At the Drop of a Hat

by Denise Hamilton

  Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense!

  Originally published in THRILLER (2006),

  edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.

  In this Thriller Short filled with Balkan intrigue, bestselling author Denise Hamilton uses a chapter from her own life to create an unforgettable escapade.

  Jane wants to leave Albania and visit Macedonia so she can attend a Balkan literature conference. She bums a ride from a restaurateur and quickly realizes that there is more to her driver than meets the eye.

  It’s a trip she will never forget.

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  At the Drop of a Hat

  Denise Hamilton

  CONTENTS

  At the Drop of a Hat

  DENISE HAMILTON

  These days, to her family’s great relief, Denise Hamilton stays home in Los Angeles and writes the Eve Diamond crime novels. But in the bad old days before she turned to fiction, Hamilton was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and roamed the globe, filing dispatches from Asia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former USSR.

  In 1993, Hamilton was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach journalism in Macedonia. The Bosnian war was in full swing, and she went with the full knowledge that if the fighting spread to her part of the Balkans, she’d go overnight from college professor to war correspondent. But Macedonia never blew up and Hamilton widely toured the South Balkans and fell in love with the small, quirky nation of Albania, which at that time was just emerging from fifty years of communist isolation. As Hamilton writes in At the Drop of a Hat, there were few ways in and out of Albania but she managed to hitchhike into Tirana with some Albanian journalists she met at a conference on beautiful Lake Ohrid, at the Macedonia-Albania border.

  Hamilton hadn’t been planning such a trip and had only two hundred dollars and one change of clothes in her backpack. But she knew a good offer when she heard it, and being an adventurous sort, arrived in downtown Tirana in the late afternoon and immediately began calling U.S. Fulbright scholars in Albania, hoping to find somebody with a spare couch where she could crash. Luckily, she reached another Fulbrighter before dark and he took her to eat at what was then Tirana’s only French restaurant, where they met the proprietor, a handsome and cultured Albanian man.

  The restaurateur eventually offered Hamilton a ride back in his Mercedes to Skopje, where he often traveled for business. Due to scheduling conflicts she never took him up on his offer, and it wasn’t until much later that she learned the full story of this man’s life. In At the Drop of a Hat, Hamilton uses that knowledge and takes readers on a thrill ride of Balkan intrigue, providing along the way a taste for the sights, smells, textures and landscape that few Westerners have seen.

  A tale from one who lived it.

  AT THE DROP OF A HAT

  Jane looked out the passenger window and told herself that everything was fine. Bashkim was driving, the Mercedes hurtling along the Albanian highway at a hundred kilometers an hour. The air inside the car felt tight and crackly. Outside, greenhouses stood in untilled fields, their shattered windows gaping empty. A black-clad woman followed a herd of goats up a rock-strewn hillside, spinning wool on a hand spindle. Anything could happen out here, Jane thought, and no one would ever know. The wind would shred her clothes and rain would bleach her bones and when spring came, the goats would crop the earth around her.

  This has to stop, Jane scolded herself. She was a sensible girl, not one of those high-strung ones that fell apart at the drop of a hat. She just needed to rekindle the excitement she had felt last night.

  She and Paul had been in their favorite Tirana restaurant, arguing because he refused to tap his diplomatic contacts to get her a ride across the border to the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. A conference on Balkan literature was taking place in the capital and she really wanted to attend.

  “What’s the big deal?” Jane had protested. “Your embassy courier does the Tirana-Skopje run twice a week.”

  But Paul had suddenly grown engrossed in photos of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the French Alps that decorated the walls. Over the sound system, Edith Piaf sobbed about love and betrayal. Omelettes and salades niçoises sailed out of the kitchen. This had been their sanctuary, a little piece of Paris that shut out the chaos outside that was Albania. But now Albania had followed them inside.

  “I can’t put a civilian on that route, it’s strictly for consular business,” Paul said at last.

  Since when am I just a civilian? she fumed, recalling other, more fevered words he had whispered in the three weeks they’d been together. He was a low-level attaché at the U.S. embassy and she was a Fulbright scholar. They’d met at an embassy reception her first week in Tirana, bonded over too much Albanian merlot and hadn’t been apart since, though in her weaker moments she wondered if it was just an expat thing.

  “What do you want me to do, hitchhike? There aren’t a lot of options going east.”

  There weren’t a lot of options because the delusional Commie who had ruled Albania for almost fifty years had torn up the rail lines and sealed the border out of fear that the Yugoslavs, America and NATO planned to attack his backward and impoverished nation. Years after Enver Hoxha’s death, it was still a logistical nightmare to get in and out. No trains or regional buses. The only planes went to Western Europe, then you had to double back. Taxis were cheaper, but she was a student and didn’t have a hundred and fifty dollars to spare.

  “Excuse me,” said a low, melodic voice. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but your voices…perhaps I can be of help.”

  The proprietor, Bashkim, stood before them, sleek in an Italian suit, hands clasped deferentially. He had toiled for years in Parisian restaurants, then come home to show the natives the glories of French cuisine. Except that Albanians, at their salaries, couldn’t afford even one frite, though the brasserie had caught on immediately with the expense-account NGO and diplomatic crowd.

  Paul fixed the restaurateur with a pensive gaze. “Really?” he said, a strange light flaring, then banking behind his eyes.

  Bashkim gave a modest smile and bowed in Jane’s direction. “I must go to Skopje on business tomorrow,” he said. “I would be honored if you would accompany me. The
re is plenty of room.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” Paul said slowly.

  But Jane had seen the shiny blue Mercedes out back and was already imagining the smooth ride, the lively discussion as first the countryside, then the desolate mountain passes, soared by. Bashkim had exquisite manners, spoke five languages, understood civil society. His wife, a beautiful Albanian with green eyes, kept the restaurant books while their little girl, immaculate in frilly dresses, played with dolls in the back. Jane could tell they were in love. Unlike many of the men who stared with hungry, medieval eyes, Bashkim never gave her a second glance. She’d seen how the expat community embraced him. She’d be safe. Plus, it would end the dreary row, her nagging suspicion that Paul didn’t care enough to pull this embassy string for her.

  Feeling a sudden need to assert herself, Jane said. “I am sure. I’m going.”

  Paul threw up his hands in mock horror, winked at Bashkim. “These Western women, they have minds of their own.”

  She had kicked him under the table, but later that night, they’d fallen into bed with their usual frenzy, all the sweeter for her impending absence. Afterward, Jane was touched that he shoved his cell phone into her backpack and insisted she keep it on until reaching Skopje, at which point she was to call and announce her safe arrival.

  And so it was that Jane had set off from Paul’s apartment this morning. The streets smelled of wet earth and sewers. Deformed Gypsy children writhed on cardboard, begging from passersby. Housewives leaned over balconies, beating carpets with red-faced fury. Four stories up, a cow mooed indignantly. The sight of livestock in apartments had startled her initially, but Jane soon learned you couldn’t leave a cow out overnight in Tirana any more than you could a car.

  Bashkim was tossing a suitcase into the back seat when she arrived. The Mercedes seemed low to the ground, like it was carrying a heavy load, but Jane thought that unlikely. Albania exported little but its own people.

  Standing in the clear Adriatic light, she sensed Bashkim checking out her hiking boots and Levi’s, the fleece-lined vest she’d thrown over a red ribbed turtleneck, and felt something shift. A flicker of apprehension went through her. Had she misjudged him? Then, he broke into a familiar smile and her misgivings evaporated.

  “You ready?”

  She climbed in. As the apartment blocks, then the dismal shanties on Tirana’s outskirts gave way to farmland, they chatted about Albanian literature and culture. Then talk turned to the present day.

  “It’s wonderful, what you’re building here. There’s so much opportunity.”

  “There was more opportunity in France,” Bashkim said. “But I couldn’t get residency.”

  “But the West is so sterile. Everyone’s obsessed with money, getting ahead. There’s no sense of family, of what’s really important.”

  “You think people here aren’t obsessed with money?” he said, jabbing the gas. After that they sat in silence. The Mercedes jostled with donkey carts and tractors, passing so close that Jane could have plucked wisps of straw from a farmer’s hair. An olive-green truck of Soviet vintage emblazoned with the letters STALIN passed them, stuffed with young Albanian men who hooted and hollered. But other vehicles fell into line behind them, content to let the Mercedes lead.

  Bashkim punched in a CD and the strains of Mozart wafted through the car. The pleasant odor of his cologne hung in the air.

  “I’m really lucky you were going to Skopje this week,” Jane said, trying to recapture their earlier ease. “How often do you make the trip?”

  A smile curled around the edge of his mouth. “Whenever business requires it.”

  She studied him. He was blond, with blue eyes. This, too, had surprised her. He could have been a surfer from her college back home, if not for his pallid skin and something ineluctable in his profile that, framed against the raw landscape and crumbling stone buildings, she suddenly saw as quintessentially Balkan.

  “Do you go to Skopje for restaurant supplies?” she asked.

  There was a pause, an intake of breath. Then, “You are very curious.”

  Jane shrugged. “Just wondering.”

  “Sometimes it’s best not to wonder too much.” He let the words hang in the air and she felt it building again, an odd pressure in her head, the tingling of individual hairs on her nape. For a long time, she studied the scrubby landscape, bereft even of litter.

  “Look,” he said after a time, pointing to a fortress atop a hill, and she knew he was trying to make nice. “Skanderbeg’s castle. Our national hero. He was a janissary, a viceroy in the sultan’s army. But he rebelled in 1569 and led an uprising of the Albanian people against the Ottomans. He was never captured.”

  At the turnoff, a crowd of ragged boys appeared, bunching their hands in front of open mouths.

  “They’re hungry,” Jane cried, reaching into her backpack for dried fruit, nuts.

  Bashkim pressed harder on the accelerator.

  “They have become accustomed to begging,” he said tersely. “The foreign-aid workers throw out sweets and they scrabble after them like dogs.”

  The lack of sympathy struck Jane as harsh. When Bashkim got off the highway in Elbassan, a town dominated by a hulking factory that belched out black smoke, delicate tendrils of unease bloomed inside her.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  Bashkim’s voice was light, nonchalant.

  “To drop some medicine off with a friend.” He grew apologetic. “It’s for his sick mother.”

  He braked for a herd of sheep and something slid from under her seat, hitting her heel. She looked down and saw the barrel of a machine gun. Bashkim saw it, too. He lunged between her legs, grabbed it. His arm slid against her inner thigh. Then he shoved the gun firmly under his own seat.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, his voice thick.

  Jane gripped the leather edge of the Mercedes seat, her palms slick with moisture. She wanted to scream. Had she only imagined that his arm had lingered? And what if the gun had gone off?

  When he tapped her, she jumped.

  “It’s to protect us,” he said. “Just in case.”

  She tried to still the thudding of her heart against her rib cage, convince herself it made sense. This was still a land of brigands. As for the other, it was just a clumsy accident.

  Bashkim wheeled the car into a driveway and the gate to a compound swung open. Jane’s unease spiked higher. Why hadn’t he told her earlier about the stop? What if it was all a ruse? A trap? The car moved forward. She thought about turning the door handle and hopping out. But then what? The streets were filled with tough-looking, idle young men. And she’d be stranded with little money and no way back. She’d heard whispers about what happened to women found alone after dark, especially outside the capital. The gate clanged behind them and three men with hawk faces materialized. This was where it would happen, she thought.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” she said.

  “You should use the facilities,” Bashkim said firmly. “There will be no other opportunity.”

  Then a door to the house burst open and a plump lady waddled out. When Bashkim pulled out a container of pills and handed them to the woman, Jane could have cried with relief. The woman came around to Jane’s door, grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the house. Oniony gusts of sweat, overlaid with a yeasty smell, came from her. When Jane glanced back, the men were clustered around the car trunk.

  Inside, Jane was plied with tea, orangeade, cookies and raki, a potent and raw grape brandy. When they walked back out half an hour later, she noticed that the car sat higher. The men were examining a stack of boxes, and she thought she saw the glint of sun on metal. Then Bashkim stepped in front of her, blocking the view, and they left. Her mind afloat from drinking raki on an empty stomach, Jane leaned back in her seat. She told herself to stay vigilant, but instead dozed off, waking an hour later with a sour taste in her mouth, acid in her stomach.

  They were in the mountains now, the tall
, fierce peaks that dominate Albania, leaving only a sliver of arable land. It was afternoon. Just ahead, a bridge spanned a deep chasm. As they shot onto it, Jane looked and saw white water rushing down. She remembered Paul saying that the bridge was near the border. Then for a while the road would skirt Lake Ohrid, a deep body of still water that formed a natural border between Macedonia and Albania. Coming off the bridge, Bashkim executed a sickening curve around a precipice without a guardrail. Hundreds of yards below, Jane saw the rusting skeletons of cars that had misjudged the turn. Jets of saliva shot into her mouth and she thought she might be sick.

  They were on a straightaway when Jane saw an accident ahead and a man waving a white shirt tied to a pole. Bashkim swore and slowed. As they drew closer, Jane saw it wasn’t an accident but two Albanian army trucks, blocking the road. A pimply-faced soldier with a rifle waved them over to the side. Bashkim stared ahead with a fixed intensity. The car surged forward, and Jane thought he meant to gun the accelerator and try to blast through.

  At the last possible second, he hit the brake. The cars behind him careened into a ditch, bumping along on a cloud of dust and then accelerating past the roadblock. Jane wondered if the authorities might give chase, but they seemed supremely uninterested.

  A soldier walked up to Bashkim, rifle pointed at his head, barking orders in Albanian. Jane saw the restaurateur’s knee tremble but his voice stayed calm. She heard the words Amerikane and Skopje. More soldiers came, ordered them out of the car. Jane felt unreal, stiff and jerky with fear. She’d heard about Albanian bandits who set up roadblocks and robbed Westerners of cars, clothes and even shoes, leaving them stranded in their underwear. In years past, tractor-trailer trucks had convoyed to the Yugoslav border without stopping. Jane thought about offering the soldiers money.

  She pulled out the cell phone, thinking she’d call Paul at the U.S. embassy in Tirana. “Help,” she’d say. “We’ve been stopped at a roadblock by Albanian soldiers and I think we’re in trouble. Now aren’t you sorry you didn’t let me ride with the courier?”