and anything else that could be filched, including anchors. A couple of men had shinnied up the foremast and were trying to pry a brass knob off the top. A gang of boys ran around the deck playing pirates or, if you think about it, not actually playing. Technically speaking, they were pirates. Elmaz said the looting had pretty much stopped, at least in the thirty or forty kilometers around Tirana. I asked him whether the OSCE force had imposed law and order. He didn’t think so. “They are just driving around and sitting in cafés like everyone else,” he said. I asked him if the government had managed to quiet things down. It didn’t have an army anymore, but it still had the secret police, actually the too-well-known police, the Sigurmi, left over from the Hoxha regime and now renamed, with euphemistic masterstroke, the National Information Service. But Elmaz didn’t think the police had done much except A little before curfew on my last night in Albania, I was sitting in a café with the wire-service reporter and a couple other fellow stateside hacks. “Albanians are just like anybody else,” I was saying. “They’re crazy,” said the wire-service reporter. “No, they’re not,” I said. “They just have a different history, different traditions, a different set of political and economic circumstances. They’re acting exactly the way we would if we . . .” There was an Albanian family at the next table: handsome young husband, pretty wife, baby in a stroller, cute four-year-old girl bouncing on her dad’s knee. The girl grabbed the cigarette from between her father’s lips and tried a puff. Mom and Dad laughed. Dad took the cigarette back. Then he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, offered a fresh cigarette to the little girl, and gave her a light. pester Sali Berisha’s political opponents. “Then what stopped the looting?” I said. “They were finished,” said Elmaz.
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