We pulled Lorik’s body out of the car and pushed it down into the ditch. There was no time to bury him or cover his body with branches. We couldn’t go back to my aunt’s house. Or to Shkodër. Or the airport. Not even Tirana felt safe. We circled aimlessly on tiny mountain roads, while she made up her mind. We’d go to Pristina, Kosovo, to a man my father knew.

Aunt Vesa seemed relieved, even hopeful.

And promised to answer all my questions before we got there.

Your father, she said as we drove straight into the night with our headlights off, smuggled weapons during the Kosovo War. For him that terrible, violent conflict was positive, even meaningful—unlike for the rest of us, who hated it. It gave him status, he became somebody, he built up his profile in the criminal underworld. Then the war ended—and with it his business and his income.

My aunt stared straight ahead as she spoke, of course she had to concentrate on the narrow and harrowing roads, whose edges were invisible in the dark. But it wasn’t just that. It was as if it were easier for her to get it all out, if she didn’t meet my eyes, everything she’d held so tightly inside her that she never thought she’d share with anyone. And I was thankful for it, because I didn’t want her to see what I was thinking and feeling now that the story I was searching for was finally being told, the one that belonged to me.

Your dad had a few years that weren’t so great. Violence became his new tool when the smuggling business bottomed. Never turned inward, toward me or the family, but outward. Until one day. I remember it so well. He found a golden egg. How I don’t know, he never said. Or where. But he told me about the contents—and that he was the only one who knew. Somewhere along the northern shore of Lake Shkodër, where there are kilometers of almost untouched nature, there was an abandoned rock shelter. Where a completely new and unknown machine gun was stored. Ten thousand of them. Much more powerful than any other machine gun on the market. One side in the civil war, I never knew which, had ordered those weapons, and they were manufactured and delivered—but just as the war ended! A product no one needed, and a customer that didn’t want to take them or pay for them.