The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  For a long time they seemed to make no headway, and then suddenly they were at the harbour wall. One of the Montenegrin’s sailors leapt up and deftly secured the boat, and then della Torre saw the ambulance. A doctor ran towards them, followed by two navy orderlies pushing a wheeled gurney. The Montenegrin’s men had radioed ahead.

  The Montenegrin was unconscious and waxen, the bandages on his thigh soaked black with blood. His men gingerly lifted him up on a stretcher and he was spirited away. Four policemen congregated at the boat.

  “Shit,” Strumbić said to della Torre. “Now we’re fucked. The welcoming party is usually just one customs man who for some reason prefers lira to Deutschmarks. I have no relationship with these guys.”

  “Let me talk to them,” della Torre said, enervated and exhausted but willing himself into authority. He hoisted himself onto the stone quayside and stepped into the middle of the group of Serb officials.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. His voice was hoarse with tiredness and the long trip in the cold boat. He pulled his wallet out and prayed that the card was still in there. With relief he passed around his old UDBA identification. In the old days of Yugoslavia it had acted like a universal key, unlocking any situation. Now it was more risky. People had become more openly skeptical about the UDBA. Increasingly, Croats were realizing that the unit had been disbanded and no longer applied to their territory. But here it carried the same force as ever. Montenegro was still part of the old Yugoslavia, with the old Yugoslav taboos and fears, including crossing the secret police.

  The policemen’s officiousness faded and they melted away in round-shouldered apology from the narrow circles of light cast by a row of lamps on ornamental posts.

  Strumbić looked more disreputable than usual under the sodium glare. “Think he’ll survive?” della Torre asked him.

  “He’d better, at least until we get out of town. Because if he dies, those Serb cops and those boatmen, who’d kill their own grandmothers if the Montenegrin told them to, will be very unhappy with us,” Strumbić said. “Our problem is getting out of town quickly. Not easy here, where you need a pass to fart. Not everybody’s going to kowtow to you for being UDBA.”

  Della Torre and Strumbić made their silent way to a small waterfront hotel. The handful of uniformed sailors and soldiers on the street paid them no notice.

  Strumbić pounded on the door to wake the man who ran the hotel. He was groggy and wore a vest and pyjama bottoms and a growth of stubble.

  “Be nice if you showed up at a civilized time for once,” he said to Strumbić.

  “I’ll take my business elsewhere next time. I need a second bedroom too.”

  The man shrugged and led them to the first floor, opening a door for della Torre. Strumbić seemed to know where he was going. “Don’t bother getting up too early,” he said to della Torre. “If you want room service —”

  “We don’t do room service,” the man said.

  Strumbić ignored the man, focusing his attention on della Torre. “I was about to say, if you want room service you’re out of luck.”

  The man who ran the pension scowled. “I’m not opening the door to all comers the whole night.”

  “That’s okay,” della Torre said. “I think I might just like some sleep.”

  Della Torre stepped into a room lit by a weak, barely shaded bulb. It was filled with the sort of heavy, dark furniture and crocheted doilies beloved of Italian grandmothers. But the bed was soft enough, and the eiderdown warm. He’d have been content to sleep upright on a wooden chair.

  They stayed at the pension for three days. Strumbić said he had things to organize, and they had to be careful to keep their heads down. They were the only guests, and the laconic, irritable manager didn’t go out of his way for them. He did lend della Torre a small transistor radio and supplied both men with newspapers and the comic strip novels, mostly westerns, that were as widely consumed by Yugoslav men as by boys.

  Sometimes della Torre sat in the small, gloomy dining room, or in the room that served as a bar, where the proprietor watched television for much of the day. In the evenings della Torre caught the news, which reported the Serbs’ version of Vukovar’s impending fall. The town was surrounded and all but crushed. He prayed Irena had gotten out. In those empty hours he imagined himself as a father. The thought made him at once happy and anxious.

  The few times della Torre ventured out, the only other people he saw on the harbourfront wore camouflage and fatigues. The regular army and navy personnel didn’t worry him; what did worry him was the fact that they were outnumbered by the paramilitaries, especially the ones with wolf insignia patches. They were Chetnik men, thugs, and their uniforms and equipment were newer. They strutted with self-assurance, while the JNA conscripts looked like what they were, boys just out of school.

  The Chetniks’ leader, the warlord Gorki, featured in the Belgrade papers every day, usually photographed with his pet wolf on a chain. He might have been a paramilitary, but he also governed regular troops. He had pull with the politicians, charisma, money, and the support of a private army.

  He and most of his men were currently torturing Vukovar with their relentless explosive barrages. Della Torre shuddered to think what would happen to the town’s defenders when it capitulated. And with Vukovar subjugated, he supposed, Gorki would come to Dubrovnik and do the same there, like a spreading pathogen, his forward guard making sure his presence was felt at a distance. The Montenegrin had better recover soon, because Gorki was a mortal enemy.

  For the first two days the prognosis was good, according to what Strumbić heard. The Montenegrin had been stabilized and was being given the best treatment available. But then his condition deteriorated. It seemed the doctors had missed a fragment of metal or bone that had splintered from the hip to the gut. Sepsis had set in, and the latest worry was that his kidneys were starting to pack up under the onslaught of infection.

  “It’s time to go, Gringo,” Strumbić said. “We don’t want to be here if the Montenegrin kicks it. His men will remember us, and so will the police. I finally managed to organize some bus tickets and, more importantly, passes for us. Harder than it seems when you’re in the middle of the fucking enemy’s military zone. Would have been cheaper to fly the Concorde, if Herceg Novi had an airport instead of just a shitty bus station.” He looked harassed. But for della Torre it would be a relief to leave this place, even though it would be to a new set of dangers.

  They were going to the heart of the Pilgrim mystery: Belgrade, the capital of what had once been Yugoslavia. Some of its power might have been shorn with the secession of two republics — Slovenia and Croatia — but it was still the capital of the rump state as well as of Serbia, an industrial powerhouse and the military centre. Della Torre had never much liked the city — it had been heavily damaged during the war and then rebuilt in a spiritless socialist aesthetic. As the home of UDBA and of all the major branches of government, it represented to him an oppressive bureaucracy. But it shocked him to think of the city as hostile territory and himself as an enemy of the state that he’d so recently served.

  After an early breakfast on the morning of the fourth day, they left. At the bus station, the transport manager handed them two passes printed on cheap grey paper and covered in the requisite stamps. He then drew aside the military policeman responsible for checking documents, for an impromptu cigarette break.

  Strumbić found the slow coach to Sarajevo, where he had a word with the driver, handing him the passes along with a few dinar notes in addition to the fare.

  The bus set off, making its way through the coastal valleys of striated white stone broken like old men’s teeth, and then crawling behind columns of military vehicles. It was frequently stopped at roadblocks. But the soldiers manning the posts never gave Strumbić’s and della Torre’s passes more than a cursory glance. If they were looking for deserters, a couple of middle-aged m
en weren’t going to interest them much.

  The bus trundled deeper into Bosnia. Telephone poles marked the route like the crucifixes that once lined the Via Appia. The landscape slowly changed from hard stone and scrub to verdant mountains covered in larch, beech, and oak. Here were deep gorges and wilderness, a vast estate of lynx, bear, and wolf. In the old days, the men who lived there — hunters and, on the high pastureland, goat herders — had been just as untamed.

  It was here more than anywhere that the Partizans and the Germans had fought without mercy, that Fitzroy Maclean and Tito only just escaped the Wehrmacht paratroopers sent in their hundreds to capture them, that Tito was finally forced to abandon his sick and wounded men, and that those men were slaughtered. But then, the Partizans had had no use for prisoners either. It was said their ghosts wandered those valleys with the morning mist.

  It was a strange country, claimed by Bosnian Serbs and by Croats and Muslims, including those who had converted from Christianity and those who had come from Albania. Serbs had been transplanted there by the Austro-Hungarians to preserve a buffer against the Turks, and the Croats rightly or wrongly claimed precedence.

  Every grudge, every debt was hidden deep in the chasms of history but secretly nurtured over generations. Who knew where they would spring up again or when. Bosnia’s tribes were like the raw limestone landscape, into which streams of resentments would disappear only to rise somewhere distant, even under the sea.

  Della Torre smoked Strumbić’s endless supply of imported Winstons. “You must be the luckiest gambler who ever existed. You could park yourself in a casino and never need to leave,” he said, tiring of their silence.

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘gamble.’”

  “Oh, you know, taking these huge risks and always coming out of them with a bigger fortune. If London was a setback, you made twice as much in Dubrovnik.”

  Strumbić laughed. “If only, Gringo, if only.”

  “But even if you haven’t made it all back, surely you’ve got enough. You don’t need any more. What is it now? Why keep taking the risks? Or is it an addiction?”

  “You’ve got me all wrong, Gringo. No amount of money can get you far enough from the memory of growing up poor. And I mean so poor that you don’t own your own pair of shoes until you’re old enough to earn the money to buy them yourself, when the house you grew up in is two rooms and the floor is boards on dirt, and when the only heat you’ve ever had comes from the wood you’ve chopped. Not something you Americans can understand. Over there, even the peasants are rich.”

  It was della Torre’s turn to laugh. “My father would laugh to hear I grew up rich.”

  “Gringo, when you grow up using chestnut leaves to wipe your ass, the man with an indoor toilet is rich. You’re right, though, I’ve got enough. The money is neither here nor there. But I’m not a gambler. For one thing, real gambling is putting something on the line you can’t afford to lose, and the odds aren’t particularly good. Think about things that way and you realize you’re the gambler, Gringo. For me, mostly it’s an intellectual challenge. Like Dubrovnik. How many cigarettes do you stock up on? How many should you sell? Or do you wait for the price to go higher? Do you dump your holdings when people find out the armada’s coming to save them? Or do you pay some docker in Split to unload all the cigarettes and then sell into the panic when the boats arrive with only half the expected supplies? These are all hypotheticals, mind.”

  Strumbić grinned at della Torre’s shock. “A lot of the money that comes in goes out. Who was the guy who said, ‘I spent ninety percent of my money on women and booze, and the rest I wasted?’ Eh?” Strumbić laughed, but only for a moment. “But seriously, Gringo, ultimately money matters because it gives you control. You don’t need me to tell you this.”

  “Power?”

  “Call it what you like. Power. Surplus. Influence. An ability to say fuck off to the world if you want. The Montenegrin has it. Or maybe had it. Me?” He shrugged. “Sometimes. But not with those Americans you got me tangled up with . . .”

  “Julius, I’ve never seen a man more desperate to be entangled. You did everything you could to get me to hook you up with the Americans.”

  “We’re not apportioning blame right now, Gringo. We’ll sort ourselves out, eh? Get the Americans off our backs, maybe even make them learn to love us.”

  “Sure, Julius,” della Torre said, without a trace of hope.

  The bus was slow and full, pulling into every town along the way big enough to have a steeple or a minaret. At longer stops, they got off to buy beers and to piss. They smoked and watched the landscape pass by, wooden farmhouses and modern concrete and cinder-block buildings, split-rail fence posts and clearings of corn or pasture hemmed in by forests, until at long last they arrived in Sarajevo, deep in the folds of its mountains.

  They waited until everyone else was off the bus, and then Strumbić finished paying off the driver, who smiled at them as if he was fixing their faces in his memory.

  They stayed the night in an anonymous hotel, Strumbić’s Deutschmarks supplanting the need for identity documents at the front desk.

  Della Torre tried to get through to Irena, but still no answer at the flat, her office, or the hospital in Zagreb. She had to have left Vukovar. He was certain of it. Maybe she’d gone to London with her Dr. Cohen, he thought with a jealous twinge.

  In the morning there were problems with the train link between Sarajevo and Belgrade, so it was back to the bus station. But there were no seats to be had until Strumbić had a word with someone, who had a word with someone else. The passengers who thought they’d reserved seats were irate, but there was a certain fatalism to their protests. Neither della Torre nor Strumbić felt ashamed. It was the way things had always been.

  The highway was single-lane and winding. Military traffic in both directions kept the roads congested. Della Torre wondered whether the rail network had been taken over for tank transport, because there were only troop carriers and army trucks and buses on the roads.

  They didn’t arrive in Belgrade until well after dark. This time Strumbić maintained their anonymity not by paying off a clerk at the front desk of a hotel, but by taking them to a brothel. He didn’t know how long they’d be staying, and the longer they did, the more chance they’d be sold out to the state security.

  “It’s more expensive than a hotel, no question, and they only take foreign currency. Cash. But the accommodation is nice. Food’s good. They’re discreet, and there’s room service.” He gave della Torre a conspiratorial wink.

  Belgrade always made della Torre uneasy: its strangeness, the fact that everything was in the Cyrillic alphabet. He could read it, but, having grown up in America, it represented to him foreignness, Russia, the Cold War enemy.

  But there was something deeper too. The feeling that here he was on the edge of another world. Jason and his Argonauts had passed this way, in their desperate flight towards the Adriatic from those mysterious lands to the east, after stealing the Golden Fleece. Belgrade’s fortress on the bluff, overlooking the confluence of the Sava with the Danube, was where the Orient began. Or ended.

  The brothel consisted of three inconspicuous storeys above a corner grocery store in a small, nondescript postwar block, grey flaking concrete and metal roll-down shutters over the windows. Strumbić pressed a buzzer between the shop and what looked like a traditional family restaurant that was shut and dark. He whispered a name into the intercom and the door buzzed open. They were in a hall with a terrazzo floor; a stairwell was in front of them, and there was no sign of anyone or anything under the stark fluorescent lighting.

  Strumbić took the stairs two at a time, moving fast for a heavy set middle-aged man. The door to the second-storey apartment opened before he knocked, and a pleasant-looking woman of indeterminate age, though probably not much younger than della Torre, ushered them in.

  “T
wo rooms for a few days. One full service.” Strumbić looked questioningly at della Torre, who shook his head. “One full service; the other hasn’t yet decided.”

  “Do you mind staying in the top-floor suite?”

  “Busy?”

  “Not really, but if you’re here for a few days, it gives you a little extra privacy.” Her eyes explained that privacy had a price.

  “Discount?”

  The woman was at once friendly and coy and ironic. “But you always get a discount, sir. And so do your friends.”

  Strumbić shook his head and grinned. “Discounts like yours will send a man to the poorhouse.” He pulled a fat roll of German currency out of his coat pocket and lay down some notes. “Three days,” he said, looking over to della Torre and then putting down a few more notes. “Four. One full service. Any add-ons, stick on the bill. Any chance of sending something up for us tonight? A man develops a hunger.”

  “Whatever you desire.”

  “Then a couple of American steak sandwiches with fried potatoes. You want cheese, Gringo?”

  Della Torre nodded with as much savoir faire as he could muster.

  “Make it with cheese on both, and a couple of blonde beers. And a couple of blondes to deliver it.”

  DRAGOMANOV’S APARTMENT WAS less than a twenty-minute walk from the brothel. Winter was already settling on the city. Cleaners swept the fallen leaves off the streets, but more accumulated behind them. Della Torre could see his breath in the air and feel the cold through his light autumn coat.

  They set out in the morning and found the building without trouble. It had been built between the wars, somehow retaining its reserved art deco detailing, which lifted the mood of its grey pebble-dash. It was five storeys high and took up the whole of a big city block. The main entrance was guarded by two uniformed sentries in what looked like adapted phone booths on either side. They sat, bored and watchful, on high stools, rifles on the floor next to them. Formerly UDBA, now Serb secret service, della Torre figured. Through the double glass doors he could see a reception desk manned by another uniformed guard.