Through the Bookstore Window

by Bill Petrocelli

  “He doesn’t even find time to fire his rifle straight,” the Hijena broke in. “I’ve watched him. He always fires into the air.”

  The Komandant gave his brother a gesture to be quiet. He grabbed another cigarette from a pack that he kept in a drawer, holding it between his yellow fingertips as he lit it. His teeth were gritted together as the smoke escaped from the sides of his mouth. He stared straight ahead without blinking.

  “What is this, more poetry? It looks like these books are in English.”

  “They’re American… They’re American poets.”

  The Komandant poked the pages. “What are these, women poets?”

  “Yes, sir, they’re…they’re mostly women.”

  “And what’s this?” He picked a couple of petals out from the pages and rubbed them between his fingers. “You put flowers between the pages?”

  “They’re just local… I mean, they’re not really flowers. They’re wild plants that I found at one of our camps and used as bookmarks.”

  The Hijena leapt out of his chair and poked at him. “What are you doing with all these books? Are you sitting there and reading them and playing with yourself?”

  The Komandant kept staring at him, ignoring his brother’s outburst. “Where did you get these books?”

  “At a bookshop. I took them… I mean, I bought them. It was a little shop that was nearby in Sarajevo.”

  The Komandant gave a small laugh that turned into a grunt. “I know that bookshop of yours—or what remains of it. Did you love it so much? The last time I looked, some riflemen had blown all the walls out.”

  He kept laughing to himself as he thumbed through the other books. But then one of them caught his attention. As he picked it up, his gaze grew more menacing. “What does this mean, The Laws of War?”

  He flipped it over and looked at the back, and then he opened it and scanned a few more pages. “It says this is the text of the Geneva Conventions.”

  He looked up sharply, his eyes reaching out like a pair of tentacles. “Did you get this at your bookstore?”

  He stammered out a “yes.”

  “So do you think you are in Geneva?”

  It was phrased as a question, but he knew not to answer it.

  “Do you look around every day and think, ‘I am in Switzerland’? Do you see some laws hanging out there on the trees, saying ‘you can do this, but you can’t do that’? Do you think there is a set of rules out there that everyone plays by?”

  He gave a faint “no.” The Komandant kept going as if he hadn’t heard him.

  “Do you think there’s some little rule book we look at to see what we can do?” He picked up the book and spat on it. “That’s what I think of your book.

  “We have one of our soldiers lying out there dead. He’s there right now—lying in the middle of the town square with the dogs sniffing at him. There’ll be maggots there before long. Do you think that we can send these people a nice little letter and quote them some section of your law book? Do you think we can say, ‘May we please go out there to recover the body’? Do you?”

  He tried to shake his head, but he was afraid to move.

  “Because if you do, let me tell you that it was those same people who shot him from the roof of the house. And then they shot him again as he was trying to get to safety. And it’s those same people who will shoot us if we try to get his body back.”

  He walked around the desk and grabbed him by his shirt. “There’s only one law out there. Shoot them before they shoot you. Attack their women before they attack yours. Do you understand that?”

  The Komandant gave him a shove against the wall. Then he picked up the books one by one, ripping them down the spine and throwing them into the corner.

  “What do you want me to do with him?” the Hijena asked.

  “Get him out of my sight.”

  The Hijena prodded him back toward the alley.

  “Just take him somewhere and make a man out of him.”

  He exhaled a long line of smoke.

  “And when you’re through with that, get rid of him.”

  sss

  An artillery shell hit somewhere close to her house, sending a shock though the cellar. She squeezed against the wall, but it was shaking. There was more rifle fire, louder than before, coming in short, staccato bursts from somewhere nearby. She heard unfamiliar voices, men screaming commands, as they ran from room to room above her. Suddenly, the door to the cellar smashed open, and a group of armed men poured down the stairs.

  sss

  He’d been running up the street with the others, trying to stay invisible in the pack of sweating, panting soldiers. They reached one of the houses, and the lead man shot at the door until it gave way. The Hijena screamed orders as they scrambled through the hallway. Two of the men raced over to the cellar stairs and kicked at the door. The first jolt knocked it off its hinges, and the second one sent it clattering down the stairs. As the two men jumped over the debris, he felt a rifle butt in his back, shoving him down the stairs behind the others. The Hijena shouted commands and warned them that it might be an ambush.

  Could it be a trap? He looked around quickly, trying to see if there was anyone lying in wait. From the dark corner, he suddenly saw a pair of eyes staring at him. It was a girl—maybe a little younger than him—and she was trying to make herself invisible behind a pile of blankets. He saw fear in her eyes.

  He’d been the first one to see her.

  The Hijena saw her next.

  sss

  She could see him shaking. She could almost feel his fear, as he seemed to be quietly pleading with her to hide, to dig a little deeper into the corner. He was a soldier of some sort, but she knew he didn’t belong there. He was carrying a rifle, but he was pointing it into the air like he didn’t know what to do with it.

  But there was another man—a very different kind of man. And he had just seen her.

  The second man had a high, screeching voice that sent a chill through her. He pushed at the young soldier, forcing him to get closer and closer to her. Then he held up for a second, but only long enough to yell at the other two men to go back upstairs and check the other rooms. She suddenly realized she didn’t want the other two soldiers to leave. Every instinct told her she would be in more danger if they left than if they stayed.

  Now there were only the three of them. The man with the screeching voice shoved the terrified soldier on top of her. He pushed down hard on him, yelling at him to get even closer.

  sss

  “This is how we teach these animals a lesson.”

  He felt the pressure from above pushing down hard on him, but his body kept refusing to move. The pair of eyes under him were terrified, and he thought he couldn’t bring any more pain to those eyes without bringing incalculable pain to himself.

  “Rip the dress off of her!” The Hijena’s hot breath enveloped him. “Do I have to kill you in order to teach you anything?”

  He was caught up in the pile of rags with the girl pinned underneath him. His tormentor was on top of both of them, shouting in his ear.

  sss

  He’s going to get himself killed. That thought spun through her head until it became a certainty: he was about to be shot. The things she had been taught as a child raced through her mind, but none of them had anything to do with what was happening at that moment. There was nothing she knew that made any sense.

  The young soldier was pushing down on her, while at the same time he himself was being pushed. The madman hovering over both of them was going to shoot him, and then he would shoot her. They would both be left to die like a pair of pathetic lovers with their bodies entwined in a pool of blood.

  sss

  He tried to get free, but the Hijena was on him, yelling in his ear, and reaching under him to tear at the girl’s dress. As her clothes c
ame off in shreds, she seemed to be letting up. Was she giving up, or was she trying to protect him?

  sss

  His eyes had a tearful message: I’m so sorry.

  sss

  The eyes below him seemed to answer: I know.

  sss

  The Hijena finally grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him back up.

  “You’re through with that. Now, we have to get out of here.”

  He looked down at the girl and then back at the soldier.

  “Now, shoot her.”

  The Hijena waited a second and then yelled at him again.

  “Did you hear what I said? I told you to shoot her. You can’t leave witnesses around for this kind of thing. Do you want me to shoot her for you?”

  He stared at him.

  “You have a gun, use it.”

  Part Two

  San Francisco—2011

  Gina

  It was a happy crowd. Friday night in a midtown restaurant in San Francisco is usually pretty lively. I was by myself, but there was a guy eyeing me from the other end of the bar. I’d seen him earlier, when he was chatting up the bartender. She hadn’t responded to his advances, so he’d turned his attention to me. I could see why she wasn’t impressed. He preened every time he moved his body. I’d picked up enough women’s intuition along the way to know that was a bad sign.

  I did a quick assessment, trying to decide where he fit on my internal scale. Most women develop an alert system as they’re growing up—an instinctive gauge that measures the threat or benefit of every man who approaches them. My situation was more complicated. I wasn’t born with that skill, but I learned a version of it later on. Right now, the system was working, and I was pretty sure of one thing: This guy wasn’t in my green zone.

  But where did he fit in? If he wasn’t at the top of the scale, was he all the way at the bottom where my fear gets tangled up in paranoia? I tried to visualize him in a warlike setting with hate in his eyes. That’s a quick judgment I find myself making with every man I meet. Could I imagine him with a gun in his hand or one bulging under his coat? If I sense anything, my body tenses up, and the old wounds come roaring to the surface. My fears have never really left me. I can be standing in the middle of the bookstore—thousands of miles away on another continent—and suddenly everything might drop out from underneath me. Then I’m back in a dark room staring down the barrel of a rifle.

  But this guy hadn’t touched that hot wire. As I watched him swirl his drink at the end of that big, brass bar, I decided there wasn’t much to worry about. I climbed down from my fears and stuffed them back in their cage. He was still looking at me, but he really wasn’t much more than a nuisance. He’d turned his body so that he was facing me, probably trying to decide when he should slide down the bar and make his move. He wanted to be cool about it, but he was failing completely. At that point it was pretty easy to see that he was just some character out by himself on a Friday night, trying to get laid.

  I should have been flattered—maybe even gratified—that my feminine charms were working so well, but instead I was just uncomfortable. I’m not that kind of woman. I know that sounds a bit prissy, but I mean it more literally than figuratively. There are things I don’t really talk about until I know you pretty well.

  When Silvia texted me earlier saying that she’d be late, she said to meet her at the bar. But right then I was wishing I’d told her no and just sat at one of the tables near the door. I had an advance reader’s copy of a new novel that I planned to give her, and I would have enjoyed rereading a few pages while I waited. I could have sat with my legs demurely crossed, looking a bit bookish. And those twenty feet or so between me and the bar would have made all the difference. I would no longer be a pickup waiting to happen. Even in the most sexually sophisticated city in the world, when a man sees a woman standing alone at a bar, he thinks he owns her.

  The bartender placed a rye Manhattan in front of me, and I took a slow taste, enjoying the quick, bracing effect of the first sip. I stared ahead, focusing on the array of gourmet wines and liquors that covered the long front window behind the bar. There are times when I’ve been bothered about the fragility of such a scene, worried that everything could come crashing down. But right then, I was enjoying the moment. The early-evening light from Market Street was filtering through the glass behind the bottles, twinkling through the browns, ambers, and yellows of the liquids, creating a soft, unexpected light show. It was one of the subtle touches that made the Zuni Café my favorite restaurant in the city.

  That guy—I didn’t even bother to look at him anymore—was going nowhere because I could sense how clueless he was. He wasn’t the only one like that. My search for some sort of sensitivity in men had been utterly fruitless, and the selection seemed to be getting worse. I wasn’t sure what attracted me anymore. They all seemed to miss the stuff that’s important to a woman—important to me, anyway. I’d had my brown hair cut earlier in the day, and it curled softly around the collar of my slate-colored jacket. But ten minutes from now, this guy—and probably all the rest of them—couldn’t have told you the color of my hair or my jacket. I was wearing a pair of opal drop-earrings and a handcrafted necklace that I’d picked up at a vintage jewelry store on Hayes Street, and there was a trio of bracelets on my right wrist in a matching color. The skirt was something I’d found in a thrift shop on Fillmore Street, and it went with an old pair of shoes that I had. My ensemble wouldn’t have won any fashion awards, but it reflected who I was at the moment.

  The thing I needed in a relationship was proving elusive. I longed for someone who would enjoy the subtleties of my feminine persona, but that kind of man wasn’t easy to find. The field, I knew, was very limited. I needed a person I could trust with a long, unpleasant list of things from my past. He had to be someone who wouldn’t be shocked by my wartime experiences or freaked out to learn there were people still trying to track me down. If my fears kicked in from time to time, he’d just have to accept them. And he’d have to put up with my dwindling hope of finding a lost child who by now was on her way to becoming a grown-up. And, of course, there was the big thing—the secret about me that wasn’t really much of a secret at all. He would have to do more than just accept that part of me—he would have to rejoice in it. My special someone had to be willing to get beyond the outer me and draw on my inner yearning for love.

  But the guys I’d been meeting were nothing like that. They were like this one at the bar. I have big brown eyes that draw some attention, and I have long hands that I use to gesture a lot. But that’s not where most men stare. When they look at me, they only see a woman in her late thirties with somewhat angular features and a slightly skinny ass. I probably fit some vague idea of what an evening’s companion should look like. But guys like this, if they got that far, would be in for a surprise.

  www

  Sylvia suddenly appeared, striding down the aisle toward me. She was dressed in her light gray, take-no-prisoners business suit that I remember her wearing when she had a crucial court appearance. She had one of those that afternoon. Even if she hadn’t sent me the text message, I would have known from the way she walked that she’d gotten her client acquitted.

  The hostess was a few steps behind her holding a couple of menus. Silvia was all hugs and apologies, and within seconds she gathered me, my purse, my book, and my phone and pointed us toward the back of the restaurant. The hostess had been holding a table along the brick wall at the back of the dining area. Sylvia knew without asking that I wanted the seat with my back to the wall. She’d been around me long enough to know that I liked to see who was coming and going.

  “Was that guy trying to pick you up?” Sylvia nodded back at the bar.

  “He thought he was. It’s probably a good thing that you showed up when you did. You saved him a lot of embarrassment.”

  Sylvia gave me one of her warm grins. It was a
palette full of teeth, dimples, and flashing brown eyes. She used to wrap that smile around me and convince me that all was right in the world.

  “Not your type?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You didn’t try to charm him with your Italian accent? That always worked with me.”

  I guess I got a little exasperated. “Give it a rest, will you? The minute I saw him, I already knew a dozen reasons why I wouldn’t be interested.”

  Sylvia brought her lips together with the hint of a kiss. She was wearing a beige blouse under her suit jacket, and I asked her where she bought it. But it made me sad that I had to ask. There was a time about a year earlier when I would have known everything about her clothing. If she wasn’t wearing one of the blouses I liked, I would have just walked into her closet and slipped it on myself—no questions asked. But those days were over.

  She reached across the table, grabbing my hand, rubbing each finger with soft strokes from her own forefinger and thumb.

  I tried to break the spell for the moment. “Shall we get the roast chicken from the brick oven? Two orders of that with the bread salad—you know, like we always do?”

  She nodded, but she wasn’t letting up. “Gina, you worry me sometimes.”

  I just shrugged. Even though our birthdays were only a few months apart, she’d taken to being maternal with me.

  “What is your type?” She was all seriousness. “I don’t even know anymore, do you?”

  “Maybe, it’s still you.”

  Her smile eased up a bit as she pursed her lips and shook her head. “You know that’s not true.”

  She stretched the thought a little further. “We had to end it. You know that, as well as I do. The only difference was that you didn’t want to talk about it. You were too kind—you didn’t want to say something that would hurt my feelings. But we had to make the change that we did.”

  I knew. I even remembered what she said: “We really don’t fit together very well.” At the time I thought that was a very polite way—even a delicate way—to put it. But I couldn’t argue with her.