Free Lie in the Dark by Dan Fesperman

guys for change, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes, it is nice,” a smiling Damir agreed. “But remember. It’s probably exactly the way Kasic wants you to feel.”

CHAPTER 4
     
    F or all its power, the Interior Ministry had no heat in its downstairs lobby. Vlado joined seven others who were waiting, bundled in heavy coats and seated on battered vinyl chairs and couches. The brown linoleum floor was a wasteland of cigarette butts and small tumble-weeds of dust. Clouds of cigarette smoke barely masked the stench of urine from a backed up toilet down the hall. The stroking thrum of a generator could be heard from inside a small booth built of plywood and clear sheets of plastic, where a uniformed officer sat, acting as receptionist, taking names and phoning upstairs for authorizations that never seemed to come.
    As Vlado waited he considered what he knew of Kasic. He was a man with a reputation for restraint, both in his anger and his goodwill, and this was said to be a product of his history. He had been a young man of impulse and scattered energies, whose sharp remarks and recklessness had stranded him for years in the great bulge of middle bureaucracy. Once he’d passed the age at which up-and-comers generally began to make their mark, plenty of people had written him off.
    Then in the early eighties, as the rigid state machinery loosened and adjusted in the wake of Tito’s death, Kasic belatedly began to rise, catching up to more fortunate peers and then surpassing them. He moved quickly through the Party ranks under vague titles that seemed to place him as an important man in state security. Those on the outside could never be sure if his ascension was guided by his own power or someone else’s, and that seemed to be the way Kasic preferred it.
    By the time the Interior Ministry began putting together its new police force he was a natural choice for the heirarchy, and he fell into line behind Vitas as a loyal lieutenant, soon known for his ruthless efficiency.
    Like Vitas he had made his name in the October raids, supervising the heavy work in the maneuver that flushed, then trapped Zarko on the second and decisive day. When an errant mortar shell from his unit landed a block north of the mark, killing three old residents of a crumbling flat, he’d flinched, but not for long. “ ‘A small price in the long run,’ that’s what they’ll say around here,” he’d concluded on the spot to his subordinates, who’d naturally agreed.
    Vlado looked around the lobby at the others, all men. They seemed bored, as if they’d been waiting for hours. Two had dozed off in spite of the cold.
    But after only a few minutes the man in the booth rapped on the plywood and waved Vlado upstairs, shouting in a muffled voice, “Mr. Kasic is waiting. Second floor.”
    Vlado trotted up the steps to warm himself, passing security warnings and propaganda posters taped to the walls. BOSNIAN ARMY ON THE BOSNIAN BORDER proclaimed one poster, done up in a nouveau social-realist style. The black silhouette of a grim, angular soldier rose out of jagged black-and-white hills against a purple backdrop, as if he had become part of the very mountains he was defending.
    Kasic stood at the top of the steps at an open door in the pose of a tolerant schoolmaster waiting to usher the last pupil into the classroom. His silvery black hair was close cropped at the sides, and as Vlado stepped closer he saw that Kasic’s face was a landscape of sharp angles and deep shadows, as lean as an athlete’s, reminiscent of the soldier on the poster. Yet it was also still pumped full of vigor and color here in mid-January in this city where everything had grown ashy and pale, as if he’d been working out on a clean gym floor of varnished oak, all bright lights and fuggy heat.
    He shook hands, grasping hard with a huge hand. Vlado had noticed him before at joint security meetings and official gatherings, a man whose intensity leaned out at you across desks, dinner