Dobrinja, too, was undoubtedly the turf of some smalltime warlord or smuggler, but it was too isolated to feel connected, and that made him secure, or perhaps it was only a sense of release he felt, of escape. The narrow peninsula, with its tight lines of fire, awaited him like a temporary refuge. Anyone choosing to follow would be painfully easy to spot, and as he glanced in the mirror he saw that the road behind him was empty.
As the Golf roared along there was a heavy boom. Vlado flinched, ducking low behind the wheel, but the sound was far off. The clouds had begun to lift.
On either side now were the towers of the Olympic Village, mostly deserted at this end. Whole chunks of brick were missing. Some window openings were black from fires. At others curtains flapped. He felt like an archeologist arriving at the site of a lost temple in the rain forest, some place where a whole civilization had packed up and left, centuries earlier.
He steered the Golf downhill, veering between curved walls of stacked cars and buses, then he eased onto the main boulevard of Dobrinja amid a warren of apartment buildings and muddy courtyards. Several hundred yards to the left loomed the grassy face of Momillo Hill, its greenness almost luminous in the pale light, lonely and talismanic, like some great ceremonial mound built to plot the whirling of the heavens.
In the most precarious days of the war the hill had been spiked with barrels and turrets, a garden of Serb weaponry that sprouted in the first spring of wartime and seemed as if it would never stop growing. But somehow the locals with their small arms stubbornly drove the Serbs off, gun by gun, and now it was empty, although still a threatening presence. A closer look revealed the faint lines of treadmarks, crisscrossing like the stitchmarks of old wounds.
Every apartment building here was sandbagged at ground level. When the supply of sandbags had run low, people had made their own from old clothes, blankets, curtains, anything that would hold a few shovelfuls of mud. Slowing to double-check his map, Vlado noticed two boys trotting alongside the car, keeping pace. He suddenly realized they were using him for cover to make their way down the street, sheltering behind him as if he were an armored car. He instinctively pressed the accelerator, worrying that his slower speed might draw fire. Then with a pang of guilt he looked in the rear view mirror to see the boys running faster now; not scowling or shaking a fist, just running faster.
Milan Glavas’s building was like all the others-tall, scarred and gray, with trenches cutting diagonally across the grounds between buildings to serve as sidewalks. Up against one end of the building was a small, muddy graveyard with rough wooden markers. In Dobrinja you buried the dead where you could.
Rifle shots popped from nearby Moments earlier a grenade had screamed through the air a few blocks away. Yet the clouds were still reasonably low, and a few children played in a nearby field, kicking a soccer ball through the remains of the slush.
Most of the names on the mailboxes were worn off, and Vlado searched in vain for “Glavas” until a young woman coming down the stairs asked who he was looking for.
“Do you know a Mr. Glavas?”
“Yes. Fourth floor, right rear door.”
Vlado started up.
“Is he expecting you?” she shouted after him.
He looked back, seeing her prim upturned faced, her heart-shaped lips with their neat layers of bright lipstick.
“I wouldn’t think so. I haven’t been able to phone him and I’ve just come from downtown.”
She seemed impressed, even wistful, merely to think of having been in downtown only moments ago.
“Then knock hard,” she said, “and be prepared to wait.”
“Is he hard of hearing or just slow on his feet?”
“Both, but only when he wants to be. Mostly he’s just old and grouchy and a bit of a bastard sometimes. Or at least he likes us to think he is.”
“Is he likely to be in?”
“He almost always is. Stand outside his door long enough and you’ll hear him coughing. It’s how we know he’s still alive, in there hacking away like a dog who never stops barking. Winter or summer, he never stops. If you live next door it can be like water torture. Sometimes you pray for the shelling to drown him out.”
Vlado smiled. “I’ll offer him some cigarettes. Maybe that will help it.”
“Yes, you do that.” She smiled back. “And good luck with him.”
Vlado reached the fourth floor and rapped loudly, then stood back looking at the heavy green door. He listened to the sounds moving up and down the stairwell, children racing down a hallway, a shout from somewhere below. There was a smell of old cooking and dampness. Somewhere in the distance a gun began to chatter.
Vlado knocked again. Still no answer but the echo of the door.
Then from within the apartment, as the woman had predicted, he heard a deep rattling cough. It accelerated into a fast series of hacks, dry and croupy, with a sound like sheet metal being torn apart in short wrenching snatches. My God.
He knocked a third time, waited a minute. Then a fourth. Nearly ten minutes passed before Vlado finally heard an approaching shuffle, the slide of slippers across linoleum, then a rattling safety chain, a sound one didn’t often hear in the city. One bolt slid back with a crack. Then another, followed by a deep wheezing cough and a wet snuffle. Finally, the click of the knob and a metallic groan as the door swung free.
He was greeted by a shocking face, not for its ravages of age or illness-although those signs were present as well in great wrinkles and splotches-but for its immediate suggestion of a neat, fastidious presence suddenly gone to seed. First there was the man’s hair, a thick explosion of whiteness radiating from a face of gray stubble where the signs of aborted shavings could be found in numerous nicks and scratches.
Yet there was still something of the refined old gentleman about him, the way the lines of a magnificent old garden still show through even after weeds have taken over. There was once an elegance at work here, Vlado guessed, once a man who might have kept his nails filed and trimmed, who might have tucked a handkerchief neatly in a breast pocket, and worn pleated trousers perfectly creased. Yet what the man wore now was a navy wool bathrobe over thick wool pants, with a green blanket thrown across it all like a tarpaulin.
There was an essence of old sweat in the air, yet also a light scent of soap and body powder, as if he had just emerged from a steaming bath.
Glavas stood carefully inspecting Vlado a few moments before finally announcing in a deep old croak, slow-roasted by decades of cigarettes, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
His open mouth exposed a number of yellow, blunted teeth, bent inward like those of an old skull.
“And for that matter, who in the hell are you, coming all the way out here from town to bother me.”
“Vlado Petric. Police investigator. You are Mr. Glavas?”
“Milan Glavas, yes,” he said, and a brief glint of interest flashed in his eyes. He tilted his head slightly upward, as if to take a better look, but said nothing further.
“How did you know I’d come from the city?” Vlado asked.
“Because you don’t smell of cabbage,” Glavas said. “Or of filthy children and their diapers and runny noses. And you aren’t coughing like a tubercular case, or look as if you’ve spent the last twenty months running through the mud or cowering in a corner away from your windows. Should I continue? Then, please, as long as you’ve come all this way at such great risk, step inside.”
They moved to a back room, probably once a guest bedroom but now the living room, judging by the furniture, doubtless chosen for its location away from the busiest lines of fire. A small handmade woodstove sat in one corner, a model fashioned roughly from heavy sheet metal. It looked as if it would crumple if you sat on it, and hardly seemed fit for a strong fire. It was cold, barely blackened.