Lie in the Dark vp-1

by Dan Fesperman

  They made the trip in an armored car, with large blue stickers plastered on either door proclaiming The Evening Standard in Gothic lettering. Vlado was impressed by the heaviness and security of the car. The back was stuffed with rattling jerrycans and cardboard boxes filled with food, notebooks, and dirty clothes. He told Toby it was a nice feeling to be bulletproof for a change.

  “Grenade-proof, too. Or practically. Some Swedes driving one of these the other day took an RPG round, not a direct hit but damn near. All it did was knock them around a little. Broke a few ribs driving into a ditch but otherwise okay.

  “Had a close call myself once. Out front of the Holiday Inn. Colleague didn’t shut his door proper, and when I swerved onto the road it flew wide open on the wrong side. Snipers must have been up there saying, ‘Well, we’ll bag us one now,’ and before I could even turn her around and shut the door three shots were pinging all around us. Didn’t think anything more of it until we were filling her up with gas the next day. The petrol tank leaked joyously. A ricochet from the street must’ve bounced right up into her. Now I can’t fill it more than two-thirds. A few inches lower and we’d have gone up in smoke. That was two weeks ago, and I still haven’t gotten her fixed. And, Christ, the way they gouge you for repairs around here maybe I never will. For all I know they make a wax mold of your keys while they’re at it.

  “So anyway,” Toby continued, “who’s this we’re going to see?”

  “Someone involved with a case.”

  Toby waited for more, and when none was forthcoming he smiled, shaking his head slowly, and glanced sideways at Vlado. “Christ, you do play it close to the vest, don’t you. And what sort of case?”

  “A murder.”

  Toby snorted. “Just one? Hardly seems worth the effort.”

  “That depends on the murder, I guess.”

  Toby waited, again hoping for more. But Vlado stared out the side window and lit a cigarette.

  Toby began a discourse on his travels around Bosnia. He really had been just about everywhere, it seemed. Central Bosnia, the Posavina corridor near Brcko in the northeast, Banja Luka and Sanski Most in the north, Mostar in the southwest. He’d been to Dobrinja more than once, too, judging by his agility in steering the obstacle course through curbs, sidewalks, and checkpoints.

  He’d even done time in Bihac, a town in Bosnia’s far northwest corner holding out much like Sarajevo, only with far less media attention and, as a result, far less international aid.

  “Look what they’re using for money up there now,” Toby said, fishing his wallet from a rear pocket as he drove. He handed Vlado a wrinkled piece of paper, about 2-by-4 inches. On one side was a small picture of the river that runs through Bihac-Vlado recognized it from a trip years earlier-and the number five was printed in both upper corners. The back side was blank.

  “Worse than play money,” Toby said, “but worth five marks in Bihac. Not even enough D-marks under their mattresses to last them through the war, and none of the government currency, so they had to print these. Looks worse than something from a board game.”

  It was odd hearing a field report on the country from this man who came and went like a business commuter, talking about places Vlado had been all his life as if they were district stops on a sales network.

  “You’ve got it lucky here in a way, you know,” Toby was saying now. “You’re crowded together in this shitty siege, getting picked off one by one. But at least you’ve kept the bastards out. Once the bad guys get in, no matter who the bad guys happen to be in your neck of the woods, then it’s all over. You go to some of these little villages in central Bosnia and find twenty, thirty houses destroyed, not just burned but dynamited. But then you look closer and there are always one or two houses that seem fine. Laundry on the line, windows intact, chickens in the yard, smoke out the chimney. You ask around and find they’re the Muslims and everyone else was Croat, or they’re Croat and everyone else was Muslim. Now those are the kinds of murder cases a Bosnian detective should be working on. Solve one of them and you’ll clean up the whole mess.”

  They climbed the stairs to Glavas’s house and knocked loudly, but after four tries and five minutes there was still no answer, nor even a cough. Vlado tried the door and it was unlocked, and as he pushed it open he heard footsteps approaching from downstairs.

  It was the woman from the time before, the one with heart-shaped lips.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “Since yesterday afternoon. Four men in a BMW A nice dark blue one without a scratch. You don’t see many of those around here. Every boy on the block came out to touch it.”

  “Were these men armed?”

  “Not that I could see. Three of them came up the stairs, went inside, then a few minutes later they left, and he was with them, everybody quiet, hardly saying a word. I haven’t seen him since. I thought I heard someone up here last night, but I checked this morning and he was still gone.”

  She was obviously worried. So was Vlado.

  “Well, let’s have a look then.”

  The apartment seemed much as before. There was a pile of writing paper and a couple of pencils next to a full ashtray on the nightstand. Pillows were propped against the headboard with the sheets turned back, as if Glavas had been sitting up working when the men came to the door. Nothing was written on a single page. Either Murovic at the museum had been right in his assessment of Glavas, or the men had taken something extra with them.

  But the most disturbing absence was up on the living-room wall, where the field of lilies had once bloomed in the fine hand of an Impressionist master. Now it was only an empty space, dustmarks showing the old outline of the frame-exactly what Glavas had told him to look for.

  Vlado pulled the ream of fax paper from his bag and thumbed through the pages until he found it: a painting checked out to Glavas, Milan, with a Dobrinja address, since April 1979.

  Most recent Reassessment: June 1988. Insured value: $112,000.

  “So, is that where one of your paintings was supposed to be?” Toby asked. Vlado had forgotten he was there, had stopped worrying about him because he didn’t speak the language. But it must have been easy enough to figure out why Vlado was looking at the list with such concern.

  “Yes,” Vlado answered. “You might say that. Don’t worry, you’ll be fully briefed on the whole thing. Soon, the way things are looking.”

  He turned toward the woman. She was watching from the doorway, as if afraid to step inside.

  “These men, were they carrying anything when they left?”

  “I don’t think so. Unless it was something they’d put in their pockets. Glavas was carrying an overnight bag, or that’s what I thought it was anyway.”

  “A briefcase, maybe?”

  “Maybe. I didn’t get a good look at it. I watched them from my front window.”

  “And you say later you thought you heard someone up here last night?”

  “It could’ve just been some boys on the stairs. I don’t know. But yes, it sounded like something. It made me feel better because I thought he must have come back, until I realized this morning that he hadn’t.”

  “Were the men in uniform?”

  She shook her head.

  “They were all wearing overcoats. Dark overcoats.”

  “How were they dressed otherwise?”

  “Neatly. Expensive, if I had to guess.”

  “Clothes like you’d wear to an office?”

  “More like you’d wear to a nice cafe.”

  Or any other place where mobsters hung out these days, Vlado thought.

  He arrived back at the office to find Damir still in an eager and mischievous mood, but he seemed fueled by something headier than the cola and chocolate he must have devoured during the past few hours. As Vlado approached, Damir pointed toward the waiting area by Garovic’s office, and Vlado saw, with a sinking feeling, what had made his partner so keyed up.

  “You have a visitor,” Damir said. “A very patient one judging by h
ow long she’s been waiting for you.”

  She sat on the same couch where Vlado had taken her a few weeks ago, only now she looked prim, knees together, holding a purse in her lap. She looked up, startled to see Vlado headed her way.

  “First the Nescafe man, now a visitor from the French barracks,” Damir said. “It must be your lucky day.”

  “Yours, too. While I’m talking to her, maybe you can get ready to start checking some new leads.” He waved the fax from Bogdan.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll explain when I’m done with her. But if we’re lucky, it’s the heart of the case.”

  She looked different by daylight, or maybe it was just that her makeup was gone. No more rouge, eyeliner, or lipstick, leaving a plain but pleasing face, tired looking but fairly well nourished, more so than the time before, a bit fuller, or perhaps his memory was playing tricks on him.

  Vlado approached uncertainly, not knowing quite what to say.

  “I believe that this is where we last met in your office,” she said, although thank God not loud enough for Damir to hear. The remark broke some of the tension, and she extended a hand in greeting. “Perhaps this time the results will be more productive for you.”

  “Depends on what you’re here for,” Vlado said, regretting the remark immediately.

  “I needed to talk to you,” she said, her tone a shade cooler, or perhaps once again it was Vlado’s imagination. “About the shooting. With Maria there the other night I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.”

  Maria. That must be the prostitute who’d done all the talking.

  “Please,” he said, pointing toward an interrogation room with glass partitions. “We can talk in here.”

  They settled into chairs on opposite sides of a battered wooden table. The aging tubes of a fluorescent light hummed and sputtered overhead. Vlado felt some of his discomfort returning, and moved quickly to fill the silence. “First things first,” he said, opening a notebook. He scribbled the date at the top and asked, “Your name, please. For the record.”

  “Hodzic, Amira,” she said.

  “Address? And phone number, if you have one.”

  “For what reason?” she asked, a sudden edge to her voice.

  “In case I need to talk to you again,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Unless of course you’d rather have me come to your place of business to ask any followup questions, in the presence of Maria, who I presume is the one who did all the talking the other night.”

  “Yes, she was, and, no, I suppose I wouldn’t like that. Number seven-twelve Bosanska Street, apartment thirty-seven. I have no phone.”

  Which probably meant she was a refugee, Vlado thought, or else she’d still have the hookup from before the war, whether it was working or not.

  “So. The night of the shooting, then. You were there I presume, outside the barracks.”

  “Yes. The usual location.”

  “And you heard the gunshot?”

  “Yes. Maria was right about one thing, though. There had been shooting off and on for hours. The usual stuff in that area. But this one was different. Louder and closer, and from the near side of the river. Maria thought right away that it must have something to do with her man. Her regular man. Or at least the closest thing she had to a regular man. It turned out that it didn’t, of course. Her man was safely off somewhere else. We all heard the next morning who had really been killed. But, well, you seemed interested in knowing any detail, no matter how small, so I thought I at least owed you that, if only because Maria seemed so determined none of us would say a word.”

  “Why did she think her man might be out there? Was she expecting him?”

  “No. She’d seen him just a few minutes before. He’d come out through the gate.”

  “From the barracks?”

  “Yes.”

  “On foot?”

  “No. In a jeep. One of the white U.N. ones. Armored, with thick windows, but we could all see who was driving because we knew him from other times.”

  “So he was a soldier, then. Not a civilian employee.”

  “Yes, an officer.”

  “Rank?”

  “A colonel. Or that’s what Maria calls him. Her French colonel. Or sometimes she just calls him Sweet Maurice. Or the Little Colonel, like Napoleon.”

  “Well, then, a colonel with a regular squeeze waiting at the gate.”

  “Yes, I thought you’d want to know, especially when I heard that the man who was killed was someone important.” She glanced toward the table. “Do you think I could have one of your cigarettes?”

  “Please.”

  He slid a pack of Drinas across the table. He held out his lighter and watched her inhale, lips tight. When she began speaking again she kept the cigarette clenched in her teeth, making little bursts of smoke with every word. It seemed almost contrived to lend her an air of harshness, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. Something in the gesture didn’t ring true. Yet she clearly preferred projecting this image to whatever might be the real one, and it occurred to Vlado that there were probably children at home, perhaps a husband in the city or out on some frontline. The pose was for their sake. This was the prostitute speaking, not the mother or the wife. He wondered for a moment what she must be like in that other world.

  “So,” he said, “we have a French colonel driving a U.N. jeep possibly in the area a few minutes or even a few seconds before the shooting,” Vlado said, “perhaps in position to have seen or heard something himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you pin it down a little more? What do you mean by a few minutes. Ten? Five? One or two?”

  “One, if I had to guess. It really was quite short, or seemed that way,” she said, with more of the little puffs of smoke bursting from her mouth.

  Well, this was something, perhaps. At minimum the colonel would be worth talking to, Vlado thought. If he’d driven in the right direction, perhaps he’d at least noticed Vitas standing on the corner, or anyone else who might have been with him. It was a longshot, but better than any other shot at a witness he had right now, which was no shot at all.

  “Is there anything else you remember from those moments right before or after the gunshot? Any other sounds. Someone running. A car driving away, perhaps.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I would have heard anything else. From the minute we heard the shot Maria was hysterical. It was all we could do to keep her from crawling around the sandbags and running across the bridge to see for herself what had happened. She was screaming for her little Maurice, her Little Colonel. It was close to curfew anyway and we were worried she’d have us all in jail for the night. And frankly, the stories you hear about police and prostitutes …”

  She stopped short, suddenly embarrassed.

  “What did you finally do?”

  “After a few minutes she calmed down. We wanted to walk her home but she refused. Said she was going to his apartment, that he would be there if he was okay, that she’d stay there for the night, so she left. If he wasn’t there, she had a key to let herself in, she said. The rest of us-it was only Leila and I that night-we walked home together. She lives in the building next to mine. Neither of us knows where Maria lives, the colonel either. And the next night everything was back to normal. Maria seemed fine. The only time she’s acted funny since was when you showed up.”

  “This colonel. He was used to having her at his apartment? Is that normal in, well, this business? With U.N. officers, I mean.”

  “Is this part of the investigation?”

  Was it? Vlado wasn’t sure. “I don’t know, frankly. Just a matter of finding every detail I can.”

  “You’ll have to ask someone who’s been at it a little longer than me. I’m new. So is Leila. We started the same week, a little more than a month ago, and from what I hear women come and go from it month to month, except for the ones like Maria who’ve been doing it for years.”

  “So tell me what you know, secondhan
d or whatever, then, about Maria and this colonel. Maurice, you said. Did she ever say his last name? And that is definitely part of the investigation, ’cause I’d like to talk to him.”

  She shook her head.

  “From what a few others have told me, it was quite a romance, at least on her part. He’d been posted to Sarajevo a year ago, and picked her up almost right away. A few nights a week. After a while he got himself an apartment. Apparently some of the higher ranking officers do that, and she started staying over at his place two or three days at a time.

  “After a while he must have cooled on her. He may even have found someone else he liked better. She ended up back on the beat more and more nights, mooning outside the barracks like a teenager, waiting for him to drive in or out in his jeep. The few times I’ve seen him drive through he gives her a smile and a wave, that’s all. It made me wonder if everything she said about the two of them was true. She’s not exactly the most stable person in the world, after all. But she did show us a key she said was to his apartment. And she did seem to know an awful lot about him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Little details from his apartment. More than what you’d just pick up in a few minutes between the sheets. Knew what his wife’s name was. What she and their kids looked like. She’d seen all his pictures from home. Knew what sort of guns he kept. Told us he was an important man with the U.N. Said he was tougher than the others. That if a Chetnik shot at him he’d shoot back, and wouldn’t miss. Not like the ones who just take cover and file a report. It sounded to me like he’d talked a lot of manly bullshit to her and she’d believed it.”

  “And now I guess we’ll find out if he has any powers of observation and memory. Whatever the case, you were right to come in. Sometimes it’s the little things that lead to the big ones.”