Zagreb Cowboy

by Alen Mattich

  “If I was to go talk to this friend of yours, I’d be making life easier for you and less pleasant for myself. For instance, it would mean not finishing this very fine meal or this excellent beer.” Strumbić lay on a doleful expression, ignoring the piece of gristle in the middle of his plate.

  “I’m sure our friend will make it worth your while.”

  “I’d like to think so,” Strumbić said. Curiosity was getting the better of him. He figured he didn’t have much to lose other than the rest of the schnitzel. And it hadn’t been much of a schnitzel in the first place.

  They didn’t drive far in the big Mercedes limousine, a model so recent he’d never seen one before. They stopped in the old town, near the cathedral. What few good restaurants and bars Zagreb still had were concentrated there. Had he been less lazy, Strumbić would have gone to one of them for lunch. But the weather was grim; it couldn’t decide whether to rain or snow.

  They parked on a mostly pedestrianized street and went into one of the eighteenth-century village-style houses that remained in this corner of town. The driver, Besim, held the door open for him, but neither Bosnian followed him in.

  The Metusalem Restaurant was empty and gloomy in the late winter light. A dim yellow lamp cast shaded light in a corner of the room, which was furnished largely in dark-stained wood, and showed a small old man sitting alone with his back to the wall. A waiter appeared from nowhere and led Strumbić to the table, where he pulled a chair out for him.

  “Please, order yourself a drink,” said the old man. His voice was light and friendly. Strumbić asked for a Karlovačka beer.

  “Thank you for allowing yourself to be dragged away from your lunch,” said the old man. “I think you’ll agree that an informal conversation right now is so much more pleasant and rewarding than having to do this another way.”

  The waiter brought Strumbić’s beer in a glass and then left. The old man was drinking Coca-Cola. He looked oddly familiar, though Strumbić couldn’t tell why.

  “If you don’t mind, I won’t introduce myself. It doesn’t really matter who I am; I’m just an intermediary. In fact, I’m retired. You can say I’m doing a favour for some friends.”

  “Some friends in Belgrade?” Strumbić asked.

  “Friends whose interest is to ensure the stability of the Yugoslav state, the homeland for which we fought so bitterly during the war against the fascists and for which we have struggled in the decades since.”

  An old Communist, Strumbić thought. An old, well-connected Communist. He knew the face, just couldn’t place it.

  “God bless the proletariat,” said Strumbić, raising his glass. He took a long drink of beer while the man watched him coolly. His face was expressionless, oddly frozen.

  At long last the old man spoke again. “My friends have noticed that certain sensitive files have been leaking from the organs of state security.”

  “How terrible,” Strumbić said. “So you’d like the Zagreb police to investigate? I’m sure if your friends made a formal complaint, my superiors would do whatever they could to track down any thefts of official secrets from sources within this city. Not something I could help with, I’m afraid. I’m on vice for the next month. Helping them out.” He gave the old man a theatrical wink. “I’m sure your friends will be looking to do similar investigations in Belgrade and Ljubljana and Skopje and Sarajevo and everywhere else one might find leaky organs,” Strumbić added blandly.

  “No. That’s not necessary. We know the files are leaking from the UDBA’s Zagreb offices.”

  “Oh?” Strumbić said.

  “Yes. And we know that they’re leaking through you.”

  “That’s a serious allegation,” Strumbić said, mustering as much shock as he could.

  “Yes, very serious.”

  “It needs a considerable burden of proof.”

  “No. I don’t think so. You see, my friends are not interested in a conventional prosecution. They know enough to be confident in their suspicions.”

  Strumbić shifted uncomfortably.

  “What they would like from you is the name of the person who has been passing to you official state secrets.”

  “Mr. . . .” Strumbić paused meaningfully.

  “My name is irrelevant.”

  “In these difficult times a great deal of information is finding its way into the wrong hands. I may have seen one or two things and passed them on to interested parties — though this is not an admission of anything — but to pick me out is like a fisherman casting a hook for a particular sardine.”

  “My friends are interested in one specific file. A file they traced to you. Now they want to know who gave it to you.”

  Strumbić raised his hands as if in supplication to some god of memory, but the old man was having none of it.

  “The file concerns Pilgrim.”

  “What?” The name meant nothing to Strumbić.

  “Pilgrim. Who gave it to you?”

  “Much as I’d like to help . . .” Whatever the file was about, there’d have been only one source; della Torre was the only person Strumbić had got anything from.

  “Detective, I don’t think you understand the position you find yourself in. All that hard-earned money of yours — my friends think that you are fully deserving of it. Fully. Yugoslavia’s third way has always left open scope for smaller-scale capitalism within the embrace of a wider socialist ideal. You are a small businessman and a valued technocrat. Perhaps you could benefit from closer ties to Belgrade in the future. Belgrade can be a very good friend, if you know the right people there. It would mean not having to run away to, where is it? Šipan. Or Varaždin. Or Opatija. Though I understand it might be very tempting to go with one of your lady friends. Renata, is it? Or perhaps you are reconciled to a long, happy retirement with your wife. But I’m afraid not everyone sees things as my friends do. Many, many people in senior positions in the Yugoslav government would wish to take away what you have earned through your industry. And to punish you for your presumption.”

  Strumbić smiled, but his blood froze at how much this man seemed to know about him.

  “That’s all hearsay, malicious gossip.”

  “Detective, our burden of proof is different from a court of law’s. Belgrade and Zagreb may have their differences, but the organs of the State still have some sway here. And even if the State were challenged now, would you bet against martial law being imposed were things to degenerate further? Do you think that if the Yugoslav army took control you would still feel the same sense of immunity?”

  Strumbić nodded in appreciation. He’d always been a deft chess player. When he was young, members of his chess club, the undergraduates and professionals, would patronize him as an uneducated boor, a lowly traffic cop. That was until they found their queens pinned by a merciless knight, forked and defeated from nowhere. And if they’d really offended Strumbić during the course of the game, there would be another beating to follow in a dark alley. He was starting to feel like one of those undergraduates. But he wasn’t giving up the game altogether.

  “Information has a price. So far, all I’ve had in return for my time is a beer to replace the one I had to abandon at lunch,” he said.

  “Very good. It is admirable that you see sense. Of course we would look to come to some agreeable arrangement. But I suggest we negotiate along Anglo-Saxon rather than Balkan lines.”

  “Oh?” Strumbić wasn’t quite sure what the man meant.

  “I give you a proposal and you accept it.”

  “That’s not the way I usually work. These things have to be carefully considered . . .”

  “Fifteen thousand.”

  “Marks?”

  “What else?”

  “You are a shrewd businessman. That was exactly the number I had in mind,” Strumbić said
.

  “That’s not all. We wish help in arranging our interview with the source of your information.”

  “But of course. I’ll give him a call now and get him up here. Assuming you have the money?”

  “No, I think it can wait for the weekend. Make yourself available. Tell the gentlemen outside where you can be found. They will come to you and pay you once you’ve fulfilled your part of the agreement.”

  Strumbić rose and held his hand out, but the old man ignored it. So instead he turned to leave.

  “Nice doing business with you. And thanks for the beer.”

  “Detective, please don’t do anything to make us think you are being duplicitous. My friends are very generous, but they can be vengeful when their generosity is abused.”

  “SO YOU SOLD me for fifteen thousand pieces of German silver?” della Torre said.

  “Don’t get stuck on the number. He could have offered fifteen marks or a hundred and fifty thousand. Whatever it was, I had to take it. It’s hard negotiating with a stranger who’s slapping your nuts with a stick.”

  “No idea who he was?”

  “No. He looked familiar, like one of the old Communists you saw in the background of Tito’s photographs. I swear he was probably dug up out of Mirogoj,” Strumbić said, referring to the beautiful and imposing Zagreb cemetery under whose long arcades many of Croatia’s great and good were buried.

  “It was at the Metusalem?”

  “Yes. I don’t know much about the place. Looked it up when I got back to the office but it was red-lined. So the people who run the restaurant are close friends of the State. Or its enemies.”

  “I’ll look it up,” said della Torre. “By the way, the Bosnians did the Karlovac job.”

  “I know. Idiots told me. It’s not like they didn’t know I was a cop.”

  “Maybe they thought you were corrupt.”

  Strumbić’s instant and genuine hurt expression made della Torre backpedal, despite himself.

  “I mean like the Karlovac cops.” He couldn’t believe he was offering a roundabout apology to Strumbić for calling him crooked.

  “Called a mate in Karlovac. They’d made a real mess there. The amount of covering up the cops did should have won them an Oscar. I think next time when they’ve got a job, they’ll just do it themselves.”

  “So why didn’t they shoot me in Zagreb? Or drop a grenade in my soup?”

  “Maybe you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Maybe all they really wanted to do was take you for a nice Sunday evening drive.”

  “Trust me, it was a hit. I wasn’t going to be coming home,” della Torre said. “And they made it pretty clear you were next.”

  Della Torre pulled the little notebook out of his breast pocket and flipped through the pages, looking back through months of tight, small-handed notes that filled about two-thirds of it. It was unlined so that he could condense as much information as was humanly visible onto a page in his immaculately neat, almost technical writing. He used the finest draftsman’s pen he could find.

  “Did he say anything more about Pilgrim? I never gave you a file about Pilgrim.” He’d kept a record of everything he’d passed on to Strumbić.

  “Sold.”

  “I never sold you a file about Pilgrim.”

  “Gringo, we have a deal, right?”

  “What deal?”

  “I’m honest with you and you accept the truth in an honourable and noble way.”

  “What are you telling me, Julius?”

  “We have a deal?”

  “Julius.”

  “Do we?”

  “We have a deal. I promise not to shoot you.”

  “Okay. Okay. You remember when I came round to your office with that attestation from the ex-UDBA guy who’d drowned his wife?”

  “The one I wasn’t interested in.”

  “That’s it. Remember you poured me a shot of Bell’s?”

  “How could I forget? You asked for it the second you got into the office, reminding me you’d bought it for me in the first place.”

  “And you got it out of your locked filing cabinet?”

  “Because that’s where I keep it.”

  “And then you got called away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’d arranged to have your secretary give you a buzz to tell you Anzulović wanted you.”

  “Anzulović didn’t want me. He wasn’t in.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was a mix-up, she said.”

  “It was a bottle of French perfume, she meant.”

  “I see. So you corrupted the office secretary. I’m not liking where this is going, by the way.”

  “Gringo, listen. The files you kept bringing for me, they were crap. I won’t beat around the bush, but they were crap. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, some of the stuff was amusing. Good for a laugh. A few helped me drag some favours out of people. But frankly, most of it wouldn’t have made it onto page twelve of the evening paper.”

  Della Torre figured Strumbić was exaggerating. But not much.

  “So why’d you buy them?”

  “Because, Gringo, I didn’t want to see you starve. It was my Christian duty.”

  “You’re telling me you bought files from me, that you knew were useless, as an act of charity?”

  “That sort of thing,” Strumbić said. He gave della Torre what he thought was a beneficent look, the sort a kind priest might give. But it just made him look like a hungry scavenger.

  “So you never managed to sell any of the stuff I gave you.”

  “Sold me.”

  “Sold you.”

  “There is this guy at the Italian consulate who was in the market for any old dross. But I’m telling you, Gringo, I barely broke even. I mean, once you factor in my costs, I was taking a loss on that rubbish. Once you gave me something worthwhile and I overpaid for it, thinking I’d encourage you. But you just didn’t get it.” Strumbić ignored the non-pecuniary advantages of having something on prosecutors and judges.

  “And?”

  “And, well, I felt that you owed me maybe a little more. Okay, maybe I was wrong, maybe I overstepped the bounds a little. Just a little. But can you blame me? Really?”

  “Julius.” Della Torre looked at the cop coldly, tempted to hit him. Just the once.

  “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.”

  “You stole files from my office. You created a ruse to steal from me. Those were my private papers.”

  “I wouldn’t say steal. I’d say borrow. I borrowed the documents with every intention of returning them. I promise. And I was going to cut you in. Share and share alike, right?” Strumbić kept up a pleasant expression but he was pale in the light of the naked bulb and sweat beaded his brow despite the evening’s chill.

  “You know Anzulović hates it when you come round the office? Calls you a snake. He’s right.”

  “Anzulović. He and that Messar think they’re whiter than white,” said Strumbić. Anzulović was the head of Department VI and Messar was one of della Torre’s colleagues. “I’ll tell you something about Anzulović. He may have clean hands, but what about his wife, eh? She’s a manager at Nama,” Strumbić said, referring to a department store chain. “Never short a dinar, those people. They’ve got their scams running. Hiding stock, marking it sold on the inventory sheets, and then putting it back on the shelves when the prices have gone up, pocketing the difference. Why do you think that most of the time there’s no coffee or toilet paper to be found for love or money, and then suddenly that’s all you can find? And his daughter works for them now too.” Strumbić sounded wounded.

  “Julius, right now the issue isn’t Anzulović’s wife. Right now it’s about me trying not to shoot you.
”

  “We had an agreement, Gringo.”

  “Oh?”

  “Gringo, you’re not the violent sort. You’re a lawyer. You’re the sort of lawyer who’d be working for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now. You don’t want to shoot people. You’re an honest man” — the words were stumbling over each other — “trying to do the right thing, doing an impossible job in impossible circumstances when the world’s against you.”

  Della Torre knew Strumbić was playing on his sense of martyrdom. As a young prosecuting lawyer he’d been roped into Department VI soon after its formation. Anzulović, a senior detective himself hired from the regular Zagreb police force to run it, had tapped della Torre because of his knowledge of Italian and English and because he’d trained in international law, all useful for investigating the UDBA’s activities abroad. It had paid well, and ironically it was — had been — a mostly honest job. One of the few truly honest jobs in a country rotten through with corruption and compromise.

  But the UDBA was widely hated. It didn’t matter that his job was to keep it as clean as possible. To most people the UDBA was poison. It may not have pervaded society as deeply as East Germany’s Stasi, but its long reach meant that no one was comfortable expressing honest political opinions, even to their spouses. Its penal colony, the Adriatic island Goli Otok, was a frozen hell in winter and a burning hell in summer from which few came back to join the living. But what the UDBA did better than any of those other hated organs of state viciousness was the murder of its dissidents. The organization and its predecessors had liquidated more than ten thousand souls during internal purges over the decades. It did so without compunction and with naked brutality, and there was no country in which an enemy of the Yugoslav state could feel safe from the reach of its long and crimson arm.

  “So what do I do now? Go back to Zagreb and wait for the next hitman to show up?”

  “Look, Gringo. If it makes you any happier, I’m in it at least as far up my neck as you are. You sure those Bosnians are fixed?”