17.

THE NEXT MORNING Tedic took Irena down into the basement, back to the faces of Milosevic, Karadzic, and Isabelle Adjani looking down on the mattresses, pocked cinder blocks, and a lone black-snouted rifle that Tedic touched with the tip of a finger.

“You’ve never fired a gun,” he remembered. “Father never hunted? Brother?”

“Never,” said Irena. “My father has only held an electric guitar.”

“Guns are beguiling, you know. All that power. Simply put your hands on it in the right way, and people scatter.”

“I’ve never been interested.”

“Not even recently?”

“Especially,” Irena asserted. “I’ve wanted to squeeze the life out of particular people with my bare hands. But shooting someone you can barely see—someone you don’t know—just because they’re there? It sickens me.”

“Me, too,” said Tedic. “So does murder. Do me a favor, my Material Girl. Hold this for a moment. I guarantee you, it’s unloaded.”

Tedic was still her boss, and Irena still wanted to play. He lifted the gun as clumsily as he would a basketball and presented the weapon to her.

“No special way,” he said. “Just like in American movies.”

Irena was surprised by the weight, but she caught the stock of the rifle in her left arm as it began to slide toward the floor.

“How does it feel?” Tedic asked.

“Ugly. Heavy.” Irena turned the rifle over so that she could see the curl of the trigger and the underside of the barrel, burned black like dried blood. She realized that she could handle the rifle’s weight and held it out to Tedic.

“Ugly,” she repeated.

“We’ll paint one pink for you,” said Tedic. “Posies on the barrel, if you like, and ribbons on the stock.” He took a step back so that Irena couldn’t hand the gun back to him without stepping forward.

“You see some fine old ones,” he continued, like the keeper of an antique-jewelry shop. “Rich woods, superior metals, delicately engraved. That was before people could customize cars. Or athletic shoes. Their gun was an extension of themselves. The same as your Air Jordans,” Tedic added with a smile and a gesture at Irena’s feet. “And just about as hard to come by in Sarajevo right now.”

Irena’s arms were beginning to flag, but she didn’t want Tedic to notice. She balanced the stock of the barrel on her left toe, as if she might actually twirl it. Tedic finally stepped forward and took the rifle from her. She gave it back without hesitation.

“Okay, what you have here,” he began after a studied pause, “is an M-14 bolt-action Remington. American. Remington made the gun that tamed the West. Gary Cooper, John Wayne never used Czech or Chinese guns. Over on the other side, they use AKs. Best piece of engineering we Reds ever did. Much sturdier than our shoes or plumbing. But Communist engineering always lacked imagination. All the sick little lies that we used to hold things together instead of know-how. I say we—I was a Party man myself, of course. You don’t become an assistant principal by being some kind of Sakharov. We were brilliant primitives, really. Tell us to get to the moon and we invented a flying oxcart. Too young to remember? The Commies got to space first. We made the Yanks look like gutless fools. But then, the Yanks beat our asses because the Russkies built these big mother ships. You can’t just bonk the moon with a spaceship. You have to coax the ship down, softly. All guts and sweat, no fucking finesse. So whose gun would you want in your hands? The folks who gave us John Glenn, Al Capone, Coca-Cola, and color television? Or the folks who couldn’t get to the moon, or out of Afghanistan? So what we have here is a Remington.”

“How do you get them?” asked Irena.

“Little birdies from America,” he told her. “Muslim brethren from Saudi Arabia. Jewish brethren from the Mossad. Anywhere we can, including greedy bastards on the other side who’ll sell out their own kind for a price, Allah be praised. You know what the important part of shooting a gun is?”

“Of course not. Aiming it, I suppose.”

“Partly. Calmness. Stillness. If your hands quaver by a nose hair, a shot can get thrown by ten yards. To stay calm, you need to be coordinated. Handle the sequence the way a river handles waves. Eye, hand, breathing. Coordination, anticipation. A shot from a gun like this gives your shoulder a hell of a kick. You’ve got to roll with it, or you’ll fall over.”

Tedic turned the rifle over like a mewling child and slapped a cartridge that he’d drawn from his pocket into the stock.

“Want to try? Go ahead, put one into Slobo’s nose.”

“No!” Irena said emphatically. But even as she spoke she took the rifle into her arms.

“A pack of cigarettes.”

“I’ll be rotten,” said Irena, who already could see no reason why she should miss a shot. “I can’t afford a pack of cigarettes.”

“You won’t lose,” Tedic assured her. “Keep your cheek against the stock like that, but softly.”

“Kiss it. Isn’t that what they say?”

“In the movies. They mean a passionless kiss. Brush your cheek against the butt as you would a lover’s. Or”—Tedic revised this quickly—“maybe the cheek of a small niece.”

Irena tucked the butt of the rifle against her left shoulder and brought her left eye against the viewing lens.

“Blink your right eye,” Tedic instructed. “Find Milosevic’s head, why don’t you, then squeeze your right eye shut. Look hard at Slobo.”

“Got it,” said Irena almost instantly. She saw small gray circles—eyes and pouches—above Milosevic’s nose.

“That ugly pig’s ass of a face, grinning while Vukovar bleeds,” Tedic said. “Put that small circle over his nose. See it? The nose of a pig. But none of the charm.”

Milosevic’s nose bobbed about in the viewfinder. “It jumps around,” Irena said. “I can’t keep it still.”

“It doesn’t move. It is your breathing,” suggested Tedic. “Put the barrel down a moment. Take a breath. Exhale slightly, evenly, so you aren’t holding a nervous bubble in your chest. Just when the air is done sliding out of your lungs, lift up the rifle. Tighten your finger against the trigger. As soon as you see your shot, squeeze. Waving the rifle around won’t make your shot any better, and it will tire your arms.”

Tedic paused for a measure, then repeated softly, “Squeeze.”

Irena squeezed. For an instant, the trigger seemed to resist. But she pulled it deeper toward her chin and an abrupt clap of thunder rang down and sizzled inside her head. She felt a thump against the palms of her hands, as if a ghost were pushing back. The barrel punched her left shoulder, making her shiver. The rifle came to life like the staff turning into a serpent. The barrel rose and bucked in her hands, as if the gun wanted to dance. Irena fought the reflex to bring it down, and instead tried to coax it, point it at the wall, if not at Milosevic’s nose. But the bullet had already gone. Air exploded against her ears. Spikes of wind and sound brushed back her hair and scratched the back of her head. And then the instant was over. The sound was spent; it crashed like the noise of a huge hornet landing.

Irena was still standing. On her heels, but standing, and still peering down the rifle’s sight. Her shot had pulled right and punctured the pouch under Milosevic’s eye. “Missed,” she said finally—a little breathlessly. “Rushed it. Lifted my head too early to check and missed it.”

“It would have been enough,” said Tedic. “A pack of cigarettes to you. We’ll show you how to get better.”

Irena sat down on a pair of old flour bags—Danish, this time—overstuffed with sand and dirt. She could feel her face redden and her breath run short. She couldn’t tell—she would need more experience for that—if it was the weight of the rifle or the exhilaration of getting off a shot. “What the hell do the people upstairs think we’re doing down here?” she asked. She shook her head, as if trying to get a bug to fall out. “The U.N.—the beer people—don’t they hear the noise?”

Tedic was already thumbing out a Marlboro for her, and acting with elaborate unconcern. “Not a problem so far,” he said. “The sound of a child laughing would stand out more in Sarajevo right now, don’t you think?”

         

MOLLY FOUND IRENA in the basement the next morning. Tedic would be there later, he explained. In the meantime, he was there. Molly was a tall, slender, pale man with a gauzy red beard that stippled his chin almost like a spill. He had a wispy reddish ponytail that he had grown, he volunteered, to confound all previous passport photos; he suggested that there had been a few other changes besides. Molly had the component parts of an M-14 laid out across the top of a trunk. He clacked improbable chunks together to show Irena that when you understood your weapon there was only one way it could fit together.

“Like your own body,” he said shyly.

Molly’s manner with Irena was bashful. His proficiency was visible in the lively assurance of his hands, which reminded Irena of old school films she had seen of robotic arms on a Japanese assembly line. But his speech was hesitant, as if he were measuring the words for a good fit. Irena, who thought she was good at identifying accents, couldn’t place Molly’s. They spoke in English. His l’s and r’s rolled like a Scotsman’s. His a’s vaulted from his first to his last word like a German’s. As gun parts clacked, she asked, “Are you from Scotland?”

“South Africa, ma’am. This is the gas port, by the way. It can be hot.” Molly ran three lissome fingertips over a vented opening in the barrel.

“South African!” she said. She had grown up hearing her parents and teachers speak approvingly of the struggle against apartheid there. When students sounded as if they had discovered a correlation between capitalism and freedom, their socialist teachers usually reminded them to look at South Africa, where Communists had been in the vanguard of the struggle. Irena didn’t want to assume the worst.

“Were you an antiapartheid activist?” she asked.

“This is the clip guide,” Molly answered first. “Make sure there are no obstructions. No, ma’am, on all counts. I was on the other side.”

Molly stood the M-14 on the back side of the stock, so that the hammer and spring, rear sight, and windage knob were all level with their eyes.

Irena tried to catch his eye through the trigger guard. “So you were one of the ones who kept Nelson Mandela in prison all those years?”

“I want you to see the bolt here, ma’am. You must be able to find it just by feeling for it, but not jam it. Never saw Mandela, ma’am. Only on the tube when he got out. Splendid presence, I thought. He could wear a candy wrapper like Armani.”

“What if you had been told to shoot him?”

Molly seemed to grasp that no conversation was going to be possible until they had finished this one, so he turned the trigger guard against his wispy beard and asked his own question.

“By whom?”

“Whomever,” said Irena. “Army, security, whatever your KGB was. Your boss.”

Molly shrugged and almost smiled. “It’s my business, ma’am,” he said. “Usually, I don’t miss.”

Molly went back to clacking. He tried to show Irena where to pinch and turn the windage knob. But she interrupted at each sentence. Impudence was her way of exercising her independence. Molly was clever enough to throw back unapologetic answers, blunted only slightly.

“Is Molly really your name?”

“Is Ingrid really yours, ma’am?”

“Tedic’s little name games.” Irena snorted. “Why doesn’t he hire ANC soldiers instead of you?”

“African National Congress, ma’am?” This really was new for Molly, and he rubbed exquisite fingernails over his scrub of a beard. “I guess they’ve got jobs now. I’m at liberty. Besides, ANC guerrillas might have a hard time fitting in here.”

“They’d be treated as heroes,” said Irena.

“They’d stick out like giraffes in Siberia. I’ve worked for plenty of blacks, miss,” he added. “No problem.”

“Brutal black despots,” Irena snapped. “I’ll bet you’ve rubbed a lot of blood off those pearly fingernails,” she said. “They look as if you polish them constantly. What’s the difference between you and the Nazis, anyway? Do you have a pat answer for that?”

Molly tilted the dull green ammunition magazine toward Irena as if it were an empty cash box. He wanted her to see the strong spring pressing the edge to the top. “Yes, I do,” Molly said from behind the magazine. “Careful of that when you load bullets. Press down in the middle. Those springs have clipped many a pearly fingertip. The Nazis couldn’t beat the Brits, ma’am,” he added. “We did.”

Irena held up one of the bullets. The body had a fine, glossy bronze color, and the hard tip was a glistening candy red. “Like lipstick,” she said.

“My thought, too, ma’am,” Molly told her. “A nice shade, too.”

         

THE REST OF Irena’s day with Molly was filled with the advice by which she was supposed to operate.

“Climb like a monkey into your hiding spot,” he said, “but shoot like a slug. Go flat against the ground when you get there, or stay flat against a wall. Lying prone keeps you steadiest. It’s the hardest for anyone to see. But it’s also harder when you get up. You’re most exposed when trying to get to your feet. Kneeling is good. It cuts your body in half. Keep a sock in your pocket filled with small stones. Stones, ma’am, not sand. Sand leaks. The sock can hold your barrel like a tripod, and you don’t have to snap it open and shut. You can leave it behind. Standing is hardest, but best if you’re hiding behind a column.”

He instructed Irena to stand and fire three shots rapidly into a target. “Boom, boom, boom!” he commanded.

She squeezed the trigger three times quickly, like a pump.

When the volley subsided, Molly trotted over to get the poster and showed Irena how her three shots had trailed down, like shooting stars, away from the heart of the target. “It’s not like shooting baskets, ma’am,” he told her. “Your first shot is your best. The rifle gets heavier in your arms within seconds. Keep it down against your belt, pick it up when you see your shot, and shoot within a second.

“Stay calm, ma’am. That’s an order,” he said, unable to suppress a small smile. “Any anxiety you think won’t show because it’s bottled inside can catch your breathing and make your hands vibrate ever so slightly. Ask a violinist. Sour notes. Don’t stare where you’re supposed to shoot. When you stare, things move. Don’t move. A move could signal where you are. But also, don’t play a statue. Breathe. Otherwise, you’ll get light-headed. You won’t see and you’ll fall down.”

Molly made his glittering fingertips twitter in the air between them. “Rain, snow, even fog will push down a shot,” he explained. “Heat can make it swerve, too. But we don’t have time or need for that lesson now. That’s for Zambia and Lesotho. You don’t get that kind of heat here. Not unless hell freezes over.”

Irena returned a small smile of her own. “That happened here months ago,” she told Molly.

         

MOLLY TOOK HER over to the serried rows of sugar sacks filled with sand, standing about a driveway’s distance from the posters of Karadzic, Milosevic, and Isabelle Adjani. He had her lie down and fire ten clips—about two hundred shots—into dark blue silhouettes inked over white paper. Irena’s bones thudded with her first five or six shots. She could feel a bruise begin to dampen her shirt faintly, but she felt it with satisfaction; she was playing hurt. Molly brought back a target and showed it to her: four shots were in the central oval that would have been a man’s heart and lungs; three were along the edge of a T shape that would have been his eyes and nose.

“Take that last breath,” he advised, “and run it up the barrel. You know?”

She did. She began to push her breath as she pinched the trigger and loosen her shoulder to clinch the kick of the rifle. After a few shots, she began to feel that her fingers had left slight indentations in the plastic stock. The gun was absorbing her touch. Molly ran ahead to fetch the next target, and came back smiling. Five holes had pierced the white T zone. The edges of each were singed a light brown; they smelled of fire.

“Do I want to know what those would have hit?” Irena asked.

“Two would be just below the left eye,” said Molly.

Irena noticed that he had stopped addressing her as “ma’am.”

“They would shatter the cheekbone and drive pieces into the brain. One shot would just about be in the right eye. Bull’s-eye. Instant results.” He poked the point of a black felt-tip pen through the last hole and wiggled it like a cartoon worm taunting a bird. “This would have shattered the teeth and jawbone,” he said. “Obliterated quite a bit of brain, too. The bleeding would be most terrible. The pain would be great. I should think a man might want to rip his head off.”

When Irena said nothing, Molly lay his elbow across one of the sugar sacks and spoke in a low voice behind her neck. “You don’t shoot at an eye or a jaw, you know. Even I don’t do that. Maybe if you saw Milosevic, Mladic, or someone who was brutal to you. Then, it’s one right for the heart. But you shoot at a spot. You shoot at a target. You don’t see somebody’s blue or brown eyes. You don’t see a smile. You see a spot in your sight. A stain, a smear, a dot. That’s where you shoot.”

“You don’t have to make things up for me,” said Irena.

“Nothing I tell you is truer,” said Molly. “Hit the spot. What’s behind is not your business.”

Irena emptied clip after clip into the blue figures against the brick wall. She lay down on the floor, feeling the stock settle into that spot on her shoulder where Pretty Bird used to sit. The rifle began to rock against her shoulder. She began to find the trigger guard by feel. She brushed her cheek against the stock and felt for a burst of heat from the gas port. She ran her breath into the barrel with each shot, as Molly had advised her, and saw it burst and heard it bellow. She felt power bristling in her hands, breath, and bones.

“Make it happy,” Molly urged at her left ear, where he was crouched on his knees. “It’s just you and it. No one else. Make it hard, make it happy. Do it better than anyone does. You’re alone together. No one knows, no one is looking. There is no one else.”

Irena’s shots screamed into the bricks, over and over, until her hands stung and sweat, or something like it, poured into her eyes.