by Evans, Jon
“If we’re so safe, why are you advancing our schedule?”
“That is an independent development,” he said smoothly.
Sure it was. “If you say so. Anything else I should know?”
“Yes,” Sinisa said. “There is one thing. I want you to remember, Paul. When you are in America, safe in America, I want you to remember the risk I am taking for you. One day I may ask you to take risks for me.”
I was not in a good position to argue. “I will remember,” I promised.
“Good. Go to work. Five days.”
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: the albanian times
Date: 29 Apr 2003 01:50 GMT
Big trouble in little Albania. I got shot at tonight. I’m okay. Everyone’s okay except some refugee who got hit by a stray bullet. He didn’t make it. I don’t even know where he came from.
S thinks D is in town and he’s teamed up with one of S’s business enemies.
I wasn’t going to tell you any of this, but I guess you want to know, even though I know it’s going to stress you out and there isn’t anything you can do. Plus I figure you’d rip my head off if I didn’t tell you and you found out later.
I’m not all that worried. We’re going sooner, now, and as long as we stay in S’s compound, we’ll be fine. Don’t go crazy worrying too much about us, all right? We’ll be okay.
Love,
Paul
When I left Sinisa’s mansion that night, around midnight, I paused outside the gate and took a good look at the street on which I lived. I was seeing everything with new eyes that night, Sinisa’s deck, the room in which I worked, the windows of our house. Believe me, you start viewing your surroundings in an entirely new manner when an invasion by armed men who badly want to kill you becomes a plausible near-future event.
The air outside was refreshingly cool, and I wondered if the heat wave was finally fading. Two dim lights mounted above the iron gates of Sinisa’s mansion provided eerie, dreamlike illumination. I looked up and down the street and again wondered why it existed, why Sinisa had built a dozen houses for the zombies, how long the zombies had lived here, why they had come all the way from Serbia to live in Sinisa’s compound. It must have cost a fortune. Sure, labour was cheap and the houses were slapped-together crap, but Sinisa still had to have paid for electricity, running water, septic tanks, all this for a couple of dozen middle-aged Serbians who spent their days doing fuck-all.
With the gate to my back, ours was the fourth house to the right. To the left, past the houses on that side, the ground fell steeply towards Vlore. To the right it sloped gently upwards into untamed land thick with bushes and clumps of trees. For the first time I understood the terrible appeal of land mines. At that moment I would have liked nothing more than the knowledge that the land around Sinisa’s compound was sown with lethal and undetectable explosives. But it wasn’t, or he would have warned us when we first arrived.
I wasn’t tired. I wanted to go for a walk, but of course I had just been told not to leave the compound for any reason whatsoever. I wanted a cigarette, but Arwin was already asleep. I walked to our house, intending to try to sleep, but at the last second I changed my mind and went around the house, walked through our backyard of thigh-high weeds and into the forest.
I was violating Sinisa’s direct order, and technically endangering myself, but that didn’t really concern me. If the Tigers were waiting in the forest right behind our house then Saskia and I were pretty screwed anyhow. Leaves and branches clawed at my face and I pushed them aside. Once I was past the first screen of trees the forest was very dark. I began to wonder what the hell I was doing and why I hadn’t stopped in my room to pick up my Maglite.
Then I stepped on something hard. I knelt and felt around, ran my hands over a cracked dome of concrete. Of course. A bunker, one of Hoxha’s omnipresent mushrooms. Good enough, I decided. What I wanted was a quiet contemplative place to sit and think. This would do. I sat down at the apex of the bunker’s six-foot-diameter dome, and I began to ponder.
I couldn’t shake the image of Sinisa’s callous execution of the Afghani man on the boat. Maybe he had been dying, but we could have taken him to the hospital or called a doctor, we could at least have tried to save him. The idea had not even crossed Sinisa’s mind. So much for Robin Hood.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The man had a private army, he invited snipers to his business meetings, his closest assistants were Zoltan and Zorana, not exactly Central Casting’s answer to Friar Tuck and Maid Marian. And yet I had somehow let him convince me with a few honeyed words that he was on the side of the angels.
They call it the Stockholm Syndrome, when hostages begin to support and identify with the hostagetakers. When someone controls your life and the hour of your death, you desperately want to believe that they are good and noble. And Saskia and I had fallen completely into Sinisa’s power the moment we crossed the border into Albania.
Sinisa didn’t want to be Robin Hood. He had told me so himself. He wanted to be a CEO like Jeff Bezos or Gordon Moore. Maybe Pablo Escobar was a better analogy, cocaine emperor of the eighties, multibillionaire smuggler, at one point the eleventh wealthiest man in the world. Escobar had been assassinated, hunted down by American soldiers using advanced electronic surveillance techniques. I suspected Sinisa knew all about the killing of Pablo Escobar. I suspected his investment in Mycroft had something to do with that history lesson.
Illegal immigration wasn’t exactly cocaine smuggling, but it was big business. I had read a lot about it in the last few weeks. At least ten billion dollars a year, estimated The Economist, spent in every corner of the globe. Mexican “coyotes”, who escort hundreds of thousands of the undocumented over the US border every year, some of whom begin their journeys in Bolivia or Paraguay. Chinese “snakeheads,” who fill shipping containers with people and send them from Shanghai to Long Beach, or buy old freighters, pack them to the gills with people, and sail them across the Pacific. Balkan gangs like Sinisa’s who conduct their clients-slash-victims, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, Kurdish, Arabian, Turkish, name your nationality, into Western Europe. Moroccans who cross the Straits of Gibraltar in rowboats overcrowded with Africans who might have come all the way from the Congo. Other Africans go south, hitch or jump trains or just walk, sometimes thousands of kilometres, all the way from their homes to Johannesburg or Cape Town. Haitians and Cubans take insane risks to come to Florida on rafts made of inner tubes. Indonesians come to Australia on stolen ships sold to them by the pirates who still ply the Straits of Malacca.
Like all crime, all smuggling, it was most rampant, most blatant, in failed or crippled states like Bosnia or Albania, places where corruption is so pervasive it almost isn’t corruption any more, where money paid to government officials is not seen by either side of the transaction as a shameful bribe, but simply as a fee for services rendered, capitalism at its purest. I wondered how much of Sinisa’s four million dollars a year went to various levels of the Albanian government in exchange for protection, for permission to build his own private enclave, for the blind eye turned as Sinisa openly ran his smuggling business out of the waterfront of one of the country’s major ports. Albania had signed and ratified several international agreements binding it against the trade in human beings, but what did paper matter when Albania was so poor, and the Italian coast was only fifty kilometres away, and so many people would pay so much money to be conveyed to the legendary uttermost West?
I wondered what I would have done, if I had grown up in Bangladesh or Afghanistan. I suspected I would have pestered the smugglers there from age twelve until they agreed to send me to London just to shut me up. Home had never meant much to me, had never been the necessary anchor it seemed to be for others. For years I had wanted only to wander, had dismissed the nesting instinct as an impulse of the weak and unadventurous. Now I was not so sure. I was twen
ty-nine years old. Did I really want to roam forever, dancing across the world like a water-spider on a stagnant pond, never making any impression?
I was a proud Canadian, but my ties to Canada were loose and distant. I had lived in San Francisco for five years, but it had never really felt like my home. Moving in with Talena had made me feel even more dissociated and detached. I was always acutely aware that it was her apartment, never ours.
Did I even want a home? What did “home” mean? A mailing address, I supposed. That was a start. A place to lay your head. Mark Twain’s definition: the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The place where your friends live. Whatever that means. My friends were scattered around the globe. Most of the people I was closest to, Hallam and Nicole and Steve and Lawrence, lived in London, where I couldn’t reside without fighting my way through parsecs of red tape and visa paperwork.
My family, never close, had fragmented. Talena was family, sort of, except I was still on the brink of being dumped. That weird relationship paradox: is your girlfriend more like family, or your friends? You’re far closer, much more intimate, with your girlfriend – but at the same time you both know, although you probably never speak of it, that this intimacy is probably temporary, that one day the relationship will be Over.
Maybe I wasn’t meant to have a home. Maybe, if and when I got out of this Albanian mess, if and when Talena dumped me, I should go back on the road. Volunteer in Africa for a year, or use Sinisa’s money to spend six months travelling overland from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. It didn’t feel like a healthy idea. But what else was there for me to do?
* * *
“From the twilight’s last gleaming,” Saskia sang from the bathtub, and paused. “Paul,” she called out, “what is a gleaming?”
I looked up from my cup of Nescafe. “Like a little flash of light,” I said. “But dimmer than a flash.”
“I see. Thank you.”
She went back to her idiosyncratic version of The Star-Spangled Banner. I had taught it to her only yesterday and her melody was inventive. I considered draining the rest of my coffee and escaping to work. I wasn’t looking forward to telling Saskia that her husband and his band of not-so-merry men were in town and heavily armed. But it had to be done.
“Over the land of the free,” Saskia sang, getting the melody right for this part, “and the home of the brave.” I heard water splash and then begin to drain from the tub. After a few minutes she emerged from the bath, wearing a towel. When we had first moved into the house she had brought a change of clothes into the bathroom and dressed before exiting, but we were now so accustomed to each other’s presence that she had stopped bothering.
She had lost weight since coming to Albania, she looked even smaller than before. I wondered how tall she was exactly, and how much she weighed. Five feet one, maybe, a full foot shorter than me, and certainly less than a hundred pounds. With her pale skin still gleamingly damp from the bath, she looked like a not-quite-life-sized doll.
“Lazy man,” she mock-scolded me when she returned from her room, dressed in a denim skirt and a white shirt, and found me still in the kitchen. “Should you not go to work?”
“We need to talk,” I said.
She cocked her head at me, sensing from my tone that the topic was something more serious than the quality of the coffee she made, a running joke between us. She sat down across from me. I looked across the cheap folding table at her and tried to find the right words. There didn’t seem to be any, so I was blunt.
“We’re pretty sure Dragan is here,” I said. “And the Tigers. One of Sinisa’s enemies is helping him. Somebody came after us on the pier in Vlore last night. They killed a man. One of Sinisa’s refugees. They were shooting at me.”
She stared at me disbelievingly.
“Sinisa says we’ll be fine,” I hurried to add. “We’ll be safe here. But you and I are not supposed to leave this neighbourhood any more, for any reason.”
For a while she didn’t react. I started to wonder if she was in shock.
Then, to my considerable surprise, she said, “I would like a gun.”
I mentally replayed the words I had just heard to ensure I had understood them correctly. “A gun,” I said. “I…a gun? Uh, jeez, I don’t know, I can ask, but I don’t know if Sinisa’s going to want to give us any guns –”
“Sinisa took guns from us already,” she said. “He should give them back.”
“I guess, but –”
“I know how to use them. I have killed men before. Did you know that?” Her voice was sharp, hard, angry. It was so unlike the voice of the timid, diffident Saskia I had come to know that if she had suddenly rotated her head 360 degrees, Exorcist-style, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised.
“Uh, yes,” I said. “Talena said.”
“Give me a gun, and if I see my husband I will kill him myself.”
“Well, good, that’s a good attitude, I guess, and I’ll ask Sinisa, but like I said –”
“He will never expect it. He thinks I am a frightened little bird. He thinks he has trained me. He thinks he has broken me, like I am a dog or a horse. He thinks all he has to do is show himself and then I will do whatever he says. I hope he does. I am glad he has come. I hope he comes to me and tries to tell me what I must do. He is the dog.” She finished with a few short sentences in Croatian. I was confident they weren’t polite.
“You’re angry,” I said.
“Angry? I am enraged. I am furious.”
“Good. Good. I’m glad. But don’t get crazy, okay? It’s good that you’re angry, but I don’t want you taking a gun and trying to go find Dragan yourself. It’s fine if we just get out of here and leave him behind. You don’t have to track him down and kill him, understand?”
“He should die a thousand times.”
“I don’t doubt it. But the important thing here is your living, not his dying, okay?”
She thought about that for some time before grudgingly saying, “Okay.”
We looked at each other.
“Wow,” I said. “I thought you’d burst into tears and run into your room or something.”
For a moment I was afraid I shouldn’t have said that. But it made her smile, one of her rare thousand-watt supermodel smiles that surely brightened the mood of everyone within a five-mile radius.
“I was not always the woman you found in Mostar,” Saskia said. “I am beginning to remember that. I am beginning to remember.”
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: the albanian times
Date: 30 Apr 2003 13:22 GMT
Get out of there. Never mind Sinisa. Just get the hell onto a boat and go to Italy. I’ll come meet you there and we’ll work things out. Seriously. Please. The email you just sent sounded way too much like the kind of email someone sends before they’re never heard from again.
If you can’t, then just, I don’t know, please just stay alive. Write me every morning and every night just to let me know you’re okay. Afternoons would be nice too.
Shit. I should be on the next flight out. Or your friends, Hallam and Steven and Lawrence. I’ll get in touch with them. What can we do? There has to be something.
Talena
PS You’re right, I would have killed you if you hadn’t told me.
PPS Give my love to Saskia, and keep some for yourself.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: the albanian times
Date: 30 Apr 2003 23:09 GMT
Don’t freak out overmuch here. Really, it’s much less bad than it sounds. I’d rather have Sinisa protecting me than NATO.
We couldn’t go even if we wanted to. And we’re safer here than trying to go on our own, I’m sure of that. And I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you or Hallam or anyone can do at this stage. Just hang in there. It’s just four more days. We’ll be fine
. I promise.
Love,
Paul
* * *
Those last five days, when we were confined to Sinisa’s compound, I exorcised my daily bouts of restlessness by roaming the nearby wilderness rather than the streets of Vlore. The forest southeast of our back yard was replete with interlacing trails, presumably laid by animals and three thousand years of wandering Albanians.
On the second day, I went deep into the woods, listening to Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory on endless repeat as I walked. The forest overlapped occasional east-west ridges of stone that protruded ten feet from the ground like colossal ribs. The trail led up and over two of those ridges, then turned eastwards and parallelled a third. After a few hundred feet it bent around a shallow gulch, thick with fallen foliage, next to the ridge. Some kind of natural sewer, carved by rainwater, now a place where storm debris collected. I would have walked right past it if my presence hadn’t caused an animal to scuttle out of the gulch, across the path maybe ten feet in front of me, and away into the forest.
It moved so fast I caught only a glimpse: lean, furry, maybe three feet long, somehow carnivorous in appearance. I couldn’t tell if it was a fox or a bobcat or some strange-to-me native Balkan animal. I looked into the gulch, and I saw something pale, something out of place. I walked to the edge of path and squinted. A bone. What I saw protruding from that loose scree of leaves and branches was the knobbed end of a large bone.
I advanced into the gulch, curious about what kind of animal had died here. The bottom of the gulch was uneven muddy gravel and dirt, and I had to be careful with my footing. Twigs snapped and leaves crackled as I walked through the fallen branches and undergrowth, shin-high and deepening, slippery and spongy. I stepped on something harder than a branch, something smoothly convex, and I stepped back and looked down. Whatever it was, it was pale and white, and still mostly concealed. Without thinking I reached down to pick it up.