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 (32 page)
But he decided to make the first small offering of information, a morsel to at least convince Damir his heart was in the right place.
“The old man in Dobrinja thinks this is all about art, smuggling it out of the country.”
Damir looked wide eyed, obviously mollified. “Oh, but I almost forgot,” he said, scrambling to open his notebook. “Your Nescafé man called this morning.”
It took a moment for Vlado to realize he must have meant Toby, the British journalist.
“He says your package has arrived. And if that means more coffee, then I hope you won’t forget your friends. Anyhow, he said you’d better get a move on. Seems he’s bursting with curiosity.”
That was the last thing Vlado needed, some reporter asking questions all over town about a copy of the transfer file. He dreaded the idea of another long walk so soon after slogging back from Zuc, but decided he’d better get over to the Holiday Inn.
Toby was in a bright and frisky mood, scrubbed and clean-shaven by the Holiday Inns private supply of running water.
The thought only made Vlado feel dirtier and more worn out, with an edge of grouchiness. Or maybe it had something to do with where he’d spent the night. He thought for a moment of the teenage boy with a girlfriend, and wondered what he was up to about now. Probably cuddled with her somewhere away from their parents, nuzzled against the warmth of a smooth, womanly neck. Telling her about the boy with the radio, of the way his face had disappeared with a wet, smacking sound and a burst of red mist, or not talking about it at all, but holding it inside, down deep where no one would ever reach it.
“So, you’re some sort of art lover, I take it,” Toby said, grinning, waving a stack of fax paper in his right hand.
Vlado could see that the writing was in Cyrillic, alphabet of Serbs and Russians, and wondered how much, if any, Toby was able to decipher. Toby seemed to sense his concern.
“Couldn’t resist having my interpreter take a look at it,” Toby said.
God only knew who that was, Vlado thought, remembering the disreputable-looking bunch that hung out by the hotel’s rear entrance.
“He says it’s nothing but museum stuff, items stored around here. You doing art thefts now? Or is this something private, something on the side?”
“Please,” Vlado said, feeling too tired to fend off such eager interest. “You mustn’t ask anyone else about this. No one. It is a most sensitive matter, even dangerous.”
Toby’s face went solemn and grave.
“No. ’Course not. Don’t worry, I know you’ll clue me in as soon as you can. In the meantime,” he said, stooping toward his big bag, “you look like you could use some more of this.”
It was another jar of Nescafé.
I’d rather not, Vlado thought, but his mouth never uttered the words, and his right hand reached for the jar.
He had no illusions about how Toby viewed these transactions. Each donation was a further claim on Vlado’s loyalty, a down payment on whatever police secrets might eventually be in the offing. And there had better be some soon, he seemed to be saying, or he’d go off seeking his own interpretations of the facts at hand. For all Vlado knew Toby had made his own copy of the list. Vlado should have known better than to trust a journalist to be a courier of sensitive information. It was like asking an alcoholic to bring you a bottle of wine. But with the scarcity of fax machines and international phone lines he’d had little choice.
“Thank you. It’s most generous,” Vlado said.
“Like I said. Comes with the business. Almost routine giving away this stuff by now. And I don’t come here half as loaded as some of the blokes you see. Whiskey, cigarettes, sugar, chocolate. Christ, it’s all they can do to fly in with a bar of soap and clean underwear and still make the U.N. weight limit. Sarajevo baksheesh.”
Yes, thought Vlado. Another way to keep the wogs talking into the cameras and tape recorders. But as long as Toby was feeling so generous this morning, why not keep him occupied a while longer. Undoubtedly he’d have a car, or access to one, and Vlado needed a ride to Dobrinja to run through the file with Glavas. By the look of it Bogdan had managed to fax details of more than a hundred items.
“Would you be interested in making a little trip over to Dobrinja this morning?” he asked Toby. “We’re a little short on official vehicles, and there’s someone I need to see. It will only take a few minutes.”
Toby thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure. Why not. Not doing anything this afternoon but sitting on my ass, trying to follow up this morning’s briefing with a few phone calls, and the lines have been down for an hour. Haven’t been to Dobrinja in a while anyway. Always an adventure. And there’s nothing doing here until the Serbs let fly with their New Year’s bash tomorrow night. The way things are going it’s all the fireworks we’ll get around here for a while. Christ but it’s been bloody slow.”
Vlado wondered if Toby would be talking this way to just anybody in the city, to a grieving mother and child in some gloomy apartment, for instance; so open in his disdain for the war’s sluggishness, its lack of media savvy. Somehow he didn’t think so. For them he’d have his game face on, uttering sympathetic banalities to coax a few more quotes. But something about Vlado’s being a policeman had made Toby drop the pretense, as if he were only hanging out with colleagues. Cops and reporters, Vlado mused, love-hate partners in the weary fraternity of those who’d seen too much.
They made the trip in an armored car, with large blue stickers plastered on either door proclaiming The Evening Standard in Gothic lettering. Vlado was impressed by the heaviness and security of the car. The back was stuffed with rattling jerrycans and cardboard boxes filled with food, notebooks, and dirty clothes. He told Toby it was a nice feeling to be bulletproof for a change.
“Grenade-proof, too. Or practically. Some Swedes driving one of these the other day took an RPG round, not a direct hit but damn near. All it did was knock them around a little. Broke a few ribs driving into a ditch but otherwise okay.
“Had a close call myself once. Out front of the Holiday Inn. Colleague didn’t shut his door proper, and when I swerved onto the road it flew wide open on the wrong side. Snipers must have been up there saying, ‘Well, we’ll bag us one now,’ and before I could even turn her around and shut the door three shots were pinging all around us. Didn’t think anything more of it until we were filling her up with gas the next day. The petrol tank leaked joyously. A ricochet from the street must’ve bounced right up into her. Now I can’t fill it more than two-thirds. A few inches lower and we’d have gone up in smoke. That was two weeks ago, and I still haven’t gotten her fixed. And, Christ, the way they gouge you for repairs around here maybe I never will. For all I know they make a wax mold of your keys while they’re at it.
“So anyway,” Toby continued, “who’s this we’re going to see?”
“Someone involved with a case.”
Toby waited for more, and when none was forthcoming he smiled, shaking his head slowly, and glanced sideways at Vlado. “Christ, you do play it close to the vest, don’t you. And what sort of case?”
“A murder.”
Toby snorted. “Just one? Hardly seems worth the effort.”
“That depends on the murder, I guess.”
Toby waited, again hoping for more. But Vlado stared out the side window and lit a cigarette.
Toby began a discourse on his travels around Bosnia. He really had been just about everywhere, it seemed. Central Bosnia, the Posavina corridor near Brcko in the northeast, Banja Luka and Sanski Most in the north, Mostar in the southwest. He’d been to Dobrinja more than once, too, judging by his agility in steering the obstacle course through curbs, sidewalks, and checkpoints.
He’d even done time in Bihac, a town in Bosnia’s far northwest corner holding out much like Sarajevo, only with far less media attention and, as a result, far less international aid.
“Look what they’re using for money up there now,” Toby said, fishing his wallet from a rear pocket as he drove. He handed Vlado a wrinkled piece of paper, about 2-by-4 inches. On one side was a small picture of the river that runs through Bihac—Vlado recognized it from a trip years earlier—and the number five was printed in both upper corners. The back side was blank.
“Worse than play money,” Toby said, “but worth five marks in Bihac. Not even enough D-marks under their mattresses to last them through the war, and none of the government currency, so they had to print these. Looks worse than something from a board game.”
It was odd hearing a field report on the country from this man who came and went like a business commuter, talking about places Vlado had been all his life as if they were district stops on a sales network.
“You’ve got it lucky here in a way, you know,” Toby was saying now. “You’re crowded together in this shitty siege, getting picked off one by one. But at least you’ve kept the bastards out. Once the bad guys get in, no matter who the bad guys happen to be in your neck of the woods, then it’s all over. You go to some of these little villages in central Bosnia and find twenty, thirty houses destroyed, not just burned but dynamited. But then you look closer and there are always one or two houses that seem fine. Laundry on the line, windows intact, chickens in the yard, smoke out the chimney. You ask around and find they’re the Muslims and everyone else was Croat, or they’re Croat and everyone else was Muslim. Now those are the kinds of murder cases a Bosnian detective should be working on. Solve one of them and you’ll clean up the whole mess.”
They climbed the stairs to Glavas’s house and knocked loudly, but after four tries and five minutes there was still no answer, nor even a cough. Vlado tried the door and it was unlocked, and as he pushed it open he heard footsteps approaching from downstairs.
It was the woman from the time before, the one with heart-shaped lips.
“He’s gone,” she said. “Since yesterday afternoon. Four men in a BMW A nice dark blue one without a scratch. You don’t see many of those around here. Every boy on the block came out to touch it.”
“Were these men armed?”
“Not that I could see. Three of them came up the stairs, went inside, then a few minutes later they left, and he was with them, everybody quiet, hardly saying a word. I haven’t seen him since. I thought I heard someone up here last night, but I checked this morning and he was still gone.”
She was obviously worried. So was Vlado.
“Well, let’s have a look then.”
The apartment seemed much as before. There was a pile of writing paper and a couple of pencils next to a full ashtray on the nightstand. Pillows were propped against the headboard with the sheets turned back, as if Glavas had been sitting up working when the men came to the door. Nothing was written on a single page. Either Murovic at the museum had been right in his assessment of Glavas, or the men had taken something extra with them.
But the most disturbing absence was up on the living-room wall, where the field of lilies had once bloomed in the fine hand of an Impressionist master. Now it was only an empty space, dustmarks showing the old outline of the frame—exactly what Glavas had told him to look for.
Vlado pulled the ream of fax paper from his bag and thumbed through the pages until he found it: a painting checked out to Glavas, Milan, with a Dobrinja address, since April 1979.
Most recent Reassessment: June 1988. Insured value: $112,000.
“So, is that where one of your paintings was supposed to be?” Toby asked. Vlado had forgotten he was there, had stopped worrying about him because he didn’t speak the language. But it must have been easy enough to figure out why Vlado was looking at the list with such concern.
“Yes,” Vlado answered. “You might say that. Don’t worry, you’ll be fully briefed on the whole thing. Soon, the way things are looking.”
He turned toward the woman. She was watching from the doorway, as if afraid to step inside.
“These men, were they carrying anything when they left?”
“I don’t think so. Unless it was something they’d put in their pockets. Glavas was carrying an overnight bag, or that’s what I thought it was anyway.”
“A briefcase, maybe?”
“Maybe. I didn’t get a good look at it. I watched them from my front window.”
“And you say later you thought you heard someone up here last night?”
“It could’ve just been some boys on the stairs. I don’t know. But yes, it sounded like something. It made me feel better because I thought he must have come back, until I realized this morning that he hadn’t.”
“Were the men in uniform?”
She shook her head.
“They were all wearing overcoats. Dark overcoats.”
“How were they dressed otherwise?”
“Neatly. Expensive, if I had to guess.”
“Clothes like you’d wear to an office?”
“More like you’d wear to a nice café.”
Or any other place where mobsters hung out these days, Vlado thought.
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