Lie in the Dark - Softcover

Dan Fesperman, a former foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, is the author of ten novels of international intrigue. His books have won a Dashiell Hammett Award for best novel and two Dagger awards from the Crime Writers Association.

Chapter  1

He began the day, as always, by counting the gravediggers out
his front window. There were nine this morning, moving through
the snow a hundred yards away in the middle of what used to be a
children’s soccer field. They stopped to light cigarettes, heads
bowed like mourners, the shadows of stubble faintly visible on hollowed
cheeks. Then they shed their thin coats and moved apart in a
ragged line. Backs bent, they began stabbing at the ground with
picks and shovels.

They moved slowly at first, working the cold and sleepiness out of
creaky joints. But Vlado Petric was in no hurry. He’d watched often
enough to know what came next.

Soon brown gashes of mud would take shape at their feet. Then,
as the men warmed to their task, the gashes would expand into neat
rectangles, and as the rectangles deepened the gravediggers would
disappear into the earth. Within an hour only their heads would be
visible. Then Vlado would leave his apartment to walk to work
through the streets of Sarajevo.

Vlado had come to depend on the gravediggers’ punctuality. He
knew they liked to finish early, while the snipers and artillery crews
of the surrounding hills were still asleep in the mist, groggy from
another night in the mud with their plum brandy. By midmorning the
gunners would also be stretching muscles and lighting cigarettes.
Then they, too, would bend to their work, and from then until nightfall
the soccer field would be safe only for the dead.

Vlado wondered sometimes why he still bothered to watch this
morning ritual, yet he found its arithmetic irresistible. It was his daily
census of the war. As the holes took shape they totted up the day’s
account like the black beads of an abacus. Large crowds inevitably
followed a day of heavy shelling, or one of the sad little hillside
offensives that rattled distantly like a broken toy. On one busy morning
he’d counted thirty-four men at work, checking twice to make
sure as they weaved and crossed, dirt flying as if from a series of
small explosions. The vapors rising from their sweat and cigarettes
had poured into the sky like the smoke of a small factory.

Lately, however, there had been layoffs and shorter hours. Today’s
crew of nine rendered a judgment of poor aim and low ammunition
on the previous day. In winter the war always lost steam.

One might also call Vlado’s interest professional. Sometimes his
own workday took shape out on the field, in graves for those claimed
not by snipers, explosions, illness, or old age. Vlado was a homicide
investigator for the local police, and still gainfully if ponderously
employed.

It was an occupation good for a few bitter laughs with friends,
amused to find small-time killing still worthy of attention after twentyone
months of war. To them, Vlado’s task was that of a plumber fixing
leaky toilets in the middle of a flood, an auto mechanic patching
tires while the engine burned to a cinder. Why bother, they would
ask. Why not just leave it all until the end of the war. By then all your
suspects will be dead anyway.

Invariably he would reply with a muttering chuckle, eyes lowered,
in the time-honored humility of all who must answer for making
their living from the dead. Then he would allow as how, yes, they
were probably right. What a fool he was. Laughs all around. Have
another one on me, gentlemen.

So they would drink to his folly, someone’s bottle of rancid homebrew
passed from hand to hand, and then they would move on to
other subjects—soccer, or women, or the war. Always, eventually,
the war. But he would linger a moment with his thoughts. No, they
were not right at all, he would reassure himself. The same two motivations
which had kept him going before the war could still sustain
him. Or at least he hoped they could.

One was the small, slender promise that beckons to all homicide
detectives—that someday, something worthy and noble would
come of his work. For the clever and the persistent, perhaps something
larger lurked behind the daily body count. In the way that an
epidemiologist knows that a single autopsy can provide the key to
a pandemic, Vlado clung to a belief that, now and then, one murder
offered a portal to machinations far greater than the pulling of a
trigger or the plunging of a blade.

But could this still be true in wartime? And here the doubts threatened
to stop him cold, so he hastily moved on to reason number
two—the puzzle of motive, diagramming the inner levers and flywheels
driving the machinery of rage. Here again, the war had muddled
the calculations. Now the mechanisms all seemed increasingly
predictable, guided by remote control from the big guns in the hills.
Each act shook to their reverberations. Every moment of passion
sprang from two years of misery.

Yet Vlado couldn’t help but marvel at the enduring popularity of
murder. He knew from his history texts what war was supposed to
do to people. In Stalingrad they ate rats and burned furniture to stay
warm, but they stuck together. Even in London, fat and soft London,
suicides dropped and mental health soared. But now he wondered if
it hadn’t all been some great warm lie of wartime propaganda.
Because, if anything, people succumbed more easily now to the passions
that had always done them in. And as the siege grumbled on,
spurned lovers still shot each other naked and dead, drunks stabbed
other drunks for a bottle, and gamblers died as ever for their debts.

The opportunities for such killings had never been richer.

There were weapons everywhere—battered models from Iran and
Afghanistan with ammunition clips curling like bananas, sleek Belgian
automatics from the tidy gunshops of Switzerland, ancient and
hulking old Tommies from God-knows-where, and every cheap
Kalashnikov ripoff ever made in the Eastern Bloc. The hills of old
Yugoslavia had been overrun at last by the arms of the Warsaw Pact
in a way the late, great Tito had never envisioned.

In moments when the war lagged, full employment for these
weapons was guaranteed by the smugglers and black marketeers,
too numerous to count. They darted about in their own war of attrition,
the cheated in vengeful pursuit of the cheating. And with
nowhere to run but the deadly noose of the hills, the chase was usually
short and decisive.

Even when both of Vlado’s reasons for justifying continued
employment faltered, he had a worthy fallback: The job kept him out
of the army. It was no small accomplishment these days, when even
young boys in muddy jeans and flannel shirts trooped uphill nightly
to the front.

That was the thought that always dragged him from his window
on his blackest mornings, out onto the walkway of the dreary block
of flats perched above the soccer field.

Had the gravediggers ever paused to gaze back on these mornings,
they would have made out the thin shape of a man in his early
thirties, draped in dark clothes. Slender to begin with, Vlado had
been further narrowed by the diet of wartime until his deep brown
eyes were almost spectral in their sockets. A face once quick to smile
was now guarded, uncertain. A small crease above the bridge of his
nose had deepened and dug in, setting itself up as the new, solemn
master of the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. His black hair
was stiff, clipped short and uneven by his own hand with a blunt
pair of children’s scissors, receding ever more rapidly at the crown
and temples. The only holdover from before the war was his voice,
flowing out deep and soft, still the comfortable sort of baritone that
beckons one into a warm, smoky room of old friends.

Behind him, in the small living room and kitchen, was all that
remained of Vlado’s prewar world. For more than a year and a half
his wife and daughter had been gone, evacuated to Germany. The
door to his daughter’s room hadn’t been opened for weeks, nor had
the door to his and his wife’s old bedroom. He had gradually drawn
his possessions and his existence together, partly because it kept him
away from the windows more exposed to sniper and artillery fire,
and partly to conserve the precious light and heat from his illegal gas
hookups, which burned fitfully and low under dwindling pressure.
But it was also his way of burrowing in for the duration, of tending
his own weak flame against the forces that could blow it out.

In approaching each day he had developed a keen sense of pace,
of constant adjustment. Those who burned too brightly, he knew
from watching, never lasted. They were the ones whose passions
eventually led them running into free-fire zones, screaming either in
madness or in a final outpouring of impotent rage.

But let your flame turn too low, fail to coax it along, and you
ended up at the other extreme, spent and empty. You saw them in
doorways, or hunched at the back of cafés, greasy-haired, staring
vacantly, clothes in tatters. They never stopped retreating, ending up
at the bottom of either a bottle or a grave.

Vlado was a Catholic, which meant he was classified as a Croat,
something he’d never much thought about nor wanted to until the
past two years. The precision of the label was questionable, given
his mixed parentage. His father had been Muslim, his mother Catholic.
She’d made sure he was baptized, though she’d never been
much for church herself. Then she’d spent years dragging him off
to religious instruction and holiday mass only to see her efforts go
to waste.

Now, one’s ethnic background seemed to be the first thing everyone
in an official position wanted to know. Your answer could get
you killed in some places, promoted in others.

It was easy enough information to find out, listed right there on
your identification papers. The ethnic labels were remnants of the
various competing empires that had clashed in these hills for centuries.
The Ottoman Turks had run the show for a while, bringing Islam
and the sultan’s bureaucracy, only to run up against the Austrians,
who brought Catholicism, impeccable record keeping, and streets
laden with their layer-cake architecture.

From the east there had always been the Russians to worry about,
sharing their Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Cyrillic alphabet with
the Serbs. Then the Nazis had come along and overwhelmed everyone,
linking up just long enough with nationalist Croats, the Ustasha,
to lay waste to a few hundred thousand Serbs. Sometimes the Muslims
had joined in the killing. Sometimes they’d been among the victims.
But all sides were supposedly forgiven under the new mantle of
the eventual victor, the postwar communist regime of Marshal Tito.
Tito proceeded to hold the fractious sides together for nearly half a
century, chiefly by acting as if no one had ever hated each other to
begin with. He banished all talk of ethnic nationalism and mistrust,
blithely announcing that henceforth brotherhood would prevail.

It almost worked.

But when Tito died, the ethnic zealots rediscovered their voices,
and the Serbs crowed the loudest. Tales of past massacres, kept alive
through the decades around family tables, emerged shiny and refurbished.
The old fears were coaxed out of cellars and attics, renourished
by a new diet of ethnic propaganda. Out came the old labels of
mistrust. If you were a Croat, that must mean you were Ustasha. Any
Serb was a Chetnik. A Muslim? No better than a Turk. When things
began to fall apart, they collapsed in a hurry.

The Serbs, holding the bulk of the army, immediately and mercilessly
seized the upper hand, and Tito’s ultimate failure was now evident
in the lines of fire dividing the city. Standing on every surrounding
hill were the Serb guns and trenches, and an army determined to
squeeze Sarajevo until it became their own. They also held much of
the ground within the city on the far bank of the Miljacka River, which
curled through the town from east to west like a crooked spine.

Trapped along with Vlado on the north bank, in the old city center,
were two hundred thousand people, mostly Muslim, occasionally
Croat and very occasionally Serb. But, as with Vlado, the labels
were often ambiguous. Mixed marriages accounted for a quarter of
the population, which only further enraged the Serbs. Bohemian
little Sarajevo, too clever for her own good, was paying the price
for years of incestuous pleasure. Now the Serbs seemed bent on
leveling the city if they couldn’t capture it, taking it apart brick by
brick, person by person.

Vlado had gone his entire life without really considering what it
meant to be a Catholic, and he saw no reason to start now. He’d
stepped into a church only three times in the past twelve years, twice
for funerals, and certainly not at all for his marriage, a civil ceremony
in which he’d wed the Muslim daughter of a Serb mother.

His only other trip to church had been his most recent, to investigate
the murder of a priest found dead in a confessional. A jealous
husband had shot the priest after finding a boxful of passionate letters
on parish stationery in his wife’s closet. The husband had
walked into the booth, sat down, fired twice through the latticed
partition, then turned the gun on himself. Vlado had felt cheated by
the suicide. He’d always wanted to know if there had been any
final conversation. He wondered if either side had offered absolution
before the gun had passed judgement on both. Both had made
adequate penance in the end, by Vlado’s way of thinking, never
mind what the Church thought.

Had the gravediggers looked Vlado’s way on this morning they
might also have seen a cup of coffee in his hand. At $20 a pound on
a salary of one dollar a month, often paid in cigarettes, it was no
small luxury. Such was the state of the local currency and the black
market that ruled the city.

He smiled to himself with a slight flush of embarrassment recalling
how he’d acquired the coffee the day before. He had begged for it,
really. Not overtly, but in an obvious enough way, having learned
how to go about such things.

A British journalist had telephoned for an interview and Vlado had
gladly set a time. The subject was to be homicide in the city of death,
as well as the ever present topic of the local corruption that was eating
away at the city from within. It was a topic Vlado was forbidden
to discuss, but that was beside the point. He knew as well as anyone
that journalists, U.N. people, and other outsiders were always eager
to ingratiate themselves with their bags full of booty—coffee, whiskey,
cartons of Marlboros, sometimes even sugar. Who knows how
generous they might be if you had information they wanted, whether
you could supply it or not.

The items a journalist might offer could fetch Deutschemarks, dollars,
friends and influence, or even a prostitute for an hour or so....