Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

Between Grebo and Damir, Vlado had begun to feel like the office eunuch.

Vlado looked at the scrawled address. Dobrinja, a peninsula of Muslim-held territory in a sea of Serb artillery, was anything but a pleasant place to visit. Too many lines of fire. But the phones there almost never worked, so it would have to be checked out in person. He would treat it as a field trip, try to learn something from it.

He started to put the number into the file folder, then wondered whether Kasic might want another glance. He folded the paper and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. No sense in attracting attention to their slackness. Besides, if they really wanted an independent investigation, what did it matter anyway?

“Another number for your black book?” said a voice, startling Vlado into momentary guilt. But it was only Damir, looking worn out, but grinning, once again the warrior triumphant, back from another successful raid on the young, willing females of Sarajevo.

“Yes, my very fat black book,” Vlado answered with a note of relief. “You’re welcome to it anytime for new contacts.”

“That’s all right,” Damir said. “I’ve already got the number for the office. And I’ve no wish to harass your wife in Berlin, and I’m probably the last person in Sarajevo she’d want to hear from anyway. And those are probably your only two numbers, am I right?”

“Close.”

He studied Damir’s face carefully, for any hint of a false note, a forced smile. But he truly seemed purged, even renewed. Perhaps the old cure had worked, after all.

“Well, a truly busy day around here for a change, I hear. Sounds like some real excitement last night after I left. Sounds good, unless Garovic decides it’s too hot for us and kicks it over to Interior.”

“He already has, but they kicked it back. They’ve got the U.N. looking over their shoulder and didn’t want to seem incestuous. So it’s ours after all.”

“Or so you think.”

“You think they’ll meddle, you mean.”

“Not obviously. But I’d expect them to put you on a very short leash, offering plenty of ‘help’ whether you like it or not. Tell me, your first appointment wouldn’t be with Assistant Chief Juso Kasic, would it?”

Vlado laughed. “No, it’s with the new Acting Chief Juso Kasic.”

Damir arched his eyebrows. “Impressive,” he said. “I suspect you’ll be seeing a lot of him until this is over. And he’ll probably be very generous with offers of ‘technical assistance’ from his various thugs and leg-breakers, if I know those boys. At an official level they’ll keep their noses out of it to impress Washington and London and Paris. But if I were you I wouldn’t look over my shoulder too much. Might be a shock to see what’s lurking in your shadow.”

Vlado then broached a possibility he’d been mulling since Garovic had handed the case file back to him. “Of course, you could always help watch my back,” he said, gauging Damir’s reaction. “And I know I’ll need some help tracking down leads, such as they are. I’ll mention it to Kasic, if you’d like. I’d imagine the ministry will want this wrapped up pretty quick.”

“Are you serious?” Damir asked, a trace of puppyish eagerness in his tone. “Or more to the point, do you think Kasic will go along with it?”

“Can’t hurt to ask. Who knows, he may even have to say yes. Feels nice to have some leverage on those guys for change, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it is nice,” a smiling Damir agreed. “But remember. It’s probably exactly the way Kasic wants you to feel.”

For all its power, the Interior Ministry had no heat in its downstairs lobby. Vlado joined seven others who were waiting, bundled in heavy coats and seated on battered vinyl chairs and couches. The brown linoleum floor was a wasteland of cigarette butts and small tumble-weeds of dust. Clouds of cigarette smoke barely masked the stench of urine from a backed up toilet down the hall. The stroking thrum of a generator could be heard from inside a small booth built of plywood and clear sheets of plastic, where a uniformed officer sat, acting as receptionist, taking names and phoning upstairs for authorizations that never seemed to come.

As Vlado waited he considered what he knew of Kasic. He was a man with a reputation for restraint, both in his anger and his goodwill, and this was said to be a product of his history. He had been a young man of impulse and scattered energies, whose sharp remarks and recklessness had stranded him for years in the great bulge of middle bureaucracy. Once he’d passed the age at which up-and-comers generally began to make their mark, plenty of people had written him off.

Then in the early eighties, as the rigid state machinery loosened and adjusted in the wake of Tito’s death, Kasic belatedly began to rise, catching up to more fortunate peers and then surpassing them. He moved quickly through the Party ranks under vague titles that seemed to place him as an important man in state security. Those on the outside could never be sure if his ascension was guided by his own power or someone else’s, and that seemed to be the way Kasic preferred it.

By the time the Interior Ministry began putting together its new police force he was a natural choice for the heirarchy, and he fell into line behind Vitas as a loyal lieutenant, soon known for his ruthless efficiency.

Like Vitas he had made his name in the October raids, supervising the heavy work in the maneuver that flushed, then trapped Zarko on the second and decisive day. When an errant mortar shell from his unit landed a block north of the mark, killing three old residents of a crumbling flat, he’d flinched, but not for long. “ ‘A small price in the long run,’ that’s what they’ll say around here,” he’d concluded on the spot to his subordinates, who’d naturally agreed.

Vlado looked around the lobby at the others, all men. They seemed bored, as if they’d been waiting for hours. Two had dozed off in spite of the cold.

But after only a few minutes the man in the booth rapped on the plywood and waved Vlado upstairs, shouting in a muffled voice, “Mr. Kasic is waiting. Second floor.”

Vlado trotted up the steps to warm himself, passing security warnings and propaganda posters taped to the walls. BOSNIAN ARMY ON THE BOSNIAN BORDER proclaimed one poster, done up in a nouveau social-realist style. The black silhouette of a grim, angular soldier rose out of jagged black-and-white hills against a purple backdrop, as if he had become part of the very mountains he was defending.

Kasic stood at the top of the steps at an open door in the pose of a tolerant schoolmaster waiting to usher the last pupil into the classroom. His silvery black hair was close cropped at the sides, and as Vlado stepped closer he saw that Kasic’s face was a landscape of sharp angles and deep shadows, as lean as an athlete’s, reminiscent of the soldier on the poster. Yet it was also still pumped full of vigor and color here in mid-January in this city where everything had grown ashy and pale, as if he’d been working out on a clean gym floor of varnished oak, all bright lights and fuggy heat.

He shook hands, grasping hard with a huge hand. Vlado had noticed him before at joint security meetings and official gatherings, a man whose intensity leaned out at you across desks, dinner tables, and interrogation rooms, giving the impression both of earnestness and of appetite.

The tendency among others was either to pass him off as a toadying yes-man showing off his enthusiasm for superiors or as a man truly wrapped up in his mission. Vlado had never known him well enough to decide.

Kasic led Vlado across an open area of cluttered desks, where men in the dark blue uniforms of the ministry police busily went about whatever it was they did up here. Vlado counted five space heaters, each working at full power. The room was comfortable, even cozy