Zagreb Noir

by Ivan Srsen

  “The Old Man will kill me too,” she said when I finished.

  “Why?”

  “If he won’t forgive a man, he’ll forgive a woman less. He’ll just kill you and then he’ll be even with you. What he’s preparing for me is much worse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who knows? He’s come in his private jet. I haven’t seen him yet and I have no intention of doing so. How can I explain to him that I didn’t do anything with you?”

  “And that kiss?”

  Zaza slapped me. “You fool. You killed me with that kiss.”

  Her bodyguard ran in without knocking. He was her trusted man and didn’t work for the Old Man.

  “They’re coming. Quick!”

  As Tafilj, Rico, and the others approached, pushing their way through the crowd, Zaza’s loyal bodyguard led us out through a back exit out of the club.

  “Run, run!” the man said. “I’ll try to hold them off for a bit.”

  We ran into the darkness. I thought it would be best for us to somehow get to my car, but it was parked out in front of the club. Zaza pulled me in the opposite direction and we ran for the lake. We stumbled, staggered, getting stuck as our feet sunk into the loose gravel.

  “Over there!” Zaza shouted, and pointed toward the lake in the darkness.

  “What’s that?”

  “A boat!”

  I didn’t see it at first; it was barely visible. It was tied three or four meters out from the shore, bobbing in the water. We stepped into the lake and got into the boat. I untied it just as we heard shouts behind us in the distance.

  “Row! Row, you slob!” Zaza shouted as they drew closer.

  I had no choice. I grabbed the oars and started rowing as hard as I could. We managed to get away from the shore before they got close to it. I rowed like crazy. An hour later we were walking in the mud and reeds on the other side of the lake. We spent a good part of the night hiding in the brush and running from any light we saw.

  VIII

  We found ourselves in a luxurious suite atop a hotel, with a beautiful view of Zagreb. A flock of ducks flew past the rectangle of the window. My life would soon pass by like that as well.

  He looked me straight in the eye and I could hardly take it. The Old Man was standing in front of me, gray-haired, slim, and handsome, in an expensive suit with a large gold name-bracelet around his wrist. He looked more like a well-groomed fifty-year-old than someone who was said to be at least seventy. He was the complete opposite of what I probably looked like. But that was hardly important now. Much more important for my survival was another kind of impression that I would make.

  “How did you reach those feminists?”

  “That was Zaza’s idea. She made that decision for both of us. She told them she was threatened with abuse and murder. They took me in at her insistence. She figured we had some chance against the Old Man if we went public with the whole story.”

  “And did you go public with anything?”

  “We didn’t. If they do anything today, it’s because they were frightened by the break-in into their safe house.”

  “They won’t.” The Old Man had evidently threatened them. “And you? Do you always hide behind women? Don’t you have any shame?”

  “Zaza insisted. At first they didn’t want to take me in.”

  “How did you even think of that . . . safe house of theirs?”

  “Zaza planned everything out earlier that day and got their phone number.”

  “And you just surrendered to her leadership?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “And what exactly did she say when she was asking them for help?”

  “I don’t know what she said.”

  He took out a piece of paper and looked at it for a few moments. “She told them you were being chased by mafia heroin dealers and hit men who never give up.”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “That’s exactly what she said about the Old Man and his people.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was stupid of you to run. And she’s even stupider than you.”

  IX

  When we got there, the feminist activists put us up in their safe house, somewhere in Lower Dubrava. It wasn’t easy. At first they didn’t want to take us in at all. They had a negative opinion of Zaza and everything she represented. They downright despised me.

  Zaza broke into tears.

  “I won’t survive. I can’t survive. I’m the Old Man’s property.”

  That was the key word that stung them like a wasp. That was crucial for their decision, and eventually they let us stay with them.

  The house was a spacious two-story building, the ground floor of which was occupied by the offices of their association and the Cake and Cookies Bakery—a project the association set up to employ some of the women who came to them; it was run by two Slavonian women who made various pastries. Upstairs, on the second and third floors, there were abused women who had found refuge because they had either fled their homes or had been left without roofs over their heads. Some had children with them. Most of the women had sought safety from dangerous, abusive husbands.

  The activists were unhappy at our arrival from the first moment. Some speculated that we were runaway lovers and thought that we had no business seeking refuge in the house. Zaza tried to explain to the women running the place what kind of danger we were facing. Not all of them could truly grasp the situation, and they didn’t understand that the Old Man from the Mountain wasn’t just another enraged husband. An argument or two even broke out. In any case, our arrival was a disturbance for all those in the house.

  After a long conversation attended by an attorney, Zaza and I were allowed to stay for a short time. They gave us a room together. The first day Zaza didn’t want to say a single word to me. She crawled into the bed and cried until evening. And then, as we ate dinner, something snapped in her. Our food had been brought to our room because the feminists didn’t want us to be with the women and children in the dining room. We began to talk a little bit and considered our options until we turned in. We knew they were limited, most likely zero. Eventually we turned out the light, and a difficult, sleepless night began for us.

  X

  Since I had never seen the Old Man from the Mountain before, I had imagined him to be completely different. Hardly anyone had seen him. They said that he hid in various Balkan gorges. They said that he slept in a different location every night. They said that he never parted from his bodyguard of assassins, and that wherever he went an invisible army of sick, lame beggars accompanied him. Some said that no one guarded him, that he was his own best protection. Then they said that he’d been dead for years, if not centuries. And others said that he didn’t even exist.

  “And so, did you and Zaza end up together?”

  “Oh no, Zaza can’t stand me, she can’t stand the sight of me. She thinks I’ve destroyed her life with my indiscretion.”

  “You have.”

  “Can’t someone be forgiven for a blunder?”

  “It depends on how bad it is.”

  “A drunken lie.”

  “A dirty, low lie, no blunder. A lie that has deprived the Old Man from the Mountain of respect, and deprived the man and woman responsible for this of their lives.”

  “But she didn’t do anything at all.”

  “She did: she ran away and acted badly later. That’s what got her into trouble.”

  “Can’t it be made right somehow?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  XI

  On the third day of our stay in the safe house, the activists held a meeting. Another argument broke out. We heard everything because they had brought us into an adjoining room and left the door open. We could see them sitting around the table, serious and worried. They evidently wanted us to hear everything, including what they thought about us.

  Nevertheless, they kept their composure to a degree and started following their agenda.
First the representative of the obese women, someone named Vera, got into it with Marta, the one who was protecting us, about the cakes and pastries, demanding that the bakery leave the house and move somewhere else.

  “That’s out of the question. The bakery is one of our key projects and we receive considerable financial support for it.”

  “But those two Slavonian girls don’t have to always be shoving those cakes under our noses and tempting us.”

  “But that’s how they try to show their appreciation. If we refuse them, we’ll insult them.”

  “Those of us on the committee of weighty women have decided that they have to go. The members of the committee alone have gained more than fifteen kilograms since the Slavonians have been here.”

  “Well, show some restraint. Nobody’s forcing you to eat so many sweets.”

  “You’re fattening us up on purpose,” another one interjected.

  “Control yourselves, you’re not little children.”

  “This doesn’t concern you, because you don’t eat sweets. We can’t control ourselves,” Vera responded.

  The chairwoman looked her up and down scornfully. Marta was one of the eco-feminists. In the house we heard them calling her “Lettuce Head” behind her back.

  “Calm down, everyone. We’ll tell the women from the bakery not to bring so many cakes and cookies to the offices. From now on that stuff will be in the dining room. Are you happy now?”

  “No. The bakery is on its feet; its sales have finally picked up and it’s time for it to go independent. At the annual meeting I will request that the budget for next year include financial support for a seamstress shop for portly people. We want that to be our next project, and that’s our final word.”

  “We’ll talk about that when the time comes.”

  Fat Vera, not at all satisfied with the answers she’d received from Marta, withdrew indignantly. The next woman to talk was a gaunt blonde with hair hanging over her brow.

  “What are we gonna do with the Serbian singer and her mafioso?”

  At the mention of us, all those present started saying basically the same thing: “We don’t want them here! They should go! Now! Everyone in the house is uncomfortable because of them.”

  “Hold on, everyone, please,” the chairwoman said, trying to quiet them down somehow.

  “That Zaza represents everything we struggle against in this life, not to mention the criminal they’re running from,” the gaunt woman said. “They have no place here among us.”

  Marta tried to explain some things to them concerning the Old Man and his business. She spun a story greater and more dangerous than the old Persian tale. But those at the meeting were not impressed.

  “We don’t care. Who is this Old Man anyway, and what’s his line of work?!”

  “Drugs, human trafficking, funneling Muslim terrorists into Europe. People say all kinds of things, but no one really knows.”

  “Is he some Arab? An Iranian?”

  “No. But he’s a very dangerous and mysterious guy,” Marta explained, not without some admiration. “You hear all kinds of things. Nothing reliable, because journalists don’t dare write about him. As of late something strange is happening around him. People say he’s trying to unite all the Balkan criminal gangs into a single, invincible one. He’s something like a Tito of crime.”

  “Serbian folk singers and mafia!” the blonde exclaimed sarcastically. “That’s the only thing that can bring us together!”

  The others stayed silent, quietly fretting. Even Vera had become nervous and kept glancing down at her watch.

  “They’ll stay here until we arrange legal protection for them, and if something happens we’ll inform the media about their situation. Up to now we haven’t gone public about it, the matter is too sensitive.”

  “What’s been done so far?”

  “We informed the police. And they are seriously concerned about the guys who are after them.”

  That wasn’t easy to listen to, not for Zaza or myself. Zaza lowered her head. Ashamed and turned into culprits, we couldn’t even look one another in the eye.

  And then, at exactly three o’clock, the Old Man’s squad burst into the room with their weapons drawn. The assassins and the activists looked at one another for a moment without a word, and then the activists jumped up and there was screaming and yelling. A real battle began. At first the assassins didn’t handle themselves well, and the feminists, to their credit, fought like real men. Hoxa and another man immediately grabbed hold of me and Zaza, while Rico and Tafilj started wrestling with the women. The blonde bit Tafilj, and the chairwoman took some pepper spray out of her purse and started spraying the intruders. Then two more women grabbed pepper spray. Vera and her colleague threw themselves on Hoxa and knocked him down. Her colleague grabbed him by the legs and Vera stepped around Hoxa, raised her skirt, and sat down on his face with all her weight.

  “Oh God! Uh-huh! Yes! Yes!” the fat woman shouted, wriggling her behind on Hoxa’s face.

  The battle was short and bitter. People bit and hit at everything. In less than a minute the whole room was full of a cloud of pepper spray. In that chaos we broke free for a moment. We tried to run, but all I saw was Rico grabbing Zaza and knocking her down on the floor. And then someone got me from behind; I felt a sharp pain and lost consciousness.

  XII

  I woke up in a wooden trunk—awakened by both the noise of it hitting things and my being jostled around in it. At first I thought that they were lowering me into a grave in a coffin, and that they were going to bury me alive. Then they opened the trunk, untied my hands, and took a blindfold off my eyes. I had to get used to the light—and everything was shining all around me.

  Was this paradise? No, more likely it was a luxury hotel room. A little later I found out where I was. Definitely not in a grave. Rather, I was in the royal suite in the Opera Hotel, one of the most luxurious and expensive places in the city, which offered a magnificent view of Zagreb—one I would probably never have an opportunity to see again. Neither would I get to go back down to its streets. Nor walk and breathe.

  Zaza wasn’t in the room.

  The room was full of the Old Man’s assassins who were tending to their wounds from the battle with the feminists. They had been roughed up, but had done their job. The Old Man had evidently forbidden them from shooting, which was probably part of his deal with the fat woman. I remembered her being tense, nervous, how she kept looking at her watch. We’d been given away; I don’t see how they could have found us so quickly otherwise. Of course, it could have been any of them, even Marta. It no longer mattered anymore.

  Everything around me looked kind of like a hospital. Tafilj’s leg was being bandaged; it was all swollen with bites. Others put wet towels on their faces, trying to recover from the pepper spray. Only Hoxa was sitting in an armchair, somehow sullen and absent. The whole time he licked his lips as if he had something sweet in his mouth.

  “After they attacked us, we should have killed them all.”

  “And just look at him,” someone said, and pointed at Hoxa. “Poor thing, he’s gone crazy.”

  Hoxa seemed quite all right to me, just a little out of it.

  “And you? What are you looking at? You gave us a bit of work!”

  I lowered my head.

  A half hour later I was summoned before the Old Man.

  XIII

  I sensed that the questioning was coming to an end. Our fate would soon be decided.

  “So, you say that nothing happened between you and Zaza?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “If I ask her, will I get the same answer?”

  “You should.”

  “Of course. She wouldn’t be acting in her own interest. Only, I don’t know why the Old Man should believe either of you.”

  “Okay, what do I have to do so the Old Man will believe me?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” He gestured with his hand for me to leave. He called Hoxa over
and they spoke briefly. He intended to question his assassins and finally Zaza, so they led me out of the room.

  The Old Man held council with his men for a long time before they called us back in. I couldn’t know what his men had said, or the eyewitnesses that they had brought before him and who had bad-mouthed me from the beginning, and least of all what the beautiful Zaza told him. It was on account of her that I was in the worst trouble of my life. In other circumstances she’d probably have offered him my head on a platter to save her own. I wouldn’t blame her; many would have done that, probably most. But now, in order to protect herself she had to protect me. We would live or die together.

  On the other hand, a fair amount was also at stake for the Old Man. Our case might have consequences for his organization, for the success of his various business ventures, especially since we’d been abducted in front of numerous witnesses. I doubted whether someone whose existence was shrouded in such a veil of mystery would want that kind of publicity. Especially now, when there was more and more talk about the Old Man fashioning some terrible plan for a great unification.

  XIV

  The old man from the mountain’s coming down to town,

  Look out, look out . . .

  He put a pistol to my temple. It seemed this was it. Now it was a little too late to become a believer and pray. I closed my eyes and waited.

  Boom! And everything would be over.

  That was that. The sound of harpists . . .

  And then there was only a click.

  Maybe that was all you heard in your head. But—I kept on thinking. That meant I was alive.

  I let twenty or thirty seconds pass and only then did I open my eyes. The Old Man was at the window looking outside, with his back to me.

  “I’m sparing your life,” he said, “because you didn’t do anything. A joke doesn’t bother me, the Old Man from the Mountain likes more than anyone to hear a good joke about himself. But yours wasn’t any good. And you told an ugly lie, and so you can never work for me again. Too bad. I trusted you and was intending to invite you to an important meeting in a small town, as a delegate, where we’re going to talk about important matters—about business, the future, and the great unification. I forgive you for that too. But you remain excommunicated; you won’t participate in the making of history. Because the Old Man doesn’t forgive lies—so go away. Get lost before I change my mind.”