Zagreb Cowboy

by Alen Mattich

  Della Torre felt the talkative Bosnian slam into his side with the impact of the crash. His ribs felt like they’d been tapped by a sledgehammer. His left knee pounded painfully into the back of the driver’s seat. For a moment he felt as if the seat belt, a proper three-pointer, was quartering him in some modern approximation of a medieval instrument of death.

  The Bosnians had looked at him with suspicion when he’d buckled up. Wearing seat belts was an idiosyncrasy left over from his American childhood. No proper Yugoslav ever used them.

  “Those things are for fairies,” the skinny one to his left had said.

  “What?”

  “Seat belts. Besim’s the best driver. Could be professional. He’s better than Senna even. See that, Besim? He’s going to wet himself. Drive carefully. We don’t want our guest to ruin the seats.”

  They probably thought differently now. Assuming they could still think.

  Besim’s cousin had gone clear over the front seat, through the windscreen, and was now in the stream, picked out by the Merc’s sole working headlight. He might have been swimming, but unless he was competing for an underwater endurance record, there was a fair chance he was dead. The skinny Bosnian was no longer so talkative; in fact, he wasn’t saying anything at all. He was crushed up against the back of the driver’s seat, wedged against the doorpost. He didn’t so much moan as let out a series of staccato grunts. An airbag, a real novelty for della Torre and probably for the driver too, had prevented Besim from joining his cousin in the water or impaling himself in the trunk of the tree. He didn’t seem to be moving, but della Torre wasn’t sure he was dead either. He didn’t really care.

  He unbuckled the belt and took a moment to get a sense of whether he’d crushed his liver or burst his spleen or had suffered any of the other myriad of ugly wounds car wrecks routinely inflicted. But other than a generalized soreness, della Torre felt that whatever ailed him was survivable.

  He fished his notebook out of the talkative Bosnian’s pocket and then reached inside the man’s coat. He was still breathing, but della Torre wasn’t checking his vitals. He found a Beretta, nine millimetre. Just like the one della Torre had left at home. He popped it into his coat pocket along with the precious silk tie and tugged on the door handle on the side where Besim’s cousin had sat. It wouldn’t open. He struggled with it for a while and then remembered the automatic lock. Randomly pressing buttons and knobs by the driver, he started up the rear wipers, rotated a wing mirror, and switched off the radio. He’d resigned himself to crawling out through the missing windscreen when he heard the clunk of four bolts.

  He turned the key in the ignition to stop the engine whining, switched off the headlight, and then gingerly opened the door. It was a drop getting out of the car, and his knee complained. It complained again as he scrambled up the ravine’s steep slope.

  The front of the car was completely smashed. Even in his dazed state he marvelled at the German craftsmanship. They must have gone from eighty kilometres an hour to zero in the space of the tree, and yet the Merc’s electronics still functioned. The only things that worked as they were supposed to when the Yugo he owned had rolled off the assembly line were the wheels. And that, della Torre figured, was down to pure chance.

  Della Torre let the relief of being alive wash over him; he’d always had luck in his misfortune. The Benz was wedged between the tree and the rocky incline. They could have crashed the car a hundred times, and ninety-nine would have resulted in an end-over-end roll or some other metallic gymnastics that would have left them all looking like off-cuts in an abattoir. Never mind avoiding a bullet in the back of the neck.

  He sat on a lonely stone bollard marking the edge of the road and considered what to do. He could walk back to Samobor. But his knee hurt, and hobbling back would take most of the night, by which time Strumbić might well find him and finish the job. He could wait for a passing car and get a lift. But there wasn’t much traffic up here. The village beyond Strumbić’s couldn’t have more than thirty houses. He didn’t feel like knocking on doors, and people in the countryside were wary of strangers appearing out of nowhere at night. If he told them about the accident, they’d call the police, and police meant being in Strumbić’s hands before long.

  So della Torre was left with just one other option. An amble into the lion’s den. At least Strumbić’s wasn’t far, no more than five hundred metres along the road and then another hundred or so down a track through the woods.

  The going wasn’t bad to start with; there was just enough moonlight to navigate by. But before long it was as miserable and painful a walk as he could remember since his army days. His knee was swollen tight in his trousers and breathing made his ribs hurt. The occasional stumble over exposed roots didn’t make him feel any better either. By the time he got to the gate where the forest track opened out onto a clearing, he was doing a geriatric shuffle.

  The moonlight etched the scene like a woodcut. The meadow was carved out of the steep forest hillside, though halfway up it flattened like a step, just wide enough to give Strumbić’s cottage a level base. The people who lived in the villages in these hills were still poor. There were plenty of families of della Torre’s generation with a dozen or more children who’d grown up in two-room houses, hovels really, in much the same way Tito had at the turn of the previous century. But now rich people from the city were coming in and buying up property and building cottages in the hills, weekend retreats not much more than an hour’s drive from their town-centre apartments. Some were newcomers, but many had roots in these impoverished and beautiful valleys, coming back for rural nostalgia after they’d made good in Zagreb through intelligence or hard work or crooked deals. Or all three. Like Strumbić.

  Strumbić was a senior detective in Zagreb’s regular police force who set new standards for venal dishonesty in an organization notorious for being on the take. Not that he’d ever been caught.

  Della Torre worked for Department VI, the UDBA’s internal investigative service. He was a lawyer, primarily responsible for investigating extrajudicial killings the intelligence service might have been involved in. The special unit had been set up five years previously when the country’s parliamentarians started to realize that the secret police weren’t always acting on behalf of the State. Sometimes, it did so for the private interests of the most powerful members of the country’s cumbersome rotating presidency — a particularly complicated Yugoslav compromise to ensure that each of the country’s six republics and two autonomous regions felt they had equal say in its running. What this really did was create a coterie of shadowy politicians with considerable power.

  It was how della Torre justified working for the UDBA. To himself at least. He’d say to himself Department VI wasn’t really UDBA. Sure, it sat under the umbrella of the organization, but Department VI people were the good guys. They were the only internal check on the organization’s concentration camp guards, on its torturers, its killers, because in truth the UDBA was Yugoslavia’s equivalent of the KGB. The Stasi. The Gestapo.

  For much of the time della Torre had worked for the organization, Strumbić had been his instrument. He’d used Strumbić to help him hook crooked UDBA officers. In exchange, Strumbić got a measure of protection from the law for his sidelines and also received the occasional whisper about a leading politician, judge, or businessman. Their relative positions were clear. Della Torre held the power. Strumbić did the legwork.

  But then Yugoslavia started falling apart. While the UDBA continued to be feared, its strength waned in Croatia and Slovenia, the two republics seeking independence. The UDBA’s main seat of power had always been Belgrade, capital of both the country and its biggest republic, Serbia. Department VI was headquartered in Zagreb as a way of silencing complaints within Croatia of the UDBA’s heavily Serb identity. Which meant della Torre’s authority quickly evaporated.

  So the relative roles of the
secret policeman and the Zagreb detective had changed, subtly but inexorably. Strumbić was no longer della Torre’s supplicant; rather it was the other way round. Now, instead of swapping crumbs of information and doing della Torre’s digging, Strumbić was paying money for more valuable nuggets than ever before. Not just the rumour of a judge’s mistress, but photographs of them in bed. Not a whisper that a prosecutor was suspected of shady deals, but photocopies of foreign bank statements. Not the hint that a businessman had been compromised by taking drugs with prostitutes, but the times and dates and names. And more besides.

  Strumbić never mentioned what he did with the information della Torre passed on, and della Torre never asked. All he knew was that Strumbić paid in cash. Deutschmarks.

  And he needed the cash. In the space of little more than a year della Torre and his colleagues had gone from being among the country’s best-paid civil servants to making less than ditchdiggers. Della Torre’s official monthly salary now barely covered the cost of a carton of cigarettes as rampant inflation destroyed his paycheque while Belgrade and Zagreb squabbled about whose responsibility it was to fund Department VI.

  Strumbić was never one to let a golden commercial opportunity pass him by. He had money. A lot. And most of it in Deutschmarks or dollars.

  He knew della Torre had access to secret files, interesting and lucrative ones. And so della Torre would make the trip out to Strumbić’s weekend place every couple of months to trade.

  Strumbić had around twenty rows of vines, along with fruit trees, mostly plums and pears, which he picked in the summer, fermented, and then cooked into a potent spirit alcohol. And then there was the ancient cherry tree that turned the ground purple with its juice in August.

  The house itself was built on top of an old wine hut. The thick and roughly made concrete-and-stone walls now formed a self-contained ground-level cellar, where Strumbić matured the wine he made from his own grapes, distilled his spirits, and hung cured hams and salamis that he bought from the local villagers. Above the cellar was the house he’d built, one full storey under a steeply pitched roof. In all there was a large sitting room and balcony that looked out over the valley, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, one of which Strumbić used as an office.

  But mostly when he was there, Strumbić sat in the cellar or at a rickety table by the side of the house under the huge cherry tree’s canopy. It was an idyll. Della Torre always looked forward to his invitations. Strumbić was liberal with the booze and American cigarettes and was a fount of amusing stories.

  Mornings after Strumbić’s were another thing entirely. More than once della Torre had woken in his car by the side of the little road to Samobor, the early sun converting him to Christianity with the force of a seventh-century bishop. Never had he prayed harder than when begging God to save him from those hangovers.

  The gate was open. Della Torre could see Strumbić’s BMW coupe parked in its little barn. There was enough space in front for a couple more vehicles, but Strumbić didn’t seem to have company. Della Torre picked his way along a stony path gently traversing the hillside. There were some lights on in the main part of the house, but the glow in front of the wine cellar told him Strumbić would be down there.

  Della Torre approached carefully. A radio played europop and he could smell Strumbić’s cigarette. His footsteps crunched on loose stones.

  Strumbić was inside, sitting on a folding lawn chair. Gun on his lap.

  THE CIGARETTE IN one hand and a tumbler of wine in the other made Strumbić slow to reach for the gun.

  Della Torre shook his head.

  Strumbić cocked an eyebrow and then gave him a broad smile. “Ah, Gringo, what a nice surprise.”

  “Do me a favour, Julius, and knock that paperweight off your lap and then nudge it away with your foot,” della Torre said. Strumbić let the gun slide onto the floor and gently lowered his drink so that his hands were free and visible to della Torre.

  “I’m guessing that’s not sausage for me in your pocket.”

  “You’d be guessing right.”

  “Not usually a man for carrying his gun. World must be changing.”

  “Oh, not that much. I borrowed this one,” della Torre said.

  “You look like you’ve been in the wars. Like you could do with a glass of something.”

  “Thanks. I’ll help myself.”

  “I didn’t hear the car. What happened to the other fellows?”

  “They decided they’d rather drop me off. They seemed a little distracted when I left them. Something about the Merc’s engine being in the back seat and a tree growing out of the bonnet.”

  “I see. Well, can’t be helped. Shame about the motor, though. Rather nice piece of Germany.” Strumbić moved to get out of his chair.

  “Listen, Strumbić, I know you won’t take it the wrong way, but would you mind terribly if you just sat there for a while? In fact, I’ll tell you what. My nerves are a bit on edge. Probably comes from spending too much time with Bosnians who want to kill me. Would you be a sport and put the wine down and stick the cigarette in your mouth and pop your hands on top of your head. Only for as long as it takes me to find those handcuffs you always keep around.”

  “You want to make it interesting, let me get my girlfriend to come over. The things she does with handcuffs.” Strumbić gave him one of those winking leers he always used when telling dirty stories.

  “Or Mrs. Strumbić.”

  “You know how to hit a man where it hurts.”

  “You’re hard on the poor woman,” della Torre said, not really meaning it. She was a shrew with a cat’s ass of a mouth. He’d met her only a couple of times, but that was enough.

  “What I have to put up with, Christ, you don’t know the half of it.”

  “So where are the cuffs?”

  “In the jacket, on the table. Don’t worry, you can come in. I won’t jump a man with a gun in his pocket,” Strumbić said.

  Della Torre was getting chilly standing by the door. He sidled into the cellar, kicking Strumbić’s gun across the floor, the movement making him wince with pain as he put his weight on his sore knee. He reached into the cop’s jacket, where he found the cuffs. He threw them onto Strumbić’s lap.

  “It’s been a while since I last had occasion to use any of these. Would you mind slowly getting them with your left hand, popping a cuff onto your right wrist, and then putting your hands back on your head.”

  “Sure, what are friends for?” With a practised hand, Strumbić clicked the cuff onto his wrist.

  Della Torre edged around Strumbić, pulled the cuffed right arm behind his back, and then the left, and then tightened the cuffs to his satisfaction, pocketing the key.

  “You couldn’t get the cig out of my mouth, could you? I don’t want it dropping on my lap. New American jeans.”

  Della Torre took the cigarette out of Strumbić’s mouth and took a long drag. Lucky Strike.

  Now that he had Strumbić secured, he relaxed a bit, sitting on a wooden stool by the little table. The table was covered in a blue gingham waxed cotton cloth that spoke of a history of spilled drinks, dripped wax, dropped cigarettes, and bread and ham cut a little too hard. The cellar was more than five metres wide on each side. It had a packed dirt floor and the sour smell of old wine, blended with tobacco and cured meat. The walls were rough, with horizontal stripes where the concrete had bulged between the planked frame when it was poured. There were three big wooden barrels on their sides, the newest one yellow, the other two blackened with age, all raised off the ground on wooden cradles. A Pirelli calendar hung on one wall, showing an exotic topless girl leaning back against an exotic topless car, but otherwise it was undecorated. A single unshaded bulb hung towards the front of the room.

  Della Torre kept his eyes on Strumbić. They were around the same age. Maybe Strumbi�
� was a couple of years older. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but it was hard to tell from just looking at him. He looked old enough to be della Torre’s own father. Strumbić had the flabby, doughy face of a man who lived hard. He smoked heavily and drank constantly. He enjoyed his work, thriving on the adrenaline of both the legal and illicit stuff he did on the side. But you could see it also wore away at him. And then there were the women.

  He’d been married for twenty years to a fierce, hard, unyielding harpy. She could never have been remotely attractive. But she’d also been the only daughter of Zagreb’s chief of police when her eye settled on Strumbić, a young cadet straight out of military service with a streak of primitive but cavalier charm and an instinct for his own best advantage.

  Her father, himself a self-made peasant and Partizan during the war, was opposed to the match. He thought she could do better and made every effort to frighten Strumbić off. It might have worked had his daughter not had twice the will of both men put together. Whatever either man thought of the matter, she got her way.

  Strumbić may not have had a university education, but he was canny enough to marry well. For her part, his wife drove him relentlessly through the police hierarchy. Maybe she’d seen something of her father in him.

  Her saving grace, as far as Strumbić was concerned, was that she understood what it meant to be a cop — the strange hours and frequent silences — which allowed Strumbić plenty of opportunity to indulge his sybaritic tastes. He was discreet. But she wasn’t all bad. She made delicious cherry strudels.

  Strumbić’s girlfriends, on the other hand . . . Della Torre couldn’t think of them without shaking his head. Pneumatic, lewd, tacky, and dumb. And undoubtedly damn good at whatever Strumbić wanted from them.