Body Surfing

better be worth all this trouble. If not, he would hand him over to Foras himself.

8
    T he streets in Bihac were dark, either because the Serbs had cut the power or because the Bosnian government had been unable to provide it. Blackout curtains obscured all but the faintest flicker of candlelight or kerosene lamps, but Ileana saw movement everywhere: rats and mice, feral cats, a dog with a bullet wound in its haunch. The animals avoided her by instinct. Not so the occasional wanderer she encountered.
    The first was a Serb. A soldier, but he went down like an old lady with a bad hip. To be fair, he never saw her coming. Ileana jumped him from behind, snapped his neck before he had a chance to cry out.
    The next was Serbian as well. His senses were sharper. He heard her footsteps, turned, actually managed to open his mouth—just in time to receive her fist. He had a small mouth, and Ileana had to dislocate his jaw to get her hand all the way inside, then yanked his tongue out by the root. She waved it before his stunned eyes. “Cat got your tongue?” she purred, then left him to bleed out as she sped into the night.
    A young man was next, a little older than the poet who taught Ileana English. Ileana could smell the sex on him from fifty feet away, and this only enraged her more. The man started when he saw the dark figure walking toward him, but when he realized it wasn’t wearing a uniform—realized it was a girl—he relaxed and smiled uncertainly. “Sestra,” he called in a thickly accented voice. And then, in English: “I guess I’m not the only one sneaking out tonight. Matters of the heart,” he added, shyly, but proudly too. Ileana’s English lessons hadn’t progressed far enough for her to understand what he said, but the demon helped her out. Even as she was striking the man in the belly with hard-flexed fingers, an entire language—dialects, accents, the highlights and low points of its literature—filled her brain. The man was English, she knew now, his accent Mancunian but trying for an Oxbridge affect. But only a wordless wheeze escaped his lips as her nails tore through his skin like wet paper. Her fingers burrowed up under the ribs until they found the beating ball of his heart, which she pulled out and held before his blinking eyes. In an accent that perfectly matched his, Ileana said, “Is this the heart you meant?” and squeezed the last of its blood onto his face. She put it in his hands, folded his twitching fingers around it. “Don’t let me keep you from it.” She was gone before he fell to the ground.
    And so on. Four more Serbian soldiers, then a Bosnian militiaman, a pair of local police officers. Scattered in there were three of her former neighbors.
    That was the first hour.
    The sun was coming up before she’d had her fill. The mortar attacks had ended some time ago, and the town had been eerily quiet for hours. A faint gunpowder tang on the breeze was the only sign of the attack that had happened the previous day.
    The demon sat in the back of Ileana’s brain. If he’d still had a face there would have been an exhausted smile on it, the face of a teenager dismounting a rollercoaster. God, he loved wars! Ileana’s victims lay scattered about the deserted city, but in the coming days they would be catalogued in the laundry list of Serbian atrocities. No one would know better.
    A square of light opened in the side of a building. A window blind being raised, brightness radiating into the town. A second blind went up like a sleeper too lazy to open both eyes at once. The demon saw tables stacked on chairs, cakes and pastries beneath plastic coverson a long Formica counter. A restaurant, preparing for business. Only someone as fatalistic as a Slav would open his shop on the second day of a war.
    A whiff of baking bread snaked through the air. Ileana’s stomach rumbled. The demon didn’t need food, of course, but he too felt a rumbling, a hunger. But it wasn’t bread he wanted.
    The knuckles with which Ileana rapped on the glass door were caked with blood and gore. Ash and blood painted her face like a minstrel.
    A man approached, his head crowned by a thatch of hair as bristly and gray as the push broom in his hands. A second thatch, also gray, also dirty, grew between nose and upper lip like a toothbrush used for cleaning the toilet. His apron was an impasto of stains. He looked at the girl warily, shaking his head.
    Ileana pounded on the door. The glass rattled