“Understood.”
“Very well.”
The pressure of the gun barrel eased, and Vlado felt his entire body relax. He made a tentative motion to stand, but a strong hand fell immediately upon his right shoulder. The gun barrel shoved back into place, and the voice spoke again.
“Don’t be in such a hurry. First you must enjoy a few moments of our hospitality. With our business concluded we can talk as men, as keepers of our families, as fellow patriots. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“We must talk of our wives. Yours, for instance. Jasmina, she is called?”
Vlado didn’t like where this was headed, hinting at resources and connections stretching to God-knows-where.
“She is, I understand, working as a clerk for an architect in Berlin, yes? Some kind of designer. And if I am not mistaken, she is technically an illegal employee, working without the benefit of the proper papers from the German government, which I suppose is all right as long as the authorities don’t find out.”
It was all true. Vlado had gone looking for a secret portal, but now felt instead as if he had tumbled through a trap door, into a pit where all those goats lay below, gutted and sticky with their own fluids, black with flies. What was it Kasic had said? There would be no turning back. Vlado had been glad at the time, excited. It seemed scant comfort now.
The voice continued: “Which reminds me, we should let you go soon or you’ll be late for this month’s phone call. Imagine the unnecessary worry if you failed to call. What would your little daughter think? Sonja, is it?”
Vlado struggled to answer, managing only a dry crackle, barely audible over the static of the Motorola: “Yes. Sonja.”
“A lovely name. So go and make your call. And keep your eyes closed, please, all the way down the stairs, provided those weak legs of yours can still carry you. Eat your meat when you’re home. It will make you stronger. See how even we are doing our part to keep our policemen healthy? Even your friend Mr. Hrnic is a patriot? You do see that now, don’t you Mr. Petric?”
“ Yes.”
“Good. Off with you, then.”
The gun barrel raised him upward like a hook, and Vlado clenched his eyes shut, seeing an apartment in Germany with his wife and daughter, with their circle of friends, other Bosnian refugees mostly, some who they knew, some they didn’t. He began to see how, even here, the influence of a few unsavory people could extend not only across a line of battle but a border. These were not people he cared to know any better. Not for the moment, anyway.
CHAPTER 7
It was at least three blocks before he was fully aware of his surroundings. Hrnic had gone, presumably back to the market, off without a further word to tend his business. Vlado was practically stumbling on the cobbles, making his way down the hill, somehow headed in the right direction toward the bridge that would take him toward the Jewish Community Center.
What he needed most right now was a drink, a jolt of something to stop the wild gyrations of his imagination. He’d heard stories about being shaken down like that, of course. Heard the ways they found out information and used it against you. The techniques had always sounded cheap and easy, like card tricks, easy to master, no more difficult than the way the gypsies told your fortune after peeking into your wallet. But it had worked its unsettling magic on him nonetheless. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself that the threats were empty, that the show of force had been illusory, he couldn’t escape the sensation that the stakes of the investigation had suddenly been raised. The trouble was, he had no idea who had raised them, or who would decide if he had run afoul of these new, uncertain rules, by crossing some unseen boundary in the dark.
Whatever the case, the encounter hadn’t lasted nearly as long as Vlado had assumed. He found that he still had a few minutes to spare in making his appointment for the monthly call to Jasmina, although right now that seemed a mixed blessing. As much as he always looked forward to speaking to her, their conversations were invariably full of difficult moments, either from the pain of separation or the distance which seemed greater with every call. And now, when he most needed someone to confide in, to tell of his fears and his dread, he would instead have to keep every hint of fear out of his voice. Everyone who made these calls knew that the line was anything but secure. For all Vlado knew, his tormenters had gotten every bit of their information from his earlier calls. Ham radio calls from any part of town were likely intercepted by the army on both sides, listened to by soldiers in headsets.
Vlado made the calls from the Jewish Community Center, at the old synagogue a few blocks away from police headquarters on the far side of the river. It had become a nerve center of sorts during the siege. Not only was it one of the strongest remaining links to the outside world, it was the only one not directly controlled by the government.
The center’s long-distance telephone service was a work of ingenuity. All lines leading out of the city had long since been cut, so a ham radio operator made the connection to the phone network in Zagreb, the capital city of neighboring Croatia, which then patched through calls to anywhere except Serbia or other parts of Bosnia. Serbia was taboo because it was still Croatia’s enemy. Bosnia was off limits simply because too many phone lines had been cut. You could call clear around the globe, but you couldn’t phone a few miles up the road to a town like Kiseljak or Pale.
Even if there was eavesdropping by the army, the people working in the radio room also couldn’t help but hear your call as they kept the connection open. Nor did you have much privacy from the others standing with you in line.
Unless the shelling was heavy, there was always a large daytime crowd at the center. On the first floor you could get a hot lunch of the standard beans, macaroni, rice, and bread. If you were bored you could find a card game, or chess, and there was a welcoming wave of heat from woodstoves and the rub and shuffle of people crowded around small tables.
The center also ran a mail service, sending and receiving by the truckload via the aid convoys that arrived at erratic intervals from the port city of Split on the Adriatic, a ten-hour journey across rough mountain roads that had been carved out of goat paths by British engineers for the U.N. The convoys were often delayed for weeks at a time, either by fighting or by paperwork at the Serb checkpoints at the entrances to the city.
The center also arranged some of the few evacuation convoys that still got out of the city every few months, always crammed full with women, children, and old folks. For men of fighting age, or those who held some technical skill deemed indispensable by the government, the only way out was up over the hills on your own, which required passage through two lines of opposing armies.
Vlado’s wife, Jasmina, and his daughter, Sonja, had left in one of the first of these convoys. They had survived shell and shot on the grinding ride out, eventually making their way from Croatia to Germany, well before the Germans decided they’d had enough and clamped down on their refugee and asylum laws.
As the man at the slaughterhouse had known all too well, Jasmina was now working for an architect, although not legally, earning wages and benefits far below the German standard. She and Sonja lived in a crumbling highrise. An old police friend of Vlado’s had arranged both the apartment and the job. He was an East German cop who’d survived the background checks after reunification to keep his job, though he was still stuck with his clunky Soviet-made Lada patrol car while his western colleagues worked in VW vans.
Vlado had met him on a trip to Berlin less than a year before the war, during a special training course. Imamovic had bent the rules and the budget to make sure Vlado got to attend, because it was a seminar on handling evidence and searching crime scenes, lessons he’d botched completely the other night as he stumbled around Vitas’s body in the dark.