Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (12 page)

* * *
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   Re: the albanian times
Date:      11 Apr 2003 11:03 GMT
I’m sorry. I’ve treated you badly, I know that now, and I’m so sorry. I know how inadequate that sounds. I don’t think sorry ever counts for much, you know that, but I guess it’s at least a start. I hope I’m at least beginning to make it up to you.
I don’t know what else I can say. I wish I did.
Things are fine over here. The work’s actually interesting. It’s a tight deadline, I’m working probably 70-80 hours a week, but I’m pretty sure I’ll make it, and you don’t know how good it is to be building something, doing something tangible again.
I love you.
Paul
   I almost didn’t write that email. Not because it wasn’t heartfelt, but because I had discovered that my computer had a keyboard monitor and packet sniffer running at all times, meaning that anything I typed, and all my Internet traffic, was recorded by virtual eyes perpetually looking over my shoulder, presumably to ensure I wasn’t posting Sinisa’s trade secrets on the Web. I didn’t like the thought of Sinisa or Arwin reading anything so personal. But if I wanted to write freely I would have to walk an hour to downtown Vlore and one of its Internet cafés, and in those early days of Mycroft’s development I didn’t dare take that kind of time away from work. I feared that if more than a day or two passed Talena would misinterpret my silence, so I resigned myself to Arwin and Sinisa reading every word I wrote.
* * *
   There was a boxing gym in Sinisa’s basement, with a full-sized ring, jump ropes, punching bags suspended from the ceiling, speed bags dangling from head-high wooden discs, gloves hanging on wall hooks, a chin-up bar, a set of dumbbells, a big wall clock counting out three-minute rounds and thirty-second intervals, and the thick smell of dried sweat. I started going there daily to work out and clear my head when it grew clogged with cobwebs of Java code. At first I just used the dumbbells, but the temptation to hit things was overwhelming and I soon took to donning gloves and clumsily pummelling the punching bags.
   Near the end of the first week, I was interrupted in mid-punch by a voice from the door: “Do you want lesson?”
   Zoltan’s voice. Zorana stood next to him, both of them dressed in workout gear. I hadn’t seen them since arriving in Vlore.
   “Okay,” I said tentatively.
   “You must make many changes,” Zoltan said, approaching. “First your stance. Right now you show your opponent all your body. In real fight, very bad. You must turn, like this, show him only left shoulder, with feet like this. Feet are very important. Most of boxing is feet and hips. Forget fists. When you throw punches they must come from hips. Even jab. Jab, you throw like this…”
   After demonstrating, he strapped flat little pads with bullseyes onto his hands, “focus pads” he called them, and had me punch them for five rounds. Fifteen minutes doesn’t sound like much, but during the last round I was on the verge of collapse and twice fell over throwing wild roundhouse hooks. In those five rounds I learned quite a lot about boxing. Most importantly the fact that you had to be in much, much better shape than me. When the final bell rang I slumped against the wall, gasping for air, so drenched in sweat I might as well have gone swimming. The world reeled around me and I closed my eyes, afraid I was about to faint.
   “You are fat and slow,” Zoltan scolded. “Punching is most easy part of boxing. Being punched, that is hard part. You must do much running, much ropework. You are very weak.”
   I was in no condition to argue.
   “Do you come here every day?” Zorana asked.
   “I guess,” I eventually managed.
   “Good,” Zoltan said. “Every day, very good.”
   “Yeah,” I said. “Sure, yeah, sure. I should, I should go shower, work, lots of work to do, very busy.”
   “Tonight, you would like to come for dinner with us?” Zorana asked. “We would like to talk to you, practice English, ask questions.”
   “Uh…” I looked from one to the other, slightly unnerved by the invitation. It was like being asked out by Special Forces troops. But I was too dazed to come up with a polite out, and I couldn’t refuse and insult them. “Sure.”
   “Excellent. We will come and find you,” she said.
   “Great. I should, yeah, shower. See you, uh, tonight.”
   When we arrived at one of the vaguely Italian beachfront restaurants, the proprietor scurried out and all but kowtowed to Zoltan and Zorana. He was visibly nervous as he took our order. We decided on pizza.
   “We want to know about California,” Zorana said, as three draft beers arrived.
   “Like what?”
   “Everything. We go to live there, you understand.”
   “Really?”
   “Yes,” Zorana said. “There is nothing for us in Serbia any more.”
   “Serbia is weak,” Zoltan said bitterly. “Our people are weak. No strength. No pride. No, how you say?” He barked a word in Serbian.
   “Brotherhood,” Zorana said sadly. “Serbia has forgotten its history and brotherhood. Our people have betrayed their own brothers and sisters. The traitors, the falsehearted, they have taken over. We fought for Serbia, Zoltan and I. We bled for Serbia. Many like us died for Serbia. Now they have driven us away, they have destroyed our country, sold our home, they kneel and lick the boots of England and France for a few euros like beggars on the street.” Her face wrinkled like she wanted to spit something foul onto the table.
   “America took Kosovo from us,” Zoltan said. “Kosovo, home of Serbian heart. Now we must go make home in America.”
   They exchanged a long, sorrowful look, as if they were discussing the painful demise of a close family member. I wished I was somewhere else.
   “So,” Zorana said. “California. We have money, but we need to know everything else. Where to live, how to move around, where to go if we need a doctor, how to stop the police from finding us. Remember we will be illegal.”
   “Not really.”
   They looked at each other. “That is what Sinisa says,” Zoltan said cautiously.
   “Well, technically, yes, but nobody talks about illegal immigrants there. There’s too many of them, there’s at least a couple of million Mexicans who snuck over the border to work there, the state’s whole economy would collapse without them. Calling them illegal is considered, well, insensitive. We call them undocumented. I don’t know much about living undocumented, but, you know, two million poor Mexicans do it, a white couple with money like you, I don’t think it’ll be that hard.”
   They nodded, pleased. The pizza arrived. As we ate I began to explain life in California to them. What a Social Security number was and how not having it was going to make their lives difficult. How in order to have a good life anywhere but San Francisco you had to have a car, but the undocumented couldn’t get driver’s licenses. The congested web of American health care that I didn’t fully understand myself, but which, contrary to what many Europeans believed, at least guaranteed that if you walked into an emergency room you would be cared for, although they would try to bill you later. How much rent would cost – I suggested that they sublet from someone else for cash. The contempt with which American banks treated retail customers and how hard it would be for them to get an account without a legal identity. They listened raptly and Zorana even made some notes.
   “Tell us about the police,” Zoltan said.
   “The police?”
   “We know some things from television, but…is hard to say.”
   “We have many questions,” Zorana added. “When are they allowed to arrest you? When can they come and search your house?”
   I answered as best I could, although my knowledge of the American justice system stemmed mostly from watching
Law & Order
. They were weirdly interested in the niceties of warrants and jurisdictions.
   “You have not been police trouble, in America?” Zoltan asked.
   “No,” I said. “Remember, I’m not American, if I got convicted they’d send me back to Canada and not let me back into America ever again.”
   “You have never been arrested?” Zorana asked.
   I shook my head, then, remembering Sinisa’s warning, clarified “No.”
   “We worry about American police,” Zorana said. “Sinisa says they are not like here, you cannot pay them to not go to jail.”
   “That’s true,” I said. Maybe not 100% always true, but I didn’t want to drown them in subtle distinctions.
   “If we go to America, and there is trouble,” Zorana said, “you will help us?”
   After a moment I said, “Sure.” I couldn’t very well say no. And besides, I kind of meant it. I was still nowhere near comfortable around Zoltan and Zorana, but they appeared to be on my team, at least at the moment. There was obviously a lot being kept from me. I wasn’t clear on why they were abandoning their much-loved Serbia and jettisoning their lives to move to America. But the fact they were doing so at all made me sympathize with them a little. I knew it was no easy thing, leaving your home, trying to find and make a new one.
   “Thank you,” Zoltan said, reaching over and clapping his hand on my shoulder hard enough that my chair rocked back and forth a little.
   “Tell us, Paul,” Zorana said. “If a friend of yours, a good friend, asked you to break an American law for them, for an important reason, would you do it?”
   “Well,” I said cautiously, “it would depend on the friend. And the reason.”
   “Suppose there is woman like Saskia,” Zoltan said. “Suppose she need safe San Francisco home. You help this woman?”
   “Or suppose your friend gives you a,” Zorana made a square shape with her hands and frowned a moment before finding the right word, “a box, and asks you to take it to their friend in Los Angeles.”
   Subtle, they weren’t. I considered my options. I didn’t want to endanger our newfound rapport. But I didn’t want to promise them they could start using my apartment as a safe house, and me as a courier, if and when I made it back to San Francisco. I already wished I had never made my magnanimous offer.
   “It would have to be a very good friend,” I said.
   “You are loyal to your friends, yes?” Zorana asked.
   “Very,” I said.
   “Good,” Zoltan said. “Is good. Loyal is very important.”
   I nodded, hoping they didn’t think I was agreeing to anything more than that sentiment, hoping they weren’t going to pursue this subject any further.
   “Maybe we go now,” Zorana said to my relief. “We talk like this again, yes?”
  
I’d really rather not
, I didn’t say. “If you like.”
   “You good man, Paul,” Zoltan said, giving me another of his bone-rattling back-claps. I tried not to wince. “You good man. I think we become good friends.”
* * *
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   Re: the albanian times
Date:      13 Apr 2003 02:11 GMT
Is there anything you need or want over there? DHL and FedEx deliver to Albania. It’s a bit expensive but they say they can get stuff there in 72 hours.
Your apology is received and understood. I think maybe we should postpone the relationship part of this conversation for now, what do you think? We’ve both got too much to worry about in the next month to start brooding about what might happen after that. My mother always said that if you took care of the present the future would take care of itself. Of course look what happened to her.
Shit. I’m just babbling. I’m scared, Paul. I stay up late every night and wake up every morning worried that something’s happened to you two.
Maybe I should just start drinking and doing crack, hold up convenience stores, that sort of thing, you know, unwind a bit. :)
I miss you. I can’t wait to see you. I want you home. Be safe. Write every day.
Talena
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   Re: daily update
Date:      12 Apr 2003 17:47 GMT
Brain hurts. Poor brain, so tired, all its crenellations mashed flat by evil Apache Web Server archenemy.
Work going well. Saskia a little bored but learning English amazingly fast, and excited to come to SF. I still have no idea how exactly we’re going to get there.
Thanks for the offer, but actually we’re pretty well-supplied with stuff. This place isn’t as boonie-remote as all that.
I hear what you’re saying about now and the future. Worry about the future when we know there is one, sure, okay, that sounds right. Sorry, I’d be more eloquent, but brain is dead.
Love,
Paul

When I was twenty-one years old, on the verge of graduating from university, infected by a feverish wanderlust that eight years later I still hadn’t fully recovered from, I made a list of cities where I would like to live for a month. The thriving metropolis of Vlore, Albania, was nowhere to be found. In fact I am willing to bet that it has never been found on any such list ever.
   But I almost liked it. Sure, it was a poor and ugly town, decorated with Stalinist concrete architecture, old groaning vehicles spewing diesel fumes and dark clouds of smoke, streets of cracked and potholed tarmac, or uneven hard-packed dirt strewn with filth and broken glass. During Albania’s several recent periods of violent instability Vlore had been openly ruled by warlord gangs, and it still had a certain Wild West feel. But once I got used to it, Vlore really wasn’t so bad. I liked walking down the main drag at sunset, a wide flat road bustling and thriving with people, small businesses, cafes, pasticeris, and a half-dozen banks. The pasticeris, ice-cream stalls, sold good Italian gelato for twenty leke or approximately fifteen cents a cone. The people dressed sharply given that they couldn’t afford much, and although it was theoretically a conservative Muslim country all the younger women seemed to have adopted the standard Balkan fashion of skimpy and two sizes too small. Every evening, the town’s teenagers and twentysomethings flooded onto the main street; the men stood around in small packs, sipping beer and smoking cigarettes, and the women paraded up and down the street, occasionally deigning to stop and flirt with the men.
   Vlore’s youth seemed almost a different species from the middle-aged and old people who watched indulgently; the elders tended to be thick, lumpy, wrinkled, and unattractive. I supposed Albania’s forty years of hardscrabble Communism had been tough on all its inhabitants. Thankfully capitalism had worked its usual tawdry magic. Booze, cigarettes, and Internet cafes were all cheap and addictively popular, satellite TV dishes had sprouted like mushrooms from the city’s squalid apartment complexes, bright new Coke and Marlboro signs and posters were everywhere, and a counterfeit Discman and a sheaf of pirated CDs cost me all of forty euros.
   I fell into a comfortable routine. Twelve hours of work a day, every day. Not that I kept regular hours. Sometimes I needed a break, and fresh air, so I beat up on the bags in the boxing gym, or walked up and down the hill on which Sinisa’s private enclave perched, or hitched a ride down to Vlore and wandered for half an hour, letting my subconscious pick at whatever coding problem was bothering me. Lots of smoke breaks with Arwin, occasional drinks and life-in-America lectures with Zoltan and Zorana, nightly English lessons with Saskia.
   I was actually happy. I had escaped the miserable rut that had been my life for a year, and I was, at least to a first approximation, living a strange and exciting adventure. If you squinted at me the right way, I was a professional hacker on the run from lethal enemies, living in a criminal overlord’s Albanian compound, helping him with his dastardly plans in exchange for the rescue of an innocent imperilled woman. For the first time in a year I felt good about myself. I felt tough, confident, debonair. I felt like the kind of man Talena might want, and even if she didn’t, like the kind of man who might be able to handle that rejection. It became possible to imagine a future without her.
   Of course it wasn’t really an adventure, I told myself, because adventure meant danger, and once I grew accustomed to the routine, my life in Sinisa’s compound seemed placid, safe, downright ordinary. It’s amazing what you can get used to. For three weeks my Albanian existence felt like little more than a working holiday, a lucrative and entertaining pause before my return to the real world.
* * *
   One day Sinisa unexpectedly came to our office and took me out for a walk, telling me he wanted to show me an empire. The Roman Empire, to be exact. In the foothills south of the city, about midway between the town proper and Sinisa’s mansion, there nestled an ancient Roman ampitheatre with room for several thousand, its terraced seats cracked and worn, two thousand years old but still the most impressive structure in Vlore. It took us about twenty minutes to walk there.
   “When I first came here, all this was overgrown,” Sinisa said, leading me to the center of the ampitheatre, the stage. He was dressed down, for once, in a gray shirt, black slacks and sport coat, and hiking boots. “I had it cleared. The Albanians, none of them understood why. They thought it was nothing more than old stones.”
   I nodded.
   “What do you think?” he asked. “What does this say to you?”
   I looked around at the haunting, silent reminder that this forgotten backwater nation had once been an integral part of the Roman Empire, civilization’s apotheosis. Only a handful of Hoxha’s mushrooms indicated that we were still in the 21st century. I imagined the stone terraces full of thousands of theatregoers in bright togas, waiting to see a few Christians fed to the lions.
   “Ozymandias,” I said.
   “Yes,” Sinisa said, pleased. “Every empire crumbles. Every man dies. In the end we are all forgotten. Our lives are like sparks from a fire, gone in a heartbeat. All we can do is burn as brightly as possible. Tell me something, Mister Wood. I am a rich man. I have enough money for all the rest of my life. And the list of those who would like me dead is long. Why do you think I do not retire to Amsterdam, to safety?”
   I resigned myself to being the straight man in this Socratic dialogue. “Because you think what you do is important?”
   “That is part of it,” Sinisa said. “Until the world sees sense and throws open its borders, someone must do what I do, operate the escape valve for those who need it. But more than that, it is because to me, a comfortable life is no life at all. Have you ever seen war?”
   “Not really,” I said, a little taken aback.
   “When I came here from Holland, as a peacekeeper, I was young, troubled, without direction. I drank too much. I took drugs. Do you know when that changed? The first time I was shot at, in Srebrenica. The intensity of it. It changed me on the spot. Every breath, every motion, was an event, because I knew it might be my last. Most people in Holland, all the rich Western nations, they go decades without living as intensely as I did in those few seconds.”
   “After the war, Holland seemed a country of shadows. Meaningless. Like living without colour. I decided then that I would not live half a life. I would not follow the laws that gray old men write because they are afraid. You have no place in this world, not truly, unless you have fought for it. A home is not a home unless you have conquered it. You have done nothing with your life unless you have built an empire from dust.” He waved at the amphitheatre. “One day your empire will crumble back to dust. One day it will be forgotten. One day you will die. That is not important. It is the fighting and the building that matters. Your heartbeat spark of life must burn brightly, but not for its own sake, you must forge something with that fire. That is why I do what I do. Do you understand me?”
   “Yes,” I said. And it was true. I wasn’t a war junkie, I had no intention of building a criminal empire, but I understood in my bones what he was saying. The need to live as intensely as possible – I felt that too, though my version was much more muted than his, I got my kicks from travel rather than war. But travel for its own sake, aimless wandering and spectating, was ultimately unsatisfying. Eventually you had to do something constructive with your life. I had always assumed that it was one or the other, live intensely or be constructive. It had never occurred to me that you might combine the two. Empire-building, he called it. I had to admit the notion sounded tempting.
   “Good,” Sinisa said. “Very few of those who serve me understand me. Zoltan and Zorana, they are my friends, they are loyal until death, but they do not think like you and I do.”
   “What about those other guys? My neighbours?” I asked, meaning the zombies. “Do they understand?”
   “They are not my friends,” he said. “Business associates. And no, they do not.” He paused. “Perhaps some of them do. But theirs was a different kind of empire.”
   I looked at him, waiting for a less cryptic explanation, but it did not come.
   “What was Srebrenica like?” I asked. I had wanted to ask him since I learned he had been there. The most terrible event of Bosnia’s terrible civil war, and he had witnessed it.
   “What was it like?” Sinisa thought the question over. “It was difficult,” he said. “Especially at the beginning. I understand that now it seems like it was evil Serbs against helpless Muslims, but in fact when the Serb advance began, we – the Dutch, I mean, the so-called peacekeepers – we were more worried about the Muslims. They threatened to murder us if we retreated from even a metre of their land, never mind the military realities. It was the Muslims who killed a Dutch soldier on the first day of the advance.”
   “From a military perspective it was hopeless. The Serbs did not have many men, but they had tanks and artillery. Our only real threat was air strikes, and once it became clear that the UN had no intention of bombing anyone, there was nothing we could do to stop them. So the Serbs advanced and the Muslims fled. Some of them fled to the UN base outside of town, but we did not allow them in. Thousands of them, desperate, weeping, old men who could barely walk, mothers carrying babies, and we watched the Serbs take them away. Oh, we made some pretense of ensuring that the trucks were going to Muslim territory, but it was only a pretense. The Muslims who gave up all hope in the UN at least had a chance. A very small chance. They had to cross eighty kilometres of fields, with Serb ambushes and patrols waiting for them at every step, but better some chance than none.”
   “In the end, all the men who got on those trucks, except the very old and very young, and all the men who were captured in those fields, they were taken to schools, or stadiums, or warehouses, and then in groups of fifteen or twenty they were taken outside, shot, and buried with bulldozers. Seven thousand dead.” Sinisa shrugged. “We did not know this then. We heard rumours, we knew something terrible was happening, but we saw no actual evidence, the Serbs hid that very well. They were very efficient, very organized.”
   “You must understand, though, that the only exceptional thing about Srebrenica was the number of the dead. Every side did the same thing, Serbs and Croats and Muslims, throughout the war. In some ways Srebrenica was very tame. The cruelty of that war was amazing.”
   I knew that already, from Talena’s stories. When we had first started dating, I started to do some reading about the Bosnian civil war, to learn more about where Talena had come from. I had soon stopped. It was too awful and depressing. I remembered pictures of thousands of emaciated human-stick-figure men penned behind barbed wire in concentration camps, descriptions of mass graves into which the remains of entire slaughtered villages had been bulldozed, nightmarish first-person stories written by women who had been taken by gunmen and tortured and gang-raped for weeks, tales of bodies that rotted on the streets of Sarajevo for weeks because no one dared to venture into the open to collect them for fear of falling victim to a sniper themselves. Organized campaigns of terror and torture and genocide, ordered and orchestrated by military and civilian commanders.
   “The men and women who fought that war,” Sinisa said, “the ones they call war criminals now, by the end they were entirely without moral limits, capable of anything, any kind of inhumanity. Not because they were inhuman. Because they had been shaped by the inhumanity around them. The UN wants to find them and put them on trial, as if the war was their fault, but the truth is it was they who were created by the war.”
   He fell silent for a moment. I looked around at the amphitheatre and wondered if seven thousand men would fit in its terraces. Probably not.
   “Enough,” Sinisa said. “We have work to do, you and I.”
   I followed him back to the mansion, wondering whether I admired him or thought he was crazy. Both, I decided. Sinisa’s methods were questionable, and his associates were scary, what he was doing still seemed like a Good Thing. I thought of Zoltan and Zorana’s unsubtle hints that maybe after I went back to America, I could continue to help Sinisa’s smuggling empire, courier packages, provide advice and the occasional bed for a night or two. I wondered if maybe I should. There was probably a lot I could do for Sinisa in America without ever breaking the law. My instinct was to disassociate myself from him as soon as humanly possible – don’t get involved, again – but if I believed that what Sinisa was doing was good, shouldn’t I stay involved? Shouldn’t I do what I could to help him? My gut was telling me no, but I was no longer sure I trusted my gut.
* * *
   “Saskia! Good news! I got you an English newspaper.” I waved the three-day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune proudly. “Sinisa brought it back from Tirana.”
   “Oh, good!” Saskia exclaimed. “Excellent! Wonderful! Fantastic! Super!”
   Both of us laughed at her imitation of a thesaurus. In only two weeks, Saskia’s English had gone from infantile to conversational, a fairly amazing accomplishment. She had exhausted the thick ESL book Talena had bought her, and now she wanted new material, like the Herald Trib.
   Saskia scanned the paper eagerly before folding it and putting it away. She looked very different since she had gotten her hair cut boy-short, even smaller, but somehow also stronger, wiry. I supposed cutting her hair was a symbolic way of severing ties with the past, kind of Samson in reverse.
   “I will read this tomorrow,” she said. “How was your work today?” A shadow of worry crept into her expression. “You will finish in time?”
   “I will finish in time,” I assured her. My coding skills, like her English, had returned with a vengeance, and I worked more efficiently with every passing day. “What did you do today?”
   “I went out. Zorana gave me a ride to the city. I wanted to go out again, I asked the woman across the street, but she said no. Her car was empty, but she said no, and she looked at me like…I do not know. I do not like her at all.”
   I made a sympathetic noise. It wasn’t the first time one of the zombies had given her the cold shoulder. Once we had gone for a walk at night, and the couple across the street had been sitting outside smoking. We had waved and Saskia had called out hello. They had scowled at us, stubbed out their cigarettes, pointedly turned their backs and gone into their house.