Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  Woody Allen once said that every time he met a woman on some level he was thinking about having sex with her. Whenever two men meet, on some level they are both thinking: could I take him? If it comes down to him or me, in a fight, who wins? Usually there is some element of doubt in the answer. Here there was none. Against any one of them I would lose. The Mostar Tigers were friendly, and at that point they were still mostly quiet and reserved, but like Sinisa’s lieutenants last night, the woman and the uber-thug, they had the feral aura of wild animals. Carnivores.

  I noticed that several of them looked towards Talena more often than necessary, and let their gazes linger. I was used to Talena attracting attention; she was tall and slender and startlingly pretty, even in khaki cargo pants and black T-shirt. But for the first time I felt irrationally threatened by it, as if she might decide on the spur of the moment to replace me with one of the pretty-boy Tigers, or one of them might challenge me to a duel for her.

  The group dynamics of the Tigers made it clear that Dragan was their leader. The others came to talk to him. They asked questions and he answered. On the rare occasions when he initiated conversation, those around him immediately fell silent and listened intently.

  Well, I thought, at least Saskia got the alpha thug.

  The party went on all day and into the night. I didn’t enjoy it. I was tired, and hot, and I wasn’t accustomed to drinking as early or as much as the Bosnians, and by midafternoon I was wobbly and exhausted. I’m not a people person to begin with, I’m uncomfortable in big groups, quickly bored by small talk, uncertain of the appropriate conversational protocols, although in Mostar that wasn’t a big deal as the only people I could communicate with were Josip and Talena. I was actually glad that the language barrier walled me off from everyone else. I wasn’t used to being at parties without Talena by my side. Here, she and Saskia were inseparable and didn’t want company, and I couldn’t blame them, but it made me feel like I was an awkward teenager again, lounging around a party looking for someone to talk to, pretending I wasn’t bored and embarrassed by my solitude. I passed my time by drinking more beer, which didn’t help. And in addition to my usual party insecurity I had to swallow the angry contempt with which I responded to the all-too-common manifestations of the endlessly deep vein of bloodcurdling hatred and bigotry that lay beneath Bosnia’s unconvincing veneer of civilization.

  And, I didn’t want to think about this and walled it off, but the more I drank the more my awful understanding began to seep in through the cracks and around the edges, I had to start dealing with the conscious knowledge that Talena and I were through. She was the only good thing in my life, and I was about to lose her forever. I tried to tell myself that maybe this would be the best thing for me. Maybe, like the US economy, like Bosnia itself, I had to hit the rock bottom of my pit before I could start clawing my way up towards the light again. But no matter how much I drank I couldn’t even begin to convince myself.

  Sometime near dusk I looked around from my intoxicated self-pitying haze and realized that Talena and Saskia were nowhere to be seen and that I badly wanted the party to end. I was very tired, my clothes were thickly crusted with my own dried sweat, and I wanted to curl up and sleep. But Josip wasn’t around either, so I couldn’t even tell this to anyone, and I didn’t remember which house was Dragan’s and Saskia’s. I got another plate of roast pork and bread and cheese and, all of it dry by now but I had the vague idea that it would sober me up a little and make me stronger. I washed it down with another beer. The soccer ball came my way and on a whim I tried to play with the teenagers.

  Like all Europeans they were frighteningly good and like all North Americans I was laughably bad. After clumsily stepping on the ball and tumbling onto the street, scraping my hand and cuing a stinging chorus of mocking laughter, I retreated back to the vacant lot next to the food tables, found a rotting concrete block in the weeds, and sat atop it for awhile. Nobody paid me any attention. By this time everyone was too drunk to feign interest in their Honoured Canadian Guest. That suited me fine.

  I vaguely noticed that the party had escalated into loud ragged laughter, short emotional bursts of song, men grabbing women and kissing them roughly, brief impassioned arguments. I watched as one of the Tigers, the one with a prosthetic leg, drunkenly tried to make the teenagers march like they were soldiers and shouted at them, spittle flying from his mouth, when they refused. Instead of laughing at him they backed quietly away. A woman hesitantly approached the one-legged man and gently tried to convince him to leave the kids alone. He rewarded her with a shove that sent her sprawling to the street. Nobody seemed to notice or care as she scrambled to her feet and retreated to her plastic chair with a newly skinned elbow, tears staining her face. I wondered if they were married.

  “Paul,” Talena said.

  I jerked with surprise and looked up at her. She and Saskia had returned from somewhere. I had a dim notion that they had been gone for hours. Saskia’s eyes were red with tears and she clutched Talena’s arm as if she would collapse without its support. She looked like a child next to Talena, who was eight or nine inches taller. Talena was pale and tense, and I could tell she had been crying too.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “You’re drunk.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Shit. Yeah, a little, I guess.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “That’s just fucking great. You go get drunk.”

  “What happened?”

  “You fucking – I can’t rely on you, you know that? I used to think I could rely on you.”

  I was drunkenly confident that her anger was unjustified, so I’d had one beer too many, it was a Bosnian party that started at noon, what the hell did she expect in this nation of alcoholics? I nearly said that, nearly picked a fight with her. Only the sight of Saskia, drained and despairing, prevented me.

  “We’re going to bed,” Talena said. “Don’t wake me up when you come in. If you come in. You can sleep out here for all I give a shit.”

  “Okay,” I said, and watched her depart. I wanted to follow and find out what terrible thing had happened. It occurred to me that maybe she wouldn’t tell me, not even tomorrow when I was sober and we were alone together. We had grown far enough apart that that was possible.

  Darkness fell. Women and children began to drift back to their homes, or to the half-ruined buildings which passed for them, but the Tigers remained, standing in a cluster in the middle of the street, circulating their umpteenth bottle of slivovitz, talking and laughing, probably reminiscing about the good old days of killing and maiming. I looked over at them. Then I sat bolt upright, alarmed, as I saw Dragan walking down the street holding a Kalashnikov. Before I could figure out how to react, he aimed the weapon at the sky, howled like a wounded animal, and fired a whole magazine straight up at the stars. I hadn’t heard the loud, curiously hollow sound of gunfire for a long time.

  I told myself I should go. I was getting maudlin and weepy again, but more to the point, drink and guns and ex-soldiers were a bad combination. If ‘soldiers’ was the right word. I suspected that the Mostar Tigers had been one of the Bosnian war’s many highly irregular warlord paramilitary units, not part of any formal army. Which made them even more volatile and dangerous. And even if they fired only at the moon, bullets that go up must eventually come down. I remembered reading somewhere that if they tumbled they would only hit hard enough to bruise, but if they came straight back down they could kill you, “space bullets” the article had called them.

  I knew I should go. But I felt about as mobile as the concrete block on which I sat. The beer and slivovitz seemed to have hardened into glue in my joints. I just watched and stared as all fifteen of them linked arms and hoarsely began to sing. Some of them began to weep. They were midway through what I had begun to recognize as the chorus when NATO arrived.

  Chapter 5

  Broken Bridges

  They came from both ends of the street at
once, two Jeeps with four blue-helmeted soldiers in each, and both of them pulled up on the side of the street opposite me, stopping perpendicular to one another, headlights crossing right where the group of Tigers stood. The Tigers split off into two groups, one facing each Jeep. It was dark but the headlights and bright rear-mounted searchlights of the Jeeps illuminated the scene clearly and kept the British hidden. The block on which I sat was just far enough away that I remained in darkness.

  “Put down your weapon immediately,” a crisp British voice demanded. His voice was quickly followed by the Croatian translation.

  Dragan bellowed something. I didn’t hear what the NATO translator said, but it certainly didn’t defuse the situation. The doors of the Jeeps opened and the soldiers took up armed positions behind them.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Josip said loudly, his English slurred and accented but unfortunately very understandable. “This is our city. Our city. We fought for it, we bled for it, we fucking died for it. Fuck you. Fuck NATO, fuck you. This is our home. Our home. Not your home. Ours. So we, we,” he staggered with the force of his inebriated emotion and just prevented himself from falling, “we will do what we want here. So fuck you, fuck every one of you, fuck your mothers, fuck your sisters, fuck your daughters, fuck yourselves, fuck yourselves up the ass, fuck each other, fuck you, fuck off, eat shit and fucking die.”

  I thought it was an impressive display of profanity considering that English was at best his second language. The British leader didn’t seem to share my admiration. “You have ten seconds to put down that Kalashnikov,” he said coolly, “or you will be arrested.”

  Josip and the NATO translator raced to convey their versions of that. The threat of their leader’s arrest galvanized the other armed Tigers– half a dozen, it turned out, carried small pistols on their persons – into drawing their weapons. No guns had yet been aimed at the NATO troops, but it seemed like just a matter of time.

  The British leader agreed with my estimation: I heard him speak, probably into a radio, and calmly report, “This is second squad. Our situation has escalated. Request backup.”

  The searchlight of one of the Jeeps described a slow arc around the street and latched onto me. I shielded my face with my arms against the blinding light.

  “You!” a young and nervous voice shouted, not the leader’s. “Get up here with your mates!” When I didn’t respond immediately the same voice barked, presumably to their translator, “Tell him to get his bloody arse up here. Last thing we need here is more of them skulking around.”

  “All right!” I said angrily, loudly enough that the Brits could hear me over the dark muttering of the Tigers. “Christ. Stop pointing that fucking thing at me already, will you? Jesus.” I stood up, still shielding my eyes, and walked over to the space between the Jeeps, moving fairly steadily, the sight of guns and the incipient standoff had half-sobered me in a hurry.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the young voice asked, astonished. “What’s a fucking Yank doing here?”

  “I’m Canadian, asshole,” I said. And then, inspiration striking: “And these are my friends, and if this is anyone’s fault, it’s mine, so why don’t you cool the fuck down and stop pointing your guns at my friends here? And for Christ’s sake get that goddamn light out of my face!”

  My stew of poisonous emotions had found an unexpected outlet: the British Army.

  My appearance and irritable complaints were so out of place that they alone half-defanged the situation. The Bosnians, coming from a land where you never trusted armed authorities, who could not even imagine treating soldiers as if you had rights that they dared not violate, were bewildered and to some extent impressed by my grumpy demands and total lack of fear that Brits might shoot me or arrest me, and my strange behaviour crowded the worst of their macho persecution complex from their minds. The British, on the other hand, nonplussed at finding an annoyed Canadian amidst this gang of thugs, were suddenly no longer certain what they should do.

  “Redirect the light,” the leader ordered, and I could see again. “And we are not pointing guns at your friends. Not yet. Now who are you and how precisely are you responsible for this?”

  “My name is Balthazar Wood,” I said. I hardly ever used my full name but I had learned that in confrontations its lengthy ring was psychologically advantageous. I indicated Dragan. “Dragan here is a friend of mine. He was telling me how they used to shoot guns into the air at parties, and I asked him if he could show me. So he did. As a favour to me, that’s all. And who exactly are you?” The best defense, it’s a good offense.

  After a pause he answered me. “Lieutenant Simon Taylor, Second Paratroop Division, British Army.”

  “Yeah. I had the British part figured out. Paratroopers, huh? Old friend of mine used to be in your outfit. Hallam Chevalier, ever heard of him?… okay, never mind. Look, I’m sorry. I asked for a little too much authentic Bosnian culture. I’m just a stupid tourist.” An old traveller’s trick: Stupid Tourist, an amazingly effective and almost universally applicable ploy that had gotten me out of countless scrapes in the past. Everyone knows that tourists are such incredible idiots that they’re effectively mentally damaged and can’t really be held responsible for their actions. “I’ve been drinking,” I continued, “we’ve all been drinking, I guess you can see that. I’m very sorry it came to this. But it’s over now, and nobody really wants any trouble, can’t we all just go home and sleep it off?”

  I hoped for a “Yes.” I expected a long, stern lecture, followed by a grudging “yes.” I feared that Dragan or one of his men, who so far had been perplexed into letting me do the talking, would ruin everything by doing or saying something stupid during the lecture. I did not expect what I heard next, from a third British voice, this one rough and middle-aged and surprised:

  “Chevalier? Sergeant Hallam Chevalier? You’re a mate of his? The South African?”

  “I – well, yes,” I said. “Zimbabwe, not South Africa. Yes, he’s a good friend of mine.”

  “I’ve heard that name before,” the leader said thoughtfully.

  “He was a fucking legend, sir,” the old voice said. “I met him a few times, my first tour here, ten years ago. I heard he was nominated for the VC. Just bloody politics he didn’t get it.”

  “Hallam was nominated for the Victoria Cross?” I said, amazed. “For what?”

  “We don’t have time for this,” the leader said sharply before the older soldier could answer. “Klein, this is not a gossip shop, and you will not waste our time exchanging war stories with one of our suspects.”

  “Yes, sir,” the older voice said, chastened.

  “And you, Mister Wood, tell me, how does one descend from being friends with a widely respected member of the finest military unit in the world to fraternizing with your current set of associates?”

  I looked over at the Mostar Tigers, looked back towards the NATO jeeps, rolled my eyes, shrugged, and said in a regretful you-know-how-it-is voice: “My girlfriend.”

  There were a couple of quickly smothered chuckles on the other side of the headlights.

  “And where is she?”

  “Asleep.”

  The leader sighed, loudly. Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, Mister Wood. If you talk your friends here into following her example this very minute, then I shall arrest no one and confiscate nothing. This is your last and only chance.”

  I turned to Josip, who was already translating. Dragan thought about it for a minute. I wondered just how big an idiot he was. Then he said something back, and Josip announced:

  “Dragan says two things. First thing, we are already tired, so the party is over and we will go to sleep, fine. Second thing he says, he says fuck you, NATO. Fuck you all.”

  Pretty big, I decided. A solid 7 on an idiot scale of 1 to 10. And there were more engines approaching. NATO’s reinforcements. If they decided to take offense, then Dragan, and possibly I, would probably spend at least the night in jail.

  Fortunately, Li
eutenant Taylor actually sounded amused. “Tell your friend that the feeling is more than mutual,” he said dryly. “Now put your guns away and go home. By the look of the lot of you, you need all the beauty sleep you can get.”

  * * *

  I followed Dragan back into his house. I was very tired, eager to sleep, but as I began to climb the stairs to the guest bedroom, he put a meaty hand on my shoulder and dragged me back to the front door. I tried to politely protest but the language barrier made the attempt futile. We waited, the door open a crack, until NATO’s headlights vanished. Then Dragan advanced into the night again, half-pulling me behind him. In the dim glow of the two functioning streetlights I saw shadows emerging from other houses. The party was not over. The Mostar Tigers were reconvening.

  I followed Dragan and the others across uneven grassy fields, led by several darting flashlights. I thought uneasily of unexploded land mines. I wanted to turn back to the warm bed I had almost reached, but doing so would clearly be very rude, and offending Dragan and the Tigers seemed like a bad idea.

  A building loomed out of the night, a big ruined house, its stone walls scarred and chipped, every window shattered. I followed the flashlights up old stone steps, through a doorway with no door, and into a big drafty room. Something scurried as we entered. I soon realized that the room was drafty because an irregular hole the size of a Volkswagen had been blasted into one wall. Shattered limbs of lacquered wood that had once been fine furniture were piled in a corner. A big and vaguely Persian rug remained, torn and covered with dust. Someone, presumably the Tigers, had redecorated the room with big logs and concrete bricks, and improvised a firepit out of the rubble beneath the hole in the wall.

  The Tigers, who had been absolutely silent on the walk over, began to chatter brightly to one another. I sat on one of the logs, between Josip and Dragan, as a fire was lit. A new bottle of slivovitz was opened and plastic cupfuls passed around. I tried to demur but a roar of disapproval forced me to accept a cup.