Lie in the Dark

CHAPTER 8

Vlado had always found a certain appeal in searching the rooms and apartments of the dead-once the body was removed, of course. It was like entering a time capsule, a privileged look at the snapshot of a life in progress, the point of departure for another unfortunate soul.

It was this oddly pleasant sense of anticipation that kept Vlado going on his way to Vitas’s apartment, that kept him from glancing too many times over his shoulder. Although he was still shaken by the encounter at the slaughterhouse, he doubted anyone there had gone to the trouble of following him.

He wondered idly how Damir had fared. He was probably finished by now, while Vlado had yet another stop after this one. He found himself wishing wearily that he’d parceled out more of the day’s chores. But perhaps Kasic was right. Vlado had probably best handle most of the work himself. No sense in getting the ministry any more perturbed than it already was, or they might strip him of the case altogether, appearances be damned.

Vitas’s apartment was ten minutes away, on the third floor of what had been a nice building in a late-eighteenth-century section of downtown built during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After fumbling for a moment with the large key Kasic had given him, Vlado pushed open the heavy wooden door.

Right away he was impressed by the lack of grandeur, the absence of fine things. Vitas had never struck him as the acquisitive sort, or as a connoiseur who might have collected art or furniture, but Vlado had at least expected a mild expression of the vulgarity that commonly afflicts bachelors reaching the top of their field in middle age. Yet here was Vitas’s television, no large Western model but a small-screen hunk of brown plastic at least twenty years old. Not that a better set would be good for anything these days.

Vitas’s stereo was similarly old, with a broad turntable and a high spindle for stacking albums five at a time. Looking at it you could almost hear the painful clacking, skidding sound of vinyl against vinyl.

The walls were bare except for an old engraving of the city mounted above the couch. No framed certificates or awards from his army days. No photos of family or friends.

There was also no electrical generator, a mild surprise in the apartment of someone with such a high rank. He did have a sturdy new woodstove, and next to it was an ample stack of neatly chopped wood. And the trim copper pipes of well-installed gas lines gleamed from a few corners of the ceiling. Someone had been called in to rig it up, no doubt. And why not? What was the worth of power and privilege if it didn’t at least bring a few comforts.

Vlado’s second impression was that he wasn’t the only other person who’d been here recently. He felt an unmistakable presence of someone recently departed from the room, though he also felt this was silly, because if Kasic’s people had been here first-and they probably had, seeing as how Kasic had no misgivings about searching Vitas’s office-then they’d have probably finished here early this morning.

As he strolled around there were small signs of disturbance-partly opened drawers, furniture moved slightly off its old marks in the carpet. The signs stood out because the apartment otherwise seemed to be the home of someone compulsively neat and careful. No dust. No clutter. Vitas had not let things slide just because there was a war on.

Vlado thought of his own place, where pots crusted with beans were only halfheartedly scoured before the next batch went in. Spilled grains of rice were scattered to every corner of the small kitchen floor, and lately he’d never seemed to have the energy or inclination to track them down. His bed hadn’t been made in weeks, and the sheets had gone gray from so little washing. True, he had bathed and shaved last night as he’d vowed to himself. But he remembered his towel, sour and stuffed into a corner of the bathroom. Here, fresh towels were folded neatly on shelves in the bathroom, which smelled lightly and pleasantly of soap and aftershave. A candle stood in a small saucer in a hardened puddle of wax.

There were clean sheets on the bed, a bedspread neatly tucked at each corner. In fact, every room except the dining room, which faced north with plastic taped and retaped over the window, seemed in tidy order. This was not the home of a man whose life was at loose ends, nor of anyone who had grown careless.

As Vlado walked toward the kitchen, he heard a stirring of noise from the apartment next door, a thumping sound followed by the crying of a child, someone else’s life going on. Then silence again.

Vlado checked the refrigerator. A large block of ice sat on a shelf, dripping slowly. Some meat was beginning to go bad. There was a half-full bottle of milk. Vlado uncapped it and sniffed. Still fresh. He was tempted to take a swallow. It had been more than a year since he’d had any. He’d never much liked it before but the smell suddenly seemed so beckoning, so full of past associations. But something held him back, whether professionalism or the higher calling of this case or the feeling that he was being tested, examined as he went about his work. If someone else had been here earlier, he might always come back.

Vlado saved for last the large Victorian desk in the corner of Vitas’s bedroom, its dark mahogany rich with nooks and pigeonholes. A kerosene lantern hung overhead from a newly installed hook. The ceiling above it was blackened slightly, presumably from many nights of use.

The desk was the only place in the house where there were overt signs of disarray, although it was impossible to say whether they had resulted from a search or from Vitas’s own energies.

Vlado went through some papers on top, finding nothing of import. In a few upper cubbyholes were stubs of bills from before the war, along with subscription notices from foreign magazines, still stacked chronologically leading up to the final months, when all such accounts halted. There were a few old letters still tucked in their envelopes, the tops torn open neatly: one from a friend in Vienna, chatty and banal, another from Zagreb, a third from Belgrade, all predating the war and each apparently worthless to Vlado. But he wrote down the names and addresses, all the same.

Nowhere was there any address book, which Vlado found particularly irritating, because there also hadn’t been one among the box of possessions at Vitas’s office. Kasic himself must have thumbed through it by now. Perhaps later he would receive a sanitized version. All he had in this line was the scribbled named and address that Grebo had found in Vitas’s watch pocket.

Among the bits of torn or crumpled paper in the wastebasket by the desk were a few aborted letters to friends, with only a few paragraphs in each, discarded either out of futility with the writing or with the prospect that they might not reach their destinations for months, if at all.

Then one of these false starts caught his eye from the bottom of the pile, not so much for anything it said as for how it was addressed:

“Dear Mother,” it began. There was no date.

So much for his mother being dead, although Kasic had sounded fairly sure. Vlado searched for her address, finding no sign of it on the letter and no envelope on the desk or in the wastebasket. Nor were any clues to be found in the two paragraphs Vitas had written, bland offerings that he was in good health and hoped that she, too, was well.

He looked back through the wastebasket for the other two letters. They were both written on wafer-thin air-mail paper, because even though you sent outgoing mail through departing journalists or via the Jewish Center, someone eventually paid postage, so you tried to keep the weight light.

The note to his mother, however, was on a cream-colored bond, the sort of sturdy writing paper a mother might buy for her son in hopes of receiving some of it back someday This, too, seemed to be another leftover from Vitas’s life before the war, as outdated now as the magazines and bills from an era that already seemed centuries old.

He searched the remaining compartments of the desk. One locking drawer, which Vlado would bet had been forced and sprung, held only old financial records, a few family documents, and a faded photo of an attractive woman standing next to a far younger Esmir Vitas, with nothing written on the back. There seemed to be nothing else of any interest, no names and numbers of butchers or cigarette cutters or whiskey smugglers. If there had been earlier, by now they were stuffed in some file drawer at the Interior Ministry.

By now he could barely see to read anyway. The light had faded to late dusk. As he stood up from the desk the smell of the butcher’s gift of meat wafted toward him, making his stomach growl in spite of the apprehension he felt over everything to do with Hrnic. He locked the apartment and started down the stairs, again hearing a child’s cry from next door. Once outside, he looked slowly around him but the streets were already empty. Then he trudged toward the river for his final stop of the day.

It was a visit he’d been subconsciously steeling himself for since morning, knowing it would best be delayed until dark. And considering that he had talked to Jasmina only an hour earlier, he felt almost guilty to be making the visit at all, especially because in a small, uncertain way he was looking forward to it.

By the time he reached the Skenderia barracks’ darkness the only light was from a small bank of floodlights the French had installed at the perimeter of their compound. Vlado worked his way toward the sandbags stacked at the entrance. Up close you could smell their dampness, an odor like wet cement that conveyed their weight and density. The French had built the walls on a day long ago when the fighting had finally slackened. Vlado had watched from an office window as they piled the bags methodically with a series of solid thunks, a sound that made one realize the very noise a bullet would make when it struck-a muffled thwack as the shell made a puckered hole, followed by the hiss of pouring sand.

Just around the corner from the entrance, as Vlado knew from his one previous venture, was the nearest place of business for local prostitutes. By dusk a few had always gathered, like birds flocking at sunset to the bare sheltering trees of a park.

Any earlier and they’d have been too well lit even for the U.N. to tolerate. They’d be ordered off by some sentry dipping his face low into the gathering as much to catch a whiff of perfume as to maintain discretion as he advised them, quite civilly, to please clear off, commander’s orders.

But there was no shooing them once darkness fell, not unless the garrison commander wanted a mutiny on his hands, for what other pleasures were there to be taken from this forlorn posting. The French were assigned to abut the frontlines of two sworn enemies, camped along the banks of a river coveted by both while shells and bullets sailed overhead in either direction. Your blue helmet was good for little more than scorn and a guaranteed ticket home if you made it through your six-month tour of duty unscathed. So what did it matter, then, if one bought an occasional woman, or even if a particularly enterprising soldier or two went into a little business for themselves as employers of the local talent. Better to have that sort of distraction than to have too much to drink and perhaps put your fellow soldiers at risk as well.

The spot was exactly where Vlado had made his own ludicrous transaction with the edgy young prostitute-“the bank teller” was how he thought of her now-and he tensed as he rounded the corner.

He found four women waiting, spaced a few yards apart. A sentry was posted just a bit farther around the bend. You could just make out his rifle barrel and the tips of his boots.

None of the women was smoking. That would have been spending their wages as they worked.

Vlado cleared his throat. Four faces rose to meet his, and he saw her right away, the third one down the line. She wore a red wool dress, still looking a bit prim and businesslike for the profession, although the dress looked rehemmed, or so he would have guessed, about four inches above the knee. The difference from before was that her makeup was heavier, caked and penciled with obvious care but leaving an impression of-what? – certainly not passion, nor willing abandon. Something melancholy, frozen. Yet she was definitely surer of herself than a month earlier, it seemed.

“I’m Inspector Petric,” he said, “and I need to question the four of you for a moment about a shooting last night.”

“Which one, there were only about a thousand,” replied the nearest woman, the tallest, with long dark hair. She wore a fake fur coat slouched open to reveal a silky black dress. The other two, he noticed, were quite conventionally dressed. Either they were newcomers or they simply didn’t care. Or perhaps with a captive clientele like this, there was a certain market for sheer normalcy, the fantasy shopclerk whisked off the street and straight into your armored personnel carrier.

“I’m interested in a single shot fired a little before nine, just before closing time, and probably the loudest one you would have heard all day if you were standing here for long. The victim was standing across the river, a little downstream. Maybe fifty meters from here. Maybe more. And it wasn’t a sniper. Whoever shot him was standing right there with him.”

“And you think maybe we climbed up on the bags here for a better look, or to maybe offer a better target,” the first one piped up again, now lighting a Marlboro, showing off her wealth and, in turn, her position among her peers. “Listen, the last thing that’s going to catch my attention is a gunshot. Unless they’re shooting at me they’re welcome to fire all day.”

“It’s not the shot itself I’m interested in. It’s the moments just before or after, anything you might have seen or heard right around the time of curfew. The footsteps of someone in a hurry. A car driving on the road by the river, that’s rare enough these days. Or any customer you might have turned loose in that direction just before. Anything at all, really, because the streets weren’t exactly crawling with witnesses at that hour.”

“Well, sweet one, we’re sorry, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to report from here.”

“And you’re the spokesman for this business association?”

“For the U.N., in fact.”

She extended her hand, as if for a very British handshake. “Chief of public affairs, U.N. bureau of personal services,” she said, cackling with a husky wheeze.

Vlado turned toward the others. “So nothing comes to mind then from last night. Nothing out of the ordinary or even noticeable,” he asked, but the first one was still the only one talking.

“If we told you what came to mind from last night you’d get so excited we’d have to charge you,” she said, while the others shrugged mutely. “Otherwise, it was nothing but the usual run of lonely faces and insulting offers. Am I right, ladies?”

A series of small nods. Vlado’s woman in red stared at the ground. He wanted to take her by the shoulders, force her to look him in the eye, though he couldn’t say for sure if it was only because he wanted some answers to his questions. Whatever, it was an obvious dead end as long as the taller woman was in charge. He should have let Damir handle this, as his first instincts had told him. Damir would have had this experienced old crone chatting and sharing cigarettes with him by now, spilling half her life’s story along the way.

“Well. If anything does occur to you later, I’m right down the block, fourth floor. Inspector Petric.”

“Don’t worry, we know the place,” the first woman’s voice called after him as he strolled around the curve of sandbags. “Some of our best customers work there. Good tippers, too, I hear.”

Her cackle rose high into the darkness, and Vlado flushed in spite of himself.

By the time Vlado reached his apartment a misty cold rain was falling. He was fatigued and hungry. It was his longest workday in months.

Yet he was energized in a way he hadn’t been since the beginning of the war. Certainly the case had problems, severe ones. But for all its portents of fear and difficulty, he’d no sooner go back to cases of murdered gypsies and drunks than he would go back to that slaughterhouse, with its stench of blood and panic.

He’d begun the investigation with doubts of his own abilities, and some persisted. Was he in over his head? Perhaps. But who wouldn’t be on this landscape, where rules and allegiances could change by the hour.

Far more worrisome than his lack of expertise was the thrust of the early evidence, such as it was. It seemed too pat, too tailored to his own needs, and those of the Interior Ministry. It might well be a concoction, either for the gain of the informers or for their bosses, who may have been eager to hide something far more complex and lucrative. Even if they were telling the truth, what would it matter. Their stories provided few useful details.

If Vlado was merely interested in disposing of the case in a tidy fashion, as Garovic would doubtless prefer, he felt sure that he need only hand over his and Damir’s four “sources” to Kasic for further questioning. Then, given enough time for more persuasive interrogation or more creative imaginations to bear fruit, Kasic’s people would emerge with enough to craft a conclusion.

Someone would be selected from the rough list of mobsters to take the blame. Perhaps the mobsters would even nominate one of their own, seizing a chance to further winnow the competition. The fellows at the slaughterhouse certainly wouldn’t be above such a trick.

Then the case would be turned back over to Vlado for its official closing, a fiction that he would sign and offer in triplicate to the appropriate international observers. It would be wrapped in the same soiled bundle with Vitas’s bloodied reputation, waved a few times before an uninterested world, then dropped out of sight and forgotten.

Vlado made up his mind that he would not proceed that way, not without being ordered to do so, even if it meant plodding through weeks of dead ends. Besides the possible danger of this approach, the only problem was that he had precious few leads.

But he did have one. Dead end or not, it might take the better part of a day to check out, if only because of its location.

He pulled from his satchel the crumpled name and address that had been in Vitas’s pocket the night of the murder. Then he lit a lazy two-inch flame from the nozzle of the hose leading across his kitchen wall. He strolled to a bookshelf and drew down a battered map of the city, unfolding it on the kitchen table in the flickering light.

“Milan Glavas” was the name on the strip of paper, and the address was indeed in Dobrinja, meaning Vlado would need a car. He traced his finger along the route, crossing the map’s creases and small tears. As always with maps, this one took him into the past, into parks and playgrounds with his daughter, into meandering walks of his youth on narrow wooded paths leading up into the hills. He ran his finger down familiar lanes and alleys, crossing snowbanks and green meadows from older, better days, passing the smells of a favorite bakery, the welcoming call of an old friend, now dead.

The world had been so large then, even if the city had been smaller. You could stroll up a mountain to catch a breeze from the northeast knowing that its smell and the way it felt in your lungs would tell you a little bit about every boundary and shoreline it had crossed to reach you-down from the Alps and across Italy, then over the Adriatic and into the dry hills of Dalmatia before finally climbing the green passes and mountains of Bosnia, to this city in the valley.

Nowadays the air only seemed stale and confined, which Vlado knew made no sense. And for the first time in nearly two years he felt the urge to climb upon the roof of his apartment building, to breathe deeply of the mountain air and again heed the call of distant lands. He would inspect his city as it reposed before him in the night, its scars hidden by the darkness. The Serbs should not be the only ones to enjoy the view.

He climbed the ladder slowly, listening for the whistle of a shell that could drive him back down, but the night was quiet. Stepping onto the roof into a scatter of broken glass, he found to his pleasure that the mist had cleared, and somewhere from behind the clouds the moon cast a pale light through the canopy. A staccato message of gunfire called to him from the west, but it was distant, harmless.

He strained his eyes toward the hills to the south, across the far bank of the river, wondering if anyone might be stirring along the battlefronts. Then he turned west, gazing toward the black hump of Zuc, gathered like a sleeping bear. To the north he scanned more ridges, then to the east. And at every vantage point, he knew, were men and weapons that could kill him in an instant if they knew he were out here, looking their way. He wondered what those men must see by day when they looked in this direction, the omnipotence they must feel as they aimed their barrels at buildings and people, seeing unmistakably who stood to die, or what buildings stood to fall, then watching the explosions as their shots soared to their destination.

The image brought to mind some verses from his youth, a poem from one of his advanced English classes. Who had written it? Stevenson, he remembered. Yes, Robert Louis Stevenson, the name that had sounded so funny and foreign to his ears at the time. The poem was “The Land of Counterpane,” and in having to memorize it some of the verses had stuck with him, had become his favorites because of the way they reminded him of his own boyhood-a child at home in bed with his toys arrayed about him like a tiny empire, of which he was lord and master.

He remembered a line from the middle, something about sending his “ships in fleets all up and down among the sheets.”

But it was the last verse that captured his fancy most, and which now came to him as he thought of the artillery men in their mountain bunkers, staring down toward his home:

I was the giant great and still

That sits upon the pillow-hill,

And sees before him, dale and plain,

The pleasant land of counterpane.

He looked toward the hills again, and, as at other times, he sensed a subterranean machinery at work, a heave and rumble of forces barely contained by the seams of the horizon. Perhaps if you put your ear to the ground, he fancied, you would even hear it, a throb like a pulse, giving life and order to every terrible action up above.

He yearned to glimpse that machinery, to slip unnoticed between the sliding teeth of its gears and find the men at the controls; to take them unawares and to know. Simply to know.

For all its flaws, Vlado decided, this case was his own best chance to do so, but first he had to believe that entry was possible. He decided it would be, if only because from what little he’d already glimpsed, perhaps the people at the controls weren’t always so vigilant. Two years of wartime had left them as dulled and careless as everyone else.

With a final glance toward the far side of the river, Vlado climbed back down the ladder. Then he gently refolded the map, sliced a bit of the cured meat from the butcher’s generous offering, and poured a glass of water from a plastic jug. That was dinner, and tonight it seemed like plenty, a feast of the privileged.

Before climbing into bed under a down blanket and three layers of wool, he reached for the stiff plumbing knob that controlled the gas jet. He thought for a moment of painting his soldiers. They sat on the workbench in the corner, untouched for days, going slack and undisciplined on him. He smiled at that thought, then shut off the gas, too weary for anything but sleep. The flame guttered briefly at the tip of the nozzle before disappearing without a sound, back up into the hose toward its source deep in the ground.

Through the wall he could hear his neighbor’s radio, playing for the first time in weeks. They must have somehow gotten new batteries. And he drifted toward sleep to the faint, tinny strains of an old folk tune from the Dalmatian coast, a guitar twanging against the static, while a silky layer of cold worked its way up under the blankets.

He fell into a restless dream, where the bright faces of women from the day’s streets and walkways came toward him in an anxious and beckoning parade. They smiled, but their makeup was heavy, the colors slightly off. They were too pale and garish, as if they had all been daubed and prettified by the cool, brisk hands of a mortician. But he strolled toward them, nonetheless.