The Wolf of Sarajevo (3 page)

No business in the Balkans was ever transacted without a cup of coffee to smooth the discussion and maybe a shot glass of
rakija
or homemade brandy to set the tone.

Hasović took a Turkish coffee with no sugar and a glass of plum brandy. Bosniaks were nominally Muslim, but Eric knew few who didn't drink.

“I suppose you know why I'm in Sarajevo,” Sondergaard began. Hasović's English, while not perfect, was adequate. Eric was along for the meeting in part to help with translation should that be necessary.

“More or less,” Hasović replied. “You are here to sell me a plan.”

“Not sell, really, but perhaps persuade. My view and the views of my colleagues in Washington and Brussels is that Bosnia is again slipping toward war. For a brief moment, it seemed that Zoran Dimitrović's election in the RS marked a turn for the better, and for a year or so, Bosnia seemed to be moving in the right direction. But the last six months have been little short of disastrous, and violence seems increasingly likely.”

Hasović nodded as though only half listening. He knew all of this.

“The ambassador tells me that you are a patriot. I hope that you appreciate the urgency of the situation, the need to overcome not only the legacy of the war but the legacy of the peace as well. Bosnia needs a new deal and a new political framework. And I need your help to get there.”

Hasović's eyebrows had lifted in what struck Eric as amusement at Sondergaard's description of him as a patriot.

“Madam Ambassador,” Hasović said. “You are still new to this part of the world. With all respect, we have seen many emissaries
come with many plans. Almost all of them fail, and the envoys depart leaving those of us who live here to suffer the . . .” He turned and looked at Eric.
“Posledice.”

“Consequences.”

“Hvala.”

“We must all take risks in the service of peace,” Sondergaard said.

“After you, Ambassador.”

Sondergaard and Hasović sparred for another twenty minutes, with Ambassador Wylie occasionally interjecting his own views as though reminding the principals that he was still there. Eric took notes, but it was clear that the BUP leader was not buying the line about a twenty-first-century Bosnia. Hasović may not love the status quo, but he had learned to benefit from it. Change was risk, and Sondergaard and Wylie had not done enough to spell out the potential benefits.

Then Hasović said something that seemed to Eric like an opening.

“The burden always seems to fall most heavily on those who have been a failed initiative's most committed supporters,” Hasović continued. “Political leaders suffer. Business suffers. The position of the Bosniak Unity Party is really quite delicate. We are faced with some potentially serious setbacks. I have to consider the good of my party as well.”

Eric understood what Hasović was saying, and he also knew that neither Wylie nor Sondergaard was in a position to grasp its significance.

“You do know, Mr. Deputy Prime Minister, that the international community would want to protect key public enterprises in
the transition to a new unitary political system . . . to ensure continuity of certain services.”

Eric was breaking protocol by speaking up, but if there was a chance to capitalize on the opportunity Hasović had given them and potentially get him behind the Sondergaard Plan, it was worth pissing off Wylie. Hell, pissing off Wylie might even be a good enough reason to do it.

Hasović's eyes narrowed as he considered what Eric had said. This was language he could relate to.

“What kind of businesses are you talking about?” he asked carefully.

Eric glanced briefly at Wylie and Sondergaard. The ambassador looked like he had just bitten into a rotten piece of fruit, but the High Representative gave him the briefest and subtlest of nods.
Go ahead.

“Basic services, really. Electricity. Water.” Eric paused and looked Hasović squarely in the eyes. “Trash collection.”

Blue Line Sanitation, the quasi-private company that had the lucrative contract for trash pickup in the greater Sarajevo municipal area, was under the nominal control of Hasović's son-in-law. In reality, it was an open secret that Hasović called the shots and had first claim on the spoils. Blue Line Sanitation was the single most important source of funding for the Bosniak Unity Party, which was run more like a for-profit company than a political party. For Hasović's profit, actually. In the last few weeks, there had been talk that Blue Line might lose the contract to a rival company with close ties to the powerful interior minister. Hasović could not allow that.

“So what would happen to existing contracts for city services?”
he asked smoothly, as though the question were of mere academic interest.

“Well, some of the details still need to be worked out, but I think it would be reasonable to consider a freeze on public tenders that would keep the current arrangements in place for a fixed period.”

Eric looked at Sondergaard as he said this. He was freelancing and wanted to make sure that he had her buy-in. Again, the High Rep nodded.
Keep going.

“What kind of period?” Hasović asked.

“Three years or so.” Eric had just pulled that number out of thin air.

“I would think five years would be more . . . patriotic.”

“You may be right, but that would no doubt require some up-front assurances that the plan could win the support of the key partners in the current coalition government.”

“The BUP is prepared to throw its weight behind a plan that recognized the need for continuity as well as change,” Hasović suggested.

“Publicly?”

“Of course.”

The rest was details.

When Hasović left, the three internationals sat back at the table for a postmortem.

“You seemed quite sure of yourself there, Eric,” Wylie said with an edge of anger in his voice. “Don't you think you might have promised too much in that exchange?”

“Almost certainly. But I didn't want to miss that chance, and I didn't think that either of you knew about his commercial stake in the trash business.”

“Like Tony Soprano?” Sondergaard asked lightly.

“Only without the class,” Eric agreed.

The ambassador polished off his “tomato juice” and gestured to the server for a refill.

“You need to remember whose mission this is,” he said sourly.

“Yes, sir. Apologies for overstepping.”

Wylie turned toward Sondergaard, now all charm and tact.

“Madam High Representative, I hope we haven't committed you to something you will have trouble delivering on.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I think we're in a better place than I had dared hope we would be at this point.”

“My government certainly recognizes the importance of your initiative. Is there anything else I can do for you? Any way I can help?”

“Well, there is one thing you could give me,” she replied.

“Name it.”

“Him.” She pointed at Eric. “Just for a month or two.”

“He's all yours,” the ambassador agreed without so much as a glance in Eric's direction.

“I'll try not to break him.”

“Don't worry. I tried. I didn't succeed.”

MILAÅ EVCI, BOSNIA

OCTOBER 9

T
he drive from Sarajevo to Banja Luka was only about four hours, but it was a trip through hundreds of years of turbulent history. This was one of the world's great civilizational fault lines, the blurry boundary between East and West, Christian and Muslim, Ottoman and Hapsburg. The Romans fought the Illyrians in the mountains that lined the road north. Soldiers loyal to Samuel of Bulgaria had patrolled these valleys in the late tenth century before losing a war to the Byzantine Empire. Most recently, Croat, Serb, and Bosniak forces in the wars of the 1990s had battled for control of the towns and villages that empire after empire had sacked and rebuilt in the same locations with the same geographic and strategic logic. The Balkans, Churchill had once observed, produced more history than they could consume.

Eric and Annika sat in the back of the high-end Land Rover that
was part of the EU mission's vehicle fleet.
The EU,
Eric thought,
for all of its shortcomings as America's premier partner in global diplomacy, made excellent cars.
Even traveling the rough mountain roads, the ride was smooth and quiet and the High Rep was using the opportunity to get briefed in advance of what was likely to be a critical meeting.

“What do you know about Zoran Dimitrović?” she asked Eric.

“Not enough,” he admitted. “He's been on the political scene for some time, but up until recently, only in a decidedly minor-league role as the head of a marginal right-wing political party called the National Party. Then, about eighteen months ago, the RS government fell and there were new elections. The National Party took off. Dimitrović all of a sudden had money and that bought him new friends in the media, the police, and the business community.”

“Where did the money come from?”

“That's the thing. Nobody seems to know. But Dimitrović and the National Party went from polling near the 5 percent threshold for making it into parliament to almost 40 percent. And it happened in the political equivalent of overnight. I've never seen anything like it, and I'd be lying if I said I understood how it happened.”

“I suspect that your ambassador would be able to offer an explanation,” she suggested slyly.

“Sure. Just not one based on evidence. I could tell you that Dimitrović is really an alien overlord from another galaxy sent here to enslave us all, starting with Banja Luka. It's an explanation, but not an especially likely one.”

Annika laughed.

“I like you, Eric,” she said.

“Thank you, Madam High Representative.”

“Oh, please don't call me that. I hate it when people have to stop and take a breath before that god-awful title. Annika is fine.”

“It does make it easier,” Eric agreed. “In truth, I appreciate the opportunity to work with you on this. What you're doing . . . what we're doing . . . is tremendously important.”

“You see the same thing coming as I do, don't you?”

“War.”

“Yes. What happened when Dimitrović came to power?”

“Now the story gets really quite odd. Dimitrović was a nationalist, remember, a hard-liner. But he comes to power in the RS and almost immediately adopts a pro-Western agenda. He wants Bosnia in the EU and NATO. He scales back ties with Serbia. He works to strengthen the central government, even when that means agreeing to transfer some powers from the entity level to Sarajevo. That's something we've been pushing for unsuccessfully for years. And this is all from a guy who's rumored to have the Serbian cross tattooed on his behind.”

“So it's a Nixon-to-China story? The hard-liner looks to open up to the world, and because his nationalist credentials are unimpeachable, he's inoculated against charges of being a sellout.”

“That's the way it looked to us,” Eric agreed. “For a while.”

“Then what happened?”

“For about ten months or so, Dimitrović was a dream partner for us. We were getting everything we needed out of the relationship. Then, about seven or eight months ago, something changed. Something important. And I'm sorry to be vague on this point. It's just that we don't entirely understand what happened. But the Dimitrović administration suddenly began to backtrack on all of
its commitments. The RS pulled out of the joint institutions and stopped paying taxes into the central coffers. Police liaisons were withdrawn; the Serbs who had been working in various international organizations active in Bosnia quit in response to threats against their families; and trade ties were cut. And most worrisome, the paramilitaries reappeared like the dead coming back to life in some zombie movie.”

“The same groups that were active during the war?” Sondergaard asked.

“Many of them, yes. Not the Tigers, thank god. But the Yellow Wasps, the Scorpions, the Green Dragons. They're all back and they're playing a major role in the RS. It's scary.”

“What about the new group?”

“The White Hand?”

“Yes.”

“Again, we know a lot less than I want to. It's a new group, but an old name. The White Hand was the name adopted by a cabal of military officers back in the early part of the twentieth century. They were led by an army colonel who was looking for leverage in opposing a parallel secret military organization called the Black Hand that also sometimes went by the name Unification or Death.”

Annika looked skeptical.

“This is real history, I promise you. I know it all sounds terribly melodramatic. But the guys who did this were all absolutely invested.”

“In what?”

“Well, the Black Hand wanted to unify the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in a single state modeled after German and Italian unification, all under a Serbian king. There's good reason to believe that
Gavrilo Princip, the guy who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and triggered the First World War, worked for the Black Hand. So it's not like the group was just a footnote.”

“And the White Hand?”

“The White Hand won a power struggle with the Black Hand and gradually accumulated more and more power, mostly by exercising control over the king, Alexander Karadjordjević.”

“What happened to them?”

“Tito. When the communists came to power, the members of the White Hand were imprisoned or executed. A few fled abroad.”

“And now they're back?”

“It's more likely that it's a new group of people who have appropriated the name. The leader is someone who calls himself Marko Barcelona.”

“Hardly sounds like a local name. Is he a Spaniard?”

“It's probably a nom de crime. Some of the gangsters in the ex-Yugosphere style themselves after the place they made their bones. Joca Amsterdam. Misa the Kraut. That sort of thing. Almost no one in that line of work uses their real name. Barcelona is one of the big points of entry for cocaine from South America. So the best guess is that he was somehow involved in the drug trade.”

“Best guess?”

“We know hardly anything about him. He uses the nickname Mali, which means
little one
in Serbo-Croatian. That could be meant literally or it could be a joke. Maybe he's a dwarf. But maybe he's two meters tall and a hundred and fifty kilos.”

“It could mean he has a tiny penis,” Annika suggested mischievously.

“Could be. Or maybe the name Tripod was also in the running. We don't know. Mali is secretive beyond the point of paranoia. I've never seen a picture of him. I don't know where he lives. Some people think he's entirely fictional and the real leader of the White Hand is someone else altogether who is hiding behind a made-up character.”

“What do you think?”

“I think he's for real, but I wouldn't rule anything out. This place can be down-the-rabbit-hole weird. Whoever he is, the power that Mali and the White Hand have accumulated in a remarkably short time is real enough. The Hand does Dimitrović's bidding, and the few politicians who have crossed the president have reason to regret it.”

The Land Rover stopped. Eric leaned forward to get a look out the front window.

“The road is closed,” the driver said to him in Serbo-Croatian.

A row of oil barrels painted white stretched across the two-lane “highway” that connected Sarajevo and Banja Luka. There were no workmen anywhere in sight, no machinery and no indications of any major construction on the road up ahead. A sign with an orange metal arrow pointed the way to a detour on a dirt track that seemed to run up into the mountains and then parallel to the highway.

“Something about this doesn't feel right,” Eric said to Sondergaard.

“I agree. What do you think we should do?”

“Smart thing would be to turn back.”

“Probably. But this meeting with Dimitrović is important. Without him, we don't have a peace deal.”

“What do you think, Munib?” Eric asked the driver.

He shrugged. “Road needs the work. Maybe they have just yet no to start it.”

Munib's English was of the rough-and-ready variety, but he spoke it quickly as though speed would somehow compensate for the errors. After years in the region, Eric had no trouble with this particular variant of fractured communication.

“We can try the detour. Take it slow and see what we find,” Eric suggested.

Annika nodded. “I do want to get to Banja Luka,” she said. “There's so little time to work with.”

Eric understood her urgency. “Let's try it, Munib.”

The dirt track was rough but not especially difficult for the Land Rover. About two kilometers down the road, however, Munib had to stop again. Two sizeable logs had been laid across the road. A gray-green tarp strung up in the trees kept the sun and the rain off the three men sitting at a wooden table alongside the roadblock. Their guns were leaning casually against a tree.

Instinctively, Eric turned to look through the rear window. There were two more men behind them. They carried their AK-47 rifles in their arms, not pointing the weapons at the Land Rover but not pointing them away either.

“What do we do?” Annika asked. “Run?”

“No, that would be a terrible idea. They'd be quite likely to shoot.”

“So what should we do?”

“Talk.”

He opened the door and got out. Sondergaard was right behind him.

The three guards stood. Two of the men retrieved their rifles, and the three guards walked toward Eric and Annika. It was likely, Eric knew, that the one man without a Kalashnikov was in charge. He looked to be a little older than the other two, in his twenties rather than his teens, and he had a full beard. The younger men looked more like they just had not shaved for a few days. They were wearing army uniforms, but they did not all match. Their boots, in particular, were an assortment of different styles. This was the trademark of the paramilitaries, a mixed assortment of clothing and weapons and equipment, whatever they had been able to scrounge or steal. There was a unit patch sewn on the left shoulder of their uniforms. It was shaped like a shield with a cartoon wasp, its stinger dripping blood. The Yellow Wasps.

In the Bosnian War, the Wasps had been responsible for the ethnic cleansing and looting of Zvornik. They were indiscriminate, killing Serbs as easily as they killed Muslims or Croats. The Wasps' original leadership was still incarcerated in The Hague, found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of crimes against humanity. That someone would seek to revive the Yellow Wasps seemed itself a crime.

Eric could hear the two men with rifles arguing fiercely with each other in Serbian. Their disagreement was about him.

“He's a Turk, just look at him,” said the soldier with a pronounced belly and the forearms of a butcher.

“Fuck you. No way. He's a Gypsy, a fucking Gypsy. He's practically black.” The second Wasp was lanky and thin and pale. He looked less like a real soldier and more like a university student acting in a play about a virulently nationalist paramilitary.

Eric and Annika stopped, and let the triad of soldiers come to them.

The leader spat into the dirt. A few flecks of spittle clung to his beard.

“What's your business in the independent state of Republika Srpska?” he asked.

“Independent state?” Eric replied. “Last I looked, the RS was part of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

“Not for long,” the Yellow Wasp officer answered. “This is the border checkpoint. You need a visa if you want to cross.”

“This is Annika Sondergaard, the European Union's High Representative, and my name is Eric Petrosian. I'm the political counselor at the American embassy in Sarajevo. We have a meeting with President Dimitrović in Banja Luka, and I don't think he would appreciate your shaking down his guests.”

“I'm not interested in what Dimitrović thinks,” the Wasp replied. That in itself was a very interesting data point.

“Who do you work for then?”

“None of your damn business.”

Eric translated the brief exchange for Annika's benefit.

“I say we turn back,” she said.

“Agreed.”

“We'll be returning to Sarajevo,” Eric said to the Wasps. “But you will be seeing us again.”

The two armed men raised their weapons, and when Eric looked over his shoulder, he could see that the men behind him were now pointing their guns at the Land Rover. Their driver, who remembered the war all too well, kept his hands visible on the steering wheel.

“Not with that nice car,” the Wasp captain said. “You can walk back to the road from here.”

In his eyes, Eric could see the same frightening mixture of avarice and nationalist fervor that had led Bosnia down the road to hell two decades earlier. He could feel his anger rising. He sure as hell was not going to give in to this kind of blackmail and intimidation.

Eric took a step toward the Wasp captain.