“She, uh, doesn’t talk,” Damir said.
“Never mind that. We’re not looking for speechmakers. We need workers. I can see you’re a tough guy.” Behind the glasses his eyes were magnified round like an insect’s, and I was doubtful about whether he could see anything at all, but I liked that he’d called me tough and I smiled a little. He tugged on the brim of my cap. “An adventurer, maybe?” I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, but I wanted the captain to like me, so I nodded. He extended a knobby hand, and I tapped it in a hesitant high five. “Okay. Indiana Jones it is.” He pressed himself back into a standing position and put his hand on Damir’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go set her up with Stallone?”
“Yes, sir,” Damir said, removing an AK from its spot on a hat rack before guiding me to the back of the room, away from the windows.
The Safe House was populated by leftovers: the elderly and teenaged, men too old to be drafted, and boys like Damir technically too young to fight. The Safe Housers had replaced their given names with those of American actionmovie icons. The house contained two Bruces (a Lee and a Willis), Corleone, Bronson, Snake Plissken, Scarface, Van Damme, Leonardo, Donatello (of the Turtles, not the painters, they were quick to assert), and several men from the next town over who answered to the general appellation Wolverines. Though I didn’t know enough about the movies to decode the system, the nicknames were usually assigned by vote and were somewhat indicative of rank. Damir, for his valor in an operation past, had been awarded the most coveted moniker: Rambo. I was the only girl there.
In the corner we found Stallone, a boy about my age, swathed in ammo belts and sporting an eye patch of indeterminate medical necessity.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“She’s Indiana,” Damir said. “She’ll be with you now.”
“Indiana Jones?” He seemed impressed. “Where you from?” I looked up at Damir, but he had already gone. “You don’t talk?” I shook my head. He raised his hands in a series of gestures synchronous with his speech. “You deaf?” I shook my head again. “My brother’s deaf,” he said. He pointed to a gunner at the side window, the only person of regular military age in the house. “The Terminator.” The floor around Stallone was littered with bullets and cartridges. I cleared a place beside him and sat down. “Okay,” he said. “This is how you do it.”
From then on I reloaded magazines. My fingers were small and agile, perfect for filling the clips. I sat on the floor with Stallone amid piles of munitions, sorting and loading. The ammo, Stallone said, was smuggled in through Hungary, too. Or Romania, or the Czech Republic—countries who knew what it meant to overthrow a Communist government and were willing to ignore the EU embargo.
Stallone also manned the CB radio, taking in strings of garbled code from other Safe House strongholds across the region, and alerting the captain of JNA plane sightings or ?etnik activity in the neighboring towns. Sometimes we picked up broadcasts from the Croatian police force, and I took their coordinates and labeled them on a map on the back wall. When we caught their frequency, Stallone always sent an SOS to see if they were coming to get us, but we never heard back. “Must be busy,” Stallone would say and readjust his eye patch.
A rough-and-ready army unit, most of the Safe Housers went out on missions for days at a time, leaving only a skeleton crew back at headquarters to protect the town. We’d fill large sacks with ammo for the men to take on their trips, and after we finished all the packs I’d run through the house distributing new belts and collecting the empties from the rest of the gunners.
Though the house had three floors, we almost exclusively used the top one; it was better to have the higher ground, to shoot at a downward angle. The room lacked any peacetime artifacts, but the parts of the ceiling that remained were so steeply sloped it was clear we were in the attic. The best gunners got the prime real estate of the front dormer window, so I resupplied them first, then the side-window shooters, and then the door guards, who were the only people on the ground floor.
Like everywhere else in the village, the Safe House had no running water or electricity, and the shuttered-up first floor was dark as night at all hours. Besides equipping the guards, using the bathroom was the only reason to go downstairs. The shadowy lower rooms were by far the scariest parts of the house, and I approached both tasks with breakneck speed.