The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  The room at the end of the hall was full of tins with rusty rims, dusty cartons of juice, and stacked cardboard boxes. Della Torre had only just stepped in when he heard the crack of a bullet hitting the wall somewhere near him. He caught sight of Dragomanov standing in the hall, holding a long-barrelled pistol.

  “What the —?” Strumbić said, turning in surprise.

  “I think it’s a P38. Must have got it from some dead German officer . . .”

  “The fuck I care where he got it. Shut that fucking door and bolt it, then come in here and help me move some of this shit so we can get to the back door before the old bastard blows our brains out. If the fucking Americans or whoever it is don’t get to us first.”

  Della Torre did as he was told, securing the storage room door behind him.

  Strumbić was already moving with whirlwind fury, shifting boxes full of papers and books, clearing a way to the back door and what he knew must be a servants’ staircase. The space was too confined for della Torre to help. It was a one-man job, so he looked ineffectually on. A second shot rang out from the hall.

  “Rather than being as useful as tits on a nun, why don’t you have a pop back at him,” Strumbić said.

  Della Torre pulled the Beretta from his pocket and fired at the door. The noise in that small, hard-surfaced area left his ears ringing. It shut the old man up for the moment. Strumbić had reached the little back door, which was built to fit under the slope of a flight of stairs. He pounded at the rusty bolt with the fat spine of a law book he’d pulled from one of the boxes, until the book’s cover shattered. But he’d loosened the bolt enough to wiggle it free.

  Della Torre could hear more people on the other side of the door. If the Americans had Uzis, they’d make short work of them. Strumbić sweated, heaving at the little back door until it finally gave way under his weight.

  “Come on,” he said.

  The stairwell was gloomy, lit by a tiny window. The stairs were steep and wooden, the space narrow, barely wide enough for Strumbić. It smelled of damp and ancient whitewash turned powdery on the walls. Strumbić negotiated the stairs with incredible speed while della Torre followed clumsily, tripping at the bottom step and almost ploughing into Strumbić’s back.

  “Fuck,” Strumbić muttered, looking over his shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “Somebody’s shoved a fucking sofa down this stairwell and there’s no fucking way we’ll get past it unless you remembered to bring an axe.”

  They could hear the sound of splintering wood above them.

  Strumbić levelled his handgun at another little servants’ door, a twin of the one upstairs, and fired at the lock at an angle, to avoid any ricochet. Once, twice, three times, until the lock broke. And then, with a series of mighty kicks, he pounded at it until the frame gave way.

  “Open fucking sesame,” Strumbić said, his breathing laboured.

  They were in another storage room, this one marginally less packed full of junk. They still had to squeeze over a dusty armchair and a chest of drawers to get in. The wallpaper was a faded floral pattern, peeling and water-stained, almost certainly predating the war.

  Della Torre dropped the box. The files spilled out into the narrow space between the chest and the wall. Overhead, he could hear the besiegers making progress. “Wait,” he shouted.

  “What now?”

  “I dropped the files,” della Torre said.

  “Smart.”

  Somehow della Torre managed to gather all the papers and tapes and keep a hold of them as he righted himself. He burst out of the little room, shoving the papers back into their box, panic mounting as noise built in the small stairwell behind them.

  An ancient couple stared in shock as della Torre and Strumbić raced down their hallway. The man belatedly gathered his voice — reedy, hollow, but so familiar.

  Strumbić scrabbled at the various bolts and locks on the door, then threw it open. And then della Torre almost knocked him over as Julius reached back into the apartment to grab a lady’s large white handbag the size of a small suitcase.

  They tore down the main staircase until they were at the back door that opened to the courtyard. They could hear their pursuers’ footsteps, sprinting now.

  “Run like your life depends on it,” Strumbić said. “Because it does.”

  They ran past the giant chestnut tree and reached the parked black Mercedes before the pop pop of a small-calibre handgun reached them. The door to the coal cellar was open. Strumbić ducked in, followed by della Torre.

  “You know what, Julius?” he said, panting up the wooden stairs, “I’ve figured you for a lot of things, but never a purse snatcher.”

  The door to the hairdresser’s stockroom remained unlocked.

  Strumbić handed the bag to della Torre. “Stick the files in here so you don’t lose them.”

  They passed through the salon and down to the front entrance, but it was locked from the outside.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Strumbić said, rattling the plate-glass door. “What did she think, that we were going to sit around and do our nails until she got back?”

  He looked at the door and then went back up the stairs. He lifted a massive dryer hood, hauled it down the steps to ground level, and heaved it at the glass door. He stepped past the jagged shards that clung to the steel frame and over the machine’s carcass onto the street.

  Della Torre followed, carrying the handbag.

  Strumbić jumped in front of a taxi with its light on.

  “You got a problem? Want to get run over?” the driver said, but he was too slow to turn them down. Both Strumbić and della Torre had already squeezed into the back seat.

  “Go, just go. Straight. We’ll tell you where to turn in a minute.”

  “If you’ve just mugged an old lady —”

  “We haven’t mugged anybody,” Strumbić said. “There’s a hundred Deutschmarks that says so. But only if you’re fast.”

  The driver put his foot on it.

  Neither della Torre nor Strumbić dared to look back; they just slid low in their seats.

  As they caught their breath, della Torre realized there would be nowhere safe for them to hide in Belgrade. They’d be found. Even the brothel, in some ways as safe and sacred as a confessional, wouldn’t hide them for long. And there were the rest of Dragomanov’s papers. Della Torre didn’t know what was in the Pilgrim file they’d taken, but he knew enough to believe the old man when he’d said they were incomplete.

  So he leaned forward and said to the driver, “Keep going west. Head towards Vukovar.”

  “THE FUCK?” STRUMBIĆ said, staring at della Torre as if he’d lost his mind.

  “In English,” della Torre whispered.

  “You crazy fucking?” Strumbić said in English.

  “Three things. I believe him when he says that the rest of the papers are at his house in Vukovar. I believe him when he says what we have is worthless without the rest. And three, how long do you think it’ll take for those people back there to find us if we try to get out of the country by any of the usual border crossings or by going through Bosnia?”

  Strumbić thought about this for a while. “But is war in Vukovar. How we can cross front lines?”

  “I know the only man who can help. He’s there and I have something he wants, enough for him to be willing to help us.”

  Strumbić stared at della Torre for a long while. And then he leaned forward in his seat, tapping the driver on the shoulder. He passed him a hundred-Deutschmark note, promising him another if he got them as close to Vukovar as possible.

  The man kissed the note, folded it, and then slid it into his shirt pocket.

  There was traffic on the road, and the driver looked like he’d been at the wheel for days. His thinning black hair was greasy and uncombed, his shirt rumpled. Maybe h
e slept in the cab; some did. But he drove efficiently, without asking too many questions, and kept the radio on a Hungarian classical station.

  As they crossed the Sava on the big bridge close to where it flowed into the Danube and passed into the sterile Communist suburbs of New Belgrade, della Torre recalled the story of Jason. With the Golden Fleece in his possession, Jason went up the Sava until he reached the limits of its navigable waters, beyond Zagreb. And then he and his men went up into the mountains and trudged through the dangerous forests patrolled by bear and wolf, until at last they crossed Dalmatia’s bleached spine. Had Jason been with Medea then, or had he already abandoned her? It didn’t matter; his flight had taken him to the Adriatic, joyous, victorious.

  Della Torre wondered if he’d make it too. He watched the countryside pass. The radio played the prelude to Parsifal, and for a long time both Strumbić and della Torre were silent, the Zastava charging through the flatlands.

  “How did you know about the stove?” della Torre asked after a long while. Strumbić passed him a Winston. The cigarette trembled in della Torre’s hand as Strumbić lit it.

  “Because I’ve got one just like it.” Strumbić grinned, though it looked more a grimace. He too was feeling the after-effects of their escape.

  “You’ve got a safe in a fake stove?”

  “Real stove. Hollowed out and used as storage. Excellent hiding place. I keep my fake secrets in it.”

  “Your fake secrets?”

  Strumbić inhaled and then blew the smoke out of his nose. The driver rolled down his window a hand’s width, and della Torre did too.

  “Sure, don’t you have them too?” Strumbić asked. “You know, not terribly sensitive documents, false record books that might get you into a little trouble but not too much. A bit of money. Some deeds. A small illicit bank account.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s not really a question, is it?” Strumbić said. Sometimes della Torre’s naivety shocked him. “Because people will keep digging until they can pin something on you. So you give it to them. Take Mrs. Strumbić. She’s a pro, unlike the police department’s bloody internal affairs department. That place is full of morons who can’t be let loose on a public road. Anyway, think she trusts me? Course not. She’s not stupid. She spends her life looking for the rope to hang me by. But as long as I give her enough thread to do a bit of embroidery, she’s content.”

  “So where do you keep the real stuff?”

  “Everywhere and nowhere, Gringo. But mostly in here.” He tapped his head. “A safe nobody can get into.”

  “And if you forget?”

  Strumbić shrugged. “What you don’t remember, you can’t regret.”

  The tension following their narrow escape from Dragomanov’s apartment slowly faded. But soon enough it was replaced by the anxiety of the approach to Vukovar. The drab browns of the late autumn landscape and the greyness of the skies melded into the malevolence of the military camouflage they passed with increasing regularity: the canvas-sided transport trucks, the heavy guns facing backward on tractor-wheel trolleys, the soldiers — most in standard uniform, though in places there was a worrying number of irregulars.

  They approached a roadblock, and as the driver slowed into traffic, he said, without turning back towards them, “The fare’s just gone up. Two hundred. Paid in advance.”

  Strumbić grinned. He pulled out his wallet, and tore a hundred-­Deutschmark note in half, and passed it to the driver.

  “What the hell?” said the driver, looking at the bill.

  In his other hand, della Torre saw, Strumbić now had his service automatic. Keeping it down, out of sight of neighbouring cars, he chambered a bullet. The sliding click was unmistakable to anyone who’d heard it before.

  “You know what that was?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the driver said, subdued. But there was a belligerence to his tone.

  “Let me explain it to you another way. If you do something stupid at the roadblock, you will not only not get your hundred Deutschmarks, you will gain a hole in the back of your head. Not right away, mind, because we will show our UDBA identification and the soldiers will let us pass. But the next time we stop. Say, when you take a piss. I won’t need to take back that half-bill because I’ve got the bigger half, and German banks will redeem a torn bank note if there’s more than half of it. And because I’m not a thief, I’ll leave the hundred you already earned for your next of kin. It will cover your funeral expenses, if anybody ever bothers to identify you. On the other hand, if you don’t make a fuss, you will earn that larger half of the note. And maybe more. Plus your wife won’t have to have your shirt dry-cleaned. Does this transaction sound agreeable to you?”

  A long pause. “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you show our driver your identification card, Gringo, just in case he doesn’t believe us.”

  Della Torre held out the old UDBA card so that the driver could see it clearly by glancing down.

  The taxi slowed and then pulled over onto a gravel verge. Soldiers, submachine guns hanging off their shoulders, walked from car to car. Sometimes the occupants were asked to step out and their vehicles were searched. But mostly they were either waved on or, occasionally, turned back towards Belgrade.

  “Can’t take rifles, machine guns, or anti-tank weapons past here. Got any?” the boy in the Yugoslav army cap said.

  “Nope,” Strumbić said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To visit our auntie.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “How far’s the road open?”

  The boy shrugged. “Up to Tovarnik, I think.”

  “Well, then, that’s where we’re going.”

  The boy looked puzzled for a second and then waved them on.

  “See how easy it is to be cooperative?” Strumbić said to the driver as they carried on along the suddenly emptier road. And then to della Torre, more quietly, he said, “Makes you wonder what sort of fuckers we’ll run into in Vukovar if they’ve got the army screening for anti-tank weapons. Who the fuck goes around with anti-tank weapons?”

  “Militia,” della Torre said. “Chetniks.”

  They reverted to silence, subdued by the flat skies and the raw earth and the smudge of smoke on the horizon before them as the radio played a late Beethoven quartet.

  Tovarnik was at the border of Croatia and Serbia. Once upon a time, the border had been an irrelevance, a red line on maps to keep functionaries busy. Now that line was being drawn in blood.

  “Matoš was born here,” the driver said.

  A couple of the poet’s lines threaded their way to the front of della Torre’s memory: I didn’t weep. I didn’t. Struck wordless, / I stood in the great hall full of the beautiful dead . . .

  Vehicles were being turned back at the Tovarnik checkpoint. Many stopped and parked on the opposite side of the road or on a gravel parking lot to the side of the roadblock, their occupants either walking into the small town or leaning against their cars, smoking.

  Everyone seemed to be dressed in the olive drab of military uniform. Many wore Chetnik hats, and a few had outrageous beards and moustaches that echoed the Serb militiamen from half a century before. Tito had killed Chetniks as ruthlessly as he had Croatia’s fascist-supporting Ustaša. But Tito was dead, and the Chetniks had risen again.

  Once again a young regular soldier stopped them. “You can’t go any farther. This is a military zone.”

  “So what’s everyone waiting for?” Strumbić asked, jabbing his thumb at the Chetniks.

  “There’s a bus that takes them in.”

  “To Vukovar?”

  “Where else?”

  Della Torre got out of the car. The other members of the young soldier’s squad took an immediate interest. They stood, rifles swung towards della Torre.

  “There’s no stopping
here. Move the car,” the young soldier said.

  Della Torre had his UDBA card in his hand. “You know what this is?”

  “Yes,” the boy said uncertainly.

  “I’ll spell it out for you. U-D-B-A.”

  The boy nodded uncomfortably, looking over towards his buddies, who had in that moment found other things to occupy their attention.

  “Gorki’s Wolves are over there, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” the boy said. Gorki’s Wolves, his paramilitaries, had haunted this borderland since before the siege. And, della Torre knew, they would stay late. If there was an authority beyond the military hierarchy these soldiers would yield to, it was Gorki. Because he was beloved by the Belgrade powers, a warlord who reminded them of the glories Serbia could aspire to. Glories, and riches — the Wolves were notorious for their rapacious looting.

  “Well, I have an appointment with Mr. Gorki —” he started to say.

  He hadn’t noticed the man who now stepped into his field of vision — a man with the wolf’s head flashing on his shoulders.

  “Do you, now,” the man said. “And who might you be?”

  Della Torre faltered for a moment. He should have known Gorki would have his own people at the checkpoints.

  “Major della Torre,” he said, as coolly as he could.

  “Of UDBA. Funny, I thought UDBA had been replaced by the State Security Service. But what do I know?”

  Della Torre didn’t answer.

  The man had a radio set clipped to his hip, which he now put to his ear. Cars behind the taxi started honking, but the militiaman paid them no attention. The conversation the man had was brief, and then, still with his back to them, he had another one, turning briefly to have a look at della Torre.

  “Ivo,” the man called over his shoulder, “I’ll take these people in. Seems Commander Gorki would like to see our friend here with the Italian name.”

  A second paramilitary touched his finger to his forehead but otherwise showed no interest.