The Company We Keep (16 page)

Split, Croatia
,
DAYNA

B
y Tuesday the snowplows are finally out, clearing the roads in northern Virginia. At the Tysons Corner Marriott, where I’m staying, guests in the parking lot help each other dig out their cars. As soon as we’re all dug out, I head off to work to check in.

The secretary looks at me oddly, I’m sure forgetting I’m back from my last assignment in the Philippines and about to go to Bosnia. But then again, why would she remember, with people coming and going as if this were a bus station? I ask her if my boss, Dave, is in. She says maybe tomorrow; his street isn’t plowed.

She remembers that Dave left an envelope for me. I open it to find a one-way ticket to Split, Croatia. Attached to it is a Post-it saying someone will call me at my hotel to tell me how to get the rest of the way to Tuzla.

“That’s all?” I ask.

“All what?”

“The commo plan is I fly to Split, and wait for a call?”

“Yeah, I thought it was funny too.”

I stick my head in a couple of offices, but they’re empty, and I go back to the hotel to pack.

I arrive in Split on Friday evening, catch up on my sleep, and the next morning tour the old town, which is built on the ruins of the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s palace. It’s fantastic, with its limestone streets polished by a thousand years of people walking them. I think how the Romans must have turned a corner, the beauty of the Adriatic catching them by surprise too. By Monday morning I’ve seen all there is of Split to see, and there’s still no call. I pick up the phone to make sure it still works. I go downstairs and ask the clerk to check my room’s pigeonhole for messages. Still nothing.

In the afternoon I walk back down to town, buy a map of old Yugoslavia, and sit on the terrace of the Bellevue Hotel to study it. Two roads go to Tuzla from here, both passing through Sarajevo. I can’t imagine anyone escorting us through Croatian, Serb, and Muslim lines—the three sides of Bosnia’s civil war. But who knows.

Jacob comes in that afternoon. Like me, he’s only been told to wait for a call. To kill time, we rent a car and drive around. The next morning we come out of the hotel to find that the car’s been broken into, the glove compartment rifled. We spend the afternoon in the police station doing our best to be friendly with the station cops. Frankly, if it had been our car, we wouldn’t even have reported it. It’s prudent never to point yourself out to the authorities unless you have to. But with a rental we don’t have a choice.

The next morning at six thirty the telephone rings. I look at it, wondering if I’m dreaming.

“Go to the airport tomorrow at two,” a woman says. She’s American, but that’s all I can tell. “Wait at the kiosk.”

“Should I look for someone?”

“They’ll find you.”

Jacob and I share a taxi to the airport and drop our bags next to the only kiosk there is in the small terminal. We don’t want to
risk going to look for coffee, so we stand there and watch an old woman swab the floor with a tin bucket and a mop.

At twenty past two, a guy in Levi’s and a parka comes out of nowhere. He knows our first names and motions for us to follow him. He doesn’t offer us his name, and without saying a word, he takes us through a door he has the code for, down a long corridor, and out onto the tarmac, where a single-engine plane waits. He points to the cargo door and tells us to climb in. Jacob and I find places on the floor between some crates. The pilot turns to take a look at us. “Welcome to our flying Winnebago,” he says. I’m not sure I know what he means. Does he live on this plane? The way he’s dressed, in a Hawaiian shirt over long underwear, it’s possible.

When he finishes his preflight checks, he half turns in his seat to look at us. “You guys got earplugs? It’s gonna get loud back there.” He offers us some beef jerky. We both take a piece.

“We’ll fly low to avoid radar. And we’re not turning the engine off when we land in Tuzla. So hustle yourselves out the back.”

I look out the window and see clouds close in on the hills around Split. We’ll be flying into a storm, I think. Jacob sticks his earphones in and fiddles with his MP3 player. He closes his eyes as if he’s about to take a nap. I’m happy it’s Jacob with me on this one; his calmness is catching.

The engine pops a couple of times, then catches, and the plane moves forward. As we taxi, a wind pulls at the tail, causing the plane to sway back and forth. It comes to the end of the runway, the engine whines, and we take off in a steep ascent. Almost immediately it levels off, at about a thousand feet. We’re so low I can see telephone wires and cows in the snow-patched fields.

I lose sight of the ground when the rain turns to snow, and then lose interest in looking out the window when the plane starts bucking. I close my eyes and think about the last time I was in a small plane in a storm. It was when my dad flew the family to Baja. I was sixteen. A thunderstorm came out of nowhere, forcing my
father to take the plane under a thousand feet. The first airstrip we came to was flooded. The storm worsened, and my dad had to drop lower and lower. By now my mother was panicking, yelling for him to put the plane down on the ground. My father kept his cool, not rattled at all. Just as we ran out of sky, he spotted a deserted airstrip near a beach. As soon as the plane came to a stop, he turned off the engine. “Cheated death again!” he said, his signature sign-off to any close call.

It wasn’t that my father was reckless; he just loved his thrills. He was already forty when he started to study at night for a private pilot’s license, and with friends bought the small plane in which we flew to Mexico. Winters, he would fly my mother, my brother, me, and our dog on ski trips up into the Sierras, our skis stacked between us down the middle of the fuselage. Summers, there were trips to the Colorado River, where he’d find a dirt strip to land on. I’ll never forget the time my mother and I watched as my dad and brother took off in a blustery wind, a wingtip scraping the ground, the plane nearly cartwheeling. My father righted the plane only at the last moment. I suppose that’s why I’m not all that nervous; I’ve been here before.

It’s dusk when I feel the plane start to descend. Lights are coming on in the houses. I sense that the plane is about to touch down, but there are no runway lights, and it’s impossible to see where we’re landing. It’s a long, dead minute before the plane bounces hard on the runway. The pilot taxis to the end and spins the plane around, bringing it to a sharp stop. He keeps the engine running.

If there’s a terminal, I can’t see it—only camouflaged tents and a few soldiers standing in front of them watching us. The pilot turns around and motions for us to open the cargo door and get out. The look on his face says,
Move fast or else
. Three olive-colored Suburbans, their lights off, pull up alongside the plane, and a couple of guys get out to help us unload. As soon as the last crate is out, the plane wheels around and speeds down the runway and
takes off like an angry wasp. Our driver tells us to get on the floor of the backseat; he doesn’t want the Bosnian sentries at the airport gate to see our faces.

They let us off in front of the Hotel Tuzla. The lobby’s a refrigerator, and I can see my breath. A young woman and a young man in faded but tidy uniforms stand behind the desk, looking surprised to see guests. We show them our passports, but all they’re interested in is our cash. The rooms are Communist-spare, the windows cross-taped against shelling. There’s no toilet paper, and just a thin blanket on the bed. I go and knock on Jacob’s door to tell him to meet me in ten minutes down in the lobby. We’ll go out and see the town.

Jacob and I walk the few blocks from the hotel to Tuzla’s center. We stop at a bakery with a blazing brick oven and buy two loaves of fresh, warm bread. We walk to a small grocery store across the street to buy butter and jam. Then sit on a bench in front and make ourselves dinner.

At the square they call Kapija, teenagers standing in clumps eye us warily, lowering their voices as we get closer. A face blooms orange from a cigarette lighter.

“I have to teach you to smoke,” Jacob says, pulling out a pack of cigarettes.

Jacob shows me how to hold a cigarette like someone who has nothing better to do than stand around and smoke. I put my back against a tree, pretending to inhale. Jacob smokes, shifting back and forth on his feet. The teenagers ignore us now and get back to talking in loud voices.

The next day Jacob buys a new Russian Lada from a car dealer we’re surprised to find open, and I shop for clothes that make me look like a local: hand-knit sweaters and a cheap wool overcoat. I find a local purse for my 9-mm pistol. The one I’ve brought with me, a custom-made embossed crocodile with a concealed cavity,
doesn’t exactly fit in here. Jacob’s fine with the Eurotrash leather fanny pack for his Glock.

In the afternoon I shop for food to supplement the Hotel Tuzla’s breakfast, which is hard bread and soft-boiled eggs. I manage to find some fresh cheese and green apples. On the way back to the hotel, I pass a hardware store where there’s a handmade sled in the window. I’ve seen people hauling their groceries around on them. I can’t resist.

Jacob watches as I haul the sled up a hill behind the hotel. I pick the steepest part and let go. When I get to the bottom, there’s an old man and woman watching me. I wave at them, and they smile back.

When we get back to the hotel there’s a little black puppy in front. It runs up to me to play. I scoop it up in my arms, looking at Jacob. “Think what good cover it would be,” I say. He gives me a look that says,
No way
. I put it down, and it runs off to try to play with a woman walking by.

As consolation, Jacob takes me out in the new Lada to look for a pizza place the desk clerk’s told us about. Just outside Tuzla, we’re stopped at a roadblock, a funnel of two old Soviet jeeps blocking traffic both ways.

A young boy with a Kalashnikov in his hand walks up to Jacob’s window. “Papers,” he says.

Jacob hands him his Virginia driver’s license. An older man walks over with a clipboard and takes the driver’s license. As he starts to write something, I watch Jacob crane his neck to see what it is.

As soon as we pull away, Jacob starts laughing.

“What?” I say.

“They’re on to us.”

“No, come on, what?”

“He wrote for my first name ‘Drivers,’ and for my last name ‘License.’ ”

Almaty, Kazakhstan:
BOB

M
y boss, Garth, is already downstairs in the lobby—in a suit and a cashmere overcoat. He takes one look at my Levi’s and old orange Gore-Tex parka and shakes his head no. As I head back upstairs two steps at a time to change, I think how he’s probably right. Our host is the Kazakh Minister of Defense. We represent the United States. We may not be diplomats. But even faux diplomats wear suits.

When I come back down, Garth’s talking with the minister, Tok, who’s in a fleece-lined parka and snow boots, over some weird jumpsuit. He looks as if he’s going out to chop wood. But it’s too late to go back up to my room and change back. I remember my mother telling me it’s always better to be overdressed than underdressed.

We follow Tok outside to a new black Suburban with a rack of squad-car lights on the top. Garth climbs in the front next to Tok, while I sit in the back.

“We see our beautiful capital now,” Tok says. He turns on the roof lights and gooses the siren to move the car in front of us.

I’ve been to Almaty enough over the last couple years to know there isn’t much to see. It’s a little frontier town, at one time a Soviet listening post on China. Legend has it that the first apple
tree grew here, in Neolithic times. Silk Route caravans passing through Almaty spread the trees, apple seeds apparently passing undamaged through the alimentary canals of horses and pack animals.