Marco turned onto a narrow side street that quickly became a steep hill. After about fifty yards, during which we talked little, he stopped by an old Mercedes and got inside.
‘We’re going to a lot of trouble just to buy a pistol,’ I said, getting in the passenger seat as he started the engine.
He lit a cigarette and puffed hard on it, blowing the smoke out of the window as he drove up the hill. ‘Sarajevo isn’t some cowboy town where guns are everywhere. It has a bad reputation but an unfair one, and it’s all because of the war, which wasn’t our fault in the first place.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you know, when I was a boy, this city was a cool place. We hosted the Winter Olympics; everyone lived together happily – Muslim, Serb, Croat. And now you people just think we’re violent hicks.’
‘I don’t think that,’ I said. ‘Were you here during the siege?’
He nodded. ‘It started when I was sixteen so I was old enough to fight. I was a volunteer in the Free Bosnian Army. It was hard to take the fight to the Serbs. They stayed up in the hills like cowards, relying on their heavy weaponry, but when they did try to break into the city, we hit them hard. And we showed no mercy. They didn’t try very often.’
I had a renewed respect for him then. He’d seen danger and hardship in a way that we in the West have no concept of. I’ve always thought of myself as a tough man but, for all the bad things that have happened to me, I’ve at least grown up in a country of relative stability and peace.
‘It must have been hard living like that.’
‘It was. Especially seeing the city that was our home destroyed around us. But our enemies never broke our people and now peace reigns, my friend, and guns, I have to tell you, are in short supply.’
‘OK, fair enough, you’ve convinced me,’ I said, staring out of the window as we moved from the old city out into the suburbs where the roads were wider and modern residential tower blocks, some still under construction, lined both sides.
‘You know the First World War started here back in 1914?’ said Marco, who now seemed to have morphed into the local tour guide.
‘I did,’ I told him. ‘I always enjoyed history at school. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, right?’
‘That’s right, but that’s not the whole story.’ Marco’s eyes gleamed with enthusiasm as he took a final drag on his cigarette and chucked it out of the window. ‘The history books get it wrong. They say it was all pre-planned, and indeed there was an attempt to assassinate him earlier that morning with a bomb by a group of Serb nationalists which failed. Ah, but the actual shooting …’ He waved a finger at me. ‘That was different. You see, Ferdinand’s motorcade was travelling back from a function at the City Hall when his vehicle took an inexplicable wrong turning and immediately got stuck behind another vehicle. This was just outside a delicatessen where a man called Gavrilo Princip was queuing for a sandwich. Now Princip was also a Serb nationalist and didn’t like Franz Ferdinand, but he hadn’t been planning on killing him.’ Marco shrugged. ‘He was hungry. He just wanted his sandwich, but then he sees the hated Ferdinand in an open-top car right outside the front door of the delicatessen. So he pulls a pistol out of his pocket, strolls right up to the car and shoots him and his wife dead. Just like that. Can you imagine it? If there’d been no queue there, or they’d had more people behind the counter, or Princip just hadn’t wanted a sandwich that day? There’d probably have been no First World War, and therefore no Second either.’
He pulled the Mercedes into a deserted car park in front of a single-storey warehouse building.
‘Imagine that, Ray. Fifty million lives lost, all over a fucking sandwich. But that’s the way of the world, my friend. Small choices can lead to some very big results.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ I said, getting out of the car and following him up to the front door.
The door was opened from the inside before we even got there by a large, unshaven man in a loud lime-green tracksuit and very white trainers, who looked like he hadn’t done any exercise in his life. He nodded at Marco, and it was clear that they knew each other well. They said a few words to each other in Serbo-Croat, and Tracksuit moved aside.
‘Come on in,’ said Marco.
I followed him into a small reception room, shutting the door behind me but making sure not to lock it in case I needed to make a quick escape.
‘My friend here needs to search you in case you have a concealed weapon.’
‘If I had a concealed weapon I wouldn’t need to be here,’ I told him, but I lifted my arms anyway, and let Tracksuit give me what I have to say was a pretty cursory search. He found the flick knife I’d bought in Paris in my back pocket and threw it down on the reception desk, before leading Marco and me down a long corridor to the back of the building and into a large storeroom, lined with boxes. On a table in the middle were three pistols side by side, all without their magazines.
Tracksuit went behind the table and made a gesture with his hand for me to take a look.
‘It’s just a matter of choosing the one you want,’ said Marco. ‘My friend here is reliable.’
I noticed that Marco’s voice had risen a couple of decibels as he spoke – and then, as I heard movement behind me, I realized why. I just had time
