Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“You’re the one we should worry about,” she said. “Aren’t you the one still living in a war zone.”

“I’m serious,” he said, his voice stern. “Watch out for yourself and Sonja.” His eyes flicked around the room, but every head was still turned. “The same people who are dangerous to me can be dangerous to you, even there.”

“Okay,” she said haltingly. “I will.” She sounded puzzled. She, too, knew these calls were likely to be monitored; that if Vlado’s safety were somehow unraveling, this might be as specific as he would allow himself to get.

“I love you,” she said.

“And I love you.” And for a change he didn’t feel self-conscious, having uttered this before a roomful of grimy, indifferent witnesses.

He offered a meek thank-you to the radioman, then left.

A few moments later he couldn’t recall having elbowed through crowds of people down two flights of stairs, or pushing out the front door. He only knew that he suddenly found himself outdoors, shocked by a cold gritty breeze and blinking into the sunlight. He had been wrapped in his family’s new world, with its playgrounds, its warm homes, and its crowded, bountiful market. He was always surprised by how deeply he could immerse himself in only a few moments of halting conversation, and by how difficult it was to fight his way back to the surface.

He plunged through the milling crowd gathered at the mail list, gaping about like a man who’d just stumbled from a darkened theater. A glance at his watch. Still plenty of time to make his other stops for the day, back across the river. No need to rush. He strolled a full block at a relaxed gait before noticing that people around him were running, heads bent. He’d moved into an open area, a clearly marked sniper zone, and a busy one as well in recent days. Vlado put his head down and broke into a half-hearted trot for the bridge.

Vlado had always found a certain appeal in searching the rooms and apartments of the dead-once the body was removed, of course. It was like entering a time capsule, a privileged look at the snapshot of a life in progress, the point of departure for another unfortunate soul.

It was this oddly pleasant sense of anticipation that kept Vlado going on his way to Vitas’s apartment, that kept him from glancing too many times over his shoulder. Although he was still shaken by the encounter at the slaughterhouse, he doubted anyone there had gone to the trouble of following him.

He wondered idly how Damir had fared. He was probably finished by now, while Vlado had yet another stop after this one. He found himself wishing wearily that he’d parceled out more of the day’s chores. But perhaps Kasic was right. Vlado had probably best handle most of the work himself. No sense in getting the ministry any more perturbed than it already was, or they might strip him of the case altogether, appearances be damned.

Vitas’s apartment was ten minutes away, on the third floor of what had been a nice building in a late-eighteenth-century section of downtown built during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After fumbling for a moment with the large key Kasic had given him, Vlado pushed open the heavy wooden door.

Right away he was impressed by the lack of grandeur, the absence of fine things. Vitas had never struck him as the acquisitive sort, or as a connoiseur who might have collected art or furniture, but Vlado had at least expected a mild expression of the vulgarity that commonly afflicts bachelors reaching the top of their field in middle age. Yet here was Vitas’s television, no large Western model but a small-screen hunk of brown plastic at least twenty years old. Not that a better set would be good for anything these days.

Vitas’s stereo was similarly old, with a broad turntable and a high spindle for stacking albums five at a time. Looking at it you could almost hear the painful clacking, skidding sound of vinyl against vinyl.

The walls were bare except for an old engraving of the city mounted above the couch. No framed certificates or awards from his army days. No photos of family or friends.

There was also no electrical generator, a mild surprise in the apartment of someone with such a high rank. He did have a sturdy new woodstove, and next to it was an ample stack of neatly chopped wood. And the trim copper pipes of well-installed gas lines gleamed from a few corners of the ceiling. Someone had been called in to rig it up, no doubt. And why not? What was the worth of power and privilege if it didn’t at least bring a few comforts.

Vlado’s second impression was that he wasn’t the only other person who’d been here recently. He felt an unmistakable presence of someone recently departed from the room, though he also felt this was silly, because if Kasic’s people had been here first-and they probably had, seeing as how Kasic had no misgivings about searching Vitas’s office-then they’d have probably finished here early this morning.

As he strolled around there were small signs of disturbance-partly opened drawers, furniture moved slightly off its old marks in the carpet. The signs stood out because the apartment otherwise seemed to be the home of someone compulsively neat and careful. No dust. No clutter. Vitas had not let things slide just because there was a war on.

Vlado thought of his own place, where pots crusted with beans were only halfheartedly scoured before the next batch went in. Spilled grains of rice were scattered to every corner of the small kitchen floor, and lately he’d never seemed to have the energy or inclination to track them down. His bed hadn’t been made in weeks, and the sheets had gone gray from so little washing. True, he had bathed and shaved last night as he’d vowed to himself. But he remembered his towel, sour and stuffed into a corner of the bathroom. Here, fresh towels were folded neatly on shelves in the bathroom, which smelled lightly and pleasantly of soap and aftershave. A candle stood in a small saucer in a hardened puddle of wax.

There were clean sheets on the bed, a bedspread neatly tucked at each corner. In fact, every room except the dining room, which faced north with plastic taped and retaped over the window, seemed in tidy order. This was not the home of a man whose life was at loose ends, nor of anyone who had grown careless.

As Vlado walked toward the kitchen, he heard a stirring of noise from the apartment next door, a thumping sound followed by the crying of a child, someone else’s life going on. Then silence again.

Vlado checked the refrigerator. A large block of ice sat on a shelf, dripping slowly. Some meat was beginning to go bad. There was a half-full bottle of milk. Vlado uncapped it and sniffed. Still fresh. He was tempted to take a swallow. It had been more than a year since he’d had any. He’d never much liked it before but the smell suddenly seemed so beckoning, so full of past associations. But something held him back, whether professionalism or the higher calling of this case or the feeling that he was being tested, examined as he went about his work. If someone else had been here earlier, he might always come back.

Vlado saved for last the large Victorian desk in the corner of Vitas’s bedroom, its dark mahogany rich with nooks and pigeonholes. A kerosene lantern hung overhead from a newly installed hook. The ceiling above it was blackened slightly, presumably from many nights of use.

The desk was the only place in the house where there were overt signs of disarray, although it was impossible to say whether they had resulted from a search or from Vitas’s own energies.

Vlado went through some papers on top, finding nothing of import. In a few upper cubbyholes were stubs of bills from before the war, along with subscription notices from foreign magazines, still stacked chronologically leading up to the final months, when all such accounts halted. There were a few old letters still tucked in their envelopes, the tops torn open neatly: one from a friend in Vienna, chatty and banal, another from Zagreb, a third from Belgrade, all predating the war and each apparently worthless to Vlado. But he wrote down the names and addresses, all the same.