When they finish stripping the truck, the man with the gun says something to the driver. They are free to go. It’s been perhaps two hours; Piotr would check his watch, but they’ve taken it, along with his wallet. He still feels his Walkman, though, tucked into his shirt pocket.
As they walk back toward the truck, Arni veers for his pack. He picks it off the ground and shakes it. The man with the machete shouts and points the blade like a finger. Perhaps he thinks there’s a telephone in there, a two-way radio. Arni doesn’t see or hear him. He brushes off his bag. And before Arni can acknowledge the shadow falling across him, the man has swung the machete.
It makes contact with Arni’s face. The sound of a handclap.
Arni falls.
Piotr pushes the driver. “Truck,” he yells. “Now!” Arni lies on the ground. Piotr doesn’t think about the gun or where it may be aimed, because there is no flak jacket to save his life. Protective layers, careful planning — none of it saves anyone. Ever.
Blood forms on Arni’s cheek. Piotr helps him to his feet. The man used the flat of the machete, but its edge has cut Arni’s face. Piotr removes his shirt to staunch the bleeding. The Walkman tumbles to the ground, and Piotr stuffs it in his pants pocket. Around them, the men back away, as if startled by their own violence. The man who made the strike has dropped the machete and run. Arni is dazed; he stumbles.
“Come on,” Piotr says. Arni hangs on his shoulder. The men back farther and farther away, like ripples. Piotr would say that they are safe, but all safety is transitory. He hefts Arni into the cab, then slaps the driver on the back. “Go, go!” The truck lurches but doesn’t move quickly enough. Arni clutches his cheek with both hands; blood seeps through his clenched fingers. It looks as if he’s juicing raspberries. “Bhuj,” Piotr tells the driver, and the truck makes a wide loop to turn around, going far off the road and onto the soft ground waiting to consume them.
After Piotr joined Lorraine’s team, he learned that Connor had been killed. Piotr had stopped talking to Connor before they returned from the Balkans. Their friendship ended the day he and Rana wed. They were on their last assignment, in the Krajina region. This was their last chance to marry, and Connor agreed reluctantly to witness. While Piotr’s plans of marriage were still theoretical, Connor worked wholeheartedly, using his connections to secure Rana passage back to the United States with a spousal green card. But now that all that was left was the ceremony, Connor became reticent, sullen, as if they’d not been colleagues but lovers, and some lover’s vow had been irrevocably breached.
They were wed in a Croatian Catholic church, because both the Orthodox church and the mosque had been burned down. The church, however, had not been immune: windows were broken, the glass swept into a corner, glittering within the debris. Birds nested in the rafters, and their wings made the sound of a book’s pages being flipped. Somehow, Rana had convinced the Catholic priest to marry a lapsed Jew and a Muslim.
“You’ve completed your official good deed for this lifetime,” Connor said. He wore his flak jacket, and its ribbons seemed ghastly, rather than cheerful. “But I suspect that you’re doing this as much for yourself as you’re doing it for her.” Connor examined his fingernails. “Which is fine, as long as you’ve come to a mutually agreeable arrangement.” He watched the ceremony with his arms crossed, as if resentful at the imposition on his time, and after the priest had said what he had needed to say, Connor pulled Piotr aside.
“Congratulations, I suppose,” he said. Rana was crying, and the priest was comforting her. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
And without knowing why, Piotr slapped him. Not hard, but hard enough to turn his head. Connor brought his hand to the point of contact, openmouthed with surprise, and walked out of the church. Upon their return to the United States, Connor deployed immediately to Chechnya, and Piotr — he wondered what his options were now that he had a wife.
Connor died there, in Chechnya.
Beth told Piotr the details. Connor had been trying to broker a cease-fire between the Chechen rebels and the Russian government. For two years, he drove from Grozny to Moscow and back again, ferrying messages between low-level functionaries, notes that were little more than barbs. He must have imagined he could accomplish something, the way all aid workers do. But Connor had elevated this to a delusion: he thought he could courier away a century’s worth of rancor. Or perhaps the futility of the situation was not lost on him, but in the face of doing nothing, anything seemed worthwhile.
He had grown increasingly vocal at the State Department as well, arguing that aid was not just an imperfect stopgap, but one that completely ignored the situation on the ground. He insisted on being included in policy-making meetings and, in Chechnya, gave interviews to news crews. For the BBC, he stood in the center of a razed Chechen town. Pillars of smoke rose from scorch marks on the ground. Nothing moved. Even the squirrels had abandoned the place. Two days before, Chechen rebels had abducted two Russian soldiers and had barricaded themselves in a former typewriter factory. A Russian commando force stormed the building and gunned down the rebels to retrieve their comrades. But the pallets to which their comrades had been strapped were rigged with explosives. Typewriter parts were found nearly a kilometer away: broken Cyrillic character keys, singed ribbons, words blown apart and dispersed. In response, the Russians sent troops and tanks into the nearby town, and now all that remained was a blackened crater.
“Aid without political force behind it is nothing,” Connor said. He walked to a body, and the camera followed shakily, as if frightened of what it might see. The body was an old man, his face covered with soot, torso erupted with bullets. Connor removed a Band-Aid from the pocket of his flak jacket, the same one he’d worn to the Christmas party years ago, and placed it over a bullet hole. “That,” he said. “That is what we’re doing.”
The Russian authorities found Connor’s Land Rover in an open field thirty miles south of Grozny, on the outskirts of Shatoi. The car was undamaged, as if it had drifted off the road. The doors were locked, the windows rolled up.
“He knew Russian intelligence services were spreading rumors about him,” Beth said. “I told him to be careful. I told him not to go back. But…” She sighed. Perhaps she had shut herself in Connor’s office, gone through his files, his papers. Perhaps she’d found the key to his lockbox and availed herself of his secrets. So much of Connor had been confidential, and now she had to piece him back together. “You know how well Connor listens,” she concluded.
Her slip into present tense. She still held out hope. It was all she could do, and in that, she was no different from Connor. Or any other aid worker.
But she was correct: Connor never listened. To anyone. Connor did only what he believed was best; anyone who did less was too timid, and anyone who did more was too reckless.
Fifty feet from the Land Rover, where the field dipped slightly and tan grass grew waist-high, they found three bodies next to each other, hands tied to feet with a single length of extension cord. They had been gagged with strips of oil-stained cloth and shot, once, in the back of the head. The exit wounds sent starbursts of blood into the grass before them.