The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  “About a third of the assembly,” Annika suggested.

  “Missed that mark by zero-point-seven assemblymen. Believe me, I’ve done the math. And there are a couple of guys in the ruling party who would easily count as zero-point-seven human beings at the most if we were allowed to keep score that way.”

  Annika laughed, and it seemed to take years off her age. It was nice to see her start to relax.

  Nikola too seemed to sense that Annika was warming to him, and while his motives may well have been less than pure, he was clearly doing everything he could to radiate charm.

  “Nikola, how much do you know about what Annika is doing in Bosnia?”

  “Just what I read in the papers.”

  “The Sondergaard Plan may be Bosnia’s last, best chance to avert another war. Another terrible war. The peace conference is going ahead with or without Zoran Dimitrović in two weeks. That doesn’t give us a lot of time to prepare.”

  “Then why are you wasting a precious afternoon on me?”

  “We need your help.”

  “To fix Bosnia?”

  “Yes.”

  Nikola looked at Annika, his blue eyes focused on the High Rep as though she were the only person in the world. It was a neat trick, Eric thought. One he would do well to learn.

  “How much has our friend Eric taught you about Bosnia?” Nikola asked.

  “More than I knew two weeks ago.”

  “Has he introduced you to the wonders of Mujo and Haso?”

  “What is it?”

  “Not what, who. Muhamed and Hasan are the quintessential Bosnian everymen. Simple village folk who somehow are always coming out on top near the end.

  “In any event, Haso goes fishing one day at the height of the war and catches the magic goldfish. ‘Let me go,’ the fish says, ‘and I will grant you a wish. Anything your heart desires.’

  “So Haso shows the fish the Contact Group map that had been proposed by the big powers as a way to split the country up among Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, and bring peace to Bosnia. Things weren’t going so good with that. And Haso says to the fish, ‘I want you to draw the lines on the map in such a way that everyone’s happy and there’s peace in our time.’ The fish takes a good long look at the map and says: ‘I can’t do that. I don’t think anyone can do that. Do you have anything that might be more within the scope of my power?’

  “‘Well,’ Haso says. ‘There’s my wife, Fata. I’d like Fata to be beautiful.’

  “‘Bring her by,’ the fish says. So Haso goes home, and he collects Fata and brings her to the lake and presents her to the fish. And the fish takes a good long look at Fata and says: ‘Let me see that map again.’”

  Annika laughed. Eric smiled. He had heard the joke before. He had heard all of Nikola’s ten thousand jokes before. But Nikola told them well.

  “So what do you want me to do?” Nikola asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled that an EU diplomat might be in need of his assistance. His confusion was not without foundation. What Eric was about to offer defied conventional political logic.

  “We want you to represent Republika Srpska at the peace conference in Sarajevo,” Eric explained. He tried not to make it sound like “We want you to grow wings and fly,” but it came awfully close.

  Nikola snorted.

  “My joke was funnier.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Come on, Eric. I’m the leader of the opposition. It’s a parliamentary system. The opposition is like a third tit. I can’t even fix a parking ticket. How am I supposed to speak for the RS at a bloody international conference?”

  “Easy,” Eric said calmly. “You represent the RS public. Not the government. Not Dimitrović. Think about it. The people who voted for him voted for his platform. They wanted Europe. They wanted a functioning state. They wanted peace and reconciliation. There were plenty of far-right loonies on the ballot. They didn’t win. Dimitrović won and you won. Now you still represent those positions—the positions that won the democratic election—and Dimitrović does not. He’s not the guy the people voted for. You are. You can speak for them. They asked you to speak for them.”

  “That’s a little . . .” Nikola was not certain how to finish the sentence. For the first time ever in their long friendship, Eric saw that he was at a loss for words.

  “Bold?” Eric suggested. “Visionary? Brilliant?”

  “No, that wasn’t where I was going. Lunatic is closer to what I was thinking.”

  “It was Dimitrović who broke faith with the electorate,” Eric insisted. “It was all a giant game of bait and switch. Step forward and let the people know that they still have a champion.”

  Nikola looked over at Annika helplessly.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “Eric’s right. You can do this. We need you to do this. You may well be the only thing standing between the Bosnian people and another bloody civil war.”

  Nikola looked unhappy.

  “Don’t put that on me,” he pleaded.

  “No one can put it on you, Nikola. You have to take it. You have to accept it. No one can force you to.”

  “But how would it be legitimate? How could it? I only have a third of the assembly.”

  “Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder,” Eric said. “If enough people believe that what you are doing is fair and just, the legitimacy will follow naturally from that.”

  “This sounds almost like a coup,” Nikola insisted.

  “Nope. You’re not overthrowing the government. You’re representing the majority of RS voters who chose peace and reconciliation when they were given the opportunity. Come to the conference. Speak for them. Give them a voice.”

  “You know that they might just kill me and dump my body in the Drina.”

  “I can get you protection.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  The rain had let up and the clouds broke. The sun peeked out uncertainly, and the wet limestone of Stari Most glistened like the scales on the brook trout that the local fishermen pulled from the green waters of the Neretva. Nikola noticed it as well.

  “All you need is a pigeon with an olive branch and you’d be Noah.” Serbo-Croatian did not distinguish between pigeon and dove.

  “Do I get my own miracle?” Eric asked.

  “You mean me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nikola turned to look at the bridge, and it seemed to Eric as though he were staring back into the past.

  “Do you know the story of that bridge?” he asked Annika.

  “Some of it. Maybe not all.”

  “Suleiman the Magnificent commissioned it to replace a rickety old wooden thing that wasn’t up to the job. Three times the architects built a stone bridge and three times it collapsed. The pasha, who did not want to look bad in the eyes of the sultan, was not especially forgiving of the failures. He had them impaled. Mimar Hayruddin, knowing that the penalty for failure was a horrible death, built a bridge of timeless beauty that stood for four hundred years. Maybe success must be built on the back of failure.”

  Eric did not interrupt. It was a truism of diplomatic practice that when the guy on the other side of the table was negotiating with himself, you did not try to stop him. Nikola was bringing himself around to the right conclusion.

  “So are you ready to join me?” Annika asked. “Are you ready to help build this bridge?”

  Nikola turned his gaze away from the bridge and looked intensely first at Annika and then Eric.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Eric had not realized that he had been holding his breath, waiting for Nikola’s decision. There was still a great deal of work to do, but there was now at least a path forward.

  While the odds were long, they had a chance. Bosnia had a chance.

  MOSTAR

  JULY 1566

&nb
sp; 10

  On the day before the bridge was opened, Mimar Hayruddin prepared for his own funeral. It seemed a reasonable precaution. This was the third attempt to span the mighty Neretva with stone. Suleiman the Magnificent himself had ordered it to be done, and what the sultan ordered had best be done. Even the impossible. Especially the impossible.

  The architect of the first attempt had been a casual acquaintance of Hayruddin’s. His bridge had collapsed before the keystone of the arch could be laid. The architect still guarded the approach to the bridge on the left bank of the river, or at least what was left of him did. His skeleton and the small bits of flesh and cloth that clung to the bones sat propped up by the sharpened stake that ran from the pelvis bone along the spine and out the mouth. The local bey’s executioner had learned the trick from a descendant of Vlad the Impaler of skewering a man from ass to mouth in such a way that no major organs were damaged. Those so punished could live for days, begging for death with their eyes.

  The second architect had been a genuine friend, a fellow apprentice of Mimar Sinan’s, the lion of Ottoman architecture. His friend had promised, rather foolishly, to deliver the bridge on an ambitious and optimistic schedule. He had run into problems when the riverbed had shifted under one of his pillars, causing cracks in the structure that had made the bridge unstable. He had been fortunate to catch the bey at a bad moment. In a fit of pique, the governor had simply killed him on the spot.

  The third architect had been a rival of Hayruddin’s, a man whose sole talent consisted of self-promotion. Arrogance did not span rivers, however, and his moldering corpse occupied a stake not far from his predecessors’. His death had been a blessing to the field of architecture.

  Now the task of constructing the bridge over the Neretva had fallen to Mimar Hayruddin. He had not wanted the responsibility, but it was difficult to say no to the sultan. For six years he had labored on the project, and what had begun as duty had grown into a labor of love. The bridge was beautiful. His bridge. It arched over the green Neretva like the neck of a swan. Hayruddin had used local stone for the bridge, a kind of limestone with the luster of marble. The builders had joined the stones with metal pins, and Hayruddin had mixed a mortar of his own design that included horsehair and egg whites. The towers at either end of the bridge were slender and elegant rather than squat or utilitarian. They added to the bridge’s grace and beauty.

  Yes, the bridge was beautiful. But was it strong? Tomorrow the bey would watch as a team of oxen hauled a large sledge loaded with bricks across the bridge. The slender swan’s neck of the bridge seemed so delicate, so fragile, that many of the builders believed the span would simply snap under the weight. Builders. They did not know math. But they did know stone. Hayruddin would give them that.

  If the bridge failed, Hayruddin would die, most likely with a spear skewering him from tail to tip.

  “I am ready to die,” he murmured to himself.

  “What did you say, Master?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Hayruddin said automatically.

  “Yes, Master.”

  Tahir was only eleven, but he was clever. Two years ago, Hayruddin had caught him stealing food. The bey would have taken his hand. Hayruddin put the boy to work. And he had fed him. If you feed a stray, Hayruddin thought ruefully, he will never leave. The boy had become his valet, somehow making himself indispensable. Hayruddin had been teaching Tahir draftsmanship and math. Not a merchant’s math. The kind of math an architect would need. Tahir was a quick study. He had an eye and the potential to be a great architect one day.

  “Tahir.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “If I die tomorrow . . .”

  “You will not die, Master. The bridge is strong.”

  “If I die tomorrow, there is a bag of coins hidden in the back room. Silver and a little bit of gold.”

  “Yes, Master. I know where it is.”

  Hayruddin’s eyes narrowed.

  “Behind the loose brick in the corner near the desk,” Tahir added helpfully.

  “And you were not tempted to steal it?”

  “No, Master. I love you.”

  Hayruddin actually had to blink away a few tears at that. The prospect of dying in the morning had made him soft.

  “If the bey kills me tomorrow, take the coins. There is more than enough to get you to Istanbul. Find a man called Sinan. He is an architect, the finest in the empire. Give him this.”

  He handed the boy a piece of paper folded into thirds and sealed with red wax.

  “It’s a letter,” Hayruddin explained. “Sinan will take you in and finish your education.”

  “Yes, Master,” Tahir said obediently.

  Hayruddin turned to the rest of his preparations. Tahir drew a bath and Hayruddin scrubbed himself with a harsh soap made of sheep fat and ashes until his skin was raw and red. The bey was unlikely to offer him the appropriate funeral rites. If his corpse could not be washed as custom proscribed, then he would at least go to his death clean.

  Hayruddin laid out a fresh tunic. White. The color of death.

  His papers were in order. He wrote a farewell letter to his wife in Istanbul. They had no children.

  Tahir helped him lay out his clothes for the morning.

  “You should eat, Master,” the boy said. “I can fix you something.”

  “No, thank you, Tahir. I am not hungry.”

  “Do not worry. You will not die tomorrow. The bridge is strong. It will stand forever.”

  “Oh, Tahir, my son,” Hayruddin said. It was the first time he had called him that. “Nothing stands forever.”

  GENEVA

  OCTOBER 25

  11

  At one time, in his youth, Klingsor had briefly flirted with the idea of going to law school and following in his father’s footsteps as a corporate attorney. Even as a young man, however, he had enough self-knowledge to know that the law was not for him. It was too staid. The work would be tedious, he thought, with little of the kind of psychological drama that engaged him. Instead, he had joined the army, quickly finding his home in intelligence and translating that experience into a career that had been many things, but never dull.

  It was, therefore, somewhat ironic that Klingsor now found himself essentially heading up exactly the kind of multinational law firm that he had taken such care to avoid. Gisler’s practice may not have been traditional, and his client base was certainly more colorful than that of a white-shoe firm in New York or London, but there was no escape from the fundamental tedium of the profession. Contract negotiations, wills, and estate planning. Even Russian mobsters, it turned out, needed trust funds for their children’s education and Caribbean tax shelters for their ill-gotten gains. One of Gisler’s clients, a wealthy Arab who stood one hundred and seventy-sixth in the line of succession to the throne of Saudi Arabia, had retained Gisler to represent him in a zoning dispute with London authorities over plans to install a pool on the roof of his Kensington estate. It was hardly the kind of stuff to get one’s pulse pounding.

  Klingsor needed to keep all of the wheels and gears turning in the law firm while they searched for the package. It needed to look like the practice was functioning normally. If Marko Barcelona realized that Gisler was dead or even if he merely suspected that something was wrong, he would move quickly to set up another fail-safe. As long as he thought Gisler was still carrying his insurance policy, they had an open window.

  Klingsor pushed aside the stack of folders on his desk that held the records for a senior Chinese general with an extraordinarily expensive Russian mistress. The general wanted Gisler to purchase an apartment for her, her third, it so happened. This one on Lake Como.

  Klingsor stretched his back without bothering to stand up from the butter-soft executive-level chair. Gisler had been something of a hedonist. His office was beautiful, with a large mahogany desk and a wall of legal books
with unbroken spines that Klingsor suspected had been purchased by the meter. There was a humidor stocked with Davidoffs and a decanter of Scotch that had no label but tasted like money.

  The hum from the industrial-strength freezer in the far corner of the office was a little distracting. Echoes Two and Four had manhandled the heavy stainless-steel box up the stairs to Gisler’s office. Gisler himself was stuffed awkwardly inside. Echo Four had had to break both his legs to get him to fit. By now, the lawyer was no doubt frozen solid into a rough cube shape.

  If Klingsor had learned anything about Gisler since taking over his office, it was that he was secretive by nature. He had no permanent employees, relying on a temp service to provide clerical support and never keeping the same person in the job for more than two weeks. Klingsor had broken the encryption on Gisler’s computer without too much trouble. He had sent an e-mail to the temp agency announcing a last-minute vacation. The office would not be requiring the services of an administrative assistant for at least the next two weeks. Two weeks. That was about as long as Klingsor thought he could keep the charade going.

  The door was open, but Echo Three knocked to alert Klingsor to his presence. He was a polite kid, but Kundry had seen his file and knew that the Andy Griffith looks and his aw-shucks demeanor were misleading. Echo Three was a stone-cold killer.

  “Any luck?” Klingsor asked without much hope.

  “Not a fucking thing,” Echo Three replied.

  Klingsor motioned to the chair on the other side of the desk. Echo Three sat down and Klingsor poured him a fifty-euro slug of Gisler’s Scotch.

  “What are we looking at?”

  “It’s a mess. There are no real records. I think that Swiss son of a bitch kept most of it in his head. He didn’t trust paper and he certainly didn’t trust electrons. The computers are almost clean. Nothing but solitaire.”