Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (2 page)

   About thirty people were clustered in the back right-hand corner, sitting in little groups, all of them near or atop one or two bags. At first glance it looked almost like a typical backpacker scene; single travellers, smoking cigarettes and playing cards, waiting for a bus or for something to happen. But these travellers were dressed in rags, layered in filth, gaunt and desperate, equipped with polyester duffel bags rather than Eagle Creek backpacks. Most of them were some flavour of Indian or Middle Eastern. Almost all were men, a few of them accompanied by a woman.
   In the other back corner of the room were a dozen white women, mostly young and slender but already visibly victims of hard living, almost all of them blonde. They were dressed slightly better than the other group, mostly in tight jeans, navel-baring T-shirts, and cheap flashy jewelry, although a few of them wore dumpy misshapen dresses and no jewels. They sat and stood in a tight group in the absolute corner of the room, mostly with their backs to the walls, smoking up a stormcloud. Like the men in the other corner they had paused their conversation to stare at my dramatic entrance.
   About halfway along the wall to my right sat the family I had seen in the Mitsubishi, all six of them huddled together in a heap of grief, heedless of the possessions that lay haphazardly piled beside them. They did not even look up to see the return of their lost son. But he saw them. He shouted so loudly that I winced, and he began to wriggle in my grip like a rabid cat. I managed to lower him most of the way to the ground before he broke free and scrambled past the nonplussed gunmen to rejoin his family.
   His parents and siblings stared at him open-mouthed as he approached. Then his mother, disbelieving, held her arms out wide, and he ran into them, and the rest of his family mobbed him like a football team that had just scored a game-winning touchdown, weeping and laughing with relief.
   That broke some of the tension. The gangsters held a brief uncouth conversation, after which the men developed a little less hostility in their eyes and stances. The woman approached me.
   “I speak English. That is their son?” She pointed at the rejoicing family.
   “Yes.”
   “Where do you get him? How do you find us?”
   I almost reflexively corrected her tense but decided it wasn’t a good time. Instead I explained my recent history. She looked skeptical. I couldn’t blame her. It was a bizarre and unconvincing story. By the time I finished telling it, one of the men had shut the door behind me, which was bad, but the guns had all been put away, which was very good.
   “Papers,” the woman said. “Identification.”
   “My passport’s back where I’m staying,” I said. “But I have a copy…”
   I opened up my travel wallet and dug out the sheet of paper I carried at all times, a photocopy of my passport’s ID page and my California driver’s license. I also had a credit card, two hundred euros, and a hundred US dollars, in cash. I expected to lose all that when the gangsters saw it, but they paid no notice. Maybe it was small change to them. I tried to remember what I had read about people smuggling. Something like five thousand dollars per person to go from India to Europe, if I recalled correctly. Even if these particular gangsters only got a tenth of that for this leg of the trip, that meant the desperate men and women in this room represented nearly thirty thousand dollars. I wondered why they looked so poor if they could muster five grand, a fortune in India, to travel. Maybe these were the ones who went on credit and had to pay it off by working illegally once they arrived. I suspected the women in the corner would all spend their first year in the West turning tricks on the street, whether they knew it yet or not.
   The male gangsters all sported the same designer-dangerous look, leather jackets, black jeans, black army boots, thick steel necklaces over the identical tattooed flames that encircled their necks and disappeared below their black T-shirts. I imagined them modelling a new clothing line, Menace by Armani. The short hypermuscled one wore no shirt beneath his open jacket, revealing mountainous pectorals and the remainder of what I assumed was their gang-membership tattoo; a flaming sword, its hilt at the collarbone and its point at the navel, with Oriental dragons dancing in the flames that covered the rest of the torso.
   The woman, who was definitely in charge, was about my age, harshly beautiful, marathon-fit. She had no leather jacket, steel necklace, or tattoo, but something about her demeanor, her flat detached expression, made her the scariest person in the room. I was dead certain she wouldn’t hesitate a microsecond to use the gun she carried.
   “America or Canada?” she demanded.
   “I’m Canadian. But I live in California. America.”
   She frowned at the ambiguity. “You NATO? NGO? Journalist?”
   “I’m a tourist.”
   She, and all the others – I supposed the word was the same in their language – stared at me in disbelief. This was arguably the least plausible part of my story. Nobody came to Bosnia for pleasure; the war was too distant for ghouls and too recent for everybody else.
   “No, really,” I said. “A tourist. My girlfriend…” I paused and then decided not to explain, it was too complicated and they probably didn’t really care.
   “A tourist,” she repeated. She sounded baffled, rather than angry or disbelieving, which was good. “What is your work, in America?”
   “Computer programmer.” That wasn’t strictly speaking accurate, but it sounded a lot better than ‘unemployed loser who can’t find a job and supports himself by sponging off his parents and girlfriend.’
   She spoke to her minions and then turned to me. “Stay here,” she said, quite unnecessarily seeing as how two of her thugs stood between me and the door, and she walked away. I watched her disappear down one of the shadowy corridors that led deeper into the building.
   “You live California?” one of the thugs asked.
   “Yes,” I said, surprised that anyone else spoke English. I looked at him. Tall and thin, a big hook nose and features that did not aesthetically agree with his shaved head, early twenties. At twenty-nine I was probably the oldest person in the room except for the parents who had just regained their child.
   “Los Angeles?”
   “San Francisco.” He seemed disappointed, so I added, “But I go to Los Angeles sometimes, I have friends there.”
   “I always want to go Los Angeles,” he said. “Make movies there.”
   “It’s the place to go,” I said banally. The English-speaker, I realized, was the one who had seemed reluctant to pull his gun and order the family around at gunpoint back in the city. I decided to think of him as the sensitive reasonable gangster.
   “Pretty girls there?” He grinned.
   I put on my lecherous-heterosexual-man leer. “You have no idea. It’s like all the pretty girls in America, they all go to Los Angeles. And the weather is beautiful, and everybody has a car, and you can swim at the beach every day.” Actually I hated L.A. with a passion but I didn’t think it was a good time to rain on his delusions.
   “Los Angeles.” He shook his head reverently. “I go there someday.”
   I smiled and nodded.
   The miniature Hulk lookalike said something to Sensitive Reasonable Gangster, who nodded and said to me, “He want to know if you like the tattoo.”
   I looked at the enormous flaming sword on Mini-Hulk’s chest. “It’s great,” I said, and then, it just sort of popped out, “Very phallic.”
   Sensitive Reasonable Gangster looked at me, perplexed. “Phallic?”
   “California slang,” I assured him. “It means really cool. Very good.”
   “Phallic,” he said, nodding and smiling. “Very phallic.” He turned and said something to the other gangsters, presumably expanding their California-cool vocabulary. By turns they each said “phallic,” trying out the word. I managed to maintain a straight face, but only just. It wasn’t just the word that was funny, it was the way the whole conversation’s power dynamic had changed. Sure, this was their country, and I was a suspicious unwanted intruder, and they were the violent criminals who did whatever they wanted; but I lived in America, in California no less, and thanks to the almighty global power of Hollywood that made me infinitely cooler than these backwater Bosnian thugs, next to them I was the Fonz, and they knew it.
   The woman returned, and two men followed behind her. I was no longer the oldest person in the room; she was near my age, and both of the men looked mid-thirties. One of them, tall and impressively craggy, hung back in the shadows, but I kept a wary eye on him all the same. He had the same dull expression that the woman did, lifeless, like a snake. He and she were far scarier than the other gangsters. Those boys were too young to have fought in the war, but I was sure the woman and the man in the shadows were veterans of casual and terrible violence.
   The other man was my height, slender, wearing rimless eyeglasses, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and black tie that even I could tell were designer and expensive, his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Except for the ponytail he could have been a Wall Street maven. This man was clearly the boss. Even the body language of the woman and the shadowed uber-thug indicated deference.
   The businessman walked straight up to me and offered his hand. “Good evening,” he said. “Mr. Wood, I presume?” A smooth, confident voice, accented but cultured.
   “That’s me,” I said. We exchanged firm handshakes.
   “My name is Sinisa. I understand you claim to be a tourist who happened to find this boy and followed my people to return him, correct? A tourist and a computer progammer?”
   His English was nearly fluent. His accent was like no other I had ever heard, not quite Eastern European, not quite anything else.
   “That’s correct. I know it’s weird, but it’s true.”
   “You will be happy to know I am inclined to believe you,” he said. “I do not think anyone would invent such a ridiculous story. But I would like to verify some things. Where are you staying in Sarajevo?”
   “This, crap, I forget the name exactly. Pensione Karnak or something, not that exactly but something like that. It’s a really cheap little backpacker place, thirty KM a night, downtown, next to a parking lot. Right on the streetcar line, near the old synagogue, you know? Shit. I forget the name right now.”
   “I know the place,” Sinisa said, sounding amused. “One moment. I will put an engineer on the telephone to ask you about computers. Try to convince him you are a real programmer.”
   He withdrew an expensive cell phone from his suit pocket and selected a number to call. I was surprised he got any reception out here. He explained the situation to whoever answered, in English, and passed the phone to me. I took it gingerly, as if it might explode, and put it to my ear.
   A gruff voice with yet another unidentifiable accent asked me, “What languages do you code in?”
   “Uh, Java, mostly,” I said faintly. “I can find my way around in C and Smalltalk and a bunch of –”
   “Java. Fine. Why would you use the synchronized keyword in Java?”
   I had not thought that the evening could get any more surreal. And what kind of gangster overlord had a computer expert on staff at this hour? “Well…basically it’s a way to indicate that while a thread is running a given block of code no other threads may concurrently access that object.”
   “Yeah,” my interrogator said. “Good description. Give me back to Sinisa.”
   I returned the phone. I was beginning to feel much better about my situation. For one thing, I was beginning to understand my situation. I had stumbled into a gathering of refugees who had been staying in various different safe houses. They had probably all been brought here to move on to the next stage of their journey, probably tonight. Sinisa and his people were no doubt unhappy that I was here but they had already concluded that killing or kidnapping a Canadian tourist, and I was sure they now believed I was a tourist, was going to bring far more grief upon their heads than letting me go. I figured they would probably keep me here overnight, until the refugees had been taken away, and then release me. I hoped they would give me a drive back to Sarajevo. My cab driver wasn’t going to wait all night.
   Sinisa listened, said, “Good,” hung up, and said to me, “You are free to go.”
   “I…what? Right now?”
   “Yes. Now.”
   This I hadn’t expected. “I can just walk away right now?”
   “Yes,” he said impatiently. “Go.”
   He motioned to the door. Mini-Hulk scurried over and pulled it open, one-handed.
   “Right,” I said. “Okay. I’ll go.”
   I stared at Sinisa for a moment, waiting for the punch line, but none came.
   “Well, see you guys, thanks for everything,” I said, automatic Canadian courtesy, and I walked out into the night. For a moment I was afraid they had just lured me outside so they could shoot me with less mess, but the door rattled back down into place behind me.
   I was so surprised I nearly pitched off the edge of the loading dock instead of going down the steps. I didn’t understand. I show up out of nowhere, I find out exactly where they are and what they are doing, and they let me go? What kind of criminals were these?
   The answer came to me halfway back to the taxi. Very confident ones. Certain that there was nothing I could do to harm them. Go to the police? The police got a percentage. Sinisa and his people-smuggling ring had to be abetted, if not outright aided, by the Bosnian authorities. Why wouldn’t they let me go? They had nothing to hide. They had no one to hide from.
   The taxi took me back to Sarajevo.
   I never saw the child or his family again. I hope they made it.

My adventure had taken up much of the night and I expected Talena to be up waiting for me, worried and angry. When I walked through the Pansione Konack’s battered wooden door, the little brass bells crudely rigged above it rang loudly. But when I climbed up the uneven wooden stairs into the Pansione’s common room, there was no one there but the old troll-like woman who worked there and seemed to have given up sleep years ago. She sat in one of the much-repaired chairs, squinting at an ancient magazine, paying no attention to me.
I went into our room and turned on the light. A dingy room that contained a sagging too-small bed, a bedside table, a chair, and nothing else. The walls and ceilings were pitted and cracked. Our backpacks barely fit into the available floor space. The light was a single dim bulb dangling from bare wire. We could have stayed with any of several of Talena’s old friends, but neither of us had felt comfortable with that idea, given that it had been eight long years since she had seen them. I wished we had taken up one of those offers. I suspected Talena wished the same thing, but I didn’t want to ask. It was one of an increasingly long list of subjects I was reluctant to bring up for fear they might trigger another icy communication breakdown. We had had more than enough of those in the last six months.
   Talena was curled up in bed, asleep. Not so worried about me after all. Without pausing to wonder whether it was a good idea, I sat next to her and shook her shoulder. I wanted to tell her all about my adventure it while it was fresh in my mind. I was proud that I had done something bold and reckless and gotten away with it, that I had had an adventure. Maybe it was stupid macho bullshit, but it was the only stupid macho bullshit I had had for a long time, and I wanted to share it with her.
   “Huh?” she mumbled, eyes flickering open. “Wha? The – what is it? What time is it?”
   “You’re not going to believe what just happened,” I said.
   “What the fuck
time
is it?” She squinted at her watch. “It – Jesus Christ, it’s four in the fucking morning!”
   “Seriously. Listen. It was unbelievable. I was walking down this random street, I turned the corner, and I saw this Tamil family –”
   “Paul,
what the fuck?
I’m trying to sleep! Jesus fucking Christ! Do lives depend on you telling me this shit right now? Do they?”
   I hesitated. “No.”
   “Then shut the fuck up and let me sleep.” She rolled over, turning her back to me. “And turn the fucking light out.”
   After a moment I rose, deflated, and turned out the light.
   I stood in the darkness for a moment. Then I went back out into the common room. I knew I should try to get some sleep, we had an early bus ride to Mostar tomorrow, but I was still wide awake. I sat down in an uneven wooden chair and looked around like I had just noticed where I was. Which was how I felt. A strange and disturbing feeling. Like some kind of film had been peeled off my eyeballs and I was really seeing the things around me, in full vivid colour, for the first time in ages.
   Like the rest of the Pensione the common room was gray, low-ceilinged, undecorated, poorly lit, too small, encrusted with grease and dust, and smelled old and sour. Everything, walls and lights and furniture and bedding and plumbing, was old and faded and rickety and barely worked. I wished we had more money. I was twenty-nine years old now, Talena twenty-eight, and I didn’t associate squalid accomodations with desirable backpacker chic any more. I would have been happy to sacrifice gritty authenticity for comfort, but we couldn’t afford comfort. We couldn’t even afford the air fare that had brought us here. This holiday was entirely financed by MasterCard.
   I sat in one of the uneven wooden chairs. The troll-woman continued pretending that I didn’t exist. I felt itchy, physically dissatisfied. After a moment I realized to my surprise that I wanted a cigarette. I had never been a regular smoker, and I hadn’t had a cigarette in two years, not since starting to date Talena.
   What the hell. She would be angry if she found out, but that hardly mattered, these days she would find reasons to be angry with me if I morphed into the Angel Gabriel and started healing cancer patients. I got up, went downstairs, exited the Pansione, and headed for the 24-hour convenience store a few blocks west.
   It was dark out, only a few occasional street lights, and the street was utterly deserted, as if the city had been evacuated while my back was turned. A warm breeze drifted eastward. The streetcar rails in the middle of the street gleamed in the moonlight. As I walked I wondered how many people had died on this stretch of road during Sarajevo’s three-year siege. It was easy to imagine it, now that the streets were empty as a deserted movie set, easy to mentally superimpose bloodsoaked scenes of anguish, terror, and war. I didn’t have to imagine bullet marks, or bear-claw-shaped mortar scars, or apartment towers blasted into gargantuan Swiss cheese. The signs of war were still easy to find, in this city overflowing with angry ghosts.
   The convenience store was a reassuring island of bright lights, modern technology, and Western brand names. I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches. I walked back to the Pansione, unwrapped the pack, and lit my first cigarette in two years. I choked a little on the first few puffs, but old habits kicked in and I was soon smoking like I had never stopped.
   I still wasn’t tired. Far from it. I was electrically awake. I hadn’t experienced tonight’s kind of adrenaline rush, or anything even close to it, for a long, long time. I felt like I had woken up from a long, deep sleep. From a coma.
   I thought of the last time I had faced down a loaded gun. The smell and taste of smoke reminded me of how I and my friends had smoked our way through a pack of cheap Moroccan cigarettes on our way back to our hotel, that day more than two years ago. I hadn’t thought about that night in ages. I hadn’t thought about anything outside the bleak rut of my day-to-day life in ages. It had hurt too much, remembering how good my life had been.
   Once upon a time I was a man who had adventures, who travelled several months a year, crossed oceans and continents on a whim, who had friends around the globe who would risk their lives for me and I for them, who had a beautiful girlfriend who I loved and who loved me, who was happy. Once upon a time I had money. Once upon a time my skills were in demand and I was able to get a well-paid job whenever I wanted one. Those two things hadn’t seemed so important. How wrong I had been.
   I still had Talena, but, I told myself, finally able to articulate it because it had moved from fear to certainty, not for much longer. I still had those friends, but most were oceans away, and I wasn’t likely to have enough money to cross oceans again anytime soon. I didn’t have much else. Two years ago, I had everything. Now I was running out of things to lose.
   At the party that night, I had watched Talena laughing with one of her old rediscovered friends, a tall easygoing model-handsome man with chiseled muscles and designer clothes, trading jokes in a language I did not understand, and for the first time I had thought:
She doesn’t belong with me. I wish she did, how I wish she did, but she doesn’t. She belongs with someone better.
   The troll woman said something. I started out of my reverie and looked at her. She reached for the Marlboros with bony claw fingers and looked at me for approval. I nodded. She coaxed a cigarette from the pack, lit it, and sucked at it like it was the source of life. I wondered how old she was. She looked about seventy, but Bosnians, like all residents of recent war zones, usually looked older than they were. Maybe sixty. I wondered where I would be when I was sixty, if I might be alone in a room like this, bumming cigarettes from strangers. Just then it seemed like a terrifyingly plausible future.
   I lit up another cigarette and contemplated myself and my prospects. I hadn’t done so for a long time. Eighteen months of poverty and boredom and rejection, of living off handouts from my parents and Talena, of being an unemployed bum with fuck-all to do, had shrunk my life to a barren rut from which I dared not lift my head. For a long time now the mental subjects of
me
and
the future
had been too repellent to dwell on. But tonight, being in Sarajevo, carrying that little boy back to his family, staring down the smugglers’ guns, tonight seemed to have jolted me out of my lethargy and depression, for a little while at least. Tonight I could look at myself without cringing.
   I stayed up all night, smoking and thinking, sometimes sitting in that common room, sometimes wandering the deserted streets, until my throat was raw and my mind was numb and the sky above Sarajevo had turned pale with incipient dawn. Then I went into our room, sat on the chair, and watched Talena sleep, peaceful and beautiful, her slender body curled up like she was cold, her face half-obscured by her long dark hair. I loved her. I wondered if she still loved me. I knew she had at one point, very much, but I also knew that she could not love someone she did not respect, not for very long.
   I knew it was too late to save what we had. Much too late.
   Unless something extraordinary happened.