The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  “I told you they were good.”

  “I have no doubt, Gringo. I think they’re very good. Probably better than you realize.” Strumbić turned to Miranda. “Lady, show us your bag.”

  Della Torre sat up in surprise. “Why?”

  “You keep your chivalrous instinct in check just now, Gringo. Lady, your bag, please.”

  She looked from one man to the other and then shrugged, passing it over.

  Strumbić opened it up and pulled out each item of clothing, one after the other, patting each down and neatly folding it onto the floor. When he’d gone through the contents, he checked the bag itself, digging his hands into the corners. When he found nothing, he replaced everything he’d removed.

  Miranda gave him a drawn, irritated smile, as she might have done with a stupid shop assistant. Strumbić ignored it.

  “And now, please,” he said, “all of your clothes. Off.”

  She looked at him, shocked.

  “Listen, Julius —” della Torre began, standing up.

  Strumbić pulled out his service automatic from a holster in the small of his back.

  “Gringo, in a past life, you were a lawyer. And it’s right for a lawyer to take a keen interest in the law and the rights of a defendant and all that. But I was a cop. And my interest was in making sure I wasn’t wrong before nailing somebody. My intention right now is to nail Mrs. Walker here. So please, off with your clothes or I’ll help you take them off.”

  Strumbić sounded dangerous, and Miranda could tell that he was. She stripped. He checked everything she took off, feeling the seams. He stood up and made her kneel with her back to him so that he could run a hand through her hair. Then he made her lie back and spread her arms and legs and then pull her knees towards her chest, clinically shining a torch over her. Apart from running his hand through her hair, he didn’t touch her. When he was done, he allowed her to dress again.

  She barely concealed her fury. She burned with anger and humiliation and moved away from the men. “Mr. della Torre, I’m afraid you and your friend are going to have to make your own way out of Dubrovnik,” she said, only just controlling the tremor in her voice.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Walker,” Strumbić said. “We weren’t going to take you up on your offer anyway.”

  Della Torre felt embarrassed for her, shocked at Strumbić, and ashamed for having allowed him to put her through the ordeal.

  But Strumbić merely shifted his attention to della Torre. “Your turn, Gringo,” he said.

  “You going to look up my ass too?” he said defiantly.

  “If I have to. But I want a look in your bag first.”

  Strumbić pulled out all the items in the bag, checking each with the same attention he had given Miranda’s belongings. Then he found it, stuck with electrical tape to the inside corner of the holdall: a small black hard plastic box, half the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  “Had this with you long?” Strumbić asked, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the thing that’s been telling our American friends where we are. Though I don’t think the signal travels very well through a couple of hundred tons of rock and masonry. I imagine they’re very irritated, having set us up so nicely.” Strumbić inspected the transmitter. With his thumbnail he slid the recessed switch to Off. And then, just in case, he also removed the batteries, four AAAs, dropping them into one pocket and the transmitter into the other.

  “Now there are two possibilities for how it might have come to be in your bag. One is that you’re screwing me, Gringo, to save your own neck. But I don’t think that’s likely, seeing as what happens to me happens to you, and you know it, whatever promises those people might have made to you. The other alternative is that somebody else is setting us both up. So to find out, let’s play a little game called ‘airport security.’ Did you pack your bag yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. And I threw a couple of things in this morning.”

  “And has it been in your sight the whole while?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I was asleep, and then I didn’t bring it with me when we went to watch the convoy come in.”

  “Was there anyone else with access to it during those times?”

  “Julius, this isn’t necessary,” della Torre said.

  “Was it Mrs. Walker here?”

  Della Torre shook his head, not to deny the question but rather to admit his own foolishness.

  “Would you care to admit to putting this in Gringo’s bag, Mrs. Walker, or do I have to threaten to throw you over the side instead? Of course, that’s a threat I can really only use once. Once you’re in the water, there’s no getting you out without the help of a good solid rope. Which I don’t have. I think our friend Mr. della Torre here will vouch for my sincerity. Right, Gringo?”

  “Yes,” della Torre said, subdued.

  “So, we accept that you planted this in Gringo’s bag. And the assumption has to be that you’re working for the Americans. Can we assume you’ve been working for the Americans all along?”

  She remained quiet.

  “Can we also assume that’s because you work for either American or British intelligence?”

  Still no answer.

  “Your silences are revealing, Mrs. Walker,” Strumbić said. “Were you sent to find me? Is that why you sailed through the blockade twice before, at great risk to yourself — because you knew Julius Strumbić would want to meet anyone who had figured out how to slip past the Yugoslav navy? Who knows, you might have enticed me to work with you.”

  Silence. Then della Torre spoke to Miranda, low, lost. “How much of that story you told me is true? About coming to live here on your own after splitting up with your husband. Nothing? Something? How long have you lived in Korčula? Not five years, is it. Five weeks?”

  Still she didn’t reply. She sat, legs drawn up, holding them, chin on her knees, her eyes glistening in the kaleidoscopic blue half-light.

  “Gringo, you keep finding them. I’m not saying they’re not good-looking, but fuck me, they’ve got venom in their fangs.”

  “How did you manage to set me up so well? I guess if you were based in Korčula it was a bonus for them that I stumbled onto you.” Della Torre was talking mostly to himself. “And then when I did, you played it by ear. Why did they follow us to Šipan, though? To make sure I didn’t chicken out?”

  She shrugged.

  “I guess that’s why nobody in Korčula knew about you,” continued della Torre. “You were too new. But you’ve sailed around here before, haven’t you? Lots. With Sir Fitzroy Maclean? He was a spy, wasn’t he? And I suppose it’d be natural for him to help out his side even if he was retired. Did he give you tips? Open doors? Were you always based on the coast? Or did you flit between Zagreb and here? Or maybe it was Belgrade.”

  “Gringo, you’re not going to get anything out of this one. She knows we’re not going to kill her. There’s no point. But we’ll figure out how to put her to good use,” Strumbić said. “Anyway, there’s a lesson for you in this: hookers are cheaper in the long run.”

  THERE WAS A modern steel door at one end of the cavern ledge that opened into a small concrete platform built onto the rocks at the base of Dubrovnik’s walls. They left Miranda in the cave, telling her they’d be back later, or at the very least they’d tell Higgins where to find her. She said nothing.

  Strumbić barred the door from the outside with a metal rail, though he left the padlock undone. After a quick glance around, they stepped out onto a narrow path that followed the base of the city walls. The rocks looked like raw, crumpled butcher’s paper below a vertical sheet of parchment.

  The late afternoon light was smudged by grey clouds, but even so della Torre blinked hard as he stepped out of the gloom.<
br />
  “My guess is that they’re going to be relying on technology to find us. The little box. They’ll figure we have to surface sometime or other,” Strumbić said. “They might have people on the walls, but I bet they’re looking into the city, not out here. Just in case, let’s not be fat German tourists about making ourselves scarce.”

  Once they moved away from the entrance to the dungeon cave, the path quickly became precipitous, in places barely a goat track. It rose, becoming almost sheer where the city walls turned inland. They had to hug the chiselled stone to avoid smashing themselves on the rocks below and then falling into the sea with cracked skulls and broken limbs. It was slow and painful going, sometimes an upward scramble in which the stone and scrub tore their hands, at other times a dangerous slide. They moved centimetre by centimetre, but eventually they reached the beach under the fortress’s main northern drawbridge.

  Without attracting attention to themselves, they headed away from the old city towards the peninsula, in the northern suburbs, Strumbić leading the way. Careful lest they be spotted, Strumbić ducked from one private garden to another, climbed a low wall or pushed through shrubbery, steadily moving farther from the ancient walls.

  They passed a smouldering, newly gutted car. The Serb gunners, bored with reducing outlying villages to dust and cinder, had shifted their sights to Dubrovnik’s suburbs. There was no method, no system to their shelling, nor any great urgency; it was a desultory effort, like boys taking potshots with their air rifles at random targets. But on the ground, the sense of panic was growing, sending ever more people to huddle within the sanctuary of the city fortress.

  Della Torre knew war would come to the old town eventually. Higgins had said the Serb Chetnik militias were taking over the campaign, edging out the regular Yugoslav forces. Theirs was an atavistic hatred for Dubrovnik and what it stood for: bourgeois wealth, golden youth, gilded lives, foreigners and their condescension to the primitive people beyond the hills. The Chetniks grew frustrated at Dubrovnik’s refusal to capitulate, even as its citizens grew dirtier, more frightened, more hopeless; irritated at Dubrovnik’s pride in its long history of independence.

  Della Torre feared for all those now seeking shelter within Dubrovnik’s walls. Because ancient stones wouldn’t stop the mortar bombs, the rockets, the high, arching shells.

  After crossing a dozen gardens, they came upon a wooden door set into a wall. With a last look around, Strumbić unlocked it.

  The house behind the wall was from the first decade of the century — Hapsburg art nouveau with a dash of Italianate influences. The windows were sealed with metal rolling shutters, but even so, it was a handsome two-storey building.

  “Home,” Strumbić said, unlocking the front door. “Swimming pool outside, views of the Adriatic and sunsets, an emergency generator I keep running so the ice doesn’t melt — you can’t hear it, because it’s in a separate building. The only real downside is that I can’t open the shutters. The Serbs would flatten the place if I lit it up.”

  “Yours?” della Torre asked, looking around in amazement at the wide hall with its big terracotta floor tiles and high ceilings.

  “Borrowed,” Strumbić said. “Look around. It’s been decorated by an Italian pimp, all white plush and gold trim. Do you really think that’s my taste?”

  “Let me guess. Some big shot in Belgrade owns it.”

  “Actually, it’s owned by a Herzegovinian mafioso who we banged up in the spring. The house isn’t conventionally documented, if you know what I mean. I’m the only person who knows who it ultimately belongs to.”

  “Julius, you are remarkable.”

  “No, it’s just that everyone else you know lacks imagination and gumption,” Strumbić said. “We’ve got a couple of hours. Why don’t you go up and have a bath.”

  “There’s a water shortage in the city, but you’ve got enough to run baths?”

  “I’ve got enough to fill a swimming pool. Which I’ve done. Bath is upstairs, room to the right. It’s in the master bedroom. By the way, you might have a rummage in the dressing room. You’re more the Herzegovinian’s build than I am.” Strumbić walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge door. “I’m afraid it’s only imports. Do you want a Heineken or a Budvar?”

  “Budvar,” della Torre said, flabbergasted, as Strumbić produced a bottle.

  “Whatever else you might say about them, the Czechs make decent beer,” Strumbić said.

  “What else would you say about them?”

  “Nothing, except they got their asses handed to them by both the Nazis and the Russians and spent the whole time saying, ‘Thank you very much.’ And when they come here, they’re cheap fucking tourists.” Strumbić opened the beer. “Take this, have a shower or a bath or whatever, and then we’ll eat when you come back down.”

  Della Torre was too nervous to soak, so he had a quick shower in an opulent marble-covered bathroom with gold taps and a floor mosaic that depicted either two women having sex or possibly a Christmas wreath.

  The Herzegovinian’s taste in wardrobe ran to too-tight bleached jeans and tank tops. But in among that, della Torre found a pair of blue cotton trousers and a shirt with buttons that went all the way up to his clavicle. The trousers were a size too generous around the waist and broke a little farther down his shoes than he liked, but he wasn’t complaining.

  When he made his way back down to the kitchen, he found Strumbić frying a couple of steaks. Pasta was cooking in another pot. Suddenly della Torre was ravenously hungry.

  “Help yourself to another beer,” Strumbić said.

  Della Torre opened the fridge and pulled out another Budvar. “I’m worried about Miranda,”

  “I just got off the phone to Higgins.”

  “Phone?”

  “Yes, a thing with a handle you can speak into that’s not a shovel.”

  “I didn’t realize they worked.”

  “Oh, you can still make calls inside Dubrovnik. You just can’t get a line out, unless you have a satellite phone. And, until the Americans came, there were only three of those in town.”

  “I was told there were only two,” della Torre said. And then, when Strumbić gave him a long look, he again understood his stupidity.

  When the steaks were cooked rare, Strumbić threw fresh cep mushrooms into the pan and then added cream and chopped parsley and chives and poured the sauce over the spaghetti. It reminded della Torre that the extent of his own cooking skills was limited to frying eggs.

  “You were saying about phoning Higgins,” della Torre said as they sat at the glass-topped dining table under a gold and crystal chandelier.

  “I was saying that I called Higgins, who knows a boy who knows the way down to the dungeon door. Excellent storage space, by the way. Though cigarettes get a bit damp. The boy’s to let your friend out as soon as the fireworks start.”

  “Fireworks?”

  “A surprise, Gringo. Enjoy the food — it’s going to be a long night.”

  They sat outside, smoking, drinking beers, and watching the sun set in an apocalypse of reds and oranges as the air filled with evening damp. When it was completely dark, they went back into the house.

  “Right, Gringo, help me open the shutters upstairs.”

  In the dark, guided only by a flashlight, they went from room to room pulling open the roller blinds. They did the same on the ground floor.

  Strumbić disappeared into what he called the utility room. He was in there for a quarter of an hour and then came out looking satisfied. At the front door, he punched a code into the burglar alarm and then played with the settings.

  He put the batteries into the transmitter he’d found in della Torre’s bag and then switched the unit on, shoving it behind a sofa cushion in the sitting room.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  They strolled out of the house, which Strumbić
locked, and walked through the door in the garden wall and back into the street.

  Strumbić led them in the darkness to the Mercedes, parked nearby, which he started up as della Torre got into the passenger seat. And then, switching on just his parking lights, he drove off at speed, tearing through the suburbs and up the steeply rising road behind the fortress city, where he pulled over by the side of the road.

  “What’s up?” della Torre asked.

  “Hop out and have a cigarette. We’ve got a show to watch.”

  They leaned against the rock face in the dark, the Merc between them and the road. A few cars passed. In the distance, past the citadel, della Torre could see the almost festive lights of the Yugoslav navy ships, such a stark contrast to the city’s fearful darkness.

  He wasn’t sure what he was meant to look for, or where. The amber glow of Strumbić’s cigarette butt flew cartwheels in the air, ending in a spray of sparks.

  And then it happened. A brightness lit up in the middle distance. White-yellow incandescent lights. Floodlights. A solitary house picked out clearly in the darkness. And then the shrill sound of a distant alarm.

  The brightness and noise lasted for a minute. Two minutes. Three. And then he saw the flashes. Half a dozen in rapid succession like dry lightning. The shrieks of passing shells and explosions followed almost simultaneously. And then bigger guns from farther away started up, bellowing roars from up the mountains. The house went up in red, green, orange streamers. They could feel as much as hear the shock of the bombardment.

  Strumbić laughed with a maniacal joy. “Holy fuck. Jesus, will you look at that,” he said over and over.

  “Julius, what the hell?”

  “If those Americans don’t learn a lesson from this, well, I’m sorry, but they’re unteachable.”