The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  “Will you shut your trap and just listen for a minute, woman?” he hissed. He could see her pinched face, top lip pursed under her sharp nose as if she’d detected a bad smell. Her thin frame, desiccated by a lifetime of bitter complaint. How many times had he told himself that if it wasn’t for her strudels he’d have left her long before?

  “Don’t you be swearing at me. If my father was still alive, you’d be watching your tongue.”

  “Well, the old thug isn’t, is he?” he said, exasperated. “Will you just for once in your life stop yammering at me and listen?”

  “So that’s how it is, eh? What’s next? You going to beat me? You going to break my arm like Franz down the way did to his old woman? Knocked her right into hospital and left her blacker than blue. Only last week . . .”

  With a pulse of cold dread, Strumbić felt every second evaporating. For twenty years now he would have been happy to beat her. But not while the old man, Zagreb’s ex-chief of police, was alive. No, not now either. If he ever laid a hand on her, he knew she’d cut his throat in the night. And no one would blame her.

  He caught himself. Forced himself to be calm. Forced his voice to become even, neutral, pleasant.

  “I’m sorry, darling. Really, I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot. I will get a good electrician in to look at the light. A proper one, not like the monkey last time.”

  “And a new washing machine . . .”

  “And a new washing machine. Could you please do me a favour? Please?”

  “And all sorts have been looking for you.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “How do I know? Police,” she said. “Detectives. People. Past couple of days.”

  The secret services wouldn’t be able to trace the call beyond the Zagreb police exchange. But he’d have to be careful about what he said. “Can we get back to that favour?”

  “What?” She didn’t sound mollified, but it was an opening.

  “Could you please write this down?”

  “I’ll remember it.”

  “Please could you write it down.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said. “My memory’s as sharp as it was when I was seventeen, and when I was seventeen I could recite, verbatim —”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, trying to hide the exasperation in his voice. “Use that seventeen-year-old memory. Can you get in touch with Marko della Torre? He’s in military intelligence. My new office. Get in touch with him, get a message to him. Tell him I’m with our colleagues —” He paused, trying to think of something della Torre would understand that no one else would. “— near that Italian staircase he liked so much.”

  Della Torre had marvelled at the staircase in Strumbić’s villa on Šipan. If he had any sense, he’d know the Italian staircase meant “down south” and the colleagues were the Dubrovnik cops.

  “Why can’t they get in touch with him if they’re colleagues?”

  He felt a hot, wet tear on his cheek. It was as much as he could do to control himself. “It’s an undercover job. Top secret. Inside stuff.”

  He could almost hear her snap to attention. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? A top cop’s daughter knew her duty.

  “Della Torre,” she said.

  “Tell him that I’m a guest of our colleagues but I’m using my pub name.”

  “Your name’s a pub?”

  “My pub name.”

  “Your pub name?”

  “Yes. He’ll know what I mean. That’s as much as I can say.” Smirnoff was the name he’d used in London. Della Torre knew all about that. And pubs were found in London.

  “I’ll make sure he gets the message,” she said, all efficiency.

  He heard the door open behind him and put his hand on the phone’s kill switch without saying goodbye to his wife. For once, he knew she’d do as she was told.

  “Calling someone, Mr. Smirnoff?” Brg asked.

  “I was just about to ask them to page you. I was starting to feel lonely.”

  Brg nodded and went round to sit on his side of the table. As he pulled out the chair, he stopped for a second and stared down at his feet. He bent over, picking up his wallet. He slid it back into his pocket without looking at the contents and sat down, staring at Strumbić with a strained expression.

  “Did you manage to find some cigarettes?” Strumbić asked, as sweet as candy floss.

  “Why don’t we get back to those questions, Mr. Smirnoff. I don’t have a lot of time to waste on you. I’ve got three dead Americans to worry about.”

  Strumbić felt a chill. He didn’t like how the detective had said “Smirnoff.” Nor did he like that the number of dead Americans had risen to three.

  In the back of the patrol car the night he was arrested, he’d listened to the cops talking about the two dead Americans on Šipan. They were keeping an eye out for anyone making the crossing from the island. The mention of dead Americans had quieted Strumbić, made him think twice about revealing who he was.

  He’d been dealing with some Americans on an official job only days earlier, while he’d been setting up his distinctly unofficial CD-smuggling scheme. In fact, one of them had stayed at his villa on Šipan. She still had the keys to the place. Two dead Americans on Šipan. A third now.

  He had nothing to do with their deaths. But it wasn’t something he wanted to argue from a jail cell. He knew it would be hung on him, on Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, unless they found out what had really happened. And as far as he could tell, they had no clue.

  Strumbić hadn’t a scintilla of doubt that della Torre was somehow tied in with the deaths. Della Torre would have to get him out of the mess. Just as well then that, however much trouble della Torre kept landing in Strumbić’s lap, he was also the only man Strumbić trusted with his life.

  “I don’t really know how I can help, Detective,” Strumbić said, helping himself to one of the cigarettes Brg held out, not allowing himself to show any of the unease he felt. “Like I said, I was fishing and suddenly found myself in the middle of the O.K. Corral.”

  The Dubrovnik detective riffled through a second file he’d brought into the room, pulled out a sheet, and contemplated it for a long, quiet moment. He raised his tired eyes, took a final drag on his cigarette, and trapped the other man in his gaze. Strumbić’s amusement at having so thoroughly picked the other man’s pockets faded a little. His certainty of having found a safe haven, a comfortable little hideaway, was evaporating. He found himself feeling increasingly unsettled. It wasn’t an emotion he was used to. Brg ground out the cigarette in a cheap tin ashtray.

  The Dubrovnik detective contemplated the man in front of him, more seriously than he had less than half an hour earlier.

  Brg had gone back up to his office, pissed off at the petty smuggler he was having to deal with, when all he wanted was sleep and then to report back to Zagreb that the American redhead had been found.

  Brg was sure that, in his tiredness, he’d left both his cigarettes and his lighter on the ferry. He got out another pack from the carton he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. But the spare matches he had to hunt for on his desk.

  It was while he was shifting the papers that the fax roll with the dead woman’s photograph fell to the floor. He picked it up and it unspooled. As he looked down the pages, folding them so that they’d fit more neatly into the file, his eye lighted on a photograph of a man, middle-aged, receding hairline, flabby face and tired eyes. Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, formerly detective lieutenant with the Zagreb police, missing, wanted in connection with the deaths of two men in a villa on the island of Šipan, and a suspect in the disappearance of the American woman Rebecca Vees, now in an Italian morgue. He must have seen Strumbić’s photograph a dozen times before without noticing it. It was fuzzy, barely bigger than passport-sized. Unlike the woman’s photo, i
t hadn’t been posted anywhere in the station. No one else on the force had seen the picture. Why? Because the note next to the photograph said the suspect had probably fled the country, most likely destination Italy or the United Kingdom.

  England. Marks & Spencer.

  Seeing the picture was like a shot of slivovitz injected into a vein.

  Detective Brg had brought the incriminating fax with him to the interview room. He sat for long minutes, comparing the photograph to the man in front of him. The other man didn’t break the silence. Brg’s eyes prickled from cigarette smoke and fatigue. At last he spoke, quietly, without aggression. “Why don’t we stop playing games, Detective Lieutenant. Or is it Captain Julius Strumbić?”

  Brg gave Strumbić credit for not betraying any emotion.

  Strumbić merely smiled. “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Detective. My name is Smirnoff.”

  Brg turned the fax towards Strumbić. “This says it isn’t.”

  Strumbić leaned forward and pulled the thin thermal paper across the stained blond wood table, turned it with three fingers, and considered.

  “It’s a reasonable likeness, though it’s a pretty small picture and not particularly clear. Could be me. Could be any one of a hundred men within a kilometre of here. What did you say you want the man for?”

  “As a witness, probable accessory, and possible perpetrator of three murders.”

  “Three? The Americans? Sounds like a dangerous fellow. But like I said, it’s not me.”

  “What do you say, Mr. Strumbić, would you like to have a friendly chat with me or do you want to wait for the Zagreb investigators? I hear they’re a lot less nice. Plenty of former UDBA types.”

  Silence. UDBA was Yugoslavia’s hated former secret police. Strumbić knew more than a few of them. Such as della Torre.

  “What I don’t get is if you killed those men, why, just a couple of days later, you’d want to be smuggling stuff onto a dock in a village on the opposite side of the channel,” Brg continued. “I mean, you don’t strike me as being stupid. They don’t make stupid people detectives in the Zagreb force, do they?”

  “Detective, those are all very good questions. But you’re asking the wrong guy.”

  Brg was fading. Questions kept crowding his mind. Irritating tiny details overwhelmed his brain. It was as if Strumbić wasn’t there and he was just asking himself.

  “Says here you own that villa on Šipan where two of the Americans were killed. We had a look and it’s not in any official records. All we could find was that it’s registered to an Italian company. Your company, Mr. Strumbić?”

  Strumbić was surprised at the turn of questioning, but played along.

  “Thought Italians could only own up to forty-nine percent of a property in this country,” Strumbić said.

  “Oh, well, that’s the clever thing. One Italian company owns forty-nine percent of the property and a Yugoslav firm owns the rest. Except forty-nine percent of that Yugoslav company is owned by an Italian company. Coincidentally, the same Italian company. The rest is owned by another Yugoslav company. You guessed it — forty-nine percent of that is owned by the very same Italian company. In the end, the only domestic ownership we could find was some lawyer in Varaždin who owns less than one percent. You won’t be surprised to hear that he’s only holding on behalf of a company based near Venice. Illegal, but what can you do? Lawyers. Anything to do with you, Mr. Strumbić?”

  Strumbić shrugged sympathetically. “What our country’s coming to.” He shook his head sadly. “All the ills of capitalism have already filled in the cracks left by the noble but failed Communist experiment.”

  Brg felt his head nod forward. He needed sleep. He knew that dwelling on stupid details was a sign of how tired he was. The villa’s ownership? Who cared about the complicated scheme designed to hide the owner? Strumbić owned it. And Strumbić was there, sitting in front of him.

  Brg needed to be sharp to deal with Zagreb. And he needed to be even more on the ball to handle as wily a character as Strumbić.

  Four hours of solid shut-eye. If he left for home now, he’d get that much rest and be awake again by lunch, have a bite to eat, and then get back to the station, refreshed. Call Zagreb, tell them he’d wrapped up the whole of the mystery, found the missing woman, had the lead suspect in a jail cell. Formally charge Strumbić with everything from smuggling to murder to fraudulent property ownership.

  Hell, how could it hurt to delay calling them by a couple of hours? The woman wasn’t going to get any more dead, and Strumbić, well, he’d already been sitting around in prison for more than two weeks. Another quiet morning wouldn’t do any harm. Just in case, Brg would have a cop stand sentry outside Strumbić’s cell. Keep an eye on him the whole time.

  Four hours. Brg thought. What could possibly go wrong in four hours?

  ZAGREB, LATE SEPTEMBER 1991

  MARKO DELLA TORRE sat at his desk looking out over the city’s red-tiled rooftops, half hoping the air-raid sirens would go off so that he’d have an excuse to leave the office tower. Zagreb was a city of low buildings, and this was one of the few to stand out, some forgotten committee’s hopeful stab at modernity. Its height and central location made the building a landmark, and thus an appealing target for Yugoslav MiGs. So far, all the alerts had been false alarms. But the war was in full flower out east. It would come to them eventually.

  He turned back to the stack of papers on his desk and lit a Lucky Strike. Maybe the nicotine would help him get through the drudgery. At the very least, the cigarette would distract him while he pretended to read. His masters had reduced him to whittling away at empty bureaucracy during this time of general paralysis. No, this was worse than that. The files crossing his desk had already been drained of any significance; these were documents the regime would be happy to pass on to those it no longer fully trusted but whose fate had yet to be decided on.

  As it should be, he reflected. Because he was not trustworthy.

  Della Torre had been an officer of the recently defunct UDBA. But now that Yugoslavia had broken apart, UDBA’s people had drifted into different shadows. In a Croatia struggling for independence, della Torre had resurfaced as a senior member of military intelligence, recently seconded to a covert American government operation. The one that had left three of its team dead.

  It dawned on him that his life could be measured by the whims of others. Half a decade ago, he had been co-opted by UDBA from his job as a young lawyer in the Zagreb prosecutor’s office. He’d had no say when they handed him the intelligence job after UDBA’s Croatian operations were quietly shut down. And then he’d been loaned to the Americans by a government minister, as a minor noble might solicit favour by proffering a useful family retainer to a powerful liege duke. The Americans had used him to plot a murder, with ruthless indifference to his wishes or his life. Somehow he’d survived when others had perished. And now he was left waiting to see where the forces beyond his control would drive him next.

  The view of Zagreb’s rooftops drew him away again. He was fond of the city, the pretty medieval centre, with its sagging wood-framed houses, surrounded by the well-ordered Hapsburg lower town with its ochre buildings and grand provincial architecture. The utilitarian tower blocks of the Communist-built new town, along with most of the other monstrosities of the new order, were thankfully out of sight.

  There was a solitary socialist encroachment he didn’t resent: the impossibly tall chimney of the Savica power plant. He felt a perverse pride in its narrow elegance, its tip banded red and white like layers of ash and ember on a cigarette. To him it was a gesture of defiance by a poor, backward eastern European city; it was as if Zagreb had looked to London with its Big Ben, Paris with its Eiffel Tower, and New York with its Chrysler Building and said, Smoke this.

  He picked up the telephone and dialled. There was a dead tone. He waited a minute and then punched in the number
s again, and at last the phone rang. It was still ringing when he heard a knock at the door. He put down the receiver.

  A young lieutenant poked his head into the room. “Captain — sorry, I mean Major.” Della Torre’s promotion was already two months old, but people still forgot. “There’s a lady here. She insists on seeing you. I tried to deal with it, but she’s pretty forceful.”

  The woman pushed past the lieutenant before della Torre could respond. She was as thin and as severe as a Roman matron, her hair piled up in tight curls and cut short at the sides. Her pale, almost lead-white complexion merely added to the effect.

  “Major, is it? Well, Major della Torre, you are a difficult man to track down. No one is at the old UDBA offices, and when I went to police headquarters, the desk sergeant pretended he knew neither me nor you. I had to pull rank,” she said, slightly out of breath.

  There were spots of red in her cheeks from the eight-storey climb to the office. Two of the building’s three elevators had broken down, their German manufacturer reluctant to send parts on credit to a government that no other country recognized. Clearly, she’d been too impatient to wait.

  “That’s fine, Lieutenant,” della Torre said, standing. “Mrs. Strumbić is of course welcome.”

  The young officer made a half-hearted effort at a salute and then sidled out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

  “Won’t you sit, Mrs. Strumbić? Can I offer you a drink?” della Torre asked.

  He felt ashamed for not having visited her, at least informally. Guilt had made it hard for him to face up to the man’s wife. He’d sacrificed Strumbić to save three people from the Americans. And to save himself.

  Officially, he had been told to steer clear of anything that had to do with the Šipan killings. Both he and Julius Strumbić were implicated in the events. But Strumbić had gone missing, and as a colleague, della Torre had a moral duty to the man’s wife.