The Heart of Hell (26 page)

“One man’s death. Well, two. There was the German as well . . .” Dragomanov began. “Odd, isn’t it. Kill a vicious dictator, and the revolution that follows will cause untold misery. Kill a Western politician, and all that results is a stack of Ph.D. theses and conspiracy theories. Tito died a natural death, and slowly the world he built crumbles. Palme is killed, and . . . nothing.”

“Just another dead man,” della Torre said.

“And what do you propose to do with the information now?” Dragomanov asked. He had recovered his composure. “It’s worth less than you think.”

Strumbić had been studying the room in a desultory way.

“Where’s the key to the safe?” he asked.

Dragomanov paused, and then said, “In the top right drawer.”

Strumbić contemplated the desk for a moment as if slow to understand. Then he opened the drawer. He removed the keys.

“Now, where’s the safe?”

Dragomanov nodded to a cupboard at the base of the bookshelves behind della Torre. Strumbić stepped around the desk and then stopped. He continued walking, behind della Torre to a corner of the room opposite the window overlooking the spreading chestnut tree.

“Not there,” Dragomanov said. “There.”

Strumbić ignored him.

“What are you doing? I said there.”

Strumbić stopped at the corner stove. It was like any other ceramic stove in the country, tall and broad and decorated with green tiles. The lack of gas pipes told that it hadn’t been converted but was kept in the old style, fuelled by scraps of wood in its small, low firebox. Utilities weren’t always reliable but wood could often be collected cheaply, and it burned, leaving barely a dusting of ash. The complex system of flues would dissipate all the fire’s energy into its brick-and-mortar structure, so that the exhaust gases, when they finally climbed the chimney, would be no warmer than a man’s breath. It was eminently practical, efficient. Another technological gift from the distant Swedes centuries before.

Strumbić put his hand on the stove and contemplated it.

Dragomanov rose from his seat, his face flushed, tiny rosettes of colour high on his yellow cheeks. “I said it was —”

“I heard you,” Strumbić said. “Sit down and calm yourself. I just wanted to warm my hands first. The keys are small, and I’ve got problems with my circulation.”

“Oh,” Dragomanov said. “Well, you won’t get any heat out of that. Hasn’t worked in years.”

“Room’s not too cold.”

“There’s an electric radiator behind the desk. I’m surprised you didn’t notice it.”

“Expensive way of heating a big apartment.”

“It’s only this room. The stoves work elsewhere.”

“Gas?”

“Of course,” the old man said, sounding relieved.

“I suppose, if it doesn’t work, you won’t mind my taking the top off then?”

Dragomanov jerked upright.

“Sit down. If I have to say it again, I’ll nail you to the fucking armchair,” Strumbić said as he gripped the top of the stove with both hands, the gun back in his coat pocket.

Della Torre was transfixed. Normally stoves would have to be chiselled apart, tiles taken off first and then the mortar knocked off the bricks. It was, he well knew, an expensive and slow business cleaning these things. But the tiled top came off easily and Strumbić placed it on the floor.

And there was the safe he was looking for. He turned the key, pulled a lever, and opened it.

“So, what am I looking for? Or shall we take the whole lot?” Strumbić said, removing box after box of files. The stove seemed to be a bottomless well of secrets.

Dragomanov shook with rage. And fear.

“Wait, you don’t need to tell us.” Strumbić passed a box to della Torre, clearly labelled
Pilgrim
in Cyrillic.

The storm within the old man had passed and now he sat there, drained.

“Those won’t do you any good,” Dragomanov said, waving his hand with a show of indifference.

“Why?”

“They are incomplete. Worthless without their other half.”

“There’s more?” della Torre asked.

“What sort of fool do you take me for? Do you really think I’d keep everything in one place?”

“Where’s the rest?”

“Ah, where no one — not you, not the Americans, no one — can reach it now. But later, when I need it . . .” He shrugged as if to say he wasn’t finished yet, not by a long shot.

“Where?”

The old man laughed. “Where no one can go just now. Where they’re safe from you, from the Americans, from everyone.”

“We’re not playing games,” Strumbić hissed, looming over Dragomanov so that there was no mistaking his intentions.

Dragomanov shrank back, but his knowledge gave him the strength of defiance. “In Vukovar.” He laughed with a sepulchral hollowness.

Della Torre and Strumbić looked at each other with a sense of defeat as the light rekindled in the old man’s eyes. In the middle of a bitter siege, a war zone of total destruction, Dragomanov was right to feel victorious.

Della Torre rose, feeling as ancient as the man he faced. “Can I ask one more question?”

Dragomanov looked up from his lap, his face yellow with sickness and a lifetime of nicotine.

“Why Pilgrim?”

“I explained —”

“No, why the name?”

“Oh.” Dragomanov’s breathing was shallow and laboured. “English is my favourite language, even more than Latin. Difficult to learn, but infinite. You can never properly appreciate Shakespeare in any other language.” He paused. “
Palmer
is an archaic word for pilgrim in English. Pilgrim, palmer, Palme.”

The buzzer at the door sounded. Dragomanov revived. His eyes were alert, and a faint look of satisfaction creased his face.

STRUMBIĆ TURNED TO
the old man. “When did you say you were expecting the Americans?”

“In the afternoon.”

“Who else comes during the day?”

Dragomanov shrugged. “A neighbour, maybe.”

“The nurse?”

“Not now.”

“Someone to bring you lunch?”

“I fix my own lunch. There’s a woman who brings my shopping, but that’s not her.”

“Who is it?”

“Ask,” Dragomanov said, suddenly insouciant. In that moment, della Torre could see a flicker of the once powerful man inside the fading carapace. The light, the force of charisma, the luck. Women had thrown themselves at him all his life, film stars and wives of famous Communists. Tito had retained his services for all those years when the dictator had broken with so many other ancient allies, exiling some, having others murdered.

“Wait here,” Strumbić said. He crossed the hall and went from room to room until he reached the apartment door.

The buzzer sounded again.

“Now that they know you’re here, you won’t get out,” Dragomanov said.

“They know we’re here?”

“I have no doubt. The guards downstairs are mostly for show, to keep the riff-raff out. But this building is under close observation. Because they’re as afraid of us as we are of —”

“The apartment is bugged,” della Torre said.

“Of course. And watched. They’ll know who you are by now.”

Why had he been so complacent? He picked up a pen and a yellow legal pad from the desk and wrote:
What’s the other way out?

Dragomanov shook his head.

The buzzer rang again.

Strumbić slipped back into the room beside the front door and then heaved a massive walnut rococo side table with a marble top against the tall twin doors. Men began pounding and pushing from the other side. The wood creaked under their weight, the blows accentuated by their bellowed command to open.

“Time to go, Gringo,” Strumbić said, panting down the hall. “And bring all that Pilgrim stuff. If people are willing to kill for it, it must be worth something.”

Della Torre grabbed the files and turned away from the main entrance. The back end of the hall was a good thirty metres from the front, but still too close. The door cracked, split, was only just held shut by the marble console.

“There’s another staircase at the back, right? These rich places all have one. Mine has one,” Strumbić said. Big 1930s apartments like Dragomanov’s often had separate servants’ entrances through the scullery or a storage room with a separate, narrow stairway, so that the bourgeois owners wouldn’t need to pass each other’s servants in the public areas.

The room at the end of the hall was full of tins with rusty rims, dusty cartons of juice, and stacked cardboard boxes. Della Torre had only just stepped in when he heard the crack of a bullet hitting the wall somewhere near him. He caught sight of Dragomanov standing in the hall, holding a long-barrelled pistol.

“What the —?” Strumbić said, turning in surprise.

“I think it’s a P38. Must have got it from some dead German officer . . .”

“The fuck I care where he got it. Shut that fucking door and bolt it, then come in here and help me move some of this shit so we can get to the back door before the old bastard blows our brains out. If the fucking Americans or whoever it is don’t get to us first.”

Della Torre did as he was told, securing the storage room door behind him.

Strumbić was already moving with whirlwind fury, shifting boxes full of papers and books, clearing a way to the back door and what he knew must be a servants’ staircase. The space was too confined for della Torre to help. It was a one-man job, so he looked ineffectually on. A second shot rang out from the hall.

“Rather than being as useful as tits on a nun, why don’t you have a pop back at him,” Strumbić said.

Della Torre pulled the Beretta from his pocket and fired at the door. The noise in that small, hard-surfaced area left his ears ringing. It shut the old man up for the moment. Strumbić had reached the little back door, which was built to fit under the slope of a flight of stairs. He pounded at the rusty bolt with the fat spine of a law book he’d pulled from one of the boxes, until the book’s cover shattered. But he’d loosened the bolt enough to wiggle it free.

Della Torre could hear more people on the other side of the door. If the Americans had Uzis, they’d make short work of them. Strumbić sweated, heaving at the little back door until it finally gave way under his weight.

“Come on,” he said.

The stairwell was gloomy, lit by a tiny window. The stairs were steep and wooden, the space narrow, barely wide enough for Strumbić. It smelled of damp and ancient whitewash turned powdery on the walls. Strumbić negotiated the stairs with incredible speed while della Torre followed clumsily, tripping at the bottom step and almost ploughing into Strumbić’s back.

“Fuck,” Strumbić muttered, looking over his shoulder.

“What is it?”

“Somebody’s shoved a fucking sofa down this stairwell and there’s no fucking way we’ll get past it unless you remembered to bring an axe.”

They could hear the sound of splintering wood above them.

Strumbić levelled his handgun at another little servants’ door, a twin of the one upstairs, and fired at the lock at an angle, to avoid any ricochet. Once, twice, three times, until the lock broke. And then, with a series of mighty kicks, he pounded at it until the frame gave way.

“Open fucking sesame,” Strumbić said, his breathing laboured.

They were in another storage room, this one marginally less packed full of junk. They still had to squeeze over a dusty armchair and a chest of drawers to get in. The wallpaper was a faded floral pattern, peeling and water-stained, almost certainly predating the war.

Della Torre dropped the box. The files spilled out into the narrow space between the chest and the wall. Overhead, he could hear the besiegers making progress. “Wait,” he shouted.

“What now?”

“I dropped the files,” della Torre said.

“Smart.”

Somehow della Torre managed to gather all the papers and tapes and keep a hold of them as he righted himself. He burst out of the little room, shoving the papers back into their box, panic mounting as noise built in the small stairwell behind them.

An ancient couple stared in shock as della Torre and Strumbić raced down their hallway. The man belatedly gathered his voice — reedy, hollow, but so familiar.

Strumbić scrabbled at the various bolts and locks on the door, then threw it open. And then della Torre almost knocked him over as Julius reached back into the apartment to grab a lady’s large white handbag the size of a small suitcase.

They tore down the main staircase until they were at the back door that opened to the courtyard. They could hear their pursuers’ footsteps, sprinting now.

“Run like your life depends on it,” Strumbić said. “Because it does.”

They ran past the giant chestnut tree and reached the parked black Mercedes before the
pop pop
of a small-calibre handgun reached them. The door to the coal cellar was open. Strumbić ducked in, followed by della Torre.

“You know what, Julius?” he said, panting up the wooden stairs, “I’ve figured you for a lot of things, but never a purse snatcher.”

The door to the hairdresser’s stockroom remained unlocked.

Strumbić handed the bag to della Torre. “Stick the files in here so you don’t lose them.”

They passed through the salon and down to the front entrance, but it was locked from the outside.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Strumbić said, rattling the plate-glass door. “What did she think, that we were going to sit around and do our nails until she got back?”

He looked at the door and then went back up the stairs. He lifted a massive dryer hood, hauled it down the steps to ground level, and heaved it at the glass door. He stepped past the jagged shards that clung to the steel frame and over the machine’s carcass onto the street.

Della Torre followed, carrying the handbag.

Strumbić jumped in front of a taxi with its light on.

“You got a problem? Want to get run over?” the driver said, but he was too slow to turn them down. Both Strumbić and della Torre had already squeezed into the back seat.

“Go, just go. Straight. We’ll tell you where to turn in a minute.”

“If you’ve just mugged an old lady —”

“We haven’t mugged anybody,” Strumbić said. “There’s a hundred Deutschmarks that says so. But only if you’re fast.”

The driver put his foot on it.

Neither della Torre nor Strumbić dared to look back; they just slid low in their seats.

As they caught their breath, della Torre realized there would be nowhere safe for them to hide in Belgrade. They’d be found. Even the brothel, in some ways as safe and sacred as a confessional, wouldn’t hide them for long. And there were the rest of Dragomanov’s papers. Della Torre didn’t know what was in the Pilgrim file they’d taken, but he knew enough to believe the old man when he’d said they were incomplete.

So he leaned forward and said to the driver, “Keep going west. Head towards Vukovar.”