Pretty Birds (37 page)

33.

“
I DON'T WANT
you to think you're being kept prisoner,” Jackie told her.

They had taken her to the brewery, into a small basement room that had no discernible purpose. The floor was black, hard-packed earth. The walls were jagged gray brick. A single bare lightbulb burned overhead. There was no visible chain, switch, or even a string to turn it on or off. There was no table, no chair, no crate, no cot, no cups, no Coca-Cola can, no Marlboro pack, no trash, and no calendar. It could have been seven at night or seven in the morning in the room. It could have been May or December, Uzbekistan or Majorca, 1903, 1930, or 1993.

Jacobo had brought in three empty green plastic pails that had once held cleaning solvent. But they had been washed out long ago, and brought only a thin synthetic scent into the room. Jacobo overturned the pails and they each took a seat. The hard earthen floor seemed to soak up their voices.

“I feel like a prisoner,” said Irena, turning around in her seat to take in the cold walls.

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Jackie, tossing back a whiplash of her hair. “We need you, that's all.”

“I can leave whenever I want?” asked Irena.

Jackie answered with another toss of her head and smiled. “Don't be ridiculous.”

         

“
I'VE WORKED MY SHIFT,
” Irena reminded them. “My parents will wonder.”

“Zoran has gone to see them,” said Jackie. “Zoran is telling your parents you're fine, you had to work. Which is true.”

Irena kept turning to look at the walls, and saw that Jacobo had quietly shut a gray sheet-metal door behind them. The door looked brighter and newer than the bricks or the floor.

Jackie saw Irena looking past her, and leaned over to place her hand on Irena's knees. “I know. It's still a shock,” she said.

“Tedic wasn't what you would call a sweetheart,” said Irena. “I just always figured he would be the last man standing.”

Jackie lightly touched Irena's hands as they lay in her lap. “He thought two steps ahead,” she agreed. “While everyone else around here was still staggering back. I used to say, ‘Miro, you little gnome. You could never make it with the likes of the girls you order around now, could you? Now, you command us. Jump! Run! Hide! Shoot! You even bestow our names. We have gone way beyond simple boyish fantasies here.' ”

For the first time since she had been picked up in the early darkness, Irena managed a smile.

“He gave us a chance to do something useful,” Jackie went on softly. “Not just cringe under the windows and wait to see who dies next. You should have seen him last night,” she continued. “Someone fell over bleeding. There were screams. Ripping sounds from the curtain. Miro realized before anyone. ‘Get down, get down!' he shouted, flapping his arms like an angry bird. Sir Sasha came charging out of the building. Tedic, our small, bald, twisted Tedic, threw himself over the great Sir Sasha Marx's vast Falstaff profile.”

“Like a smelt trying to protect a whale,” Irena said.

“Conflict reveals,” said Jackie. “The one thing I learned in drama school that might hold for real life. Neighbors turn into monsters, and Miro Tedic turns into a hero.”

         

“OKAY NOW,” SAID JACKIE.
She had taken to lacing shawls across her shoulders—they seemed to restore the symmetry of two arms—and had developed a gesture in which she absently tugged on an end of red fringe as she spoke.

“We are pretty sure we know how your friend got word about the play. The person who told her didn't know who she was, and just wanted to make a little time with her.”

But Irena had to take a step back. She hugged her elbows close to her chest, as if she were trying to fit into a small, narrow space. “My friend,” she asked. “What is she?”

Jackie inclined her head toward Jacobo.

The Mexican had folded his softly flanneled legs over the edge of the pail. “Your friend is a member of a group”—Irena thought that he hesitated at the next phrase—“called the Hornet's Nest.” He sat back so that Jackie could add her corroboration.

“Hornets, the Viper, the Knight. Such nicknames. I swear, military men are only as clever as adolescent boys.” Jackie's smile invited Irena to do the same.

Jacobo leaned in toward Irena. It was the first time she could recall looking into his dark eyes. “It was someone in the Hornet's Nest who fired the shot that killed the French doctor at Franko Hospital,” he explained. “Someone in the Hornet's Nest fired the shot that killed the man—who knows his name?—in the courtyard of the Presidency Building. That unit got off the shot that killed the mother on Sutjeska Street. We know her name. . . .” Jacobo's voice trailed away into the earthen floor. “At least, Jackie knows it,” he said, waving a hand in her direction as if acknowledging a region on a map. Jackie gave a slight nod back.

“From what we overhear,” said Jacobo, “and from what the Knight so conscientiously passes on, it was someone from the Hornet's Nest who shot playgoers last night. ‘Every step you take, every move you make . . .' however it goes.”

“Coach Dino?” Irena asked softly.

Jackie flashed a quiet grin over at Jacobo, and tried to obscure it with the end of her shawl. “The basketball coach? The biathlon champ?”

Irena nodded once.

“Dino Cosovic has been in Belgrade. He shoots targets in tournaments. For him, the front lines might as well be in Tasmania. The only wounds he risks are from jealous husbands.”

Irena's head had dropped between her shoulders, and she cast her eyes down along the floor. “Is Amela the Viper?” she finally asked.

Jacobo let out a breath as Jackie tucked a small cough into the red-fringed edge of her shawl. Jacobo leaned forward again, so close that his face almost touched the side of Irena's head.

“Time for a state secret,” Jackie said softly from behind them.

“There is no Viper,” said Jacobo. “The Viper is their artistic creation. He cannot miss. You cannot kill him. They assign him credit for their most extraordinary shots. He becomes more renowned with each one. Better—he becomes
real.
Everyone in that unit thinks that he or she is the Viper. But no one is. No
one
is. Like most art, he is a collaboration between truth, fraud, and imagination. The Serbs fool us so they can fool their own people. They make everyone scared of the sting of the Viper. The reflection of our fear makes them look larger to themselves.”

         

JACKIE HAD LEANED
back on her seat during Jacobo's speech, as if she wanted to observe them from some distance. She settled the rim of the green pail back onto the earthen floor, and kept her tone conversational. “Now here is the hardest part, dear,” she said. “It is also the most necessary. Your friend is the enemy. She is
your
enemy. No poetic euphemisms are permissible. She is not just another sniper on the other side. She does not just wear another uniform. She is your predator. If you showed up in her sights, she would shoot you in the back. She has
our blood
on her hands.”

Irena raised her own hands over her eyes and tugged at their corners. When she drew back her fingers, she saw that they were wet.

“Whatever kind of friend she ever was,” said Jackie, still speaking gently, “she now shares a bed with the men who mistreated you in Grbavica.”

         

JACOBO HELD OUT
a pack of Marlboros to Irena. The top was still sealed and shiny.

“I thought you didn't,” Irena told him.

“I don't. I just thought—” The pack crackled as he tapped it against his knee. Irena shook her head and smiled faintly. But as Jacobo went on, he slipped a finger through the creases of the cellophane wrap around the cigarettes. “We knew about her when she came over the other night,” he said. “She was not supposed to get back. Zoran was supposed to surprise her, when she was all drunk and tired and you two had had your talk, and bring her here. So we could have our own talk.”

“Zoran?”

“Zoran has worked for Tedic longer than any of us,” Jackie explained. “Miro always had an eye for finding the overlooked man. Two steps ahead,” she reminded Irena.

Something tougher entered Jacobo's tone. “If she resisted,” he said, “Zoran was supposed to shoot her. If he had, we would have taken his word, no questions asked. And we might not be here now.”

“Why not just . . .” Irena began to search for words. “I don't know . . . take her somewhere . . . lock her up . . . arrest her?”

“For what?” asked Jackie. “She is an enemy soldier. The best we can do—the duty we owe the people she killed—is to keep her from shooting anyone else. That duty we can deal with a bullet.”

“How do you know what she has done? Like the Viper—there are a thousand boasts for every truth.”

“She is helping to slaughter this city,” said Jackie evenly. “What more do we need to know?”

         

JACOBO AND JACKIE
exchanged glances again. They both pulled their pails imperceptibly forward toward Irena.

“What changed this beautifully conceived plan,” Jacobo began, “was your crafty friend.”

“She started begging Zoran for help,” said Jackie.

“To stay alive?”

“To come over.
To switch sides.
She said she was on the wrong one.”

“They were pulling away from your building when she started in,” Jacobo explained. “She said, ‘I've got to quit, I can't do this, I have to change. I know you can help me.' ”

Jackie tossed an edge of her shawl over her right shoulder and snorted a burst of air that brushed back the ends of her hair. “You know. What hookers usually say.”

         

JACOBO CURLED BACK
the tinfoil on the Marlboros and plucked at one for Jackie.

“Zoran said he was glad to hear it. Zoran—a classic case of a compromised asset.” Jacobo shook his head like an indulgent older brother. “Zoran knows you, he knows her. He likes you both. He likes your
parrot.
His pretty birds, he calls you all.

“Zoran told her there was a place he could take her where they would be glad to see her. She'd be cooped up and questioned. But she'd be safe. And if what she said checked out, she could be a very valuable teammate.

“But your friend said that if she didn't show up for work her parents would be killed. She said her managers had always made that clear. She said she had been plotting for some time, and that what she had to do was go home and tell her parents something so they could get away.”

It was Jackie who finally extracted a cigarette from the pack and flourished it.

“Zoran said—he didn't know what to say,” Jacobo went on. “He told her—he actually told her!—that if she didn't come back to the brewery with him his orders were to stop the car and kill her.”

Jackie added a kindly, incredulous comic snort. “Zoran.
Secret Agent Man.
”

Irena could think of nothing more resourceful to ask than, “What happened?”

         

“
ZORAN IS NO
James Bond,” Jackie continued. “Your friend reached around his belly and yanked the wheel to turn the car into a mortar hole along Lukavicka Cesta. She wrenched Zoran's arms behind his back and tied them with his own belt. Zoran is no Schwarzenegger. She tied his feet with her belt. Trussed him like a rabbit. She took his gun out of the glove box and made Zoran bunny-hop to the back of his taxi and forced him into the trunk. His own fucking trunk. The rabbit hopped into the pot.”

Jacobo had a gentleman's habit of keeping a brass lighter in his slacks, which he now fired up below Jackie's cigarette. He spoke as he flicked the flint wheel. “Your friend kept saying, ‘I'm sorry. I am so sorry.' This girl expects a lot for being sorry. ‘It has to be.' She rapped Zoran's own gun against the trunk and said, ‘I'm taking this in case I need it. I'm leaving your keys in the glove box. I'll send someone to get you.' Then she said, ‘I'm going to come back at six tomorrow night. It's all planned. Tell your people. Tell Irena. If I see Irena from the other side, I'll follow through.' ”

Jacobo laughed—despite his vexation, Irena was inclined to think, until she realized that it was because of it.

“The audacity! She asks for help, then gives us orders.”

Jackie blew her first puff of smoke, and crossed her legs at her ankles. “She got to the airport, picked one of the thieves in the hedges—the most honest-looking one, I'm sure—and said, ‘I've locked a man in the trunk of his taxi back on Lukavicka. His keys are in the glove box. Go back. Let him out, and he'll give you beer, cigarettes, whatever you want.' ”

Jacobo was genuinely chuckling by now. “Zoran had to promise the bandit cartons of cigarettes and cases of beer,” he said. “He was choking to death in that trunk, he was laughing so hard. Miro made good on the spot. He sent the smuggler away with so much loot, we had to have a truck deliver him back to his hedges.”

“I told Miro that the whole play sounded like a ploy,” said Jackie. “Feminine wiles. An athlete's wiliness. She figured out what Zoran was, and shrewdly said the one thing that could buy her the chance to save herself.”

“I told Miro that I didn't know why she was coming back,” said Jacobo. “But—what did we have? Eighteen hours? As much as a day? Not nearly time enough to certify her story. I said, ‘Let her get a few steps across the runway and have Molly bring her down. Blame it on the Frenchies. If the death of one more girl at the airport even makes a story.' ”

“I asked Miro not to get dazzled and distracted by dreams of luring defectors and cracking secret cells,” said Jackie. “I said, ‘This is not one of your foggy British spy stories, full of mist and gray. This is Sarajevo. This girl has killed a lot of us already. You don't have to certify that. Let Molly bring down this spotted leopard and mark one up for our side.' ”