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Chapter One
`No-one knows what he can't do until he tries.' ANON
ROSSO WAS ALIVE AND ASHAMED OF IT.
The policeman could do nothing about the sense of elation he felt at being alive when others were dead, or the shame that followed.
I live, others die.
It was a high like no other, better than amphetamines, even sex. Whenever it happened he wanted to lau-gh, hug people, throw a party, drink too much and get laid. It was like living at the speed of light while others crawled around in slow motion, as if underwater.
I am never so alive as when others die, he told himself. The sensation was brief, something akin to shock, but the shame which followed on its heels remained like a stain: I don't deserve to live any mare than they do and they are dead.
He told himself the exhilaration at having survived countless incidents was entirely natural, an animal thing, an involuntary squirt of adrenalin mainlined into the bloodstream, a narcotic hit at the illusory conquest of death. It never failed, any more than the cold, teeth-chattering funk that preceded it or the self-disgust that followed.
It was only a step from there to atrocity. It was out of a desire to defeat fear of death that same men who survived in battle mutilated the bodies of their enemies. It was why they took trophies--a fingertip, ear or resticles--why they sometimes ate a portion of their foes, remains or left a calling card, such as an ace of spades, in the victim's mouth.
More than once he saw survivors clowning with the enemy dead, lying down among them, sticking lit cigarettes between their cold lips, propping them upright, shaking their stiff, bloodied hands, talking to them and finding the whole thing uproariously, hysterically funny.
It's not personal, he told himself.
Rosso could not afford to let it get personal. If he believed every artillery shell, anti-aircraft round and sniper's bullet were directed at him, he would not be able to get out of bed each morning, let alone cope with the job in hand.
Much better, he said to himself as he climbed out of the minibus into the snow, to imagine that you're simply a blade of grass and some asshole in a silly hat and check pants with a club is trying for a hole in one all the way down the fairway.
The travellers stood on the icy airfield, the snow whipped up by the wind flailing at their legs. They stamped their feet and beat their hands together. Rosso counted five apart from himself. They put their bags in a neat row under the wing of the huge plane that towered above them and then they stood back in a semicircle and seemed to inspect one another, shifting from one foot to the other and swinging their arms about as if engaged in a tribal ritual. Faces muffled in scarves and woollen hats, bodies bulging in puffer jackets, hands flapping in mittens. Anonymous, sexless. Rosso almost burst out laughing at the sight. Not a word was said. Their voices would have been torn from their mouths and shredded by the gusts of wind in any case. Rosso saw that the plane's engines--like huge silvery seedpods suspended from the wings--were still protected by orange plastic covers. There was no sign of life on board. The doers were shut. Even the cockpit canopy appeared to have a shutter across it. He turned slowly and could hardly make out the airport control tower or the terminal. The buildings were obscured by the horsetails of snow hissing across the runways. There were no other planes taking off or landing. The wind moaned about the lone and immobile Russian aircraft, rising to a shriek where it pushed past innumerable rivets in its metal skin. The snow whispered like blown sand, the millions of tiny pellets of ice pattering and crackling against their clothing, stinging hands and faces.
Someone kicked open the door in the side of the plane above Rosso's head. The policeman moved backwards and, craning-his neck, looked up. A crewman pushed out an aluminium ladder and started to climb down. The flimsy device shook at every step the Russian took. Once on the ice the crewman turned and looked at Rosso, as if sizing him up, finally jerking his head at the ladder. Rosso did not hesitate. He picked up his bag, hoisted it onto his shoulder and climbed.
Fifty-three minutes later the plane--a massive, noisy and uncomfortable contraption called an Ilyushin-76, chartered from the Russians by the International Committee of the Red Cross--was about to drop from 14,000 feet to a few hundred in four minutes, a steep spiral to evade ground fire. Rosso, standing in the cockpit behind the copilot, was told by a crewman tO bend his knees and get a grip on the fuselage as the nose dipped and twisted sharply. It felt to Rosso like a roller-coaster, only a roller-coaster was scary in a delicious sort of way, because you knew you were safe at a fairground. Here you knew nothing of the sort. Every part of the metal flying machine seemed to be howling in protest. It was a wonder the huge,wings weren't torn off. He could see them rocking and trembling. The passengers, luggage was doing its best to escape the netting securing it to the deck. Rosso's stomach went into his throat and he found himself gazing up instead of down at the crests of the snow-crusted hills around the city as they zigzagged towards the runway, standing on one wing, the horizon slipping to the vertical and back again the other way.
Any moment there would be the heart-stopping bellyflop, the scream of brakes, the roar of reversed engines and the sudden silence as crew and passengers held their breath and listened for incoming from Serb lines.
If the odds were infinitesimal, then how come so many people got hit? No, he told himself, riding on his toes, tiers is no time for asking questions of that nature. Not in this flying coffin. Be a modest blade of grass instead.
Their papers checked and their pathetic bundles searched by UN police, the six tired, dispirited Bosnians were led out to the yard behind the terminal, waiting patiently in the mud to board a French armoured troop carrier for the run through a Serb checkpoint 800 metres from the French bunker at the airport entrance. It was a half-hourly shuttle service. Always the Serbs--wearing paramilitary blue uniforms and carrying automatic weapons--demanded to check the passengers, and so far at least the UN soldiers had always denied them the pleasure. Rosso could always hear their voices raised through the quarter-inch of steel behind his head. It was just a matter of time before the Cetniks decided to force the issue by using crowbars on the hatches. There were a thousand and one ways for the separatists to turn the screw and they knew them all. The detective hoped he wasn't travelling when it happened.
He sat near the rear of the Panhard and glimpsed the wreck of the city's lone Bosnian T-55 tank in the ditch, red with rust and its 105mm gun pointed impotently at a bruised grey sky, the muzzle choked with ice.
You didn't have to come back, Rosso told himself
That tank made his heart sink every time he saw it. It stood for everything that had gone wrong: the false hopes, the clutching at straws, the ease with which the Serbs had bottled them up in this ghetto of a city.
Squinting through the peep-hole set in the rear doors, Rosso mentally ticked off each stage in their journey. There were. the gutted houses lining the route, the windows and doors like empty eye sockets in fleshless skulls, each a potential firing point for a sniper. Muslims to the left, Serbs to the right. Here was the worst: he could hear the gears shift, the whine of the engine change as the troop carrier began to ascend the flyover at the western entrance to the city, frequently mortared and where both sides played chicken with UN patrols by firing rocket-propelled grenades at them. Rosso tensed for the impact, the final explosion that would tear them all apart. Think blades of grass. Think little, white balls.
Think lucky.
The policeman worried about his car. That was the next and final stretch since leaving Zagreb that morning. To cope, Rosso mentally divided kits journeys into stages, taking them one at a time. It was never wise to think tOo far ahead. He had left the squat Yugo outside the UN headquarters at the city's telecommunications building. It was in no man's land, but parked sufficiently close to the coils of razor wire to deter thieves, or so he hoped. Also it had a huge Bosnian coat of arms on the bonnet--the shield with the fleur-de-lis and the bar sinister--and above it the number 600: once the city's emergency services number. Once, because there were no emergency services worthy of the name any more and because the telephones worked at best intermittently, but most of the time not at all. Rosso was never really sure if the official badge emblazoned an the car would attract villains or repel them.
Nearly there and still alive. The first Bosnian army checkpoint lay ahead. He could see it in his mind's eye.
Welcome to Sarajevo.
Welcome home.
`Car coming,' said Mahmud. The burly fighter wore a battered trilby, a war-surplus, West German combat jacket and several layers of clothing beneath that. It was not surprising thee he made no effort tO get up. He held a one-shot glass of schnapps, full to the brim and he watched the clear liquid carefully lest it escape, car or no car. His bolt-action rifle was propped up against the side of the corrugated iron lean-to.
`It's your turn,' said his companion, a tall youth with a pinched expression exaggerated by hollow cheeks and stubble. When Zoran spoke it was obvious he had lost his front teeth. He was blowing on his fingers and stamping his feet. The skin, tight over his prominent cheek-bones, was a startling pink.
`It fuckin' ain't.'
`It'll cost you a smoke.'
`Here, fuckwit.' Mahmud tossed over a packet of twenty. `Take one. One, mind!'
The boy, in jeans and bomber jacket with a Bosnian army badge crudely sewn on to the shoulder, lit up, threw the pack back, slung his weapon over his shoulder and shuffled outside. Zoran wore a black woollen cap, pulled down over his ears. His feet felt numb and he tried to wriggle his toes to get the blood moving in his damp boots. He had stuffed them with newspaper, but far from giving warmth all the paper had succeeded in doing was to restrict the circulation of blood to his feet. He saw a beige Yugo approach, parting the crowd of people trudging through the snow. The sentry checked that he had a round in the breech of his obsolescent Czech machine-pistol and extended the folding butt.
`Looks like our top cop,' he called over his shoulder.
At that his companion threw the schnapps down his throat, smacked his lips and heaved himself up. He looked round, patting his jacket, then hurriedly shoved his hands into one pocket after another until he found what he was looking for. He opened a fist, revealing a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper. His actions were hurried. He cast a furtive eye at the entrance, as if fearful that he would be observed. He bent, scribbled something, pausing at one point to lick the end of the pencil and turning his head to one side as if in deep thought. Finished at last, he rolled the note up into a tiny ball and pushed both it and the pencil back into a trouser pocket. Panting with the effort, he joined the other militiamen in the open, cradling the Mannlicher hunting rifle in his arms.
`Maybe he's got some coffee for us,' Mahmud said.
`Lucky bugger. Dunno why he bothers tO come back.'
`It'll be a woman. Why else?'
Rosso drove with care, tapping the horn sparingly, almost apologetically, to forge a path through pedestrians searching for food, water and firewood. The crowd parted with painful reluctance, as if the walkers were unwilling to use more energy than was absolutely necessary.
He hunched forward, peering through a windscreen smeared with ice, both hands clenched on the wheel. He had no chains, and he could feel the little hatchback slipping on the layer of fresh, dry snow. The city was silent, the low mist obscuring the view of the gunners perched in the surrounding hills. On a clear day you could see the sun glint on their gun barrels, and they could see the moustache on a man's upper lip, even the colour of a woman's eyes, through their telescopic sights. People would sprint or hobble as fast as they could from one corner to the next, a contorted smile on their faces in the effort to at once mask the terror they felt and disguise the indignity of being compelled tO run. Running for one's life became as routine as running for a bus in any ocher city. Most made it, some never did.
Today, despite the subzero temperature, everyone seemed to be out, taking advantage of the lull.
Rosso found these quiet periods disturbing. He could feel the fear like physical nausea, a nugget in his stomach, expand into his chest.
A silent scream of panic rose inside him.
He knew the calm to be deceptive, a lie and always shortlived. The price was always too high: more dead, people cue down queueing in front of a water-pipe or soup-kitchen. The Cetniks dug into the hillsides sought to lure people out of their chilly homes before lobbing a salvo of 152mm shells into a throng of civilians. It usually happened mid-morning. There would be a pause and just as ambulances arrived, the Serbs would loose off more rounds.
Rosso took to the backstreets, hugging the industrial sector. Many pedestrians were heading for a sawmill where there was a regular hand-out of bread. Although Rosso had one of the few cars and the petrol to keep it going, no-one spared him so much as a glance. They were moving in the same direction as the policeman, but were too intent on their mission, on not falling and breaking their brittle bones, to move quickly out of his way. If they were resentful, they did not waste effort expressing-it. They carried `perhaps bags' or tugged children's sleds in the hope of finding something, anything, to alleviate hunger and cold. They were thin, their faces blank, eyes unfocused. Rosso left this tide of ragged humanity and turned onto the main drag--he always knew how dangerous a place was by the number of people about and there no-one at all could be seen--save for one old man digging up the roots of a tree in the centre island. Only his head could be observed, bobbing up and down above the highway known as Sniper's Alley.
It was as if Rosso had stumbled into a world of scarecrows. I will look like them again very soon, he said to himself. A few months, living on scraps, no bathing, shaving with a blunt blade in cold water and wearing the same unwashed clothes. The same resigned scare, the soft-shoe shuffle through the snow to an empty market.
Patriotism meant nothing to the starving.
Perhaps that was part of the problem, Rosso thought. People were not starving, not really, they were simply malnourished, losing their vitality and health too slowly to die out of hand and not fast enough to take some desperate measure to alleviate their plight by an ace of supreme will. Their passivity alarmed Rosso. As their teeth fell out, their skin developed ulcerous rashes and diarrhoea became routine, their ability to adapt, their acceptance of their lot--including diversion of UN food on a huge scale to front-line units and the black market--was their very undoing. Had he fallen into the same trap, dreaming of an end to it all when there was none?
When he opened his door, Rosso could smell the soldiers at the checkpoint--the not altogether unpleasant smell of damp clothes, unwashed bodies, cigarette smoke and schnapps on their breath. They shivered in the icy wind; like half-starved young dog foxes eyeing a chicken, furtively drooling from the mouth.
He wondered if he looked well fed, and if they could smell his English mother's soap on his skin from the hot bath he had had that very morning at her home in Zagreb. He felt like a cartoonist's missionary tn the cannibals, cooking pot.
They stared at his papers blankly, then asked respectfully for coffee, cigarettes: the currency of survival. Rosso always brought extra for the checkpoints, but he insisted the fighters paid the going rate. Otherwise, they would get greedy. He would be regarded as an easy mark and stripped of everything. On the other hand, by providing them with luxuries he was putting them in his debt. It made getting through checkpoints a lot easier.
He produced receipts for the 500-gram bag of coffee and a carton of cheap, Croatian-made cigarettes, showed them to the soldiers and waited while they muttered to each other and reluctantly dug the almost useless dinars out of their pockets.
They searched his vehicle carelessly, without interest.
Mahmud managed to push himself into the rear of the little car, his large buttocks protruding as he rummaged about behind the seats. He stopped suddenly, paused and then extricated himself. Red-faced and wheezing, he stood upright. Zoran handed him his rifle. He took it absently. They both seared at the gleaming metallic bottles on the floor behind the seats, looking questioningly at the detective and exchanged glances.
`Oxygen,' Rosso said helpfully, so they did not have to lose face by appearing ignorant or impolite by asking.
`Ah,' said Zoran, nodding. As if to say `Of course, naturally. Think nothing of it.' And he stamped his frozen feet again and looked away, down the road. He wanted to get back to the lean-to and out of the wind. He had his cigarettes now.
`For the hospital,' Rosso said to Mahmud. He said it quietly, easily; he knew it could lead to unpleasantness.
`Wha'?'
`For premature babies, mothers in labour, the wounded--'
That was enough for Mahmud; enough talk of babies and women. He had a suspicious nature, he thought the worse of people if he could. Yet all talk of women and babies had him flustered and the policeman had spoken so calmly, so equably that further inquiries would only reveal his own ignorance of medical matters and all things female. Rosso was no stranger, besides, he was a senior police officer. Deference was his due.
It was the way things were. In the old days, one glance from Rosso would have been enough. They would have waved him through, never entertained the notion of searching his car. Now his authority was gone, or at least his official rank carried little weight. All that was left was the stamp of authority on his face, the way he carried himself, the tone of voice. Rosso knew how to obey orders, and he expected to be obeyed. It showed. But the badge, the rank, the office of superintendent--well, he had to admit they were not what they once were.
Mahmud grunted and slammed the door viciously, looking embarrassed, and then started apologizing for having treated the car door roughly. It was his clumsiness more than anything else. He opened it again. After all, they had not finished their search. There was the stuff in the front.
For his part, Rosso thought he had said too much, been too laboured in his explanation, the words tumbling out over one another in their haste, as if he had something to hide. He had: guilt--both particular and general. As for the particular kind, it was not the guilt of a smuggler, but of a man who has, for a few days at least, lived a normal life, shed the constant risk of a violent death, left behind the gradual humiliation of the effects of a bad diet and no way to clean either the body or the shabby clothes left on his back. Instead he had lived in the very lap of luxury (though he had hated every moment of it and perversely counted the days to his return) while others shivered, hungered, saw hope fade and died. He was alive, and who could say he deserved to be?
Guilt in general was Rosso's cross. It was what made him such a good detective, a diviner of men's secrets. He felt himself apart, living as one who expects to be found out at the very next moment. Rosso did not believe in original sin. He had lived it all his life. It gave him a peculiar empathy with the men and women he had to interrogate from time to time. He understood them better than they did themselves. As for common criminals, never for a moment did he believe himself superior; indeed, for much of the time they had his genuine sympathy.
The soldiers glanced cursorily at Rosso's bag on the front passenger seat. The policeman unzipped it for them; il was not locked. They made no comment on the bottle of perfume and the make-up he had bought in Zagreb. Rosso had laid these items on top for the very reason that they should deter a more rigorous search. Mahmud stared at the fat, fancy bottle with its amber liquid and the pink, plastic make-up bag until Zoran nudged him roughly, as if telling him not to pry into another's affairs.
There was a bottle of vodka, a few cigarettes.
Rosso felt Mahmud next to him. It felt as if the bulky Muslim was pushing him. For a moment Rosso was irritated, annoyed at Mahmud's clumsiness. But then his right hand was grabbed, his wrist held firmly. Something was pushed into his palm, his own fingers forcibly curled around whatever it was and in a moment Mahmud had moved away from him again.
Zoran appeared to have noticed nothing.
`No Scotch, chief?' Mahmud cried in mock surprise, his humour restored to him. Zoran grinned, then covered his gap-toothed mouth with his fingerless mitten. Simple, decent men in their way, Rosso thought. But there were no doubt simple, decent men up in those hills. Simple, decent men could do, and did, the most terrible things.
There was a commotion down the road, the way Rosso had come, the sound of car horns blaring continuously, like sirens. Mahmud and Zoran stepped back. Mahmud put his hand on the superintendent's arm.
`Watch out!'
The three men stared at the approaching cavalcade.
There were three cars, moving at surprising speed through the crowd from the south-west--the way Rosso had come--and making little allowance for the shabby tide of humanity. First came a silver grey Mercedes, luxuriously sleek, its headlights on. Two men had their heads and shoulders out of the rear windows, Kalashnikov rifles pointed skywards.
Behind the Merc and slightly to each side were the two chase cars, black Opels packed with gunmen, weighed down so much that the exhausts almost scraped the surface of the ice. The gunmen held the doors ajar, ready to spring out and beat some poor unfortunate if he or she did not move out of the way fast enough. They shouted and waved their guns.
Rosso turned away. He felt ashamed that people could be subjected to this display of intimidation; that this arrogance was being flaunted in this place and at this time. He felt personal shame, too, that he of all people, one of the most senior police officers left in the capital, simply stood by.
On the sides of the escort cars were painted yellow moons, each with the black outline of a wolf, head thrown back, baying: the emblem of the so-called Special Forces. They were special all right, Rosso thought, but not in the manner of America's celebrated Green Berets or Germany's crack Grenzschutsgruppe-9 anti-hijack force. Luka's boys were street fighters, thugs who had taken advantage of the siege to adopt the trappi-ngs of official sanction but more than ever saw themselves as beyond the law.
`Luka,' said Mahmud, as if anyone needed telling.
`Good man,' said Zoran, raising a hand in salute.
`I fuck your mother and sister,' Mahmud said in an almost conversational voice--lest he be heard by the gunmen leaning from the cars--and he contented himself with a sullen glare in their direction.
`Fuck your God,' retorted Zoran. Then he laughed and clapped Mahmud on the shoulder. The Muslim ignored the insult. It was commonplace. Zoran was his mate, anyhow. A curse meant nothing, reduced to insignificance by repetition in a city still largely secular, multiconfessional in outlook.
All it meant was that they disagreed about Luka's place in the order of things.
The convoy surged past. Mud and melted snow spurted up from the potholed road. The heavily laden Opels bounced up and down as they went by. The passing gunmen gazed blankly at the checkpoint and its comically dressed guardians. They did not return Zoran's wave. They wore black woollen caps like commandos, Rosso saw, part of the dressing-up men indulge m when they set about creating the myth of their own narcissistic invincibility.
Rosso bent slightly, hands on knees, and looked carefully at the Mercedes. He was sure he could see, just for an instant, Luka at the wheel. He was staring straight ahead, sitting up straight, head high, that long jaw jutting forward. The detective wasn't searching for Luka. He was looking for Tanja and he felt relieved when he failed to see his god-daughter sitting next to him.
What would she have said if she had been sitting there and seen Rosso standing in the snow at the side of the road? Would she have urged Luka to have stopped, right there, and offered him a lift home? Or would she have hesitated, as so many people do, until the moment passed and then rationalized OUt her failure to stop? Just one of life's innumerable little betrayals of someone we love, until they accumulate into indifference, or worse? Was she ashamed of her adoptive family already? Had the cars and guns gone to her head? Were the tales of glory too good to resist in a climate of despair?
Would he have accepted a lift?
But she wasn't there, so it didn't matter.
`Always in a bloody rush,' grumbled Zoran. His admiration for Luka slightly dented by the fact that his trousers were liberally sprayed with a new layer of Sarajevo's glutinous mud.
Rosso had lost a bottle of whisky to the Polish police officer who had searched his bag at the airport--the price of letting him through with the oxygen. The police contingent at the airport was huge, unnecessarily so, and seemed to comprise every nationality under the sun. All the officers seemed to do was stand around and wait for a genuine civilian, a local, someone like Rosso, so they could order him about, demand papers, wave rules in his face--their rules, not his--and filch cigarettes and whisky. And he, the city's most senior detective, one of three deputies reporting to the interior minister himself. It was humiliating.
Anyhow, what was the point of bringing home expensive foreign booze to an alcoholic wife who'd distil it from boot polish if she had to? When he thought of Sabina, his heart sank. She was a responsibility that hung heavily on his mired simply because no solution presented itself. It was like an incurable disease. Alcoholism wasn't incurable, of course, but the state of mind that brought it about apparently was. His thoughts turned instead to Tanja, their godchild. Rosso was anxious about her too. She was nineteen, a refugee. Since the Rossos had taken her under their wing--they had no children of their own--TanJa had qualified as a paramedic and had recently formed something of a friendship with Luka. He was always going off to the front line for a taste of the action and taking her with him. It was a taste the police officer would never acquire and he wished Tanja would stay well away--from both Luka and front lines. At first it had seemed a useful way to find out more about the man Indeed, Rosso had encouraged her, had put her information to good use, but now Rosso feared his god-daughter was developing a genuine attachment to the man people called, not without irony, the Robin Hood of Sarajevo. He had used her; was she now using him? Were all families like this? They felt so much and had so much to say to one another and yet were so tongue-tied and inhibited in expressing the things that really mattered. What mattered now was tenderness. Like food placed before a man with a full belly, love had been taken for granted, used carelessly in times of peace. Now Rosso felt it well up in him. Tears came to his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand. You sentimental old fool, he told himself. You're not even drunk.
Just afraid, and that was nothing new.
`It was a woman, all right,' said Mahmud, waddling back to his seat in the lean-to arid collapsing onto it with a sigh.
`How do you know?'
`Didn't you see that big bottle of perfume?'
`He could be planning to sell it.'
`Bollocks. If he wanted to deal on the black market he would have brought more smokes and coffee. No, he's cunt-struck, poor fellow.
Mahmud, a former nightclub bouncer and amateur weight-lifter, took a swig from the bottle and sat down. `He's come back for a little boom-boom.' He made a pumping motion with his right fist. `Boom-boom,' he said again.
`You're a cynic.
`No, just wise as to the way the world works.
`He's probably married with three kids.'
`Well, if he is, that bottle isn't for the wife.'
`We'll never know,' said the boy, disappointed by his companion's jaded view of humanity and bored by all the talk. Zoran was a countryman, his mother a Hercegovinan Croat and proud of it. All this chatter was the habit of idle Muslim townsfolk. A lot of good it did them.
`This war is full of people doing the right things far the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons,' Mahmud said importantly. `The cop is one of them.'
`I wouldn't drink too much of that if I were you. It's turning you into a philosopher.'
As if to emphasize his contempt for philosophers, Zoran hawked spittle up from his throat and spat into the snow.
Mahmud was unmoved. He picked up the bottle again.
`Fuck off, will you?'
Copyright © 1996 John Fullerton All. All rights reserved.
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