Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

The taxi arrived at exactly the wrong time. Ten seconds earlier and I wouldn’t have seen the child at all. Ten seconds later and it would have been too late to help him. I would have moved on, uninvolved, and I cannot even imagine how different the rest of my life might have been.
   When I encountered the little boy it was two in the morning and I was somewhere in the back streets of Sarajevo, completely lost, muttering incoherent fury at my absent girlfriend. My soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. I was just drunk enough to admit that to myself for the first time. We were finished, Talena and I, our two-year relationship had frayed beyond repair. This vacation, our last desperate throw of the dice, had come up snake eyes. She would dump me as soon as we got back to California, and I couldn’t blame her. I would have dumped me a long time ago.
   We had been at a party, a reunion hosted by friends Talena had not seen in eight years, held in a lushly decorated apartment, elegant furniture and tasteful paintings and acid jazz on the turntables, American cigarettes and French wine, lean and beautiful people, everyone but Talena and I decked out in designer clothes. Only the groaning plumbing and low cracked ceiling hinted that we were in a dazed and shambling nation still trying to recover from the most vicious civil war in all the bloody history of Europe. Talena’s friends were very good at keeping up the façade of urbane cosmopolitan high life. For some of them I think it was all they had.
   Everyone but me was Bosnian, though many spoke good English, and I knew no one but Talena, who was absorbed with her long-distant friends. I felt excluded. I drank too much slivovitz, Bosnia’s lethal plum brandy. I told Talena I was leaving. She accused me of avoiding her friends. It had escalated into a bitter fight, as our disagreements so often did these days, and I had turned and stormed into the night, fuelled by slivovitz and wounded rage.
   Losing myself on the steep slopes of southern Sarajevo shouldn’t have been possible. All I needed to do was to go downhill until I reached the Miljacka River and then follow it upstream. But in my drunken emotional haze I found myself climbing as often as I descended, somehow the winding streets never went in quite the right direction, and every time I caught a glimpse of the few dim lights of downtown they seemed no nearer than before. I was beginning to wonder if I should try to turn back when I turned yet another a corner, saw the family in the pickup, and stopped dead with surprise.
   The street was typical suburban Sarajevo. A pair of street lamps shed barely enough light to navigate by, but bright light from an open doorway illuminated the street. A pitted and crumbling road, no sidewalk, barely wide enough for two cars, its edges slowly eaten away by a thousand ravenous generations of grass. Little houses of five or six rooms were arrayed on either side, their walls, like the street itself, still pockmarked with bullet scars from the eight-years-ended war. The plots of land between houses contained lawns and vegetable gardens, but no trees; the war had swallowed almost all the trees within a mile of Sarajevo, cut down and burnt for warmth. There was a pervasive air of neglect and decay – peeling paint, a plank fallen from a wooden fence, a cracked window, gardens that were mostly weed, little clumps of debris – that the few new or brightly painted houses could not dispel.
   A beat-up white Mitsubishi pickup was parked in front of the lit doorway. In the bed of the pickup a dark-skinned family sat atop a ragged collection of bags and bundles. They were so out of place they startled me out of my self-righteous reverie and nearly into sobriety. Other than a few NATO troops they were the only nonwhite people I had seen in Bosnia. Two adults, and four children ranging in age from high single digits to mid-teens. I guessed they were South Asian, probably Tamil, judging by their features and the darkness of their skin.
   Three young white men emerged from the house, all sporting the Menacing Gangsta look, black clothes, shaved heads, tattoos, alpha-male attitude. They approached the pickup, obviously intending to get in and drive away, and the dark-skinned parents, alarmed, started objecting loudly in a strange and sonorous language. The white men hesitated and looked at one another. The driver replied in annoyed Serbo-Croatian. After a brief, confused pause, both groups started speaking at once. It quickly became apparent that neither side understood a word the other was saying.
   I didn’t know either language, but I understood that the white men insisted on driving off, while the Tamils passionately wanted to stay. The dispute was serious, and exacerbated by the mutual miscommunication, and as I watched the volume and emotion escalated rapidly until both sides were shouting. Everyone was much too engrossed in their argument to notice me.
   It took only a minute for matters to come to a boil. One of the white men withdrew keys from his pocket and started towards the driver’s seat. The adult Tamils leapt to their feet, howling with anger and dismay, obviously about to step down from the pickup and take their children with them.
   Then another white man, short and thickly muscled, drew a gun, a big all-metal handgun that gleamed dully in the light, and the cacophony of angry voices went quiet like somebody had pulled a plug.
   The third white man, skinny and tall, followed his companion’s lead and drew another, smaller, gun. I thought from his body language that he was only reluctantly following along. The hulking eager gunslinger aimed his weapon at the Tamil father and barked an order, pointing to the bed of the pickup with his free hand. The father looked at his wife and children. A moment passed where I wasn’t sure which way things would go. Then, slowly, unwillingly, the father sank back down to a seated position, and his wife did the same.
   The two armed men got into the back of the pickup as well, their guns still out, and motioned and shouted at the Tamils until the family was lined up against the front of the pickup, their backs to the cab, while the two white men sat in the back corners. The engine wheezed and groaned and started. The father started shaking uncontrollably. The mother began to speak breathlessly to the white men, pleading with them desperately, waving her hands weakly, tears leaking out of her eyes, her voice so drained of strength that I could not hear it. Their children stared dully at me. I think the eldest, a teenage girl, may have registered my presence.
   The woman’s pleas met with no response. The light in the house went out. After a moment the door shut, and a fourth figure left the house and entered the passenger side of the cab. In the newly dim light I couldn’t tell if this new arrival was a man or a woman, black or white. The side door closed and the pickup started forward. I could hear the father weeping over the engine’s growl as they moved away.
   Now that the house light was out I saw that the street went straight downhill, towards the Miljacka. I shook my head and slowly started to walk, beginning to actually think about what I had seen. Until then I had reacted like it was entertainment, unscheduled street theatre. I had felt no fear when the guns came out. I suppose too much slivovitz had something to do with that, but even sober I think I would have stayed calm. I was so much and so obviously not a part of whatever happened on and around that Mitsubishi pickup that I couldn’t imagine actually being threatened. The setting and the people involved were too foreign, too apart from my life, to impinge on my existence in any way.
   I developed a vague idea of what had happened. I knew that Bosnia, still a basically wild and lawless country beneath the rigid order imposed by NATO’s peacekeepers, was a nexus for people smuggling. That had to be why that family was here, there was no other conceivable reason. They were trying to get themselves into Europe, make a better life for themselves than what they had had in Sri Lanka or wherever. This house was a transfer station on the way. And for some reason the Tamil family really, really hadn’t wanted to leave it yet. As I walked I vaguely wished them the best, hoped they weren’t being taken someplace unspeakably awful, and idly wondered why they had so desperately wanted to stay. I was already categorizing the incident as a minor anecdote, something to recount to Talena tomorrow, nothing that had anything to do with me, when I saw the little boy.
   He was maybe five years old, wearing ragged blue shorts and little sneakers with holes in them and, oddly, a torn and too-big Tupac Shakur T-shirt. His hair was dirty and unruly, his skin so dark he looked almost African or Aboriginal. He looked around, up and down the street, and then at me, very confused, his mouth open.
   I put it all together. The family’s other child. He had wandered off or gotten lost or decided to play hide-and-seek just as the Bosnian refugee-smuggling gangsters had come to take them somewhere else. And now the family, unable to make their loss understood, had been dragged off at gunpoint, to who knows where, without their youngest son.
   The lights and sound of the pickup dwindled in the distance.
   The little boy and I stared at each other.
   My instinctive, overpowering, primal reaction was this:
don’t get involved.
   It wasn’t like this was the first time I had witnessed something awful, or potentially awful. I had spent a good portion of my twenties travelling to and through various exotic Third World destinations. I had seen countless hordes of men, women, and children whose lives were measured in suffering. AIDS babies in Zimbabwe, mutilated beggar children in China, whole villages with malnutrition-distended bellies in Mali. I had seen scores of skin-and-bones familes, their bodies pockmarked with scars and boils, somehow surviving on the streets of Calcutta, staring at wealthy passersby with eyes too dulled by pain and hunger to even be greedy any more, and I had walked casually past without sparing them a rupee or even a thought. This planet is full of terrible things, and if you want to travel and see its wonders, you have to inure yourself to its anguish.
   I rationalized that the world’s awful suffering was not my responsibility and as long as I didn’t actually do anything to increase it I was on solid moral ground. I told myself that I did a little good each time I travelled, bringing in much-needed hard currency, spending money on hostels and taxis and street vendors who in turn spent it on their families and neighbours, my own personal trickle-down effect. That was good enough for me. I was a traveller, not a missionary, and I wasn’t willing to turn into Mother Teresa. I gave a little money each year to Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, and that gave me a licence, I thought, some kind of licence to watch terrible things without ever getting involved.
   Easy enough to tell yourself. Hard to tell a little boy staring at you quietly with big betrayed eyes as his family disappears into the darkness behind him.
   Whatever happened, I reminded myself, it wouldn’t be my fault. The boy was not my responsibility. I couldn’t take him under my wing. The hassle and confusion would become incredibly oppressive, and most of all I would violate the Prime Directive: don’t get involved.
   I half-expected him to start crying but he somehow maintained a kind of solemn dignity. For a moment I wondered what his name was. Then I got hold of myself, looked away from him, and began to invent a reason to walk away from this abandoned child. Surely his family would eventually talk someone into bringing them back to find him. If I took him with me I might actually destroy their only chance of reunion. So the best thing to do was to leave the boy here. QED. A solution so plausible that if I tried very hard I would eventually be able to convince myself of its truth. Though maybe not tomorrow. And maybe I wouldn’t tell Talena about this. It might be hard to explain to somebody else, anybody else, even her.
   The boy’s face started to grow brighter, and I turned around to see the lights of a car behind us. Two headlights beneath a trapezoidal call light. A taxi. Almost as out of place as a Tamil family in this distant neighbourhood. I still don’t know what it was doing roving Sarajevo’s late-night backstreets instead of looking for passengers downtown.
   I looked back down the street. The lights of the pickup were still visible.
   If I had stopped to think about it, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. But there was no time to think. I waved violently and the taxi stopped and I grabbed the little boy around his waist, he was heavier and much warmer than I expected him to be, and then we were in the taxi and I pointed desperately at the vanishing taillights of the pickup and ordered, “Follow them! Follow that car, now!”

The driver may not have understood me, but he didn’t need to, my desperation was infectious. Tires squealed as he launched us down the street and after the pickup. The boy squirmed in my arms and I let him go sit in the corner of the back seat, arms around his knees, staring at me. He was so soundless I began to wonder if he might be mute.
   The pickup crossed a bridge over the Miljacka to Zmaja od Bosne, a street once bitterly nicknamed Sniper’s Alley, and turned right. We followed it through the ancient, elegant, and often devastated buildings of downtown Sarajevo. To our left, mortar-scarred mosques and cathedrals, a synagogue abandoned since the Nazis slaughtered most of the city’s Jews, and the boarded-up burnt-out hulk of the National Library, across from which Gavrilo Princip had fired the shot that killed Archduke Ferdinand and began the First World War. On our right, across the river, a concrete stadium built to host the 1984 Winter Olympics, upon which the five Olympic rings had once been inscribed. It took some imagination now to reconstruct those rings from the keloid pattern left by bullets and shellfire. For a moment I tried to imagine how much worse the city had looked in 1995, given that it was still so battle-scarred eight years later.
   The boy said something in a soft musical language. So much for the mute theory. I realized that the taxi driver had not started his meter. Pretty typical in Bosnia or any non-First-World country. Normally I made sure to negotiate the fare before I got in, and since I had neglected to do so, the driver would now try to charge me an outrageous price when we finally got wherever we were going.
   The pickup climbed up the hills east of Sarajevo. The lights of the city began to diminish behind us as we picked up speed on the wide, smooth, NATO-rebuilt road. I began to wonder how far they were going. For all I knew they could be en route to the Croatian border. The taxi driver wasn’t likely to take me that far. Even if he did, I couldn’t afford it. I wondered if I could convince the driver to cut them off and force them to stop. My guess was no. I would have to wait for the Mitsubishi to come to a stop.
   The boy, still huddled in his quasi-fetal position, began to loudly and insistently repeat some incomprehensible phrase, his voice quavering.
   I looked at him and shook my head. “Sorry, kid. It’s all Greek to me.”
   He didn’t seem to find the sound of my voice comforting and kept chanting his mantra. Around us the street lights grew further apart and the road wound its way past overgrown bushes and weeds. We were now the only two vehicles on the road, and I hoped that maybe the pickup would stop to see who was following them, but they didn’t.
   The taxi driver turned to me and said something I didn’t understand, and just then the boy finally began to cry, to bawl really, the floodgates opened and he sobbed and shrieked with a voice incredibly loud for someone so small.
   “Where we go?” the taxi driver shouted over the howling child.
   I looked at him. Then I took a mental step back and looked at myself. Ten minutes ago I had been walking back to our hostel. Now I was in a taxi I couldn’t afford, accompanied by a shrieking five-year-old boy I had just met, following armed criminals and a family of refugees to God only knows where.
   “Beats the hell outta me,” I assured the driver.
   “I no – sorry,” the driver said carefully, “I don’t understand. Where do you want to go today?”
  
Great
, I thought.
Here I am adopting children and chasing gangsters and my driver is quoting Microsoft ads
. I was saved from having to answer by the Mitsubishi’s squealing brakes. The pickup made a sudden left turn onto a gravel road it almost overshot, changing course so suddenly that my taxi flew right past before I could tell the driver to stop.
   “There!” I said excitedly. “There! Turn around!” I mimed a U-turn.
   The driver looked dubious. I saw his point. The winding road had narrowed to typical Bosnian size, much too skinny for a U-turn, with a ditch on one side and a steep hill on the other. If a car piloted by your typical Bosnian driver came from either direction while we were in the middle of the eleven-point turn probably required to reverse our course, we would all become footnotes in tomorrow’s Sarajevo obituaries.
   “Wait,” the driver decided.
   We drove for another minute until he found another offshoot road and used that to turn around. The boy’s howling tantrum had begun to dissipate and by the time we turned onto the gravel road it had diminished to coughing and soft, pitiful sobs. I ignored him. Under other circumstances I might have tried being fatherly and sympathetic, but I had begun to unfairly blame the kid for getting me into this mess in the first place.
   The gravel road went downhill, through shoulder-high bushes and across disturbingly jittery bridges that spanned little streams, presumably tributaries of the Miljacka. Out here there were no street lights and the darkness on either side of the taxi was so thick it seemed solid. The driver glanced back at me nervously. I didn’t feel too confident either. The situation seemed to be deteriorating with every passing minute.
   I looked at the child and wondered what would have happened to him if I hadn’t grabbed him and hailed the taxi. Maybe nothing. Maybe the family would find a translator at the pickup’s destination, and after a quick explanation the Mitsubishi would have returned and retrieved the boy. Possible. But it didn’t seem likely.
   Maybe a neighbour would have discovered him in a yard and adopted him. Bosnians, like all the denizens of the Balkans, were famous for their hospitality. Maybe he would have grown up here, learned the language, only vaguely remembered his early childhood, and one day ten years from now one of his elder sisters, by now a doctor in London, would have tracked him down for a tearful and joyous reunion.
   Or maybe he would have been abandoned, ignored, turned over to the rough shelters and violent tutors one finds on the streets of Sarajevo. That seemed a lot more likely. Bosnians were also famous for their racism.
   I could have taken him back to our hostel and tomorrow turned him over to the police. I still could. What would happen next was hard to imagine, the Bosnian government was as minimal as possible and I doubted they had procedures in place for alien children who showed up out of nowhere. But surely some well-meaning NGO would take him in and try to find his family, or put him in an orphanage here, wouldn’t they? Though I couldn’t imagine who. Maybe the government would deport him back to Sri Lanka, a callous move but the world is a callous place, and few countries more so than Bosnia. It was easy to imagine the boy returned to his homeland, spending his youth in some Dickensian orphanage, a place worse than jail.
   The taxi’s headlights uncovered a bumpy dirt-and-rocks trail that veered away from the gravel to the right. The driver slowed us to a crawl and inquired, “Go here?”
   “Excellent question,” I said. “Brief, to the point, well put. I have no fucking idea.”
   The driver stopped the taxi. “I don’t understand.”
   “Me neither.” I looked at the dirt road. Were those fresh tire tracks? They might be. I was an out-of-work computer programmer, not Aragorn the Ranger, but those tracks did look distinctly darker than the soil around them. I looked down the dirt track and in the distance I saw a tiny flicker of light.
   “Yes,” I said. “Turn here.”
   The driver advanced into the dirt road, then stopped so abruptly that the child next to me, who had thankfully fallen silent again, slid forward and nearly off the seat. There was a gate in front of us, part of a rusting metal chain-link fence that intersected the dirt trail about twenty feet up from the gravel road. The gate was locked with a thick chain and padlock.
   For a moment I felt defeated. We could go no further. I would have to take the boy back to the city and go to the police. Then the driver said something and pointed at the gate, and I noticed what should have been obvious. The vehicular gate included a pedestrian doorway, like a house door might include a catflap, and that doorway was latched but unlocked.
   “Right,” I said. “Okay. God fucking damn it.” It was either walk or turn back, and I wasn’t ready to turn back. “Okay, stop here, and wait for me. Wait for me until I come back.”
   I tried to think of a reason for the taxi driver to wait. My mind replayed a helpful scene from Eyes Wide Shut, and I withdrew my Eagle Creek travel wallet from beneath my slacks, dug out a pink 50-euro note, tore it in two and handed half to the driver. Just then I remembered all the warnings that U.S. dollars in Bosnia had to be in pristine condition for anyone, including banks, to accept them. Fortunately this stricture didn’t seem to apply to euros. My driver looked at it, nodded slowly, and said “I wait.”
   “Good,” I said. I probably wasn’t even overpaying him that much. Sarajevo was an expensive place to travel and 50 euros or 100 km – “konvertible marks”, the local currency – seemed almost right for a cab ride to and from the outermost boonies.
   I reached out and gently took the boy by the arm. He looked at me, his face soaked with tears, shuddered, and began to cry again, quietly this time.
   “Dogs and small children are supposed to naturally trust me,” I muttered. “I guess you didn’t get the memo.”
   I picked up the boy, who sobbed but didn’t resist, exited the taxi, passed through the gate, and began to trek down the dirt road towards that faint spark of light. As always while travelling, I had my keychain with me, a small Swiss Army knife connected to a mini-Maglite flashlight, and once again it came in handy. After some awkward juggling I wound up with the shaking, weeping boy in the crook of my right arm and the flashlight in my left hand.
   I thought uneasily of all the land-mine signs and warnings in every guidebook. There were still a million live land mines in this country, and we were close enough to Sarajevo that the field surrounding this dirt track probably contained its share. As long as we stayed on the road we should be all right, but if the boy decided to wriggle away and run off…I tightened my hold on him and picked up my pace, trying to walk without thinking about where I was, or what I was doing, or why. No good would come of that.
   We walked maybe half a mile. There were no sounds but the child’s soft sobs and my Doc Martens against the dirt ruts and tire tracks. The weeds on either side of the road had not been touched for years. The spark of light grew and resolved into a single bare fluorescent bar, the only illumination outside a big concrete-and-metal building, some three hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, surrounded by a flat gravel field. Once upon a time it had been some kind of factory, but it looked long-deserted, almost all the doors and windows were boarded up. The light glowed above a set of concrete stairs that led up a few feet to a loading dock. The door next to the light was an eight-foot-square sheet of horizontally corrugated metal that slid up and down. There were two vehicles parked near the light. A gleaming new Land Rover, the vehicle of choice for Bosnia’s warlords, criminals, thugs, and venal officials, and a familiar empty white Mitsubishi pickup.
   I stood before the steel door for a long moment. The boy had given up on crying and buried his face in my shoulder instead. I could feel his quick panting breaths and his warm damp face and his jackhammer heartbeat. He felt very heavy now but I didn’t want to put him down. It wasn’t just fear of him running away. Some kind of paternal instinct had arisen during our walk down that dark dirt road. I felt jealously protective of him and afraid for us both. I didn’t know exactly what lay behind that steel door, but I was pretty confident that the answer included violent armed criminals. Maybe my refugee-smuggling theory was wrong. Maybe for some reason the family had been brought here to be executed and the child was lucky to have been left behind.
   I considered my options. The smart thing to do was obvious. Turn around, go back, take the taxi back to the city, confer with Talena, and turn the kid over to the police in the morning. Hell, the Bosnian police were so corrupt they probably knew these smugglers by their first name, they could deliver the boy to them during their first donut break.
   But I wanted to return this child to his family. I knew that his family was just behind that door. I did not really think they had been brought here to their deaths. And, yes, it was kind of insane that I was standing here at all, but now that I had come this far it was too late to chicken out and turn around.
   That last was really the deciding factor. A stupid motivation, granted, but enough. I banged on the door with my left fist, using my Swiss Army knife to generate a pleasingly loud metal-on-metal sound. The boy started to cry again.
   Loud but muffled voices behind the door expressed surprise in the guttural warlike sounds of Serbo-Croatian. I heard the tromp of heavy boots, followed by a few questions aimed in my direction. I banged on the door again. There was a moment of silence. Then the grating rattle of metal on metal as the door rose up, revealing three men and one woman, all of them carrying guns, all of them aiming at me. I had planned to say “Avon calling” or something equally amusing, but staring down four gun barrels really saps one’s desire to be flip and entertaining. I barely forced an unconvincing smile.
   The woman, a tall slender black-clad redhead who would have been intimidating even unarmed, unleashed a jackhammer sequence of harsh syllables which I was sure translated to something like “Who the fucking fuck are you?”
   “Sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, trying to make my voice as soothing as a hypnotist. “Does anyone here speak English?”
   They stared at me, dumbfounded. The guns stayed aimed at my head and body as if magnetically attracted.  It took a lot of effort to keep the smile on my face. It had been a long time since I had faced a situation anything like this. My slivovitz courage had evaporated in the face of all those guns, and my whole body trembled with adrenaline and fear.
   I looked past the guns, hoping to find a willing interpreter. The door opened onto a large room, a loading bay I supposed, concrete floor beneath a wooden ceiling supported by concrete pillars. The room stank of sweat and urine and cigarettes and sawdust, there was a thin layer of sawdust everywhere. At the back and sides of the room a few dark door-sized openings led deeper into the building, and there was a big open space from which a conveyor belt protruded into the loading bay. The part of my mind not frozen by fear decided this place had once been a furniture factory or sawmill or something like that.