Lie in the Dark vp-1

by Dan Fesperman

  “You find our hatreds unconvincing, I take it? Perhaps poor old Marx was right, after all, even if he’s no longer in fashion. In the West, it’s always about money.”

  “Because it is always about money, or power, or whatever form of wealth you want to name,” Toby said. “And that’s true in the East as well. Why do you think the Serbs grabbed half your country right out of the gate? Not so they could lord it over you lovely people, I can tell you that. It was an economic land grab, plain and simple, dressed up as an ethnic holy crusade. ‘Save our Serbian brothers. Oh, but while you’re at it, take that factory over there, won’t you?’ I’m not saying there’s any shortage of genuine hatred up in those hills. There are enough zealots to keep these armies burning for years. But look at the support systems and the lines of supply. All the bit players that prop it up. Who needs morale when you’ve got a nice flow of hard currency to keep the officers happy? Take that away and who knows, maybe the whole thing begins to rot from the inside out. Maybe the hatred isn’t enough anymore. Maybe you even end up with a ceasefire that lasts long enough for something more than allowing the next shipment of tobacco and liquor to come across the lines. With fifty percent of the proceeds going to the local constabulary, of course.”

  “I think you are oversimplifying a complex situation.”

  “Yes, well that’s what I’m paid for, isn’t it. Take all the nice blurry grays and turn them into black and white for the public to digest before moving on to the horoscopes and the latest from the Royals. But before you dismiss me as just another hack, which is exactly what I am, by the way, let me tell you a little story I picked up down the road in your city of Mostar-then we’ll see what you think.”

  The last thing Vlado wanted from this blustering little man was an object lesson, but he’d paid for at least that much with the pound of coffee, so Vlado let him ramble on.

  “You know the situation in Mostar, right?” Toby said, his face more flushed by the minute. “Even worse than here, in a way. Croats and Muslims fighting each other tooth and nail down in the streets, shooting at each other from across the river, while the Serbs sit on the mountains to the east and lob shells on the both of them. Like a bored old housewife pouring boiling water onto a couple of fighting alley cats.

  “Well, a few weeks ago the local Muslim commander’s doing his usual bit for the home side when he starts running low on artillery shells. So he gets on the radio and calls his mate on the next hill to ask for more. ‘Sorry, lads, we’re running low ourselves. Can’t spare you a single shot. Arms embargo and all that, you know.’

  “So who should pipe up on the same frequency, because everybody’s using the same old Yugoslav army radios anyway, but our Serb friend up on the mountain. We’ll call him Slobo.

  “‘If it’s shells you need, we’ve got all you’d ever want,’ General Slobo says. ”‘And at popular prices.’

  “ ‘Great,’ General Mohamad says. ‘But what about delivery? The Croats are between you and us.’

  “‘No problem,’ Slobo says. ‘My Croat friend, Commander Tomislav, can bring them right to your doorstep for a small commission, say, twenty-five percent of the ordnance.’ So they haggle for a while over price, set a time and place for delivery. Then they chat up the U.N. to arrange a temporary ‘ceasefire’ to allow for shipments of ‘humanitarian aid,’ and the whole thing goes off without a hitch. The U.N. people spend a whole day patting themselves on the back, then can’t understand why things go sour as soon as the last truck leaves. So there you go: enemy number-one arms enemy number-two with the help of enemy number-three, while greasing the palms of God knows how many generals, staff officers, subordinates and checkpoint trolls along the way. And all you people down here want to talk about is hatred, intolerance, and ‘woe is me.’ When the topic’s corruption, everyone clams up.”

  Vlado had no answer for him. Nor did he doubt that Toby’s little story had been true. He’d heard much of the same sort of thing around here. So he decided to just sit. Toby would be bored soon enough.

  Indeed he was. Sighing, he pulled a business card from his bag.

  “If you should ever happen to change your mind, here’s my card. You can reach me at room four thirty-four of the Holiday Inn. You know the place, the big yellow dump on the front line with all the shell holes. But it’s the only room in town. Who knows, if you decide a week from now to talk, I might even be able to scrounge you a sack of sugar. A little palm greasing for the good guys for a change.”

  And it was that parting message, Vlado supposed, that had left him with the bitter aftertaste, a hint of shame that had played at the edge of his thoughts for the rest of the day, like the vivid last image from a waking dream.

  But coffee was coffee, and he savored another sip, cradling the cup in both hands for warmth as he gazed toward the soccer field. What was so embarrassing about a little ingenuity, he told himself. He sipped the gritty remains and glanced back outside. The gravediggers were waist-deep. He had perhaps another half hour before the snipers would be stirring, although he had a feeling it would be another slow day.

  Some mornings he killed the extra time time by working on his growing army of model soldiers. They lay before him on a small workbench he’d set up in the kitchen, row upon row of dash and color. It was a hobby he’d taken up years ago, partly out of his bookish fascination with military history, only to immediately find it tedious, a headache of minor details. And when impatience turned his work sloppy he’d given it up, packing away dozens of unpainted lead men that he’d bought in an industrious burst of optimism.

  Then the war came. His wife and daughter evacuated the city after the first two months of fighting, leaving in a dusty convoy of school buses on a warm May morning. Women, children and old men waved from every window to a forlorn audience of young and middle-aged men, forced by the army to stay behind. Other families spilled from the sides of stuffed panel trucks, their colorful scarves flapping in the breeze that dried their tears.

  That evening Vlado climbed to the roof of their four-story apartment block, hauling himself up the fire ladder along with a small folding chair and a bottle of plum brandy. He sat down to watch the nightly bombardment as if it were a summer storm rolling in from the mountains. Distant artillery flashes played against the clouds with the red streams of tracer bullets, and he found himself gauging the range of each impact by counting the seconds before the blast, just as he’d done with his daughter to calm her fear of thunder. For a moment he recalled the fatherly comfort of having the weight of a child in one’s lap, resting your chin on the top of the small head, the hair smelling of sunlight, playground sand, and baby shampoo.

  He held the brandy bottle, sipping every few minutes, feeling the fire of each swallow ramble down his throat, the level dropping past the halfway mark as the bombardment groped its way around the city.

  He was an attentive spectator. Over there was a blast, just by the hospital, yellow and deep, the sound reaching into his stomach. To the southwest, a few spiraling streamers whistled through the sky like crazed birds, headed toward the presidential building. Most everything else was happening off toward the highrise suburbs to the west, or in the hills to the north. Tomorrow there would be more to watch. And the day after that. He could spend the entire war up here.

  Then a shell screamed nearby with a sudden moan, and landed with a heaving blast. The compression knocked him from the chair, and as he lay sprawled on his back he listened to glass showering from the windows of the building next door. He lay still for a moment, accounting for himself, attentive for pain, for the ooze and gush of blood. Feeling none, he stood. His face was covered with dust. He still clutched the neck of the brandy bottle in his right hand, but the rest had been shattered by a chunk of shrapnel. He looked shakily across the city, seeing not a soul and hearing nothing but a slight ringing in his ears. Then he turned and descended the ladder as fast as his trembling legs would allow.

  The next morning he’d moved into the living room,
closing the doors of the two bedrooms and folding open the sofa bed. Then he opened his old footlocker to retrieve his lost battalions of lead men along with the tiny bottles of paint and the thin, delicate brushes. He’d set up a workbench at the end of the small kitchen and welcomed tedium back into his home. That action, he now realized, had begun the slow and careful tending of his own weak flame, a means of nurturing it through the dead hours of winter darkness. By brushing on the gold edge of a tiny belt buckle, or the silver of a saber blade, the yellow of a helmet’s plume, he moved through the hours and left them in his wake.

  Six days after the rooftop explosion, he’d received word from the Red Cross that his wife and daughter had arrived in Berlin. They were living in an east-side highrise apartment with two other sets of mothers and children from Bosnia. From then on he was linked to them only by the mail that arrived fitfully, when at all, and by a once-a-month phone call that he made with the help of ham radio operators at Sarajevo’s Jewish Community Center, one of the few lines of communication to the outside world not controlled by either the government or the international news media.

  Now, deep into his second winter alone, most nights found him submerged in a haze of paint fumes and cigarette smoke, squinting in the dim glow of a thin flame of natural gas. The work was slowly blinding him, but it kept him off the roof and away from the bottle.

  Vlado’s interests ran to the armies of the Napoleonic Age. He could tell you the trajectory and range of each painted fieldpiece in his model arsenal, or the fighting capabilities of nearly any unit of the era, whether Prussian, Russian or French.

  It had occurred to him that perhaps he should think of the hobby as inappropriate now, an exercise in poor taste. He’d never had any illusions about what model soldiers represented. Nor did he doubt that fascination with guns and uniforms had some role in sustaining the war. He’d heard too many tales about refugee boys from country villages, new to the trenches, who were eager to settle old scores the moment they felt the power of a Kalashnikov in their hands.

  But just as the men in the hills were no soldiers-an armed mob at best, he told himself-these leaden figures had about as much to do with real war as the drawings in his history books, with their bright arrows colliding mutely on clean, colorful maps.

  A week ago he’d lined up twenty Austrian dragoons to spray with a coat of primer, having glued on their heads a few minutes earlier. He should have waited longer for the glue to set, but he’d been in a hurry. The blast of the spray blew off every head, as if by a tiny firing squad. It was a morning’s labor gone to waste, but he’d laughed in spite of himself and hustled out the door. Later he’d started to tell some friends about it, then stopped. And when he returned home that night he hadn’t been able to face them, the men of his toppled platoon, decapitated on his workbench, heads scattered on the floor like shotgun pellets.

  This morning he’d waited until too late to get started, but his soldiers would hold until the evening. Their chances of going somewhere were about as good as his. He shrugged on his overcoat and headed out the door.

  His office was down by the Miljacka River, just across a bridge on the far bank, and only a few hundred yards from the frontline. At one time the police headquarters had been located in the Interior Ministry building in the center of downtown. But early in the war the ministry had formed a new special police force, which promptly booted Vlado’s unit out of the building and proceeded to take over nearly every important investigation in town.

  Vlado had watched alternately astonished and dismayed as Interior’s special police force violently rooted out the gangland core of the black market while cannily backing away whenever it scented official involvement. As Toby had suggested, it was an open secret that some people in high places with profitable connections would just as soon see the war continue in its slow, plodding march, holding their markets captive a while longer. Yet this open knowledge was of the vaguest sort, names obscured.

  Vlado chafed at this implicit demotion, knowing that the secret portals he sought had eased further beyond sight. But his superiors submitted quietly, and his department moved across the river to a newer building in a chockablock section of homes and businesses tucked within a few blocks of the Serb lines. Most of the far bank of the river, in fact, belonged to the Serbs, spreading uphill through the homes and churchyards of Grbavica to the forested rim of the mountaintops, up where the big guns sat.

  The main buffer between the police station and the nearest Serb positions was a French U.N. garrison posted a block down river at Skenderia, next to the old speedskating rink from the ’84 Olympics. A faded mural of the Olympic mascot, a grinning fox, leered down from a high brick wall, his smile was pocked and dented by mortar rounds.

  The new police building was a squat ugly affair of concrete and brown glass. During Yugoslavia’s heyday it had housed a Communist Party youth center. Now about a fourth of the windows were either cracked or blown out, replaced by plywood and sheets of U.N. plastic held down by U.N. tape.

  Government buildings were among the few in town with reliable electricity. Three large gasoline-powered generators kept just enough juice flowing to light and refrigerate the crime lab, such as it was. After that there was enough power for a few fluorescent tubes and a scattering of overworked space heaters that glowed like toasters. Every morning lately they were draped with soggy hats and socks. The smell alone was enough to make you want to come in late.

  Vlado’s walk took nearly half an hour, looping gradually downhill toward the river. When he left his house it began to snow, and by the time he reached the office the snow had turned to rain. It had been a mild winter, not even freezing the ground enough to trouble the gravediggers. Gray slush pooled in shell dimples and on the collapsed roofs of abandoned cars.

  By the time Vlado arrived, Damir Begovic was ensconced at the next desk over. He was the city’s only other homicide investigator. Before the war there had been a third, Dejan Vasic, a Serb. He was Vlado’s friend, a companion for card games and family dinners. Their infant children had played together on weekends, clutching at each other’s hair and drooling on each other’s toys. They’d once lugged their families out to the Adriatic for a beach holiday, then celebrated their return by building a swing set together. Someday, they said, they’d build their children a treehouse up in a nice spot in the hills, a pretty one with a rope ladder, well hidden from hikers and older kids, but close enough to a good picnic spot to bring their whole families up.

  A week or so before the war began, Dejan left town without a word, taking only his family and the service revolver from his desk. Vlado heard later they’d hoped to make it over the hills to Belgrade, but he wondered. Perhaps Dejan was still in the city, farther up the opposite hill, or only a few blocks away, writing murder reports in Grbavica, or in the northwest suburb of Ilizda. Maybe he was in the army, squibbing mortar rounds into the city center. Or he could be dead and rotting in a trench. Perhaps he’d made it to Vienna, or Berlin. Who could say?

  Almost everyone still in Sarajevo knew someone like that, usually a Serb, someone who’d vanished without warning on the eve of the fighting, as if privy to a vision of what the city would become.

  That left only Damir, likable enough but seven years younger and, even in wartime, still elbowing happily through a smoky world of cafes and loud music. He was a bit of a rake, really, in his never-ending pursuit of new women, yet forgivable if only for the childlike joy he took in his pleasures. When Damir had seen Vlado’s soldiers he’d gushed like a schoolboy, an exuberant grin spreading across his broad, flat face. He’d hinted impishly that Vlado might even spare him a few, not realizing that Vlado would no sooner divide a unit than an antiques collector would break up a set of chairs. It had been a disastrous evening anyway, with Damir barging into the apartment with a woman in each hand and a bottle in each pocket of his overcoat, arriving to “cheer up” Vlado with a party. It had taken two hours to usher them out the door, giggling and swaying in a noxious
cloud of brandy.

  But he was easy enough to work with in his occasionally overbearing way. Early in the war they’d agreed that each detective would take every other homicide, an arrangement originally intended to keep either from hogging the work back when they wanted to stay as busy as possible. Now Damir seemed bored with death in all its guises, and their routine was all that kept him from slipping into permanent idleness on the job.

  This day, like the last several, turned out to be another slow one, with nothing to do but read, gossip, and smoke. To make matters worse, Damir was far from his usual cheery self, sullen and grumbling through every hour. So it was something of relief when the phone finally rang in late afternoon.

  Damir took the call, listened for a while, scribbled something, mumbled a phrase or two, then hung up and turned to Vlado.

  “It seems that a gypsy woman with a grudge and a baby has just hammered her drunken husband to death during his afternoon nap. Her neighbor says the gypsy’s ready to confess. I told her we’d have a street officer haul her in. In the meantime, here’s where you’ll find the dear departed.” He held out a scribbled address. “All yours.”

  “All mine? You took the call.” Vlado was eager for work, but this hardly sounded like the sort of case he’d had in mind.

  “I got the last one, remember? Last Wednesday? Card players arguing politics with guns. One dead, one drunk, one arrested. Your turn.”

  Vlado frowned and picked up his coat. An hour later and he’d have been out the door, headed for another dinner of beans and rice and a quiet night painting his dragoons and hussars. He mumbled something about the stupidity of taking turns, then cursed the foolhardiness of answering telephones after 3 p.m. He grabbed the address and stalked away.