Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“Depends on what you’re here for,” Vlado said, regretting the remark immediately.

“I needed to talk to you,” she said, her tone a shade cooler, or perhaps once again it was Vlado’s imagination. “About the shooting. With Maria there the other night I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.”

Maria. That must be the prostitute who’d done all the talking.

“Please,” he said, pointing toward an interrogation room with glass partitions. “We can talk in here.”

They settled into chairs on opposite sides of a battered wooden table. The aging tubes of a fluorescent light hummed and sputtered overhead. Vlado felt some of his discomfort returning, and moved quickly to fill the silence. “First things first,” he said, opening a notebook. He scribbled the date at the top and asked, “Your name, please. For the record.”

“Hodzic, Amira,” she said.

“Address? And phone number, if you have one.”

“For what reason?” she asked, a sudden edge to her voice.

“In case I need to talk to you again,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Unless of course you’d rather have me come to your place of business to ask any followup questions, in the presence of Maria, who I presume is the one who did all the talking the other night.”

“Yes, she was, and, no, I suppose I wouldn’t like that. Number seven-twelve Bosanska Street, apartment thirty-seven. I have no phone.”

Which probably meant she was a refugee, Vlado thought, or else she’d still have the hookup from before the war, whether it was working or not.

“So. The night of the shooting, then. You were there I presume, outside the barracks.”

“Yes. The usual location.”

“And you heard the gunshot?”

“Yes. Maria was right about one thing, though. There had been shooting off and on for hours. The usual stuff in that area. But this one was different. Louder and closer, and from the near side of the river. Maria thought right away that it must have something to do with her man. Her regular man. Or at least the closest thing she had to a regular man. It turned out that it didn’t, of course. Her man was safely off somewhere else. We all heard the next morning who had really been killed. But, well, you seemed interested in knowing any detail, no matter how small, so I thought I at least owed you that, if only because Maria seemed so determined none of us would say a word.”

“Why did she think her man might be out there? Was she expecting him?”

“No. She’d seen him just a few minutes before. He’d come out through the gate.”

“From the barracks?”

“Yes.”

“On foot?”

“No. In a jeep. One of the white U.N. ones. Armored, with thick windows, but we could all see who was driving because we knew him from other times.”

“So he was a soldier, then. Not a civilian employee.”

“Yes, an officer.”

“Rank?”

“A colonel. Or that’s what Maria calls him. Her French colonel. Or sometimes she just calls him Sweet Maurice. Or the Little Colonel, like Napoleon.”

“Well, then, a colonel with a regular squeeze waiting at the gate.”

“Yes, I thought you’d want to know, especially when I heard that the man who was killed was someone important.” She glanced toward the table. “Do you think I could have one of your cigarettes?”

“Please.”

He slid a pack of Drinas across the table. He held out his lighter and watched her inhale, lips tight. When she began speaking again she kept the cigarette clenched in her teeth, making little bursts of smoke with every word. It seemed almost contrived to lend her an air of harshness, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. Something in the gesture didn’t ring true. Yet she clearly preferred projecting this image to whatever might be the real one, and it occurred to Vlado that there were probably children at home, perhaps a husband in the city or out on some frontline. The pose was for their sake. This was the prostitute speaking, not the mother or the wife. He wondered for a moment what she must be like in that other world.

“So,” he said, “we have a French colonel driving a U.N. jeep possibly in the area a few minutes or even a few seconds before the shooting,” Vlado said, “perhaps in position to have seen or heard something himself.”

“Yes.”

“Can you pin it down a little more? What do you mean by a few minutes. Ten? Five? One or two?”

“One, if I had to guess. It really was quite short, or seemed that way,” she said, with more of the little puffs of smoke bursting from her mouth.

Well, this was something, perhaps. At minimum the colonel would be worth talking to, Vlado thought. If he’d driven in the right direction, perhaps he’d at least noticed Vitas standing on the corner, or anyone else who might have been with him. It was a longshot, but better than any other shot at a witness he had right now, which was no shot at all.

“Is there anything else you remember from those moments right before or after the gunshot? Any other sounds. Someone running. A car driving away, perhaps.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I would have heard anything else. From the minute we heard the shot Maria was hysterical. It was all we could do to keep her from crawling around the sandbags and running across the bridge to see for herself what had happened. She was screaming for her little Maurice, her Little Colonel. It was close to curfew anyway and we were worried she’d have us all in jail for the night. And frankly, the stories you hear about police and prostitutes …”

She stopped short, suddenly embarrassed.

“What did you finally do?”

“After a few minutes she calmed down. We wanted to walk her home but she refused. Said she was going to his apartment, that he would be there if he was okay, that she’d stay there for the night, so she left. If he wasn’t there, she had a key to let herself in, she said. The rest of us-it was only Leila and I that night-we walked home together. She lives in the building next to mine. Neither of us knows where Maria lives, the colonel either. And the next night everything was back to normal. Maria seemed fine. The only time she’s acted funny since was when you showed up.”

“This colonel. He was used to having her at his apartment? Is that normal in, well, this business? With U.N. officers, I mean.”

“Is this part of the investigation?”

Was it? Vlado wasn’t sure. “I don’t know, frankly. Just a matter of finding every detail I can.”

“You’ll have to ask someone who’s been at it a little longer than me. I’m new. So is Leila. We started the same week, a little more than a month ago, and from what I hear women come and go from it month to month, except for the ones like Maria who’ve been doing it for years.”

“So tell me what you know, secondhand or whatever, then, about Maria and this colonel. Maurice, you said. Did she ever say his last name? And that is definitely part of the investigation, ’cause I’d like to talk to him.”

She shook her head.

“From what a few others have told me, it was quite a romance, at least on her part. He’d been posted to Sarajevo a year ago, and picked her up almost right away. A few nights a week. After a while he got himself an apartment. Apparently some of the higher ranking officers do that, and she started staying over at his place two or three days at a time.

“After a while he must have cooled on her. He may even have found someone else he liked better. She ended up back on the beat more and more nights, mooning outside the barracks like a teenager, waiting for him to drive in or out in his jeep. The few times I’ve seen him drive through he gives her a smile and a wave, that’s all. It made me wonder if everything she said about the two of them was true. She’s not exactly the most stable person in the world, after all. But she did show us a key she said was to his apartment. And she did seem to know an awful lot about him.”