Nowhere Man

5. The Deep Sleep

CHICAGO, SEPTEMBER 1/

OCTOBER 15, 1995

The Slumbering guard, about to slide off his chair, had his fingers on the holstered revolver. Pronek passed him by, pushed the grill door aside, and stepped into the elevator. The elevator was rife with a woman’s fragrant absence: peachy, skinny, dense. Pronek imagined the woman who might have exuded that scent, and she was worth a stare. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking; her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle; she had black eyes and a sulky droop to her lips. She took a cigarette out of her purse, which was heavier than it needed to be, turned to him and said, expecting a friendly lighter: “I’ve been searching for someone, and now I know who.”

Pronek’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the space where the woman would have stood, and he saw himself through her eyes: tall, formerly lanky, so his relaxed movements did not match his fat-padded trunk; his head almost shaved, marred by a few pale patches (he cut his own hair); a gray sweatshirt that read ILLINOIS across his chest; worn-out jeans with a few pomegranate-juice splotches; and boots that had an army look, save for the crack in his left sole — September rains had already soaked his left sock. As he stepped out of the elevator, a whiff of the fragrant cloud followed him out. He stood in the empty hall: on the left and on the right, there were rows of doors standing at attention in the walls. Above a door on the right was a lit exit sign. Pronek made an effort to remember the position — in case he was too much in a hurry to wait for an elevator. He was looking for office number 909 and decided to go right. The colorless carpet muffled his careful steps. The elbow-shaped hall reeked of bathroom ammonia and sweet cigars, and the fragrant whiff dissipated in it. Pronek tried to open the bathroom door — green, sturdy, with a silhouette of a man — but it was locked. When he pushed the door with his shoulder, it rattled: he could break it open without too much force. He figured that there would be fire stairs behind a milky bathroom window, and that the alley would lead to Michigan Avenue, where he could safely disappear in the street mass.

All of a sudden, Pronek became aware of a sound that had been in his ears for a while but not quite reaching his brain: it was a smothered, popping sound — first one, then two — with a click at the end. Much like the sound of a gun with a silencer. Pronek’s muscles tensed and his heart started thumping like a jungle drum — he was convinced that the hall was echoing his accelerating pulse. He felt his eyebrows dewing, thick loaves of pain forming in his calves. He tiptoed past the doors: 902 (Sternwood Steel Export); 904 (Marlowe Van Buren Software); 906 (Bernard Ohls Legal Services); 908 (empty); 910 (Riordan & Florian Dental Office) — the popping, along with the murky light, came from behind the dim glass of 910. Pronek imagined bodies lined up on the floor facedown, some of them already dead, with their blood and hair on the wall, their brains bubbling on the carpet. They were shivering, waiting for a quiet man with a marble-gray face to pop them in their napes, knowing they would end up in unmarked graves. They reacted to the surprising bullet with a spasm, then death relaxation, then their blood placidly soaking the carpet. There was another pop. There had been at least six of them, and Pronek reckoned that the killer must be running out of bullets. It was risky, it was none of his business, so he twisted the door handle and peeked in.

A large man in a yellow helmet was pressing his orange staple gun against the far wall. He sensed Pronek and turned around slowly. His skin was pale and he needed a shave. He had dirty overalls and a green shirt underneath, with tiny golf balls instead of buttons. He stood firmly facing Pronek, his jaw tense, as if expecting a punch, his staple gun pointing to the floor. “Can I help you with something?” he said, frowning under his helmet. Pronek could see his eyebrows almost encountering each other above his nose. “Sorry,” Pronek said. “I look for the office 909.”

Office 909 had a sign that read GREAT LAKES EYE and a black-and-white eye with long, upward-curling eyelashes. Pronek hesitated for a moment before knocking at the door — his fingers levitated, angled, in front of the eye. Pronek knocked, using three of his knuckles, the glass shook perilously, then he opened the door and entered an empty waiting room. There was another door, closed, and there were magazines strewn on the few chairs, even on the musty floor, as if someone had searched through them all. The waiting room was lit by a thin-necked lamp in the corner, leaning slightly as if about to snap. There was an underdeveloped cobweb without a spider in the upper left corner. A picture of an elaborate ocean sunset — as if somebody lit a match under the water — hung on the opposite wall. ACAPULCO, it said in the lower right corner, WHERE YOU WANT TO DREAM. Pronek stood in front of the picture, imagining himself playing the guitar on a beach in Acapulco, tears welling up in his eyes.

The door opened and a man and a woman came out. They were laughing convivially with someone who remained invisible. The man — tall and black — put on a fedora with a little bluish feather, which went perfectly with his dapper navy blue suit, snug on his wide shoulders, and his alligator boots with little explosions on his toes. The woman was pale and slim, with blond boyish hair and a pointy chin. She had a tight, muscular body, like a long-distance runner, and a beautiful lean neck. She kept the tip of her finger on her chin as she listened to the man inside, who said: “What you wanna do is get some pictures.” Pronek imagined touching gently the back of her neck, below the little tail of hair on her nape, and he imagined the tingle that would make her shudder. “You bet,” the woman said, stepping out of the waiting room, barely glancing at Pronek. “You got yourself a client, Owen,” the dapper man said, following the woman, and a head sprung out of the door, eyes bulging to detect Pronek. “Gee, a client,” the head said, and the couple giggled as they closed the door. “Why don’t you come in.”

Pronek followed the man inside, closing the croaking door behind him. The room was bright, its windows looking at Grant Park and the dun lake beyond it, waves gliding toward the shore. There was a sofa with a disintegrating lily pattern and a coffee table with a chess board on it. Pronek landed in the sofa and the fissures between the cushions widened and gaped at Pronek’s thighs.

“My name is Taylor Owen,” the man said.

“I am Pronek,” Pronek said. “Jozef Pronek.”

“Good to meet you, Joe,” Owen said.

Owen had sweat shadows under his armpits and a hump on his back, as if there were a pillow under his beige shirt. His tie was watermelon red, tightly knotted under his Adam’s apple, which flexed sprightly like a Ping-Pong ball as he spoke. He was bald, with a little island of useless hair above his forehead and a couple of grayish tufts fluffing over his ears. He sat behind a narrow desk piled with papers, the back of his head touching the wall as he leaned in his chair.

“I called. I talked to somebody,” Pronek said, “about the job. I thought you need the detective.”

“The detective?” Owen chortled. “Lemme guess: you seen a few detective movies, right? The Bogart kind of stuff?”

“No,” Pronek said. “Well, yes. But I know it is not like that.”

Owen stared at him for a long instant, as if deciding what to do with him, then asked: “Where you from?”

“Bosnia.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It was in Yugoslavia.”

“Ah!” Owen said, relieved. “It’s a good place not to be there right now.”

“No,” Pronek said.

“You a war veteran?”

“No. I came here just before the war.”

“You have a blue card?”

“What?”

“You have any security experience?”

“No.”

“See, son, we don’t have detectives around here no more. Detectives are long gone. We used to be private investigators, but that’s over too. We’re operatives now. See what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Pronek said. There was a black-and-gray pigeon on the windowsill, huddled in the corner, as if freezing.

“No Bogey around here, son. I been in this business for a good long time. Started in the sixties, worked in the seventies. Still work. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I worked when Papa Daley was running the Machine. .”

The phone rang behind the parapet of papers, startling Pronek. Owen snatched the receiver out of its bed and said: “Yup.” He turned away from Pronek toward the window, but looked over the shivering pigeon, out to the lake. It was a sunny day, cold and blustery still. The wind gasped abruptly, then pushed the windowpane with a thump, overriding the grumbling hum of Michigan Avenue. Above Owen’s hump there was a picture of an army of bulls chasing a throng of men with red scarves down a narrow street. Some of the men were being trampled by bulls who didn’t seem to notice them.

“You can kiss that sonovabitch good-bye,” Owen said, throwing his feet up on the corner of his desk and rocking in his chair. “You’re kidding me. Shampoo? You gotta be kidding me.”

On the desk, there was a pile of letters ripped open, apparently with little patience, and a couple of thick black files. Owen scratched the hair island, the size of a quarter, with his pinkie, beginning to rock faster. The pigeon barely had its eyes open, but then it turned its head back and looked straight at Pronek, smirking. Pronek crossed his legs and tightened his butt muscles, repressing a flatulence.

“I know what you up against. It sure is tough. Join the rest of the fucking world.” He listened for a moment. “Skip the wisecracks, darling, all right?”

The pigeon was bloated, as if there were a little balloon under the feathers. What if the pigeon was a surveillance device, Pronek thought, a dummy pigeon with a tiny camera in its head, pretending to be sick, watching them.

“All right, I’ll see you after the fight tonight. Love ya too,” Owen said, and hung up. He swung back on his chair toward Pronek, sighed and said: “My wife is a boxing judge. Can you believe that? A boxing judge. She sits by the rink, watching two guys pummel each other, counting punches. Hell, people think I’m making that up when I tell them.”

“It’s normal,” Pronek said, not knowing what to say.

Owen opened a drawer in his desk, the drawer resisting with a bloodcurdling screech, and produced a bottle of Wild Turkey. He poured a generous gulp in a cup that had CHICAGO BULLS written around it, shaking his head as if already regretting his decision. He slurped from the cup and his face cramped, as if he had swallowed urine, then it settled down, a little redder now. He looked at Pronek, trying to see through him.

“So you wanna be an operative?”

“I would like to be,” Pronek said.

“We don’t solve big cases here. Rich women don’t make passes at us. We don’t tell off big bosses, and we don’t wake up in a ditch with a cracked head. We just earn our daily bread doing divorces, checking backgrounds, chasing down deadbeat dads, know what I mean? It’s all work, no adventure, pays the rent. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Pronek said.

“Do you know where the Board of Education is?”

“In the downtown,” Pronek said.

“Do you know where Pullman is?”

“No.”

“Way south. Do you know where the Six Corners is?”

“No.”

“Irving Park and. . Oh, fuck it! Do you have a car?”

“No. But I want to buy the car.” Pronek started fidgeting in his chair. A drop of sweat rolled down from his left armpit.

“Do you have a camera?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to tail.”

“Tale?” Pronek asked, perplexed. “You mean, tell the tale?”

Owen formed a pyramid with his hands and put its tip under his nose, then pushed his nose up a little, so the bridge of his nose wrinkled. He glared at Pronek, as if affronted by his sheer presence, curling his lips inward, until his mouth was just a straight line. Pronek wanted to tell him that he could learn, that he was really smart, that he used to be a journalist, talked to people — he could make himself over to be an operative. But it was too late: Owen was blinking in slow motion, gathering strength to finish the interview off. He dismantled the pyramid, unfurled his lips and said:

“Listen, son, I like you. I admire people like you, that’s what this country is all about: the wretched refuse coming and becoming American. My mother’s family was like that, all the way from Poland. But I ain’t gonna give you a job just ‘cause I like you. Gotta pay my rent too, know what I mean? Tell you what I’ll do: give me your phone and I’ll call you if something comes up, okay?”

“Okay,” Pronek said.

Owen was watching him, probably expecting him to get up, shake hands and leave, but Pronek’s body was suddenly heavy and he could not get up from the sofa. Nothing in the room moved or produced a sound. They could hear the ill cooing of the pigeon.

“Okay,” Owen repeated, as if to break the spell.

Pronek stood at the corner of Granville and Broadway, watching his breath clouding and dissolving before his eyes, waiting for Owen. The picture-frame shop across the street had nicely framed Halloween paintings in the window — ghosts hovering over disheveled children, ghouls rising out of graves. The shop window was brightening as the sun was moving slowly out of the lake, most of it still underwater. A man with a rotund goiter growing sideways on his neck was entering the diner on Granville. Pronek thought that the man was growing another, smaller head and imagined a relief of a little, wicked face under the taut goiter skin. Across Broadway, they were tearing down a Shoney’s: what used to be its parking lot was just a mud field now. The building was windowless; floors ripped out; cables hanging from the ceiling like nerves. Just in front of Pronek, a throbbing car stopped at the street light, inhabited by a teenager who had a shield of gold chains on his chest. He was drumming on the wheel with his index fingers, then looked up, pointed one of his fingers at Pronek, and pretended to shoot him. Pronek smiled, as if getting the joke, but then the teenager turned east and disappeared down Granville. Pronek was cold, Owen was late. A Chicago Tribune headline, behind the filthy glass of a newspaper box, read THOUSANDS KILLED IN SREBRENICA. In the distance, Pronek saw a boxy Broadway bus stopping every once in a while on the empty street, sunlight shimmering on its windshield.

Owen pulled up, materializing out of nowhere, brakes screeching, right in front of Pronek. He drove an old Cadillac that looked like a hideous offspring of a tank and a wheel cart. Before Pronek could move toward the car, Owen honked impatiently, and the sound violated the early morning hum. Pronek opened the door, and an eddy of cigarette smoke and coffee smell escaped into the street. Owen said nothing, put the car in gear and drove off — a bus whizzed by, barely missing them. He drove with both of his hands on top of the wheel, alternately looking at the street and frowning at the tip of his cigarette as it was being transformed into its own ashen ghost. Finally, the ash broke off and fell into his lap. Owen said, as if on cue: “Damn, it’s early. But what can we do? We gotta get this guy while he’s home sleeping.”

Pronek was silent, mulling over a question that would not require too many words. They were waiting at the light on Hollywood. The car in front of them had a bumper sticker reading: IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING CALL 1-800-EATSHIT.

“Who is this man?” Pronek asked.

“He’s a character, lemme tell you. He’s Serbian, I believe. Been here for fifteen years or so, married an American girl, had a child, and then split after years of marriage. He’s a runaway daddy, is what he is. Couldn’t find the sonovabitch, wouldn’t show up in court, the lady couldn’t get child support. I gotta get him to accept the court summons, so if he doesn’t show up in court, we can get cops on his ass. Are you all like that over there, sonovabitches?”

He put out his cigarette in the ashtray already teeming with butts, a few of them falling on the floor. Pronek imagined himself snorting up all those ashes and butts: it would be a good way to exhort a confession under torture. He coughed nauseatedly.

“What are you?” Owen asked. “It’s Serbs fighting Muslims over there, right? Are you a Serb or a Muslim?”

“I am complicated,” Pronek said, and retched. The car was like a gas chamber, and Pronek felt an impulse to rise and breathe from the pocket of air just under the roof. “You can say I am the Bosnian.”

“I don’t give a damn myself, as long as you speak the same language. You speak the same language, right? Yugoslavian or something?”

“I guess,” Pronek said.

“Good,” Owen said. “That’s what we need here. That’s why I called you. You get the job done, you get sixty bucks, you’re a happy man.”

Owen lit another cigarette, snapped his Zippo shut, and inhaled solemnly, as if inhaling a thought. The hair island had developed into a vine growing out of his forehead, nearly reaching his eyebrows. He drove past Bryn Mawr, where a crew of crazies was already operating: a man who kept lighting matches over a bunch of cigarettes strewn on the pavement before him, muttering to himself, as if performing a recondite ritual; an old toothless woman in tights with a wet stain spreading between her thighs; a man with thick oversized glasses hollering about Jesus. They drove past the funeral home: a man in a black coat was unlocking the front door and adjusting the welcome mat, yawning all along — there must have been an early death. They stopped at Lawrence, then turned right.

As they were moving westward, Pronek felt the warmth of a sunbeam tickling his neck. The windshield had thick eyebrows of dirt and a few splattered insects under them. As if reading his mind, Owen said:

“Lemme ask you something: what’s the last thing that goes through a fly’s head as it hits the windshield?”

He glanced sideways at Pronek with a mischievous grin, apparently proud of his cleverness. “What is it?” he asked again, and slammed the brakes, honking madly at the car in front.

“I don’t know,” Pronek said. “I should have gone the other way.”

“Went,” Owen said.

“What?”

“Went. You say I should’ve went the other way.” He slammed the brakes again. “But no, that’s not what it is. Think again.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s the ass. The last thing that goes through a fly’s head as it hits the windshield is its ass.” He started laughing, nudging Pronek, until his guffawing turned into coughing, and then nearly choking. They stopped at the Clark light and he thumped his chest like a gorilla, his vine of hair quivering, his throat convulsing.

Pronek realized that there was an entire world of people he knew nothing about — the early morning people. Their faces had different colors in the morning sunlight. They seemed to be comfortable so early in the morning, even if they were already tired going to work: he could tell they had had their breakfast, their eyes were wide open, their faces developed into alertness — in contrast to Pronek’s daze: the itching eyes, the tense, tired muscles, the crumpled face, the growling stomach, the pus taste in his mouth, and a general thought shortage. The six A.M. people, the people who existed when Owen and his people were sleeping: old twiggy ladies, with a plastic cover over their meticulously puffed-up hair, like wrapped-up gray lettuce heads; old men in nondescript suits, obviously performing their morning-walk ritual; kids in McDonald’s uniforms on their way to the morning shift, already burdened with the midday drowsihead; joggers with white socks stretched to their knees, who seemed to be running in slow motion; sales associates in black stockings, freshly made up, dragging screaming children into a bus; workers unloading crates of pomegranates onto a stuck-up dolly — they all seemed to be involved in something purposeful.

Owen completed his coughing, cleared his throat confidently and asked:

“You still have family there?”

“Where?” Pronek responded, confused by a sudden change in the communication pace.

“Phnom Penh, that’s where! Wherever you’re from, you still have folks there?”

“Yeah, my parents are still there. But they are still alive.”

“Now, who’s trying to kill them? I can never get this right. Are they Muslim?”

“No,” Pronek said. “They are in Sarajevo. Some Serbs try to kill the Muslims in Sarajevo and Bosnia, and also the people who don’t want to kill the Muslims.”

“You probably gonna hate this sonovabitch then.”

“I don’t know yet,” Pronek said. What if, he thought, what if he were dreaming this. What if he were one of those six A.M. people, just about to wake up, slap the snooze button, and linger a few more minutes in bed. Owen hit the brakes again, and Pronek slapped the dashboard, lest he go through the windshield. They were at Western: a Lincoln statue was making a step forward, worried as ever, his head and shoulders dotted with dried pigeon shit. “That sonovabitch lives around here,” Owen announced. He crossed Western, almost running over a chunky businessman who was hugging his briefcase as he scurried across the street.

They parked the car on an empty street with two rows of ochre-brick houses facing each other. Owen adjusted his curl, adhering it to his dome. He was looking in the rearview mirror, his hump breathing on his back, his eyes shrunken because of the fuming cigarette in his mouth. The houses all looked the same, as if they were made in the same lousy factory, but the lawns were different: some were trimmed and orderly like soccer pitch; some had strewn litter, little heaps of dog turd, and wet leaves raked together. Owen pointed at the house that had a FOR SALE sign, like a flag, in front of it.

“What I want you to do,” he said, handing him a stern envelope, “is to go to that door, ring the bell, and when he asks who it is, you talk to him in your monkey language and give him this. He takes it, you leave, I give you sixty bucks, we all happy and free. How’s that?”

“That is fine,” Pronek said, and wiped his sweaty palms against his pants. He considered getting out of the car, passing the house, and running away — it would take him forty minutes to walk back to his place.

“You all right?” Owen asked. “Piece of cake, just do it.”

“What is his name?” Pronek asked.

“It’s Branko something. Here, you can read it.” He pointed at the envelope.

Pronek read: “Brdjanin. It means the mountain man.”

“Whatever,” Owen said, and excavated a gun from under his armpit — two black, perpendicular, steely rectangles, the nozzle eye glancing at Pronek. He looked at it as if he hadn’t seen it for a while and offered it to Pronek: “You want it?”

“No, thanks,” Pronek said. He wondered what would be the last thing going through his head.

“Nah, you probably don’t need it,” Owen said. “I’ll be right here, caring about you.”

Pronek stepped out of the car and walked toward the house. The number on the brass plate next to the door was 2345, and the orderliness of the digits seemed absurd against the scruffy house: blinds with holes, dusty windows, a mountain of soggy coupon sheets at the bottom of the stairs, blisters of paint on the faded-brown door with a red-letter sign reading NO TRESPASSING in its window. There was a squirrel sitting in an empty bird bath padded with damp leaves, watching him, with its little paws together, as if ready to applaud. Pronek walked up the stairs to the door, clenching the envelope, his heart steadily thumping. He pressed the hard bell-nipple, and heard a muffled, deep ding-dong. He looked toward Owen in the car, who looked back at him over the folded Sun-Times, with an eager pen in his hand. “If this is a detective novel,” Pronek thought, “I will hear shooting now.” He imagined going around the house, jumping over the wire fence, looking in, and seeing a body in the middle of a carmine puddle spreading all over the floor, a mysterious fragrance still in the air. Then running back to Owen, only to find him with a little powder-black hole in his left temple, his hand petrified under his armpit, too slow to save him. There was no doubt that he would have to find the killer and prove his own innocence. Maybe Mirza could come over and be his partner, they could solve the crime together. He rang the bell again. The squirrel moved to a better position and was sitting on a tree branch, watching him intently. “Dobro jutro,” Pronek muttered, rehearsing the first contact with Brdjanin. “Dobro jutro. Evo ovo je za Vas.” He would give him the envelope then, Brdjanin would take it, confused by the familiarity of the language. Piece of cake.

But then he heard keys rattling, the lock snapping, and a bare-chested man, with a beard spreading down his hirsute front and a constellation of brown birthmarks on his pink dome — a man said: “What?” Pronek stared at him paralyzed, his throat clogged with the sounds of dobro jutro.

“What you want?” The man had a piece of lint sticking out of his navel and a cicatrice stretching across his stomach.

“This is for you,” Pronek garbled, and handed him the envelope. The man snatched it out of Pronek’s hand, looked at it, and snorted.

Should’ve went the other way.

“You no understand nothing,” the man said, waving the envelope in front of Pronek’s face.

“I don’t know,” Pronek said. “I must give this to you.”

“Where you from?”

“I am,” Pronek said reluctantly, “from Ukraine.”

“Oh, pravoslavni brother!” the man exclaimed. “Come in, we drink coffee, we talk. I explain you.”

“No, thank you,” Pronek uttered. “I must go.”

“Come,” the man said growled, and grabbed Pronek’s arm and pulled him in. “We drink coffee. We talk.”

Pronek felt the disturbed determination of the man’s fingers on his forearm. The last thing he saw before he was sucked in the house by the man’s will was Owen getting out of the car with an unhappy, worried scowl on his face.

As Pronek was walking in Brdjanin’s onionesque wake, he saw a gun handle — gray with two symmetrical dots, like teeny beady eyes — peering out of his pants, which were descending down his butt. Brdjanin led him through a dark hall, through a couple of uncertainly closed doors, into a room that had a table in its center and five chairs summoned around it. On the lacy tablecloth, there was a pear-shaped bottle of reddish liquid with a wooden Orthodox cross in it. There were five shot glasses and a platoon of crushed McDonald’s bags surrounding it.

“Sit,” Brdjanin said. “Here.”

“I must go,” Pronek uttered, and sat down, facing a window. A fly was buzzing against the windowpane as if trying to cut through it with a minikin circular saw. There was an icon on the wall: a sad saint with a tall forehead and a triangular beard, his head slightly tilted under the halo weight, his hands touching each other gently.

“Sit,” Brdjanin said, and pulled the gun out of his ass, only to slam it on the table. The five glasses rattled peevishly. The window looked out at the garden: there was a shovel sticking out of the ground like a javelin, next to a muddy hole and a mound of dirt overlooking it. Brdjanin sat across the table from Pronek, and pushed the gun aside. “No fear. No problem,” he said, then turned toward the kitchen and yelled: “Rajka, kafu!” He put the envelope right in front of himself, as if about to dissect it. “We talk with coffee,” he said.

A woman with a wrinkled, swollen face and a faint bruise on her cheek, like misapplied makeup, peeked in from the kitchen, pulling the flaps of her striped black-and-white bathrobe together, and then retreated. There was a din of drawers and gas hissing, ending with an airy boom.

“You Ukrainian,” Brdjanin said, and leaned toward him, as if to detect Ukrainianness in his eyes. “How is your name?”

“Pronek,” Pronek said, and leaned back in his chair.

“Pronek,” Brdjanin repeated. “Good pravoslav name. Pravoslavni brothers help Serbs in war against crazy people.”

Pronek looked at Brdjanin, whose beard had a smile crevice in the middle, afraid that a twitch on his face, or a diverted glance would blow his feeble cover. Brdjanin was staring at him enthusiastically, then pushed the envelope aside with contempt, leaned further toward Pronek, and asked fervently:

“You know what is this?”

“No,” Pronek said.

“Is nothing,” Brdjanin said, and thrust his right hand forward (the gun comfortably on his left-hand side), all his fingers tight together and his thumb erect, as if he were making a wolf hand-shadow. His thumb was a grotesque stump, like a truncated hot dog, but Pronek was cautious not to pay too much attention to it.

“You must understand,” Brdjanin said. “I was fool, budala. Wife to me was whore, was born here, but was Croat. Fifteen years. Fifteen years! I go see her brothers, they want to kill me.” He made the motion of cutting his throat with the thumb stump, twice, as if they couldn’t kill him on the first try. “They Ustashe, want to cut my head because I Serb. Is war now, no more wife, no more brothers. My woman is Serb now, you brother to me now. I trust only pravoslav people now. Other people, other people. .” He shook his head, signifying suspicion, and pulled his thumb across his throat again.

Pronek nodded automatically, helpless. He wanted to say that Croats are just like everyone else: good people and bad people, or some reasonable platitude like that, but in this room whatever it was he used to think just an hour ago seemed ludicrous now. He wanted the woman to be in the room with him, as if she could protect him from Brdjanin’s madness and his cutthroat thumb stump. The room reeked of coffee and smoke, stale sweat and Vegeta, a coat of torturous, sleepless nights over everything. The woman trudged out of the kitchen and put a tray with a coffee pot and demitasse between the two of them, and then dragged her feet back, as if she were ready to collapse. Pronek looked after her longingly, but Brdjanin didn’t notice. “This Serbian coffee. They say Turkish coffee. It’s Serbian coffee,” Brdjanin said, lit a cigarette and let two smoke-snakes out of his nostrils. Pronek imagined saving the woman from this lair, taking her home (wherever it may be) and taking care of her, until she recovered and regained her beauty, slouching somewhere in her heart now — and he would ask for nothing in return. Brdjanin slurped some coffee from his demitasse, then reached behind his chair and produced a newspaper. The headline said: THOUSANDS KILLED IN SREBRENICA.

“Killed?” Brdjanin cried. “No killed. Is war. They kill, they killed.”

He threw the paper across the table and it landed right in front of Pronek, so he had to look at it: a woman clutching her teary face wrapped in a colorless scarf, as if trying to unscrew her head.

“Hmm,” Pronek said, only because he thought silence might be conspicuous.

“You know what is this?” Brdjanin asked, and spurted out an excited flock of spit drops. “You know?”

“Nothing,” Pronek mumbled.

“No, is not nothing. Is Muslim propaganda.”

“Oh,” Pronek said. Where was Owen? If Owen broke in now taking out Brdjanin as he was trying to reach his gun, Pronek would run to the kitchen, grab the woman’s hand, and escape with her. “Come with me,” he would say. “Podji sa mnom.”

“You know when bomb fall on market in Sarajevo?” Brdjanin asked, frowning and refrowning, sweat collecting in the furrows. “They say hundred people die. They all dolls, lutke. Muslims throw bomb on market. Propaganda! Then they put dolls for television, it look bad, like many people killed.”

Pronek’s mother had barely missed the shell. She had just crossed the street when it landed. She wandered back, dazed, and trudged through bloody pulp, torn limbs hanging off the still-standing counters, shell-shocked people slipping on brains. She almost stepped on someone’s heart, she said, but it was a tomato — what a strange thing, she thought, a tomato. She hadn’t seen a tomato for a couple of years.

“I have the friend,” Pronek said, trying to appear disinterested, his heart throttling in his chest, “from Sarajevo. He says the people really died. His parents are in Sarajevo. They saw it.”

“What is he?”

“He is the Bosnian.”

“No, what is he? He is Muslim? He is Muslim. He lie.”

“No, he’s not Muslim. He is from Sarajevo.”

“He is from Sarajevo, he is Muslim. They want Islamic Republic, many mudjahedini.”

Pronek slurped his coffee. The gun lay on the left-hand side, comfortably stretched like a sleeping dog — he wouldn’t have been surprised if the gun scratched its snout with its trigger. Pronek could see the woman’s shadow moving around the kitchen. Brdjanin sighed, and put both of his hands on the table, pounding it slowly as he spoke:

“How long you been here? I been here twenty years. I don’t come from nowhere. I leave my parents, my sister. I come here. Good country, good people. I work in factory, twenty years. But not my country. I die for my country. American die for his country. You die for Ukraine. We all die. Is war.”

Pronek looked out and saw Owen getting around the shovel, the paper and pen still in his hands, almost falling into the hole. Owen looked up at the window, saw Pronek and nodded upward, asking if everything was all right. Pronek quickly looked at Brdjanin, who was looking at his hand, gently hacking the table surface, muttering: “I Serb, no nothing.”

“I must go,” Pronek said. “I must go to work.”

“You go.” Brdjanin shrugged and stroked his beard. “No problem.”

Pronek stood up. Brdjanin put his hand on the gun. Pronek walked toward the door. Brdjanin held the gun casually, no finger near the trigger. Pronek opened the door, Brdjanin behind him. It was the bathroom: a radiator was wheezing, a cat-litter box underneath was full of sandy lumps. As Pronek was turning around, slowly, Brdjanin grasped Pronek’s jacket, his left hand still holding the gun, and looked at him: he was shorter than Pronek, with an exhausted yeasty smell, his eyes were moist green. He had a coffee shadow on the beard around his mouth. Pronek nodded meaninglessly, paralyzed with fear. Brdjanin bowed his head, saying nothing. Pronek could see the woman framed by the kitchen door, watching them. He looked at her, hoping she would come and save him from Brdjanin’s grasp. She would come and embrace him and say it was all okay. But she was not moving, as if she were used to seeing men in a clinch. She had her hands in her robe pockets, but then took out a cigarette and a lighter. She lit the cigarette and Pronek saw the lighter flame flickering with uncanny clarity. She inhaled with a deep sough and tilted her head slightly backward, keeping the smoke in for the longest time, as if she had died an instant before exhaling. Brdjanin was sobbing: squeally gasps ending with stertorous, shy snorts, his shoulders heaving in short leaps, his hand tightening its grip on Pronek’s jacket. Pronek imagined Brdjanin’s gun rising to his temple, the index finger pulling the trigger in slow motion — a loud pop and brains all over Pronek, blood and slime, dripping down. The woman looked down, drained, her bosom rising, patiently not looking up, as if waiting for the two men to disappear.

“It is okay,” Pronek said, and put his hand on Brdjanin’s shoulder. It was sticky and soft, with a few solitary hairs curling randomly. “It will be okay.”

“What the hell were you doing in there?” Owen asked curtly standing at the bottom of the stairs with his hands on his hips. “I almost went in there shooting to save your ass.”

Pronek descended the stairs. The sun was creeping up from behind the building across the street, making the black trees gray. The same squirrel stopped, now upside down, midway down a tree and looked at Pronek. It was skinny and its tail fluff was deflated — it was going to be a long winter.

“Did he take the thing?”

“Yeah,” Pronek said. “But I don’t think he cares.”

“Oh, he’ll have to care, believe you me, he’ll care.”

“There is the woman in there,” Pronek said, wistfully.

“There always is,” Owen said.

Owen patted Pronek on the back, and softly pushed him toward the car. All the weight of Pronek’s body was in his feet now, and his neck hurt, as if it were cracking under his head. They walked slowly, Owen offered him a cigarette and Pronek took it. Owen held the lighter in front of Pronek’s face, and Pronek saw the yellow flame with a blue root, flickering under his breath — he recognized with wearisome detachment that he was alive. He inhaled and said, exhaling:

“I don’t smoke.”

“Now you do,” Owen said.

They drove up Western, past the cemetery wall, past the used car shops — cars glittering in the morning silence, like a timorous army. Owen turned on the radio: Dan Ryan was congested, Kennedy moving slowly, the day was to be partly cloudy, gusty winds, high in the fifties. They turned right on Granville. Pronek felt his muscles tense, a cramp in his fingers, as if they were transforming into talons, clutching the dollar bills Owen had given him.

“I used to know a guy like you in Vietnam,” Owen said. “Never said a fucking word. Kept to himself. He was a sniper, popped them like bottles on a fence. He would sit in a tree camouflaged, for hours, not moving, not making a sound. Guess you get used to it. He’d watch a village, wait for Charlie to crawl out, and then bam! Once we were—”

“You can leave me here,” Pronek said abruptly. “I’m the next block.”

“Sure. Thanks again, man,” Owen said, and pulled up. “I’ll sure call if I have something for you. Okay?”

“Thanks,” Pronek said, and got out of the car. The morning was crisp, with just enough snap in the air to make one’s life simple and sweet. But he was sleepy, with the feeling that he had just spent time with someone who didn’t exist, a feeling that was slowly turning into anger. Way down Broadway, there was a quick shimmer coming off a moving bus windshield. Pronek stood on the corner, letting his eyelids slide down like blinds, gathering strength before walking home. He looked at the Shoney’s being razed, and imagined himself destroying it with a huge hammer, slamming the walls, ripping out pipes, until there was just a pile of rubble. And then he would go on, until there was nothing left.