The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  “What can our humble order do for you gentlemen?” he asked in impeccable German. His voice was measured and quiet and lacking all human emotion, as if he were speaking patiently to children.

  “I’m looking for a priest who I believe is one of your order,” I said. “A monk called Father Ladislaus. Also known as Antun Djurkovic. I have an important letter for him that I have been ordered by my superiors in Berlin to deliver into his hands, personally. We have today driven all the way from Zagreb just to be here now.”

  “Zagreb?” He pronounced the name of the city as if it had been Paris or London. “It’s many years since I was in Zagreb.”

  “It’s much the same as ever,” said Geiger.

  “Really? I heard there was a mosque now in Zagreb. With minarets. And a muezzin who calls the faithful to prayer.”

  “True,” said Geiger.

  The Father Abbot shook his head.

  “Could I trouble you for a cigarette?” he asked Geiger.

  “Certainly,” said Geiger.

  The abbot puffed a cigarette into life happily and sat down.

  “Those pistols you are carrying, gentlemen,” he said, clearly enjoying his cigarette very much. “I assume they are loaded.”

  “There wouldn’t be much point in carrying them if they weren’t,” said Geiger.

  The Father Abbot was silent for a minute or two and then said, “Cigarettes and bullets. Both of them so small and yet so efficient. If only we spent more time using one more than the other, life would be so much less complicated, don’t you think?”

  “It might be less dangerous,” said Geiger.

  “But. To answer your question. It’s true that for a while there was a man here called Father Ladislaus. And I believe his given name is Djurkovic. Happily he is no longer a member of our order and he has not lived in this monastery for several years. Even by the standards of this unhappy country, his views were extreme, to say the least. Most of us in this order practice our Catholic faith with prayer books and a cross. I’m afraid that Djurkovic believed it was necessary to practice it with bullets and bayonets, which is why I asked him to leave this monastery and also why any mail that was received for him here I ordered destroyed. Consequently he is dead, to us. Certainly his life as a priest is over.

  “To the best of my knowledge he joined the Ustaše after he left us and his present whereabouts are unknown to me, as is his current occupation. I suggest that your best course would be to inquire after him at their headquarters in Banja Luka. To find the Ustaše building in the center of town you need only look for the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, which is currently being demolished by a punishment battalion of Jews, Serbs, and Roma using their bare hands.”

  “Demolished?”

  “You did not mishear me, Captain. Race and religion is a vexed issue in this part of the world, to put it mildly. Following some damage that was inflicted on the cathedral by a German fighter aircraft, the Ustaše government decided to finish the job and ordered it to be destroyed, completely. And if that was not bad enough, the bishop of Banja Luka, Platon Jovanovic, was taken away and murdered in cold blood. Yes, that is what I said. In this country, a Christian priest was martyred for the way he chose to worship God.”

  “On the journey here from Zagreb I saw some Ustaše forces shelling a Serbian Orthodox church,” I said. “Why?”

  The Father Abbot spread his hands as if this question was beyond his understanding.

  “At Petricevac we try to keep ourselves to ourselves and take no interest in politics. But a certain fanatical element in the former Yugoslavia regards the Serbian Orthodox Church and its pro-Russian adherents with unremitting hostility. Doubtless they are partly motivated by the fact that this monastery was itself destroyed by Ottoman Serbs during the middle of the last century. I am myself Croatian but I am not one of those who believe in an eye for eye. As Saint Francis himself reminds us, there are many ways to the Lord, and we pray for all those who are so cruelly oppressed and for their deliverance from bondage. If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will also have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”

  “Amen to that,” I said.

  “I’m glad you say so, Captain Gunther. You and your two friends will stay to supper, of course.”

  “We’d be delighted,” I said.

  “And if you have driven all the way from Zagreb it may be that you are also seeking a place to sleep. You are welcome to stay the night in our humble quarters. This is the true monk’s duty. For the Bible reminds us to ‘be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Hebrews chapter thirteen, verse two.”

  “I promise you, we’re a very long way from being angels,” I told him.

  “Only God knows the truth of a man, my son,” said the Father Abbot.

  We stayed for supper at Petricevac but we did not spend the night there. In spite of the Father Abbot’s civilized words, there was something about the place—and him—I didn’t like. The man was as forbidding as the north face of the Eiger. He had the world-weary air of a Grand Inquisitor and, in spite of what he had said, I would not have been surprised to have found him in charge of a rack or a set of thumbscrews. Then again, I just don’t like priests very much. Most of them are fanatics for a different, less worldly deity than Adolf Hitler but they are fanatics nonetheless.

  As soon as we had finished eating we climbed back into the Mercedes and set off for Banja Luka and, as the Father Abbot had promised, we quickly found the Ustaše headquarters building we were looking for. It was a large, cream-colored, square building with Ottoman features—all Corinthian pillars and arched windows—that resembled a theater or an opera house. An Ustaše flag hung limply above a main door that was busy with men wearing black uniforms and even blacker mustaches. On the other side of the main road older men wearing flat caps and carpet slippers were playing chess in a little park that was what you might have found on a summer’s evening in almost any provincial European town. But it’s not every provincial town that has a punishment battalion of its own citizens tasked with the destruction of a cathedral. At this particular hell on earth an iron cloud of barbed-wire fence had been erected around what remained of the cathedral’s walls to ensure that the poor people detailed to their slave labor did not escape. Work had not yet ceased for the day, however, and from behind piles of loose rubble the emaciated faces of walking caryatids, drooping under their yellow brick burdens, stared hopelessly back at me as I stepped out of the car. Horrified fascination held me rooted to the spot, and I don’t know why but I snatched off my cap as if part of me recognized something about this heap of stones that was still a church. Or perhaps it was the sight of so much human suffering that made me do it—respect for people who were obviously not long for this world. But I did not stay very long to look at what was being done to one church in the name of another in this miserable, godforsaken place; an Ustaše guard advancing on me with a rifle in his hands persuaded me to turn away and go about my business. But man’s inhumanity to man had long been a matter of small surprise to me and I might as easily have turned away because I had become callous. I have to confess all I cared about now was finding Father Ladislaus, giving him his daughter’s letter, and then getting away from the Independent State of Croatia as quickly as possible.

  “I wouldn’t get too upset about that if I were you,” said Geiger, following me inside the headquarters building. “If you ever saw what their side has done to ours in this war you wouldn’t pity them for a minute.”

  “I expect you’re right,” I said. “But all the same I do pity them. I rather think that without pity, we might as well be animals.”

  “It beats me how you ever joined the SD.”

  “It’s a mystery to me, too.”

  In the headquarters building, which was fu
ll of polished marble and crystal chandeliers, I presented my credentials to a sullen Ustaše intelligence officer whose intelligence did not run to speaking any German and who seemed to be more interested in picking his nose and finishing the elaborate doodle on his blotter than in listening to me. Looking at the drawing’s Gordian knot complexity, upside down, it seemed like a perfect image for the impossible-to-unravel politics of Yugoslavia.

  Having secured transport for himself and Sergeant Oehl, and established the latest whereabouts of the SS Prinz Eugen Division captain, Geiger now came to my aid and further established that the man formerly known as Father Ladislaus was now better known as Colonel Dragan.

  “It’s a sort of joke, I think,” he said. “Colonel Dragan. It means the dear colonel. The joke being that from what this fellow says, the colonel is much feared around these parts and quite notorious. He’s currently to be found at a place called Jasenovac, about a hundred kilometers back up the road we were just on. It’s a place where they make bricks.”

  “Bricks? My God, I’d have thought they had plenty of those outside.”

  “You’d certainly think so.”

  “How does a Franciscan monk get to be a Ustaše colonel?” I wondered aloud.

  Geiger shrugged. “There’s only one way in this country,” he said. “By being an efficient killer of Serbs.”

  “Ask him what else he knows about this Colonel Dragan,” I said.

  Geiger spoke again and gradually the Ustaše officer became more animated.

  “This man you’re looking for, Gunther, is a great hero,” said Geiger, offering me a simultaneous translation. “Adored even and something of a living legend in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was sick with fever for a while—apparently, the marshes at Jasenovac are full of mosquitoes—and it was feared he would die. But lots of good Catholics prayed to God and lit many candles, so now he is back to full health again and, if anything, stronger than before and more feared than ever. But even the Ustaše fear the colonel and for good reason. Because he can’t be reasoned with. That’s what his men say. Once his mind is made up there’s no changing it. His mind is impregnable—that’s what this fellow says. But that you can’t judge a man like Colonel Dragan the way you would judge an ordinary man. He’s anything but ordinary. Perhaps that’s because he used to be a priest, like Father Tomislav, who is also attached to the Ustaše troops in Jasenovac. It may be that it is God who gives the colonel the strength to do what he does. Which is to be a man who can do such terrible things. Perhaps it’s his special relationship with God that makes him strong. That makes him so resolute and a source of inspiration to his men. To all Ustaše who would see this country free from the threat of Communism and the Jews and Muslims, and the peasant stupidities of the Serbian Orthodox Church.”

  “And I thought the Nazis had the monopoly on this kind of goat’s shit.”

  Geiger opened his cigarette case and offered me one. Then, taking me by the arm we went outside for a smoke. The summer sun was low behind the clouds now and the sky over Banja Luka was the color of blood. At the Serbian Orthodox cathedral, demolition work had stopped for the day but not the cruelty. I could hear a woman crying. Why had I come to this infernal place?

  “You know, it seems to me that I’ve heard about this fellow, Colonel Dragan, on my first tour of duty down here. About both these men. Your Father Ladislaus and this Father Tomislav. I heard some pretty terrible things. The sort of things that could only happen here in Yugoslavia. This country is full of hate—the Father Abbot was right about that.”

  “What did you hear, Geiger? What kind of things?”

  “Terrible things. Something about two monks who were working with the Ustaše. Just a name, really. They used to call them Ante Pavelic’s twin priests of death. That’s right. The priests of death. I heard they killed a lot of people. Not just in battle. And not just partisans—people who need killing—but women and children, too.”

  “Because they were Serbs?”

  “Because they were Serbs. Look, Gunther, it’s none of my business what you do. But in this country, you’re a fish out of water. In Berlin you probably know what you’re doing, but down here, wearing that uniform, you’re just another target. My advice to you is to stay away from this Colonel Dragan, and from Jasenovac. Leave the minister’s letter here with this fellow, drive back to Zagreb, and get on the next plane home.”

  “I’ve thought about that. Don’t think I haven’t. But I’ve a personal reason for making sure the letter gets into his hands. Besides, the minister won’t be too pleased with me if I tell him I could have met this fellow and then funked it. He might not sign my expenses, and then where will I be?”

  “Alive. Look, I’m not kidding you. This colonel is a real monster. The fact is that even the SS don’t go to Jasenovac if we can possibly avoid it. The place used to be a brickworks, before the war, but now it’s a concentration camp. For Serbs. I believe there were some Jews in Jasenovac, at the beginning of the war, but they’re all dead now. Murdered by the Ustaše.”

  After Smolensk, I wondered how bad things could be in Jasenovac. And after all, I was only delivering a letter. Surely I could do that in next to no time. Besides, I’d met the devil before; in fact I was pretty certain I used to work for him. Heydrich was my best guess as to what the devil was really like. And I could not conceive that Croatian mass murderers could be any worse than German mass murderers like him, or Arthur Nebe. But what was I going to tell Dalia Dresner? That her father was a monster? I didn’t think she was going to be pleased to hear something like that.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m tougher than I look.”

  “No, you look tough enough. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I’ve seen inside your soul, Gunther. There’s still a sliver of decency left in there. There’s your fucking problem. What does Nietzsche say? A man might think he can stare into the abyss without falling in but sometimes the abyss stares back. Sometimes the abyss exerts a strange effect on your sense of balance. Take it from one who knows.”

  I shrugged. “I’m still going to Jasenovac. Besides, like you said, it’s on the way back to Zagreb.”

  “I like you, Gunther,” said Geiger. “I don’t know why, but I do. Maybe it’s that sliver of decency in you. I envy you that. Me, I’m up to my elbows in blood. But you. You’re different. I don’t know how you’ve managed it in the SD but you have and I admire that. So, you give me no alternative but to go to Jasenovac with you. Think about it. You don’t speak Croatian. Or Bosnian-Serb. Besides, suppose you run into some Proles? Or some hostile musclemen?”

  Musclemen was what Oehl was in the habit of calling Muslims.

  “I told you. These bastards like to make you suck your own dick. You need me and the sergeant riding shotgun on the road with you. Besides, we’ve got another car now. With a driver. So you’ll be even safer than you were before.”

  I had to admit he had a point.

  “What about rejoining your SS unit?” I said.

  Geiger shrugged. “There’s plenty of time to do that. Besides, now we’re here in Banja Luka, I know a good place to eat and to stay. Tonight you’re my guest. And we’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

  Twenty-three

  It was a beautiful warm day and we made excellent progress back along the narrow road to Jasenovac. I’d managed to persuade myself that once there I would be halfway back to Zagreb and then Germany, which would somehow make everything all right. You can stand to see almost anything provided you know it isn’t going to be for very long. Reeking of alcohol, Geiger dozed in the passenger seat beside me, while Oehl and another SS man followed in the car behind. A couple of times we saw Ustaše trucks heading the other way but the men inside them paid us little regard. Once or twice we heard the sound of small-arms fire in the distance and as a precaution stopped for a while and had a smoke. But if it was Proles, we didn’t see them. Our new com
panion, a Croatian SS corporal called Schwörer, was a boy not much older than the one Geiger had shot the previous day. His hair looked like fine gold thread and his complexion was as fair as a schoolgirl’s. He didn’t say much. It wasn’t a place for conversation. He tried to match us smoke for smoke but ended up puking at the side of the road after turning himself green with tobacco, which Geiger thought was very funny. We set off again and, after a couple of hours, we slowed to cross a wooden bridge near the confluence of the Sava and Una rivers. Underneath the light mist that hung above the water like the breath of some foul underwater creature, something caught my eye. I stopped the car and got out to take a look and quickly lit a cigarette when I heard the whine of a mosquito. I never did take to being bitten by anything very much, even if it was female. For a brief moment I thought the object in the water was someone swimming. But as I was about to discover, we were a long way from Wannsee and the Havel and anything as innocent as swimming.

  “What is it?” asked Geiger.

  “I’m not sure.”

  I pointed at the river and waited for the slow, mud-brown water to bring the object nearer but I already had a strong suspicion about what it was. It was a woman’s body, still wearing a floral dress, and it floated right under the bridge we were standing on—close enough to see that her hands were tied behind her back, her eyes had been gouged out, and a large piece of her head was missing. A second body and then a third were in the water not far behind her and these were women, too, also mutilated. Schwörer stared impassively at these bodies and I got the strong impression that despite his innocent-looking face he was already familiar with such sights as this.

  “This river goes right through Jasenovac before it gets here,” said Geiger.

  “On its way to Hades, perhaps. And meaning you think that’s where they were killed. In Jasenovac.”

  “Probably.”

  “Shit.”