The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  As the daughter of the fearsome and now dead chief of Zagreb’s uniformed police, she knew the job could be dangerous. Her stoicism was undoubtedly fortified by the mutual antagonism between her and her husband. And she was used to Strumbić’s long, silent absences.

  Della Torre wondered if she knew just how corrupt her husband was — and how wealthy his corruption had made him. Strumbić had numerous foreign bank accounts and mistresses and secret apartments and houses — even one in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world. His wife was an intelligent woman, so she must have had an inkling. But then, being the daughter of Zagreb’s police chief, maybe she knew it was all part of the game, the great socialist con in which the only sin was to be caught, exposed, shamed, and exiled to Goli Otok, Yugoslavia’s infamous political prison.

  No one played the system better than Strumbić, but in these past weeks della Torre had wondered whether Strumbić’s luck had finally run out. The consensus view was that he’d skipped the country, maybe to one of his secret boltholes. Della Torre’s conscience was assuaged by his knowledge of Strumbić’s resourcefulness. More than any other man, Strumbić could weave gold out of a noose wrapped around his neck and buy not just his freedom but the thoroughbred to carry him as well. Della Torre was sure of it. He prayed it was true. Because he was fond of the man, as fond as he might have been of a brother.

  “Nothing for me,” Mrs. Strumbić said abruptly.

  “I’m sorry, I have nothing to report on Julius. We still don’t know where he is. I would have called, but —”

  “I’m not here to find out where Julius is. I’m here to pass on a message from him.”

  “Julius sent you a message?”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” she snapped. “Get a pen, you’ll need to write this down.”

  Under a stack of files on top of his desk, della Torre found a notepad and one of the fine-point mechanical pencils he favoured. “Please, carry on, Mrs. Strumbić,” he said, sitting. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a seat?

  She continued to stand, her oversized Italian leather handbag hanging off the crook of her arm. Her mouth was stern, her lips pleated, her cloying rose scent mixing unpleasantly with the room’s cigarette-ash smell. “He said this would mean something to you, though only heaven knows what. He told me to tell you he’s with colleagues near the staircase you so liked, and is using his pub name.”

  Della Torre looked at her blankly. “Could you repeat that, please?”

  “He’s with colleagues near the staircase you so liked, and is using his pub name. Don’t tell me you don’t know what he’s talking about, because if military intelligence doesn’t know its own codes, then we might as well be pissing on paper when it comes time to fight this war.”

  “No, of course. Yes, code, of course,” della Torre said, looking at the words he’d written down in his tiny, neat handwriting.

  “So now that I’ve told you, maybe you can tell your people to stop bothering me. I don’t mind that you’ve got my phone tapped — don’t deny it — but there’s no point in having people telephoning asking for Julius. I’ll unplug it if this carries on. As for the idiots you’ve posted to keep a watch on the building — well, at least they keep the vandals away. Little bastards. The vandals, I mean. Though the surveillance people probably are too. Stupid bastards at that. You can hear their brains rattle when they move. So it’s just as well they don’t move much. They’d give themselves a concussion otherwise,” she muttered.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Strumbić . . .” Della Torre reeled from the torrent of words. She talked faster than he could think.

  “No point in being sorry. If I wanted an apology, you’d have known about it. Julius is enough of a pain in my backside without having to deal with everything else.”

  “I’m sure it’s not intentional. Bureaucracy. You know how it is.”

  “Julius? Bureaucracy? What are you talking about, Major?”

  “I mean keeping a watch . . . it’s, you know, we like to keep an eye on the families — I mean, to ensure the safety of the families of missing officers.”

  “I just told you, he’s not missing. Though I haven’t a clue where he is. Disappears for months on end. He’s lucky I’m not the jealous type, though it’d take some fancy imagination to be jealous over Julius.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t got —” Della Torre stopped himself from saying imagination. “— reason to be worried.”

  “If you can’t make those irritating phone calls stop, I’ll find somebody who can.”

  “My apologies,” della Torre said again. “Did Julius say nothing more?”

  “Of course he said more, but that’s all he told me to tell you.”

  “Oh. It’s just that, maybe if you could share a bit more of your conversation —”

  “Share my conversation? You’ve got the whole thing taped somewhere. I’m not here to make your life easier, I’m just here to tell you what Julius told me to tell you. Understand, Major?”

  Della Torre stood up. “Yes, of course. Thank you, Mrs. —”

  “Good day to you, Major. And when you find Julius, tell him he’d better get home soon or he’ll regret it.”

  HIS EYES AND nose were still prickling from Mrs. Strumbić’s perfume when the door opened. A tall man stepped in.

  Major Anzulović, twenty years della Torre’s senior, had been one of the Zagreb police force’s most successful detective inspectors before being put in charge of the secret police’s internal affairs unit. He’d personally recruited della Torre to be a part of Department VI, hired him to investigate UDBA’s history of external assassinations. Until della Torre’s recent promotion, given to him as an enticement to help the Americans, Anzulović had been his boss. Even though they now officially held the same rank, della Torre knew his place. Anzulović carried the authority of wisdom and experience. And a tenacious ability to survive.

  “Hear you’ve had a visitor, Gringo,” Anzulović said, invoking the nickname that della Torre so hated. He’d grown up in the United States; as a teenager, after his mother’s death, he’d come back to Zagreb. The local kids, all of whom fanatically read strip cartoons and watched films about cowboys and Indians, had rechristened him.

  Anzulović was holding a big mug of coffee. It was one of his few affectations. He was a movie buff, in particular an enormous fan of Hollywood westerns and film noir. And that’s the way Americans drank their coffee. Not long after he’d recruited della Torre, Anzulović had asked the younger man to make him a pot of “real” cowboy coffee. Della Torre had offered up a thin, dirty concoction of instant grounds in tepid water, and Anzulović had walked around with a mug of something like it ever since. Though, della Torre reflected, he’d never actually seen Anzulović drink any.

  “You are uncannily well informed for an officer in military intelligence,” della Torre said, taking in Anzulović’s pot belly, the tufts of black and grey hair sprouting from his ears, and his long, bulbous nose — a face like an old saddle.

  “Got a cigarette?” Anzulović asked, sliding into the faux leather office chair opposite della Torre’s desk.

  “Lucky Strike?”

  “If I must,” Anzulović said. He was too frugal to buy foreign cigarettes, and he’d never been one for corruption, claiming to be too lazy and too fond of a quiet life to expend his energy on covering his ass. So he lived in a modest apartment in the new town with his wife, two daughters, son-in-law, and a decrepit yellow poodle he loathed.

  Della Torre lit Anzulović’s cigarette and his own. “Let me guess, you’re here to find out what Mrs. Strumbić wanted.”

  “Not really. I’ve got some news,” Anzulović said. “But if you’d like, that can wait. What did our esteemed erstwhile colleague’s wife want? Her husband?”

  “Actually, no. She came to give me a message from Julius.”

  Anzulović
sat up a little straighter. “From? What’d he say? Where is he? He must know that a few people have some questions for him.”

  “That’s the thing, the message was in a kind of code.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Something about a staircase and staying with mutual friends, and he’s naming a pub.”

  Anzulović sighed. “So he’s back in London?”

  “I guess so,” della Torre said. Where else but in Britain were there pubs? The staircase reference meant nothing to della Torre, though his shattered elbow had bled up the stairs to Strumbić’s London apartment earlier in the summer. As for mutual friends, well, they’d both known a woman there too. She was hard to forget.

  So why did he have a hard time believing that’s where Strumbić had run to? Maybe because the Americans would have looked for him there already.

  “Think his old lady knows about the London place?” Anzulović asked.

  “No,” della Torre said, after giving the question some thought. “She would have her hands on it by now. She doesn’t know a quarter of what he actually has.”

  “A tenth.”

  “A hundredth.”

  “I wonder if even he knows how much money he’s salted away.”

  “He was organizing a scam when I last saw him in Dubrovnik,” della Torre said. “Something about smuggling pirated heavy metal CDs knocked off in Turkey.”

  Anzulović shook his head. A slow, sad motion, at once showing disbelief and an absolute understanding of how the world worked. Corruption suited some people better than others. Strumbić was good at being on the take. He revelled in it, lived for it, even. But della Torre’s one foray into shady dealings had left him with a bullet in his elbow and a price on his head, which he still hadn’t been able to rub off. It was at the beginning of the year and he’d been short of funds. Like almost everyone. At the time, Strumbić was in the market for UDBA’s secrets, so della Torre had passed on to him what he thought were a few inconsequential files, and Strumbić paid him enough to buy the occasional carton of Luckys. But one of the documents, the Pilgrim file, had come back to bite him. An ancient Communist had gotten wind of the leak and set a couple of Bosnian killers on della Torre. He owed his life to Strumbić.

  “Everybody else in the whole fucking country is hiding behind the furniture, scared to death about what’s coming, and what does Julius do? He sells them shitty stolen music,” Anzulović said. “Well, good luck to him in London, and well done to him for getting out. I used to resent him. But now I know he’s the only sane human being this country has ever produced. Except maybe Irena.”

  “No, she’s gone mad too.”

  Irena was della Torre’s ex-wife. A doctor, she had recently gone east to Vukovar because so many of the local medics had evacuated the city when the Serbs were besieging it. Tito had kept Yugoslavia together with charm, hubris, and an iron fist. But he’d died ten years earlier. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent continent-wide upheaval, bitter nationalist rivalries between the country’s ethnic groups, especially the Serbs and Croats, had created a violent rupture. And Vukovar was on the fault line. Della Torre had been adamant that Irena shouldn’t go. She went anyway, with her British “friend” (was paramour still the right word?), a specialist in bullet wounds. It’d been a week since della Torre had last managed to speak to her. The phone lines were unreliable in these times of war, and anyway, she spent most of her days in the operating theatre.

  Anzulović shrugged. “Still trying to convince her to leave? They need doctors in Vukovar. Is her Dr. Cohen there still?”

  “They need to evacuate the city,” della Torre said, ignoring the question. “Because when they finish flattening it, no one’s going to be living there anyway.” And then, after a pause: “Yes, as far as I know he’s still there with her. But I haven’t been able to get through for a while. Last I heard, he was only allowed to assist. I guess British imperialist doctors don’t have the right sort of political training to heal the proletariat.”

  “New regime, Gringo. Remember, we’re now capitalist revanchists. No longer socialists with an inhuman face.”

  “I find it so confusing. Aren’t we supposed to be nationalist socialists these days?”

  “Shhh,” Anzulović said, suddenly alarmed. It was one thing to joke about how the newly independent Croatia was shedding the trappings of Yugoslav Communism, but to hint back at the country’s Nazi sympathies during the Second World War was to become allied with the Serbs. The new masters of Croatia were as fanatical as any revolutionaries and as cynical as old Communists — which many were, having been part of the Yugoslav government for decades. “Some jokes don’t seem so funny from inside a prison cell.”

  “Plus ça change,” della Torre said, but he felt less brave than he sounded. “So, what did you want to tell me about?”

  “The Americans want to talk to you.”

  “They have my reports.”

  “Deputy Minister Horvat has been persuaded to allow the Americans to interview you.” Horvat ran military intelligence, and therefore he was their lord and master. He was a political operator of the highest order, so if he was allowing the Americans access to della Torre, they must be providing him something valuable in return.

  “I won’t ask how you know,” della Torre said. “Have you got a role in the investigation?”

  “No, notionally it’s still in the hands of the Dubrovnik police.”

  “And I take it the police in Dubrovnik have got so much on their plate, the Americans aren’t making any headway.”

  “Not much.”

  “And it’s driving them nuts because they can’t do anything about it.”

  “You could say,” Anzulović agreed.

  “Except they offered something to Horvat and now he’s letting them have me?”

  “To talk to. Maybe.” Anzulović got up. “Listen, Gringo, why don’t we go out for a coffee.”

  Years of working for UDBA, where phones and offices were commonly bugged, had conditioned them to be wary of speaking too openly.

  Della Torre noticed that Anzulović had left his full mug on the desk. He made a mental note to pour it into his indestructible potted rubber tree when he got back.

  It was a relief to leave the office, even if the streets were looking scruffy. Buildings were inflamed with an eczema of graffiti while litter flecked the pavements like dandruff. Shops were short of everything. And though there was plenty of food for sale in the markets — the autumn harvest had been good — few people were buying, and the day-end spoils of mouldy and bruised vegetables were picked over by refugees who’d swollen the city’s population.

  As they passed the cinema, della Torre saw Anzulović glance longingly at the posters advertising the latest Hollywood import. His former boss couldn’t resist even a second-rate film already forgotten everywhere else in the world.

  The pedestrianized street was guarded by a sculpture of a man standing in a slouch, wearing a long overcoat and a hat pulled down over his eyes. It was of a writer, though he looked more like a secret policeman. A monument to the unknown spook.

  They sat at an outdoor café table under the statue’s gaze, facing the Square of Flowers. Della Torre was about to make a wisecrack about the symbolism but thought better of it. There was something about Anzulović’s mood.

  People had long underestimated Anzulović. His lugubrious demeanour and hangdog face made him unprepossessing. In serious discussions, he preferred to listen rather than to talk. With politicians he kept his mouth shut so that he seemed part of the furniture. Another know-nothing career apparatchik. About five years after Tito’s death, when the Yugoslav parliament finally made an effort to show it could rule responsibly rather than just exist as a dictatorship’s marketing tool, one of its first major expressions of power had been to hold the UDBA to account.

  To that end, th
e lawmakers grafted an internal investigative unit, Department VI, onto UDBA and gave it to Anzulović. The UDBA hierarchy took a brief, supercilious look at Anzulović and accepted the imposition. After all, what threat could this time-server possibly pose to them, especially if he was kept at arm’s length in Zagreb, well away from the centre of power in Belgrade?

  By the time they appreciated that there was substance to this man who’d worked his way up from a traffic beat, Anzulović had created a smart and solid team.

  There was something deeply paternal about Anzulović. But della Torre reminded himself that his old boss had survived so long for a reason.

  Anzulović rubbed his hand over his face, and della Torre inadvertently did the same. Even now the absence of his moustache, which he’d shaved off earlier in the year, caught him by surprise.

  “Gringo, just a bit of advice: lay off the political jokes. Our masters are touchy. And they’re keeping tabs.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” della Torre said. “But we didn’t come out here just for you to tell me to shut my mouth.”

  “No, I want to ask you what happened in Dubrovnik.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m curious about what you’re going to tell the Americans.”

  “You read my reports,” della Torre said, shifting slightly. Their coffees arrived. Della Torre spooned sugar into his double espresso and lit a cigarette.

  “And if they were satisfied with what you gave them, why do you think they want to talk to you?” Anzulović pressed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Are you about to tell me I need a lawyer?” della Torre said. He made it sound like a joke, but the levity fell flat.

  Anzulović considered the question for a long moment. “I think it’s fine for now. Shall we go over what happened?”

  Della Torre dragged on his cigarette. He felt the urge to talk. Anxiety had slowly been consuming him over the weeks. “Are you asking as an interested friend or as a cop?”

  “Gringo, when haven’t I ever been both?” Anzulović sighed. “Look, I’ve been asked — informally, mind you — to supervise the case. From our end. Rubber-stamp whatever it is that comes my way, for want of anybody else fit and proper to do the job.”