Goran called down, “Are you okay?”
The sky was so clear and light-flooded, so blindingly blue. On the left there was a contrail from probably a military aircraft, and straight overhead a thin smudge of cloud, like an attempted erasure with one of those worthless latex nubs. Stargazing would be excellent in this dry and remote terrain. “What did Susan want to talk to you about?” Mark asked the sky. “During the drive.”
Goran’s voice floated down to him. “She thought the UN official was an idiot. In love with himself. She’d spent the last two days with him, and he’d been flirting with her.”
“Doing what?”
“The usual stuff.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Putting his hands on her when talking. Her arm, her hip. Telling her she was beautiful.” Mark couldn’t see Goran, but it sounded like he’d braved the mines as well and come partway down the slope. “He’d invited her back to his room the night before. Maybe you shouldn’t tell anyone I said this.”
God forbid I should embarrass the fellow, Mark thought.
“Since he could hardly speak Spanish, and I understand it pretty well, she told me these things in the front seat, while he sat in the back. Probably the car noise made it hard for him to hear anything. And also maybe she thought if she sat in the back, he’d insist on sitting with her.”
Mark could feel a number of sharp stones pressing into his back. On a discomfort scale of one to ten, it counted as a one. The bushes smelled like creosote and thyme. There was a tiny lavender flower with five petals at the end of one branch. Just one flower, out of all the branches in Mark’s view. “Do you remember what Susan was saying just before the shot?”
“Nothing. Her complaints about the guy were all in the first ten minutes. She laughed at him—I wanted to hit him—a lot of these UN people are stupid members of rich families, sent off to do something where if they fuck up no one cares much, or it never comes out. After that we just drove. The windows were open, it was noisy.”
Then the shot, the fracturing safety glass, the car veering to the left and sliding down the slope. The autopsy specified the bullet. It was something called an M75 ball, fired from a Zastava M76 sniper rifle. It had a mass of thirteen grams and traveled at 760 meters per second. That translated into 3750 joules of kinetic energy, equivalent to a bowling ball dropped from a height of 180 feet. But the bullet expended some of its energy on the windshield and then, with its full metal jacket, and missing Susan’s ribs, it went right through her, with enough energy left over to tear through her seat back and the lower part of the rear seat. It probably lodged somewhere in the metal chassis between the rear wheels. If it had gone through her lung, or through her neck without hitting a major artery, she might have survived. “And after?” Mark asked. “Did she say anything?” The intensity of human desire to know a loved one’s last words. Mark wondered at it, but felt it nonetheless.
“I put the car down off the road, it was quiet, I think I said, ’Is everyone okay?’ And the UN guy was down on the floor in the back and he said, ‘Was that a shot?’ And it’s strange, but it was only then I realized it might have been a bullet. I looked at your sister and . . . Do you want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“She was leaning against the passenger door, with her head down. I said, ‘Are you okay?’ and she said, I think she said, ‘Jesus, what was that?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and then she said, ‘Something hit me really hard,’ and I leaned over, and that’s when I saw the blood.” Goran stopped.
“Please keep going.”
“I think I said something like, ‘Oh my god, you’ve been shot!’ and she said, ‘Figures.’ I think she was trying to make light of it. Then the pain must have kicked in. She didn’t say anything after that. I took off my shirt and pressed it on the wound on her front. We stayed in the car because we didn’t know where the sniper was, we were afraid of also being shot.”
“Of course.”
“So we didn’t move her, and she was bleeding into the seat and I couldn’t see it.”
“She never said anything else?”
“No. She was in a lot of pain. She was making sounds of . . . of great pain, of . . . what’s the word . . . agony. I am very sorry to tell you that. It was terrible to hear. After a few minutes, she got quieter. We had no radio phones with us, and it was another maybe ten minutes before another car came by, a local villager, and we decided the sniper had left, or wouldn’t shoot anymore, or anyway we had to risk it, so we moved her into the other car, and that’s when I saw how much blood there was on the seat cushions.”
“And she died on the way to the hospital.”
“No, we drove her to a hospital in Mostar. She was still alive when the people from the ER took her out of the car.”
“The report said DOA.”
“That’s incorrect.”
Some unmeasurable period of silence went by. Some ants, or some other sort of sociable insects, had found Mark. The smudge of cloud had dissipated, and the contrail had drifted south, widening and blurring. “I’m guessing that the UN guy was sitting behind you, rather than behind my sister,” Mark said. “Before the shot.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”
He would have done this if he was still trying to flirt, so that he could see her profile, try to engage her in conversation. The
