The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  “Then why would Mali go to him?”

  “Because of ideology. It makes sense that Mali would have confidence in Father Stefan, that he would see him as a fellow traveler. Stefan’s a right-wing nationalist with deep roots in the RS. It’s easy to understand how Mali would feel that he could count on the priest to keep the faith.”

  “Maybe he’s changed,” Sarah suggested. “Fifteen years. Twenty years. That’s a long time.”

  “Not for these guys. It’s the blink of an eye. They think in centuries. And besides, you know what the Serbs say about wolves.”

  “What?”

  “The wolf can change its fur, but never its character.”

  Sarah looked at him curiously. “You sure about that?”

  —

  It was not easy to find the chapel. Sarah observed that it was as though it did not want to be found, like a Bosnian Brigadoon. The locals they stopped to ask offered confusing and contradictory directions, much of it predicated on a detailed knowledge of landmarks that used to be there some decades in the past. “Drive straight until you see the place where the widower Tamjanović cut down the big oak,” one older woman had suggested unhelpfully.

  Finally, after almost two hours of driving around nameless back roads, they found the Monastery of St. Archangel Gabriel, a collection of neat whitewashed buildings surrounded by well-tended orchards. Although the monastery was six hundred years old, there was nothing touristy about it. There were no signs in fractured English, no guides, not even a stand selling souvenirs and religious bric-a-brac. It looked like what a monastery was supposed to be, a working religious community.

  They parked the car under a maple tree with flaming-red leaves that were just beginning to fall. As they walked up the path toward the rectory, Sarah took Eric’s arm and leaned against him. It was an intimate gesture, the kind that new lovers might make as easily as a couple celebrating their golden anniversary. Eric did not know what to make of it. To call Sarah’s signals mixed was to devalue the concept.

  They stopped a young monk carrying a load of firewood on his back. In the Orthodox Church, except for hieromonks like Father Stefan, there was a sharp divide between monks and priests. Priests were allowed, even expected, to marry and have children. Only the monks were celibate. Priests were generally educated and drawn from the middle class, while the monkhood did most of its recruiting among the working poor. This young man could look forward to a life of hard work, but he could at least count on steady if parsimonious meals.

  Eric asked the monk where they could find Father Stefan. The monk said nothing but pointed them toward a small chapel located on the crest of a hill.

  “Hvala,” Eric said. Thank you.

  The monk simply nodded and shouldered his burden.

  They walked up the hill to the chapel shoulder to shoulder rather than arm in arm. Stolid and serious. Representatives of the United States of America.

  Two rows of white apiaries stood a hundred meters or so from the chapel. A man dressed in the rough clothes of a laborer but sporting a beard that was unmistakably priestly was tending to the hives. Eric saw him bend over to grab one of the hives from the bottom and lift. He had to strain to raise the bottom up even a few inches. Seemingly satisfied, the priest set the hive back into place gently.

  “That looks heavy,” Eric said, as they approached. “Do you need help moving it?”

  “No, thank you,” the priest replied. “I was just checking the weight. The hive needs somewhere between thirty and forty kilograms of honey to make it through the winter. I want to make sure that my little friends are prepared. Praise God, they seem to be ready. Which is a good thing. It looks to be a harsh winter.”

  “It could be a very harsh winter, Father. But with your assistance, it may yet be less brutal than the winter of 1993.”

  The priest looked at them sharply, seeing them for the first time. Eric with his dark complexion and exotic features and Sarah with her unmistakable Americanness. There was no mistaking Eric’s reference to 1993. It could be to nothing except the siege of Sarajevo.

  “Who are you?” the priest asked in excellent English. “You’re not from here, although you speak our language tolerably well.”

  “Not as well as you speak ours,” Eric replied in the same language. “My name is Eric Petrosian. This is Sarah Gold. We’re from the American embassy in Sarajevo.”

  The priest looked at Sarah with an expression that was difficult for Eric to interpret.

  “Gold?”

  “That’s right. Not literal, unfortunately, more an aspiration.”

  The priest nodded slowly.

  “I am Stefan, the priest here at this chapel.”

  “We know. You’re the man we’ve come to see.”

  “What is this about?” The priest made no effort to hid his suspicions.

  “Is there someplace we could sit and talk?”

  “There’s a table and benches behind the church,” the priest said grudgingly.

  No matter his suspicions about the visitors and their motives, the rules of hospitality were permanent and inflexible. Father Stefan brought them coffee and sweet cakes made from walnuts and honey. It was a warm day under a blue sky, and it was pleasant enough to sit outside as long as they kept their jackets on.

  Sarah complimented Stefan on the honey.

  “Thank you,” the priest replied. “If the bees are happy and content, the honey is sweet and pure. I try to keep them happy. Beyond that, I can take no credit for the product of their labors.”

  They talked about nothing in particular while they drank the coffee. The weather. The frescoes in the chapel. The bumper crop of pears and apricots from the monastery’s orchards.

  Eric studied Stefan’s face while they talked, comparing it to the man he remembered from the war years. The priest had seemed younger than his forty-five years when he was thumping the pulpit in support of national unity and in defense of ethnic cleansing. His arctic-blue eyes had burned with a fervor that reminded Eric of the line from Yeats. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Now he seemed older than his three score and five, bent under the weight of memory and—Eric dared to hope—regret. The blue eyes had grown milky and softer, the color of a hazy summer sky.

  The face that had been as smooth and unblemished as that of a porcelain doll was now leathery and wrinkled from long hours laboring under the sun. His once-dark hair now more white than gray. His hands were rough and calloused.

  But the most salient difference was not the physical change. The younger priest had been charged with pent-up energy, eager and focused like a dog straining on the leash. Two decades later, Stefan seemed at peace, reflecting on the world rather than seeking to bend it to his will.

  There was a risk, Eric understood, that he was projecting, seeing in the priest what he wanted to see rather than what was there. He would find out soon enough what was real and what was not.

  “Now,” Stefan said, when a sufficient time had elapsed to permit business to be done. “Why don’t you tell me why you are here. I don’t expect the fame of my honey has reached as far as the embassy of the United States.”

  “No,” Eric acknowledged. “The honey is a bonus. We are here to talk to you about a man we believe you are working with in some capacity. Marko Barcelona.”

  For a brief moment, Stefan looked startled, but he quickly buried that expression under a mask of priestly calm. It was too late. His reaction had confirmed for Eric his suspicions about the identity of the Father S in Mali’s ledger. The trick now would be eliciting the information they had come for, the location of Sarah’s mysterious “package.”

  “I have heard of this man,” the priest admitted, after a long pause in which he seemed to be weighing his response. “And I can understand why you would think of me in connection with him. I have a reputation. That rep
utation may be unfair, but it is not unearned. As a younger man, I was fiery, impetuous, quick to anger, and even quicker to take offense. I am an older man now. Slower. Wiser, I would like to think. Wise enough to stay out of politics and stay away from politicians as much as I can. They speak as the serpent spoke to Eve. Up is down. Black is white. They would as soon argue the one as the other depending entirely on utility to determine their position.”

  None of this was an actual denial. It would be better, Eric decided, not to press the priest too hard, but rather to lead him gently to the answer he desired. As a reporter, he had interviewed countless reluctant sources. What he was doing with Stefan was closer to investigative journalism than diplomacy.

  “If I understand you correctly,” Eric said, “you are telling me that you are not the same man you were when the Bosnian War was at its height. The Palace Priest of Pale.”

  “That is what they called me,” the priest acknowledged with a sigh. Pale was the ski resort not far from Sarajevo that had been the seat of government for the leadership of Republika Srpska during the war. Stefan had been a prominent figure there, offering blessings and convocations at official functions and celebrations. “I was blind. We all were. The other sides were no better, but that hardly matters. So much blood. So much suffering.”

  Eric could see that the priest was genuinely moved by the memories of the hardship of war.

  “Father, what if I told you that it could happen again. That the Bosnia we have been trying to build for twenty years with room for all regardless of ethnic origin could fall apart. That the four horsemen could ride again through the Balkans.”

  “Pestilence, war, famine, and death.” Stefan recited it like a liturgy. “Every generation forgets the teachings of their parents.”

  “Dimitrović and Marko Barcelona are setting the stage for another war, hitting the same old nationalist chords to motivate their followers.”

  “Things are different now,” the priest insisted. “Most Serbs will not follow the siren song onto the rocks. Not again.”

  “No,” Eric agreed. “Most won’t. But it doesn’t take most; it only takes enough. And Mali and Dimitrović have more than enough. The paramilitaries are back. The Wasps and the Dragons and the Volunteer Guard. It will take only a single spark to light the fire.”

  “And we will all burn,” Stefan said.

  Sarah reached across the table and laid her hand on the back of the priest’s.

  “All of us,” she agreed.

  There was a faraway look on the priest’s face, but Eric could not tell whether he was gazing into the past or the future.

  “It doesn’t need to be this way,” Eric said softly. “There is another way.”

  “Sondergaard?” Stefan asked.

  “You’ve been following this?”

  “No. I try to stay away from politics, but it is impossible not to know the basics.”

  “This plan has a real chance,” Eric said insistently. “We can undo the mistakes of Dayton, mark a path forward for Bosnia to Europe and the twenty-first century. But we need your help.”

  “My help? I am an old man with a small church on a small hill. I am nothing.”

  “But you have something important,” Eric said carefully. “You are holding something for Mali, and in return he supports your church and your work. I can understand that. Maybe you don’t even know what it is. But you know it’s important to him. We believe it is information. Something about Dimitrović. Something that he is using to control Dimitrović, to push him down the path to war. Father, we need to know where to find it. We need to break the link between Dimitrović and Mali, and give Sondergaard’s plan for Bosnia a fair chance to succeed.”

  The priest was quiet as he processed what Eric had said. He did not try to deny the threat to what had become a fragile peace, which itself was encouraging. Eric tried to read his face, but it was impassive. Seemingly unconsciously, Stefan picked up a walnut from the table and worked it around in his hand as though it were a prayer bead. There was a tension in the set of his shoulders that gave the impression of an internal struggle. Eric said nothing. He did not want to disturb the priest’s thought process, to make him feel as if someone else were making his decisions. He would have to reach the right conclusion on his own.

  Sarah seemed to understand this as well. Under the table, she took Eric’s hand and squeezed it hard, but she did not speak.

  “Let us assume for a moment that what you say is true,” Stefan said, after almost five minutes of silence. “That there was such a package and I knew where to find it. What would you do with this thing if I gave it to you?”

  Eric let the air out of his lungs, surprised to find that he’d been holding his breath. The journalist in him understood that Stefan had made up his mind. There was still delicate work to do. Like a fisherman reeling in his catch, Eric could not move too fast or too slow or the line would break. But the hook was set.

  “It depends in part on what it is,” Eric answered. “But we would use it to separate Mali from Dimitrović, then work to persuade Dimitrović to support the Sondergaard Plan, or at least not obstruct it.”

  “Blackmail, you mean. You would be no better than Mali.”

  “No,” Eric hastened to explain, realizing that he had been careless in his response. “If what you have . . . what you might have,” he corrected himself, “is criminal, we would expose it, we would be obligated to. Information about common criminal behavior would be turned over to the state-level prosecutor in Sarajevo. Information about war crimes is the property of the international tribunal in The Hague. We have a treaty obligation to share everything we know about war crimes in the Balkans with the tribunal. It’s an obligation we take very seriously.”

  “And what about Barcelona?” the priest asked. “What becomes of him?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric admitted. “It depends, I suppose, on what the information reveals. But I do know this. Mali is bad for Bosnia. He is a cancer, a parasite feeding on the state. He will suck it dry and leave the husk to blow in the wind. He cares nothing for Bosnia. He doesn’t care about the RS either, or the Serbian people, or the church. He cares only for himself. You know this is true.”

  Stefan shook his head, not in denial but in resignation. “I do,” he said sadly. “God help me, I do.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Sarah asked.

  Stefan looked at her, studying her face as though the answer might be written there.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  The priest led them back to the row of apiaries.

  “It would be better if you wait here,” Stefan said. “My friends are usually well behaved, but they don’t know you.”

  The priest did not put on any special gear. He simply walked over to one of the hives and removed the top. Moving slowly and patiently, he removed two screens from inside the hive and set them on a frame next to the apiary box. A mass of bees crawled aimlessly across the screens. A few took flight and circled around the hive, seemingly disoriented by the sudden transition. One bee lit on Stefan’s exposed neck, but if he used his stinger, the priest gave no sign of it.

  Stefan reached into the hive with one arm, digging deep for something at the bottom. He pulled out what looked like a small metal box and set it on the grass before replacing the screens and the lid with the same slow, mechanical patience.

  Eric felt his pulse quicken. Sarah had taken his hand and was digging her nails into his palm. She was coiled tightly and Eric could sense that it took all of her self-control not to leap forward and snatch the box from the ground.

  “Patience,” he whispered to her. “We’re almost there.”

  Stefan walked over to them, the box and his hand both dripping with raw honey, cloudy and crystalline and spotted with clumps of waxy comb and dead bees.

  “This is it,” Stefan said unnecessarily. “My friends
have guarded it patiently and without curiosity as to the contents. I have tried to match them, but I suppose we are past that point now. Would you like to see what’s inside?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. And the eagerness in her response was an almost physical thing.

  TRNOVA, BOSNIA

  NOVEMBER 14

  12:50 P.M.

  30

  It was such a small thing. A steel box no more than six inches across, four inches deep, and three inches high. It was well made, with a rubber seal around the lid that looked airtight, and secured with a key lock rather than a combination.

  “I don’t suppose you have the key?” Eric asked Stefan.

  The priest shook his head.

  “No. It was not for me to know what was in the box. I was just to keep it safe.”

  “And Mali paid you for this?” Sarah said. There was a sharp edge to the question that Eric thought was unnecessarily cruel.

  “Yes,” Stefan replied, with no attempt at self-defense. “For the church.”

  Sarah studied the lock.

  “This isn’t a serious thing,” she announced. “It’s to deter the merely curious, not the professional.”

  From her jacket pocket, Sarah produced a small set of tools on a chain. Within a minute, she had the lock open.

  “Took a little longer than I thought,” she said. “I think there’s some honey in the mechanism.”

  Stefan looked at her curiously.

  “What exactly do you do for the embassy, Miss Gold?” the priest asked.

  “Economic policy.”

  “Of course.” The irony in his reply was as thick as honey.

  Sarah raised the lid and removed a foam insert that had been cut to the shape of the box. Using a pocketknife, she peeled off the top of the insert, which looked like it had been secured with some kind of epoxy. Nestled inside was a small videotape, the kind that would fit an old-model handheld camera before everything went to solid state and high-density memory cards.