The Small Boat of Great Sorrows Read Online Free

away—an expressive gleaming brown, lively and eager. If he had a tail, it would be wagging, and Vlado wondered why. And why an American?
    The authorities, both national and international, had long since lost interest in Vlado following his sudden arrival nearly five years ago. He had shown up unannounced at an American military base in Frankfurt on a cargo plane from Sarajevo, spilling from a wooden crate like the misloaded parcel he was. As a homicide detective who had smuggled himself out of a sealed war zone with a sheaf of incriminating documents, he had been something of a sensation at first. Not the sort that made headlines—just the opposite, in fact, for the results of his work had been an embarrassment for more than a few international agencies. So, he had attracted various men in gray from miles around, fretting over what secrets might have been blown, who might have been compromised, whose credibility might need to be rebuilt.
    Just about everyone had wanted to hear the story he’d unearthed, a tale of theft, smuggling, murder, and corruption that might have been impossible to believe if not for the packet of evidence in his satchel.
    He’d been debriefed by everyone who seemed to count in this part of the world—the UN, NATO, the Council of Europe, Interpol, and half the embassies in Germany. Protocol demanded that the Germans go first. Then came a tag team of Americans and French, arguing loudly over who had precedence. Next came the British, the most polite but somehow the most frightening, with the cool clipped manner of executioners. The parade seemed as if it would never end, and everyone spoke the careful language of damage control.
    Some played it friendly, offering cigarettes and jokes. A short, jolly American talked Yugoslav basketball for a while, biting off half his questions with inappropriate giggles, lunging forward every time he came to a key point. Vlado, who knew a thing or two about interrogation, figured the man was probably proud of his style. The ones who weren’t good at it usually were.
    The French and Germans were icy, unyielding, seeming to frown at his every word. An intense chain-smoking German named Rolf kept asking about another German named Karl, who, judging from the line of questioning, must have been a Balkan smuggler of some success. Pleading ignorance of Karl only earned a raised eyebrow from Rolf, followed by an unconvinced smirk and a slow release of cigarette smoke.
    The whole thing lasted four days, hours on end in a small, windowless room under a cool blaze of fluorescent light. Mornings brought lukewarm coffee in chipped mugs that left sticky rings on white Formica. Cold lunches arrived on a wobbly cart. Then more questions, followed by a bland, overcooked dinner and a night of poor sleep in a steel-frame bed down the hall. A guard outside the door turned the pages of newspapers throughout the night while Vlado tossed in his sleep, trapped in dreams of long walks through ravening crowds, awakening exhausted and sweating to the knocking of a radiator before the whole business started again. He could only guess what the fallout had been back in Sarajevo—a few less bureaucrats to worry about, perhaps, but probably little else.
    In the end, the Germans deemed him unsuitable for repatriation—too many enemies on both sides, especially in the middle of a war, when it would have been too easy for someone to kill him. Besides, it turned out he had a family already living in Berlin. They’d been there for two years, in fact, a wife and daughter who were evacuated during the first month of the war. So the authorities did the easy and humane thing by letting him stay, and sent him packing to Berlin with a train ticket, a residence visa, and a work permit. Later he would discover just how rare and valuable such documents were when the Germans began sending home every Bosnian refugee they could find.
    But for all their care with paperwork, the