The Heart of Hell (24 page)

They stayed at the
pension
for three days. Strumbić said he had things to organize, and they had to be careful to keep their heads down. They were the only guests, and the laconic, irritable manager didn’t go out of his way for them. He did lend della Torre a small transistor radio and supplied both men with newspapers and the comic strip novels, mostly westerns, that were as widely consumed by Yugoslav men as by boys.

Sometimes della Torre sat in the small, gloomy dining room, or in the room that served as a bar, where the proprietor watched television for much of the day. In the evenings della Torre caught the news, which reported the Serbs’ version of Vukovar’s impending fall. The town was surrounded and all but crushed. He prayed Irena had gotten out. In those empty hours he imagined himself as a father. The thought made him at once happy and anxious.

The few times della Torre ventured out, the only other people he saw on the harbourfront wore camouflage and fatigues. The regular army and navy personnel didn’t worry him; what did worry him was the fact that they were outnumbered by the paramilitaries, especially the ones with wolf insignia patches. They were Chetnik men, thugs, and their uniforms and equipment were newer. They strutted with self-assurance, while the
JNA
conscripts looked like what they were, boys just out of school.

The Chetniks’ leader, the warlord Gorki, featured in the Belgrade papers every day, usually photographed with his pet wolf on a chain. He might have been a paramilitary, but he also governed regular troops. He had pull with the politicians, charisma, money, and the support of a private army.

He and most of his men were currently torturing Vukovar with their relentless explosive barrages. Della Torre shuddered to think what would happen to the town’s defenders when it capitulated. And with Vukovar subjugated, he supposed, Gorki would come to Dubrovnik and do the same there, like a spreading pathogen, his forward guard making sure his presence was felt at a distance. The Montenegrin had better recover soon, because Gorki was a mortal enemy.

For the first two days the prognosis was good, according to what Strumbić heard. The Montenegrin had been stabilized and was being given the best treatment available. But then his condition deteriorated. It seemed the doctors had missed a fragment of metal or bone that had splintered from the hip to the gut. Sepsis had set in, and the latest worry was that his kidneys were starting to pack up under the onslaught of infection.

“It’s time to go, Gringo,” Strumbić said. “We don’t want to be here if the Montenegrin kicks it. His men will remember us, and so will the police. I finally managed to organize some bus tickets and, more importantly, passes for us. Harder than it seems when you’re in the middle of the fucking enemy’s military zone. Would have been cheaper to fly the Concorde, if Herceg Novi had an airport instead of just a shitty bus station.” He looked harassed. But for della Torre it would be a relief to leave this place, even though it would be to a new set of dangers.

They were going to the heart of the Pilgrim mystery: Belgrade, the capital of what had once been Yugoslavia. Some of its power might have been shorn with the secession of two republics — Slovenia and Croatia — but it was still the capital of the rump state as well as of Serbia, an industrial powerhouse and the military centre. Della Torre had never much liked the city — it had been heavily damaged during the war and then rebuilt in a spiritless socialist aesthetic. As the home of
UDBA
and of all the major branches of government, it represented to him an oppressive bureaucracy. But it shocked him to think of the city as hostile territory and himself as an enemy of the state that he’d so recently served.

After an early breakfast on the morning of the fourth day, they left. At the bus station, the transport manager handed them two passes printed on cheap grey paper and covered in the requisite stamps. He then drew aside the military policeman responsible for checking documents, for an impromptu cigarette break.

Strumbić found the slow coach to Sarajevo, where he had a word with the driver, handing him the passes along with a few dinar notes in addition to the fare.

The bus set off, making its way through the coastal valleys of striated white stone broken like old men’s teeth, and then crawling behind columns of military vehicles. It was frequently stopped at roadblocks. But the soldiers manning the posts never gave Strumbić’s and della Torre’s passes more than a cursory glance. If they were looking for deserters, a couple of middle-aged men weren’t going to interest them much.

The bus trundled deeper into Bosnia. Telephone poles marked the route like the crucifixes that once lined the Via Appia. The landscape slowly changed from hard stone and scrub to verdant mountains covered in larch, beech, and oak. Here were deep gorges and wilderness, a vast estate of lynx, bear, and wolf. In the old days, the men who lived there — hunters and, on the high pastureland, goat herders — had been just as untamed.

It was here more than anywhere that the Partizans and the Germans had fought without mercy, that Fitzroy Maclean and Tito only just escaped the Wehrmacht paratroopers sent in their hundreds to capture them, that Tito was finally forced to abandon his sick and wounded men, and that those men were slaughtered. But then, the Partizans had had no use for prisoners either. It was said their ghosts wandered those valleys with the morning mist.

It was a strange country, claimed by Bosnian Serbs and by Croats and Muslims, including those who had converted from Christianity and those who had come from Albania. Serbs had been transplanted there by the Austro-Hungarians to preserve a buffer against the Turks, and the Croats rightly or wrongly claimed precedence.

Every grudge, every debt was hidden deep in the chasms of history but secretly nurtured over generations. Who knew where they would spring up again or when. Bosnia’s tribes were like the raw limestone landscape, into which streams of resentments would disappear only to rise somewhere distant, even under the sea.

Della Torre smoked Strumbić’s endless supply of imported Winstons. “You must be the luckiest gambler who ever existed. You could park yourself in a casino and never need to leave,” he said, tiring of their silence.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘gamble.’”

“Oh, you know, taking these huge risks and always coming out of them with a bigger fortune. If London was a setback, you made twice as much in Dubrovnik.”

Strumbić laughed. “If only, Gringo, if only.”

“But even if you haven’t made it all back, surely you’ve got enough. You don’t need any more. What is it now? Why keep taking the risks? Or is it an addiction?”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Gringo. No amount of money can get you far enough from the memory of growing up poor. And I mean so poor that you don’t own your own pair of shoes until you’re old enough to earn the money to buy them yourself, when the house you grew up in is two rooms and the floor is boards on dirt, and when the only heat you’ve ever had comes from the wood you’ve chopped. Not something you Americans can understand. Over there, even the peasants are rich.”

It was della Torre’s turn to laugh. “My father would laugh to hear I grew up rich.”

“Gringo, when you grow up using chestnut leaves to wipe your ass, the man with an indoor toilet is rich. You’re right, though, I’ve got enough. The money is neither here nor there. But I’m not a gambler. For one thing, real gambling is putting something on the line you can’t afford to lose, and the odds aren’t particularly good. Think about things that way and you realize you’re the gambler, Gringo. For me, mostly it’s an intellectual challenge. Like Dubrovnik. How many cigarettes do you stock up on? How many should you sell? Or do you wait for the price to go higher? Do you dump your holdings when people find out the armada’s coming to save them? Or do you pay some docker in Split to unload all the cigarettes and then sell into the panic when the boats arrive with only half the expected supplies? These are all hypotheticals, mind.”

Strumbić grinned at della Torre’s shock. “A lot of the money that comes in goes out. Who was the guy who said, ‘I spent ninety percent of my money on women and booze, and the rest I wasted?’ Eh?” Strumbić laughed, but only for a moment. “But seriously, Gringo, ultimately money matters because it gives you control. You don’t need me to tell you this.”

“Power?”

“Call it what you like. Power. Surplus. Influence. An ability to say fuck off to the world if you want. The Montenegrin has it. Or maybe had it. Me?” He shrugged. “Sometimes. But not with those Americans you got me tangled up with . . .”

“Julius, I’ve never seen a man more desperate to be entangled. You did everything you could to get me to hook you up with the Americans.”

“We’re not apportioning blame right now, Gringo. We’ll sort ourselves out, eh? Get the Americans off our backs, maybe even make them learn to love us.”

“Sure, Julius,” della Torre said, without a trace of hope.

The bus was slow and full, pulling into every town along the way big enough to have a steeple or a minaret. At longer stops, they got off to buy beers and to piss. They smoked and watched the landscape pass by, wooden farmhouses and modern concrete and cinder-block buildings, split-rail fence posts and clearings of corn or pasture hemmed in by forests, until at long last they arrived in Sarajevo, deep in the folds of its mountains.

They waited until everyone else was off the bus, and then Strumbić finished paying off the driver, who smiled at them as if he was fixing their faces in his memory.

They stayed the night in an anonymous hotel, Strumbić’s Deutschmarks supplanting the need for identity documents at the front desk.

Della Torre tried to get through to Irena, but still no answer at the flat, her office, or the hospital in Zagreb. She had to have left Vukovar. He was certain of it. Maybe she’d gone to London with her Dr. Cohen, he thought with a jealous twinge.

In the morning there were problems with the train link between Sarajevo and Belgrade, so it was back to the bus station. But there were no seats to be had until Strumbić had a word with someone, who had a word with someone else. The passengers who thought they’d reserved seats were irate, but there was a certain fatalism to their protests. Neither della Torre nor Strumbić felt ashamed. It was the way things had always been.

The highway was single-lane and winding. Military traffic in both directions kept the roads congested. Della Torre wondered whether the rail network had been taken over for tank transport, because there were only troop carriers and army trucks and buses on the roads.

They didn’t arrive in Belgrade until well after dark. This time Strumbić maintained their anonymity not by paying off a clerk at the front desk of a hotel, but by taking them to a brothel. He didn’t know how long they’d be staying, and the longer they did, the more chance they’d be sold out to the state security.

“It’s more expensive than a hotel, no question, and they only take foreign currency. Cash. But the accommodation is nice. Food’s good. They’re discreet, and there’s room service.” He gave della Torre a conspiratorial wink.

Belgrade always made della Torre uneasy: its strangeness, the fact that everything was in the Cyrillic alphabet. He could read it, but, having grown up in America, it represented to him foreignness, Russia, the Cold War enemy.

But there was something deeper too. The feeling that here he was on the edge of another world. Jason and his Argonauts had passed this way, in their desperate flight towards the Adriatic from those mysterious lands to the east, after stealing the Golden Fleece. Belgrade’s fortress on the bluff, overlooking the confluence of the Sava with the Danube, was where the Orient began. Or ended.

The brothel consisted of three inconspicuous storeys above a corner grocery store in a small, nondescript postwar block, grey flaking concrete and metal roll-down shutters over the windows. Strumbić pressed a buzzer between the shop and what looked like a traditional family restaurant that was shut and dark. He whispered a name into the intercom and the door buzzed open. They were in a hall with a terrazzo floor; a stairwell was in front of them, and there was no sign of anyone or anything under the stark fluorescent lighting.

Strumbić took the stairs two at a time, moving fast for a heavy set middle-aged man. The door to the second-storey apartment opened before he knocked, and a pleasant-looking woman of indeterminate age, though probably not much younger than della Torre, ushered them in.

“Two rooms for a few days. One full service.” Strumbić looked questioningly at della Torre, who shook his head. “One full service; the other hasn’t yet decided.”

“Do you mind staying in the top-floor suite?”

“Busy?”

“Not really, but if you’re here for a few days, it gives you a little extra privacy.” Her eyes explained that privacy had a price.

“Discount?”

The woman was at once friendly and coy and ironic. “But you always get a discount, sir. And so do your friends.”

Strumbić shook his head and grinned. “Discounts like yours will send a man to the poorhouse.” He pulled a fat roll of German currency out of his coat pocket and lay down some notes. “Three days,” he said, looking over to della Torre and then putting down a few more notes. “Four. One full service. Any add-ons, stick on the bill. Any chance of sending something up for us tonight? A man develops a hunger.”

“Whatever you desire.”

“Then a couple of American steak sandwiches with fried potatoes. You want cheese, Gringo?”

Della Torre nodded with as much
savoir faire
as he could muster.

“Make it with cheese on both, and a couple of blonde beers. And a couple of blondes to deliver it.”

DRAGOMANOV’S APARTMENT WAS
less than a twenty-minute walk from the brothel. Winter was already settling on the city. Cleaners swept the fallen leaves off the streets, but more accumulated behind them. Della Torre could see his breath in the air and feel the cold through his light autumn coat.

They set out in the morning and found the building without trouble. It had been built between the wars, somehow retaining its reserved art deco detailing, which lifted the mood of its grey pebble-dash. It was five storeys high and took up the whole of a big city block. The main entrance was guarded by two uniformed sentries in what looked like adapted phone booths on either side. They sat, bored and watchful, on high stools, rifles on the floor next to them. Formerly
UDBA
, now Serb secret service, della Torre figured. Through the double glass doors he could see a reception desk manned by another uniformed guard.

He and Strumbić took a turn around the building. A large gated archway led to a central courtyard, where they could see about a dozen top-end German and Italian cars and a couple of Zastavas that looked like beggars at a banquet. In the centre of the block, a great spreading chestnut tree officiated. Della Torre wondered whether its conkers dented the cars when they dropped in the autumn. All along his road in Zagreb, they fell with a sound like hail on shantytown tin roofs.

The carriageway was also guarded, though the sentry boxes here were under the shelter of the entrance arch, behind the wrought-iron gates. Two foot patrols, each with a pair of uniformed police, made the rounds. And there was a patrol car at each of the building’s long ends.

“Well, nice to see our masters take their security seriously,” Strumbić said.

“I think maybe today we’ll go to that place across the road, have a coffee, and watch for their shifts to end,” della Torre said.

“Well, we shouldn’t make it too obvious. I’d be surprised if the staff weren’t bosom buddies with the sentries.”

There weren’t many pedestrians, and della Torre knew that if he and Strumbić loitered, they’d be clocked by the police and quite possibly asked to present documents. His
UDBA
ID definitely wouldn’t pass muster here, and when they found his Croatian military document, his circumstances would almost certainly become very unpleasant.

“Maybe somewhere else,” Strumbić said as they were about to cross the road to the café. He stooped suddenly and pulled della Torre by the sleeve.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Just keep your head down and walk fast. Remember that American who escorted me on the flight to Zagreb because Rebecca found me inconvenient in Dubrovnik? You know the guy, seemed to be running their whole show.”

“John Dawes?”

“That’s the man.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but I don’t want to go back and ask.”

They found another café with a worse line of sight but no other customers.

“He’s probably just there for the coffee. The American embassy’s not too far away.”

“Or an early morning beer,” della Torre said, lighting a cigarette and passing the packet to Strumbić.

“Maybe he’s here for the weather.”

“There are plenty of other leading ex-Communists who live in the building. He could be visiting any one of them.”

“All of them.”

Neither found the joke funny just then.

They stared out the plate-glass window, straining to see the apartment building’s front door.

“They’ve beaten us to him,” della Torre said.

They both had the same thoughts. The Americans had tried to kill the Montenegrin. They were hunting for them both. After that, only Dragomanov would be left.

“Or they’re keeping an eye on him. Or waiting for us to show up.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t delay our visit,” della Torre said. “Though it won’t be fun trying to figure out how to get in.”

“You’ve got the apartment number, right?”

“Yes.”

“So we can work out approximately where he is.”

“Third floor.”

“The building’s a lot like mine,” Strumbić said. He lived in one of the best Hapsburg blocks in Zagreb. Most of the apartment buildings from that era were more like a collection of very large townhouses, separate buildings each with a front door leading to a staircase with two large or four small apartments on each floor. But Strumbić’s was an integrated block, big enough to have central corridors with larger apartments facing the street and smaller ones looking into the courtyard. The biggest apartments were at the ends of the corridors and faced both the street and the courtyard. Strumbić had one of those, and they were betting Dragomanov did too.

“You know what?” said Strumbić. “Normally I’d have said let’s spend some time scouting the place, do some planning. But fuck it, Gringo, we haven’t got time. What we’ve got instead is money. You got your gun?”

“No.”

“Well, we have to settle our bill with the ladies,” Strumbić said. “Might as well get ourselves sorted there now. If things go tits up, we won’t want to hang around.”

It was early and only two people were at the brothel, a middle-aged receptionist and a girl barely out of her teens, sitting on the sofa and smoking a cigarette with her morning coffee. Strumbić drew the receptionist aside.

“Janica, what do you know about that hairdressing salon . . .” he was saying as della Torre disappeared upstairs to their suite. He packed his few things and popped the Beretta into his jacket pocket, and then waited for Strumbić to sort himself out. They left their bags with the receptionist.

“You know where to send them in case we can’t get back,” Strumbić said, passing the woman a fifty-Deutschmark bill.

“You’ll be back,” she said with a wink and a smile. Their footsteps echoed down the stairwell as they left.

Strumbić led them to a hair salon della Torre hadn’t noticed. It was one of the various shops set into the ground floor of Dragomanov’s building, around the corner from the main entrance to the apartments. The place was marked by a narrow, tall window in which an unlit neon Frizerka sign hung, along with a poster of a woman whose hairstyle was a 1970s Yugoslav imitation of 1960s British chic.

Strumbić pushed the door to the left of the window and walked up the steps into the long, narrow salon. A woman sitting under a large dryer hood flicked her eyes towards them, and the youngest of the three hairdressers got out of her chair and gave them a bland, bored look. She, like the others, was wearing a baby-blue uniform dress with white piping. Her hair was cut straight in a bob that looked like a wig.

“This is a ladies-only salon,” she said, the vowels rounded in what might have been mock elegance if they hadn’t sounded so earnest.

“Is Mrs. Gavrilović here?”

One of the older women stood up and approached him. “That’s me.”

“Janica said you might be able to do me a favour.”

She stared at him and then nodded. “We can have a cigarette outside,” she said.

Della Torre stood, embarrassed, while Strumbić and the woman stepped out onto the pavement, out of sight of the main window. “Getting cold,” he said to the women there, who looked at him appraisingly, as an auctioneer might consider a prize steer.

“Winter,” said the youngest of the three. “Every year it’s the same.”

The other two laughed, and the girl said, “What?” Blushing, she turned her back to della Torre.

He sat down on a red leatherette seat, but not for long. The woman Strumbić had been talking to came back in. “Your friend’s waiting for you,” she said.

“What’s up?” della Torre asked, stepping back onto the pavement.

“Now we wait for lunchtime. We’d better wait in that friendly café. I don’t feel like being stopped by a cop and having to explain why I’ve got a gun in my pocket.”

So they sauntered over, behaving like any pair of Belgrade bureaucrats armed with newspapers and cigarettes.

“So what do you tell Mrs. Strumbić?” della Torre asked, once they’d ordered sandwiches.

“About what?”

“About how much time you spend away. About how you’ve got more money than a pasha. About anything.”

“I tell her whatever she’s willing to believe.”

“And you think that’s enough.”

“You ever hear the one about the guy whose wife tells him she’ll divorce him if he ever comes home drunk again? Well, he goes out and drinks most of the night and throws up on himself. His friend says, ‘Not to worry. Put a twenty-Deutschmark note in your pocket, and when you get home, you tell your wife that some stupid German tourist vomited on you but gave you a twenty-Deutschmark note for the cleaning bill.’ So he goes home. Wife opens the door and is immediately outraged. But he holds up his hands and says how somebody threw up on him and gave him the money for the dry cleaning bill. ‘But you’ve got two twenty-Deutschmark notes,’ she says. ‘Ah,’ he replies, ‘the other one’s from the guy who shat in my trousers.’”

Strumbić roared with laughter until the tears trickled out of the corners of his eyes, and della Torre found it impossible to resist the humour.

At twelve thirty they left and went back to the hair salon. The older woman was waiting for them at the front door. Otherwise, it was empty.

She led them in, and then to a door at the back. “You steal anything or tell anyone about this, and I’ll make sure Janica hears about it,” she said.

The door opened into a stockroom that smelled of peroxide and perfume. Strumbić passed her two twenty-Deutschmark notes. His calling cards. Della Torre marvelled at how the cop hemorrhaged money without batting an eye.

She found a key for a door that led to a very steep set of wooden stairs, switching on the light for them. “We don’t reopen until three. Make sure you’re out by then.”

Strumbić didn’t reply.

The cellar was low and smelled of damp. It hadn’t been used to store coal for at least a generation. Now it was filled with junk: a couple of old hairdresser’s chairs, dusty drying hood, boxes, paint pots, and a child’s bicycle. But the path to the little door at the back was clear. They walked through cobwebs.

The back door had swollen into its frame so that it budged only when Strumbić put his shoulder to it. Cautiously they stepped into the courtyard. A buttress of wall hid them from the guards at the carriage gate, but they had to surface soon enough when they crossed the car park, the open space under the chestnut tree, to the building’s back door. Della Torre ducked between a Mercedes and a canvas-sided truck.

“Get up,” Strumbić said.

“The guards will see us.”

“So what? It’s their business to keep people out, not to bother anybody who’s already in. For all they know, we came in through the main entrance and had to come out here for a smoke or to fetch something for whoever owns this car. Just act normally and they’ll mind their own business. But if you go scuttling around, they’re going to start wondering.”

So they walked between the car and truck and then across the courtyard, as if in conversation. Not hurried but not aimless either.

The back door was unlocked. It led down to the basement, and they stepped into a dimly lit low corridor bounded by storage rooms along both sides and ending at the bottom of the main stairwell. To climb up, they knew they’d be in sight of the guard at the desk just inside the main entrance. With hands in pockets, slightly stooped, they took the stairs looking as if they were talking about money. When they got to the first landing, they moved to the wall side, out of sight of the main doorway. It was all della Torre could do to stop himself from bolting. His heart pounded as though he was running it at a sprint.

When they got to the landing they wanted, they followed a long corridor off the staircase, lit mostly by daylight. At the end they saw a door with a black plastic rectangle with the name
Dragomanov
engraved in white. It had three locks needing three different keys, one ordinary, two special security.

“I guess we either knock on the door or break it down,” della Torre said.

Strumbić knelt at the door. “Gringo, you stand facing the hallway, give me a bit of cover.”

“What are you going to do, slip yourself through the keyhole?”

“Something like that.”

Della Torre saw he had a ring of keys in his hand and then realized it was a set of lock picks.

“Eyes on the corridor,” Strumbić said.

“That’ll be fine for the simple lock, but those picks won’t work for the security locks.”

“They don’t have to. Didn’t you tell me that a nurse comes once a day, and so does the housekeeper or whatever she is?”

“Yes.”

“What are the chances a nurse or housekeeper triple-locks behind them when visiting? What are the chances he gives them copies of the security keys? He’ll make it secure at night. But if people are coming and going, it’s just going to be this one.”

Strumbić worked quickly while he spoke, manoeuvring the pins in the mechanism.

“Two one-point-five-millimetre hex keys do the trick, one straight and one curved. I keep them with a couple of bump keys. If I can’t pick them I can bump them open, if they’re standard types. Crowbar works best for security locks,” he said. The lock clicked and he pulled down the handle, pushing the door silently.