Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (10 page)

   “How interesting. Do you know how much expert coders cost per hour in California?”
   He sighed. “Ten thousand dollars.”
   “Fifteen.”
   “Fine.”
   We shook hands. To him it was obviously petty cash.
   “Will Talena be staying here with you?” he asked.
   “Talena will be flying back to California tonight,” I said.
   Talena looked like she very much wanted to object, but she stayed quiet.
“All right,” Sinisa said. “Arwin. Take his bank details and arrange the transfer for my authorization.”
   Talena and I followed Arwin back to the pickup and watched him unfold and launch the laptop. I was in a bit of a daze. I had just agreed to join a criminal conspiracy of Bosnian thugs. Talena would be leaving me tonight. The future had become a gray and  unknowable void.
   “Tell me everything you know about the bank,” Arwin said. “I should be able to find the SWIFT code online, if they’re –”
   Arwin was interrupted by Zoltan, who stood atop the cab of the Mitsubishi pickup, keeping watch. He barked something which made the previously unflappable Sinisa pause for a moment, then turn, vault atop the Land Rover, and look where Zoltan pointed.
   “There are cars stopped at the cemetery entrance,” Talena said to me quietly. “Men are getting out of them.”
   After a moment she and I followed Sinisa up to the hood of Land Rover and looked around. There were nine men climbing towards us. They had divided into three groups, coming from three different directions. One of the stopped cars was a battered diesel Mercedes with a visible zigzag crack across the windshield.
   “That’s Dragan’s car,” Talena said, just as I was thinking it.
   Saskia emitted a tiny, barely audible whimper of terror.
   The three groups approached from different directions, west and north and east. They carried shotguns and Kalashnikovs, and they moved fast, with military discipline. They would reach us in a few minutes. As they passed, a half-dozen kids playing soccer on a green patch near the entrance picked up their ball and scurried away. Startled mourners backed away and fled out of the graveyard. Trouble was brewing, anyone could tell.
   “Friends of you?” Zoltan, the uber-thug atop the Mitsubishi, asked me with a thick accent.
   I considered lying. I doubted Sinisa would be willing to get into a firefight for our sake, especially when he was badly outnumbered. But it wouldn’t take long to figure out why they were here. Might as well go down telling the truth.
   “They’re after her,” I said, nodding to Saskia, who stood with fists tightly clenched, looking from me to Talena and back, her eyes blank with terror.
   Talena said, “Paul. We should run. Now.”
   Behind us, to the south, the ground sloped downwards for a few hundred metres, then, just past the graveyard’s perimeter fence, it rose abruptly into a steep rocky slope. A thin ribbon of dirt path wound its way up that slope.
   “That is what they want,” Sinisa said to her.
   “What? How do you know?”
   “Basic tactics. They would not come like this unless they wanted to drive you that way. There are more of them waiting on top of that path, I assure you.”
   If he was right then we were surrounded. I reached for my phone.
   “Who do you call?” Zorana, the redheaded woman who had greeted me in the factory, asked sharply.
   “NATO.”
   “You have interesting contacts,” Sinisa said. “We must discuss them someday.”
   “Yeah, sure,” I said. “If this isn’t my last day on earth that is.”
   “Hang up,” he said.
   “What?”
   “Do not call them. I would prefer not to owe Major Botham any perceived favours.”
   “Well, I would prefer not to be dead.”
   “You will be fine,” he said. “Everything is under control. Trust me.”
   He looked at me and waited, calmly and patiently, as if nine armed and extremely dangerous men were not within a minute or two of arrival. I paused. My finger hovered over the DIAL button. We were surrounded and outnumbered. Sinisa was a professional criminal and therefore completely untrustworthy. Maybe he was the one who had called Dragan here, was deliberately betraying us. It was entirely possible.
   But if that was the case we were dead anyway, it didn’t matter whether I called or not. If Sinisa didn’t help us we would be dead well before NATO ever showed up. Mistrusting him was no longer an option. I pushed CANCEL.
   “Good,” Sinisa said. He switched to Serbian and started barking orders. Zoltan, Zorana, Mini-Hulk and SRG took positions behind the vehicles and the bigger marble tombstones. Arwin folded the laptop, replaced it in its case, and got into the Mitsubishi. Sinisa vaulted nimbly to the ground.
   “Get inside,” he said, patting the Land Rover fondly. “Fully bulletproof, solid rubber tires. But do not get too comfortable. They may have grenades. Tell me, who are these men?”
   Talena and Saskia and I climbed onto the Land Rover’s leather seats. Talena had to help Saskia, who was numb and shivering.
   “They’re called the Mostar Tigers,” I said.
   Sinisa stiffened with surprise. My stomach clenched with fear. He had heard of them, and not in a good way. Now, I was suddenly and terribly certain, he would decide to abandon us to our fate rather than fight the Tigers.
   Instead he rolled his eyes, drew his cell phone, and said “Good God almighty, why can nothing ever happen the easy way?”
   We could see them in the distance now, nine men fanned out in a semicircle like pack animals on the hunt, moving with coordinated precision from tombstone to tombstone, using them as cover. Dragan and the Tigers, with more waiting atop that path, maybe all fifteen of them were in Sarajevo, he must have called in reinforcements from Mostar.
   Sinisa joined us in the Land Rover, in the driver’s seat, still holding his cell phone to his ear. He opened the window a finger’s width, and we waited.
   Sinisa’s eyes were alive with excitement, and muscles jutted from his neck, but he seemed otherwise calm. Saskia’s eyes were closed and every breath was a soft groan. Talena and I were somewhere in between; my right leg twitched nervously, she wound a loop of hair around a finger and pulled hard enough that it had to hurt, both of us taut as guitar strings but still in control. I was intensely aware of all my senses, the rich smell of leather, the sound of Saskia’s breathing, the soft textures of Talena’s hand as I took it in mine.
   They stopped about fifty feet away from us, sheltered behind gravestones.
   Sinisa had a quick muttered conversation with his phone.
   Then Dragan’s bellowing voice sounded. Talena muttered a translation into my ear.
   “We want the Canadian and the two women!” he shouted. “Give them to us and we will all leave this graveyard alive! If not, that Land Rover will be your mausoleum! We are the Mostar Tigers! I am Dragan Kovacevic! The woman, Saskia, she is
mine!
She is my
wife!
I will not rest, not a single day, not an hour, until I have my woman back, until I have my revenge and the streets run red with the blood of my enemies!”
That last sounded much too poetic for Dragan, but Talena assured me that it was fairly basic hyperbole around these parts, sort of the Bosnian equivalent of “Yo’ momma.” Sinisa lowered the window a little further and called out a reply.
   “The Mostar Tigers,” Talena translated. “I know of you. Perhaps you know of me. My name is Sinisa Obradovic.”
   There was a pause.
   “I know who you are,” Dragan said, his voice suddenly less strident.

 “These people are under my protection. Leave while you still can.”
   “If you know of the Mostar Tigers, you know we never run from a fight.”
   “This is no fight. This is suicide.”
   Dragan laughed. “Bold words from a man surrounded and outnumbered.”
   Sinisa muttered something else into his phone. I looked at Talena, who shrugged, she hadn’t caught it. Sinisa then closed his window, interlaced his hands behind his head, and leaned back in the leather seat, a slight, confident smile on his face. I began to wonder if we had turned ourselves over to a deranged megalomaniac.
   There was a loud crack, not gunfire, more like a big log snapping in two. Then another, and another, and I caught some kind of puffing motion out of the corner of my eye. I looked out at the graveyard. Something flickered in the distance. I blinked. One of those marble obelisks, over by the Tigers – had one of those just vanished?
   Another loud crack, and this time I saw the top half of one of those marble spires disappear into a puff of dust and gravel. Then another. And another. Somebody in the distance, one of the Tigers, yelled with rage and fear.
   Sinisa spoke into his phone, and the pace of destruction accelerated. All around where the Tigers huddled, grave markers snapped and burst and fell to the ground. It was like watching loggers clearcut a forest. I covered my ears against the piercing cracks, feeling slightly guilty about the desecration, but only slightly. Better to destroy others’ tombstones than to qualify for our own.
   Finally Sinisa spoke a single word into his phone and the onslaught stopped. My ears rang like I had spent the day front row center at Lollapalooza. A stunned silence hung over the cemetery.
   Sinisa lowered the window and shouted.
   “You have one minute to leave,” Talena translated, “before my snipers stop shooting at stones and start shooting at you.”
   There was no immediate response. I wondered where the snipers were. There were many houses on the slopes to the south, and several tall buildings across the Miljacka, with a clear view of the graveyard.
   Sinisa glanced at his watch. “Forty-five seconds!” he called out.
   “That woman is my wife!” Dragan shouted. “My
wife!
”
   “Forty seconds.”
   “I make a bad enemy, Sinisa Obradovic. If you do this thing then you too will have taken my wife from me. I make a bad enemy!”
   “Then perhaps I should just kill you now,” Sinisa suggested.
   “Perhaps you should!”
   “Christ,” I muttered. It wasn’t bravado. Dragan really was nuts.
   “If you stay here for only thirty more seconds,” Sinisa said, “I will.”
   I held my breath. I wanted them to stay. I wanted Sinisa to wipe them out. But just before Sinisa’s deadline the Tigers began to retreat downhill, towards their vehicles.
   Sinisa looked back at us, grinning smugly.
   “They’ll be back,” I warned him.
   “I doubt that.”
   “Paul’s right,” Talena said. “Those guys are crazy. And crazy dangerous. You know that, right? If they find out where you are…”
   “If they find out where we are they will be very frustrated. If Dragan Kovacevic tries to leave the country, believe me, I will know.”
   “Leave the country?” I asked, perplexed.
   “I am no longer based in Bosnia,” Sinisa explained. “You will come with me to my new headquarters.”
   “I what? Where? What country? When?” Everything was happening too fast.
   “Albania. Today.”
   “
Albania?
”
   “No worries, Mr. Wood,” he said. “I think you will like it.”
* * *
   Sinisa was in a hurry. We didn’t have time to drive Talena to the airport. Instead we dropped her off downtown where she could catch a taxi. I exited the car with her, and she turned to me, and we hugged each other so hard that after a moment I relaxed my grip for fear I might crack one of her ribs.
   “You take care of yourself,” she whispered. “And Saskia too. You have to take care of both of you. Don’t you dare do anything stupid and get yourself hurt. Don’t you dare. Promise me you’ll come back safe.”
   “I promise,” I said.
   “I shouldn’t go,” she said. She let me go and shook her head angrily. “This is crazy. What am I doing? I’m not going. No. I’m staying here with you.”
   “No,” I said. “You can’t. I’m wish you could, believe me, but no. You have to go back to work, and you have to be the one to help us if we get in trouble.”
   “I can’t. Fuck the job, Paul, I can’t go, this is wrong. It feels so fucking wrong to turn around and walk out on you. Fuck. Fucking fucking fuck. You better not just be telling me to leave so I’ll be safe.”
   “I’m not. Talena, I don’t want you to go any more than you do. But we’ll be safer if you leave.”
   “How am I supposed to help you if you get in trouble in Albania?” she asked.
   “Call my friends. Hallam and Steve and Lawrence. They’ll come if I’m in trouble.”
   “God damn it. I better hear from you every fucking chance you get. Every single day. No exceptions.”
   “Every chance I get,” I promised.
   “You better. I…” She sighed. “This is so fucked up. We shouldn’t be doing this like this, not here, not now, but…Paul, listen, I know this is all crazy, this whole, everything that’s been happening. And I know we haven’t talked, I can’t even remember the last time we really talked. I know things haven’t been good between us for awhile. But these last few days, I’ve been thinking…maybe, when you get back, maybe we could try one last time. Things will have to be different. Very different. But maybe we could try.”
   “I would like that,” I said quietly. “Very much.”
   “Okay. Good. Okay.” She took a deep breath. “You know, I almost, I almost forgot how much I like you. I forgot how good you are. How did that happen? How did we let that happen?”
   “It was my fault,” I said.
   “Never mind. Dammit. Of all the fucking times, you know? Right now I want to sit you down and just talk for six straight days. Make up for our whole lost last year.” She closed her eyes. “But we can’t. So let’s, okay, shit. You better,” her lip started to quaver, “you better just go now. Just, please, turn around, go, tell Saskia goodbye for me, tell her I’m sorry, tell her I couldn’t tell her goodbye myself or I’d just start bawling in the middle of the street, and, Paul, please, please be okay. Please come back okay. Please don’t get hurt.”
   “I love you,” I said, and kissed her softly. She didn’t answer. I turned my back on her and got into the Land Rover, and I sat stiffly with my heart pounding and a lump as big as a grapefruit in my throat as Sinisa drove me away from the woman I loved.
   At least she would be safe. I was sure of that. That was something.

“Paul,” Saskia whispered, touching my shoulder so tentatively I barely felt it. “Paul.”
   “I’m awake,” I lied, shook my head to clear it, looked around, tried to remember where I was and what I was doing. The back of Sinisa’s Land Rover. Driving south, towards Albania. No, wait, we were in Albania, I remembered shivering in the chill mountain wind, waiting outside the Land Rover at three in the morning while Sinisa talked to the guards at the Montenegro border, dispensing cigarettes and envelopes full of money. Seven hours had passed since then, and our convoy of two, the Land Rover leading the white Mitsubishi pickup, rolled along a smooth two-lane road that wound its way through green rolling hills flecked with red brick buildings, groves of olive trees, herds of sheep and cattle. My expectations of Albania, vague television memories of angry men in filthy gray cities waving AK-47s while disheveled Western reporters explained how pyramid schemes had looted the whole country’s savings, had never included this vision of rural paradise.
   “Did you sleep well?” Sinisa asked. He was in the passenger seat; at some point Arwin had taken the wheel.
   “Fine,” I said. There was a crick in my neck, and my clothes felt thickly uncomfortable, but I did feel rested, albeit several coffees away from alert.
   “There is a café by the side of the road here. A good place. They know me.”
   “Everyone knows Sinisa,” Arwin added. “In case you hadn’t figured it out already.”
   Sinisa beamed at the tribute.
   I looked over to Saskia. “How are you?” I asked.
   “Good,” she said, forcing a smile. I didn’t believe her. I guessed it had to be traumatic, fleeing your country, turning yourselves over to refugee smugglers, still pursued by your monstrous husband and his friends. I guessed the road to freedom was always bumpy.
   “Your NATO friends helped build this road,” Sinisa said. “Three, four years ago, this was all potholes and cracks. It took all day to go from Tirana to the border. Then Kosovo happened, NATO started bombing the Serbs, a hundred thousand refugees came into Albania, and the aid organizations finally started pouring money into this country. The Kosovo crisis was the best thing that ever happened to Albania. Here we go. The coffee here is splendid. Italian coffee, not Turkish, we left Turkish coffee behind at the border.”
   The café was clean, well-lit, and spacious, the scrambled eggs and ham and Greek salad were excellent if an odd mix, the gleaming new cappucino machine was put to good use, and our waiter refused a tip. Yesterday’s notion of Albania whimpered briefly in my head before disintegrating for good.
   Our convoy stopped for a cigarette in the gravel parking lot outside the café before resuming our journey. Zoltan and Zorana smoked unfiltered Camels as they leaned against the Mitsubishi, piled high and riding low with bags and boxes and crates and canisters. I was glad they were on our side. I felt uneasy around them, like I was in the presence of wild and possibly rabid animals.
   Sinisa and Arwin were Marlboro Light men. I bummed a cigarette off Sinisa. He offered one to Saskia as well, and after a moment she took it. I didn’t really intend to take up smoking again, but I figured it would make for good relations with my new boss to be a smoking buddy.
   “It is not all like this,” Sinisa assured us, as the nicotine hit me and I involuntarily shuddered. “Remember, this is the poorest country in Europe, the only country where you do not dare drink the tap water. The countryside is nice, but the cities are ugly, the factories are filthy, there are chemical leaks and oil spills, the medical standards are disastrous, only the main roads like this are any good. And the people, backward, corrupt, no education. But despite its difficulties, I tell you, this is a land of opportunity. The economy is booming, the trade barriers are falling, the government is slowly becoming competent, the people work hard when they can find work. And we are so close to the West. It is fifty kilometres to the Italian coast. This will be holiday country in a few decades. Lake Ohrid, to the east, huge, beautiful, almost untouched, last year I bought a whole kilometer of waterfront property, not a single building on it, less than a one-bedroom flat in London.”
   Arwin snorted. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said to me. “This place is a shithole.”
   Sinisa sighed. “Arwin, you have no dreams in you.”
   “Sure I do. I want to spend a long weekend driving around Manhattan in a stretch Hummer limo with two slutty supermodels. If that isn’t the ultimate dream, tell me what is. Lake Ohrid? Fuck that. The girls here, sure, they’re pretty, but they’re all Muslim, you’d have to pry their legs open with a fucking crowbar.”
   “I keep Arwin around for his delicate sensibilities and his valuable cultural insights,” Sinisa said to me.
   I chuckled. Zoltan growled something in Serbian.
   “English,” Sinisa said. “Around Paul, both of you speak English, always. It is a valuable opportunity for you two, to be able to practice with a real American English speaker.”
   Zoltan looked away and took a long drag on his cigarette before saying, “Yes, okay.”
   “Are you two going to America too?” I asked.
   Zoltan and Zorana looked at each other and then at Sinisa. I sensed I was not supposed to know the answer to that question. Which by itself pretty much told me the answer. It was hard to picture the two of them in America, they seemed too raw, too primal, for the modern civilized USA. Like bringing wolves into a city.
   “English skills are important everywhere today,” Sinisa said blandly.
   I suddenly realized, by how they stood and the way they had looked at one another, that Zoltan and Zorana were a couple. I noted identical plain gold wedding rings. Husband and wife. I repressed a chuckle. Of course. With names like theirs, how could they not be married?
   We smoked the rest of our cigarettes in silence and piled back into the Land Rover and Mitsubishi for the five-hour ride to Vlore. Near the city of Elbasan we passed a gargantuan chemical factory the size of a small town, the land around it blighted to a sooty lunar grey decorated only by stunted bushes and weeds. From Elbasan south at least half the vehicles were minivans carrying up to a dozen passengers apiece, here called
furgons
but no different from African
tro-tros
or
matatus
, Indonesian
bemos
, New Guinean
PMVs
, Central American
colectivos
. The poor world’s public transit is everywhere the same.
   The road veered around the capital of Tirana, headed west to the Adriatic coast, and then turned south again, parallelling empty railroad tracks. The buildings we passed were either red brick houses or cheap gray concrete blocks still sprouting rusting bundles of rebar, sometimes with scarecrows attached. I saw lumberyards, machine shops, bales of hay piled in enormous pyramids, gas stations, but mostly the road went through fields, half of them abandoned to waist-high weeds and grass. We overtook
furgons
, groaning tractors, ancient Fiats belching dark filth from their tailpipes, and once an old man on a rusted Vespa scooter with an eight-foot pitchfork strapped to his back. Occasionally we caught a glimpse of the Adriatic Sea to our right.
   The craziest thing was the bunkers. They were everywhere. “Hoxha’s mushrooms,” Arwin called them, pointing them out to me and explaining. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s paranoid Cold War dictator, during his forty-year tenure had ordered the construction of some 750,000 concrete bunkers from which his loyal Albanians could resist the onrushing hordes of invaders that Hoxha feared. Now no Albanian landscape was complete without a couple of dozen of Hoxha’s bunkers, squat concrete mushrooms four feet tall and six feet in diameter, clustered along roads and waterfronts and any vaguely strategic location but also sitting in ones and twos in the middle of green farming fields or lurking deep in the forest. Their existence seemed like evidence of Hoxha’s complete insanity; but maybe, given what had happened to neighbouring Yugoslavia after his death, he hadn’t been so crazy after all.
* * *
   By the time we finally reached Vlore we had been driving for a full day and I was too tired and punch-drunk to pay close attention to the town. My first impressions were of a sea of squat gray concrete bricks, wheezing old cars, a big open-air market, uneven streets, a huge decrepit pier jutting into the sea like a rotting tooth, a long arc of beach covered with flotsam and filth. We went through the downtown and up a high bluff that overlooked the harbour, a bay of the intensely blue Adriatic ringed by high green hills. The gray sprawl of Vlore proper looked like a fungal infection on the otherwise gorgeous panorama.
   We switchbacked up the steep slope, past chains of Hoxha’s mushrooms, and emerged onto a surprisingly pleasant little street lined with olive trees. There were a half-dozen small houses on either side and one very large house at the end, on the lip of the bluff. We turned into a gravel driveway midway along the street.
   “I figured the one at the end was yours,” I said.
   “These are all my houses,” Sinisa said casually. “This is the one where you will live.”
   “Oh.” Sinisa didn’t just have a big house; he had his own
neighbourhood
.
   Saskia and I got out of the car carrying the Adidas bags that contained all our worldly possessions. It was good to stretch my legs again.
   “The door is open,” Sinisa said. “Come to the house at the end in thirty minutes. Then you will begin your work.”
   I opened my mouth to agree but he was already reversing back onto the street and driving towards his mansion. Saskia and I looked at one another.
   “Well,” I said. “I guess this is home. Let’s take a look.”
   It was like walking into a cave. Our new home was nothing but a barren shell of uneven drywall and pitted concrete floors. Albanian construction standards were obviously lax. At least it had electricity and running water. The whole house smelled of fresh paint and was uncomfortably hot. Vlore was cooler than Bosnia, thanks to the nearby Adriatic, but the heat wave that had hung over the Balkans for two weeks had not yet abated. I thought longingly of the cool mountain air at the Montenegro border.
   We dumped our Adidas bags and went back outside, where the air was cooler and there was no unnerving emptiness. I was both exhausted and restless from our 24-hour drive. I wanted to go for a walk, get the lay of the land, but there was nowhere to go, Sinisa’s private hillside neighbourhood was a good hour’s walk from downtown Vlore. I saw that several of the other houses on the street were adorned with satellite dishes and wished that ours was similarly endowed. A little CNN or better yet Fox Sportsworld was just what the doctor called for. But it seemed I would have to go without.
   This was where I would live for a while. A very weird notion.
   “Nothing,” Saskia said. She looked even paler than usual. “Nothing inside.”
   “Don’t worry,” I said. “I guess he wasn’t expecting us. I’ll have him get some stuff out here. Beds and chairs and, I don’t know, stuff.”
   She smiled hesitantly. I doubted she had understood a word. I was speaking fast and mumbling, tired from the drive. “It will be OK,” I tried again, speaking as clearly as I could.
   “Good,” she said. “That is good, Paul.” But I wasn’t sure she believed me.
* * *
   The first day of work is always surreal. It is ten times more surreal if you are now working for a criminal enterprise, if you have just parted from your girlfriend for an extended period, if you have just driven from Bosnia into Albania after a cemetery firefight with the gang of thugs pursuing the woman you are trying to rescue, and if it begins with a long speech from Sinisa Obradovic. Take my word for it.
   “My parents were from Belgrade,” Sinisa said, leaning back against his desk, as I sat in one of his overdecorated office’s overstuffed leather chairs. “They moved to Amsterdam in the sixties. I speak Serbian because they spoke it at home, but I considered myself Dutch. I joined the army. I was a paratrooper, a lieutenant. Because I spoke the language they transferred me to the 13th Air Mobile Battalion and sent me here as a peacekeeper. To Srebrenica.”
   “Oh,” I said softly.
   “You know of it. Seven thousand unarmed men, slaughtered. I was there. It was despicable. The UN, my own army, they betrayed those men. An airstrike that would have stopped the Serb advance, the massacre would never have happened, that airstrike was cancelled because the man who requested it filled out the wrong UN airstrike form, did you know that? Children were dying, but the UN would not intervene because the paperwork was filled out incorrectly.”
   “I didn’t know that,” I said, tentatively appalled in case it was true.
   “That was where my faith in armies and governments collapsed. I went back to Holland. I left the army and went to school. Let me tell you of my qualifications. I am of course a citizen of the Netherlands, an EU citizen. I was a lieutenant in the Dutch Army. I have a diploma in business from a university in Eindhoven. I am a licensed pilot. I speak Serbian, English, Dutch, German, I am learning Spanish, one day I hope to learn Chinese. Here in Vlore I own a cement factory, eight and a half hectares of olive groves, three fishing boats. I have various business interests in Amsterdam and Belgrade and Sarajevo. But, with you I can be blunt, my major business, my
raison d’etre
as the French would say, is illegally smuggling refugees from poor countries into rich ones. Illegal. Not immoral. On the contrary, my business is as moral as the work of Medecins sans Frontieres, Amnesty International, UNICEF. I take people from danger, hunger, fear, desperation, unbearable poverty, unendurable despair, and I deliver them to the land of opportunity. What is immoral is that my business is illegal. You remember that famous motto on the Statue of Liberty? ‘Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to live free.’ No more. Not today. Today the tired and hungry are no longer wanted. Now the huddled masses must have visas, money, connections. Now they are guilty until proven innocent, guilty of being Muslim, guilty of being dark-skinned, guilty of being poor, guilty of wanting a better life for themselves.”
   He obviously wasn’t ad-libbing. This was a spiel, some kind of sales pitch. I wondered who else it was used on. Investors, contributors, potential employees, the refugees who were his clients, the officials who looked the other way in return for regular envelopes filled with cash US dollars? Had Arwin heard this pitch? I didn’t think so. Arwin didn’t seem like a man who would be moved by any attempt to awaken his inner Gandhi. This speech was saved for people who Sinisa thought might become True Believers.