The Wolf of Sarajevo (18 page)

Stefan poured himself a glass of brandy, uncertain about the answer to that question.

SARAJEVO

NOVEMBER 4

A
re you sure this is a good idea?” Sarah asked.

“Absolutely,” Eric answered with more assuredness than he felt. “And besides, it's too late. We're here.”

“I'm not sure she ever really liked me.”

“What is this, junior high school? Grow a pair.”

“You first.”

“Touché.”

They were standing in front of an older building. The architectural details marked it as prewar. Pre–World War II. The Balkans had seen so many wars it was often necessary to be specific. The façade was brick rather than concrete, and at least a few apartments had balconies with Ottoman-style carved wooden balustrades. To the right of the gated front door was a list of apartments and an intercom system. Eric did not need to search for the number. Muscle
memory guided his finger to the button labeled
ALIMEROVIĆ
. This had been Meho's apartment. His mother and sister still lived here.

“Halo,”
said a scratchy voice over the intercom. Eric was not sure if it was Meho's sister, Amra, or their mother.

“It's us.”

“Come on up.”

Amra, then. Meho's mother would have greeted them with an effusive warmth. Amra had always had sharper edges.

The apartment was on the third floor. The stairwell was dark and unwelcoming. Most of the lights had burned out, and there was no condo board to take responsibility for upkeep. Neighbors competed to see who could put up with an inconvenience the longest. The loser would be the family that replaced the bulbs at their own expense or repaired the cracked tiles on the stairs. Both of those contests seemed to be ongoing.

The door to 313 was solid wood with a chunky brass lock. Eric caught Sarah looking at it with professional interest.

“How long?” he asked.

“Twenty-five seconds on a bad day.”

“Sometimes it's easier just to knock.”

He did.

Meho's mother, Elvira, opened the door. She was a small woman, no more than five foot four and shaped more like a barrel than a pear. Her knee-length dress was maroon and black and would have been at the cutting edge of fashion in the Yugoslavia of the nineteen seventies.

Elvira grabbed Eric's face with both hands and squeezed. Her palms were rough and calloused from a life of hard work, and her face was lined by years of still harder loss and grief.

“Zlato moje,”
she called him, which meant literally
my little golden one
but was closer in spirit to
darling
.

“Hello, Elvira,” Eric said in Serbo-Croatian, when she had ceded control of his face. He kissed her on both cheeks. “You look fabulous.”

He presented Elvira with a box of Swiss chocolates and a bouquet of lilies.

Elvira greeted Sarah next, politely but not nearly as warmly as she had welcomed Eric. They removed their shoes while Elvira took the flowers to the kitchen to find a vase. The Alimerović family was not especially religious, but removing shoes at the door was a deep-seated cultural norm among Balkan Muslims.

A striking woman in dark-blue slacks and a white blouse tailored and open at the throat stepped out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel. Her hair was the color of sand dunes.

Amra Alimerović was almost Eric's age, but she looked considerably younger. Her skin was smooth and only a shade or two lighter than Eric's. Meho joked that his sister offered proof of the Alimerović family's Gypsy roots.

She gave Eric a kiss on the cheek, and he caught a hint of the perfume she was using, musky and unfamiliar.

Amra was much cooler with Sarah, shaking her hand and welcoming her to the family's apartment in a way that might have encouraged an independent observer to doubt her sincerity.

Eric looked around.

“The place hasn't changed,” he said.

“Not really,” Amra replied.

They spoke English together. Amra was fluent with just the trace of an accent.

The apartment was built around a central foyer. There were three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room just barely big enough for a table and eight chairs, and a simple galley kitchen where Elvira worked her artery-clogging culinary miracles.

There was more than enough space for the two of them. Multigenerational living arrangements were the norm in the Balkans. Amra had been married for a few years and her husband had moved in with them, but the marriage had not lasted and Amra's ex had moved to Switzerland to find work. There were no children.

Amra had once confessed to Eric that she could not see bringing up a child in a city that seemed to have no future. In this, she was hardly alone. Bosnia's demographics were both dismal and disheartening.

Elvira stuck her head out of the kitchen to announce that she needed a few more minutes, and Amra led Eric and Sarah into the living room. There were several paintings hanging on the walls, mostly landscapes but also a few abstract pieces and one portrait. Eric stopped in front of that one. It was a picture of Elvira, Amra, and Meho painted by one of the faculty members at the University of Sarajevo's Academy of Fine Arts. Eric had commissioned the painting during the siege and had provided the artist with paint and canvas as well as food and a nominal sum of money.

It was a good painting, a somewhat stylized representation of the family rather than photorealistic, but it was emotionally true. It captured something of each of them that was essential. Elvira was painted in somber dark tones. She was already a widow, and the dark colors seemed somehow to foretell the family tragedies to come. Amra's portrait was sharper and more angular than she was in real life. The artist had used that to express the intensity of her
personality, and she seemed almost ready to step off the canvas. Meho was painted in lighter tones, standing between his mother and sister, and connecting them like a bridge. One arm was draped over his mother's shoulder, and the other hand firmly clasped Amra's. That was Meho, ever the conciliator. Gregarious and easygoing. A friend. Eric felt a tightness in his chest.

“I'm glad to see that this is still up on the wall,” he croaked.

“It's Elvira's favorite,” Amra said. Since she was a child, she had called her mother by her first name. “Mine too.”

Amra poured three glasses of wine, a good-quality red from Croatia. Both Serbia and Croatia were producing excellent wine, but Bosnia's vineyards had a long way to go before they could be considered even middling.

“So how's work been treating you, Amra?” Sarah asked.

“Busy. You know how it is with us journalists. The worse things get, the better it is for business.”

There was little warmth in her response.
Maybe Sarah had been right,
Eric mused,
to question whether she should have come.

“Same in our line of work,” Sarah replied gamely.

“That's right. Economic affairs, is it?” Eric could tell that Amra did not for a moment buy Sarah's cover story.

“Still stuck on the econ track. I've been doing some Balkans, but also Central Asia. I've been in D.C. for a while, but my last overseas tour was two years in Pakistan.”

“Just goes to show,” Amra offered. “You can take the girl out of Lahore . . .”

Amra did not finish the sentence. She took a sip of her wine, giving Eric and Sarah a moment to process the jibe that was remarkable for both its cleverness and cruelty.

Sarah arched an eyebrow. “Is that the best you got?”

“We'll see. I have a lot of material to work with.”

The frost had settled over the conversation so quickly that Eric was left confused. There seemed to be a backstory here that eluded him. He was grateful when Elvira appeared in the doorway to announce that dinner was ready.

Even by Elvira's lofty standards, the dinner was a feast. The appetizers included
kajmak
and
ajvar
, pickled vegetables, potato salad in the Balkan style made with vinegar and onions, and long hot peppers grilled and marinated in oil and garlic.

Every square inch of the table was covered in platters and serving dishes, and it was all delicious. But Eric had learned from hard experience the importance of pacing at a Bosnian dinner. These were just the starters.

The next course was trout with almonds, the skin crisp and the flesh sweet and juicy. This was followed by roast lamb and new potatoes baked with rosemary.

Conversation was light and in Serbo-Croatian so that Elvira could join in. This put Sarah at something of a disadvantage. Her language was good, but it was not at Eric's level and she had to work hard to keep up. Eric had the impression that Amra made things harder for Sarah than she had to, picking obscure or difficult words when a commonplace word would have worked just as well. They had all been friends back in the war. Amra and Meho and Sarah and Eric. But there was clearly something between the two women, something that was a source of considerable friction. But Eric would be damned if he could figure out what it was or whether it was fixable.

Eric watched helplessly as Elvira spooned an enormous serving of
Turkish-style moussaka onto his plate. It was a complex dish, layers of ground beef alternating with grilled eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, and onions. Chilies gave it just a hint of heat. Its only flaw—common to most dishes in Bosnia—was the daunting size of the portion.

A sip of Sarajevsko Tamno, a dark lager with a malty sweetness and a thick white head, cut the heat of the chilies.

Amra looked at him appraisingly.

“There's something you want to tell me, isn't there?”

She was right.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Let's just say that I'm looking forward to our next poker game. Bring your checkbook.”

“I went to Srebrenica,” Eric said. “Sarah and I did. I went to Meho's stone.” He couldn't quite bring himself to use the word “grave,” not in front of Elvira.

“I'm glad you did,” Amra answered. “It's hard for me to go now that the checkpoints are back. The wasps or the ants or whatever little creepy-crawlies are camped out at the border like to hassle little Muslim girls.”

“There's more,” Eric said. “I met a man there who was with Meho at the tractor factory.”

“I know him. He found me after the war. Meho asked him to.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“You were gone, Eric. Off to your next assignment. You'd left Bosnia behind you, left us to clean up from the war.”

“I had no choice,” Eric said defensively.

“I know.” Amra reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “In truth, there was no great revelation. Meho just wanted me to know that he loved me.”

“He had a message for me as well.”

“What was it?”

Eric swallowed the lump in his throat. “He asked the old man to tell me that it wasn't my fault.”

“It wasn't,” Amra agreed. “There are others with more to answer for.”

At first, Eric thought Amra was talking about herself and he wanted to say something reassuring, but then he saw that she was looking at Sarah, who was staring intently at the food on her plate, pointedly not meeting Amra's gaze.

There was something between these two women that Eric did not understand. They were both beautiful and intense, but so different in character. Amra was fire to Sarah's ice. Passion and heat contrasted with cool logic and self-control. Eric only now appreciated the thickness and solidity of the wall that separated the two women who had once been friends.

Now was not the time, he knew, to try to untangle the knot of this relationship. But neither would he let it rest. There would be time enough to learn what had come between them.

Over coffee and baklava, the conversation turned to politics, with Elvira excusing herself to the kitchen. Eric switched back to English, hoping that this would help put Sarah back on a more even footing with Amra.

“What are you hearing about the peace conference and Sondergaard's plan?” Eric asked Amra. “You've always had good sources. What are they saying?”

Amra seemed to weigh her response carefully, taking a bite of baklava and washing it down with a sip of coffee before replying.

“There's some hope that this time is different,” she said finally.
“That Sondergaard has buy-in from the right people in the Federation and a viable partner in your friend Nikola Petrović. But there was hope the last time there was a big peace conference, and the time before that. So I expect the optimists to be disappointed.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” Eric asked.

Amra looked down at the tablecloth and angrily brushed some crumbs onto the floor. When she looked up, her eyes were bright with tears.

“War,” she said. “Again and forever with no victors and no end.”

“Hell on earth,” Sarah said.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Eric asked. “Why do you see failure as a foregone conclusion.”

“Dimitrović and the White Hand. They've gone too far. They have too much power, and they are prepared to drag the whole region down with them if that's what it takes to satisfy their ambitions. I don't think there's anything they wouldn't do.”

“What do you know, Amra?” Sarah asked. “There's something else that you're not telling us.”

“It's just rumor at this point, speculation.”

“What is it?” Sarah asked insistently.

“One of my sources in Srpska, a politician with the Green Party, has a friend whose sister works for Mali. Under Mali, really, both literally and figuratively from what I understand. In any event, the word from her is that Mali has engaged the services of one or more snipers with wartime experience. The last time we heard anything like that, it ended with the Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić being assassinated with a .50 caliber sniper bullet. I can't see any use for a sniper in this political climate other than one. Murder.”