Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Oskar considered that, but however he looked at it, it still made no sense. “Andrei didn’t suspect? No one’s that stupid.”

“I said the same thing. Mihai thinks Andrei suspected but was too horrified to ever ask the question. But he did change. A month after her return, he called to ask if Mihai could help them get papers to move to Germany. He wanted to do it, he said, for Adriana, because if she could run away to go to Germany, then leaving was very important to her.”

“The man lives with blinders.”

“Don’t we all,” said Erika. “When I asked Mihai for names, he seemed very nervous-it was the first time during our talk that he was. But he gave me one. Rainer Volker, the man who owned his bakery. Ring a bell?”

“No. He doesn’t own it anymore?”

“He’s dead now, so he doesn’t own a thing,” she said wistfully as she gazed at the gray sky ahead of them. “His name didn’t ring a bell with me either, but when we got into the car, I remembered him from a piece in the Hamburger Abendblatt. Last month-first week of January, I think. Rainer Volker was found shot to death down by the Elbe. You know what the article said he was?”

“I don’t know.”

“A philanthropist.”

Radovan Pani ć had been home less than a week, making arrangements for his mother’s cancer treatments in Vienna, when he learned from a friend in a smoky Novi Beograd café that the parliament of Kosovo, the Serbian province they had fought a humiliating war to keep, was holding a vote on independence that coming Sunday. Radovan, distracted by the details of the Zürich heist and finding a visa for his mother, had stayed away from newspapers.

The result was a foregone conclusion, because the Serb-dominated northern region of Kososvo was too much of a minority to hold any sway. Had there been a public referendum, they might have all boarded buses to offset the vote, but since it was a parliament vote the only idea anyone had was to send buses of Kalashnikovs.

As Sunday grew nearer, his more optimistic friends pointed out that the results didn’t matter. Kosovo had already declared independence before, in 1990, and only Albania had recognized it. This time around, no one would, because Article 10 of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1244, which had ended the Kosovo War, gave Kosovo “substantial autonomy” within Serbia, which negated the possibility of real independence.

“That’s historical record,” said one, clutching his cigarette in a fist. “Internationally recognized. Go ahead and let them play their game. They’ll end up with egg on their faces.”

The optimists weren’t worried. The others-and they were far more numerous-included friends and most of the politicians he heard on television. The world, they reminded him, had long ago singled out Serbs for eternal punishment. They adored the Muslims in Kosovo because they had been fooled by their crying women and those alleged mass graves. The Americans, who after 9/11 should know better, would once again let their stupid political correctness get the better of them.

Radovan preferred optimism. With a mother being slowly eaten by cancer, it was the one stance that could give him some measure of peace. However, he was also a career criminal who knew the world didn’t always bow to your optimism. The result of the vote that chilly Sunday one week ago was no surprise to anyone. What followed was.

Afghanistan was the first to recognize the Republic of Kosovo. Then Costa Rica and, of course, Albania. There were jokes, because sovereignty is only as strong as the nations that agree with it. Then France said yes. The French president was of Hungarian stock, and Hungarians hated Serbs more than most, so perhaps it was an anomaly. Breaths were held. Turkey-more Muslims, so what else could you expect? Then, in Dar es Salaam, George W. Bush, that ignorant cowboy, said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”

Exhale.

By then Radovan had settled most everything with his mother’s Austrian visa and had a final appointment for the following Monday. So, with her blessing, he took to the streets with his friends and shouted and raised his fists. They cursed the UN and the USA and sang Orthodox hymns and war songs. Each night, exhausted and pleased with themselves, they got drunk and told their Kosovo stories. Some had been there for the fighting, and Radovan drank in their tales of burning villages and Muslim terrorists and tracking down soldiers who had gone MIA. Others were amateur historians-most Serbs these days were amateur historians-who could recite a litany of dates that tied the region more tightly to the Serbian breast. The 1389 battle against the Ottomans on Kosovo Polje-Kosovo Field, or the field of the black birds-figured heavily in any discussion, so that any Serb could, and would, proclaim that they had been fighting for Kosovo for the past six hundred years, ever since that first gloriously lost battle.

When a crowd is convinced it has been truly wronged, little can stop it from smashing windows and pulling up sidewalks. When the injustice reaches back into medieval times, and the humiliation has lasted six centuries, then the anger is buoyed by religious fervor. You break glass not only for yourself but for all who have come before you, and when, on Thursday night, one of your comrades, a functionary with the Radical Party, suggests a visit to the American embassy, there is no choice but to go.

All Radovan’s ancestors hung behind him, watching with pleasure as he went to give a history lesson to the monolith nation that thought history was something you only read about in books. History, his lesson would say, was the blood that kept you alive. History separated you from the beasts. This was tonight’s lesson.

It was beautiful. The ease of their entry was breathtaking, for the marines guarding the unassuming building on Kneza Miloša drew back like troublemakers hoping that in the rear of the room the teacher wouldn’t notice them. Then the windows were shattered, drunk professors scaling the facade, legs flailing at the sills as they slid inside. They ran cheering through the narrow, dark corridors of the empty building, banging against locked doors that likely held the darkest secrets of the American empire, and when they couldn’t get them open someone-Dejan? Viktor?-decided the best way was to burn it down. If there are no students, then what use is the schoolhouse? Perhaps in the morning, when the students see the pile of ashes, they just might understand.

By the next day, though, no one understood, and their own policemen collected them in the streets and knocked down apartment doors looking for the professors of history. One died in the embassy fire, consumed by smoke, but Radovan didn’t know that one. Some Bosnian rounded up with him said the dead man was a martyr, but with a crushing hangover accentuated by the cold morning light, Radovan couldn’t be sure of anything.

Now, the Sunday after the vote, he was still here: a group cell in the Belgrade District Prison on Bačvanska ulica.

Occasionally, policemen arrived to take away this or that prisoner for questioning. The ones who returned said they were asking who had organized the attacks on the Croatian and American embassies, as well as the attempted attacks on the Turkish and British embassies, but the pressure depended on which interrogator you got. Some didn’t care for those mysteries and just sat discussing minor offenses, like the trashed McDonald’s and other stores along Terazije.

So far, no one had asked him a single question, and he wanted out. He’d grown sick of the stink. He’d watched the testosterone overflow and fights break out. Some skinheads had smuggled in a couple of knives, and two Bosnians had been cut already. More importantly, tomorrow he was expected at the Austrian embassy, and at this rate he wouldn’t get questioned until the middle of the week. So when one of the skinheads was returned to the cell, grinning, Radovan flagged his escort. “Tell Pavle Ðord-evi ć that Radovan Pani ć has information for him.”