The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  Gorki’s man sauntered to the taxi’s passenger side and got in next to the driver. Even before the barrier was lifted, the militiaman retuned the car radio to a Belgrade station playing nationalist tunes.

  “Proper music,” he said, and then stabbed his hand forward to direct the taxi driver.

  STALE SMOKE HUNG listless in the sky. Earth had been churned raw by tanks and heavy guns among amputated trees. Having seen the destruction in Dubrovnik, della Torre thought he was prepared for the ruins of Vukovar, but what he saw now could have only been conjured in hell.

  “Mother of God,” he said to himself.

  No wall was unmarked; the smallpox scars of bullet holes defaced every façade, and many buildings had fallen in on themselves. The taxi slowed. A path had been cleared along the road, but the tires crunched as if on cinders.

  Strumbić watched, stunned, swearing near silently, a thin stream of fucks becoming a prayer to ward off evil. Even the taciturn taxi driver sat up straight, gripping his steering wheel, his sallow complexion blanched. Only the militiaman in the front passenger seat observed what passed with indifference.

  They drew towards the fringes of the town, a village just beyond Vukovar’s southern suburbs. Della Torre marvelled that Vukovar’s water tower, visible in the near distance, had managed not to collapse. It looked like an ancient Roman ruin, flayed of its concrete skin, its bloody brick exposed.

  The taxi driver switched off the radio. The militiaman turned to him as if to protest, but then just said, “Left there. Pull in behind the trucks.”

  They stopped in the shade of a mostly collapsed office building. Opposite was a villa without a front wall. In what was once a large kitchen and dining room, a folding card table had been set up, surrounded by an assortment of chairs. Della Torre was wondering what had happened to the original furniture, but then he saw that a washing machine and a tall grandfather clock were being carried out of the neighbouring house into one of the army trucks. The looting was efficiently organized.

  A massive, square-built man with a large, round head was sitting at the card table, speaking into a large hand-held radio set.

  Della Torre got out of the cab with the militiaman, who told Strumbić and the driver to stay in the car. The half-dozen men with Kalashnikovs ensured that they wouldn’t think of doing anything rash.

  Della Torre and the militiaman walked through crushed concrete, glass, and shattered tiles. The man at the card table motioned for della Torre to sit and flicked his fingers at his soldier, who left the room.

  Della Torre noticed what looked like a big dog lying to the side of the table. The creature looked up at him, half-curious, and then lay its head back down on its front legs.

  “Wolves need an astonishing amount of exercise. I have my men run with him every day so that he covers, I don’t know, thirty kilometres,” Gorki said. His voice was pleasant. He was moderately good-looking, though the eyes were too wide-set and the mouth too small and thin-lipped. His uniform was pristine, his hair neat, and his face close-shaven. The faint scent of lavender surrounded him.

  “So, Major, we keep encountering each other,” Gorki said. “I think the documentation I saw the last time we met was out of date. It said ‘Captain’ and you didn’t correct me to say you’d been promoted.”

  “I had other things on my mind.”

  “Of course you did. So who are you working for now? The Americans again? The Croats? The Europeans? They’re itching for us to call a ceasefire, to make a truce, so that we can all shake hands and walk away and be friends,” he said with a broad smile, sharing a joke. “Or are you working for yourself?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Help? I’ll help dig your grave.” Gorki roared with laughter. “You must realize we’re enemies. I have no obligation to you. So you will join the rest of the Ustaša prisoners, and then we will decide what to do with you when we have tidied up Vukovar.”

  Della Torre felt light-headed. His throat was dry and he held his hands against his body so they’d stop trembling. For Gorki, Vukovar’s defenders were indistinguishable from fascist Croats of the Second World War. He would have no compunction about murdering them.“I have something to give you in exchange for your assistance,” he said.

  “What could you possibly have that I can’t get for myself?”

  The wolf kept its eyes on della Torre.

  Della Torre swallowed, summoning up his courage. “The Montenegrin.”

  Gorki grinned, eyes raised as if he was waiting for the punchline. “What makes you think he interests me?” he finally said.

  “It’s a gamble I’m taking,” della Torre replied, willing himself to speak evenly and clearly. “I know there’s history between you two. I think he was responsible for the death of someone you were . . . friends with. And you’re not a man who forgets. Or forgives.”

  He knew very little about their history, only that there had been a boy at the fringes of the Yugoslav mafia in Sweden who’d helped the Montenegrin with Palme’s assassination, at a time when Gorki was, coincidentally, in a Swedish prison.

  “Even if it were true,” Gorki said, waving away one of his soldiers, who’d drawn up to the house on a motorcycle, “why would you think that I won’t just have my men beat the information out of you?”

  “It’s a gamble I’m taking,” della Torre repeated.

  Gorki laughed and shook his head. “People take extreme gambles when they run out of options,” he said. “Okay, Major. Say I was interested. What would you want in return for this information?”

  Della Torre knew that if he asked for too much, he’d be refused, and Gorki’s men would extract the information from him. He’d seen the corpses of people that Gorki’s Wolves had tortured. They’d killed for no reason other than to satisfy visceral, sadistic hatreds.

  “I want for me and my colleague back there to be taken through the front lines into Vukovar.”

  Gorki’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not giving away any military secrets if I tell you that we will completely take over the town in a day or two. Three at most. I won’t be responsible for what happens to the fascist Ustaša who have been instrumental in destroying Vukovar. They are insects to be exterminated. If you are there, we will crush you too. Tell you what, Major, if you ask to be taken somewhere safe in Croatia instead, I will allow it.”

  “So you have Vukovar completely surrounded?”

  “Essentially.”

  “But the reports say there’s still a route through the cornfields.”

  “Major, there are ten thousand people in Vukovar. A few dozen get in or out by that route. Four times as many try and fail.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Gorki considered him. “Why, I’m wondering, are you so eager to make your way into a condemned city?”

  Della Torre toyed with the thought of not responding, but he knew that an unsatisfactory answer would raise the man’s suspicions and ensure a refusal. “My wife works in the Vukovar hospital,” della Torre lied, supposing that a few doctors might remain after the evacuation. “I want to get her out.”

  Gorki thought for a long time. “Yes,” he said. “Very well. I’ll make sure we show you a way into the town. What happens to you after, I won’t be responsible for. Now for your part of the bargain.”

  Della Torre stared into the man’s hazel-green eyes. Gorki was an intelligent man who spoke half a dozen European languages well. And he had fooled many with his charm and seeming civility. He was ruthless and deceitful, yet also believed himself to be a man of his word. “He’s in hospital. In Herzeg Novi. A private room. An unnamed patient.”

  “My men will give you and your colleague a drink. You can wait over there.” Gorki pointed to some chairs laid out around a table under a restaurant umbrella, set up in the middle of the street. And then he picked up the telephone.

  Della Torre and
Strumbić waited. Strumbić was holding his old-lady handbag, which no one questioned. Gorki’s men had let the taxi driver leave, though they made him take an unpaid fare back to Belgrade. He’d been only too relieved to go. And Strumbić had done as he’d promised and given the man the other half of the torn German note.

  An hour later, Gorki made an impatient flicking motion with his fingers. “The boss wants you,” a militiaman told della Torre.

  He approached carefully. Gorki’s expression betrayed nothing. Della Torre wondered whether the Montenegrin had been discharged, gone home, disappeared. Or maybe he’d died and della Torre’s gamble had failed.

  “You are correct,” Gorki said. “Mr. Djilas is in the hospital. It’s a poor bargain you’ve given me, though. He’s said to be in a coma. His organs are failing and he’s expected to die. But you knew that, eh?”

  He waved over one of his men, who was working a combat radio set by an armoured personnel carrier.

  “That boy who you brought in yesterday. The one you cornered in the sewer,” Gorki said.

  “Calls himself Plavi, and he’s a little faggot,” the soldier said, spitting on the ground.

  “I didn’t ask you to describe his habits. He was to remain unharmed.”

  “We haven’t touched him.”

  “Bring him to these men and then take them to the sewers so the boy can guide them into Vukovar.”

  “You want the kid free? The little fucker’s been a complete pain in our ass for a month now —”

  “I’m not asking, I’m ordering. Do it now.”

  Gorki stood, and the wolf stood next to him. Both looked dangerous. Gorki leaned over the little table and stared at della Torre.

  “Goodbye, Major,” he said. “Pray you die before you see us again.”

  THEY CAME TO a group of farm sheds, the biggest a long, high cinder-­block barn with a run of small, high windows and a roof of galvanized metal. Gorki’s men were smoking outside. They came to attention, saluting self-consciously, when the officer commissioned with finding the boy for della Torre and Strumbić stepped out of the armoured car. One tried to hide a bottle of Bell’s whisky.

  An occasional cry rose from the barn, and then they heard the sound of gunfire from the cornfield behind them. Farther away was a near-continuous roar of field guns, followed by explosions.

  A militiaman pulled open one of the barn’s large sliding doors. The interior was dimly lit.

  Five Serb militiamen went in ahead of them. The scores of people inside edged away from the soldiers. The straw spread across the concrete floor was dark in patches. The room smelled of barnyard and sour blood. A few voices called out, begging for water, claiming their innocence. One of Gorki’s men raised his rifle butt and told them to be quiet. Della Torre saw women and old men among the prisoners.

  They found the boy called Plavi hiding at the back. The small, skinny youth was dragged to his feet by one of the militiamen.

  He had shoulder-length fair hair and a small, slight build, and he was wearing a sleeveless dark blue dress patterned with small blue flowers underneath a plaid shirt and a heavy canvas camouflage jacket. He also had on heavy woollen stockings and solid hiking boots. Plavi looked like a girl.

  The soldier dragged him towards the armoured car. His mascara had run and he had a split lip and a crust of blood under his nose. “In.” The soldier shoved the youth inside and directed della Torre and Strumbić to climb in as well. The boy looked fearfully up at them as the car moved off.

  “Are you the one called Plavi?” della Torre asked.

  He nodded.

  “We’re friends. You’ve been released so that you can help us get into Vukovar. I’m a friend of Lieutenant Boban’s. Do you know who he is?” Boban had been the right-hand man to the police chief in nearby Osijek; the chief had been assassinated for trying to reconcile the Serb and Croat communities. Last summer, della Torre had met and warmed to both men.

  Plavi nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” It was a boy’s voice, high but with a male resonance.

  The armoured car took them along an asphalt road. Through a small porthole, della Torre could see a handful of collapsed suburban houses, each with a courtyard and front garden, the roses all gone to hips by now. There was no sign of life in any of them.

  They saw a couple of militiamen squatting down on the narrow grass verge by the side of the road. Immediately beyond, lining both sides of the road, were the rich, green, and unfeasibly high cornfields. A fragment of a tune trickled through della Torre’s brain: as high as an elephant’s eye.

  “That’s as far as we go. Out,” Gorki’s officer said as they pulled up by a clutch of suburban ruins within sight of Vukovar’s water tower. Della Torre nervously stepped out of the armoured car, followed by Plavi and Strumbić, who was still clutching the white handbag.

  From somewhere they heard a shot and its whining whistle passing overhead. Della Torre’s throat was dry. They stood in the shadow of a half-destroyed wall as the armoured car pulled away. Plavi looked as though he didn’t believe what was happening.

  “Can you get us into Vukovar?” della Torre asked.

  The boy nodded.

  Strumbić had been shocked into silence.

  The boy guided them past houses whose roofs had collapsed and rafters were exposed, revealing home-cured hams hanging like strange fruit.

  They made their way through overgrown back gardens with unpicked beans, their dried husks hanging from bamboo canes made into tripod frames. A glossy toy tractor sat neglected in the grass. Della Torre stumbled on an iron reinforcing rod, leaving him with a sore shin.

  They heard a roar of engines not far away.

  “Tanks,” the boy said, sniffing the air.

  Della Torre couldn’t see the tanks, but he could hear them spitting angrily. He was hit by the pungent smells of cordite, powdered cement, burning plastic, rubber, and wood, and by the sharper odour of rotting flesh. Buildings exploded and crumbled, metal squealed, and then they heard a sudden cascade of tiles.

  “Midway through life’s journey,” he spoke from memory, amended to his circumstances, “I found myself in a dark ruin. How I got there I know not, nor did I know the way back. It was a harsh place, harsh to remember, wild, lacerating, so that even its memory fills me with fear. A place as bitter as death, and though among its debris and destruction there was good to be found, so too was there much else.”

  They were lines his father had often recited over the years. Sometimes he said them as a joke, like when they were repairing the decrepit farmhouse. But sometimes he’d spoken them with great melancholy.

  “Gringo,” Strumbić said, “this may be cheering you up, but it isn’t doing me a lot of good.”

  “Sorry.”

  Plavi motioned for them to halt. Looking both ways along a street full of rubble, he led them to a gaping hole to one side, into which he disappeared.

  “Well, if you haven’t got any better ideas,” Strumbić said, “I guess we follow the kid with the fashion sense.”

  Like rats, they scrambled into the crater and discovered they were at the opening of a sewer. The concrete pipe was low and the central groove slick.

  “There’s no piped water, so people don’t use their inside toilets anymore,” Plavi explained almost apologetically. “The Serbs don’t like coming into the sewers, so we’re pretty safe.”

  “How did they catch you?” della Torre asked.

  “Foraging,” the boy said.

  “Foraging?”

  “The hospital needs medicines, so we go to pharmacies in no man’s land.”

  Della Torre wanted to ask the boy about the hospital, about whether he’d met Irena. But this wasn’t the right time; he focused on keeping his balance in the confined space. It was hard going. Strumbić grunted behind him.

  “How far?” della Torre eventually asked,
stopping under a sealed manhole to stretch his back.

  Plavi, who had forged ahead as if he’d been born in the tunnel, turned to call them forward. “Don’t stop. It’s not long.”

  They reached a side passage and pulled themselves over a concrete wall.

  It was good to be out in the air. Della Torre leaned against the channel’s steep, rock-lined side, feeling his muscles complain. The sky was pewter and smelled of the autumn rains.

  The boy scrambled down to the stream and hopped nimbly over some big concrete sections of a collapsed building to the other side. Della Torre followed, ungainly, feeling his age.

  They reached a cluster of ruined buildings, where Plavi stepped over a threshold of broken cinder blocks, through what was once a window, and into the building. “We might not want to make too much noise now,” he said. “We’ve been following along the line of no man’s land, but now we can go towards our side.”

  They moved through the dark interior until they reached the front door, which somehow had survived intact. Plavi poked his head out of the gaping hole in the wall next to the door and then motioned for della Torre and Strumbić to follow. They ran across the rubble-filled road, slipping on bits of brick and tile, and ducked into the house opposite.

  The darkness of the ruined building was oppressive. They moved as quietly as they could along hallways, crunching shattered glass, feeling their way along the walls. From one building to the next, they walked in near silence. A big diesel engine revved up somewhere not far from them. They stopped; della Torre shrank into the damp wall he stood against. They continued after they heard the vehicle pull away until the sound was lost among the lacerating explosions wounding the very air.

  They stopped at a shop with a shattered faÇade that emanated the vague smell of antiseptic. That’s when della Torre realized they were not far from the centre of town. They were near the restaurant where he’d had a disquieting dinner with Deputy Minister Horvat only a couple of months before. Horvat had used the occasion to have a close look at della Torre, to gauge the potential reliability of this former UDBA man who’d lived in America. Somehow della Torre had passed. And from there his fate had been written in the stars, the line of which he was still following.