“And then, after spending a few weeks in jail you were pardoned. Into the army, in recognition of your, how did they put it? …”
“My invaluable service to my country,” Neven said, smiling for the first time, teeth crooked, a carnivorous smile stained deeply with nicotine. His breath was of onions and fried meat, vapors heavy with grease. Vlado pictured slabs of lamb frying over a cookstove down in the hole of some smoky bunker. His stomach growled as Neven leaned over to stub out a cigarette on the table.
“And that is how I would like to keep my relationship with my country right now,” Neven continued. “Steady and warm. And I’m not sure I can do that by talking to you about any of this. Maybe all I will do is make them decide that I should have stayed in prison after all.”
“Or maybe they’ll decide someone else should be in prison instead.”
“Who?”
“Whoever it is that makes it necessary for you to stay up here surrounded by men with Kalashnikovs, living like this. When you’re more comfortable near the Chetnik army than near your own government I’d say you have some enemies you need to take care of, but can’t. Maybe some of them are involved with all of this, with this art business. It must have been making more money than anything else Zarko was associated with.”
Neven, who had been affecting something of a bored attitude up to now, looked straight into Vlado’s face, his eyes burning with an intense, scornful arrogance. “Let me tell you how it works up here, Mr. Detective, and don’t tell me your name again because I don’t want to know it, much less remember it. Here I have my own men and the army leaves me alone. They hate the Interior Ministry even more than I do. The only people they hate worse are the military police. Any of these rivalries can get you killed, or, if you know how to use them, they can keep you alive, even make you rich.”
“The word on the streets, in fact, is that you did get killed.”
“Yes. In the Jewish cemetery. It was a helpful story. Even if some people knew it was untrue they decided that it let them off the hook. If people in the city thought I was dead then it was no longer necessary to try to bring me to justice, now or later. And I was in some of those damn fool attacks at the Jewish cemetery, too, early on. That’s what convinced me I had to get together my own men and get out of there, even if it meant coming some place like this. So I convinced some soldiers to join with me, in the customary way.”
“You bought them.”
“Of course.”
“And didn’t some officers in the regular army have their own ideas about that?”
“They had their ideas, but I had the D-marks, or at least I was willing to spend mine. Why should they waste money trying to outbid me when they could make their own profits on the arrangement?”
“You paid them, too, you mean.”
“At officers’ rates, of course. All for the privilege of my own comfortable billet here on Zuc. Remote enough to keep away the prying eyes of the generals, and an important enough part of the line to make myself necessary. One thing I have always been is a good fighter. They know that, and their lines are so thin in places that they’re glad to have me.”
The coffee arrived on a small copper tray. The aide poured the thick Turkish brew from an hourglass-shaped pot. Vlado sipped it, and was surprised to find it was even flavored with cardamom, all but impossible to find in the city these days.
“What’s to keep you from bolting to the other side. Plenty of others do it.” Indeed, it happened every week, sometimes in units of twenty or more men.
“Let’s just say there are even more people on that side for me to fear than over here. They still aren’t very happy about what happened two years ago. We made a lot of JNA officers look very bad by holding off their tanks with small arms. And there are always those who are enemies for other reasons.”
“Like General Markovic, for example.”
For the first time Neven seemed mildly impressed. He cocked his head slightly, as if to reassess the potential of the meeting. Then he said slowly, “Yes. General Markovic, for example.”
“Another admirer of fine art, I’m told.”
“Indeed he is.” He paused for a moment. “So, you say you may be able to help me. How?”
“Look, we know that art is being taken out of the country, even if the museum doesn’t seem to have a clue. If we can tie the operation to Vitas’s murder and root it out, I’d imagine we’d end up putting away some of the people who want to see you put away.”
“Like General Markovic? Not likely unless you have a very accurate piece of artillery and some good sources on the other side.”
“No. But we can certainly discredit him.” Vlado ventured out on a limb. “We have the full backing and support of the international community”
“The U.N., you mean?”
“And that puts our reach potentially across the river.” He saw by Neven’s reaction that the limb had just given way.
“The U.N.,” Neven snorted, smiling crookedly again. “Who do you think is making it possible for this art to leave the country?”
“That’s exactly what we’d like to know.”
“You want to know too much. And all I can possibly do by telling you is to make even more enemies, in more of the wrong places.”
“Look, I’m not asking for everything you know. Just take it question by question, and when you begin to feel the risk outweighing the benefits, then stop answering. But give yourself a chance.”
And then, Vlado’s first and only stroke of providence fell literally to the ground. A shell screamed toward their position from the Serb lines: a high, arching mortar lob from a few hundred yards away. They both sprawled to the ground and were sprayed by a shower of dirt, the earth shaking and grumbling beneath them. When Neven rose his beret was askew, and mud was caked in his stringy bangs. The timbers providing the foundations of his “office” were bent inward. The coffee tray was overturned. Neven no longer came across as any sort of master, even for this small stretch of the line, and his face momentarily betrayed that he knew it, too. They waited a moment through an answering burst of shellfire and a brief exchange between automatic weapons. Then Neven said, barely audible, “What sort of questions.”
Vlado didn’t gloat, didn’t act as if the dynamic had shifted in the least.
“Let’s start with the files. You staged the explosion and the fire at the museum and then stole them, correct?”
“Yes.”
To Vlado’s wonderment, Neven then said that the covering artillery barrage had been arranged on their behalf by General Markovic.
“And this was when Zarko joined the operation?”
“It was his first starring role, you might say. Markovic had brought us into it a few days earlier.”
“How did he make the arrangements? There was the slight inconvenience of a war going on at the time, and like you said, Zarko was making Markovic’s army look pretty bad.”
“If they could have wiped us out, they would have. Markovic as readily as anybody. But by then it was clear they weren’t going to be able to take the bridges, and they weren’t going to get to the museum. Once he realized that, he arranged a meeting.”
“How?”
“It was easy enough. You asked for ceasefire negotiations at unit level. That’s always the best way to get the blue helmets moving on your behalf to establish an official contact with the other side. So one morning we all got together, Markovic and two of his officers and Zarko, myself and another of ours, along with two of the European Community monitors, those guys in the white uniforms, the ones who look like ice cream men. They always believe that the more they can keep us talking the closer we’ll be to peace.”
“You could hardly seem to discuss smuggling arrangements under those conditions.”
“We didn’t, at first. We talked prisoner exchanges, artillery monitoring, sniper moratoriums. All the things neither side had any intention of doing, because no matter how much money we might want to make together, at th
e bottom of it we still hated them and they hated us. When it came time for the real business Markovic told the E.C. monitors that he and Zarko needed a few moments of privacy, for greater frankness and candor. They gave it to him, of course. So then we set it all up, sitting in a white U.N. APC, right down by the river.”
“And that’s where Markovic laid it out for you, and offered to cut you in if you’d help.”
“He told Zarko he wanted the pieces of art from our side of the river. He said that’s where the better items were. Said he could handle transportation out of the country if we could get them over the bridge. But first he wanted us to take care of the transfer files. He already has his own copy from somewhere else.”
The Belgrade copy, Vlado figured. If a friend of Vlado’s could get a copy, Markovic certainly would have had no problem.
“He wanted the copy in the museum destroyed,” Neven said. “He gave us a date and said he could provide covering fire. Zarko told him fine as long as he didn’t actually hit the building while we were in it. We had a few laughs, a few smokes, a shot of brandy, then we left. The E.C. guys seemed disappointed when we told him we’d accomplished nothing.”
“So. You were to take charge of the museum and find a way to destroy the records. But you kept them instead, didn’t you. Then staged a destruction.”
“Zarko wasn’t a fool. He figured with his own copy he could run the operation more easily, with more independence. He sold the idea to Markovic as a way of cutting down on logistics, simplifying it so we wouldn’t have to risk using couriers or cryptic shortwave messages every time Markovic had a painting he wanted us to pick up. I don’t think Markovic ever really got used to the idea, but he kept getting his cut so he lived with it.”
“But first you had to get yourself established at the museum. Move in on the place as its ‘protectors.’ Which I suppose was pretty easy with Murovic running the place.”
“He was in love with us. And I mean that literally. Always swooning over the manly fighters in his lobby, bringing us coffee and cakes. I liked to think that he fancied me in particular.” Neven laughed. “To him we were beyond reproach. We had come to save his fabulous galleries, and in doing so we had saved his job. We were his noble savages, who’d even more nobly resisted the urge to plunder. Zarko was always very strict about that. There was to be no looting of the museum, of even the smallest object, and those were some of the best.”
“Because he wanted the files. And after you had them, then what?”
“From then on only two of us were involved besides Zarko. Alijah Nerevic and me. Alijah was killed on the first day of the police raid in October, standing outside like a fool, thinking it was only the Chetniks shelling while the rest of us ran for cover.”
“Only two of you besides Zarko?”
“It was as many as he could trust. He’d go through the files, find a card he liked, one with a higher value, then send us out to make the pickup.”
“Just like that? A couple of thugs walking into someone’s home to take a painting off their wall?”
“It was easier than you’d think. While we were at the museum we helped ourselves to some of Murovic’s stationery, so we forged his signature on official permissions for ‘protective custody,’ then paid each person a hundred marks for their cooperation and inconvenience. It’s amazing how quickly people take the hint. Even if they were suspicious, once you paid them they didn’t dare ask any questions of the museum or any other authority. Why risk losing their precious D-marks? Especially when it hadn’t really been their painting to begin with.
“But what was funnier was that some people had already figured out the profit possibilities for themselves. At about every fifth stop both the painting and the people who’d been living there were gone. A few others had already crated it and put in a basement or a closet. They’d go all red in the face and say they’d been doing it for safekeeping. Only one man ever tried to make a stink about us. Yelled at us and threatened to go the police.”
“And?”
“We took him down to the river and shot him through the head. The next morning the morgue collected him. It was a busy day and they wrote him off as a sniper hit.”
“A familiar technique. That’s how Vitas got it.”
Neven didn’t seem the least bit surprised.
“Then you just walked through the streets with a painting?” Vlado asked.
“We crated it on the spot. Always took boards, nails and a drop cloth with us. Loaded the crate on a truck, then waited until after dark to make the drop.”
“Where.”
“For a while at a place by the river, near a checkpoint crossing where supplies came in through a back channel. There were intermediaries cleared for action on both sides who brought in tobacco, meat, liquor. Dangerous work, but they made a lot of money while they lived, and both sides used them for information. They’d take our crate across, or at least until the overhead began to get ridiculous.”
“The overhead?”
“Too many payoffs to too many people. Skimming and siphoning. The operation was leaking like a sieve, and because Markovic was sending everything out over the hills by truck there were more payoffs at every checkpoint, and even then sometimes the freight never reached its destination. So we simplified.”
“How.”
“How else. ‘Maybe Airlines.’ It’s what the U.N. soldiers call their daily flights because maybe they’ll fly, maybe they won’t. Guaranteed overnight delivery as long as the Serbs weren’t shooting or shelling the airport the next day. And sometimes Markovic could take care of that problem, but not always.”
“So you’d drop off the paintings where?”
“At the U.N.’s freight and shipping depot, near the PTT building on the way to the airport. Right behind U.N. Forces headquarters. Especially convenient because it was on our side of the line. We’d drive through the gates waving our U.N. shipping invoice and leave the crate on the rear loading dock, ready for delivery via the first flight out to Frankfurt in the morning.”
“How often?”
“Maybe once a week at first. Zarko didn’t want to overdo it, start drawing too much attention. Our U.N. contact was always antsy about it, too. Markovic would push for more deliveries, the U.N. man would push for fewer. Then maybe a month before the raid, we heard Murovic was working to get the list out of Belgrade through UNESCO. So we stepped up the schedule. Three times a week, sometimes even four or five if it was quiet and flights were running every day. We knew it was risky, but once Murovic got the copy of the files we’d be out of business. We talked about killing him, but figured his replacement could only be worse. It might even be someone who’d want to look a bit more deeply into the cause of the fire.”
“Well, he got UNESCO approval all right. But the grant isn’t activated until February.”
“So they’re probably still doing it, then.”
“How? The raid put you out of business.”
“It did. And that alone should have been enough to get Vitas killed. But he obviously had the clout to make the crackdown stick. What galled Zarko is that he never got advance warning. He’d always bragged he had somebody inside the Ministry, but they must not have been very high up because he never heard a word. When Zarko was killed afterward, I was sure his source was no good.”
“Wasn’t he shot while trying to escape?”
“That’s the official version, but there’s no way. Zarko had a good lawyer and a lot of D-marks, and too many ways out of town even after getting caught. He never would have risked running. Maybe a well-planed escape from prison, later, during heavy fighting, with plenty of payoffs and inside help. But not a clumsy try at bolting.”
“Why not. Even people like Zarko can get desperate.”
“It didn’t happen,” Neven shouted furiously.
Vlado gave him a moment to calm down. “The way you describe it, even Vitas could have been Zarko’s contact at Interior. He takes out Zarko, takes the files, increases his ow
n cut, and moves on.”
“Which would also explain why Vitas was killed. More rivalry and more blood. You live by it long enough and you eventually die by it.”
But an insider would have had no need for a briefing from Milan Glavas just last week, Vlado thought. That sounded like an investigator following up a discovery.
“More likely he was killed because he was onto the operation,” Vlado said. “Which leaves the question of who Markovic must still be working with. Maybe he hired somebody new.”
“There’s always somebody willing to take a job like that,” Neven said. “And once you get an outfit like the U.N. involved these things take on a bureaucratic inertia. You don’t stop something like this just by removing one of the principals. You only make it more lucrative for those who’re still in the game.”
“So, then, let’s look at who was left in business after the raid. There’s Markovic, and then there’s somebody from the U.N. And who might that be?”
“Somebody at the shipping office. The shipping forms were always signed and stamped in advance. All Zarko had to do was fill in the details. We shipped everything to a Frankfurt contact who, I presume, got a cut for handling the sale, the marketing, whatever. Alijah and I got extra pay for every one we handled, but probably nothing close to what the major players were making. We were just part of the overhead.”
“Let’s fill in some names, starting with Frankfurt and the U.N.”
“I don’t know any.”
“How couldn’t you? They were both right there on the invoice, unless somebody was using a forged signature at this end and an alias at the other.
Neven frowned, fidgeting and looking at the ground. There was silence for a moment as he stooped to pick up one of the fallen coffee cups.
“Come on,” Vlado said. “You can’t possibly have forgotten.”
“Maybe I never knew them to begin with,” Neven said bitterly, looking straight into Vlado’s face. “Because I can’t read. Never learned. Dyslexia, I think they call it now. Except that our progressive schools under Marshal Tito never knew a way around that obstacle. I was a strong boy, so it never really mattered. There were always other uses for me, and people like Zarko were always glad to put me to work. I’d always thought of it as a weakness, then Zarko came along with his loan sharking business and my future was assured. When the war started the future was even rosier. It’s why he could always trust me so much. It was my key to promotion. There was nothing I couldn’t handle for him, no written message I couldn’t deliver without complete guarantee of confidentiality. I was the perfect courier.”
Lie in the Dark vp-1 Page 22
