The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  “What about the safe-deposit boxes?”

  “There are bills from various banks. They’re all over town, just like fatso said before his coronary. But we don’t know what’s where. There doesn’t seem to be a master key of any kind.”

  “What about the ledger?”

  The black leather book they had found in Gisler’s desk was filled with coded entries, symbols of various kinds that did not mean anything to Klingsor or the Echoes. The code was too personal and idiosyncratic to give up its secrets easily.

  “Can’t figure it out. If it’s coding for whatever insurance packages he’s holding for his clients, there’re no obvious indicators. Nothing that looks like a bank routing number or a safe-deposit box number. Any chance we could get the geeks to look at it?”

  Klingsor hesitated. The nerd battalion with their pocket protectors and supercomputers could perhaps tease some meaning out of the ledger book, but there were complications with this operation, and they were not the kind that he wanted the Echoes to know about.

  “Give me the book,” he said finally. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Once Echo Three had left, Klingsor closed his eyes and massaged his forehead and temples with his fingertips. He could feel a tension headache coming on. This op had been a total cluster fuck from the beginning, and there was no clear path forward to success that he could see. The clock was ticking. The package was almost certainly somewhere in this city, but with Gisler dead, it might as well have been in Timbuktu.

  The phone rang. Gisler’s private line.

  “Allo,” Klingsor said in French. He could have gone with German, but he had the Swiss lawyer pegged as someone who preferred French whenever possible. It was difficult to be elliptical and imprecise in German.

  “Gisler?”

  “No, this is his assistant. Monsieur Gisler is currently unavailable.”

  “That is not acceptable.” The caller spoke German with an accent that Klingsor could not identify.

  “I am sorry,” Klingsor said in his best High German. “I can get a message to Herr Gisler.”

  “My name is Ibrahim Korkuti. Tell him that. He will wish to speak with me.”

  Klingsor knew that name. Korkuti was Albanian mafia, head of the most powerful clan in the country and the kingpin of a criminal enterprise that encompassed not only the usual drugs and guns and extortion but also manufacturing and even mainstream politics. Korkuti had his own political party and a dozen seats in the Albanian parliament. His organization was also violent enough to make the Colombians and the Sicilians look like grade-schoolers. He was not a man used to hearing no.

  “I really can’t interrupt him at this moment.”

  “I have something that I need to deliver to Gisler today for safekeeping. One of my associates will deliver it, but I want Gisler there personally to receive it. I won’t trust anyone else. He will hold it for me as per the usual arrangement. For reasons that you do not need to know, the delivery must take place this afternoon. It is extremely important.”

  “I will give Herr Gisler that message.”

  “Tell me, assistant. Are your insurance premiums paid up?”

  Klingsor hesitated. The last thing he needed was someone from the Korkuti clan paying a late-night visit to Gisler’s office and either burning it down or breaking in to smash the place up . . . maybe checking the freezer for a late-night snack.

  “Give me a minute to find Herr Gisler, please.”

  Klingsor held the phone with his hand over the receiver for almost two minutes as he thought through the problem set. He had an idea. It was not one that he was especially comfortable with, but at this point it was all improvisational. And improvisation, Klingsor knew, could be exceedingly dangerous.

  “Herr Korkuti,” he said into the receiver. “Herr Gisler has agreed to receive your materials this afternoon at four thirty. But there are a few conditions.”

  “What are they?” Korkuti did not bother to disguise the irritation in his voice.

  Klingsor explained.

  When he had finished, Klingsor called Echo Three into the office.

  “What’s going on?” Echo Three asked.

  “We have a job to do,” Klingsor said, before outlining his conversation with Korkuti.

  “Where do we start?” Echo Three asked.

  “By thawing the son of a bitch out.”

  —

  The Albanian mob was nothing if not punctual. At 4:32 the bell rang. Echo One opened the door and escorted the courier to the outer office. To Klingsor’s mild surprise, the courier was a woman. He would have expected the Korkuti clan to be somewhat retrograde in its attitude toward gender equality.

  Klingsor tracked her arrival on the computer with a feed from a series of closed-circuit cameras that the Echoes had installed for that purpose. He looked up from the screen in feigned surprise when Echo One and the courier arrived.

  The courier was young and attractive, with raven-dark hair and features that were just on the edge of severe. There was a slight bulge at the beltline of her tailored suit, likely a firearm of some kind. In her right hand, she carried an attaché case. Black sharkskin. Very stylish. And no doubt outrageously expensive. Who said crime doesn’t pay?

  “Herr Korkuti sent you?” he asked in German.

  “I am here for Herr Gisler,” she replied. Klingsor noted that she had not answered the question. It was a professional response.

  “Herr Gisler is in his private study.”

  “I was told that I would be able to see him.”

  Klingsor nodded.

  “But not disturb him. His time is exceedingly valuable. You may watch, however, as I deliver him the materials Herr Korkuti would like safeguarded. I assume that they are in the attaché.”

  “It is the attaché. It should not be opened.”

  “Very well.”

  Klingsor extended his hand and waited while the courier’s instincts struggled against her instructions. She handed the case over with visible reluctance.

  “My employer is displeased with these special arrangements,” she said, seeking to salvage some kind of moral victory from the exchange.

  “We do apologize for the inconvenience. This was very last-minute, is all.”

  “It is not always possible to plan ahead in my employer’s line of work.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Klingsor opened the double doors to the study. Inside, Gisler was sitting at his desk studying a folder that was open in front of him with an intensity that brooked no distraction.

  “Wait here,” Klingsor whispered to the courier, trying to convey the importance of not disturbing the great man at work.

  The blinds were not drawn, and this late in the afternoon the sun shone directly into the office. This would account for Gisler’s decision to don tinted glasses at his desk. The large mirror on the far wall reflected the light back toward the outer office, leaving Gisler somewhat in silhouette. Echo Two had purchased and installed the mirror earlier in the day.

  Klingsor saw the courier glance at her phone then up at Gisler. He knew what she was looking at. A photo of the lawyer. She seemed satisfied and slipped the phone back in her jacket pocket.

  Klingsor walked the attaché case over to Gisler and placed it on the top of the desk where it would be clearly visible to the courier. Then he leaned over to whisper something in Gisler’s ear, placing his hand on the lawyer’s back as he did so.

  From this close, the makeup job looked obvious and overdone, but Echo Four had assured Klingsor that from a distance it would look natural.

  Gisler nodded his head, as though accepting something that Klingsor had told him. What the courier could not see was the handle of the screwdriver inserted into a small hole drilled into the back of Gisler’s skull that Klingsor had used to manipulate his head. He would look stiff, Klingsor knew,
but then he was a Swiss lawyer.

  It would help that the courier seemed more interested in the briefcase than in Gisler. Whatever was inside it must be extremely important.

  Klingsor did not linger. The longer he was in the office, the greater the chance of a screwup that would reveal to the courier that she was doing business with a week-old corpse. He exited the study and closed the doors behind him. They had been open for no more than forty-five seconds.

  Echo One escorted the courier to the door.

  When she was gone, Klingsor returned to the study and poured himself a stiff measure of Gisler’s Scotch. In a slightly macabre gesture, he poured one for the lawyer as well, setting it on the desk in front of him.

  “To your health,” Klingsor offered, raising the glass to his lips.

  It had been a hell of a day. He did not know how long he could keep the charade going.

  Maybe the code geeks could get something out of the ledger.

  If not, Kundry had better deliver results.

  SARAJEVO

  OCTOBER 28

  12

  She was waiting for him when he got home.

  Eric’s apartment was a comfortable two-bedroom in Logavina, a hip and up-and-coming Sarajevo district only a short walk from the embassy. As was the case with most apartment buildings in the city, the common space was dirty and grim. The glass over the front door was cracked. The paint on the walls was stained and peeling, and the row of metal mailboxes was dented and rusty. In the foyer, a faint scent of urine hung in the air.

  The private apartments in the building were a stark contrast to the common spaces. They were spacious and elegant, and when Eric had visited the neighbors for coffee, he had been struck at the care the residents lavished on their own homes. This was one of the legacies of Yugo-style communism. What belonged to everyone belonged to no one. There was no condo board or tenants’ association. A few months ago, the elevator had broken. One of the families on the seventh floor had taken up a collection to get it repaired. But the residents on the first floor refused to contribute. They did not need an elevator. Families on the second and third floors did not want to pay as much as the people who lived on six or seven. Tensions were running high and neighbors who had been friends for decades stopped talking to one another.

  Eric’s apartment was on the fourth floor. He routinely took the stairs for the exercise, but when the residents of the upper floor had collected half of the money they needed to repair the elevator, Eric had made up the difference. It was only a couple hundred dollars and it helped to keep the peace.

  He had spent the day working with Annika on the plans for the conference. There was still a great deal of work to do, but the pieces were beginning to fall into place. Eric felt energized by the work they had been doing, and he bounded up the stairs to his apartment.

  The door was unlocked.

  He was always careful to use the dead bolt. Most Sarajevans were still struggling to get by and break-ins were common.

  He opened the door with a sense of foreboding, expecting to see his possessions strewn about from a desperate search for valuables. Eric had a good laptop and an iPad and there was maybe fifty dollars in various currencies scattered throughout the apartment, but the burglars were hardly going to make a big score.

  To his relief, everything was in place. Maybe he had somehow forgotten to lock the door.

  Then he heard the music.

  The unmistakable bluesy sound of Ray Charles singing “The Midnight Hour.” It was unlikely that a Bosniak burglar would have put Genius Sings the Blues on the turntable while he ransacked the apartment.

  Eric knew who it was.

  They had listened to this album together on enough lazy Sunday mornings, trying to pretend for just a few hours that there was no war. Sarah had teased him good-naturedly about his fetish for vinyl. LPs were a technology that she had assigned to the same category as vacuum tubes and Betamax, losers in the march of progress.

  Sarah was sitting on the couch in the living room with her shoes off and a glass of red wine in her hand. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She looked relaxed, almost happy. Her eyes were closed as she listened to the music.

  “Make yourself at home,” Eric said.

  “Thanks.” She did not open her eyes.

  “Enjoying a little R&B with your B&E?”

  Sarah opened her eyes slowly, languidly, like a sleepy cat stirring reluctantly from its spot in a beam of sunlight.

  “Don’t be so dramatic. I didn’t break anything. The door was hardly locked.”

  “It has a dead bolt.”

  “Like I said. You really should talk to the embassy security office about getting better locks. This isn’t the safest part of town.”

  “You could have called.”

  “It’s better to have this conversation in person, I think.”

  Eric did not need to ask what Sarah meant by this conversation.

  He slipped his jacket off and undid his tie, draping both over the back of a chair.

  “It’s better to have this conversation over a drink.”

  Sarah poured a generous glass of Eric’s wine and handed it to him. He saw that she had picked the most expensive bottle that he had in his modest collection. Sarah had good taste. She saw that he had noticed, and she held up the bottle with the label facing him.

  “I assume you were saving this for a special occasion.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well. I’ll see what I can do to make it special.”

  Eric’s throat suddenly felt dry, and he took a large swallow of the wine to cover his confusion. Sarah had always blown hot and cold, and the signals she sent could be misleading, sometimes deliberately so.

  “I’m sorry about Zvornik,” she said. “That didn’t work out the way I had hoped. It got a little out of hand.”

  “How far out of bounds are you, Sarah? How much are you risking on this play?”

  “As much as I have to. Washington wants reward without risk. Well, you can’t have that. The trick is to take smart risks. It’s got to be worth it.”

  “And is it?”

  “Without a doubt. I won’t stand by and let this place fall back into the savagery of the nineties. Not if I can do something about it.”

  “And you think Mali is the key?”

  “I do.”

  “And you’re ready to do anything to bring Dimitrović back into our camp.”

  “I am.”

  “What is it that Mali has on Dimitrović? You know more than you told me. You told Viktor it was a disc or a tape of some kind. What is it? What’s on it?”

  Sarah seemed to hesitate. “We’re not sure. But it’s something pretty big.”

  “Something from the war?”

  “Most likely.”

  “What if it’s something criminal? Dimitrović had a dark past. I’m sure that you can find all sorts of slimy things under the rocks of his personal history if you turn enough of them over.”

  “I’m not interested in the past. It’s the future I care about. Dimitrović may have been a wing-nut nationalist up until a few years ago, but he changed. I don’t know why he did and I don’t particularly care. All that matters is what he can do. What he can mean for the future.”

  “What about justice?” Eric pressed. “Who speaks for the dead? What do we owe them?”

  “Nothing, Eric. We owe them nothing.” Sarah leaned forward to emphasize her point. “The dead don’t care.”

  “What about Meho?”

  “What about him?”

  “What do we owe him and his family?”

  “We owe it to him to make this country the best place it can be. If that means that a few creeps manage to escape the consequences of their actions, so be it. It isn’t personal.”

  “You do understand that if we have evidence
that Dimitrović was culpable in serious human-rights violations or something from the war that would meet the bar for crimes against humanity, we have a legal obligation to turn it over to the tribunal in The Hague.”

  “To hell with the tribunal. It’s a bunch of old men sitting in a courtroom a thousand miles from here splitting the few hairs they have left.”

  “That’s pretty much the way the law works.”

  “I don’t care. Morality trumps law.”

  “Who’s the judge of what’s moral?”

  “I am. You are.”

  The final sorrowful notes of “Ray’s Blues” faded to a close and the arm of the turntable swung up back into its cradle.

  Eric rose from his seat and flipped the disc. It gave him something to do to cover his confusion. Was Sarah right? Was his own obsession with the past not only damaging to his psyche but morally misguided as well?

  He watched as the arm settled back onto the vinyl disc and the first few brassy piano notes of “Mess Around” played over the ProAudio speakers.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder gently pressing against the tension in his muscles.

  “Eric . . .” Sarah said, and stopped.

  He turned, taking her in his arms and pressing his lips against hers. Sarah kissed him back fiercely. She tasted of wine and chocolate. Sarah wrapped her arms around his waist. Eric stroked her hair then caressed the side of her face. She shivered slightly at his touch as though from cold, and a soft sound of pleasure and desire came from deep in her throat. It was just as it had been.

  “Sarah, I . . .”

  “Shhh.” She put a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk. Not now. Later.”

  She unbuttoned her jacket and let it fall to the floor. Her nipples were clearly visible under the sheer fabric of her blouse. Eric took her hand and led her back to the bedroom, remembering what it was like to be young and in love.

  —

  The morning was awkward.

  Sarah was up and dressed before Eric was even awake. He threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and padded barefoot into the kitchen where Sarah was brewing coffee. She seemed distant and cool, turning away from Eric when he moved to embrace her.