After I finished Secret War, I looked in the history section for more books on Yugoslavia. There weren’t any; it wasn’t a very good bookstore.
The shop had a theft problem. The till at the back of the store meant it was easy to walk in, grab some books from the front, and leave. Greg told me not to worry about theft; books weren’t worth getting punched over. I followed that advice unless someone was being too obvious to ignore.
I had my eye on an obvious thief the next night Drago came in. It was a kid who was looking at me every time I looked at him. He had a large, open gym bag on the side of the shelf I couldn’t see from the till, but which I could see in the security monitor behind the desk. I was waiting for him to actually put a book in the bag so I could tell him to leave.
Drago came out of the back and handed me some DVDs. I pulled the discs out and looked at the shoplifter. The shoplifter looked down at the shelf. I rang in the titles and hit the discount button and looked at the shoplifter, who looked down at the shelf again. Drago looked around and leaned into me. He whispered, “Trouble?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
Drago went over to a shelf and took a book out. He looked sideways at the shoplifter, who was still looking at me. I walked over to Drago to tell him not to worry about it. The shoplifter dropped some books into his duffle bag. I rolled my eyes and said, “Put those—”
Drago walked down the aisle and pushed the shoplifter down to the ground. He said, “You stealing, you piece of shit?” He bent down and picked up the kid, turned him around and ran him into the door, opened it, and threw him on the sidewalk. The door swung shut. Drago walked back up the aisle and picked up the duffle bag. He kicked open the door. The kid was just getting up. Drago threw the bag at him and then grabbed him by the front of the jacket and said something I couldn’t make out through the door. He let go and when the kid turned around to run, Drago kicked his legs out from under him. Then picked him up and slammed him into the dollar-book cart that we kept in front of the store. He hauled the kid back to his feet and kicked his ass to get him moving, then picked up the bag and threw it after him.
Drago came back in. He was shaking. He said, “Piece of shit.” He came around the counter. I moved away. He reached under and started looking around for something. He was sweating and breathing heavy. He said, “Tissue.” There was a box on the shelf behind the till—I handed it to him and he pulled a wad out and put it on his hand. I hadn’t noticed it was bleeding. He said, “Fuck. That fuck.” He sat down on my stool. I stepped around to the customer side of the counter.
I said, “There’s some water….”
He grabbed the bottle and drank. He took a deep breath and said, “Piece of shit.”
He got the bathroom key from where we kept it under the till and went in. I thought about calling Greg. Drago came out ten minutes later. His face was wet and his hair slicked back. He said, “I always look out for you guys.”
I said, “Thank you.”
“You need anything, let me know.” He slapped my shoulder, said, “You look shook up. Don’t worry. That guy was nothing. He wouldn’t have done anything to you.” He laughed. “He won’t be back.” He slapped my shoulder again.
I got a job at a bookstore that didn’t have a porn section on the other side of town and forgot about Drago until a few years later. I was waiting for my lunch at a falafel place that had the 24-hour news channel on mute. The closed captioning lagged behind the footage, so it was a minute before I realized the man being led out of a courthouse in handcuffs had been arrested on suspicion of war crimes committed in Yugoslavia twenty-five years before. He had been living under assumed names in London, Ontario. His real name was Drago Mošević. It took me a minute to remember where I’d heard the name before: he was the man who had ordered anyone who got out of the burning town hall shot.
I looked up the story when I got home. Mošević had been living in a quiet subdivision outside of London, Ontario, under an assumed name for almost a decade. His neighbours were all surprised by his arrest—he was a quiet guy who kept to himself, but had done small favours for his neighbours over the years that made everyone say they couldn’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.
He’d been caught because he’d gotten into a bar fight years before. He hadn’t been charged, but he had been taken into the drunk tank and fingerprinted. The prints got uploaded to an international database, where they were eventually flagged. The Yugoslavian War Crimes Commission had been alerted. Mošević had been found out years before all the agencies involved were able to coordinate an arrest.
I kept an eye on the news after that, but the only follow-up articles were in Balkan languages and Google translate only really helped me confirm the obvious: he was going to jail. As far as the Canadian news was concerned, it seemed to have just been a news-of-the-weird, war-criminal-in-our-midst story that didn’t warrant a follow up. The war had happened a long time ago, in a country that didn’t exist anymore. It wasn’t the sort of thing people cared about.
The next time I was downtown, I stopped by the old bookstore. Greg was working. It had been long enough and staff turnover was such that it took him a minute to recognize me. He seemed happy to see me, wondered what was new. We swapped stories about some of the old regulars, and then I asked if that Drago guy still came in.
Greg said, “I haven’t seen him in months.” I asked when, exactly, and he said, “I don’t know, maybe two months ago? He just stopped coming in.”
Drago Mošević had been arrested two months before. It seemed like too much for it to be a coincidence that Drago stopped coming in at the same time as the arrest. If he was into anything more serious than porn smuggling and knew a co-conspirator had been arrested, he’d want to disappear.
I wanted to get more from Greg, but couldn’t think of a way to do it that wouldn’t draw attention to my questions and make me look silly; I knew Greg would just say he “didn’t ask too many questions.” And he had already moved on to telling me a story about an old regular who he’d had to ban for pissing himself in the back room. I let it go and, after a bit, said I had to run. It probably was just a coincidence, and, after all, didn’t really matter.
Victory Day
Cassidy McFadzean
I’ve only been in Tbilisi twenty minutes when I’m smoking hash out of a can of Borjomi mineral water that Sasha lights for me. Nara and Davit have given me a ride from Yerevan where there’s two weeks remaining in the art residency, but I’ve brought all my luggage and haven’t decided if I’ll go back. Sasha sucks his lips against the can, and I tell him how our car was searched at the border, that I walked in on a guy at the squat toilet, standing naked from the waist down. Sasha asks if the guy had a bigger cock than him, and I don’t answer. Instead, I tell him I feel guilty for missing the election of Nikol Pashinyan and the celebrations of the new prime minister following the Armenian revolution.
“You were there for the important part,” he reassures me.
We have sex and when we come at the same time Sasha shouts, “Team sport.”
The next morning, we sleep late and smoke more hash at his desk, overlooking the mountain, forest, and graveyard below. Sasha has added more transplants from his forest hikes to the ceramic planter on his windowsill. He shows me the winding succulent, thin green stalks of something that resembles clover, and deep red grasses with small spiky flowers.