CHAPTER 40
Mari? lifted his gaze to the dark corner of the living room where he had exiled his son. “Aleksandar.”
The lad approached, rifle in hand, pointed downward.
“Pull the shirt off Dragoslav. Use your drinking water to bathe the baby’s body. Clean him well, then wrap him in the shirt—neatly. Respectfully. Say some prayers. This child was one of ours.”
Aleksandar nodded, but the look of distaste on his face said he’d rather do anything but.
Mari? grasped his son’s elbow on the way past. “Get the feel for the dead,” he said. “And while you handle them, give some thought to how often you want to be part of this. Discipline protects your life, the life of the men in your unit—and the lives of the innocents.”
The boy nodded somberly. “Da, Tata.”
Mari? turned to his men. “Strip Dragoslav of his uniform. Take his weapons—everything that could be useful.”
“What should we do with the body?”
“Toss him off the balcony into the rubbish heap below. Nobody will miss him.”
Mari? walked to the back of the apartment, slowed briefly to check the bathroom and the kitchen, then paused at the nursery-room door. He methodically scanned the room with his flashlight.
Brenna heard Squeak’s mewl, Grub’s scratchy cry, Heckle and Jeckle’s whimpers. She dropped her face in her hands in relief.
Next, Mari? disappeared into the bedroom, returned, and dropped Grace’s jacket on the floor beside Brenna. “She is shaking from the cold. You may place this over her.”
She hesitated. Two guards stood over her. Mari? ordered them to stand at the entrance and shoot her if she tried to escape.
She grabbed Grace’s jacket and scrambled over to her.
She was lying on her back.
Brenna’s heart tumbled with dread. She didn’t see Grace’s chest rising. She bent over her. Resting one palm on her chest, hoping to feel it expand, she dug in her neck with her other hand, seeking a pulse. Her face was swollen, nose shoved to one side, running with blood.
Come on. Breathe. She felt a pulse.
Grace’s chest rose, shallow. She was still alive!
Brenna sagged forward, choking down a sob of relief, ordering herself to remain silent.
If she cried, Mari? might take Grace away from her.
Maybe draw his pistol and shoot her outright.
She placed her lips on Grace’s ear and whispered so only she could hear.
“I’m here,” she murmured, her voice and eyes and nose wet with the tears she didn’t dare shed.
She lowered her face and rested her cheek against hers, cupping her sticky face with her hands. “You’re not alone.”
Her skin was cool. Brenna sat up, chafing Grace’s chest and belly and arms, stimulating circulation, warming her.
Despite the stimulus, she remained unconscious.
The brain floated in fluid that helped cushion it from injury.
But with severe enough a blow, it would swell.
The skull was a closed vault, so there was little room for the brain to expand.
And that scenario, without medical intervention, could be catastrophic.
She gently palpated the back of Grace’s head, feeling for indentations or fractures. She found a lump and felt blood.
She set Grace’s head down carefully, lifted her nearest arm across her chest, then picked up her far knee and bent it.
Pulling it toward herself, she rolled her onto her side, placing her in the recovery position.
If she vomited, she wouldn’t choke on it.
It also minimized body contact with the cold floor, which would help fight hypothermia.
She shook out her jacket and draped it over her head and shoulders to conserve the heat over her critical organs, and started chafing her back, warming her as much as she could with just her hands. It was all she could do.
Mari? studied her intently, his brows drawn together.
“Brenna Rease,” he said. “You are truly remarkable.”
Her hand froze under Grace’s jacket.
He knows who I am. She hadn’t said two words aloud since he’d entered the room. Just bebe, spoken in Kav?ak. She hadn’t knowingly divulged anything about herself or Grace. Her camera wasn’t in the apartment, and her press ID and travel papers were in her pocket.
She recalled, now, that Mari? had spoken to her in English. You are as intelligent and courageous as I suspected. He knew all along, and she’d been too fragmented to notice.
He waited, no doubt registering her surprise.
“She needs a doctor,” Brenna said. Not that Mari? was about to drop everything and drive them all over to Luc’s infirmary at the airport.
Mari? pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, shook one loose, and offered it to her. When she didn’t respond, he shrugged, and stuck it between his lips. He struck a match, lit the tobacco, and inhaled. He gave the match a shake, and used it to point at Grace. “You love her.”
She lifted a shoulder.
“The two of you in a cold apartment with your shirts scarcely buttoned? You’re lovers.”
A shiver ran through her.
“I could help her.”
The statement was bait.
“Sure,” she said, her eyes and voice both level. “Maybe you have a CAT Scan in the truck.”
Mari? chuckled and flicked the dead match across the floor. “You are so much your father’s daughter. Any other woman would be begging by now.”
“You hate the sound of crying.”
He studied the glowing point of the cigarette. “You don’t dare hope, do you? Not even for your lover.”
Especially not for her.
He laughed, a short derisive sound with no mirth. “You have been here too long. You do not believe in the goodness of man.”
“What do you want, Captain Mari??”
He looked at her with surprise. He was the interrogator, not her. But he answered: “A few minutes with the woman who filmed ?avi? at the market?”
What was he doing? Collecting anecdotes for when he handed her over to the General?
Christ, was there a bounty on her head? She appraised him, decided he wasn’t after money.
He was a law unto himself. Hadn’t he just served as Dragoslav’s judge, jury, and executioner?
Slaying Dragoslav wasn’t the act of a man tied to a chain of command.
He was a rogue, an armed lunatic on the loose.
She tested her hypothesis. “So what do you think? Did I capture your guy in a good light?”
Mari? spat. “?avi? is a barbarian. He has dragged my city into the fourteenth century. He has reduced our lives to ethnic and identity politics.”
“Your city? You’re from Kav?ak?”
He nodded. “Born two kilometers from here.”
“But you’re shelling it. Attacking your own people. Starving them.”
He sucked in smoke, spoke as he released it. “I fire on my own cousins, on my childhood friends. The apex of absurdity in an absurd war.”
“Why aren’t you fighting the siege, instead of being part of it?”
As long as he was talking, he wasn’t shooting.
Maybe she could establish a connection with him and persuade him to let Grace and the children go.
She herself would never be released. As the daughter of the U.S. Special Envoy, her political value was too high.
The idea of rescuing Grace and the children seemed crazy.
But if Mari? meant to execute them, wouldn’t he have done it by now?
Didn’t he have a neighborhood to occupy?
She chided herself for her spurt of hope.
Maybe Mari? was just relishing the preamble to his unique judicial process.
He squatted, leaning against the near wall.
“Kav?ak is a diverse city—but it is also the seat of Fundamentalist power. They wish to eradicate us. They tried, you know, after World War II. Hundreds of thousands of us were exterminated. Our bodies floated down the river. They seek a totalitarian, clerical rule.
Have you read the city president’s book? He seeks a religious empire.”
She had read the book, and was familiar with the inflammatory passages, but she wanted to hear what Mari? had to say. Know thy captor.
“The Fundamentalists have made Nationalists out to be the villains. First, they hold a referendum—”
“—which your community boycotted—”
He waved his cigarette dismissively. “The referendum was not a democratic act. Inside the city of Kav?ak, we were a minority, outnumbered three-to-two. Of course a vote would come back with the results they desired. The international community recognized the president’s government,
ignoring the ethnic minority inside the city. So we took the militia, moved into the mountains, and became Nationalists. We have to defend ourselves, defend our open society against clerical fascism.”
And just like that, the so-called aggressor was redefined as the victim.
Mari?, however, was at least partly right. Balkans carried history like a bag of grudges. The past was a labyrinthine path of grievance and counter-grievance. All the factions had blood on their hands.
She glanced at Grace. Each minute that passed placed her at greater risk.
“The Separatist-Fundamentalist coalition forbids civilians to leave the city,” Mari? went on.
“They loot their neighbors. They shell the airport to close the airlift and drive up the prices of black market goods. They set up movable artillery at the hospital, fire at us, then conceal themselves. When we fire back, we are blamed for targeting civilians.”
Fantastic as his arguments might sound, they were not entirely improbable, either. Perfidy knew no bounds.
“I am a man without a country, forced to take sides, when such a choice was never necessary. The people in my city were living in peace before ?avi? and the city president came with their oratory and separated us like species of animals. All to feed their own desire for power.”
Mari? was a complex and tormented man, she realized, an intellectual trying to make sense of chaos.
“And so I ask: What is the truth?”
Truth, she had learned during her thirty months in Kav?ak—and during her time in Israel—did not raise a clean flag and announce its whereabouts.
It was hidden, desecrated, twisted, transformed as it moved from hand to hand.
“Truth is rooted in a point of view,” she answered. “Everyone claims they own it.”
Mari? dragged pensively on his cigarette.
She chafed Grace’s hands. She felt rage flaring up, scraping at a wild chemistry in her body. HELP HER! she wanted to scream. FUCK THE TRUTH! THERE’S NO SUCH THING!
But Mari? couldn’t abide emotion. He’d seen too much of it.
He was as desperate for rational answers as Grace was for medical care.
What good is a man who doesn’t think? he had asked his son.
He needed meaning. He needed to understand how his world had come to this, why he was firing on his friends and family, how he came to be sitting in the ruins of another man’s home with a gun in his belt.
And for some insane reason, he thought she could provide answers.
Her, of all people, who after thirty months of living under siege in Kav?ak, had unconsciously begun to see the Nationalists as the enemy, the ‘other’.
With a jolt, she realized that she and Mari? both wanted the same thing: enlightenment.
They were adrift, seeking some magical truth that explained everything.
All that they had been taught about morality—about good and evil, about justice and humanity, and the value of the individual—had crumbled under the pressure of war.
They were going through the motions, clinging to survival, yielding to the expedience of unfolding events, and trudging on.
The two of them had become deranged in their quest to understand the incomprehensible.
Mari?’s eyes shifted from her to Grace. “You take no pictures outside of Kav?ak.”
“I picked a territory, not sides.”
“What I did, shooting Dragoslav. You saw my intention, but you did not cry out. You did not object.”
A dark undertow dragged through her. “He shot Mr. Fierce.”
“Mr. Fierce?”
“The little boy.” She nodded at Grace. “Grace gave him the name. She gave all the children names. She’s a good woman. Kind. Gentle.”
“Not like Kav?aks?”
She shrugged. “She hasn’t been here long enough. Given enough time, push her hard enough… she could be lost, too. Let her go, Mari?. Let her take the children. She’ll take care of them, I promise you. I know she will.”
Mari? ignored her, his thoughts still elsewhere. “You did not warn Dragoslav. You wanted revenge.”
The undertow pulled her under. “Yes,” she whispered. “I wanted revenge.”
“So. You understand.”
She hung her head. Yes, goddammit, I understand.
Mari? stood up. “Leave, then. Take the woman.” He barked an order for his men to stand down and let her pass.
Brenna sobbed, one deep clutch of emotion. Could it be? Just like that? A reprieve? Grace, safe. And her, too? “The children,” she said. “Let me take the children, too.”
“No. They are Kav?aks. Their fate is ours.”
“They won’t survive.”
His face closed, dark and fearsome. His hands went to his belt. “This city is six hundred years old.”
“I’ll get them foster parents, Kav?aks living abroad. They can come back when this is over.”
“What kind of Kav?ak abandons his city?”
She circled herself with her arms and rocked forward. The children. Squeak. She couldn’t leave them. “Keep me, if you want a hostage.”
“Your argument falls apart. I already have hostages—a whole city full.”
“My life for the children’s, then. If you need blood, take mine.”
He snorted. “Death is too easy. Now, go. You delay me. Other units await us.”
“I can’t leave the children.”
“All right. Stay and take care of the children.” He pulled his gun out of his belt and walked over to Grace. “But your lover dies.”
“No!” she said, terrified. “Stop!”
“Choose. Now,” he said. “I order you to pick a side.”
“Oh, God, Mari?, please. You can’t do this! Please—”
“You beg. I cannot stand begging.” He lifted the gun to Grace’s head.
“No!” she cried. “I’ll take her!”
Mari? slowly lowered the pistol.
Brenna crumpled.
“Ah,” he said, straightening. “Now you understand the impossible choice. The next time we meet, we can finish our conversation.”