Lie in the Dark vp-1

by Dan Fesperman

  He saw with relief that everyone seemed intact, although they had yet to speak a word. They followed Vlado into the snow, not exactly dressed for the weather. He glanced around to make sure that the children were at least wearing shoes.

  Once inside his apartment he practically had to shove them into chairs, cutting his right hand as he hastily flicked shards of shattered glass onto the floor from the cushions. He then moved to the kitchen like the anxious host of a dinner party, lighting the burner to heat water for coffee.

  “You should probably get yourselves checked out by a doctor,” Vlado shouted from the kitchen, still to no answer. “The concussions from these explosions can do more damage than you think. You can come away without a scratch and be dead an hour later from internal bleeding.”

  “The hospital,” someone finally said. It was the woman. “Can you tell us how to find it?”

  Christ, these really were newcomers if they didn’t know that. “It’s on the top of the hill over there,” Vlado motioned toward his covered window to the east. “Right across the graveyard, and on up the street from there. But I’d wait at least a half hour after the last shell.”

  He clattered on with his hospitality, wiping out a pair of dusty and long unused coffee cups, and four small tumblers for the children. He wondered what he might give them for breakfast, figuring bread would have to do. It was probably what they were accustomed to, anyway.

  Their silence resumed, and it began to unsettle him. He glanced up quickly, as if to make sure there wasn’t a roomful of zombies in his living room, propped in their chairs and going stiff with rigor mortis, and he saw to his relief that the two youngest children had dropped onto the floor, and were playing with something.

  When he saw that their toy was one of his metal soldiers, his first impulse was to ask them to put it away. But what better use could there be for them, he told himself. Play with them all you like. The parents, however, remained as silent as stones.

  “So, how long have you been in the city,” Vlado asked.

  For a moment it seemed no one would answer. Then the father moistened his lips, as if with great effort, and spoke up. “Four weeks,” he said. He’d stopped shaking and seemed to have collected himself somewhat.

  Vlado handed him a hot mug of weak coffee, and another to his wife. “The children, have they eaten?”

  “Yes, some bread,” the mother said. “We will get more this morning.”

  “What was your town?” Vlado asked. “Where did you come from?”

  They named some village Vlado had barely heard of, some dot from one of his maps about forty miles distant, in the middle of a narrow beleaguered supply corridor. They must have had quite a time of it these past few years, and getting here couldn’t have been easy, either.

  “How did you make it into the city.”

  “With another family,” the father said. “By cart. We came across Igman. Sometimes you can still get through. We were lucky. A family that left only an hour after us lost two sons along the way to snipers.”

  “I didn’t even know anyone was still trying to get in,” Vlado said. “I thought it was just people trying to get out.”

  “You can’t,” the man said. “At least, not over Igman, not if you’re a man. The soldiers in the pass will only let a family in with an able-bodied male. For more soldiers. I keep wondering when they’re going to pick me up for that. But it was the only way we got in.”

  “Oh, they’ll find you soon enough, I’d imagine. But I’d send your wife to the bread-and-water lines by herself from now on, if I were you, even if she can’t haul back as much. That’s how they get most of them.”

  Then, something seemed to dawn on the man. And he looked Vlado full in the eye as he asked, “And you. How do you stay out? I noticed you our first week here and wondered that. You’re young and strong.”

  “Strong, no. Young, debatable after two years like this. But you’re right, definitely of military age. I serve in the police, though. A detective. Investigating murders.”

  The man shook his head, assenting to the reasonableness of Vlado’s occupation with the air of one obliging a lunatic. It was hardly the first time Vlado had seen such a response.

  “Now, I guess we will have to find a new place to live,” the man said. “But it shouldn’t be hard. There are so many apartments open now, and there will always be more.”

  Vlado considered this vast, continual shuffle that had been taking place beneath his nose, an inner circle of migration.

  “I am Alijah Konjic,” the man said, as if suddenly remembering his manners. “My wife is Nela.”

  “Vlado Petric.”

  “We must leave now, I suppose. Go out to find food and another place to live. And I suppose you are right, that we should see a doctor first.”

  They all stood to go without a further word, seeming more composed now, though still reminding him somehow of shellshocked troops being deemed fit for service by doctors under pressure to supply reinforcements.

  “Come back if you need anything,” Vlado said, seeing with a pang of disappointment that the small boy had put the toy soldier back where he’d found it. “And if you need to use my place while you’re looking for a new apartment, you are welcome.”

  “Thank you, but really, I am sure it won’t be difficult. This place was the third empty one we’d seen after we arrived. There really are many to choose from.”

  “Do you need extra clothes?” Vlado asked, feeling the desperation of someone whose party has failed, ending too soon. “Or blankets? I have some spare ones.”

  “No. We are fine,” the mother said. But at least she was smiling, and for the moment that seemed like more than enough.

  “Children,” she called. “It is time to move. Please thank Mr. Petric.” And they did so, one after the other, beginning with the oldest and ending with the youngest, as if they were practiced in this routine.

  “And like I said,” Vlado added. “I will be here again tonight if you need me.” But he knew that he would likely never see them again.

  He watched them go from his open doorway, the two empty coffee cups still in his hands, and as they trooped away in a narrow line of footprints in the thin layer of snow it dawned on him that they’d been his first visitors since Damir had tipsily barged in on him all those months ago.

  Closing the door, he noticed that the room still held their smell, not an unpleasant one, just another few variations on the local mix of smoke and sweat. And as he tidied up from his small duties as a host he felt a small lift, a fullness that had long been vacant.

  He mixed his own cup of coffee, making sure to make his own just as weak as the cups he’d stirred for his guests, and as he went through the motions a thought returned to him unbidden from his final moments of sleep. His mind had been sorting, culling, searching through the previous evening’s conundrums. But now, with his first sip of coffee, the solution came to him: There would be a way to get a full copy of the transfer file, and he could get it before Murovic, or even UNESCO. And it would not have to depend on the aging memory of Milan Glavas. But it would require a satellite phone and a fax machine, on a line without a government minder or eavesdropper, and for either of those he’d have to visit the Holiday Inn.

  The phones there could be scanned, too, but the odds were far better than with any official phone, especially considering the number of journalists who called in and out at all hours of the day.

  He tried again to call Damir, but if the lines had come back on overnight, the explosion had knocked them back off in his neighborhood here. So he pulled on his boots and coat, then headed out the door.

  Far across the makeshift field of graves he saw his family of neighbors, heads bobbing, small vapors of breath rising from them as they worked their way up the hill toward the hospital.

  The Holiday Inn had become the lodging of choice for visiting journalists and international celebrities, mostly because it was the only choice. Virtually every other hotel of appreciabl
e size had been shuttered or shelled out of existence, and under current conditions no Hiltons or Hyatts would be breaking ground anytime soon. So, on most every night the Holiday Inn had a full house, despite its precarious location three hundred yards from the frontline.

  The hotel’s garish facade, the color of an egg yolk, looked out across Sniper Alley and the Miljacka River into the blind stares of Grbavica’s empty, windowless highrises, where snipers and grenade crews did a brisk business of sighting and shooting, lighting the place up at night with red streams of tracer fire, and the yellow bursts of launched grenades.

  The result was that virtually every one of the hotel’s rooms across the front, or south, side was uninhabitable. The same was true for some on the east side, with gaping shell holes in the walls.

  Vlado remembered the hotel fondly from 1984, when it was not only new but the hub of all social life associated with Sarajevo’s Winter Olympics. He’d been a single man in his early twenties, partying lustily and late at the overcrowded disco, drinking to the throb of sound and light, then wobbling home, often as not with a girl on his arm from some other part of the world, putting his good English to the best possible use, all of those studies finally paying off.

  In those few precious weeks somehow the city had functioned as never before, with miraculously working phones, television signals crisp and clear, and a tram system that sparkled and ran impeccably on schedule. With that had come a certainty that, with Tito already four years in the grave, Sarajevo was about to move forward, beyond communism and beyond Yugoslavia, into some new realm that could only be wildly better and full of opportunity The world had made its mark, and the mark would never be erased.

  Now the hotel disco was dark and closed. The restaurant up front had been moved to a safer location in a rear conference room, chilly and dim, with its own plastic windows. And the only way the world made its mark anymore was with the glare of television lights, or with the white fleets and blue helmets of the U.N. soldiers.

  But the hotel kept running, fueled by mob money and connections, as well as the grim determination of its staff to hang on to their jobs. They still managed to serve up three hot meals a day, nearly always with meat. Waiters in stained dinner jackets patrolled with desultory efficiency, quietly setting aside for themselves the unfinished bottles of wine and water so often left on the table by roaring packs of weary journalists. Each afternoon a tanker truck pulled up out back and emptied a full load of water into the hotel’s tanks, ensuring another few hours of toothbrushing, cold showers, and flushing toilets. A steady but increasingly expensive supply of gasoline powered enough generators to keep electricity running for part of every day, if erratically, and once in a great many days there was warm water. On such occasions you could almost hear the journalists’ groans of pleasure from out on the street.

  Thus, the hotel was once again the mandatory destination for any visiting elite, even if the star actors and musicians who occasionally came to town, eager to pick up their Sarajevo merit badge before flying back over the hills, were often of a low or dimming wattage. Sarajevo had become a place where you could boost a sagging career with some quick if risky publicity, not to mention the public relations points earned for “public service,” or “solidarity with the people of Bosnia.”

  This, at least, was the way Sarajevans had come to see the interlopers. They’d been eager for the attention at first, flattered even, finding a thin silver lining to their predicament. And perhaps the publicity would help. Now they knew better, and saw their flak-jacketed visitors as just that, transients who would climb upon the ruins of their misery for a few brief moments in the world spotlight, then depart once the lights were off. The only impact anyone concerned himself with anymore was the economic ripple of D-marks and Marlboros strewn in their wake.

  Vlado approached the building from behind, crossing an open courtyard. The usual lineup of hangers-on gathered near the rear entrance. Little boys stood outside the door asking for handouts. Down-at-the-heels young men chain smoked and showed off their smattering of English, hoping to pick up interpreting and guiding jobs which could pay up to one hundred marks a day, or more if you were lucky enough to latch onto a Japanese television crew.

  The talk among the rabble this morning was of a hotel employee who’d been shot in the back by a sniper. He was the attendant of the underground parking garage, lord of the small but expensive fleet of vehicles belonging to the journalists and aid workers staying at the hotel. His job was to make sure none was stolen, siphoned, or vandalized, keeping them locked behind a chain-link entrance throughout the night. Most were armored, but not all, as he’d discovered this morning while moving one behind the hotel to ready it for one of the reporters. A bullet had come in through the rear window, passing through the driver’s seat before striking him in the left kidney. A few moments ago he’d been hauled off to the hospital, his shirt and pants soaked in red. The journalist himself was now out back inspecting the vehicle in the lee of the building, flak vest open in front as he peered inside, frowning at the bloodied seat. He then walked to the back, fingering the bullet hole in apparent fascination. Because he worked for one of the wilder London tabloids, perhaps he was already contemplating how a cheap bit of first-person melodrama might be salvaged from the morning’s damage: “It was a bullet with my name on it, but this time someone else took the hit.” Yes, that would do nicely. He’d work on it.

  Vlado opened the door to see a guard inside a glass booth, where a droning TV was showing a subtitled American movie on Bosnian television. With the power out as usual across the rest of the city, this was one of the few places you could actually watch the broadcasts of the local network.

  The guard stopped him with a stern grunt. Locals were not readily admitted here, especially when they arrived unsolicited to bother the paying customers. Vlado flashed his I.D. and the guard waved him along with another grunt.

  Walking into the hotel’s mall-like plaza was like stepping onto the floor of a deep canyon at dusk, dim and chilly, with a hollow echo from every step. Looking up toward the broken skylights eight stories higher one wouldn’t have been surprised to see stalactites dripping from the ceiling. Word had it that a French radio journalist had spent his spare hours here sharpening his mountaineering skills by rappelling down the inner walls.

  The front desk was surrounded by a jerry-rigged frame of wood and plastic to hold in the warmth from a small space heater. The clerk was mistrustful until Vlado showed his card. He asked for Toby Perkins and was directed to room 434.

  He trudged up a darkened stairwell to the fourth floor, then groped along a hallway until he could just make out the numbers on the doors. He knocked.

  A voice answered from inside: “Nigel? Come on in.”

  Vlado opened the door to see Toby Perkins, the same pink and well-fed face from the other day, seated at the end of an unmade bed, flipping through a small notebook.

  “Well, then, our intrepid detective is it?”

  “Inspector Petric, yes. I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “Not at all. A pleasant surprise, in fact. Given that interview a second thought, perhaps? Or maybe my little lecture on social responsibility hit home. No, not that for sure, I suppose. Either way, I was expecting my photographer but you’ll do much better. Delivering me a hot tip no doubt.”

  There was that cherub’s grin again, a face right out of a jolly evening down at the pub. Vlado hesitated at the door.

  “Please, please, come in,” Toby said. “Sit down and tell me what I can do for you. No more coffee, though, I’m afraid.”

  The implicit rebuke stung, and Vlado supposed he’d deserved it. But never mind.

  “It’s a favor I need, actually. Access to a satellite phone, if you have one,” and Vlado had already seen that he did. It sat on a chair by the window, its antenna opened like a white umbrella next to the window, which even here was a sheet of plastic.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Toby said. “’Was
just getting ready to pack it up and maybe head for the airport a day earlier than planned. Getting so slow here lately. My rag was sending someone else in in another week and we figured we could let the place go uncovered for a while. Then ten minutes ago my desk calls and my bloody editor says he wants me here for the interim. Says he thinks things are due to heat up again soon. Calls it his instinct, but that’s editors for you. Always seem to know exactly what you don’t want to hear. Anyhow, no problem with the phone. Come on in and I’ll get it on the uplink for you.”

  Vlado dug the phone number out of his bag.

  “So then,” Toby continued, “where are you calling, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Vlado hesitated, then figured Toby probably would know by the country code anyway. No sense in trying to keep it a secret.

  “Belgrade.”

  “Well, then.” Toby’s smile melted into a look of curiosity. “Not too many Bosnian government employees are in the market for calls to Belgrade these days, I’d imagine. Family?”

  “A friend.”

  “Yes, well, as long as I’m not participating in anything illegal.” He said it laughing, a knowing twinkle in his eyes. “I can just punch up the numbers to get you up on the satellite, and you can hit the rest. Country code for Yugo is three-eight-one now, in case you didn’t know. Belgrade is still one-one.”

  Vlado was about to ask meekly for privacy when Toby said, “And I’ll wait outside, of course, as much as it might be tempting to eavesdrop on a policeman’s call to the enemy capital. Besides, even if I could overhear you I don’t speak the language, and my interpreter’s been out all morning drinking coffee.”

  “One other request before you go, if it’s all right.”

  “Sure.”

  “I see you also have a fax machine. If my friend here has something to send me, what number would he use?”

  “Well, this is getting interesting, isn’t it. Tell me, is this something you might be able to talk to me about? When it’s all over, of course. And I’m assuming now this must have something to do with your work, at least peripherally.”