by Alen Mattich
He thought about the tortures the UDBA routinely used, most of them crude weapons of pain. Though there was psychological terror too, fear for one’s parents, one’s children. Was that why he’d been so reluctant to have children? He prayed that Irena was safe.
“Right, Mr. della Torre. What do we do now? How do we get to Djilas now that we have no leverage and he knows we’re after him rather than his money?”
Della Torre wouldn’t lift his eyes from the floor. “Gorki,” he said.
“Gorki? The paramilitary gentleman who was so kind to us at the border?”
“Yes.”
“How badly does he want Djilas?”
“I don’t know. But Gorki hates the Montenegrin. You knew they were enemies. That’s why we got through that border post. You know more about him than I do. Talk to your friends. But if you want the Montenegrin, Gorki’s the person you want to be dealing with. Offer him money. Asylum, after all this is over. Guns. I don’t know. You do these things better than I do. Either that or have a submarine sink the Montenegrin’s boat.”
She nodded. “Maybe that’s what we should have done in the first place. Dealt with the other side,” she said, mostly to herself. “Rob, you stay here. Sit with him. Keep a gun on him. If he moves, shouts, anything, kill him. If anyone comes to the house — I don’t care if it’s Strumbić or his cleaner — kill them. Bill, get on the radio to our friends. Tell them to organize a pickup tomorrow morning, first light. Can they get here that fast?”
Bill looked at his watch and did a quick mental calculation. “Shouldn’t be a problem. They can’t travel in these waters at night. The Yugoslav patrol boats are keeping traffic on a curfew, but they’ll be able to get here once light breaks.”
“The American navy’s extracting you?” della Torre asked.
“Us. Picking us up. In the plushest yacht you’ve ever seen. Even the jail on board is comfortable. You’ll have a little luxury before a tribunal decides what to do with you, Gringo. Though I happen to think you’ll be put away for a long time, so don’t get your hopes up.” She turned away from della Torre. “Do that, then, Bill. And when you have, we’re going for a little trip down to the Argentina. How long do you think it will take for Strumbić’s boat to get us there?”
“About an hour, maybe a bit more,” Bill said.
“Fine. Though I think Mr. Strumbić will have made himself scarce. But if we find him, we’ll see if we can’t persuade him to come back here, to confirm Mr. della Torre’s story.”
They left della Torre in the kitchen, tied to the chair. Rob took a seat in a corner of the room, his eyes locked on his prisoner. Della Torre listened to Rebecca and Bill leave the house, and then he heard the motorboat’s engine start up. For a long time he could feel only pain, but then exhaustion got hold of him and he slipped into and back out of unconsciousness. His head hung forward, chin against his chest, shoulders straining because his arms remained tied behind the chair. When he woke, it was with a whimper, his eyes narrow slits taking in the emptiness of his lap and the floor’s ancient, worn stone. He felt defeated. He was defeated.
At least the girl was safe. He wondered what would have happened to her otherwise. Would she have been allowed to live?
Would he? Or Strumbić?
He wondered whether he would have saved the Montenegrin had it not been for the child. The Montenegrin was no less a killer than Rebecca. No less an executioner. They’d both worked for their governments to the best of their abilities. Warriors in a time of peace. No different from the gunners pulling the lanyards on artillery pieces pointed at Vukovar.
Irena. He prayed for her. He prayed hard to a god the Communists had tried to crucify into oblivion.
• • •
Some time later, he couldn’t tell how much, Rebecca walked into the kitchen. She turned on the lights and took some food out of the refrigerator. He asked for water, but she ignored him, left without saying a word.
He dozed, and when he woke it was dark. The light had been switched off. His shoulders and back hurt almost as much as his head. He felt damp across his crotch and realized he’d pissed himself. It could have been his thirst that brought him back to consciousness, or it could have been the sound of the engine, an outboard that ran at a lower pitch than the one on Strumbić’s boat. It was hard to tell at that distance. Maybe it was one of the fishermen returning late to the village in the bay.
He heard movement in the house, people walking on the floorboards overhead, steps on the wooden staircase. He tried to call out to them, to one of the Americans, to tell them he needed water. But his mouth was sticky, dry, and uncooperative. Someone left the villa. He heard the door swing shut. He waited, hoping they’d be back soon, only to be startled by explosions, the timpani of war. And then silence again.
He heard the door open behind him, then footsteps. More than one pair. The Americans must have come back. The kitchen door opened and he croaked, “Water,” without bothering to look up. His head was too heavy to lift.
“Ah, Gringo,” said the Montenegrin. “What a sad state of affairs when you’re reduced to drinking water.”
BELGRADE, APRIL 1986
The offices were elegantly furnished, though in a dated style. Nineteen-fifties internationalist, he guessed, though, thinking about it, maybe it was modern. He’d never been much for fashions in furniture. Or in anything else.
The waiting room was grand, with tall windows looking out over the Danube. On one wall was a bookcase made of blond beech with clean, simple lines. The books — law reports and Communist dogma all bound in the same green leather and embossed with gold lettering — looked like they belonged to a dark, fussy library. Not this place.
He wore his major’s uniform. He’d placed his peaked hat emblazoned with formal piping on the neighbouring chair, but he kept his briefcase on his lap. The uniform had that new look about it, but only because he wore it so rarely. It was grey with a hint of green, adorned with only a couple of ribbons and the insignia showing his rank. He’d polished his shoes to a high shine, though they were beginning to crease, showing signs of age. He’d had them re-soled recently.
The briefcase was also old. An antique. It was made from good, thick hide. As a young officer, he’d bought it as a present to himself, from an old man selling off his possessions in the Sarajevo flea market. The old man had been a lawyer between the wars, but when the Communists came to power he’d been put to work in a factory. He’d kept the briefcase as a last link to his bourgeois life, but eventually he’d found the luxury of eating more appealing than old memories.
The case was just a prop. The Montenegrin always took it with him to these official meetings. It contained a fountain pen made in East Germany, a pad of paper, and a few pages of cryptic notes he’d typed up for the UDBA archives. A word-sketch of his mission with so few details or facts that the document would be useless to someone who didn’t already know what it was about. It would be collated with other, similarly opaque reports and then stuffed deep into the UDBA’s hidden files. One day all these papers would crumble into dust. But they wouldn’t disappear entirely. Against all orders, he kept copies of whatever documents he could. His insurance.
In the days after he’d come back from Stockholm, it had been like stepping into a vacuum. He reported in, went to his desk at the Interior Ministry in Belgrade, and waited. There had been no debriefing, either official or unofficial, if only because so few people had known about the mission. None of his colleagues or immediate superiors had been aware of it. As far as they were concerned, he’d been on a temporary secondment to the Foreign Ministry. The reports from the Stockholm embassy were either classified or bland. All the useful information he got had come from the newspapers, especially the English press. There were plenty of accounts of Palme’s killing, but apart from one vague description of the killer and an uncertain identification of the type of gun used, there was nothing
of substance. Nor had there been any sign the boy’s body had been found, or, if it had, that it was in any way connected to Palme.
He waited, wanting to go back to Montenegro but knowing he couldn’t until they decided what to do with him.
He knew he was in a dangerous position. He knew that whoever had ordered the killing was nervously watching to see whether the UDBA would be implicated. The Montenegrin wondered how he’d be handled if suspicion drifted his way. A cell in the Belgrade headquarters and a sudden bullet in the back of the head. It reminded him of Svjet, the old man from London with the hollow, haunted eyes of someone who’d known his fate the moment he’d stepped into that Trieste hotel room.
More than once the Montenegrin had thought of escape. In his job it was never truly far from his mind. Take his youngest daughter and go somewhere, to someone who might offer him sanctuary in exchange for information. The Americans.
But that was an idle fantasy. Nowhere was safe from the UDBA. Twice, after the failed Croatian independence movement of the early 1970s, he’d hunted renegade UDBA agents. One had disappeared to Australia, where under a different name he’d bought a vineyard with money accumulated over years of graft. The other he’d tracked down to an American suburb near Chicago. The man was staying with relatives.
The Australian had tried to run, had seen him and had fled through his vineyards. The American had long been resigned to his fate. He was sitting in a big, comfortable chair in the basement, watching television. He made a brief move to stand, but gave up and wept for himself. Both men had died.
Inevitability was a hard master.
If he hadn’t known it already, he’d learned it standing in the corridor of that hospital, offering bargains to a god he’d long neglected, as the doctors fought for his wife’s life. At some point, he’d learned, events set in motion can not be halted. His wife’s fate had been sealed by her determination to have a last child. Physics, chemistry, biology all conspired against her once she’d started the mechanism of her fate spinning. No, once they’d set it spinning.
In the end, as the winds of fate had blown for her, they’d blow for him. His destiny also floated like the willow down. And if it landed in the sea, there he would drown.
What then for his daughter?
The UDBA had no compunction about killing children. The memory of the boy in Sweden rose in his gorge, as green and bitter as bile. He had an atavistic urge to cross himself, as his grandmother had whenever a shadow swept past her cataract-fogged eyes.
All he could do now was wait and see what fate held in store for him. But he swore to himself that if he survived this, he would build a fortress around himself and his daughter. He realized that the protections he’d built for himself, the files of secret documents, were frail barriers against bullets. He’d had a thought that the UDBA would be afraid of having its assassination program exposed to the world at large. But then it dawned on him that the Germans, Americans, Australians, Italians — every government — had colluded with the Yugoslavs. It had suited them to turn a blind eye to these judicial killings, in exchange for Yugoslavia’s promise to remain neutral between the West and the Soviet bloc. He’d have to do more, to learn from his forefathers. Neither the Venetians nor the Turks had ever completely conquered Montenegro. The Montenegrins had negotiated, bribed, blackmailed, built fortresses, and fought, and they’d always kept a measure of wild independence. He would build his own citadel in Montenegro, man it with his own people.
For now, he would have to survive by doing his job so well that his masters would find it a greater loss to sacrifice him.
It was during those days that he learned the details of another operation, also an unusual one, that had overlapped with his. Unusual because the target was not a Yugoslav dissident and had no connection, as far as the Montenegrin could tell, with Yugoslavia or its émigré community. It was strange enough that he wondered whether it had something to do with the Palme killing. Or whether the timing had been purely coincidental.
The morning after Palme died, a unit — two killers from the Kosovar mafia who did occasional work for the UDBA — had driven to the house of a German industrialist in Cologne. Because it was a Saturday, they had to wait for him to collect the morning newspapers from the letterbox fixed to the neat picket fence that bounded the tidy garden around his suburban house. They’d parked the car behind a hedge, where they could watch for him.
They stationed themselves before daybreak. No one passed on the pavement to wonder why the two men were sitting in a car on a suburban street. The man was an early riser, even on weekends. It was in that watery light of a winter’s morning that they spotted him, dressed in casual trousers and a thin jersey — too thin for the weather — as he hurried down his walkway, braced against the cold, to collect his newspapers.
The car’s passenger got out in the same instant, leaving the door open. The industrialist and the man from the car approached the letterbox simultaneously.
The industrialist noticed the other man only at the last second, too late to react to the gun. The man shot him twice in the chest. The industrialist had a surprised expression as he fell back, the impact of hitting the ground causing his slightly tinted bifocals to bounce onto his forehead. His light green sweater turned a deep brown where the blood soaked through. The noise of the gun had been suppressed, and not a curtain twitched that cold morning.
The assassin walked back to the car and the driver pulled away smoothly, unobtrusively, back to their temporary residence in Cologne, where everything was packed and ready for them to return to their Stuttgart homes. They only stopped long enough to call in a message to Belgrade from a phone box. Like the call he’d made to Germany from a Swedish phone box.
All that information was in the official file, pulled together by the UDBA resident in Bonn from a debriefing of the assassin and local newspaper reports. Another killing the Montenegrin couldn’t understand.
So he waited in purgatory, staying at the UDBA officers’ barracks, an east European version of a gentlemen’s club, though with linoleum instead of polished marble and a bar that looked like a workingmen’s café. The rooms were comfortable enough and the food was close to home-cooked. In the mornings, including Saturdays, he went to his office, and there he pushed bits of paper around his desk, read files, and stared out the window at melting snow on the Belgrade streets, waiting, forever waiting for a tap on the shoulder and a military escort to take him to the subterranean questioning rooms and prison. He’d waited like that for more than two weeks when the handwritten note was brought to his desk by an orderly, requesting his presence at the Foreign Ministry the following morning. The same offices he’d been taken to, just before the new year, by the Dispatcher, to discuss the assignment.
As he had the previous time, when he’d come for his orders, he arrived early and then regretted not bringing something to read. They kept him waiting through much of the morning; finally he was called into the chief translator’s office by a male secretary.
“Major,” Comrade Chief Translator to the Presidency Ivan Dragomanov said from behind a broad desk. “Thank you for being so patient. Things always come up at the last minute when one is at the beck and call of the presidency.”
The order from the presidency to kill Palme had been implicit. But not signed, not issued on paper. The first irregular job the Montenegrin had ever done.
“I understand,” said the Montenegrin.
Dragomanov smiled with the corners of his eyes. He was elegant, tall, his thick salt-and-pepper hair combed back over his head to give him a leonine air. The suit he wore was expensive, the French cuffs on his shirt held together with gold-and-onyx links. The tie, the Montenegrin guessed, was Italian silk. And the glasses the sort one saw on Americans in films.
“Please sit,” Dragomanov said, waving the Montenegrin towards a chair. “Would you like a coffee? Yes, I think that should be two coffees. Unless
you prefer a little glass of something stronger?”
“Thank you, a coffee is sufficient.” The young man who’d shown him into the room left without being told to, closing the tall double doors behind him.
Dragomanov offered a cigarette, a pastel Davidoff, from a cedar box on his desk, but the Montenegrin declined. He would have liked a cigarette just then, but he abstained for fear that his hand might be seen to tremble.
“Don’t smoke? Very good. You’ll live longer. I can’t remember a morning I haven’t woken up coughing,” Dragomanov said.
His eyes had that wetness of chronic smokers; the skin on his otherwise handsome face had thinned and was heavily lined.
There was a moment’s silence while Dragomanov put the cigarette into a short ivory holder and lit it. The Montenegrin wondered whether the holder was an affectation; Dragomanov’s fingers were as yellow as the ivory.
“I must thank you for how successfully and professionally you performed your service for us. I had wanted to call you in earlier, but first I wanted to make sure we kept our side of the bargain. You will have word of your impending promotion soon, I’m told. May I be the first to congratulate you, Lieutenant Colonel. I understand that when your service comes to an end, when you retire, you will be given the rank of full colonel with a full colonel’s pension. Am I correct in saying it is three years before you are eligible for your pension?”
“A few months more. Thank you,” said the Montenegrin, genuinely relieved. They needed him, it seemed.
“I’m afraid some conditions will apply to the remainder of your service and retirement,” Dragomanov said, contemplating the delicately carved holder. “I’m sure the terms won’t surprise you. The only one that really interests the Foreign Ministry is that you won’t be able to leave the country for a period of ten years after you leave service.”
The Montenegrin shrugged. He knew he would be kept under surveillance during that time as well. There were ways around those things.