Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

She read like this, and made love to him, he believed, because she knew she would never get out of the city as long as the war lasted. She was a Serb living with Muslims and Croats, a living anachronism, a relic of the days of Tito. She knew and he knew she would be detained on the far side of any checkpoint. The Serbs, identifying her as a traitor for staying behind in Sarajevo, would tell her they could not guarantee her safety if she proceeded into Serb territory, which was the nice way of saying they would shoot her in the back of the head if she took another fucking step.

So she stayed, parentless, without family, like him, and they talked of their lives before and maybe after. The war progressed into the next summer and the following winter.

– It won’t end until we are all dead.

– Yes, it will. It will end before then.

– Your Americans, the NATO, is never coming to help us.

– Eventually they will. I think they will.

They were in a pizzeria on the eastern side of town on an August afternoon, a small stucco place in the middle of a block on a narrow street. The location was shielded from snipers and a shell would have to whizz-bang straight down to hit it from the Serb-held hills, an angle that was beyond the laws of physics. There was moderately cold beer. It cost seventeen dollars per bottle. She had eaten two slices and half of another and was still too thin, the stress, the diet pasta and almost no vegetables, her skin breaking out across her forehead.

– We will be in Paris in a couple of years, he said, and then this will only be the way it used to be.

– I don’t like Paris.

– Okay. New York. We’ll go to New York.

– I don’t like New York.

– You’ve never been.

– I wouldn’t like it.

– Tell me then. Tell me where.

She thought, looking at him.

– Santorini.

– Greece?

– I like olives.

– To live?

– Why not?

– It’s a tiny little island. What will we do there?

– Olives. We will raise the olives. And goats. And kids.

– Baby goats are kids. You call them kids.

– We will make baby goats, she laughed, finally, her mood swinging back the other way, and she slapped the table, tipping her beer back, laughing harder. Sully and Nadia, they fuck and make the baby goats!

Sully pulled her scarf, the only thing of hers he had left, over his lap. He did not smell it anymore because he knew the scent of her had long since faded.

In the late winter of the third year of the war, when spring was still just an idea, he flew into the city on an aid flight. He was unable to get to her apartment because of the late hour, the curfew, and the falling snow. He spent the night in the hack hotel, the Holiday Inn, and went by the hospital the next morning to talk to a doctor he knew for a story he was working on about surgeons operating without electricity or anesthesia or running water. He stopped in the morgue on his way out because the only way to count the dead in a city with no phones was to go there and count noses. There were several bodies on stretchers on the freezing concrete floor and there was Nadia, eyes closed and half her head gone, heaved in twain by shrapnel from a mortar. The rest of her body, when he had pulled back the sheet, was completely untouched.

The photograph of her in the cable-knit sweater was in his hand now but he was hearing her voice, that husky Balkan accent that would say his last name in the dark, two syllables, Car-ter, Car-ter, like a chant, like a prayer, when they made love, as if it were carried by the breeze that would blow in from her balcony window.

The sun was streaming across the room in ribbons of light, the sound of traffic coming up from the street below. There was no clear sense of the hour. Cotton balls seemed to fill his mouth, and there was a dim throbbing at his forehead. The phone was ringing.

He blinked and sat up. He had his shirt on from the night before but had taken off his jeans and socks. The pictures were everywhere, on the bed beside him, on the floor, on the bookcase. His eyes wandered till he found the clock by the bedside lamp. Twenty after ten.

“Fuck me,” he said.

The caller ID on his cell read PRIVATE NUMBER. He coughed and clicked it on. “I didn’t think you did Sunday mornings,” he croaked.

“I do brunch on Sundays in good weather,” Sly Hastings said, sounding like he’d been up since six, gotten in a nice run and a workout at the gym. “I’m sitting here reading my paper in a reputable establishment, a place people stand in line to get to, and this story you got here, you trying to run down my property values.”

“I didn’t create the neighborhood, Sly, and I didn’t kill anybody in it.”

There was a pause. “What, you got jokes now?”

Sully, coughing some more, brushing the pictures back in the box, “No jokes, hombre. They wanted poetry of the neighborhood. You want better poetry, move to a better neighborhood. What’s the reputable establishment?”

“Colorado Kitchen. Where they make real waffles and fried chicken. Which is what I got today, thanks to you. Put me in the mind for it, me and Lionel.”

“So at least I did you a favor.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as a favor. A suggestion. But look here. That’s not what I called to tell you. I called to tell you to be ready for some news today. I think our friends in law enforcement will stumble across them three brothers they looking for.”

Sully paused, then said, “You didn’t.”

“You damn skippy I did. MPD and the DEA and FBI and all them other goons? Out there like ugly on ape. Two detectives and a fed came and knocked on my door last night, you know it? Acting all friendly, asking if maybe I knew something about something. You know what that tells me? It tells me I ain’t got no outstanding warrants, I ain’t got a goddamn parking ticket, ’cause they will bury you with that shit if they can. So, they asking a favor? Well. That’s a business proposition. So, as a responsible homeowner and taxpayer, I assisted local law enforcement. About where maybe they might could find them three.”

“And what time is this to happen?”

“You know, police can’t ever just go get motherfuckers. They got to call SWAT and fifteen other badasses.”

“I thought it was bad form to cooperate with police.”

“It is if you’re in the getting-caught-at-it business. If you’re in the keeping-your-ass-on-the-street-and-making-money business, which is my line of work, it is a sound decision from time to time. Particularly when you know they ain’t done it. They’ll be in D.C. jail for six months or something and they’ll be back home. Daddy Sly’ll be there for them when they walk out.”

“How you know they won’t get drilled?”

“This ain’t the parade of the innocents, you hear me, so I wouldn’t worry about these three brothers even if they do wind up catching a twenty-five-year bid. But they ain’t no way they did this, and not even the U.S. Attorney’s Office is going to think that.”

“You tell your new friends in MPD that?”

“Oh, hell no. They out there saving white folk from crazy-ass niggers, far as they know.”

Sully hung up a minute later and went downstairs to put on the coffee. When it finished, he called the desk and told them to look out for an arrest of the three suspects. Patrick Ogle, running the paper for the day, startled, asked him his source, and Sully said it was reliable and not to worry about it. Sweet as spun honey, he said he’d love to help more, but that Melissa had asked him to cover the Reese family announcement and that he had to run. Also, since he’d be on the bike? He couldn’t take any calls. Sorry. Clicked off to end it before Patrick could say anything else.