Zagreb Cowboy (2 page)

The Bosnian to his right glowered and dug him in the ribs with his elbow.

“Just taking my tie off. I’m getting a bit hot. It’s not a formal occasion we’re going to, is it?”

The Bosnian shrugged.

Della Torre felt the silk. A nice tie. It had been given to him on a job in Rome. The Italian police had kept him locked up for four days on suspicion of . . . they’d never said, not in so many words. It all sorted itself out in the end, and the arresting officer, in contrition, had given him the tie. A spare, he’d said. The Italian cop had probably been glad to be rid of it, but it was della Torre’s favourite — dark blue silk with a pattern of even darker blue foliage. All his others were a shiny socialist polyester. He slipped the tie through his fingers like worry beads.

The Mercedes’s headlights swept across fields and small vineyards carved out of the hillside forest. The beams bounced around as the car twisted along the bumpy road. The reflection of a village boundary sign flashed up. In a few hundred metres they’d round sharply to the right as the road followed a gully carved out by a little stream, and then just beyond that was the turning to Strumbić’s weekend house.

It was dark in the car, except for the blue, red, and green glows coming off the dashboard indicators.

Tension had been building in della Torre’s muscles. The Bosnians next to him could feel it. They shifted away from him. They watched him. The blood had drained from his face and the insouciant air he tried to put on just made him look like he’d swallowed his own sick. He felt the sweat rolling down his chest. His shirt was sodden. His nerves resonated like the strings of a piano dropped down the stairs.

Later della Torre couldn’t remember making any conscious decision or forming a plan. It could have been that stress had switched on his long-forgotten military training. But he couldn’t be sure.

Some unconscious reflex made him jerk forward, loop the tie over the Bosnian driver’s head, and pull back. But if della Torre had intended to garrotte him, he’d missed. He only just managed to get the dark blue Italian silk under the driver’s nose.

DELLA TORRE FELT
the car grind over loose gravel and hit a little ramp or ridge, maybe a narrow verge of grass. For an instant he felt weightless.

The car was airborne. It had come off the edge of the road and was heading into the gully. A tree stopped it, just short of the stream. Somehow the tree remained upright, though the rending crack of a rupture deep through its heart echoed the explosion of crushed metal.

The two Bosnians sitting next to della Torre reacted a fraction too slowly.

It was a spacious car, but even so, three grown men didn’t leave a lot of wiggle room in the back. Della Torre was taller than either of the Bosnians and his shoulders pressed against theirs so that when he sprang forward, they naturally twisted away and had to turn again to face him. The one to his right, Besim’s cousin, reached for his gun while the skinny, talkative one tried to knock into della Torre’s arms. But della Torre kept a tight grip on the tie, and the struggle merely whipped the driver’s head around.

Della Torre felt the talkative Bosnian slam into his side with the impact of the crash. His ribs felt like they’d been tapped by a sledgehammer. His left knee pounded painfully into the back of the driver’s seat. For a moment he felt as if the seat belt, a proper three-pointer, was quartering him in some modern approximation of a medieval instrument of death.

The Bosnians had looked at him with suspicion when he’d buckled up. Wearing seat belts was an idiosyncrasy left over from his American childhood. No proper Yugoslav ever used them.

“Those things are for fairies,” the skinny one to his left had said.

“What?”

“Seat belts. Besim’s the best driver. Could be professional. He’s better than Senna even. See that, Besim? He’s going to wet himself. Drive carefully. We don’t want our guest to ruin the seats.”

They probably thought differently now. Assuming they could still think.

Besim’s cousin had gone clear over the front seat, through the windscreen, and was now in the stream, picked out by the Merc’s sole working headlight. He might have been swimming, but unless he was competing for an underwater endurance record, there was a fair chance he was dead. The skinny Bosnian was no longer so talkative; in fact, he wasn’t saying anything at all. He was crushed up against the back of the driver’s seat, wedged against the doorpost. He didn’t so much moan as let out a series of staccato grunts. An airbag, a real novelty for della Torre and probably for the driver too, had prevented Besim from joining his cousin in the water or impaling himself in the trunk of the tree. He didn’t seem to be moving, but della Torre wasn’t sure he was dead either. He didn’t really care.

He unbuckled the belt and took a moment to get a sense of whether he’d crushed his liver or burst his spleen or had suffered any of the other myriad of ugly wounds car wrecks routinely inflicted. But other than a generalized soreness, della Torre felt that whatever ailed him was survivable.

He fished his notebook out of the talkative Bosnian’s pocket and then reached inside the man’s coat. He was still breathing, but della Torre wasn’t checking his vitals. He found a Beretta, nine millimetre. Just like the one della Torre had left at home. He popped it into his coat pocket along with the precious silk tie and tugged on the door handle on the side where Besim’s cousin had sat. It wouldn’t open. He struggled with it for a while and then remembered the automatic lock. Randomly pressing buttons and knobs by the driver, he started up the rear wipers, rotated a wing mirror, and switched off the radio. He’d resigned himself to crawling out through the missing windscreen when he heard the clunk of four bolts.

He turned the key in the ignition to stop the engine whining, switched off the headlight, and then gingerly opened the door. It was a drop getting out of the car, and his knee complained. It complained again as he scrambled up the ravine’s steep slope.

The front of the car was completely smashed. Even in his dazed state he marvelled at the German craftsmanship. They must have gone from eighty kilometres an hour to zero in the space of the tree, and yet the Merc’s electronics still functioned. The only things that worked as they were supposed to when the Yugo he owned had rolled off the assembly line were the wheels. And that, della Torre figured, was down to pure chance.

Della Torre let the relief of being alive wash over him; he’d always had luck in his misfortune. The Benz was wedged between the tree and the rocky incline. They could have crashed the car a hundred times, and ninety-nine would have resulted in an end-over-end roll or some other metallic gymnastics that would have left them all looking like off-cuts in an abattoir. Never mind avoiding a bullet in the back of the neck.

He sat on a lonely stone bollard marking the edge of the road and considered what to do. He could walk back to Samobor. But his knee hurt, and hobbling back would take most of the night, by which time Strumbić might well find him and finish the job. He could wait for a passing car and get a lift. But there wasn’t much traffic up here. The village beyond Strumbić’s couldn’t have more than thirty houses. He didn’t feel like knocking on doors, and people in the countryside were wary of strangers appearing out of nowhere at night. If he told them about the accident, they’d call the police, and police meant being in Strumbić’s hands before long.

So della Torre was left with just one other option. An amble into the lion’s den. At least Strumbić’s wasn’t far, no more than five hundred metres along the road and then another hundred or so down a track through the woods.

The going wasn’t bad to start with; there was just enough moonlight to navigate by. But before long it was as miserable and painful a walk as he could remember since his army days. His knee was swollen tight in his trousers and breathing made his ribs hurt. The occasional stumble over exposed roots didn’t make him feel any better either. By the time he got to the gate where the forest track opened out onto a clearing, he was doing a geriatric shuffle.

The moonlight etched the scene like a woodcut. The meadow was carved out of the steep forest hillside, though halfway up it flattened like a step, just wide enough to give Strumbić’s cottage a level base. The people who lived in the villages in these hills were still poor. There were plenty of families of della Torre’s generation with a dozen or more children who’d grown up in two-room houses, hovels really, in much the same way Tito had at the turn of the previous century. But now rich people from the city were coming in and buying up property and building cottages in the hills, weekend retreats not much more than an hour’s drive from their town-centre apartments. Some were newcomers, but many had roots in these impoverished and beautiful valleys, coming back for rural nostalgia after they’d made good in Zagreb through intelligence or hard work or crooked deals. Or all three. Like Strumbić.

Strumbić was a senior detective in Zagreb’s regular police force who set new standards for venal dishonesty in an organization notorious for being on the take. Not that he’d ever been caught.

Della Torre worked for Department VI, the
UDBA
’s internal investigative service. He was a lawyer, primarily responsible for investigating extrajudicial killings the intelligence service might have been involved in. The special unit had been set up five years previously when the country’s parliamentarians started to realize that the secret police weren’t always acting on behalf of the State. Sometimes, it did so for the private interests of the most powerful members of the country’s cumbersome rotating presidency — a particularly complicated Yugoslav compromise to ensure that each of the country’s six republics and two autonomous regions felt they had equal say in its running. What this really did was create a coterie of shadowy politicians with considerable power.

It was how della Torre justified working for the
UDBA
. To himself at least. He’d say to himself Department VI wasn’t really
UDBA
. Sure, it sat under the umbrella of the organization, but Department VI people were the good guys. They were the only internal check on the organization’s concentration camp guards, on its torturers, its killers, because in truth the
UDBA
was Yugoslavia’s equivalent of the
KGB
. The Stasi. The Gestapo.

For much of the time della Torre had worked for the organization, Strumbić had been his instrument. He’d used Strumbić to help him hook crooked
UDBA
officers. In exchange, Strumbić got a measure of protection from the law for his sidelines and also received the occasional whisper about a leading politician, judge, or businessman. Their relative positions were clear. Della Torre held the power. Strumbić did the legwork.

But then Yugoslavia started falling apart. While the
UDBA
continued to be feared, its strength waned in Croatia and Slovenia, the two republics seeking independence. The
UDBA
’s main seat of power had always been Belgrade, capital of both the country and its biggest republic, Serbia. Department VI was headquartered in Zagreb as a way of silencing complaints within Croatia of the
UDBA
’s heavily Serb identity. Which meant della Torre’s authority quickly evaporated.

So the relative roles of the secret policeman and the Zagreb detective had changed, subtly but inexorably. Strumbić was no longer della Torre’s supplicant; rather it was the other way round. Now, instead of swapping crumbs of information and doing
della
Torre’s digging, Strumbić was paying money for more valuable nuggets than ever before. Not just the rumour of a judge’s mistress, but photographs of them in bed. Not a whisper that a prosecutor was suspected of shady deals, but photocopies of foreign bank statements. Not the hint that a businessman had been compromised by taking drugs with prostitutes, but the times and dates and names. And more besides.

Strumbić never mentioned what he did with the information della Torre passed on, and della Torre never asked. All he knew was that Strumbić paid in cash. Deutschmarks.

And he needed the cash. In the space of little more than a year della Torre and his colleagues had gone from being among the country’s best-paid civil servants to making less than ditchdiggers. Della Torre’s official monthly salary now barely covered the cost of a carton of cigarettes as rampant inflation destroyed his paycheque while Belgrade and Zagreb squabbled about whose responsibility it was to fund Department VI.

Strumbić was never one to let a golden commercial opportunity pass him by. He had money. A lot. And most of it in Deutschmarks or dollars.

He knew della Torre had access to secret files, interesting and lucrative ones. And so della Torre would make the trip out to Strumbić’s weekend place every couple of months to trade.

Strumbić had around twenty rows of vines, along with fruit trees, mostly plums and pears, which he picked in the summer, fermented, and then cooked into a potent spirit alcohol. And then there was the ancient cherry tree that turned the ground purple with its juice in August.

The house itself was built on top of an old wine hut. The thick and roughly made concrete-and-stone walls now formed a self-contained ground-level cellar, where Strumbić matured the wine he made from his own grapes, distilled his spirits, and hung cured hams and salamis that he bought from the local villagers. Above the cellar was the house he’d built, one full storey under a steeply pitched roof. In all there was a large sitting room and balcony that looked out over the valley, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, one of which Strumbić used as an office.

But mostly when he was there, Strumbić sat in the cellar or at a rickety table by the side of the house under the huge cherry tree’s canopy. It was an idyll. Della Torre always looked forward to his invitations. Strumbić was liberal with the booze and American cigarettes and was a fount of amusing stories.

Mornings after Strumbić’s were another thing entirely. More than once della Torre had woken in his car by the side of the little road to Samobor, the early sun converting him to Christianity with the force of a seventh-century bishop. Never had he prayed harder than when begging God to save him from those hangovers.

The gate was open. Della Torre could see Strumbić’s
BMW
coupe parked in its little barn. There was enough space in front for a couple more vehicles, but Strumbić didn’t seem to have company. Della Torre picked his way along a stony path gently traversing the hillside. There were some lights on in the main part of the house, but the glow in front of the wine cellar told him Strumbić would be down there.

Della Torre approached carefully. A radio played europop and he could smell Strumbić’s cigarette. His footsteps crunched on loose stones.

Strumbić was inside, sitting on a folding lawn chair. Gun on his lap.