The Heart of Hell (28 page)

THEY CAME TO
a group of farm sheds, the biggest a long, high cinder-block barn with a run of small, high windows and a roof of galvanized metal. Gorki’s men were smoking outside. They came to attention, saluting self-consciously, when the officer commissioned with finding the boy for della Torre and Strumbić stepped out of the armoured car. One tried to hide a bottle of Bell’s whisky.

An occasional cry rose from the barn, and then they heard the sound of gunfire from the cornfield behind them. Farther away was a near-continuous roar of field guns, followed by explosions.

A militiaman pulled open one of the barn’s large sliding doors. The interior was dimly lit.

Five Serb militiamen went in ahead of them. The scores of people inside edged away from the soldiers. The straw spread across the concrete floor was dark in patches. The room smelled of barnyard and sour blood. A few voices called out, begging for water, claiming their innocence. One of Gorki’s men raised his rifle butt and told them to be quiet. Della Torre saw women and old men among the prisoners.

They found the boy called Plavi hiding at the back. The small, skinny youth was dragged to his feet by one of the militiamen.

He had shoulder-length fair hair and a small, slight build, and he was wearing a sleeveless dark blue dress patterned with small blue flowers underneath a plaid shirt and a heavy canvas camouflage jacket. He also had on heavy woollen stockings and solid hiking boots. Plavi looked like a girl.

The soldier dragged him towards the armoured car. His mascara had run and he had a split lip and a crust of blood under his nose. “In.” The soldier shoved the youth inside and directed della Torre and Strumbić to climb in as well. The boy looked fearfully up at them as the car moved off.

“Are you the one called Plavi?” della Torre asked.

He nodded.

“We’re friends. You’ve been released so that you can help us get into Vukovar. I’m a friend of Lieutenant Boban’s. Do you know who he is?” Boban had been the right-hand man to the police chief in nearby Osijek; the chief had been assassinated for trying to reconcile the Serb and Croat communities. Last summer, della Torre had met and warmed to both men.

Plavi nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” It was a boy’s voice, high but with a male resonance.

The armoured car took them along an asphalt road. Through a small porthole, della Torre could see a handful of collapsed suburban houses, each with a courtyard and front garden, the roses all gone to hips by now. There was no sign of life in any of them.

They saw a couple of militiamen squatting down on the narrow grass verge by the side of the road. Immediately beyond, lining both sides of the road, were the rich, green, and unfeasibly high cornfields. A fragment of a tune trickled through della Torre’s brain:
as high as an elephant’s eye
.

“That’s as far as we go. Out,” Gorki’s officer said as they pulled up by a clutch of suburban ruins within sight of Vukovar’s water tower. Della Torre nervously stepped out of the armoured car, followed by Plavi and Strumbić, who was still clutching the white handbag.

From somewhere they heard a shot and its whining whistle passing overhead. Della Torre’s throat was dry. They stood in the shadow of a half-destroyed wall as the armoured car pulled away. Plavi looked as though he didn’t believe what was happening.

“Can you get us into Vukovar?” della Torre asked.

The boy nodded.

Strumbić had been shocked into silence.

The boy guided them past houses whose roofs had collapsed and rafters were exposed, revealing home-cured hams hanging like strange fruit.

They made their way through overgrown back gardens with unpicked beans, their dried husks hanging from bamboo canes made into tripod frames. A glossy toy tractor sat neglected in the grass. Della Torre stumbled on an iron reinforcing rod, leaving him with a sore shin.

They heard a roar of engines not far away.

“Tanks,” the boy said, sniffing the air.

Della Torre couldn’t see the tanks, but he could hear them spitting angrily. He was hit by the pungent smells of cordite, powdered cement, burning plastic, rubber, and wood, and by the sharper odour of rotting flesh. Buildings exploded and crumbled, metal squealed, and then they heard a sudden cascade of tiles.

“
Midway through life’s journey,
”
he spoke from memory, amended to his circumstances, “
I found myself in a dark ruin. How I got there I know not, nor did I know the way back. It was a harsh place, harsh to remember, wild, lacerating, so that even its memory fills me with fear. A place as bitter as death, and though among its debris and destruction there was good to be found, so too was there much else.
”

They were lines his father had often recited over the years. Sometimes he said them as a joke, like when they were repairing the decrepit farmhouse. But sometimes he’d spoken them with great melancholy.

“Gringo,” Strumbić said, “this may be cheering you up, but it isn’t doing me a lot of good.”

“Sorry.”

Plavi motioned for them to halt. Looking both ways along a street full of rubble, he led them to a gaping hole to one side, into which he disappeared.

“Well, if you haven’t got any better ideas,” Strumbić said, “I guess we follow the kid with the fashion sense.”

Like rats, they scrambled into the crater and discovered they were at the opening of a sewer. The concrete pipe was low and the central groove slick.

“There’s no piped water, so people don’t use their inside toilets anymore,” Plavi explained almost apologetically. “The Serbs don’t like coming into the sewers, so we’re pretty safe.”

“How did they catch you?” della Torre asked.

“Foraging,” the boy said.

“Foraging?”

“The hospital needs medicines, so we go to pharmacies in no man’s land.”

Della Torre wanted to ask the boy about the hospital, about whether he’d met Irena. But this wasn’t the right time; he focused on keeping his balance in the confined space. It was hard going. Strumbić grunted behind him.

“How far?” della Torre eventually asked, stopping under a sealed manhole to stretch his back.

Plavi, who had forged ahead as if he’d been born in the tunnel, turned to call them forward. “Don’t stop. It’s not long.”

They reached a side passage and pulled themselves over a concrete wall.

It was good to be out in the air. Della Torre leaned against the channel’s steep, rock-lined side, feeling his muscles complain. The sky was pewter and smelled of the autumn rains.

The boy scrambled down to the stream and hopped nimbly over some big concrete sections of a collapsed building to the other side. Della Torre followed, ungainly, feeling his age.

They reached a cluster of ruined buildings, where Plavi stepped over a threshold of broken cinder blocks, through what was once a window, and into the building. “We might not want to make too much noise now,” he said. “We’ve been following along the line of no man’s land, but now we can go towards our side.”

They moved through the dark interior until they reached the front door, which somehow had survived intact. Plavi poked his head out of the gaping hole in the wall next to the door and then motioned for della Torre and Strumbić to follow. They ran across the rubble-filled road, slipping on bits of brick and tile, and ducked into the house opposite.

The darkness of the ruined building was oppressive. They moved as quietly as they could along hallways, crunching shattered glass, feeling their way along the walls. From one building to the next, they walked in near silence. A big diesel engine revved up somewhere not far from them. They stopped; della Torre shrank into the damp wall he stood against. They continued after they heard the vehicle pull away until the sound was lost among the lacerating explosions wounding the very air.

They stopped at a shop with a shattered faÇade that emanated the vague smell of antiseptic. That’s when della Torre realized they were not far from the centre of town. They were near the restaurant where he’d had a disquieting dinner with Deputy Minister Horvat only a couple of months before. Horvat had used the occasion to have a close look at della Torre, to gauge the potential reliability of this former
UDBA
man who’d lived in America. Somehow della Torre had passed. And from there his fate had been written in the stars, the line of which he was still following.

Della Torre remembered Vukovar as it had been, a sleepy town on the shores of the Danube. The river was wide and easy-flowing through the fertile land, and poplars stood sentry along its banks. Vukovar’s citizens had always been well off, bourgeois even, under Communism. Much of the town was Hapsburg. Elegant façades had been painted ochre or yellow or robin’s-egg blue, evidence of wealth that had lasted more than a century. The farmland was productive and the factories, including the one founded before the war by the Czech shoemaker Bata, paid well.

Of course, the Communists had also made their mark. They always did. The Venetian towns along the coast had their brutalist hotel blocks, Zagreb its power-station chimney, and Vukovar its concrete water tower on a prime site on the Danube, near the centre of town. It was a monument to socialist ambition, to remind people that aesthetics were irrelevant in the face of proletarian progress.

When della Torre had been there last, the tension had been palpable. Back then, the smell in the air had mostly been of fear. Now it was the smell of destruction. And death. The pungent assault of burning plastic, rubber, of rotting meat, more penetrating than raw ammonia, dug its way into his sinuses and into the back of his throat.

He was shocked by the sight of the wounded trees, their branches severed. A dog loped towards them and then lost interest. Della Torre caught sight of the water tower, which was pockmarked with bullet holes. Farther along, the pretty church had lost a corner of its baroque copper steeple. He stood there for a long moment, his eyes watering involuntarily from the battering his senses were taking.

“Fuck,” Strumbić said again, retching.

Then a voice called out from a ruined building: “Plavi? Where the fuck have you been?” Plavi raced towards it and disappeared inside, leaving della Torre and Strumbić exposed on the street.

“Don’t shoot. We’re friends,” della Torre called.

“Come over here with your hands up. Slowly. You make any sudden moves and we’ll shoot you Serbs.”

“We’re not Serbs. We’re friends,” della Torre called over.

“We’ll be the judges of that.”

They edged forward, hands up, frightened of being shot from behind or in front or of having a rocket land on them. The constant noise and violence was shattering.

When they reached the building, the Croat soldiers made them lie belly down on the rough concrete, then took their handguns and Strumbić’s white handbag. Three of them marched della Torre and Strumbić through the rubble-strewn streets, deeper into Vukovar.

They arrived at the entrance to a cellar. One of the soldiers spoke into the opening: “Captain, we’ve detained these Serb spies. Would you like us to shoot them?”

“Spies?”

“They forced Plavi to guide them from the Serb lines.”

“Plavi’s back?” This was said with a shout of enthusiasm and relief. A man flung himself through the narrow opening of the cellar, both hands grasping the door frame. He was hugging Plavi when he looked up at della Torre and froze. “Captain —” he said.

Della Torre recognized him immediately, but it took a while for him to believe who he was seeing.

“Lieutenant Boban.”

Boban’s face was more gaunt and angular than it had been two months ago, when della Torre had last seen him. His hair was no longer closely cropped, and his clothes were covered in a film of dust.

Boban let go of Plavi and grasped della Torre with a two-armed handshake.

Della Torre could see their militia escorts looking puzzled and worried. They started to withdraw, but Strumbić stopped them. “My gun, my money, and my bag,” he said with considerable authority.

“Lieutenant Boban — or is it Captain? — this is Captain Strumbić of military intelligence,” della Torre said. “My colleague.”

Strumbić made a cursory nod as he collected his possessions from the men with Kalashnikovs.

Boban led the way into his cellar headquarters. A dozen men were down there, some sitting, some half-asleep. One was on a telephone; another spoke into a military radio, going through a list in a children’s notebook. The men immediately gathered around Plavi, ignoring Boban’s two guests.

“We can’t hold out much longer,” Boban said. “It’s coming to the last days. They prod and we push back, but we’ve run out of anti-tank rockets and we’re low on supplies. As soon as they round themselves up, they’ll overrun us. We can hear them planning the assault over the radios; they use normal frequencies and don’t even bother coding their messages. It was fine when we were up against the regular army. The conscripts ran away or hung back during attacks, and we dealt with them. So they just sat back and bombed us. They say we’ve been shelled as much as Stalingrad . . .” Boban shook his head. “But gentlemen, I’m remiss. I haven’t offered you anything to drink.”