The Wolf of Sarajevo (4 page)

“You had better tell your men to put those guns down,” he advised, with what he hoped was a confident smile. “It could get them killed.”

“By you? A Gypsy?”

“Oh, no. I don't do that kind of thing. But, you see, I work for the government of the United States of America. There are people I work with who do that sort of work regularly.”

“I don't see them here,” the Wasp said sneeringly.

Eric pointed up into the clear blue sky.

“Do you see that little black dot?” he asked.

Despite himself, the Wasp leader looked where Eric was pointing.

“No.”

“Look carefully. It's very small. But it's there.”

“What about it?”

“It's an unmanned aerial vehicle. You might call it a drone, but don't do that around the people who fly it. They're very sensitive. In any event, it's monitoring us. The woman I'm traveling with is rather important. If you shoot at us, the Reaper pilot controlling that aircraft will hunt you down and kill you in these mountains. I'd hate for something like that to be necessary.”

“I don't believe you,” the captain said, although it was clear
that he was less than 100 percent certain. “The bombs would kill you too.”

“These are the very latest Reapers,” Eric replied. “They're equipped with more . . . personal . . . capabilities. It wouldn't take more than a few seconds, and from what I've been told, there should be very little pain. The rounds it fires are remarkably accurate but also quite large. Again, I'd really be sorry to see something like that prove necessary.”

Without waiting for orders, the two armed men in front of them lowered their weapons. The captain gestured palms down to the two behind them, and Eric knew that they had lowered their guns as well.

“I have a little gift for you,” Eric said.

He pulled something out of his pocket and extended his hand. The Wasp captain reached out, and Eric shook hands with him, pressing something into his palm as he did so.

The paramilitary leader looked at it. It was a coin with an American flag on one side and the Great Seal of the United States on the other.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It's a challenge coin,” Eric explained. “If you can produce the coin the next time we see each other, I have to buy you a drink. If you don't have it on you, you buy me one. We're friends now.”

The Wasp smiled, showing a mouth full of yellow-brown teeth. He pocketed the coin.

“Now, why don't you ask your boys to move those logs so we can get on our way to Banja Luka.”

The Wasp nodded and patted the pocket where he had placed the challenge coin.

He barked instructions to his subordinates, who were soon pulling on the ropes that opened a gap in the log barrier.

When they were back in the jeep and through the checkpoint, Eric explained to Annika what he had done.

“There's a drone following us?” she asked.

“Of course not. But they don't know that. All these guys have seen too many movies. It seems to them like just the sort of thing we would be able to do. I used that.”

“But then why give him the coin at the end? It seems like a mixed signal to me. You risk confusing the dog.”

“We'll be back this way. We may need him to want to help us without the constant threat of an invisible drone. What I did helped him save face. It looks like he won because I gave him something even if it's only a trinket from the embassy gift shop that cost me a couple of bucks.”

“They teach you to do things like that drone story in your school for diplomats?”

“Oh god, no,” Eric said laughing. “That's not a diplomat thing. I learned that kind of bullshit as a journalist.”

—

Zoran Dimitrović's office
was on the top floor of an early-twentieth-century Italianate bank building that had been converted into a presidential villa. It was neither vast nor imposing. The scale was appropriate, however, for Banja Luka, a city of some one hundred and fifty thousand on the banks of the Vrbas River. It would never rival Vienna or Budapest, but Eric appreciated the city's wide-open green spaces and provincial charm. During the war, Republika Srpska's government had operated out of an old
ski center in the mountain town of Pale. Banja Luka was at least a real city.

In the 1990s, Banja Luka had been a magnet for Serbs displaced from the parts of Bosnia under Muslim or Croat control. Many had stayed on after the war. The fighting had touched the city only indirectly. The notorious Manjača concentration camp built by the army on a mountain just south of town had held thousands of prisoners. The camp leaders, who had presided over a brutal regime of torture and murder, had been convicted of war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague.

The president's chief of staff met them at the villa's wrought-iron doors and escorted them up the marble stairs to the office. Oil paintings featuring dark colors and somber themes hung heavy on the walls. It had been more than eight months since Eric had been in the building. He and Ambassador Wylie had met frequently with Dimitrović when he had first taken office. Cutting ties with the American embassy had been one of the first signals that something fundamental had changed in Banja Luka. The presidential palace seemed less dynamic than it had on Eric's last visit. Most of the offices they walked past were empty and looked like they had been for some time.

The president was waiting for them just inside the door to his office. He was only in his midfifties, but his hair was already turning from gray to white. He kept it cut short. His blue suit looked tailored and his tie looked expensive. Italian, Eric suspected. Dimitrović was tall, even for a Serb, almost six foot four, but he was stoop-shouldered and walked with a slight limp, an old war wound, it was rumored, even though no one seemed to know exactly where he had served in the fighting.

Dimitrović greeted Annika coolly. There would be nothing friendly about this meeting.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Petrosian,” Dimitrović said, as he shook Eric's hand. It was clear from his sour expression, however, that this was a lie. It was not the last one that Eric expected to hear over the next hour.

“Nice to be remembered, Mr. President,” Eric offered in return. This, at least, had the virtue of being true.

The furniture in Dimitrović's office was a mishmash of styles. Eric sat in an overstuffed armchair that was too soft and too low to be comfortable. Sondergaard was seated on a love seat directly across from the president.

Dimitrović's plus-one was young and fit. He did not offer his name and Dimitrović did not introduce him. He looked more like a bodyguard than an advisor. There was a small pin on the lapel of his jacket that seemed like the kind of thing Diplomatic Security or the Secret Service used to differentiate levels of access. He took a seat along the wall behind Eric and Sondergaard so that he was looking across the room at Dimitrović rather than facing the guests. It was unusual behavior. Eric could not recall ever seeing anything like it.

“Madam High Representative, welcome to Republika Srpska,” Dimitrović began, as two middle-aged women in matching uniforms distributed coffee and cookies. “I believe this is your first time in my country.”

Dimitrović understood English well enough, but he spoke it with difficulty. Eric translated his Serbian for Sondergaard.

“Actually, this is my third visit to Bosnia,” she replied.

“I don't include the Federation. I mean the RS.”

“As your country?”

“Maybe not yet as a member of the United Nations. But my first loyalty is to Republika Srpska and its people.”

“Well, the future of your people will be determined by the decisions that you make in the next few weeks. You know why I'm here.” Sondergaard leaned forward on the love seat to underscore the urgency of her message. “Bosnia is at the edge of a precipice. You know what lies at the bottom. We all do. We've seen it before, close up. I want to help you step back from the abyss. But I need your help.”

“I don't believe we are at the edge of anything,” Dimitrović replied, and then paused to allow Eric to translate. “We are already falling. We have been falling for nearly twenty years now. Bosnia is a trap, pure and simple. It is a pit with smooth sides from which we have not been able to climb out. Look with clear eyes at the real lessons of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing was an ugly reality, but it worked. The places in the former Yugoslav space that are the most stable and successful are those places that were most effective in eliminating their restive and quarrelsome minority populations. Slovenia is the easiest example; it didn't have many minorities to start with. But look at Croatia. The Croats expelled nearly all of the Serbs and they have little cause to regret it. The same is true for the expulsion of Serbs from their ancestral home in Kosovo. It is those places that cling to the fantasy of multiethnic harmony that are the hardest to govern and the most backward politically. The peoples of the Balkans do not want to live together. They want to live at peace as neighbors with good fences between them. The sooner you in the West understand that basic reality, the easier it will be to talk about real solutions.”

“Such as?”

“A new Congress of Berlin. The big powers agreed to a rational redrawing of borders once before. But the last time around, Europe and America insisted that the Tito-era administrative boundaries of Yugoslavia's republics were sacrosanct and could not be changed. This is ridiculous. If Yugoslavia could be so casually disintegrated, what is so special about Bosnia? Kosovo was not even a republic. It was a Serbian province that you chose to strip away and give to the Albanians. Why should we not have the same rights if we don't wish to live together with the Croats and the so-called Bosniaks? If we wish to live on our own, who are you to tell us that we cannot?”

“So yours is the discredited dream of a Greater Serbia?” Sondergaard asked incredulously. “Have we not already seen the terrible consequences of that ambition?”

“I am no more interested in being ruled from Belgrade than from Sarajevo. We Bosnian Serbs have fought for our freedom and we have won the right to self-determination. And we are determined to chart our own way forward, unburdened by the ineffective Dayton institutions.”

“You do appreciate that the Congress of Berlin set the stage for World War I. None of these decisions are made in isolation. I offer you an alternative vision. Community. Union. Cooperation. These stand in opposition to the idea of separation and isolation. Yours is a dark view of human nature, Mr. President.”

“Yes,” Dimitrović agreed readily. “Yes, it is.”

“There was a time not so long ago when your views were different. When you supported Bosnia's membership in the European Union and even NATO. When you worked in favor of a unitary
Bosnian state that did not distribute rights and responsibilities to its citizenry on the basis of their ethnicity and family name.”

“Times change. I assure you that my views are sincere.”

Dimitrović was looking over Sondergaard's shoulder, Eric noticed, as though seeking approval from the young “advisor” sitting along the back wall.

“So you no longer see Bosnia as a future EU member state?” the High Rep asked.

“I no longer see Bosnia as a state.”

“Even at the risk of war?”

“Yes. Even then.”

“What happened to you, Mr. President? You came to power promising support for a unified Bosnia. You started to make good on that commitment, then you moved away from it without any sort of warning.”

“Perhaps the scales fell from my eyes,” Dimitrović suggested, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The only past that concerns me is the past injustice that has been done to my people.”

“There will be a peace conference in Sarajevo in three weeks' time. Will you participate?”

“In my capacity as a hypocrite? I don't see how that would be possible. History is our guide. A history of man's inhumanity to man. We learned under the Ottoman pashas the importance of solidarity and will not surrender it to your artificial concept of unity.”

“Will you at least send someone to represent you at the conference?”

Dimitrović again looked to the back wall before responding.

“If you force me to be blunt, I will be. Republika Srpska is not interested in the Sondergaard Plan. We have our own plan.”

“Which is?”

“You'll see.”

On the way out, Eric made certain to walk over to the “advisor” and shake his hand.

In the car on the way back, Eric asked the visibly dispirited High Representative if she had noticed the man's pin.

“No,” she admitted. “But he didn't really seem the type for jewelry.”

“It wasn't jewelry,” Eric agreed. “It was more like a unit badge.”

“For which unit?”

“It was a white hand.”

“That's interesting.”

“Ain't it. I think we may be looking at this all wrong.”

“In what way?”

“We'd been assuming that Dimitrović was using the White Hand as an instrument of his personal power, a way to consolidate influence in his office. What if it's the other way around?”

“Meaning?”

“What if the White Hand is in control of Dimitrović?”

“Well, that would certainly complicate things, wouldn't it?”

—

On the drive back,
Annika looked out the window at the verdant mountains only just beginning to change their summer colors for the muted tones of fall. In a few months, the Bosnian landscape would appear harsh and unforgiving, but for the moment, it was hard to credit that life in a place this beautiful could be anything
but peaceful and comfortable. Settlements were spaced out along the road almost at regular intervals like mile markers.

Half an hour outside Banja Luka, they had to stop as a column of ten tanks crossed the highway, a mix of Yugoslav-era M-84s and Soviet surplus T-55s. In a field to one side, regular army troops were digging in, building firing positions for towed artillery that was pointed south toward Sarajevo. It was just an exercise, Eric knew, but there was a sense of urgency to the scene as though the soldiers involved expected to be doing this again for real at some point soon.