15.

IRENA’S FIRST DUTIES at the brewery were not demanding. She was given a blue plastic pass that seemed to confine her to the first floor. Tedic would bustle past with a greeting and a sallow smile, then bound up to the second floor. Sometimes she encountered him in a stairwell as he descended into the basement. Once he was with a gray-suited bald man—authentically bald, not shaved, like Tedic—whose face brightened when Tedic introduced her as “Zaric, the great basketball star.”

“You are a household name in Grbavica,” he told her. “We are lucky to be working with you.”

After the man had passed by, Tedic turned around and mouthed to Irena, “The Home Minister. Very important.”

There was a brooding, milky-faced man in a smudged red woolen shirt who always sat by himself behind a window off the loading dock. Irena heard Tedic call him Mel. She had gathered that the man’s profoundly undetectable resemblance to Mel Gibson was a standing joke. Occasionally, Mel would hold up a broom for Irena and point to a litter of dirt and wood splinters left by the boots of delivery people. Irena would make five minutes’ labor last thirty, for lack of other work. “Other duties as assigned” were not yet forthcoming.

Irena was hanging a broom back on a rack near the docks one day when she saw the blue eyes of a beautiful blond woman staring up from the top of a crate. One of the woman’s breasts was bared—her lacy black vest had been artfully parted. She picked up the magazine and waved it through the dispatch window at Mel.

“Can I look at this?” she mouthed.

“What the fuck?”

It had taken Irena a couple of days to decipher Mel’s phrasing. He seemed to pull out of his sentences two or three words from the end, so that “What the fuck?” could mean “What the fuck is that?” or “What the fuck are you doing with that?”

Mel stayed seated in his swivel chair, so Irena guessed it was the former. “It’s Kim Basinger,” she told him. “Sky, June ‘92. Maybe one of the U.N. people left it.”

“What the fuck?” said Mel. “What the fuck?”

Irena translated this as “What the fuck do I care?” and so sat down with the magazine on the steps of the loading dock.

         

KIM TOLD SKY that she liked a man with good lips who had clean, bracing breath and didn’t slobber when he kissed. “You have to think it’s as good as what’s coming later,” she said, and Irena thought briefly of Coach Dino. His breath often smelled of cigarettes and beer. Sometimes he pushed his tongue so far into her mouth that his top lip would begin to slip over her nose.

She couldn’t quite follow an article in English about IRA terrorists in Belfast. It showed photographs of young Catholic schoolkids hiding behind a burnt car during a shoot-out, and young IRA men in running shoes, dark sweaters, and ski masks, holding rifles. I guess that’s the universal uniform for their team, Irena mused. She blinked a few times on learning that Eamonn, the young IRA terrorist who had been quoted extensively, was seventeen years old. That can’t be, Irena thought for a moment. That’s my age. Well, she thought after a pause, that’s old enough for anything, I suppose. The author asked Eamonn why the IRA had killed more Irish Catholics than British soldiers, and Eamonn said, “Killing is the only way to get their attention.” Well, Irena thought, we seventeen-year-olds are not always good at math, are we?

A few pages on was the sex-advice feature called “Confidential” (despite, obviously, appearing in a mass magazine). Susan in Birmingham worried that her vagina was too small. Sky told her that there was no such thing. Algie from London said his girlfriend had told him that his penis was too smooth. The magazine suggested that he take a day trip to Birmingham to meet Susan. Kim in Kent said her boyfriend insisted that she lather his cock with Nutella before they had sex. Sky said that seemed like an awful waste of chocolate spread, and Irena agreed. Especially here, she thought. Gobble the spread and forget the cock.

There was a gorgeous photograph of a swimmer’s back in a Seiko watch ad. The young man’s muscles seemed to swell and ripple like an ocean current. “He’s spent 21 years getting here,” said the ad. “But all that matters is the next 48.62 seconds.” Seventeen years getting here, Irena said to herself, thinking of Nermina. And it’s over one morning for a loaf of bread. South Korea banned Right Said Fred’s song “I’m Too Sexy.” But in America Sharon Stone was unveiling her crotch, like a new car design, in her latest movie. The director was a Dutchman who said, “People always criticize violence. But we humans have evolved from savage apes.” Teenage gangs in New York housing projects were slicing off their legs and arms trying to ride the roofs of moving elevators; they called it elevator surfing. Well, that’s one worry we don’t have here, thought Irena.

Irena was immersed in the personal ads (“Handsome gay male, 17, N. Ireland. Very straight-acting. Write soon, sinking fast.” Is that you, Eamonn? she thought. Better not let your brothers under their ski masks know) when Tedic turned a corner onto the dock.

“I’m glad to see you improving your mind away from the classroom,” he announced.

Irena closed the magazine, but only over her thumb, so that she could keep her place.

“Do you have a jacket?” he asked. “Never mind. We’ll get something. We have a ‘duty as assigned.’ ”

Irena’s Air Jordans smacked and squeaked on the loading dock as they scuttled out into a beer truck that Tedic had kept running.

         

“DO YOU KNOW Dobrinja?” he asked.

“We played Veterans High a couple of times.”

Tedic nodded in recollection.

“That big, slow girl who couldn’t be moved from the key.”

“Radmila,” Irena remembered. They had held her to four points.

“Out near the airport, you know, this has been the bloodiest ground. We can’t even count. All those Olympic-era housing blocks out there—shooting people in their apartments has been like shooting bean cans off shelves for the valiant Serbs. But the folks in Dobrinja have been brave. They dig out of their rubble and come to greet the tanks with bricks and rocks. They hold them back. They lost three men—women, too—for every one that they killed. But they’ve held the bullies back. Now, we have the smallest chance to return the favor.”

         

DOBRINJA’S OLYMPIAN PANORAMA of ten-story apartment buildings looked almost intact as they approached from behind. Only the accustomed old Soviet satellite corrosion was visible: shattered windows left to decompose like chipped teeth, burgundy paint peeling and retouched with the gray that alone was available.

But the faces of buildings overlooking Serb territory had been razed. The buildings just refused to accept their demolition. Artillery shells had slammed into the apartments at intimate range. They had screamed in through the windows, blazed through rooms, torn off heads and arms, and soaked the ash and powder of the burned-out walls and floors with blood. Most apartments had been turned into dark pits clinging to sheer rubble.

A Bosnian who led a defense committee from his building had once waved a handgun truculently late at night and shouted across the indiscernible line. “Why don’t you just finish us off? Come on over, right now, you pussy-faces, give us your best, and get it over with.”

The Serb general Ratko Mladic had bellowed back, “We have a big army, you goat-fucking fairy. If my men don’t have something to do tomorrow, they’ll all get the clap.”

         

THE PARKING LOT of the apartment block had been declared no-man’s-land. No Bosnian could safely inhabit it, yet the Serbs had been unable to take it for their own: fifty yards of concrete scarred with bullets and pitted with shells, some still smoldering. Six cars stranded there when the war began now looked like flattened ladybugs. There were shoes, shirts, and slats of fractured wood scattered over the old parking spaces, decaying under the autumn sun. Up close, Irena realized that they were the bones, ribs, shirts, shins, and shoes of people who had been shot and left along the front lines. A doorframe incongruously left standing in the parking lot led down to what a sign said was a bomb shelter.

Tedic remembered when the buildings had been finished for athletes’ housing just before the 1984 Olympic Games. The bomb shelters had been conspicuously included to impress Western athletes with the resolve of the socialist alliance to withstand imperialist assault. But the young American skiers and sledders had grown up after Dr. Strangelove and were simply bemused. The bomb shelter became a rendezvous for gay men before the Olympics had even left town.

Some of the people who were putrefying into the asphalt of the parking lot may have been racing for the bomb shelter. Socialism had built bastions to survive nuclear holocaust, but not the small-arms pops and mortar bangs of ethnic cleansing.

         

TEDIC STOPPED THE beer truck at the side of an apartment building and took Irena by the arm over to a basement window that had been wrenched open. She backed in, feet first, a line of hands taking hold of her legs, sides, and finally shoulders before her shoes came down. None of the men or women introduced themselves. Tedic followed, slipping in with surprising agility.

“Our sewer rats,” he called out to the circle of men and women.

They answered with subdued cheers, moans, and a couple of handclaps. “And we have baited the trap,” said a slender, mahogany-haired woman in tight blue jeans and a baggy sweater, who seemed to be in charge of everyone but Tedic.

“I have brought you an authentic member of the Pepsi generation,” Tedic said with a mock bow toward Irena.

Irena had a quick impression of young, smart people whose bodies were tapering with each week of war. Many wore glasses that looked outsized and owlish on tightening faces. A couple of flashlights shone up from the floor, cans of light splashed against the ceiling, so that the wires in various colors that had been pulled across the gray space could be traced.

“We are ready?” asked Tedic.

“Anytime,” said the girl in charge. Her wrists twitched like branches from the sleeves of her baggy gray sweater. “But soon is advisable. We don’t know when Romeo will be calling.”

“Or coming,” Tedic added.

He called the girl Jackie, and hailed a fig-shaped man in the basement as Gerry. Irena guessed it was because of their resemblance to Jacqueline Bisset and Gérard Depardieu. She had a new curiosity about Mel.

         

“YOU ARE A twelve-year-old girl,” Tedic said to Irena. “Can you be that?”

“I was once twelve,” she pointed out. “Do I have a name?”

Gerry stepped forward, and looked down at the notes he had inked on his hands and wrists.

“Vanja Draskovic,” Gerry said. “Thirty-nine Hamo Cimic Street in Dobrinja.”

“Parents?”

“You’re a step ahead. Milica and Branimir.”

“Are they real?

“They were.”

“Who were they?” Irena demanded.

“Names from around here,” he said.

“Where are they now?” Irena wanted to know.

“Killed when the house was taken,” Tedic explained flatly. When Irena didn’t register horror or disdain, he went on. He was holding a beige telephone handset of the kind repairmen hooked on their belts.

“We will put a call through to the rectory of the Orthodox Church in Dobrinja,” he said. “They have installed a mortar squad on the roof of the church, so their soldiers can rain holy hot shells on the children and old people of Dobrinja who may one day advance on them with their menacing empty hands. Your parents were not members of this church. You have scarcely been there. Your parents were sophisticated urbanites who considered themselves agnostics. But everyone on the street knows the Orthodox Church.”

“Who will I talk to?”

“Whoever answers. Priest, housekeeper. It could be a soldier. Improvise accordingly.”

“What the hell—?”

“Here’s the hell,” said Tedic. “Here is the hell that has caused you to dial the church for help. You are inside your house. The house in front of you—that big stone gray one across the street—has been invaded by Muslim assholes. They are shooting into your kitchen. Your parents are away. Working, shopping. You have the kitchen phone on a long wire and are hiding in the hallway. But the Muslim bastards are so close, you can smell their greasy breath. You can practically feel the scrape of their ill-shaven chins against your soft young neck. You are a twelve-year-old girl—innocent, sweet, and unspoiled. Unspoiled. I hope I don’t have to be too frank. Put that in your voice. You have been forsaken by everyone but God.”

Jackie, who had been standing with her hands on her hips, scowled with disapproval.

“Honestly, Tedic, the only story lines men know are rape fantasies,” she said.

“Jackie, love, let’s try to get this job done without arguing sexual politics.” Tedic turned back to Irena. “Try to sound naÏve,” he said. “But not stupid. Wide-eyed, not empty-headed.”

“For fuck’s sake, Miro.” Jackie stamped her foot. “You just drag her out of the second grade and expect her to all of a sudden act like Julia Roberts.”

When a chorus of kindly laughter flickered across the basement room, Tedic waited for it to die down.

“Not Julia. Ingrid,” he announced softly, looking at Irena. “Bergman. The maid, the maid. ‘I hear voices in the bells.’ ” Tedic did a little singsong. “Go forth, save France,” he sang, barely above a whisper.

“Whoever answers may ask you questions,” Tedic continued. “Gerry over there will hear them, too, and try to give you answers. We don’t have time for a tutorial. Make it up. Be specific. Let your certainty confound them. Keep your voice urgent. Make your urgency move them along.”

“What the hell,” Irena said, “is going on?”

“We don’t have time for a tutorial,” Tedic repeated, holding the phone up in his hand as if he were about to dial.

“I am a full-court player,” Irena reminded him. “Offense and defense. What the hell,” she asked urgently again, “is going on?”

Tedic smiled slightly, and lowered the phone to his waist. “Look across the street at the stout gray house protruding behind that row of homes,” he said. “It has a sturdy basement wine cellar. The Serbs took the house from a Serb family so they could drink the wine, and store gold, dollars, deutsche marks, and diamonds in the cellar. Their booty is installed in the basement. Some unassuming guards scratch their guns on their asses on the ground floor. The top, with its pretty oval windows, has become a sporting club for the bankers who oversee these holdings.”

“Sporting club?”

“Fishing and rod club. Hunt club. Pig-sticking club. They take their girls there, to be plain. Bordeaux and pearls in the basement, creamy Swiss sheets on the beds.”

“They take other people’s girls, too,” added Jackie.

“That’s plain,” said Irena.

“Ingrid,” Gerry said, “about half an hour ago, one of the bankers pulled up with a young blonde. Mitar is his name. If we proceed quickly, there is a real chance of pulling off something that would disrupt the Serb cash flow. And catch a bad man with his pants down.”

There was another chorus of laughter from the young people clustered around Irena in their blue jeans and baggy sweaters. Jackie had eyeglasses like Nermina’s and, beneath them, pools of warm chocolate for eyes. The boys and girls all stood around Irena, looking at her, waiting for her to begin the play. She took a breath, let it go, and nodded.

Gerry punched a number into the handset and handed it to Tedic, who listened for a moment, smiled, and then held it to Irena’s left ear. She heard a trilling. She heard squeals and clicks. Two rings, three rings. Gerry stood directly in front of her, an earpiece hanging from his left ear, a scratch pad at the ready. She sensed that Jackie was behind her; she smelled a rose perfume and turned around. Rosy Jackie, she thought to herself, guarding my back. When Irena looked over her shoulder, Jackie smiled as she listened to the rings, prepared to eavesdrop with her own earpiece.

“Do you hear voices in the bells, Ingrid?” she asked. “ ‘Go forth, kick ass.’ ”

Irena heard a rattling on the line, and then a rough, phlegmy man’s voice. “Ah, yes.” She was on.

         

“IS THIS THE Orthodox Church in Dobrinja?”

“Yes.”

“I am Vanja Draskovic. My parents, maybe you know them, Milica and Branimir. We need help.” Irena spoke in a hushed rush, as she would coming downcourt alongside Amela Divacs.

“I am Father Pavlovic. What is it, child?”

“Muslims,” said Irena huskily. “They have shot their way into the house in front of ours. The Domics’ house.”

“Where are your parents, child?”

“Gone,” said Irena. Then she added, “Work. I’m supposed to stay in the basement when they’re gone. But I heard shooting and wanted to be sure that our bird was safe. I should have taken him. Oh, hell,” she said suddenly. Gerry’s eyes widened, but relaxed when he heard the priest respond only with new concern.

“What child? What’s wrong?”

“I . . . I saw one of them. In the window. Long beard, like a rabbi. A long gun.”

“Can he see you?”

“I’m in the hallway. Outside of our kitchen. I have the phone on a cord.”

“Stay there,” said Father Pavlovic. “Stay down. Stay away from the windows. Do you know your address, dear?”

“Thirty-nine Hamo Cimic.”

“How old are you, dear?”

“Twelve. I’ll be thirteen next February twenty-eighth,” Irena volunteered. Nermina’s birthday. Gerry dashed out a note: “NOT TOO MUCH,” it said in big black letters.

“Well, you’re a very bright girl,” the priest resumed. “Where do you go to school?” Gerry already had that on his pad, and pointed to the note for Irena.

“Number Nine.”

“A very good school,” said the priest. “Do you know Mrs. Ivanovic?”

“My bird,” Irena said suddenly. “Miro.” An inspired interjection, she thought. Tedic hovered by Gerry, who was flipping pages on his pad. “He’s in the kitchen, where the Muslims can see him.”

“I’m sure Miro is fine, dear,” said the priest soothingly. “You say you went to Number Nine?” Irena’s distraction afforded Gerry the time to find the right page and hold up one full hand of fingers and two on his second.

“Mrs. Ivanovic is a seventh-grade teacher,” said Irena, then pressed ahead to close off another route. “But not mine.” Gerry already had his finger on another name. “Mrs. Fejzic is my teacher. But there is no school. I miss her,” Irena added. And before Gerry could groan he heard the priest brim with new tenderness.

“Of course you do, dear. This war is a terrible thing. Look, dear, I am writing something out here. I don’t know your parents. Do they come here?”

“We have been to church. But not a lot.”

“What church do you and your parents go to, dear?” the priest asked.

Tedic’s eyes narrowed as he held his breath.

“None, really,” said Irena. “My parents are still socialists. We go to Christmas Mass.” She paused. “We go when we are in trouble. I’m sorry, Father. That’s why we had the number in my mother’s little plaid book in the kitchen.” Irena imagined her mother’s small plaid book of numbers, filled with listings for telephones that now could not ring.

“That’s why I called,” Irena continued. “All these numbers she has of friends and restaurants. I didn’t know who else could help. My mother has always said, ‘We go to the church in times of trouble.’ ”

“Oh, child,” said Father Pavlovic, “your mother said the truth. Now, dear, the house in front of yours. Where the Muslims are. Can you tell me what it looks like?”

“Do you want me to take a look?”

“No, dear. Away from the window. Just what you remember.”

Irena’s memories of the house across the way were fresh; she softened them a little. “Gray. Nice round windows in front. Red roof.”

“Are you sure?” asked the priest. “How can you see the color of the roof?”

“It is one of those old buildings. The roof isn’t flat. It’s like a triangle. There are red shingles.”

“Does it have a chimney?”

Gerry nodded and whispered, “Kitchen fireplace.”

“Yes. The Domics have a fireplace in the kitchen. Mrs. Domic loves to make cevapcici there.”

Jackie, Gerry, and the kids beamed at Irena, almost to bursting.

“You are in the hallway, daughter?”

“Yes,” said Irena. “You told me.”

“Good. Good. Now I am going to have to put the phone down for a moment.”

“Don’t be away for long!” Irena put the crack of a command into her voice; but infused it with a child’s confusion and fear.

“I won’t,” Father Pavlovic ardently assured her. “I won’t. Just a moment, child. Bear with me.”

“The Muslims,” said Irena, her whisper rising. “I hear them laughing. They are over there in the Domics’ house, laughing.”

“Stay where you are, child. Stay down. Be quiet. Say a prayer. Think of the baby Jesus, safe in his manger.”

Irena, Jackie, and Gerry were utterly still as they listened to Father Pavlovic’s telephone handset settle on a hard surface. They heard a brief murmur of voices.

Jackie shook her head. “Not a thing,” she whispered.

Irena whispered back, “Won’t someone there know that all the money and gold is kept in that house?”

Gerry smiled. “Kept it secret,” he rasped. “Else their own folks would steal it.”

There was a clank and a rattle on the line as Father Pavlovic returned. “I am back, child,” he said. “Now you must listen. It is important that you stay away from the windows. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Your bird, Mischa.”

“Miro.”

“Where is he?”

“In a corner of the kitchen.”

“Well, then, he has his cage to protect him. The rest of us are not so lucky as your little bird. What I want you to do now, dear,” the priest said soothingly, “is lie down on the floor. Get down, dear. I will hold on.”

Irena obeyed instantly. Tedic, who was not able to listen, stared at her quizzically, but put his hands out to ease her onto the stony basement floor.

“I am on the floor, Father.”

“Are you all right there?”

“Yes,” said Irena. She had turned her head so that her left temple rested against the floor. The side of her skull got instantly cold against the stone. Her nose filled with the smell of smoke and stale blood. “It’s not very comfortable,” she said. “Is something happening, Father?”

“Soon, daughter. It will not last long. Are your eyes down against the floor?”

“No. That would put my mouth against the floor. How could I breathe? Father, Father, Father, what’s going on?”

The priest began to coo into Irena’s ear, as if he were soothing a lost child. Jackie appreciated his tenderness even as she admired Irena’s ingenuity.

“It will not last long, child,” he said. “It will be over soon. You will soon be safe. Turn your head to the floor, child. Rest on your chin. You will be able to breathe just fine. Put your hands over the back of your head. Shut your eyes. Put the phone down next to your ear. Don’t worry about speaking. I will just keep talking. Can you hear me? Just grunt once, child. Softly.”

Irena grunted. Softly. Once.

“Don’t worry about speaking, dear. There is nothing for you to say. You reached out to God when you were troubled, and He put me nearby to hear you. Stay down, dear. Just listen to me, dear. Shut everything else out for a few seconds, dear. You are not alone. God is on that floor with you. God has His arms around you. God is with all of us who fear. His Son was fearful, too. His Son tells us that the meek are blessed. They—we—shall inherit the earth. The merciful shall have mercy. The poor shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, dear. They are the children of God. Anyone who has to hide on the floor, seek help from strangers, or fear men bursting through their door is blessed. The kingdom of heaven is theirs.”

Irena was glad that her eyes were turned toward the floor. The tears that had inexplicably filled them could just trickle away onto the ground. Out of a corner of her eye she could see Gerry’s feet turning. She looked up, and saw Jackie’s chin tip upward as she looked toward the small basement windows. Irena could hear a crash from across the way, then the whine of another mortar. There was another boom, and then a spray of rock, earth, and glass falling to earth in the no-man’s-land just beyond their snug little basement.

“Direct hit,” said Tedic.

“Flames,” said a man in a jean jacket nearby, squinting through a set of field glasses. “Nice, big orange sheets of flames.”

“Dead-on shots,” Tedic repeated. “Hand it to the bastards. Broke their own bank, didn’t they?”

“Looks like they have a team outside, just raking the house with gunshots,” said another member of Tedic’s team, and Irena could hear a popcorn of retorts under the bristle of flames.

“Strike the set,” Tedic ordered softly.

There was a sudden scramble of Tedic’s boys and girls pulling at wires and snapping open cases. The telephone handset was turned up on the floor; people stepped back as if it were a broken glass. Irena, who had pulled herself up on her knees, picked up the handset and spoke into the receiver without listening.

“Thank you, Father Pavlovic.” She let Gerry take it gently from her hand, and told him, “Really, he wanted to help me.”

         

TEDIC SAID A quick goodbye to Gerry, Jackie, and their troupe.

Jackie slipped her glasses onto the collar of her sweater, and when she pulled a pin from her brown hair it tumbled over her shoulders. She smiled at Irena and reached a hand out to squeeze her shoulder. “Ingrid,” she said. “Vanja. Masterful. Five-star. Tedic renames us all according to his screen fantasies. I will look forward to your next performance.”

People began to slip out through side windows, counting to thirty to space their exits.

“We got them to break their own bank,” Tedic repeated as the group thinned out. “Our banker and his pal should be in oblivion. If we’re lucky, there’s a funeral pyre of dollars and deutsche marks burning now. Even if we aren’t, they’ll have to send teams to dig out their riches. They’ll be sitting ducks with shovels. We don’t need the Serbs’ heavy weapons,” Tedic said, “as long as we can fool them into firing at themselves.”

“But this was a trick shot,” Jackie reminded him. She gathered a handful of her hair, then let it fall. “The spectators now know where to look for the wires.”

         

TEDIC GAVE IRENA another four cans of beer when they got back to the brewery. He added two packs of Marlboros, and made a small ceremony of lighting one from his own pack for her.

“You were genuinely distinguished, Ingrid,” he said. “Really. I don’t mind telling you—sitting on the far end of the bench, as we coaches do, after all—that I wondered what you were trying to do with that bird. Miro. ‘We made cevapcici in the fireplace.’ But it was inspired. The great Zaric.”

“Just trash talk,” said Irena.

They were sitting in Mel’s dispatch office. He had the brewery’s 1992 calendar hanging on a nail over a deep green file cabinet. A new picture flapped down each month, of brisk streams, effulgent mountain flowers, and snowcapped crags, where the journey of Sarajevo Beer ostensibly began. But Mel had stopped turning the pages of the calendar in June. The months and weeks sat barren, with no appointments to keep or celebrations to schedule. It was no longer possible in Sarajevo to flip through the pages of a calendar and say, “Thank God it’s Friday,” “My birthday is soon,” or “Our vacation starts here.”

“We need to make new calendars,” Irena told Tedic.

“Oh, I don’t imagine we will soon put out new ones,” he answered.

“But we need them,” said Irena. “Not to sell beer. There’s no competition—it’s our beer or no beer. The kind of calendar we need now,” said Irena, “would be marked differently. Not holidays or moon phases. There would be a red sign in the box for the last day of the month that said, ‘If you can read this, you are still alive. Congratulations. Go on to the next month.’ ”

“You are a marketing genius,” Tedic said finally.

         

IRENA WAS STILL circling Tedic’s seat, prowling for scraps.

“The girl is the girl, the banker is the banker,” she said. “We don’t give them names, do we?”

“Terms of art,” said Tedic.

“And you give us stage names. Gerry, Jackie, Ingrid.”

“Sigourney, Arnold, Nicole, and Jean-Claude,” he agreed.

“And the banker’s girl is even just ‘the blonde,’ ” Irena pointed out. “Brunettes can sometimes be ‘the cute one.’ But blondes are always ‘the blonde.’ ”

“I suppose we don’t even know if she really was blond,” Tedic said.

“The banker,” Irena asked suddenly. “Who was he?”

“Mitar Boskovic,” answered Tedic. He flattened his hands over the packing slips on Mel’s desk.

“A thief, a debaucher, a financier of mass murder,” Tedic continued. “Husband, father of three, lover of many. An old Tito man who used to reassure the West that those Commies could be as greedy as any Swiss banker. I never saw him outside of a photograph. International banking buccaneers do not invite assistant school principals for ski weekends.”

“Our bankers. They are so different?” Irena wondered as she rocked back on the heels of her Air Jordans.

“Ours merely steal and seduce,” Tedic said. “That is practically virtuous right now. You know,” he added in the admonitory tone of a teacher, “you don’t look more wise and worldly by assuming that everyone is equally contemptible.”

“I miss Father Pavlovic already,” said Irena saucily. “He treated me nice.”

“He is a message boy for a missile battery,” Tedic answered more emphatically. “They shoot at civilians and hide behind the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Anyhow, I would not want to be in his cassock now, thanks to you. Fooled by a babe.”

“We shoot at civilians, too,” said Irena. “Today we just borrowed their bullets to get at Mr. Banker and his friend.”

“He didn’t run a shoe-repair shop on Rave Jankovic. He didn’t drive the Marshal Tito tram. The money and riches that Boskovic and his friends plundered opened the slaughter camps in Vukovar. Not shopping centers.”

“The girl?”

“His Polish girlfriend, Albinka. She was just along for the ride. Or the gold. She got caught in the wrong neighborhood when she got into banker Boskovic’s bed. I wish she had stayed away. You lie down with dogs, you may not get up. But we can’t let the life of an innocent trollop deter us from taking our best chance to bring down a fiend. Don’t you remember? They’ve been trying to kill us. I doubt that Madame ever rested her posh nails on his arm to say, ‘Give the Muslims a chance, my little pierogi.’ Or whatever stage names they used. I’m sorry she got caught between bastards. It’s what the Yanks call collateral damage.”

Irena let the words grow between them. “That makes her only collaterally dead?” she asked finally.

Tedic swirled Marlboro smoke through his mouth until it seeped out and hung in front of his face. “It makes us less than Gandhi,” he said. “We’ve had a few people run amok. I won’t deny it. I won’t pretend to be outraged. Maybe the Serbs will take us more seriously if they think we have a mad dog or two among us. But we don’t shoot tank shells at people waiting for food and water. We killed a bad man and a harmless, worthless girl. All on my head, not yours. Before you feel even a twinge of remorse, let me offer you what I tell myself.” Tedic stabbed the space between them with his right hand. “It was a pinprick against a bloodbath,” he declared.

Death, Irena thought but kept to herself, by a thousand pinpricks.

“Maybe I will go to hell for it,” Tedic continued in a strident voice. “But when they open the door, I’ll see the banker and the priest there. God willing, I’ll see Mladic, Milosevic, Arkan, and Karadzic there. And I’ll leap into those flames the way Pelé runs toward the goal.”

         

WHEN IRENA ARRIVED home—after a long walk, which Tedic had made only a perfunctory attempt to discourage—she told her parents that she had made a delivery in Dobrinja that morning and gotten delayed by mortar fire. That characterization was technically, if outlandishly, correct. She told them about the pockmarked apartments in the housing blocks of Dobrinja. They look like biblical ruins, Irena said, until you notice people cooking and sleeping inside. They all laughed at her description of the bomb shelter, the bastion from nuclear destruction reduced to no useful purpose between opposing front lines.

Irena was a little puzzled over her contentiousness with Tedic. The irritation that she felt was more acute and credible than any qualms she had tried to throw in his face. She decided that she had argued with Tedic mostly for the exercise. She was running out of subjects to argue about with her parents. They had learned one another’s jabs and feints so well over the past few months that their arguments held no challenge or surprise.

Irena drank a beer with her parents and Aleksandra. Mrs. Zaric opened some cold beans, and they listened a little to the BBC. But after ten minutes there was nothing about Bosnia. The daily registry of blood and loss was becoming mundane, no longer news. It was just about as eventful as another bus crash in Bengal. Mr. Zaric lit one of his candles. The sun made a quick descent before seven. They had entered that time of year when the sun seemed to slip hastily into the hills. Shadows rolled up and disappeared as if they were being chased. Mortars whimpered like lonely dogs before they fell. In the quick, inky darkness, Irena sank into sleep amid the blankets on the floor. She usually slept well when she won.