by Evans, Jon
“Never mind. Dammit. Of all the fucking times, you know? Right now I want to sit you down and just talk for six straight days. Make up for our whole lost last year.” She closed her eyes. “But we can’t. So let’s, okay, shit. You better,” her lip started to quaver, “you better just go now. Just, please, turn around, go, tell Saskia goodbye for me, tell her I’m sorry, tell her I couldn’t tell her goodbye myself or I’d just start bawling in the middle of the street, and, Paul, please, please be okay. Please come back okay. Please don’t get hurt.”
“I love you,” I said, and kissed her softly. She didn’t answer. I turned my back on her and got into the Land Rover, and I sat stiffly with my heart pounding and a lump as big as a grapefruit in my throat as Sinisa drove me away from the woman I loved.
At least she would be safe. I was sure of that. That was something.
Part 2
Albania
Chapter 10
Human Traffic
“Paul,” Saskia whispered, touching my shoulder so tentatively I barely felt it. “Paul.”
“I’m awake,” I lied, shook my head to clear it, looked around, tried to remember where I was and what I was doing. The back of Sinisa’s Land Rover. Driving south, towards Albania. No, wait, we were in Albania, I remembered shivering in the chill mountain wind, waiting outside the Land Rover at three in the morning while Sinisa talked to the guards at the Montenegro border, dispensing cigarettes and envelopes full of money. Seven hours had passed since then, and our convoy of two, the Land Rover leading the white Mitsubishi pickup, rolled along a smooth two-lane road that wound its way through green rolling hills flecked with red brick buildings, groves of olive trees, herds of sheep and cattle. My expectations of Albania, vague television memories of angry men in filthy gray cities waving AK-47s while disheveled Western reporters explained how pyramid schemes had looted the whole country’s savings, had never included this vision of rural paradise.
“Did you sleep well?” Sinisa asked. He was in the passenger seat; at some point Arwin had taken the wheel.
“Fine,” I said. There was a crick in my neck, and my clothes felt thickly uncomfortable, but I did feel rested, albeit several coffees away from alert.
“There is a café by the side of the road here. A good place. They know me.”
“Everyone knows Sinisa,” Arwin added. “In case you hadn’t figured it out already.”
Sinisa beamed at the tribute.
I looked over to Saskia. “How are you?” I asked.
“Good,” she said, forcing a smile. I didn’t believe her. I guessed it had to be traumatic, fleeing your country, turning yourselves over to refugee smugglers, still pursued by your monstrous husband and his friends. I guessed the road to freedom was always bumpy.
“Your NATO friends helped build this road,” Sinisa said. “Three, four years ago, this was all potholes and cracks. It took all day to go from Tirana to the border. Then Kosovo happened, NATO started bombing the Serbs, a hundred thousand refugees came into Albania, and the aid organizations finally started pouring money into this country. The Kosovo crisis was the best thing that ever happened to Albania. Here we go. The coffee here is splendid. Italian coffee, not Turkish, we left Turkish coffee behind at the border.”
The café was clean, well-lit, and spacious, the scrambled eggs and ham and Greek salad were excellent if an odd mix, the gleaming new cappucino machine was put to good use, and our waiter refused a tip. Yesterday’s notion of Albania whimpered briefly in my head before disintegrating for good.
Our convoy stopped for a cigarette in the gravel parking lot outside the café before resuming our journey. Zoltan and Zorana smoked unfiltered Camels as they leaned against the Mitsubishi, piled high and riding low with bags and boxes and crates and canisters. I was glad they were on our side. I felt uneasy around them, like I was in the presence of wild and possibly rabid animals.
Sinisa and Arwin were Marlboro Light men. I bummed a cigarette off Sinisa. He offered one to Saskia as well, and after a moment she took it. I didn’t really intend to take up smoking again, but I figured it would make for good relations with my new boss to be a smoking buddy.
“It is not all like this,” Sinisa assured us, as the nicotine hit me and I involuntarily shuddered. “Remember, this is the poorest country in Europe, the only country where you do not dare drink the tap water. The countryside is nice, but the cities are ugly, the factories are filthy, there are chemical leaks and oil spills, the medical standards are disastrous, only the main roads like this are any good. And the people, backward, corrupt, no education. But despite its difficulties, I tell you, this is a land of opportunity. The economy is booming, the trade barriers are falling, the government is slowly becoming competent, the people work hard when they can find work. And we are so close to the West. It is fifty kilometres to the Italian coast. This will be holiday country in a few decades. Lake Ohrid, to the east, huge, beautiful, almost untouched, last year I bought a whole kilometer of waterfront property, not a single building on it, less than a one-bedroom flat in London.”
Arwin snorted. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said to me. “This place is a shithole.”
Sinisa sighed. “Arwin, you have no dreams in you.”
“Sure I do. I want to spend a long weekend driving around Manhattan in a stretch Hummer limo with two slutty supermodels. If that isn’t the ultimate dream, tell me what is. Lake Ohrid? Fuck that. The girls here, sure, they’re pretty, but they’re all Muslim, you’d have to pry their legs open with a fucking crowbar.”
“I keep Arwin around for his delicate sensibilities and his valuable cultural insights,” Sinisa said to me.
I chuckled. Zoltan growled something in Serbian.
“English,” Sinisa said. “Around Paul, both of you speak English, always. It is a valuable opportunity for you two, to be able to practice with a real American English speaker.”
Zoltan looked away and took a long drag on his cigarette before saying, “Yes, okay.”
“Are you two going to America too?” I asked.
Zoltan and Zorana looked at each other and then at Sinisa. I sensed I was not supposed to know the answer to that question. Which by itself pretty much told me the answer. It was hard to picture the two of them in America, they seemed too raw, too primal, for the modern civilized USA. Like bringing wolves into a city.
“English skills are important everywhere today,” Sinisa said blandly.
I suddenly realized, by how they stood and the way they had looked at one another, that Zoltan and Zorana were a couple. I noted identical plain gold wedding rings. Husband and wife. I repressed a chuckle. Of course. With names like theirs, how could they not be married?
We smoked the rest of our cigarettes in silence and piled back into the Land Rover and Mitsubishi for the five-hour ride to Vlore. Near the city of Elbasan we passed a gargantuan chemical factory the size of a small town, the land around it blighted to a sooty lunar grey decorated only by stunted bushes and weeds. From Elbasan south at least half the vehicles were minivans carrying up to a dozen passengers apiece, here called furgons but no different from African tro-tros or matatus, Indonesian bemos, New Guinean PMVs, Central American colectivos. The poor world’s public transit is everywhere the same.
The road veered around the capital of Tirana, headed west to the Adriatic coast, and then turned south again, parallelling empty railroad tracks. The buildings we passed were either red brick houses or cheap gray concrete blocks still sprouting rusting bundles of rebar, sometimes with scarecrows attached. I saw lumberyards, machine shops, bales of hay piled in enormous pyramids, gas stations, but mostly the road went through fields, half of them abandoned to waist-high weeds and grass. We overtook furgons, groaning tractors, ancient Fiats belching dark filth from their tailpipes, and once an old man on a rusted Vespa scooter with an eight-foot pitchfork strapped to his back. Occasionally we caught a glimpse of the Adriatic Sea to our right.
The craziest thing was the bunkers. They were everywhere. “Hoxha’
s mushrooms,” Arwin called them, pointing them out to me and explaining. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s paranoid Cold War dictator, during his forty-year tenure had ordered the construction of some 750,000 concrete bunkers from which his loyal Albanians could resist the onrushing hordes of invaders that Hoxha feared. Now no Albanian landscape was complete without a couple of dozen of Hoxha’s bunkers, squat concrete mushrooms four feet tall and six feet in diameter, clustered along roads and waterfronts and any vaguely strategic location but also sitting in ones and twos in the middle of green farming fields or lurking deep in the forest. Their existence seemed like evidence of Hoxha’s complete insanity; but maybe, given what had happened to neighbouring Yugoslavia after his death, he hadn’t been so crazy after all.
* * *
By the time we finally reached Vlore we had been driving for a full day and I was too tired and punch-drunk to pay close attention to the town. My first impressions were of a sea of squat gray concrete bricks, wheezing old cars, a big open-air market, uneven streets, a huge decrepit pier jutting into the sea like a rotting tooth, a long arc of beach covered with flotsam and filth. We went through the downtown and up a high bluff that overlooked the harbour, a bay of the intensely blue Adriatic ringed by high green hills. The gray sprawl of Vlore proper looked like a fungal infection on the otherwise gorgeous panorama.
We switchbacked up the steep slope, past chains of Hoxha’s mushrooms, and emerged onto a surprisingly pleasant little street lined with olive trees. There were a half-dozen small houses on either side and one very large house at the end, on the lip of the bluff. We turned into a gravel driveway midway along the street.
“I figured the one at the end was yours,” I said.
“These are all my houses,” Sinisa said casually. “This is the one where you will live.”
“Oh.” Sinisa didn’t just have a big house; he had his own neighbourhood.
Saskia and I got out of the car carrying the Adidas bags that contained all our worldly possessions. It was good to stretch my legs again.
“The door is open,” Sinisa said. “Come to the house at the end in thirty minutes. Then you will begin your work.”
I opened my mouth to agree but he was already reversing back onto the street and driving towards his mansion. Saskia and I looked at one another.
“Well,” I said. “I guess this is home. Let’s take a look.”
It was like walking into a cave. Our new home was nothing but a barren shell of uneven drywall and pitted concrete floors. Albanian construction standards were obviously lax. At least it had electricity and running water. The whole house smelled of fresh paint and was uncomfortably hot. Vlore was cooler than Bosnia, thanks to the nearby Adriatic, but the heat wave that had hung over the Balkans for two weeks had not yet abated. I thought longingly of the cool mountain air at the Montenegro border.
We dumped our Adidas bags and went back outside, where the air was cooler and there was no unnerving emptiness. I was both exhausted and restless from our 24-hour drive. I wanted to go for a walk, get the lay of the land, but there was nowhere to go, Sinisa’s private hillside neighbourhood was a good hour’s walk from downtown Vlore. I saw that several of the other houses on the street were adorned with satellite dishes and wished that ours was similarly endowed. A little CNN or better yet Fox Sportsworld was just what the doctor called for. But it seemed I would have to go without.
This was where I would live for a while. A very weird notion.
“Nothing,” Saskia said. She looked even paler than usual. “Nothing inside.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I guess he wasn’t expecting us. I’ll have him get some stuff out here. Beds and chairs and, I don’t know, stuff.”
She smiled hesitantly. I doubted she had understood a word. I was speaking fast and mumbling, tired from the drive. “It will be OK,” I tried again, speaking as clearly as I could.
“Good,” she said. “That is good, Paul.” But I wasn’t sure she believed me.
* * *
The first day of work is always surreal. It is ten times more surreal if you are now working for a criminal enterprise, if you have just parted from your girlfriend for an extended period, if you have just driven from Bosnia into Albania after a cemetery firefight with the gang of thugs pursuing the woman you are trying to rescue, and if it begins with a long speech from Sinisa Obradovic. Take my word for it.
“My parents were from Belgrade,” Sinisa said, leaning back against his desk, as I sat in one of his overdecorated office’s overstuffed leather chairs. “They moved to Amsterdam in the sixties. I speak Serbian because they spoke it at home, but I considered myself Dutch. I joined the army. I was a paratrooper, a lieutenant. Because I spoke the language they transferred me to the 13th Air Mobile Battalion and sent me here as a peacekeeper. To Srebrenica.”
“Oh,” I said softly.
“You know of it. Seven thousand unarmed men, slaughtered. I was there. It was despicable. The UN, my own army, they betrayed those men. An airstrike that would have stopped the Serb advance, the massacre would never have happened, that airstrike was cancelled because the man who requested it filled out the wrong UN airstrike form, did you know that? Children were dying, but the UN would not intervene because the paperwork was filled out incorrectly.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, tentatively appalled in case it was true.
“That was where my faith in armies and governments collapsed. I went back to Holland. I left the army and went to school. Let me tell you of my qualifications. I am of course a citizen of the Netherlands, an EU citizen. I was a lieutenant in the Dutch Army. I have a diploma in business from a university in Eindhoven. I am a licensed pilot. I speak Serbian, English, Dutch, German, I am learning Spanish, one day I hope to learn Chinese. Here in Vlore I own a cement factory, eight and a half hectares of olive groves, three fishing boats. I have various business interests in Amsterdam and Belgrade and Sarajevo. But, with you I can be blunt, my major business, my raison d’etre as the French would say, is illegally smuggling refugees from poor countries into rich ones. Illegal. Not immoral. On the contrary, my business is as moral as the work of Medecins sans Frontieres, Amnesty International, UNICEF. I take people from danger, hunger, fear, desperation, unbearable poverty, unendurable despair, and I deliver them to the land of opportunity. What is immoral is that my business is illegal. You remember that famous motto on the Statue of Liberty? ‘Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to live free.’ No more. Not today. Today the tired and hungry are no longer wanted. Now the huddled masses must have visas, money, connections. Now they are guilty until proven innocent, guilty of being Muslim, guilty of being dark-skinned, guilty of being poor, guilty of wanting a better life for themselves.”
He obviously wasn’t ad-libbing. This was a spiel, some kind of sales pitch. I wondered who else it was used on. Investors, contributors, potential employees, the refugees who were his clients, the officials who looked the other way in return for regular envelopes filled with cash US dollars? Had Arwin heard this pitch? I didn’t think so. Arwin didn’t seem like a man who would be moved by any attempt to awaken his inner Gandhi. This speech was saved for people who Sinisa thought might become True Believers.
While I was a long way from shaving my head and joining his cult, I had to admit he had some good points. That said, for an altruist working to help the world’s poor and struggling, he sure had done well for himself. His mansion had two fully-equipped Land Rovers out front, an armed guard at the wrought-iron gate, a pool, a Jacuzzi, a clutch of satellite dishes. As he spoke Sinisa leaned on a magnificent mahogany desk adorned with a top-of-the-line Vaio notebook, dressed in Armani finery like some Eurotrash male model, outlined by a bay window which framed a spectacular view of Vlore’s harbour. I felt like I was in a Town And Country photo shoot.
“Do you know why I hired you?” he asked. “I suppose you are good at your job, but not only that. I hired you because I can trust you. I know this beca
use of that little boy you saved, because you walked into that place and returned that child to his family. I know you understand that the people I carry across borders, it is our moral duty to help them.”
“What happened to that family?” I asked.
He shrugged. “My business has grown too large to track all my clients. I will find out and let you know.” But he never did.
“My business,” he continued, stressing the word. “A business, not a charity. People will give money to help the poor, but not to help bring them to places where they can provide for themselves. I run a profitable business. I see no contradiction. One can both do good and do good business. And this is a good business to be in. People are the ultimate commodity. They supply themselves, transport themselves, hide themselves, they can travel halfway around the world with only minimal assistance and coordination. My total business income last year, Mr. Wood, was four million United States dollars. You see how open I am being with you. A considerable amount. But around the world, every year, more than ten billion dollars are spent on services such as mine. This market is wide open, fragmented, populated largely by incompetent organizations. You might be surprised to learn that modern business management techniques are almost entirely absent in the world in which I work. When they are introduced, I assure you, they are completely applicable and fantastically successful. I am in a market which is ripe for growth, Mr. Wood. I intend to grow. I intend to expand around the world. I intend to be number one. Not the Microsoft of people smuggling, Bill Gates is too public and visible, but the Intel. Do you know what the maxim of Intel’s CEO has always been?”
I did know. “Only the paranoid survive.”
He beamed with approval. “Exactly. And that, Mr. Wood, is why you are here. Intel is one good analogy to what I hope to build, but perhaps another, better analogy is Amazon, or Ebay. My business, going forward, will be an Internet business. You and I and Arwin are going to move my business into the New Economy.”