Vlado reached the western edge of downtown, working his way behind the highrise apartments along Sniper Alley, also known as Vojvode Radomira Putnika Street, although the new government had already come up with its own, more politically inspiring name for the wide boulevard.
The buildings here had taken some of the heaviest beatings, yet were still virtually filled with residents, unless you counted the apartments facing the river. Most of those were vacant, destroyed during the first weeks of the war, when helicopters had poured red streams of tracer fire through the windows, either to root out nests of snipers or just to take out the day’s frustrations. A few entire floors had gone up in flames, and some windows were now empty and blackened. Whole sections of concrete facing were ripped away and, in some rooms torn open, you could still see the wall hangings and bits of blackened furniture.
Across the street and closer to the river was a no-man’s-land of gutted, burned highrises, a landscape of shredded metal and broken glass where some people still scavenged furtively at night, risking lives to search for old door frames, window sashes, broken furniture, anything that might be used for firewood. They crept through the damp and musty blackness, dodging rats and the sweeping beams of the sniperscopes.
Behind the apartment blocks and out of the line of fire was an entire subculture of young people, the strong ones who always found a way to enjoy themselves no matter what the cost. Vlado passed several clusters of chatting teens, some of the older boys in uniform or carrying guns. In one parking lot a basketball game was in progress. Boys dribbled a slick, underinflated ball on a wet court, the ball kicking wildly as it struck the edges of shell dimples. The steel backboard was embossed with an old pattern of shrapnel spray. The boys’ jeans and shirts were black from the grime of the ball, their faces and hands as smudged as coal miners’.
The whine of a rocket grenade interrupted the splat and ping of the ball, but only for a moment. Everyone behind the building knew instantly, through some well-practiced inner calculation, that the loudness and tone meant the shell wasn’t close enough to do them harm, and life continued after only the briefest hesitation, a collective flinch so slight that a newcomer would never have noticed.
An ill-advised hook shot clanged off the rim. The shell exploded six blocks away. The shortest boy on the court reached on his tiptoes and grabbed the rebound, dirty water flying with the slap of his hands.
After another block Vlado turned right, passing beneath a railroad overpass and climbing a slight hill before turning left toward the entrance of the cigarette factory.
A crowd of nearly a hundred was gathered outside the chain-link gates, bunched tightly but waiting quietly for the daily emergence of the one pound plastic bags of chopped tobacco. They would buy the bags for ten marks apiece, then try to resell them for double the price in the city center to people who didn’t have the energy or courage to walk to the plant.
Vlado showed his pass and slipped past three guards toting heavy machine guns. The security here was better armed than outside the presidential building, although these men wore old doubleknit pants and print shirts, with dark caps of napped wool. True to the spirit of the enterprise they worked for, cigarettes burned in the mouths of all three.
Vlado passed more guards at the plant doorway, then moved down a flight of stairs to a vast noisy cellar. Most of the manufacturing had been moved below ground long ago after shells began slamming into the upper floors. Vlado entered a room where ten women lined either side of a long table, stacking cigarettes into packs. The packs themselves had been made from whatever paper was available-old wrappers for toilet paper rolls, soap wrappers, pages from old school textbooks and even used government forms. Vlado wondered vaguely if any of his old arrest reports might be in the high piles. He idly picked up a new pack and began reading a passage from page 283 of a high school physics textbook. Something about Bernoulli’s principle.
All around him men wheeled huge green bins of chopped tobacco, heading for the hoppers of machines that were rolling and cutting cigarettes by the thousands. There were always complaints from the factory that supply was down to its last reserves of tobacco, but it looked to Vlado like production was at full tilt. He walked on, watching a conveyer belt carry newly made cigarettes toward the table of women. A man who seemed to be a foreman approached with a frown and a creased brow. They shouted to each other above the din of the machinery.
“Vlado Petric. I am here to see a Mr. Kupric.”
The foreman nodded and disappeared around the corner of a large green machine that hummed and banged away Vlado waited for Kupric to emerge, half expecting someone in a furtive hunch, glancing about nervously. He wondered if he should move toward a darker corner. How did these appointments work, anyway?
A few moments later a man who must have been Kupric strolled around the corner of the machine, preceded far in advance by a grand belly that stretched the limits of a sweaty white T-shirt. He extended his plump right hand in welcome. A large smile spread across his wide face, as if he were meeting a valued client to close a business deal.
So this is our fine and secretive undercover man, Vlado thought.
“Please, follow me.” Kupric shouted into the noise. “The plant manager has made his office available, where it is quiet and we can enjoy some privacy.
“And,” he said, his grin widening, “we can have a few smokes. I work all day in the middle of this, and the only time I can smoke is lunch. Too dangerous. If this place ever burned down the war would be lost in a week.”
It wasn’t far from the truth. The factory was one of the great beating hearts of the war effort, every bit as vital as a munitions plant. If most armies are said to travel on their stomachs, the Bosnian forces were crawling painfully on their lungs. Daily cigarette rations kept them smoldering through the nights in cold muddy trenches. The rations were higher for frontline duty, and the soldiers were the only people in the city who got filtered cigarettes. That didn’t sound like much of a privilege until you inhaled an unfiltered Drina. The sharp, acrid bite had inspired a cottage industry of handcrafted wooden cigarette holders, which you now saw all over town.
Kupric took Vlado upstairs to the office wing of the building. Leaving the noise, they ducked for a moment into a large meeting room, which looked like it had once been quite splendid, paneled and carpeted. Now the long oak table in the middle of the room was split down the middle, its broken sides covered with fallen plaster and ceiling tiles. Overturned swivel chairs and plaques citing past production achievements were piled together at one end, and the paneling had been torn in long streaks. Overhead, a ragged hole in the ceiling sprouted wires and shredded insulation around its edges.
“From a mortar shell last week,” said a beaming Kupric, who seemed to view the ruined room with pride. “Fortunately no one was hurt.”
They walked down a hallway to the plant manager’s office and seated themselves on his couch by a low coffee table a few feet from a huge oak desk. On the table the manager had arrayed about a dozen sections and shapes of heavy, twisted metal, the choicest surviving chunks from shells that had landed in or around the plant.
Vlado had seen similar displays in offices around the city-at the hospital, at stores, at the courthouse, at the few bureaucracies still up and running. The fascination with these instruments of torment baffled him. He looked for a moment at this assemblage, the conical tops from a few big shells, the jagged sides of smaller rocket grenades.