Vlado made up his mind that he would not proceed that way, not without being ordered to do so, even if it meant plodding through weeks of dead ends. Besides the possible danger of this approach, the only problem was that he had precious few leads.
But he did have one. Dead end or not, it might take the better part of a day to check out, if only because of its location.
He pulled from his satchel the crumpled name and address that had been in Vitas’s pocket the night of the murder. Then he lit a lazy two-inch flame from the nozzle of the hose leading across his kitchen wall. He strolled to a bookshelf and drew down a battered map of the city, unfolding it on the kitchen table in the flickering light.
“Milan Glavas” was the name on the strip of paper, and the address was indeed in Dobrinja, meaning Vlado would need a car. He traced his finger along the route, crossing the map’s creases and small tears. As always with maps, this one took him into the past, into parks and playgrounds with his daughter, into meandering walks of his youth on narrow wooded paths leading up into the hills. He ran his finger down familiar lanes and alleys, crossing snowbanks and green meadows from older, better days, passing the smells of a favorite bakery, the welcoming call of an old friend, now dead.
The world had been so large then, even if the city had been smaller. You could stroll up a mountain to catch a breeze from the northeast knowing that its smell and the way it felt in your lungs would tell you a little bit about every boundary and shoreline it had crossed to reach you-down from the Alps and across Italy, then over the Adriatic and into the dry hills of Dalmatia before finally climbing the green passes and mountains of Bosnia, to this city in the valley.
Nowadays the air only seemed stale and confined, which Vlado knew made no sense. And for the first time in nearly two years he felt the urge to climb upon the roof of his apartment building, to breathe deeply of the mountain air and again heed the call of distant lands. He would inspect his city as it reposed before him in the night, its scars hidden by the darkness. The Serbs should not be the only ones to enjoy the view.
He climbed the ladder slowly, listening for the whistle of a shell that could drive him back down, but the night was quiet. Stepping onto the roof into a scatter of broken glass, he found to his pleasure that the mist had cleared, and somewhere from behind the clouds the moon cast a pale light through the canopy. A staccato message of gunfire called to him from the west, but it was distant, harmless.
He strained his eyes toward the hills to the south, across the far bank of the river, wondering if anyone might be stirring along the battlefronts. Then he turned west, gazing toward the black hump of Zuc, gathered like a sleeping bear. To the north he scanned more ridges, then to the east. And at every vantage point, he knew, were men and weapons that could kill him in an instant if they knew he were out here, looking their way. He wondered what those men must see by day when they looked in this direction, the omnipotence they must feel as they aimed their barrels at buildings and people, seeing unmistakably who stood to die, or what buildings stood to fall, then watching the explosions as their shots soared to their destination.
The image brought to mind some verses from his youth, a poem from one of his advanced English classes. Who had written it? Stevenson, he remembered. Yes, Robert Louis Stevenson, the name that had sounded so funny and foreign to his ears at the time. The poem was “The Land of Counterpane,” and in having to memorize it some of the verses had stuck with him, had become his favorites because of the way they reminded him of his own boyhood-a child at home in bed with his toys arrayed about him like a tiny empire, of which he was lord and master.
He remembered a line from the middle, something about sending his “ships in fleets all up and down among the sheets.”
But it was the last verse that captured his fancy most, and which now came to him as he thought of the artillery men in their mountain bunkers, staring down toward his home:
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
He looked toward the hills again, and, as at other times, he sensed a subterranean machinery at work, a heave and rumble of forces barely contained by the seams of the horizon. Perhaps if you put your ear to the ground, he fancied, you would even hear it, a throb like a pulse, giving life and order to every terrible action up above.
He yearned to glimpse that machinery, to slip unnoticed between the sliding teeth of its gears and find the men at the controls; to take them unawares and to know. Simply to know.
For all its flaws, Vlado decided, this case was his own best chance to do so, but first he had to believe that entry was possible. He decided it would be, if only because from what little he’d already glimpsed, perhaps the people at the controls weren’t always so vigilant. Two years of wartime had left them as dulled and careless as everyone else.
With a final glance toward the far side of the river, Vlado climbed back down the ladder. Then he gently refolded the map, sliced a bit of the cured meat from the butcher’s generous offering, and poured a glass of water from a plastic jug. That was dinner, and tonight it seemed like plenty, a feast of the privileged.
Before climbing into bed under a down blanket and three layers of wool, he reached for the stiff plumbing knob that controlled the gas jet. He thought for a moment of painting his soldiers. They sat on the workbench in the corner, untouched for days, going slack and undisciplined on him. He smiled at that thought, then shut off the gas, too weary for anything but sleep. The flame guttered briefly at the tip of the nozzle before disappearing without a sound, back up into the hose toward its source deep in the ground.
Through the wall he could hear his neighbor’s radio, playing for the first time in weeks. They must have somehow gotten new batteries. And he drifted toward sleep to the faint, tinny strains of an old folk tune from the Dalmatian coast, a guitar twanging against the static, while a silky layer of cold worked its way up under the blankets.
He fell into a restless dream, where the bright faces of women from the day’s streets and walkways came toward him in an anxious and beckoning parade. They smiled, but their makeup was heavy, the colors slightly off. They were too pale and garish, as if they had all been daubed and prettified by the cool, brisk hands of a mortician. But he strolled toward them, nonetheless.
CHAPTER 9
Peparing to go to Dobrinja was a bit like outfitting for a wilderness expedition. Vlado had to arrange for cash, hire a car, find gasoline, plan his route in advance, and drive with a reckless precision that would evade shellholes and torn metal without slowing down enough to invite gunfire. It was not a place for stopping to look at maps, because if Sarajevo had become a sort of hell on earth, Dobrinja was its innermost circle of despair and isolation.
Dobrinja’s highrise neighborhoods crouched on a lonely peninsula to the southwest, pinched uncomfortably on three sides by Serb guns and trenches, connected tenuously to the rest of the city by a narrow lane running between abandoned buildings and walls of stacked cars and buses. The route led through checkpoints and security officers, and the reward at the end of the line was a small, hushed community of tom buildings, sandbagged and dug in against the daily tidal surges of artillery.
The safest way to go was by hitching a ride in a U.N. armored car, but that meant going through official channels. There would be forms and waivers to sign, wasting at least a day and drawing unwanted attention as part of the bargain.