Pretty Birds (19 page)

         

WHEN TEDIC ZIPPED
open the back of the beer truck to receive them, he was stern.

“That last burst back there,” he said. “Freelance, I assume? Sudden artistic inspiration?”

Molly did the talking for Irena and himself, and affected deference.

“I assumed, sir, that their mortar team would try to take their toy to the roof.”

“And were they there?” asked Tedic. His tone was wintry.

“I didn't see them,” said Molly. “Maybe they were getting ready.”

“Maybe they were hiding under their beds, or in the showers they still have there. Maybe they were watching TV and eating last night's cold roast chicken. Maybe they didn't notice that you wasted five precious bullets on the ghost of a chance.”

“They noticed,” Molly asserted. “I put a wreath of bullets around that window.”

Tedic put a huge, silly grin of surrender on his face. When he spoke, it was to Irena. “Molly,” he said, “I love you. Molly, I truly do. I pretend to be mad, and Molly pretends to be contrite. We are like an old married couple, the Queen of the Veldt and I, aren't we?” he asked Irena. “We will do this all over, many times.”

“Her Highness says the first shot hit the engine,” said Molly. They were on to Irena's part of the play. “The second went through the windshield and killed the truck.”

“That's what Mandy saw,” said Tedic. He turned back to Irena. “Mandy is someone you don't know. She says the truck was killed. Was there mist?” he asked Molly.

“Something in the windshield, I think.” Tedic shrugged.

“Mandy thinks she saw that, too. It could be shards causing lots of cuts, nothing serious.”

“Bits and pieces, then, not mist,” said Molly.

“Our Ingrid here was up to the role.”

“A star is born,” said Molly. “A star rises in the east. Or whatever Muslims say.”

Tedic turned his compact charm on Irena. “Mist has been explained to you?” he asked.

“I think I've figured it out,” she told him.

Tedic rolled out a drawer for some phantom consultation, then rolled it back. When he brought his head up, his chin was challenging. “And did Molly here show you any tricks I'm not supposed to know?”

Irena was ready to block his shot. “What could you possibly not know?” she asked.

The three of them laughed. As Tedic laughed, cigarette smoke spurted from his nostrils. “Ingrid, my Ingrid, my great sixteen-point scorer,” he said. “You belong in these leagues. The insult that flatters, the compliment that ridicules.
Killer charm.
Praise be that you are on our side.”

         

MOLLY AND IRENA
took their leave under the covered section of driveway leading out of the brewery. Mel was driving Irena home. Molly lived God knows where. A few dark, dirt-floored rooms were rumored to exist in the bowels of the brewery, where their dinginess was slightly relieved by bare lightbulbs powered by the springs below. Irena could picture Molly flopping down on a stark cot, eating cold French beans out of a can, and buffing his nails before unscrewing the bulb and sinking into the night.

“Let me guess,” she said straightaway. “The business on the fourth floor. You were trying to draw fire to the fourth so they wouldn't know we had been on the eighth. Protecting our spot. But you knew they'd be loaded, so you got me out from under.”

“I don't know basketball,” said Molly. “But in football we protect the striker.”

“So,” said Irena. “Is this graduation? Do we wait for the tenth reunion before we see each other again? We could have coffee sometime and catch up. Or do you just go back home and wait for some rich brute to ring you up and send you a ticket?”

Molly fingered a spot on his chin with one of his superb nails. “I can't go back home,” he explained. “Or much of anywhere. Change is afoot. Not that we couldn't use it, mind you. The new regime wants me to talk about some ancient history in Natal.”

“Tell them what they want,” Irena suddenly urged him. “Finger the folks who ordered you to do whatever it was. Old apartheid swine are making deals and getting rich. You make a deal, too.”

“I made an offer,” said Molly. “They had another. I'd have to give up some mates. Bastards like I am. But still mates.”

“Like me,” said Irena. “So give me another guess. We here in gallant little Bosnia have given you a home.”

Molly hugged himself in imitation of a shivering African caught in a cold clime. In the gloom of a long October shadow, his imitation was convincing.

“Bosnia in winter,” Molly shuddered. “Not my dream of paradise. It's here or Tuzla for me. But don't think I'm not grateful. No tears and flowers called for, but I don't have a country.”

“Use ours,” Irena offered.

         

WHEN IRENA TRAMPED
upstairs into her apartment, her mother brightened at the turn of the latch. She called out from behind the bathroom door, “How did it go today, dear?”

“I can't go into it,” said Irena. “National security.”

Mr. Zaric was sitting with his legs folded below his mother's old sofa table, rolling over one of his candles to find a seam for the wick. “I understand why you can't tell your mother,” he said soberly. “But I dig trenches for the army. I am involved in national security myself. You can tell me about your highly placed exploits and skulduggery.”

“Don't force me,” said Irena. “If you make me talk, the repercussions could be dire.”

Irena and her father shared a peal of laughter. Mrs. Zaric opened the door in time to join them. Aleksandra, who was trying to kindle a fire for hot water in the kitchen, joined in the merriment, too. But Irena saw in a flash—like the sudden chill in summer when rain clouds slide under the sun—that when Aleksandra looked through the doorframe she wasn't laughing in the least.

20.

TEDIC RECEIVED HER
in the storeroom the next morning, Dragan's smock drooping over a hanger like some headless ghoul behind his shoulder. Irena noticed that he seemed to keep no paperwork outside his pockets, and no implements of his actual daily business in front of him.

“Should the U.N. pay a surprise visit,” he explained, “I swear, they'll be disappointed. They'll think they've stormed into a brewery.”

He pointedly stood back from Dragan's costume, and away from the doorway. He wanted to give Irena the sensation of more air, more light, and the liberty to make a choice. “You must have questions,” he said. “Questions let me know what you're thinking.” Tedic was pleased by what he heard first.

“Well, what would I be paid?” asked Irena. She had grasped that her gifts were worth some reward that it was in his power to bestow.

“Believe it or not, money is not such a problem,” Tedic said quickly. “We have Muslim friends in Riyadh and Tehran who would like to buy a little bit of Mecca here. We have Jewish friends in New York, London, and Jerusalem who remember who their friends were when the Nazis stormed in.”

Tedic lifted a leg up onto one of the overstuffed sacks, as if to take the weight off his vast responsibilities.

“But fistfuls of money,” he went on, “only buy all the wrong things here now. Neighbors would suspect that you're selling drugs, or screwing government ministers. Or playing grab-ass with Frenchies in the Protection Force. We can't afford to have you scrutinized. So we give you twenty cans of beer a month. Share them. Let it be known that you can get a little more if friends persist. You work in a brewery. For other duties as specified, you will also get three cartons of cigarettes a month, American. You and your family can smoke what you like, trade what you like. Our own currency is worth less than a product that gives you cancer.

“And every month, like Swiss clockwork, two hundred deutsche marks go into an account in your name in a bank in Bern. A very nice, clean, thrifty, and cheerful city, I'm told, which I hope to see myself after the war.”

“Why only five bullets in a clip?” Irena moved on to her next item coolly. “They can take twenty.”

“Bullets are expensive,” he answered.

“Bullets are
expendable,
” she snapped. “That's the idea, right? Expend them.”

“Only if we can get them,” he told her. “Right now, cocaine comes into this city more easily than bullets. It's easier to put a condom of cocaine into someone's asshole or vagina than a box of bullets. Americans stuff bullets into their guns like cans of Coke in a cooler. They can write the price of war into the cost of Marlboros. But here in Sarajevo five bullets in a clip are what we manage. If we don't get more soon, it could be three.

“Besides,” Tedic said, softening, “we can't contact you by radio without signaling where you are. All alone up in the girders, you can feel that nobody cares about you. We don't want you to go for too long without remembering who loves you.”

“Can I quit?”

Tedic couldn't suppress a smile. His eyes crinkled, his brows arched, his bald skull wrinkled with the pleasure of having a student who could anticipate his lesson plan.

“Of course. This isn't the Red Army,” he said. “We don't have Cossacks to drag you back. But it's not as if we would be content to see you loose on your own. You will have seen and heard things by virtue of our trust, and you will have been recompensed for it. We have an investment in you. It makes us want to protect you. It also makes us keen to keep up our investment. So if you feel tired and lousy we give you time off. Not in Monaco, mind you, much as we'd all like to join you there. We can't even get our cabinet ministers to Antwerp for a conference without having them inspected and certified by the authorities like a fine cheese. But we'll put you in a place here where you can sleep, have a little to drink, and repair your circuits—no questions asked, no mark against you.”

Irena persisted. “And if I
still
want to quit?”

“We haven't written that chapter in the handbook,” said Tedic. “I suppose we hope this will all be over before we have to.”

         

“
YOU SAID WE
killed the truck yesterday,” said Irena.

“It's a phrase.”

“To avoid saying that we killed someone?”

“We can't tell.”

“Someone can,” Irena insisted. “What did the Knight say this morning? I took the long way round so I wouldn't hear him.”

“Why bother with what he says?” asked Tedic.

“I don't believe him,” Irena returned tartly, “any more than I believe everything you say. It just lets me know the lies I have to account for to figure out the truth. What did he say?”

Tedic began to squirm. It was a bit of stage business to encourage Irena to think she had pierced his flesh. Tedic had figured Irena would feel flashes of guilt or disdain for her work; he knew that she might even get frightened. But he calculated that the remorse Irena felt would drive her not away from the work he had set out for her, but closer to someone who exhorted and rewarded her—who coached her.

Tedic paused, to appear trapped and hesitant. “The Knight said two people were shot dead by Muslim fanatics,” he said finally. “Two angelic Serbian kids—Boy and Girl Scouts, no doubt—who were delivering medical supplies and food to famished mental patients.”

“Is that possible?”

“No.”

“They just made it up? If they made it up, they would have said that we shot a busload of legless orphans.”

“They just acknowledged what suits their story,” he replied. “Medical supplies and food must have been all mixed in with bullets and mortar shells. Believe me, no truck—
no truck
—is going to risk a journey now just to deliver food and medical supplies on that side of the city. Imagine braving bullets only to throw back the tarp and find Tuborg and Spam, but no mortar rounds.”

“Maybe the facts are so damning, all they have to do is tell the truth,” said Irena.

“If just two was the truth,” Tedic avowed, “they'd say that twenty had died. Take it from an accomplished prevaricator. Two means one. Maybe none. Maybe just a couple of Serbs with complexion problems that will heal.”

“It's hard to keep score in this twisted little game,” Irena said quietly.

         

STILL, IRENA DIDN'T
walk out the open door.

“It was them or you,” Tedic told her. “If not yesterday, then today. Or a week from today.”

“Soldiers are honorable,” Irena said. “They face each other, even from a long way away. Soldiers have uniforms and manners. But what's the difference between doing this and being an assassin?”

Tedic paused again. “Perhaps none,” he finally offered. “But what's the difference between doing this and doing nothing? You might run that play in your mind, too. In this place, conscience is not a virtue. It is a self-inflicted wound.

“You cannot expect to feel easy about any of it. But how much anguish do you want to expend when each and every day they are coming for us? When they march in to sweep away our bones, I don't want my hands to be empty. I want them to find my fingers clenched around a sword, a slingshot, or at least a rock.”

Irena let Tedic's words settle between them. There was no longer any question—really, there never had been—that she would do the job he had set out for her. But she wanted to remind him that she wasn't one of his hired assassins, working for Marlboros, deutsche marks, and beer.

“How are we different from them?” she asked finally.

Tedic seemed to stagger backward. Then he laughed, a sharp, astonished, nearly giggly laugh that both bewildered and elated Irena. Something she said to Tedic had finally pierced his scales. “Kids.
Kids,
” he said, shaking his head. “Bless your heart. Bless my soul.”

Irena found his response so out of character that she wondered if he was speaking in a kind of code.

“Of all the times and places to be reminded,” he said.

“Of what?” asked Irena.

“Of why I became a teacher.” Tedic fished inside his vast leather pockets and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He stood the box on a flour sack between them.

“Take one,” he offered. “Take the pack. Take them all. I could give you lots of reasons,” he said. “Maybe we lose a few each day.” Tedic had become so utterly still that when he spoke his words seemed to launch from the dead center of his two blistering brown eyes. “In the end, I'll settle for just one.
We
will
survive.
”