Dan Fesperman: Lie in the Dark

The main buffer between the police station and the nearest Serb positions was a French U.N. garrison posted a block down river at Skenderia, next to the old speedskating rink from the ’84 Olympics. A faded mural of the Olympic mascot, a grinning fox, leered down from a high brick wall, his smile was pocked and dented by mortar rounds.

The new police building was a squat ugly affair of concrete and brown glass. During Yugoslavia’s heyday it had housed a Communist Party youth center. Now about a fourth of the windows were either cracked or blown out, replaced by plywood and sheets of U.N. plastic held down by U.N. tape.

Government buildings were among the few in town with reliable electricity. Three large gasoline-powered generators kept just enough juice flowing to light and refrigerate the crime lab, such as it was. After that there was enough power for a few fluorescent tubes and a scattering of overworked space heaters that glowed like toasters. Every morning lately they were draped with soggy hats and socks. The smell alone was enough to make you want to come in late.

Vlado’s walk took nearly half an hour, looping gradually downhill toward the river. When he left his house it began to snow, and by the time he reached the office the snow had turned to rain. It had been a mild winter, not even freezing the ground enough to trouble the gravediggers. Gray slush pooled in shell dimples and on the collapsed roofs of abandoned cars.

By the time Vlado arrived, Damir Begovic was ensconced at the next desk over. He was the city’s only other homicide investigator. Before the war there had been a third, Dejan Vasic, a Serb. He was Vlado’s friend, a companion for card games and family dinners. Their infant children had played together on weekends, clutching at each other’s hair and drooling on each other’s toys. They’d once lugged their families out to the Adriatic for a beach holiday, then celebrated their return by building a swing set together. Someday, they said, they’d build their children a treehouse up in a nice spot in the hills, a pretty one with a rope ladder, well hidden from hikers and older kids, but close enough to a good picnic spot to bring their whole families up.

A week or so before the war began, Dejan left town without a word, taking only his family and the service revolver from his desk. Vlado heard later they’d hoped to make it over the hills to Belgrade, but he wondered. Perhaps Dejan was still in the city, farther up the opposite hill, or only a few blocks away, writing murder reports in Grbavica, or in the northwest suburb of Ilizda. Maybe he was in the army, squibbing mortar rounds into the city center. Or he could be dead and rotting in a trench. Perhaps he’d made it to Vienna, or Berlin. Who could say?

Almost everyone still in Sarajevo knew someone like that, usually a Serb, someone who’d vanished without warning on the eve of the fighting, as if privy to a vision of what the city would become.

That left only Damir, likable enough but seven years younger and, even in wartime, still elbowing happily through a smoky world of cafes and loud music. He was a bit of a rake, really, in his never-ending pursuit of new women, yet forgivable if only for the childlike joy he took in his pleasures. When Damir had seen Vlado’s soldiers he’d gushed like a schoolboy, an exuberant grin spreading across his broad, flat face. He’d hinted impishly that Vlado might even spare him a few, not realizing that Vlado would no sooner divide a unit than an antiques collector would break up a set of chairs. It had been a disastrous evening anyway, with Damir barging into the apartment with a woman in each hand and a bottle in each pocket of his overcoat, arriving to “cheer up” Vlado with a party. It had taken two hours to usher them out the door, giggling and swaying in a noxious cloud of brandy.

But he was easy enough to work with in his occasionally overbearing way. Early in the war they’d agreed that each detective would take every other homicide, an arrangement originally intended to keep either from hogging the work back when they wanted to stay as busy as possible. Now Damir seemed bored with death in all its guises, and their routine was all that kept him from slipping into permanent idleness on the job.

This day, like the last several, turned out to be another slow one, with nothing to do but read, gossip, and smoke. To make matters worse, Damir was far from his usual cheery self, sullen and grumbling through every hour. So it was something of relief when the phone finally rang in late afternoon.

Damir took the call, listened for a while, scribbled something, mumbled a phrase or two, then hung up and turned to Vlado.

“It seems that a gypsy woman with a grudge and a baby has just hammered her drunken husband to death during his afternoon nap. Her neighbor says the gypsy’s ready to confess. I told her we’d have a street officer haul her in. In the meantime, here’s where you’ll find the dear departed.” He held out a scribbled address. “All yours.”

“All mine? You took the call.” Vlado was eager for work, but this hardly sounded like the sort of case he’d had in mind.

“I got the last one, remember? Last Wednesday? Card players arguing politics with guns. One dead, one drunk, one arrested. Your turn.”

Vlado frowned and picked up his coat. An hour later and he’d have been out the door, headed for another dinner of beans and rice and a quiet night painting his dragoons and hussars. He mumbled something about the stupidity of taking turns, then cursed the foolhardiness of answering telephones after 3 p.m. He grabbed the address and stalked away.

“Have the gypsy waiting at my desk when I get back,” he called over his shoulder to Damir. “I want her calmed down and ready to talk. And try not to ask her out before I’m back, although she sounds like your type.”

“Yes, good with hand tools,” Damir answered, offering his first smile of the day.

“And thanks again.”

“My pleasure,” Damir shouted, already easing back in his chair.

Vlado headed into the melting slush, bound for the couple’s home in what passed for a gypsy quarter, a narrow rack of two-story cinder-block buildings near the top of a steep, exposed hill just north of the city center. The Bosnian army often kept one of its few big guns up there, mostly for nuisance-firing at the Serbs, which prompted plenty of answering nuisance-fire, usually from even bigger guns. But it was only gypsies, the authorities reasoned. In a city where people still liked to talk about the unimportance of ethnic designation, gypsies had always been singled out as the lowest of the low. Their warren of apartments was a nasty place to live, even by wartime standards.

Ten minutes into his walk, a flushed and breathless Damir appeared at his side.

“Change your mind?” Vlado said.

“Needed the walk. Cooped up all day yesterday with nothing but paperwork, then all of this morning with nothing but a hangover. And in between was last night, which I’d just as soon forget altogether. So I’ll at least make it up the hill with you. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll even help you write the report. But don’t worry. I’ll head back in time to have the gypsy woman checked in and ready for interrogation.”

“So, trouble with a woman?” Vlado asked. It was the only sort of trouble he could imagine Damir having.

“I wish. It’s my mother and father.”

Damir had moved back in with his parents when the war began to make sure they’d be provided for. Also to avail himself of his mother’s cooking. With fresh meat and produce having virtually disappeared, she was one of those resourceful cooks who still managed some variety-pies made of rice, “French fries” shaped from a corn meal paste, and garden snails, soaked overnight then pan-fired with wild herbs. But the price for a fuller stomach was his mother’s temper, vast and explosive, and Vlado figured there must have been another blow up.