Walter made us coffee while we waited in the small office, which had the dimensions of a trailer. More people were arriving for work now, and each did a turn at the door looking us over. We were a sight. Most of Goos’s shirt was black with clotted blood, and the agony in his side left him slumped awkwardly in his chair. My lip was blown up to the size of a squash ball, and a streak of bloody brown ran from the corner of my mouth to my chin. The company had a nurse on call nearby. She took Goos to the small washroom and washed off the wound at his temple, applying gauze and a wrap that went all the way around his head. She also taped his ribs. She pronounced me much better off. My chin was bruised and there was a lump on the side of my head from the rifle barrel, but the only lasting damage was that the bottom third of one of my upper front teeth was gone, with the tooth beside it divoted by a chip. Our wrists were still bleeding, and she treated them with iodine and a sterile wrap. My trousers had dried, but not my underwear, a problem I kept to myself.
Through Goos, Walter explained that he was the deputy chief engineer and lived on the property, but more than a mile away at the motor works, where the enormous pumps operated. Because the water pressure had to remain constant, the machinery was always whining, meaning Walter could hear nothing happening outside. As a result, the mine had been dealing with persistent vandalism since reopening about a decade ago. A security guard was supposed to make rounds every night, but he had not showed up last evening. In front of us, Walter called the guard, who claimed that his wife had taken ill suddenly. Walter fired him on the spot, saying, “You work for crooks, let them pay you.”
“He is Orthodox,” Walter said, after he put down the phone, “and people here told me not to hire him, but that is not how we were in Tuzla, and how we must never become.”
Attila arrived half an hour later.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” she said, stopping in her tracks when she saw us. “You’ve gotta start drinkin in better places.”
Our first stop on the way back to the Blue Lamp was a small one-story clinic nearby, equivalent to a rural emergency center, so Goos could be x-rayed. As always, everyone seemed to know Attila, and the doctor, a young man who wore his white coat over his blue jeans, saw Goos ahead of four or five waiting patients.
It was all good news. Goos did not have a skull fracture, and he exhibited no signs of a brain bleed from his pistol-whipping. Three of his ribs were cracked, but none with a through-and-through break that would have required total bed rest for fear of puncturing his lung. A nurse at the clinic put a butterfly on Goos’s temple and retaped his ribs and sent us off.
As we were driving, Attila asked us for a full version of the story, beginning from when we left Barupra. Her initial suspicion was that the men who had kidnapped us were the remnants of one of the Serbian milicija, the civilian militias, which had it in for Goos and probably had trailed us all day. To me, that didn’t add. Our kidnappers never seemed to make any distinctions between the two of us. And they’d had plenty of opportunities to grab us before we reached Vo Selo. Things had gone to hell only after we rang Ferko’s bell.
To explain, I told Attila about our encounter with the man I referred to as ‘our major witness.’ I had gotten as far as describing the house and the dogs, when Attila smashed on the brakes. Goos cried out in the backseat as the seat belt constricted against him, and Attila pulled over at the roadside to be sure Goos was okay. She then surged toward me in the passenger’s seat.
“Fer-ko? Ferko the Jerko is your big witness?”
I looked back to Goos. He was supposed to be resting with one leg across the rear bench, but his eyes were closed and he was grimacing. I had the feeling that was about more than his ribs.
“How do you know Ferko?” I asked.
“That soup-sandwich motherfucker used to work for me. Just for one thing.”
“Doing what?”
“I told you,” said Attila. “Remember I told you how I hired Gypsies? Ferko was a driver. Until he started in stealin the trucks. The ungrateful fuckface. He’s basically gone Elvis, but I caught sight of him sneakin around Tuzla a few years ago, and he ran like he was in the Olympics. That jagbag knows better than to ever let me catch him.”
“But why does he own a big house?”
“Ferko? Ferko’s a fuckin car thief. I guess you could say I gave him his start in show business, stealing my flippin trucks. Now he steals cars all over Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, mostly on order. He can break into a car and drive it away in ten seconds.”
“Does he work for the crime gangs?” I remained focused on why he’d been able to deploy the goons who’d captured us.
Attila laughed out loud.
“Ferko sells cars mostly to the Russian mob. Everyone in Russia wants a car. Have you seen the traffic in Moscow? They still have seven families sharing an apartment, but every one of them needs a Buick. That’s how they know Putin is better than Stalin. But Ferko’s a fuckin butler to those guys. He’s small-time. He might pay off the local cops, but nobody’s takin orders from Ferko. Or kidnapping anybody for his weak ass.”
From the backseat, Goos asked, “He lived in Barupra, did he?”
“When I hired him first, he did.”
“Any reason for a man with money to make up a story about a massacre?”
“Hell if I can say,” said Attila. “Some Gypsies, scamming is a way of life. All I know is if the Jerko told me it was daytime, I’d run to the window to check.”
Goos went silent. I thought he was figuring things through, but the pain meds had caught up with him and when I looked back he was sound asleep, his mouth wide open so I could see the dark evidence of several fillings.
“Ferko,” said Attila, still trying to believe it. “You’re not really telling me this whole shitstorm is because of Ferko, are you?”
I’d basically missed two nights’ sleep, given the fitful slumber of a transatlantic flight, and I felt limp now. In memory, certain sensations, like the wind and the view from atop the water tank, had a high-def quality, but there were already vague spots in my recollection and some disorder about which events happened first. Goos, in the meantime, began snoring.
“By the way,” I said to Attila. “You owe me some records.”
“I’ll give you the records,” said Attila, “but hell if I know what for. If Ferko’s your big witness, dude, then your case is so over.”
Right now, I was too tired to care. After apologies, I reclined the deep seat in the A8 and followed Goos into a black sleep.
When we arrived at the Blue Lamp, Attila shook me awake to help with Goos. Now that he had time to stiffen up, Goos’s pain was worsening and he was also woozy from the meds. We walked him up the street, supporting him from each side with his arms slung over our shoulders, like an injured player leaving the field. Once we had him on his bed, I headed down to check into the hotel. With my luggage AWOL, I thought of going out to buy some cosmetics, but I had no energy for that. Attila promised to touch base tomorrow. When the clerk handed me the key card, I smiled. It was the same room where I’d frolicked with Esma. That already seemed far in the past.
Once I was upstairs, I found that my brief sleep in the car had revived me a bit. I sat on my bed, both comforted and terrified now that I was alone. I looked at my hands for some reason, lifted them and studied my fingers and palms. Being alive seemed such a profound mystery.
I was also a bit lost, not only about what had happened, but also about what was ahead. A good part of me wanted to book a flight back to the US and stay there, a feeling I resisted, in part because I realized again I didn’t even have a house to return to. The homiest activities I’d undertaken recently were fishing with my sons and eating herring in a café in The Hague with Narawanda.
I decided to check my e-mail. That seemed ludicrously mundane, but that was where much of the comfort of life actually lay for us, in the routine. I considered writing my boys, but knew I’d alarm them if I made even a sideways reference to being safe. Instead, I went down to the bar, drank most of a double scotch at two in the afternoon, and barely made it back upstairs. I finally changed my underwear, then slept until 12 o’clock the next day.
After I woke, I was surprised to find Goos downstairs already. He’d made himself a coffee from the machine in the lobby and was sitting at one of the small tables in the breakfast area, stirring his cup with his left hand. His second dose of hydrocodone had worn off a couple hours ago, he said, so he’d come down for ‘brekkie.’
We shared a long look across the white laminate.