Halilović shrugged, a gesture that shifted only one shoulder. "As you prefer. The address is on the deed. Unit forty-one. Do not expect a shipping business. Expect something else."
She lingered for him to elaborate, and he did not, and he stood, which meant the meeting was finished, and she stood with him.
And they shook hands with the formal economy of people who had no further use for each other.
At the door he said, "Your uncle spoke of you. He said you put the dead in order. He said it as praise, and I am not sure it is praise."
"In this country, job descriptions and eulogies use the same verbs." He secured the door behind her with a soft click that had nothing soft in its meaning.
The stairwell of the building smelled of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke ground into plaster. On the cobbled street she stood with the folder under her arm and let the city arrive in layers: tram bell.
A man arguing with a parking sign, the river's mineral breath when the wind shifted. She had parked the rental two streets away, a grey Škoda that smelled of other people's cigarettes and the pine air freshener rental companies called hospitality.
She drove west with the folder on the passenger seat, and the key sat in her lap. She did not put music on. She never put music on when she was working.
The next morning she built a wall chart on the warehouse's interior steel with painter's tape and printed pages. Family name. Case number. Serial cluster. Buyer hands.
The chart looked like the kind of thing television detectives made and material analysts mocked, until the mockery met a wall large enough to hold forty-seven lives. Stanko stood in the doorway and whistled once, low.
"Your uncle used notebooks," he said. "Notebooks can be burned. Walls cannot. Think about that."
"Visibility is also a target." He pointed at the chart with his cigarette. "If the journalist sees that, you will be on the evening news with arrows. If the wrong cousin of the wrong buyer sees that, you will be on no news at all."
She took the chart down before she left for the night and photographed each sheet in order.
Then filed the sheets in the document box. The wall returned to blank steel, and the pattern remained in the camera and in her head, two storage systems with different failure modes.
Meredith texted after midnight Hague time: Those serials. I checked one more database. Still nothing. Be boring; boring people survive. M.
Failed contacts. Fuel costs for routes through eastern Bosnia; Overnight stays where the drive exceeded safety margins she assigned herself: no night driving on certain roads.
No stops in towns where the receipts' surnames matched municipal directories; a protocol for contact: phone first where possible, letter where not, in-person only after verification of identity.
She made a plan because planning was what she did when the alternative was to sit in a warehouse and let 223 deaths arrange themselves into a shape she could not catalog.
The plan filled three pages of her notebook. Routes in pencil on a folded map. Phone numbers copied twice. A column for status that was still vacant. She closed the notebook.
She locked the warehouse. She drove toward the old city with the windows down, September air coming in warm and carrying the smell of someone grilling meat on a balcony, fat and smoke and oregano.
She halted at a market near Marin Dvor because the refrigerator in the apartment held only mustard and a bottle of water. Milk, bread.
She did not drive straight to the warehouse. She drove to the river and parked and walked along the bank for ten minutes, the vacant box under her arm like a failed delivery.
A fisherman cast and recast, and the water was low and green, and she watched a plastic bottle float past and did not invent a metaphor. Bottles floated. Cups returned. Both were accurate.
At the warehouse she updated the spreadsheet row for Container 07: teacup returned to Emina Zulfikarić, notes accepted, coffee, no speech, bread, geraniums.
Stanko looked at her face when she arrived to lock up. "Quiet and worse?"
"Exact is good. Exact is also a blade." He handed her a paper bag. "Burek. Eat it while it is warm. Cold burek is an insult to the animal that died for it."
She ate in the van before driving home. Oil on her fingers. The armor had a crack the size of a teacup. She did not name what came through it. She set the alarm for six and slept for five hours, which was more than she had managed since the warehouse door first rolled up.
On Sunday she repotted geraniums with Emina. The roots were white and stubborn. Dirt stained the knees of Ajka's trousers. When they finished, Emina poured water from a plastic jug and the soil darkened in rings.
"My sister hated geraniums," Emina said. "She said they were vulgar. I grow them to annoy her ghost. Ghosts should not get everything they want."
Her uncle's van lived under a tarp behind the warehouse, and Stanko had kept the battery charged. The interior smelled of old tobacco and the cardboard dust of a thousand deliveries that had nothing to do with this. Ajka loaded Container 00's objects in reverse inventory order.
Each item rewrapped in clean newsprint she had bought in bulk, each box labeled with a number that matched her spreadsheet. The packing was a ritual.
She performed it alone. Her hands recognized the work: fold, wrap, tape, label, stack. The wedding dress went in last, laid flat in a box of its own, tissue between the folds.
Stanko watched from the warehouse door, cap on, cigarette lit, and he did not offer to help; Helping would have made him a participant in a way that watching allowed him to avoid.
He crushed the cigarette. From his jacket he produced a folded road map, a flashlight, and a slip of paper with a phone number. "If there is trouble. Not the police, and this number, and a man who owes your uncle a debt that is not money."
"The kind that follows vans east." He put the items in her hands. "Your uncle would be proud. He would also be terrified. Both things are true."
The road east climbed and fell through country that held its history in the condition of its bridges. Ajka drove with both hands on the wheel and the map on the passenger seat, weighted by Amira's shoe.
Which she had brought without deciding to bring it. Forests. River valleys. Towns where the minarets had been rebuilt and towns where they had not.
She stopped once for fuel and once for coffee she did not finish. The van smelled of newsprint and the cedar ghost of the wedding dress.
Višegrad announced itself with the bridge. The famous one, stone arches over green water, rebuilt and photographed and written about until the stones themselves appeared tired of meaning.
She did not stop at the bridge. She followed Fadila's directions to a side street of rented rooms above secured shops, discovered the number, carried the first box up a narrow stair.
Fadila Kurtović opened the door on the first knock. Forty, perhaps. Dark hair pulled back. A face that had learned German expressions and then set them aside for the working day.
The room behind her held a bed, a table, two chairs, a window looking onto a wall. She had cleared the table, though she had hung nothing on the walls, and the room was a temporary space for a permanent transaction.
"Put them there," Fadila said. "All of them. Then sit. Or do not sit. As you like."
Contact. Verify identity. Deliver. Leave. Four steps, written in her notebook under the heading returns: procedure, the same heading style she had used for accession manuals in The Hague. No extended conversation. No coffee unless the recipient insisted and the insistence could not be refused without cruelty. No discussion of the receipts or the buyers. No discussion of the war beyond what the objects themselves required. In and out. The objects did the work. She was transport.
In Tuzla, a woman received a set of copper pots, held each one up to the electric light, and closed the door with a nod so small it nearly was not motion.
In a village off the Bratunac road, a cousin signed for a photograph album on behalf of a sister in Malmö and offered water from a well that tasted of iron.
Near Srebrenica, in a house rebuilt on the footprint of a house that had burned, a man took his brother's tools: a plane, a level, a box of bits. "He was better with wood than I am," he said. "I will use them badly, and that is also a kind of memory." Ajka left before the sentence could become a conversation.
The survivor was a woman named Munira, sixty-one, living in a ground-floor apartment in a Zenica block that smelled of coal smoke even in September. The object was a photograph album, thick, the kind with adhesive pages that had yellowed into amber. Munira opened the door, saw the album in Ajka's hands, and said, "Come in. Sit down. I am not doing this in a doorway."
"Everything is too much. That is not a reason to leave." Emina added the potatoes to the pot. "You return objects. That is what you told yourself. You are wrong. You return people, and the objects are just how they travel."
The sentence landed in the kitchen between the sound of the pot lid and the sound of a neighbor's television through the wall. Ajka cut a carrot she had not been asked to cut. The knife hit the board in a steady rhythm.
They ate at the small table by the street-facing window. Stew, bread, a salad of tomatoes that tasted of the balcony sun.
Emina poured a little rakija into two small glasses and raised hers without a toast. They drank. The rakija was homemade and fierce. Ajka's eyes watered, and Emina nodded as if the watering were a correct response to the recipe.
"Tell me about your father," Emina said. "Not the coordinates. The person."
Ajka had answered this question in bureaucratic forms for years: name, date of birth, last known location, status.
The forms did not ask for the person. She put her hands flat on the tablecloth, on either side of her plate, and discovered the words that were not form words.
"He fixed radios. Small ones, and he could make a dead thing play music again. He sang while he worked, badly. My mother said his voice was a crime against the song. He laughed at her.
Stanko installed the new locks that afternoon. Ajka inventoried nothing. She walked the warehouse perimeter and checked the neighboring units.
She called the three contacts scheduled for the following week and shifted one appointment, delayed another, confirmed the third with a voice that sounded like her professional voice and registered, in her chest, as a different instrument under strain.
At the apartment she reread Nermin's article. Vague enough. Specific enough. The breach was not only the gate. The breach was the end of working unseen.
From now on every return carried a second shadow: not only the grey Lada of the Bratunac road, but the possibility of a reader, a tip line, a man in an office somewhere cross-checking industrial zone addresses against a journalist's deliberate paragraphs.
She washed every glass in the cupboard. She set Amira's absence on the windowsill where the shoe had been. Fadila had the shoe now. The vacant sill was more difficult than the shoe had been. Absence was also an inventory item. She logged it without a spreadsheet: space where a child's shoe was. status: returned to a woman who was not the mother. note: the vacant sill continues.
He appeared at dusk, when the industrial zone's workers had gone and the electric light through the skylight had thinned to the color of old newspaper. Ajka was locking the new padlock.
She caught the limp before she saw the older man, and for a moment she took him for Stanko. The limp was different. Heavier on the other side. A different mine, a different year, a different body learning the same mathematics of uneven ground.
The man halted at the edge of the cone of light from the unit's exterior bulb. Sixty, or sixty-one. Capless.
A face that had been handsome in the way of men who spent their youth outdoors and then spent their middle age indoors.
With the consequences. He rolled a cigarette with fingers that recognized the operation too well to need watching. He did not light it.
"Ajka Hadžić," he said. "I am Dražen Milošević. I drove a truck in 1995, and I transported what is in your warehouse. I have something to tell you that your uncle never finished telling."
She kept her hand on the padlock, and the key was in her pocket. Stanko's number was in her other pocket. The industrial road was vacant in both directions.
"Stanko. And the article. And before that, your uncle. He found me in 2008, and he asked me questions. I answered some of them, and then I stopped answering. Then he died. Now you are here, and the gate has been forced."
