Pretty Birds Read online

  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, a
nd 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.”

  25.

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks, three more people were shot to death in places that had been assumed to be inaccessible to snipers.

  A man was found early one morning, splayed out beside the parking spots in the enclosed courtyard of the Presidency Building on Marshal Tito Boulevard. He lay face down over a scattering of crushed plastic water bottles, a single 7.62 X 39-millimeter bullet lodged in his right shoulder blade, no identification in his pockets, and a face that no one professed to recognize.

  “A drifter, a squatter, a pain in the ass,” said Tedic. “But dead he is a marker for dangerous territory.”

  A Bosnian captain at the scene who had once competed in the biathlon with Coach Dino Cosovic found the shot that felled the man highly improbable. “Not unless they have a balloon they can use to hover above us,” he said, pointing to the severe downward trajectory of the bullet. The captain told Tedic that the man must have been shot a block away, on an open section of Marshal Tito Boulevard, and had staggered into the courtyard for help; or just to die.

  But no one on duty in the basement of the building recalled hearing a cry or shout. Perhaps they were merely loath to reveal that they had not dashed out of their brick citadel to help a wounded man. Tedic found the theory suspect, in any case. There was no trail of blood leading to the man’s body. And, as Molly pointed out, no blood had trickled down from the wound, as would have been the case if the man had staggered upright for a block. The man’s slacks were inescapably filthy—stretchy, maroon nylon Tito-era trousers—but there were no fresh tears or abrasions along the knees to suggest that he had crawled before collapsing atop the clutter of squashed bottles.

  “If he had crawled,” said Molly, “the shooter would have finished him off back in the street.”

  “Why waste a bullet on a man who’s bleeding to death?” asked Tedic.

  “Compassion,” Molly said with grim humor. “They’ve got bullets enough to be generous.”

  Tedic bent over the dead man’s body, pinching folds of the shiny maroon fabric in his fingers and stretching it out the way a child might tug on a rubber band. “Imagine,” he said, “meeting your Maker wearing”—and here Tedic pulled on the slacks in comic disdain—“these circus pants. Just a lucky shot?” he asked after a pause.

  “Fluky. If we’re lucky,” said Molly, “I’d say someone got up somewhere and arced one lonely, lovely round exactly right.”

  THE VERY NEXT day, a woman pushing her child in a stroller toward a water line behind the barrier of gutted trucks and buses on Sutjeska Street was shot in the top of the head. She fell forward—Allah be praised, said the Home Minister—onto the stroller and thus protected her two-year-old son.

  The citizens standing in line had believed they were sheltered behind the barrier. The woman gasped and blood sputtered out of her mouth while her son screamed. People rolled into gutters and under the bus, a chorus of screams mingling with the scraping and clattering of empty water bottles. The boy shrieked; his mother bled. Voices began to call out from gutters and behind walls.

  “We must help her!”

  “She’s dead!”

  “How do you kn
ow, Dr. Without Borders?”

  “She’s not breathing! That’s a hint!”

  “Her child is screaming!”

  “His mother is dead and he’s scared. He’ll bloody scream for the rest of his life!”

  “We should at least lift her body off him.”

  “Her body shields her child. She wouldn’t want to be moved. It’s not worth the risk.”

  “Whoever you are, you’re a selfish pig!”

  “Run out yourself! We’ll bury you with your medal for stupidity!”

  It was almost ten minutes before a brewery truck bearing Tedic could pull up to the scene and take the dead mother into their load. She was dark-haired and thin-boned, and felt as light as a sack of dry leaves when Tedic took her shoulders and Mel lifted her feet to place her in the truck. Tedic himself picked up the frightened brown-headed boy, his small legs churning, and tucked him into the arms of a policeman. Tedic then made a point of pacing around the splatter of blood surrounding the empty stroller, while people cautiously began to creep out of their burrows along the street.

  “Brave and noble Sarajevans,” he intoned. “I hear about you all on the BBC. I must say, you don’t look the way you have been described.”

  But by the time Tedic reported to the Home Minister in the basement of the Presidency Building, his sarcasm was directed at the deceased. “What is a mother doing with her child out on that kind of street, anyway?” he asked.

  “Going for water, like everyone else,” answered the Home Minister. “There were two empty bottles alongside the boy.”

  “So!” said Tedic. “If she had left the boy behind, she might have carried back more water.”

  “Tedic, it is surely best for the world that you have no children,” the Home Minister said with a weary shake of his head. “Claimed and acknowledged, in any case. Best for you. Certainly best for the children. Anyone with even a few nieces and nephews will tell you that you can’t leave a child cooped up all the time, never breathing fresh air.”