Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (5 page)

   “What happened?”
   “You fucking – I can’t rely on you, you know that? I used to think I could rely on you.”
   I was drunkenly confident that her anger was unjustified, so I’d had one beer too many, it was a Bosnian party that started at noon, what the hell did she expect in this nation of alcoholics? I nearly said that, nearly picked a fight with her. Only the sight of Saskia, drained and despairing, prevented me.
   “We’re going to bed,” Talena said. “Don’t wake me up when you come in. If you come in. You can sleep out here for all I give a shit.”
   “Okay,” I said, and watched her depart. I wanted to follow and find out what terrible thing had happened. It occurred to me that maybe she wouldn’t tell me, not even tomorrow when I was sober and we were alone together. We had grown far enough apart that that was possible.
   Darkness fell. Women and children began to drift back to their homes, or to the half-ruined buildings which passed for them, but the Tigers remained, standing in a cluster in the middle of the street, circulating their umpteenth bottle of slivovitz, talking and laughing, probably reminiscing about the good old days of killing and maiming. I looked over at them. Then I sat bolt upright, alarmed, as I saw Dragan walking down the street holding a Kalashnikov. Before I could figure out how to react, he aimed the weapon at the sky, howled like a wounded animal, and fired a whole magazine straight up at the stars. I hadn’t heard the loud, curiously hollow sound of gunfire for a long time.
   I told myself I should go. I was getting maudlin and weepy again, but more to the point, drink and guns and ex-soldiers were a bad combination. If ‘soldiers’ was the right word. I suspected that the Mostar Tigers had been one of the Bosnian war’s many highly irregular warlord paramilitary units, not part of any formal army. Which made them even more volatile and dangerous. And even if they fired only at the moon, bullets that go up must eventually come down. I remembered reading somewhere that if they tumbled they would only hit hard enough to bruise, but if they came straight back down they could kill you, “space bullets” the article had called them.
   I knew I should go. But I felt about as mobile as the concrete block on which I sat. The beer and slivovitz seemed to have hardened into glue in my joints. I just watched and stared as all fifteen of them linked arms and hoarsely began to sing. Some of them began to weep. They were midway through what I had begun to recognize as the chorus when NATO arrived.

They came from both ends of the street at once, two Jeeps with four blue-helmeted soldiers in each, and both of them pulled up on the side of the street opposite me, stopping perpendicular to one another, headlights crossing right where the group of Tigers stood. The Tigers split off into two groups, one facing each Jeep. It was dark but the headlights and bright rear-mounted searchlights of the Jeeps illuminated the scene clearly and kept the British hidden. The block on which I sat was just far enough away that I remained in darkness.
   “Put down your weapon
immediately
,” a crisp British voice demanded. His voice was quickly followed by the Croatian translation.
   Dragan bellowed something. I didn’t hear what the NATO translator said, but it certainly didn’t defuse the situation. The doors of the Jeeps opened and the soldiers took up armed positions behind them.
   “Go fuck yourself,” Josip said loudly, his English slurred and accented but unfortunately very understandable. “This is our city. Our city. We fought for it, we bled for it, we fucking died for it. Fuck you. Fuck NATO, fuck you. This is our home. Our home. Not your home. Ours. So we, we,” he staggered with the force of his inebriated emotion and just prevented himself from falling, “we will do what we want here. So fuck you, fuck every one of you, fuck your mothers, fuck your sisters, fuck your daughters, fuck yourselves, fuck yourselves up the ass, fuck each other, fuck you, fuck off, eat shit and fucking die.”
   I thought it was an impressive display of profanity considering that English was at best his second language. The British leader didn’t seem to share my admiration. “You have ten seconds to put down that Kalashnikov,” he said coolly, “or you will be arrested.”
   Josip and the NATO translator raced to convey their versions of that. The threat of their leader’s arrest galvanized the other armed Tigers– half a dozen, it turned out, carried small pistols on their persons – into drawing their weapons. No guns had yet been aimed at the NATO troops, but it seemed like just a matter of time.
   The British leader agreed with my estimation: I heard him speak, probably into a radio, and calmly report, “This is second squad. Our situation has escalated. Request backup.”
   The searchlight of one of the Jeeps described a slow arc around the street and latched onto me. I shielded my face with my arms against the blinding light.
   “You!” a young and nervous voice shouted, not the leader’s. “Get up here with your mates!” When I didn’t respond immediately the same voice barked, presumably to their translator, “Tell him to get his bloody arse up here. Last thing we need here is more of them skulking around.”
   “All right!” I said angrily, loudly enough that the Brits could hear me over the dark muttering of the Tigers. “Christ. Stop pointing that fucking thing at me already, will you? Jesus.” I stood up, still shielding my eyes, and walked over to the space between the Jeeps, moving fairly steadily, the sight of guns and the incipient standoff had half-sobered me in a hurry.
   “Who the fuck are you?” the young voice asked, astonished. “What’s a fucking Yank doing here?”
   “I’m Canadian, asshole,” I said. And then, inspiration striking: “And these are my friends, and if this is anyone’s fault, it’s mine, so why don’t you cool the fuck down and stop pointing your guns at my friends here? And for Christ’s sake get that goddamn light out of my face!”
   My stew of poisonous emotions had found an unexpected outlet: the British Army.
   My appearance and irritable complaints were so out of place that they alone half-defanged the situation. The Bosnians, coming from a land where you never trusted armed authorities, who could not even imagine treating soldiers as if you had rights that they dared not violate, were bewildered and to some extent impressed by my grumpy demands and total lack of fear that Brits might shoot me or arrest me, and my strange behaviour crowded the worst of their macho persecution complex from their minds. The British, on the other hand, nonplussed at finding an annoyed Canadian amidst this gang of thugs, were suddenly no longer certain what they should do.
   “Redirect the light,” the leader ordered, and I could see again. “And we are not pointing guns at your friends. Not yet. Now who are you and how precisely are you responsible for this?”
   “My name is Balthazar Wood,” I said. I hardly ever used my full name but I had learned that in confrontations its lengthy ring was psychologically advantageous. I indicated Dragan. “Dragan here is a friend of mine. He was telling me how they used to shoot guns into the air at parties, and I asked him if he could show me. So he did. As a favour to me, that’s all. And who exactly are you?” The best defense, it’s a good offense.
   After a pause he answered me. “Lieutenant Simon Taylor, Second Paratroop Division, British Army.”
   “Yeah. I had the British part figured out. Paratroopers, huh? Old friend of mine used to be in your outfit. Hallam Chevalier, ever heard of him?… okay, never mind. Look, I’m sorry. I asked for a little too much authentic Bosnian culture. I’m just a stupid tourist.” An old traveller’s trick:
Stupid Tourist
, an amazingly effective and almost universally applicable ploy that had gotten me out of countless scrapes in the past. Everyone knows that tourists are such incredible idiots that they’re effectively mentally damaged and can’t really be held responsible for their actions. “I’ve been drinking,” I continued, “we’ve all been drinking, I guess you can see that. I’m very sorry it came to this. But it’s over now, and nobody really wants any trouble, can’t we all just go home and sleep it off?”
   I hoped for a “Yes.” I expected a long, stern lecture, followed by a grudging “yes.” I feared that Dragan or one of his men, who so far had been perplexed into letting me do the talking, would ruin everything by doing or saying something stupid during the lecture. I did not expect what I heard next, from a third British voice, this one rough and middle-aged and surprised:
   “Chevalier? Sergeant Hallam Chevalier? You’re a mate of his? The South African?”
   “I – well, yes,” I said. “Zimbabwe, not South Africa. Yes, he’s a good friend of mine.”
   “I’ve heard that name before,” the leader said thoughtfully.
   “He was a fucking legend, sir,” the old voice said. “I met him a few times, my first tour here, ten years ago. I heard he was nominated for the VC. Just bloody politics he didn’t get it.”
   “Hallam was nominated for the Victoria Cross?” I said, amazed. “For what?”
   “We don’t have time for this,” the leader said sharply before the older soldier could answer. “Klein, this is not a gossip shop, and you will not waste our time exchanging war stories with one of our suspects.”
   “Yes, sir,” the older voice said, chastened.
   “And you, Mister Wood, tell me, how does one descend from being friends with a widely respected member of the finest military unit in the world to fraternizing with your current set of associates?”
   I looked over at the Mostar Tigers, looked back towards the NATO jeeps, rolled my eyes, shrugged, and said in a regretful you-know-how-it-is voice: “My girlfriend.”
   There were a couple of quickly smothered chuckles on the other side of the headlights.
   “And where is she?”
   “Asleep.”
   The leader sighed, loudly. Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, Mister Wood. If you talk your friends here into following her example this very minute, then I shall arrest no one and confiscate nothing. This is your last and only chance.”
   I turned to Josip, who was already translating. Dragan thought about it for a minute. I wondered just how big an idiot he was. Then he said something back, and Josip announced:
   “Dragan says two things. First thing, we are already tired, so the party is over and we will go to sleep, fine. Second thing he says, he says fuck you, NATO. Fuck you all.”
   Pretty big, I decided. A solid 7 on an idiot scale of 1 to 10. And there were more engines approaching. NATO’s reinforcements. If they decided to take offense, then Dragan, and possibly I, would probably spend at least the night in jail.
   Fortunately, Lieutenant Taylor actually sounded amused. “Tell your friend that the feeling is more than mutual,” he said dryly. “Now put your guns away and go home. By the look of the lot of you, you need all the beauty sleep you can get.”

* * *

I followed Dragan back into his house. I was very tired, eager to sleep, but as I began to climb the stairs to the guest bedroom, he put a meaty hand on my shoulder and dragged me back to the front door. I tried to politely protest but the language barrier made the attempt futile. We waited, the door open a crack, until NATO’s headlights vanished. Then Dragan advanced into the night again, half-pulling me behind him. In the dim glow of the two functioning streetlights I saw shadows emerging from other houses. The party was not over. The Mostar Tigers were reconvening.
   I followed Dragan and the others across uneven grassy fields, led by several darting flashlights. I thought uneasily of unexploded land mines. I wanted to turn back to the warm bed I had almost reached, but doing so would clearly be very rude, and offending Dragan and the Tigers seemed like a bad idea.
   A building loomed out of the night, a big ruined house, its stone walls scarred and chipped, every window shattered. I followed the flashlights up old stone steps, through a doorway with no door, and into a big drafty room. Something scurried as we entered. I soon realized that the room was drafty because an irregular hole the size of a Volkswagen had been blasted into one wall. Shattered limbs of lacquered wood that had once been fine furniture were piled in a corner. A big and vaguely Persian rug remained, torn and covered with dust. Someone, presumably the Tigers, had redecorated the room with big logs and concrete bricks, and improvised a firepit out of the rubble beneath the hole in the wall.
   The Tigers, who had been absolutely silent on the walk over, began to chatter brightly to one another. I sat on one of the logs, between Josip and Dragan, as a fire was lit. A new bottle of slivovitz was opened and plastic cupfuls passed around. I tried to demur but a roar of disapproval forced me to accept a cup.
   Dragan lifted his cup. “Paul Wood!” he said. With his other hand he clapped me on the back so hard I nearly spilled my slivovitz.
   “Paul Wood!” the Tigers chorused, and they raised their glasses to me, then drained them. I was so surprised that I forgot to drink.
   “It is friends like you we need, Paul,” Josip said. “Friends who can stand up to NATO and make them listen. Friends who can support our business.”
   “I’m happy I could help,” I said cautiously. The appreciation was flattering. I had to admit I got a bit of a buzz from all those battle-hardened warriors smiling approvingly at me. But I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be an honorary member of the Mostar Tigers. A subject change seemed like a good idea. “What is this place?”
   “One of the rich Turks lived here,” Josip said. “It was our headquarters during the war. We did great things here. Great things. And now, now we come here to drink. Look at us. Hiding here like children escaping their parents. It is a humiliation. Look at these men around you. Every one of us has killed men in battle. We saved one another’s lives times beyond counting. Our enemies trembled at our name. And now, now the war is over, all we do is drink and curse NATO and talk about how bold we once were. But look, Paul, look, I tell you, these are some of the bravest and most dangerous men in the world. We are not useless. But this peace,” he spat the word out, “this NATO peace, it comes with nothing, no opportunity. If we were given an opportunity, I tell you what we would do with it. We would make a miracle. We would make an empire.”
   It was a stirring speech. I wished I was a rich Western investor, wished there was some way I could help Dragan and Josip and the Tigers. But they were aiming their speeches at the wrong man. I couldn’t even help myself.
   “You are tired,” Josip said. “I understand. We will speak of this further tomorrow. But do not forget what I tell you. You are with men capable of great things.”
* * *
   I woke early. Partly because ten time zones’ worth of jet lag was still making my metabolic clock spin like a compass in a magnet factory. Partly because I always wake up early when I’m badly hung over, as if my body wants me to suffer through as many hours of my self-inflicted agony as possible, some kind of moral lesson. It was barely dawn. Talena slept beside me. I didn’t remember coming into the house and going to sleep. I hoped I hadn’t woken her up.
   The bathroom, I remembered, was downstairs. Standing up was a terrible mistake. A sledgehammer began to pound at my skull from the inside. I felt so weak that I tottered rather than walked. I descended the stairs slowly and clumsily. There was no rail, so I pressed my hands against the wood-panelled wall next to the stairs for support. The steps creaked beneath me. Eventually I reached the bathroom door and pushed it open.
   The toilet lid was down, and Saskia sat atop it, her face in her hands, tears leaking from her closed eyes. She was crying without making a single noise, absolutely silent even though her whole body shook violently. She wore sweat pants and a black bra, and her long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her stomach and upper arms were mottled with bruises the size of apples, vividly purple and yellow against her otherwise porcelain skin.
   I stood there, stunned, my mind wrapped in my hangover’s thick blinding cloth, barely able to parse what I was seeing.
No wonder Talena was so upset
, was my first coherent thought. You’d be upset too if you met your half-sister and once-best-friend after eight years and found that she was a battered wife. I wondered if I should turn around and go upstairs and pretend this encounter had never taken place. It seemed horribly rude to intrude on Saskia’s misery like this. But she would hear my retreat. She must have heard me coming downstairs.
   “Sorry,” Saskia managed to whisper through her silent sobs. “Sorry. Wait. Please wait.” Her eyes had at least flickered open, so she knew who stood before her.
   I waited, amazed at her noiseless weeping, at the discipline it takes to control an involuntary physical reaction like that. Easy, and terrible, to imagine how it had happened. Dragan liked beating her, but he didn’t like the way she sounded when she cried afterwards, so he punished her even more severely when she cried until she learned how to be silent. A kind of self-control that didn’t come easy. Hindu fakirs practiced for half their lives to have so much control. Years upon years of patient, methodical, endless abuse must have been inflicted on the woman before me before she had learned to cry silently. I shivered at the thought.
   “Sorry,” she whispered again, getting control of herself. “I am sorry, Paul, I am sorry.”
   “It’s okay,” I whispered back. “Saskia. It’s okay.”
   “I am think you are Talena,” she said. She frowned, trying to find the right words in her broken English. “But it is okay it is you. You are good man, Paul. Talena tell me. You are good man. She tell me. I tell her to stay with you. It is okay you see me.” She spread her arms wide to display her bruises, almost proudly. “But no tell Dragan. No tell. Please. No tell. You tell, is bad, is most bad for me, okay?”
   “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”
   “I am sorry. I not, I do not know English. Not good. In German I am good. In English I am so stupid. Please know, please know, I am not stupid. I am…what is word? Good, not stupid.”
   “Smart,” I said.
   “Yes. Smart. I am smart like Talena, I am, please know. But in English I am not say the words I want. It make me…” She shrugged with a frustration which required no translation. “I am not stupid. I have diploma, good school. In Croatian or German I am smart. Big smart. In my school I was most smart, girl or boy, I was most smart. I know you must think, stay with Dragan, must be stupid. But please, I am not.”
   “I don’t think that,” I said. “I don’t think you’re stupid.” And I didn’t. I had some idea how hard it was to flounder in a language you had only a bare and broken understanding of, and she was doing wonders to convey what she needed to with her hundred-word vocabulary, on the fly, without hesitation. I would never have done near as well in French.
   “Talena want me to go with you now. To Sarajevo. To go and stay.” She shook her head. “I no go. No now. Is not smart. I want to say what is not smart. I want to say big many things to you, Paul, but I not have words, I am sorry. You go back to Sarajevo. I stay here. I want to go to Sarajevo with you. I want it big, most big. If I go, then Dragan go. I go before. I know I have baby, so I go. Dragan want baby. Dragan want baby most big. I no want Dragan baby father, so I go. Dragon go. Dragan…” She hesitated, lost for words, then she formed a fist and mimed punching herself in the belly. “Many times. So no baby. Dragan want baby most big, but he want me know Dragan most big more.”
   I stared at her, speechless.
   “Talena want me to go with you. But if I go, Dragan go. Dragan go, Dragan kill me.” She shrugged. “I think, I kill Dragan. But is others. I kill Dragan, I go, they go, they kill me. I go Sarajevo, Banja Luka, I go Bosnia, they go, they kill me. So I no go with you. If I go America, I go with you. But Talena say, I no go America.”
   Which was true. It would take months to get a visa.
   “You and Talena, you go America now. I wait. You go do things so I go America, you go Bosnia, I go America. I stay America. Is good. Is most good. Is smart? Is good?”
   “Is good,” I assured her. I wanted to cry. “Is smart.”
   “Good,” Saskia said. “You good man, Paul. You good man.”
   We looked at each other. It was clear that the conversation was over.
   “Do you go to…” She couldn’t think of the word, and mimed using her hands as a pillow.
   “Sleep,” I said.
   “Sleep. Yes. Do you go to sleep now?”
   “Yes,” I said. “Except I need to use the bathroom first.”
   She looked at me, confused, and I pointed to the toilet.
   “Oh, yes,” she said, and smiled, amused and slightly embarrassed. I hadn’t seen her smile before. It was a smile that seemed to belong to an entirely different woman, confident and beautiful and insouciant, rather than the frightened, huddled, desperate person who had conducted the rest of this conversation. She got up and padded silently past me. On impulse I reached out and took her shoulder. I was going to hug her, but she pulled away, fast, her smile fading to fright.
   “Sorry,” I said, kicking myself for being an idiot, for not realizing that she associated any male touch with terror and pain. “Sorry. I just… sorry.”
   “Oh,” she said. “Okay. Sorry. Is no good. Sorry.”
   “Good night,” I whispered, although it was now day.
   “Good night.”
* * *
   I woke the second time to a pounding headache and an angry girlfriend.
   “Sure hope you had a good time yesterday,” Talena said, when I made the mistake of opening my eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, reading my Lonely Planet guide. “Hope you had a wonderful time with all your new friends. Why don’t you ask them to take you hunting later on? Maybe they can explain the fine points of how you set land mines so that they’ll kill small children.”
   “Nguh,” I protested. It was hard to talk. I cleared my throat. “Land mines…what?”
   “But that’s all old news. What they’re really expert at nowadays is beating their wives. Ask them all about it. I’m sure they can teach you all the details. Where you hit them so that they piss blood for a week but it isn’t visible in public. How you hit them on the soles of the feet so they can’t walk if you don’t want them to leave the house. You know what? I just realized. I bet actually they learned all this from torturing people during the war, and now that the war’s over, they’re just keeping in practice with their wives. That’s how Saskia got that black eye. Dragan’s just practicing for the next war.”
   “Black eye?”
   “There’s a reason she dragged all her hair over one side of her face and put makeup on like she was about to go on TV.” She paused and in a slightly less angry tone said, “I didn’t notice it either at first. He stopped hitting her in the face a couple of weeks ago, because we were coming to visit. He told her that if she told either of us he would cut her tongue out. You hear that? Cut her tongue out. And it’s not some empty hyperbolic threat, he actually means he would take a steak knife and hold her mouth open and saw her fucking tongue off. That’s your new buddy Dragan for you. She was crying all day yesterday. It took her all day to start talking about it. He wouldn’t give a shit whether we knew or not, not Dragan, except he wants to make a good impression because he’s hoping you’ll give him money.”
   “Yeah,” I said. “He mentioned.”
   “He did? He talked to you? In English?”
   “His friend. Josip. Speaks English.”
   “Josip. Right. The Professor. Well, Saskia says Dragan doesn’t, so we can speak freely as long as Josip isn’t around. But if you so much as hint that we know about him beating her…” She tried to come up with some kind of consequence equal to the enormity of that action, and failed. “Don’t. Just, don’t. Please, Paul, for God’s sake, wake the fuck up. This is bad. This is really fucking bad. All those men last night, all your new best friends? They’re monsters. Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as demons in human form. I’m not exaggerating, not one fucking bit, if you heard the stories she told me…God. Crucifixions, old men and boys crucified alive, live impalings, locking children into houses and setting them on fire, shooting pregnant woman in the belly, stopping buses and picking out girls to drag outside and rape in front of their families, war or no war, and it wasn’t a war, it’s fucking unspeakable what they did, and I don’t care that half the rest of the country was doing the same kind of thing, they’re still monsters. It’s like Saskia was kidnapped by orcs eight years ago and they kept making her send letters saying she was OK. Except they didn’t make her. She just didn’t want to trouble me. If she’d only told me, if she’d just called or written and told me…Fuck. It makes me want to scream. I guess she didn’t get email until a few years ago anyway and by then he’d already kicked all the good sense out of her.”
   “You don’t need to worry about me,” I said defensively. “They were already definitely not my new best friends.”
   “That’s not what Josip said you told the NATO troops.”
   “I was trying to mediate. That’s all. Defusing the situation. Come on, Talena, you know me, do you really think I was male bonding with those animals? I was just trying to be polite and friendly so that you wouldn’t be pissed off at me for ruining your reunion. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have stayed at that party more than ten minutes.”