Lie in the Dark

by Dan Fesperman

  But there was no shooing them once darkness fell, not unless the garrison commander wanted a mutiny on his hands, for what other pleasures were there to be taken from this forlorn posting. The French were assigned to abut the frontlines of two sworn enemies, camped along the banks of a river coveted by both while shells and bullets sailed overhead in either direction. Your blue helmet was good for little more than scorn and a guaranteed ticket home if you made it through your six-month tour of duty unscathed. So what did it matter, then, if one bought an occasional woman, or even if a particularly enterprising soldier or two went into a little business for themselves as employers of the local talent. Better to have that sort of distraction than to have too much to drink and perhaps put your fellow soldiers at risk as well.

  The spot was exactly where Vlado had made his own ludicrous transaction with the edgy young prostitute—“the bank teller” was how he thought of her now—and he tensed as he rounded the corner.

  He found four women waiting, spaced a few yards apart. A sentry was posted just a bit farther around the bend. You could just make out his rifle barrel and the tips of his boots.

  None of the women was smoking. That would have been spending their wages as they worked.

  Vlado cleared his throat. Four faces rose to meet his, and he saw her right away, the third one down the line. She wore a red wool dress, still looking a bit prim and businesslike for the profession, although the dress looked rehemmed, or so he would have guessed, about four inches above the knee. The difference from before was that her makeup was heavier, caked and penciled with obvious care but leaving an impression of—what?—certainly not passion, nor willing abandon. Something melancholy, frozen. Yet she was definitely surer of herself than a month earlier, it seemed.

  “I’m Inspector Petric,” he said, “and I need to question the four of you for a moment about a shooting last night.”

  “Which one, there were only about a thousand,” replied the nearest woman, the tallest, with long dark hair. She wore a fake fur coat slouched open to reveal a silky black dress. The other two, he noticed, were quite conventionally dressed. Either they were newcomers or they simply didn’t care. Or perhaps with a captive clientele like this, there was a certain market for sheer normalcy, the fantasy shopclerk whisked off the street and straight into your armored personnel carrier.

  “I’m interested in a single shot fired a little before nine, just before closing time, and probably the loudest one you would have heard all day if you were standing here for long. The victim was standing across the river, a little downstream. Maybe fifty meters from here. Maybe more. And it wasn’t a sniper. Whoever shot him was standing right there with him.”

  “And you think maybe we climbed up on the bags here for a better look, or to maybe offer a better target,” the first one piped up again, now lighting a Marlboro, showing off her wealth and, in turn, her position among her peers. “Listen, the last thing that’s going to catch my attention is a gunshot. Unless they’re shooting at me they’re welcome to fire all day.”

  “It’s not the shot itself I’m interested in. It’s the moments just before or after, anything you might have seen or heard right around the time of curfew. The footsteps of someone in a hurry. A car driving on the road by the river, that’s rare enough these days. Or any customer you might have turned loose in that direction just before. Anything at all, really, because the streets weren’t exactly crawling with witnesses at that hour.”

  “Well, sweet one, we’re sorry, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to report from here.”

  “And you’re the spokesman for this business association?”

  “For the U.N., in fact.”

  She extended her hand, as if for a very British handshake. “Chief of public affairs, U.N. bureau of personal services,” she said, cackling with a husky wheeze.

  Vlado turned toward the others. “So nothing comes to mind then from last night. Nothing out of the ordinary or even noticeable,” he asked, but the first one was still the only one talking.

  “If we told you what came to mind from last night you’d get so excited we’d have to charge you,” she said, while the others shrugged mutely. “Otherwise, it was nothing but the usual run of lonely faces and insulting offers. Am I right, ladies?”

  A series of small nods. Vlado’s woman in red stared at the ground. He wanted to take her by the shoulders, force her to look him in the eye, though he couldn’t say for sure if it was only because he wanted some answers to his questions. Whatever, it was an obvious dead end as long as the taller woman was in charge. He should have let Damir handle this, as his first instincts had told him. Damir would have had this experienced old crone chatting and sharing cigarettes with him by now, spilling half her life’s story along the way.

  “Well. If anything does occur to you later, I’m right down the block, fourth floor. Inspector Petric.”

  “Don’t worry, we know the place,” the first woman’s voice called after him as he strolled around the curve of sandbags. “Some of our best customers work there. Good tippers, too, I hear.”

  Her cackle rose high into the darkness, and Vlado flushed in spite of himself.

  By the time Vlado reached his apartment a misty cold rain was falling. He was fatigued and hungry. It was his longest workday in months.

  Yet he was energized in a way he hadn’t been since the beginning of the war. Certainly the case had problems, severe ones. But for all its portents of fear and difficulty, he’d no sooner go back to cases of murdered gypsies and drunks than he would go back to that slaughterhouse, with its stench of blood and panic.

  He’d begun the investigation with doubts of his own abilities, and some persisted. Was he in over his head? Perhaps. But who wouldn’t be on this landscape, where rules and allegiances could change by the hour.

  Far more worrisome than his lack of expertise was the thrust of the early evidence, such as it was. It seemed too pat, too tailored to his own needs, and those of the Interior Ministry. It might well be a concoction, either for the gain of the informers or for their bosses, who may have been eager to hide something far more complex and lucrative. Even if they were telling the truth, what would it matter. Their stories provided few useful details.

  If Vlado was merely interested in disposing of the case in a tidy fashion, as Garovic would doubtless prefer, he felt sure that he need only hand over his and Damir’s four “sources” to Kasic for further questioning. Then, given enough time for more persuasive interrogation or more creative imaginations to bear fruit, Kasic’s people would emerge with enough to craft a conclusion.

  Someone would be selected from the rough list of mobsters to take the blame. Perhaps the mobsters would even nominate one of their own, seizing a chance to further winnow the competition. The fellows at the slaughterhouse certainly wouldn’t be above such a trick.

  Then the case would be turned back over to Vlado for its official closing, a fiction that he would sign and offer in triplicate to the appropriate international observers. It would be wrapped in the same soiled bundle with Vitas’s bloodied reputation, waved a few times before an uninterested world, then dropped out of sight and forgotten.

  Vlado made up his mind that he would not proceed that way, not without being ordered to do so, even if it meant plodding through weeks of dead ends. Besides the possible danger of this approach, the only problem was that he had precious few leads.

  But he did have one. Dead end or not, it might take the better part of a day to check out, if only because of its location.

  He pulled from his satchel the crumpled name and address that had been in Vitas’s pocket the night of the murder. Then he lit a lazy two-inch flame from the nozzle of the hose leading across his kitchen wall. He strolled to a bookshelf and drew down a battered map of the city, unfolding it on the kitchen table in the flickering light.

  “Milan Glavas” was the name on the strip of paper, and the address was indeed in Dobrinja, meaning Vlado would need a car. He traced
his finger along the route, crossing the map’s creases and small tears. As always with maps, this one took him into the past, into parks and playgrounds with his daughter, into meandering walks of his youth on narrow wooded paths leading up into the hills. He ran his finger down familiar lanes and alleys, crossing snowbanks and green meadows from older, better days, passing the smells of a favorite bakery, the welcoming call of an old friend, now dead.

  The world had been so large then, even if the city had been smaller. You could stroll up a mountain to catch a breeze from the northeast knowing that its smell and the way it felt in your lungs would tell you a little bit about every boundary and shoreline it had crossed to reach you—down from the Alps and across Italy, then over the Adriatic and into the dry hills of Dalmatia before finally climbing the green passes and mountains of Bosnia, to this city in the valley.

  Nowadays the air only seemed stale and confined, which Vlado knew made no sense. And for the first time in nearly two years he felt the urge to climb upon the roof of his apartment building, to breathe deeply of the mountain air and again heed the call of distant lands. He would inspect his city as it reposed before him in the night, its scars hidden by the darkness. The Serbs should not be the only ones to enjoy the view.

  He climbed the ladder slowly, listening for the whistle of a shell that could drive him back down, but the night was quiet. Stepping onto the roof into a scatter of broken glass, he found to his pleasure that the mist had cleared, and somewhere from behind the clouds the moon cast a pale light through the canopy. A staccato message of gunfire called to him from the west, but it was distant, harmless.

  He strained his eyes toward the hills to the south, across the far bank of the river, wondering if anyone might be stirring along the battlefronts. Then he turned west, gazing toward the black hump of Zuc, gathered like a sleeping bear. To the north he scanned more ridges, then to the east. And at every vantage point, he knew, were men and weapons that could kill him in an instant if they knew he were out here, looking their way. He wondered what those men must see by day when they looked in this direction, the omnipotence they must feel as they aimed their barrels at buildings and people, seeing unmistakably who stood to die, or what buildings stood to fall, then watching the explosions as their shots soared to their destination.

  The image brought to mind some verses from his youth, a poem from one of his advanced English classes. Who had written it? Stevenson, he remembered. Yes, Robert Louis Stevenson, the name that had sounded so funny and foreign to his ears at the time. The poem was “The Land of Counterpane,” and in having to memorize it some of the verses had stuck with him, had become his favorites because of the way they reminded him of his own boyhood—a child at home in bed with his toys arrayed about him like a tiny empire, of which he was lord and master.

  He remembered a line from the middle, something about sending his “ships in fleets all up and down among the sheets.”

  But it was the last verse that captured his fancy most, and which now came to him as he thought of the artillery men in their mountain bunkers, staring down toward his home:I was the giant great and still

  That sits upon the pillow-hill,

  And sees before him, dale and plain,

  The pleasant land of counterpane.

  He looked toward the hills again, and, as at other times, he sensed a subterranean machinery at work, a heave and rumble of forces barely contained by the seams of the horizon. Perhaps if you put your ear to the ground, he fancied, you would even hear it, a throb like a pulse, giving life and order to every terrible action up above.

  He yearned to glimpse that machinery, to slip unnoticed between the sliding teeth of its gears and find the men at the controls; to take them unawares and to know. Simply to know.

  For all its flaws, Vlado decided, this case was his own best chance to do so, but first he had to believe that entry was possible. He decided it would be, if only because from what little he’d already glimpsed, perhaps the people at the controls weren’t always so vigilant. Two years of wartime had left them as dulled and careless as everyone else.

  With a final glance toward the far side of the river, Vlado climbed back down the ladder. Then he gently refolded the map, sliced a bit of the cured meat from the butcher’s generous offering, and poured a glass of water from a plastic jug. That was dinner, and tonight it seemed like plenty, a feast of the privileged.

  Before climbing into bed under a down blanket and three layers of wool, he reached for the stiff plumbing knob that controlled the gas jet. He thought for a moment of painting his soldiers. They sat on the workbench in the corner, untouched for days, going slack and undisciplined on him. He smiled at that thought, then shut off the gas, too weary for anything but sleep. The flame guttered briefly at the tip of the nozzle before disappearing without a sound, back up into the hose toward its source deep in the ground.

  Through the wall he could hear his neighbor’s radio, playing for the first time in weeks. They must have somehow gotten new batteries. And he drifted toward sleep to the faint, tinny strains of an old folk tune from the Dalmatian coast, a guitar twanging against the static, while a silky layer of cold worked its way up under the blankets.

  He fell into a restless dream, where the bright faces of women from the day’s streets and walkways came toward him in an anxious and beckoning parade. They smiled, but their makeup was heavy, the colors slightly off. They were too pale and garish, as if they had all been daubed and prettified by the cool, brisk hands of a mortician. But he strolled toward them, nonetheless.

  CHAPTER 9

  Peparing to go to Dobrinja was a bit like outfitting for a wilderness expedition. Vlado had to arrange for cash, hire a car, find gasoline, plan his route in advance, and drive with a reckless precision that would evade shellholes and torn metal without slowing down enough to invite gunfire. It was not a place for stopping to look at maps, because if Sarajevo had become a sort of hell on earth, Dobrinja was its innermost circle of despair and isolation.

  Dobrinja’s highrise neighborhoods crouched on a lonely peninsula to the southwest, pinched uncomfortably on three sides by Serb guns and trenches, connected tenuously to the rest of the city by a narrow lane running between abandoned buildings and walls of stacked cars and buses. The route led through checkpoints and security officers, and the reward at the end of the line was a small, hushed community of tom buildings, sandbagged and dug in against the daily tidal surges of artillery.

  The safest way to go was by hitching a ride in a U.N. armored car, but that meant going through official channels. There would be forms and waivers to sign, wasting at least a day and drawing unwanted attention as part of the bargain.

  Vlado found a car easily enough, his next door neighbor’s white VW Golf with two bullet holes in the passenger door. Taped plastic flapped in the rear window. The neighbor wanted no part of driving to Dobrinja, so he handed Vlado the keys and wished him well. He hadn’t particularly wanted his car going to Dobrinja, either, until Vlado sweetened the offer of four packs of Drinas with half the remaining meat from the butcher. Judging from his eager acceptance, Vlado probably could have sealed the deal with far less.

  Supply and demand, Vlado mused.

  Buying the gas wasn’t as easy, even though just about anyone could point out the doorways and storefronts where someone sold gasoline. Supply was tight lately, and the first two locations came up empty. The third was two blocks from the city market. Vlado parked on the sidewalk, at a corner where a stubbly-faced man in a wool cap stood behind a folding table covered with paperbacks in the alcove of a shuttered business. Vlado studied the titles—cheap mysteries with yellowed pages and half-naked women on the cover, a repair manual for an ’83 Yugo, a travel guide to Greece, a Serbo-Croat translation of Dickens’s Pick-wick Papers.

  “Gasoline?” Vlado asked.

  “You have money?”

  Vlado showed him five crumpled bills totaling to sixty Deutschemarks. He’d gotten them earlier from Garovic, who g
ot cash for special occasions by trudging upstairs to a location only he knew. He invariably went to it hunched and muttering like a worried old troll, reappearing a few minutes later with the bills folded tightly in his right hand.

  “Two liters only,” he’d told Vlado. That, plus the puddle already in the tank would barely be enough for the trip.

  The man in the cap crossed the street toward the doorway of another abandoned building, unlocking a large padlock on a bent hasp. With some difficulty he shoved open a groaning metal door plastered with scarred posters from prewar circuses and concerts, then disappeared up a dark stairwell.

  Vlado shivered, partly from the cold, partly from the eerie resemblance of the whole setup to the storefront slaughterhouse the day before. He looked at the upstairs windows for any sign of light or movement, wondering who might be up there—how many men in makeshift uniforms, lounging with their guns. How many men with Motorolas, smoking at some battered desk before ledgers already filled with black ink. The stacks of petrol cans, reeking of fumes the way the other place had reeked of blood. For all he knew, perhaps even his friend from the slaughterhouse, the one he’d heard but not seen, was up there, paying a visit to another realm of his empire.

  A few minutes later a second man emerged from the door, looking around briefly before crossing the street. In one hand he carried a plastic funnel. In the other was a large wine bottle sloshing with an amber liquid. Vlado recognized the label of a wretched wine from Mostar, but the picture was pleasant enough, a pastel drawing of the city’s ancient stone bridge. A few months earlier it had been blown into the river by shelling.

  As the man moved closer Vlado frowned.

  “Are you sure that’s two liters?”

  “Quite sure. See?” he said, pointing to the markings on the label. “Just as it says.”

  “Yes, but the gasoline’s not even up to the neck.”