Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“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.”

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.

“Please, with my compliments, as well as those of the manager,” Kupric said.

By now Vlado was half expecting a welcoming committee to march through the door, unfurling a WELCOME INSPECTOR PETRIC banner while chanting factory slogans.

“Tell me,” Vlado asked, “are your police appointments always so public?”

Kupric seemed crestfallen. His smile vanished. “It’s not as if people know why I’m talking to you,” he said. “Or even that you’re working for the Interior Ministry. I have the manager’s trust. I am a foreman. And when I said I was receiving an important guest from the police he was only too happy to accommodate me. If he had asked for more information I was ready to tell him it was a small matter of the government seeking help in identifying tobacco smugglers, but as it was he never bothered to ask. As I said, he trusts me. And so does your ministry.”

Kupric lit a cigarette, snapping a silver Zippo shut with a rebuking click. “I would have thought my sort of attitude and ability would be reason for confidence, not ridicule.”

“Perhaps I’m just not familiar with the way these things work,” Vlado said, unsure whether to feel appalled or stupid. He reached into his bag, shuffling through papers until he found a spiral pad and a pen.

“So then, Mr. Kupric, if you will bear with my relative inexperience in these matters, I am told you have news of Mr. Vitas. Perhaps you could begin with the first time that you heard his name mentioned with anything you considered improper or illegal behavior.”

Kupric’s face went long and grave. He said that he’d first heard of Vitas entering the cigarette trade a few months back.

“It was all pretty vague then, something about a ham-handed attempt to stuff Drinas into empty Marlboro cartons. Not much future in that game. One round of sales and then your credibility was burned for good. Unless you were Interior Ministry police chief. Then maybe you felt like you could make your own rules.”

“And this was when?”

“Two, three months ago. Not so long. The next thing I hear, maybe a few weeks after that, is that he was piecing off a share of the incoming tobacco. We like to complain here about supply, but we had plenty stockpiled from before the war. And no matter how much fighting there is, another load always seems to come in over the hills just in time. The U.N. won’t lift a finger for us unless you pay the right people, and even then it’s hard. But by truck and by other means, it gets here. Even by donkey cart once.

“So, anyway, this was the supply line Vitas wanted to tap into. As I said, the word on it was vague, but he was supposedly using his people to pry loose some as it came over the mountain.”

“ ‘His people?’ Meaning, Interior Ministry police?”

“Who knows? But why not. Easy enough for him to say they were confiscating it for prosecutions in smuggling cases. Easy enough afterward to then make it all disappear.”

“And might I ask where this ‘word’ was coming from?”

“From my sources, of course.”

“Some names would be helpful. Or even a single name.”

Kupric assumed a look of ridicule, as if he was dealing with a rank amateur.

“I am not much good as an undercover man if I blow my sources,” he said, snorting smoke out his nostrils. “Suffice it to say, these are people who know what they are talking about. These are people who are plugged into the networks, the supply lines, and we all know where those supply lines eventually lead. So obviously they have their reasons for wanting to remain anonymous, and if we don’t indulge them, or if we start throwing around their names in the wrong circles, then they’ll be of no use to us at all inside of a week, I can tell you that for certain. Besides, it is their bosses you want. Not them.”