The halfhearted gestures toward a truce and the negotiations which Marko attended as Velimirović’s bodyguard, the musty cellar where he was forced to listen to the lewd jokes of the officers, generals, and politicians, and their perverse laughter, while he and Schweppes—a kid, just his age, who worked on the Croatian side for Ilinčić—patrolled, fully armed, by a door that was slightly ajar. They exchanged glances over their gun sights, wincing at some of what they heard. For the first time, here, through the smoke and wan light, the name Kirin came up. Only years later did he realize what they were talking about then, and what Velimirović was congratulating Ilinčić for. Then, without hardly anyone ever knowing, he saved Schweppes’s life and the lives of several others: he overheard plans being hatched among the Serbs to ambush the delegation of Croatian negotiators and, with news of the putsch drumming in his ears, he persuaded the Croatian team to travel by a different route. Years later he received a message of thanks over the Spanish mobile-phone network, to which he never replied, and then found a package by the door to his apartment and in it, a bottle of Glenlivet. Months of hell followed; Marko began distancing himself from his fellow fighters in the unit and kept as low a profile as he could manage. His mother was finding it a struggle to get out of bed; without his help she couldn’t even reach the improvised chamber-pot toilet in the corner of the cellar where they were sheltering from the constant shelling. For days and nights she lay on a narrow folding cot, waiting for Marko to come home and lift her. The most cherished item, the best thing, he ever received in return for his service in the paramilitary unit was a package of diapers from Belgrade, through someone he knew; all the local suppliers had run out. Whenever he had to leave on an assignment that would be taking him away for a whole day or night, he’d rinse his mother with water from a bottle over a washbasin in the basement to ease her bedsores. They were all maddened by the siege, the shooting, the lack of sleep, the reek of burning buildings, the feces, the blood, and the corpses. There was no longer any clear rhythm of day and night, the whole place lived at the unnatural pace of the shelling, bombing, dying, drinking. No one was able to leave or enter the city. This evil was bound to implode. Then Marko was ordered to organize excavation backhoes to prepare several mass graves in fields just outside of town and arrange for trucks to bring in the people who’d do the digging. He didn’t fire a single shot the night of the massacre; the next night he broke into Velimirović’s bedroom and defiantly jammed his pistol up into the roof of the man’s mouth. The first night following what the Serb forces were calling liberation, which Marko and his mother had been hoping finally to spend in their apartment after three months of crouching in the basement, he went down to carry his sleeping mother upstairs to her bed. He slipped an arm under her tiny, frail body and felt the stiffened, chill resistance of her thighs. All he could hear after that was the buzzing of bees. In late 1991, he went through a long bout of depression, and he didn’t pull out of it until 1997. After that he hadn’t left the city, feeling he deserved to live there amidst it all and with what had survived inside him. He was resolved to stay there for the rest of his life, blaming himself for each and every victim. From that time on he worked only at physical jobs and drove the taxi, reading everything he could get his hands on. Recently he’d been able to obtain almost everything over the Internet. This was the only thing that did him good for a spell, helped him feel alive and gradually pulled him up out of his deep hole. As did music sometimes, mostly dark, dark jazz. Until this evening, when, while circling around town, he’d met Nora. He nearly drowned in her eyes. He knew her so well; she was everything this part of the world was that could never be explained to anybody from someplace else. The river water which compelled him though he couldn’t bear to look at it, and the honey, and the bees, and the gardens, and all the blood that had soaked deep into the ground for miles around, knives gripped between teeth, sabers strapped to thighs. He knew everything, and he saw that she, too, sensed much of it, but what she sensed didn’t come close to the unspeakable things he knew. He felt like standing out in front of the hotel till the end of his days, kneeling at her bedside in case she opened her eyes. He stepped into the little elevator in his building, and, deep in thoughts about the warm place under his arm where he still felt the glow of her hand, he chanced to look at the mirror in the neon light. With a surge of nausea he hastily looked away.
12.
Cold
time is no longer a problem for me
I know no better way, actually,
to spend it
now (fall 2010)
He moved noiselessly around the dark apartment. The front door wasn’t locked, which implied that the man inside was desperate or no longer cared about what would happen next, all because of his frantic obsession with revenge. He froze in the corner of the bedroom and listened to the man’s breathing in the dark, how he shuddered and moaned in a fitful half sleep. Only five paces to the bed. He cocked the pistol, muffled with a silencer, and inched toward the moans. He hadn’t been doing this for a while; two steps from the bed he tripped over the electric cord for the bedside table lamp and nearly lost his balance. Nevertheless, he rested the pistol precisely on the man’s temple and grabbed him by the throat to keep him from shouting. He waited a few seconds for the man to wake, allowing him only to breathe. When he saw the man was aware enough to understand what was happening, he asked him softly and distinctly:
“Where are the pictures?”
The mayor spluttered, fighting for air, his arms flailing. Schweppes relaxed his grip slightly.
“There are no . . . no pictures . . . I just heard about them.” He confirmed with desperate sincerity what Schweppes had assumed—he’d been bluffing. Which did not mean that they didn’t exist in a secret dossier kept by the former boss of the underworld. With a voice full of mercy he asked once more:
“Certain?”
“I swear,” answered the mayor with a sob. Schweppes moved back a few inches and tilted his head ever so slightly to the side. Two seconds later, the hole was symmetrical and round, lacy only on the edges and gray as mold. For the last time, his eyes swept the room to be sure he was leaving behind no traces. For years now he’d been caught up with other things, mostly smuggling, and once Croatia’s membership in the European Union had become a certainty, people had become the hottest commodity. There were wagonloads of desperate people, and their numbers were unlikely to diminish. They swam, crawled, sprinted through woods, grabbed barbed wire with their bare hands, and the blood on their palms was the color of freedom. All he had to do was wave the EU circle of yellow stars and they were ready to give him every cent they had. And there was always something, dollars, euros, all he did was clear the way, he knew the Spačva route backwards and forwards after his time spent in the field during the war, as well as several other routes, and he was on good terms with local police chiefs. He never exposed himself to danger; the kids he recruited were the ones who were exposed, while he pocketed the cold cash. Belgrade to Zagreb, six hundred euros per head; double that to Italy. His business had taken off. The array of services he offered in the chain of human trafficking was far-reaching, though over the last month he’d kept a low profile after a deputy police chief was booted who’d been one of the crucial links in his chain on that route. From a business perspective, this thing with the mayor suited him to a tee, but never would he have done such a thing for anybody but Brigita. Schweppes belonged to a group of local professional hitmen, most of them schooled abroad. He began his training as a kid in Germany, after he was convicted of assault causing bodily harm. When he arrived in Croatia in the 1990s, only just then founded as a state, he offered his services to the secret service through the Boss and the casino at the InterContinental Hotel. Absolution for his earlier sins had to come from the powerful sponsors within the state system and the crime world, which was supported right at the highest echelons of government. A segment of the criminal elite was responsible for assass
inations: suspicious traffic accidents, explosive devices attached to cars, sniper kills. One of his first targets was Kirin, a policeman. The bosses of the underground were in agreement all across former Yugoslavia: the murder of one’s opponents and related criminal activity aimed at erasing any connection to the people in charge was standard practice. The war was a boon to them all. If someone from the Zemun clan was interested in having someone hit, he’d reach out to his colleagues in Sarajevo, Skopje, or Zagreb for help. He’d dispatch his hitman to do the job and then have the killer hidden in one of the other ex-Yugoslav countries. Later, the favor would be returned in kind. Faced with this system, the police were hard-pressed to link the murderer to the person who’d ordered the hit, and the investigation was made all the more complicated, and still is, by the poor levels of cooperation among the various Balkan police forces. So the vast majority of these hits remain unsolved. Professional killers who work for the state always exploit moments of crisis; they hide behind political intrigue and turmoil, and their connections with the powermongers mean they won’t be exposed. Although most killers are psychopaths, Schweppes was not lacking in all human emotion. He’d killed his stepfather, and then spent the man’s savings. The police quickly caught him, and it was in a German prison that his training in murder began. These were his glory days; he was so young that he was allowed to return to Croatia to serve out the rest of his sentence. So the path to the casino and recruitment by the secret services was not a long one. After his first murder it was as if a bottomless hole had opened up inside him, and he’d gone over the edge. He didn’t have many choices. The genotype, phenotype, the easy accessibility of weapons and the lack of any ethical constraints in society formed him quickly, fiercely, with no way out. On his way he stumbled across Brigita, and that was as close as he ever came to a moment of atonement. He watched her as she moved among the tables, as she laid her little hand on men’s broad shoulders. He wanted to shield her. Himself and her together. She, on the other hand, admired Schweppes and felt safe with him, but she didn’t need him in that way, and she knew she felt best when she was on her own. Men were a means to an end, not the end itself. Meanwhile she’d earned her university degree and went where nobody else wanted to go, straight into the heart of darkness, because she knew, if she were among the first, that she’d be at an advantage over others and have the chance to set up her own network. The empire soon crumbled, and then began the legal proceedings against criminal organizations. Schweppes’s name and hers both came up, but at that level she remained loyal. She appeared as a witness and testified that she knew nothing, she’d never noticed anything, she was doing the job while she studied so she could get more easily through her schooling. In the end she added that she’d noticed that her boyfriend did carry a pistol. She’d thought this a little strange, just that. But that was what the times were like, other people carried weapons, too. Here their paths diverged. There were no hard feelings, and she knew that because of all this she had the right to count on at least one more favor. She was right: whenever he thought about her, all those feelings came back to Schweppes. Although he was fully capable of standing by, never getting his pants cuffs wet while he watched people drown in the Danube as they tried to swim across it, he could not resist her I need you. This was completely irrational and so rare in his life, because he felt almost nothing for others, with the exception of the hatred he felt for his closest family and indifference for everybody else. And once, gratitude. For a young Serbian man who saved his life at the outset of the war by deliberately changing the route of their van. Schweppes understood that he had done nothing to deserve this. That his life had been saved by the action of the young Serbian reservist was something he only learned of years later, and that the man’s name was Marko, and that he was still living here in the city. He found the man’s contact information through the police, sent him a message and a bottle of the finest whisky. Now that was someone he’d like to meet again, to ask him why he’d done it. He cast another glance at the mayor’s lifeless body. One more person’s suffering over—that was the thought that passed through his mind as he slowly shut the door of the apartment, stepping out into the quiet hall.
13.
The first and the last day
is this only a lie?
is it only trickery?
now (fall 2010)
The message flashed onto Ilinčić’s cell phone at 5:30 a.m., while he was lifting weights in the basement of the private hotel gym that had previously housed a disco. He always got up early and exercised. Despite his age, he kept himself in shape, a step ahead of everyone. His man on the police force let him know the mayor had been killed before the media got a hold of it. The message was delivered flatly, as if he wasn’t sure whether Ilinčić himself was involved in some way. If he wasn’t, the city’s boss needed to hear about it before everybody else did, but if—which the man thought more likely—he was involved, then when Ilinčić took complete control he’d remember who’d proved loyal and reliable and kept him in the loop. The news was so shocking that Ilinčić stopped working out, straining to make sense of the unexpected murder while his pulse gradually returned to normal as big beads of sweat leached from his pores. He puzzled over this murder that he’d known nothing about and who could be behind it. He took a quick cold shower, instead of the longer one in lukewarm water that he preferred, while his thoughts turned to the little girls from the local orphanage who were ordered in on weekends for the amusement of the Forestry Maintenance crew. He dressed and went upstairs to the restaurant to have breakfast and an espresso. His suspicions circled around the poltical and criminal factions in the city, without dwelling on anyone in particular. After the recording of the bribe offer was made public, the mayor was dead politically, and for an act as radical as this murder there must be a powerful motive. The other thing bothering him was the worry that there was someone out there who’d had the audacity to aim so high, sidestepping him and his connections and daring to perpetrate something this outrageous in his city. The third was the serious possibility that he would be considered a suspect and talk would start circulating that he was implicated. Someone might well turn up who knew that Ilinčić had been pressuring the mayor to change the future lessee of the port. Very little happened in the city without Ilinčić’s blessing. He had a finger in every pie. He’d placed almost everyone who was serving on the city council. They didn’t dare think with their own heads, except those who were genuinely stupid, and they were easy to manipulate. Like the fanatic young hawk from the radical right-wing party who sabotaged the passing of a law regulating the holding of pigs and sheep only because the document submitted by the minority party was written in both alphabets. The kid was caught hook, line, and sinker by the nationalist program, thereby vulnerable to endless forms of manipulation. Precisely because of him and those like him, all the processes in the city had ground to a halt, and the money kept pouring in. Like when, five years ago, the national government and various funds invested millions of euros in the city’s commercial zone. They built up the infrastructure to support several industrial plants, but to this day not a single one of the factories had opened. Six of the investors pulled out. Parallel to building the infrastructure, Ilinčić had built a magnificent summer home for himself on the island of Pag, and the city of Pag then became their sister city. Now focus had shifted to the port: the only company anywhere in the area that was making a profit, the only undertaking with no losses and which was not laying off its employees. Approval had finally come down from above for its sale, or, as formulated in the spirit of democracy, its lease. Whoever was running city hall when the lease of the port went through, with its annual trans-shipment capacity of over a million tons of freight, would bring in enough revenue that they would never again have to worry about their own subsistence, if, indeed, the right lessee were found. Everything had to be set up with care, the tender prepared meticulously. The chaos reigning in the city was convenient in this regard, but what
with a murder investigation possibly forthcoming, the dead mayor could get in the way, too. In this sense, dead Ante could prove useful. If only the Serbian kid had been a year or so older. After the tragedy, Ilinčić had come up with a plan: when this administration fell, he’d install someone, again, with a strong camera presence. He’d hold the tender and transactions for the port, standing, as always, in the shadows and skimming off the cream. Now, because of the murder, things would get tricky—too many police would be poking around, and they wouldn’t be the usual local cops; instead a team he didn’t control would be investigating the city power structures, and he’d have to keep a low profile for a time. Journalists, scandals he hadn’t staged himself, morons who’d blurt out something. He could see this coming. He didn’t like it. And he didn’t like the way that young woman was hanging around his hotel. He’d immediately sniffed out that she was Kirin’s daughter, a female version of her father. She’d struck him as familiar as soon as he laid eyes on her, focused as she’d been on her laptop. And when she gave her name as Kirin, looking him boldly in the eyes, he’d frozen. He couldn’t be wrong, even though she’d said she was from Omiš. Bullshit, from Omiš. The widow had given up, finally, on pursuing an investigation, though she’d been unexpectedly persistent, but he’d always assumed that at least the daughter wouldn’t stick her nose into it. He’d already have been planning how to handle a son, but as she was the man’s daughter he hadn’t given a thought to her all these years. And a journalist to boot. He was not one to give credence to conspiracy theories, nor did he allow himself to be swept up into a panic, but something worried him here, too much for him to let it go—her face kept swimming back into his thoughts. What had brought her here, and why? The Kirin murder was ancient history. When the case was dredged up every few years, with each change of government, he was never too worried; he could rely on the powerful backing of the head of state. And besides, they couldn’t touch him even if they chose to try, because all of the ruling elite of Zagreb, including the Supreme Court, would end up in the gutter if they did. But someone’s child—now that’s a different matter. This he knew at a gut level. He’d send her a message, there was no other way; he had to take steps to insure his safety. He needed to really shake her up and send her back to her Omiš with her tail between her legs. What a fucking family; some people just don’t know when to stop, like that father of hers. Ilinčić had offered him everything. But no, that man was so righteous. Kirin could have moved his whole family to Germany; Ilinčić had offered him that, too. If only he’d gone off and left them to wage their wars in peace, the car accident would never have happened. And now this woman shows up. She gave him the chills; he had to shake her off as soon as possible so he could get back to work.
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