by Tom Saric
“So what do you want from me?” She took a drag and blew the smoke over her shoulder.
“I want you to take me to your husband.”
“Why?” she asked.
Not “He isn’t there,” Luka noted.
“I have questions for him.”
“So who do you work for, then? Interpol? I thought your people had given up trying to take the girls.”
“You mean your slaves?”
A deep cackle. “My girls are as free as you and me,” she snapped. “But I know you’re not Interpol. They show up at the door.”
“Your husband sent a man to kill me.”
“So you want me to take you to him so you can finish him off.” She took both hands off the steering wheel and motioned to the sky. “I’ve been waiting for someone to get rid of him. Thank you, God.”
She took another drag and kept driving. Luka looked over his shoulder. Braun was fifty yards back.
“I am Luka Pavić,” he said.
In the rear-view mirror, her eyes widened ever so slightly. She squeezed the steering wheel twice.
“You know who I am.”
“You’re the fugitive. You killed those people in Nisko.”
“I didn’t kill anyone, and you know that. Your husband hired someone to do it. Last week, your husband sent Dragoslav Gavrić to kill me.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That’s what I want to know. So pick up your phone and call your husband. Tell him that the car stalled and you’re stuck on the side of the road, or else I will shoot you.”
A thick silence descended over the car. The muffled drone of the radio was almost inaudible over the engine’s hum. Azra’s cigarette had burned almost to the filter.
The car slowed down and she stopped on the shoulder underneath a pine tree. Beams of blue moonlight poked between the leaves. Luka saw Braun’s headlights as he pulled over two hundred yards back before shutting off the engine. Azra picked up her mobile and dialed. She stared at Luka through the rear-view mirror as the phone rang.
“Haris,” she said into the phone. “The car stalled… I tried that… no, nothing… I’m three kilometers from the club, on the shoulder. Be quick.”
Azra put the phone down on her lap, pulled the emergency brake, and killed the engine. The lights went out, and Azra’s face was bathed in darkness. Luka could only see the orange nub of her cigarette.
“You won’t get out alive,” she said, certainty in her voice. “You somehow got away in Nisko, and from Drago. But it won’t be the same here.”
Luka lifted the gun again and put it to her head. “You know about Nisko.”
“I know you shouldn’t ever have gone there.”
Luka tried to sort through the facts. Azra immediately knew who he was and why he was there. She knew about Drago and Nisko. She was somehow tied to everything, so she would also have known about—
“Natalia,” he said.
“Who?”
“The girl in Nisko. I found her in the house, but when it burned, she ran away and disappeared.”
She put her cigarette out in the ashtray. He could just make out her eyes looking at him in the rear-view mirror. “She called herself Pipa.”
Luka swallowed hard. “Called?”
“We took her in. She was an orphan.”
“What did you do to her? Was she one of your girls?”
She shook her head. “She was too young. We took her in to help her.”
“I don’t believe that. What were you going to do with her, wait until she developed?”
“Possibly.”
“So where is she now?”
“She ran away.”
He didn’t pause. He didn’t raise his voice or speed up the rhythm of the conversation. He ignored the sense of relief that came over him.
“Where?”
She shrugged. “It’s been a long time. All I know is that one night, two years after we took her in, she disappeared.”
“How do you know she ran away?”
“Last year, one of our girls left. We tried to find out how she managed to get away, but no one knew. They said she had mentioned a friend named Natalia who was going to help her get to Spain.”
“The same girl?”
“I don’t know.”
Headlights approached, and a car slowed ahead. Azra shut the music off. A silhouette stepped in front of the headlights.
Azra turned around. “This is your only chance to leave. I assure you that if you wait, you won’t leave alive.”
Luka stared at her through the rear-view mirror, unflinching. She could bluff all she wanted, double and triple down. He knew that she wasn’t expecting him, she wasn’t prepared. And Braun was still just behind them, waiting for the signal.
“Suit yourself.” She rolled down the window and waved towards the silhouette.
The person moved slowly, dragging himself towards the car. He stopped midway between the cars and pointed up the road. Another set of headlights approached from behind. Azra pulled her seatbelt across her lap, buckled it, and tossed the mobile phone onto the passenger seat.
The phone.
Luka’s body tensed. The screen glowed yellow, showing the name “Haris.” The call had been going on for five minutes. And counting.
As Luka lifted the gun to put it to Azra’s head, he saw that the vehicle approaching from the rear wasn’t slowing down.
He dove to the opposite side of the back seat and tried to buckle up, but the vehicle rammed into the rear bumper, sending him crashing into the footwell. The gun slipped from his hand, and his head snapped back against the door. He opened his eyes and saw lights all around. A door opened, and he felt a hood being dragged onto his head.
Arms pulled his elbows back, and then a zip tie bound his wrists together. He was pushed out of the car, and he stumbled onto his knees on the road. He heard at least two sets of footsteps behind him, and then an arm jerked him up. Another car door opened, and he was shoved face down onto a seat.
Shots were fired, not towards him, but somewhere in the distance. Towards Braun. He heard an engine rev and tires screeching.
The car was moving, the road bumpy, windy. He tried to count the turns in case he managed to free himself so he could find his way back.
The car slowed, tires crunching across gravel, and then stopped.
The door opened, and arms lifted Luka and pulled him out of the car. The only sounds he could hear were the murmur of a television in the distance and the scratching of their shoes on the driveway.
A deep voice. “Up the stairs.”
Luka’s feet froze to the ground. He took in a stuttering breath.
A metallic clink.
He knew that sound. He felt the cool muzzle press onto his neck.
A firm hand on Luka’s back pushed him up the stairs. When they got halfway up, the man yelled out, “Debeli!”
A voice from somewhere: “Upstairs.”
At the top, the hand directed him to the left. A door opened, and he took two steps inside. The hood was slipped off.
A living room. An old man, brushing back strands of grey, oily hair from his otherwise bald head, turned towards them. Clear tubing ran from under his nose, curving around his ear into a small oxygen tank beside his chair. His belly filled the armchair, fat rolls hanging out of his ribbed tank top. Debeli. He examined Luka up and down, and then turned towards the two men on the couch across from him.
One was Nenad, sitting unapologetically, cradling a glass of cloudy white wine.
“Sit down,” Debeli said, motioning to an empty armchair.
Luka’s eyes shifted to the third man. Young, face ravaged by acne, ears sticking out like tennis rackets. He wore black leather gloves. He seemed unbothered by Luka’s arrival, consumed by the soccer game on television.
The man behind Luka nudged him into the chair. Azra positioned herself against the wall, lit up another cigarette with one hand, the other on her hip.
“You two know each other,” Deb
eli said, pointing at Nenad.
Neither Luka nor Nenad answered. Luka looked over at the fat man. “Debeli?”
“That’s what they call me,” he said, his voice wheezy. “A drink?”
Luka nodded, and the young man poured him a glass of white wine from a plastic bottle. He took a sip. It was strong, which he thought was good. Better to be drunk when the inevitable happened.
“You’ve been looking for me,” Debeli said.
“I could say the same thing about you.” Luka downed the wine in a single gulp. He slammed the glass on the table and motioned for the man to fill it up again.
“You’re hard to find,” Debeli said.
“Not hard enough. You want me dead because of Nisko. Why?”
Debeli wheezed again, exhaling through pursed lips. “You’re one of these special breeds, Pavić, like me: a survivor. Police or criminals can be after us, but we always get away and then bounce back. Regular people can’t stop us. We have a survivor’s spirit.”
“We’re very different. You’re a murderer; I’m not.”
“According to whom?” Debeli laughed. “You’re one of the most wanted criminals in this country. I’m simply scum.”
“I did not commit those crimes in Nisko, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t matter what I know, or what you know. It only matters what the courts and the media think they know.”
“Why do you want me dead? Why now?”
“We’ve always wanted you dead, Pavić. From the day you stumbled into that home in Nisko, you had to die. They were going to make those girls look like casualties of the battle. Mortars gone astray. But then you walked in. Our men tried to kill you inside the home, but you somehow survived. Then The Hague decided that you were the culprit. We couldn’t have you get to trial and start claiming your innocence. So, we had Rukavina set you up with a new identity, a new place in France. You were supposed to die there, and then the investigation into Nisko would be over. But you disappeared. We were sure you would turn up eventually, but you didn’t. Then one day you decided to use the bank card.” Debeli smiled broadly.
Luka stared at Debeli’s tongue dragging across his teeth, feeling unsteady. The room was rocking under him. The wine? No. Memories flashed through his mind. The fake passports, the ATM card, the job at the fish plant in France. Stopping at Tomislav’s office to announce his arrival in Croatia. Asking Tomislav for help. Giving him a step-by-step plan of where he was going. Always Tomislav.
Luka slumped in his seat and looked at the glass in his hand. He never had a chance of getting away. All that running for nothing. He’d never hold Natalie again.
“If I had turned myself in?”
“That would have been very bad for us. You see, your defense attorney would have started to do some investigating, and the case might have been reopened. It was best to nip it in the bud.”
“And now the time has come,” Luka said, knocking back the rest of the wine.
Debeli shook his head. “No. If we wanted you dead, you’d be dead already.” He nodded to the man with the acne, who reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin wire. In a fluid motion, he twisted the wire twice around each of his hands and slipped it over Nenad’s head. He pulled back.
The wire sank into Nenad’s skin, a thin line of blood streaking down his neck. The man held steady as Nenad landed a few elbows and kicked wildly. He made a single grunt. His face turned red, then blue and grey, and he jerked a few times. Luka saw his eyes fade. The young man released the wire, and Nenad crumpled to the floor.
“Traitors never make it very far,” Debeli said.
Luka wanted to scream, to run to the window and yell for Braun to call the cavalry, but he didn’t. Instead, he stared at Nenad’s corpse. His throat went dry, but he managed a sentence. “Why did you kill them?”
“Who? Tadić?” Debeli said. “Because he stole from us. Ten girls. That would have equaled at least twenty thousand Deutschmarks at the time. He threatened the whole operation, wanted to eliminate us at our peak. The war was good for our business.”
“So you decided to make them look like war casualties.”
“Someone’s bright idea. Didn’t work, though, did it? You stumbled in and fucked it all up.”
“What do you want from me?”
“We want this to go away. We want you to go away. But you have too many people looking for you now to kill you. You have an agent with you. So if we kill you, there will be an investigation.”
“What do you want?”
“Get the computer,” Debeli said to Azra, then he turned to Luka. “We want you to confess.”
Luka blinked, his vision slightly blurry, the alcohol setting in. “Confess?”
“To The Hague. Tell them you killed Saša Tadić, Bojan Radović, Filip Nemet.” He paused and wet his lips. “Natalia Nemet.”
“But I—”
“I know you didn’t,” Debeli said, holding up his finger. Azra returned and placed a black laptop on the coffee table, then plugged the charger into the wall. She knelt down and turned on the computer, then opened up Skype and began a call.
“You see, it’s all about choices, Pavić,” Debeli said. “Because you’re a survivor, and survivors make the choice to survive.”
Debeli leaned forward and turned the screen towards Luka.
The glass slipped out of Luka’s hand.
Natalie and Sara sat on the edge of a bed, duct tape over their mouths. Eyes red, faces wet from tears, hair tangled from sweat. They stared, begging, fear in their eyes. A gun was held to Sara’s head.
“The choice is simple: confess, or they die.”
36
Braun knew he should call for backup. He couldn’t go in alone, but how, exactly, could he explain having taken a wanted war criminal across borders?
Braun stood in front of an iron gate spanning a gap between eight-foot concrete walls. A three-story villa rose behind the gate, and inside, a light was on in one of the third-floor rooms. He caught sight of a silhouette and the flicker of a television.
In the driveway, he saw the Renault Clio.
After evading the shots when Luka was captured, he pursued, following the taillights through the blackness. After three curves, he lost them, and drove up and down the pitch-black streets until he eventually saw the Clio.
He ran to the edge of the wall and rounded the corner, but he saw no alternate way in. The wall ran far back, fading into blackness. There were no guards. Strange, Braun thought.
He found a thick vine stem that climbed the wall. Pressing his foot onto the stem for leverage, he grabbed the top of the wall. After hanging from it momentarily, he swung his leg up.
Then, he heard gears grinding. The gate was sliding open.
He hung motionless on the wall, expecting a car to pull out.
But nothing drove past. He heard feet dragging on concrete and the squeaking of wheels.
An obese elderly man emerged from the gate, looking quizzically around. He was almost bald, save for a few strands of hair. He wore a housecoat and wheeled a small oxygen tank behind him.
He looked at Braun. “Can I help you?”
Braun hopped off the wall. “Where is Luka Pavić?”
“Who?” The man cocked his head to the side, puzzled.
“He was with a woman in a Renault Clio.”
“My wife drives a Clio, but she was alone.”
“What’s your name?” Braun said, his voice rising. “Debeli?”
“I should ask you that. You are trespassing.”
“My name is Robert Braun. I’m an investigator with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.”
“I’m Haris.”
“Where is your wife now?”
“Asleep.”
Braun pushed past him and walked into the grounds. He saw the Clio parked underneath a pergola. The property stretched back far enough that he couldn’t see the far wall in the darkness.
No lights were on inside the house. Braun opened the door,
and Haris yelled after him.
Braun knew entering the home alone and unarmed was a bad idea, but he really had no choice. He hoped they wouldn’t kill him based on the fact that killing a Hague agent wouldn’t go unnoticed.
He walked down the hallway, opening each door, then swept through two bedrooms with the beds made but empty. Moving to the kitchen at the end of the hallway, he turned on the light. A few dishes were left in the sink.
His pulse quickened. Where would they have put Luka?
He took the stairs, ignoring Haris yelling at him from the front door.
At the top of the stairs, he turned and threw open a bathroom door. He flicked the light on and pulled the shower curtain aside. Nothing.
He moved into another room. The light was on, illuminating an empty couch and chaise. The pillows had been moved around. He opened a closet door and rummaged around but found nothing.
He moved on to another bedroom, feeling around for a light switch. When he turned it on, he saw the outline of a person on the bed. Azra.
She looked at him, eyes wide, and screamed with terror, “Haris!”
Haris came up behind Braun, wheezing.
“Where is he?” Braun said, moving inches from Azra’s face.
“Who? Where is who?” she said, practiced panic on her face.
“Pavić. The man you drove home with.”
“I came home alone.”
Braun heard a click behind him. He turned around and saw Haris holding a revolver.
Haris shook the revolver at him. “You get out of my house, trespasser!”
“Where is Pavić?” Braun repeated.
“I do not know who you’re talking about. But if you don’t leave, I will shoot you.”
Hazy streaks of persimmon clouds hung low in the grey morning sky, reflecting warmth on the apartment buildings on the outskirts of Zagreb, briefly making the communist-era relics look majestic rather than dreary. Braun drove towards the city center, and, as always when he entered Zagreb, felt like he was being transported across Europe. Grey concrete elongated blocks that would not have been out of place in any Soviet Bloc neighborhood, green spaces with large statues of national heroes reminiscent of Vienna, tall glass buildings, as cold as anything seen in Berlin.