Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  I sipped from my bottle and nodded as if I was interested.

  “How much money are we talking about here?” I asked.

  Josip and Dragan conferred briefly. There was some kind of disagreement. Dragan won. Josip turned back to me and said, “We estimate one hundred thousand euros.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t have anything like that kind of money,” I said.

  Josip’s expression condensed to a mixture of disbelief and betrayal.

  “I have some friends, though, in London and New York and other places,” I paused a moment before diverging from the truth, “who I think might be interested in this. At the very least I can go home and put together a business plan for you. If I can get five or six of my corporate friends interested…well, then there are some very real possibilities.”

  Josip’s eyes widened at my use of the word ‘corporate’, and he hurried to translate to Dragan, who grinned broadly and nodded.

  “There are a lot of things I need to know,” I said. I dug into my backpack and came up with a pencil and paper. I figured that as in most social situations, asking a lot of specific questions would convince them that I took them seriously. But for a moment I couldn’t fight my way through the painful mental shroud of my hangover, couldn’t think of any questions to ask. They waited for me as I stared dumbly. I pretended to be thinking, muttered to myself inaudibly and incoherently for a little while, and then my brain kicked into gear and I began to rattle off questions about ownership percentages and mortgages and supply reliability and wages. Most of the questions were completely bogus, I didn’t really know anything about running a company in any field other than software consulting, but they knew even less.

  Sometimes they looked at each other and talked in low voices and then admitted they didn’t know. Sometimes my questions made them fervently excited and Josip would explain vividly imagined details of how their international body shop would operate. I almost felt bad about inflating their expectations. Heartless killers and wife-beaters, sure, but when it came to business and to the myth of the endlessly wealthy West they were very much like children. I kept reminding myself of the image of Saskia weeping silently, her stomach carpeted with bruises, and of what Talena had said about them. Setting children on fire, shooting pregnant women in the belly, raping teenage girls in front of their families. It was hard to believe, hard to even imagine, watching rumpled Josip and suddenly-jolly Dragan grin eagerly at one another, their eyes lit with long-suppressed hope.

  * * *

  It was noon when we finally departed the shabby concrete shell that contained Dragan and Josip’s dreams of wealth. The heat wave had if anything intensified. I had them drop me off at an Internet café so I could send email to my investors. I did send an email, but it didn’t mention their business plan. I emailed Hallam in London, my friend the ex-paratrooper, asking him if he still had any friends in Bosnia, because I had gotten into a bad situation here, and I was probably going to need help.

  Before plunging into the colourless pit of poverty and unemployment I had led a strange and much-travelled life, and I had many unusual friends scattered about the globe. Most importantly I had my close friends, my tribe, the people with whom I had travelled across Africa five years ago. Hallam was one of that tribe. Two and a half years ago he and I, and his wife Nicole, and our friends Steve and Lawrence, had avenged the murder of one of our members. I knew they would do whatever they could to help me, the same way I would help them, or Talena would help Saskia. I couldn’t imagine how Steve or Lawrence could be of assistance but I cc’d them on the email just in case.

  After spending half an hour on the Net for the princely sum of four euros, twice the going Sarajevo rate, I decided to walk around Mostar a little, get the lay of the land, see the sights if any, go over to the Muslim side and see how different it was. My Lonely Planet map indicated where the front line had been during the war, just west of the Neretva River that divided the town, a five-minute walk from the Internet café. I decided to go stroll along the front line and then cross the river to the Muslim old city.

  En route to the river I passed a few bombed-out, bullet-cratered, war-scarred buildings, but only a few, standing out like rotting teeth amid new or rebuilt houses and offices and apartment complexes. The streets were buzzing with cars and well-dressed pedestrians, and every intersection had a couple of cafes crowded with men drinking coffee. I began to realize that the Tigers lived in Mostar’s equivalent of the ghetto.

  The front line, Santiceva Street, was staggering. It was lined by rows of half-collapsed heaps of gray concrete and brick, torn open by ragged misshapen gaps and holes like Godzilla had taken bites out of them, punched full of bullet holes, many of them roofless, covered with dust, full of misshapen rubble. Chimneys and jagged concrete spurs that had somehow survived the tank and shellfire jutted out like broken bones. Bushes grew within the gaping shells that had once been buildings. It went on for a dozen blocks. A few houses had been rebuilt, and EU plaques proudly pronounced the reconstruction effort in five languages, but in that setting the words seemed like a sick joke.

  I walked silently along Santiceva Street, keeping close to cover as if a sniper might shoot at me, holding my breath as I had done as a child when driving past a cemetery, afraid that one of the spirits of the dead might enter my body when I breathed in. At the north end I crossed the bridge. The bridge at the south end, a centuries-old World Heritage Site, had been destroyed during the war. There was talk of rebuilding it, scaffolding hung over the river there, but there was so little traffic on the existing bridges between the severed halves of the city that building another seemed ridiculous. I wondered whether it might be best to dynamite all the remaining bridges instead, leave the Neretva River as an uncrossable barrier between Mostar’s two seething hatreds.

  The river was gorgeous, deep blue water racing through a steep twenty-foot-deep ravine of huge boulders and thick bushes. A few people frolicked in the water. The Muslim Old City was a few square cobblestoned blocks. I sat at an old café, among crowds of men who sipped coffee and talked. On this side of the river they dressed more simply. I gratefully drank a cold Coke and looked down on the river. The usual madman’s connect-the-dots of bullet and mortar scars dotted the walls all around, but I barely even noticed them. By now they were just standard Bosnian wallpaper, and besides, I had too much to think and worry about.

  The only way to help Saskia was to get her away from Dragan, away from Mostar, and if we did that, he and his fellow thugs might very well come after her and us. They had done so before. If we tried to help Saskia, Talena and I would be putting ourselves in serious danger. But we couldn’t abandon her, not now that we knew what had happened to her. We had to help Saskia. I felt that almost as strongly as Talena, even though I hardly knew her. Her whispered baby-talk tales of horror had moved me to overwhelming pity. And I had been primed by helping the Tamil boy, my don’t-get-involved reflex had been disabled, I was unable to watch Saskia through my usual detached, dehumanizing lens. We had to help. But how?

  We could not get her to America. We could buy her a plane ticket to the UK or the USA, have her claim refugee status, but in this new world, the world that had changed in the time it took the twin towers of the World Trade Center to collapse, she stood no chance. She would be on the next plane back, and Dragan would be waiting for her. We could get her to Sarajevo, if she would go – but the Tigers, Dragan’s band of blood brothers, veterans of the most savage civil war Europe had ever seen, would track us down anywhere we went in Bosnia. And despite NATO’s presence Bosnia was still a morass of crime and corruption, a place where competent murderers stood a good chance of getting away free.

  We could follow her plan, work to get her an American or Canadian or British visa, but that would take months, and would Dragan really let her get a passport, get a visa, get away to Sarajevo and onto an airplane? Could she do all that by herself, when she spent her whole life surrounded by the Tigers and their wives and
children, watching her, willing to go to Dragan if they saw anything suspicious? Not likely. She could only get away if we were here to help. I had no idea when Talena and I would be able to come back to Bosnia, but given our bank balances and my job prospects, the answer was likely measured in years.

  All we needed to do was get her out of the country, a simple thing; but we couldn’t, it was unthinkable, impossible, just because she didn’t have the right kind of paperwork. It probably happened all the time. There were probably thousands of people like us, with relatives and friends caged in terrible situations like Saskia’s. And there was nothing they or we could do.

  Chapter 6

  Cynosure

  I checked email on my way back; no answer from Hallam or my other friends. I forked over twenty KM to call him, but got only the voice of his wife Nicole, asking me to leave a message. I asked them to read their email as soon as was humanly possible. I wanted to go to the Brits and ask them for help, but without Hallam’s intervention that would do me no good. NATO was here to keep the lid on Bosnia’s seething cauldron of hate, a tough enough job already. Helping battered women was way outside their duties.

  By the time I returned to Dragan and Saskia’s block another party was in progress. Maybe they wanted to show that they hadn’t been intimidated by NATO. Maybe this was all they did, all day, every day. The only difference from yesterday’s party was that instead of pigs they were cutting and roasting steaks from half a butchered calf. The calf lay on the ground, wrapped in brown paper, it and the pool of its blood covered with flies. The Tigers stood around it, drinking and watching the flames, just like yesterday. Maybe I had walked into some kind of sick-black-comedy Bosnian version of Groundhog Day. I wondered if Dragan beat Saskia out of nothing more than boredom.

  Dragan smiled at me but his eyes were wary. I all but ignored him. I got a beer from Josip, who wanted to talk about their business some more. He did not share Dragan’s wariness. His instincts were not as sharp. I suggested we leave business until tomorrow, walked back to the same concrete block I had sat on the night before, perched on it again, and began to drink. Talena looked at me, confused and hurt and a little angry. I knew she wanted me to come join them, distract Dragan away from her and Saskia.

  But what was the point? We couldn’t help her. That was the hard unbearable truth. There was nothing we could do. We would have to leave tomorrow, leave Saskia here to struggle through the rest of her life alone, uncountable years of abuse and suffering until Dragan lost his temper one day and beat her to death.

  I returned to the barbecue pit for a slab of beef and another beer. Josip, worried and solicitous, asked me if I was all right. I said I was fine, just tired, hung over, a little sick. He laughed and clapped me on the back and told me to have some slivovitz. I had a swallow and returned to my concrete block and my despairing reverie. I couldn’t help Saskia. I couldn’t help anyone. Even that little boy – for all the pride and righteousness I felt for having gotten involved with him, for saving him, I had sure gotten uninvolved in a big hurry. I had left him and his family in the care of animal thugs, less dangerous than the Mostar Tigers maybe, but probably no less vicious. What if I had really gotten involved? What if I had taken a little fucking responsibility? What if I had done all I could to care for him, make sure that he got to the West, to civilization, to a bright future? Just once, what if I had picked someone out of the suffering throngs and done what I could, really done everything that I could, to help?

  Talena reluctantly left Saskia with Dragan and approached me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, both worried and angry. “What’s wrong?”

  “Will she come with us?”

  “No,” she said. “We have to talk her into it. We can sneak her out tonight. He’ll be drunk, like last night. You have to help me. She says she won’t do it. I don’t know how to convince her. I have to talk to her in English around him, it’s like pulling teeth, and he gets angry and tells her to stop, he even told me to stop last time. You have to get him away from us so I can convince her. I told her we could get her to America, but she didn’t believe me.”

  “Because you were lying.”

  “We can. Somehow. I don’t know how.”

  “We’re flying home in three days. You’re going to get her a visa by then?”

  “We don’t have to go home,” Talena said. “We can stay and help her.”

  “Oh, good, so then you lose your job, too, and when we’re completely out of money, which will be all of what, a week later, then we have to fly back anyway. How does that help her again?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t fucking know. I don’t have any logical answers, I know that, so shut your fucking logic up already. I know I’m not being logical. All I know is that she’s my sister and I can’t leave her here like this. I’m sorry for not having a rational plan. And if you don’t want to go along, I understand. I do. I’m not even angry at you for it. Not at all. She’s my sister, not yours. You go back. But I’m getting her out of this hellhole and then I’m getting her out of the country. I’ll carry her over the border myself if I have to. If that means staying here, then it means staying here. I’m not asking you to stay with me. But while you’re here, please help me. Please.”

  I started to shake my head at her ruefully.

  Then my head stopped in mid-shake and my eyes widened. My mind began to fit jigsaw pieces together, pieces I had not previously realized were part of the same puzzle.

  Carry her over the border myself.

  Hallam.

  The little boy.

  “Paul,” Talena said. “Paul?”

  “Sit,” I said. I motioned at another nearby block. “Sit there. Don’t look at Dragan and Saskia. Look depressed. Like you’ve given up.”

  After a moment she did just that.

  “Where’s your passport?” I asked. “And your money and credit card?”

  “Right here,” she said. “In my travel pouch.”

  “Good.” I patted my own travel wallet to reassure myself that I had passport and money and MasterCard and airplane tickets. “I guess he probably has all Saskia’s ID anyway. Doesn’t matter. She won’t need it. We’ve got everything we need.”

  “Need for what?”

  What I was about to propose was certifiably insane. It was also insanely exciting. It felt like the moment before a bungee jump, standing on the brink of an abyss, about to jump into it for no good reason.

  “We can’t sneak out tonight,” I said. “Dragan’s suspicious. He’s watching us. Don’t look. We want him to think we’ve given up, but even if he does, he won’t get drunk tonight, just in case. He’s not dumb, not about things like this. He’s a cunning motherfucker. We have to go right now. During the party. No packs, no preparation, nothing. Clothes on our backs.”

  “She won’t come,” Talena said.

  “She will when you convince her that we’re going to take her to America.”

  “I tried that already, remember? She didn’t believe me.”

  “That’s because you were lying,” I said. “This time you’ll be telling the truth.”

  “How?”

  I actually smiled.

  “The hard way,” I said. “How else?”

  Chapter 7

  Shelterless

  Saskia shivered with terror and excitement. Certainly not with cold, the air conditioning was broken, and even though it was well past sunset the Mostar-Sarajevo bus was a mobile sauna. Every seat was occupied: old ladies wearing babushkas and faded dresses, young couples in tight jeans and glittery shirts bedecked with logos, bearded middle-aged men in cheap suits who walked with limps. I supposed buses to Sarajevo, Bosnia’s alpha metropolis, were always busy.

  The three of us had disappeared individually into the darkness, met at the end of the street, and raced to catch this 8:40 bus. There was another at 10:00, but waiting that long might have been disastrous. In the end we got to the station on time by hailing a passing car and offering the dr
iver 20 KM to drive us. Instant Taxi, another veteran traveller’s ploy. We had feared that someone at the bus station might recognize Saskia and carry news back to Dragan, but Mostar was big enough that one could be anonymous, and the bus station was after all on the Muslim side, little travelled by the Tigers and their ilk.

  I sat behind Talena and Saskia, next to a remarkably ugly teenage girl with bottle-blonde hair who read some Croatian equivalent of Seventeen while listening to angry hip-hop on her Walkman. I was nervous too. They had to be beginning to suspect that we weren’t coming back. Maybe Dragan was already in hot pursuit in his Mercedes. This bus was the only way to Sarajevo, but it was also a deathtrap, impossible to escape. Maybe they would cut us off on this dark and lonely road, force the driver to stop, drag us out and shoot us. It wasn’t likely. But it wasn’t completely impossible either.

  I realized that we were going to live in a haze of constant fear until we got Saskia out of the country. We would spend every moment knowing that the Mostar Tigers might suddenly appear and attack. It sounded like we were being pursued by some kind of demented football team, but I found myself entirely unable to smile at the idea.

  In front of me, Talena put her arm around Saskia, who quietly began to cry on Talena’s shoulder. I wished she would make noise when she wept, like a normal human being. Her silence was unnerving. I put my hand on Talena’s other shoulder and squeezed. She put her hand on mine. We rode like that for a long time.

  Eventually I broke the silence. “Do you think we should go back to the Pansione?”

  “Would anywhere else be better?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. The Pansione was cheap and inobtrusive. If – when – they came after us, they would probably start their search at Sarajevo’s famous Holiday Inn and other expensive hotels, what with their certainty that we were rich Americans. The Pansione was also located next to a parking lot, which was useful, since I planned to rent a car tomorrow. A car is a very practical investment when you’re running for your life.