Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

Nowhere was there any address book, which Vlado found particularly irritating, because there also hadn’t been one among the box of possessions at Vitas’s office. Kasic himself must have thumbed through it by now. Perhaps later he would receive a sanitized version. All he had in this line was the scribbled named and address that Grebo had found in Vitas’s watch pocket.

Among the bits of torn or crumpled paper in the wastebasket by the desk were a few aborted letters to friends, with only a few paragraphs in each, discarded either out of futility with the writing or with the prospect that they might not reach their destinations for months, if at all.

Then one of these false starts caught his eye from the bottom of the pile, not so much for anything it said as for how it was addressed:

“Dear Mother,” it began. There was no date.

So much for his mother being dead, although Kasic had sounded fairly sure. Vlado searched for her address, finding no sign of it on the letter and no envelope on the desk or in the wastebasket. Nor were any clues to be found in the two paragraphs Vitas had written, bland offerings that he was in good health and hoped that she, too, was well.

He looked back through the wastebasket for the other two letters. They were both written on wafer-thin air-mail paper, because even though you sent outgoing mail through departing journalists or via the Jewish Center, someone eventually paid postage, so you tried to keep the weight light.

The note to his mother, however, was on a cream-colored bond, the sort of sturdy writing paper a mother might buy for her son in hopes of receiving some of it back someday This, too, seemed to be another leftover from Vitas’s life before the war, as outdated now as the magazines and bills from an era that already seemed centuries old.

He searched the remaining compartments of the desk. One locking drawer, which Vlado would bet had been forced and sprung, held only old financial records, a few family documents, and a faded photo of an attractive woman standing next to a far younger Esmir Vitas, with nothing written on the back. There seemed to be nothing else of any interest, no names and numbers of butchers or cigarette cutters or whiskey smugglers. If there had been earlier, by now they were stuffed in some file drawer at the Interior Ministry.

By now he could barely see to read anyway. The light had faded to late dusk. As he stood up from the desk the smell of the butcher’s gift of meat wafted toward him, making his stomach growl in spite of the apprehension he felt over everything to do with Hrnic. He locked the apartment and started down the stairs, again hearing a child’s cry from next door. Once outside, he looked slowly around him but the streets were already empty. Then he trudged toward the river for his final stop of the day.

It was a visit he’d been subconsciously steeling himself for since morning, knowing it would best be delayed until dark. And considering that he had talked to Jasmina only an hour earlier, he felt almost guilty to be making the visit at all, especially because in a small, uncertain way he was looking forward to it.

By the time he reached the Skenderia barracks’ darkness the only light was from a small bank of floodlights the French had installed at the perimeter of their compound. Vlado worked his way toward the sandbags stacked at the entrance. Up close you could smell their dampness, an odor like wet cement that conveyed their weight and density. The French had built the walls on a day long ago when the fighting had finally slackened. Vlado had watched from an office window as they piled the bags methodically with a series of solid thunks, a sound that made one realize the very noise a bullet would make when it struck-a muffled thwack as the shell made a puckered hole, followed by the hiss of pouring sand.

Just around the corner from the entrance, as Vlado knew from his one previous venture, was the nearest place of business for local prostitutes. By dusk a few had always gathered, like birds flocking at sunset to the bare sheltering trees of a park.

Any earlier and they’d have been too well lit even for the U.N. to tolerate. They’d be ordered off by some sentry dipping his face low into the gathering as much to catch a whiff of perfume as to maintain discretion as he advised them, quite civilly, to please clear off, commander’s orders.

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.”