let them play their game. They’ll end up with egg on their faces.”
The optimists weren’t worried. The others-and they were far more numerous-included friends and most of the politicians he heard on television. The world, they reminded him, had long ago singled out Serbs for eternal punishment. They adored the Muslims in Kosovo because they had been fooled by their crying women and those alleged mass graves. The Americans, who after 9/11 should know better, would once again let their stupid political correctness get the better of them.
Radovan preferred optimism. With a mother being slowly eaten by cancer, it was the one stance that could give him some measure of peace. However, he was also a career criminal who knew the world didn’t always bow to your optimism. The result of the vote that chilly Sunday one week ago was no surprise to anyone. What followed was.
Afghanistan was the first to recognize the Republic of Kosovo. Then Costa Rica and, of course, Albania. There were jokes, because sovereignty is only as strong as the nations that agree with it. Then France said yes. The French president was of Hungarian stock, and Hungarians hated Serbs more than most, so perhaps it was an anomaly. Breaths were held. Turkey-more Muslims, so what else could you expect? Then, in Dar es Salaam, George W. Bush, that ignorant cowboy, said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”
Exhale.
By then Radovan had settled most everything with his mother’s Austrian visa and had a final appointment for the following Monday. So, with her blessing, he took to the streets with his friends and shouted and raised his fists. They cursed the UN and the USA and sang Orthodox hymns and war songs. Each night, exhausted and pleased with themselves, they got drunk and told their Kosovo stories. Some had been there for the fighting, and Radovan drank in their tales of burning villages and Muslim terrorists and tracking down soldiers who had gone MIA. Others were amateur historians-most Serbs these days were amateur historians-who could recite a litany of dates that tied the region more tightly to the Serbian breast. The 1389 battle against the Ottomans on Kosovo Polje-Kosovo Field, or the field of the black birds-figured heavily in any discussion, so that any Serb could, and would, proclaim that they had been fighting for Kosovo for the past six hundred years, ever since that first gloriously lost battle.
When a crowd is convinced it has been truly wronged, little can stop it from smashing windows and pulling up sidewalks. When the injustice reaches back into medieval times, and the humiliation has lasted six centuries, then the anger is buoyed by religious fervor. You break glass not only for yourself but for all who have come before you, and when, on Thursday night, one of your comrades, a functionary with the Radical Party, suggests a visit to the American embassy, there is no choice but to go.
All Radovan’s ancestors hung behind him, watching with pleasure as he went to give a history lesson to the monolith nation that thought history was something you only read about in books. History, his lesson would say, was the blood that kept you alive. History separated you from the beasts. This was tonight’s lesson.
It was beautiful. The ease of their entry was breathtaking, for the marines guarding the unassuming building on Kneza Milosa drew back like troublemakers hoping that in the rear of the room the teacher wouldn’t notice them. Then the windows were shattered, drunk professors scaling the facade, legs flailing at the sills as they slid inside. They ran cheering through the narrow, dark corridors of the empty building, banging against locked doors that likely held the darkest secrets of the American empire, and when they couldn’t get them open someone-Dejan? Viktor?- decided the best way was to burn it down. If there are no students, then what use is the schoolhouse? Perhaps in the morning, when the students see the pile of ashes, they just might understand.
By the next day, though, no one understood, and their own policemen collected them in the streets and knocked down apartment doors looking for the professors of history. One died in the embassy fire, consumed by smoke, but Radovan didn’t know that one. Some Bosnian rounded up with him said the dead man was a martyr, but with a crushing hangover accentuated by the cold morning light, Radovan couldn’t be sure of anything.
Now, the Sunday after the vote, he was still here: a group cell in the Belgrade District Prison on Bacvanska ulica.
Occasionally, policemen arrived to take away this or that prisoner for questioning. The ones who returned said they were asking who had organized the attacks on the Croatian and American embassies, as well as the attempted attacks on the Turkish and British embassies, but the pressure depended on which interrogator you got. Some didn’t care for those mysteries and just sat discussing minor offenses, like the trashed McDonald’s and other stores along Terazije.
So far, no one had asked him a single question, and he wanted out. He’d grown sick of the stink. He’d watched the testosterone overflow and fights break out. Some skinheads had smuggled in a couple of knives, and two Bosnians had been cut already. More importantly, tomorrow he was expected at the Austrian embassy, and at this rate he wouldn’t get questioned until the middle of the week. So when one of the skinheads was returned to the cell, grinning, Radovan flagged his escort. “Tell Pavle ?ord-evi c that Radovan Pani c has information for him.”
He’d seen Pavle ?or?-evic in the unheated entrance when he and ten others were dragged in to join the crowd of young men that now numbered about two hundred. He’d known Pavle in high school, though to call them friends would have been a stretch. He’d punched Pavle’s face when both were fourteen, and the policeman’s long nose still made a slight detour halfway down to his lips. But it was the only name he knew.
The cop pretended to ignore his request, and after he left some of the Bosnians began to hassle him-who was he planning to give up? He stood his ground and told them that a well-known Novi Beograd gangster was his boss. It was enough for them to give him breathing room.
Hours later, around six thirty, he was led to an interview room, where Pavle sat smoking a Marlboro and scratching his broken nose. He ignored Radovan’s attempts at reminiscing and pocketed his cigarettes when Radovan made a move for them. He spoke as if he’d been awake for a week straight. “I don’t have time for your bullshit, Radovan. Get to the point.”
“I’ve got information. Let’s make a deal.”
“What kind of information?”
“The good kind. The kind that gets you a promotion. You agree to let me go, and it’s yours.”
“You’re going to tell me who organized the burning of the American embassy?” Pavle grinned. “That information won’t get me promoted. It might just get me a bullet in the head.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with Belgrade. No one gets in trouble except some foreigners.” He paused. “In particular, an American.”
Pavle exhaled smoke, then after a moment placed his Marlboros back on the table. Radovan took one and waited for Pavle to light it. “Go on,” said the cop.
“Do we have a deal? I’ve got to get out. Family business.”
“If it’s as good as you say, then sure.”
“It is, Pavle. Believe me.”
7
The request came in the form of a morning e-mail with a red priority flag, asking her to please come to Conference Room S on the second floor for a 10:00 A.M. meeting. It had been sent by Teddi Wartmuller’s secretary.
The second floor was a rarity for Erika. She kept to her office on the ground floor, and when the directors of the various departments wanted to talk, they came to her. There had always been a silent understanding in this, since the second floor was where they stocked the French wines and the ten-year-old single malts for serious intelligence bureaucrats poring over policy dictates and making serious decisions. Such important people required their meals be delivered and their drinks poured; it was a place Erika Schwartz did not belong.
She’d been invited not merely to the second floor but to the most esteemed and contentious of the conference rooms. Each department had been tapped to pay for S’s renovation more than two years ago. They paid for the Spanish leather upholstery, the Italian cabinets, and the long conference table made of Finnish oak and fitted out with its own laptops and cameras for conference calls displayed on an enormous plasma television at the end of the room; at the other end, windows with electric blinds surveyed the grounds. The inevitable argument over funding this monstrosity had finally uncovered the true purpose of S, which was to impress the Americans. This, of course, was before the CIA’s Afghan heroin scandal shut down most of their joint operations, but construction had
