The Wolf of Sarajevo (13 page)

SARAJEVO

OCTOBER 28

S
he was waiting for him when he got home.

Eric's apartment was a comfortable two-bedroom in Logavina, a hip and up-and-coming Sarajevo district only a short walk from the embassy. As was the case with most apartment buildings in the city, the common space was dirty and grim. The glass over the front door was cracked. The paint on the walls was stained and peeling, and the row of metal mailboxes was dented and rusty. In the foyer, a faint scent of urine hung in the air.

The private apartments in the building were a stark contrast to the common spaces. They were spacious and elegant, and when Eric had visited the neighbors for coffee, he had been struck at the care the residents lavished on their own homes. This was one of the legacies of Yugo-style communism. What belonged to everyone belonged to no one. There was no condo board or tenants' association. A few
months ago, the elevator had broken. One of the families on the seventh floor had taken up a collection to get it repaired. But the residents on the first floor refused to contribute. They did not need an elevator. Families on the second and third floors did not want to pay as much as the people who lived on six or seven. Tensions were running high and neighbors who had been friends for decades stopped talking to one another.

Eric's apartment was on the fourth floor. He routinely took the stairs for the exercise, but when the residents of the upper floor had collected half of the money they needed to repair the elevator, Eric had made up the difference. It was only a couple hundred dollars and it helped to keep the peace.

He had spent the day working with Annika on the plans for the conference. There was still a great deal of work to do, but the pieces were beginning to fall into place. Eric felt energized by the work they had been doing, and he bounded up the stairs to his apartment.

The door was unlocked.

He was always careful to use the dead bolt. Most Sarajevans were still struggling to get by and break-ins were common.

He opened the door with a sense of foreboding, expecting to see his possessions strewn about from a desperate search for valuables. Eric had a good laptop and an iPad and there was maybe fifty dollars in various currencies scattered throughout the apartment, but the burglars were hardly going to make a big score.

To his relief, everything was in place. Maybe he had somehow forgotten to lock the door.

Then he heard the music.

The unmistakable bluesy sound of Ray Charles singing “The Midnight Hour.” It was unlikely that a Bosniak burglar would have
put
Genius Sings the Blues
on the turntable while he ransacked the apartment.

Eric knew who it was.

They had listened to this album together on enough lazy Sunday mornings, trying to pretend for just a few hours that there was no war. Sarah had teased him good-naturedly about his fetish for vinyl. LPs were a technology that she had assigned to the same category as vacuum tubes and Betamax, losers in the march of progress.

Sarah was sitting on the couch in the living room with her shoes off and a glass of red wine in her hand. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She looked relaxed, almost happy. Her eyes were closed as she listened to the music.

“Make yourself at home,” Eric said.

“Thanks.” She did not open her eyes.

“Enjoying a little R&B with your B&E?”

Sarah opened her eyes slowly, languidly, like a sleepy cat stirring reluctantly from its spot in a beam of sunlight.

“Don't be so dramatic. I didn't break anything. The door was hardly locked.”

“It has a dead bolt.”

“Like I said. You really should talk to the embassy security office about getting better locks. This isn't the safest part of town.”

“You could have called.”

“It's better to have this conversation in person, I think.”

Eric did not need to ask what Sarah meant by this conversation.

He slipped his jacket off and undid his tie, draping both over the back of a chair.

“It's better to have this conversation over a drink.”

Sarah poured a generous glass of Eric's wine and handed it to
him. He saw that she had picked the most expensive bottle that he had in his modest collection. Sarah had good taste. She saw that he had noticed, and she held up the bottle with the label facing him.

“I assume you were saving this for a special occasion.”

“Yup.”

“Well. I'll see what I can do to make it special.”

Eric's throat suddenly felt dry, and he took a large swallow of the wine to cover his confusion. Sarah had always blown hot and cold, and the signals she sent could be misleading, sometimes deliberately so.

“I'm sorry about Zvornik,” she said. “That didn't work out the way I had hoped. It got a little out of hand.”

“How far out of bounds are you, Sarah? How much are you risking on this play?”

“As much as I have to. Washington wants reward without risk. Well, you can't have that. The trick is to take smart risks. It's got to be worth it.”

“And is it?”

“Without a doubt. I won't stand by and let this place fall back into the savagery of the nineties. Not if I can do something about it.”

“And you think Mali is the key?”

“I do.”

“And you're ready to do anything to bring Dimitrović back into our camp.”

“I am.”

“What is it that Mali has on Dimitrović? You know more than you told me. You told Viktor it was a disc or a tape of some kind. What is it? What's on it?”

Sarah seemed to hesitate. “We're not sure. But it's something pretty big.”

“Something from the war?”

“Most likely.”

“What if it's something criminal? Dimitrović had a dark past. I'm sure that you can find all sorts of slimy things under the rocks of his personal history if you turn enough of them over.”

“I'm not interested in the past. It's the future I care about. Dimitrović may have been a wing-nut nationalist up until a few years ago, but he changed. I don't know why he did and I don't particularly care. All that matters is what he can do. What he can mean for the future.”

“What about justice?” Eric pressed. “Who speaks for the dead? What do we owe them?”

“Nothing, Eric. We owe them nothing.” Sarah leaned forward to emphasize her point. “The dead don't care.”

“What about Meho?”

“What about him?”

“What do we owe him and his family?”

“We owe it to him to make this country the best place it can be. If that means that a few creeps manage to escape the consequences of their actions, so be it. It isn't personal.”

“You do understand that if we have evidence that Dimitrović was culpable in serious human-rights violations or something from the war that would meet the bar for crimes against humanity, we have a legal obligation to turn it over to the tribunal in The Hague.”

“To hell with the tribunal. It's a bunch of old men sitting in a
courtroom a thousand miles from here splitting the few hairs they have left.”

“That's pretty much the way the law works.”

“I don't care. Morality trumps law.”

“Who's the judge of what's moral?”

“I am. You are.”

The final sorrowful notes of “Ray's Blues” faded to a close and the arm of the turntable swung up back into its cradle.

Eric rose from his seat and flipped the disc. It gave him something to do to cover his confusion. Was Sarah right? Was his own obsession with the past not only damaging to his psyche but morally misguided as well?

He watched as the arm settled back onto the vinyl disc and the first few brassy piano notes of “Mess Around” played over the ProAudio speakers.

He felt a hand on his shoulder gently pressing against the tension in his muscles.

“Eric . . .” Sarah said, and stopped.

He turned, taking her in his arms and pressing his lips against hers. Sarah kissed him back fiercely. She tasted of wine and chocolate. Sarah wrapped her arms around his waist. Eric stroked her hair then caressed the side of her face. She shivered slightly at his touch as though from cold, and a soft sound of pleasure and desire came from deep in her throat. It was just as it had been.

“Sarah, I . . .”

“Shhh.” She put a finger to his lips. “Don't talk. Not now. Later.”

She unbuttoned her jacket and let it fall to the floor. Her nipples were clearly visible under the sheer fabric of her blouse. Eric
took her hand and led her back to the bedroom, remembering what it was like to be young and in love.

—

The morning
was awkward.

Sarah was up and dressed before Eric was even awake. He threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and padded barefoot into the kitchen where Sarah was brewing coffee. She seemed distant and cool, turning away from Eric when he moved to embrace her.

Here we go again,
he thought.
The emotional roller coaster.

Sarah handed him a mug of coffee, black and strong.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Not really.”

It was hard to believe that this ice queen was the same person who had made love to him with passionate intensity only a few hours earlier. His back stung deliciously where Sarah's nails had scraped furrows in his flesh. She was a complicated woman. She always had been. Eric had to acknowledge that his feelings for her were still strong, stronger than he had realized. But that did not mean that he had any real hope of understanding her. Sarah was a paradox, a beautiful enigma.

“Are you hungry? There's a great bakery on the corner that has the best
burek
in the city. They'd be the first to tell you that.”

Sarah offered him a wan smile.

“Coffee's all I need,” she said.

“The breakfast of champions.”

“I thought that was cornflakes and bourbon.”

“Cold pizza and warm beer, actually.”

“Eric, about last night . . .”

“The night you don't want to talk about?”

“Yes. That one.”

“Tell me.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm not.”

“I shouldn't have done that.”

“I don't think it was just you. I remember being there too.”

“Okay. We shouldn't have done that. I've been under a lot of stress and I'm lonely. It just happened.”

“Maybe it'll just happen again.”

She shook her head and sipped the coffee. “I don't think so.”

“Just try to keep an open mind.”

“I should go,” she said.

And Eric thought that if she left his apartment then and there she was lost to him forever.

“Actually, I was planning to call you last night and invite you to take a road trip with me today.”

“Because the last one was such a success?” Sarah suggested.

“Because there's someone I want you to meet.”

“Who?”

“Nikola Petrović.”

“Nikola Petrović of the Social Democrats?”

“The very same.”

“Kind of a small fish, isn't he?”

“Not for long,” Eric assured her. “Not if I have anything to say about it. No matter what happens with Mali, I think Nikola can be part of the answer to the problem.”

“Where will he be today?”

“Prijedor.”

“The RS again?”

“Hey, it's gotta go better than the last time around.”

Sarah was quiet, thinking through the implications of accepting or rejecting Eric's invitation. She had a sharp analytical mind and a processing speed that kept her a step or two ahead of nearly all her colleagues.

“Okay,” she said, after no more than ten or fifteen seconds of contemplation. She cast an appraising look down at the outfit she was wearing, the same one she had been wearing the night before. “But I need to go home to get changed first.”

Eric smiled at his little victory.

“I'll drive,” he said.

—

The drive to Prijedor
took about four hours, and he kept the conversation light, steering clear of the emotional minefield of their past and future. Eric outlined for Sarah his plan for elevating Nikola to a leadership position in the RS by virtue of his unwavering support for a European Bosnia. Sarah was skeptical. She was focused on returning Dimitrović to the pro-West camp as the answer. But she recognized that it was always good to have a fallback plan.

Sarah's trick with the license plates helped them slip past the checkpoint into the RS without being stopped. Eric's car, an eight-year-old Volkswagen Golf, was one of thousands just like it on Bosnia's roads. It was cheap, reliable, and completely anonymous. The guards, who looked to be the same trio who had stopped Eric and Annika on their visit to Banja Luka, hardly glanced up at the Golf from their card game as they sped through the checkpoint.

Prijedor was an attractive riverside town that featured an interesting mix of Austrian and Ottoman architecture. The city had been cleaned up a few years earlier in a major municipal beautification campaign, but it was harder to scrub out the bloody spots of its recent history. Prijedor had lent its name to one of the worst massacres in the Bosnian War, second only to Srebrenica. After the Serbian takeover of the city, thousands of civilians had been executed, raped, or detained without trial. A series of concentration camps in the hills around Prijedor, including the notorious Omarska camp, had been virtual abattoirs. To the survivors, as well as to the prosecutors in The Hague, what had happened in this sleepy little city was known as the Prijedor Massacre.

Eric parked a few blocks from the city center.

“Hope you don't mind a short walk. Political rallies here can generate counterdemonstrations. And cars that get caught between the two groups can suffer all sorts of indignities.”

Sarah cast a disparaging eye over Eric's car, which had once been white but now could be only charitably described as “dusty.” There was a sizeable dent in the driver's-side door and a spiderweb crack in the rear window.