The Threat

She was small-boned and fine-featured, with black shining hair that fell in ringlets. Pale lipstick, and kohl pencilled around the eyes. A worn brown leather jacket, open just enough to show a zip-up blouse the color of plums. Black jeans. She and the mustached, ponytailed guy with her watched Dan approach. They were smoking. A bottle of clear fluid glowed in the candlelight. “Hi,” Dan said. “Speak English?”

After a minute the guy with the ponytail said, “Some.” He didn’t sound welcoming.

Dan pulled out a chair. He perched on the first two inches, to show he didn’t plan to stay if they didn’t want him. After a moment the woman pushed the bottle his way. “You look sober,” she said. “Not a good way to see a war. Rakija. Smuggled in from Bradina.”

“No thanks. They tell me you might want to go to Srebrenica.” He pronounced it Sebreneetsa too.

She didn’t blink. Obviously used to strangers coming up and starting provocative conversations. “Who the hell are you?”

He didn’t think it was a good idea to try to cross the Serb lines with a U.S. military ID in his wallet. “I work for a paper in Grand Centre, Saskatchewan.”

“Where the heel eez ‘Saskatchewan’?” said Ponytail.

“Canada. Western provinces.”

The girl said, “What paper?”

He’d been in Grand Centre but didn’t remember the name of the paper. But probably she didn’t either. “The Record. How about you?”

“I work independent. Radio networks, mostly. Jovan here, Jovica, he sells pictures to whoever’s buying. Srebrenica? That’d take serious money. And a car.”

“I have a little cash.” Four thousand dollars, to be exact, which Jonah Freed had counted out, and made him sign for, before he left the Eighteen Acres.

“How much is a little?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

“We’d need three.”

“I guess I could get my hands on another thousand.”

“Canadian?”

“No, U.S.,” he said. She smiled, and he realized she’d just blown away his little facade.

“I won’t ask who you really are. Gavorite li srpskohrvatski?”

“Is that Bosnian?”

“You really aren’t going to blend in.” She looked him up and down. “Though the stubble helps. But maybe that’ll be okay. Maybe that’ll even be better.”

“So you’re going to blend in with the other side? As you put it?”

“At least convince them we’re not Muslim.”

“You speak Bosnian?”

“Da, gavorim. And it’s not ‘Bosnian,’ it’s Serbo-Croatian. My mother was from Vlasenica.”

“Which is where?”

“Not too far from Srebrenica. As it happens. We had Muslim neighbors. Serb neighbors.”

“So you’re a Croat?” Dan asked her.

“Yes. But I can pass. And Jovo here, he really is a Serb. One of the good ones. So we should be okay. If we don’t run into the wrong people. Keep Jovo company while I go talk to somebody.”

Dan looked at the guy again — she pronounced his name Yoh-vo — wondering just what kind of war it was, when not even the participants could tell enemy from friend.

“We’ve got a ticket through the tunnel,” she said when she came back. “But that’s the easy part. Getting through the mountains, that’ll be hard.”

“All we can do is try,” Dan told her.

“You sure you want to do this?” she said, twisting a lock of hair so dark it was blue-black, looking straight at him. “They kill strangers here. Journalists too. The JNA kills them, the Muslims kill them, the Chetniks kill them. Not to mention we could drive over a mine. I don’t know your business in Srebrenica. And I don’t want to. But it’d be smarter for all three of us to just stay here and finish getting drunk.”

“That’s not how you get the story,” Dan said.

She grinned, not too enthusiastically. “That’s right. That’s not how you get the story.” She stuck out her hand suddenly. It was small and very, very warm. “Zlata Kovacevic.”

* * *

He stopped in the basement of the house, at the dark entrance that opened like a hatchway to a lightless engine room. Tasting fear like stale crackers. On the way here, trotting across an intersection, someone had taken a shot at him. With a heavy weapon, a fifty-caliber at least, that had whiplashed past his head and blown chunks of brick and mortar off a wall.

He’d ducked and kept going, suddenly a lot more alert. But now, crouching, watching his breath puff out white in the cold air blowing from somewhere ahead, he felt even more vulnerable.

Past that door, he was on his own space walk. Beyond the protection of the military, his orders, beyond what Sebold or Gelzinis or Clayton probably expected him to do. Into a Heart of Darkness where no law prevailed. He hesitated, thinking this probably wasn’t smart. Then thought, Fuck it. What did he have to go back to anyway? Without Blair?

He ducked his head and went in.