Lie in the Dark

by Dan Fesperman

  Imamovic had been the only boss Vlado had known in his four years as a homicide investigator. He’d been a deliberate man who counseled professionalism and thoroughness. He’d been determined that each case would be conducted by the book, no matter how insignificant or meaningless it seemed, and he’d drained every last ounce of his budget to send his three investigators off for weeks at a time to pick up the proper training. Vlado had envisioned a future in which he would learn his trade inside out, with no case he couldn’t handle. Then the war had come, taking Imamovic and those hopes with it.

  It had taken Garovic only a few minutes to settle behind Imamovic’s gray metal desk as if he’d never worked anywhere else and, by the time Vlado and Damir had arrived, he’d tacked a picture of his family on the wall, spread a sheaf of case files before him, and was enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was as fine an imitation of businesslike efficiency as Vlado had ever seen, and it fooled everyone until at least mid-afternoon.

  Garovic was of medium height, with a soft, pale body spreading in the middle like a melting pat of butter. Lank, black hair was combed straight back over a broad face, and his skin was white and puffy from a lifetime of cabbage, beer and potatoes. He was among the few in Sarajevo who’d managed to gain weight during the war. His eyes, which seemed to blink constantly, were the gray-green of weak broth, and he spoke in the high, crackling voice of a bird used to being heard amid great chattering flocks.

  There was nothing Garovic cherished more than the order and tranquillity of business as usual, especially amid the chaos and clutter of war. And in the case of a murdered chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police, he sensed the disturbing tug of a whirlpool.

  He decided right away to swim for open water.

  “Not our jurisdiction, not even close,” he said, shaking his head vigorously as he reached Vlado’s desk. “And just to make sure, I phoned the Interior Ministry an hour before you arrived. They agree, of course.”

  His face was flushed, as if he’d just run a race. He stooped across the back of Vlado’s desk, his white hands poking through the unruly pile of books and papers. Vlado watched the invasion without expression, leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. Then Garovic found what he’d come for. He held aloft the pale green folder with the report from the night before.

  “Vitas, Esmir,” he chirped triumphantly, reading the block lettering. “An interesting case, no doubt. Who, indeed, would murder the most powerful law enforcement officer in the city? Something to speculate about while you’re painting your next regiment, Vlado.”

  Damir must have blabbed about the soldiers.

  “But now it’s officially none of your business. Or mine.”

  “Whose business is it then? Officially?” Vlado asked, although he knew the answer.

  “Interior’s special police. Dead or alive, he’s their boy.”

  The expanding realm of the special police had become an endless source of frustration and fascination for Vlado. At first he had only been annoyed, watching the city’s most interesting cases slide across the river to this hybrid at a time when he could have been learning from the experience. It was one part police force, one part army, and a third part secret intelligence service. Some people liked to say a fourth part was the largest—the mafia part, with a complex web spreading to every gang of smugglers and black marketeers in the city, reaching even into the hills of the Serbs. It was hard to say how much of the speculation was true, if any.

  Such uncertainty was inevitable in a city that owed its survival to private bands of armed thugs. When the Serbs were poised to rush across the bridges and overrun every main road during the first weeks of fighting, it was the outlaws—thieves, loan sharks, racketeers, and their various enforcers—who had rallied the defense, arming and organizing just enough people to fight off the advancing tanks with little more than pistols and machine guns. Vlado had to hand it to them. They’d fought like tigers, rescuing museums, hospitals, banks, government buildings, and the entire city center. If along the way they’d helped themselves to some of the contents of these buildings, or set up supply networks that filled their own pockets as much as they filled the stomachs of Sarajevans, well, who was going to complain?

  But once the Serbs were dug in around the city and it became clear no one was leaving anytime soon, the balance came due for this unorthodox protection racket. The privateers and their roving armies became the de facto local government, and for months they proved far more nimble than the fledgling Bosnian bureaucracy and its brand-new Interior Ministry police. They ruled the streets with an appalling boldness, stopping vehicles to siphon out gasoline, or, if they were feeling lazy, simply taking the vehicles. They stole flak jackets from reporters and aid workers, shanghaied men from cafés and water lines to dig trenches at the front, and stole or arranged U.N. passes as part of a thriving trade in human beings, smuggling friends and customers out of the country. For a price of course. All for a stiff price.

  And so, they made money. Lots of Deutschemarks and dollars. They also acquired property, storefront after storefront, but not by spending their riches. Their favorite method was convincing owners at gunpoint to sign over their deeds. Few owners objected for long, especially when offered the chance to stay on as manager at a handsome salary.

  As their fiefdoms grew stronger and more numerous, their world inevitably devolved into a fierce war within the war. The struggle for primacy became dazzling for its shifting alliances, for its sharp outbreaks of shooting, but it soon settled into a major standoff between two apparent kings, Enko and Zarko, who eventually worked out an uneasy peace by carving up the biggest rackets between them. Somewhere out on the fringe were the special police, still bickering over jurisdiction with the civil police, the army, the militia and the military police, as if any were really in charge.

  In the end it was their swaggering as much as their swag that did them in. Zarko became known for dropping by the presidential building during lulls in the daily shelling, herding his great shifting bulk of muscle and fat down gray aisles of desks, loudly lecturing anyone who would listen, either on the virtues of bodybuilding or the realities of who was really running the country. Him, of course, and don’t you forget it.

  His audience was usually a meek row of clerks and typists, although the new government’s chieftains doubtless also heard through their open doors, gritting their teeth and slowly laying plans for revenge. The U.N. was equally powerless to stop this behavior, but soon adopted the lawlessness as a convenient excuse for not moving aggressively against the Serbs. After all, they argued, what would be worse, a Serb takeover or this petty tyranny of gangsters?

  After a little more than a year of this, the aspiring powers of the Bosnian government decided they’d had enough, but it took a few months more before they were ready to strike back. That’s when the young police force of the new government’s Interior Ministry finally rose to its feet, and Esmir Vitas led the way.

  And what better person for the job? As a young scholar he’d won every possible award for duty and honor, yet his classmates had never considered him a snitch or a self-promoter. From university and more top honors he moved into the army, then over to law enforcement, and when the war had begun he’d been the natural choice to head the special police. It was mostly through his doing that the ministry had been able to mount any challenge to the gangs, much less the powerful assault they eventually unleashed. And his strengths were as much evangelical as organizational.

  Vlado had overheard him one night as he preached in a café to a tableful of midlevel officers, booming in tones of moral certitude above the noise of a heavy bombardment. The bottles passed around the table as Vitas railed against “the profiteers and the paper killers, the ones who would have us sitting down here in this bowl of blood forever as long as they can control the markets that are making them rich.”

  It now amused Vlado, then shamed him, to realize how much the tirade had sounded like the one delivered
two days ago by Toby, the British journalist.

  “They may be Muslims, but they are our enemy every bit as much as the Serbs,” Vitas had said. “Stop them and we stop half of the reason for the siege. Stop them and we save ourselves, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world.”

  And for a moment Vlado had almost believed it, sitting there enjoying a sip of the bottle that had finally been passed to his table. True or not, it had been a bold moment of inspiration. Dangerous, too, for you never knew who else would be listening in a place like that. Someone in the crowd would almost certainly be reporting the remarks straight back to the gangs. Dangerous people might well take offense at such zeal.

  Soon afterward Vitas had backed his words with deeds, drawing upon elements of the army, the military police, and even some of the other gangs that had lost out in the earlier power struggle. He launched a huge assault upon the strongholds of Zarko and Enko, and for two days in October the city shook under self-inflicted fire from mortars, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. State radio crackled out messages for everyone to stay off the streets, as if they’d been safe to begin with, and throughout it all the distant Serb gunners remained oddly quiet. One imagined them watching through their scopes and binoculars with pleasurable bewilderment, seeing their enemy implode with a ferocity long absent from the stalemated fighting in the hills.

  Enko was the easier nut to crack. He was killed on the first day, going down in a desperate charge. He left behind a dozen dead hostages, burned like bundled kindling in a basement, hands wired behind their backs.

  Zarko took longer. He finally surrendered when his building was surrounded. He couldn’t have missed the absurdity of his predicament—surrounded and besieged by an army that was itself surrounded and besieged. So he gave up, strolling into a courtyard of golden chestnut leaves in late afternoon with his top lieutenant, Neven Halilovic, and a handful of others. Four hours later he was dead, shot by the special police while trying to escape. Or so went the official version, but everyone had always wondered, and a thousand different versions sprang up to explain what had really happened. His body was never recovered, no autopsy performed. The following morning the Serb bombardment resumed as if it had never stopped.

  Since then, the city had begun to settle, as much as a city could under such circumstances. But no one had ever doubted that the previous beast had survived in some form. It had too many tentacles, and the thinking was that they would regenerate under a new head, even if the head was of a more official nature.

  So now Vlado would once again become a spectator of the doings of the special police, like an eavesdropper straining to hear a conversation through the heavy door of a locked room.

  He wondered if he would even hear of the investigation again. It would certainly not be good publicity to admit that the city’s antigang crusader had been murdered. So perhaps there would be a muted official inquiry that would release muted, official results. The killing would be attributed to, say, a personal disagreement, maybe involving a jealous husband. Women were said to be Vitas’s weakness. He was a bachelor, and a man in his position under these conditions had the whole city to choose from.

  Or perhaps authorities would invent a tale of Serb cunning and treachery—a gunman slinking through the lines and across the river. God knows it had happened, but it was rare, and usually infiltrators were in the business of spying, not shooting.

  Maybe even the official explanation would be true. But Vlado doubted it, mostly because he knew what would have happened if he hadn’t found the body. It would have been discovered instead by some poor old woman or wandering boy just after dawn. The hospital’s morning crew would have collected it, and out of haste, danger, and the general weariness with death, it would have been deemed a sniper case right away by some overburdened young doctor, or by the chief of the morgue, who was no doctor at all. The conclusion would have been plausible enough, if only due to the location, no questions asked and no autopsy. Even if someone had bothered to question the finding later, he’d be easy enough to silence with the right combination of threats and Deutschemarks. The identity of the victim would have created a bit of a stir, but by then the body would have been tagged, wrapped, and buried deep in the ground, out in another fresh rectangle on the soccer field outside Vlado’s window. Case closed.

  If this case had been one of those rare portals Vlado was looking for, he’d never be permitted to gaze into it now. His friends, he was beginning to believe, were right. But the job still beat serving in a trench. Now he’d have to wait for the next phone call. Or, rather, for the second call. Damir got the next one. And where was Damir, anyway, Vlado wondered with a vague sense of worry. Vlado hadn’t seen him all day. He tried his home, but even his mother and father were out. Or perhaps the line wasn’t working, an even stronger possibility.

  Vlado pulled a paperback from the pile on his desk and leaned back to read. Something about traveling in Tibet. Within an hour he was dozing, the book splayed across his chest, the backrest of the swivel chair groaning behind him.

  Then a cold, flabby hand was on his shoulder, jostling him awake. A high voice croaked in his ear.

  “To work, Vlado, to work. I know you’re very busy with your heavy caseload, but there is real work to be done.”

  Garovic again. The green file folder was back in his hand, as if he’d never put it down. He was forcing a smile.

  “It seems it’s your lucky day, Vlado.” He paused to catch his breath. “Esmir Vitas is all yours. That’s the word straight from the Interior Ministry. And who am I to second guess? It seems they want this to be an independent investigation, all very proper and aboveboard, et cetera, et cetera. So here, keep the file. But before doing anything else you’re to see Kasic at noon, in an hour, at Special Police Headquarters.”

  “Juso Kasic?”

  “Yes. Acting Chief Kasic.”

  “Very efficient.” He fought to temper the excitement in his voice, lest Garovic snatch back the file. “They might have at least let the chair go cold.”

  Garovic refused to rise to the bait.

  “Someone has to step in and mind the store,” he said. “Anyway, if they’re going to have a new chief, it might as well be Juso.” He’d spoken with Kasic for the first time five minutes ago and was already calling him by his first name.

  “And, Vlado.”

  “Yes?”

  “This is not some drunken gypsy with a hammer in his head. Don’t make trouble for you, or for me. Keep it respectful. The quicker you’re through with it, the better. And above all, keep it neat.”

  We’ll see about that, Vlado thought. He still needed to play it cool around Garovic, lest he set off the man’s bureaucratic radar. But he fully intended to run with this until he dropped. The broader and slop-pier things got, the better.

  So far the case was quite neat. The file folder which Garovic had treated with such grandiose caution had nothing in it but the previous night’s reports. Grebo’s findings had been standard: Death by high-caliber handgun at close range. No alcohol or drugs in the bloodstream. Vitas’s last meal had been about two hours before he was killed—a roast chicken (Grebo must have sighed with envy) and cabbage, a little rice and some coffee. There was nothing to indicate anything other than a straightforward death by shooting. There were no strange marks on the body to indicate a struggle before he was shot. Nor was Vitas armed, unless the killer had taken the weapon. If Vitas had been keeping an appointment, then it apparently wasn’t with someone he feared.

  When Vlado had gone back to the crime scene he’d found little but the pool of blood. The snow on the sidewalk had melted, so there were no footprints, or none he could find by crawling with his nose pressed close to the wet concrete. No one lived nearby, there were only abandoned office buildings shelled full of holes, gutted and waterlogged. The nearest inhabited place at that hour would have been the Skenderia barracks right across the river, although anyone there would have been unlikely to have seen anything. S
till, it would be worth speaking with the duty guard from the night before, and with the usual crowd of prostitutes.

  The military policeman who’d helped Vlado move the body had noticed nothing before the shooting, although he’d remembered seeing Vitas leave the building about ten minutes earlier, so he must have come straight from his office. The guard didn’t recall hearing the gunshot as such, having heard shots throughout his posting, which had begun four hours earlier. He’d been more concerned with the cold as it seeped through holes in the soles of his boots, and with an anticipated visit from his girlfriend, who’d never shown up. She was supposed to have brought his dinner, so he’d been left only with his daily ration of Drina cigarettes, one pack, and had fought hunger with deep inhalations. But there had been nobody else on the street after Vitas except for Vlado, and no cars other than the usual U.N. armored vehicles that rumbled by at all hours.

  Vitas’s wallet had also revealed little—the usual ID cards and a few old receipts, some from well before the war. Vlado glanced fondly at one from a restaurant now closed. He’d gone there once with his wife, a special meal for their fifth wedding anniversary. He thought briefly of the lamb and wild mushrooms, the glasses of red wine, the honeyed pastries for dessert.

  In one pants pocket there was only a stubby pencil, in the other a wrinkled and soiled handkerchief. In the shirt pockets, nothing.

  As Vlado scanned the report once again, Grebo materialized at his desk.

  “Sorry about last night,” Vlado said, looking up. “Hope you were able to finish your drink in peace.”

  “Oh, more or less.”

  Grebo was fidgeting, glancing back toward Garovic’s office. “In fact, I’m afraid I was maybe in a bit too much of a hurry to get to the bottle.”

  “What do you mean? And what’s the matter, Grebo? Still hung over? Actually, what are you doing here at all? Are you meeting Damir on a call?”