19.

TEDIC HAD DRAGAN’S gray smock unrolled like a fairy-tale cloak and waiting for Irena in the storeroom the next morning. “Something for you and Molly this morning,” he told her. “The first time, he will go with you.”

         

“I AM HAPPY to announce,” Tedic began, speaking to both Irena and Molly now, over some flour sacks, “that today’s target of opportunity—like so much else in life, I have lately been convinced—begins with beer.”

A couple of “higher minds,” as Tedic called them, whose job was to stay tuned to the radio chitchat of Serb artillery teams, had heard a supply unit assure one of the firing squads that their promised provisions of piss would be delivered at a guaranteed hour. The higher minds interpreted “piss” as beer.

“You do not always have to be MI-5,” Tedic explained, “to crack these codes.” The artillery team, he said, had installed themselves in the basement of a mental-health clinic in Jagomir. “Where, no doubt,” he went on, “the ka-thump ka-thumps are so very therapeutic for their patients. Where, no doubt, the patients enlisted because of all the beer the Serb units are drinking.”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Molly with a show of timidity. “But all we know for sure is that it’s piss.”

Tedic explained that they would not want to fire shots into a mental-health clinic, even if all the patients had been trucked out to make room for gun crews; the publicity would be ruinous. But a truck delivering all of that piss, plus, the higher minds assumed, cans of ham, beef, cabbage, and coffee, bullets, shells, and rubbers, would need to make a turn on one of two streets that lead into Nahorevska Street. They should be able to see the truck coming. They should be able to get it in their sights. They should be able to get off a shot that might shatter the windshield, or blast out a tire.

“At least when they pop open their bottles of piss,” said Tedic, “it will spray in their faces. They will know we can catch up with them.”

“Do we know what kind of piss, sir?” asked Molly, and Tedic smiled.

“In fact,” he told them, “the higher minds say they have reason to believe it’s Tuborg.”

“Perhaps, sir, it would be equally effective,” ventured Molly, “just to deliver a case of ours.”

         

TEDIC HAD SELECTED an old apartment building in Breka as their perch. It was abandoned, but there were squatters. He told them to take care to fire from the ninth floor, because people had moved in below. He was counting on the Serbs to know this—and think that they would not fire any shots from that site.

“Ninth floor, kids. In the stairwell off the elevator shaft. There is a hole about nine inches across, no more than two inches tall, from what we can tell. Right near the floor, so you can lie down. Molly will spot the target. He’ll show you how. You, Ingrid, take care of actual delivery. Up, out, back.”

The building was one of the standard brown-and-gray blocks that had been built in time for the Olympics. Irena couldn’t remember what the city’s landscape had been without them, but she also couldn’t tell the difference between that apartment house and half a dozen others nearby.

Molly and Irena trudged up the building’s unlit staircase, which had mostly been spared the damage of mortars and bullets that had so effectively razed the rest of the structure. It was too dark to see, too dark even to speak. They had to feel with their toes for the next step up, and use their footfalls to gauge the nearness of walls and corners. Even in daylight, their orders were not to carry electric torches. Lights playing across darkened interiors could attract attention, although the instruction seemed particularly pointless in the stairwell, which was completely hidden from view. It seemed to take five minutes to feel their way past each floor.

Now and then they could hear sounds of habitation through the cinder-block walls: the whispers of squatters trying to stay quiet, radios turned on low for just a few minutes to save batteries. The squatters may have heard them, too, and feared that they were Bosnian police intent on clearing the building—or stealthy Serb paramilitaries there to steal and slaughter. Quiet, then, was in everybody’s interest.

A strong smell of turds and urine hovered on each floor. There was no running water in this building, either. But the squatters, afraid of losing their places to other squatters, were even more reluctant than other Sarajevans to venture out to water lines.

“Better we can’t see so well,” Molly called back to Irena softly. “Some of the things . . . Dogs and cats crawl in for food, and curl up to die. They become meals, bones. I had a great dog back home.” He cut his speech short, as he felt for the next step.

Molly stayed half a floor ahead of Irena. When they reached the eighth-floor landing, he turned around so that Irena could hear him. “We stop here, Ingrid.”

“A floor short?”

“Your last lesson,” he explained.

There were streaks of light when they exited the stairwell from a small industrial window just above their heads, and perhaps half a dozen small mortar holes. It made the light slice over their shoulders. Molly pointed at two jagged gashes, no more than four inches wide, about four feet from the floor.

“The space upstairs would be better for surveillance and operation,” he said. “That’s why Tedic chose it. But these two gashes here will do well enough.”

“Shouldn’t we follow orders?” asked Irena.

“We will make the delivery,” Molly assured her.

“But surely,” she said, “we were told to go to the other place for good reason.”

“The other place is a better shooting spot.”

When Irena stood unblinking and disbelieving before Molly for more than a moment he turned gruff. They were both wearing ski masks. Tuck in his strawberry ponytail, Irena thought, cloak his cottony beard, and Molly turned back into a pig-faced Boer.

“Just get ready here,” he said. “I’ll explain it later.”

“When I’m older?” Her sarcasm was biting.

“Yes,” said Molly. “And you’ll be a lot older when this is over.”

She stood in a small space on the eighth-floor landing. The ski mask prickled with sweat from the long walk up, and now exasperation. “I’m here,” she told Molly. “I’m old enough now.”

He sighed, rolled his mask up to his forehead, and fluffed out his wispy beard before speaking. “Whenever there is an obvious best spot,” he told her, “don’t take it. Take something less perfect nearby. The best place is always where they will be looking for you. When it comes to our own lives, we can only really trust ourselves.”

Irena took the opportunity to roll her own ski mask up off her eyes. Wordlessly, she took the M-14 parts out of the pockets and sleeves of Dragan’s smock and began to assemble her rifle.

In the clacking and clatter between the spikes of light, Molly added, a little more gently, “You can trust me on this, Ingrid. Because I am alive to tell you.”

         

MOLLY MADE THEM roll their masks back down over their noses, but he said they could get away with leaving their mouths uncovered; he didn’t like the feel of wool and nylon threads on his tongue. He also insisted that they observe the mandated silence, after pointing out to Irena that she would need to make a standing shot in which she could at least rest her rifle barrel on a crook in the wall, aiming her shot from a kind of half-squat. She bent her knees to test the position.

“I can do this,” she told Molly. “It’s a free-throw stance.”

Molly raised only his eyes and forehead into a corner of the gash. “Now, we know the truck is supposed to be coming along Nahorevska Street,” he whispered. “But you don’t stare, remember? Things move. Look all around.”

He had a pair of field glasses, the stubby kind that Westerners take to the opera. Every now and then he’d raise them, careful not to bring them forward where they might catch a glint of the sun, squint through the eyepieces, then fold the glasses back into his smock. Once he handed them over to Irena and watched her as she focused them on Potok Street, the small dollhouses in pinks and yellows hugging the hills. It had been a Serb neighborhood since she could remember, and she could not remember ever having been on those streets.

Molly nudged her. “The clinic is in the pale green house, three houses in from that corner,” he said. “Do you see it? They take the mortar up to the roof. You see the third-floor window leading out?” Irena did. “They open it up, leap out, fire a few shells into the Kosevo neighborhood, then scramble back in. Two-man teams, boys and girls. In thirty seconds, they fire a shell that can kill twenty.”

The two of them stood in position, peering down from the shadows. Out of the corner of her eye, Irena could just see Molly, his half-face of a smile and quarter-face of a beard, and she couldn’t help thinking of new parents gazing into a nursery window.

         

“THERE IS OUR truck,” Molly said quietly. He handed the field glasses back to Irena. “Red, military green tarp pulled over the load. Take a quick look, then get it in your sights.”

The truck was rusting into orange. Irena took up her rifle. Tedic had been right—few cars moved, few people were ever visible—and in less than a breath she had the rust in her rifle’s sights. When it bounced, Irena wondered who was at the wheel, or lashed down under the load.

“How do you know it’s the truck we want?” she asked Molly.

“The way it rides,” he told her. “It rides heavy.”

“Beer is so heavy?”

“Beer, ammunition, and food all together is.” Molly nodded. “No one but paramilitaries are getting such big deliveries over there right now.”

“Why don’t they use army trucks?” Irena could take both her eyes from her sight and still see the rusty truck moving with the slow determination of a ladybug down Potok Street.

“Serb paras stole everybody’s trucks for themselves,” Molly said. His words had picked up pace. He could see the progress of the truck, too. “You know that,” he added. “Don’t expect to see a truck with Karadzic’s picture on the side.”

“I wasn’t expecting just a normal truck,” said Irena. She put her left eye back on the sight and rested the snout of her rifle in the craggy edge of the mortar hole. The wound, she thought, from which I am preparing another. The truck’s windshield had come into plain view. But, even as she squinted, sun and soil kept her from glimpsing who was inside.

Now the truck was close enough for them to hear it, bouncing and rattling toward the turn on Nahorevska Street, clouds of grit coming up from its tires, catching the sun like sneezes.

“It doesn’t matter, Ingrid.” Molly answered her hesitation. “Anyone delivering anything there, bullets or just beer, is loading the gun pointed down our throats.” He swallowed. “If this is a philosophy class, dear,” he said finally, “sorry. I didn’t come prepared.”

Irena let the breath of a laugh escape her mouth. She ran the breath up the barrel, bent her knees to take the charge, and pulled the trigger with the same tender touch that she would use to scratch a dog’s ears. Easy now. Oh, yes. Therrre we go.

The first shot hit the engine block. Irena was able to keep the sight to her eye as the rifle bucked back into Pretty Bird’s spot on her shoulder. The second shot struck the windshield. As she fired the third, she saw the glass swell and break into a thousand pieces, like the glitter of a waterfall. It shone blue and pink before going dark and dry, like the inside of a cave. The truck turned on its wheels, sputtered, foundered, and stopped. Irena waited for people to spring out of the cab. When no one did, she fired her third, fourth, and fifth bullets into the expanse of tarpaulin in the back, and decided that she might be the first Bosnian to know what it was like to shoot at a beached whale.

         

MOLLY WAS LOOKING through the field glasses with approval.

“One Serb truck down, Ingrid. No brewski tonight. Maybe no mortar shells, either. Okay now, no fuss, keep the barrel down. You’ve shot your clip, but put on the safety. We pick up our shell casings—we are good guests. Keep the snout pointed at your toes while we walk down the stairs.”

When they turned the corner into the dimming light of the stairwell, Molly took a small penlight out of his smock.

“I thought—” Irena began.

“Tedic wanted the full test.”

They walked together on the way down, so they could both see into the same spot of light on the stairs. Irena thought that this posture confirmed a partnership.

“Did I pass?” she asked after the first floor.

“No test,” said Molly. “That’s a joke.”

“Still. Did I do well?”

“A few Serbs surely think so.”

“I can do even better,” she said.

“No one could have done better today,” Molly told Irena. “Not even if you had hit with the first shot. The first made them flinch, and hold up for the second. Did you notice? Still, it’s good that you know you were also lucky. Otherwise, doing well can shut down your learning.”

When they reached the fourth floor, Molly turned and handed the penlight to Irena. She shrank back at first, uncomprehendingly, as if he were giving her the keys to a vehicle she couldn’t drive.

“A quick bit of business, dear,” was all he explained. “Go down and hang around for two minutes before you leave for the truck. No, three, please. Count to two hundred. I’ll be along.”

“So I’ll just wait for you.”

“No. Just wait for a count of two hundred.”

“What the hell—” Irena shined the penlight into Molly’s wispy beard and saw his mouth curling up.

“When you’re older, dear.”

Irena continued a slow, careful tread down the staircase. Within half a minute, she heard a burst of five shots behind her. They were outgoing—Molly’s. They made the cinder blocks shiver. Irena faltered slightly when her right foot came down in midstep over a stair, but she had made it to the ground floor by the time the echo of the fifth shot was leaking out of the stairwell and into the street.

         

WHEN TEDIC ZIPPED open the back of the beer truck to receive them, he was stern.

“That last burst back there,” he said. “Freelance, I assume? Sudden artistic inspiration?”

Molly did the talking for Irena and himself, and affected deference.

“I assumed, sir, that their mortar team would try to take their toy to the roof.”

“And were they there?” asked Tedic. His tone was wintry.

“I didn’t see them,” said Molly. “Maybe they were getting ready.”

“Maybe they were hiding under their beds, or in the showers they still have there. Maybe they were watching TV and eating last night’s cold roast chicken. Maybe they didn’t notice that you wasted five precious bullets on the ghost of a chance.”

“They noticed,” Molly asserted. “I put a wreath of bullets around that window.”

Tedic put a huge, silly grin of surrender on his face. When he spoke, it was to Irena. “Molly,” he said, “I love you. Molly, I truly do. I pretend to be mad, and Molly pretends to be contrite. We are like an old married couple, the Queen of the Veldt and I, aren’t we?” he asked Irena. “We will do this all over, many times.”

“Her Highness says the first shot hit the engine,” said Molly. They were on to Irena’s part of the play. “The second went through the windshield and killed the truck.”

“That’s what Mandy saw,” said Tedic. He turned back to Irena. “Mandy is someone you don’t know. She says the truck was killed. Was there mist?” he asked Molly.

“Something in the windshield, I think.” Tedic shrugged.

“Mandy thinks she saw that, too. It could be shards causing lots of cuts, nothing serious.”

“Bits and pieces, then, not mist,” said Molly.

“Our Ingrid here was up to the role.”

“A star is born,” said Molly. “A star rises in the east. Or whatever Muslims say.”

Tedic turned his compact charm on Irena. “Mist has been explained to you?” he asked.

“I think I’ve figured it out,” she told him.

Tedic rolled out a drawer for some phantom consultation, then rolled it back. When he brought his head up, his chin was challenging. “And did Molly here show you any tricks I’m not supposed to know?”

Irena was ready to block his shot. “What could you possibly not know?” she asked.

The three of them laughed. As Tedic laughed, cigarette smoke spurted from his nostrils. “Ingrid, my Ingrid, my great sixteen-point scorer,” he said. “You belong in these leagues. The insult that flatters, the compliment that ridicules. Killer charm. Praise be that you are on our side.”

         

MOLLY AND IRENA took their leave under the covered section of driveway leading out of the brewery. Mel was driving Irena home. Molly lived God knows where. A few dark, dirt-floored rooms were rumored to exist in the bowels of the brewery, where their dinginess was slightly relieved by bare lightbulbs powered by the springs below. Irena could picture Molly flopping down on a stark cot, eating cold French beans out of a can, and buffing his nails before unscrewing the bulb and sinking into the night.

“Let me guess,” she said straightaway. “The business on the fourth floor. You were trying to draw fire to the fourth so they wouldn’t know we had been on the eighth. Protecting our spot. But you knew they’d be loaded, so you got me out from under.”

“I don’t know basketball,” said Molly. “But in football we protect the striker.”

“So,” said Irena. “Is this graduation? Do we wait for the tenth reunion before we see each other again? We could have coffee sometime and catch up. Or do you just go back home and wait for some rich brute to ring you up and send you a ticket?”

Molly fingered a spot on his chin with one of his superb nails. “I can’t go back home,” he explained. “Or much of anywhere. Change is afoot. Not that we couldn’t use it, mind you. The new regime wants me to talk about some ancient history in Natal.”

“Tell them what they want,” Irena suddenly urged him. “Finger the folks who ordered you to do whatever it was. Old apartheid swine are making deals and getting rich. You make a deal, too.”

“I made an offer,” said Molly. “They had another. I’d have to give up some mates. Bastards like I am. But still mates.”

“Like me,” said Irena. “So give me another guess. We here in gallant little Bosnia have given you a home.”

Molly hugged himself in imitation of a shivering African caught in a cold clime. In the gloom of a long October shadow, his imitation was convincing.

“Bosnia in winter,” Molly shuddered. “Not my dream of paradise. It’s here or Tuzla for me. But don’t think I’m not grateful. No tears and flowers called for, but I don’t have a country.”

“Use ours,” Irena offered.

         

WHEN IRENA TRAMPED upstairs into her apartment, her mother brightened at the turn of the latch. She called out from behind the bathroom door, “How did it go today, dear?”

“I can’t go into it,” said Irena. “National security.”

Mr. Zaric was sitting with his legs folded below his mother’s old sofa table, rolling over one of his candles to find a seam for the wick. “I understand why you can’t tell your mother,” he said soberly. “But I dig trenches for the army. I am involved in national security myself. You can tell me about your highly placed exploits and skulduggery.”

“Don’t force me,” said Irena. “If you make me talk, the repercussions could be dire.”

Irena and her father shared a peal of laughter. Mrs. Zaric opened the door in time to join them. Aleksandra, who was trying to kindle a fire for hot water in the kitchen, joined in the merriment, too. But Irena saw in a flash—like the sudden chill in summer when rain clouds slide under the sun—that when Aleksandra looked through the doorframe she wasn’t laughing in the least.