From the other side of the wall facing Vlado there was suddenly a wild thrashing, a long, high squeal, then the clatter and drumming of hooves before the squeal abruptly turned ragged and guttural, drowning on itself. Gradually it subsided, followed by the noise of a bulky load being heaved upon the floor. Then the muffled scrape and glide of blades easing beneath fur and flesh, or so it sounded to Vlado.
“An unplanned but worthy object lesson,” the voice behind Vlado said. “Perhaps you will keep it in mind throughout our little chat. I am told that you wished to meet me.” The voice took on a trace of amusement. “That you might even be eager to ask me a few questions.”
Vlado said nothing.
“Well, do you or don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“The questions you can forget. All of them. Because I’ll tell you the only answer you need to hear. Especially if you’ve come to ask about Esmir Vitas. And when I’m finished, your path up the chain of command will be at an end as well, unless you wish to feel more of this,” he shoved the gun barrel a little deeper into Vlado’s neck, “only with more of a bite next time.”
Vlado keenly felt his frailness, his recent loss of weight, as if his spine might bend and break with an ounce more of pressure.
“Vitas was scum, do you understand me? A self-righteous little prick who fancied himself a competitor. But he was unworthy competition. So, ultimately, a far worthier competitor killed him. Not me, you understand. Not that I couldn’t have managed it, if I’d wanted. Which should tell you how much help you’ll get from your ministry if you choose to pursue the question of my indentity or my whereabouts any further beyond this meeting. Understood?”
He again pressed forward with the barrel of the gun. Vlado wet his lips to speak, but he was too slow.
“So you understand the way things will work from now on, yes?”
“Yes.”
Let’s get this over with, he thought. These people had long ago stopped being amusing. Hrnic could have his damn meat back as well. Just deliver him from this stench, this pressure at the base of his neck.
“Then you will be moving on now, with your eyes closed and your hands behind your head until you are out of this building. And if anyone in this room ever sees you on this street again, they will kill you on the spot, then flay you to pieces for the rats. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Very well.”
The pressure of the gun barrel eased, and Vlado felt his entire body relax. He made a tentative motion to stand, but a strong hand fell immediately upon his right shoulder. The gun barrel shoved back into place, and the voice spoke again.
“Don’t be in such a hurry. First you must enjoy a few moments of our hospitality. With our business concluded we can talk as men, as keepers of our families, as fellow patriots. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“We must talk of our wives. Yours, for instance. Jasmina, she is called?”
Vlado didn’t like where this was headed, hinting at resources and connections stretching to God-knows-where.
“She is, I understand, working as a clerk for an architect in Berlin, yes? Some kind of designer. And if I am not mistaken, she is technically an illegal employee, working without the benefit of the proper papers from the German government, which I suppose is all right as long as the authorities don’t find out.”
It was all true. Vlado had gone looking for a secret portal, but now felt instead as if he had tumbled through a trap door, into a pit where all those goats lay below, gutted and sticky with their own fluids, black with flies. What was it Kasic had said? There would be no turning back. Vlado had been glad at the time, excited. It seemed scant comfort now.
The voice continued: “Which reminds me, we should let you go soon or you’ll be late for this month’s phone call. Imagine the unnecessary worry if you failed to call. What would your little daughter think? Sonja, is it?”
Vlado struggled to answer, managing only a dry crackle, barely audible over the static of the Motorola: “Yes. Sonja.”
“A lovely name. So go and make your call. And keep your eyes closed, please, all the way down the stairs, provided those weak legs of yours can still carry you. Eat your meat when you’re home. It will make you stronger. See how even we are doing our part to keep our policemen healthy? Even your friend Mr. Hrnic is a patriot? You do see that now, don’t you Mr. Petric?”
“ Yes.”
“Good. Off with you, then.”
The gun barrel raised him upward like a hook, and Vlado clenched his eyes shut, seeing an apartment in Germany with his wife and daughter, with their circle of friends, other Bosnian refugees mostly, some who they knew, some they didn’t. He began to see how, even here, the influence of a few unsavory people could extend not only across a line of battle but a border. These were not people he cared to know any better. Not for the moment, anyway.
CHAPTER 7
It was at least three blocks before he was fully aware of his surroundings. Hrnic had gone, presumably back to the market, off without a further word to tend his business. Vlado was practically stumbling on the cobbles, making his way down the hill, somehow headed in the right direction toward the bridge that would take him toward the Jewish Community Center.
What he needed most right now was a drink, a jolt of something to stop the wild gyrations of his imagination. He’d heard stories about being shaken down like that, of course. Heard the ways they found out information and used it against you. The techniques had always sounded cheap and easy, like card tricks, easy to master, no more difficult than the way the gypsies told your fortune after peeking into your wallet. But it had worked its unsettling magic on him nonetheless. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself that the threats were empty, that the show of force had been illusory, he couldn’t escape the sensation that the stakes of the investigation had suddenly been raised. The trouble was, he had no idea who had raised them, or who would decide if he had run afoul of these new, uncertain rules, by crossing some unseen boundary in the dark.
Whatever the case, the encounter hadn’t lasted nearly as long as Vlado had assumed. He found that he still had a few minutes to spare in making his appointment for the monthly call to Jasmina, although right now that seemed a mixed blessing. As much as he always looked forward to speaking to her, their conversations were invariably full of difficult moments, either from the pain of separation or the distance which seemed greater with every call. And now, when he most needed someone to confide in, to tell of his fears and his dread, he would instead have to keep every hint of fear out of his voice. Everyone who made these calls knew that the line was anything but secure. For all Vlado knew, his tormenters had gotten every bit of their information from his earlier calls. Ham radio calls from any part of town were likely intercepted by the army on both sides, listened to by soldiers in headsets.
Vlado made the calls from the Jewish Community Center, at the old synagogue a few blocks away from police headquarters on the far side of the river. It had become a nerve center of sorts during the siege. Not only was it one of the strongest remaining links to the outside world, it was the only one not directly controlled by the government.
The center’s long-distance telephone service was a work of ingenuity. All lines leading out of the city had long since been cut, so a ham radio operator made the connection to the phone network in Zagreb, the capital city of neighboring Croatia, which then patched through calls to anywhere except Serbia or other parts of Bosnia. Serbia was taboo because it was still Croatia’s enemy. Bosnia was off limits simply because too many phone lines had been cut. You could call clear around the globe, but you couldn’t phone a few miles up the road to a town like Kiseljak or Pale.
Even if there was eavesdropping by the army, the people working in the radio room also couldn’t help but hear your call as they kept the connection open. Nor did you have much privacy from the others standing with you in line.
Unless the shelling was heavy, there was always
a large daytime crowd at the center. On the first floor you could get a hot lunch of the standard beans, macaroni, rice, and bread. If you were bored you could find a card game, or chess, and there was a welcoming wave of heat from woodstoves and the rub and shuffle of people crowded around small tables.
The center also ran a mail service, sending and receiving by the truckload via the aid convoys that arrived at erratic intervals from the port city of Split on the Adriatic, a ten-hour journey across rough mountain roads that had been carved out of goat paths by British engineers for the U.N. The convoys were often delayed for weeks at a time, either by fighting or by paperwork at the Serb checkpoints at the entrances to the city.
The center also arranged some of the few evacuation convoys that still got out of the city every few months, always crammed full with women, children, and old folks. For men of fighting age, or those who held some technical skill deemed indispensable by the government, the only way out was up over the hills on your own, which required passage through two lines of opposing armies.
Vlado’s wife, Jasmina, and his daughter, Sonja, had left in one of the first of these convoys. They had survived shell and shot on the grinding ride out, eventually making their way from Croatia to Germany, well before the Germans decided they’d had enough and clamped down on their refugee and asylum laws.
As the man at the slaughterhouse had known all too well, Jasmina was now working for an architect, although not legally, earning wages and benefits far below the German standard. She and Sonja lived in a crumbling highrise. An old police friend of Vlado’s had arranged both the apartment and the job. He was an East German cop who’d survived the background checks after reunification to keep his job, though he was still stuck with his clunky Soviet-made Lada patrol car while his western colleagues worked in VW vans.
Vlado had met him on a trip to Berlin less than a year before the war, during a special training course. Imamovic had bent the rules and the budget to make sure Vlado got to attend, because it was a seminar on handling evidence and searching crime scenes, lessons he’d botched completely the other night as he stumbled around Vitas’s body in the dark.
Vlado’s memories from the trip were all he had to go on as he tried to imagine Jasmina’s new life. Berlin had been in turmoil then, only a few weeks before reunification. Mostly he recalled the women, so tall, almost spectral, and invariably in black clothes, as coldly grim as winter itself with their severe haircuts, heavy boots, and unsmiling faces. He recalled his rides on the S-Bahn, jostling commuter trains with doors that slid shut with a slam, legions of somber people shuffling on and off at every stop, ignoring the graffiti in their orderly but disheveled surroundings, angry messages in spray paint which demanded, AUS-LANDER RAUS! Foreigners Out.
His walk to the Jewish Center took only a few minutes, and by the time he arrived he’d mostly calmed himself. The less said about the encounter, the better. He wondered how much he should tell Damir. Perhaps he’d had a similar experience.
There was a crowd in front of the center, faces raised to scan a long list of names of people whose mail had arrived. He elbowed through and headed upstairs to the radio room.
Vlado’s monthly phone call was invariably slotted between the same two people-a lovesick young soldier in a ponytail who phoned his girlfriend in Vienna, and a stooped old woman phoning her grandson in Hungary. He always drove up from Belgrade to take her call, crossing the Serbian border into Hungary long enough for their brief chat plus an extended shopping trip for whiskey, gasoline, and cigarettes, which he could resell in Belgrade.
Vlado had come to know the faces of the other regulars, and they usually nodded and chatted while waiting in the hallway, but always without giving up too much of themselves, figuring that they already revealed enough in their phone conversations. Today it seemed especially comforting to see everyone in their places as usual, as if nothing had changed from the last time around.
Vlado had begun to daydream abundantly about Jasmina only a week after she left, and he soon found himself far more mindful of her than when they’d been together, preoccupied with the daily duties of keeping a home and raising a child. Suddenly cut off from those routines and left to face a war on his own, he pictured her often. In idle moments when he least expected it an image of her would stand before him, her long slender legs in black hose, disappearing up into a skirt. The moments crept up on him with a slow building tightness in his chest, and at night he would dream of them astride each other in frantic energy and motion, her face locked in a grimace of pleasure. Always in the aftermath, laying awake on the bed, he would imagine he could hear the slow, measured breathing of their daughter coming from across the hall, asleep in her crib, curled like a fetus beneath a soft yellow blanket.
The lovemaking in these dreams became far more passionate and frequent than it had been during their last year together, and he realized that this was how it should have been before. It had taken the first few weeks of separation to rediscover her as lover, as something more than the wife and mother she’d become. But as the weeks turned into months the dreams faltered, grew fuzzy at the edges. Often as not the face before him on the bed was now borrowed from some woman he’d passed in the street that day, one of the improbably well-groomed women you saw everywhere in the city, in their crisply ironed skirts and dark lipstick, every hair in place.
Two months ago Vlado had clumsily tried to break the cycle by buying a prostitute one night after work. He’d made sure he was the last to leave the office, then walked two blocks to the sandbagged alley outside the side entrance to the French garrison. In the glow of a U.N. security lamp he’d evaluated the prospects-three women standing limp and slack in oversized coats. Two had angled a leg forward, showing long legs in nylons and no hint of where any skirt might begin. The third had tried to smile. Then, belatedly noticing her colleagues, she, too, had slipped a thigh forward from beneath her overcoat.
Vlado had chosen her, as much for her lack of professional polish as anything else. Ever the bad bargainer, he quickly settled on a price of six packs of Marlboros, to be paid from a carton he’d received the week before from a U.N. official. He then took her back to his building and up the stairs to the office, hoping no one had by chance returned.
The place was still empty, and when he flicked the light switch he was relieved to find that the generators were still going. He locked the office door from the inside, then steered her gingerly by the elbow toward a couch along the wall in the office’s small waiting area. Neither of them had yet spoken or touched since they’d agreed on the price.
It occurred to him this was probably one of the better locales she’d worked lately. Both the French and the Egyptian soldiers on this side of town preferred to arrange their cut-rate trysts in the back of an armored personnel carrier, their buddies looming out the hatches and doors, chatting and smoking, maybe making a joke or two, and for a moment Vlado thought of her stooped beneath the low armored ceiling, the space musty with old sweat and the smell of metal; sucking off some strange man from a faraway place, then spitting discreetly while he zipped his fatigues and she silently calculated what she might be able to buy with her new packs of cigarettes.
She began to undress, and Vlado followed her lead, both of them fumbling with buttons and zippers, the chill of the room creeping onto them, raising goose bumps. He looked at the pale skin of her face in the blueness of the fluorescent light, and flashed for a moment on what sort of life she must have lived before the war, for it was obvious from her discomfort this hadn’t been her profession for long. He pictured her, neat and efficient in nylons and a sensible dress, arriving at an office much like this one, removing the same wool overcoat, then sitting before a typewriter, or opening a file drawer, or perhaps lifting the phone receiver to speak crisply to a subordinate on another floor, illuminated all the while by the same pale, fluorescent glow.
She turned toward him, her face blank, lips shut primly, still unbuttoning and unsnapping.
�
��Please,” he said in a quiet voice. “Stop.”
She looked at him, her expression a mixture of relief and worry. Af ter all, she needed those cigarettes.
“Here,” he said hastily. “Take them.” He handed over not only the six packs agreed upon but the entire carton. “Take them and go before I change my mind.”
She quickly pulled up her skirt and buttoned her blouse, not fumbling at all now, then strolled briskly away, heels clicking toward the stairs as she rebuttoned her overcoat, leaving Vlado to sink back onto the couch, the vision of Jasmina appearing for a moment, then fading, once again indistinct.
His connection to his daughter Sonja had become even more remote. She had been eleven months old when she left, a loyal girl who clung to her father whenever possible, pulling herself to her feet by holding his hand, and crawling rapidly after him each morning as he walked to the bathroom to shave. Now she was two years and eight months. She’d nearly tripled in age since he’d last seen her. She’d learned to walk, talk and count to five.
She chattered now in a blend of German and Serbo-Croatian, and even her voice seemed different the few times he could hear it in the background of his telephone calls to Berlin. Although more often lately he didn’t hear her at all.
Early on she had come to the phone whenever he called, too shy to make any sound but a giggle, but eager to listen and reluctant to give up the receiver without a piteous wail of indignation. But he’d quickly faded for her, and now she couldn’t be dragged close to the phone.
“I don’t want to,” he’d heard her say, or simply a stern “Nein!” her obstinance crackling through the static from hundreds of miles away. Usually now he didn’t bother to ask, although today he felt a special urgency to hear her voice again, to hear the soft, steady breathing across the miles.
A set of photographs had arrived in a recent pack of convoy mail, postmarked October, 1993-three months late of course, after the long delay of checkpoints and permissions. They’d depicted a robust young stranger, smiling and confident, dressed in a bright warm snowsuit and standing on the raked sand of a Berlin playground. In the background were sturdy wooden swingsets, a fleet of strollers, and other children and their mothers, relaxing on a sunny day without worry.
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