Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  Pigoreau had seen the map, so he didn’t bother to follow Dukas closely. Nonetheless, he kept him in view after he got off the tram. Pigoreau was not at all sure that Dukas could take care of himself. Dukas was an investigative cop, after all, not a hammer, as Pigoreau was. And Dukas was older by a good eight or ten years. Even the gun Dukas carried—a revolver! It was like something in a Humphrey Bogart movie. In fact, it was a Ruger .357 Magnum, but to Pigoreau, all revolvers were antiques. He carried a Browning High-Power 9 millimeter and thought it a minimal, but modern, weapon.

  He cut across a diagonal of Dukas’s route and made a wrong turn and, cursing, had to retrace his steps and then follow Dukas’s own route. He knew the destination, a small park he had checked out yesterday. At least it was an unlikely spot for a drive-by assassination because of a fringe of trees and several small buildings around the running track. By the time Pigoreau got into the trees and could see without being seen, Dukas was already standing at the far side, and with him was the woman.

  She was not Pigoreau’s type. She looked, at this distance, plain and dumpy—a peasant. Pigoreau liked small, dark, intense women like his wife, an urban shrew who made half his life suicidal and the other half intoxicating. Pigoreau thought that the woman with Dukas looked like a cow. And maybe a Serb decoy.

  Dukas was thinking, She’s too casual; she should be scared, but he knew he was blushing because he thought she was beautiful and he was excited. Dukas’s luck with women was terrible, and the worse it got, the less cool he got around them. He was like a high-school boy.

  “Would you like to walk?” she said. She had a strong accent, but her voice was better than nice. Warm. She was nearly forty, he thought, with little lines around her eyes, and skin that had been exposed to too much wind, yet she was lovely. Strong bones, very full lips, gray-green eyes a little tilted, like a cat’s. And big. She was almost as big as he was. That was a plus. She was wearing some kind of stretch-fabric pants, like old polyester, blue, the fabric pilled from age, and a long-sleeved maroon shirt that showed off her big shoulders.

  “Do you want to walk?” he said. It was what he always did with women: they wanted decisions, he asked for more input.

  “I will walk if you like,” she said.

  Here we go again, he thought. Dukas the jerk. “Siddown,” he said. The hell with it, this is business. He jerked his head toward a bench. He plunked himself on the hard iron seat; she settled next to him more gracefully. The thought flashed through his consciousness that she was light despite her big body, would be a good dancer, and he said, “You wrote to me you got information.”

  “About war criminals, yes.” She smiled. “You are after war criminals, yes? WCIU?”

  “Yeah.” He was head of WCIU, he meant—the War Crimes Information Unit, pronounced “Wicky-U” by those who tried.

  “I have information about four of your criminals.”

  They had a list of 237 “strong suspects,” Croat, Muslim, and Serb. About a third of the names were still secret, another fifty or so treated as “eyes only,” meaning there had been no press contact on them yet. The Hague court had indicted seventy-five. Nine—nine!—were in custody. He found himself thinking that she had worked very quickly, to locate him within a few weeks of his setting up an office. As so often in the past, Dukas the callow high-school boy was running neck-and-neck with Dukas the cynical cop. “How do you know they’re war criminals?” he said.

  She was a little flustered. “Well—everybody knows. Yes?” She smiled, all that warmth again. Was she coming on to him too obviously? “You have hundreds. Haven’t you?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Oh—Everybody knows. The newspapers, the TV.” If she watched Serbian TV, all she got was Belgrade—no Serb war criminals there. He continued to look at her. She looked away, made a nervous gesture with one hand on her knee, looked back at him. “I have a friend.”

  A friend, holy God. A leak? Already? Maybe Pigoreau is right about her. Dukas had had snitches before, lots of them; in that respect, being a Navy cop was little different from being any other kind. In a sense, the woman was coming to him as a snitch, but the context turned her into something closer to an agent. If, that is, she had real information and she could go on providing it.

  “What’s your name?” Dukas said. He leaned a little toward her.

  “Draganica Obren. I am Serb. What is your name?”

  Dukas was caught off guard. He laughed, first to cover, then with real humor when he glanced at her and saw she was laughing a little too. “I’m supposed to ask the questions,” he said.

  “Yes, you are the policeman.”

  “Exactly. My name is Michael.”

  “Oh, I like that name.” She said it as if it was a great relief—as if she had feared disliking his name and thus ruining everything. “You are American.”

  “Miss Obren—”

  “Mrs.”

  He glanced at her. She was suddenly serious. Okay, something about being married—the husband doesn’t know she’s here? The husband is a war criminal? “Mrs Obren, why did you approach us the way you did—no name on the note, meeting like this?”

  “Because it is a secret.” She might as well have added “of course.” She said it the way you say something obvious to a child.

  “Why is it a secret?”

  “Because they will kill me if they find out. Everybody knows that. Especially in Republika Srpska. They say there you are the enemy and anyone who goes to you will be dead.” Republika Srpska was the Serbian zone on the other side of the wiggly line that was officially known as the IEBL—the Inter-Entity Boundary Line.

  “What are you doing in Republika Srpska?” His voice was harder.

  “I live there. I am free to come and go, like anybody. I go everywhere.” She looked defiant.

  “Yeah, everybody’s free to do anything, and everybody else down here in the Federation is terrified to cross the IEBL. So why aren’t you?”

  “I am terrified. But—so?”

  So she was a Serb from the Republic, coming to offer him information from the goodness of her heart. It stank. “What d’you want?” Dukas said.

  “I want what every woman in a conquered country wants from the conqueror.”

  “You’re talking riddles.”

  She smiled, not very pleasantly now. “Chocolate—cigarettes—silk stockings—”

  “Money?” It was a kind of relief to say the word, although he was disappointed in her. He had been liking her. Jesus God, she wants money. What the hell was that crack about conquerors? Oh, I get it—the army of occupation turns nice girls into whores. Okay, lady. There were already hundreds of newly recruited prostitutes in the resorts along the coast, put in place by the international gangs that had flocked into Bosnia while the ink was still damp on Dayton.

  “Money—of course, money.”

  “How much?”

  “How much do you pay?” She was trying to be flirtatious all of a sudden; the effect was unutterably grim and for the first time made her seem grotesque because of her age. She knew at once how she seemed, and she looked away across the soccer field. A boy in red shorts was dribbling the ball around two other, bigger boys. She nodded as if approving his skill. She clasped her hands between her knees and looked down. “My husband disappeared two years ago. I must find him.”

  “So you want money?”

  She nodded. “Money and help. You can help me.”

  “How?”

  “You know how. You are police; you look for people.”

  “That’s the business of the High Commission. Or the Red Cross. UNHCR. Amnesty—”

  She was shaking her head. “They are no good; they want to find graves, or prisoners, or papers—I have been to them. Do you think I have not been to them?”

  Dukas tried a guess. “They told you he was dead?”

  “They ‘made a negative evaluation.’ A lot of hearsay, guess-work. He is not dead. He is not dead. If he is dead—” She put
her elbow on the back of the bench and rested her forehead on the hand, rubbing her temples with her big fingers. “Let me work for you! Help me! The money itself will help; I can buy information, buy officials in the Republik. I must be paid in Deutschmarks; you must give me identity so I can pass into the French sector as somebody else. Then I will give you good information.”

  “Now, just why am I supposed to believe that?”

  She reached into the V of her blouse with two fingers and took out a slip of paper, probably from her bra. Dukas was aware of its warmth as she passed it to him. He opened it, recognized two of the four names on it. “Two of these guys are Bosnian Muslims,” he said. They were on his list.

  “So? The Muslims are war criminals, too!” She meant that she knew that the UN and the United States were prejudiced against the Serbs and favored the Muslims.

  “Twenty-five dollars a month,” he said. Sarajevo cops made thirty. It was ridiculous—a drug dealer could buy a whole squad for the US price of a cheap suit.

  “In Deutschmarks. Cash.”

  Dukas hated all the Mickey-Mouse about signals and drops and cutouts and all that shit, but he knew she would have to be able to communicate. He sighed. “How well-known are you in Sarajevo?”

  She shook her head. “I came here only to see you. I stay with a friend—” She waved her fingers. “Near the airport. Ilidja.” She was telling him too much, he thought; was it significant?

  He thought of different people he might hand her over to, knowing all along that he would run her himself. He had to try her. He thought she was a plant or a double, but she was the first one who had come to him, and he knew he had to see where she would lead him. “Why don’t you give me a call or a visit next time you’re in Sarajevo? We’re interested, you understand, in any local information.”

  In his mind, she was already his agent. He would run her as Petra, a name he had taken from a list of the names of ancient cities. They had a safe house, actually a deserted apartment, in Novi Sarajevo; he would work with her there. She would have to have some sort of comm plan. If she was a plant or a double, she would be secretly amused. If she was the real thing, she would be risking her life. He wanted to go to bed with her and thought he probably would, because if she was a plant, that would be part of the deal, and if she was sincere she would do anything to find her husband.

  When he looked at her, she seemed excited, at the same time disappointed, as if he had given her exactly what she had come for but had withheld what she really wanted. Maybe she thought he would, like the conqueror, turn her into a whore that very day?

  Pigoreau followed her when she and Dukas separated. After walking for five minutes, she looked around, looked at him and through him, not appearing to see him, and then stepped into the street with her arm up, and a yellow Yugo swung in with a screech and she all but fell in. Small car, big woman; the door banged, and it squealed away.

  When he got back to the WCIU office, Dukas was waiting for him. “So, did you find where she lives?” he said. Pigoreau stared at him, then burst out laughing. So did Dukas.

  “Michael, I didn’t think you would see me. You’re pretty good.”

  “You were dead easy; I was expecting you.”

  “I thought you had eyes only for the lady.”

  “Oh yeah. Oh, sure. Listen—” Dukas jabbed a finger into Pigoreau’s chest. “She knew more than she should about us, so I think we got a leak already. Check around.” He smiled in a way that was not at all a smile.

  “I thought you were making a conquest.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s what I was supposed to think, too. We’ll see. Where’d she go after she met me?”

  “She walked and then got in a car.”

  “Rendezvous?”

  Pigoreau shrugged. Sometimes, without his knowing it, he was like somebody playing a French cop. “Maybe. Maybe not. Anybody with a car here, they can make money picking up passengers.”

  Dukas sniffed. He got out a wad of tissue, peeled some off and began to straighten it so it would fit around his nose. “See what IFOR has on people up in RS. Maybe phone books, voter lists—I don’t know. She says her name is Draganica Obren, so check that. Also the last name for a guy, the husband. I’ll get more out of her next time. Maybe even the truth.” He blew his nose to hide the fact that he wanted to see the woman again.

  It occurred to him that he might be making a big mistake. Dukas was less intellectual than Harry O’Neill, but he had better instincts when it came to women.

  In Republika Srpska.

  Zulu found his way in the dark to the bathroom and urinated and pushed open the window to ease the stink of the place. The woman was a sloven, or the sewer had backed up. Maybe both; what he had seen of the little apartment last evening had shown him disorder. Zulu believed that one’s outer world reflected one’s inner self—cluttered room, unfocused mind. His own surroundings were always austere, even monastic. Yet he liked a certain sluttishness in women other than his wife, and this one’s flat, with its clothes strewn over the floor and its dirty cups and plates, had suggested to him—correctly, as it turned out—a sexuality little restrained by convention or the marriage she kept talking to him about and the husband she wanted to find.

  He went back into the bedroom and sat on the few inches of free space on the only chair. His neatly folded clothes lay on some of it, her castoff garments, that might have piled up over weeks, on the rest. He began to dress in the dark.

  She had been lying with her back to him; now she rolled over and lay looking at him, or at the dark space where she must have known he sat. He was a careful man, but he supposed he had made small noises.

  “Going?” she said.

  He liked her husky voice. It was what had attracted him at the party. He was recruiting in RS. He usually paid for a party in somebody’s house so that he could invite the possibles and harangue them as they got drunk. He had his local contacts make sure there were women, too, loyal Serbs who understood that soldiers, even would-be soldiers, needed sex. This woman was rather old for the job. Surprisingly, he had picked her for himself.

  “I asked if you’re going,” she said.

  He grunted.

  “I can fix you food.”

  “I’ll eat on the way.” He had a car and a driver and false papers. The Americans were all over up here, setting up roadblocks, interfering; but he was going only thirty miles, and then there would be a house where he would be welcome, food, and then horses to go where there was no road.

  “I will do anything,” she said. “Please help me find him.”

  “I know.”

  “My husband—”

  “You told me. Several times, Mrs Obren.” It was an old story to him. Lots of women were looking for their husbands or fathers or brothers. Lots were willing to trade sex for help in finding them. A paradox—the loyal wife is disloyal out of loyalty. Still, some of them were glad for the excuse, he thought; this one was sincere, but when they had made love she had made a sound of pent-up release that had surprised him. The husband was a good Serb, she had told him between bouts of love-making; he had been in a militia, active against the Muslims; he had disappeared; she would do anything to find him. Then she had initiated another round of sex. Then the questions again: What could she do so he would help her find him? What did he want her to do?

  Zulu stood and zipped his jeans and began to button his shirt. “I will put his name on a list,” he said. “It is Mister Obren, yes?” His voice was sarcastic.

  She boosted herself up on her elbows. A little light came in the window; he could just make out the shape of her, one breast with inky shadow below it. “I can find things out for you,” she said.

  There was little he didn’t know, he thought. He grinned, unseen. “What things?”

  “What the Americans are up to.” Her voice had an edge—of what?

  “Which Americans?”

  “Any of them.” She was going too fast, making it up as she went along—some fantasy o
f spying she had seen in a film. “The ones who come through from Tuzla in the tanks. The ones who set up the roadblocks. I get around, looking for my husband. I can make notes of what I see—when they are such-and-such a place, when they are not. Patterns. Anything you think would be of use.”

  “I’m a soldier, not a spy-master.”

  “Soldiers need information.”

  He grunted. He went into the other room and found his warmup jacket by feeling over piles of old magazines, clothes, dishes. He could feel filth and dust—was she never here to clean the place? Disgusting. Still, a good, sluttish woman in bed, and maybe a good source of information because she was not stupid and because she got around. Maybe it was not such a bad idea. The UN had got together some gang of do-gooders who were going to arrest what they called “war criminals”—a bad joke, that—and he had heard that they already had their spies out. Maybe having some of his own would not be so stupid. Anyway, if doing that helped her to be a good Serb, what was the harm? He put on the jacket, aware of her as a bulk in the doorway. He kissed her, meaning nothing, and caressed one breast.

  “You’re a good woman. I’ll try to remember your husband, but—you know, there are thousands. If you get useful information, sure, pass it along.” He told her whom to give her information to, a schoolteacher in the town. The information about tanks and roadblocks would be useless, of course, but later, who knows? This war would go on for years. Maybe they would need spies. The husband, he thought, was dead and in one of the Croats’ mass graves.

  “And—do I simply tell him? No secrecy, no, well, codes?”

  He smiled in the dark. “Whatever the schoolteacher wants. Just tell him it is for Z.” He kissed her cheek. She smelled slightly gamey, warm, female. He would not have tolerated the smell on his wife, but he liked it on this woman. He would come back to her next time he came this way.

  “My spy,” he said, and he squeezed her breast and left her.