Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  “I do not yet know. But there are so many people who need help. Everywhere. I am sure even in America. Not just women like me with bad husbands. People who are sick, or lost, or, I do not know. But I know I want to help people. Like you and Talena have helped me. I owe you everything, Paul.”

  “Saskia…”

  “I know. You do not want me to say thank you. I understand. I know you do not like it when I talk like this, it makes you very uncomfortable.”

  “No, no, Saskia, you can say anything you want to me, uh, I don’t want you to feel –”

  “Paul, you are a bad liar.”

  I fell silent. It was true.

  She smiled unexpectedly. “Very bad. Awful. Terrible. Despicable. Appalling. Horrible.”

  “All right,” I said, waving my hands mock-defensively. “All right, I give in.”

  “Come,” she said, standing. “They listen to you. Make Arwin drive us to get ice cream.” I wasn’t allowed to drive any of Sinisa’s vehicles. “We only have ten days and I hear American ice cream is loathsome and contemptible.”

  * * *

  “So this is the final game for the Italian league?” I asked.

  “No, no, no,” Zoltan said, scandalized. “This is Champions League.”

  “That’s not an Italian thing?”

  “No. Is league for all best teams in Europe.” We had already had three beers apiece, except Sinisa who drank only water, and Zoltan’s English was degrading.

  “But both these teams are Italian, right?”

  “They were lucky,” Sinisa said. “Ajax should be playing tonight.” Ajax was pronounced ‘eye-axe.’ Similarly, Juventus, one of the teams that was playing, was pronounced ‘you-vent-us’.

  “Ajax?” Zoltan snorted. “Ajax very lucky to win Arsenal. Partisan Belgrade should be play tonight, but Champions League is cheat, cheat against poor countries, especially Serbia.”

  It was nice to see that sports conspiracy theories were everywhere the same. I wasn’t really that ignorant of European football, my many friends in London had seen to that, but it was fun playing the Stupid American. We sat in a bar on Vlore’s waterfront festooned with satellite TVs. Sinisa had taken over the whole place. He, Zoltan, Zorana, Arwin, and myself sat at the best table. The zombies were clustered at three neighbouring tables, drinking heavily and maintaining their usual sour frowns and silence. Saskia had declined to come. I suspected the thought of so many people had spooked her.

  “Everywhere in the world, football is very popular,” Zoltan announced. “Everywhere but our new home in America. Because Americans are too stupid for football.”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” I said politely. “Everyone in Canada and America plays soccer. Until we’re twelve. That’s when we move on to sports for grownups.”

  Zoltan stared at me. “Grownups?”

  Zorana translated. Zoltan frowned at me angrily and turned back to the game. I decided to turn down my snideness level. Zoltan seemed like a mean and confrontational drunk.

  “Give me hockey any day,” Arwin said to me.

  “Damn straight,” I agreed. We clinked our glasses together.

  “Hockey?” Sinisa asked, pretending confusion. “You mean the sport played on grass with little sticks? By women?”

  “Ice hockey, you Dutch ditzdork,” Arwin said.

  I blinked. Sometimes Arwin seemed to have not so much absorbed American slang as irradiated it and used the freakishly mutated results.

  “Oh, yes. With skates. In Holland everyone skates until they are twelve.”

  “Fastest, toughest game in the world,” I said. “This game, you wink at one of the other players and they fall over. Some of them oughta get Oscars. When hockey players take dives the commentators say that they’re acting like European soccer players.”

  “Italians, yes, always they cheat. Always is how they play,” Zoltan agreed.

  “It’s how they do business too,” Sinisa said darkly.

  We groused about Italians for a little while. When various ethnicities gather together it is always good to find a shared target without a representative present. The game went into sudden-death overtime, confusingly called “golden goal extra time”, and was finally resolved by a penalty shootout. The somewhat slurred post-game consensus was that shootouts were a horribly unfair way to settle things.

  “After extra time, more extra time,” Zoltan proposed. “But only five players each side. Much better than shootout.”

  “You must be happy, eh?” I asked Arwin. “That Russian guy Shevchenko won it all.”

  “Ukrainian,” Arwin corrected. “They hate us down there.”

  Zoltan launched into a speech in Serbian.

  “Yo, Zoltan, English. Be civilized,” Arwin suggested.

  Zoltan looked at Arwin, obviously amazed at the temerity of this little weaselly long-haired runt of a man.

  “How you say in English,” Zoltan rumbled. “Fuck you?”

  Arwin didn’t quail away like I expected. “Fuck you very much back atcha,” he retorted. “You want to sit at the grownups table, you speak English so I can understand.”

  Both them, I realized, were go-out-and-pick-a-fight drunks. Zoltan clenched his beer stein and for a moment I thought he might use it as a club. Zorana put her hand on his shoulder and he cooled a little and took another swig instead, before muttering something in Serbian that I figured was probably an aspersion on Arwin’s ancestry. Whatever it was it made Sinisa chuckle.

  “You still haven’t told me how we’re getting to America,” I said to Sinisa, changing the subject.

  “No,” he said absently. “Come. You and Arwin. I want to stop by the pier before we go back. You can come and watch.”

  “The pier? What’s there?”

  “Business. Unless you are not curious.”

  Business. That meant there was a shipment of refugees going out to Italy tonight. Probably the same thing I would be doing soon enough.

  “Oh no,” I said. “I’m curious all right.”

  Vlore’s main street, the name of which I never learned due to the absence of any street signs in the city, ran straight up to the waterfront, through a chainlink fence, and through a little cluster of forklifts, small warehouses, and cheap little administrative buildings, before continuing into the Adriatic, morphing from road into pier. The waterfront was guarded by two policemen with Dobermans and Kalashnikovs. They hustled to open the gate for Sinisa and treated him with reverential deference. I got the impression he didn’t come down here for personal inspections very often.

  The pier was as wide as the road and several hundred metres long. The lights from the dockside areas dwindled into darkness after a few dozen metres, but halfway along its length, to the left, a pool of dim light fell from the peak of the the single moored fishing boat. Three rusty but functional loading cranes towered over us like gargantuan praying mantises. A tiny sliver of moon hung high in the sky. The sea lapped at the pilings of the pier and the wooden planks creaked beneath our feet. The air was salty and refreshingly cool.

  The boat smelled of fish and unwashed humanity. It was smallish, maybe forty feet long. Two vanes descended in an inverted V from its peak, presumably used to hold the ends of a net. About sixty people huddled on its deck, most of them sitting, a few standing restlessly near the edges. A slight majority were Indian or Middle Eastern, single men, a few couples, two families. The youngest was a girl maybe ten years old. There were several black men, two of them dressed in geometrically patterned African robes which I knew meant they had come from south of the Sahara, and about fifteen white men. A half-dozen gauntly pretty white women stuck close together, like the ones I had seen in the factory near Sarajevo. Even in the dim forgiving light all of them looked filthy, beaten down, exhausted, their clothes tattered and crusted in dirt. Many of them clutched their pitifully small bags of possessions to their chests as they might a life raft in a whirlpool.

  They watched us, some with curiosity, some with trepidation, most with du
ll fatalism. They hardly spoke to each other. All were nervously waiting for their journey to begin and most of all for it to be over. Most of them had spent their life’s savings to come to the West. Some of them had already spent months on a gruelling and perilous journey just to get this far. Tonight was the moment of truth. I wondered what their stories were. Some of them were no doubt fleeing torture and violence, but most of them, I suspected, were driven more by opportunity than oppression, and no doubt several of them were criminals on the run.

  “Too bad they’re going already,” Arwin murmured. “I bet I could go up to those women and tell them I work for Sinisa and they’d line up on their knees to make me happy. Some of those lips could suck watermelons through garden hoses.”

  I wondered what would happen to the people on the boat. They were going through a gruelling, desperate struggle for just a taste of what I had been born with, travelling halfway around the world the hard way to be part of the poor invisible underclass of the rich western world I took for granted. Most of them were hard-working, motivated, smart, good planners, dedicated, just the kind of immigrant you want, or they wouldn’t be here. Even if they weren’t running for their lives, I couldn’t help but think, watching them squat miserably in that stinking fishing boat, that they deserved to succeed.

  There was a ticking sound at my feet and something seemed to jump up from the pier. I looked down, surprised, and instinctively crouched to investigate. It looked like something had harrowed a fresh gouge in the wooden pier below me. The pale jagged gorge of revealed wood looked so different from the tarred weatherbeaten exterior that it seemed to be an entirely different substance, like flesh under skin. I heard a faint popping sound in the distance as I tried to work out what had happened to the pier. I actually thought of a meteorite.

  Then there was an earsplitting clang! of metal on metal above me. Something had struck the nearby loading crane. I stood up, still driven purely by reflex wow-that-was-weird curiosity, and inspected the worm-shaped patch of newly shiny, indented metal, easily apparent against the yellow paint and rust that was the rest of the crane. I still didn’t understand what was happening and when Arwin tackled me I barely got my hands up in time to break my fall. I heard another dim popping noise.

  “What the hell?” I demanded, outraged. Splinters dug painfully into my palms.

  I tried to get up to my feet and he pulled me back down, hard, shouting at me in Russian before realizing and switching to English, “Someone’s shooting at us, you fucking idiot! Stay the fuck down!”

  I stayed down. The base of the crane was a solid metal platform about three feet high and I hugged the pier behind it as adrenaline and understanding finally began to course into me. Someone was shooting at us. A bullet had struck the pier, and then the crane, both of them missing me by only a couple of feet.

  There were more popping noises and ticking sounds, and one splash. Then loud barking noises that I recognized as gunshots, from the dockside area where pier met land. A dissonant chorus of whimpering fear-noises rose from the ship. Arwin wiggled away from me and turned around to peer around the corner of the crane, still prone. After the moment I did the same. If the gunmen were at the end of the pier there would be no way out other than jumping into the sea. I doubted all the refugees on the boat could swim.

  “There,” Arwin said. We were facing back towards the land, and he was pointing at a big building on the waterfront just to the right of the chain-link fence that delimited the docks area. “That building there. I saw a flash up top – there!”

  I saw it too, a brief white flicker, followed immediately by another clang! from the crane. Then the hollow pop of the gunshot, dawdling at the speed of sound and arriving a couple of seconds after the bullet. There followed a fusillade of a half-dozen shots from where the pier met the land.

  “What about there?” I asked, pointing to the end of the pier.

  “Those are our guys. Security. Shooting back.”

  Another flash of light from the building. This one prompted a shocked cry of pain from the fishing boat. Someone had been hit. More shots came from the dockside. There was movement to my left and I twitched violently with panic but it was only Sinisa, elbow-crawling next to us, a small pistol in his hand. I hadn’t realized he went around armed. He wore a disturbing grin, like he was actually enjoying this.

  “I am so terribly insulted,” he said. “How dare they not shoot at me?”

  I decided he had gone crazy.

  “If they are serious, they will come through the fence now,” Sinisa said. “If they do, go into the water and swim north. Do not go towards the beach. Swim to the north end of the bay. Do not go back into Vlore. Go to the highway and get a furgon to Tirana. Leave a message at the English-language bookstore in Skandenberg Square.”

  “Skandenberg Square,” I said, trying to burn his instructions into my memory.

  “I should have told you these procedures before. But I did not think, nobody thought there would be a problem.”

  “You think it’s Mladen?” Arwin asked.

  “No. Mladen would have shot at me first, not our Canadian friend.”

  I stared at him, appalled. “They were shooting at me?”

  “That or they hired a blind sniper.”

  “Your buddy from Bosnia,” Arwin said. “Dragan.”

  There were two more shots from the dockside, and men shouted at one another. I tensed up, waiting for a bulldozer or something to crash through the dimly visible chainlink fence. The low bleating from the ship rose into a horrific coruscating howl of pain.

  “Shot in the stomach,” Sinisa said. “The shock has worn off.”

  We lay there for I don’t know how long, your sense of time is massively dilated in a situation like that, but it felt like forever. Probably three or four minutes. The pier was cool and damp against my skin. My hands burned with the half-dozen splinters that had thrust into them when Arwin had tackled me to the ground. I was sweating like this was a boxing workout. The screams of the person who had been shot, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, faded into gurgling coughing whimpers. My mind felt weirdly dissociated from my body. I felt half-convinced that I was in some controlled environment, some Disney ride, Smugglers of the Adriatic, all the people around me were just animatrons and if I really needed to I could go through the emergency exit at any time. I wasn’t really pressing myself against this damp pier jutting from a rotting Albanian city, fifty feet from a boat full of Third World refugees, one of them groaning from a gunshot wound, tensely waiting for a crowd of killers to swarm through the fence and come charging at us.

  Headlights appeared outside the fence. I swallowed and measured the distance to the edge of the pier, tried to guess how far down the water was. Twenty or thirty feet. At least jumping into the ocean would clear my fear-fuzzed head.

  The men inside the fence ran to the gate, opened it, and allowed a half-dozen figures with AK-47s inside. I recognized Zoltan and Zorana among them. Our people. We were safe.

  “What an interesting development,” Sinisa said. He pressed his hands into the pier and vaulted upright like a yoga master. After a moment I climbed awkwardly to my feet and Arwin followed.

  I looked over at the boat. The man who had been shot, Afghani if I guessed his ethnicity correctly, had been standing right at the edge of the crowd. Now he lay sprawled on deck, one foot hanging over the side of the boat, clutching his hands on his belly, lying in a pool of his own blood. He shuddered violently. Every breath was a battle and he seemed to have lost the strength to cry out. The rest of the passengers had moved away, cleared a semicircle of open deck around him as if he was contagious.

  The ship’s crew approached Sinisa. He directed a few curt words at them and they nodded and rushed back to the ship. One of them began to unwind the thick mooring rope.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you doing?”

  “They are leaving.”

  “What about him?” I pointed at the wounded ma
n.

  Sinisa calmly aimed his gun at the fallen man and shot him in the head.

  I jumped as if shocked with ten thousand volts, and gaped at Sinisa as he re-safetied his gun and tucked it into the back of his belt. Then I looked over to the boat and the dead man sprawled on its deck. The other refugees stared at Sinisa in frozen, terrified silence. My mind kept replaying the sledgehammer sound of the gunshot. I couldn’t believe I had just seen him kill a man as casually as I might flick off a light switch.

  “He was beyond saving,” Sinisa said. “They will bury him at sea. Come. We have much to do.”

  Chapter 13

  Back Doors

  “You have brought a very large amount of trouble with you, Paul Wood,” Sinisa said.

  I shrugged uneasily. “Are you sure it’s Dragan?”

  “No. But I know the Mostar Tigers left Mostar a week ago, and have not been seen in Sarajevo.”

  I said, “I thought you would know if Dragan left Bosnia.”

  “The fact I did not know tells us they were assisted.”

  “Assisted?” I didn’t like the sound of that. “By who?”

  “I do not know. It is the nature of my business that I have many enemies. I think one of my enemies helped the Tigers into the country, shelters them, uses them to attack me indirectly.”

  “Right. So what’s the bad news?”

  He didn’t get the joke and looked at me quizzically.

  “Never mind. What’s the plan?”

  “You do not leave my compound, you or Saskia,” Sinisa said. “Here there is no danger. They will not dare a frontal assault. I hope they do, but they will not. We are vulnerable only to ambush or a sniper, and if you remain in my compound, neither can occur. You will be safe, I assure you.”

  “That’s a relief. For a moment there I was worried.”

  Sarcasm was wasted on Sinisa, it just didn’t compute. “I am glad you are relieved. Furthermore, I am advancing our schedule. We leave for America in five days, not eight. Your system will be complete by then.” It wasn’t a question.