24.

FRANKO HOSPITAL HAD windows. After just a few months of war, windowpanes looked like extravagant embellishments in the wracked gray cityscape. It was like finding a teacup intact in the wreckage of a tornado.

The hospital still had whole windows that looked north, into the curve of Mount Zuc, and windows that stared south into the smashed and forsaken towers downtown. Nearly all of the city’s other windows had been shattered. Almost every block looked like a gallery of blinded heads.

“We are the only building left that has eyes,” said Alma Ademovic, the hospital director.

The hospital had been finished against a deadline in 1984 to welcome the Olympic Games (and thereby named for Jure Franko, the first Yugoslav slalom skier to win an Olympic medal). The new building was meant to impress the West with a show of modernity. It was an Eastern bloc hospital in which the interior walls were not gray concrete blocks but chest-high panels in lemon, mauve, and peach—pastel socialism, topped with transparent plastic leaves that displayed the latest imported medical machinery, like glossy cars in a California parking lot.

Marxism that let the sunshine in.

The windows remained luxuriously whole because there was a whalebacked little flip of the mountain that prevented snipers from firing from the north, and the hospital was too far from the lines to be struck by shots from any snipers roosting in the trees east and west of the city. The south was close, just across the Miljacka River and Serb lines, but the thicket of scarred steel buildings downtown protected that side.

Bosnians were wary about advertising the hospital’s seclusion. Officials did not want a community of refugees pitching tents there. But they used the hospital for meetings, battening down participants into the back of ambulances for delivery at the appointed times, and kept the state’s reserves of deutsche marks, dollars, and Swiss francs in the basement, as well as rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches, and silver coffee servers that several old Sarajevo Serb families had donated, with unwitting generosity, after taking flight across the river. The basement also held boxes of bullets.

Alma Ademovic considered the provisions to be unwarranted incursions into her domain. She complained to the Home Minister as he was conveyed to a conference one afternoon.

“You are violating the Geneva convention,” she said, stamping her right foot in her fury. “I’m sure of it.”

The Home Minister considered the Geneva convention as unenforceable in Sarajevo—and as unaffordable—as the Ten Commandments. Camouflaged in an ambulance attendant’s smock, the Home Minister looked like an especially insolent underling.

But Alma Ademovic was adamant. “Your pirate’s booty and bombs are taking space that could store neomycin, lidocaine, or sulfonamide,” she said heatedly. “That’s what’s supposed to be in this hospital.”

“I was not aware that our shelves are short of space to hold such an excess,” the Home Minister called back as he turned. “But if I had to choose between antibiotics and ammunition . . .” He let the thought hang as he stamped away.

         

RADOVAN KARADZIC, THE Bosnian Serb leader, had once been a consulting psychiatrist at Franko. Staffers asked about their recollections either had to acknowledge that they had no clear memories of him—which awarded them no prestige—or pass on anecdotes that would prompt the question, “Didn’t you know he was a lunatic?”

Karadzic would bustle in, the lapels of his Burberry trench coat flapping expensively, great Waikiki swells of silver hair breaking over his forehead. “Close your eyes with me a moment,” he would command some dimpled and appealing nurse, and take her hands at the wrists, as if the recitation that followed was a human response test.

“The gentlefolks’ aortas will gush without me,” he would begin, eyes half closed, like the hired singer at a wedding party.

The last chance to get stained with blood
I let go by.
Ever more often I answer ancient calls
And watch the mountains turn green.

The doctor was moved, manifestly. He usually peeked at his ensnared audience. The nurses tended to be considerate in their reactions. The doctor had them by the wrist. He was also the consulting psychiatrist for Sarajevo’s soccer team, and sometimes doled out tickets.

“Those lines are beautiful, are they not? Images mix over centuries. I like to think that I am perhaps the third-best living poet in our language. And I cannot remember the names of the other two!”

The woman he had detained for his recitation would be stuck for an accolade commensurate with Karadzic’s.

“It reminds me of that song about what a cat sees at night,” said one lab technician. “You know: ‘Midnight, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, the moon has no memory. . . .’ You know, that Englishman.”

The doctor’s eyes bulged at the affront. “Andrew Lloyd Webber writes—pop tunes,” he sputtered. “Cheap, flimsy”—he was the poet struggling for just the right words here—“Coca-Cola-flavored words cannot be compared to my poetry.”

Most of the hospital’s psychiatric staff had become scarce since the start of the war, feeling useless or absurd. Anxiety, paranoia, and doom are not disorders when snipers are trying to shoot you through your bathroom window. How could a psychiatrist tell any Sarajevan that he was suffering from depression? Feeling safe and free from terror—that would be a clinical disturbance.

         

IN THE FALL, the U.N. officials overseeing the siege of the city permitted the hospital to receive a skin-graft machine donated by the Charles Nicolle Medical Center of Normandy. The equipment had been packed into a grave-looking silvered valise, heavy as a casket, that came attached to a fifty-three-year-old emergency surgeon, Dr. Olivier Despres, a lean, graying man with the agreeably long face of a pedigreed hound. He was wearing smart field khakis that bore the wrinkles of previous deployment.

He was delivered to Franko Hospital in a French Foreign Legion armored personnel carrier that smelled of other men’s boots, breath, and sweat. The young Foreign Legion captain overseeing his delivery was Cambodian; he was the one legionnaire who spoke French. The two enlisted men who turned the slings of their rifles around onto their backs in order to haul the doctor’s bags and boxes into the carrier were Kazakh—Russian army refugees who had signed on to the Legion because it paid its troops. The driver was an Egyptian army sergeant whose head could not be seen in the roost in which he sat, above their shoulders. He had to call down in English over the toes of his shoes.

“Franko Hospital, yes?”

The legionnaires yelled back up the sergeant’s muddy pant legs.

“Franko Hospital, yes!” They clanged the butts of their rifles twice against the muddy floor. “Franko! Franko!”

There were six small open slits on the khaki-painted steel walls of the carrier. Dr. Despres steeled himself over the bumps and tried to steady his head against a window to glimpse something of the wreckage that had moved him to come to the city. But the slits were so small—no larger than the space under a door—that the doctor could see nothing. One of the Kazakh soldiers waved his hand as Dr. Despres tried to peer through one of the minute openings.

“No,” the soldier called over. “Dangerous.” He held his hands out, as if holding a rifle, and trained his two index fingers toward the doctor’s chin. “P-eee-owww! P-eee-owww!” he said, then shut his eyes and slumped forward. “Dead, bye-bye. P-eee-owww!” Dr. Despres joined in the laughter, and pulled back from the slit with comic haste, as if the wall were electrified. The carrier bounced up and down over rubble and clutter as the soldiers banged their rifle butts against the floor.

“We all live in a yellow submarine!” they sang.

Clang!

“A yellow submarine!”

Clang!

“A yellow submarine!”

Clang!

Dr. Despres offered to take down names and phone numbers of loved ones he could call when he returned to France. But the men said they could think of no one who was eager to hear of them.

“I am gone,” said one of the Kazakhs. He laughed joylessly through a three-toothed smile. “Happy here dead.”

         

WHEN DR. DESPRES reached his destination up on a hill in the north of the city, Franko Hospital doctors expressed gratitude, but also bewilderment.

“We haven’t had power for several months,” they said, shaking their heads.

A German army truck drove a generator at the hospital that could power surgical lights, a sterilizer, and a water pump, but not at the same time. The doctors and nurses had learned how to conduct surgeries by lantern light, sluicing away blood and slime by squeezing clumps of soaked paper towels carefully over the wounds as they probed and stitched. The staff squinted at a large block of type on the underside of Dr. Despres’s Swiss skin-shearing machine and deduced that it would draw more power than they could deliver.

“You would need at least the lights and the water pump working at the same time,” said Dr. Despres. “This is not a procedure for dim light. Or no water pressure.”

The hospital director was more put out than apologetic. “I know it must seem like we are living in caves,” Alma Ademovic said. “But, honestly, I don’t know why the U.N. sent you here. Our limitations cannot surprise them. Of all people,” she added almost into her chin.

Dr. Despres tried to reply lightly. “Oh, that alphabet soup of U.N. agencies often gets things jumbled,” he said. “I learned that in Somalia and Ethiopia.”

“Well,” the hospital director sniffed, “we are surely better off than that. We are Europeans.”

The director clipped away quickly. Dr. Despres was standing rather forlornly in the hall when the hospital’s chief surgical nurse introduced herself. “We had a message telling us that you were coming, Doctor,” she said in English. “But nothing about preparations for a skin-graft machine. Perhaps we can get in to see the U.N. official who approves our equipment to find about getting another generator. Perhaps you can get in to see him.”

Zule Rasulavic was fortyish, with a redhead’s sprinkling of freckles over her nose. When Dr. Despres took her right hand and unexpectedly brushed it with his lips, she regretted the blue jeans that she had been left with to wear through the war. No matter how much weight had melted away over the months, she was sure that the jeans thickened the look of her hips.

“I am certainly willing,” said Dr. Despres. “I didn’t come here just for the mountain view. It is lovely,” he added quickly, having been alerted to local sensitivities. “But I want to help.”

This brought Alma Ademovic back from halfway down the corridor. “What kind of help do you think we need?” she said. “We are taking care of our patients in a modern, educated way. We are Europeans,” she fairly hissed at him. “Do you think we are witch doctors?”

The nurses took Dr. Despres by the shoulders and steered him into one of the hospital’s waiting rooms, where they told him that he might want to rest and restore himself after a rough journey. After a few minutes, Dr. Despres closed his eyes in the dim midmorning light strained, like weak tea, through the hospital’s soiled windows, and fell asleep in a chair that had only one arm.

         

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON, Dr. Despres towed a heavy brown box that the legionnaires had delivered with him against a wall just across from Alma Ademovic’s open office door. The open door did not signal Miss Ademovic’s manner of administration. It was an operational necessity, to allow daylight from her window to filter into the murky hallway.

Dr. Despres approached her door cautiously, and pointedly took up a position just outside. “Excuse me, Miss Ademovic,” he said. “I wonder if I might ask about lunch.”

The hospital director’s reply was brisk. “Of course. There are no restaurants to speak of. We will serve you in our kitchen.”

“I was advised to provide for myself.”

“That is ridiculous,” she said. “You are our guest. I am sure that we can find something.” In fact, the United Nations administration made certain that the hospital was well provisioned. They did not want any stories arising from Sarajevo that the U.N. had failed to provide food for war victims in their hospital beds. The monotony of rice, beans, saltines, and an occasional frozen cutlet was more of a problem than scarcity. But Alma Ademovic had discovered that giving foreign visitors a few pangs of hunger gratified their guests; it sent them back to the West with a vivid story for after-dinner speeches.

Throughout his years in emergency medicine, Dr. Despres had uncomplainingly consumed rather a lot of relief agency–issue beans and rice. But he had another plan.

“You know we French—we take such pleasure in our own foods,” he said. “So I have brought enough for everyone here, if you will permit.” He stepped back to pat the big brown box and lug it several inches into view. “I brought a few saucissons, some of our flavorful dried sausages. Also some lovely cured ham from Bayonne. It has the most amazing velvet feel as you carve it away from the bone. We are very proud of our patés in Normandy. I have some tins of very nice duck and goose patés. The goose liver is studded with pistachios. I have also added some small rounds of toasts and a jar of cornichons. I thought a good, tangy Gruyère would compliment all. I have included a couple of pounds of ground coffee—I haven’t seen the hospital yet that isn’t fueled by coffee—and some Côte d’Or chocolate. I also thought that some of our tasty crisp Brittany butter cookies might be welcome, although,” he added, “I left several with the Norwegian soldiers at the airport who examined my equipment. I thought it might make them more amenable about weight restrictions.”

Alma Ademovic looked up from her desk with unblinking blue eyes, as hard as tile.

“The food is all packaged very soundly,” added the doctor. “Anything left will keep.”

When the administrator remained expressionless, Dr. Despres made an instant diagnosis: he would have to extract any insinuation of charity.

“When I consult in Paris, I frequently bring a ripe Neufchâtel cheese,” he said.

“I’m sure the girls will appreciate your snacks,” Alma Ademovic said finally. “I do without lunch. But help yourself.”

Dr. Despres pushed the brown box back around the corner of the administrator’s office. He thought about the saucissons and Gruyère as his stomach growled and churned over the rest of the afternoon. But he left the box, untouched, on the worn green alga carpet just outside Alma Ademovic’s office. He hoped the administrator would observe that he had not helped himself to so much as a cornichon.

         

DR. DESPRES SPENT the first part of the afternoon removing stitches from the wounds of an elderly woman who had been hiding in her bathroom when a bullet pierced her closed wooden door and smashed the mirror over her head. He tried to play a card game with a thin girl who had forgotten her name and had been found sleeping against the steps of an empty housing block. But only the girl knew the rules, and she soon tired of easy triumphs.

A nurse brought the doctor to the bedside of a small boy with a shaved head who said that his name was Zijo. The boy lay on his stomach, a strap cinched over his waist, so that a large bandage plastered over a wound in his left shoulder blade would not be disturbed.

“Shrapnel,” the nurse explained in a low voice. “It came through the window. Thank God he was turned away.”

Zijo had twisted his head on the pillow to face Dr. Despres, who knelt down beside the boy’s left shoulder. “Zijo?” he said gently. “I’m Dr. Despres.” A hospital orderly, wearing blue jeans under his white coat, stood over the doctor as he translated. The boy blinked once. Dr. Despres motioned to the orderly to kneel with him on the floor. Years of talking to wounded children in field hospitals had taught him that children usually attended to the translator, not the physician.

“I would like to take a little look at your back,” said Dr. Despres.

He waited for the orderly to finish before putting the palm of his right hand lightly on the small of Zijo’s back. He then ran his index finger gently below the surgical tape to lift up the bottom edge of the boy’s bandage.

Zijo began to twitch and shudder. He squeezed his bony shoulders toward his ears, as if the sting were a sound he could shut out.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I am sorry that it hurts.”

The orderly didn’t translate; he felt sure that Zijo understood as much from the doctor’s tone. A nurse shined a flashlight under the flap of the bandage so that Dr. Despres could see the boy’s wound. It was as wide as the doctor’s palm and still glistening.

“You are a brave young man,” he continued. The orderly translated that. Dr. Despres saw white threads of nerves shimmering in the wound, and red ribbons of ragged, unmended muscle.

“It’s been three days since he came, and they cut out the steel,” said the orderly quietly.

“Another three hundred before this heals without a skin graft. Don’t—there is no need—to tell him that,” he added in an even tone. Dr. Despres patted the flap of the dressing in place and rested his hand just above the boy’s waist.

“Zijo, I am sorry that it feels the way it does.” The doctor looked into the little boy’s face. “It itches, yes?”

Zijo shook his head slightly and mumbled into his pillow.

“A little, he says,” said the orderly.

Dr. Despres laid the hand that had lifted up the bandage and caused so much hurt on the boy’s small, bald, bony head. It was slightly damp, and cold. Above his pillow was a stuffed bear with a stitched smile wearing a worn red T-shirt with gold lettering across the front. It said CONGRATULATIONS!

“The bear was just around here,” the orderly explained.

“Maternity ward, I would think,” said the doctor with a mild laugh.

“We give it to children.”

Dr. Despres kept his manicured right hand on Zijo’s back, below the wound, pressing lightly on his spine. “Where was this boy when he was hit?” he asked.

“In an apartment,” said the orderly. “Alone.”

“Were his parents killed?”

“Or lost. Or he’s lost.”

“Why would anyone”—Dr. Despres could not prevent his voice from rising—“leave a little boy alone in the middle of a war?”

“Perhaps to save his life,” said the orderly.

“His parents could have been running away,” a nurse who had come in added. “They could have left him behind and hoped he would be found.”

“Or Serbs could have taken his parents and spared the boy,” said the orderly. “Even demons make exceptions.”

“Paramilitaries sometimes kill little boys but let go of little girls, because they won’t grow up to be soldiers,” said the nurse. “Sometimes they kill the little girls because they will grow up to bear soldiers. But they pass over the little boys because they remind them of themselves.”

“People are killed for no reason and for any reason,” the orderly added. “We will be dead before we can figure out the difference.”

Dr. Despres rose slightly from his crouch to pick up the CONGRATULATIONS! bear. Then he bent back down to hold the bear in front of Zijo’s small, pebble-gray eyes.

“Have you given your friend a name?” asked the doctor.

Zijo nodded once on his pillow.

“Zarko,” explained the nurse. “I think it is the name of someone he knows.”

“Well, that’s great,” said Dr. Despres slowly. “Zarko. It is almost like your name.”

While the orderly passed on his words, the doctor sat on the edge of Zijo’s cot and took a roll of white surgical tape from the nurse’s cart. The nurse pulled out sheets of cotton wadding to replace Zijo’s bandage. But Dr. Despres took the wadding from her hand and folded it into a small square, which he pressed against the bear’s worn back. With the nurse’s help, he pulled a length of tape over one side of the bandage, then another.

“Here is what we have done for Zarko,” he said, bringing the bear closer for Zijo to see. “You are hurt, Zarko is hurt. We will take care of you both.”

The little boy looked on dully as Dr. Despres tucked the bear against his pillow.

         

THE FIRST WHITE stick candles were being lit in the wards when Dr. Despres excused himself and found Nurse Rasulavic standing in a weak wash of light near a window at the end of a darkened hallway. The doctor’s stomach was rumbling, and he thought that his hands were beginning to shake.

“I am sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but I’m not used to going so long without a cigarette. Is there somewhere I can smoke?” When Nurse Rasulavic looked up, he could see that her eyes were smoky gray.

“This hospital is a no-smoking zone,” she said. “A few years ago, Miss Ademovic came back from a conference in California.”

Dr. Despres smiled. “We have a new law in France, too,” he said.

Nurse Rasulavic returned the doctor’s smile and widened it. “Let me show you a place that is lawless,” she said.

         

NURSE RASULAVIC LED the doctor to a pair of steel doors in a hallway loading dock. The space was far from any windows and darkened quickly in the late afternoon. “There is a small area out here,” she said, pressing her shoulder against one of the doors. The door rocked open with an iron groan. The sky was dimming, and the last gold light of the day grazed against their hands as they took them out of the pockets of their white hospital smocks. Dr. Despres shook a pack of Gauloises, and held it out to Nurse Rasulavic.

“How lovely to see that. Thank you. You know, you could get a lot for these here now,” she said.

“Money?” The doctor affected an expression of mock surprise.

“Oh, no,” she said. “What could you do with money? Sardines, olive paste, beans.” In the pause that followed, Dr. Despres counted the sound of three rifle shots popping in the distance. “Drugs. Sex. Anchovy paste. We are fine down here,” she added.

“Bullets?”

“Of course. But blocks away.”

Dr. Despres produced a black-and-gold enameled Dupont lighter from his right pocket, and flipped the roller three times before he got it to fire. He held the flame under Nurse Rasulavic’s cigarette and cupped his left hand just below her chin.

“That lighter would also get you a lot of nice something. Until you ran out of fluid. Then matches would bring more. How long are you staying?”

“It’s not determined,” said Dr. Despres with a shrug. “I have clothes for a week. I want to get the skin-graft machine running. Then the U.N. is supposed to take me out on a cargo flight back to Zagreb or Italy. I don’t want to leave until we know if the machine can be used. Until then, maybe you can use an extra set of hands.”

Nurse Rasulavic took a long pull on her cigarette. “We used to come out here for peace and quiet,” she said. “Now the quiet is frightening. You used to hear the sizzle and click of streetcars, the clop of feet in the street. That there are still a few of us here worth shooting is almost the only sign of life. Are you from Paris?”

“Actually, a town called Rouen,” he said. “In Normandy, along the Seine.”

“It is beautiful?”

“It has many beauties. Monet painted the famous cathedral in the center of town. But it got damaged in the war. The Germans rolled in with tanks. When it came time, the Americans and British tried to blast them out, and in spite the Germans burned the heart of town on their way out. The Allies were pink-skinned boys from Texas and Scotland who threw oranges and chocolate bars to children and young girls. I was a child, and my mother was a pretty young girl. Those were some of the best days of my life.” Dr. Despres paused and smiled.

Nurse Rasulavic could see a kind of fashion clinging to the doctor, even as his fatigues were rumpled by travel, sweat, and sleep. He still smelled of strong cigarettes and sharp cologne. He was the first man she had seen for months whose face was still softened by cheeks. Sarajevo was beginning to look like a city of hawks.

“Did it take your town long to recover?” she asked.

“It’s quite prosperous now,” said the doctor. “It drizzles almost every day. That’s good for the apples and grows grass for the cows. Tourists come to see where Jeanne d’Arc was burned at the stake. They close the center streets so tourists can walk about, as if they were in the sixteenth century.”

“We are rather sixteenth-century ourselves at the moment,” said Nurse Rasulavic.

This won a long, low laugh from Dr. Despres. He coughed small clouds of smoke, and Nurse Rasulavic cleared her own throat noisily to put him at ease. It was flattering to make a man laugh until he exploded with smoke.

“Do you have a family?” she asked. She smoothed a thicket of hair that had got bunched behind her right ear.

“Two children,” said the doctor. “Teenagers, a girl and a boy. They live with their mother. Our girl wants to be a doctor. But not a surgeon. All her life, she has heard that surgeons are lousy husbands.”

Nurse Rasulavic fought back a smile, but not too hard. “I know.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard.”

“No,” she said. “I know. I’ve married a couple of surgeons.”

Their laughter mingled as they leaned back on a parking rail, each waiting for the other to take the next step. It was the doctor. He stepped down delicately onto the butt of his cigarette. Zule Rasulavic saw his soft brown loafer slide away and heard his shin snap like a branch breaking off a tree in an ice storm. When she looked up, bewildered by the sound, she saw Dr. Despres reaching up to try to keep his head from blowing away. She thought she could see the mist around him darken from pink to ruby.

         

THE SHOOTING OF Dr. Despres at dusk outside the hospital in which he was helping to heal the victims of war was reported as a death that signified the hopelessness of the conflict. The outside world could send some of its most conscientious citizens to try to ease the suffering; they would only die in cross fire. Bosnians, Serbs, Croats—people with a scarcity of vowels in their names, and a surplus of hatred in their hearts.

And centuries of blood on their hands.

The Bosnian security forces, however, did not see the doctor’s death as a time for reflection on the futility of war. A good man had died. But, rather more to the point, he had been shot to death in a spot that had been regarded as impenetrable by rifle fire.

Tedic had been alerted to the doctor’s shooting when the hospital raised U.N. headquarters over a radio link. Tedic, bent over a street map in the basement of the brewery, dispatched himself to follow. When he arrived in the surgical room, the bright light of a headlight powered by a car battery was trained on a purpling stump. It took Tedic a moment to take in what remained of a man’s head after the blood and brains had spilled out.

The presiding physician was a young man named Cibo. He had once been a student in one of Tedic’s algebra classes, had gone to medical school in Vienna, and become an orthopedist, whom Tedic would see over the years on habitual trips to the hospital when one of his basketball players cracked a tibia. Cibo’s black crow’s eyes were the only features by which his old teacher could recognize him; the younger man was shrunken.

“You are looking good,” was what Tedic told him.

“The war has been my spa.”

“I must ask a few quick questions, Cibo, while we have time. Are there Frenchies around?”

“Out in the ‘secured area,’ ” said the young doctor. “Looking for the bullet. And whatever is left.”

“Good. Let Frenchies go out and wave the flashlights just after a sniper shooting.”

The bright white light from the lamp curled the hairs on the back of Tedic’s hands. Dr. Despres’s head had been propped up on a block that was now slick with blood. His shirt had been split and pulled away from his shoulders, where the skin was turning waxy.

“His wounds?”

“One shot,” said Cibo. “Near as I can tell.”

“Rifle?”

“Not a mortar. But, Mr. Tedic, this is not my line.”

“Short range? Long range?”

“Medium.”

“From a height?”

“For sure. Look here.” Cibo held the eraser end of a pencil above a jagged rim of whitening bone.

“Whatever hit the doctor was tumbling, falling down, and smacked flat. It plunged into the midbrain like”—Cibo wavered; a man’s head was still in his hands—“like a hot stone into a pudding. The brain blows up from the pressure. That’s why part of the skull comes off”—Cibo paused considerately—“so trimly.”

“A tibia mechanic,” Tedic said, “figures all that?”

“I’ve had to branch out,” Cibo said.

“As have we all. Can you tell anything about the bullet?”

“Not until someone finds it.”

“The radio call mentioned a woman,” Tedic noted.

“Zule Rasulavic was having a smoke with the doctor out back.”

Tedic didn’t know the name.

“You’ll recognize her,” said Cibo. “A nurse here. Pretty, forty, red-haired most months. The Frenchies asked her some questions and put her in a storeroom.”

There was a brief fusillade of cracks and sizzles as hospital attendants began to snap photographs of the doctor’s wounds. Tedic thought that he saw only a couple of soldiers in the room jump back, startled. The scent of night and the clang of steel doors reached the room as a half dozen Frenchies stomped in with a bullet in a waxed hospital cup.

“On l’a, on l’a,” the apparent captain of the detail sang out. “Right here, my friends, right here.” He inclined the cup toward Cibo, who took it between his palms and shook it gently, as if it were brandy.

“More brain than blood,” Cibo announced. “Not surprising, given the velocity. It’s in and out of the brain before bleeding begins.”

Tedic and the French captain drew perceptibly closer to Cibo, though neither man acknowledged the other.

Cibo plunged a pair of forceps into the cup and lifted out the bullet to bring it into the light. “Smashed nose,” Cibo announced to the room. “Someone with a microscope will have to make out any other marks. But it’s a 7.62 X 39-millimeter. Soviet, with that shorter case. Can we all see that?”

A chorus of murmurs assented. Cibo dropped the flattened gray bullet into a plastic sleeve that the French captain held out before him, between his thumb and forefinger. Tedic stepped out from the circle of shoulders and left to find the storeroom.

         

TEDIC EXTRACTED ONE of the black wallets he stored in his coat. They afforded him a range of affiliations, and he flashed one at the raw-faced French soldier guarding the room, who had tipped his folding chair back, away from the light, his rifle laid across his knees like an art book.

The room had a fuel lamp that hissed and sputtered and seemed to boil over with light. Nurse Rasulavic was sitting on a blanket on the floor, with her head against her knees. Tedic held a hand in front of his eyes as he sought out her face. He lowered himself to a spot just beyond the blanket.

“Miss Rasulavic, yes?” he said to the dark outline of the woman on the floor. “I am Miro Tedic. Perhaps, if you can glimpse my face, you will find me familiar. I know I recognize you. You are the nurse in the emergency room that all of my high-school basketball players want to hold their hands when I bring them in with injuries.”

“I think they prefer some of the young blondes,” she said.

“My boys are sophisticated.”

He could see Zule Rasulavic’s lips part slightly in a smile.

“I think I remember your face.”

The last inch of a Marlboro glowed from the hand that grasped her knee. One knee up, one leg down, a shy smile—preposterously, Tedic was reminded of one of the bathing-beauty calendars he used to buy on summer holidays in Dubrovnik. The Frenchies had laid down a beach blanket in the storeroom and lit up a hissing sun.

“I am with the city,” Tedic said. “Have the Frenchies had the sense to get you a drink?”

Zule shook her head, shook her hand with the Marlboro, to wave the thought away. Tedic pulled a stainless-steel flask from yet another pocket in his coat, curved to rest against the hip.

“Scotch,” he said. “A Canadian mix.”

Zule Rasulavic reached over to a small pile of pill cups, curling like a snail from atop a crate. “We have cups,” she said. “Not always pills.”

Tedic poured carefully in the faint light. He lifted the flask with a grin toward the young soldier, who held up his hand in affable refusal. “Duty, duty,” he said in English.

“Let me explain. I am with the Home Ministry,” Tedic began.

“Are you some kind of policeman?”

“By no means. But I am concerned with security.”

“There’s a difference?”

“A policeman investigates crime,” said Tedic. Zule had lowered her hand to the floor to snuff out her cigarette, and Tedic spoke low, as she bowed her head to watch the glow smudged against the floor.

“But what would a policeman do here? The world regards shooting down old ladies who are in line for a bag of beans as a blameless tragedy. Not a crime. The ladies were standing in the way of somebody’s national destiny.”

Tedic took Zule’s upturned head as a sign to proceed. “Because of the arms embargo,” he said, “in Sarajevo right now, we are afforded only the right to be fatalities. The U.N. sees, hears, and speaks of no evil. They bid us just run back into our holes, and scurry out later for beans. Some of us are refusing to stay in those holes, Miss Rasulavic. Before I crawl back into mine, I need to know what happened here.”

         

THEY NODDED AT each other over their pill cups, sipping from their scotches.

“I thought no sniper was supposed to be able to reach here,” said Zule.

“There is no isle of refuge here,” said Tedic. “Perhaps we should have known that all along. Perhaps something you noticed can help us.”

“I was talking to a man,” she said, “and then he was shot.”

Tedic sat with his shins tucked under his thighs. More out of discomfort than calculation, he shifted, but as he did so he was careful to keep his knees low. He had his own pack of Marlboros in the inexhaustible inventory of his black coat. But he chose not to distract Zule with another cigarette.

“Did you know Dr. Despres?” he asked.

“Barely. Barely an hour.”

“You met—was it in the morning? About what time?”

“Eleven or so.”

“He was shot close to five.”

“I did not see him again until just a few minutes before he was shot.”

The French soldier, who gave no indication of being attuned to their Bosnian-language conversation, sat up in his chair and waved his own cigarette pack at Zule. She put her hands before her chest in a shunning motion, mitigated by a smile.

“But thank you,” she called over to the soldier in English.

“Yes, thank you,” Tedic said, including himself in appreciation of the soldier’s generosity. It was a way of conveying to the Frenchie that they had exchanged responsibility for the relief of Zule. Tedic went on, “You were conversing?”

“When he was shot? Yes. He had just finished telling me about his son and daughter. His daughter wants to be a doctor.”

“Her name? We might help you get a letter to her.”

“I don’t remember. He didn’t mention it. Really, he didn’t have the chance.”

Tedic had learned from trying to elicit confessions from students that silence could encourage disclosure. He stared back blankly.

“I mean,” Zule continued in the silence, “the shooting came that quickly. Within a few minutes.”

“I understand. Would you say two minutes after you started talking?”

“Maybe closer to three or four. He was putting out his cigarette.”

“He had smoked down a cigarette. You had already finished yours?”

“I didn’t finish mine.”

“You lit them at different times, then?”

“In fact, no,” said Zule. There was a note of surprise in her voice. “It was off the same flame, in fact. The doctor had a very sweet”—and here she flicked her right thumb—“little Dupont lighter.”

Tedic stopped for a moment to squeeze his eyes, as if to visualize some delicacy of which he had only read descriptions. “It is what a man of distinction carries,” he said. “He had been all over the world, you know. I would guess that a man so gallant would not light his cigarette before lighting yours.”

“I don’t believe he did,” said Zule. “But more or less at the same time.”

“Yours before his?”

She paused, recalled to the last act of a nightmare. “Yes.”

“He insisted on this? You did?”

“He didn’t insist. It was what he did.”

“A gentleman. So, let me understand,” said Tedic quietly. “You go out of the loading-dock door at the same time, light up cigarettes at the same time. But he finishes his ahead of you, puts it out, and then is shot. While your cigarette is still dwindling.”

“Yes.”

Tedic gave Zule another blank look, but she moved no further.

“Yes,” she repeated, letting the word hang between them.

“How far from the end?” Tedic asked finally.

“I don’t know. Enough so that I didn’t look every few seconds.”

“Two or three puffs?”

“Probably.”

“You each had the same make of cigarette?”

“Gauloises. From the same box.”

“Ah. A Gauloise must be nice now.”

“It was.”

“Perhaps the doctor left the rest of his pack.”

Zule scowled at the implication that she would plunder a dead man’s pockets for his cigarettes. “Perhaps,” she said. “You are welcome to look. I will never smoke one again.”

Tedic made sure to cringe. He wanted the nurse to have the satisfaction of winning a point, and play on.

“So,” he resumed, “you light up the same make of cigarette at the same time, but he finishes his ahead of you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we are not machines. One inhales more than the other. One talks more than the other.”

“Maybe having two or three last puffs of a French cigarette meant more to me than it did to him,” said Zule.

“For certain. You were talking?”

“For a couple of minutes.”

“For three or four minutes.”

“Three or four minutes, then.”

“Talking, then. About what?”

Zule flailed her hands impatiently. “I told you—his home in France.”

“Wife? Kids? Dogs? Horses?”

“Ex-wife, two kids. I don’t know the rest.”

“And how was it that you opened up this particular avenue for your first conversation and the last two minutes of Dr. Despres’s life?”

“There’s no mystery.”

“Demystify it for me, please.”

“I wondered where he was from,” said Zule. “I asked him. I asked him if he was from Paris.”

“Why Paris?”

“Everybody knows Paris.”

Tedic consciously leaned back from Zule, affording her enough room to fidget. “Yes, everybody wants to see Paris,” he said. “You didn’t know he was from the hospital in Rouen?”

“I didn’t know anything.”

“Why was it important to know anything about Dr. Despres?”

“I was being sociable,” said Zule.

“Being sociable wouldn’t seem to be utterly necessary these days,” Tedic said.

“All right, then. Why don’t we let the savages take over right now? I was making conversation.”

“If I were a doctor,” Tedic professed to muse, “and had come into a hell like this, I think I would be the one asking questions. How do you live? Where do you go for fun?”

“Nothing like that.”

“He asked you nothing?”

“I don’t remember,” Zule fairly hissed. “I wanted to hear what the real world was like.”

“You kept him talking, then.”

“He was nice. He talked to me.”

“Until he was shot.”

“He was not shot because he was talking to me!”

Tedic decided that he and the nurse were beginning to thread themselves into the ground. He sprang to his feet. When Zule looked up in bewilderment, he began to lift her up by the loose white coat around her shoulders, as if he were plucking a disobedient student out of a lunchroom seat. Tedic caught a glimpse of the Frenchie, who was roused by the commotion but didn’t interfere or follow. After all, he was under orders not to intervene in assaults.

Tedic took hold of Zule’s arm and steered her quickly out of the storeroom and through the groaning steel door. Thin pillars of flashlight slashed the night. French soldiers looked up only briefly from their duties, drawing down tape.

“This is where you were standing?” Tedic demanded with more force than volume.

“Out here, yes.”

“Over where? Show me, please.”

There was not really a pause between the sentences—and not really a “please.” The railing against which the nurse and the doctor had perched was an hour’s dark harder to pick out. Zule had to squint, and hold out her hand, as if she were searching for a light switch in a darkened hall. In the days when light switches worked.

“I was like this,” she said, turning toward Tedic. “He was standing alongside. Then, to light the cigarette, he stepped here.” Zule took some satisfaction in taking hold of Tedic’s shoulders roughly. “Then, as we talked, he moved to face me.”

“As the two of you were talking,” said Tedic. “About children, ex-wives, and four hundred cheeses.”

“We were talking.”

“Replay those moments for me, please.”

“I’m not sure I remember.”

“It was only two minutes, right?” said Tedic. “Three at the most. You are a woman who has to remember lymphocytes, phagocytes, and thrombocytes.” Assistant principals absorb a great deal of extraneous information against that one day when it might become useful. “Please trouble your memory banks to recall a couple of minutes of conversation.”

Zule looked over at the soldiers engaged on the floor with rolls of tape, scrawling into field notebooks. They offered no assistance.

“He began,” she said. “He asked, ‘Where can I smoke?’ ”

“No one would have prevented the great Dr. Despres from lighting a cigarette anywhere. Surely you told him that?”

“I told him that our hospital administrator does not think smoking is modern. Miss Ademovic scares people.”

“Then you led him here?”

“I said, ‘We have a place, let me show you.’ Something like that.”

“You didn’t just give him directions?”

“He was a visitor. I didn’t want him going down dark halls.”

“So your humanitarian instincts induced you to lead him out here.”

“Bastard.” Zule pronounced the word thoughtfully, as if she were identifying a dark spot on an X-ray.

“I confirm your diagnosis,” said Tedic. “And so then, please, what happened?”

Zule paused—to show that she could.

“He lit my cigarette. He lit his.”

“Yours first?”

“He was a gentleman, I told you.”

“I remember that you mentioned his lighter.”

“A Dupont. Black and gold. He flicked it once, twice, then the third produced a flame.”

“Where is this lighter now, I wonder?”

“I expect it’s still in his pants. Or perhaps in your pocket. You may search my belongings. Bastard! Do you really think I got a man killed because I wanted his cigarette lighter?”

“Not at all,” said Tedic. “But until a few months ago I would not have thought that one of my neighbors would cut the throat of the little girl who lived downstairs because he thought she would grow up to be his enemy. What we used to think . . .” Tedic let the thought trail away.

Zule’s face had hardened. The sprinkling of freckles that usually suggested perpetual girlhood now tightened across her face like bolts.

“I told Dr. Despres,” she said, “that he could get a lot for such a lighter and his cigarettes.”

“Such as?”

“Drugs, sex. Lots of new best friends.”

“A curious thing to tell a visitor.”

“I was trying to tell him how things are here.”

“The humanitarian again.”

“You make that sound like an insult.”

“I don’t find humanitarianism despicable,” said Tedic. “Merely useless. Did this advance the conversation as you had hoped?”

“I hoped for nothing,” said Zule. “I think I asked him how long he would be here. He said maybe a week. He wanted to get the skin-graft machine working. He said, ‘I don’t want to leave until it’s working. Maybe until then you can use a good pair of hands.’ ”

“And you took this—may I ask—in what way?”

“In the only way there was.” Zule had exploded, if quietly. “An offer of help from a skilled surgeon.” She spat out the last two words to emphasize the difference between Dr. Despres’s proficiency and Tedic’s.

“Nothing more?” he asked.

“What more? What madness are you dreaming?”

“Dreaming is enticing,” said Tedic. “More seductive than ever, I would say. So here are the two of you, attractive adults, marriage survivors, parents, bright, pleasing in appearance, I would say, thrown together into the fires of hell. It would be only natural, wouldn’t it?”

“It was a two- or three-minute conversation.”

“Lives pass in seconds these days.”

“I asked him about his hometown. He said it was pretty. Tourists come to see where Jeanne d’Arc was burned.”

“Jeanne was from Orléans.”

“This is crazy,” said Zule. “Where she was burned.” Tedic took a half step backward.

“Where she was burned,” he agreed, on the strength of her certitude. “And now, let me ask, because it seems to me we are hovering over the defining point in the conversation—three minutes, one, it doesn’t matter. You and the doctor are mature people. You know how to sort through the tomato basket. I know, you are about to point out, ‘We didn’t even have time to smoke a cigarette together.’ Rationally, you are right. But we are protons and electrons, not rational elements. Put some people smack up against each other—nothing catches. Others journey from another part of the world and”—Tedic clapped his hands loudly—“smack!”

Zule hunched over as Tedic spun out his analysis, like a woman caught in the rain at a bus stop.

Tedic took her acquiescence as encouragement. “I know this state of mind,” he continued. “I have spent my professional life trying to fathom adolescents. None of us ever gets beyond, oh, fourteen years old in such matters. You try out the sound of your name beside his. You imagine how your friends will tell your story. A distinguished man of the world, his heart pierced by misery so immense he cannot get his arms around it. So he lifts you, the healing angel, into his arms. Some silvery duke to sweep your soiled Cinderella skirts out of the blood and carry you back to the family estate. You can sleep softly there, between linen sheets. You can awaken to see apples blooming, not just stumps of trees that have been cut down for heat. There, you can open the windows and watch cows chewing placidly on grass, and apple-cheeked French children tumbling after soccer balls.”

Tedic finally ignited the fireball he had been trying to set off—a detonation of rage in which Nurse Rasulavic burned down to find something unspoken and unsuspected in herself. When she cried this time, the tears spilled quickly down her face.

“I steered him—out here,” she began in a gasp, “because I wanted him for myself!”

Tedic stood back, as if he had dropped a glass. He waited a minute—he had inflicted the same kind of treatment so many times on fourteen-year-old girls that he impassively counted to sixty in his mind—before speaking, being certain to stay a body length away from Nurse Rasulavic, who had sunk to her knees.

“And so he was yours, in his last few minutes. I am sorry. I really am almost sorry to put you through this. But we needed to know if you took the doctor out here to see if you two would stick. Or if you brought him outside and got him to stand up and light a cigarette to light a sniper’s shot into his head. Nothing else matters quite as much now.”

         

THE HOME MINISTER brought Tedic’s finding that a Serb sniper had fired the shot that killed Dr. Despres to the U.N. administration building near the airport. U.N. bureaucrats now sat blandly at steel desks that, only a few months earlier, had been occupied by travel consultants and transport brokers. He was directed into the office of a Mr. Benoît, a Belgian functionary with a broad, red-brown mustache. Mr. Benoît knew what was coming and didn’t wait to hear it.

“I cannot accept this finding,” he said. His one visible touch of élan was to wear a black turtleneck sweater that slouched down from his throat, almost in frown lines. Like Dr. Despres’s khakis, Benoît’s sweater bore the folds of prior service in the globe’s troubled zones.

“We are conducting our own investigation,” he said. “And so far we have found no reason to exclude the prospect that Dr. Despres was shot by someone on this side of the line. He was a world-renowned humanitarian, you know. He closed wounds on the front lines of Ethiopia and Somalia without suffering a scratch. He comes to Sarajevo and gets shot in the head.”

The Home Minister had become ashamed of his appearance when meeting foreign officials. Other members of the Bosnian cabinet could travel to conferences in New York or Vienna. The meetings might have done little to secure Bosnia, but those Bosnian politicians in the delegation could at least refresh themselves and repair their wardrobes. When the doors shut on their foreign hotel rooms, most leaped at the chance to punch the numbers of a working phone. They ordered up steak and scotch from room service, telephoned relatives in the West, and called down to have their suits taken away for cleaning. They would travel with half a dozen pairs of shoes, which would hang like white bat’s nests from the door handles of their rooms until they were picked up for shining by the valet. They would wrench on the showers and let the hot water gush over their heads until it soaked into their bones.

But the Home Minister was confined to Sarajevo. He was sure he looked dirty and bedraggled to visiting Western Europeans. He could bathe only infrequently. He was lucky to shave every third day. His one London pinstripe was stiffening with sweat and grime. He could feel the trousers stick to his flanks and scuff his backside as he squirmed in his seat, drawing his words out carefully.

“We are saddened and outraged, too,” he told Benoît. “Please do not consider our outrage reduced if I note that we—you, none of us—also cannot keep children in this city from getting shot where they sleep on bathroom floors.”

But this remark only annoyed Benoît. “We cannot stop a war,” he said, “when two peoples are determined to have one.”

“We consider this a case in which one people is determined to annihilate the other,” said the Home Minister.

“I think we can stop this business far short of that.”

“How far?” asked the Home Minister, whose voice now had a slight edge. “Can you share the news? After fifteen thousand lives? Fifty thousand? I would like to be able to tell our citizens how many of our shoes we must burn in order to have heat this winter.”

The Home Minister could see a couple of framed citations on the wall behind Benoît’s slight shoulders. He couldn’t read them; they were probably in Flemish. But between those indecipherable certifications was a portrait-size photograph of Benoît, plumper in a pale gray suit and flapping black tie, shaking hands with a dark-haired woman who was improbably stunning for a bureaucrat’s walls. The Home Minister allowed his eyes to linger discreetly for a moment: Bianca Jagger. He guessed that Benoît had been mayor of some modest city, lost his office, and enlisted in the U.N.’s bureaucracy. He was sure that the hope of another small chance to meet the likes of Bianca Jagger was what had kept Benoît in public service.

“The knights and dragons in this city are not as easy to distinguish as you insist,” Benoît finally said. “This is not always a struggle between good and evil.”

“No,” said the Home Minister. “Merely between life and death.”

Benoît went on placidly. “At that target, at that range, we must begin with the supposition that the shot came from your side.”

“Our preliminary evidence suggests otherwise,” said the Home Minister. “The ammunition is conclusively a 7.62 X 39-millimeter shell fired from an AK-47. The Yugoslav National Army possesses several million such weapons.”

“You don’t?”

“Your good offices have imposed an arms embargo that effectively prevents us from possessing anything that can be used to defend ourselves. You will see, in any case.” And as Benoît began to fulminate, the Home Minister laid a brown envelope on his desk. “The angle and size of the wound suggest that the shot that struck home could only have been fired from one of the taller buildings almost directly south. From the other side.”

Benoît did not reward the envelope with so much as a look. “And why would they shoot a French doctor when they are pleading for Europe to support their Serb state?”

“No Bosnian would shoot a man who had come here to help.”

“Oh, come,” Benoît said. “Save that line for your suave spokesmen crying on the BBC and CNN. We both know there are Muslims who would shoot a French doctor to make it appear as if Serbs had. ‘Oh, those monsters! They rape our women and shoot children. Look—now they have even gunned down a gallant European doctor. Help us, Europe! Save us, America! Rescue us from those swarthy swine!’ ”

The Home Minister was nearly pleased to see the Belgian show some sign of real indignation. But the Home Minister restrained himself; patting the fingers of his right hand on the envelope helped. “Our preliminary findings are here,” he said simply. “I think it is clear which side rules this city with sniper fire.”

Both men were glad of the formalities that permitted them to say goodbye quickly and civilly.

         

BUT BY THE time the Home Minister reviewed the meeting with Tedic, he had begun to have some doubts. “God forbid, maybe it did come from our side,” he said. “We have had to pass out so many guns. There are people who will shoot a dog, a doll, a doctor—no difference. At what distance do they say the shot was fired?”

“About six hundred meters south,” said Tedic. The Home Minister shook his head.

“Shit—the Bristol Hotel?”

“No. Across the river. Probably an apartment tower in Grbavica.”

Neither man needed to remind the other that their security forces had considered that area across from so many shattered buildings inaccessible and unavailing for a sniper’s roost.

“All the same,” the Home Minister said finally, “I’m glad it was the Frenchies who found the 7.62 X 39-millimeter round. What if your friend Cibo had plucked it out of the cup and announced that it was a round from one of our guns?”

“I was prepared to swallow it on the spot,” declared Tedic.

         

THE HOME MINISTER had several small plastic bottles of drinking water on the edge of his desk, and he handed one to Tedic. They unscrewed the caps and touched the bottles together for a squashy plastic toast.

“To Dr. Despres,” intoned the minister. “A good man. God bless him. And please, God, send no more like him.” The men clapped their bottles together with vehemence and brittle little laughs.

“Yes,” said Tedic. “We don’t need Dr. Schweitzers. We need howitzers.”

         

DR. DESPRES’S REMAINS were respectfully repackaged and conveyed to his home in Normandy. The doctor had not been an observant Catholic. He had seen too much mindless, unmerited suffering in the world to believe in a moral puppet master. But his family, friends, and colleagues prepared a huge and affecting memorial for him in the church of the Place du Vieux Marché, where a bishop declared that as Joan had once sacrificed her life for France and God, so Dr. Despres had given his life to uphold France’s good name and God’s work.

Alma Ademovic could not send a card or make a phone call. But she arranged with the Home Minister to include her name in an official message of condolence approved by the Bosnian cabinet. After she had heard a brief reference to the doctor’s funeral on the BBC, she found Zule Rasulavic in the hospital’s hallway and motioned to the brown box of delicacies that the doctor had brought along just days earlier.

“Tidbits and luxuries,” she told the nurse. “Cheese, coffee, cookies. Give a bit to everyone, patients and staff, as far as it will go. And remind them,” she called back as she turned to walk to her office, “that it came from Dr. Despres.”