“My father has no room for joy,” Mila added. “Only for grief.”
“Anyway, when I got back from my first semester in college, I persuaded my mother to buy Deda a laptop computer. My grandmother was never home, she’d gotten all wrapped up with this new religion. I thought if I showed Deda how to do research online, browse the Internet, he might reengage with the world again. He used to be a professor, you know, a brilliant scholar. Anyway, it seemed to work, at first. But then, he became obsessed with it. Secretive, too.”
“He spends hours on the computer,” Mila said. “Days.”
“And then, one night, someone, a burglar we thought, broke into the house. I was away at school.”
“I hear a shot,” Mila confirmed. “I run to my father’s office. He is dead, shot through back of head.”
“Any sign of a struggle?” Bill spoke for the first time, all business.
“No,” Sasha said. “But my grandfather wasn’t the type to fight. Anyway, whoever it was, they stole his computer.”
“Anything else?”
“His wedding ring. They never figured out who did it.”
Mila’s voice was steel. “I know. I know who killed my father. Is Zarko.”
“We don’t know that yet, Mama, not for sure,” Sasha said.
Random images pixilated and formed into new ones. I felt lightheaded, as the pieces of this story spun and danced in my brain like fireflies.
“When I came home last summer, I decided to listen to one of Deda’s records. I chose his favorite, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy.’” Sasha shook his head. “Not that it brought him any.”
The truth of his words sank in.
“So, anyway,” Sasha continued, “when I pulled the record from the sleeve, a computer disc fell out with it. Deda must have hidden it there. He’d handwritten something on the disc with a marker, a bunch of initials, you know, that stood for something else.”
My sense of dread grew. “An acronym,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“N-D-R-S-N-T,” I said.
Sasha stared. “But, how could you possibly know that?”
“Zarko killed my father,” Mila insisted, as if caught in her own loop. “Now I will kill Zarko.”
The rest of us met this declaration of war with a kind of stunned silence.
Bill’s voice broke the spell. “Ten.”
I hadn’t heard that degree of steel in his voice since the time I ran into gunfire without waiting for backup.
“You feel like telling me what in the name of God is going on here?”
At that, Julie set Homer down. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I need a cup of hot tea.” She left for the kitchen, with Sasha and Mila trailing behind her.
I stayed where I was, glued to the sofa, as Martha and Bill conferred, their voices low. Bill looked over at me, pulling at his upper lip. The kettle whistled, and Martha hurried out.
“How would you feel about moving these operations over to your house?” Bill said, sitting across from me. “Martha and Julie can stay here with the girls. I’m not sure they need to know any more about this.”
I’d been thinking the same thing. We hadn’t heard the worst of this tale, and I couldn’t yet guess where it might lead.
“Let’s meet up at my house in an hour,” I said. “And Bill? Bring your gun.”
CHAPTER 28
Tank seemed no worse for wear after his close encounter with a wrinkled canine. He’d licked his cat bowl clean, and promptly fallen asleep on the deck in an oval of late afternoon sun. A platter of artichoke hummus, lemon pita chips, satsuma tangerine segments, raw almonds, and cherry tomatoes would have to do for the humans. I’d set a cast-iron, round-bellied pot of green tea to steep on the kitchen counter, and four chipped but clean mugs, almost matching, awaited their payload of hot brew.
I’d had to smile as I busied myself around the kitchen. That look on Martha’s face, when I marched into the kitchen and exchanged a good long kiss with Julie before I left! It might be my best gift to Martha yet—something new to obsess about, rather than the Bill and Mila show.
My last words to Julie, hurried but sincere? “I’ll keep you posted. I promise.”
Her last word to me, delivered in a whisper? “Dessert.”
Before the other three arrived, I’d managed to gather up and even execute a hasty review of all my notes, downloads, and other items of research regarding Agvan Supply. I was fairly confident I could add to the coherent side of the ledger, as opposed to muddling things up even more.
I ushered everyone into the living room, and set the platter of food and the tray of tea on the low glass coffee table. I poured. Soon, we each held a steaming mug. The sharp tang of green leafy brew saturated the room.
This time, we’d formed a square: one perplexed Detective III (chair), one overeager ex-monk (chair), one angry Sarajevan (sofa), one naive journalist (chair).
“Where were we?” Bill pulled out his notebook, a small black Moleskine with its own narrow elastic belt. He snapped it open and waited for someone to answer, pen poised.
“‘Ode to Joy,’” I said. “Sasha, you’d just discovered the disc of your grandfather’s downloaded computer file.”
“Right.” For the first time, Sasha spoke directly to Bill. “How much has Ten told you about my uncles?”
“Half-uncles,” Mila snapped.
Bill tipped his chair on its two back legs and stared upward, as if searching the slat-and-beam ceiling for the facts. “Let’s see. Back when I was stationed in Sarajevo, I knew your mother had two older brothers, sorry, half-brothers. As I recall, they may have fought with the Army of the Serbian Republic, right?”
Mila merely grunted.
“So I knew there was no love lost at the time. That’s about it,” Bill said. I cleared my throat. “Oh, right. Until Ten called me in Sarajevo to tell me about Agvan Supply, and its possible connection to the Stasic brothers.”
Mila erupted, instantly furious. “You keep this from me!? Why!”
Bill put up a hand. “Mila, don’t get in a twist, okay? I was about to board an airplane home. You’d just kicked me to the curb! ‘Never call me again’ were your exact last words.” He shook his head. “Jesus, you’ve got a short fuse.”
Not only had the “Mila fever” broken, I suspected Martha was looking better and better to Bill by the minute.
“According to my grandfather’s research,” Sasha continued, “Milo Stasic’s company was called Tresinmerc. Why do you think Agvan is the same operation?”
“I don’t think so, I know so.” I had printed out the “About Us” company description, and I read it aloud to the others, concluding with: “Our father and uncle dedicated their lives to supplying quality product from around the world. We aim to continue that tradition. Agvan Supply’s specialty is difficult-to-find foodstuffs; the rarer the item, the harder we will work to bring it to you.”
Mila spat out a Bosnian invective, adding “Evil men!” in English.
Sasha’s response was much more measured. “Yes, this makes sense. According to my grandfather’s notes, Milo Stasic, Grandmother Irena’s first husband, or rather, his company, Tresinmerc, was partly responsible for brokering a major trade agreement between the governments of India and Yugoslavia, in the early sixties. They exported industrial goods to India. Machinery, tools, sometimes even entire industrial plants and equipment.
“India paid Yugoslavia a fortune for these items. In return, Yugoslavia imported foodstuffs from them: fresh fruits, cashews. Also tea, coffee, tobacco, like that. Plus hard to find items, like shark oil and Bengal tigers.” He shrugged. “The agreement was a bit lopsided. My grandfather had downloaded the actual treaty and added his own commentary in a separate document: ‘Worse than robbery!’ he’d said. And, ‘The people always lose!’ He wasn’t a big fan of profit-based business practices, such as Tresinmerc’s.”
Long ago, first father rich. Very good at stealing sheep.
“Anyway, after Ti
to died, Tresinmerc went into a decline. Almost went bankrupt, more than once, including when Milo’s brother Jovan died in the late 1980s. Then the Bosnian War happened, and soon after the Dayton Accords, Uncle Zarko and Uncle Stojan took over.”
“And mangoes and cheese came to mean a different thing entirely,” I said.
“What prompted your grandfather to look into Tresinmerc in the first place?” Bill asked. That was Bill, always drilling down to the core, asking the key question.
“I think it started because Grandmother Irena got so strange. According to his notes, she’d been disappearing for days, and spent hours and hours praying in their bedroom. It really bothered him that she started to wear a hijab, you know, a robe and headscarf again. When he challenged her about it, she spouted all this nonsense about a new world order and kept mentioning Tresinmerc. Praising her first husband, Milo Stasic, and their sons Zarko and Stojan.”
Mila broke in. “With me, too, she does this! Tells me I have to go with her to meet new imam. Take Sasha to meet his uncles. That big change is coming. I tell her I will die before I do these things!”
I thought over this new information.
Sasha drained his mug of tea. “Anyway, after I found this disc, I picked up the investigation where my grandfather left off, and it led me pretty quickly to the human trafficking trade in Sarajevo. I started a blog, which hooked me up with other people trying to put a brake on the explosion of the sex slave industry in the Baltics.” His voice softened. “That’s how I met Audrey.”
He drifted off for a moment. We waited.
“But a month in,” he said, “Tresinmerc shut down its operations, and I couldn’t figure out where they’d gone. Next thing you know, someone was messing with my own website and blog. My followers kept getting error messages when they tried to log on.” His eyes glinted, and I saw Mila’s fire in his look of determination. “You know what? They did me a favor! I’d gotten wind of those two little boys, and Audrey and I decided to take action against the monsters, instead of just writing about them.”
“And then you lost the trail,” I said, remembering.
“Right, I lost the trail, here in Los Angeles. The rest you know. I’d pretty much given up on ever finding my uncles, or those kids, until Ten called, asking me about Agvan Supply. It got me thinking.”
“Sasha comes to me right after,” Mila said, eyeing her son with pride. “And we come to you.”
Bill was pulling at his upper lip furiously. Sasha watched as his father’s cop-mind went to work, fascinated by the turning of the wheels despite some residual resistance to the holder of the brain.
Mila’s brow was ploughed deeper than ever with furrows. She clenched and unclenched her hands, as if itching for a fight. I could definitely see why she assumed one or both of her brothers had murdered her father. If he’d chosen to expose Tresinmerc’s new line of business, he could not only bring the company down, but also land his stepsons in jail.
I still wasn’t sure where Irena fit in, though. Or how the brothers had managed to move their operations so secretly and easily. There had to be an international connection—companies didn’t just die in one country and reincarnate in another like that. And now, Agvan Supply was headed underground as well.
Bill had left his chair and was pacing the borders of my living room, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
He halted. “Are we agreed that catching these fuckers is the goal?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Da,” said Mila.
“Plus finding those two little boys,” I added. Sasha shot me a grateful look.
Bill nodded. He rocked back on his heels.
Here it comes.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Bill said. “Number one: we need to get in contact with Zarko and his brother. Mila, do you have any way of calling them?”
Mila shook her head. “I have not talked to them since before my father is killed.”
“Sasha?”
Sasha, too, shook his head.
“I might,” I said. I held up Ponytail’s throwaway phone, a piece of my one-man, ongoing investigation. “I’ll bet the guy I took this from used it to call Zarko the minute he spotted me spying on them in Moorpark. He’d have needed to ask for instructions.”
I flipped open the phone, powered it on, and checked recent calls against the date and time in question. Sure enough, on the Saturday, at 4:27 A.M., he’d made a call to the initial Z, at a 213 exchange.
“Mila, do you have your own cell phone here?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I have.”
“Can you make calls in the states with it?”
“I can with mine,” Sasha jumped in. “Audrey upgraded my data package before I left. So we could, you know, talk.”
“That’s good,” Bill said. “We’ll use yours.”
Sasha nodded, but his eyes asked Why?
“If Zarko’s on the run, he might not pick up a local call,” I explained. “But he probably won’t be able to resist a call with a Sarajevo exchange.”
“Number two,” Bill said. “If we’re going to hook them, we need bait.”
“I have bait,” Sasha said. “I have this.” He held up his grandfather’s DVD.
Bill glowed with pride. “Brilliant,” he said.
Sasha pulled out his phone as if to start punching in numbers there and then.
No.
“No,” Bill and Mila said at the same time.
“It can’t be you, Son,” Bill said. “They know you to be their enemy. And it can’t be me, or Ten either, for that matter. They’d never go for it.”
“I will call.” Mila’s hot eyes gave a split-second view into a depth of hatred unfamiliar to me. “I know these men. I know how to deal with pure evil.”
That word again. At Dorje Yidam, we were taught that good and evil weren’t exclusive unto themselves, but rather two elements of the same whole, opposites forever linked, along with right and wrong, truth and ignorance, love and hatred. To embrace such contradictions was the first step in finding the middle way, in learning to walk the eightfold path, and the only hope for a life lived in balance.
“Ten,” Bill said. “Let’s take a little walk.”
Bill and I moved onto the deck, but not before I’d grabbed two Belgian Chimay Whites from the fridge, and poured them with care into two wide-mouthed glass steins.
We hoisted the steins to observe the rich, foamy heads; took our first slow swigs; and even sighed in unison after swallowing, like synchronized swimmers.
Bill gazed across the canyon, but his focus was elsewhere. “So what do you think?”
“I think Mila’s our only play,” I said. “And a complete long shot.”
“If I know her, she’s going after them whatever we decide,” Bill said. “Sasha, too.” He shook his head. “I mean, if Zarko Stasic answers, and if he agrees to meet, both huge ifs, she’s walking into a fucking dragon’s lair, and we have no way to protect her. No way I’m letting that happen. Too dangerous.”
I took a second perfect pull of a beer in perfect balance. Smooth and harsh. Bitter and sweet. I craned my head to look into the kitchen window. Mila stood by the sink, rinsing our tea mugs, her brow creased. Fierce, like the protectress Palden Lhamo.
You like to clean up your little piece of the world. You’re after justice above all, even if it means bending the rules.
Mila dried her hands on the seat of her pants. She wore her usual uniform: jeans and a men’s button-down shirt tied at the waist.
I turned back. “I have an idea,” I said.
First I talked, and Bill listened. Then we leaned against the railing, running potential scenarios and outcomes past each other.
Just like old times.
We reached the same conclusion: everything went back to that warehouse in Van Nuys—the address in Sasha’s missing persons file that Bill first discovered was the hub of a wheel that connected Sarajevo, Agvan Supply, NDRSNT, and us.
The sky was a bow
l of faded blue, and as I watched, a thin slice of pale moon materialized, as if by magic, just above the tree line. Tank had followed us out, and pushed his way between my legs.
I turned to my friend and previous partner.
“You know this is totally nuts, right?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. Then: “Isn’t it great?”
CHAPTER 29
Mila entered Zarko’s number into Sasha’s phone and put the call on speaker.
I counted the rings: one, two, three, he’s not going to answer, four …
“Da?”
Mila said, “Zarko? I am Mila. Mila Radovic.”
The silence stretched, until it was so thin I thought the room itself would snap.
“I am surprised. You said you no want to speak to me again. Why you call now?”
“I need to see you.”
“What for?”
“I have something you want.”
During this next soundless gap the phone seemed to go dead.
“Zarko?”
“Why you speak in English?”
Mila picked up the phone, turning off the speaker and switching to Bosnian with impressive speed and smoothness. In her native tongue, her engine accelerated from zero to sixty in about ten seconds flat, until she was battering Zarko with a long burst of vocal bullets.
Sasha offered a whispered translation, as best he could. “She says now she will do the talking. She says she’s here in town.”
“Ne!” Mila said, and spat out another round of guttural venom.
“She says ‘No!’” Sasha gave Bill an apologetic look. “She says she’s not here with you, that you turned out to be a bigger asshole than ever. She’s here on her own.”
Now Mila listened for a bit. “Yah! Yah!” she said, and then: “Ne!”
I heard Sasha’s name several times.
“She says she’s made me stop what I’m doing, because she found something that might endanger all of us. Bring shame to our name. That she wants to turn it over to Zarko. She says I got in too deep, that she’s afraid, and only Zarko can fix it.”
The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) Page 25
