Lie in the Dark

CHAPTER 15

The boys on the walk up the mountainside had been right. Overnight visitors to Zuc didn’t sleep. They squirmed and talked, smoked and drank. They cursed the war, the shells, and the Chetniks. But mostly they watched and listened, like frightened children tucked in their beds, attuned to every creak of the floorboards.

Occasionally flocks of red tracer fire streaked crazily overhead, illuminating a rolling plain of mud. Shellfire rumbled from the other side of the mountain and flashed from a distant hill. Luckily most of the action stayed well down the line.

The biggest surprise to Vlado was the random, aimless nature of it all. Even in the ghastliest descriptions he’d read of past wars, there was always the semblance of a plan. Even the senselessness of World War I had borne the stamp of some huge, unstoppable organism of flesh and steel, with a vast network of communications strung out to all corners of the front. Bombardments were coordinated, lasting days at a time, if only to bring on a single frenzied moment of suicidal assault. Every massive wave of murder was premeditated.

And here? The war lurched through the dark like a beast with every limb disabled. Firing was sporadic, as if by whim. Desultory sniper exchanges quickly turned into heated personal vendettas, then just as quickly subsided. Gun crews worked or didn’t work depending on their supply of shells, sleep, and brandy, though most often upon the latter. Command and control were concepts for some other hillside, some other part of the country where the line shifted occasionally, perhaps for some other war altogether. Or perhaps this was the way a war always felt from the inside, as if one were part of a vast portrait that only assumed shape and order when viewed from a distance.

Toward 4 a.m. it began to rain, beginning with a heavy mist that progressed into a steady drizzle of cold, fat drops. Vlado lowered his head, straining his eyes in the dark to watch the water sluice off his sodden cap into a puddle at his feet.

The narrow beam of a penlight swept into his trench, illuminating other men similarly posed. A hand latched onto his right shoulder from behind, jostling him as if he’d dozed off. “Let’s go if you’re going.”

It was the officer who’d brought their unit up the hill. They were pulling out.

He climbed out, the soft ground sinking beneath his weight, his joints stiff from hours of standing and sitting in the cold.

They formed up in the grove of splintered trees and began their parade downhill. Vlado was too tired to bother checking who was in front and back of him. They all stared at their own feet. No one spoke. The cookfires that had been burning hours earlier were out now.

It was another twenty minutes before he took stock of the situation, making a mental roll call as he glanced from the front to the rear of the shambling column. Leading the way were the older men, still grouped by age and attitude. Turning toward the rear he saw to his alarm that two of the teenage boys were carrying a blanket between them, slung heavily like a stretcher. It was obvious someone was in it, dead or wounded. Probably dead, judging by the way the bulge kept bumping the ground.

It was the boy with the ponytail, it turned out, the one with the radio. He’d been hit square in the nose by a chunk of shrapnel, which tore off half his face but left him otherwise untouched. The other boys had turned his body face down into the blanket, hauling him as if he were only napping in a sodden hammock. A corner of his plaid shirttail dangled over the side. His radio was nowhere in sight, either destroyed in the same blast or nimbly confiscated by some veteran of the line.

By the time they reached the bottom of the hill, a dim light was bleeding into the deep gray of the eastern sky, and the rain had stopped. They reached their rendezvous point from the previous evening, and the commander began handing out the day’s ration of cigarettes. You got a whole pack for a night at the front. Frontline regulars even got filter tips. The officer thrust a pack toward Vlado, a pleasant surprise until it occurred to him how the pack had suddenly become available. Vlado waved it away. “Give it to one of his friends instead.”

“What friends?” the officer asked gruffly. “Everyone hated him. Him and his damn radio.”

Vlado numbly reached out to take the pack, then thought better of it, pulling his hand back.

“Give it to one of them,” he said, motioning toward the others in the unit. “I’m finished with handouts.”

“Just as well,” the officer said. “I’ll keep it for myself. Anyone who’s tired of taking handouts in this place might as well shoot himself before he starves.”

It was another half hour’s walk to home, and it was all Vlado could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The conversation with Neven already seemed as if it had taken place days ago, the memory of the scene almost surreal with its flashes of light, the sharp taste of the Turkish coffee. Surely that other world up the hill no longer existed except in Vlado’s mind.

He arrived on his doorstep soaked to the bone, and it was times like these when he most wished for a hot shower and a warm bed. Instead he peeled off his clothes and laid them across the bathroom sink, wiping the mud from his body with a damp, sour sponge. He lit two gas flames on the kitchen stove, one to heat a pot of beans he’d left to soak overnight, another to heat water for coffee. The Nescafe was down to the last grains so he used them all, preferring a single strong cup to a pair of weak ones.

A few moments later he sipped down the scalding brew, the brief pain of the heat feeling good in his throat and stomach. Then he pulled on thick dry socks and long underwear, a T-shirt and a sweater, and crawled under his blankets.

He slept until almost noon, waking groggily to the sound of a distant explosion. His stomach was cramped and gassy, and his breath smelled of stale beans and coffee. He tried calling the office to let them know where he was, but the lines were down again. He checked in the mirror, rubbing a hand across stubbly cheeks, but didn’t have the heart to drag a cold, dull razor across two days of growth. Outside it was still gray. He swished a glass of water in his mouth, spit into the sink, then pulled a soiled but dry pair of trousers on and shrugged into his overcoat. It was time to walk to the office.

Damir greeted him as if in amazement.

“You’re back from the dead!” he shouted, then asked for a complete rundown on the evening. Vlado told him what he’d learned, giving only a few details, mentioning a smuggling operation but nothing about what was being smuggled. Further details could wait until he had the list from Glavas. Otherwise, he still felt bound by his promise to Kasic to hold back what he could. He sagged into a chair, exhaustion catching up to him already.

“Hard to believe the bastard can’t read,” Damir said. “No wonder Zarko trusted him. Once the war’s over we’ll have to recruit a better class of criminal or else they’ll never let us join the European Union.”

“Any further word from anyone?” Vlado asked.

“All quiet. Nothing at all. This morning I was so desperate for something to do I was almost hoping for another murder. No such luck. But this Vitas case-we need new leads, Vlado, or else we’re up against a dead end. Whatever trail there was a few days ago is probably cold by now.”

“That’s the longest stream of Western detective cliches I’ve heard out of your mouth since we started working together,” Vlado said.

Damir laughed, but his heart wasn’t in it. For a moment Vlado detected a shadow of the bleakness that had washed across Damir’s face a few days ago, when he had strolled through the sniper zone.

“What’s bothering you?” Vlado asked with concern, although he already had a pretty good idea. “I figured you at least had your new friend Francesca to help pass the time. Either way your evening couldn’t have been as bad as mine.”

“You’re holding back on me, Vlado. When you asked me to help out on this investigation I was excited, but I’ve been completely shut out. I’m nothing but an errand boy. You spend a night with probably the city’s most notorious surviving mobster and you sum it up in three minutes of vague chit chat. The other day you spent four hours interviewing some old man in Dobrinja. Four hours! Then you explain it to me in two minutes of broad assurances that soon we’d have a lot of new leads. I’m supposed to take you at your word without even knowing his name or what he does, and then I’m supposed to keep myself happy by talking to whores, which I suppose is all you think I’m good for. Why is it that I think that even when I’m running down these leads I still won’t really know what I’m looking for?”

Damir had built a head of steam as he went, nearly shouting by the time he finished. Spent, he eased back in his chair.

“You’re right,” Vlado said, “and I’m sorry.”

He momentarily considered arguing that he was only keeping Damir in the dark for his own protection, because that was indeed a worry. The fewer people who were kicking around this information, the better, for Vlado’s security as well, especially given Damir’s penchant for cafe crawling.

Yet, he knew that when push came to shove, Damir could keep his mouth shut as tightly as anyone. Behind the carefree demeanor was a zealous streak of professional ambition that revealed itself from time to time, and Vlado could sense it now in the stubborn set of Damir’s jaw, the steadiness of his eyes. This was no merry lad looking for nothing more than an easy good time. Damir wanted to be taken seriously, and was feeling belittled.

Besides, even if spreading the information further was a risk, there was a certain safety in numbers that resulted from keeping Damir better informed. If he knew what to look out for, he’d be more adept at watching Vlado’s back, not to mention his own.

“It’s Kasic,” Vlado finally said. “He made me promise. To keep it all close to the vest.”

Damir said nothing. True or not, it was obvious this explanation wasn’t sufficient either, and Vlado understood. After two years of watching the Ministry shut them out of the biggest cases in the city, they finally had their piece of the action, but Vlado was keeping it all for himself.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Vlado said. “I promise. And I’ll tell you more. As much detail as I can. It’s probably time you knew anyway, if I get the leads I’m hoping for from Dobrinja.”

He knew he would have to come up with a way to at least honor the spirit of his pledge to Kasic without further wounding his partner’s ego. And, who knows, a better informed Damir might even help turn the tide. But all that would have to wait until early evening. Vlado had gotten a late start and needed to catch up.

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 Nescafe 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 Nescafe.

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 cafe.”

Or any other place where mobsters hung out these days, Vlado thought.

He arrived back at the office to find Damir still in an eager and mischievous mood, but he seemed fueled by something headier than the cola and chocolate he must have devoured during the past few hours. As Vlado approached, Damir pointed toward the waiting area by Garovic’s office, and Vlado saw, with a sinking feeling, what had made his partner so keyed up.

“You have a visitor,” Damir said. “A very patient one judging by how long she’s been waiting for you.”

She sat on the same couch where Vlado had taken her a few weeks ago, only now she looked prim, knees together, holding a purse in her lap. She looked up, startled to see Vlado headed her way.

“First the Nescafe man, now a visitor from the French barracks,” Damir said. “It must be your lucky day.”

“Yours, too. While I’m talking to her, maybe you can get ready to start checking some new leads.” He waved the fax from Bogdan.

“What’s that?”

“I’ll explain when I’m done with her. But if we’re lucky, it’s the heart of the case.”

She looked different by daylight, or maybe it was just that her makeup was gone. No more rouge, eyeliner, or lipstick, leaving a plain but pleasing face, tired looking but fairly well nourished, more so than the time before, a bit fuller, or perhaps his memory was playing tricks on him.

Vlado approached uncertainly, not knowing quite what to say.

“I believe that this is where we last met in your office,” she said, although thank God not loud enough for Damir to hear. The remark broke some of the tension, and she extended a hand in greeting. “Perhaps this time the results will be more productive for you.”

“Depends on what you’re here for,” Vlado said, regretting the remark immediately.

“I needed to talk to you,” she said, her tone a shade cooler, or perhaps once again it was Vlado’s imagination. “About the shooting. With Maria there the other night I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.”

Maria. That must be the prostitute who’d done all the talking.

“Please,” he said, pointing toward an interrogation room with glass partitions. “We can talk in here.”

They settled into chairs on opposite sides of a battered wooden table. The aging tubes of a fluorescent light hummed and sputtered overhead. Vlado felt some of his discomfort returning, and moved quickly to fill the silence. “First things first,” he said, opening a notebook. He scribbled the date at the top and asked, “Your name, please. For the record.”

“Hodzic, Amira,” she said.

“Address? And phone number, if you have one.”

“For what reason?” she asked, a sudden edge to her voice.

“In case I need to talk to you again,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Unless of course you’d rather have me come to your place of business to ask any followup questions, in the presence of Maria, who I presume is the one who did all the talking the other night.”

“Yes, she was, and, no, I suppose I wouldn’t like that. Number seven-twelve Bosanska Street, apartment thirty-seven. I have no phone.”

Which probably meant she was a refugee, Vlado thought, or else she’d still have the hookup from before the war, whether it was working or not.

“So. The night of the shooting, then. You were there I presume, outside the barracks.”

“Yes. The usual location.”

“And you heard the gunshot?”

“Yes. Maria was right about one thing, though. There had been shooting off and on for hours. The usual stuff in that area. But this one was different. Louder and closer, and from the near side of the river. Maria thought right away that it must have something to do with her man. Her regular man. Or at least the closest thing she had to a regular man. It turned out that it didn’t, of course. Her man was safely off somewhere else. We all heard the next morning who had really been killed. But, well, you seemed interested in knowing any detail, no matter how small, so I thought I at least owed you that, if only because Maria seemed so determined none of us would say a word.”

“Why did she think her man might be out there? Was she expecting him?”

“No. She’d seen him just a few minutes before. He’d come out through the gate.”

“From the barracks?”

“Yes.”

“On foot?”

“No. In a jeep. One of the white U.N. ones. Armored, with thick windows, but we could all see who was driving because we knew him from other times.”

“So he was a soldier, then. Not a civilian employee.”

“Yes, an officer.”

“Rank?”

“A colonel. Or that’s what Maria calls him. Her French colonel. Or sometimes she just calls him Sweet Maurice. Or the Little Colonel, like Napoleon.”

“Well, then, a colonel with a regular squeeze waiting at the gate.”

“Yes, I thought you’d want to know, especially when I heard that the man who was killed was someone important.” She glanced toward the table. “Do you think I could have one of your cigarettes?”

“Please.”

He slid a pack of Drinas across the table. He held out his lighter and watched her inhale, lips tight. When she began speaking again she kept the cigarette clenched in her teeth, making little bursts of smoke with every word. It seemed almost contrived to lend her an air of harshness, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. Something in the gesture didn’t ring true. Yet she clearly preferred projecting this image to whatever might be the real one, and it occurred to Vlado that there were probably children at home, perhaps a husband in the city or out on some frontline. The pose was for their sake. This was the prostitute speaking, not the mother or the wife. He wondered for a moment what she must be like in that other world.

“So,” he said, “we have a French colonel driving a U.N. jeep possibly in the area a few minutes or even a few seconds before the shooting,” Vlado said, “perhaps in position to have seen or heard something himself.”

“Yes.”

“Can you pin it down a little more? What do you mean by a few minutes. Ten? Five? One or two?”

“One, if I had to guess. It really was quite short, or seemed that way,” she said, with more of the little puffs of smoke bursting from her mouth.

Well, this was something, perhaps. At minimum the colonel would be worth talking to, Vlado thought. If he’d driven in the right direction, perhaps he’d at least noticed Vitas standing on the corner, or anyone else who might have been with him. It was a longshot, but better than any other shot at a witness he had right now, which was no shot at all.

“Is there anything else you remember from those moments right before or after the gunshot? Any other sounds. Someone running. A car driving away, perhaps.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I would have heard anything else. From the minute we heard the shot Maria was hysterical. It was all we could do to keep her from crawling around the sandbags and running across the bridge to see for herself what had happened. She was screaming for her little Maurice, her Little Colonel. It was close to curfew anyway and we were worried she’d have us all in jail for the night. And frankly, the stories you hear about police and prostitutes …”

She stopped short, suddenly embarrassed.

“What did you finally do?”

“After a few minutes she calmed down. We wanted to walk her home but she refused. Said she was going to his apartment, that he would be there if he was okay, that she’d stay there for the night, so she left. If he wasn’t there, she had a key to let herself in, she said. The rest of us-it was only Leila and I that night-we walked home together. She lives in the building next to mine. Neither of us knows where Maria lives, the colonel either. And the next night everything was back to normal. Maria seemed fine. The only time she’s acted funny since was when you showed up.”

“This colonel. He was used to having her at his apartment? Is that normal in, well, this business? With U.N. officers, I mean.”

“Is this part of the investigation?”

Was it? Vlado wasn’t sure. “I don’t know, frankly. Just a matter of finding every detail I can.”

“You’ll have to ask someone who’s been at it a little longer than me. I’m new. So is Leila. We started the same week, a little more than a month ago, and from what I hear women come and go from it month to month, except for the ones like Maria who’ve been doing it for years.”

“So tell me what you know, secondhand or whatever, then, about Maria and this colonel. Maurice, you said. Did she ever say his last name? And that is definitely part of the investigation, ’cause I’d like to talk to him.”

She shook her head.

“From what a few others have told me, it was quite a romance, at least on her part. He’d been posted to Sarajevo a year ago, and picked her up almost right away. A few nights a week. After a while he got himself an apartment. Apparently some of the higher ranking officers do that, and she started staying over at his place two or three days at a time.

“After a while he must have cooled on her. He may even have found someone else he liked better. She ended up back on the beat more and more nights, mooning outside the barracks like a teenager, waiting for him to drive in or out in his jeep. The few times I’ve seen him drive through he gives her a smile and a wave, that’s all. It made me wonder if everything she said about the two of them was true. She’s not exactly the most stable person in the world, after all. But she did show us a key she said was to his apartment. And she did seem to know an awful lot about him.”

“Like what?”

“Little details from his apartment. More than what you’d just pick up in a few minutes between the sheets. Knew what his wife’s name was. What she and their kids looked like. She’d seen all his pictures from home. Knew what sort of guns he kept. Told us he was an important man with the U.N. Said he was tougher than the others. That if a Chetnik shot at him he’d shoot back, and wouldn’t miss. Not like the ones who just take cover and file a report. It sounded to me like he’d talked a lot of manly bullshit to her and she’d believed it.”

“And now I guess we’ll find out if he has any powers of observation and memory. Whatever the case, you were right to come in. Sometimes it’s the little things that lead to the big ones.”

They went out the door together, and he escorted her to the steps, listening as her heels clicked down to the ground floor, echoing just as sharply as the time before.

He ignored Damir’s questioning gaze as he sat back at his desk, but Damir didn’t take the hint. “So,” he chirped. “Success?”

“Not the sort you have in mind,” Vlado answered.

“But you got a phone number, I hope.”

“Confidential. If you want to reach her you’ll have to walk down to Skenderia. Just make sure to take a carton of Marlboros if you want anything more than conversation.” He felt cheapened by the remark the moment he spoke it, though it certainly seemed to be a hit with Damir. “Besides, don’t you have some work to do?”

“That depends. Where are those new leads you were promising.”

“Yes. These.” Vlado pulled the fax from his satchel. “Here, take a few pages and you can get started right away.”

Damir scanned the Cyrillic writing and his eyes lit up. “Where the hell is this from? Somewhere we don’t belong, that’s for sure.”

“Never mind that. Just oil up your rusty Cyrillic and get reading. It’s a list of paintings, valuable artworks hanging around town, with their last known addresses. We want to know which ones are still here, which ones are missing. Check them one by one, address by address. If the building’s been destroyed, move on to the next one. If the apartment’s been destroyed, ask the neighbors what happened, where the occupants went, then follow up. And if the place is occupied but the painting’s gone, find out when it was taken, and by who, and the official reason given. Get descriptions of whoever they saw, as much detail as you can. With any luck we’ll be on the trail to Vitas’s killer within a day.”

Damir glanced down at the papers, eagerness apparent in his features. “Sooner, if I can help it,” he said. “I’m on my way.” And he bustled out the door, coattails flying like wings.

Left on his own, Vlado picked up the phone, and he was pleased to again hear a dial tone. He thumbed through a U.N. directory and dialed the number for the Skenderia barracks. A man’s voice answered in English with a heavy French accent.

“Yes, this is Inspector Petric from the civil police. I’m trying to reach one of your colonels, only I’m afraid all I have is a first name.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, the battalion’s only got one colonel, and his first name is Alain. Would you like me to connect you?”

Vlado sighed. So much for the delusional ravings of an unstable old prostitute, Vlado thought.

“Never mind, thank you. The colonel I was looking for is named Maurice. I obviously got some bad information.”

“No you didn’t. Just the wrong place. You’re looking for Colonel Maurice Chevard. He was officially posted here with the battalion last year, but he’s assigned to headquarters at the PTT building. Would you like his number?”

“By all means.”

The PTT building housed the headquarters for U.N. Forces, a grim, gray fortress on the west side of town along Sniper Alley, near the turnoff for Dobrinja. It was a precarious location, surrounded by sandbags and sprouting scores of satellite dishes and antennae. In better days it had housed the central telephone company and postal service.

Vlado dialed the number.

“Shipping office,” said a voice with a British accent.

Vlado was so taken aback that for a moment he said nothing.

“Hello?” the voice spoke again.

“Yes. Excuse me. I’ve dialed the wrong number.”

Vlado hung up.

Colonel Chevard worked in the shipping office, which meant he was directly connected to Maybe Airlines, Sarajevo’s main lifeline, and the best way in and out of the city for food, soldiers, and, perhaps, valuable works of art. This put the Little Colonel’s jeep ride in a new light. Or did it? It really wasn’t much of a connection. And he had no idea how many people worked in the shipping office, or how many might have the authorization to make sure a crated piece of art made the next flight out. With the the right combination of payoffs almost anyone might be able to do it, he supposed.

Vlado stood up from his desk and paced the room. He lit a cigarette and mulled his options for a few moments, then sat back down, figuring it had been long enough for whoever answered the first time to forget his voice. He again dialed the number at the PTT Building.

“Shipping office,” answered the same British voice.

“Yes, I’d like to inquire about the possibility of sending a private parcel out on one of your flights. I normally post them through the Jewish Center’s convoys, but this one is a matter of some urgency Perhaps you could tell me how it might be done.”

“It can’t be. Strict policy against it. No exceptions. Sorry.”

And with that he seemed ready to hang up, so Vlado spoke quickly. “Surely there are exceptions. I’m told these things can be done occasionally, even if rarely.”

“Look, mate, I don’t want to get rude with you, but I personally double-check nearly every outgoing manifest, and I can tell you on very solid authority that nothing private, or public either for that matter, ever goes out of here under my approval. My boss would skin me alive if anything ever did, never mind what would happen if the press got hold of it.”

“Might I appeal this. To your boss, perhaps. And I don’t believe I got your name, either.”

Vlado had found that, when dealing with the military or other similar hierarchies, requesting someone’s name nearly always got you nothing less than a referral to the next rung up in the chain of command. As if by giving you their name they were obligated to send you home a satisfied customer, or else risk having to explain away any sort of official complaint you might lodge. He never understood why they didn’t simply refuse to give their name and hang up. Passing the problem on to someone else just seemed to be the accepted way of doing things.

“My name is Maclean, sir. Lieutenant Maclean.”

“Very good lieutenant. And your superior officer.”

“Look, Mr….”

“Jusufovic,” he said, saying the first thing that popped into his head-his wife’s maiden name.

“Mr. Jusufovic. In answer to your original question, there are some rare, quite rare, cases in which we can haul private parcels on our flights, usually only as a special favor to people who have done us special favors in matters of aid operations or supply. And even then it is strictly hush hush, and only as a favor to individuals, and not to the Bosnian government, for obvious reasons of nonpartisanship. If you’re asking for that kind of permission, not only can I not handle it, but you’ll have to make the request in person to my superior. He’s the only one who can say yes, and I can tell you right now that nine times out often he says no.”

“And his name?”

“Colonel Chevard, sir, and the earliest he can see you is next Wednesday. If you don’t mind the advice, sir, he can be a bit prickly. If there’s any way you can make it seem like it’s his idea, you’ll stand a better chance. That’s the way it works with the French, you know. So, shall I schedule an appointment for you next Wednesday, then? Mr. Jusufovic? Are you there? Jesus. All that and the bloody bugger hangs up on me.”