28.

TEDIC RELIEVED THE drudgery of Irena’s daily duties by asking her to assist the crew from an Arabic-language television service that had been slipped into Sarajevo to interview the Home Minister. Some delicacy was involved. Arab groups had been generous in their support for Bosnia’s besieged Muslims. Bosnians were grateful. And yet many Arabs sensed something chilly in their expressions of appreciation—the cold, merely correct formality of a printed thank-you card.

Bosnian officials eloquently told the world that they were European and ecumenical. Some Arabs heard a sniff of disdain in these boasts of secularism.

“As if,” the Home Minister had explained to Tedic, “we do not see ourselves as Muslims. As if Bosnians do not see our plight as being at one with the beleaguered Palestinians.”

“And you have been selected to reassure Arab viewers otherwise?” Tedic inquired with comically arched brows.

The Home Minister was married to a woman who had been educated in convent schools. Their religious life was nominal, sundry, and ceremonial. They observed Ramadan by attending parties to break the fast, and offered similar devotions on Yom Kippur. When their children were growing up, the Home Minister and his wife decorated Easter eggs and opened presents on Christmas morning. They did not want their children to feel as if Islam had cheated them of some seasonal reward. But the Home Minister tended to venture into actual houses of worship only for funerals and weddings. He shifted from foot to foot during the most solemn intonations, rushing through the text of a prayer as if it were the fine print on a car-rental contract.

“I hope to God, Kemal, they don’t ask you when you were last in a mosque,” said Tedic.

“I can answer that,” replied the Home Minister smoothly. “Eid ul-Adha.”

“Nineteen seventy-five?”

“The year escapes me. Yoko Ono had just broken up the Beatles. I was bereft. But I will assure our guests from the Kingdom of Saud that I look forward to making my pilgrimage someday.”

“To the four-star restaurants of Rome,” said Tedic.

Yet the Home Minister was a faithful man. He believed in Sarajevo.

         

TEDIC TOLD IRENA that she should accompany the television crew to their interview in the Home Minister’s basement office in the Presidency Building.

“Smile. Laugh at their sly witticisms and marvel at the brilliance of their Muhammadan parables. Lug their equipment, flatter them, make them at home,” he told her. “Then, listen carefully to what they say and repeat it to me, word for word.”

“And if they don’t say a thing?”

“They will,” Tedic asserted. “They will. To a young Muslim girl they are trying to impress.”

“These people are trying to help us,” said Irena. “Why don’t you trust them?”

“I’ll need a better reason than that,” Tedic told her. “In the country—some of the villages—they sneak in guns and fighters to save the place for Islam. Which means they drive out everyone else. Officially, we don’t notice. Moral reservations are an expensive indulgence. As long as Uncle Sam stays away, we need the ayatollahs. That’s why the Home Minister is participating in such a farce. But we watch the bastards,” said Tedic. “Just as closely as they watch us.”

The delegation from the television syndicate consisted of four men, all dangling U.N. media credentials stamped the day before in Zagreb. The Home Ministry had given them rooms at a former Holiday Inn along the front lines in which certain diplomats, soldiers, U.N. officials, and Bosnian functionaries were staying, as well as most of the international press covering the siege. The hotel was no safer than the rest of the city, and only marginally more comfortable. The water pipes were dry. The rooms were dark and powerless. Some groups brought in generators. But because of the lack of gas they were useful only for the sporadic operation of computers and satellite television and telephones.

Freebooters in the employ of the hotel brought in black-market food and old Slovenian wines, which they sold at the hotel at magnified prices. The Americans, British, and Canadians bought and enjoyed the wines, which the French and Italians pronounced “Barely drinkable” before draining their glasses.

The hotel’s mountain-side rooms had once been the most prestigious. But now direct views onto snow-clad peaks were dangerous, as so many shattered windows attested. Tedic had dispatched Jackie, rosy Jackie, to be his liaison for the Arab delegation, and to explain why they had to be housed in such dark, grim, common quarters. Irena did not see any of the Arabs in the hotel’s dining area—they may have felt uncomfortable around such public drinking—and so walked up seven flights to find their fleet of rooms. She was pleased not to feel winded; the coil in her legs was still tight and strong.

A man named Charif answered the door of Room 706. He wore a white shirt, buttoned to the neck, and smooth black pants. He had a black beard and small, dark, merry eyes.

“Hi, Ingrid, yes. Tedic said you would be making contact. We have some other guests here, too.”

The visitors had opened the door between two adjoining rooms and had arrayed small plastic drums of raisins and nuts on one of the beds. There were easily twenty people between the two rooms, standing and talking. But it was the first time in months that Irena had been in a room with more than two people that wasn’t suffused with smoke. Some of the men wore black or white turbans, which Irena had not seen outside of textbooks or movies, or variations in Western women’s fashion magazines. Many also wore expensive-looking woolen winter coats over black vests and high-collared white shirts.

Jackie stood near the curtained windows, caught in conversation, and met Irena’s eye with a wink. Jackie had a soft black silk head scarf with gold embroidery clasped at her coltish throat. Irena flushed with embarrassment and thrust a hand up to her own head.

“I’m sorry,” she told Charif. “No one warned me.”

“No problem, Ingrid,” he said. “We know most women here want to look European.”

He led her toward the nuts and raisins, and offered her tea and coffee from brass pots they had set over a small camp stove in another corner of the room.

“Are you a Muslim, Ingrid?” he asked in English as he handed her a small glass of dark coffee.

“Yes.”

“Aha,” said Charif, as if he had just removed the wrapping of an unexpected present. “You say ‘Yes,’ not ‘Of course.’ ”

Irena hesitated but smiled. “I say ‘Yes’ because we can be a great many things here in Sarajevo.”

“I understand,” said Charif. “I am Egyptian. Those who say ‘Yes, I am a Muslim’ leave open the chance of other choices. But those of us who know the word of God and His Prophet say ‘Of course.’ Once we have heard His word, there is no other choice to make.”

Charif delivered his speech with utter cheerfulness. If he admitted of no other spiritual choice, his graciousness seemed to invite Irena to respond with a question, or perhaps even a contrary opinion. Instead, she said, “I see.”

“You will see more,” said Charif. “You have come at just the right moment. The Prince is visiting. We are going to hear from the Prince.”

“I was not told about any prince,” Irena said carefully. “Only about you and your crew.”

“The Prince is amazing,” Charif said in a quieter voice. “The Prince carries the message of the Prophet. He wanted no official notice of his visit. He did not want to inconvenience anyone. He is that modest. A prince, truly, a man of great wealth. A prominent Saudi family that built the great modern structures of Mecca. But the Prince lives among refugees and outcasts. His presence will be an immense gift to all he meets here. You do not know who I mean?”

Irena shook her head.

“Take my hand here, Ingrid,” Charif said. “Let’s see if we can get across this busy room before he begins.”

Charif took Irena’s hand and she clasped her glass of coffee to her chest as he led her to the far side of the room. The men in turbans and high-collared shirts had turned toward a tall man with a long beard, who was wearing an immaculate long white gown underneath a soiled green American army-surplus jacket. At last, Irena thought to herself, the U.S. Army comes to Sarajevo. Charif lifted Irena’s free hand as he held both of his palms up humbly to the Prince. It took a moment for the Prince to see this.

“May I present a new friend,” said Charif with his head bowed. Irena reflexively turned her face down toward the floor in time to hear the Prince respond simply, “If it pleases you.”

“This is Ingrid, my Prince. Ingrid, who lives here. Ingrid, who is helping us.”

Irena lifted her head in time to see the Prince raise a hand to his heart. His fingers were long and lean, his nails so polished and glassy that his hands reminded Irena of long branches on a tree, glistening with ice.

Irena opened her mouth. But she had nothing—she found it hard to know what—to say. She picked up Jackie in the corner of her eye, and noticed that she had tugged her head scarf more tightly over the crown of her head as the Prince faced the room to speak.

         

HE DID NOT need to clear his throat, tap a glass, clap his hands, or shout. The din of the room just stopped, as if someone had clicked off a switch. When the quiet was complete, the Prince received it with a small smile.

“Allah Akhbar, God is great,” he said quietly. And then he took a long, jaguar stride toward the windows. With wiry arms he took hold of the curtains and yanked them open. Somebody’s coffee cup was knocked to the floor. Somebody’s pad of paper sailed a few inches across the ledge. Twenty cries of surprise sprang up around the room. Two men sank onto the bed, eyes brimming. The malevolent mountains, cloaked by snow and swarming with unseen snipers, looked grim and gray in the top of the window frame. The Prince turned his back to them and faced the room.

“God will protect us,” he announced softly. “There is no God but Allah. In the name of God the most merciful, I bring you greetings.”

“Allah Akhbar! Allah Akhbar!” Shouts and cries moved over the room.

         

THE PRINCE BEGAN in a low, slow tone.

“You here in Sarajevo live on the edge of the West,” he told them. “You live within the hot breath of the beast. In fact”—and here the Prince leveled one of his lean, elegant fingers at the blank screen of the mute television—“the beast has revealed himself to you. Now that the lack of electricity has blinded him, your own eyes can open. You can see how this beast was filling your lives with vile and useless images. Sex without love. Flesh without humanity. Bloodshed without consequence. Prosperity without spirituality. Nike, Marlboro, Rolex, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Air Jordan. You know those names, don’t you?”

The men around the room gave amused and knowing murmurs of assent.

“They mock us with things that adorn or invade our bodies. But these things do nothing to nourish our souls. What you have seen should not make you envious. The beast is rich but empty. Violent but cowardly. He is surrounded by things, but lonely inside without our real God.”

Heads nodded. People murmured low, involuntary sounds of enchantment as the Prince continued in a voice as soft as spun wool.

“We can see now, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, how much of history has been manipulated by Jews. I don’t say this as an anti-Semite. Whenever the West hears some truth it would rather conceal, they dismiss it as anti-Semitic. We Muslims cannot be anti-Semitic. It would be against ourselves. We are Semites. When it comes to Semites, we Muslims are far more numerous than Jews.

“The people of the East are Muslims. The people of the West are the Crusaders. They may call themselves Christians, Jews, British, French, Italians, or Americans. These days, even Russians. But those are different brand names for the same lethal cigarette. They are the Crusaders. They are the infidels. They defile our faith. They rape our sisters, mothers, and daughters. God says, ‘Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion.’ ”

The Prince stopped for a moment to peer above the heads of the men and women in the room. “World War I began here. Just steps away, right? Were it possible for me to walk around outside, like a simple visitor, I would see the plaque on that spot where it began. Someday we must chisel in the truth. With that war, which the Serbs began, the whole Islamic world fell under the Crusaders’ banner. The British, French, and Italian governments divided the world. Britain got Palestine, our Holy Land. Who divided Palestine, our lands and families? The British Lord Arthur Balfour, servant of the Jews Weizmann and Rothschild. How many hundreds of thousands of Muslims have since been killed, imprisoned, or maimed?”

“Millions,” a voice called out.

“This war in Bosnia is a continuation of this genocide,” said the Prince. “This battle is part of a chain of the long, fierce, and ugly Crusader war.”

Irena finally noticed his eyes. They were milky brown, warm, and light. The Prince pitched his voice even lower, but the silence of the room seemed to deepen as people stood on their toes and drew in their breath to hear him.

“In the twentieth century, whenever a nation tries to protect itself against craven Jews, the Jews cry genocide. The vast armies of the Crusaders march to save Jews. Jews like Weizmann and Einstein invent the most terrible weapons and use them against those who do not accept the god of the Crusaders.

“But when Muslims are killed those vast armies stay home. They play games. This war here is practically within the Crusaders’ breast. It is on television all over America. Our Muslim brothers are being killed, our women raped, our children massacred—all under the watch of the United Nations. And the Blue Helmets sit idly by. And should we be so surprised?”

Several men had to pinch tears from their eyes as the Prince permitted his voice to rise.

“No. No! God cannot be deceived. The United Nations partitioned Palestine at the command of the British and turned Muslim land into a Jewish nation. A Jew can be British or French prime minister or the richest man in America. Who owns the great newspapers of London, New York, Paris, and Toronto? Who controls the eyes of the beast?”

Here the Prince slapped the tip of his finger against the television screen.

“Who controls the movie studios in Hollywood, and even in India? And yet it is the Jew who screams genocide. The Jew who says he needs a homeland and steals our land. Those who cannot see this disavow the Holy Book and the Prophet Muhammad, God’s peace and blessings be upon him.”

“Allah Akhbar! Allah Akhbar!” Calls went up again.

“I will warn you,” the Prince continued. “When the Muslim begins to strike back, the Crusaders call us terrorists. If a terrorist is a man who fights for freedom with the rocks God has placed in front of him, then I am a terrorist. But how can we be terrorists? The West has atom bombs, smart bombs, and rocket ships. We have only a few rocks, a few bullets, and bombs made from gas poured into their filthy Coke bottles.”

Laughter flickered around the room. Irena heard her own laugh mingling in.

“History keeps count,” said the Prince. “If you take all of the victims of the Crusades, all who were slaughtered by imperialists, all of the Palestinian mothers and children slaughtered in the name of Israel, they would not add up to our small bombs and satchels of dynamite. The United Nations, which created Israel, will not let Muslims defend themselves here in Bosnia. They permit us to be only fatalities. But when the victim starts to take revenge for those innocent children—in Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, the Philippines, and now Bosnia—the Crusaders defend this blasphemy by calling us terrorists.”

By now the laughter of the men was rolling and boiling in their throats. The Prince widened his eyes, as if he had just heard something bizarre and confounding.

“Now there are Muslims in Sarajevo who say—perhaps some of you have said it yourself—’But, Prince, we are Europeans.’ I say, you are mocking God and fooling yourself. The Crusader does not call you European. Ask the Muslims of Brixton in London. Or Saint-Denis in Paris. Or Brooklyn, New York. Ask the Muslims in Haifa if they are treated as European. The Crusaders drove you here, five centuries ago, with the sword, the lash, and the word of their depraved Jew god, who feasts on the blood of children, even his own son.”

“Jews were driven here, too!” a voice rang out, a woman’s voice. Irena snapped around to see that it was Jackie, and the men around her seemed to be stepping back slightly.

“Who is that, please?” asked the Prince in a mild voice. “No, please,” he said when a moment passed with no response. “Let her be heard.”

Jackie raised her hand, and lowered it quickly to tug her head scarf forward. “I spoke, Your Highness,” she called out.

“I am glad,” said the Prince. “I congratulate you. I would rather hear the voice of a brave person challenge me than a thousand cowards shower me with compliments. May I ask, are you Jewish?”

“I am Muslim,” Jackie called back in a rising voice. “I may have a touch of Jew. I know I have a touch of Serb. I also refuse to eat animal flesh—a touch of Hindu. You will find, Prince, that here in Sarajevo we all have a touch of something.”

Jackie’s performance sent a hissing spark of laughter around the room. The Prince smiled and seemed to cough out a laugh himself.

“We seek only the pure of heart. Not purity of race. Muslims come in all stripes and colors. I admire Jews greatly. We Muslims can—we have to—learn from the Jews. They are not just smart. They fight. They scheme and succeed. Small in number, yet they control great nations.”

“Muslims, Serbs, Christians, and Jews have gotten along here for five centuries,” said Jackie. Irena thought that she had permitted her black head scarf to slip to the back of her head. She could see more glints of shiny chestnut hair and creamy cheeks.

“Five centuries?” asked the Prince. “Is that all?”

The laughter in the room surged back decisively toward the tall Prince standing so boldly against the view of the mountains.

“Certainly the Serbs,” he continued, “who say you have deprived them of their kingdom, believe that five centuries is the blink of an eye.”

“I don’t want to live in Iran,” Jackie shot back. “I don’t want to go through life in a black sack. I don’t want women to be locked away in closets, like vacuum cleaners that get rolled out for occasional service.”

Jackie won a round of snorts. She was still standing, nearly as tall as the Prince, shoulders back, hands strapped against her incomparable hips. The Prince was in no peril of losing the encounter in front of his court, and so he relaxed to enjoy a smart and pretty challenge.

“We haven’t built our kingdom yet,” he told her.

Irena wondered how many times he had spoken directly, even as he made love, into a woman’s face.

“Saudi Arabia, Pakistan—they are sham Islamic states. They mock Islam to flatter the Crusader. They let him roll his armies across our holy places. They think they can adorn themselves with his things but not catch his diseases. When we get the chance to create our own Islamic state—here, elsewhere, or everywhere—you will see how glorious it will be.”

“Will the mullahs let me drive?” Jackie persisted. “Will they let me get rid of a bastard husband? Will they stone me for showing my elbows, telling a dirty joke, or listening to Madonna? Would the mullahs let girls like me go to school if they knew what kind of pains in the ass we could all become? Will they let me be a Jew, a Christian, an atheist, a vegetarian, or whatever else we risk our lives here for?”

“Surely you can be a vegetarian,” the Prince countered with more laughter. Jackie refused to concede the round.

“Jews die for Bosnia, Mr. Bin Laden,” she said evenly. “So do Serbs. So do Crusaders. You shouldn’t mock them.”

“Don’t mock yourself,” the Prince said. He was not ruffled by the unexpected mention of his name. “Use the Jews, if you think you can. Use the Crusader. But know that they bring themselves close only to use you. There is a holy war going on here,” the Prince continued as he took a pointed step away from Jackie and gathered the room in his mild brown eyes. “A genocide that we fight with jihad. The West sends Blue Helmets and dried beans. We bring you guns and men. It is our faith. It is our duty. When our enemies lie slain before us, Sarajevo will become a monument to God and his Prophet. Sarajevo will be Mecca.”

The Prince pressed his back against the precarious, tempting pane of cracked glass behind him, squared his shoulders, and raised his voice until it sounded like the urgent call of a lover. “You are not alone,” he declared. “Every Muslim suffers with you. The tears you shed scour our hearts. Your blood gives us life. Let the faith of hundreds of millions of Muslim men, women, and children, from the camps of Palestine to the golden holy spires of Mecca, offer you strength. We stand with you! We bleed with you! Every Muslim stands under your banner. There is no God but Allah! There is no faith but his! We have heard you! Islam calls you! I pray I have conveyed God’s message. His peace and blessings be upon you.”

The hand clapping gathered under the Prince’s last words. He tipped his chin into his chest and bent his head in the swelling thunder of exaltation and tears. The clapping and crying seemed to gust through the room. Irena was raised to her toes. The pealing rang in her ears like the retort of a shot. Her eyes shone red, and wet with awe and dread. Irena didn’t like the talk of Jews, blood, and jihad. But something in the room had shot electricity into her veins. She could no more keep tears from her eyes in the rush of clapping, cries, prayers, and shouts than she could keep herself dry in a rainstorm.

Jackie was still on the other side of the room, and more than ever the center of attention. She twitched her hips, flicked a cigarette, and flipped the ends of her hair like a chestnut switch from beneath her head scarf. She leaned toward Irena.

“Ingrid, darling, hi.”

They brushed each other’s cheeks with their lips. They took one another into their arms.

“You were quite magnificent,” Irena told her.

Jackie squeezed Irena’s elbow tightly and switched to the Bosnian language.

“I was scared.”

“The Prince loved it,” said Irena. “He is in love with you. I could tell. You brought out the best.”

“Not of him,” said Jackie. “Them. The crew we are supposed to work with. One of the reasons I spoke up is they were getting a little too attentive to me.”

“Why not?” Irena said. “I love you, too. You are so amazing and beautiful.”

“I’m not wearing a black potato sack,” said Jackie. “They hear that Bosnian women are like Western ones—we drink, smoke, and fuck. We’re crazy for it in all ways.” Jackie revised her vocabulary to avoid offending—or alerting—Bosnian speakers standing nearby. “To them, it’s like romancing a sheep. Allah is not offended if you screw Bosnians. Lipstick, tight pants, Madonna—we are not women. We are another species.”

Irena laughed and leaned over Jackie’s shoulder to breathe a question into her ear.

“Did you scare them away?”

Jackie laughed so powerfully that her head scarf began to slip to her shoulders. Irena caught it and held it against her ears.

“Now they say, ‘Jackie, you are so brave. We must keep you very close to us.’ ”

         

IRENA AND JACKIE joined Charif and his three colleagues the next morning in a van that Tedic had provided. Molly met them, his pale skin whiter than the winter sun, wearing an AK-47 slung across his shoulders the way a long-haired German college student might carry a guitar while hitchhiking. Molly wordlessly took the passenger seat of the van and Jackie did the driving. The Arab men rather quickly got the point of that.

“We know women can drive,” Charif said gently. “We are sure that women can drive moon rockets, if they have to.”

“Not much to show you on the way over,” Jackie said as they made their way along Marshal Tito Boulevard. Charif and his crew were quiet and, Irena thought, alert and anxious in their seats.

“This used to be a leafy street, like the Champs-Élysées,” Jackie called back to the men in the van. When she heard Irena stifle a small laugh from the back, she chuckled aloud. “All right, not quite. But leafy.”

“There is not much traffic,” observed one of the men in the crew, Heydar. Nervous talk, thought Irena; it was like driving around Rome and saying, “A lot of history here.”

“Fuel is impossible,” Jackie explained. “Serbs took the best cars anyway. And there’s the snipers.”

“Snipers knocked down all these trees?” asked Heydar. She could hear apprehension tightening his voice.

“People here,” Irena said. “To get wood for heat and fuel.”

“Burning your furniture might be better,” observed Charif, “than giving snipers an easier shot.”

“Furniture is going up now,” Jackie said. “Doors, chairs. Even clothes and shoes. A worn-out old shirt can make a small pot of tea if you have the water.”

Irena thought the men took a moment to puzzle over the sense of her remark, and look down at their own clothes and shoes.

Jackie steered the van into the courtyard of the Presidency Building and pulled it alongside the upturned undersides of an old delivery truck that formed part of a barrier. Irena threw open the doors in the back of the van and helped the men put down battered black and silver cases. She helped a short man they called Abdullah sling a band of silvery lights over his shoulders.

“Everything will have to be checked,” Molly admonished them; it was the first time Irena had heard him speak that morning.

Charif cast a glance at his watch. “We are even a little early,” he observed.

“No traffic jams,” Jackie said. “We’ll go inside.”

“So early? I don’t want to inconvenience anyone,” said Charif.

Irena was taken by his consideration.

“Better inside than out here,” Jackie said simply, and cast a glance at the overturned carriage of the delivery truck that now rose above their heads. “Even so.”

But the Home Minister had sent a functionary to wait for their arrival. Gerry heard the van pull up to the building. Irena remembered him from the basement in Dobrinja, all bluff and roly-poly. He stepped out from behind a scarred steel door in a thick blue jacket and began to fill his hands and arms with some of the crew’s cases. His words burst into puffs in the cold.

“We have some coffee inside, good and hot,” he told them. “German. The Home Minister gets nothing on the black market, of course. But friends give him some for honored guests.”

Irena took up a small silver case that was studded with travel stickers: Lufthansa, Royal Jordanian, Air Pakistan. First class all the way, she noted. Two police officers, a man and a woman, kept the steel door open while they all stamped in heftily, boots and latches clattering. The crew snapped opened their cases. The police picked up their lenses and lights and looked them over, tapping, peering, occasionally unclasping.

“I’m sure everything is in order,” Gerry said with apology coating his voice.

“And we understand you must be certain,” Charif said.

The police bowed slightly and stood back as Gerry steered the crew down a half flight of stairs and into the Home Minister’s spare office. It was unpainted, undecorated, and pale, almost like the inside of an eggshell.

“Hello, hello, Allah Akhbar,” the Home Minister said as they came through the door. “God is great.”

Charif bowed his head slightly and took the Home Minister’s hands into his own. “May the peace of the Prophet be upon you,” he replied.

The Home Minister had received a briefing only that morning, but Irena thought he was still mixing a bit of Christianity into his Muslim lexicon.

“And also upon you,” he said. “I am but a poor messenger of the Messenger,” the Home Minister continued as he showed the crew into a sitting area.

Irena made a mental note to report the Home Minister’s virtuosity to Tedic. I wonder, she asked herself, how long he can keep this up.

         

COFFEE CUPS APPEARED. Tired, scuffed plastic cafeteria cups, but indeed they were steaming. Irena accepted one and sipped eagerly. She was about to apologize for slurping when she saw Charif smiling fondly at the sound to save her the embarrassment. It had been months since she’d had coffee this dark. The intensity prickled her tongue, and seemed to give her eyes sharper focus.

“Your people have been most hospitable,” Charif told the Home Minister.

“A small repayment for the generosity of so many of your viewers,” the Home Minister replied warmly. “I am glad of the chance to tell them myself.”

Irena was given a pair of lights to hold at her waist while Abdullah unfolded the legs of a tripod.

“I am sorry I did not have the chance to meet the Prince,” the Home Minister said while slipping back casually into his office chair. It was not an observation, Irena sensed, so much as a cast into rippled waters.

“He departed early this morning,” Charif offered cheerfully, but no more than that. “I am told. I am sure he would have welcomed the opportunity to meet your good self, too.”

Abdullah had the camera up on the tripod and was running his hand over some cables that hung down from the rear like rats’ tails.

“We will be ready momentarily,” Charif assured the Home Minister.

The Home Minister shifted in his graying pinstripes. “I would have welcomed the occasion to speak with the Prince,” he said. “I am eager to have my own faith enriched by his wisdom.”

Abdullah took the two lamps from Irena and clipped them above the glassy blank eye of his camera.

“He impresses everyone,” Charif assured them. Abdullah made a kind of winding signal with his right hand, and Charif turned to Irena sheepishly. “This is,” he said quietly, “too embarrassing. Could I—do you mind—if I ask you for a favor?”

Irena stepped to his side as the Home Minister pretended to turn away, and Jackie moved close to Abdullah, who was crouching behind the stork legs of the camera.

“We have only a twenty-minute tape,” Charif whispered. “We need another. I am so forgetful. It must be nerves. All the talk of snipers and burning my shoes.” He laughed under his breath. “The man with the rifle—”

“I saw him,” was all Irena said.

“He has been with the car?”

“I assume.”

“Do you think he would let you back in?”

“If I asked him. If I told him that it is your instruction,” Irena corrected herself.

“There should be three or four tapes in black cases on the backseat. We have enough to begin.”

“Bring them all?”

“Why not?” said Charif. “I am sure the Home Minister will be most eloquent.” Charif raised his voice to draw the rest of the room into the conversation. “Our audience will be most eager to hear him.”

Irena glanced over her shoulder as she scurried out. Charif and the Home Minister clasped hands, closed their eyes, and bent their heads together. Jackie, Gerry, Abdullah, and Heydar stood by silently as Charif said, “Praise to those who hear and heed the words of his Prophet. May the peace of the world be upon them.”

“Allah Akhbar,” agreed the Home Minister quietly. “The peace of the world upon us all.”

         

TEDIC WAS ON his knees inside the van, lifting up a panel of black vinyl flooring and running his hand over the underside while Molly stood watch in front of the windshield. The sling of his gun had been turned around to cross his chest.

“Good Christ,” Tedic said without looking up when Irena unlatched the door. “What did our friends forget?”

“Tapes,” said Irena. “Somewhere on the backseat.”

At this, Tedic lifted his head and widened his eyes. “Not there,” he said.

“Black cases, like small books,” Irena persisted.

“I know what they look like. They’re not here,” said Tedic. “Anyone say anything about how the Prince got out of town?”

“Not that I heard,” said Irena. “Maybe the man named Charif mentioned it to the Home Minister.”

“Or how he got in town?”

“Nothing,” Irena repeated.

“He somehow bought his way over. We’d like to know his travel agent.”

Molly had crooked his chin over his shoulder and was calling Irena through the windshield. “Better find those tapes or scurry back, love, and say you can’t.”

“Maybe they’re back at the hotel,” Irena told him, and then asked Tedic, “You’re sure—no tapes?”

“I would have stolen them by now,” he said sternly. “I’m not down here looking for cigarette butts. Wait another minute, so you can say you’ve been thorough.”

“Two,” suggested Molly. “I gave you a hard time about opening the car. Tell them you found nothing in the back but decided to check everything, including the glove box. Wait—check that there is a glove box.”

“And maybe,” Irena suggested with an edge of irritation, “they are just a television crew that forgot their tapes.”

“Too embarrassing,” said Tedic. “They wouldn’t send you.”

“They have one,” she told him. “To start. They didn’t want to keep the Home Minister waiting.”

“A test for sure,” Molly said. “Shit. They probably have someone watching us right now.”

Irena began to clamber ostentatiously over the backseat to convince anyone watching of the sincerity of her search for the small black cases.

“Impossible,” said Tedic. “They wouldn’t know where they were going to park.”

“It shouldn’t be too hard to guess,” Molly said, shrugging.

“You’d have to be inside the building to see the car,” said Tedic.

“You think they don’t have someone inside?”

Irena was sitting on her haunches on the floor just in front of the backseat. She could feel muddy footprints beginning to seep, tread by tread, through her blue jeans.

“Can I have a Marlboro?” she asked. “If I have two minutes left. I’m getting footprints stained onto my ass. I can’t smoke in front of our visitors.”

“They’ll smell it on your breath and wonder,” Tedic said.

“They’ll smell it on your breath and think they are James Bond for figuring out what took you so long to find nothing,” cut in Molly.

Tedic’s right hand was beginning to dive deep into his pocket, keys jangling and cellophane cigarette wrappers crinkling, when a thud in front of them popped their ears. The glass in the van quivered. Molly and Tedic felt a shudder in their heels and toes. When they tried to run, the ground trembled and sent sparks into their knees. Irena, Tedic, and Molly turned their heads back toward the building in time to see a couple of small basement windows hiccup clouds of dust that burst open with the shower of glass that gouged the pavement in front of them with screams.

         

MOLLY, HIS RIFLE borne like a spear, ran into the last clatter of glass and slid, feet first, into the hole of one of the smashed windows. Tedic had reached into his pocket and come up with a black-nosed gun. He waved it unconvincingly as he stumbled after Molly, like a child running after a lost kite waving a candy stick. By the time Irena had gotten unstuck from the floor, the steel door that Gerry had wrenched open for them had been thrown open for people trying to escape the smoke and fire. They were coughing and crying. When they hit the cold air, they remembered that they were under the eyes of snipers. They stumbled onto their knees and began to crawl.

Irena high-stepped over them. She hurtled down the half flight with a single step and ran flat-out, head up, shoulders back, into a stinging fog of plaster dust, brick dust, and mud in the Home Minister’s office. Jackie, beautiful Jackie, was on the floor, her brown eyes twitching like hummingbirds. Her right hand reached out for reassurance, but her right arm was rolling over and away from her, like a sausage that had fallen out of a truck. Irena ran after Jackie’s arm. She stepped on Gerry’s dead, bleeding boulder of a chest. Abdullah waved at her in the storm of smoke. But his head had blown back into Charif’s stomach. Irena saw Jackie’s arm, still clad in its stretchy red sleeve. She picked it up for safekeeping, and as the blood gushed out, Irena was appalled to find herself warmed. She put Jackie’s arm behind her back, as if she were hiding a bouquet of flowers. Molly had the snout of his rifle thrust into Charif’s mild, unmoving smile. But the Home Minister stalked over on his one whole leg, stretching a flap of his suit coat over his mouth so that he could breathe.

“We can’t spare the bullet,” he commanded Molly. “Someone in pain might need it.”

         

ABDULLAH, CHARIF, HEYDAR, and the other man in their crew had died in the blast, which had apparently been set off by their camera. Tedic and Molly guessed that plastic explosives had been packed into the casing panels of the camera.

They dismissed the possibility that the crew had been the unwitting agents for someone else’s bomb. Molly concluded that a real television crew, innocent and unsuspecting men, would have noticed the difference in weight after their equipment had been altered. They would have been alarmed.

Gerry was dead. His death was despicable, terrible, and a crime. But, Tedic reminded them, it was also a remarkably modest showing for a bomb that four people had journeyed thousands of miles to blow up in the world’s most dangerous city, for some purpose they could not yet fathom.

Jackie lost her right arm. The Home Minister had stripped off his suit coat, leaned down into the sickening clouds, and pressed his jacket against her spurting wound. She was still lovely, as Tedic had assured her at the scene, ever so much more.

“You are even more like Venus,” he’d told her, clasping her surviving hand to his cheek.

The dead men had a collection of driver’s licenses and citizenship cards in their pockets, a dozen names and identities by which they could become Lebanese, Egyptian, British, German, or French. Days later, Tedic passed some of their names along to certain contacts in Zagreb, London, and Jerusalem. They said the names were unconnected and clean. They might as well have been—they might well have been—from the New York City phone book.

The television syndicate for which the men ostensibly worked was real. It was based in London and beamed to cable systems in Europe and Arabia. Tedic offered the men’s conjured names to company managers, who reported that none of them appeared in their payroll records. An executive explained that freelancers often exaggerated their connections to secure an interview. They suggested that Tedic deliver to the men a stern sermon about misrepresenting their credentials. Tedic assured them blandly that he would.

The Home Minister was presumed to be the principal target of the bomb (Jackie may have been an improvised addition). Some of the people who were steering aid into Bosnia held the Home Minister’s pronounced ecumenical Islam in contempt. Tedic asked him—in a frank, just-guys-together tone—to appraise his life and consider whether someone had a more personal motive for his assassination.

“Like a jealous husband?” he barked from his hospital bed. “A scorned lover?”

“A former business associate who may feel cheated,” Tedic suggested carefully. “An old employee who was fired. A black-market gangster,” he added more quietly.

The Home Minister didn’t fly into a rage or even protest. Instead, he took a long draw on his cigarette and appraised Tedic through the smoke. “You must belong to all of those categories,” he told him. “Unless it was you, Miro, I can think of no one.”

But Tedic was mostly trying to snip off loose ends. The expensive preparations that the plot involved didn’t support a personal motive. Four men were not likely to sacrifice their lives to avenge an affronted husband, a foiled lover, or a thwarted gangster. And it certainly didn’t explain the Prince’s proximity to the crime. He seemed to have appeared mysteriously, and to have departed without a trace that would lead to the detonation.

Some of Tedic’s recruits went over the rooms that the men had slept in at the Holiday Inn. They found soiled clothes of no particular significance left behind the sliding doors of the closets; they would be checked for traces of explosives. More interesting was a smattering of small bills of different denominations and nationalities in the room of the man who had posed as Charif. But an accountant in the hotel’s office who worked with foreign currencies quickly calculated that the bills amounted to no more than one hundred U.S. dollars. That was scarcely enough to buy a bottle of scotch in Sarajevo, much less finance an uprising. She ventured a sensible guess that the bills were merely the accumulation of constant travelers.

The men left behind nail clippers, lilac and sandalwood soaps, combs and brushes, toothpaste, and, in one room, contact-lens solution. None of them left notes for family, friends, survivors, adversaries, or posterity, although, as Tedic thought it through, such letters could have been thoughtfully drafted and dispatched from Vienna, Rome, or some other stopover before the men made the journey into Sarajevo.

There was a single sentence written in Arabic on the back of the plastic card in the bathroom that invited people to ring 777 to have ice delivered to their room. The card was from the time of the Olympics. But the thick black letters seemed fresher: THOSE WHO MOCK ALLAH ARE THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM.

“I cannot believe that they would inscribe their motto—if that was their motto—in a place so easily overlooked,” the Home Minister told Tedic.

“Unless they knew that no place would be overlooked,” Tedic suggested.

“Besides,” said the Home Minister, flicking a sheet from his shin, “who is mocking Allah? An imperfect Muslim like me? Or sick bastards who use Allah’s name like some kind of bath soap to rinse blood from their knuckles?”

“An excellent speech,” Tedic told him. “Let’s win the war before you start campaigning.”

The Home Minister drew the gray sheet back over his legs with a sigh.

Tedic reached over to tuck the rough fabric around the Home Minister’s waist. “The note was probably written years ago by a carpet salesman from Istanbul,” Tedic assured him. “He was distressed because the hotel ran out of ice. Allah was mocked.”

The Home Minister flung the sheet off again and smacked the heels of both hands against his pillow. “They are using our war to start their own,” he said, punching at the pillow behind him, while Tedic fumbled in the pockets of his vast black coat for his gunmetal flask of scotch.

         

THE HOME MINISTRY made no announcement about the death of the men in the television crew. No news service working in the city knew anything about the explosion; nothing was reported. Assistance to Bosnia from sources in the Arab world continued with no evident decline. Tedic received occasional reports that the Prince had been glimpsed in various localities in Bosnia’s interior. But he discounted most of the reports as wishful. Besides, Tedic knew that the inspirational appearance of a rich, outcast Arab prince was scarcely necessary for Arab irregulars who had managed to steal into the country to incite thuggish local Muslim and Croat militia to drive Serb families into the forest. And it was scarcely possible for Tedic, the Home Minister, or President Izetbegovic himself to stop them. Even if they had so desired.

Tedic did have one last conversation on the incident with Irena. He didn’t summon her to his office, but found her absently flipping through the pages of an old VOX in a stairwell lit by a splinter of daylight.

“You can say anything,” he began without introduction. “Any answer will do. There is nothing you can say that will bring any penalty, disfavor, or reprimand. Is there any reason—any reason you can fathom—why they would send you out to the van?”

“Why did they spare my life?” she asked back.

“Or why they would want you alive and Jackie, Gerry, the Home Minister, and anyone else who happened along dead?”

Irena closed the magazine and rolled it up in her hands.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why did they blow themselves up, too?”

“That I know,” said Tedic. “They recognized the likes of Molly. They knew they weren’t about to set a bomb and sneak out of town with their lives. Killing themselves was their exclamation point. Blood—the universal language. It was a way of proclaiming that they can kill anyone they want because they’re not afraid to die.”

Irena shook her whole body no over and over. “Well, I’m afraid to die,” she said finally. “Maybe they sent me back because they knew my courage is lacking.”

“There is no courage,” said Tedic, “like that of some of the ten-year-old boys they have sent to die in Iraq, Iran, Gaza. Allah be praised.” He spat out the phrase as if it had been made from sour milk.

“The Crusaders had their ten-year-olds,” Irena answered.

“The Prince has made his mark.” Tedic met her slow smile. “If there was something else—a tender moment, a rambunctious romp—that made any one of them send you away . . .” Tedic allowed his sentence to run out of fuel. He took a step back down the stairwell to let the light fall back into Irena’s lap.

“I suppose we will just have to consider it a last act of benevolence,” he said, “bestowed by men who didn’t want to be remembered just for the blood they shed.” The heavy sound of Tedic’s footsteps seemed to pursue him as he continued down the staircase and returned to his perch by the loading dock.