Authors: Dan Fesperman
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Suspense, #Contemporary Fiction, #Thrillers
Lie in the Dark (18 page)
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.
“My genius neighbor built it,” Glavas said, following Vlado’s stare. “Nearly burned down the apartment first time I tried it. But it worked, in its way. No matter, though. Ran out of wood after three days. And that’s after it cost me forty marks. Live and learn.”
Glavas picked up a second wool blanket from the couch and draped it across his back as he sank onto the couch. A half-filled bowl of beans sat on an end table.
“I hope I haven’t interrupted your lunch,” Vlado said.
“If only you had. That is a time when I would always welcome an interruption. That and when I have to take a shit on these stinking toilets. I allow myself one flush a week. I just can’t bring myself to waste water by pouring it down the john after hauling it up six flights of stairs.”
Vlado glanced around the room. There was a stylish green wing chair in silk upholstery, a thick Oriental rug on the floor, finely woven. He glanced upward and saw two nice pen and ink sketches, elegantly framed, and an oil painting that, even to Vlado’s unpracticed eye, looked worth a small fortune.
“Please, Mr. Petric, do tell me, although I’m hardly the impatient sort who needs to get straight to the point, what would bring a police inspector to my door.” He leaned forward slightly, as if harboring his own little surprise.
“I’m investigating a murder. The victim had your name and address in his pocket, and I thought he might have visited you recently, perhaps even sometime in the last several days.”
Glavas slowly leaned back, raising his eyebrows. “Ah. Esmir Vitas, then?”
“Yes. So he was here.”
“Oh yes. Tuesday, I believe it was? Or whatever day it was three days ago. I don’t bother to identify the days as such anymore. They are either good or bad, mostly depending on the visibility, and then they’re dead and gone. But I remember Vitas all right, yes. My only visitor in months, quite literally And until you arrived I thought he might be the last one for several months more. When you knocked I assumed you were just another of the bored children with nothing to do but make themselves a nuisance by knocking on an old man’s door, then run away laughing as soon as the door opens. Or worse, they don’t run away at all. ‘Please,’ I tell them, ‘why don’t you run along and play out in the shelling. Call down some artillery on us. Let us watch out our windows while you run for your lives.’ ”
He broke into a wheezy chuckle, burbling toward the ledge of a deep cough before somehow bringing himself under control.
“So then,” he continued, now smiling. “You have decided, perhaps, that I am a suspect in this murder?” saying it as if the prospect pleased him.
“Mostly what I think is that I’d like to ask you some questions. I want to know why Vitas came here, and what, if anything, he wanted to talk about. Were you friends?”
“No. I’d never met him until that day. A Tuesday, did I say? And a horrible Tuesday it was. Grenades zipping around all morning. Man next door was killed, just stood in the courtyard like he was waiting for it. Some people do that, you know, just give up and go out there asking for it. Boy just above here was out on his balcony. Lost an arm. And in the middle of all that there’s a knock at the door. Three of them actually, and when I finally open up this Vitas fellow is waiting, filling the doorframe in a dark blue overcoat. I knew he wasn’t from around here, too. Clean as a whistle. Not a speck of mud on him.”
“And you hadn’t been expecting him?”
“No more than I was expecting you. Phone’s dead so he couldn’t have called. He’d gotten my name in town and came looking, or so he said. He wanted to talk.”
“About what?”
“A great many things, as it turned out. He was here a few hours. And he got right to the point, as I assume you will.”
“Maybe we could start just by going over your conversation with him, as much of it as you can remember. Even the parts you don’t think are particularly interesting, if you don’t mind. Because the things that seem meaningless to you might be of great value for me.”
“Yes, I thought you’d say as much. It’s exactly what Vitas said,” and with this Glavas burst into a hoarse wheezing laugh that quickly melted into a coughing jag. It took a full minute for the hacking to subside.
“He’d brought a card with him,” Glavas said. “And he wanted to ask me about it. A 3-by-5 index card with my name and signature on it and a small red circle in the upper-right-hand corner. A card from the inventory files of the National Museum. You’re familiar with the place?”
“Yes, right on the river. Saved, just barely.”
“Saved, indeed. By our valiant militia, our thugs in green camouflage. Art lovers, every one, I’m sure. Raging against the philistine Serbs in their enlightened, selfless struggle. But that is another story. So Vitas showed me this card, pulls it out of his coat pocket with a flourish, as if he’d brought me the Hope diamond. Then he looked me straight in the eye, just as you’re doing now, and he said, ‘Can you tell me the significance of this?’
“And I said, ‘Indeed I can, for hours on end, Mr. Vitas, hours on end. Only I’m not sure you’ll care to hear the whole story,’—which is when he told me what you’ve just said. Tell him everything, no matter how insignificant. Let him sort out what was important. Just keep talking until nothing was left to tell. Then he offered me a cigarette from a fresh pack. Marlboros, in fact, which I don’t suppose you’d happen to have?”
“No. Only Drinas. But I do have a fresh pack.”
Glavas curled a hand out from his coat, waiting as Vlado tore open the flimsy paper. He grabbed the first cigarette greedily, an expression of relief unfolding on his face as Vlado leaned forward with his lighter. Glavas sank back on the couch, sucking in the first draught of smoke just in time to smother a rising cough. A wide grin spread across his face. “There,” he said. “Much better. Even with Drinas.”
He inhaled a second time just as deeply while Vlado waited, then exhaled a long, luxurious plume of smoke before resuming, half a beat slower than before.
“So, then, Vitas lit my cigarette, the first of many, so I hope you’ve brought more than one pack. Then he said, ‘Well, why don’t you just tell me what you know about the card, and when you’re finished we’ll go back over some of the things I’m interested in.’ I told him this could literally take hours, because that card had a history going back a half a century, and the fact he was in possession of it told me its history was perhaps still being revised.
“ ‘Oh don’t worry about that, Mr. Glavas,’ he said, in a most gentlemanly way. He was like a fine young nephew who’d dropped by for tea. Quite pleasant in his way. Put me completely off guard. ‘I am a very patient man,’ he said, ‘and by the sound of things neither of us will be going anywhere anytime soon.’ For you see, the shelling was still making quite a ruckus. I was surprised he’d come at all, much less arrived in one piece with such an unflappable air. And you say now he’s been murdered. You’re certain of that.”
“I’m afraid so. Saw the body myself.”
“Ah, a shame.” Glavas shook his head, tapping his cigarette against the arm of the couch, then brushing away some spilled ash with the quick flicking motions of a fastidious man. He leaned back to savor another slow draw on the cigarette.
“Might I ask how it was done?” Glavas asked. “The murder, I mean.”
“Shot through the head. Down by the river at night. Most likely so it would look like he was a sniper victim.”
He seemed to consider this a few moments, then grunted, as having made up his mind to get on with it.
“Well then, so where was I?”
“The index card, the one with the red dot. You said Vitas had one.”
“Yes, it came from what is known as the transfer file, a very important but little-known part of ‘our cultural heritage,’ as the art bureaucrats like to call it. I told Mr. Vitas that I was very surprised to see that he had the card at all, and he merely smiled and said nothing. So I proceeded to tell him all that I knew of that card, and of hundreds of others like it, and I suppose you’d like a repeat performance, even though you have only Drinas, not Marlboros, and most likely you haven’t got any coffee with you, either.”
“Not a grain.” Vlado smiled.
“No. I should think not. And I have no hot water anyway, although I suppose I could have imposed on one of my lovely neighbors by offering a spoonful of Nescafé in exchange. But you have none, so ...”
Then, with great effort, Glavas took as deep a breath as his wheezing lungs would permit, as if steeling himself for a dive into deep water. He looked down at his hands, as if he might have been holding the very card that Vitas had brought that day. And he began his story.
CHAPTER 10
“T
he card is all about art, you see,” Glavas said. “Fine works of art.”
he card is all about art, you see,” Glavas said. “Fine works of art.”
Vlado felt a twinge of worry. So would this be the essence of the secret Vitas had died for? Some paintings from the museum? A bit of culture wrenched from a wall?
“Ah,” Glavas said. “I see that I bore you already. Not even interested enough to take notes.”
Vlado realized with a flush that he had put his pen down.
“Was I that obvious?” he asked. “I guess I had hoped that it might be something more. More than a few cases of liquor or cigarettes, or a few sides of mutton. And I’m sorry, but a few pictures strike me as an even less inspiring reason for getting yourself killed with a war on. Assuming that that’s where this might lead, of course. Meat, at least, you can eat.”
“Yes, meat,” Glavas said. “That and alcohol and gasoline and cigarettes can make you rich on the black market. Over time. And with a great deal of competition to worry about. But with a mere few pictures, as you put it, you can make yourself wealthy almost overnight. A millionaire, several times over, if you make the right choices. Even with the meager offerings of this town.
“And in the process, you can begin the destruction of an entire culture. Either one of those things alone, Mr. Petric, would seem reason enough for killing someone in this climate of looting and genocide, wouldn’t you agree? After all, what could be more calming to one’s conscience, being able to boast that you were destroying a nation’s emotional heritage even as you were lining your own pockets with a fortune to last a lifetime.”
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