back of Tedic’s hands. Dr. Despres’s head had been propped up on a block that was now slick with blood. His shirt had been split and pulled away from his shoulders, where the skin was turning waxy.

  “His wounds?”

  “One shot,” said Cibo. “Near as I can tell.”

  “Rifle?”

  “Not a mortar. But, Mr. Tedic, this is not my line.”

  “Short range? Long range?”

  “Medium.”

  “From a height?”

  “For sure. Look here.” Cibo held the eraser end of a pencil above a jagged rim of whitening bone.

  “Whatever hit the doctor was tumbling, falling down, and smacked flat. It plunged into the midbrain like”—Cibo wavered; a man’s head was still in his hands—“like a hot stone into a pudding. The brain blows up from the pressure. That’s why part of the skull comes off”—Cibo paused considerately—“so trimly.”

  “A tibia mechanic,” Tedic said, “figures all that?”

  “I’ve had to branch out,” Cibo said.

  “As have we all. Can you tell anything about the bullet?”

  “Not until someone finds it.”

  “The radio call mentioned a woman,” Tedic noted.

  “Zule Rasulavic was having a smoke with the doctor out back.”

  Tedic didn’t know the name.

  “You’ll recognize her,” said Cibo. “A nurse here. Pretty, forty, red-haired most months. The Frenchies asked her some questions and put her in a storeroom.”

  There was a brief fusillade of cracks and sizzles as hospital attendants began to snap photographs of the doctor’s wounds. Tedic thought that he saw only a couple of soldiers in the room jump back, startled. The scent of night and the clang of steel doors reached the room as a half dozen Frenchies stomped in with a bullet in a waxed hospital cup.

  “On l’a, on l’a,” the apparent captain of the detail sang out. “Right here, my friends, right here.” He inclined the cup toward Cibo, who took it between his palms and shook it gently, as if it were brandy.

  “More brain than blood,” Cibo announced. “Not surprising, given the velocity. It’s in and out of the brain before bleeding begins.”

  Tedic and the French captain drew perceptibly closer to Cibo, though neither man acknowledged the other.

  Cibo plunged a pair of forceps into the cup and lifted out the bullet to bring it into the light. “Smashed nose,” Cibo announced to the room. “Someone with a microscope will have to make out any other marks. But it’s a 7.62 X 39-millimeter. Soviet, with that shorter case. Can we all see that?”

  A chorus of murmurs assented. Cibo dropped the flattened gray bullet into a plastic sleeve that the French captain held out before him, between his thumb and forefinger. Tedic stepped out from the circle of shoulders and left to find the storeroom.

  TEDIC EXTRACTED ONE of the black wallets he stored in his coat. They afforded him a range of affiliations, and he flashed one at the raw-faced French soldier guarding the room, who had tipped his folding chair back, away from the light, his rifle laid across his knees like an art book.

  The room had a fuel lamp that hissed and sputtered and seemed to boil over with light. Nurse Rasulavic was sitting on a blanket on the floor, with her head against her knees. Tedic held a hand in front of his eyes as he sought out her face. He lowered himself to a spot just beyond the blanket.

  “Miss Rasulavic, yes?” he said to the dark outline of the woman on the floor. “I am Miro Tedic. Perhaps, if you can glimpse my face, you will find me familiar. I know I recognize you. You are the nurse in the emergency room that all of my high-school basketball players want to hold their hands when I bring them in with injuries.”

  “I think they prefer some of the young blondes,” she said.

  “My boys are sophisticated.”

  He could see Zule Rasulavic’s lips part slightly in a smile.

  “I think I remember your face.”

  The last inch of a Marlboro glowed from the hand that grasped her knee. One knee up, one leg down, a shy smile—preposterously, Tedic was reminded of one of the bathing-beauty calendars he used to buy on summer holidays in Dubrovnik. The Frenchies had laid down a beach blanket in the storeroom and lit up a hissing sun.

  “I am with the city,” Tedic said. “Have the Frenchies had the sense to get you a drink?”

  Zule shook her head, shook her hand with the Marlboro, to wave the thought away. Tedic pulled a stainless-steel flask from yet another pocket in his coat, curved to rest against the hip.

  “Scotch,” he said. “A Canadian mix.”

  Zule Rasulavic reached over to a small pile of pill cups, curling like a snail from atop a crate. “We have cups,” she said. “Not always pills.”

  Tedic poured carefully in the faint light. He lifted the flask with a grin toward the young soldier, who held up his hand in affable refusal. “Duty, duty,” he said in English.

  “Let me explain. I am with the Home Ministry,” Tedic began.

  “Are you some kind of policeman?”

  “By no means. But I am concerned with security.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “A policeman investigates crime,” said Tedic. Zule had lowered her hand to the floor to snuff out her cigarette, and Tedic spoke low, as she bowed her head to watch the glow smudged against the floor.

  “But what would a policeman do here? The world regards shooting down old ladies who are in line for a bag of beans as a blameless tragedy. Not a crime. The ladies were standing in the way of somebody’s national destiny.”

  Tedic took Zule’s upturned head as a sign to proceed. “Because of the arms embargo,” he said, “in Sarajevo right now, we are afforded only the right to be fatalities. The U.N. sees, hears, and speaks of no evil. They bid us just run back into our holes, and scurry out later for beans. Some of us are refusing to stay in those holes, Miss Rasulavic. Before I crawl back into mine, I need to know what happened here.”

  THEY NODDED AT each other over their pill cups, sipping from their scotches.

  “I thought no sniper was supposed to be able to reach here,” said Zule.

  “There is no isle of refuge here,” said Tedic. “Perhaps we should have known that all along. Perhaps something you noticed can help us.”

  “I was talking to a man,” she said, “and then he was shot.”

  Tedic sat with his shins tucked under his thi
ghs. More out of discomfort than calculation, he shifted, but as he did so he was careful to keep his knees low. He had his own pack of Marlboros in the inexhaustible inventory of his black coat. But he chose not to distract Zule with another cigarette.

  “Did you know Dr. Despres?” he asked.

  “Barely. Barely an hour.”

  “You met—was it in the morning? About what time?”

  “Eleven or so.”

  “He was shot close to five.”

  “I did not see him again until just a few minutes before he was shot.”

  The French soldier, who gave no indication of being attuned to their Bosnian-language conversation, sat up in his chair and waved his own cigarette pack at Zule. She put her hands before her chest in a shunning motion, mitigated by a smile.

  “But thank you,” she called over to the soldier in English.

  “Yes, thank you,” Tedic said, including himself in appreciation of the soldier’s generosity. It was a way of conveying to the Frenchie that they had exchanged responsibility for the relief of Zule. Tedic went on, “You were conversing?”

  “When he was shot? Yes. He had just finished telling me about his son and daughter. His daughter wants to be a doctor.”

  “Her name? We might help you get a letter to her.”

  “I don’t remember. He didn’t mention it. Really, he didn’t have the chance.”

  Tedic had learned from trying to elicit confessions from students that silence could encourage disclosure. He stared back blankly.

  “I mean,” Zule continued in the silence, “the shooting came that quickly. Within a few minutes.”

  “I understand. Would you say two minutes after you started talking?”

  “Maybe closer to three or four. He was putting out his cigarette.”

  “He had smoked down a cigarette. You had already finished yours?”

  “I didn’t finish mine.”

  “You lit them at different times, then?”

  “In fact, no,” said Zule. There was a note of surprise in her voice. “It was off the same flame, in fact. The doctor had a very sweet”—and here she flicked her right thumb—“little Dupont lighter.”

  Tedic stopped for a moment to squeeze his eyes, as if to visualize some delicacy of which he had only read descriptions. “It is what a man of distinction carries,” he said. “He had been all over the world, you know. I would guess that a man so gallant would not light his cigarette before lighting yours.”

  “I don’t believe he did,” said Zule. “But more or less at the same time.”

  “Yours before his?”

  She paused, recalled to the last act of a nightmare. “Yes.”

  “He insisted on this? You did?”

  “He didn’t insist. It was what he did.”

  “A gentleman. So, let me understand,” said Tedic quietly. “You go out of the loading-dock door at the same time, light up cigarettes at the same time. But he finishes his ahead of you, puts it out, and then is shot. While your cigarette is still dwindling.”

  “Yes.”

  Tedic gave Zule another blank look, but she moved no further.

  “Yes,” she repeated, letting the word hang between them.

  “How far from the end?” Tedic asked finally.

  “I don’t know. Enough so that I didn’t look every few seconds.”

  “Two or three puffs?”

  “Probably.”

  “You each had the same make of cigarette?”

  “Gauloises. From the same box.”

  “Ah. A Gauloise must be nice now.”

  “It was.”

  “Perhaps the doctor left the rest of his pack.”

  Zule scowled at the implication that she would plunder a dead man’s pockets for his cigarettes. “Perhaps,” she said. “You are welcome to look. I will never smoke one again.”

  Tedic made sure to cringe. He wanted the nurse to have the satisfaction of winning a point, and play on.

  “So,” he resumed, “you light up the same make of cigarette at the same time, but he finishes his ahead of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we are not machines. One inhales more than the other. One talks more than the other.”

  “Maybe having two or three last puffs of a French cigarette meant more to me than it did to him,” said Zule.

  “For certain. You were talking?”

  “For a couple of minutes.”

  “For three or four minutes.”

  “Three or four minutes, then.”

  “Talking, then. About what?”

  Zule flailed her hands impatiently. “I told you—his home in France.”

  “Wife? Kids? Dogs? Horses?”

  “Ex-wife, two kids. I don’t know the rest.”

  “And how was it that you opened up this particular avenue for your first conversation and the last two minutes of Dr. Despres’s life?”

  “There’s no mystery.”

  “Demystify it for me, please.”

  “I wondered where he was from,” said Zule. “I asked him. I asked him if he was from Paris.”

  “Why Paris?”

  “Everybody knows Paris.”

  Tedic consciously leaned back from Zule, affording her enough room to fidget. “Yes, everybody wants to see Paris,” he said. “You didn’t know he was from the hospital in Rouen?”

  “I didn’t know anything.”

  “Why was it important to know anything about Dr. Despres?”

  “I was being sociable,” said Zule.

  “Being sociable wouldn’t seem to be utterly necessary these days,” Tedic said.

  “All right, then. Why don’t we let the savages take over right now? I was making conversation.”

  “If I were a doctor,” Tedic professed to muse, “and had come into a hell like this, I think I would be the one asking questions. How do you live? Where do you go for fun?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “He asked you nothing?”

  “I don’t remember,” Zule fairly hissed. “I wanted to hear what the real world was like.”

  “You kept him talking, then.”

  “He was nice. He talked to me.”

  “Until he was shot.”

  “He was not shot because he was talking to me!”

  Tedic decided that he and the nurse were beginning to thread themselves into the ground. He sprang to his feet. When Zule looked up in bewilderment, he began to lift her up by the loose white coat around her shoulders, as if he were plucking a disobedient student out of a lunchroom seat. Tedic caught a glimpse of the Frenchie, who was roused by the commotion but didn’t interfere or follow. After all, he was under orders not to intervene in assaults.

  Tedic took hold of Zule’s arm and steered her quickly out of the storeroom and through the groaning steel door. Thin pillars of flashlight slashed the night. French soldiers looked up only briefly from their duties, drawing down tape.

  “This is where you were standing?” Tedic demanded with more force than volume.

  “Out here, yes.”

  “Over where? Show me, please.”

  There was not really a pause between the sentences—and not really a “please.” The railing against which the nurse and the doctor had perched was an hour’s dark harder to pick out. Zule had to squint, and hold out her hand, as if she were searching for a light switch in a darkened hall. In the days when light switches worked.

  “I was like this,” she said, turning toward Tedic. “He was standing alongside. Then, to light the cigarette, he stepped here.” Zule took some satisfaction in taking hold of Tedic’s shoulders roughly. “Then, as we talked, he moved to face me.”

  “As the two of you were talking,” said Tedic. “About children, ex-wives, and four hundred cheeses.”

  “We were talking.”

  “Replay those moments for me, please.”

  “I’m not sure I remember.”

  “It was only two minutes, right?” said Tedic. “Three at the most. You a
re a woman who has to remember lymphocytes, phagocytes, and thrombocytes.” Assistant principals absorb a great deal of extraneous information against that one day when it might become useful. “Please trouble your memory banks to recall a couple of minutes of conversation.”

  Zule looked over at the soldiers engaged on the floor with rolls of tape, scrawling into field notebooks. They offered no assistance.

  “He began,” she said. “He asked, ‘Where can I smoke?’ ”

  “No one would have prevented the great Dr. Despres from lighting a cigarette anywhere. Surely you told him that?”

  “I told him that our hospital administrator does not think smoking is modern. Miss Ademovic scares people.”

  “Then you led him here?”

  “I said, ‘We have a place, let me show you.’ Something like that.”

  “You didn’t just give him directions?”

  “He was a visitor. I didn’t want him going down dark halls.”

  “So your humanitarian instincts induced you to lead him out here.”

  “Bastard.” Zule pronounced the word thoughtfully, as if she were identifying a dark spot on an X-ray.

  “I confirm your diagnosis,” said Tedic. “And so then, please, what happened?”

  Zule paused—to show that she could.

  “He lit my cigarette. He lit his.”

  “Yours first?”

  “He was a gentleman, I told you.”

  “I remember that you mentioned his lighter.”

  “A Dupont. Black and gold. He flicked it once, twice, then the third produced a flame.”

  “Where is this lighter now, I wonder?”

  “I expect it’s still in his pants. Or perhaps in your pocket. You may search my belongings. Bastard! Do you really think I got a man killed because I wanted his cigarette lighter?”

  “Not at all,” said Tedic. “But until a few months ago I would not have thought that one of my neighbors would cut the throat of the little girl who lived downstairs because he thought she would grow up to be his enemy. What we used to think . . .” Tedic let the thought trail away.