Through the Bookstore Window Read online

  This is a Genuine Defenestraton Book

  Defenestration | Rare Bird

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Bill Petrocelli

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Minion Pro

  epub isbn: 9781947856523

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Petrocelli, William, author.

  Title: Through the bookstore window : a novel of mystery and suspense / Bill Petrocelli.

  Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Defenestration Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572906

  Subjects: LCSH Yugoslav War, 1991–1995—Fiction. | Bosnian Americans—Fiction. | Adoption—Fiction. | Sexual abuse—Fiction. | San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. | Transgender people—Fiction. | Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction. | BISAC FICTION /

  Thrillers / Suspense

  Classification: LCC PS3616.E8668 T57 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  To my wife, Elaine, and my colleague, Karen West,

  for all of the faith and energy that they put into this book.

  To my special support team of Petra, Ian, Sammy, Bryn, Laura, and Dylan—may they all grow up to be writers.

  To all the dedicated booksellers of America, who are often overworked and underappreciated.

  Contents

  Gina

  Part One

  Bosnia

  Part Two

  San Francisco

  Indianapolis

  Gina

  Alexi

  Part Three

  Gina

  Davey

  Gina

  Davey

  Alexi

  Gina

  Davey

  Alexi

  Part Four

  Gina

  Davey

  Alexi

  Davey

  Gina

  Davey

  Alexi

  Gina

  Part Five

  Two Weeks Later

  Gina

  Gina—2011

  Here’s what I think:

  We’ve all been wounded by war. Some of the wounds come from big, brutal wars, but others are from smaller bloodlettings that don’t make the front pages. Sometimes the injury arrives in a personal way—in a one-on-one encounter that invades your body, your life, and your soul. But it’s always there somewhere. And if you really want to understand a person, you have to find that wound.

  That’s true of me. And it’s true of the person lying next to me—who, I should note, is a first-time visitor to my bed. There are sleep noises coming from that other pillow, which are comforting to hear from someone who has had a close brush with death. Peace and sleep are what we both need at the moment. But at some point we’ll have to share our experiences and try to make sense of them. What happens then depends upon whether our memories—our war-wounds—provide us any understanding or whether they’ll just grate on each other and move us further apart.

  I have another thought, but this one I’m not as sure about.

  I think reality only exists in our life stories. I’m a character in your story, and you’re a character in mine. And both of us intrude upon the stories of hundreds, thousands—maybe millions—of others. Trying to isolate our own story is a mistake, because everything that makes life worth living occurs at the place where our stories intersect. People in my profession just add to the confusion. Downstairs from where I’m lying at the moment are thousands of books on the shelves of the bookstore, waiting for you to walk in and pick one up—and maybe find characters who will invite themselves into your life.

  These are some of thoughts running through your head when you wake up at 4:00 in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. I’ve been lying here for a while. The wind has been battering the trees against the front window of the apartment. Now the foghorns are starting their wail, telling me that the morning fog is beginning to roll down the hills of San Francisco and head our way. My worries about the bookstore downstairs have a sharper edge at this time of night. I think about who might be walking by at that moment, wrapped up in darkness, maybe looking in the window and feeling threatened by something he sees. It’s a fragile business in a fragile world.

  And it’s at times like this, when you can’t sleep, that you might as well start telling stories.

  Part One

  Bosnia—1996

  She kept watching the soldier, but his last breath had disappeared. He’d writhed in pain in the middle of the street when he was first shot, but he must have realized he was in even greater danger if he couldn’t get out of the intersection and crawl over to the buildings. He pulled himself across the pavement, dragging his wounded leg through the dirt, trying to stop the flow of blood with his free hand. The agony on his face was harrowing. She found herself quietly cheering him on, even though in another part of her brain she knew he was her enemy. He was part of the Militia—a brutal group of killers that showed no mercy. But that didn’t stop her from hoping that this soldier—the one outside her window—might survive.

  She watched him from the window at the top of the cellar, because that one broken window was her only connection with the outside world. The cellar was the only place where she felt safe. The soldier’s last movements were slow and painful, as he kept trying to reach the comparative safety of the alley. He didn’t make it. After he’d crawled only a few meters, there was another crack of rifle fire. It came from the roof, where her brother and his friends had set themselves up as snipers. And with that burst of gunfire, there was an eruption of blood from the soldier’s chest. After that, he didn’t move at all.

  When the shooting first started, she tried to sort out the individual sounds, wondering where the bullets were coming from. But as the gunfire became more incessant, she realized it could be coming from anywhere. The Militia troops were shouting in a dialect of Serbo-Croatian that she thought was spoken only in the villages across the canyon. She knew they were patrolling the streets, and she shuddered at the idea that they might be getting ready to burst into the house. The electricity and phone lines had been out for days, so she was by herself in the dark, hovered up against the wall, trying to stay safe and keep warm. She had her favorite books stacked nearby, but in the dark it was impossible to read. The only blankets she had belonged to their family dog, who had fled when the explosions began. She had no idea where he’d gone.

  The day before, a shell had ripped through the nearby house where her friend lived, setting it afire. When she saw that, she ran screeching upstairs, trying to force her way through the door and out into the street. But her brother grabbed her. You can’t go out, he said. It’s too dangerous. She started screaming that she’d never see her friend again, but his grip got tighter. She tried arguing with him. You and your friends sneak out every night. Let me go! But he pushed her back. Listen to me, he said, we’re risking our lives to protect you from these animals. We know how to avoid getting killed. There’s no place for girls in this fight. She seethed at his words, but she couldn’t force her way past him. She headed back to the cellar, where she began burrowing into the dark.

  From the
cellar window, she could see the smoking hulk of their local store. By now, they were almost out of food in the house. When she first headed down to the cellar, her mother had grabbed some slices of bread and a hunk of cheese, leaving as much as she could for the others. Her mother’s words trailed her down the stairs, as she kept trying to reassure her that her sister would be coming back soon and bringing food with her. But her mother was talking more and more to herself. A day earlier she’d walked in front of the window by the sink and was met by a flurry of bullets that sent a shower of broken pottery down on top of her. But she refused to leave the kitchen. Even now she was upstairs, wandering around, sadly trying to prepare a meal with no food and for no one who would sit down to eat it. She was going mad like everyone else.

  sss

  He felt a shove in the small of his back that caused him to stumble into the debris from a collapsed wall. He managed only barely to step to the side of the alley, avoiding the sharpest nails.

  “Keep moving, you little sissy.”

  The rifle hit him again between his shoulders. “Are you going to act like a soldier, or are you going to keep being a coward?”

  His tormentor let out a high-pitched noise that started deep in his throat and twisted its way into a screech. It was an obnoxious, grating sound, but he didn’t dare act like it was funny. No one ever did. The man doing the laughing was far too dangerous. He had a whole series of animal-like sounds that became even more chilling when he was enjoying some sadistic pleasure. Among the Militia troops, it had earned him the name Hijena—the Hyena.

  The Hijena kept pushing him down the street toward their unit’s temporary headquarters, slowing down only as they passed the burnt-out remains of some local shops. The Hijena stopped, shoving aside the remains of a few books that had burst out of the window of a tiny corner store, and pushed his way toward a bottle of Slivovitz that was sticking out of the rubble. It was somehow still intact. He tore off the top and downed a couple of swallows.

  The rest of the men in the unit were sitting on broken boxes or lying against abandoned automobiles, smoking and talking, watching the two-man parade that the Hijena was leading in front of them. There was some laughter—but it was uneasy. They all knew the Hijena was sending a message that their turn could be next. The Hijena and his older brother, the Komandant, didn’t hesitate to take even the harshest measures whenever they felt the need. Two days earlier, they’d tied a soldier—whom they claimed was a deserter—to a pole in the street and ordered the others to shoot him. When none of the soldiers in the line made any move to open fire, the Komandant walked up to the prisoner, put a pistol against the man’s temple, and fired. With the gun still in hand, he then walked slowly down the line in front of the reluctant firing squad, staring at each one of them.

  sss

  The brutality of it sickened her. It seemed like the Militia would just keep shooting until there was no one left. Her brother and the others had been warning her for weeks that this would happen. These militiamen were dogs, they said—filthy animals that were capable of anything. Rumors had swept through town about terrible things going on in other parts of the country. There were stories of mass killings—murders in places like Srebrenica and other towns to the north.

  And there was more, they warned. There was rape. That thought made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t even grasp the idea that a soldier could stop long enough to assault a woman in the midst of all the killing going on around him. The madness of it was unbearable. Was being raped worse than being killed? That made no sense to her. But the idea that someone attacking her might think that it was worse left her gripped in fear. And it was more than just the Militia she was worried about. She was fearful about what was going on in the heads of her brother and his friends. These young, would-be soldiers had decided that the rape of a woman was an attack against them. This was an intolerable offense, they kept saying—an intrusion into their territory. An attack on their women was an attack on their sense of pride. It demanded retaliation.

  The things that had held her together were falling apart—her family, her school, and her friends all seemed to be spinning away. This was the time of day when she might be reading a book or be on the phone with her girlfriends, talking about things that had happened in school. They might be planning their next shopping trip or chatting about their upcoming vacation. But it was becoming harder and harder to hold on to any of that. Her clothes, her books, and her other things were upstairs in her room, but when she’d gone up to get them she’d been totally exposed. There was gunfire just outside her window, and bullets had ricocheted off the outside walls. She’d grabbed some underwear and a couple of books, scooping some clothing off of her chair as she raced for the stairs. By the time she got down to the cellar and looked at what she had grabbed, she realized she had only one item of real clothing in her hands. It was her favorite party dress.

  Her piano was upstairs, but it was as good as gone. It was buried under rubble from a shell that had struck the other side of the compound, causing a living room wall to collapse. That piano had been in their family for eighty years, and her grandmother had left it to her in her will. She’d thought about her grandmother as she played it every afternoon, trying to learn the Bach Fugue in G minor. Her music teacher had said it might be too difficult for her to master, but she kept working at it. The sheet music was still open to that piece when the artillery shell hit the building. Now the main theme of the Fugue was running through her head as she sat there in the cellar, moving her fingers, trying to remember the sequence of notes.

  She picked up the dress and stared at it in the dark, trying to get a sense of its color and design, resisting the temptation to burst into tears. The memories hiding in that soft material seemed to be mocking her, reminding her of times spent celebrating with her friends, flirting with the local boys, dancing at parties—things that she had now lost. But as she ran her fingers around the bows and straps of the dress, it started to come alive to her touch. She allowed herself to be lost in its textures and sensations. Without really thinking about it, she’d slipped out of her other clothes. Now that dress was hovering above her head as she let it slide slowly over her body. The noise of artillery shells was getting louder, but she tuned that out of her mind for the moment. The dress now covered her completely. She felt herself swaying slightly. Was she going mad? she wondered. Was she really dancing in the cellar to the silent music of the Fugue? She caught herself for a second but then gave way to the feeling, letting loose the emotions she had almost lost.

  sss

  The Hijena kept prodding and shoving him until they got to a small open space at the back of the alley. They were in the middle of a makeshift office, where the Komandant was hunched over a temporary desk pieced together from packing crates. He was reading a map and checking it against some other papers. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, holding an ash that looked ready to break loose. He took one ferocious drag and then tossed it away. He reached for the pack on his desk and, finding it empty, squashed it and threw it in the direction of the cigarette.

  One hard push by the Hijena sent him sprawling against the desk, coming face to face with the Komandant. The other man looked down at him with an icy stare. His eyes were uneven, with the right one opened wide and arched while the left one drooped slightly. But the two eyes had one thing in common—they both seemed bottomless.

  “What’s going on?” Even as the Komandant stared in his direction, he kept directing his voice at his brother.

  “It’s this little coward.” The Hijena shoved him again. “He’s a slacker, and he’ll desert us at the first opportunity.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “It was your idea to put him in our unit in the first place!” the Hijena shouted. “He never should have been here.”

  “Shut up for a minute. You may be my brother, but I’m in charge here.”

  The Hijena
didn’t back off. “You should take him out and shoot him as an example to the others.”

  As the back-and-forth continued between the two brothers, spasms of weakness rushed through his knees. He was afraid to move. He tried to think of a way out of that nightmare, but there was nowhere to go. As they debated what to do with him, his life was swinging in the balance.

  “You’re the one who picked him out of all the other garbage at the orphanage. You should have sold him like the others and made some money for yourself instead of sticking him with me.”

  He had been dragged out of the orphanage a year earlier. At the time, the man standing in front of him wasn’t known as the Komandant, and he wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform. Whether he had any kind of military authority, no one said. He just appeared one day at the orphanage in Sarajevo, walking slowly behind the director, peering at the children lined up in front of him. He said nothing, but he didn’t have to. He had the air of someone you needed to listen to—someone you needed to fear. As he walked down the line, he stared at each of the orphans and strays who were unlucky enough to be there, sometimes grabbing one of the children for a better look, often turning the youngster’s head from side to side, as if to assess how much it was worth. The rumor around the orphanage was that he was a child broker. With one flick of the finger he could pack you up and send you off to God-only-knows where.

  “What’s so important that you had to come bursting in here?”

  “Here—look at the books I found in his pack.” The Hijena grabbed the backpack and dumped the contents on the desk. “Take a look at these.”

  “Oh, sit down.” The Komandant flicked his hand at his brother. “You look like you’re drunk. What are these books?” The Komandant picked one up and turned it over. “You just carry these books around with you? This writing here in the margin—is that poetry? Did you write that?”

  “Yes.” He could feel his voice breaking.

  “When do you find time to write poetry?”