The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  Here we go again, he thought. The emotional roller coaster.

  Sarah handed him a mug of coffee, black and strong.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  It was hard to believe that this ice queen was the same person who had made love to him with passionate intensity only a few hours earlier. His back stung deliciously where Sarah’s nails had scraped furrows in his flesh. She was a complicated woman. She always had been. Eric had to acknowledge that his feelings for her were still strong, stronger than he had realized. But that did not mean that he had any real hope of understanding her. Sarah was a paradox, a beautiful enigma.

  “Are you hungry? There’s a great bakery on the corner that has the best burek in the city. They’d be the first to tell you that.”

  Sarah offered him a wan smile.

  “Coffee’s all I need,” she said.

  “The breakfast of champions.”

  “I thought that was cornflakes and bourbon.”

  “Cold pizza and warm beer, actually.”

  “Eric, about last night . . .”

  “The night you don’t want to talk about?”

  “Yes. That one.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I don’t think it was just you. I remember being there too.”

  “Okay. We shouldn’t have done that. I’ve been under a lot of stress and I’m lonely. It just happened.”

  “Maybe it’ll just happen again.”

  She shook her head and sipped the coffee. “I don’t think so.”

  “Just try to keep an open mind.”

  “I should go,” she said.

  And Eric thought that if she left his apartment then and there she was lost to him forever.

  “Actually, I was planning to call you last night and invite you to take a road trip with me today.”

  “Because the last one was such a success?” Sarah suggested.

  “Because there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Who?”

  “Nikola Petrović.”

  “Nikola Petrović of the Social Democrats?”

  “The very same.”

  “Kind of a small fish, isn’t he?”

  “Not for long,” Eric assured her. “Not if I have anything to say about it. No matter what happens with Mali, I think Nikola can be part of the answer to the problem.”

  “Where will he be today?”

  “Prijedor.”

  “The RS again?”

  “Hey, it’s gotta go better than the last time around.”

  Sarah was quiet, thinking through the implications of accepting or rejecting Eric’s invitation. She had a sharp analytical mind and a processing speed that kept her a step or two ahead of nearly all her colleagues.

  “Okay,” she said, after no more than ten or fifteen seconds of contemplation. She cast an appraising look down at the outfit she was wearing, the same one she had been wearing the night before. “But I need to go home to get changed first.”

  Eric smiled at his little victory.

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  —

  The drive to Prijedor took about four hours, and he kept the conversation light, steering clear of the emotional minefield of their past and future. Eric outlined for Sarah his plan for elevating Nikola to a leadership position in the RS by virtue of his unwavering support for a European Bosnia. Sarah was skeptical. She was focused on returning Dimitrović to the pro-West camp as the answer. But she recognized that it was always good to have a fallback plan.

  Sarah’s trick with the license plates helped them slip past the checkpoint into the RS without being stopped. Eric’s car, an eight-year-old Volkswagen Golf, was one of thousands just like it on Bosnia’s roads. It was cheap, reliable, and completely anonymous. The guards, who looked to be the same trio who had stopped Eric and Annika on their visit to Banja Luka, hardly glanced up at the Golf from their card game as they sped through the checkpoint.

  Prijedor was an attractive riverside town that featured an interesting mix of Austrian and Ottoman architecture. The city had been cleaned up a few years earlier in a major municipal beautification campaign, but it was harder to scrub out the bloody spots of its recent history. Prijedor had lent its name to one of the worst massacres in the Bosnian War, second only to Srebrenica. After the Serbian takeover of the city, thousands of civilians had been executed, raped, or detained without trial. A series of concentration camps in the hills around Prijedor, including the notorious Omarska camp, had been virtual abattoirs. To the survivors, as well as to the prosecutors in The Hague, what had happened in this sleepy little city was known as the Prijedor Massacre.

  Eric parked a few blocks from the city center.

  “Hope you don’t mind a short walk. Political rallies here can generate counterdemonstrations. And cars that get caught between the two groups can suffer all sorts of indignities.”

  Sarah cast a disparaging eye over Eric’s car, which had once been white but now could be only charitably described as “dusty.” There was a sizeable dent in the driver’s-side door and a spiderweb crack in the rear window.

  “How would you tell?” she asked.

  “I’m not much of a car guy.”

  “No,” Sarah agreed. “Not really a clothes guy either.”

  Eric was wearing jeans and a light-blue oxford shirt with perhaps a little too much mileage on it.

  “Harsh.”

  “Just saying that you look more like a start-up maven in San Francisco than a diplomat.”

  “It’s because I’m Asian, isn’t it?”

  Sarah laughed at his mock indignation.

  “You’ll see,” Eric said. “I’ll be the best-dressed guy at the ball. Trust me, this will not be a black-tie event.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  The SDP rally was at the town’s central square in front of the city assembly building, a beaux arts behemoth that dated back to the days of Austro-Hungarian suzerainty. There were maybe five hundred people milling around the square waiting for the speeches. A local band was playing traditional folk music, not the ear-splitting version known colloquially as turbofolk, but the older, more melodic songs of love, loss, and suffering that were like windows to the Balkan soul.

  “Take a look around,” Eric said. “What do you see?”

  “A political rally like a million others,” Sarah replied. “Smaller than most.”

  “Look again,” Eric insisted. “Look at the flags they’re carrying. EU flags. Bosnian flags. There are even a few old Yugoslav flags with the big red star. No RS flags. No Serbian flags. It’s an antinationalist crowd nostalgic for the days of brotherhood and unity. And there’s a mix. Young people. Old people. There are pensioners who look like they don’t have two marks to rub together and a guy right over there with Italian sunglasses that must have cost two hundred euros. It’s a movement.”

  “That’s a pretty big word for five hundred people.”

  “Wait. You’ll see.”

  They joined the crowd, working their way up toward the front. After another couple of songs—which Eric delighted in pointing out were a mix of Serbian, Bosnian, and Croat standards—Nikola came onto the stage.

  He was dressed in black jeans, work boots, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was slicked back, and he had what looked like a three days’ growth of beard. The crowd cheered loudly and stamped their feet on the cobblestones.

  “Not your typical pol,” Sarah observed.

  “No. He is not.”

  “And good-looking.”

  Eric rolled his eyes.

  “You can do better,” he assured her. “Hell, you just did bette
r.”

  Sarah stuck an elbow in his rib cage.

  Nikola soaked up the applause, spreading his arms and tilting his head backward as though the heavens had just delivered a cooling rain to break a long drought.

  “He looks like Jesus,” Sarah suggested.

  “What do you know about Jesus?”

  “I’ve seen pictures.”

  “My fellow Bosnians,” Nikola began, and the crowd roared.

  “Bosnians?” Sarah asked

  “Not Bosniak,” Eric answered. “Bosnian. Bosniaks are members of the ethnic group who used to be called Muslims before and during the war. Changing that to Bosniak was part of the growing nationalist consciousness on the part of all three communities. Bosnian just means a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina irrespective of their ethnic identities.”

  “Seems like a minor distinction.”

  “Not to them. People here have killed and died for much, much less.”

  “We are here today,” Nikola continued, “to send a message to Banja Luka. That we didn’t vote for what they’ve become. That we didn’t choose what they represent. That we—the people of Republika Srpksa—have chosen peace and reconciliation and a European future for our children. That we do not believe them when they tell us to fear our brothers. That we will not listen when they command us to hate our neighbors. That if they cannot deliver on the promises they made and the future we have chosen then we will goddamn deliver it for ourselves.”

  The crowd roared its approval. Eric cheered along with them, abandoning any pretense of diplomatic impartiality. Dimitrović and Petrović were not equal. What they represented was not worthy of the kind of false equivalence that too often paralyzed diplomacy, making it impossible to distinguish between right and wrong, between good and evil.

  “Good-looking and talented,” Sarah said. Her Serbo-Croatian was rusty, but she could follow along easily enough even after twenty years. “You know, I think my organization might have some people who could help him. He’ll need access to capital, expertise, pollsters. I could deliver that.”

  “It’d ruin him if he was ever linked to the Agency,” Eric protested.

  “We know that. We’re patriots, not idiots. We could keep it quiet. Petrović would get money and expert help, and no one would ever need to know.”

  “If his circumstances changed like that, everyone would assume it was you, in the same way that they assumed it was you behind the suspiciously well-heeled group of students who brought down Milošević in Belgrade.”

  “I wish we had the stones and the skills to do half the stuff we get the credit or the blame for.”

  “Still and all, what Nikola’s doing has to be natural. It has to be organic and Bosnian. If it’s seen as something alien or foreign, it’ll trigger the political equivalent of an immune system response.”

  “Well, what can you do, then, to help the good guys?”

  “There are things,” Eric said cryptically. “I’m doing some of them.”

  Nikola was just getting warmed up. He attacked Dimitrović, lambasting him as a cheat who had promised the voters a European future and delivered instead a Byzantine past.

  “And Dimitrovic is not alone in this,” Nikola insisted. “He has allied himself to the mysterious Marko ‘Mali’ Barcelona, a man no one seems to have met but who has made himself into perhaps the most powerful man in Republika Srpska. I heard that Mali went fishing the other day and caught the magic goldfish. Being a kind-hearted fellow, he unhooked the fish and tossed it back into the lake. The fish turned to him, and said, ‘But wait. You forgot about the wish.’ ‘Okay, fish,’ Mali answered. ‘What do you want?’”

  The crowd laughed, but the laughter was tinged with anger.

  “There is a way forward,” Nikola said, as though sensing that the crowd was on the edge of becoming a mob and setting fire to the parliament building behind him. “Annika Sondergaard, the Viking warrior, has put forward a peace plan that would finally make us whole. It is not a perfect plan; no plan is perfect. But it is a step forward, a step in the direction that we have chosen. I will walk this path with Sondergaard, and I hope that you will all walk it with me.”

  Eric scanned the crowd, hoping to gauge their reaction. This was exactly what he had had in mind when he had pitched the idea to Nikola in Mostar. Now was the chance to see whether it would play in Peoria—or Prijedor.

  Twenty feet to his left and closer to the stage he saw a large man in a long coat that seemed unnecessary on such a warm afternoon. Although Eric had proudly highlighted the crowd’s diversity for Sarah, this man seemed out place. He did not belong here. Eric could see a dark tattoo creeping up the side of the man’s neck, but he was too far away to see if it was one of the paramilitary symbols.

  In what seemed to Eric like slow motion, the man swung his coat open and pulled a wicked-looking gun from a concealed holster. An Israeli Uzi, Eric realized, and a part of his brain was unreasonably proud that he had identified the weapon.

  He pushed his way toward the assassin shouting “Gun!” at the top of his voice. It was too far. There was not enough time.

  Even worse, Eric saw, the gunman was not alone. There was a second man about fifteen feet farther to his left. He had drawn a handgun and was leveling it at the stage.

  “Nikola! Get down!” Eric doubted that he could be heard over the crowd.

  Those standing closest to the gunmen were fleeing in every direction, all except four. Eric saw two men tackle the first shooter. They did not look like amateurs. One man went for the gun, grabbing both the weapon and the shooter’s forearm, and forcing it down toward the ground. The second man had a pistol in his hand that he jammed into the base of the would-be assassin’s skull. Even over the crowd noise, Eric could hear the instruction.

  “Drop the gun, you piece of shit.”

  Something similar was happening to the second gunman. He was already on his knees. A woman Eric would have taken for a middle-aged housewife was standing behind him strapping his wrists together with yellow flex cuffs. Her partner, a younger man dressed like a student, covered the second shooter with a snub-nosed pistol. It had all taken only seconds.

  Nikola had not moved. He was standing on the stage straight and tall. Eric jumped up beside him. Nikola embraced him and kissed him roughly on the cheeks three times in the Serbian fashion.

  “Oh, to be shot at and missed,” he said.

  “They didn’t get a chance to shoot,” Eric replied.

  “That’s not what the papers will say. There’ll be a hail of bullets in the stories tomorrow. Those two just did me a huge favor.”

  Eric looked out over the crowd. Only a few of Nikola’s supporters seemed to have fled the shooting. Hundreds were still milling around the square. They were keeping a respectable distance from the subdued shooters, but the atmosphere was still more that of a rock concert than a crime scene.

  “My friends,” Nikola said into the microphone. “We have clearly scared the powers that be. They know what we stand for and what we fight against. And we live to fight another day. Now, let us leave the authorities to do their work. We will meet again soon. Bring your friends, and your cousins and your lovers. And thank you for sharing this adventure with me today.”

  The crowd cheered its enthusiasm. Few seemed inclined to go home.

  The uniformed police had arrived and were arguing with Nikola’s rescuers about custody of the shooters.

  “Are those Dragan’s people?” Eric asked.

  “They are.” The answer came from behind Eric, and he turned to see a short man in aviator sunglasses and a brown leather jacket who looked more than a little like Telly Savalas. He was completely hairless, without eyebrows or even eyelashes, the consequence, Eric knew, of an autoimmune disease.

  “Good to see you, Dragan,” Eric said. “I don’t suppose it was luck that had your people within arm’s re
ach of the shooters.”

  “I don’t believe in luck. We know those two. They’re heavies for the Zemun clan who have moved over to the White Hand. We marked them the moment they stepped into the square.”

  The police had evidently won the argument, because they bundled the shooters into their cars, ridiculously small Czech Škodas done up in the standard blue-and-white livery of the RS police.

  Sarah joined the group, and Eric made the introductions.

  “Gentlemen, this is my colleague, Sarah Gold, on temporary assignment to the embassy’s economic department. Sarah, this is Nikola Petrović of the SDP and Dragan Klicković of the BIA.”

  “State security?” Sarah asked with a raised eyebrow. BIA was the acronym for Bezbednosno-informativna agencija, or Security Information Agency, an organization that was supposed to spy on Serbia’s enemies but spent much of its time and energy spying on the political opponents of whoever happened to be in power.

  “Formerly,” Dragan explained. “Now I’m a . . . what’s the word . . . privateer?”

  Eric swallowed a laugh. “That’s the right word for sure,” he offered.

  “I run a private security firm,” Dragan said to Sarah, ignoring Eric’s jibe. “I have been contracted to provide security to Mr. Petrović here, and my employees, if I may say, have again demonstrated that this is a quality firm. Well worth the price.”

  “Who hired you?” Sarah asked.

  “Your friend Eric, of course,” Dragan answered.

  Eric shrugged.

  “It’s not my money. It’s Annika’s. But it was well spent.”

  Nikola clapped him on the shoulder. “Indeed. Thank you, my friend. You kept your word.”

  Dragan pulled a silver flask from his hip pocket and unscrewed the cap. He passed it to Nikola, who took a deep swallow and then handed it to Eric. It was homemade plum brandy, the kind that should not be set next to an open flame. Sarah took a slug as well. Dragan raised the flask and offered a toast.

  “To near things,” he suggested, before downing the rest of the flask.