Somewhere across town a shell fell to the ground, driving home the point, and Vlado experienced a mixture of fear and exhilaration. Damir was right. No one had a map to lead them through this darkness, and anyone offering to light their way would, by nature, be unreliable.
“So, what are you trying to tell me, exactly?” Vlado asked, as they reached the stairwell.
“To keep your eyes open. To watch your back. And to be aware that now you’ve taken this case, there can be no turning back. And, that despite all of the help I would like to and, indeed, can offer you, in the most important sense you will be very much on your own.”
“I’m aware,” Vlado answered, trying his best not to sound as timid as he felt. “And I’m ready.”
“We are all hoping so,” Kasic said. And, with a smile, he turned back toward his office.
CHAPTER 5
Vlado’s legwork was exactly that. All the police department’s cars had been commandeered by the army, and Vlado’s own car, a brick-red Yugo, had long ago joined hundreds of other junked vehicles atop a parking deck near his house after a mortar round filled it full of holes and shredded its vital organs.
U.N. trucks had recently begun towing crumpled car bodies from all over the city, victims of every imaginable type of shot and shell. They’d been exploded, ruptured, battered, torn, burned, and perforated. Viewed from a hillside in the middle of town, the collection made a pretty sight, lumped together in a rainbow of color and an occasional glint of chrome, their ruin obscured by the distance, although here and there the burned ones stood out as ugly black smudges, like oversize gum wrappers that had been crumpled and held above a flame.
So, Vlado walked wherever he went, piling up more mileage than he ever had as a foot patrolman. He’d grown used to it, and for all the hazards of extra exposure to gunfire the walking had become something of a comfort. He worked himself into a rhythm on the longer stretches, easing his bleakest thoughts into the open, then pounding them beneath his feet, moving until his mind was blank and he could drift, with an eye out for people running or dodging, and an ear open for the whistling approach of a shell.
Besides, the only people still riding in cars were either U.N. types, foreign journalists, mobsters, officers with the army or government, or anyone else who’d become one of the small moving parts of the war’s lumbering machinery. That was an identity Vlado would just as soon do without.
He and Damir had divided up the four contacts provided by Kasic. Damir would handle the two men in the liquor trade. Vlado would take meat and cigarettes.
The only other consideration was making sure he’d be able to reach the Jewish Community Center in time for his monthly call to Jasmina, scheduled as always for 3 p.m. Miss it and you had to wait another thirty days before your next chance.
He decided to head first to the cigarette factory. That meant a long walk out past the western edge of downtown, which would likely be no problem because the day had remained quiet into early afternoon.
From Kasic’s office Vlado moved uphill toward Kranjcevica Street, which ran parallel to the river and the so-called Sniper Alley, but was protected by a long row of tall buildings, or, in open areas, by makeshift walls built of wrecked buses, sheet-metal crates, and concrete highway barriers. Some of this stuff wouldn’t have stopped even the weakest of bullets, but it blocked the lines of sight of the snipers. Occasionally they fired anyway, perhaps out of boredom, and some stretches of sheet metal were so full of holes they looked like giant cheese graters.
This time of year the route was cloaked in a haze of woodsmoke that poured from the pipes peeping out of plastered-up holes in the sides of buildings. It was yet another way people rigged heating systems, yet another way in which the city was slowly becoming a warren of battered mountain huts, one piled atop another in gray buildings being slowly knocked to pieces.
Every few blocks Vlado passed workers neck-deep in muddy holes. They pulled at the innards of old gas lines or hammered together new pipes, working to keep one or another vital substance flowing to some other corner of town. Some worked for the city Others were working for themselves or their neighbors, digging up the street to install another illegal gas hookup.
The usual crowd was out strolling. Some toted empty milk containers and jerrycans on small carts, headed to water collection points. Others walked toward the Markale Market at the city center, where most shoppers walked slowly past meager heaps of vegetables—mostly cabbage and potatoes—looking but seldom buying.
Still others, like Vlado, were simply trying to get across town while the going was safe. There were old women in head scarves clutching shawls and tattered bags, wiry men bent against battered canes, and then there were those remarkable young women, still smartly dressed against all odds, with styled hair and touches of lipstick, liner, and rouge.
Weaving through this flow like zephyrs were teenage boys in twos and threes, skittish and glassy-eyed, already as inured to war as if it were a stubborn case of acne. Somehow Vlado could never imagine these boys someday running banks and businesses once the war was over.
Overlaying the procession was the winter bouquet of the siege—a smell of damp and dirty clothes, boiled cabbage, and thawing garbage, locked together by the acrid haze of the woodsmoke.
On several corners would-be merchants had set up shop on the sidewalk, standing at small folding tables or inside abandoned kiosks that before the war had sold candy, magazines and cold drinks, fresh snacks and newspapers. Now you could choose from used paperbacks, stacks of loose cigarettes, a few very old chocolate bars priced well beyond a day’s income, and an occasional bottle of beer for about a week’s pay.
Almost all the old shops and storefronts were locked and shuttered, although on the south side of the street, less vulnerable to the shells arcing in from across the river, some window displays were still intact. Mannequins wore the same dresses they’d worn two years earlier, gesturing stiffly toward full shelves of clothing stacked behind them in the dust and dimness. In a place surviving on corruption and cunning, it had not yet been deemed permissible to break into these stores, or perhaps criminals figured it simply wasn’t worth the trouble.
It was all the more puzzling because the goods of the sidewalk peddlers were far below the quality of what was behind the windows. They were the lowest rung of a black market that had become so meager as to be pitied. Vlado thought of Grebo and Mycky, so triumphant over their acquisition of a few Bic lighters, and wondered how Vitas could have succumbed to such paltry temptations.
Was it possible? Perhaps. Under these kinds of daily circumstances small temptations easily grew larger. When it seemed that the future would never arrive, every day became a sort of judgment day. Every morning seemed a vindication of your behavior the day before, no matter what you’d done, and it soon was evident to all that the innocent fared no better than the guilty. The old rules began to seem almost quaint, in the way that an adult looks back on adolescence and wonders how he ever got so worked up over such trivial matters as exams and weekend dates.
So perhaps Vitas had found some new agenda to operate by, although it didn’t fit with anything Vlado had ever known or heard about him.
He remembered the family’s gloomy house in Grbavica, the oldest and biggest on the block, standing out like a bunker with its angled shadows and gabled windows. Inside there were lacy curtains, doilies on the couches, a weary sense of never-ending dusting and vacuuming, of pillows that would be puffed and slipcovers smoothed as soon as you left the room. He’d felt nervous about sitting down anywhere, especially when Vitas’s mother had come down the long staircase. She was a fluttering, fretful woman, eager to ingratiate herself with the friends of her young sons, attentive yet always seeming to focus on some point just over your right shoulder. She spoke in a delicate, quavering voice, in elaborate sentences that had a way of tailing off before completion, as if her thoughts began evaporating as soon as they bubbled to the surface, and she could never quite catch up to them
before they disappeared.
He remembered her particularly from his last week in high school. The Vitas family had invited their youngest son’s classmates up to their cabin in the mountains. They barbecued cevapcici over a glowing bed of wood coals, the smell of smoke and the spiced meat delicious on the sharp clean air. Spring blossoms bloomed across the green sloping meadows, with a few strips of snow still lurking in the creases and shadows. They’d all taken a nice walk, crossing grassy fields of butter-cups, cutting beneath fragrant stands of balsam, and stepping across clear, rushing streams.
They’d ridden home together in a farm truck, bouncing around tight curves halfway down the mountain before Vlado had remembered he’d left his knapsack behind. He had picked it up the next morning at the Vitas home in the city, sitting gingerly on one of the immaculate couches to stay the requisite amount of time for politeness while Mrs. Vitas asked him in an increasingly distracted way about her older son, Esmir, apparently forgetting that Vlado was a classmate of her younger son, Husayn. Esmir, in fact, was by then already off in the army, serving on the Adriatic coast, and already winning glowing reports, as he’d done in every endeavor until now.
Vlado reached the western edge of downtown, working his way behind the highrise apartments along Sniper Alley, also known as Vojvode Radomira Putnika Street, although the new government had already come up with its own, more politically inspiring name for the wide boulevard.
The buildings here had taken some of the heaviest beatings, yet were still virtually filled with residents, unless you counted the apartments facing the river. Most of those were vacant, destroyed during the first weeks of the war, when helicopters had poured red streams of tracer fire through the windows, either to root out nests of snipers or just to take out the day’s frustrations. A few entire floors had gone up in flames, and some windows were now empty and blackened. Whole sections of concrete facing were ripped away and, in some rooms torn open, you could still see the wall hangings and bits of blackened furniture.
Across the street and closer to the river was a no-man’s-land of gutted, burned highrises, a landscape of shredded metal and broken glass where some people still scavenged furtively at night, risking lives to search for old door frames, window sashes, broken furniture, anything that might be used for firewood. They crept through the damp and musty blackness, dodging rats and the sweeping beams of the sniperscopes.
Behind the apartment blocks and out of the line of fire was an entire subculture of young people, the strong ones who always found a way to enjoy themselves no matter what the cost. Vlado passed several clusters of chatting teens, some of the older boys in uniform or carrying guns. In one parking lot a basketball game was in progress. Boys dribbled a slick, underinflated ball on a wet court, the ball kicking wildly as it struck the edges of shell dimples. The steel backboard was embossed with an old pattern of shrapnel spray. The boys’ jeans and shirts were black from the grime of the ball, their faces and hands as smudged as coal miners’.
The whine of a rocket grenade interrupted the splat and ping of the ball, but only for a moment. Everyone behind the building knew instantly, through some well-practiced inner calculation, that the loudness and tone meant the shell wasn’t close enough to do them harm, and life continued after only the briefest hesitation, a collective flinch so slight that a newcomer would never have noticed.
An ill-advised hook shot clanged off the rim. The shell exploded six blocks away. The shortest boy on the court reached on his tiptoes and grabbed the rebound, dirty water flying with the slap of his hands.
After another block Vlado turned right, passing beneath a railroad overpass and climbing a slight hill before turning left toward the entrance of the cigarette factory.
A crowd of nearly a hundred was gathered outside the chain-link gates, bunched tightly but waiting quietly for the daily emergence of the one pound plastic bags of chopped tobacco. They would buy the bags for ten marks apiece, then try to resell them for double the price in the city center to people who didn’t have the energy or courage to walk to the plant.
Vlado showed his pass and slipped past three guards toting heavy machine guns. The security here was better armed than outside the presidential building, although these men wore old doubleknit pants and print shirts, with dark caps of napped wool. True to the spirit of the enterprise they worked for, cigarettes burned in the mouths of all three.
Vlado passed more guards at the plant doorway, then moved down a flight of stairs to a vast noisy cellar. Most of the manufacturing had been moved below ground long ago after shells began slamming into the upper floors. Vlado entered a room where ten women lined either side of a long table, stacking cigarettes into packs. The packs themselves had been made from whatever paper was available—old wrappers for toilet paper rolls, soap wrappers, pages from old school textbooks and even used government forms. Vlado wondered vaguely if any of his old arrest reports might be in the high piles. He idly picked up a new pack and began reading a passage from page 283 of a high school physics textbook. Something about Bernoulli’s principle.
All around him men wheeled huge green bins of chopped tobacco, heading for the hoppers of machines that were rolling and cutting cigarettes by the thousands. There were always complaints from the factory that supply was down to its last reserves of tobacco, but it looked to Vlado like production was at full tilt. He walked on, watching a conveyer belt carry newly made cigarettes toward the table of women. A man who seemed to be a foreman approached with a frown and a creased brow. They shouted to each other above the din of the machinery.
“Vlado Petric. I am here to see a Mr. Kupric.”
The foreman nodded and disappeared around the corner of a large green machine that hummed and banged away Vlado waited for Kupric to emerge, half expecting someone in a furtive hunch, glancing about nervously. He wondered if he should move toward a darker corner. How did these appointments work, anyway?
A few moments later a man who must have been Kupric strolled around the corner of the machine, preceded far in advance by a grand belly that stretched the limits of a sweaty white T-shirt. He extended his plump right hand in welcome. A large smile spread across his wide face, as if he were meeting a valued client to close a business deal.
So this is our fine and secretive undercover man, Vlado thought.
“Please, follow me.” Kupric shouted into the noise. “The plant manager has made his office available, where it is quiet and we can enjoy some privacy.
“And,” he said, his grin widening, “we can have a few smokes. I work all day in the middle of this, and the only time I can smoke is lunch. Too dangerous. If this place ever burned down the war would be lost in a week.”
It wasn’t far from the truth. The factory was one of the great beating hearts of the war effort, every bit as vital as a munitions plant. If most armies are said to travel on their stomachs, the Bosnian forces were crawling painfully on their lungs. Daily cigarette rations kept them smoldering through the nights in cold muddy trenches. The rations were higher for frontline duty, and the soldiers were the only people in the city who got filtered cigarettes. That didn’t sound like much of a privilege until you inhaled an unfiltered Drina. The sharp, acrid bite had inspired a cottage industry of handcrafted wooden cigarette holders, which you now saw all over town.
Kupric took Vlado upstairs to the office wing of the building. Leaving the noise, they ducked for a moment into a large meeting room, which looked like it had once been quite splendid, paneled and carpeted. Now the long oak table in the middle of the room was split down the middle, its broken sides covered with fallen plaster and ceiling tiles. Overturned swivel chairs and plaques citing past production achievements were piled together at one end, and the paneling had been torn in long streaks. Overhead, a ragged hole in the ceiling sprouted wires and shredded insulation around its edges.
“From a mortar shell last week,” said a beaming Kupric, who seemed to view the ruined room with pride. “Fortunately no one was hurt.”<
br />
They walked down a hallway to the plant manager’s office and seated themselves on his couch by a low coffee table a few feet from a huge oak desk. On the table the manager had arrayed about a dozen sections and shapes of heavy, twisted metal, the choicest surviving chunks from shells that had landed in or around the plant.
Vlado had seen similar displays in offices around the city—at the hospital, at stores, at the courthouse, at the few bureaucracies still up and running. The fascination with these instruments of torment baffled him. He looked for a moment at this assemblage, the conical tops from a few big shells, the jagged sides of smaller rocket grenades.
At Vlado’s office, Damir had taken to collecting fragments of spent sniper bullets he’d found on streets and sidewalks. They were torn and tarnished bits of brass. In six months he had amassed 79—he recounted them every week or so—and when he was burning off nervous energy he’d sit at his desk tapping the cup up and down to the beat of some tune in his head, occasionally rattling them like a cup of crushed ice.
One saw boys in the street collecting for their own desks and bedrooms, legions of tiny amateur experts who’d learned to identify the range, caliber, and origin of nearly every sort of weapon. They also knew the habits and accuracy of various neighborhood snipers, and if you asked they’d tell you the present likelihood of being fired upon if you stepped into a nearby alley or intersection. They had mapped out lines of fire in their heads the way Mediterranean boys familiarize themselves with local ruins and landmarks, hoping to earn tips from tourists.
Kupric stood for a moment, then plucked something from a wall shelf behind the manager’s desk. He returned with his arm outstretched, handing Vlado a small, flat tin of cigarettes. Nicely displayed on the lid was a hand-drawn scene of Sarajevo in its former glory, against an orange backdrop.
Lie in the Dark Page 8
