Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  Vlore’s youth seemed almost a different species from the middle-aged and old people who watched indulgently; the elders tended to be thick, lumpy, wrinkled, and unattractive. I supposed Albania’s forty years of hardscrabble Communism had been tough on all its inhabitants. Thankfully capitalism had worked its usual tawdry magic. Booze, cigarettes, and Internet cafes were all cheap and addictively popular, satellite TV dishes had sprouted like mushrooms from the city’s squalid apartment complexes, bright new Coke and Marlboro signs and posters were everywhere, and a counterfeit Discman and a sheaf of pirated CDs cost me all of forty euros.

  I fell into a comfortable routine. Twelve hours of work a day, every day. Not that I kept regular hours. Sometimes I needed a break, and fresh air, so I beat up on the bags in the boxing gym, or walked up and down the hill on which Sinisa’s private enclave perched, or hitched a ride down to Vlore and wandered for half an hour, letting my subconscious pick at whatever coding problem was bothering me. Lots of smoke breaks with Arwin, occasional drinks and life-in-America lectures with Zoltan and Zorana, nightly English lessons with Saskia.

  I was actually happy. I had escaped the miserable rut that had been my life for a year, and I was, at least to a first approximation, living a strange and exciting adventure. If you squinted at me the right way, I was a professional hacker on the run from lethal enemies, living in a criminal overlord’s Albanian compound, helping him with his dastardly plans in exchange for the rescue of an innocent imperilled woman. For the first time in a year I felt good about myself. I felt tough, confident, debonair. I felt like the kind of man Talena might want, and even if she didn’t, like the kind of man who might be able to handle that rejection. It became possible to imagine a future without her.

  Of course it wasn’t really an adventure, I told myself, because adventure meant danger, and once I grew accustomed to the routine, my life in Sinisa’s compound seemed placid, safe, downright ordinary. It’s amazing what you can get used to. For three weeks my Albanian existence felt like little more than a working holiday, a lucrative and entertaining pause before my return to the real world.

  * * *

  One day Sinisa unexpectedly came to our office and took me out for a walk, telling me he wanted to show me an empire. The Roman Empire, to be exact. In the foothills south of the city, about midway between the town proper and Sinisa’s mansion, there nestled an ancient Roman ampitheatre with room for several thousand, its terraced seats cracked and worn, two thousand years old but still the most impressive structure in Vlore. It took us about twenty minutes to walk there.

  “When I first came here, all this was overgrown,” Sinisa said, leading me to the center of the ampitheatre, the stage. He was dressed down, for once, in a gray shirt, black slacks and sport coat, and hiking boots. “I had it cleared. The Albanians, none of them understood why. They thought it was nothing more than old stones.”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “What does this say to you?”

  I looked around at the haunting, silent reminder that this forgotten backwater nation had once been an integral part of the Roman Empire, civilization’s apotheosis. Only a handful of Hoxha’s mushrooms indicated that we were still in the 21st century. I imagined the stone terraces full of thousands of theatregoers in bright togas, waiting to see a few Christians fed to the lions.

  “Ozymandias,” I said.

  “Yes,” Sinisa said, pleased. “Every empire crumbles. Every man dies. In the end we are all forgotten. Our lives are like sparks from a fire, gone in a heartbeat. All we can do is burn as brightly as possible. Tell me something, Mister Wood. I am a rich man. I have enough money for all the rest of my life. And the list of those who would like me dead is long. Why do you think I do not retire to Amsterdam, to safety?”

  I resigned myself to being the straight man in this Socratic dialogue. “Because you think what you do is important?”

  “That is part of it,” Sinisa said. “Until the world sees sense and throws open its borders, someone must do what I do, operate the escape valve for those who need it. But more than that, it is because to me, a comfortable life is no life at all. Have you ever seen war?”

  “Not really,” I said, a little taken aback.

  “When I came here from Holland, as a peacekeeper, I was young, troubled, without direction. I drank too much. I took drugs. Do you know when that changed? The first time I was shot at, in Srebrenica. The intensity of it. It changed me on the spot. Every breath, every motion, was an event, because I knew it might be my last. Most people in Holland, all the rich Western nations, they go decades without living as intensely as I did in those few seconds.”

  “After the war, Holland seemed a country of shadows. Meaningless. Like living without colour. I decided then that I would not live half a life. I would not follow the laws that gray old men write because they are afraid. You have no place in this world, not truly, unless you have fought for it. A home is not a home unless you have conquered it. You have done nothing with your life unless you have built an empire from dust.” He waved at the amphitheatre. “One day your empire will crumble back to dust. One day it will be forgotten. One day you will die. That is not important. It is the fighting and the building that matters. Your heartbeat spark of life must burn brightly, but not for its own sake, you must forge something with that fire. That is why I do what I do. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” I said. And it was true. I wasn’t a war junkie, I had no intention of building a criminal empire, but I understood in my bones what he was saying. The need to live as intensely as possible – I felt that too, though my version was much more muted than his, I got my kicks from travel rather than war. But travel for its own sake, aimless wandering and spectating, was ultimately unsatisfying. Eventually you had to do something constructive with your life. I had always assumed that it was one or the other, live intensely or be constructive. It had never occurred to me that you might combine the two. Empire-building, he called it. I had to admit the notion sounded tempting.

  “Good,” Sinisa said. “Very few of those who serve me understand me. Zoltan and Zorana, they are my friends, they are loyal until death, but they do not think like you and I do.”

  “What about those other guys? My neighbours?” I asked, meaning the zombies. “Do they understand?”

  “They are not my friends,” he said. “Business associates. And no, they do not.” He paused. “Perhaps some of them do. But theirs was a different kind of empire.”

  I looked at him, waiting for a less cryptic explanation, but it did not come.

  “What was Srebrenica like?” I asked. I had wanted to ask him since I learned he had been there. The most terrible event of Bosnia’s terrible civil war, and he had witnessed it.

  “What was it like?” Sinisa thought the question over. “It was difficult,” he said. “Especially at the beginning. I understand that now it seems like it was evil Serbs against helpless Muslims, but in fact when the Serb advance began, we – the Dutch, I mean, the so-called peacekeepers – we were more worried about the Muslims. They threatened to murder us if we retreated from even a metre of their land, never mind the military realities. It was the Muslims who killed a Dutch soldier on the first day of the advance.”

  “From a military perspective it was hopeless. The Serbs did not have many men, but they had tanks and artillery. Our only real threat was air strikes, and once it became clear that the UN had no intention of bombing anyone, there was nothing we could do to stop them. So the Serbs advanced and the Muslims fled. Some of them fled to the UN base outside of town, but we did not allow them in. Thousands of them, desperate, weeping, old men who could barely walk, mothers carrying babies, and we watched the Serbs take them away. Oh, we made some pretense of ensuring that the trucks were going to Muslim territory, but it was only a pretense. The Muslims who gave up all hope in the UN at least had a chance. A very small chance. They had to cross eighty kilometres of fields, with Serb ambushes and patrols waiting
for them at every step, but better some chance than none.”

  “In the end, all the men who got on those trucks, except the very old and very young, and all the men who were captured in those fields, they were taken to schools, or stadiums, or warehouses, and then in groups of fifteen or twenty they were taken outside, shot, and buried with bulldozers. Seven thousand dead.” Sinisa shrugged. “We did not know this then. We heard rumours, we knew something terrible was happening, but we saw no actual evidence, the Serbs hid that very well. They were very efficient, very organized.”

  “You must understand, though, that the only exceptional thing about Srebrenica was the number of the dead. Every side did the same thing, Serbs and Croats and Muslims, throughout the war. In some ways Srebrenica was very tame. The cruelty of that war was amazing.”

  I knew that already, from Talena’s stories. When we had first started dating, I started to do some reading about the Bosnian civil war, to learn more about where Talena had come from. I had soon stopped. It was too awful and depressing. I remembered pictures of thousands of emaciated human-stick-figure men penned behind barbed wire in concentration camps, descriptions of mass graves into which the remains of entire slaughtered villages had been bulldozed, nightmarish first-person stories written by women who had been taken by gunmen and tortured and gang-raped for weeks, tales of bodies that rotted on the streets of Sarajevo for weeks because no one dared to venture into the open to collect them for fear of falling victim to a sniper themselves. Organized campaigns of terror and torture and genocide, ordered and orchestrated by military and civilian commanders.

  “The men and women who fought that war,” Sinisa said, “the ones they call war criminals now, by the end they were entirely without moral limits, capable of anything, any kind of inhumanity. Not because they were inhuman. Because they had been shaped by the inhumanity around them. The UN wants to find them and put them on trial, as if the war was their fault, but the truth is it was they who were created by the war.”

  He fell silent for a moment. I looked around at the amphitheatre and wondered if seven thousand men would fit in its terraces. Probably not.

  “Enough,” Sinisa said. “We have work to do, you and I.”

  I followed him back to the mansion, wondering whether I admired him or thought he was crazy. Both, I decided. Sinisa’s methods were questionable, and his associates were scary, what he was doing still seemed like a Good Thing. I thought of Zoltan and Zorana’s unsubtle hints that maybe after I went back to America, I could continue to help Sinisa’s smuggling empire, courier packages, provide advice and the occasional bed for a night or two. I wondered if maybe I should. There was probably a lot I could do for Sinisa in America without ever breaking the law. My instinct was to disassociate myself from him as soon as humanly possible – don’t get involved, again – but if I believed that what Sinisa was doing was good, shouldn’t I stay involved? Shouldn’t I do what I could to help him? My gut was telling me no, but I was no longer sure I trusted my gut.

  * * *

  “Saskia! Good news! I got you an English newspaper.” I waved the three-day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune proudly. “Sinisa brought it back from Tirana.”

  “Oh, good!” Saskia exclaimed. “Excellent! Wonderful! Fantastic! Super!”

  Both of us laughed at her imitation of a thesaurus. In only two weeks, Saskia’s English had gone from infantile to conversational, a fairly amazing accomplishment. She had exhausted the thick ESL book Talena had bought her, and now she wanted new material, like the Herald Trib.

  Saskia scanned the paper eagerly before folding it and putting it away. She looked very different since she had gotten her hair cut boy-short, even smaller, but somehow also stronger, wiry. I supposed cutting her hair was a symbolic way of severing ties with the past, kind of Samson in reverse.

  “I will read this tomorrow,” she said. “How was your work today?” A shadow of worry crept into her expression. “You will finish in time?”

  “I will finish in time,” I assured her. My coding skills, like her English, had returned with a vengeance, and I worked more efficiently with every passing day. “What did you do today?”

  “I went out. Zorana gave me a ride to the city. I wanted to go out again, I asked the woman across the street, but she said no. Her car was empty, but she said no, and she looked at me like…I do not know. I do not like her at all.”

  I made a sympathetic noise. It wasn’t the first time one of the zombies had given her the cold shoulder. Once we had gone for a walk at night, and the couple across the street had been sitting outside smoking. We had waved and Saskia had called out hello. They had scowled at us, stubbed out their cigarettes, pointedly turned their backs and gone into their house.

  “I very much want to leave this place,” Saskia said. “It is good of Sinisa to give us a home, but I want to leave and go to America. It is not, I am not frightened of, of him.” Her reluctance to speak Dragan’s name said otherwise, but I pretended not to notice. “If he had gone…no. If he was going to come and find me, he would come before now.”

  “He would have come,” I corrected. “I think you’re right.”

  “I just want to depart this place,” she said. “There is nothing I can do, all day.”

  “You’re bored,” I said.

  “Yes. I am bored. I am so very bored here. It is better being bored than being frightened, but it is best to be not bored and not frightened. To be neither. To be neither in America, that is what I want.”

  “We’re supposed to leave in ten days,” I said.

  “Ten days. Paul, I am so excited! Today, in a store, I saw a…a plan.”

  “A what?”

  “A plan. Of America. Like you would make a plan of this room, or of Vlore.” She pretended to draw on a piece of paper. Yet another round of our endless and usually amusing game of Learning English Charades.

  “A map,” I said.

  “Of course! My vocabulary, that is the hardest thing, there are so many words. I saw a map, and I saw San Francisco in the map, and I thought, I am going to live there! In a place with buildings a hundred stories high and that famous golden bridge and so many wonderful things! I have decided, it will be like being born. When I enter America, it will be like being born from a new mother, it will be a new life, my old life will be dead.”

  I considered telling her the sorry news that the Golden Gate Bridge was actually orange, and San Francisco didn’t have any hundred-story skyscrapers, but it wasn’t the time for harsh reality, and besides, the Bay Area was full of enough genuine marvels and beautiful sights that she wasn’t likely to be disappointed. “You’re going to love it there,” I told her. “Everyone does.”

  She smiled wistfully. After a moment she said, “It would be nice, it would be so good if I really could be born again. I – what?”

  “Nothing. Born again has a specific meaning in America. Doesn’t matter. Go on.”

  “If I could really be born again, then I could forget,” she said. “It would be so easy if I could forget.”

  “You’ll put all that behind you,” I said, uneasily. Reassurance was not my strong suit, especially when I didn’t really believe what I was saying.

  “I do not know. It will be hard. I have…” She hesitated. Another unknown word. “When I am cut, and the skin grows back, there is a mark.”

  “A scar,” I said.

  “A scar. I have scars. On my body, my feet, but I mean here.” She raised her hands up and rubbed her temples with her fingers. “I can feel them. When I think about certain things. I was trying to make myself think about being with other men. I mean to say, not like with you, as friends, but…being with a man. It was, I do not know what to say. I wanted to not think about it at all, to not even imagine it, it was frightening, I was so frightened, thinking of another man touching me, and it feeling like…I am sorry, Paul. I do not know how to say. I think even if I spoke English like you or Talena I still would not know how to say. It is like there
are parts of me here,” she rubbed her temples again, fiercely, “that are like land mines.”

  I couldn’t think of anything I could possibly say to that. I wanted to reach out and hug her, but I knew better. I had touched Saskia a couple of times, accidentally, and both times she had gasped and flinched away.

  “I am sorry. Paul. I am very sorry.” She shook her head and forced a smile. “I will talk happy talk. Maybe I can at least pretend to forget. I will think of good things. I will read books. So many books. I will make new friends. I will buy a bicycle. I will swim in the ocean.”

  Not in San Francisco, not without a wet suit, I didn’t say. She would have to find that out sometime but this was the wrong time for discouraging news.

  “I want to help people,” she said. “When we get to America. If we get to America.”

  “When,” I said.

  She frowned. “I am not a child, Paul. I know it is a long way. I know it is if.”

  “Okay. Sorry. All right. If we get to America. Who do you want to help?”