The only things Greg knew about Drago were that he was from Serbia or Yugoslavia or somewhere like that and that he did the store’s owner favours every now and then. I never met the owner, but Greg told me he owned a lot of property around town and ran a lot of small businesses that only seemed to break even or lose money. The bookstore was a money-loser. When I asked why he didn’t just rent out the building if the bookstore lost money, Greg said, “I don’t ask too many questions.” I had never been asked for my SIN number or address and I paid myself cash out of the till at the end of every week. Greg said, “Drago’s okay. Don’t worry about him.” And then he looked at me and added, “Just do what he says.”
Drago came in about once a week. He’d browse for ten minutes and then buy eight or so DVDs. He always said he got a deal and leaned over the counter and paid with cash. The back room was busy and there were plenty of porn-section regulars who drew as much or more attention to themselves. One guy insisted on letting me know what fetish he was into each week, another always called his purchases “items” in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable—“Just these three … items,” he’d say—and there were hagglers that wasted a lot of my time. Drago didn’t stand out too much the first few months I was there.
Then, a week before Christmas, Drago came in near the end of my shift and went into the back. I heard a noise and looked into the security monitor behind the desk—by then I’d learned to check the monitor rather than run into the porn section to see what the problem was. Drago had stumbled into a wall of DVDs and knocked the cases over. He bent over to pick them up and knocked a bunch off another shelf. I left him to it. Eventually, he came around the wall and I pretended like I had been sorting porn DVDs. I realized Drago was very drunk.
He dropped the brown paper bag I handed to him and bent over to pick it up. A gun slipped out of his jacket and fell onto the floor. He picked it up and tucked it behind his belt. I handed him his change and he left.
Greg knew Drago carried a gun and told me not to worry about it, Drago wouldn’t cause any trouble at the shop, “He helps out around here.”
“With a gun?”
“No, no. He gets us porn from some of his old buddies in Bosnia or Yugoslavia or whatever country he’s from. A lot of that really hardcore stuff is illegal here.” Greg saw me react. “It’s an old law. They only enforce it at the border—no one will ever come in here and give you a hard time.” I didn’t say anything. “Look, Drago is fine.” Greg added, “Just do what he says.”
There was a regular who always picked up a book on his way into the back. When he came to the till, he’d have the book on top of the DVDs to disguise his stack of porn. Every few months he sold the books back to the store. A few weeks after Drago dropped his gun and I found out he was smuggling illegal porn into the country, this regular sold me back a bag of books. One of them was Secret War: The Break-Up of Yugoslavia and the Balkan Wars, 1991-2001.
The book opened with a crane lifting a semi-truck trailer out of a lake somewhere near a town called Peć. The crane’s chain snapped. The trailer fell onto the beach and tipped over, cracking open the back doors and spilling water and months-old decomposing bodies all over the shore. The bodies had been wrapped in tarps. Their hands were bound behind their backs where the rope or arms had not rotted away.
The next chapter jumped forward to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The book’s author was one of the lawyers prosecuting the men responsible for putting those bodies in the truck. He began to trace the history of the case of the bodies in the truck as a means of examining the whole history of the Yugoslavian Wars, and the genocide that came of it.
I barely knew about this war. I did not know about the genocide.
The author recreated the scene of the mass killing. A paramilitary unit whose later-arrested members would argue was not part of the Yugoslav People’s Army, but who were most certainly working under orders from a low-ranking officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, who was himself almost certainly working under orders from even higher up, had been sent to a small village to round up rebels. The village was predominantly Albanian; the soldiers worked under the assumption that anyone not an actual rebel was housing or abetting the rebels in some way. They rounded up everyone they could find and locked them in the city hall. The commander of the operation came into the village once it was secure. His name was Drago Mošević.
I put the book down.
I picked it back up and flipped to the index and read every page with “Mošević, Drago” on it. A few pages ahead of where I’d been reading, Drago Mošević had the town hall lit on fire and ordered his troops to shoot anyone who managed to get out. A few chapters later, he and his troops went on the run after the fall of Slobodan Milošević, and, further on, several of his troops were caught while Drago Mošević managed to escape. Toward the end of the book, it was revealed that the investigators had not yet found him. They believed he and a few others from his unit had escaped to North America. I checked the copyright date. The book was two years old.
Drago came into the bookstore. I tucked Secret War under the till and pretended to be filing porn DVDs. I didn’t see until he was at the till that he had a kid with him. He said, “This is Petr. Keep an eye on him a minute.”
Drago went back outside and headed north up the street.
I said, “Hi.”
Petr pulled out a phone and sat on a box of books. He looked maybe eight. I wanted to read my book but didn’t want the kid to see what I was reading so took a stack of DVDs into the back and shelved them. When I came back Petr had grabbed the DVDs I’d left behind and was flipping through them, looking at the covers. I took them back and moved the stack under the counter. He went back to looking at his phone.
Drago came back two hours later and said, “Let’s go,” to Petr.
Petr didn’t look up from his phone but said, “I just need to finish….”
Drago said, “Now.”
And Petr said, “No, no, I need to—” Drago hit him on the side of the head.
Petr’s eyes turned red and Drago said, “You going to cry like a little pussy? Come on.” He pushed Petr down the aisle ahead of him and out the door.
I took the book home after my shift. A few more chapters in, I saw that Drago was a very common name in the former Yugoslavia. Aside from Drago Mošević, there was a chief investigator, a village mayor, and a forensic doctor all named Drago. I also realized it would not have made sense for Drago Mošević to move to Canada and not change his name to something other than Drago. But then, I thought, if it was a common name, another war criminal who escaped to North America could have named himself Drago and moved to Toronto.
Greg thought it was unlikely that Drago had been involved in anything like war crimes, but he did know that Drago moved to Canada in the late nineties, which lined up, time-wise, with the war. “But it’s more likely he moved here to get away from that life,” Greg said. “You said yourself, there was a civil war or something. Would you want to raise your kids around that type of violence?”
I said, “I saw him hit his kid.”
“Well, that’s a cultural thing. It’s rough where he’s from. I don’t judge. But he doesn’t strike me as the war-criminal type. Just an average, small-time porn smuggler.” Greg laughed, but stopped when he looked at me. He said, “Look, you don’t need to worry about Drago, he’s never been anything but fine to us.” I waited for him to add, “Just do what he says.”