by Alen Mattich
“Sure, I’ll come looking for you,” he said, shaking his head and going back to his engine.
Della Torre had as much luck with the two other fishermen he spoke to. The last one shook his head and added, “What is this, a lunatic convention? Or are you mates with the other guy?”
“Other guy?”
“Yes, other guy. Foreigner. German or something. Speaks crap Italian. Well, I’ll tell you what I told him. A few of us go to Orebić,” he said, “but unless you’ve got a speedboat and God on your side, you’re not getting to Dubrovnik. Though I suppose you could ask the Serbs to stick you in one of their cannons and blast you over.” He paused, holding his hand up for della Torre to be quiet. “Hear that? The guns.”
“Who’s the other guy?” della Torre squatted down so that he was on the man’s level. The muscles in his thighs were tense, and he supported himself with three fingers against the damp, cool stone of the dockside.
“Some other guy. Didn’t leave his business card. But it’s not a big place. Not many foreigners about. Come to think of it, I think he said he was a journalist.”
Della Torre strolled back into the town’s narrow alleys. Most of the windows were shuttered, the louvred panels painted white rather than the green favoured in Istria. Ornate niches were carved into many of the stone walls; skeins of wires hung above, and sometimes a profusion of vines, still green, spilled over the tops of walls from hidden gardens. Each alley ended at either a building or a seascape narrowed to a vertical slice, as if seen through a castle’s crenellations.
The sun had come out, so he stopped for a coffee on a terrace. The wind had turned, and the distant rumble of guns disappeared. For a moment he watched a small sailboat cross the channel. The blue hull, in combination with the red and white forward sail and the white main, made it look like the country’s flag, without its checkerboard crest.
Della Torre thought about Libero with a shudder. He tried to convince himself that the man had died of a heart attack or just old age. Marko’s and his father’s suspicions were absurd. And yet . . .
Della Torre’s thoughts drifted to Irena. He hadn’t been able to get through to her from his father’s house. Today, Anzulović had gone to commandeer an office at the police headquarters. Della Torre would try again from there.
He idly watched the little boat round the end of the port town. He made a mental note to track down the journalist looking to get to Dubrovnik. If this one was half as good as Higgins, he’d find a way. But something still bothered della Torre.
It wasn’t until he’d strolled most of the way back to the pension that the thought snapped into a recognizable shape. Triangles. Sailboats. He remembered what his cousin Brnobić had said about breaking the blockade in a small sailboat, like the one he’d watched crossing from Orebić and then rounding Korčula’s promontory, out of sight.
Earlier he’d spotted a sheltered marina in the bay between Korčula and the main part of the island. Now he hurried there, but the little boat had disappeared. He cursed his obtuseness.
The dull middle-aged man guarding the marina didn’t know much about anything. None of the docked yachts had been sailed for months, and most of them not since the previous year. Few owners had come to see their boats, and the man had not noticed a small sailboat passing earlier. He was just there to keep an eye on his marina. There was another marina farther along the coast. He pointed vaguely away from Korčula.
Della Torre started walking the length of the waterfront, away from the town, in hopes of catching sight of the other marina or any other possible home for the boat. But it proved to be a fruitless morning’s search, and he determined to drive around in the car later.
He found Anzulović back at the pension.
“Militia headquarters is a zoo,” Anzulović said. “We might as well stick around here a while. Nonna’s agreed to let us use her phone for a consideration, and we’ll wait for the convoy, unless you’ve had some luck.”
“Nothing. Fishermen all think I’ve gone insane. And apparently there’s some foreign reporter looking to go to Dubrovnik too. Maybe we can share a ride.”
Anzulović nodded. There was a time when journalists from abroad were closely tracked, but these days they came and went. Some bothered to get accreditation from the ministry in Zagreb; others just pretended to be foolhardy tourists.
Della Torre paused. For the past few days, something about Anzulović had been troubling him. He didn’t know how to approach the question, so he did it bluntly.
“Why are you here?”
“Why?”
“Why are you still with me?”
“To keep you company,” Anzulović said. “To keep you out of trouble. Because you’re going to need help with Strumbić.”
“Am I?”
“Aren’t you?”
“What are we going to do with him when we find him? Warn him off? Or hand him over to the Americans?”
Anzulović paused. He lit a cigarette and slowly let the smoke seep through his nostrils. “He’s an asset of the Croatian government. Let’s leave those tricky decisions to others.”
AFTER LUNCH, DELLA Torre left Anzulović at the pension, where he was stretched along the sofa in the parlour, drinking a glass of wine mixed with water and reading a novel.
“Detective work is hard, isn’t it,” della Torre said.
Anzulović grunted.
Della Torre drove the Citroën along the seafront, from village to village. None of the fishermen he spoke to showed any interest in taking him farther than Orebić or back to Ploče. They were making enough money on those routes that they didn’t need to bother risking their lives for a single big payoff.
He kept his eyes peeled for the little sailing boat. Some of the locals he talked to had seen it sail to Orebić a couple of times a week, but no one seemed to know whose it was, though the consensus was that the boat was moored in a sheltered inlet.
Eventually he spotted it tied to a buoy some twenty metres off a pebbly shore. It couldn’t have been more than six metres long. Its small tender lay upside down under a broad spread of long-needled pine in a quiet spot up from the stony beach. The track to and fro was little used, and from the road it appeared to belong to a neighbouring villa.
He knocked on the doors of the waterfront houses, but they were all shuttered. Rich people’s summer hideaways now closed for god knew how long. He wondered how many owners were Serbs praying for a quick victory so they could get back to their old lives.
On the way back to the car, he spotted a boy on a bicycle and flagged him down. The child kept a wary but polite distance.
“Are you from around here?” della Torre asked.
The boy waved inland, farther up the hill.
“Do you know who owns the boat that’s moored in the water down there?”
The boy thought hard, then shook his head. “Some foreigner,” he said.
“Do you know where the foreigner lives?”
“No.”
“Has he got a car?”
“Yes,” the boy nodded. “A yellow Cinquecento. A real Italian one, not a Zastava that looks like one. One of the doors is more orange. I think it was replaced.”
“You sure about that?” della Torre asked, though it was a foolish question. Boys like this knew cars, all the makes and all their idiosyncrasies.
“Yup.”
“Do you know where it goes?”
Once again, the boy waved vaguely inland. “Up the road and then right.”
“Where does that road on the right go?”
“Up.”
Up to the hamlets in the island’s interior. It was a start at least.
It was too late in the afternoon to go wandering around the countryside. On the off chance, he drove back to the police station in Korčula, but no one was terribly sure about the owner of a yellow Cinquecento.<
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The day had been warm, and by the time he got back to the pension, della Torre was tired and irritated. He sat down to Nonna’s supper of fried fish and boiled, oiled potatoes, not even bothering to mention the small sailboat to Anzulović, who seemingly hadn’t stirred from the couch in the front room.
After supper, they played cards on the pension’s terrace late into the evening, by the light of a kerosene lamp. A blackout had blanketed the town in silent darkness.
Della Torre woke unaccountably early. The eiderdown smelled slightly of the seaside damp that seemed to infuse these old stone houses from mid-autumn until late spring. The tiled floor was cold underfoot. Nonna had given della Torre and Anzulović each a pair of her dead husband’s slippers to wear around the house. She seemed to take comfort in the men’s company. Was loneliness inherent in old age?
Anzulović hadn’t risen yet, and Nonna was in her dressing gown, baking their bread for the day. She made della Torre a coffee from her dwindling supplies. It was becoming ever harder to find luxuries on Korčula, as the ferries and supply ships restricted themselves to essentials. Della Torre wondered what life might be like in Dubrovnik. Or Vukovar. Yet again he tried calling Irena, without success.
At a loss over what to do with himself, della Torre went out. On a whim he decided to drive inland, knowing he shouldn’t waste gasoline but unable to resist.
Away from the coastal fringe, the settlements were sparsely populated. The red-tiled roofs of many houses had collapsed in on their empty shells. Weeds and wild shrubs overgrew ancient vineyards and orchards. Dry-stone walls were gap-toothed with neglect.
By midday he’d reached a hill with long views of the island, the sea, and the mainland beyond, the landscape scattered with cypresses like verdant columns from ancient ruins. He stopped to take in the view and smoke a cigarette by the side of the road. But his stomach rumbled with the distant memory of a modest breakfast, so he got in the car, aiming to get back to Korčula along an unpaved road that he suspected would cut a corner rather than retracing a long circuit. That’s when he saw it.
The yellow Cinquecento with a slightly more orange passenger door was parked in the courtyard of a small, two-storey stone farmhouse. The house was old, the paint on its shutters peeling, its roof tiles mottled orange and bleached red. But there were roses climbing along one wall, and the garden was tidy and well tended.
He stopped and lifted the bar to the steel gate, which was painted with red rustproofing. But he didn’t push it open just yet. Most farmers kept guard dogs that could be savage with strangers.
“Hello,” he called.
There was no sound of barking.
“Hello,” he called again, pushing the gate open and stepping onto the chipped stone driveway.
A figure came from around the corner of the house wearing a broad sun hat, loose shorts, and a coarse faded blue smock. From the legs he could tell it was a woman, though her face was in shadow and the clothes hid her figure.
“Good day,” she said. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”
She was tall, and from her voice he guessed she sang alto. As she approached, she took off her straw hat and smiled. She had pale brown hair, tied back and falling behind her shoulders, and a long, thin face, high-boned, with a prominent nose. Her lips were thin and her pale green eyes sparkled with a wary intelligence. She didn’t look Croat, though she spoke the language with only a slight hint of a foreign accent.
“Hello,” he said again. “I was looking for the owner of a sailing boat that I saw crossing the channel from Orebić yesterday. I was led to believe that whoever drove this Fiat might know.”
“Can I ask why you might be interested?”
“I have a proposition. Well, a possible proposition that might be of interest.”
“What sort of proposition?”
“It has to do with the boat.”
“You want to buy it?”
“No, nothing at all like that. I’d . . . I’d like to charter it.”
“You want to be taken to Orebić, or Ploče?”
“I’d be happier speaking to the owner of the boat, if you don’t mind.”
She considered him for a long moment. “My name is Miranda Walker,” she said. “I’m the owner of the boat.”
“I’m Marko della Torre.” He held out his hand. “Miranda Walker isn’t a very Croat name.”
“Neither is Marko della Torre.”
“I’m Istrian.”
“I guessed.”
“Are you American?”
“English,” she said, finally stepping forward to take his hand.
Her fingers were long but her palms were rough and told of physical work. Now that she was close to him, he saw the fine lines that creased the corners of her eyes; the tanned skin was no longer in its first youth. But there was no grey in her hair, and the freckles that ran along the bridge of her nose and under her eyes lent her a certain girlishness. He guessed she was a few years younger than him, in her mid-thirties.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “I have some lemon cordial made with my own lemons, from the grove behind the house. Or there’s some wine that my landlord gives me. It’s quite strong, so you ought to add water to it, but I’m afraid it’ll have to be from the tap. The fizzy kind is too expensive these days.” Even before the war, a bottle of carbonated mineral water had cost more than a bottle of wine.
“The cordial would be nice. I’ve been driving around all morning looking for you.”
“You must have been very eager to have wasted all that petrol,” she said. “Come round the back. We can sit and you can tell me what you want.”
He followed her around the side of the house to the rear terrace, which was shaded by a trellis of vines, the grapes long since harvested. They ripened sooner here than up north in Istria. She motioned to a chair with a plywood seat and back, by a rough wooden table, and went inside the house.
When she came out again with a tray of glasses, a bottle, and a jug, she’d taken off her smock and wore a simple white linen blouse.
She was only half a head shorter than della Torre, and he saw that she had a fine figure, deeply tanned arms and legs. Everything about her said that she was used to physical work but hadn’t been born into it.
“So, Mr. della Torre, what can I do for you?” she asked.
“If you’d rather talk in English, I’m as happy to do that,” he said.
Her eyebrows rose slightly but she didn’t comment. Instead she said, “As you wish.”
“It might be nice. I get out of practice.”
“So you’re American.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What is it that you want, Mr. della Torre?”
“Were you sailing to Orebić yesterday?”
Her smile was slightly strained. “What concern is it to you, Mr. della Torre?”
“Just curious.”
“Then that’s how you’ll have to stay.”
“Or were you coming back from Ploče? For some reason I remember seeing a small sailing boat like yours there the other day.”
She continued to smile. “What is it that you’d like to discuss?”
“Do you take people off the island?”
“Mr. della Torre, I have a little boat and I sail places. It comfortably fits a few people, so if I’m making a trip I can usually squeeze in a passenger or two. The boat’s sound and everyone gets to wear a life jacket,” she said. “Would you like to be taken somewhere? I couldn’t transport your car; you’d have to leave that behind. But if it’s just you, or a couple of you, I’m sure we could negotiate a passage. But if you were in Ploče the other day, you’ll probably know that the car ferry risks the journey every couple of days. It’s cheaper than I am, though you can’t always get a place on it. Plenty of people are trying to leave Korčula.”
“How is it that an Englishwoman lives here, and speaks our language?”
“Is there a law against that?”
“Well, actually, it’s quite difficult to get a residence permit. Or was, in Yugoslavia. I’m not sure what the latest laws are for Croatia.”
“I have a residence permit for Yugoslavia, and I was told that it would be transferable to the Croat state.”
“You’ve got a nice place here. Nice view. Must be expensive.”
She laughed. “I think you know very well it isn’t. This far inland, most of the houses are ruins. The farmer who owns the house is happy enough for me to maintain the property and pay the taxes and bills. Which is just as well, because that’s about what I can afford. I’m sure if you were keen, you could come up with a similar arrangement for one of the other semi-derelict houses around here.”
“It’s delicious lemonade,” he said.
“Lemonade is freshly made. This is cordial. Would you like some more?”
“Yes, please.”
She poured him another glass, mixing it with cold water from the white enamelled jug.
“As nice as it is to have some company, and as nice as it is to be speaking English, I wish you would tell me what you want, Mr. della Torre. Otherwise I’ll start to think you’re a policeman on a fishing expedition.”
The comment caught him off guard, but he tried not to show it. “I came here on the very slight possibility of finding somebody to take me to Dubrovnik,” he said.
She laughed out loud. It was a nice laugh, full of surprise and humour, not meant cruelly. But when she saw he wasn’t laughing with her, she quieted, though she continued to smile. “You’re not joking, are you, Mr. della Torre.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“You’re probably aware of the fact that there’s a blockade? And that the Yugoslav navy is shooting at ships that are breaking that blockade? Sinking them too.”
“Yes, but none of the fishermen would take me, and the blockade runners based in Dubrovnik don’t seem to have moved from port in recent days.”
“Very sensibly.”