“That’s not much assurance, coming from the expert who once said the war would be over in three months. How reliable’s your source?”
“Pretty reliable. Vitas told me.”
“When?”
“Must have been about a year ago. He’d come round here doing something a little bit like you are, searching the family tree of one hood or another. I asked after his family and he mumbled something about his late mother. Said she’d died a few months earlier. Old folks die, you know, even when there isn’t a war on. Especially when they’re bored and lonely, like you. Please, Vlado, don’t forget to call next week or I’ll come pull you out of your flat myself. And I’ll step on some of those little men while I’m there. Now, off to the dining rooms of New York.”
He opened the door to the sound of squealing tires and Hollywood gunshots, which sounded nothing at all like the sharp crack of a sniper rifle. These were soft little pops, the sound of children making believe.
By the time he left Goran’s it was probably too late to catch Damir at the office, and chances were the phones would be down as well, which rankled because now he had plenty to discuss. They’d have to remap their strategy now. If Glavas was able to deliver as promised, they’d have scores of leads to check out around the city from the transfer files, looking for lost paintings.
When he reached his apartment he was cold and bone-weary, the first time in weeks he’d felt so tired, a sensation he might even welcome if a hot bath awaited. Instead there was only a dead phone line. The temperature indoors seemed even colder.
He threw open the oven door and turned the knob for the gas, hearing the weak hiss, then lighting it with a match. He made a mental note to scrounge up some more matches. There were fewer than a dozen left in his box.
A feeble blue ring of flame sprang from the burner. As more families tapped into the pipes the pressure continued to drop, and the supply was prone to frequent interruption, sometimes for days at a time. At this rate it would be twenty minutes before he could boil a pot of water, longer still before he’d actually heat even a corner of the apartment.
He walked to the workbench in the corner of the narrow kitchen, fumbling for a few moments with some half-painted soldiers, but his hands were still too stiff for any detail work.
He sliced a piece of the butcher’s meat and chewed slowly, wrapping the rest back in the rough paper, then swigged some water from a plastic milk jug and tore at a stale heel of bread.
He pulled his bed next to the kitchen door, hoping to capture as much of any heat as possible, and decided to leave the oven on all night. It was a risky proposition. If the gas supply was cut the flame would go out, and if the gas were then turned back on, he’d either suffocate or go up in a ball of flame. One or the other event happened about once a week in the city these days, either from a faulty hookup or from a gamble just like this one. It didn’t help that the local utility had long ago exhausted its supply of the additive that gave gas its tell-tale warning scent, nor would the Serbs be sharing any of theirs any time soon.
Vlado mulled the facts of the case as he pulled down an extra blanket from a closet shelf. It was easy enough to figure where the transfer file must have gotten to. Zarko’s people, with connections to General Markovic and God-knew-who-else had carted it away. Perhaps they were even running competing operations. But how had Vitas gotten a card? Was he a part of it, too? Or had he turned up a card in his own investigation. Maybe he’d gotten it in the October raid on Zarko’s headquarters. Neven Halilovic would know the answers, but he was dead. Everyone who seemed to know anything, in fact, was either dead or on the wrong side of the city. The gallery director, Murovic, would be no further help for at least a month, when the UNESCO grant kicked in. Unless Glavas came through, Vlado would be facing a dead end. And as much as Vlado had taken an instant dislike to Murovic, perhaps he was right about Glavas. Maybe all Vlado would end up with would be an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
But why the stories from the butcher and the cigarette man. And why the show of muscle at his shakedown. They fit with each other but with nothing else. Were they simply opportunists trying to make a few marks, and had Kasic been taken in? Perhaps he, too, was in over his head on this case. The word had always been that Vitas was the brains behind the Interior Ministry, and maybe it was true. Goran had made a worthy point. Kasic had always scored higher marks for style than substance. When all was said and done perhaps he was no sharper than Garovic, just another bureaucrat trying to tread water. The initial reports from the undercover men had seemed like a promising path to a quick finish. He was doubtless under plenty of pressure to wrap this one up in a hurry.
Vlado’s teeth chattered as he climbed into bed, stiff and sore. Tonight there was no radio playing next door. One night of fun and then back to conserving the batteries for more vital purposes. He turned his head on the pillow, peering through the kitchen doorway into the open oven, where the ring of blue flame glowed like the footlights of a darkened theater just before the show danced onto the stage. He drifted off to sleep still waiting for the performance, and soon was dreaming of a woman’s face staring at him from a stage, prim and pale, with heart-shaped lips done up a bit too brightly with lipstick. It was a sweet face, but insinuating as well. It was the woman from Glavas’s apartment, in fact. Or was it a mask? No, it was a face, but suddenly it turned a shocking white, and now it stared up at him from the bottom of a stairwell, emitting a muffled watery sound that was too garbled to understand. Yet, he felt, she had a message for him, if only she could articulate it. The woman pursed her lips, then pressed a finger to her mouth, either in mischief or in warning, while he backed away uneasily, uncertain whether to smile or to show concern. Instead he merely kept moving, as if guided by remote control, moving farther up a stairway that grew colder with every step.
CHAPTER 12
A huge explosion jarred him awake. He opened his eyes to a sunny morning and the tremors of an aftershock, something like the rumbling conclusion of a distant thunderclap. He felt for a moment as if someone had sat on his stomach, and he heard objects dropping to the ground outside.
A wave of cold air stole across him, and he saw why when he sat up and looked across the room. His last intact window had been blown in, and was now a pile of gleaming fragments on the living room floor. Several shards had been driven into the opposite wall. Others protruded in clusters from an old blue armchair, like the quills of a porcupine.
He got up to look for a spare roll of plastic stashed in a kitchen closet, and promptly cut his left foot on a shard by the kitchen door. He looked back at his bed and saw that a few pieces had landed across his blanket, but none with enough strength to pierce it. He checked in the bathroom mirror and plucked two or three slivers from his hair.
That’s the way it worked here, he told himself He’d gotten up in the middle of the night to shut down the gas, prodded awake by some deep, urgent fear of being consumed by either suffocation or explosion. Then an explosion had come along anyway from the outside, as if to remind him that precautions didn’t matter. It was all odds and luck, and there was no way to outmaneuver them.
Looking out the gaping window, his hands already numb and his teeth chattering, he surveyed the damage out front as he taped up a sheet of plastic. A neighbor’s apartment was torn open. It had been vacant until the week before, when a family of six had moved in, another wandering band of refugees from some small, overrun town in the hills.
From the damage to the roof and to the front it was obvious a shell had slammed directly into an upper corner of the house-nothing of large caliber, probably only a rocket-propelled grenade, but big enough to do the job, wrecking the front room and blowing out every nearby window that had still been intact. With luck the family had been sleeping in the back. Looking through the opening Vlado saw no bodies, and his inclination was not to go looking for any in the cold, especially with more shells possibly on the way.