Pretty Birds (25 page)

“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.