by Blake Banner
Now he stared up into my face and his glasses flashed with rage. “Who in the hell…?” His eyes turned to Helen. “Helen, what means this?”
She pointed at me. “This man is looking for Colonel Kostas Marcović. Do you know…?”
He ignored her and snarled at me. “Why? Why you are looking for Colonel Marcović? Who are you?”
I showed him the Sig without pointing it at him. “I’m the guy with a gun who wants to ask you some questions. There is a hurricane going on and a lot of rain. Can we come inside, please? Or do you want to ask me some more of your dumb-ass questions?”
He looked at the gun, grunted and muttered, “Sig Sauer,” like it meant something. He turned and went inside, leaving the door open. We followed, Helen first, then Constantino and then me.
We were in a spacious, shapeless, tiled hall with a few sheepskins on the floor, a wooden trunk and a staircase that climbed to the next floor. The hall seemed to open into other rooms or areas, but in the deep gloom it was hard to tell. The man I assumed was Kostadin Milojević climbed the stairs in silence, with Helen still behind him. I pushed Constantino and he went after them.
We came to a landing with a large, open arch onto another spacious room. The far wall was glass and overlooked the thrashing forest and the now invisible ocean a couple of miles away. On the right there was a large, open fire where logs were crackling and spitting among flames, and the amber glow was reflected, dancing on the glass. There was a suede sofa, a couple of armchairs, bookcases, and on a coffee table in front of the sofa there was a bottle of cognac and a half-full glass.
Or maybe it was half-empty.
He crossed the gloomy room and dropped onto the sofa with his back to me. The storm was almost silent outside. He spoke suddenly.
“Glock,” he said. “Everybody use Glock. Glock 17 or Glock 19. Only men I ever knew who use Sig Sauer are special operations.”
My own voice sounded loud. “So you were in the army.”
“Of course.”
I pointed Constantino to one of the chairs and Helen sat next to Kostadin Milojević on the sofa. I sat on the other chair, with Milojević on my left and Constantino opposite me.
“You were in the Croatian War of Independence from ’91 to ’95?”
“Of course.”
“And you were at Vukovar?”
He nodded several times, slowly, watching the flames. “Yes, I was at Vukovar.”
“Are you Colonel Kostas Marcović?”
I could feel the cold steel of the Sig in my hand. My finger resting lightly on the trigger. It would take less than a second.
His eyes swiveled to meet mine. “I am not Colonel Kostas Marcović. I was not at Vukovar to murder prisoners of war. I was at Vukovar protecting my city from Serbian bastards coming to destroy, murder and rape.”
Helen said, “You are Croatian?”
He half stood, his face flushed red. “I was Yugoslav! Vukovar was my city! My home! Political bastards destroy my country, my city, my home! And then Serbian animals start killing! Killing! Killing! Everywhere Serbians killing!”
Helen was frowning. She drew breath but I spoke first. “You were fighting to protect your city, you didn’t care if they were Serbs or Croats?”
He seemed not to hear. “My wife, my mother, my two daughter, five and seven year old, my brothers, my father…” He stared at me and tears were glinting in the firelight on his cheeks. “They kill everybody, when they discover I am Serb fighting against Serbs, they kill my whole family and they tell me it is my fault. I think they are going to kill me too. I pray they will. But they take me to hospital and they force me to be guard of prisoners. They don’t give me gun. They give me stick. I know what they are going to do.”
He reached for his glass. His hand was shaking. He took a pull and swallowed.
“They take prisoners from hospital in bus, to farm near city. And there they say to me, ‘With stick, now you beat these people, break arms and legs…’ I said no. I hit guard and I run, run like crazy into forest and I escape. Afterward I hear that they kill everyone at farm. They kill all my family, too.”
“What is your name?”
“Kostadin Milojević.”
“What was your name back in Vukovar?”
He held my eye. “Kostadin Milojević.”
“You never changed your name?”
“Why do I want change my name? I am not war criminal. I am not escaping from nobody. I am not hiding. I try to escape only from my mind, from my memory.”
“Why St. George, Mr. Milojević? Why this island, specifically?”
“I need to explain to you?”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Fascist bastard with a gun. I come to St. George because I am looking for something here.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Is none of your fuckin’ business, Mr. Killer! Mr. Murderer! Mr. Assassin! I come lookin’ for peace! For quiet! For human beings!”
“Right where the Colombians were shipping coke to Miami? You couldn’t have gone to Wyoming or Iowa, or Nepal, or the Andaman and Nicobar Islands?”
“This is none of your business.”
“Wrong, Mr. Milojević, unfortunately it is very much my business. I need to know what brought you to this island.”
“And if I don’t tell you? What you will do? Kill me? Too late, I am already dead! Kill my family, my children, my mother, my father? Too late! They are already dead! So what? What, Mr. Killer? What will you do to make me talk?”
I sighed. “If you don’t help me, Mr. Milojević, then one of two bad things might happen.”
He shrugged, and his face said he really didn’t care. I went on.
“In the first place, the wrong man—an innocent man—might die. And in the second place, the true criminal, the man who murdered your family and massacred those people from the hospital, he might walk free.”
He didn’t answer for a while, staring sullenly at the fire, with its flames reflected on his bald head. Eventually he said, “He walked free. He walked free many years ago. He has walked free all this time. It is men like you, men of violence, who control fate and destiny. There is no justice, Mr. Killer. Justice is a human construct. There is no justice in nature. There is only violence. If you can bring violence and unleash it, then you have power and control. He is free. He walks free. What can you do?”
I sighed loudly and noisily. “Mr. Milojević, can we cut the bullshit? Do you know where Colonel Kostas Marcović is?”
He nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“Where is he?”
Without looking at him, he stretched out his arm and pointed at Constantino Marcos.
“There,” he said, “that is Colonel Kostas Marcović.”
Sixteen
Constantino cleared his throat and spat elaborately on the floor.
“Wasn’t it your Benjamin Franklin who said, ‘It is better that a hundred guilty persons should escape justice, than that one innocent man should be wrongly condemned’?” He made a contemptuous noise like, “Pah!” and waved a hand at me. The light from the fire dancing on his face, creating deep shadows around his eyes, made him look momentarily diabolical.
“If you kill one of us, you have fifty percent chance of killing Colonel Kostas Marcović. Of course, you can kill us both, and then you will be close to one hundred percent certain that you have killed your prey, but you will also be one hundred percent certain that you have killed at least one innocent man.” He tilted his head down and scowled at me from under his brows. “Or, in the face of your complete lack of evidence, and the disgusting nature of your mission, you could walk away and leave two old men to live out their lives, haunted by their own daemons and dealing with their own consciences.”
I nodded. “Is that how we are supposed to dispense justice, Constantino? Allow inhuman bastards to do what they like, murder, rape, torture, and then ship them off to small paradise islands to wrestle with their conscience? That’s pretty severe punis
hment. I once saw a four-year-old kid told to sit in the corner and think about what he’d done. I think he almost cried.”
“Your sarcasm is misplaced.”
I ignored him and turned to Kostadin Milojević. He was staring sullenly at the guttering fire, with the lamp in front of him on the table painting his face with amber light and black shadows.
“So what’s your opinion, Kostadin? Should I just walk away? Leave whichever one of you committed those atrocities to the punishment of your own conscience? Should I make an informed guess and shoot the one I think most likely? Or should I execute you both, to cover my odds?”
He picked up his glass of cognac, swirled it around and drained it. He smacked his lips, set the glass down and refilled it to the top, till it spilled over.
“If these are the options, then you should kill us both, to be sure that you have the right man. I am happy to give my life to make sure that this kučkin sin pays for his crimes. I should have killed him myself, years ago, but I was too much coward. Sometimes it is easier to die than to kill.” He turned to face me and his black eyes were like two caverns. “But I ask you one thing. Before you execute us…,” he extended his left hand to point at Constantino, “go to his house, look at his collections there, look at what he has in his private rooms…”
Constantino’s voice was a rasp, almost a reptilian hiss, as he spat the word, “Lažov!”
Milojević turned on him. “Liar? Liar? You call me a liar? Do you deny you have a room full of the treasures you stole from the men and women and children that you butchered? Kučkin sin! Son of a filthy whore bitch! You look me in the face and tell me you don’t have scalps hanging in your office? You did not take trophies from the people you butchered? You do not keep those trophies in your house?”
I was watching Constantino Marcos very carefully. His face was rigid and his hands, like claws, were gripping the arms of his chair as he slowly rose to his feet, while Milojević screamed at him on the brink of hysteria.
“You think I have not been to your house a hundred times? You think I have not inspected your collection a hundred times, wondering which one is my sister, which one is my mother, my father or my brother? You think I have not waited there, a hundred times, watching through your window while you swam on the beach, with my Glock loaded, praying! Praying for the courage to execute you, you filthy bastard kučkin sin!”
There was a moment of absolute, shocking silence. Then, in the space of a fraction of a second, Milojević hurled his glass of cognac at the fire. It erupted in a huge ball of fire. We all shied away, momentarily overwhelmed by the shock and the heat. It took less than two seconds, but in that time, Milojević, with surprising speed and agility, had scrambled over the back of his chair and sprinted for the stairs.
I swore violently and made after him, stumbling against the sofa as I went. Then a steel wall crashed into my head. Thick needles of pain stabbed through my skull and I swore at myself for my stupidity. I wasn’t unconscious, but I lay on the floor, my coordination gone and my limbs refusing to respond. I opened my eyes and saw the cognac bottle lying beside my head, slowly spilling its contents onto the tiles.
I struggled unsteadily to my feet and saw the flash of Helen’s legs running past me, screaming “Constantino! No!”
And then, with my head swimming and the house rocking like a barge in an Atlantic storm, I staggered down the stairs with Helen’s fleeting shadow ahead of me. A sudden howl and a scream told me Milojević had opened the front door. My mind, full of pain and nausea, was struggling to make sense of what he had done. I got to the bottom of the stairs and just managed to avoid my knees buckling. Ahead of me the door was wide open and outside the trees were lashing and dancing in the growing darkness. I could see the black hulk of the Toyota up on the porch, and two figures clawing their way along the veranda toward the side of the house. There were barely two or three feet between them.
In the doorway, clinging to the frame, was Helen, screaming into the gale. I staggered up beside her and yelled in her ear, “Where are they going?”
She stared up into my face, her cheeks and her hair drenched with rain. Her eyes were fierce with reproach. “His garage is at the back! What have you done?”
I snarled, “Save it!” and went after them.
The wind had shifted and hit me like a brick wall, knocking me sprawling to the wooden porch. I grabbed hold of the truck and pulled myself to my feet, as Helen climbed behind the wheel. I dragged myself to the passenger seat with the wind pounding at my face, making it hard to breathe and threatening to drag me from the truck. I hauled myself in and slammed the door shut.
She fired up the engine and reversed down the steps, yelling at me, “I’m more accustomed to these storms, and you’ll need to jump out. I’ll drive!”
We moved forward with the wind threatening to lift the tail of the truck and making it skid and swerve in the mud. At the corner of the house she spun the wheel left and accelerated steadily in first. We hit the lea of the house and fifteen or twenty yards ahead of us we saw the two figures of Milojević and Constantino struggling with each other outside an open garage. Milojević, the younger man, struck Constantino a couple of blows on the head and the older man fell to the ground. He struggled to pull himself away but Milojević didn’t go after him. He ran into the garage as we skidded to a halt. Our headlamps picked out a black Land Rover Defender. The door flashed, there was a roar and the headlamps came on. Next thing the Defender was surging past us.
I swung down into the gale to go get Constantino. He was clutching at the garage wall as he staggered to his feet, with his coat and his pants flapping around him. I called to him, but the wind snatched his name from my lips and hurled it up into the tossing treetops.
Then he was stumbling inside the garage, twisting and warping among the shadows. I swore violently and two powerful headlamps snapped on. There was the roar of a massively powerful engine and I scrambled back toward the Toyota as a huge Range Rover thundered past, sending showers of mud spraying into the air.
It was the craziest drive of my life. Milojević was clearly out of his mind and Constantino was nothing short of batshit crazy. We rattled, skidded and slid, head-on into the wind, back down the driveway toward the path we’d followed to get there, skirting the forest where the tall pines were twisting and groaning in the gale. The Defender was powering through the mud and the rain with the Range Rover stuck to its tail, illuminating the truck in the twin arcs of its powerful lamps. They were faster and more powerful than the Toyota, and were steadily slipping away from us.
We came to an intersection of flooded, pitted paths and the two Rovers turned left, bouncing and lurching, then fishtailed down a narrow road between dry-stone walls fringed by tall, thrashing pines. The trucks were lost to view in seconds and only the glow from their headlamps appeared occasionally above the dancing trees. We rattled, bumped and jerked through almost three feet of water, over rocks and potholes, to the track where the two trucks had disappeared. The going was painfully slow. The Toyota was not up to the standard of the Defender or the Range Rover. And we were not, like Milojević or Constantino, driven by sheer desperation.
Ahead, we caught occasional glimpses of their headlamps pulling farther and farther away from us. Helen spoke suddenly. Her face was tense and her voice sharp.
“I know where he is going.”
“Where?”
She glanced at me and her eyes were afraid. “He’s going to Constantino’s house.”
“He wants us to see what’s there.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, David.”
The name sounded suddenly incongruous and ugly in her mouth: another lie in an unending ocean of falsehoods. I bit my teeth to silence myself, but she must have sensed it because she glanced at me again, as she negotiated a bend and said, “If that is your name. It’s not, is it? Men like you don’t have names. You don’t need them. They are an inconvenient means by which you can be tracked. You exist only to ki
ll and destroy.”
Before I could answer, the two sets of headlamps came into view and the trucks turned a sharp left and accelerated onto the main road. For a moment there was the eerie image of a black palm branch sailing above them through the air like a banshee screaming in the night. Then it crashed on the road and cartwheeled, making the Defender swerve, and the Range Rover surged to overtake. Then they were lost to view again.
By the time we reached the intersection and pulled out onto the blacktop the two Rovers were disappearing east along the long, straight road, the glow of their headlamps engulfed by the dark and the rain. We accelerated after them with the wind battering at our right side, driving us toward the ditch, forcing Helen to wrestle with the wheel and force it back to the center of the road.
We drove in tense silence for maybe five minutes. Twice she lost control of the truck and we did a slow waltz along the road, skidding on the wet asphalt, propelled by the wind. But she drove well and eventually got control.
After five minutes we began to climb and the road began to weave and bend, up the only mountain on the island, the Belle Tout. We were soon engulfed by dense forest on all sides. The road was invisible under a thick cloud of rain mist and the tires on the truck could barely hold it and skidded and swerved on each bend. Another five minutes, which felt like half an hour, brought us to a large, iron gate set back from the road that stood open. Through it a path led down through the forest and we moved in among the tossing, sighing trees that swayed and groaned above our heads. Here, in the eerie, damp gloom, the storm was broken and dispersed, but the ominous sense of menace was somehow magnified.
The path was six inches deep in slime and mud and we proceeded, painfully slowly, skidding and fishtailing, occasionally colliding in slow motion with a tree. Then the real problem came. We reached the bottom of the slope, and had to start a steady climb through a broad curve to a house we could just make out maybe a hundred yards away. The Toyota made it up twelve feet. Then the wheels started to spin and the truck slid slowly back down to the bottom of the track, where the dip was steadily filling up with water.