Read the Excerpt: The Quiet Librarian by Allen Eskens
Chapter 1
Minnesota, After Everything
The man steps through the door and into the library, no coat despite the late-spring rain. He stops to cast his gaze around the room. Maybe it is the way he focuses on people and not books that first catches her attention. Or maybe it’s the question in his eyes despite his confident demeanor, the look of a seasoned hunter in an unfamiliar wood. Whatever the pique, it is enough to hold Hana’s attention.
The man pulls a small notepad from the pocket of his tweed jacket, a pencil slid into the wire spirals, old-school in this world of cell phones and apps. He opens the notepad, reads something, and looks around the library again, pausing on faces, holding for a few seconds on Deb Hansen, the president of the Friends of the Library, who sits in the reading room. He glances at his notes, gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head, and moves on. She is not the one he’s looking for.
Hana slips into a row of histories, pulling her cart of books behind her, keeping one eye on the man as she reshelves a tome on the Crusades. The man passes his gaze over a young mother and then a twenty-something girl looking through the DVDs. There are no other patrons in the library, yet he continues to scan.
The man is tall with sleepy eyes that droop at the edges. Dark hair sprinkled with gray puts him in his late forties maybe early fifties, Hana’s age or thereabout. His chin looks weak but probably hadn’t been so in his youth. He wears a jacket but no tie, and his khaki pants are creased at the hip as if he had been sitting—maybe in a car—before coming into the library.
When he sweeps her way, Hana holds still—a rabbit frozen in her tracks. She immediately feels foolish for reacting so. No one comes to the library looking for her. She has been invisible for far too long now, walking through the rows with her cart and her drab clothing. The Sweater Lady—that’s what the children call her when they think she cannot hear them. She tugs at the sleeves of her cardigan, an unconscious tic that she can’t seem to shake even after all these years.
She likes the history section. It is quiet there, and the aging books smell slightly of old wood, a scent that can sometimes whisk her back to the mountains of her youth and the peace of those days before the war. It had been a desire to find that sense of peace that drew Hana to the library in Farmington, Minnesota. That had been thirty years ago, and she still finds herself looking over her shoulder for those who might hunt her. Thirty years and she can still see the faces of the dead when she closes her eyes at night.
She peers over a collection of Civil War histories and watches the man make his way to the circulation desk, where Barb snaps on her best can-I-help-you smile. The man is probably in sales, hustling cleaning supplies or new software for the computers. He leans down and says something to Barb, who looks confused at first but then stands, scans the library, and points at Hana’s cart, which sticks out into the aisle.
Hana pulls the cart into the row with her. Maybe Barb was directing the man to a book. Hana picks up a treatise on the fall of the Roman Empire and places it on the shelf.
No, that can’t be it. Barb wouldn’t need to look around the library before pointing. She knows the placement of every book in the building.
The man walks toward the history section. Hana pulls her cart deeper into the row and picks up a book on the Louisiana Purchase, raising it toward the shelf as the man draws closer. When he enters her row, the book in her hand sinks slowly to her side. This man is not a salesman. A salesman would have no business with her.
He offers a weak smile, a gesture that seems forced. Practiced. Up close, his eyes seem more sad than sleepy, and his features are stronger than they appeared from a distance. He stops a few feet away and asks, “Are you Hana Babić?”
He pronounces her last name wrong, ending it with a hard K the way most Americans do.
“Bah-bich,” she corrects quietly, doing her best to hide what remains of her accent. “Hana Bah-bich.”
“Sorry.” He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out what looks to be a wallet, then opens it to show her a gold badge. “I’m David Claypool, a detective with the St. Paul Police Department. Is there someplace where we can talk?”
It is then that Hana notices the gun holstered on his hip. How had she not seen that when he first walked in?
Memories—of men carrying guns, of bodies covered in white sheets stained red with blood—flash through her mind. Hana opens her mouth, but no words form. She wants to know why this man has sought her out, but she doesn’t want to hear what he might say. She wants to ask if she’s done something wrong, but that is not the right question either. The better question is, Does he know?
The book she holds slips from her fingers and falls. “I’m sorry,” she mutters.
Before she can bend to pick it up, he squats, lifts the book, and puts it on the cart, his dark eyes meeting hers again; she sees kindness in them or maybe pity. “Can we talk?” he asks again.
“Yes,” she says, “in the conference room.”
She leads him to a small room reserved for book clubs and school projects, walking like a child being escorted to the principal’s office, passing by the circulation desk, where Barb watches them. At the conference room, Detective Claypool opens the door for Hana, and she passes within a few inches of him, his tweed jacket smelling old, but the scent mixed with something clean. Soap. Maybe bodywash.
Detective Claypool gestures Hana to one of the four chairs at a small table, his anemic smile gone now. He takes a seat next to her but turns his chair to face her. When he opens his notepad, Hana tries to read the hen scratching, certain that hidden within those pages are the secrets of her past, embers of a life that Hana has worked hard to escape. The words on the pad flash by too quickly for her to see.
He looks at his notes and asks, “Do you know a woman named Amina . . .”
He pauses as if he needs to practice before attempting her last name, and in that pause, Hana’s world folds in around her. No breath comes in. No breath goes out. Her tongue becomes bone-dry. It feels as though her body is being pricked with tiny needles.
Detective Claypool tries again. “Amina Jun . . .”
How could he not make the effort to learn Amina’s name before plodding forward so clumsily? His delay is torture, and when she can no longer endure it, Hana swallows the dust from her throat and whispers. “Amina Junuzović.”
“Yes,” he says, in a heavy tone. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Amina has passed away.”
At first his words float in the air like wisps of smoke, impalpable, formless, the gibberish of a foreign tongue. Hana repeats them in her head, trying to give them texture and edges. Amina . . . passed away.
“I’m sorry,” Claypool says. The kindness in his eyes makes Hana want to believe that he means it.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“She has a grandson—Dylan. He lives with her.”
“He’s safe.”
Hana breathes a small sigh of relief, but there is a terrible pain in her chest. Amina is dead. “What happened?”
Claypool slides the pencil from the spiral of the notepad. “Were the two of you close?”
“Close?” Hana ponders the ambiguity of the word for a moment before answering. “Amina is . . . the only friend I have in the world. I would like to think that I was her friend as well.”
“Where were you yesterday at about four p.m.?”
Hana stands and backs away from the table. “Why would you ask me such a question?”
“It’s routine,” Claypool says, and there is a hint of embarrassment in his eyes.
“I was here . . . at the library, working. You can ask Barb—the woman at the circulation desk.” Hana is about to say more when it hits her that Claypool had dodged her question. She asks again. “What happened to Amina?”
“You may want to sit down,” he says.
Sit down? Is he worried that she might faint—wilt like some delicate flower? He sees her as weak, but how could he know; she has hidden the truth well.
Hana is thin. Her clothes, a simple gray skirt that reaches to her feet, a white blouse, and of course the cardigan sweater, all hang loosely on her frame. Her hair, once as black as onyx, holds veins of silver that streak back from her temples, contrails that lead to the bun on the back of her head. It all works to age her beyond her forty-seven years. She has gone out of her way to look older than she is, duller, plainer, cultivating an appearance to make her invisible to the world. Of course he would see her as weak.
He asks, “Do you know of anyone who might want to do her harm?”
“Was she . . . killed?”
“I’m afraid she was,” Claypool says.
His answer does not cause Hana to faint. It is the one answer that makes sense of Claypool being there and asking the questions he is asking. Still, bile roils in Hana’s stomach. Her mouth turns wet with spit, nausea building with every shallow breath. She walks to the window that looks out over the old grain elevator by the railroad tracks. It’s raining, and she leans her forehead against the glass to cool the heat of her skin.
“Your name was listed as a contact on some documents we found,” he says. “That’s why I came here. I was hoping you might be able to help.”
“What happened?”
Again he dodges the question. “Is there anyone you know who might have wanted to harm Amina?”
Hana returns to the table and sits in a chair across from Detective Claypool, holding his gaze for a second before saying, “I want you to tell me what happened to Amina.” She can see in his eyes that he is wavering, so she searches her memory for his first name and finds it. “David, if you want answers from me, you are going to have to tell me the truth. What happened to Amina?”
His eyes soften in surrender. “Yesterday,” he begins, “someone broke into her condo. The intruder . . . tied Amina up.”
“Was she—”
“No. We found no indication of that. We don’t know how long the intruder was there, but we think maybe a couple hours. The place was torn apart, like he was looking for something.”
“He?”
“A man was seen on her balcony just after . . .” Claypool seems to get twisted in what he wants to say.
“After what?”
Claypool takes another breath, a beat to collect his thoughts. “At four fifteen yesterday, Dylan’s bus dropped him off at the corner near Amina’s condo. He was walking with two other children, both older.”
Claypool pauses. He gives Hana a look as if to appraise her grit, assessing whether she might be able to handle the details he is about to tell her.
“Go ahead,” Hana says.
“There was a crash. The sound of breaking glass. The sliding door to her balcony. What happened isn’t clear. The kids saw her fall, but they didn’t see how she came to go over the railing. We believe she was pushed. She might have been trying to escape, or . . . maybe not. The children said that they saw a man on the balcony. He stepped back into the condo before they could get a good look. They weren’t able to give a description beyond believing it was a man.”
“I saw that story on the news last night. I had no idea . . .”
“We haven’t released her name to the press yet.”
Hana closes her eyes and sees her friend fall four stories to the ground. “And Dylan saw her fall?”
Claypool nods.
Hana folds her hands together on the table. “Did she die from the fall . . . I mean . . . was it instantaneous?”
There is a gentleness in Claypool’s voice that makes Hana forget about his badge and gun. “A couple of guys working across the street heard the commotion. They tried to help her. She died from internal injuries before the ambulance could get there.”
Claypool waits to let his words settle before continuing. “Do you know of anyone who would want to harm her?”
Hana shakes her head no. “Amina was a gentle, forgiving soul.” Claypool flips through his notebook, landing on a scribbled page.
Hana tries to read it but can’t. “Do you know a man by the name of Zaim?”
“Zaim? Amina dated a man named Zaim—not for very long though. She broke up with him about a week ago.”
“Do you know his last name?”
“I . . . I don’t remember if she ever told me. Like I said, it didn’t last long, maybe a couple months.”
“Did you ever meet Zaim?”
“No. They weren’t serious. Do you think—”
“Did she talk about him—say anything to make you think she was afraid of him?”
“What did he do?”
“Maybe nothing. It’s just a name we have.”
“How do you know about him . . . if you don’t know his last name?”
“Dylan told us. What did Amina tell you about Zaim?”
Hana tries to remember. “Amina said that he smiled too much— like a salesman . . . like he was putting on a show. She didn’t trust men who smiled too much.”
“Was he ever rough with her?”
“Not that she said.”
“And she never said his last name?”
“She may have, but I don’t think so.”
Claypool flips to a clean page of his notebook. “Before Zaim, had there been anyone else in her life? Another man maybe?”
“Not for a year or more. She wasn’t big on dating.”
Claypool taps his pencil on the empty page as silence builds between them. He is contemplating something. Then he leans in as if to study her reaction and says, “When those two workers got to Amina, she was conscious—barely. Amina grabbed her necklace . . . a pendant . . .”
A sudden dizziness sweeps over Hana. “A marble.” Her voice is shaky despite her effort to sound calm. “Blue like the waters of the Adriatic Sea.”
“Yes, blue. Does that necklace have some significance?”
“Significance?” Hana steadies herself, hoping to give away nothing.
Claypool says, “Her last act in life was to hand that necklace to those men. Given how badly she was injured, that last act took strength . . . I can’t help thinking that she was trying to say something.”
“It was her favorite necklace.”
“It might be important.”
Hana wants to look him in the eye but she cannot do it. “I’m not aware of any special significance.” Lying to Claypool isn’t easy. She’s out of practice.
“You have an accent,” Claypool says. “Are you from Bosnia as well?”
Claypool’s question is a dangerous one. Too much digging and he may discover that Hana Babić—the real Hana Babić—died thirty years ago on a mountain in Bosnia. A strange suffocation tightens in Hana’s throat. She needs to get out of that room and away from Claypool. She needs time to think.
She stands. “I’m not feeling well.”
Claypool stands as well. Politeness, or does he plan to block the door? “I have a couple more—”
“I’m sorry.” Hana puts her hand to her lips to feign illness. “I can’t talk right now. I need air.”
Claypool opens the door for Hana. “I understand.”
As she passes, he pulls a card from his pocket and hands it to her. “When you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to talk. Please call me.”
Hana takes the card, but does not answer. She walks to the women’s restroom without glancing back.
In the restroom she holds on to the sink as visions of Amina pass before her. They had been through so much together, yet Hana has no tears, nor the power to conjure them, having cried her last so many years ago. Instead Hana breathes slowly, intentionally, calm on the out- side but spinning on the inside. She wets her face with cold water, the swell of emotion making her angry. She’s stronger than this—or she had once been so.
She dries her face with a paper towel. When she finally peeks out of the restroom, Claypool is gone.
Chapter 2
Bosnia, 1977
Nura Divjak drew her first breath on a cold night in 1977, in the upstairs bedroom of a small farmhouse northwest of Tuzla, Yugoslavia. Her father—her babo—had been the one to deliver her because there wasn’t time to get a midwife. Babo had hands of granite, but was a loving, gentle man, his hard eyes softening to tears as he first held his daughter—or at least that is the story that Mama told Nura.
The three of them lived on a weathered mountaintop surrounded by forests of spruce, and oak, and beech trees that stretched for several kilometers in every direction. Babo’s older brother, Reuf, lived across a small gravel courtyard from them; beyond that, they were alone.
Babo and Reuf had inherited the mountain from their father, dividing it between them with a handshake after he passed away, Reuf taking the tillable land on the northern slope and Babo the southern woods. Reuf, a man who wore thick glasses and fancied himself some- thing of an intellectual, sometimes bragged that he had outmaneuvered his younger brother to get the cropland.
In truth, neither man had a heart for farming. Reuf preferred read- ing and spending time in Tuzla, where he drank coffee and discussed world affairs with other men. Babo had wanted nothing of the farm other than a barn to stable a handful of cows and some woods in which to hunt. His true passion lay not in corn, but in stone and mortar, taking up masonry as a trade.
Nura’s earliest memories of Mama were of sitting on her lap on their front porch, looking out over the mountains, the autumn beech trees catching the sun to paint the horizon a vibrant orange. Mama would tell her stories of the woodland faeries who walked through the trees at night, beautiful creatures with long hair and mellifluous voices who protected children from bad men. She remembers looking up at her mama and wondering if she had once been a faery with her round apple face, a slender nose, and long black hair that caught the sun.
As a little girl, Nura dreamed of being like her mama, of taking control of a house, raising children, and sitting at the side of a man she loved. More than that, she dreamed that one day she would be beautiful like her mother, but with every passing year, Nura’s mirror revealed more of her father’s features than her mother’s: the angular face, the hard cheekbones, and a nose just a touch too big for a young girl. She whispered her disappointment to her reflection but to no one else.
The nearest village of any size, Petrovo, lay three valleys away, and when Nura was old enough, that was where she went to school. Nura knew that a great big world lay beyond her woods, beyond Petrovo and Tuzla, beyond the mountains and the sea, a magical world that seemed to her as make-believe as the faeries of Mama’s stories. But in 1984, when Nura was six years old, the great and magical world beyond the sea came to her little mountain. That was the year that Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics.
Babo bought a television set that year, erecting an antenna up the side of their cow barn, the metal spire grabbing colors from the sky and casting them into Nura’s living room. She and Mama watched as ice skaters from England named Torvill and Dean danced so beautifully that it made Nura want to cry. Babo, however, preferred to watch hockey. And, because he loved to hunt, Babo became captivated by a strange sport called the biathlon, in which men skied through the snow and shot at tiny targets.
Her country—her Yugoslavia—had offered this beauty to the world. She and her people were the epicenter of all things wonderful. Nura was sure that nothing more amazing than the Olympics could ever happen in her lifetime.
But then, almost three years later, something more amazing did happen.
On her ninth birthday, after a meal of beef stew capped with a chocolate cake, Babo and Mama gave her a new coat—brand-new, not secondhand. Nura had been wanting a coat because her old one no lon- ger fit and had stains at the cuffs from wearing it when she did her chores. She promised herself that she would never wear this new coat out to the barn.
But when they finished the cake, Mama sat beside Nura at the table, put her arm around her, and said, “There is something else.” Mama and Babo shared a look.
Babo said, “It is a present, but it is one for all of us.”
Nura tried to read the secret in their eyes, but couldn’t. Then Mama said, “In the spring, you are going to become a big sister.”
The words didn’t sink in right away, but then Mama placed her hand on her belly—on her womb—and Nura leapt into her mama’s arms and cried with happiness.
* * *
Danis came to them on the third Sunday of April, 1987, his face plump and red, his tiny hands perfect as he wrapped his fingers around Nura’s pinky. It was as though she could see entire galaxies shining in his eyes. And when she held him for the first time, he looked up at her as if he were studying her face, memorizing it. She was so happy she wanted to cry. Instead, she leaned in and gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek and whispered a promise.
“I am Nura, your big sister,” she said. “I will always love you and take care of you.”
True to her word, she had been the one who taught him to dance when he was barely old enough to stand. It was more of a silly little bounce than a dance, but he would do it whenever she sang to him. She taught him to say Nura, which started out as “Nono” but grew into a proper name by the time he reached his second birthday.
In the summer when he was two, she took him to the pond for the first time. The land behind the barn sloped gently to a creek, where Nura’s great-grandfather had dammed up the water to make a pond for watering cows. Not much bigger than the footprint of their house, the pond was Nura’s favorite place on the mountain. Danis dipped his toes into the cool water and squeezed mud through his fingers. She showed him how to make ripples on the water by throwing small stones. And though he was easily distracted—as most toddlers are— something about the way the light danced on the surface of the pond held his attention and calmed him.
Those years had been the happiest of Nura’s life. In the winters, she pulled Danis on her sled. In the springs, she taught him how to find mushrooms and wild blackberries. In the summers, she took him to the pond, and read him books, and told him stories about the wood- land faeries. They picked apples and pears in the fall and rolled down hills full of leaves. And even though Danis grew fast, he always seemed the perfect size to fit on Nura’s lap.
* * *
The first time that Nura saw an image of war on her television, it had been in the summer before her fourteenth birthday: tanks in the streets of Slovenia and Croatia, bloody sheets draped over bodies, and burning houses. She held her breath as she watched soldiers battle in villages that were part of what had once been her country. When Danis, who was four, wandered into the room, she turned the television off and with a smile on her face, asked him if he wanted to go to the pond.
They returned that evening, hungry for dinner, their pant legs wet from walking in the shallows. As they approached the house, Nura heard Babo and Uncle Reuf inside, engaged in a heated discussion. She held Danis’s hand tightly in hers and snuck onto the porch to listen, the men’s voices hitting hard against the window above her.
Reuf said, “If we declare independence, Bosnia will no longer have a communist fist beating us into submission.”
“Do you think a piece of paper means anything to Milošević?”
Babo said. “Do you think a referendum will end our problems? You see what the Serbs are doing in Croatia. Declaring independence will bring violence to our door.”
“We are in the middle of nowhere,” Reuf said. “No one cares what happens on this little mountain. They would not be able to find us if they tried.”
“You are wrong, brother,” Babo said. “War has a way of finding everyone.”
“All our lives, we have dreamt of independence, and now it is here,” Reuf said. “The hour has come at last.”
“Independence from whom?” Babo calmly asked. “Why do you think that a new government will treat us any better or worse? All men have ambition. All men seek power for their own gain.”
“But it will be men like us who make the laws, not some tyrant in Belgrade.”
“Men like us? Farmers? Is that who will be making the laws?”
Nura could hear sarcasm in her father’s tone and anger in her uncle’s reply.
“Muslims,” Reuf said. “We will control our destiny.”
“My brother, when is the last time you saw me in a mosque? Does my wife cover her beautiful hair with cloth? No. I am a mason . . . a farmer. I want to build houses and raise my family and my cows. I want to be left alone. I do not care about your politics.”
“You are a child,” her uncle fumed. “You cover your eyes with your hands and think that the problem will go away. To say that you do not care about politics is to be a man adrift on the ocean who says that he does not care about water.”
Nura loved her uncle. He was kind, like Babo, although he sometimes walked with his head a little too high in the clouds. He had given her a new book every year on her birthday and had taken her to Tuzla to explore the Salt Museum and get lost in the collection of books at the library. But in that moment when Reuf called Babo a child, she hated her uncle for treating her father that way. The two men were not just brothers—and neighbors—but friends. Babo had told her stories of the two of them as children, boys in search of adventure in the woods, each looking out for the other. How could something now make them argue that way?
“I have a wife and children to think of,” Babo said. “What would you have me do?”
“We are forming counsels and militias—pockets of men who can act when the time comes. The steel is hot and ready to be forged. Plans need to be made. I want you at my side. I want you there when we raise our flag over a country that we will build together.”
“Will I be able to raise my cows under this new flag of yours?”
“Of course you will.”
“Will I be able to ply my trade as a mason?”
“Yes.”
“So I would gain what I have now.”
“Don’t you want to be free?”
Babo sounded tired, or maybe sad, as he gave his reply. “Brother, the freedom that I seek is the freedom to be left alone . . . to build things with my hands . . . to raise my cows. I have a son and daughter to think about. I’m sorry, but I will not join you. I will not invite trouble to my home.”
Before another word could be spoken, the porch door opened and Mama looked down at Nura sitting with Danis. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Nura said, her voice cracking slightly. “Come inside.”
Nura stood and led Danis into the house, her eyes cast down as they passed Babo and Uncle Reuf. Danis didn’t understand any of what was happening and asked Mama what she was making for supper.
Mama placed a hand on Nura’s shoulder and, in a gentle voice, said, “I’m making burek. Would you like to help?”
Nura smiled at Mama’s forgiveness. She loved her mama’s quiet ways, how she kept some things between the two of them. And she loved her mama’s burek. Danis jumped and squealed with delight. Burek was his favorite.
Then to the men, Mama said, “Reuf, you are welcome to stay and eat with us, but there will be no more talk of politics. Is that understood?” Her words were like iron.
Uncle Reuf wilted as he gave his answer. “There will be no more talk,” he said.
As they ate their meal that night, Nura couldn’t help replaying the argument between Babo and Uncle Reuf, one of Babo’s comments echoing louder than all the others. War has a way of finding everyone.
Was there going to be a war?
Chapter 3
Minnesota, After Everything
Hana comes out of the restroom in search of mooring, her gait made unsteady by a tumult of memories. It is Amina’s hand, of all things, that finds its way through the muddle, the way Hana held it on that darkest of nights so long ago—and again later, on the brightest of days when Amina gave birth to her only child, Sara. Years later, Hana held Amina’s hand as Sara walked down the aisle at her wedding. Hana sat with Amina the day Sara gave birth to Dylan, and she held Amina’s hand as they lowered Sara’s casket into the ground two years later. She and Amina were supposed to grow old together, share the aches of time over coffee and cake. Now she will never be able to touch the hand of her friend again.
Claypool had asked about the significance of the blue marble; he may as well have asked the significance of rain in a time of drought. But why had Amina handed the marble to those men? If the blue marble had been a message, it was one meant for her alone. But what had Amina been trying to say?
Hana slips into a row of books to get away from Barb’s watchful eyes and to steady herself against a shudder of grief. Poor Amina. A lifetime ago they survived a crucible that would have laid waste to the strongest of men. Why now? Why Amina? Unlike Hana, Amina had left no wake. It doesn’t make sense.
Hana tries to put herself in Amina’s head after the fall, enough strength for one last gesture. In Hana’s mind she watches Amina pull the necklace off, hold it in her hand. But nothing comes to her.
Claypool said that Amina’s killer tore her condo apart like he was searching for something. Or had he been searching for someone? After all these years . . . could it be possible? Why not? Hana knows all too well how the bitter taste of revenge can linger on the tongue.
She composes herself, steps out of the stacks, and makes her way to one of the library’s computers. She opens an incognito search so that the computer won’t hold on to the information, then types the name Nura Divjak. She finds the site she’s looking for. It ends with the suffix “.rs”—Republic of Serbia.
She clicks on it, steadying her breath as the page fills her screen.
It’s a rendering of what they believe she should look like now that she is nearly fifty years old. They have the nose wrong. She has grown into it over the years so it doesn’t look as big as it had when she was a teenager. Thirty years ago, they had used an old school photograph. Now it’s an artist’s sketch of a woman who has no smile. That part, at least, they got right.
Hana looks around. No one seems to be paying attention to her; still, her heart beats hard in her chest. She scrolls down to read:
REWARD—EIGHT MILLION DINARS
For the capture of Nura Divjak—the Night Mora
Wanted for the murder of innocent civilians
In Bosnia Herzegovina—1995
The first time she saw her Wanted poster it had been a worn piece of paper handed to her by a friend, back when the reward had been only three million dinars, not eight. That older poster also promised the reward for either her capture or her death. They had removed the death part; apparently the international community frowns upon such assassinations. Still, the people who might hunt her would know that the money—about seventy thousand dollars—will be paid either way.
A rustle of shoes on carpeting pulls Hana’s attention. Deb Hansen is wandering toward her, a book in her hand, her finger pressed between pages to mark her place. Hana closes the computer window, and Deb takes a seat in the chair beside her.
If the Farmington library had a patron saint, it would be Deb Hansen. She had been the director when Hana got the job, back when Hana could barely speak English. Of all the people who applied for the position, Deb had taken on the one with no degree in library science, no high school diploma. She had gone with a refugee whose past was a mix of half-truths and forgeries. She had hired a girl who hid terrible secrets beneath her drab cardigan sweaters. Deb had given Hana a break when she didn’t deserve one, and Hana never forgot that kindness.
Now Deb serves as president of the Friends of the Library, which makes sense because, even in retirement, she spends more time at the library than she does at home. And if Hana ever needs reassurance that kindness exists in this world, she need only think of Deb.
Deb leans in to Hana and in a low voice asks, “Are you okay?”
“Is it that obvious?” Hana says.
Deb shrugs and then nods.
“A close friend has died,” Hana tells her.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. It wasn’t one of our patrons, was it?”
“No.”
“And that man . . . who was talking to you . . . he’s a relative?”
“A detective.”
“Oh my.” Deb clutches a hand to her collar. “Was your friend . . . I mean, was she . . . ?”
“She fell from a balcony,” Hana says. “He wanted some background on her, that’s all.”
“You should ask Barb for the rest of the day off,” Deb whispers. “Hell, take the rest of the week. You’ve earned that much.”
“I think I’d rather stay here. I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts right now.”
Deb puts a hand on Hana’s shoulder. Gives a pat. “Just . . . don’t lock it away,” she says. “Grief needs to be felt—expressed. When my Arnold died, I bottled it up to the point that I couldn’t eat or sleep. Then one day I cracked. I just started crying and couldn’t stop. All day from sunup to sundown. I had said goodbye to him at the funeral, but it wasn’t until that day of crying that I said goodbye to him in my heart.”
Deb takes a moment to herself before continuing. “All I’m saying is don’t be afraid to take some time off if you need it.”
“Thanks.” Hana gives Deb’s hand a pat.
Deb stands. “And if you need a friend to talk to . . .”
“I will,” Hana says.
After Deb leaves, Hana’s thoughts return to Amina. She had once said that their friendship had been chiseled from marble. Hana liked the sentiment, even though she saw relationships more as water. Marble is inflexible, solid, unchangeable unless the stone splits apart. On the other hand, water can join and separate. It can be large and turbulent like a sea or small and placid like a puddle. And if relationships were capable of high tides and low tides, she and Amina had been on a low tide over the last few months, the lull born of history. Amina’s grandson, Dylan, had reached an age that brought back too many painful memories for Hana, and rather than face them, Hana had pushed Amina—and Dylan—away.
Maybe that was why Hana knew so little about the man named Zaim. Occasional phone calls, a few texts here and there, were no substitute for an afternoon of deep conversation. Had she asked more questions, talked to Amina more, maybe she would have seen the danger coming.
Their last conversation had been a week ago. Amina called Hana to tell her that she had ended her relationship with Zaim. At the time, Hana had been relieved, because all she knew about the guy was that he liked to flatter Amina and then borrow money.
“I don’t trust him,” Amina had said. “He’s not the man I thought he was.”
“All men say nice things when they are trying to take something from you,” Hana said. “Some men just cannot be trusted. It’s good that you found this out early.”
“There’s no doubt, he is not to be trusted,” she’d said.
Hana pressed for more, but Amina gave a wistful sigh and said that it was a long story best told over a cup of coffee.
They never had their cup of coffee, and now they never will.
Zaim wasn’t the man Amina thought he was. She didn’t trust him.
Those offhand comments now take on immeasurable weight.
Hana opens a new search on her computer and types Zaim into the box. How many men named Zaim can there be in America? She gets eight million hits. She narrows the search by adding the word Minnesota to the query and gets just under one million hits. Amina must have mentioned his last name at some point, but try as she might, nothing comes to Hana.
He was from Bosnia, though. Hana remembers asking Amina if he had been in the war.
“We haven’t talked about that,” Amina had said. “Questions like that open doors that I’m not ready to walk through.”
After twenty minutes of dead ends, Hana closes her search window.
She doesn’t know his last name or what he looks like. She may as well be searching the internet with her eyes closed.
If the blue marble had been meant as a warning, the message was garbled. All Hana could think was that someone from a place far away and a time long ago had found their way to Minnesota. If someone from the war had at last killed Amina, it made sense that they would also be here for her, too.
Hana had learned long ago that it was better to be the hunter than the hunted. But she had been a very different person then, a girl forged by tragedy and rage, capable of acts that would stun her current coworkers. Still, the vestiges of that girl must reside within her some- where, relics buried beneath thirty years of ash and rust. The time has come to dig.
Detective Claypool must suspect Zaim of having a role in Amina’s death. Zaim had been the only name he asked about. He must know more. If she could get him to reveal something—anything—it would at least give her a bread crumb to follow. It would be a place to start.
Hana pulls his card from her pocket. Hesitates. Then types his number into her phone.
“Detective Claypool here.”
“Detective, this is Hana Babić . . . from the library. I’m sorry for how I acted—”
“Please, don’t be sorry. I have never been good at breaking bad news to people.”
“Um . . . you said that you’d like to talk some more . . . when I am feeling up to it.”
“Yes.”
“I think I’m feeling up to it.”
Chapter 4
Bosnia, 1992
Babo had been right about the war finding them, but when it came it did not arrive with the thunderclap of shells or the roar of tanks—not at first. Rather, it came with hard stares and whispers in dark corners.
Nura attended a small school in Petrovo, a village of two thousand people, the vast majority of them Serbian. There were few Muslims in her school and only her in her class, but such things didn’t matter to Nura. For her, school was an opportunity to leave her mountain and be with other kids—to make friends. And by the time she was a teenager, Nura had two of the best friends a girl could want: Jovana and Tanja.
As children, the three of them had spent their recesses together: hopscotching, running, and playing with dolls. They grew up talking about boys, and music, and things that weighed heavily on a young girl’s mind. Nura had stayed the night at both of their houses, shared meals with both of their families, and slept in the same bed with them. For her fourteenth birthday, Tanja gave Nura ten beautiful blue marbles, a color that Tanja said reminded her of the Adriatic Sea, her family having spent a week in Dubrovnik a few years earlier. Nura had never seen the sea, but the marbles matched the picture she had in her mind. They were mere bobbles, yet Nura cherished that gift.
That night, she slept at Jovana’s home, a small cottage in the coun- try outside of Petrovo. They ate a spiced chicken that melted on Nura’s tongue, and for dessert they had soćni kolaći, a rich cake with rai- sins and walnuts that Jovana’s mother made. They watched romantic movies on Jovana’s VCR. Jovana’s little brother, Ratko, who was ten, sat with them and made puking sounds every time the people on TV kissed.
When they finally climbed into bed, Jovana gave Nura a friendship bracelet she had made, strings of red, green, and gold tightly woven into small diagonal lines. Jovana tied it around Nura’s wrist and Nura promised to never take it off.
Two months later, Nura spent New Year’s Eve at Tanja’s home, a house as nice as any in Petrovo. It had been the first time that Nura counted down the final seconds of the year. But the moment that stayed with Nura wasn’t the clang of noisemakers when the clock struck mid- night. It was when Tanja’s older brother, Luka, kissed Nura on the cheek to celebrate the passing of the year, a small peck that made Nura feel like she was falling.
He was four years older than Nura and had locks of golden hair that danced as he walked. He was the kind of boy she pictured when reading stories about heroes and princes. Slavic mythology spoke of a god of thunder named Perun, usually pictured as a man with a long beard and flowing white hair, but Nura liked to imagine that if Perun had ever existed, he would be young, and strong, with piercing blue eyes, like Luka.
But other than that New Year’s Eve peck, Luka never acknowledged Nura, the gangly girl with the nose a little too big for her face.
Two months later, Bosnia declared its independence from Belgrade. The next day, Jovana and Tanja stopped talking to Nura, turning their backs on her whenever she came near. By April, the two began calling her Yak, a shortened version of Bosniak, a word meant to suggest that she smelled bad. Jovana’s brother Ratko started calling Nura “the Muslim whore.”
One day, Jovana and Tanja caught Nura behind the school and threw her to the ground. Tanja sat on Nura’s chest, pinning her arms down, while Jovana cut the friendship bracelet from Nura’s wrist with a knife. That same evening, a convoy of Serbian soldiers were ambushed leaving Tuzla. Ninety-two members of the Yugoslav People’s Army were killed and another thirty-three were wounded, shot by soldiers from the Bosnian Territorial Guard.
The next day, Mama and Babo told Nura that she would not be going back to school.
* * *
After that, Nura’s world shrank. Babo and Uncle Reuf felled a dozen trees where the trail to their houses left the highway, hiding the turnoff from strangers. The only remaining path to civilization was a tractor groove that twisted through the woods behind Uncle Reuf’s house, cutting its way down the back side of the mountain to a pasture. Beyond the pasture lay the blacktop that went north to Petrovo—a Serbian town—or south to Tuzla, which was under the control of the Bosnians. Uncle Reuf had an old truck that could make it down the rough trail, and he sometimes snuck into Tuzla for supplies, but Babo’s Yugo remained parked in the machine shed.
After the Serbs cut electricity to the mountain, Babo built a generator from an old mortar mixer and used a waterfall in the creek to power it. The generator produced enough electricity to run refrigerators and a few lights in both houses.
Babo and Uncle Reuf also began spending their days in the forest hunting deer or boar. Sometimes Nura heard gunfire in the distance, not the single report of a man shooting at game but sporadic exchanges that lasted hours, faint echoes that reminded her that somewhere out there men were fighting a war. And even though she feared for Babo and Uncle Reuf on those days, it didn’t stop her from wanting to go hunting with them.
On a calm night in July, when the sound of gunfire had been absent for weeks, the family sat for a dinner of beets and potatoes. Babo and Uncle Reuf lamented their bad luck in not having brought home meat for a while. Nura mentally prepared her pitch. When she thought the moment was right, she said, “I can help you hunt.”
Both men looked at her as if she had just asked to sleep on the roof. Then Babo smiled and put his hand on hers. “We are not starving just yet. We have five cows for meat if we need them.”
“But if I go hunting with you, we can spare the cows until later. I’m a good shot.” Babo had taught her how to shoot his squirrel rifle, although she had never actually shot at anything more than a tin can.
“It is too dangerous,” he said. “Reuf and I can take care of it.”
“There hasn’t been fighting in a long time,” she said. “Besides, I’ll be with you and—”
“It is not for girls,” Uncle Reuf said.
Babo gave him a stern glance before looking into his daughter’s eyes, his face clouded with apology. “I love you, my sweet daughter. And I appreciate that you want to help, but I would not be a good father if I let you follow us. We go beyond our mountain, where the woods are not safe. You help me by taking care of the cows and the farm while I am gone. That is more than enough.”
Babo had spoken and that was the end of it. They finished their meal without another word on the matter, Nura hiding her disappointment in silence.
The next morning, Babo asked Nura to accompany him to the machine shed. There he picked a coil of thin wire from a nail on the wall and handed it to Nura. She looked to Babo for an explanation.
“You cannot join us for the hunt,” he said, “but I can teach you to set snares. It is still hunting, but you will make the prey come to you.”
Nura tried to be appreciative, but her effort fell short. Babo smiled and led her into the woods. They walked until Babo pointed to a rabbit run, a trail in the grass that showed where the rabbits liked to travel. Nura had walked past that spot a hundred times but had never noticed the tamped grass.
“If you were a rabbit, would you walk along that path or fight through the thicket?”
“I would take the path,” Nura said.
“Then that is where we will set our snare.”
Babo knelt beside the path with the wire and a set of pliers. He unspooled about half a meter of wire and clipped it off. “We’re going to start with a simple slipknot snare. Someday, if you want, I will teach you to make more sophisticated snares with triggers, but for now this is all you will need.”
He twisted one end into a tiny loop and slid the wire through to make a slipknot. Then he anchored it to the base of a sapling next to the trail.
“Make the loop about the size of your hand,” he said. “And place it . . .” He took Nura’s hand and touched the tip of her fingers to the ground. “Just above your knuckles. That’s about where the head of the rabbit will be.”
“What if he ducks under?” Nura asked.
Babo smiled with pride. “You are a smart one, my Nura.”
He found a twig nearby, broke it to the size of a pencil, and jammed it into the ground beneath the loop. “With this stick here, the rabbit will raise his head as he passes.”
Babo got up off his knees with a mild grunt, and stepped back to inspect his work. “Now, it is very important that you check your trap every day, because if you catch a rabbit, you do not want it to suffer. Do you understand?”
Nura nodded, even though she had assumed that they would be leaving the woods with that day’s supper in hand. As they stood together, admiring the snare, Nura asked, “Babo, why do the Serbs want to hurt us?”
Babo thought for a bit, and said, “I don’t think Yugoslavia was ever meant to be a country. There are faction—”
“No, I mean us . . . our family. We have done nothing wrong. We are not soldiers. We are not even Muslims—not really. We do not observe salat. We do not pray at the mosque. Can we just tell them? Maybe they will leave us alone.”
Babo put an arm around her. “Like it or not, my child, we are at war. It doesn’t matter that we are not soldiers. The Serbs have such hatred for us that they will not look for uniforms. They will not ask if we are observant in our faith. They will see us as their enemy and do us harm.”
“Why?”
Again, Babo gave her question considerable thought before he answered. “Men have the capacity for good as much as they have the capacity for cruelty. What is right and what is wrong is written on our hearts. But when there is war, men follow what they choose to follow and rationalize the evil they do. The Serbs see this as their country. They see us as a blight. They are told that the only way to have peace is to expel us or kill us. When such are the words they hear every minute of every day, it becomes too loud for them to listen to their hearts. They will do terrible things and believe they are doing what is right.”
Nura wanted to tell her babo how proud she was to have him as her father. She wanted to say that he was the wisest man in the world. Instead, she leaned her head to his shoulder and said, “I will be the finest hunter in all the land . . . even if it is only with snares.”
* * *
That evening, she caught her first rabbit, carrying it home with enough pride to fill the barn. She hid her queasiness as Babo led her through the task of cleaning the meat. She had seen him and Uncle Reuf butcher cows before, but only from a distance. She had never held a knife to flesh, but if she was going to be a hunter, she would have to do such things.
She used Babo’s knife, a folding knife with two blades and a worn black handle. He had carried that knife in his front right pocket for as long as Nura could remember. When she finished skinning the rabbit, she cleaned his knife and handed it back to him—but he didn’t take it.
“I think it is time that you have a knife of your own,” he said.
The thought of Babo giving her something so personal, something so much a part of him, almost made her cry, but she held her tears back. She was a hunter and hunters don’t cry.
The rabbit offered far less meat than she had expected, but Mama cooked it into a stew and everyone praised her for the meal she had provided.
* * *
By 1995, they were down to three cows despite Nura’s growing proficiency as a trapper and Babo’s daily hunting trips.
When Danis’s birthday came that spring, Nura made him a slingshot, cutting the handle from an oak branch and slicing strips of rubber from a used inner tube for the bands. The pocket was a patch of leather sawed from the heel of an old boot. To make the present extra special, Nura wrapped the ten blue marbles that Tanja had given her when she was fourteen—ten perfect little balls he could use for ammunition.
Of all the presents he opened that year, her slingshot was his favorite. He fired stones, nuts, bolts, and ball bearings that he stole from Babo’s machine shed, anything small that had weight. But the marbles he treasured. He only shot the marbles at a paper target that he pinned to the wall of the barn, being careful to find each again before having another go.
One day, they were sitting at the pond, Nura teaching Danis about fractions as he shot stones at a nearby tree. Danis stopped shooting and stared blankly at the pond.
“What’s wrong?” Nura asked.
He didn’t answer at first, but then said, “Will I ever go to school?”
“Someday you will.”
“Promise?”
Nura smiled to hide her doubt. “Yes, my little tadpole. I promise.”
“Will they make me be a soldier?”
“What?”
“I don’t want to be a soldier.”
Nura patted her leg and Danis sat. That was the thing about Danis: He was eight years old, an age when other boys would recoil at the notion of sitting on their big sister’s lap, but Danis never seemed to outgrow being her baby brother. He was smart and beautiful, with dark eyes that danced when she told him Mama’s stories about the woodland faeries that walked through the trees at night. And she hated how the sound of gunfire in the distance sometimes caused her little brother to curl up and hide his face.
“It would make me sad to hurt anyone like that,” he said.
She wrapped her arms around him. “I will never let them take you away. I will never let them make you a soldier.”
“The war scares me.”
“You don’t need to be scared.” Nura held Danis tightly to her. “I will protect you.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” She kissed the top of his head. “The war will be over soon,” she said.
“And I will be able to go to school?”
“Yes . . . and you will get to play with the other boys. It will not be long. You will see.”
Nura hated how easily she had lied.
* * *
When they emerged from the woods that day, they saw Uncle Reuf’s truck, a beat-up old monster he called the Torpedo, parked in the courtyard, suitcases loaded in the back. Inside, Mama shooed them upstairs, which always meant that the men were talking politics. Nura was seventeen and wanted to stay with the adults, but Mama was firm. It didn’t matter, because Nura could listen through the heat register.
“These are very dangerous times,” Uncle Reuf said. “Very few Muslims remain in these hills. Most have gone to Tuzla to the refugee camp near the airport.”
“If we keep our heads,” Babo said, “we will outlast the war.”
Reuf then spoke with a heaviness that Nura had never heard from her uncle. “I am leaving. They are calling for men to go defend Srebrenica. The Serbs are tightening their siege.”
“What good will you be to them if the city is under siege?”
“I cannot speak of independence and then not heed the call to help my brothers. And you . . . should take your family to Tuzla,” Reuf said. “It’s safer than staying on this mountain.”
“What do they care about our little farm?” Mama said. “We have no strategic value to them.”
“They intend to drive us from the land by any means,” Reuf said. “They expelled the Muslims from Foća, and Zvornik, and Višegrad.”
“Expelled?” Mama asked.
“A man from Foća told me that they murdered civilians there. Hundreds, maybe thousands. But that is not all. The man said that Serbian soldiers . . . took advantage of the women. They created . . . I can’t . . .”
“Say it,” Mama said. “We need to know what is happening.”
“The man called them . . . rape camps,” Reuf said. “Special prisons where the women are . . .”
“That cannot be true,” Babo said.
“I wish it were not,” Reuf said. “They treat us worse than animals to spread fear so that people will run and not fight. But things will turn around, and when they do, we will bring them to justice—every last one of them. We will not let them get away with such inhumanity. That is why I must go.”
Nura couldn’t sleep that night. She had always envisioned war as men in uniforms standing on opposing hillsides firing their weapons at each other. Civilians were supposed to be off-limits. Women were supposed to be left untouched—she was supposed to be left untouched.
* * *
A month later, as Nura spread straw bedding for their three remaining cows, Uncle Reuf’s story of the man from Foća came back to her— for it was in that moment that she heard the hum of the truck engine climbing up the back side of her mountain.
Discover the Book
Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia–until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend–the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.
Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana’s care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora–and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.
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