Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  Or maybe he would have been abandoned, ignored, turned over to the rough shelters and violent tutors one finds on the streets of Sarajevo. That seemed a lot more likely. Bosnians were also famous for their racism.

  I could have taken him back to our hostel and tomorrow turned him over to the police. I still could. What would happen next was hard to imagine, the Bosnian government was as minimal as possible and I doubted they had procedures in place for alien children who showed up out of nowhere. But surely some well-meaning NGO would take him in and try to find his family, or put him in an orphanage here, wouldn’t they? Though I couldn’t imagine who. Maybe the government would deport him back to Sri Lanka, a callous move but the world is a callous place, and few countries more so than Bosnia. It was easy to imagine the boy returned to his homeland, spending his youth in some Dickensian orphanage, a place worse than jail.

  The taxi’s headlights uncovered a bumpy dirt-and-rocks trail that veered away from the gravel to the right. The driver slowed us to a crawl and inquired, “Go here?”

  “Excellent question,” I said. “Brief, to the point, well put. I have no fucking idea.”

  The driver stopped the taxi. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither.” I looked at the dirt road. Were those fresh tire tracks? They might be. I was an out-of-work computer programmer, not Aragorn the Ranger, but those tracks did look distinctly darker than the soil around them. I looked down the dirt track and in the distance I saw a tiny flicker of light.

  “Yes,” I said. “Turn here.”

  The driver advanced into the dirt road, then stopped so abruptly that the child next to me, who had thankfully fallen silent again, slid forward and nearly off the seat. There was a gate in front of us, part of a rusting metal chain-link fence that intersected the dirt trail about twenty feet up from the gravel road. The gate was locked with a thick chain and padlock.

  For a moment I felt defeated. We could go no further. I would have to take the boy back to the city and go to the police. Then the driver said something and pointed at the gate, and I noticed what should have been obvious. The vehicular gate included a pedestrian doorway, like a house door might include a catflap, and that doorway was latched but unlocked.

  “Right,” I said. “Okay. God fucking damn it.” It was either walk or turn back, and I wasn’t ready to turn back. “Okay, stop here, and wait for me. Wait for me until I come back.”

  I tried to think of a reason for the taxi driver to wait. My mind replayed a helpful scene from Eyes Wide Shut, and I withdrew my Eagle Creek travel wallet from beneath my slacks, dug out a pink 50-euro note, tore it in two and handed half to the driver. Just then I remembered all the warnings that U.S. dollars in Bosnia had to be in pristine condition for anyone, including banks, to accept them. Fortunately this stricture didn’t seem to apply to euros. My driver looked at it, nodded slowly, and said “I wait.”

  “Good,” I said. I probably wasn’t even overpaying him that much. Sarajevo was an expensive place to travel and 50 euros or 100 km – “konvertible marks”, the local currency – seemed almost right for a cab ride to and from the outermost boonies.

  I reached out and gently took the boy by the arm. He looked at me, his face soaked with tears, shuddered, and began to cry again, quietly this time.

  “Dogs and small children are supposed to naturally trust me,” I muttered. “I guess you didn’t get the memo.”

  I picked up the boy, who sobbed but didn’t resist, exited the taxi, passed through the gate, and began to trek down the dirt road towards that faint spark of light. As always while travelling, I had my keychain with me, a small Swiss Army knife connected to a mini-Maglite flashlight, and once again it came in handy. After some awkward juggling I wound up with the shaking, weeping boy in the crook of my right arm and the flashlight in my left hand.

  I thought uneasily of all the land-mine signs and warnings in every guidebook. There were still a million live land mines in this country, and we were close enough to Sarajevo that the field surrounding this dirt track probably contained its share. As long as we stayed on the road we should be all right, but if the boy decided to wriggle away and run off…I tightened my hold on him and picked up my pace, trying to walk without thinking about where I was, or what I was doing, or why. No good would come of that.

  We walked maybe half a mile. There were no sounds but the child’s soft sobs and my Doc Martens against the dirt ruts and tire tracks. The weeds on either side of the road had not been touched for years. The spark of light grew and resolved into a single bare fluorescent bar, the only illumination outside a big concrete-and-metal building, some three hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, surrounded by a flat gravel field. Once upon a time it had been some kind of factory, but it looked long-deserted, almost all the doors and windows were boarded up. The light glowed above a set of concrete stairs that led up a few feet to a loading dock. The door next to the light was an eight-foot-square sheet of horizontally corrugated metal that slid up and down. There were two vehicles parked near the light. A gleaming new Land Rover, the vehicle of choice for Bosnia’s warlords, criminals, thugs, and venal officials, and a familiar empty white Mitsubishi pickup.

  I stood before the steel door for a long moment. The boy had given up on crying and buried his face in my shoulder instead. I could feel his quick panting breaths and his warm damp face and his jackhammer heartbeat. He felt very heavy now but I didn’t want to put him down. It wasn’t just fear of him running away. Some kind of paternal instinct had arisen during our walk down that dark dirt road. I felt jealously protective of him and afraid for us both. I didn’t know exactly what lay behind that steel door, but I was pretty confident that the answer included violent armed criminals. Maybe my refugee-smuggling theory was wrong. Maybe for some reason the family had been brought here to be executed and the child was lucky to have been left behind.

  I considered my options. The smart thing to do was obvious. Turn around, go back, take the taxi back to the city, confer with Talena, and turn the kid over to the police in the morning. Hell, the Bosnian police were so corrupt they probably knew these smugglers by their first name, they could deliver the boy to them during their first donut break.

  But I wanted to return this child to his family. I knew that his family was just behind that door. I did not really think they had been brought here to their deaths. And, yes, it was kind of insane that I was standing here at all, but now that I had come this far it was too late to chicken out and turn around.

  That last was really the deciding factor. A stupid motivation, granted, but enough. I banged on the door with my left fist, using my Swiss Army knife to generate a pleasingly loud metal-on-metal sound. The boy started to cry again.

  Loud but muffled voices behind the door expressed surprise in the guttural warlike sounds of Serbo-Croatian. I heard the tromp of heavy boots, followed by a few questions aimed in my direction. I banged on the door again. There was a moment of silence. Then the grating rattle of metal on metal as the door rose up, revealing three men and one woman, all of them carrying guns, all of them aiming at me. I had planned to say “Avon calling” or something equally amusing, but staring down four gun barrels really saps one’s desire to be flip and entertaining. I barely forced an unconvincing smile.

  The woman, a tall slender black-clad redhead who would have been intimidating even unarmed, unleashed a jackhammer sequence of harsh syllables which I was sure translated to something like “Who the fucking fuck are you?”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, trying to make my voice as soothing as a hypnotist. “Does anyone here speak English?”

  They stared at me, dumbfounded. The guns stayed aimed at my head and body as if magnetically attracted. It took a lot of effort to keep the smile on my face. It had been a long time since I had faced a situation anything like this. My slivovitz courage had evaporated in the face of all those guns, and my whole body trembled with adrenaline and fear.

  I looked past the
guns, hoping to find a willing interpreter. The door opened onto a large room, a loading bay I supposed, concrete floor beneath a wooden ceiling supported by concrete pillars. The room stank of sweat and urine and cigarettes and sawdust, there was a thin layer of sawdust everywhere. At the back and sides of the room a few dark door-sized openings led deeper into the building, and there was a big open space from which a conveyor belt protruded into the loading bay. The part of my mind not frozen by fear decided this place had once been a furniture factory or sawmill or something like that.

  About thirty people were clustered in the back right-hand corner, sitting in little groups, all of them near or atop one or two bags. At first glance it looked almost like a typical backpacker scene; single travellers, smoking cigarettes and playing cards, waiting for a bus or for something to happen. But these travellers were dressed in rags, layered in filth, gaunt and desperate, equipped with polyester duffel bags rather than Eagle Creek backpacks. Most of them were some flavour of Indian or Middle Eastern. Almost all were men, a few of them accompanied by a woman.

  In the other back corner of the room were a dozen white women, mostly young and slender but already visibly victims of hard living, almost all of them blonde. They were dressed slightly better than the other group, mostly in tight jeans, navel-baring T-shirts, and cheap flashy jewelry, although a few of them wore dumpy misshapen dresses and no jewels. They sat and stood in a tight group in the absolute corner of the room, mostly with their backs to the walls, smoking up a stormcloud. Like the men in the other corner they had paused their conversation to stare at my dramatic entrance.

  About halfway along the wall to my right sat the family I had seen in the Mitsubishi, all six of them huddled together in a heap of grief, heedless of the possessions that lay haphazardly piled beside them. They did not even look up to see the return of their lost son. But he saw them. He shouted so loudly that I winced, and he began to wriggle in my grip like a rabid cat. I managed to lower him most of the way to the ground before he broke free and scrambled past the nonplussed gunmen to rejoin his family.

  His parents and siblings stared at him open-mouthed as he approached. Then his mother, disbelieving, held her arms out wide, and he ran into them, and the rest of his family mobbed him like a football team that had just scored a game-winning touchdown, weeping and laughing with relief.

  That broke some of the tension. The gangsters held a brief uncouth conversation, after which the men developed a little less hostility in their eyes and stances. The woman approached me.

  “I speak English. That is their son?” She pointed at the rejoicing family.

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you get him? How do you find us?”

  I almost reflexively corrected her tense but decided it wasn’t a good time. Instead I explained my recent history. She looked skeptical. I couldn’t blame her. It was a bizarre and unconvincing story. By the time I finished telling it, one of the men had shut the door behind me, which was bad, but the guns had all been put away, which was very good.

  “Papers,” the woman said. “Identification.”

  “My passport’s back where I’m staying,” I said. “But I have a copy…”

  I opened up my travel wallet and dug out the sheet of paper I carried at all times, a photocopy of my passport’s ID page and my California driver’s license. I also had a credit card, two hundred euros, and a hundred US dollars, in cash. I expected to lose all that when the gangsters saw it, but they paid no notice. Maybe it was small change to them. I tried to remember what I had read about people smuggling. Something like five thousand dollars per person to go from India to Europe, if I recalled correctly. Even if these particular gangsters only got a tenth of that for this leg of the trip, that meant the desperate men and women in this room represented nearly thirty thousand dollars. I wondered why they looked so poor if they could muster five grand, a fortune in India, to travel. Maybe these were the ones who went on credit and had to pay it off by working illegally once they arrived. I suspected the women in the corner would all spend their first year in the West turning tricks on the street, whether they knew it yet or not.

  The male gangsters all sported the same designer-dangerous look, leather jackets, black jeans, black army boots, thick steel necklaces over the identical tattooed flames that encircled their necks and disappeared below their black T-shirts. I imagined them modelling a new clothing line, Menace by Armani. The short hypermuscled one wore no shirt beneath his open jacket, revealing mountainous pectorals and the remainder of what I assumed was their gang-membership tattoo; a flaming sword, its hilt at the collarbone and its point at the navel, with Oriental dragons dancing in the flames that covered the rest of the torso.

  The woman, who was definitely in charge, was about my age, harshly beautiful, marathon-fit. She had no leather jacket, steel necklace, or tattoo, but something about her demeanor, her flat detached expression, made her the scariest person in the room. I was dead certain she wouldn’t hesitate a microsecond to use the gun she carried.

  “America or Canada?” she demanded.

  “I’m Canadian. But I live in California. America.”

  She frowned at the ambiguity. “You NATO? NGO? Journalist?”

  “I’m a tourist.”

  She, and all the others – I supposed the word was the same in their language – stared at me in disbelief. This was arguably the least plausible part of my story. Nobody came to Bosnia for pleasure; the war was too distant for ghouls and too recent for everybody else.

  “No, really,” I said. “A tourist. My girlfriend…” I paused and then decided not to explain, it was too complicated and they probably didn’t really care.

  “A tourist,” she repeated. She sounded baffled, rather than angry or disbelieving, which was good. “What is your work, in America?”

  “Computer programmer.” That wasn’t strictly speaking accurate, but it sounded a lot better than ‘unemployed loser who can’t find a job and supports himself by sponging off his parents and girlfriend.’

  She spoke to her minions and then turned to me. “Stay here,” she said, quite unnecessarily seeing as how two of her thugs stood between me and the door, and she walked away. I watched her disappear down one of the shadowy corridors that led deeper into the building.

  “You live California?” one of the thugs asked.

  “Yes,” I said, surprised that anyone else spoke English. I looked at him. Tall and thin, a big hook nose and features that did not aesthetically agree with his shaved head, early twenties. At twenty-nine I was probably the oldest person in the room except for the parents who had just regained their child.

  “Los Angeles?”

  “San Francisco.” He seemed disappointed, so I added, “But I go to Los Angeles sometimes, I have friends there.”

  “I always want to go Los Angeles,” he said. “Make movies there.”

  “It’s the place to go,” I said banally. The English-speaker, I realized, was the one who had seemed reluctant to pull his gun and order the family around at gunpoint back in the city. I decided to think of him as the sensitive reasonable gangster.

  “Pretty girls there?” He grinned.

  I put on my lecherous-heterosexual-man leer. “You have no idea. It’s like all the pretty girls in America, they all go to Los Angeles. And the weather is beautiful, and everybody has a car, and you can swim at the beach every day.” Actually I hated L.A. with a passion but I didn’t think it was a good time to rain on his delusions.

  “Los Angeles.” He shook his head reverently. “I go there someday.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  The miniature Hulk lookalike said something to Sensitive Reasonable Gangster, who nodded and said to me, “He want to know if you like the tattoo.”

  I looked at the enormous flaming sword on Mini-Hulk’s chest. “It’s great,” I said, and then, it just sort of popped out, “Very phallic.”

  Sensitive Reasonable Gangster looked at me, perplexed. “Phallic?”


  “California slang,” I assured him. “It means really cool. Very good.”

  “Phallic,” he said, nodding and smiling. “Very phallic.” He turned and said something to the other gangsters, presumably expanding their California-cool vocabulary. By turns they each said “phallic,” trying out the word. I managed to maintain a straight face, but only just. It wasn’t just the word that was funny, it was the way the whole conversation’s power dynamic had changed. Sure, this was their country, and I was a suspicious unwanted intruder, and they were the violent criminals who did whatever they wanted; but I lived in America, in California no less, and thanks to the almighty global power of Hollywood that made me infinitely cooler than these backwater Bosnian thugs, next to them I was the Fonz, and they knew it.

  The woman returned, and two men followed behind her. I was no longer the oldest person in the room; she was near my age, and both of the men looked mid-thirties. One of them, tall and impressively craggy, hung back in the shadows, but I kept a wary eye on him all the same. He had the same dull expression that the woman did, lifeless, like a snake. He and she were far scarier than the other gangsters. Those boys were too young to have fought in the war, but I was sure the woman and the man in the shadows were veterans of casual and terrible violence.

  The other man was my height, slender, wearing rimless eyeglasses, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and black tie that even I could tell were designer and expensive, his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Except for the ponytail he could have been a Wall Street maven. This man was clearly the boss. Even the body language of the woman and the shadowed uber-thug indicated deference.

  The businessman walked straight up to me and offered his hand. “Good evening,” he said. “Mr. Wood, I presume?” A smooth, confident voice, accented but cultured.