Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

Mustafa had also arrived, waiting at the grave with hands on his hips. After a few minutes more the gravedigger cleared the rest of the dirt covering the lid of the coffin. He then dug a small shelf into the mud next to the casket and stepped out, resting on his shovel. Vlado tried to recall the gravedigger’s face from all his mornings by the window, but he seemed like all the rest, chiefly recognizable by the slight stoop to his shoulders, the cap slouched on his head, the thin jacket loose across his back.

Mustafa stepped down to the small shelf of mud. He pulled a screwdriver from a coat pocket and pried open the lid, then flicked on a small flashlight. The yellow beam swept onto the face of Milan Glavas.

“Is this your man?” Mustafa asked, looking up at Vlado.

“Yes,” he said. “Glavas, Milan.”

They’d at least let him change out of his dirty robe and blanket, although his chest was a matted eruption of torn fabric and dried blood. His mouth was ajar, as if it had drooped open in the middle of a nap. His expression seemed almost one of boredom rather than pain or terror. The overall impression was that of someone who’d gone through life dirty and disheveled, and that made Vlado sad. It was not the way Glavas would have wanted to have been buried, that was certain, and for some reason this realization brought tears to Vlado’s eyes, as he stared into the grave at the drawn, gray face.

“I remember him from last night,” Mustafa said.

“You examined him?” Vlado asked.

“Yes. He came in late. Later than usual. I was halfway out the door.”

“Cause of death?”

“Shrapnel. Sniper. Who knows? I’m not really trained in those things. Hit by something, though. Whole chest torn open, as you can see for yourself. Death by war. What else is worth saying once you’ve said that?”

“Who brought him in?”

“Army. From Dobrinja that’s usually the way it works.”

“Did they say where he was found?”

“They never do. It probably wasn’t near his home or they’d have been able to make an I.D. They usually ask some neighbors to have a look when they can. He’s lucky, though. No-names in Dobrinja usually end up buried in a backyard.”

“Yes. A very lucky man.”

Vlado walked across the graveyard toward home, tired and hungry, the day’s information bearing down on him. He was still clearing his throat and spitting from his visit to the morgue, though by now he knew virtually all of the smell must be gone.

Having seen what had become of Glavas, he wondered at his own predicament. Who was he fooling with his persistence, or with his flimsy excuses to Kasic? For that matter, what purpose was he really serving? Even if he cracked the case, who would he report his findings to without feeling he was risking his neck. Kasic was obviously poised to deal with him at a moment’s notice. He couldn’t count on the U.N. for much help either. To survive two years of war only to die investigating a murder would be the height of absurdity. Why bother?

The last person to walk this path had been Esmir Vitas, and Vlado had seen all too well where that led. If the city’s cultural heritage was vanishing, was that so terrible when stacked up against the city’s other losses?

Then again, by now the effort to smuggle artwork seemed so much a part of the machinery of the war itself that stopping it would seem to be a calling as high as his work had ever offered.

But another problem remained: How to put his findings to use. If even U.N. channels posed a risk, were there any channels available that would accept the information without then turning it on him as a weapon. As for Kasic, the case against him seemed damning enough, but there was still the possibility he was only the tool of someone else, perhaps even higher in the government. For all Vlado knew the entire ministry was corrupt, now that Vitas was out of the way. There was so much to think about, and so little time or room for doing so.

Even if Vlado wanted to back out of the investigation now, how could he? It was time for him to huddle with Damir, to look for some way out of this mess. He supposed they could report findings tame enough to appease whoever might fear the truth. But would that be enough to protect them, considering what they’d learned? For all Vlado knew, Damir had stumbled onto a home where a painting had been removed, and had set off some unseen alarm with his queries.

Not for the first time it occurred to Vlado how small his world had become. In the last few days he had traversed virtually all of it on foot, and even his most remote destination, Zuc, had been reached in a few hours. There really was no place to run unless one was willing to cross over to the Serb lines at night, and Vlado was surprised to find himself thinking that such a chancy proposition now seemed within reason, or at least an option he could no longer reject out of hand. Even that held extra complications, though. On the other side there would still be the influence of General Markovic to deal with.

The moment he walked through the door, something seemed awry in his apartment. The sloppiness was the same as always. But he felt the same unmistakable sense of disturbance that he’d felt at Vitas’s apartment. He walked around slowly, looking for some tangible difference from the way he’d left things. After a few minutes, having found none, he began to calm. It was just his nerves, just an accumulation of the day’s facts upon his mind. He would brew a cup of coffee and have a bit to eat, then he would relax. And once his stomach was no longer empty, he would paint his soldiers to clear his head. Perhaps he’d finally finish the platoon.

He picked up the hunk of cured meat from the butcher. There was still enough for a few more meals if he paced himself, though he decided that tonight he owed himself a larger-than-usual slice. He lighted the stove to boil water for coffee.

A few minutes later, the water boiling, he lifted his mug to pour in some Nescafe, and as he did so it left behind a chocolate brown ring on the green fields of Austerlitz, at almost the same place on the page that he’d wiped clean that morning.

Someone had moved the mug.

A coldness stole down his throat to his stomach, and he began a cursory inspection of his painted platoon. They, too, seemed in disarray, brushed closer to the edge of the workbench than he’d left them. In fact, the unit was now a man short. Whoever had searched the place must have knocked one into the piles of newspaper below. Doubtless they’d been in a hurry. Vlado had kept such odd hours recently that they probably figured he might walk in at any moment. But there’d certainly been nothing to find. As always, Vlado had kept all his notes and numbers in his satchel, which he took wherever he went.

Vlado wondered what might have brought this on. Had Kasic’s curiosity simply been too much for him? Perhaps Krulic, the clerk from records, had felt a pang of bureaucratic conscience and phoned Kasic to alert him to Vlado’s unusual requests. Maybe someone in the morgue had been tipped to watch for anyone inquiring about an old man from Dobrinja. Or maybe Colonel Chevard had gotten wind of the strange request for information on shipping a parcel out of the city. Glavas might have said God knows what before he died, depending on how forceful they’d been with him before finishing him with a shot to the chest.

The more Vlado thought about it, the more he realized how almost anyone he’d talked to during the past few days might have wittingly or unwittingly tipped higher-ups to his progress on the case.

He suddenly felt such an amateur, a complete and utter naif. He was a fisherman set loose upon a reef full of sharks who only now had noticed the rot in the hull of his sinking craft. Far too late he considered the depth of his carelessness as it opened darkly before him.