The Wolf of Sarajevo (10 page)

“You don't understand . . .” Eric began.

“Don't I?”

“No. Listen. By early July 1995 the situation in Srebrenica was deteriorating pretty quickly. The whole city was supposed to be a UN safe area protected by a Dutch batallion, but it was clear to the Bosnian Serbs that the Dutch weren't willing or able to fight to defend the city. So Ratko Mladić and the Bosnian Serb army were going to go ahead and take it. We could all see it coming. The regular staff reporters were too nervous to go to Srebrenica and see for themselves what was happening. A few of us stringers wanted to go.
I was ready to go, but I asked Meho to go first and scout around for a few days. I told him I would join him later. I had someplace to go first.”

“Vienna?” Sarah asked resignedly.

“Yes.”

“To be with me?”

“Yes. Just for the weekend like we'd planned. Then I was going to Srebrenica to meet up with Meho. He wasn't supposed to be there. He wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for me.”

“Or me.”

“You didn't know. I did. It was dangerous and I asked him to do it.”

“He was a grown-up. Meho made his own choices. Don't take that away from him.”

“He was a fixer. He worked for me. He would have done anything I asked. If I had asked him to go to hell and get me an interview with Satan himself, he would have done it. I should have known. I should have been more careful. It's my fault.”

“It's the past, Eric. You need to let it go.”

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

“Faulkner was an alcoholic prick.”

Eric smiled in spite of himself. Only Sarah.

“Yes, he was. But he had his moments.” Eric paused, struggling for the right words. “According to the State of California, my mother's cause of death was suicide. But it was really murder. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed her as surely as they killed her father and mother and brothers and everyone else who mattered to her. They stripped her of her past, and it was more than she could bear. Before her, my father's family fled Armenia steps ahead of the genocide. I
heard all their stories about their village near Trabzon. Their own paradise lost. And then Meho. Three generations of genocide. The defining features of my life.”

“I understand, Eric. I do. My mother's parents had numbers tattooed on their forearms. The years had blurred them, but they were still legible. They were both at Bergen-Belsen although neither would ever talk about it. They met there, actually. Never again. That's why we do this. That's why we are here. Don't lose sight of the good we can do.”

Eric reached out again to touch Meho's grave with the tips of his fingers, as though performing a benediction.

“Why today, Eric? You've been living in Bosnia for years and you haven't come here before. Why now?”

Eric turned from the grave to look Sarah in the eyes. They were standing inches apart, and he could feel her hot breath on his skin, as intimate as a kiss.

“Because being with you is a bridge to the past. It's like it was all the day before yesterday. I had to come here eventually, and I'm glad I could do it with you.”

Sarah took his hand.

“This war wasn't about him or you or me. It was much bigger than all of us. We were all of us caught up in its wake and tossed about like bits of sea grass in the ocean. You and I washed ashore, is all. Meho didn't make it. He was my friend too, Eric. I loved him same as you. But I buried him and I mourned him and I moved on. Time for you to do the same.”

Sarah was right. He knew she was right. Eric nodded as though he agreed with her. But it was a kind of lie. He would never be able to let go of the past.

Sarah shook her head. She seemed to recognize the lie.

“Come on,” she said resignedly. “Let's go.”

—

Another ninety minutes
of driving brought them to the outskirts of Zvornik. The transition from sylvan wilderness to the urban and industrial was shockingly abrupt. On the far side of a sharp curve, the city appeared like a concrete spaceship that had landed in a farmer's field. It was an ugly town, comprised mostly of two- or three-story buildings, many half finished as though the owners had overreached and run out money for windows and doors and roof tiles. Many of the homes had a kind of gap-toothed quality, missing something even if it was hard to pin down exactly what.

On the edge of town, there was a complex of large factory buildings, all of them shuttered and silent. For political reasons, Marshal Tito, the unquestioned ruler of Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980, had spread industrial production across the country's six republics. One factory in Croatia might make the soles of work boots while another factory in Macedonia made the uppers and a third factory in Slovenia stitched them together. When Yugoslavia broke up, many of these inefficient socially managed factories lost their reason for being. Eric knew of at least one former steel plant that had been given over to growing mushrooms.

—

Their route took them
past the Bijela Džamija, the White Mosque. A week ago, it had been a graceful link to the region's Ottoman past. But the firebombing had put paid to that. The dome had
collapsed and the marble-clad minaret was streaked with black. The air smelled of smoke and diesel. Bright yellow police tape was strung mockingly around the mosque, as though the police would really investigate the crime with an eye toward possible arrests. The cops were just going through the motions, and the crime scene tape was just so much bunting. It was oddly festive.

“Do they know who did this?” Sarah asked.

“Almost certainly the Scorpions. This was ground zero for the chitinous bastards.”

Sarah stopped the car.

“I want to look at this,” she said. “And remember what this is all about.”

“Do we have time?”

“Viktor's not going anywhere. He's got nowhere to go.”

Sarah pulled the Peugeot up onto the curb. They stood side-by-side on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, close but not touching.

“It's already started, hasn't it?” Sarah said.

“Yes.”

“Can we stop it?”

“I don't know. But I'm sure as hell going to try.”

She took his hand and squeezed it hard as if they were shaking on a deal.

—

“Bježi! Pusti me!”
It was a girl's voice shouting “Go away. Leave me alone.”

A knot of boys in black leather jackets embossed with red scorpions rounded the corner. They surrounded two young girls wearing headscarves and long dresses in dark colors. The girls were hunched
over, afraid. The boys were taunting the older girl, who could not have been more than sixteen.

“Come on, you little Muslim bitch. What's the going rate for a Turkish whore? Five dinars? I think you'll have to do me for free.” One of bigger boys grabbed the girl's right breast. She screamed and tried to push him away. The second girl, who was no more than ten or eleven, looked confused. Eric could see that she had Down syndrome.

“Are you armed?” Eric asked Sarah.

“You're goddamn right I am.”

“Try not to kill anyone.”

“No promises.”

Eric strode quickly toward the girls and their tormentors. Sarah was right behind him.

“That's enough, boys,” he shouted.

The Scorpions turned to face him, no longer laughing but deadly serious in the face of a challenge.

“Go home, old man,” one boy said dismissively.

“Not without the girls,” Eric said calmly.

“You can have the little one. This one's coming with me.” The boy who said this was the biggest and, Eric suspected, the ringleader. He put his arm possessively around the older girl, who struggled in vain to get away.

“Let her go right now, or my friend here will put a bullet between your legs. That should cool you down a bit.”

A gun had appeared in Sarah's hand as if by magic. It was now leveled straight at the Scorpion's groin.

He let go of the girl and reached behind his back.

“I wouldn't do that,” Eric said. “It might hurt. A lot.”

The boy seemed suddenly unsure of himself.

“Go ahead,” Eric suggested. “Give her a reason.”

The Scorpions slunk off, leaving the girls free and at least temporarily safe.

The young girl with Down syndrome hugged Eric, pressing her face into his jacket. He patted her back awkwardly.

“Are you two okay?” he asked the older girl.

“Yes, thank you. Come on, Edita, we need to get home.” The girl's eyes were red and brimming with the tears she had been fighting to hold back.

“We'll take you,” Sarah said. “I don't think those poisonous bugs have gone far.”

The girls accepted the ride gratefully.

“Why are you still here?” Eric asked, as they drove the few short blocks to the address the girls had given them. “Zvornik is hardly a safe place for Bosniaks.”

“Our mother is sick,” the older girl, whose name was Aida, explained. “We have nowhere else. No family. We'll survive here.”

“No, you won't,” Sarah said, and there was bitterness in her voice. “You have to leave.”

“To go where?”

“Sarajevo.”

“We have no place to live there.”

“I can help you with that,” Eric said. “A friend of mine is the head of a group that helps resettle people from the RS in Sarajevo. I'll put you in touch.”

They brought the girls home, and Eric took their contact information. It would be easy enough to bring the family to Sarajevo and get them set up with a temporary place to live and maybe even a job.

Twenty minutes later, they were back on the road driving to their rendezvous with Jovanovski.

“You do understand what we just agreed to,” Sarah said sadly. “What we decided to do.”

“I do,” Eric said. “We just agreed to take part in the ethnic cleansing of Zvornik. Ain't life a bitch.”

ZVORNIK

OCTOBER 16

S
arah turned off the main road onto a side street and stopped in front of a charmless building with a sign in Cyrillic letters identifying it as Vitez, which means
knight
. A Balkan
kafana
was a kind of hybrid bar/coffee shop. Men would get their morning coffee at their favorite
kafana
, maybe a beer in the afternoon, and something stronger in the evening with a little music thrown in for good measure. The
kafana
was a full-service establishment and the linchpin of Balkan social life.

Vitez was decidedly down-market.

“Nice place.”

“Not much to look at,” Sarah agreed. “But it's one of the places where Viktor and I used to meet when he was an active asset. It's quiet and out of the way. The owner is discreet and the beer's cold.”

The inside of Vitez matched the grim exterior. The thick clouds
of smoke from the generations of men chain-smoking cheap, foul-smelling cigarettes had left a gray film over nearly every visible surface. The windows were clouded with grime, filtering the sunlight to a weak, sickly yellow. The furniture was mismatched, and the tabletops were pitted and scarred.

The bar might once have been handsome. It was made of dark wood with a marble top, but the wood was discolored and the marble was stained and cracked. Most of the bottles lined up along the wall behind the bartender had no label. Some of the bottles had once held Coca-Cola or orange juice. Home brew.

“That's Viktor,” Sarah said sotto voce, pointing to a table in the back of the room with just the sparest movement of her head.

The man sitting at the table Sarah had indicated was large even by the outsize standards of the Balkans, a region that turned out NBA-caliber basketball players and heavyweight judo champions at a prodigious rate. Eric estimated that Viktor was somewhere north of two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it muscle. He wore a white silk shirt, and a trace of tattoo across his neck and chest hinted at a large swath of ink under his clothes. From what Eric could see, it looked like a professional job, not a crude prison tattoo. His hair was cut short, almost military in appearance. He was alone but talking animatedly on a cell phone.

Eric could not see a weapon of any kind, but he knew that a man like Viktor would never be far from a gun—or a bodyguard. One or more of the other men in the
kafana
were no doubt on his payroll. But the dozen or so patrons all looked like they would have been right at home in the cantina from
Star Wars
, and there was no way to be sure which ones belonged to Viktor.

They walked over to the table and sat down across from Sarah's one-time asset.

“Hello, Viktor,” she said in English.

“Stinky, I'm going to call you back,” Viktor said into the phone before hanging up. “It is nice to see you, Sarah. Long time.” Viktor's English was accented but more than adequate. The former Yugoslavia's criminal class was multilingual. It was good business.

“Yes, and it would be impolite to remind a girl of just how many years it's been.”

“It will be the secret between us.” The Serbo-Croatian language had no articles, and even Slavs who spoke English well had trouble with “a” and “the,” often picking between the two seemingly at random.

“I'm glad you reached out to me, Viktor. I need your help with a little problem.”

“I will listen. But first, tell me who is Gypsy friend with four eyes.” The Serb nodded with his head in Eric's direction. Eric was used to the various reactions that his skin tone elicited in the casual racists who populated the region. Some insisted he was black. Some thought him an especially swarthy Greek. Gypsy was a common conclusion. Almost no one guessed half Asian.

“This is Eric. He's from the embassy and he's working with me.”

“Good to meet you,” Eric said in Sarajevo-accented Serbo-Croatian. “But I should probably tell you that I'm not a Gypsy. I'm a grave digger.”

Viktor laughed and slapped the table with a meaty hand that was so hairy it might have belonged to a gorilla. Gypsy was the nickname for the fans of the Red Star Belgrade soccer club. Their arch
rivals, Partizan, were known as the grave diggers after their black uniforms.

“I like this one,” Viktor said to Sarah. “He can stay.”

“Glad you approve.” The note of irony in Sarah's reply would not have been lost even on someone whose English was considerably weaker than Viktor's.

“I hear you are asking questions about Mali Barcelona,” Viktor said. “That can be . . . unhealthy.”

“So are cheese fries and chili dogs, but you won't see me cutting those out of my diet anytime soon.”

Viktor probably missed some of the nuances of this. There was no regional equivalent of a chili dog. But he likely got the gist.

The crime lord motioned to the waiter. He pointed at the cup of coffee in front of him and held up three fingers. The rules of hospitality were inviolable.

“Sarah, you have been working too hard,” Viktor said. “There is more to the life than chasing poor law-abiding criminals through the mountains. Look at how that has gotten you. Forty-three years old. Divorced after a three-year marriage. No kids. No boyfriend. The small apartment in the not-so-good part of city. You are still pretty girl. You could do better. Leave Mali alone.”

Eric was taken aback about how much Viktor seemed to know about Sarah's life. He knew more than Eric did, for sure. The news about Sarah's divorce and current relationship status was interesting. The bit about the size of her apartment was just showing off. He wanted Sarah to understand just how much he knew about her. Where did he get that kind of information?

Sarah seemed unfazed and unsurprised.

“You're working with him, aren't you?” she said. “You're Mali's boy now.”

Viktor shrugged.

“I like to think we are colleagues,” he said. “It is the relationship of a mutual benefit.”

The waiter arrived at Eric's elbow and placed three cups of coffee on the table along with three glasses of water. It was the same coffee as was served in Sarajevo, but here in Republika Srpska it was known as
domaća
—domestic—rather than Turkish. On the back of the waiter's hand, Eric saw a tattoo of a barbed scorpion's tail that disappeared under his sleeve. Eric glanced quickly around the room and realized that it had emptied out. The other patrons were gone. The waiter's shirt was untucked. Maybe he was just sloppy, or maybe he was concealing a weapon of some kind at his waist. The situation was starting to look both unstable and, as Viktor had observed only a few minutes earlier, unhealthy.

“I believe that renewing our earlier relationship would be even more beneficial to you than whatever arrangement you have now with Mali,” Sarah said smoothly.
She was a professional,
Eric thought, with no small amount of admiration. He cast another quick look around the room. Even the bartender had vanished. It was just the four of them.

“What are you offering?” Viktor asked Sarah.

“Whatever you want . . . in exchange for what I need.”

“Which is?”

“A tape that little Marko has been using to blackmail Zoran Dimitrović. It might be a disc or a memory stick or a software file.
But whatever form it's in, I want it. Every last damn copy. If you can get it for me, or help me get it, I'll make you a rich man.”

Viktor's laugh was harsh and barking.

“I am the rich man. Mali offers me far more than money.”

“What?”

“Power.”

Sarah looked at Eric, and although her face was calm and impassive, he could see the muscles in her jaw were tight. She was nervous. She had reason to be. This was not going the way she had hoped.

“What do you mean, Viktor? What kind of power? Political power? You want to be the next minister for transportation in the RS government? Doesn't seem like your style.”

“Mali has plans. He is a man of the vision. I like this vision. This future. There is room in it for the man of my talents.”

Eric felt a shadow cross over the conversation, the shadow of war and death.

“Are we done here?” Sarah asked.

“Not quite, I'm afraid. Mali, he asked me to give you the message. So that you do not forget to stay out of his business.”

Viktor stood, leaning forward on the table to glower at Sarah and Eric. It was a practiced look, one Eric was certain he had used countless times in countless displays of dominance meant to intimidate rivals or marks. Understanding it as a show did not make it any less effective.

Eric looked quickly over his shoulder and saw that the “waiter” was about five feet behind them with his right hand resting casually behind his back, almost certainly on the butt of a pistol or the handle of a knife.

“You are supposed to rough us up?” Sarah asked innocently. “Drop us in front of the embassy from the back of a speeding car? Doesn't seem like such a good idea. My government will hunt you down and squash you like a roach.”

“Mali tells me that you will not report this. That you aren't even acting for the American government. That you are . . .”

Sarah moved with speed and power, and she lunged across the table with a telescoping metal baton in her right hand. Eric had not noticed it. She must have slipped it out of her purse while Viktor was delivering his soliloquy. The tip of the rod caught Viktor in the throat just below the Adam's apple, and he went hard to the floor.

Acting on instinct and reflex rather than experience or training, Eric shoved the chair he had been sitting on backward toward the waiter. The heavy wooden chair slammed into his kneecap and tangled his legs, throwing off his timing as the Scorpion foot soldier tried to draw a snub-nosed pistol from his waistband. By the time the ersatz waiter had his weapon out of its holster, Sarah had had time to close the gap. The blunt tip of the rod smashed onto his wrist, and Eric could hear the dry crack of breaking bone. The gun fell from his hand and clattered on the concrete floor.

Sarah shoved the tip of the baton like a lance into the man's solar plexus, and he doubled over, exposing the back of his skull to a sharp blow that sent him sprawling forward on his face. He did not move.

Viktor, however, was trying to regain his feet, clawing at his throat as though gasping for air. Sarah walked up to him and delivered a calm, almost clinical shot to his temple with the baton. The big man joined his associate in blissful unconsciousness.

Sarah looked over at Eric. She was not even breathing hard.

“Nice assist with the chair.”

“Not sure you really needed it.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We'll never know. But you did good. First time?”

“Yep.”

“You can get to like it.”

“I don't think so. Let's get the hell out of here.”

“Agreed. We can talk in the car.”

“Damn right we will.” Eric was angry and he wanted Sarah to know it. She had not been straight with him. “You owe me some answers.”

“You'll get them,” Sarah promised.

Eric wanted to believe her, but he could not.