Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

Besides, Vlado was curious, having felt shut out of things for far too long. He could feel himself easing into the rhythm of an investigation, could sense a thrumming in the back of his mind where the workings had been idle for months.

“I believe you’ll find all the context you need with those people,” Kasic said, pointing to the thin files in Vlado’s hands. “As for Vitas’s other things, I’ve kept them separate from my own. They’re right here.” He pointed to a large cardboard box in the corner of the office, taped shut. Which meant he or someone else had already gone through everything.

“I’ll also need access to his apartment. His car, too, if he still had one.”

“Of course.” Kasic reached into the desk again. “Here are his house keys. His car, I’m afraid, was destroyed a month ago. A direct hit on a building across the street while it was parked out front. And, Vlado, I know Garovic is nervous about all this. About the sensitivity of the case. That’s just the way he is. Let me deal with that. You go where you need to go. Ask what you need to ask, and don’t worry about stepping on any toes. Mine included.”

Kasic rose from behind his desk, his hand outstretched for a parting shake. As Vlado turned to go, Kasic placed a hand firmly on his shoulder.

“Vlado?”

“Yes.”

“A last word of caution.” Kasic paused. “There will be people watching you closely on this, and I’m not speaking merely of me and the U.N. Some of them I’m probably not even aware of myself, but suffice it to say that they have the means to influence any and all aspects of your life. They will want results, Vlado, and they will want them quickly. They will not wish to be told of some chain of evidence that drifts off into the hills to points unknown. They will want specifics, name by name.”

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.

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.