The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  The inside of Vitez matched the grim exterior. The thick clouds of smoke from the generations of men chain-smoking cheap, foul-smelling cigarettes had left a gray film over nearly every visible surface. The windows were clouded with grime, filtering the sunlight to a weak, sickly yellow. The furniture was mismatched, and the tabletops were pitted and scarred.

  The bar might once have been handsome. It was made of dark wood with a marble top, but the wood was discolored and the marble was stained and cracked. Most of the bottles lined up along the wall behind the bartender had no label. Some of the bottles had once held Coca-Cola or orange juice. Home brew.

  “That’s Viktor,” Sarah said sotto voce, pointing to a table in the back of the room with just the sparest movement of her head.

  The man sitting at the table Sarah had indicated was large even by the outsize standards of the Balkans, a region that turned out NBA-caliber basketball players and heavyweight judo champions at a prodigious rate. Eric estimated that Viktor was somewhere north of two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it muscle. He wore a white silk shirt, and a trace of tattoo across his neck and chest hinted at a large swath of ink under his clothes. From what Eric could see, it looked like a professional job, not a crude prison tattoo. His hair was cut short, almost military in appearance. He was alone but talking animatedly on a cell phone.

  Eric could not see a weapon of any kind, but he knew that a man like Viktor would never be far from a gun—or a bodyguard. One or more of the other men in the kafana were no doubt on his payroll. But the dozen or so patrons all looked like they would have been right at home in the cantina from Star Wars, and there was no way to be sure which ones belonged to Viktor.

  They walked over to the table and sat down across from Sarah’s one-time asset.

  “Hello, Viktor,” she said in English.

  “Stinky, I’m going to call you back,” Viktor said into the phone before hanging up. “It is nice to see you, Sarah. Long time.” Viktor’s English was accented but more than adequate. The former Yugoslavia’s criminal class was multilingual. It was good business.

  “Yes, and it would be impolite to remind a girl of just how many years it’s been.”

  “It will be the secret between us.” The Serbo-Croatian language had no articles, and even Slavs who spoke English well had trouble with “a” and “the,” often picking between the two seemingly at random.

  “I’m glad you reached out to me, Viktor. I need your help with a little problem.”

  “I will listen. But first, tell me who is Gypsy friend with four eyes.” The Serb nodded with his head in Eric’s direction. Eric was used to the various reactions that his skin tone elicited in the casual racists who populated the region. Some insisted he was black. Some thought him an especially swarthy Greek. Gypsy was a common conclusion. Almost no one guessed half Asian.

  “This is Eric. He’s from the embassy and he’s working with me.”

  “Good to meet you,” Eric said in Sarajevo-accented Serbo-Croatian. “But I should probably tell you that I’m not a Gypsy. I’m a grave digger.”

  Viktor laughed and slapped the table with a meaty hand that was so hairy it might have belonged to a gorilla. Gypsy was the nickname for the fans of the Red Star Belgrade soccer club. Their arch rivals, Partizan, were known as the grave diggers after their black uniforms.

  “I like this one,” Viktor said to Sarah. “He can stay.”

  “Glad you approve.” The note of irony in Sarah’s reply would not have been lost even on someone whose English was considerably weaker than Viktor’s.

  “I hear you are asking questions about Mali Barcelona,” Viktor said. “That can be . . . unhealthy.”

  “So are cheese fries and chili dogs, but you won’t see me cutting those out of my diet anytime soon.”

  Viktor probably missed some of the nuances of this. There was no regional equivalent of a chili dog. But he likely got the gist.

  The crime lord motioned to the waiter. He pointed at the cup of coffee in front of him and held up three fingers. The rules of hospitality were inviolable.

  “Sarah, you have been working too hard,” Viktor said. “There is more to the life than chasing poor law-abiding criminals through the mountains. Look at how that has gotten you. Forty-three years old. Divorced after a three-year marriage. No kids. No boyfriend. The small apartment in the not-so-good part of city. You are still pretty girl. You could do better. Leave Mali alone.”

  Eric was taken aback about how much Viktor seemed to know about Sarah’s life. He knew more than Eric did, for sure. The news about Sarah’s divorce and current relationship status was interesting. The bit about the size of her apartment was just showing off. He wanted Sarah to understand just how much he knew about her. Where did he get that kind of information?

  Sarah seemed unfazed and unsurprised.

  “You’re working with him, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re Mali’s boy now.”

  Viktor shrugged.

  “I like to think we are colleagues,” he said. “It is the relationship of a mutual benefit.”

  The waiter arrived at Eric’s elbow and placed three cups of coffee on the table along with three glasses of water. It was the same coffee as was served in Sarajevo, but here in Republika Srpska it was known as domaća—domestic—rather than Turkish. On the back of the waiter’s hand, Eric saw a tattoo of a barbed scorpion’s tail that disappeared under his sleeve. Eric glanced quickly around the room and realized that it had emptied out. The other patrons were gone. The waiter’s shirt was untucked. Maybe he was just sloppy, or maybe he was concealing a weapon of some kind at his waist. The situation was starting to look both unstable and, as Viktor had observed only a few minutes earlier, unhealthy.

  “I believe that renewing our earlier relationship would be even more beneficial to you than whatever arrangement you have now with Mali,” Sarah said smoothly. She was a professional, Eric thought, with no small amount of admiration. He cast another quick look around the room. Even the bartender had vanished. It was just the four of them.

  “What are you offering?” Viktor asked Sarah.

  “Whatever you want . . . in exchange for what I need.”

  “Which is?”

  “A tape that little Marko has been using to blackmail Zoran Dimitrović. It might be a disc or a memory stick or a software file. But whatever form it’s in, I want it. Every last damn copy. If you can get it for me, or help me get it, I’ll make you a rich man.”

  Viktor’s laugh was harsh and barking.

  “I am the rich man. Mali offers me far more than money.”

  “What?”

  “Power.”

  Sarah looked at Eric, and although her face was calm and impassive, he could see the muscles in her jaw were tight. She was nervous. She had reason to be. This was not going the way she had hoped.

  “What do you mean, Viktor? What kind of power? Political power? You want to be the next minister for transportation in the RS government? Doesn’t seem like your style.”

  “Mali has plans. He is a man of the vision. I like this vision. This future. There is room in it for the man of my talents.”

  Eric felt a shadow cross over the conversation, the shadow of war and death.

  “Are we done here?” Sarah asked.

  “Not quite, I’m afraid. Mali, he asked me to give you the message. So that you do not forget to stay out of his business.”

  Viktor stood, leaning forward on the table to glower at Sarah and Eric. It was a practiced look, one Eric was certain he had used countless times in countless displays of dominance meant to intimidate rivals or marks. Understanding it as a show did not make it any less effective.

  Eric looked quickly over his shoulder and saw that the “waiter” was about five feet behind them with his right hand resting casually behind his back, almost certainly on the butt of a pistol or the hand
le of a knife.

  “You are supposed to rough us up?” Sarah asked innocently. “Drop us in front of the embassy from the back of a speeding car? Doesn’t seem like such a good idea. My government will hunt you down and squash you like a roach.”

  “Mali tells me that you will not report this. That you aren’t even acting for the American government. That you are . . .”

  Sarah moved with speed and power, and she lunged across the table with a telescoping metal baton in her right hand. Eric had not noticed it. She must have slipped it out of her purse while Viktor was delivering his soliloquy. The tip of the rod caught Viktor in the throat just below the Adam’s apple, and he went hard to the floor.

  Acting on instinct and reflex rather than experience or training, Eric shoved the chair he had been sitting on backward toward the waiter. The heavy wooden chair slammed into his kneecap and tangled his legs, throwing off his timing as the Scorpion foot soldier tried to draw a snub-nosed pistol from his waistband. By the time the ersatz waiter had his weapon out of its holster, Sarah had had time to close the gap. The blunt tip of the rod smashed onto his wrist, and Eric could hear the dry crack of breaking bone. The gun fell from his hand and clattered on the concrete floor.

  Sarah shoved the tip of the baton like a lance into the man’s solar plexus, and he doubled over, exposing the back of his skull to a sharp blow that sent him sprawling forward on his face. He did not move.

  Viktor, however, was trying to regain his feet, clawing at his throat as though gasping for air. Sarah walked up to him and delivered a calm, almost clinical shot to his temple with the baton. The big man joined his associate in blissful unconsciousness.

  Sarah looked over at Eric. She was not even breathing hard.

  “Nice assist with the chair.”

  “Not sure you really needed it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll never know. But you did good. First time?”

  “Yep.”

  “You can get to like it.”

  “I don’t think so. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Agreed. We can talk in the car.”

  “Damn right we will.” Eric was angry and he wanted Sarah to know it. She had not been straight with him. “You owe me some answers.”

  “You’ll get them,” Sarah promised.

  Eric wanted to believe her, but he could not.

  MOSTAR

  OCTOBER 23

  9

  To look at it now, it was hard to believe that Mostar had been the site of some of the most intense and vicious fighting of the Bosnian War. This city had been the focal point of the fighting between Croat and Muslim forces before Washington had forced a peace and a shotgun wedding between the two sides in a Federation that neither had ever fully embraced. The centerpiece of Mostar was Stari Most, an elegant bridge made of white limestone that arched gracefully over the Neretva River. The bridge had stood for more than four centuries, and a rotating cast of conquerors and foreign overseers had marveled at its otherworldly beauty: Ottomans and Austrians, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, Yugoslavs of all flavors and the nationalist splinters left after the country’s disintegration. All had trod the bridge’s cobbled street as rulers.

  Then, in 1993, a Croat artillery unit had targeted the bridge, hitting it with some sixty shells before it finally collapsed into the Neretva, leaving behind two towers on opposite banks with stubby stone arms reaching out across the river straining to touch. The Croatian Defense Council claimed that the bridge was of strategic importance. In truth, it had held little military value. The shelling of Stari Most was an assault on culture, an act of killing memory. The Croat paramilitaries had wanted to erase any trace of shared heritage, of Islamic achievement.

  In this, as in so many other things, they had failed. The bridge had been rebuilt after the war at considerable expense, using as much of the original stone as possible. Still, while the physical gap across the river had been repaired, the rift between the two sides had never really been closed.

  Eric told Annika something of the history of the bridge as they walked from the old mosque on the left bank to the bazaar area on the opposite side of the Neretva. The sky was the color of slate. It had been raining lightly off and on all day, and the cobblestone streets were slick. They took their time.

  At the midpoint of the bridge, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy stopped to take a selfie.

  “For my Facebook page,” she explained somewhat sheepishly. “At the end of the day, I’m still a politician.”

  Eric nodded absentmindedly. He was distracted, thinking about Sarah.

  They had had it out on the ride back to Sarajevo. Sarah clearly knew more than she had let on about what leverage Marko Barcelona had on Dimitrović. She had been holding back on him. Even more worrisome, she had not really pushed back against Viktor’s accusation that she was essentially freelancing, operating without official sanction from their government. How Mali could know that seemed an important and interesting question. But neither as important nor as interesting as whether or not it was true.

  “Is it?” Eric had demanded. “Is it true?”

  “It’s complicated,” Sarah had replied.

  “Bullshit. It’s yes or no. Do you have the authority for what we’re doing out here, or did you put our necks on the block on spec, just looking to see what you can turn up?”

  “Eric, the CIA is a bureaucracy, and like all bureaucracies, it sometimes wants things that it cannot ask for. You need to see that we are doing the right thing.”

  “Where’s the line, Sarah? What separates an informal effort from a rogue operation?”

  “Success,” she countered. “And secrecy.”

  The drive back to Sarajevo had seemed to take a very long time.

  With a conscious effort of will, Eric shunted all of that off to the side. That problem was for later. He was in Mostar to introduce Annika to someone he thought could help them.

  “Can this really work?” Annika asked, as they neared the café where Eric’s friend had agreed to meet them. “What you’ve proposed is more than unorthodox, it’s . . .” The High Representative was at a loss for words.

  “Nuts?” Eric suggested.

  “Yes. That just about sums it up.”

  “Got any better ideas?”

  “No,” Annika admitted. She looked tired. The burden and responsibility of peacemaking was weighing heavily on her. They were not succeeding, and the consequences of failure were too awful to contemplate.

  “So why not at least put this on the table?” Eric asked.

  “Why the hell not,” she agreed.

  —

  It started to rain again just as they reached their destination, a café with a view of the old bridge and the somewhat unimaginative name View of the Old Bridge. Much of life in the Balkans revolved around the café. This is where business was done, friendships sealed, and courtships conducted. The View of the Old Bridge had been in business for more than a century, and it had not changed all that much over the years.

  A few patrons looked at them with unabashed curiosity when they stepped inside. Annika was well known to those who read the papers and Eric’s look—which was mainstream for New York or London—was decidedly exotic by local standards. He had long ago learned to tune it out.

  The café was open to the street, with a mix of tables inside and in a fenced-off garden area out front. Eric led Annika to a table in the garden under an awning that shielded it from the rain. The man sitting at the table was young and looked even younger than his thirty-four years. Black hair framed a face that was arresting if not conventionally handsome. His ice-blue eyes were his dominant feature and together with his easy smile were the key to his considerable appeal to women. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. A copy of the Sarajevo daily Oslobođenje sat on the table next to his coffee.

&nbs
p; He rose when he saw Eric and folded him into an embrace.

  “Good to see you, my friend.”

  “And you. Annika, this is Nikola Petrović, leader of the political opposition in Republika Srpska.”

  “Such as it is,” Nikola said modestly.

  He took Annika’s hand and held it for just a moment too long, an invitation. Nikola was incorrigible, but Annika, Eric was quite confident, could handle him.

  They sat at the table and ordered coffee. The rain was heavier now, running off the awning and wrapping them in a curtain of water and sound. Eric realized that Nikola had chosen the table deliberately. He did not want their conversation to be overheard. It was why they were meeting in Mostar, far from the reach of the RS state security. It was so easy to slip back into the old paranoid behaviors.

  “Nikola is the head of the Social Democratic Party,” Eric said to Annika, as though she were hearing this for the first time. In reality, he had already briefed her thoroughly in advance of the conversation, but it would be helpful for Nikola to hear the thinking behind the proposition Eric was about to put to him. “The SDP was part of the governing coalition with Dimitrović’s National Party when it was backing a unitary Bosnia and eventual EU and even NATO membership. When the National Party turned back to the dark side—or however you want to describe it—the Social Democrats left the government and set themselves up as the loyal opposition.”

  “How many seats do you control?” Annika asked Nikola.

  “We have seventeen deputies,” Nikola said.

  “And how many seats are there in the RS assembly?”

  “Eighty-three.”

  “But the SDP has allies,” Eric hastened to assure her.

  “Powerful allies,” Nikola added with a grin.

  “Dazzle me.”

  “Well, the United Party of Roma—that’s the Gypsies—have two seats. The Party of Pensioners—that’s the graybeards and the blue hairs—have four. And Youth of the Left—that’s the longhairs—have three. That’s pretty much it, bringing my grand coalition up to a total of twenty-seven opposition parliamentarians.”