Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“How often?”

“Maybe once a week at first. Zarko didn’t want to overdo it, start drawing too much attention. Our U.N. contact was always antsy about it, too. Markovic would push for more deliveries, the U.N. man would push for fewer. Then maybe a month before the raid, we heard Murovic was working to get the list out of Belgrade through UNESCO. So we stepped up the schedule. Three times a week, sometimes even four or five if it was quiet and flights were running every day. We knew it was risky, but once Murovic got the copy of the files we’d be out of business. We talked about killing him, but figured his replacement could only be worse. It might even be someone who’d want to look a bit more deeply into the cause of the fire.”

“Well, he got UNESCO approval all right. But the grant isn’t activated until February.”

“So they’re probably still doing it, then.”

“How? The raid put you out of business.”

“It did. And that alone should have been enough to get Vitas killed. But he obviously had the clout to make the crackdown stick. What galled Zarko is that he never got advance warning. He’d always bragged he had somebody inside the Ministry, but they must not have been very high up because he never heard a word. When Zarko was killed afterward, I was sure his source was no good.”

“Wasn’t he shot while trying to escape?”

“That’s the official version, but there’s no way. Zarko had a good lawyer and a lot of D-marks, and too many ways out of town even after getting caught. He never would have risked running. Maybe a well-planed escape from prison, later, during heavy fighting, with plenty of payoffs and inside help. But not a clumsy try at bolting.”

“Why not. Even people like Zarko can get desperate.”

“It didn’t happen,” Neven shouted furiously.

Vlado gave him a moment to calm down. “The way you describe it, even Vitas could have been Zarko’s contact at Interior. He takes out Zarko, takes the files, increases his own cut, and moves on.”

“Which would also explain why Vitas was killed. More rivalry and more blood. You live by it long enough and you eventually die by it.”

But an insider would have had no need for a briefing from Milan Glavas just last week, Vlado thought. That sounded like an investigator following up a discovery.

“More likely he was killed because he was onto the operation,” Vlado said. “Which leaves the question of who Markovic must still be working with. Maybe he hired somebody new.”

“There’s always somebody willing to take a job like that,” Neven said. “And once you get an outfit like the U.N. involved these things take on a bureaucratic inertia. You don’t stop something like this just by removing one of the principals. You only make it more lucrative for those who’re still in the game.”

“So, then, let’s look at who was left in business after the raid. There’s Markovic, and then there’s somebody from the U.N. And who might that be?”

“Somebody at the shipping office. The shipping forms were always signed and stamped in advance. All Zarko had to do was fill in the details. We shipped everything to a Frankfurt contact who, I presume, got a cut for handling the sale, the marketing, whatever. Alijah and I got extra pay for every one we handled, but probably nothing close to what the major players were making. We were just part of the overhead.”

“Let’s fill in some names, starting with Frankfurt and the U.N.”

“I don’t know any.”

“How couldn’t you? They were both right there on the invoice, unless somebody was using a forged signature at this end and an alias at the other.

Neven frowned, fidgeting and looking at the ground. There was silence for a moment as he stooped to pick up one of the fallen coffee cups.

“Come on,” Vlado said. “You can’t possibly have forgotten.”

“Maybe I never knew them to begin with,” Neven said bitterly, looking straight into Vlado’s face. “Because I can’t read. Never learned. Dyslexia, I think they call it now. Except that our progressive schools under Marshal Tito never knew a way around that obstacle. I was a strong boy, so it never really mattered. There were always other uses for me, and people like Zarko were always glad to put me to work. I’d always thought of it as a weakness, then Zarko came along with his loan sharking business and my future was assured. When the war started the future was even rosier. It’s why he could always trust me so much. It was my key to promotion. There was nothing I couldn’t handle for him, no written message I couldn’t deliver without complete guarantee of confidentiality. I was the perfect courier.”

“But Alijah could read.”

“And Alijah was never allowed to hold the papers, or see them. He was only part of the delivery team. So the names, the U.N. shipper and the guy in Frankfurt, I really have no idea. Only Zarko knows.”

“Which leaves me almost back where I started. Unless.”

“Unless?”

“Unless you’re still involved. Still running it all from up here, and using me to lay down a false trail.”

Neven smiled, almost wistfully.

“Yes. Up here without the files and without any direct line of communication except the poor dumb boys who come walking up here every day with their loud radios and the likes of you. Besides, if I was still involved you’d be in pretty rough shape right now. Now that I had all the information from you I needed, it would be easy to drop you in a muddy hole and forget you, as everyone else soon would. Someday your bones would turn up under the plow of some farmer, or maybe a tourist would find your belt buckle with his metal detector. Do you realize, Mr. Detective, how little you know about what makes that place down there run?” He pointed into the valley, to the well of darkness where the city slept. “It is the same thing that makes this place up here run. Take a look around you at the shitholes and the trenches. This is the future of our wonderful hometown. And if people like me are in charge up here, that should tell you something about the people in charge down there. Do you think any of them will really trust you much longer to complete a fool’s errand like this one, Mr. Detective? I would say that you are about to become a very lonely man.”

He tossed his Marlboro into the mud and stood to depart.

“And now, Mr. Detective, our conversation is finished.”

He turned and walked away, disappearing around a bend in the trench.

The boys on the walk up the mountainside had been right. Overnight visitors to Zuc didn’t sleep. They squirmed and talked, smoked and drank. They cursed the war, the shells, and the Chetniks. But mostly they watched and listened, like frightened children tucked in their beds, attuned to every creak of the floorboards.

Occasionally flocks of red tracer fire streaked crazily overhead, illuminating a rolling plain of mud. Shellfire rumbled from the other side of the mountain and flashed from a distant hill. Luckily most of the action stayed well down the line.

The biggest surprise to Vlado was the random, aimless nature of it all. Even in the ghastliest descriptions he’d read of past wars, there was always the semblance of a plan. Even the senselessness of World War I had borne the stamp of some huge, unstoppable organism of flesh and steel, with a vast network of communications strung out to all corners of the front. Bombardments were coordinated, lasting days at a time, if only to bring on a single frenzied moment of suicidal assault. Every massive wave of murder was premeditated.

And here? The war lurched through the dark like a beast with every limb disabled. Firing was sporadic, as if by whim. Desultory sniper exchanges quickly turned into heated personal vendettas, then just as quickly subsided. Gun crews worked or didn’t work depending on their supply of shells, sleep, and brandy, though most often upon the latter. Command and control were concepts for some other hillside, some other part of the country where the line shifted occasionally, perhaps for some other war altogether. Or perhaps this was the way a war always felt from the inside, as if one were part of a vast portrait that only assumed shape and order when viewed from a distance.