Lie in the Dark (25 page)
Authors: Dan Fesperman
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Suspense, #Contemporary Fiction, #Thrillers
But why the stories from the butcher and the cigarette man. And why the show of muscle at his shakedown. They fit with each other but with nothing else. Were they simply opportunists trying to make a few marks, and had Kasic been taken in? Perhaps he, too, was in over his head on this case. The word had always been that Vitas was the brains behind the Interior Ministry, and maybe it was true. Goran had made a worthy point. Kasic had always scored higher marks for style than substance. When all was said and done perhaps he was no sharper than Garovic, just another bureaucrat trying to tread water. The initial reports from the undercover men had seemed like a promising path to a quick finish. He was doubtless under plenty of pressure to wrap this one up in a hurry.
Vlado’s teeth chattered as he climbed into bed, stiff and sore. Tonight there was no radio playing next door. One night of fun and then back to conserving the batteries for more vital purposes. He turned his head on the pillow, peering through the kitchen doorway into the open oven, where the ring of blue flame glowed like the footlights of a darkened theater just before the show danced onto the stage. He drifted off to sleep still waiting for the performance, and soon was dreaming of a woman’s face staring at him from a stage, prim and pale, with heart-shaped lips done up a bit too brightly with lipstick. It was a sweet face, but insinuating as well. It was the woman from Glavas’s apartment, in fact. Or was it a mask? No, it was a face, but suddenly it turned a shocking white, and now it stared up at him from the bottom of a stairwell, emitting a muffled watery sound that was too garbled to understand. Yet, he felt, she had a message for him, if only she could articulate it. The woman pursed her lips, then pressed a finger to her mouth, either in mischief or in warning, while he backed away uneasily, uncertain whether to smile or to show concern. Instead he merely kept moving, as if guided by remote control, moving farther up a stairway that grew colder with every step.
CHAPTER 12
A
huge explosion jarred him awake. He opened his eyes to a sunny morning and the tremors of an aftershock, something like the rumbling conclusion of a distant thunderclap. He felt for a moment as if someone had sat on his stomach, and he heard objects dropping to the ground outside.
huge explosion jarred him awake. He opened his eyes to a sunny morning and the tremors of an aftershock, something like the rumbling conclusion of a distant thunderclap. He felt for a moment as if someone had sat on his stomach, and he heard objects dropping to the ground outside.
A wave of cold air stole across him, and he saw why when he sat up and looked across the room. His last intact window had been blown in, and was now a pile of gleaming fragments on the living room floor. Several shards had been driven into the opposite wall. Others protruded in clusters from an old blue armchair, like the quills of a porcupine.
He got up to look for a spare roll of plastic stashed in a kitchen closet, and promptly cut his left foot on a shard by the kitchen door. He looked back at his bed and saw that a few pieces had landed across his blanket, but none with enough strength to pierce it. He checked in the bathroom mirror and plucked two or three slivers from his hair.
That’s the way it worked here, he told himself He’d gotten up in the middle of the night to shut down the gas, prodded awake by some deep, urgent fear of being consumed by either suffocation or explosion. Then an explosion had come along anyway from the outside, as if to remind him that precautions didn’t matter. It was all odds and luck, and there was no way to outmaneuver them.
Looking out the gaping window, his hands already numb and his teeth chattering, he surveyed the damage out front as he taped up a sheet of plastic. A neighbor’s apartment was torn open. It had been vacant until the week before, when a family of six had moved in, another wandering band of refugees from some small, overrun town in the hills.
From the damage to the roof and to the front it was obvious a shell had slammed directly into an upper corner of the house—nothing of large caliber, probably only a rocket-propelled grenade, but big enough to do the job, wrecking the front room and blowing out every nearby window that had still been intact. With luck the family had been sleeping in the back. Looking through the opening Vlado saw no bodies, and his inclination was not to go looking for any in the cold, especially with more shells possibly on the way.
But he couldn’t pull himself from the window. There seemed to be no one up and about. He listened closely, cupping his ear, but there were no moans, no cries for help, only the stillness of an early morning with bright sunshine flashing on a new dusting of snow. A hot metallic smell mixed with the usual sharpness of woodsmoke and burning garbage.
He completed the hasty repair of his window, pressing the final strip of duct tape into place. There would be no more morning inventories of the gravediggers, and the thought unexpectedly filled him with a sense of relief, the lightness that follows the completion of any long-dreaded chore.
Then, standing back from his work, he thought again of the family in the next apartment. His window plastic billowed slightly with a fresh breeze, and he shivered. There was still no sound from next door. Someone else would sort it all out later, he told himself. But he decided to take another look, and as he peeled back the new strip of tape there was a voice, a man’s, telling someone to stay inside. Vlado rolled away enough plastic to see a disheveled man, his hair and beard full of plaster dust, walking unsteadily through the hole in the front wall into the snow.
“Everyone all right?” Vlado asked. The man turned robotically, and his eyes briefly fixed Vlado with a blank stare. Thin streams of blood oozed from each of his nostrils, but otherwise he seemed in one piece. The man turned back around without a word, and when another minute passed without a reply, Vlado retaped the plastic over the window.
He should put the water on to boil for coffee, he told himself, as he turned toward the kitchen. Should tend to his cleaning, should shave and prepare for work. They would be fine out there, whoever they were. And if not, then the hospital would be far better equipped than he to set them right.
A few days earlier he had seen the two smallest children in the family playing out front, a boy and a girl, cooing and laughing as they tugged at a small raggedy doll. He turned toward his door and walked into the snow.
The man he’d seen earlier was visible through the opening of the apartment’s blown-out window. Vlado strolled across the courtyard and over the threshold, and saw that the man was shaking, on the verge of collapse. Vlado grasped him around the shoulders and lowered him into a chair covered with dust and chunks of plaster. A second explosion followed, perhaps a block away, and down a hallway a small child began to wail. Now he could see that there was also a large, ragged hole in the ceiling.
“Come on,” Vlado said sternly. “Those shots are coming from the north, and there will be more of them. You’ve got no protection here, now. Bring your family next door with me until this is over.”
The man still didn’t speak, but he seemed to stir himself, and he walked unsteadily down the hallway toward where the wail had come from a moment ago. He emerged at the head of a straggling column, with his wife trailing the children. They were all as quiet as the father, the four children staring with wide eyes, the mother seeming only weary, as if she’d finally given up.
“Come. Quickly,” Vlado urged them, more to get their muscles moving than from any fear of imminent danger. Often these “bombardments” consisted of no more than two or three shells at a time, flung like scattershot toward random points of the city. Then, having made their statement for the hour, the gunners grew bored and went back to their naps or their card games.
But the sooner this bunch was up and about, Vlado figured, the sooner they’d purge the shock from their systems.
He saw with relief that everyone seemed intact, although they had yet to speak a word. They followed Vlado into the snow, not exactly dressed for the weather. He glanced around to make sure that the children were at least wearing shoes.
Once inside his apartment he practically had to shove them into chairs, cutting his right hand as he hastily flicked shards of shattered glass onto the floor from the cushions. He then moved to the kitchen like the anxious host of a dinner party, lighting the burner to heat water for coffee.
“You should probably get yourselves checked out by a doctor,” Vlado shouted from the kitchen, still to no answer. “The concussions from these explosions can do more damage than you think. You can come away without a scratch and be dead an hour later from internal bleeding.”
“The hospital,” someone finally said. It was the woman. “Can you tell us how to find it?”
Christ, these really were newcomers if they didn’t know that. “It’s on the top of the hill over there,” Vlado motioned toward his covered window to the east. “Right across the graveyard, and on up the street from there. But I’d wait at least a half hour after the last shell.”
He clattered on with his hospitality, wiping out a pair of dusty and long unused coffee cups, and four small tumblers for the children. He wondered what he might give them for breakfast, figuring bread would have to do. It was probably what they were accustomed to, anyway.
Their silence resumed, and it began to unsettle him. He glanced up quickly, as if to make sure there wasn’t a roomful of zombies in his living room, propped in their chairs and going stiff with rigor mortis, and he saw to his relief that the two youngest children had dropped onto the floor, and were playing with something.
When he saw that their toy was one of his metal soldiers, his first impulse was to ask them to put it away. But what better use could there be for them, he told himself. Play with them all you like. The parents, however, remained as silent as stones.
“So, how long have you been in the city,” Vlado asked.
For a moment it seemed no one would answer. Then the father moistened his lips, as if with great effort, and spoke up. “Four weeks,” he said. He’d stopped shaking and seemed to have collected himself somewhat.
Vlado handed him a hot mug of weak coffee, and another to his wife. “The children, have they eaten?”
“Yes, some bread,” the mother said. “We will get more this morning.”
“What was your town?” Vlado asked. “Where did you come from?”
They named some village Vlado had barely heard of, some dot from one of his maps about forty miles distant, in the middle of a narrow beleaguered supply corridor. They must have had quite a time of it these past few years, and getting here couldn’t have been easy, either.
“How did you make it into the city.”
“With another family,” the father said. “By cart. We came across Igman. Sometimes you can still get through. We were lucky. A family that left only an hour after us lost two sons along the way to snipers.”
“I didn’t even know anyone was still trying to get in,” Vlado said. “I thought it was just people trying to get out.”
“You can’t,” the man said. “At least, not over Igman, not if you’re a man. The soldiers in the pass will only let a family in with an able-bodied male. For more soldiers. I keep wondering when they’re going to pick me up for that. But it was the only way we got in.”
“Oh, they’ll find you soon enough, I’d imagine. But I’d send your wife to the bread-and-water lines by herself from now on, if I were you, even if she can’t haul back as much. That’s how they get most of them.”
Then, something seemed to dawn on the man. And he looked Vlado full in the eye as he asked, “And you. How do you stay out? I noticed you our first week here and wondered that. You’re young and strong.”
“Strong, no. Young, debatable after two years like this. But you’re right, definitely of military age. I serve in the police, though. A detective. Investigating murders.”
The man shook his head, assenting to the reasonableness of Vlado’s occupation with the air of one obliging a lunatic. It was hardly the first time Vlado had seen such a response.
“Now, I guess we will have to find a new place to live,” the man said. “But it shouldn’t be hard. There are so many apartments open now, and there will always be more.”
Vlado considered this vast, continual shuffle that had been taking place beneath his nose, an inner circle of migration.
“I am Alijah Konjic,” the man said, as if suddenly remembering his manners. “My wife is Nela.”
“Vlado Petric.”
“We must leave now, I suppose. Go out to find food and another place to live. And I suppose you are right, that we should see a doctor first.”
They all stood to go without a further word, seeming more composed now, though still reminding him somehow of shellshocked troops being deemed fit for service by doctors under pressure to supply reinforcements.
“Come back if you need anything,” Vlado said, seeing with a pang of disappointment that the small boy had put the toy soldier back where he’d found it. “And if you need to use my place while you’re looking for a new apartment, you are welcome.”
“Thank you, but really, I am sure it won’t be difficult. This place was the third empty one we’d seen after we arrived. There really are many to choose from.”
“Do you need extra clothes?” Vlado asked, feeling the desperation of someone whose party has failed, ending too soon. “Or blankets? I have some spare ones.”
“No. We are fine,” the mother said. But at least she was smiling, and for the moment that seemed like more than enough.
Other books
Accidentally Hers (Sterling Canyon #1) by Jamie Beck
The Poseidon Initiative by Rick Chesler
Galactic Treasure (Quads of Galafrax) by Castle, Angela
Terror Stash by Tracy Cooper-Posey
Don't Bet On Love by Sheri Cobb South
Kiss of Midnight by Lara Adrian
Diary of a Male Maid by Foor, Jennifer
Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One by Dale, Veronica
Who You Least Expect by Lydia Rowan
21st Century Science Fiction by D B Hartwell