Her words reassured him, as they were meant to. They were a sign that she was strong enough to survive. And Hammond had believed her. There was nothing to be frightened of.
But there was. He knew that now.
Ingrid’s deadline was not the only thing due to expire on Friday. Hammond’s leave, which he had looked forward to spending with Peter and Julie on the Austrian ski slopes, would also come to an end. But there was no realistic prospect of him returning to St George’s, ready to tackle his normal caseload, on Monday morning. From the departure lounge at Zürich airport, he phoned his PA and told her to ask – beg, if necessary – Roy Williamson to cover for him the following week. Numerous consultations would have to be rescheduled, even so. A lot of people were going to be inconvenienced. ‘Apologize to one and all for me, will you, Fiona? An emergency’s cropped up in my private life I have to deal with.’ Well, that was true enough. An emergency it certainly was.
‘When I left Belgrade nine years ago, I thought I would never return,’ Piravani declared as the plane to Zagreb reached cruising altitude. ‘But I guarantee this will be my last visit.’
‘When was your first?’ asked Hammond.
‘May 1992. I’d handled the accounts for an air freight company Gazi had a stake in. He’d been impressed by some of the … tax efficiencies … I’d introduced. The UN was all set to impose sanctions on Serbia and the war in Bosnia had just begun. Gazi saw sanctions as a problem and an opportunity. There was big money to be made from sanctions-busting, but he had to export the cash in US dollars and Swiss francs to protect it from his enemies and the hyperinflation of the Serbian currency. That’s where I came in.’
‘Why did you take the job?’
‘Because I wasn’t cut out to be a by-the-book accountant. I wanted to be rich and I knew that’s what Gazi would make me. It was actually fun at first. The first year or so was really exciting. The financial tricks. The fringe benefits. The whole buzz of it. It was only when I began to find out what Gazi’s business really amounted to and what his paramilitaries were doing in Bosnia that I realized I’d sold my services to a gangster and a murderer. And by then …’
‘It was too late to pull out.’
‘I knew too much for him to let me go, doctor. I could be rich. But I couldn’t be free. Until Gazi was dragged down with the rest of Milošević’s cronies, anyway. And even then …’
‘The memory of all those fees you’d paid on his behalf to politicians and smugglers and hit men wouldn’t go away.’
‘No.’ Piravani sighed. ‘It wouldn’t.’
‘And one of the fees you paid was mine.’
‘It was, yes.’
‘I thought it was easy money at the time.’
‘There’s no such thing, doctor.’ Piravani shook his head, incredulous, it seemed, at the folly of what he had done in the pursuit of wealth. ‘I learnt that lesson from Gazi. And now you’re learning it too.’
FIFTEEN
Hammond would have been hard-pressed to imagine a more dispiriting arrival at any destination than his and Piravani’s in Belgrade in the frozen darkness of Friday morning. Back in 1996, he and his team had been met at the airport by a pair of chauffeur-driven limousines and whisked off to the city’s smartest and newest hotel, where Miljanović and the director of the Voćnjak Clinic had been waiting to greet them. Thirteen years later, everything was very different, notably Hammond’s state of mind, not to mention the state of his body. Piravani had failed to secure sleeper berths for them on the train from Zagreb and the ride had been anything but smooth. Six hours in a poorly sprung seat had proved more than a match for a maximum dose of paracetamol, ensuring Hammond had been jolted painfully awake every time he had succeeded in dozing off.
They emerged from the chill cavern of the railway station into a pre-dawn gloom through which sharp needles of icy sleet were slashing. The road that ran past the station was already busy with traffic: vans, buses and cars rumbling past in an eye-stinging miasma of exhaust fumes. ‘How could we have stayed away so long, hey?’ quipped Piravani.
He led Hammond past a hopeful swarm of taxis to the bus station next door and into a dismal café. Most of the customers looked as if they had spent the night there, or on one of the benches outside. Piravani left Hammond at a table and went up to the counter to buy coffee and bread rolls, a process which involved a lengthy debate about something with the sullen man behind it.
‘Congratulations, doctor,’ said Piravani when he rejoined Hammond. ‘You look so bad you almost blend in.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me that a bath, a shave, a hearty breakfast and a good hotel wouldn’t put right.’
‘Sorry. No can do any of those. I’ll have to fix us private accommodation to avoid our passports being registered with the police. The standard might not be what you’re used to. Drink some coffee. That should help. Do you want a cigarette? At least the Serbs don’t bother where you smoke.’
‘I’ll pass, thanks.’ Hammond took a sip of coffee as Piravani lit up. It did help – slightly. ‘What was the commotion up at the counter?’
‘My Serbian currency’s still got Yugoslavia printed on it. Our friend wasn’t keen on taking it. I’ll get some up-to-date notes when the exchange office opens.’
‘What then?’
‘I find us somewhere to stay and something to get around in. While you take a look at the Villa Ruža. Here …’ Piravani whipped out a street map of Belgrade and opened it up. ‘This is where we are now.’ He tapped with his finger at the bus and train symbols located at the city-centre end of one of the bridges across the Sava, where the river began to curve west towards its junction with the Danube. Then his finger slid south to the neighbourhood of Dedinje. ‘See the x? That’s the villa.’ At some point, he had marked the location with a small red x. ‘Take a taxi to the Tito Mausoleum and walk from there. It’s not far. Find out what’s going on. Gazi never actually sold the place, but the government will have seized the property and sold it on. We need to know who owns it now, whether they live there all the time and what sort of security they have. You follow?’
‘This is an exclusive area, right?’
‘The most exclusive in Belgrade. Milošević lived in Dedinje.’
‘Then I’d guess the neighbours aren’t likely to be eager for a chat with a stranger, assuming any of them ever show their faces on the street.’
‘Just look around. See if any nearby properties are for sale. If they are, make a note of the agent’s name and number. They might be a useful contact.’
‘Well, I …’
‘You agreed to help me, doctor.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘So help, OK?’
‘Yes, Marco. OK.’ Hammond swallowed some more coffee. ‘I’ll do the best I can.’
‘Take a bus back into the centre when you’ve finished. Meet me in Trg Republike at midday.’ Piravani’s finger slid back up the map. ‘Here. The city’s main square. Wait by the horse.’
‘The what?’
‘The statue of Prince Mihailo Obrenović on horseback, in front of the National Museum.’ Piravani looked suddenly thoughtful. ‘It’s what Zineta often used to say to me. “Kod konja.” “Meet you at the horse.”’ He gazed past Hammond into the unplumbable depths of his past. ‘But she’ll never say it to me again.’
Hammond was too tired to summon any words of consolation. He tore his bread roll in half, smeared the yellow grease from the small carton labelled ПYTEP on one of the halves and took a bite. ‘Some jam would have been nice,’ he said, more as a statement of fact rather than a complaint.
Piravani smiled grimly. ‘Maybe tomorrow, doctor.’
The taxi driver was a voluble Tito nostalgist. All the way to the last resting place of Yugoslavia’s great leader he sustained a panegyric on the late lamented president. Hammond would have found it difficult to concentrate on this even if he had not been distracted by jolts of pain from his ribs – the journey progressing as it did in a series o
f violent accelerations and emergency brakings, often accompanied by brief skids as the unstudded tyres lost their grip on hard-packed patches of ice – since he had no interest in the unifying genius of Marshal Tito and no intention of visiting his grave.
In point of fact, he had visited it once before. Back in 1996, Miljanović had insisted on taking him to the House of Flowers one afternoon when he could be spared from ministering to Gazi’s post-operative needs. The grave itself he remembered as plain, not to say austere, the adjoining museum of Tito-related artefacts less than riveting. Miljanović, however, like the taxi driver, recalled Tito’s era as a golden age of pan-Slavic harmony. ‘Everything has gone wrong since he died, Edward. He would weep if he could see what we have done to his country.’
Hammond did not doubt that. He was close to weeping himself as he waited for the taxi to pull away from the foot of the slope that led up to the mausoleum, though his tears were induced by the knife-edged wind rather than the ravages of history. The city stretched away before him, a pewter sky slung over it like a cowl. Behind him were the villas of Dedinje, widely spaced and screened by conifers. After checking where he was in relation to the red x on his map, he set off.
A steady climb past snow-carpeted parkland took him to a long, quiet road of high-walled residences. There was no possibility of striking up an illuminating conversation with a garrulous local. The only people he could see were bored-looking security men in gatehouses at the fronts of several properties.
The scene was in fact vaguely familiar. En route to or from the House of Flowers, Miljanović had driven Hammond past a similar stretch of Dedinje’s real estate, commenting unfavourably on some of the kitsch extravagances the nouveau riche of Milošević’s Serbia had encouraged their architects to indulge in. Several of the villas Hammond glimpsed over their boundary walls as he made his geriatrically slow way along the road had indeed been tastelessly extended, although some of the extensions were already showing signs of dilapidation. All that new money had been spread thinly.
The Villa Ruža was a triumph of elegance by comparison, a salmon-pink neoclassical mansion replete with pillars and balconies standing four-square at the end of a lawn-flanked drive. The walls screening it from the road were a matching pink and in the centre of each of the firmly closed wrought-iron gates was a cleverly worked likeness of a wolf. Gazi had left his mark.
There was some kind of intercom attached to one of the gate pillars, but no gatehouse or any other obvious sign of security. Worryingly, from Hammond’s point of view, there were no cars on the drive and the windows of the villa were all shuttered. The property gave every appearance of being unoccupied, though immaculately maintained. He would be unable to argue that covert entry was impossible. And that was likely to be all the encouragement Piravani needed.
A Range Rover with reflective windows cruised slowly past as Hammond walked on, heightening his sense of being observed even as he was observing. The whole area had a quality of nervous stillness about it, though he was aware that his own apprehensiveness might well be the root of it. More powerfully than ever, he felt he should not have allowed his life to be pulled so far off course that he found himself in Belgrade with Piravani, plotting a burglary. But how he could have avoided it remained obscure. A man who is not in control of events is at the mercy of them. And he was assuredly such a man.
Descending towards the Crvena Zvezda football stadium, where it was safe to suppose he could catch a bus, he suddenly recognized the curve of a road as it passed a low-rise apartment block, and realized the road led to the Voćnjak Clinic. It was only about a quarter of a mile away. He stood gazing in the direction he would have to take to reach it, depressed by the contrast between the circumstances of his two visits to Belgrade. There were others to blame for that contrast beside himself. But he bore his share. And that thought only deepened his depression.
*
A ride on a Belgrade bus was an experience his VIP treatment had spared him in 1996. Now, after a lengthy wait outside the football stadium, he clambered aboard one, swiftly abandoned the idea of buying a ticket in the crush of passengers and braced himself against a handrail as best he could. The destination, shown in Cyrillic lettering, had meant nothing to him, but the bus was going in the right direction as far as he could tell.
The ride ended some way short of Trg Republike, but Hammond had time in hand and took reviving refuge in a coffee shop before trudging on to his destination, pausing en route to buy a badly needed hat – a fur-lined cap with earflaps.
He had been to Trg Republike before, he realized when he arrived, although there was nothing particularly memorable to his eye about the square, with snow-patched greenery, frozen fountains, surging traffic and buildings locked in a stand-off between nineteenth-century grandeur and twentieth-century brutalism. Piravani was nowhere to be seen and it was cold enough to ensure no one else was waiting by the large equestrian statue outside the National Museum. Hammond pulled down the flaps on his hat and started walking round the base of the statue, hoping he would not be kept waiting long.
He was halfway through a fourth circuit when several sharp toots on a horn drew his attention to a rust-pocked white van that had pulled up on the pavement on the north side of the square. Piravani was gesticulating at him from the driver’s seat.
Hammond hurried over and climbed in. He had barely closed the door behind him when Piravani took off. ‘I almost didn’t recognize you in that hat,’ he complained. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘The villa’s closed up,’ Hammond replied, pulling off his hat. ‘In good repair and recently painted, but shutters over the windows.’
‘Excellent. Security?’
‘Nothing. No gatehouse. No guard. But I’d guess there’s an alarm, at least.’
‘So would I. I’ll take a look myself after dark. Learn anything else?’
‘There were no gabby neighbours, Marco. No estate agents’ signs. No builders in anywhere. The area’s deathly quiet. One car drove along the road the whole time I was there.’
‘Quiet is good.’
‘I’m glad you think so. Where are we going now?’
‘Your new home away from home, doctor. Trust me: you won’t like it.’
They crossed the bridge over the muddy brown Sava into New Belgrade, leaving the old city behind and entering a remorseless sprawl of drab, grey, post-war apartment blocks. Sleet was sweeping horizontally across their façades: there was no shelter here from the wind.
The weather was, in fact, much as it had been when Hammond arrived with his team in March 1996, but then it and the cheerlessness of their surroundings had made little impact on him. Thirteen years later, his cushion of professional indifference was gone. He was out in the world, exposed and fallible. Looking down at the shanty dwellings on the riverside below the bridge, he felt suddenly and dismayingly close to those whose lives contained neither comfort nor security of any kind.
Whatever its visual shortcomings, however, New Belgrade contained two modern upmarket hotels: the Inter-Continental and the Hyatt Regency. It was in the latter that Hammond and his team had stayed. He recognized its prow-like frontage as they drove past, his recollection of its de-luxe facilities sharpened by the certainty that he would not be sampling them.
‘Sorry, doctor,’ said Piravani, reading his mind. ‘You have to rough it this time.’
The block they parked outside was a dismal clone of all the others that surrounded it – geometrically arranged buttes in an architectural desert. A grim graffiti-spattered entrance led to a still grimmer concrete stairway where the air seemed even colder than outside. They started climbing, Piravani having to wait on each landing for Hammond to catch up. Their destination was the third floor. Piravani produced a key and led the way into a small two-bedroomed flat. It was actually more brightly decorated and better furnished than Hammond had feared, though the view through the door that led on to a tiny balcony, where a clothes rack had been left to rot, was dominated by the s
oaring grey flank of an adjacent block.
On the dusty worktop in the kitchen Piravani dumped the bulging plastic bag he had carried from the van. ‘Beer, coffee, orange juice, milk, butter, bread, cheese, ham,’ he announced. ‘Enough to keep us going.’
‘For how long?’
‘A few days. That’s all we’ll need. Win or lose.’
‘I still don’t understand how you hope to get the tapes, Marco.’
‘I have to work on a plan, OK?’ Piravani lit a cigarette and flapped it at Hammond as if shooing away a fly. ‘But it can be done. First we eat. Then we sleep.’ He yawned. ‘I’m too old to think with a tired brain.’
Hammond was not about to argue with that. Piravani activated the heating, which turned out to be surprisingly efficient, and cut some sandwiches. A couple of those, washed down with a bottle of Serbian beer, converted Hammond’s fatigue into heavy drowsiness. The bed he chose needed a new mattress, but he was too tired to care. The thin curtains reduced the grey afternoon light to a soothing subfusc. Closing his eyes was like flicking a switch from on to off.
SIXTEEN
It was dark when he woke. In the kitchen an orange light was beating like a pulse. Stumbling into the room, he confronted a giant neon-lit sign in the middle distance, blinking out some message in Serbian that was lost on him. Between them, traffic roared past on the highway feeding the city: a blur of white, red and amber into which snow fell from an invisible sky.
He switched on some lights and registered the time: nearly seven o’clock. He had slept for the best part of five hours. Piravani had evidently been less weary. In a note scrawled on a scrap of paper wedged prominently under an empty beer bottle, he explained: ‘Gone to Dedinje. Could be late when I get back. Take it easy.’
A shower and a shave in the no-frills bathroom restored a measure of normality to Hammond’s sense of himself, though everything took him far longer than usual thanks to the lengths he had to go to avoid jarring his ribs. He treated himself to a couple more paracetamols afterwards and a cup of coffee, opening a window to clear the smell of Piravani’s cigarettes while he drank it.
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