Lie in the Dark

by Dan Fesperman

  “It’s as full as you’ll find it anywhere this week,” the man said, breaking into a crooked grin, his breath a cloud of slivovitz and cigarettes.

  The gasoline fumes came to Vlado like a tonic, an old smell of nostalgia carrying him briefly to long rides through the countryside, tires thrumming on an empty highway. Hills rolled by, green and unthreatening, then the small thrill of that first blue glimpse of the ocean after the long drive to the coast. You rounded a high curve and broke into a vista of sky and water. Saw the waves marshaling themselves in long, distant rows across an endless sea.

  The gas cap closed with a thump.

  The man shuffled back across the street, not bothering to glance around this time, relighting his cigarette as he disappeared through the door, leaving his table of books untended. Vlado stole a final glance at the upstairs window, where a pale face appeared momentarily behind the smudged glass. Then, a flick of a curtain, and the face was gone. Vlado climbed into the Golf and swerved it into a U-turn, bound for Dobrinja.

  Earlier that morning he and Damir had compared notes from the previous day Damir’s undercover men had been about as productive as Vlado’s, meaning he’d gotten little but generalities from them, and their line had been the same: Vitas was horning in on our trade, this time in liquor, and in doing so made himself a marked man.

  “They’re a load of shit, is what I think,” Damir concluded dismissively. “Somebody’s plants, and damned clumsy ones at that. But whose? And for what purpose? To lead us to something or away from something.”

  Vlado mentioned the shakedown at the slaughterhouse, but toned it down considerably, partly out of embarrassment and partly out of the promise he’d made to Kasic to keep most of the facts of the case to himself.

  In fact, he felt altogether unsure of how he should proceed with Damir while keeping that promise. Damir would chafe and complain if he felt he was merely serving as a glorified clerk, and justifiably so. Despite their difference in years, Damir was his equal in rank and responsibility. He, too, had earned his chance at a case of substance.

  But when they discussed their next moves, Vlado offered only that he was going to pursue a lead in Dobrinja, and already he could sense Damir’s dissatisfaction.

  Damir volunteered to go back to the whores at Skenderia, and Vlado was only too happy to agree.

  “Perhaps I will be a little more comfortable there,” he’d offered with a grin. “In fact, I know I will. Leave the women to the professionals, Vlado, or at least to the single men.”

  It was good weather for Sarajevo driving. Low clouds sagged heavily, leaking cold mist, although there was a worrisome brightening to the west. But even with the poor visibility Vlado accelerated when he hit the wide canyon of Sniper Alley. No other car was in sight, only a few men and women strolling at a leisurely pace, either foolhardy or bereft of hope. He swerved around two shellholes, sensing the gasoline gurgling and draining away at several Deutschemarks per minute. An income that would support an entire family for weeks was disappearing out his exhaust.

  He turned left, cutting across rail lines where a few empty tram cars slumped on the tracks as if they’d been dropped from a great distance, full of holes, every window shattered. The government still talked of restarting the trams as a show of spirit and resolve. Brilliant idea, he thought—a moving target on a fixed course for the amusement of the snipers.

  Vlado had been to Dobrinja once before since the start of the war, and he vaguely remembered the driver’s route, up and over sidewalks, and around army barriers. He headed west, where the highrises began to thin out, among some of the city’s newer suburbs. The Golf lurched across a curb and through the parking lot of an empty mini-mall, thumped onto a sidewalk, and accelerated. Two men on bicycles pedaled out of the way The car crunched across broken glass then thumped back onto the parking lot. After another half mile in this fashion he turned left up a slight incline and into a parking deck to pass through an army checkpoint, the last stop before Dobrinja. A bored soldier huddled in the protective shadows of the ground floor checked his papers and waved him on.

  By all rights, Vlado should have been trembling as he floored the Golf back into the open. A few hundred yards to either side were the advance positions of the Serbs. He would have to run the gauntlet for a quarter mile before easing behind the cover of the high rise buildings lining the wide street farther on. Yet if anything he felt calmed by his surroundings, and not only because it seemed to be a lazy day where snipers played cards and oiled their rifles, either too bored or too stingy with their ammunition to pay him the honor of their attention. And with a jolt he realized he had begun to fear his own city, as much for the forces within it as for those upon the hills.

  Dobrinja, too, was undoubtedly the turf of some smalltime warlord or smuggler, but it was too isolated to feel connected, and that made him secure, or perhaps it was only a sense of release he felt, of escape. The narrow peninsula, with its tight lines of fire, awaited him like a temporary refuge. Anyone choosing to follow would be painfully easy to spot, and as he glanced in the mirror he saw that the road behind him was empty.

  As the Golf roared along there was a heavy boom. Vlado flinched, ducking low behind the wheel, but the sound was far off. The clouds had begun to lift.

  On either side now were the towers of the Olympic Village, mostly deserted at this end. Whole chunks of brick were missing. Some window openings were black from fires. At others curtains flapped. He felt like an archeologist arriving at the site of a lost temple in the rain forest, some place where a whole civilization had packed up and left, centuries earlier.

  He steered the Golf downhill, veering between curved walls of stacked cars and buses, then he eased onto the main boulevard of Dobrinja amid a warren of apartment buildings and muddy courtyards. Several hundred yards to the left loomed the grassy face of Momillo Hill, its greenness almost luminous in the pale light, lonely and talismanic, like some great ceremonial mound built to plot the whirling of the heavens.

  In the most precarious days of the war the hill had been spiked with barrels and turrets, a garden of Serb weaponry that sprouted in the first spring of wartime and seemed as if it would never stop growing. But somehow the locals with their small arms stubbornly drove the Serbs off, gun by gun, and now it was empty, although still a threatening presence. A closer look revealed the faint lines of treadmarks, crisscrossing like the stitchmarks of old wounds.

  Every apartment building here was sandbagged at ground level. When the supply of sandbags had run low, people had made their own from old clothes, blankets, curtains, anything that would hold a few shovelfuls of mud. Slowing to double-check his map, Vlado noticed two boys trotting alongside the car, keeping pace. He suddenly realized they were using him for cover to make their way down the street, sheltering behind him as if he were an armored car. He instinctively pressed the accelerator, worrying that his slower speed might draw fire. Then with a pang of guilt he looked in the rear view mirror to see the boys running faster now; not scowling or shaking a fist, just running faster.

  Milan Glavas’s building was like all the others—tall, scarred and gray, with trenches cutting diagonally across the grounds between buildings to serve as sidewalks. Up against one end of the building was a small, muddy graveyard with rough wooden markers. In Dobrinja you buried the dead where you could.

  Rifle shots popped from nearby Moments earlier a grenade had screamed through the air a few blocks away. Yet the clouds were still reasonably low, and a few children played in a nearby field, kicking a soccer ball through the remains of the slush.

  Most of the names on the mailboxes were worn off, and Vlado searched in vain for “Glavas” until a young woman coming down the stairs asked who he was looking for.

  “Do you know a Mr. Glavas?”

  “Yes. Fourth floor, right rear door.”

  Vlado started up.

  “Is he expecting you?” she shouted after him.

  He looked back, seeing her prim upturned f
aced, her heart-shaped lips with their neat layers of bright lipstick.

  “I wouldn’t think so. I haven’t been able to phone him and I’ve just come from downtown.”

  She seemed impressed, even wistful, merely to think of having been in downtown only moments ago.

  “Then knock hard,” she said, “and be prepared to wait.”

  “Is he hard of hearing or just slow on his feet?”

  “Both, but only when he wants to be. Mostly he’s just old and grouchy and a bit of a bastard sometimes. Or at least he likes us to think he is.”

  “Is he likely to be in?”

  “He almost always is. Stand outside his door long enough and you’ll hear him coughing. It’s how we know he’s still alive, in there hacking away like a dog who never stops barking. Winter or summer, he never stops. If you live next door it can be like water torture. Sometimes you pray for the shelling to drown him out.”

  Vlado smiled. “I’ll offer him some cigarettes. Maybe that will help it.”

  “Yes, you do that.” She smiled back. “And good luck with him.”

  Vlado reached the fourth floor and rapped loudly, then stood back looking at the heavy green door. He listened to the sounds moving up and down the stairwell, children racing down a hallway, a shout from somewhere below. There was a smell of old cooking and dampness. Somewhere in the distance a gun began to chatter.

  Vlado knocked again. Still no answer but the echo of the door.

  Then from within the apartment, as the woman had predicted, he heard a deep rattling cough. It accelerated into a fast series of hacks, dry and croupy, with a sound like sheet metal being torn apart in short wrenching snatches. My God.

  He knocked a third time, waited a minute. Then a fourth. Nearly ten minutes passed before Vlado finally heard an approaching shuffle, the slide of slippers across linoleum, then a rattling safety chain, a sound one didn’t often hear in the city. One bolt slid back with a crack. Then another, followed by a deep wheezing cough and a wet snuffle. Finally, the click of the knob and a metallic groan as the door swung free.

  He was greeted by a shocking face, not for its ravages of age or illness—although those signs were present as well in great wrinkles and splotches—but for its immediate suggestion of a neat, fastidious presence suddenly gone to seed. First there was the man’s hair, a thick explosion of whiteness radiating from a face of gray stubble where the signs of aborted shavings could be found in numerous nicks and scratches.

  Yet there was still something of the refined old gentleman about him, the way the lines of a magnificent old garden still show through even after weeds have taken over. There was once an elegance at work here, Vlado guessed, once a man who might have kept his nails filed and trimmed, who might have tucked a handkerchief neatly in a breast pocket, and worn pleated trousers perfectly creased. Yet what the man wore now was a navy wool bathrobe over thick wool pants, with a green blanket thrown across it all like a tarpaulin.

  There was an essence of old sweat in the air, yet also a light scent of soap and body powder, as if he had just emerged from a steaming bath.

  Glavas stood carefully inspecting Vlado a few moments before finally announcing in a deep old croak, slow-roasted by decades of cigarettes, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  His open mouth exposed a number of yellow, blunted teeth, bent inward like those of an old skull.

  “And for that matter, who in the hell are you, coming all the way out here from town to bother me.”

  “Vlado Petric. Police investigator. You are Mr. Glavas?”

  “Milan Glavas, yes,” he said, and a brief glint of interest flashed in his eyes. He tilted his head slightly upward, as if to take a better look, but said nothing further.

  “How did you know I’d come from the city?” Vlado asked.

  “Because you don’t smell of cabbage,” Glavas said. “Or of filthy children and their diapers and runny noses. And you aren’t coughing like a tubercular case, or look as if you’ve spent the last twenty months running through the mud or cowering in a corner away from your windows. Should I continue? Then, please, as long as you’ve come all this way at such great risk, step inside.”

  They moved to a back room, probably once a guest bedroom but now the living room, judging by the furniture, doubtless chosen for its location away from the busiest lines of fire. A small handmade woodstove sat in one corner, a model fashioned roughly from heavy sheet metal. It looked as if it would crumple if you sat on it, and hardly seemed fit for a strong fire. It was cold, barely blackened.

  “My genius neighbor built it,” Glavas said, following Vlado’s stare. “Nearly burned down the apartment first time I tried it. But it worked, in its way. No matter, though. Ran out of wood after three days. And that’s after it cost me forty marks. Live and learn.”

  Glavas picked up a second wool blanket from the couch and draped it across his back as he sank onto the couch. A half-filled bowl of beans sat on an end table.

  “I hope I haven’t interrupted your lunch,” Vlado said.

  “If only you had. That is a time when I would always welcome an interruption. That and when I have to take a shit on these stinking toilets. I allow myself one flush a week. I just can’t bring myself to waste water by pouring it down the john after hauling it up six flights of stairs.”

  Vlado glanced around the room. There was a stylish green wing chair in silk upholstery, a thick Oriental rug on the floor, finely woven. He glanced upward and saw two nice pen and ink sketches, elegantly framed, and an oil painting that, even to Vlado’s unpracticed eye, looked worth a small fortune.

  “Please, Mr. Petric, do tell me, although I’m hardly the impatient sort who needs to get straight to the point, what would bring a police inspector to my door.” He leaned forward slightly, as if harboring his own little surprise.

  “I’m investigating a murder. The victim had your name and address in his pocket, and I thought he might have visited you recently, perhaps even sometime in the last several days.”

  Glavas slowly leaned back, raising his eyebrows. “Ah. Esmir Vitas, then?”

  “Yes. So he was here.”

  “Oh yes. Tuesday, I believe it was? Or whatever day it was three days ago. I don’t bother to identify the days as such anymore. They are either good or bad, mostly depending on the visibility, and then they’re dead and gone. But I remember Vitas all right, yes. My only visitor in months, quite literally And until you arrived I thought he might be the last one for several months more. When you knocked I assumed you were just another of the bored children with nothing to do but make themselves a nuisance by knocking on an old man’s door, then run away laughing as soon as the door opens. Or worse, they don’t run away at all. ‘Please,’ I tell them, ‘why don’t you run along and play out in the shelling. Call down some artillery on us. Let us watch out our windows while you run for your lives.’ ”

  He broke into a wheezy chuckle, burbling toward the ledge of a deep cough before somehow bringing himself under control.

  “So then,” he continued, now smiling. “You have decided, perhaps, that I am a suspect in this murder?” saying it as if the prospect pleased him.

  “Mostly what I think is that I’d like to ask you some questions. I want to know why Vitas came here, and what, if anything, he wanted to talk about. Were you friends?”

  “No. I’d never met him until that day. A Tuesday, did I say? And a horrible Tuesday it was. Grenades zipping around all morning. Man next door was killed, just stood in the courtyard like he was waiting for it. Some people do that, you know, just give up and go out there asking for it. Boy just above here was out on his balcony. Lost an arm. And in the middle of all that there’s a knock at the door. Three of them actually, and when I finally open up this Vitas fellow is waiting, filling the doorframe in a dark blue overcoat. I knew he wasn’t from around here, too. Clean as a whistle. Not a speck of mud on him.”

  “And you hadn’t been expecting him?”

  “No more than I w
as expecting you. Phone’s dead so he couldn’t have called. He’d gotten my name in town and came looking, or so he said. He wanted to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “A great many things, as it turned out. He was here a few hours. And he got right to the point, as I assume you will.”

  “Maybe we could start just by going over your conversation with him, as much of it as you can remember. Even the parts you don’t think are particularly interesting, if you don’t mind. Because the things that seem meaningless to you might be of great value for me.”

  “Yes, I thought you’d say as much. It’s exactly what Vitas said,” and with this Glavas burst into a hoarse wheezing laugh that quickly melted into a coughing jag. It took a full minute for the hacking to subside.

  “He’d brought a card with him,” Glavas said. “And he wanted to ask me about it. A 3-by-5 index card with my name and signature on it and a small red circle in the upper-right-hand corner. A card from the inventory files of the National Museum. You’re familiar with the place?”

  “Yes, right on the river. Saved, just barely.”

  “Saved, indeed. By our valiant militia, our thugs in green camouflage. Art lovers, every one, I’m sure. Raging against the philistine Serbs in their enlightened, selfless struggle. But that is another story. So Vitas showed me this card, pulls it out of his coat pocket with a flourish, as if he’d brought me the Hope diamond. Then he looked me straight in the eye, just as you’re doing now, and he said, ‘Can you tell me the significance of this?’

  “And I said, ‘Indeed I can, for hours on end, Mr. Vitas, hours on end. Only I’m not sure you’ll care to hear the whole story,’—which is when he told me what you’ve just said. Tell him everything, no matter how insignificant. Let him sort out what was important. Just keep talking until nothing was left to tell. Then he offered me a cigarette from a fresh pack. Marlboros, in fact, which I don’t suppose you’d happen to have?”

  “No. Only Drinas. But I do have a fresh pack.”