by Scott Turow
“Broken ribs?”
He nodded rather than speak. I’d been there once, after a car accident. For an injury that was rarely life-threatening, it was astonishingly painful and left you reluctant to breathe.
“This here is the salt vat,” he said. “It’s full of water, supersaturated with salt. Hydrochloric acid basically. Won’t be much trace of us in a few weeks.” He said it almost casually.
So that was the plan. Throw us in with our hands tied. Let us drown as our flesh was burned away. Maybe the beating would be better. What I really wanted to do was make them shoot me now.
The leader returned and pointed the AK. I sat down beside Goos, causing the fellow with the Zastava to grunt in Serbo-Croatian. He was telling me to stand up and I shook my head no. I saw the rifle barrel coming and ducked under it as it swept over my head, but having gotten down, there was no way to avoid the muzzle as it returned on the backhand swing, catching me solidly on the ear and the temple. It probably wasn’t an availing angle for him, because the pain didn’t feel overwhelming.
There was some growling around and the English speaker was back.
“If you walk up there, we will shoot you in the head before you go into the tank. Otherwise, we will drag you and throw you in there alive.”
“And why should we believe that?” I asked from the ground. These guys weren’t humanitarians. If we walked up, I was pretty sure they’d throw us in anyway, while we were still breathing. Maybe they’d stand around for a few minutes to laugh as we screamed.
I took a second trying to figure why they seemed intent on getting us to walk up to the top of the tank, and recognized we finally had some advantage. Dragging a man struggling for his life up an incline was dangerous for them. Even beating us with the fierceness of the blows Goos had received on the ground risked catapulting the assailant right off the dome if he lost his balance. They couldn’t shoot us either as we lay there, for fear of blowing holes in the tank, with God knows what consequences. In a while, they’d find solutions for these problems, but right now we were a little safer than we’d been down below. The guy who spoke English walked away to confer with the leader.
“Don’t move,” I told Goos.
“And I was just about to run for the next tram, mate.”
I laughed a little, which had a weird sweetness to it.
The stalemate with our captors continued for a couple of minutes. Then, as I lay there against the steel rim of the tank, I could see lights sweep up the road. I heard gravel spurning, and in a second, the thud of a car door. In the dark, a voice echoed. They had phoned for assistance, apparently.
“Nikolai,” a man called below. He repeated the name several times and the leader walked over to the ladder and looked down. The man on the ground said something else and Nikolai protested, but stepped onto the ladder. I could hear the two arguing as Nikolai descended. Their voices quieted once he was on the ground.
When Nikolai climbed back up in a few minutes, he whispered to the others. There was a new plan. All four came over to me first. One of them administered a solid shot with the metal stock of the AK that caught me in the mouth, and they pulled me up to my knees. I was bleeding inside my lip, which within seconds felt like it had grown to the size of a grape. One of them held me upright while another suddenly placed a ski mask over my head. I felt the muzzle of the AK braced hard against my temple as I realized that they’d placed the mask on backward so I couldn’t see. It stunk of sweat and cigarette smoke, and my breathing was stifled. I’d been hooded, just like the familiar pictures of men in their final instants before execution. Even now, there was something to learn: Blindfolding the doomed man was not for his sake. The sudden blackness geared up my fear to an absolute level, where fright itself was physically agonizing. The mask was meant to spare the executioner the beseeching look of the condemned, to keep any last-minute fellow feelings from standing in the way.
From the sound of his breathing, I recognized that Goos had been positioned beside me, both of us kneeling with our feet against the rim of the tank as we faced the crown of the dome. I took it they had realized they were going to have to shoot us here and drag us up to the tank door themselves. I thought of plunging down on my face again, but I was satisfied that dying right here was the best we could do.
In the meantime, I could hear footfalls on the ladder again and, occasionally, the clanging of a rifle barrel on the iron. Two or three of our captors were heading down. They were going to leave one man up here to finish the job. I felt the Zastava pressed harder against my temple as the executioner, probably the English speaker, prepared to shoot.
“God no, please,” I said, but I didn’t get out more, because I was shocked by the wet heat of my own pee soaking my lap. I would never say I was concerned about self-respect at that moment, but I did care about self. I had come too far in the last few years to die without wrapping both arms around who I was, and I sunk inward. I had solemn fervent thoughts about my boys, which rose in my heart like a silver beacon, and then, as I knelt there waiting for the bullet, I unexpectedly thought about my father. And what do you say now, Dad? I suddenly asked him. He’d abandoned who he was to be safe from the return of history’s monsters, and yet here I was, about to die at the hands of the same kind of ghouls. In this life, there was no place beyond the reach of evil.
Time wore on. I was amazed by every second. Another, I thought, another. I heard something from the side of the tank that sounded like one of the AKs banging again on the ladder rungs. Then the gravel popped below as one of the cars drove off, quickly followed by a second, even a third, perhaps, judging from the engines’ whines.
The night wind whipped across us and I was abruptly aware that my hands were numb from the ties. The urine on my lap and left pants leg was cold now.
“Are you here, Goos?”
“Yay, mate.”
“Are they gone?”
Goos spoke up boldly, something in Serbo-Croatian, shouted into the night. The silence afterward lingered.
“Gone,” he said. “I just said ‘Your mother’s cunt is wide as a river from all the men that have been in it.’ Would have earned us a proper spanking if they were still here.”
“Did you understand anything of what the guy who drove up was saying to Nikolai?”
“Not much. He told him to come down. When Nikolai objected, the other one said it was an order. But I couldn’t understand anything they said on the ground, except that they were cross with one another.”
“They’re not going to kill us?”
“No idea, Boom. Apparently not right now. But I reckon I wouldn’t be donning my party hat. We’re forty meters off the ground with our hands tied behind us and blindfolded to boot. Best be careful or we’ll do the job for them.”
Talking it over, we wondered if they might have left some kind of booby trap behind. We decided to lie down again, with our feet braced against the tank rim, so we didn’t tumble off blindly. The steel footholds stood high enough to make for painful bedding. Goos had to lie on his other side, which meant he’d landed another couple of feet away from me. I knew he was hurting and I told him to remain still, while I began inching toward him, keeping my feet against the rim as I scooted his way. The footholds cut into my gut as I moved over them, but in time I felt his shoe against mine.
I took a couple of tries at getting my mask off along the edge of a foothold, but that only seemed to be another way to knock out a couple more teeth.
“Can you bend toward me?” I asked Goos.
“Slowly,” he answered.
“All the time in the world,” I said.
I eased back and Goos doubled over, then I carefully rolled to my other side, a frightening business since I had to remove one foot from the tank rim and really had no idea of exactly where I was heading. But when I’d finished the turn, my hands were facing Goos. I eased back toward him, until I felt him there, then I lifted one leg to the next foothold above and pushed myself up until my fingers behind
me grazed Goos’s face. I grabbed the mask and climbed up to the next foothold, then one more.
“Can see,” he grunted. We worked the mask up a little farther to be sure it didn’t slip over his eyes again. Then he slowly straightened up and guided me inch by inch as I made my way back to the safe footing of the tank rim. Once I was there, I bent slowly toward Goos until he had the back of my mask in his teeth. I tried skootching away to help him pull. He got it up as far as the back of my skull, but it seemed stuck there. Finally, he managed to get all the gathered material in his mouth. I had found one of the steel footholds with my hands, which meant I had more support, and after a three count, I jerked my head down. My chin rammed against another foothold, but the mask was up to my crown and then off. I filled my lungs. The air was sweet, but my front teeth hurt a lot.
We both lay there. It was a beautiful night, with a clear country sky, a bright moon, and away from that light, a spill of stars. Life, I thought, life. Out of nowhere, I was reminded of being in Esma’s bed, thrilled by my own vitality.
22.
Why—June 3–4
Talking things through on the top of the tank, Goos and I agreed that the best idea would be to get down the ladder and run like hell. But there was a reason that jailers around the world used zip ties. After sawing them against the rough edges of the footholds for at least thirty minutes, we’d accomplished nothing besides cutting our wrists. The rope that had been around our necks had been left behind and I crawled over to it—Goos was much too sore to move much. We figured if we could somehow secure one end up here, and then fasten it around us, we could make the climb down, but the line proved far too short to reach the ground. Without that, descending the ladder with our hands bound behind our backs was pretty much suicidal. However, after more than an hour of working back to back, we had gotten surprisingly adept and managed to loop the yellow strand over a rung of the ladder. We then threaded the ends through the belt loops on our trousers, making the rope a kind of safety harness. This allowed me to explore the top of the dome a bit, although I failed to discover anything that could razor through the ties. We pondered using the hinge of the door on top, the place where we were supposed to die, like a wire cutter, but we decided we were more likely either to cut off part of a hand or fall in. Ultimately, we settled down on either side of the ladder to wait for daylight, in the hope that the workers who were sure to arrive would not shoot us as intruders.
With rest, the adrenal rush was subsiding, making each of us more aware of our discomfort. Goos was much worse off than I was. My mouth hadn’t seemed to stop bleeding, and my shoulders were aching from using my hands so much with my arms tied behind my back. Other places hurt, too, but not enough to warrant a lot of attention. Overall, we were both exhausted. Goos lay down to try to sleep and actually dozed for a while.
As our kidnapping was progressing, I had thought only in spurts about why this was happening, and even now I couldn’t fully piece things together. I still had no clue what kind of enterprise Ferko held status in. There had always been a mob in Bosnia—they’d been fierce fighters during the war and were the first to commit atrocities against the Serbians—but I couldn’t imagine what stake organized crime would have in promoting the story of a massacre at Barupra. Perhaps the mobsters had been the killers, and Ferko was covering for them by blaming ‘Chetniks’?
Not long after sunup, two fellows in white jumpsuits drove into the graveled area below in a truck with the logo of the salt mine on the side panel. They parked about a block up, near what I could now see was a small wooden office. I started screaming at them, and Goos woke up and joined me in Serbo-Croatian. They heard us relatively quickly, but couldn’t place where the voices were coming from, even as Goos repeatedly shouted “Ovamo,” meaning, ‘Up here.’
When one finally caught sight of us, he immediately demanded we come down. It took a few minutes to persuade him that we were tied up. Instead of rescuing us, the two went off to call somebody else, but the man they summoned, named Walter, sussed things out quickly and was up the ladder with a wire cutter in a matter of minutes. He ordered the two men on the ground to bring up security belts, and once they were fixed on us, we headed down the ladder, latching and unlatching the carabiner clips on each rung. I was a lot weaker than I would have guessed and was glad to be attached.
Walter was a sincere, decent guy, and as soon as he heard our story, he wanted to call the police. Goos and I responded politely that that was not a good idea, which Walter was quick to accept. Instead, he allowed us to use the office phone, from which I dialed Attila.
“Fuck, I must have called both of you six times,” she said, as soon as I said hello. She’d wanted to be sure we didn’t need more workers. I told her in outline what had happened last night.
“Joke, right?” she said first. She promised to come immediately.
Walter made us coffee while we waited in the small office, which had the dimensions of a trailer. More people were arriving for work now, and each did a turn at the door looking us over. We were a sight. Most of Goos’s shirt was black with clotted blood, and the agony in his side left him slumped awkwardly in his chair. My lip was blown up to the size of a squash ball, and a streak of bloody brown ran from the corner of my mouth to my chin. The company had a nurse on call nearby. She took Goos to the small washroom and washed off the wound at his temple, applying gauze and a wrap that went all the way around his head. She also taped his ribs. She pronounced me much better off. My chin was bruised and there was a lump on the side of my head from the rifle barrel, but the only lasting damage was that the bottom third of one of my upper front teeth was gone, with the tooth beside it divoted by a chip. Our wrists were still bleeding, and she treated them with iodine and a sterile wrap. My trousers had dried, but not my underwear, a problem I kept to myself.
Through Goos, Walter explained that he was the deputy chief engineer and lived on the property, but more than a mile away at the motor works, where the enormous pumps operated. Because the water pressure had to remain constant, the machinery was always whining, meaning Walter could hear nothing happening outside. As a result, the mine had been dealing with persistent vandalism since reopening about a decade ago. A security guard was supposed to make rounds every night, but he had not showed up last evening. In front of us, Walter called the guard, who claimed that his wife had taken ill suddenly. Walter fired him on the spot, saying, “You work for crooks, let them pay you.”
“He is Orthodox,” Walter said, after he put down the phone, “and people here told me not to hire him, but that is not how we were in Tuzla, and how we must never become.”
Attila arrived half an hour later.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” she said, stopping in her tracks when she saw us. “You’ve gotta start drinkin in better places.”
Our first stop on the way back to the Blue Lamp was a small one-story clinic nearby, equivalent to a rural emergency center, so Goos could be x-rayed. As always, everyone seemed to know Attila, and the doctor, a young man who wore his white coat over his blue jeans, saw Goos ahead of four or five waiting patients.
It was all good news. Goos did not have a skull fracture, and he exhibited no signs of a brain bleed from his pistol-whipping. Three of his ribs were cracked, but none with a through-and-through break that would have required total bed rest for fear of puncturing his lung. A nurse at the clinic put a butterfly on Goos’s temple and retaped his ribs and sent us off.
As we were driving, Attila asked us for a full version of the story, beginning from when we left Barupra. Her initial suspicion was that the men who had kidnapped us were the remnants of one of the Serbian milicija, the civilian militias, which had it in for Goos and probably had trailed us all day. To me, that didn’t add. Our kidnappers never seemed to make any distinctions between the two of us. And they’d had plenty of opportunities to grab us before we reached Vo Selo. Things had gone to hell only after we rang Ferko’s bell.
To explain, I told Attila abo
ut our encounter with the man I referred to as ‘our major witness.’ I had gotten as far as describing the house and the dogs, when Attila smashed on the brakes. Goos cried out in the backseat as the seat belt constricted against him, and Attila pulled over at the roadside to be sure Goos was okay. She then surged toward me in the passenger’s seat.
“Fer-ko? Ferko the Jerko is your big witness?”
I looked back to Goos. He was supposed to be resting with one leg across the rear bench, but his eyes were closed and he was grimacing. I had the feeling that was about more than his ribs.
“How do you know Ferko?” I asked.
“That soup-sandwich motherfucker used to work for me. Just for one thing.”
“Doing what?”
“I told you,” said Attila. “Remember I told you how I hired Gypsies? Ferko was a driver. Until he started in stealin the trucks. The ungrateful fuckface. He’s basically gone Elvis, but I caught sight of him sneakin around Tuzla a few years ago, and he ran like he was in the Olympics. That jagbag knows better than to ever let me catch him.”
“But why does he own a big house?”
“Ferko? Ferko’s a fuckin car thief. I guess you could say I gave him his start in show business, stealing my flippin trucks. Now he steals cars all over Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, mostly on order. He can break into a car and drive it away in ten seconds.”
“Does he work for the crime gangs?” I remained focused on why he’d been able to deploy the goons who’d captured us.
Attila laughed out loud.
“Ferko sells cars mostly to the Russian mob. Everyone in Russia wants a car. Have you seen the traffic in Moscow? They still have seven families sharing an apartment, but every one of them needs a Buick. That’s how they know Putin is better than Stalin. But Ferko’s a fuckin butler to those guys. He’s small-time. He might pay off the local cops, but nobody’s takin orders from Ferko. Or kidnapping anybody for his weak ass.”
