Chapter 2

Later that afternoon, Annie was loping easily along the tree-lined promenades of the lower city and the wide ramparts of the Kalemegdan fortress, trying to make sense of things.

Their visit to the police station hadn’t gone terribly well. She didn’t know why Tom had dragged her along at all—she hadn’t been a witness to the alleged crime, and could barely make out a word that was said. For a while, Tom had badgered the front-desk clerk, gesturing and raising his voice whenever things hit an impasse. Eventually they were shunted along to a broom-closet office in the back, where some detective or constable processed their complaint.

As the episode stretched on, time seemed to move slower and slower. It was a struggle for Tom to communicate with his halting Serbian; and his face took on a florid crimson shade that signaled an unpleasant mixture of irritation, frustration, and embarrassment.

At last, however, the task was complete. “Did you get the documents you needed?” she asked as they left the building.

“Yeah, I ... think so,” he replied. “There was a hell of a lot of paperwork, but ... yeah, I think I figured it all out. And I guess Miloz was right too—cops seemed to agree it must be pickpockets. But even if it wasn’t, I suppose we can kiss that money goodbye. The second guy laughed like crazy when I suggested a good-samaritan might turn it in.”

The entire incident had put Annie on edge—and the debrief afterwards had hardly been reassuring. Tom, however, seemed to consider the matter settled. Now he was off again, doing whatever it was he did all the time, bending ears or pounding pavement, leaving her to her solitary jogging.

Annie found herself running a lot in Belgrade; and the thought of how she must look always brought a smile to her lips. The only jogger in a city of a million. A solitary creature running free amidst the teeming herds of plodders. An immaculate vision in tank-top and shorts, set off against an unending backdrop of lumpy gray babushkas...

She’d jogged in Philly too, of course, but she’d never been religious about it. Here in Serbia, though, it had proven essential as a way to pass the time.

Time ... God, time just seemed to stretch on before her, dreary and uniform and endless. Annie wondered when they would leave this place—when she could get on with her life. She saw no finish-line up ahead of them, no arrow of progress, just endless cycles of pointlessness and falling short.

Oh, for the first couple of months it had been fun to play house in a foreign land. She’d found bits of communist-era kitsch to decorate their flat in Skadarliya, trolled the markets for edible foodstuffs, cooked meals for Tom on their archaic gas stove. But the glamor of it only went so far, and had long since faded.

Now, it was a challenge just to fill her days. For one thing, she no longer had tidying the apartment as an excuse for busywork. Instead, in exchange for a few coins (American coins), a grimly-efficient char-lady came in, scrubbing the threadbare rooms to within an inch of their lives. Annie did still go out to browse the shops now and then, and never failed to delight in how much purchasing power her US dollars brought her. But in truth there was hardly ever anything worth buying.

Other times, she’d while away the hours with the expat wives. Yet there, too, she felt like she was spinning her wheels. There weren’t that many of the women, and they were a motley bunch. All they really seemed to have in common was a tendency to narcissism and a burning desire to be somewhere else. At least most of them had kids to obsess over and keep them occupied. Annie didn’t even have that.

Yeah, she sighed, kids...

Things had gotten so bad, in fact, that she almost missed social-work. For Annie, one of the big draws when Tom suggested moving to Europe was the excuse to chuck a career she’d started to hate. The idea of helping people still struck her as noble, of course. But the endless stream of addicts and mental patients rotating through her office in Philly had burned out her belief that she could help, and she knew it wasn’t coming back. Yet, for all its downsides, the job had at least kept her busy. Only now did she see the value in that.

One of the other wives had labeled their shared ailment as TSS—’trailing spouse syndrome.’ It was a glib phrase, but it did seem to capture something about her situation. Annie kept doing what she could to outrun it—jogging, cooking, shopping, listening to music on Radio-B92 sometimes. But even so, despite her very best efforts, the loaded question of how the hell she’d ended up in Belgrade just never seemed far from her mind.

Tom and Annie arranged to meet Ricardo for dinner at Vuk, a little neighborhood restaurant that experience told them was better than most. All three of them ordered the usual—veal sausages, together with a tomato salad dotted with dry crumbles of cheese.

“Delicious,” Ricardo gushed, waving his glass of scotch around like the emperor at the banquet table. “All that, plus booze, for a buck-fifty? You kids are really living it up here!”

Sure—thought Annie, mentally rolling her eyes—as long as you never want to eat anything but sausages.

After dinner, they sat a while longer, relaxing and sipping their drinks. Ricardo and Tom talked shop. Nothing specific, just trading gossip—who was putting money in, who was pulling out, who was making a killing...

It was all a bunch of hot air, as far as Annie was concerned, and she was bored. To pass the time, she people-watched at the throngs passing by. The militia-men in their uniforms, puffed up, arrogant, unruly. The bohemian students, scraggly and acerbic. The refugees ... too sad. Annie folded her arms and looked away.

She wondered if anybody really was making a killing. Back in Philly, slogging away at Anders-Beaumont, dismantling rust-belt companies and picking over the carcasses, Tom had chafed to hear how his old classmates were succeeding in the new post-communist worlds of Budapest, Prague, and Moscow. Annie suspected it was only bluster and braggadocio. Those B-school types were all the same: always marketing themselves, selling themselves.

In the end, though, it didn’t really matter what was false and what was true. What mattered was that the promise of it was real to Tom. For him, Eastern Europe was the holy grail—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a virgin land-grab—and if he didn’t act quickly, he’d miss out on it completely.

Hence Belgrade. Tom said that the Balkan wars had slowed the development of the region—meaning that it remained a land of new horizons when doors were already starting to swing shut in Hungary and Romania. It was his last chance to get in on the action and hit it big. She hadn’t had the heart to stop him from trying.

Once the men ran out of business chatter, the conversation turned to lighter topics, with the extroverted Cuban doing most of the talking. And then eventually, when the hour seemed sufficiently late, they roused themselves and caught a cab over to Klub Industriya.

The backseat was a tight squeeze for three, and Ricardo was the type who expanded to fill any space he occupied. The alcohol on his breath mingled in Annie’s nose with the spicy notes of his aftershave. Once they got going, he casually draped an arm over her shoulders, in the guise of pointing to sights of interest—”hey, what’s that over there?” Annie kept herself rigid, and answered as best she could.

Thankfully the ride wasn’t long, and they soon spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the club. “You got a real knack for this tour-guide stuff Annie,” Ricardo cajoled. “Can I twist your arm into showing me more of the city tomorrow? Why don’t you come by my hotel around 10—you don’t have anything going on, right?”

Annie had never been good at devising spur-of-the-moment excuses, and her brain came up empty now. She glanced at her husband, praying he’d offer a reprieve, but instead he shot her a look that said to keep the man happy. At last, defeated, she gave in to the inevitable: “Sure, why not.”