Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  The police bowed slightly and stood back as Gerry steered the crew down a half flight of stairs and into the Home Minister’s spare office. It was unpainted, undecorated, and pale, almost like the inside of an eggshell.

  “Hello, hello, Allah Akhbar,” the Home Minister said as they came through the door. “God is great.”

  Charif bowed his head slightly and took the Home Minister’s hands into his own. “May the peace of the Prophet be upon you,” he replied.

  The Home Minister had received a briefing only that morning, but Irena thought he was still mixing a bit of Christianity into his Muslim lexicon.

  “And also upon you,” he said. “I am but a poor messenger of the Messenger,” the Home Minister continued as he showed the crew into a sitting area.

  Irena made a mental note to report the Home Minister’s virtuosity to Tedic. I wonder, she asked herself, how long he can keep this up.

  COFFEE CUPS APPEARED. Tired, scuffed plastic cafeteria cups, but indeed they were steaming. Irena accepted one and sipped eagerly. She was about to apologize for slurping when she saw Charif smiling fondly at the sound to save her the embarrassment. It had been months since she’d had coffee this dark. The intensity prickled her tongue, and seemed to give her eyes sharper focus.

  “Your people have been most hospitable,” Charif told the Home Minister.

  “A small repayment for the generosity of so many of your viewers,” the Home Minister replied warmly. “I am glad of the chance to tell them myself.”

  Irena was given a pair of lights to hold at her waist while Abdullah unfolded the legs of a tripod.

  “I am sorry I did not have the chance to meet the Prince,” the Home Minister said while slipping back casually into his office chair. It was not an observation, Irena sensed, so much as a cast into rippled waters.

  “He departed early this morning,” Charif offered cheerfully, but no more than that. “I am told. I am sure he would have welcomed the opportunity to meet your good self, too.”

  Abdullah had the camera up on the tripod and was running his hand over some cables that hung down from the rear like rats’ tails.

  “We will be ready momentarily,” Charif assured the Home Minister.

  The Home Minister shifted in his graying pinstripes. “I would have welcomed the occasion to speak with the Prince,” he said. “I am eager to have my own faith enriched by his wisdom.”

  Abdullah took the two lamps from Irena and clipped them above the glassy blank eye of his camera.

  “He impresses everyone,” Charif assured them. Abdullah made a kind of winding signal with his right hand, and Charif turned to Irena sheepishly. “This is,” he said quietly, “too embarrassing. Could I—do you mind—if I ask you for a favor?”

  Irena stepped to his side as the Home Minister pretended to turn away, and Jackie moved close to Abdullah, who was crouching behind the stork legs of the camera.

  “We have only a twenty-minute tape,” Charif whispered. “We need another. I am so forgetful. It must be nerves. All the talk of snipers and burning my shoes.” He laughed under his breath. “The man with the rifle—”

  “I saw him,” was all Irena said.

  “He has been with the car?”

  “I assume.”

  “Do you think he would let you back in?”

  “If I asked him. If I told him that it is your instruction,” Irena corrected herself.

  “There should be three or four tapes in black cases on the backseat. We have enough to begin.”

  “Bring them all?”

  “Why not?” said Charif. “I am sure the Home Minister will be most eloquent.” Charif raised his voice to draw the rest of the room into the conversation. “Our audience will be most eager to hear him.”

  Irena glanced over her shoulder as she scurried out. Charif and the Home Minister clasped hands, closed their eyes, and bent their heads together. Jackie, Gerry, Abdullah, and Heydar stood by silently as Charif said, “Praise to those who hear and heed the words of his Prophet. May the peace of the world be upon them.”

  “Allah Akhbar,” agreed the Home Minister quietly. “The peace of the world upon us all.”

  TEDIC WAS ON his knees inside the van, lifting up a panel of black vinyl flooring and running his hand over the underside while Molly stood watch in front of the windshield. The sling of his gun had been turned around to cross his chest.

  “Good Christ,” Tedic said without looking up when Irena unlatched the door. “What did our friends forget?”

  “Tapes,” said Irena. “Somewhere on the backseat.”

  At this, Tedic lifted his head and widened his eyes. “Not there,” he said.

  “Black cases, like small books,” Irena persisted.

  “I know what they look like. They’re not here,” said Tedic. “Anyone say anything about how the Prince got out of town?”

  “Not that I heard,” said Irena. “Maybe the man named Charif mentioned it to the Home Minister.”

  “Or how he got in town?”

  “Nothing,” Irena repeated.

  “He somehow bought his way over. We’d like to know his travel agent.”

  Molly had crooked his chin over his shoulder and was calling Irena through the windshield. “Better find those tapes or scurry back, love, and say you can’t.”

  “Maybe they’re back at the hotel,” Irena told him, and then asked Tedic, “You’re sure—no tapes?”

  “I would have stolen them by now,” he said sternly. “I’m not down here looking for cigarette butts. Wait another minute, so you can say you’ve been thorough.”

  “Two,” suggested Molly. “I gave you a hard time about opening the car. Tell them you found nothing in the back but decided to check everything, including the glove box. Wait—check that there is a glove box.”

  “And maybe,” Irena suggested with an edge of irritation, “they are just a television crew that forgot their tapes.”

  “Too embarrassing,” said Tedic. “They wouldn’t send you.”

  “They have one,” she told him. “To start. They didn’t want to keep the Home Minister waiting.”

  “A test for sure,” Molly said. “Shit. They probably have someone watching us right now.”

  Irena began to clamber ostentatiously over the backseat to convince anyone watching of the sincerity of her search for the small black cases.

  “Impossible,” said Tedic. “They wouldn’t know where they were going to park.”

  “It shouldn’t be too hard to guess,” Molly said, shrugging.

  “You’d have to be inside the building to see the car,” said Tedic.

  “You think they don’t have someone inside?”

  Irena was sitting on her haunches on the floor just in front of the backseat. She could feel muddy footprints beginning to seep, tread by tread, through her blue jeans.

  “Can I have a Marlboro?” she asked. “If I have two minutes left. I’m getting footprints stained onto my ass. I can’t smoke in front of our visitors.”

  “They’ll smell it on your breath and wonder,” Tedic said.

  “They’ll smell it on your breath and think they are James Bond for figuring out what took you so long to find nothing,” cut in Molly.

  Tedic’s right hand was beginning to dive deep into his pocket, keys jangling and cellophane cigarette wrappers crinkling, when a thud in front of them popped their ears. The glass in the van quivered. Molly and Tedic felt a shudder in their heels and toes. When they tried to run, the ground trembled and sent sparks into their knees. Irena, Tedic, and Molly turned their heads back toward the building in time to see a couple of small basement windows hiccup clouds of dust that burst open with the shower of glass that gouged the pavement in front of them with screams.

  MOLLY, HIS RIFLE borne like a spear, ran into the last clatter of glass and slid, feet first, into the hole of one of the smashed windows. Tedic had reached into his pocket and come up with a black-nosed gun. He waved it unconvincingly as he stumbled after Molly,
like a child running after a lost kite waving a candy stick. By the time Irena had gotten unstuck from the floor, the steel door that Gerry had wrenched open for them had been thrown open for people trying to escape the smoke and fire. They were coughing and crying. When they hit the cold air, they remembered that they were under the eyes of snipers. They stumbled onto their knees and began to crawl.

  Irena high-stepped over them. She hurtled down the half flight with a single step and ran flat-out, head up, shoulders back, into a stinging fog of plaster dust, brick dust, and mud in the Home Minister’s office. Jackie, beautiful Jackie, was on the floor, her brown eyes twitching like hummingbirds. Her right hand reached out for reassurance, but her right arm was rolling over and away from her, like a sausage that had fallen out of a truck. Irena ran after Jackie’s arm. She stepped on Gerry’s dead, bleeding boulder of a chest. Abdullah waved at her in the storm of smoke. But his head had blown back into Charif’s stomach. Irena saw Jackie’s arm, still clad in its stretchy red sleeve. She picked it up for safekeeping, and as the blood gushed out, Irena was appalled to find herself warmed. She put Jackie’s arm behind her back, as if she were hiding a bouquet of flowers. Molly had the snout of his rifle thrust into Charif’s mild, unmoving smile. But the Home Minister stalked over on his one whole leg, stretching a flap of his suit coat over his mouth so that he could breathe.

  “We can’t spare the bullet,” he commanded Molly. “Someone in pain might need it.”

  ABDULLAH, CHARIF, HEYDAR, and the other man in their crew had died in the blast, which had apparently been set off by their camera. Tedic and Molly guessed that plastic explosives had been packed into the casing panels of the camera.

  They dismissed the possibility that the crew had been the unwitting agents for someone else’s bomb. Molly concluded that a real television crew, innocent and unsuspecting men, would have noticed the difference in weight after their equipment had been altered. They would have been alarmed.

  Gerry was dead. His death was despicable, terrible, and a crime. But, Tedic reminded them, it was also a remarkably modest showing for a bomb that four people had journeyed thousands of miles to blow up in the world’s most dangerous city, for some purpose they could not yet fathom.

  Jackie lost her right arm. The Home Minister had stripped off his suit coat, leaned down into the sickening clouds, and pressed his jacket against her spurting wound. She was still lovely, as Tedic had assured her at the scene, ever so much more.

  “You are even more like Venus,” he’d told her, clasping her surviving hand to his cheek.

  The dead men had a collection of driver’s licenses and citizenship cards in their pockets, a dozen names and identities by which they could become Lebanese, Egyptian, British, German, or French. Days later, Tedic passed some of their names along to certain contacts in Zagreb, London, and Jerusalem. They said the names were unconnected and clean. They might as well have been—they might well have been—from the New York City phone book.

  The television syndicate for which the men ostensibly worked was real. It was based in London and beamed to cable systems in Europe and Arabia. Tedic offered the men’s conjured names to company managers, who reported that none of them appeared in their payroll records. An executive explained that freelancers often exaggerated their connections to secure an interview. They suggested that Tedic deliver to the men a stern sermon about misrepresenting their credentials. Tedic assured them blandly that he would.

  The Home Minister was presumed to be the principal target of the bomb (Jackie may have been an improvised addition). Some of the people who were steering aid into Bosnia held the Home Minister’s pronounced ecumenical Islam in contempt. Tedic asked him—in a frank, just-guys-together tone—to appraise his life and consider whether someone had a more personal motive for his assassination.

  “Like a jealous husband?” he barked from his hospital bed. “A scorned lover?”

  “A former business associate who may feel cheated,” Tedic suggested carefully. “An old employee who was fired. A black-market gangster,” he added more quietly.

  The Home Minister didn’t fly into a rage or even protest. Instead, he took a long draw on his cigarette and appraised Tedic through the smoke. “You must belong to all of those categories,” he told him. “Unless it was you, Miro, I can think of no one.”

  But Tedic was mostly trying to snip off loose ends. The expensive preparations that the plot involved didn’t support a personal motive. Four men were not likely to sacrifice their lives to avenge an affronted husband, a foiled lover, or a thwarted gangster. And it certainly didn’t explain the Prince’s proximity to the crime. He seemed to have appeared mysteriously, and to have departed without a trace that would lead to the detonation.

  Some of Tedic’s recruits went over the rooms that the men had slept in at the Holiday Inn. They found soiled clothes of no particular significance left behind the sliding doors of the closets; they would be checked for traces of explosives. More interesting was a smattering of small bills of different denominations and nationalities in the room of the man who had posed as Charif. But an accountant in the hotel’s office who worked with foreign currencies quickly calculated that the bills amounted to no more than one hundred U.S. dollars. That was scarcely enough to buy a bottle of scotch in Sarajevo, much less finance an uprising. She ventured a sensible guess that the bills were merely the accumulation of constant travelers.

  The men left behind nail clippers, lilac and sandalwood soaps, combs and brushes, toothpaste, and, in one room, contact-lens solution. None of them left notes for family, friends, survivors, adversaries, or posterity, although, as Tedic thought it through, such letters could have been thoughtfully drafted and dispatched from Vienna, Rome, or some other stopover before the men made the journey into Sarajevo.

  There was a single sentence written in Arabic on the back of the plastic card in the bathroom that invited people to ring 777 to have ice delivered to their room. The card was from the time of the Olympics. But the thick black letters seemed fresher: THOSE WHO MOCK ALLAH ARE THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM.

  “I cannot believe that they would inscribe their motto—if that was their motto—in a place so easily overlooked,” the Home Minister told Tedic.

  “Unless they knew that no place would be overlooked,” Tedic suggested.

  “Besides,” said the Home Minister, flicking a sheet from his shin, “who is mocking Allah? An imperfect Muslim like me? Or sick bastards who use Allah’s name like some kind of bath soap to rinse blood from their knuckles?”

  “An excellent speech,” Tedic told him. “Let’s win the war before you start campaigning.”

  The Home Minister drew the gray sheet back over his legs with a sigh.

  Tedic reached over to tuck the rough fabric around the Home Minister’s waist. “The note was probably written years ago by a carpet salesman from Istanbul,” Tedic assured him. “He was distressed because the hotel ran out of ice. Allah was mocked.”

  The Home Minister flung the sheet off again and smacked the heels of both hands against his pillow. “They are using our war to start their own,” he said, punching at the pillow behind him, while Tedic fumbled in the pockets of his vast black coat for his gunmetal flask of scotch.

  THE HOME MINISTRY made no announcement about the death of the men in the television crew. No news service working in the city knew anything about the explosion; nothing was reported. Assistance to Bosnia from sources in the Arab world continued with no evident decline. Tedic received occasional reports that the Prince had been glimpsed in various localities in Bosnia’s interior. But he discounted most of the reports as wishful. Besides, Tedic knew that the inspirational appearance of a rich, outcast Arab prince was scarcely necessary for Arab irregulars who had managed to steal into the country to incite thuggish local Muslim and Croat militia to drive Serb families into the forest. And it was scarcely possible for Tedic, the Home Minister, or President Izetbegovic himself to stop them. Even if they had so desired.


  Tedic did have one last conversation on the incident with Irena. He didn’t summon her to his office, but found her absently flipping through the pages of an old VOX in a stairwell lit by a splinter of daylight.

  “You can say anything,” he began without introduction. “Any answer will do. There is nothing you can say that will bring any penalty, disfavor, or reprimand. Is there any reason—any reason you can fathom—why they would send you out to the van?”

  “Why did they spare my life?” she asked back.

  “Or why they would want you alive and Jackie, Gerry, the Home Minister, and anyone else who happened along dead?”

  Irena closed the magazine and rolled it up in her hands.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why did they blow themselves up, too?”

  “That I know,” said Tedic. “They recognized the likes of Molly. They knew they weren’t about to set a bomb and sneak out of town with their lives. Killing themselves was their exclamation point. Blood—the universal language. It was a way of proclaiming that they can kill anyone they want because they’re not afraid to die.”

  Irena shook her whole body no over and over. “Well, I’m afraid to die,” she said finally. “Maybe they sent me back because they knew my courage is lacking.”

  “There is no courage,” said Tedic, “like that of some of the ten-year-old boys they have sent to die in Iraq, Iran, Gaza. Allah be praised.” He spat out the phrase as if it had been made from sour milk.

  “The Crusaders had their ten-year-olds,” Irena answered.

  “The Prince has made his mark.” Tedic met her slow smile. “If there was something else—a tender moment, a rambunctious romp—that made any one of them send you away . . .” Tedic allowed his sentence to run out of fuel. He took a step back down the stairwell to let the light fall back into Irena’s lap.

  “I suppose we will just have to consider it a last act of benevolence,” he said, “bestowed by men who didn’t want to be remembered just for the blood they shed.” The heavy sound of Tedic’s footsteps seemed to pursue him as he continued down the staircase and returned to his perch by the loading dock.