Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) by William T. Vollmann Read Free Book Online Page B

their own, and had to share them in shifts, increased their risk of traumatic death; because, as I have already told you, when a vest is damp, for instance with sweat, it stops bullets more poorly.
    Enko asked Amir: Does he deserve to meet Bald Man?
    Amir shrugged.
    Well, Mr. Journalist, do you or don’t you?
    Sure.
    The thing is, guy, Bald Man’s got style. Someone like you, there’s nothing you can give Bald Man. But Bald Man, he can give you everything.
    Oh. Well, maybe I’d better not waste his time.
    That’s a fact.
    By the way, what neighborhood has the most trouble getting water? I’d like to interview some—
    Let’s go. Amir, swing by Anesa’s.
    In the safe shade of an office building, couples walked calmly. They reached the intersection, looked down into the openness nervously, and quickened their steps until they’d crossed. The President sped by in a grey Audi. Now Amir floored the gas pedal, and the American felt that same meaningless bitter flood of fear behind his breastbone. They rounded the corner successfully, completed a sickeningly exposed straightaway on which nothing moved, made a hard right on three wheels, and then another car careened toward them, struck the curb, screeched and whirled out of control, wrecked. The driver and passengers got out slowly. Soldiers gathered. It didn’t appear that anyone was injured. Perceiving this, Amir drove on, toward a sign which had been shot through half a dozen times, and then they pulled up at the portico of the almost unscorched apartment tower where Anesa lived; she waspart of Vesna’s circle. Enko leaped out. The journalist sat in the back seat taking notes while Amir smoked a cigarette.
    Enko returned.— That goddamned little cunt, he said. In case you were wondering, she’s got plenty of water.
    The American said nothing, since Enko looked to be in a rage. Amir started the engine and put the car in gear.
    Now where we’re going, said Enko, the Serbs cut off that well on July eighteenth. This place here, this is a low area, like the Holiday Inn, so these people can still get water from the reservoir. Why the fuck don’t you say something?
    That well that the Serbs use—
    I already explained that. Who do you want to interview?
    Anybody who has trouble with water.
    All right. I know a fighter over there, and his mother, she’s a sick old lady. That’d be just about perfect for you, wouldn’t it? Maybe if you’re lucky you can watch her get killed by some Chetnik. That would be a scoop, wouldn’t it?
15
    I need a drink, said Enko. You got your story, right?
    Right.
    The bar lay behind a courtyard five floors high, and hence protected from snipers. Jasmina had told him that it was organized by Bald Man to keep it safe—evidently a relative term, since he saw a few shrapnel-pocks and windowpanes nibbled away by explosions; one windowpane was blasted into a hole the shape of a flayed animal. Someone with a machine gun was standing in the half-silhouetted stairway.
    It was midafternoon, the canned music (Bosnian rock and roll) loud but not deafening. The singer’s voice reminded him of the golden shimmers in Anesa’s purple sweater. At the next table, crew-cut men in bulletproof vests and camouflage sat smoking. Across the room, a dozen men and women in civilian clothes were getting drunk. A beautiful woman in camouflage from head to toe, her outfit completed by an impractically thin black bulletproof vest with a Bosnian army insignia on it, sat smoking, sipping juice and tapping the toe of her combat boot to themusic. A man with a pistol at his hip, likewise smoking, gazed at her urgently; his hand gripped her knee. No one appeared to be listening for the shells.
    Enko and the American ordered American whiskey. Amir had a Turkish coffee.
    The song ended.— No, said one of the civilians, she was killed by a sixty-millimeter shell, just after her children had left the