Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

The gas cap closed with a thump.

The man shuffled back across the street, not bothering to glance around this time, relighting his cigarette as he disappeared through the door, leaving his table of books untended. Vlado stole a final glance at the upstairs window, where a pale face appeared momentarily behind the smudged glass. Then, a flick of a curtain, and the face was gone. Vlado climbed into the Golf and swerved it into a U-turn, bound for Dobrinja.

Earlier that morning he and Damir had compared notes from the previous day Damir’s undercover men had been about as productive as Vlado’s, meaning he’d gotten little but generalities from them, and their line had been the same: Vitas was horning in on our trade, this time in liquor, and in doing so made himself a marked man.

“They’re a load of shit, is what I think,” Damir concluded dismissively. “Somebody’s plants, and damned clumsy ones at that. But whose? And for what purpose? To lead us to something or away from something.”

Vlado mentioned the shakedown at the slaughterhouse, but toned it down considerably, partly out of embarrassment and partly out of the promise he’d made to Kasic to keep most of the facts of the case to himself.

In fact, he felt altogether unsure of how he should proceed with Damir while keeping that promise. Damir would chafe and complain if he felt he was merely serving as a glorified clerk, and justifiably so. Despite their difference in years, Damir was his equal in rank and responsibility. He, too, had earned his chance at a case of substance.

But when they discussed their next moves, Vlado offered only that he was going to pursue a lead in Dobrinja, and already he could sense Damir’s dissatisfaction.

Damir volunteered to go back to the whores at Skenderia, and Vlado was only too happy to agree.

“Perhaps I will be a little more comfortable there,” he’d offered with a grin. “In fact, I know I will. Leave the women to the professionals, Vlado, or at least to the single men.”

It was good weather for Sarajevo driving. Low clouds sagged heavily, leaking cold mist, although there was a worrisome brightening to the west. But even with the poor visibility Vlado accelerated when he hit the wide canyon of Sniper Alley. No other car was in sight, only a few men and women strolling at a leisurely pace, either foolhardy or bereft of hope. He swerved around two shellholes, sensing the gasoline gurgling and draining away at several Deutschemarks per minute. An income that would support an entire family for weeks was disappearing out his exhaust.

He turned left, cutting across rail lines where a few empty tram cars slumped on the tracks as if they’d been dropped from a great distance, full of holes, every window shattered. The government still talked of restarting the trams as a show of spirit and resolve. Brilliant idea, he thought-a moving target on a fixed course for the amusement of the snipers.

Vlado had been to Dobrinja once before since the start of the war, and he vaguely remembered the driver’s route, up and over sidewalks, and around army barriers. He headed west, where the highrises began to thin out, among some of the city’s newer suburbs. The Golf lurched across a curb and through the parking lot of an empty mini-mall, thumped onto a sidewalk, and accelerated. Two men on bicycles pedaled out of the way The car crunched across broken glass then thumped back onto the parking lot. After another half mile in this fashion he turned left up a slight incline and into a parking deck to pass through an army checkpoint, the last stop before Dobrinja. A bored soldier huddled in the protective shadows of the ground floor checked his papers and waved him on.

By all rights, Vlado should have been trembling as he floored the Golf back into the open. A few hundred yards to either side were the advance positions of the Serbs. He would have to run the gauntlet for a quarter mile before easing behind the cover of the high rise buildings lining the wide street farther on. Yet if anything he felt calmed by his surroundings, and not only because it seemed to be a lazy day where snipers played cards and oiled their rifles, either too bored or too stingy with their ammunition to pay him the honor of their attention. And with a jolt he realized he had begun to fear his own city, as much for the forces within it as for those upon the hills.

Dobrinja, too, was undoubtedly the turf of some smalltime warlord or smuggler, but it was too isolated to feel connected, and that made him secure, or perhaps it was only a sense of release he felt, of escape. The narrow peninsula, with its tight lines of fire, awaited him like a temporary refuge. Anyone choosing to follow would be painfully easy to spot, and as he glanced in the mirror he saw that the road behind him was empty.

As the Golf roared along there was a heavy boom. Vlado flinched, ducking low behind the wheel, but the sound was far off. The clouds had begun to lift.

On either side now were the towers of the Olympic Village, mostly deserted at this end. Whole chunks of brick were missing. Some window openings were black from fires. At others curtains flapped. He felt like an archeologist arriving at the site of a lost temple in the rain forest, some place where a whole civilization had packed up and left, centuries earlier.

He steered the Golf downhill, veering between curved walls of stacked cars and buses, then he eased onto the main boulevard of Dobrinja amid a warren of apartment buildings and muddy courtyards. Several hundred yards to the left loomed the grassy face of Momillo Hill, its greenness almost luminous in the pale light, lonely and talismanic, like some great ceremonial mound built to plot the whirling of the heavens.

In the most precarious days of the war the hill had been spiked with barrels and turrets, a garden of Serb weaponry that sprouted in the first spring of wartime and seemed as if it would never stop growing. But somehow the locals with their small arms stubbornly drove the Serbs off, gun by gun, and now it was empty, although still a threatening presence. A closer look revealed the faint lines of treadmarks, crisscrossing like the stitchmarks of old wounds.

Every apartment building here was sandbagged at ground level. When the supply of sandbags had run low, people had made their own from old clothes, blankets, curtains, anything that would hold a few shovelfuls of mud. Slowing to double-check his map, Vlado noticed two boys trotting alongside the car, keeping pace. He suddenly realized they were using him for cover to make their way down the street, sheltering behind him as if he were an armored car. He instinctively pressed the accelerator, worrying that his slower speed might draw fire. Then with a pang of guilt he looked in the rear view mirror to see the boys running faster now; not scowling or shaking a fist, just running faster.

Milan Glavas’s building was like all the others-tall, scarred and gray, with trenches cutting diagonally across the grounds between buildings to serve as sidewalks. Up against one end of the building was a small, muddy graveyard with rough wooden markers. In Dobrinja you buried the dead where you could.

Rifle shots popped from nearby Moments earlier a grenade had screamed through the air a few blocks away. Yet the clouds were still reasonably low, and a few children played in a nearby field, kicking a soccer ball through the remains of the slush.

Most of the names on the mailboxes were worn off, and Vlado searched in vain for “Glavas” until a young woman coming down the stairs asked who he was looking for.

“Do you know a Mr. Glavas?”

“Yes. Fourth floor, right rear door.”

Vlado started up.

“Is he expecting you?” she shouted after him.

He looked back, seeing her prim upturned faced, her heart-shaped lips with their neat layers of bright lipstick.