by Alen Mattich
After Tito died, an unwieldy rotating presidency from the country’s various republics kept things going for a decade. But a crumbling economy, endemic corruption, and a deep vein of cynicism collided with the end of Communism, and the richer, western republics of Slovenia and Croatia had decided to go their own way.
Slovenia took over control of its borders from the federal police and military units. The Yugoslav government had responded by sending its air force to attack the rebels and commanding its military units to recover the federal government’s authority.
But the federal authorities acted without any great conviction. Yugoslavia had one of the biggest armies in the world, out of all proportion to the country’s modest size. Slovenia’s force was limited to little more than traffic policemen and farmers called up from the reserves. And yet, after ten days of desultory bombings and small, localized engagements, the Yugoslav army was ordered to withdraw. Slovenia was allowed to secede because nearly the whole of the population was ethnically Slovene.
Croatia wasn’t so lucky. There was no way its proclamation of national sovereignty would go unchallenged. One in eight of its inhabitants considered themselves ethnic Serbs. And Serbia effectively ran both the federal government and the Yugoslav army. There was an impasse. Croatia might have declared independence along with Slovenia, but its rulers made no effort to physically enforce their new country’s sovereignty. The Croat government rightly feared the Yugoslav tanks and fighters.
So far the federal presidency in Belgrade was too split to make any authoritative decisions. And anyway, the Europeans had brokered a temporary truce. Though that was going to end in a few weeks.
Meanwhile Serbian leaders were consolidating their power over the federal system. They made up most of the army’s officer class, and held most of the senior posts in the government bureaucracy, and Serbia was the heartland of heavy industry. Even the rulers of compliant republics were fearful of what would come once the Serbs decided to make their own greater nation. Especially the Bosnians. Bosnia was a microcosm of Yugoslavia, wedged between Serbia and Croatia and made up of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. They knew that whatever storm broke elsewhere, it would hit them like a holocaust.
Once the Serbs were sure of their strength, air raids were sure to follow the sirens. And with them, the tanks and the big guns.
Della Torre watched and waited for the all-clear. But the sirens kept on with their urgent nagging. He spread the slats of the thin metal Venetian blinds with his fingers and looked skyward. Were those vapour trails? The thought made him pull back from the window. The Croat government had taken over all the Yugoslav federal buildings in Zagreb, including his. Especially his.
Della Torre figured the federal forces might have a special interest in destroying the UDBA’s regional headquarters in Zagreb. The UDBA was Yugoslavia’s notorious department of internal security. The secret police. It held plenty of documents the Yugoslavs would want incinerated. Besides, Serb staffers had long since vacated the building. Della Torre doubted the Yugoslav pilots would be particularly concerned for the welfare of any Croats working there. And not just because people in every walk of Yugoslav life hated the UDBA. It was time to leave. Before he got bombed. Or before the all-clear sounded and he got caught.
The corridor was empty. Everyone had gone down to the basement shelter. Officially he was still on sick leave, nursing a not very old bullet wound in his elbow. The bandage was off, but his scar was puckered and pink.
He should have stayed away, but the combination of a deep thirst, being broke, and knowing there was a three-quarters-full bottle of Bell’s nestled in the locked bottom drawer of his filing cabinet had made him tempt fate. If Anzulović spotted him, he’d come to the erroneous conclusion that della Torre was ready to return to work. Ready to drink and ready to work were entirely different states of being.
Captain Anzulović was in charge of UDBA’s Department VI and was della Torre’s boss. Department VI had been created five years earlier as a sop to Yugoslavia’s increasingly activist parliament. In Tito’s time the parliament had been a nursery for the dim but well-behaved sons and brothers of the dictator’s old cronies. After his death they’d started to find a spine and a conscience. One of their bravest acts was to insist on the creation of an agency that could monitor the UDBA. Someone to watch the watchers everyone feared. The UDBA tried to neuter the department by making it part of the apparatus and then sticking it in Zagreb, well away from the heart of the organization. But they’d underestimated Anzulović, drafted in from the Zagreb police force.
Anzulović hired the most competent people he could find, including Marko della Torre, a smart young specialist in international law whom he had poached from the Zagreb prosecutor’s office. In Department VI, della Torre was given responsibility for reviewing the UDBA’s program of assassinating Yugoslav dissidents in foreign countries. No other secret police force in the world was as successful at killing people beyond its borders — not the KGB, not the Stasi, not the Securitate, not Savak, not even Mossad. The CIA didn’t even register as competition. Della Torre’s job was to find and prosecute any UDBA operations done outside the scope of Yugoslav laws. Killings done for the personal motives of people in power.
Della Torre slipped out of his office into the high, long corridor, trying to keep his heels from clicking on the terrazzo floor. He was halfway down the hall, almost at the emergency staircase, when a familiar voice stopped him dead.
“Where are you going?” It came from behind the frosted glass window of a half-open door.
“I thought maybe I’d see whether they’d done up the bomb shelter. You know, new wallpaper and carpet to cover up the bloodstains, that sort of thing,” della Torre said.
“Nope, still looks like Frankenstein’s cellar. Come on in.”
“Don’t you think maybe it’s worth going down —”
“Why? Do you suppose the bombers are flying from Belgrade via Reykjavik? They could have sent Zeppelins, bombed us, and been back by now if anything was happening,” Anzulović said, irritated.
As they spoke, the warning gave way to an all-clear. Della Torre cursed under his breath as he hovered near the door, feebly trying to hide the bottle of Bell’s behind his back.
“See? Anyway, don’t stand there looking like a lemon. Come in,” Anzulović said. “Sit. And shut the door behind you.”
Della Torre slipped the bottle onto the floor behind the chair leg as discreetly as he could.
Anzulović allowed himself a half grin. “You shouldn’t have. Though it’d be rude not to.”
He reached a long arm into a low cupboard on one side of his desk, from which he pulled out two dusty cut-glass tumblers. One had a hairline crack.
“I was only stopping in to say hello. As part of my convalescence. You know, until the doctors say I’m fit for work,” della Torre said.
“And to pick up your medicine? Sort of prescription I like,” said Anzulović.
It was only a little past ten in the morning, but della Torre poured two fingers into each glass. The whisky was warm and burned just the right way. Anzulović offered della Torre a cigarette from his pack of Lords and lit a match for them both.
From the corridor came sounds of people returning to their offices.
“How’s the funny bone, by the way?”
Della Torre rubbed his elbow. “Keeping me in stitches.” He knocked back what remained in his glass. “Well, thanks for taking an interest. I’ll let you know when my sick leave’s over. Assuming there still is an office . . .”
“Or that you’ve still got a job,” Anzulović said, finishing the sentence. “Well, the office is moving.”
He blew smoke through the tufts of hair growing out of his nostrils so that he looked like he was stoking a miniature brush fire. He was in his mid-fifties, nearly twenty years older than della Torre, but already looked ripe for retirement. Th
e saddlebags under his eyes made his hangdog face look even more basset-like.
“So have I still got a job?” della Torre asked.
“Good question. All those nasty bits of the UDBA that everyone hates so much, they’re being absorbed into the Croat Interior Ministry.”
“A new, better UDBA, eh? Plus ça change . . . What about us?”
“You can imagine how hard the new, improved UDBA fought to keep us with them,” Anzulović said dryly. “And oddly enough, now that the Croat government has power over the security apparatus, they’re no longer very keen on having an anti-corruption unit either.”
“Funny, that. So where’s this leave us?” della Torre asked.
“We, my dear Gringo . . .” Della Torre still disliked that nickname, though after twenty years he’d become inured to it. The kids at school had started calling him that when he and his father had moved back to Zagreb from America. They were obsessed with cowboys and Indians — everyone in the country was — and anybody who’d lived in America had to be one or the other. The name stuck, and now the only people who used his given name were his wife and his father. And Harry, the English woman he’d met in London. “We are being absorbed into military intelligence.”
The Croat military had been patched together from the various local and regional police services. Their personnel weren’t known for their brains or insight.
“And because I know how happy this will make you, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The military intelligence unit is being run by your number one fan: Colonel Kakav.”
Della Torre choked, whisky fumes scorching his lungs.
“Of the Zagreb police?”
“The one and only.”
Della Torre slumped in his chair. Kakav was a bureaucrat attached to the Zagreb police. He was an oleaginous, self-serving political coward with considerable resentment against the state security apparatus. And, lately, della Torre.
Earlier that spring, a senior Zagreb police detective called Julius Strumbić had been shot by an UDBA agent. Namely, one Marko della Torre. It was Kakav’s life ambition to nail an UDBA agent and here he had one. “Shit.”
“Ah, you put your finger right on it. Or, rather, in it. Kakav was very eager that you be part of his team. Mentioned it more than once.”
“Because then it’s that much easier to hang me high?”
“Probably.” Anzulović wasn’t showing much sympathy.
“I thought that little misunderstanding had been sorted out. Didn’t Strumbić write an affidavit to the effect that it was an accident and we’re friends again?”
“He wrote a statement but he still hasn’t signed it. Like you, he’s officially on leave. Post-traumatic stress for getting shot twice in less than six months.”
“There’s no one more deserving,” della Torre said.
Strumbić set new standards for police corruption, even in a force as dirty as Zagreb’s. He’d amassed huge wealth and had never been caught.
Anzulović cocked a bushy eyebrow at della Torre. “I thought you said it was an accident.”
It really had been an accident. A complicated accident.
He had been selling third-rate files to Strumbić, making just enough to keep smoking his Lucky Strikes. Everything was fine, except somewhere in among the dross was a document somebody cared about. It got back to people in Belgrade that it had come from della Torre, and they called the Dispatcher, Tito’s old fixer in Zagreb. The Dispatcher specialized in making problems go away. He’d arm-twisted Strumbić into setting up della Torre for a bunch of Bosnian killers.
It was only through a happy accident that della Torre didn’t end up in a shallow grave. He hadn’t intended to use violence to find out from Strumbić what was going on. But the crappy Bulgarian knock-off pistol went off on its own and shot Strumbić in the leg. And then della Torre stole Strumbić’s money, his coat, his cigarettes, and his BMW and ran. To Italy. And then to London. Where he found himself having to deal with the UDBA, Strumbić, his ex-wife, and the Bosnians.
For the next several months, della Torre hid out in London — from the Bosnians, from Strumbić, from the entire Zagreb police force, who didn’t take kindly to one of their own being shot.
He thought about the file at the heart of all the trouble. An operation called Pilgrim. Finding and assembling that file had been an accident. Like shooting Strumbić.
“It was,” della Torre said. “Do you think they’ll try to prosecute me?”
“Kakav? He’s enough of an idiot. But he’ll probably just use the charges against you as leverage. Make you jump when he says jump. Don’t worry. Strumbić will sign. Eventually. Knowing him, he’s just waiting to see where his best advantage lies. Unfortunately, I’m not in a great position to twist his arm,” Anzulović said.
“So it’s either Kakav making me dance or Goli Otok. Or whatever they’ve replaced it with.” Goli Otok had been Yugoslavia’s gulag, a hellish island prison off the Dalmatian coast, run by the UDBA. Its reputation had grown so vast and ugly that a couple of years before, the Yugoslav government, embarrassed by international attention and shocked by the findings of a Department VI investigation, had finally shut it down.
“Look on the bright side. If you’re rotting in prison, it means you won’t have to be standing on the front lines when the shooting starts.”
“Thanks. I’ve had enough of standing around with a bull’s eye painted on my back.”
“Well, then, you’re in luck. A nice little war means that whoever it is in Belgrade that wants you dead is probably a bit distracted right now.”
“You really believe that?” Della Torre sat forward in his chair, hopeful.
“No. But has anyone taken a potshot at you over the past couple of months?”
“No. But I thought that was because you’d put some security on me.”
“You mean those guys we had drive by your place a couple of times a day? Only lasted for a couple of weeks. Though I suspect the Zagreb cops might have taken an interest in your welfare,” Anzulović said. He was doodling circles with his cigarette butt in a crystal ashtray the size of a dinner plate and heavy enough to break a foot. It had, for once, been emptied. “What I suggest, Gringo, is that all those files, all that stuff that got you into trouble, that business about Pilgrim or whatever it was called, that you forget about it. Ever hear the phrase ‘let sleeping dogs lie’?”
“Maybe.”
Pilgrim. He’d put some of the pieces of the puzzle together. He knew it had something to do with nuclear centrifuges exported from Sweden to Belgrade and then onwards. Somewhere.
And that it had involved the Montenegrin. He took his nickname from his home, the tiny republic to the south. Montenegro meant “black mountain.” It was a land of blood feuds and vendetta. It was almost as if even his UDBA colleagues were too afraid to evoke his real name, needing the comforting distance of a pseudonym. He’d led some of the organization’s most effective assassination squads and was, for a time, head of the secret police’s wetworks.
Had the Montenegrin wanted him dead, della Torre knew that by now he’d be a yellowing black-bordered photograph in the back pages of an old evening newspaper.
That was the extent of his knowledge. And yet it was enough for somebody to want to have him killed.
“Then don’t go poking them with sticks. Because, knowing my luck, you won’t be the only one who ends up getting bitten. Right?”
“Right.” Della Torre screwed the cap back on the bottle of Bell’s, now less than half full, and got up. “I guess I’ll be back in touch once the doctors figure I’m all right.”
“Did I say you could go?”
“Oh, sorry, how remiss,” della Torre said, unscrewing the cap.
“No, not that. You’re back on duty.”
“But —”
“No buts. Even if I hadn’t caught you
prowling around right now, I’d have had somebody dig you out of your flat.”
“Don’t I —”
“No, you don’t. Remember when I said that Kakav was going to take great pleasure in making you jump? Well, he said jump. There’s an order from him to find you and send you to Istria.”
“For what?”
“Ours is not to question and all the rest . . . You’re to talk to the captain of the Poreč police.”
“About what?”
“Gringo, I was not made privy to that. Maybe you should ask Kakav.”
“Can’t I just phone?”
“Kakav said go. So you will go. If you know what’s good for me,” Anzulović said. “Remember, I like an easy life. A quiet life.”
Della Torre shrugged. He’d lived most of his life in the system. At university, in the army, in the prosecutor’s office, in the UDBA, he’d always had to deal with incomprehensible, stupid orders handed down from one oblivious bureaucrat to another until they landed in his lap. Sometimes he could pass them down to someone lower on the food chain. Sometimes he couldn’t.
“Okay, I’ll go.”
“Nice of you to be so obliging. And while you’re there, you’re expected to stay at your father’s.”
“Oh, I see. It’s a cost-saving exercise. Send the guy who has family there to do the work so that we don’t have to put him up in a hotel or pay for his meals,” della Torre said.
“I’m sure it’s something like that.”
“Did he say what sort of toothpaste he wants me to use?”
“No point getting smart with me, Gringo. Your arm good enough to drive?”
“Should be,” della Torre said.
“Good. Otherwise I’d have to put you on a bus.”
“So does this mean we’ll be getting paid again?”
“We’ve been on payroll since the start of the month.”
“So I can afford to buy myself some cigarettes?”
“Don’t get too ambitious.”
“Do I get to keep my UDBA rank? Or is it back to where I was when I left the army?”