Lie in the Dark

CHAPTER 2

Vlado headed into the melting slush, bound for the couple’s home in what passed for a gypsy quarter, a narrow rack of two-story cinder-block buildings near the top of a steep, exposed hill just north of the city center. The Bosnian army often kept one of its few big guns up there, mostly for nuisance-firing at the Serbs, which prompted plenty of answering nuisance-fire, usually from even bigger guns. But it was only gypsies, the authorities reasoned. In a city where people still liked to talk about the unimportance of ethnic designation, gypsies had always been singled out as the lowest of the low. Their warren of apartments was a nasty place to live, even by wartime standards.

Ten minutes into his walk, a flushed and breathless Damir appeared at his side.

“Change your mind?” Vlado said.

“Needed the walk. Cooped up all day yesterday with nothing but paperwork, then all of this morning with nothing but a hangover. And in between was last night, which I’d just as soon forget altogether. So I’ll at least make it up the hill with you. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll even help you write the report. But don’t worry. I’ll head back in time to have the gypsy woman checked in and ready for interrogation.”

“So, trouble with a woman?” Vlado asked. It was the only sort of trouble he could imagine Damir having.

“I wish. It’s my mother and father.”

Damir had moved back in with his parents when the war began to make sure they’d be provided for. Also to avail himself of his mother’s cooking. With fresh meat and produce having virtually disappeared, she was one of those resourceful cooks who still managed some variety-pies made of rice, “French fries” shaped from a corn meal paste, and garden snails, soaked overnight then pan-fired with wild herbs. But the price for a fuller stomach was his mother’s temper, vast and explosive, and Vlado figured there must have been another blow up.

“Your mother went off again?”

“Yes. The worst ever. And this time she went for maximum damage, and got it. From my father, at least, and maybe from me, too.”

“Well, give it a few days and it will blow over.”

“Not this time,” Damir said, shaking his head with grim assurance. “All she did this time was tell me that everything I’d ever believed about my father was a lie.”

Vlado wasn’t sure how to respond to that and, based on past experience, Damir wasn’t likely to offer anything more until he was ready and willing. So they walked on a few minutes more without a word, until Damir abruptly resumed.

“All these years he’s told me what a hero he’d been during the last war. Fighting the Nazis with Tito’s Partisans. Hiding in caves and corn fields with the great man himself. Parachuting onto some mountain in the dark. Stories that I’ve heard a thousand times, and memorized every detail.”

“Then your mother says that he’s been making some of it up, right? Which only makes him like every other man in this town over the age of 70. My uncle was the same way. Had us believing he was God’s gift to guerilla warfare. And who says your mother’s right anyway. She was just angry and saying whatever she could to make it hurt.”

“My father says she’s right, that’s who. And it wasn’t just details she was talking about, or exaggerations. It was everything. The whole damn war. He hid out all right, with the neighbors next door, in their cellar. Looking after their two children. Once he came out to help move some cows-steal them is probably more like it-from the next village. The only gun his family had, he buried, hid it from his own father, and he never dug it up again. When my mother told me all this, he didn’t even try to pretend anymore. He confessed just like any other common criminal who knows the evidence is against him. Then he pulled his chair into a corner and did nothing but cry. His face was gray, like he was turning to ashes before our eyes. My father, the great Partisan, nothing but a scared peasant wiping babies’ noses in a root cellar.”

Vlado worried that almost any response would seem weak, banal, but he tried anyway.

“Even Tito lied about these things,” he said. “Now everyone says he was sick in a cave during what was supposed to have been his greatest battle.”

“Yes, but Tito lied about everything. That was his job. This is my father, Vlado, and I’d always been a big enough fool to believe him. One of the reasons I wanted to be a big shot police investigator was so I might have half the adventures he did. When the war started, it’s why I almost quit to join the army, figuring it was my biggest chance yet for heroics. And if it hadn’t been for my mother crying and throwing a fit about it-and thank God she did-then I would have. Now, who knows.” He shrugged, kept walking. “So, here I am. Just taking a walk and doing my job. I’ll get over it, though.”

But it was clear that for a while, at least, he wouldn’t. Even Damir’s customary medicine for a black mood-women and alcohol, taken liberally for one full evening-might be too weak to bring about a quick recovery. Vlado wondered what to say next, if anything. He tried out a few phrases in his head until his thoughts were interrupted by a gunshot, loud and close, echoing from across the river.

Whenever a sniper opened fire in daylight, it flipped a switch on every nervous system within range, especially for anyone standing in an exposed line of fire. Slack jaws tightened, eyes widened, bodies bent and curled, as if trying to melt into the pavement.

One never grew accustomed to it no matter how long the war dragged on, because inevitably someone got caught in the wrong place, fell, blood pooling, and became the twitching center of an empty circle as everyone else scattered. The circle remained empty until the danger passed and an ambulance came. Then the crowds leeched back toward the middle, and the body vanished. The blood remained, for the rain to wash away.

The body in question this time was a man in military uniform, about 30 feet ahead, in an intersection sheltered neither by buildings nor the walls of old cars stacked in protective barriers.

A woman who had just trotted through the area gasped upon reaching the safety of the corner where Vlado and Damir stood.

“I was practically next to him when it happened,” she said, eyes wide, a hand across her mouth, eyes wide. Her makeup was beginning to give way to a burst of perspiration. The right shoulder of her coat was spattered with the man’s blood.

“He was just walking,” she said, verging on hysteria. “Just walking. Like he thought he was any old place, while everyone else was running. He should have known better. How couldn’t he have known?”

For a moment it appeared that no one would step in to see if the man was still alive. He wasn’t moving, and a semi-circle of blood oozed from beneath him like a scarlet cape thrown gracefully upon the ground. Then a large, well dressed man, smelling strongly of aftershave, shouldered through the crowd and trotted toward the body. He knelt quickly, a gold chain dangling from his neck.

“Stay back! I’ll take care of this,” he shouted. People on both sides edged closer to the open area, as if shamed into helping. He gripped the man beneath both arms, grunted, and dragged the body through a smearing path of blood to the sheltered area where Vlado and Damir stood.

“Maybe we need to do something,” Vlado said.

“Better leave this one alone,” Damir muttered. “The big guy runs one of the gasoline rackets. Must be one of his foot soldiers that got it.”

Reading Vlado’s thoughts, Damir said, “I guess he thought that being a man for all sides meant he was no longer at risk.”

Instead, the gangster’s bold stroll through the intersection had violated the siege’s unwritten code of conduct. If you showed a sniper respect, running like everyone else, chances are he would give you nothing but a bored glance through his sighting scope. But this fellow had made himself a walking insult, and a shooter, who may have intended to take the afternoon off, had been stirred to action.

For a moment the crowd’s attention was diverted by the nearby shouts of a small man who had begun angrily lecturing a U.N. soldier at a sentry post a half-block away.

“You will stand here doing nothing the entire war until they kill us all!” the little man shouted, over and over, his face livid with rage. The plastic sacks in his hands, one filled with rice and the other with bread, swung back and forth like pendulums, as the man spluttered and roared. The soldier, a Jordanian, didn’t seem to comprehend the local language, although he couldn’t have missed the message. He stared blankly ahead while the man moved closer, dropping one his bags to point and jab at the soldier’s blue helmet.

The sight was arresting enough that at first Vlado paid little attention when Damir began to speak.

“The gypsy case is all yours, Vlado. In fact, the whole rest of the war is yours.”

Damir strolled away. As Vlado turned, he saw to his alarm that Damir was heading straight into the open intersection where the man had just been shot, walking no faster than a shuffling old man, shoulders slumped and head bent, hands in his pockets.

“What are you doing?” Vlado shouted.

Damir stopped only for a moment, looking back with a cold blank anger in his eyes.

“Don’t worry Vlado, I will still do my job. I will have the gypsy ready for you, as requested.”

“Screw the work. Take the day off, the whole week. Just get yourself out of the open. Run!”

But Damir resumed his plodding gait, this time answering Vlado over his shoulder. “In my own good time, Vlado. Not yours or anyone else’s.”

The small crowd which had formed to watch the removal of the body now watched Damir with weary fascination. No one other than Vlado shouted or urged him on, conserving those energies for loved ones. Vlado decided to make a run for it, hoping to either tackle Damir or shove him to safety. Before he could move, there was a quick whizzing sound, followed by a loud metallic ping as a bullet struck a yellow traffic sign a few feet behind Damir. Then came the sharp report of the rifle itself, as the sound caught up to the consequences. The traffic sign quivered as if plucked by a hand from the clouds. A fresh hole rimmed in gray joined two others already orange with rust.

Surely the sniper would not miss twice, and Vlado again braced for a run, only to be interrupted by a second shot. It, too, struck the sign, though Damir had continued moving forward. Then came a third shot, and a fourth, with the sign pinging and quivering each time.

The sniper was taking target practice, and with each impact he was tapping out a message, a terse, cynical telegram of his disdain for them all.

Damir, of course, received the signal loud and clear, and as he finally reached the shelter of the opposite corner he turned and shouted to Vlado in a monotone, “You see, this is our war. Games of chance before a live audience. And when the killing spills into the grandstand, you and me get to sort it out. Maybe someday we can make up our own stories of how heroic it all was.”

Damir kept walking, neither faster nor slower than before. His footsteps were drowned out by the shouts from the U.N. sentry post. The small angry man had still not relented in his harangue of the soldier, who, for all the impassiveness of his face, might as well have been made of lead.

The gypsy’s home was predictable enough, like just about any other overcrowded apartment in the city these days: two rooms, with paint peeling on dingy walls, a garden hose creeping across the walls like a long green snake, carrying gas from an illegal hookup to a makeshift stove and to a second nozzle mounted precariously at eye level, spurting a small jet of flame that provided the only light in the gloom of late afternoon. On the stove was a large pot encrusted with day-old beans. The window glass was gone, taped over with milky, billowing plastic. The bed was pushed into a corner away from the window. A small bassinette sat nearby on the floor. The air was rank from sweat, whiskey, old food, and soiled diapers. And, yes, the smell of blood.

On the bed was the body of a large man sprawled face-down, his head a pulp of gore and matted hair. A hammer lay in the floor nearby, plastered with more of the same mess. Vlado took out his notebook and sat in a small chair to wait for Tomislav Grebo, who in the pared down police department was now both the evidence technician and the medical examiner, although his police work was decidedly secondary to his part-time career as a scrounger and small-time retailer. Grebo was in partnership with his cousin Mycky, who had a knack for coming up with the odds and ends necessary to keep life running in a broken city. Most mornings you’d find them seated behind a card table in the dimness of the drafty old market hall in the city center, peddling plumbing equipment that came in handy for everything from gas hookups to makeshift stoves. They’d recently expanded their operation to a second table, carrying stray cartons of Marlboros or whatever other items they managed to procure.

This meant it always took a few minutes to round up Grebo. Usually someone had to reach him on foot. But within a half hour he breezed into the apartment, rubbing his hands against the cold. He was tall and thin, with an unruly thatch of wavy dark brown hair and a thick mustache drooping above a long, narrow chin.

Grebo looked toward the bed, grimaced, then pulled an Instamatic camera from a bulging coat pocket.

“What’s today’s special?” Vlado asked, trying to cheer himself out of the funk he’d been in since watching Damir walk away.

“Cigarette lighters. BICs, too. Mycky came up with a whole case, don’t ask me how.” He paused, placing his cigarette on a small table, a column of ash hanging over the edge. “We sold a few and swapped some others for beer-Amstel, not the local shit-and a bag of salt.”

He snapped a photo, the flash popping, then waited for the print to slide from the front of the camera.

“Not a bad morning. He thinks if we’re patient we can trade the rest for gasoline.”

“Why would anyone trade gasoline for cigarette lighters?” Vlado asked.

Grebo lowered his camera, frowning. “Why would anyone trade a blow job for Marlboros?”

“Good point.”

“It all depends on need. Supply and demand. This is gut level capitalism, Vlado. After the war everything will be banks, accountants, and middlemen, so learn the easy stuff while you can.”

Vlado was used to these lectures. It amused him to think of the likes of Grebo as the future of the city’s economy. Yet he admitted that the ways of barter and the black market baffled him. He considered his new jar of Nescafe. Perhaps he could trade a little for something to break the monotony of his diet, even if only for some cabbage.

“How much cabbage do you think I could get for a quarter pound of Nescafe?” he asked.

Grebo again lowered his camera, scowling now. “Jesus, Mary, and God, Vlado,” Grebo said. Like Vlado, Grebo’s father was a Muslim, his mother a Catholic, and he had been baptized a Catholic. But like some in Sarajevo, he expressed his religious affiliation mostly through his choice of curse words. “Only an idiot would trade coffee for cabbage.”

“But you just said …”

“That’s different. Marlboros for blow jobs, yes. Coffee for cabbage, not even on the same map. It’s a matter of comparable worth. I keep telling you, it’s supply and demand. You’re still thinking like a Communist, a fucking Yugoslav. Coffee’s as good as hard currency, save it for something special. Cabbage you can get with army cigarettes, and army cigarettes you can get anywhere.” He glanced furtively around the room, adding in a lowered voice. “You might even find some here, unless the gypsy’s cleared them out.”

Vlado continued to brood about his Nescafe. If not cabbage, then maybe some oranges? It made him tired to think about it. Better just to keep the coffee or he’d only end up feeling cheated.

They stepped around the body as they talked, not once mentioning it. Grebo snapped photos while Vlado jotted a note now and then, plotting out the room’s dimensions in case anyone ever asked, which no one ever did. They began talking of food. People in Sarajevo sometimes seemed to talk of nothing else.

“Did you hear about Garovic,” Grebo said. “Eating again on the U.N.’s tab, and they took him to Club Yez. Again.”

Garovic was Lutva Garovic, their boss. Club Yez was Sarajevo’s best restaurant, safe and snug in a deep, brick cellar with a fireplace and a piano player. Every bottle at its bar had the right label, no matter what was really inside, and the kitchen had spices and fresh meat. Deutschemarks only. U.N. people, foreign journalists, and successful smugglers were the only ones who could afford the place, and on any given night they could be found dining together, asking no questions of each other except perhaps whether the special was worth a try.

“His third time this month,” Grebo said, disgusted. “And of course he had to tell me all about it. He was going on and on about this piece of veal. A filet, ‘Pink as a puckered cunt,’ he said, the asshole. And twice as juicy’ All you can do is sit there and listen. Tell him what you really think and you’ll be up on Zuc shooting at Chetniks by the end of the week.”

“Fat chance. If he fires you he’ll have to fill out forms, recruit a replacement, answer questions to higher ups. Aggravation’s not his style.”

“You’re supposed to say he’d never let me go because I’m indispensable, Vlado. Because the department would fall apart without me.”

“As if that would be a tragedy. Besides, why bother sending you to the front when he can make your life miserable down here.”

“That’s for sure, the bastard.”

Two more policemen soon arrived to move the body back to Grebo’s lab. As Vlado and Grebo stepped from the apartment a low, deep thud echoed down from the hills to the north.

Grebo waved his right hand toward the sound. “Speaking of Zuc,” he said. “Busy as always, the poor bastards.”

By the time Vlado got back to the office, the gypsy woman was waiting at his desk with a policeman, just as Damir had promised, although he was nowhere to be seen.

The woman was short, petite, with delicate features and high cheek-bones. She’d obviously spent some time getting ready at her friend’s house, and her face was scrubbed and neatly made up, with bright lipstick carefully applied and her hair perfectly combed. She wore a smart brown skirt and tan blouse. After-murder wear, Vlado thought.

The interview went predictably. She said her husband was a brute, always drinking and gambling. He also dodged army conscription, she mentioned, her eyes flashing with a desperate stab at patriotism. Most people assumed that any official of the new government was swept up in the cause for Bosnian nationalism, and Vlado let them think it, finding it sometimes gave him leverage.

The woman continued. Her husband could’ve worked but never did, always too lazy or drunk. He beat her when he felt like it and yelled at the baby nonstop. They barely had enough to eat. This afternoon he’d slapped her, shaken the baby, then slapped the child as well before stumbling into bed, where he fell into a snoring stupor. She’d seen the hammer, picked it up, walked to the bed. Next thing she knew she was looking down at her sleeping husband, only he wasn’t sleeping anymore, and his head looked like a cherry tart. She picked up the baby and strolled to a neighbor’s, then dropped off the news along with the baby.

Neighbors would have to be interviewed to check parts of her story, but Vlado didn’t doubt it for a moment. He had half a mind to send her back to her son and let the court clerks sort it out in the morning. But a policeman was waiting in the hallway to take her to jail. Tomorrow judges would be presiding again in their unheated courtrooms with their dim dirty hallways, hoping that the day’s trials and hearings would not be interrupted by an explosion. Peacetime procedure marched on.

Vlado sighed, spent a few minutes typing her statement, then asked her to sign it. She read it slowly, hesitated for a moment, then scribbled her name. As Vlado added his signature she asked, “What will happen to my baby?”

Vlado replied without looking up: “An orphanage probably, at least for tonight.”

“How long will he be there?”

Had this really not occurred to her until now? Vlado thought back on the times he’d had to tell spouses and friends of murdered loved ones. There were almost always tears and awkward pauses, and he was always tempted to run away, to flee the grief as soon as possible, though instead he had to pay close attention, to check for false grief or lack of surprise. This was worse, somehow. News of death brought finality, an imperative to move on. The news for this woman promised only a long, indefinite slide into despair.

He glanced off to the side, fixing on a clock on a far wall which hadn’t worked for months, then slowly turned to meet her stare. Her eyes were filled with tears, but so far none had spilled.

“He’ll be there at least until your trial, unless you have family who will take him, of course.” She’d already mentioned she was an orphan.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “There is only me.”

They both knew that few people would be likely to take on an extra mouth to feed under these conditions. And who, for that matter, would want a gypsy baby.

“When the trial comes, you will be convicted. Your statement assures that. Even without it the evidence would be overwhelming. But if your neighbors can back up your story about your husband, who knows?” He shrugged. “Perhaps a judge will show restraint. You may be lucky. The sentence could be light.”

“And that would mean?”

“Three years, maybe more. Probably nothing less.”

She said nothing. A single tear had fallen across her right cheek, and she wiped it away. She stared straight ahead, jaws rigid, then gave a small nod. He stood, escorting her to the hallway, where the waiting policeman slept in a folding chair, bundled against the cold. His mouth was agape, exhaling peaceful sighs of vapor into the dark corridor. Vlado jostled him, and in a few moments he and the woman were gone, their footsteps echoing down the stairwell.

Grebo’s mass of hair bobbed around the corner.

“Just finishing up,” he said, briskly wiping his hands on a towel, the sharp reek of chemicals accompanying him like a separate presence. “It looks like twenty-six blows, give or take a few. Quite a bashing for such a little thing. The famous gypsy anger, Exhibit A. Listen, I’ve got a bottle of some homemade slivovitz for a little after-curfew drink if you can wait a minute or two.”

Vlado sagged with the thought of making conversation. He preferred sleep and silence.

“No thanks,” he answered. “I’m a little done in. Have one for me, though.”

“That you can count on. See you tomorrow then if there’s any action. I’ll leave the report on your desk. No surprises, though. The man had enough alcohol in his blood to light a stove.”

There was hardly a sound outside as Vlado stepped toward the doors of the downstairs exit. It was only a few minutes before curfew, so the streets would be empty except for military police and a few prostitutes desperate for one last transaction. If the phones were working when he got home, he would call to see how Damir was doing. It was cloudy, but the rain had stopped. Sniper fire had popped throughout the day like bacon in a skillet, but overall it had been another quiet afternoon, even down by the river. Maybe it would last for the rest of the month.

Then, just before Vlado pushed open the door there was a gunshot-loud, sharp, perhaps only a few blocks away

Sniper fire at night inspired an altogether different behavior. Nobody scattered unless the Serbs fired off a flare. There were no street-lights, and the darkness encouraged a tame version of defiance and bravado, a little flirting with the local brand of fatalism that Damir had displayed so recklessly that afternoon.

So it was that Vlado’s response to the gunshot was to light a cigarette as he stood on the porch, inhaling deeply to brighten the orange pinprick of light.

Here I am, if you’re interested, the cigarette said. But I’m betting you’re too lazy.

He strolled down the steps and toward the bridge, the streets quiet again except for the rasp of his soles against wet grit. He crossed, gazing at the dimness of the water below, the white flecks of foam and ripples barely visible in the filtered moonlight. He passed under a banner strung across the bridge, as if for a holiday parade, which warned, CAUTION. SNIPER! Turning left off the bridge, he headed another block toward the corner that would take him out of the line of fire, telling himself not to rush, not to panic. Then he asked himself, Who are we fooling here, and he quickened his pace. A dark form lay ahead on the sidewalk.

He stopped.

It was a lump, curled, man-size.

It was a body.

He stooped for a closer look and smelled sweaty wool and something metallic. A widening pool of black liquid oozed toward his feet, warm to the touch, a bit sticky. It seemed to be coming from the head. Vlado reached down to an arm, grasping the wrist to check for a pulse, finding none, but noticing a heavy, expensive watch. Nice cufflinks, too, and the coat had the feel of a rich cashmere. A well dressed man, as far as one could tell in the dark.

He’d probably been killed by the gunshot a few moments ago, doubtless from someone perched in a window across the river, some asshole with a nightscope and nothing better to do. Vlado angrily tossed his cigarette away, watching the small trail of sparks arch through the night as it fell.

For a moment he felt paralyzed. In all these months of war and four years as an investigator, he had never been the one to discover a body. Always he’d been summoned, until this moment. In a matter of hours he had seen one man shot and a second one needlessly risk his life. And now this, a body at his feet with no one else in sight. It was deeply unsettling, but there was also the undeniable hint of a thrill, because for a moment only he and the killer knew. Perhaps the sniper was watching him even now, had listened to Vlado’s footsteps and watched the flung cigarette floating end over end, while knowing exactly what terrible knowledge was unfolding down on the corner.

But the sniper had not bargained on the arrival of a professional, someone to whom this would be not just an ordeal but a revelation to learn from, a jittery taste of the odd intimacy between killer and victim.

Vlado straightened and walked around the corner into a sheltered street until he reached the next block. He looked both ways, and to the left he could barely make out a guard in front of the Interior Ministry fifty yards away.

“You,” he shouted, his voice loud but somehow weak at the same time. There was no movement. Was the man dozing? Dead?

Finally the guard turned, shouting back gruffly, “It is after curfew. You must come here for questioning. Slowly, please.”

Vlado heard the click of a gun’s safety.

“I’m a policeman,” he shouted back, feeling the tone of authority return to his voice. “Detective Inspector Petric. There’s a man who’s been shot over here by the river. Come and help me. Now.”

The soldier-or was he military police? Hard to tell in the dark, they all carried the same weapons-strolled over at a leisurely pace. But his nonchalance stiffened when Vlado led him into the field of fire by the river, and as they prepared to lift the body he glanced repeatedly toward the wall of darkness on the hillside across the water.

“Help me move him,” Vlado said. “You take the arms.” Let him rub against that mess of a head, Vlado thought. “I’ll take the legs.”

The guard gasped, and Vlado didn’t need to ask why.

Vlado figured they might as well haul the body to the porch of the police building. Grebo could write it up and call the hospital, save the boys at the morgue a few minutes of paperwork. They’d owe him one.

“Why are we crossing the river,” the guard whispered urgently, sounding alarmed as they moved onto the bridge, the water gurgling below.

“Relax. We’re taking him to police headquarters. It’s only a few more yards.”

As soon as they reached the porch, the soldier dropped the dead man’s arms. He was already worried he’d be missed at his post. He looked down, brushing the front of his uniform and checking for bloodstains, then began to ease away.

“Hold on a minute,” Vlado said. He ordered the young man to fetch Grebo from upstairs.

The porch was sheltered from fire, so Vlado drew out his lighter for a better look.

Good God. Right in the face. A bigger mess than the gypsy’s husband. Still, there was something vaguely familiar in what remained of the jawline, in the bulk and shape of the body.

Grebo pushed through the door, followed by the soldier.

“Christ, Vlado. Knew you should have stayed for a drink. How close were you?”

“Not very. I think I heard the shot as I was coming out the door. He was over the river, a block down.”

“And you brought him back here?” A hint of irritation in the voice.

“Figured we might as well handle him, or that you could at least take a look,” Vlado said, feeling stupid now, sheepish.

Grebo shrugged, exhaling through his nose, fumes of plum brandy misting into the night, then pulled a penlight from a shirt pocket and flicked the beam toward the ruined face. Vlado looked away this time, focusing on Grebo, and saw his eyebrows arch in surprise.

“This one’s no sniper,” Grebo said, leaning closer, squinting now. “Whoever did this was close.”

“Close enough to be on the same side of the river?”

“Close enough to be stepping on his toes.”

Vlado let that sink in, then announced what Grebo already knew:

“I guess he’s our customer then.”

“Looks that way.”

Now it would be necessary to work, and a mixture of weariness and distaste came over Vlado, though not without a stirring of his slumbering curiosity. His mind shifted into the rote workings of an investigator fresh on a crime scene, and his first thought was a question: Why kill someone in a known sniper zone, unless you wanted it to look like a sniper had done it? That would imply a plan, something more than blind emotion at work, perhaps even something elaborate for a change. It had possibilities, he told himself.

He thought of the guard, who’d already disappeared back to his post without a word and would now have to be questioned, to find out if he’d seen or heard anyone nearby a few minutes earlier. Same thing for the whores at Skenderia, if any had been on duty at this hour. They would have been just across the river from the shooting, skulking next to the sandbagged walls that kept them out of the line of fire but still handy to the French and Egyptian soldiers. Perhaps they’d heard something before or after, though God knows they couldn’t have seen a thing in this darkness.

Already he’d made mistakes. He thought with disgust of how he and the guard had trampled all over the murder scene, stepping in the blood, then dragging the main piece of evidence down the street and over a bridge. He realized with mild alarm how much he’d let himself begin to slip, despite all his precautions. There was no excuse for it. He made a note to himself to bathe and shave tonight the minute he was home, no matter how cold the water, even if he had to head out in the morning with a load of empty jugs to stand in line for a fresh supply.

For now, he’d have to return with a flashlight to the spot where he’d found the body and search the scene-carefully, though, flicking the light sparingly lest he attract the attention of a real sniper-looking for the pool of blood and whatever else might be around.

But first things first. The victim needed to be identified.

Vlado reached behind the body and pulled out the man’s wallet. It seemed full, about seventy D-marks in all, a small fortune these days. There had certainly been no robbery.

“Give me a light,” he said to Grebo, who turned his penlight toward the wallet. The narrow beam landed on the identification photo, that of a brown-eyed man in his mid-to-late forties, coal-black hair. Vlado recognized him at once.

“ Esmir Vitas,” he said, without bothering to read the fine print, and his stomach made a small leap.

“Vitas,” Grebo said. “Sounds familiar.”

“It should. He’s chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police. Or was.” He looked up at Grebo. “I’d say he’s our customer all right.”