The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  Brnobić shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to be caught wandering dockside in Herceg Novi, asking around for somebody who could sneak me into Dubrovnik, unless I wanted an abbreviated life expectancy. The only half-possible way is the convoy that’s being put together in Rijeka. European Union humanitarians, film crews, and some of our own worthies. You could take that, though I don’t know how long it’ll take them to put it together.”

  The convoy Grimston had mentioned. The Americans would be on it.

  “That’s it?”

  Brnobić shrugged. “You could try your luck and see if you could find a fast boat with a good skipper who’s got brass balls. The run from Dubrovnik usually takes them to Korčula, the nearest big port with access to the wider world.” He pointed to an island a little more than a hundred kilometres northwest of Dubrovnik. “You can still get there, though even that trip is becoming more difficult. The ferries have been targeted, so their skippers are pretty nervous. If nothing else turns up, the humanitarian convoy will pass through. You should be able to hitch a ride.” He gave an apologetic shrug and rolled up his charts.

  “Guess we’ll have to make our way down to Korčula and try our luck from there,” Anzulović said.

  “The coast road in that area is pretty uncomfortable these days as well,” Brnobić said. “Serbs have been shelling the route around Zadar, virtually cutting the Croatian coast in two. Meanwhile the Yugoslav navy is harassing the ferries that are keeping out of field-gun range. No one is flying. The Yugoslav air force has taken to downing anything in Croat airspace —”

  Brnobić was cut off by the sound of a car pulling into the courtyard.

  PIERO DELLA TORRE was slightly unsteady on his feet. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was a little more stooped and aged than his son remembered. Della Torre thanked the stars his father never drove faster than thirty kilometres an hour, and that the service and wake had been only a quarter of an hour’s drive away on quiet country roads.

  It was unfair catching the old man off guard like that, but Piero composed himself, didn’t slur his words, and was gracious about the intrusion after his son gave him an arm to steady his walk up the stairs to the vine-covered terrace where the others sat.

  The sun had dropped below the treeline. Della Torre had switched on the outdoor lights, drawing the early evening moths. Where Zagreb had already tilted towards winter, here, just inland from the Adriatic, the evening air was a nostalgic memory of summer.

  Among the pleasantries, the elder della Torre told them a little about the day, about the funeral and the wake, but his narrative was dishevelled, his thoughts tired, unsteady. Della Torre could see Anzulović’s professional, clinical appraisal of his father under the veneer of sympathy. He was always the detective, always weighing the evidence and its source, and wondering about the uneasiness with which the old man glanced at his son.

  Della Torre knew better than to ask too many questions about Libero’s death. That would need to wait for breakfast. Piero excused himself after taking a small glass of white wine, and Marko accompanied his father up to his bedroom, where the older man said he was going for a little solitary contemplation and apologized for leaving his guests to fend for themselves.

  When della Torre came back down, Brnobić also said he needed to be off. Della Torre left Anzulović on his own and walked his cousin back to the Mercedes.

  “Thanks for coming,” della Torre said.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. It’s a good thing you came. Your father could probably use your company for a day or two. Libero’s death came as a shock. It leaves him rather alone. It’ll be hard to find anyone to replace Libero. He was a friend to your father, in his own odd way. I guess it’s also a reminder of our own mortality.”

  “Yes,” della Torre said. “What was it that my father said to you about Libero’s death?”

  “Nothing,” Brnobić said, wary. “Or something that didn’t make much sense. Ask him tomorrow. Get it out of him gently. He’s a little confused, and the . . . well, I’d just muddy things if I tried to tell you what I thought he was trying to say.”

  Della Torre cloaked his disappointment but again decided not to press the issue.

  Brnobić, in turn, seemed uncomfortable at withholding whatever it was he didn’t want to say. “Listen, I had a little thought about one way of breaking the blockade,” he said.

  “Oh.” Della Torre was suddenly all attention.

  “Don’t get your hopes up.” Brnobić laughed. “It’s a fantastically impractical solution. I wouldn’t do it myself or recommend it, but it is possible.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can sail to Dubrovnik.”

  “Sail?” Della Torre laughed, incredulous. “What, in a yacht?”

  “No, not a yacht. A little boat — a dinghy, up to around five or six metres; more than that and it becomes risky if you’ve got a still night with a full moon. And only for the last few kilometres. You’d have to do it at night, which makes the sailing particularly tricky, dangerous even. You might even have to swim the last hundred metres or so.”

  “You don’t think the Yugoslav navy would notice?”

  “No, not at night. It would be incredibly hard for them to discover a dinghy unless you sailed right into them.”

  “What about radar and sonar and all those things?”

  “Even the best radar can’t distinguish a small sailboat from a wave. A dinghy’s radar profile is tiny, all but invisible. Even fishing boats don’t show that well if the seas are up. But anyway, the navy mostly relies on infrared surveillance cameras and sound for nighttime tracking of surface traffic. The acoustic tracking is particularly sensitive to engine noise. That’s what it’s tuned to. It’s so good that even the quietest engine being run very slowly will provide enough of a signal for the weapons systems to target. That’s how they’ve been sinking the fast blockade breakers. The infrared cameras pick up engine heat and exhaust. A couple of well-covered bodies in a sailing boat look no bigger than a pair of gulls.

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t try it myself. But it’s the only possibility I can think of. Sometimes low tech outperforms high tech in the most surprising ways. A mechanical pencil and a sheet of paper are still more useful to me when I want to do a quick engineering drawing than the best computer I’ve ever used. Though that’s probably because I’m old.”

  “Why stop at a dinghy? What’s wrong with a pedal boat?” della Torre said.

  Brnobić laughed. “The reason I mention it is because there’s a rumour someone’s been breaking the blockade just that way. Not that I believe it. But it is possible.”

  Della Torre saw his cousin off and then turned back to the house. The light of his father’s second-storey room filtered through the slats of his closed wooden shutters. Della Torre knew the old man had fallen asleep without undressing. It happened when he’d had a few drinks too many.

  Anzulović was waiting for him on the terrace, helping himself to the remaining ham and cheese that della Torre had carved. There was plenty more of both in the pantry.

  “Seems a nice guy,” Anzulović said.

  “He is. Smart too.”

  “Shame he didn’t have any good ideas on how to get to Dubrovnik. I guess we’ll just have to sit and bide our time at Korčula until something comes up.”

  “Yes,” della Torre said. He was too tired to mention the sailing boat idea. He’d dismissed the notion almost as soon as he’d heard it.

  They’d both had enough to eat and maybe a little too much of the strong wine, so they retired to their bedrooms. Della Torre first went to put a blanket over his father, who only half-woke at the intrusion. When Piero was tucked under the covers, della Torre switched off the old man’s light.

  Both della Torre and Anzulović had had breakfast by the time Piero appeared on
the terrace the following morning. He bore the hangover with dignity and nursed himself with a large, sweet Turkish coffee and a glass of his own wine, mixed liberally with sparkling water.

  “Ah, Libero,” Piero said. “I think I’ve known him all my life. Knew him all my life. As far as anyone can ever say they knew him.”

  “Angelo told me some things about him last night that I’d never heard before.”

  “You mean about his family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we Istrians aren’t very demonstrative people. We don’t like to talk about ourselves much. Emotionally hard as stone, your mother used to say, and as warm.” And then to Anzulović: “She was Istrian too, but Istrian Italian.”

  Istria had been part of Venice for centuries and was heavily Italian until after the war, when the Slavs forced many to leave the country under duress. Plenty were killed along the way for having Italian names or accents. Della Torre’s branch of the family had been assimilated over the centuries. They were Slav and Italian and wholly Istrian, speaking the local dialect among themselves and equally fluent in Italian and Serbo-Croat.

  His mother’s family considered themselves Italian. Her parents had spoken only that language, never bothering with Serbo-Croat. They’d all left in the decade following the war. Their village was now entirely abandoned, a cluster of ruined stone houses on a small hill farther north.

  “Ah, well, maybe you soften a little the older you get,” Piero said. “All my life, I only ever shook hands with my father and always used formal language with him. But when you were small, Marko, your grandfather would perch you on his knee and wouldn’t correct you when you addressed him informally. And I suppose I would have been even more sentimental with any grandchildren.”

  Della Torre smiled softly at his father, remembering how, when he was a child, Piero would put his arm over his shoulders, ruffle his hair, and kiss his forehead when they watched movies together. And how the old man must miss not having grandchildren.

  “Angelo mentioned something yesterday,” della Torre began, finding the gentlest introduction.

  Piero looked quizzically at his son, waiting for him to complete the thought. And then an expression of alarm crossed his face, as if he realized where the subject was headed.

  “Oh, that. Nothing. There was nothing. Just the ramblings of an emotionally addled old man,” Piero said. “Libero’s sudden death got me so confused, I just . . . Well . . .”

  Anzulović was a silent observer. It had been his greatest skill as a detective, allowing people to talk. And when they were finished, he would wait in silence for so long that they’d finally come out with what they’d been hiding all along. It didn’t escape his attention that Piero had given Anzulović furtive glances as he steered the conversation away from where he thought della Torre might be leading. Piero knew Anzulović had been della Torre’s boss in the UDBA. They’d met before. The UDBA was not a topic of conversation in old Yugoslavia, even between father and son. The subject was still taboo, especially among Istrians, who in all their history had never trusted a government of any political stripe or ethnicity.

  There was something immeasurably forlorn about the old man. His soft, deep voice seemed to come out of an Arvo Pärt composition. Spiegel im Spiegel. Mirror in mirror.

  “It is sad about Libero, but we all come to an age. He lived the life given to him,” Piero said. “He lived simply, never involved himself in politics or much with other people. Just with the land. He drank moderately. Less than moderately. Didn’t smoke. He worked for my father and then came to me when Marko and I returned and bought this place. My father sent him and he stayed. He never said whether he was happy to have come or not. I paid him better, I suppose. Not that he ever cared about money. The Italians killed his brother, the Germans his mother and wife. I’d known him all my life and only learned after his death about his wife. They’d been married for a month. We Istrians don’t talk much, and if someone doesn’t want to talk, we don’t pry. After the war the Communists took his father. They looked for Libero for a while, but after the break with Stalin they didn’t look anymore. I don’t know why. His sister-in-law remarried. He saw her once a year. She died a few years back. Was he my friend? I don’t know. I know everything he thought about engines and how to cultivate vines. I’ve been to his little house, the one he lived in with his parents and brother and brother’s wife and his own wife when they were all still alive. On his own, he said two rooms were enough. I offered to renovate a cottage behind the house here so he wouldn’t have to walk three kilometres each way every day, but he wouldn’t have it. ‘Better the ghosts you know,’ he said. One Sunday every month he’d walk six kilometres to the graveyard. Never to church, just the graveyard. All my life I knew him. We ate lunch together here, six days a week. When I gave him a week off, he’d spend it in the vineyard or in the sheds working on things. If he was around, I’d give him lunch. That was his life. I think he was content.”

  Now that Libero was gone, his father was, in a way, della Torre thought, twice a widower.

  So they reminisced about Libero and talked about the practicalities now that he would no longer be around to help. Piero figured that if he wanted to keep up his small vineyards, orchard, and vegetable garden, he’d need a man at least two days a week in the winter months, and most days from spring to late autumn. It would be expensive and eat heavily into Piero’s pension. Just as well he had foreign-currency income — abjectly small for anyone in the West but decent in Yugoslav terms — from the articles he wrote about Yugoslav politics.

  Anzulović found an excuse to drive the Citroën into Poreč, a beautiful Venetian city on the coast, fifteen kilometres away. Father and son stayed back to walk around the fields, among the strips of earth that bled between the rows of vines.

  “What happened, Dad?” della Torre said.

  Piero shrugged, sunlight glistening along the fine edge of his lower eyelids. They brushed past vine leaves autumnal in their colouring. Libero had helped to plant them, thinned the branches in the winter, sprayed them in the summer, harvested them only a few weeks before. They were his memorial.

  “I don’t know. I was having breakfast when the telephone rang. The person spoke English, which made me think that he was from one of the publications I write for. Sometimes the editors call me to clarify a point. But they’re almost all in the U.S., and morning here is the middle of the night for them. I’ve done some writing for a couple of English journals, except the man sounded American. But Americans work for English periodicals. I haven’t anything outstanding with an English journal so I thought maybe this was a commission. All these things were occupying my mind when I spoke to him, so I missed most of what he said. And then he hung up, very soon after. But I did remember he’d mentioned Libero, who hadn’t arrived yet. Sometimes he comes a little later, when he’s tending his own garden or has to go to town.” Piero spoke of his old companion in the present tense as he struggled to splice his thoughts into coherence. “He tells me in advance, but I never remember. I know he’ll be here when he’s needed.”

  “The American mentioned Libero?” Della Torre tried to hide his alarm.

  “Yes, though I couldn’t remember what he said. He didn’t repeat himself, just spoke briefly. I got into the car and drove to Libero’s cottage, but even as I was driving I wondered if I had really been telephoned or imagined it. My . . . sometimes things like that happen to me. Not often. But I’ve noticed . . .”

  “And when you arrived . . .” Della Torre encouraged the older man, trying not to betray his urgency.

  “His door was unlocked. I have a key to the cottage, so I let myself in. And there he was in his bed. I knew then that he . . . Libero doesn’t have a telephone, so I drove back and called the doctor. He came with an ambulance, but they just confirmed what I knew.”

  “Was there an autopsy?”

  “No, the doctor said age had f
inally gotten to Libero. It happens that way sometimes, he said. The heart switches off. Maybe because of a nightmare or because it’s just run its course. There was absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.”

  “Did you tell him about the telephone call? Or the police?”

  “No, I . . . it had lost significance after what happened. I told Angelo today, this morning. Or was it yesterday?”

  Della Torre’s breathing shallowed. He bent his head to compose himself. He needed a cigarette but didn’t dare light one. “I should have guessed . . .” he said, more to himself than to his father.

  “Guessed what?”

  Della Torre paused and then whispered, “Libero.”

  “You knew something about this?”

  For what seemed like a long time, but couldn’t have been more than the span of three breaths, della Torre was silent.

  “No,” he answered, trying to remember what Grimston had said to him at the café in Zagreb. Just like his father, he was unsure of his own recollection.

  “Do you know something about Libero’s death?”

  “I don’t know.” Could they arrange an autopsy? Yes, certainly on della Torre’s suspicion. If he suspected. Anzulović would know the procedure. But that wouldn’t be necessary. Had his father really been telephoned or had he imagined it after the fact?

  An autopsy might or might not confirm murder. If that’s what it was. If they wanted to, the Americans could make death seem natural, traceless, especially in such an old man. But maybe they didn’t care, as long as it stood as a warning to della Torre.

  “Why? What does Libero have to do with you?”

  “Nothing,” della Torre said, shaking the suspicion from his mind. It seemed too far-fetched. The threat, if that’s what it was, was too obscure. And his father was too unreliable a messenger. “Are you sure you didn’t imagine the phone call? You’ve been drinking lately, and —”