Authors: Dan Fesperman
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Suspense, #Contemporary Fiction, #Thrillers
Lie in the Dark (29 page)
“Hey, that’s still Aerosmith,” the aggrieved party shouted. “Fuck Aerosmith.”
“Fuck Guns ‘N’ Roses,” ponytail shouted back.
“He’s always that way,” the other boy muttered. “Plays his own stuff until we’re too high up the hill, then puts yours in right when we have to cut the noise.”
“So what’s it like up there,” Vlado asked. “What should I expect?”
“Cold,” one answered. “Muddy. Lots of mud and lots of Chetniks.”
“Scary?”
“Sometimes. Usually just quiet and boring. That’s when you just sit and talk and smoke all night.”
“Can you hear them on the other side?”
“All the time. Sometimes you shout back and forth. They scream something over, we scream something back, then it keeps up until either some officer stops it or it gets nasty. ’Cause when it gets too nasty somebody always starts shooting. Then everybody’s mad at whoever was doing the talking to begin with, so you have to watch what you say.”
“Does anyone ever sleep?”
“You’re not supposed to, but you’re welcome to try. We’re never sleepy up there. We don’t get sleepy until we’re halfway back down the hill. And that’s when the asshole with the radio finally starts playing our music.”
They all laughed again.
By then they were out in the open, the road winding along the side of a grassy hill in the dark. When a shell went off now you could see flashes in the sky. They were in farmland now. Each house was a hundred yards or so from the last, places where families used to tend goats and cows and grow long rows of corn, pumpkins, and cabbage. Now the houses were empty, roofs gone, animals too.
They passed a blown-up bus tilted off into a ditch, painted camouflage green. Some sort of army transport that had gone off the tracks. Even in the darkness you could see that the damp fields were pocked with shellholes, as if giant gophers had been spent the last few years digging.
From up ahead the screech and snarl of Guns ‘N’ Roses finally filled the air. A small cheer went up from the four boys nearest Vlado.
Then, following the brief chatter of an automatic weapon from somewhere over the rise, the commander at the head of the column ordered silence.
“Off with the music and off with the talk,” he shouted. “All cigarettes out until we’ve reached the top.”
“Fuck you, sir” the boy with the tape muttered, inhaling fiercely before tossing his cigarette into the ditch.
The tape ejected from the machine with a click that signaled the crossing of some invisible line. A few minutes later they were greeted by a shell, and then a rumble. Then the sky lit up with a riot of red tracer bullets, streaming in a wild search for targets. With the approach of the Orthodox Christian New Year such celebratory firing had been growing more commonplace, and by the next night there would no stopping it until the wee hours.
They reached a small row of shattered houses, a village high on the hill just before the shank of the ridge, and it was here they halted. An officer greeted their unit, signaling them off to the left. Vlado approached him to announce his title and his destination.
“So, it’s Neven you want. You can have him. Down that way, another quarter mile, maybe a little more. I’ll get someone to take you.”
Shortly afterward he was joined by yet another teenage boy, in a plaid wool jacket streaked with mud. He seemed glad for the chance to move about.
Boards were stacked and nailed up between the houses, and fortified by mounds of earth. Men squatted behind them or sat on the ground behind the houses, talking in low voices and smoking cigarettes. One boiled water for coffee over a small stove.
Vlado heard chattering in the near distance, followed by laughter, and wondered if it was coming from the other side. Then there was a shout, more laughter, then someone yelling, this time from nearby.
He and the boy moved farther down the line, on a path behind more of the houses, sidestepping broken branches and sinking ankle-deep in mud. The path then curved around the slope of the hill toward more exposed ground, out where there were no homes and trees.
A few moments later there was the whoosh of a shell, a yellow flash, and a crushing blow deep in the pit of Vlado’s stomach. There was also a slight heave to the ground, or so it seemed to Vlado as he suddenly found himself in a crouch, his face twisted in fear.
He looked for his escort and saw the boy standing upright, relaxed, inhaling from his cigarette, and regarding Vlado with mild curiosity. “Relax,” the boy said. “It wasn’t that close.” Vlado would have to recalibrate his definition of close if he was to last very long up here.
They finally reached their destination by stepping down into a communications trench leading to a small bunker, where they found a sentry reading a paperback by the light of a kerosene lantern. The boy turned to go without a word as the sentry looked up.
“I wish to see Neven Halilovic,” Vlado announced, as if to a hotel doorman, or the secretary of a business executive.
“General Halilovic usually doesn’t see anyone but his own men,” the sentry replied.
General. That was a laugh. Though if you could manage putting together your own army while officially under army arrest then perhaps you’d earned the right to call yourself whatever you wanted.
“Tell him that Inspector Petric of the Interior Ministry would like to speak with him about a case he has some interest in.”
“Doubtful. But I’ll pass it along.”
The reply was only five minutes in coming.
“Neven says to fuck off and go back down the hill where you came from.”
Vlado pondered for a moment what to do. It was clear the sentry didn’t wish to ask again. Vlado fished in his pockets for a five mark piece he’d scrounged out of a drawer before leaving. The sentry looked at it scornfully, but took it.
“Tell him I wish to discuss the level of art appreciation of the late Esmir Vitas.”
This time it took ten minutes, but when the sentry returned he motioned for Vlado to follow him. They headed down a long, neatly dug trench, stepping deeper into the private war of Neven Halilovic.
CHAPTER 14
T
hey walked for a few hundred yards, negotiating a twist and a turn before arriving a few minutes later at a bunker of logs and sod, surrounded by soldiers who lounged amid guns and ammunition boxes. A stovepipe poked from the bunker roof, smoke pouring from it. Then a voice called him inside, where it was warm but smoky, and lit brightly by a kerosene lantern.
hey walked for a few hundred yards, negotiating a twist and a turn before arriving a few minutes later at a bunker of logs and sod, surrounded by soldiers who lounged amid guns and ammunition boxes. A stovepipe poked from the bunker roof, smoke pouring from it. Then a voice called him inside, where it was warm but smoky, and lit brightly by a kerosene lantern.
And there was Neven, slumped regally in an aluminum lawn chair, its vinyl straps fraying at the edges. He was bearded and looked tired but still carried an edge of ferocity, especially in the bright, round eyes, a deep brown, the pupils almost abnormally large.
He spoke without either rising or offering his hand. “So. The late Esmir Vitas?”
“Yes. Does that help you or hurt you?”
“Probably neither. But it is something I’d like to know more about. You have the only thing valuable to me anymore. Information.”
He looked at Vlado a moment, as if making up his mind about something, then motioned toward a second tattered lawn chair on the opposite side of a small wooden tea table. “Please. Have a seat.”
Neven called for an aide, then ordered two coffees as if in a café, showing off his easy authority as well as the possibilities at his beck and call.
“It is real coffee,” he said. “Not instant.”
When Vlado said nothing, Neven resumed. “So, you are here to discuss art and Mr. Vitas.”
Vlado decided to lay most of his cards on the table right away. “More to the point, I’d like to ask you about the transfer files, and how Zarko may have used them. Vitas apparently knew something about the operation, and it seems to have gotten him killed. He may have been participating; he may only have been investigating. I think you can help me decide which.”
“There is very little I can tell you about any of that except to say that I know we had the file cards and that for some reason they were considered very important. But they were either confiscated or destroyed in the raid, so what would they matter now anyway?”
Well, there was something, at least. The files had survived the museum “fire,” as Vlado suspected, and might still be around. Presumably either the Interior Ministry or the army had them. He wondered again about Vitas’s remark, “in safe hands in unsafe surroundings.”
“Confiscated by who?” Vlado asked.
“You will have to ask the Interior Ministry. You work for them, don’t you? I only know we left them behind when we walked out to surrender. Although by then the building had caught fire, so you never know.”
“And then, after spending a few weeks in jail you were pardoned. Into the army, in recognition of your, how did they put it? ...”
“My invaluable service to my country,” Neven said, smiling for the first time, teeth crooked, a carnivorous smile stained deeply with nicotine. His breath was of onions and fried meat, vapors heavy with grease. Vlado pictured slabs of lamb frying over a cookstove down in the hole of some smoky bunker. His stomach growled as Neven leaned over to stub out a cigarette on the table.
“And that is how I would like to keep my relationship with my country right now,” Neven continued. “Steady and warm. And I’m not sure I can do that by talking to you about any of this. Maybe all I will do is make them decide that I should have stayed in prison after all.”
“Or maybe they’ll decide someone else should be in prison instead.”
“Who?”
“Whoever it is that makes it necessary for you to stay up here surrounded by men with Kalashnikovs, living like this. When you’re more comfortable near the Chetnik army than near your own government I’d say you have some enemies you need to take care of, but can’t. Maybe some of them are involved with all of this, with this art business. It must have been making more money than anything else Zarko was associated with.”
Neven, who had been affecting something of a bored attitude up to now, looked straight into Vlado’s face, his eyes burning with an intense, scornful arrogance. “Let me tell you how it works up here, Mr. Detective, and don’t tell me your name again because I don’t want to know it, much less remember it. Here I have my own men and the army leaves me alone. They hate the Interior Ministry even more than I do. The only people they hate worse are the military police. Any of these rivalries can get you killed, or, if you know how to use them, they can keep you alive, even make you rich.”
“The word on the streets, in fact, is that you did get killed.”
“Yes. In the Jewish cemetery. It was a helpful story. Even if some people knew it was untrue they decided that it let them off the hook. If people in the city thought I was dead then it was no longer necessary to try to bring me to justice, now or later. And I was in some of those damn fool attacks at the Jewish cemetery, too, early on. That’s what convinced me I had to get together my own men and get out of there, even if it meant coming some place like this. So I convinced some soldiers to join with me, in the customary way.”
“You bought them.”
“Of course.”
“And didn’t some officers in the regular army have their own ideas about that?”
“They had their ideas, but I had the D-marks, or at least I was willing to spend mine. Why should they waste money trying to outbid me when they could make their own profits on the arrangement?”
“You paid them, too, you mean.”
“At officers’ rates, of course. All for the privilege of my own comfortable billet here on Zuc. Remote enough to keep away the prying eyes of the generals, and an important enough part of the line to make myself necessary. One thing I have always been is a good fighter. They know that, and their lines are so thin in places that they’re glad to have me.”
The coffee arrived on a small copper tray. The aide poured the thick Turkish brew from an hourglass-shaped pot. Vlado sipped it, and was surprised to find it was even flavored with cardamom, all but impossible to find in the city these days.
“What’s to keep you from bolting to the other side. Plenty of others do it.” Indeed, it happened every week, sometimes in units of twenty or more men.
“Let’s just say there are even more people on that side for me to fear than over here. They still aren’t very happy about what happened two years ago. We made a lot of JNA officers look very bad by holding off their tanks with small arms. And there are always those who are enemies for other reasons.”
“Like General Markovic, for example.”
For the first time Neven seemed mildly impressed. He cocked his head slightly, as if to reassess the potential of the meeting. Then he said slowly, “Yes. General Markovic, for example.”
“Another admirer of fine art, I’m told.”
“Indeed he is.” He paused for a moment. “So, you say you may be able to help me. How?”
“Look, we know that art is being taken out of the country, even if the museum doesn’t seem to have a clue. If we can tie the operation to Vitas’s murder and root it out, I’d imagine we’d end up putting away some of the people who want to see you put away.”
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