Killing Pilgrim (12 page)

Della Torre looked down at his stuffed cabbage, pulling some meat from the wilted white leaf with the tip of his fork.

“But we were talking about your time in commandos,” Horvat said in English, the storm passing as quickly as it had built.

“They wanted somebody who spoke American English so that when the Americans invaded, they could drop me behind the enemy lines, where my job would be to commit sabotage while blending in. Or something like that.” The Yugoslav government kept its people in line by keeping alive the threat of an invasion by the Russians or Americans. As a country that was Communist and yet had broken with the Soviet bloc, positioned right between the East and the West, it balanced on a geopolitical tightrope. To be sure, there were plenty of advantages. Russians and Americans could be played off against each other so that concessions could be squeezed from both — finance, cheap oil, a blind eye to Yugoslavia’s vendetta against its dissident émigrés. But it also made the country a prime candidate to host the start of the next world war. Then again, maybe Yugoslav waiters were just the people to serve canapés at Armageddon.

“And would you have? If America invaded?”

“No,” della Torre said. “I’d have welcomed them.”

“Good,” Horvat burst out. “Good for you. Give those Yugoslav bastards poke in eye. And how did you find it in commandos?”

“Hard. I barely scraped through basic training. I think they made it easier for me, and then when I got my lieutenancy, my men carried me. I was without question the worst officer in the whole of the commandos since the Second World War.”

Horvat laughed. “Oh, it wasn’t so bad, from what I hear. Your men were quite fond of you.”

“They get sentimental about their mascots.”

“Is that what you were, Gringo?” Horvat said, enjoying della Torre’s surprise that he knew the nickname.

“Yes,” he said.

“You married Jew,” Horvat said. Della Torre’s face must have registered shock, because Horvat immediately held up his hand. “Is okay, is okay. I understand. Every young man makes mistakes. You are now looking for divorce. I know. You don’t want children with this woman. I understand. You become more mature. Maybe is time to find nice Croat girl, have children with her,” Horvat said, talking over della Torre’s horror. Until then, he’d felt merely distaste for the man opposite him. Now it was disgust. Loathing.

How did he know so much about him? And why?

And yet whatever Horvat did know he didn’t really seem to understand. Della Torre wasn’t leaving Irena. It was the other way around. And no, he didn’t want children. Not with anyone. But if he did have children he could only imagine having them with Irena.

“I was friend of Svjet’s,” Horvat said, watching della Torre. Svjet was constantly being dug up out of della Torre’s past, an unhealed wound. The deepest form of unhealed wound: shame.

“Oh?” Della Torre’s fork hung in the air for a brief moment and then, with huge effort, he ate. He could taste only gristle in the ground meat; vinegar in the salad; flat, bitter water in the beer.

Svjet. Another Croat dissident. Another old man.

A painful memory from the first time della Torre had gone to London, more than a dozen years before. He had taken a postgraduate law course paid for by the Zagreb prosecutor’s office. He hadn’t been there long when he’d been approached by the Montenegrin, one of
UDBA
’s most notorious operatives.

He’d been at his shared flat, studying after breakfast on a Saturday morning, when the doorbell rang. He’d answered. The man standing there was almost as tall as him, more solidly built, wearing an unmistakably east European suit. He’d asked to see della Torre’s passport before identifying himself with an
UDBA
ID.

He came in but wouldn’t accept a coffee or anything. He just stood there and said, “I have a job for you. You are to get to know a man called Svjet. He goes to the Croat Sunday service at the Brompton Oratory. Introduce yourself. Become familiar with him. Don’t tell him you were sent. Let him believe it’s because you’re lonely for Croat company. In everything else be honest with him. Tell him who you work for and what you’re doing in London. He’ll understand.”

That was it. And della Torre did as he was told. Who was he to refuse an order from the
UDBA
? And such an innocuous one. But there was nothing innocuous about the
UDBA
. Even then he knew it.

When his law course had ended and he was about to leave London, the Montenegrin visited della Torre again. He’d handed della Torre a file and told him to deliver it to Svjet. The Montenegrin said it contained details about the
UDBA
assassination of another dissident in Paris a couple of years earlier. Again, della Torre did as he was told, dropping the file with Svjet before returning to Zagreb, telling him, truthfully, that it had come to him by way of someone he knew in the
UDBA
. Soon after, Svjet told his wife and daughter he was off to Trieste to meet someone about the file. He was never heard from again.

“Yes. Well, when I say ‘friend,’ I don’t mean we agreed on everything,” Horvat continued. “We had differences, of course.” Croatian dissidents were notorious for never being able to agree on any one position. There were as many firmly held beliefs, unshakable convictions, as there were émigrés, each one at war with the next over who was the biggest patriot, who had the purest notion of a true Croat future, who’d suffered more for their faith. None would compromise. “But I used to visit him in London. Or we met in Munich. Many Croats in Munich. Before, I think, you met him. Croatian exiles everywhere, we were like brothers. We had common enemy.”

Della Torre forced himself to look up from the food, to hold Horvat’s eyes. His breathing was shallow and he felt the prickle of sweat on his palms.

“Then he disappeared. You were in London. You knew him there before he disappeared.”

“Yes. I was studying international law,” della Torre said, in a slow monotone. “Then I was with the prosecutor’s office.”

There was a long silence. The first of the evening.

“Lost your appetite?” Horvat asked with amusement.

“No. It’s just that I guess I wasn’t in the mood . . . for stuffed cabbage.”

“My fault. I’m so sorry for having chosen badly,” Horvat said, pleased with himself. “So you met Svjet in church?”

“Through the Croatian mass at the Brompton Oratory,” della Torre said. “They have a chapel where they do an early Sunday morning service in —” He paused. “— in Croat.”

“Bravo. But you don’t seem to me to be a very religious man. Nothing to be ashamed of. Religion is mostly for women. You were student. You didn’t get up early on Sunday for body of Christ, blood of Christ, eh?” Horvat said.

No, thought della Torre, it wasn’t religion that got him up and across town at that early hour. It was fear.

“I know why you did,” Horvat said.

Della Torre looked around the restaurant. He counted at least seven paramilitaries and remembered seeing another three at the door.

“Excuse me,” he said, standing up and walking towards the back of the room.

One of the paramilitaries caught Horvat’s eye and followed della Torre to the toilets, watched while he tried to force out a dribble of urine. He’d dried up. Evaporated. His mouth. His piss. He thought he could feel the blood in his veins turn to dust.
Svjet
, he thought to himself. Svjet. Would the man’s ghost never leave him alone?

He washed his hands and walked back to the table as though he were following a procession of tumbrels.

“We were talking about Svjet, I think,” Horvat said.

“Yes.” Della Torre lit a cigarette.

“I think I know why you went to mass. To meet Svjet, no?”

He blew smoke through his nose. “Yes.”

“I knew it,” Horvat laughed with glee. “You see. I knew it. I caught you. An old pizza man caught the
UDBA
lawyer. You see?”

Della Torre rolled the end of his cigarette around the ashtray, shaping the ember into a cone.

“Admit it, you didn’t go to church to pray.” Horvat made a show of putting his hands together and looking heavenward.

Della Torre shrugged.

Horvat pointed his fork at della Torre’s wounded arm. “You got into scrape with some Bosnians. Some deep undercover work they didn’t much care for.”

“Something like that,” della Torre said. It had been nothing like that at all. He’d been selling
UDBA
files to a crooked cop and somebody hadn’t liked it. And when he’d run away to London, they’d sent a couple of hired guns to hunt him down.

“You see, I think I know what it is,” Horvat said, the tiny twist of a smile playing on the side of his mouth.

“Oh?”

Horvat threw up his hands in mock frustration at having to explain himself, but he was enjoying his game.

“Obvious, isn’t it? You are true Croatian. You didn’t go to oratory to pray but to be part of Croat community. And when you finished with London, you were going to be Svjet’s man in Zagreb, weren’t you? Svjet told me about you. He had plans for you.” For a man who’d suffered Tito’s prisons and exile, Svjet was somehow hopelessly naive, vulnerable to flattery, to being given — handed by the gods — a handsome young acolyte whom he could mould in his image. Della Torre found it embarrassingly easy to be adopted by the old dissident. “You were in prosecutor’s office. From there a short step to Interior Ministry, where we needed eyes to see what
UDBA
were up to. Except Svjet got caught. And eventually they discovered what you were doing too, didn’t they? They found out you were a sleeper for Croatian cause and they tried to kill you, didn’t they?”

Della Torre stared at Horvat with incredulity. The émigré had built up some fantasy about him, a complicated fantasy that fitted della Torre into his nationalist imaginings. Horvat had convinced himself that the Bosnians who’d shot him had been
UDBA
agents sent to eliminate the Croat nationalist double agent in their midst. Della Torre knew these people spent too much time watching spy movies, reading spy novels. But now they wove their own plots too?

Horvat looked at the younger man with satisfaction, tapping the side of his nose with his index finger.

“I got you, didn’t I? I knew when they told me about you. I remembered my conversation with Svjet, his boy in prosecutor’s office.” Horvat nodded. “I asked about you. Forgot your name, but they found it for me. I got background on you. Istrian? Yugoslav secret policeman? Nonsense. You’re one of us.”

The man had called him to Vukovar to show him what they were fighting for and how. To Horvat, della Torre was another of his fanatical nationalists.

He held out his hand over the table. Della Torre took it reluctantly and let Horvat pump it until beer bottles fell onto the floor. The half of Horvat’s face that worked was beaming. The other half remained frozen — cold, turned down, cruel.

He
sat in the car for a little while before starting it up. He was pretty sure his blood alcohol level was finally close to legal. He could have slept another few hours. His shoes were still damp, and the inside of his head was a ball of fuzz pierced with razor blades. As long as he didn’t make any sudden moves, he would feel no pain. He swallowed. At least his mouth was somewhere back to normal again. He’d had to clean his teeth three times and then down a long espresso and smoke a cigarette, but he finally got the oily paint-thinner taste of home-distilled slivovitz out of his mouth.

Della Torre had left the Ribar not long after that handshake, turning down the offer to stay for a few drinks with Horvat and the boys. The weather had just broken, and those black, threatening clouds had opened themselves up on the landscape. The rain, mixed with hail, was Biblical. He’d started to sprint but was soaked through before he’d gone half a block. In a moment, the street became a stream, a tendril of the Danube sending its shoots up through the town. He breathed water, was pelted by ice until he stung. Even after he reached the arcades on the main street, the rain sprang back up at him from the force with which it had hurtled to earth.

He’d thought he’d wait it out, but why? He could get no wetter. His clothes could absorb no more water. So he might as well try to enjoy it, like Gene Kelly in
Singin’ in the Rain.
Anzulović had made him watch the movie once. All della Torre remembered was the guy getting drenched.

As he’d checked into the hotel, they’d mopped the floors around him. The bellboy had delivered the bottle of slivovitz, compliments of the hotel. Best quality, he said. He had also offered to find someone della Torre could share it with. Della Torre declined, in favour of a hot bath and his novel. The slivovitz was just anaesthetic.

As he pulled away from the hotel, he noticed one of Horvat’s militiamen watching him. Camouflage trousers, black T-shirt, thick arms and neck.

It took him the best part of an hour to get to the Osijek police station. Because he’d driven slowly, unsure of his reflexes. And because he took a couple of wrong turns. So it was after nine by the time he parked and got to the booking sergeant’s desk. The same one as the previous afternoon.

“You’re back.”

“Lieutenant Boban, please.”

“He told me you might come looking for him. He’s in. Up those stairs, second floor to the right. I’ll call to tell him.”

He let della Torre through.

The door to Boban’s office was open, but he was on the phone. He gave della Torre an apologetic look and pointed to the office next door, miming that he should knock.

Rejkart opened it. Della Torre was surprised by what he saw.

The police chief was a young man, younger even than
della Torre
. He wasn’t yet in his mid-thirties and looked younger still. He was about della Torre’s height, but thinner, with hollow eyes from lack of sleep and months of worry. His thick black hair sat high on his head, but the feature that really stood out was his luxuriant black moustache, which harked back to an imperial age. For years della Torre had had one too, but he’d shaved it off during his ill-fated trip to London this past spring. His had been a weak effort by comparison.

“I’m told you’re a friend, even though you come from Zagreb,” Rejkart said, holding della Torre by the shoulder as he shook his hand.

“It took a while to convince the lieutenant.”

Rejkart waved della Torre in and shrugged sympathetically when della Torre refused a drink. Della Torre sat in a slightly reclined padded office chair facing Rejkart’s plain wooden desk. The desk was mostly tidy, with two telephones and, in one corner, a small stack of papers. Rejkart sat in a chair next to della Torre.

“My men are overprotective of me sometimes,” Rejkart said, smiling apologetically. “Especially when it has to do with Zagreb. All we seem to get from there these days is troublemakers. Thank you for taking Damir to the hospital.”

“How is he?”

“He’ll be fine. A clean, simple-to-repair wound, I’m told. A sharp piece of tile sliced through muscle. Lieutenant Boban tells me the doctors think he’ll be fit for work in a week’s time.”

There was a pause. Rejkart gave della Torre an encouraging smile. He sat back in his chair as if he had all morning to chat about football or the weather, but his eyes danced back towards his desk. Della Torre realized the police chief had sat away from it to avoid succumbing to the temptation of looking at his papers while entertaining his guest. Nothing about Rejkart, from the pallor of his skin to his fatigued eyes, suggested he gave himself over to any leisure.

“I won’t play games,” della Torre said. “Anzulović sent me to see how you were doing, but he didn’t want me to tell you because he thought you’d varnish the truth, paint me a pretty picture, and I’d leave not knowing any more than if I’d read
Vjesnik
at a café in Zagreb this morning.”

Rejkart laughed.

“Anzulović . . .” he said, shaking his head at the name. “He’s been at it since the start of the year, trying to get me transferred out of here.” He smiled when he saw the look of guilt on della Torre’s face. “Ah, I see he told you.”

“He might have mentioned something along those lines. But that you’ve been . . . ah . . . reticent with him.”

“Well, I shouldn’t keep him hanging on. Tell him I’m accepting the latest offer. They’re making me head of training at the Zagreb Academy. I haven’t told anyone here yet, so if you could make sure it doesn’t go beyond Anzulović I’d be grateful. It won’t become official until next week. I’ve got some things to finish up here first. Between my wife, my officers, and Anzulović, everyone wants to get me the hell out of here. So I said yes to the academy job. It’ll be dull, but I could use a bit of dullness after this place. If that’s what he sent you here for, to find out whether I’d finally given in, then you can tell him I have.”

“I’ll tell him,” della Torre said.

The phone rang. Rejkart asked della Torre to excuse him and picked up the receiver. He listened and then said, “Let me know if anything more comes up.”

“So how is the old man?” Rejkart said, turning back to della Torre.

“Getting older. He’s looking tired,” said della Torre.

“Aren’t we all. I hear they’ve shut down Department VI.”

“We’re owned by military intelligence now. Run by a man called Kakav.”

“I know Kakav. He was with the Zagreb police when I worked there. A sort of commissar, if I remember. Not very intelligent but somehow manages to worm his way up to the top of the shitpile, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

“That’s the man.”

“Not someone to get on the bad side of. Venomous, if I remember well,” Rejkart said.

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Sounds like it’s something you might have already found out for yourself.”

“Yup,” said della Torre.

Rejkart smiled. There was a wisdom to his young face, warmth and concern. Della Torre was getting an inkling of why his men liked him so much.

“Has he changed?” Rejkart asked. “Is the first thing he asks whether you’ve seen any good movies lately?”

“Anzulović? He used to, but he’s given up. I don’t go to any good movies. Or bad ones, for that matter,” della Torre said.

“Neither do I. Not anymore. But whenever we talk, he still asks,” Rejkart said. He pulled out a pack of Lord cigarettes and peeled back a corner, pushing one out slightly and offering it to della Torre.

“Thanks.” Della Torre leaned forward to light the police chief’s cigarette and then his own.

“He was head detective when I was starting out on the Zagreb detective squad. After a while, I noticed he was bunking off Thursday afternoons,” Rejkart continued. “I wondered what he was up to, so one day I followed him. I thought he might have a mistress. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d found out he did. Anyway, I was pretty disappointed to discover he was going to the university cinema club. I thought I was being clever and subtle, but he knew straight away I’d followed him. In fact, I think it was that afternoon or the next day in the office that he asked me whether I liked movies. I thought, boy, that’s me back on the traffic beat. But I managed to say yes. And then he asked whether I’d like to go with him the following Thursday.”

“The movie club shut down,” della Torre said. “He takes
videos
into the office now. He’s got a TV and a machine. Locks his door and tells his secretary to take his calls.”

Rejkart laughed.

“Sometimes it was just us there, me and him. In the cinema,” Rejkart said. “I didn’t go often, and after a while I’d only go to the Hollywood movies and maybe a Japanese sword
movie
. What killed me was when he took me to a four-hour-long Russian film. I’d fallen asleep and Anzulović just left me there. When I finally got back to the office, I got it in the neck from my immediate superior. Anzulović refused to back me up when I said I’d been with him. He told my boss that he thought I’d bunked off to spend the afternoon with some woman. When I admitted I’d fallen asleep at the movies, nobody believed me. For a while I had a reputation as a ladies’ man just on the strength of that story. That was before I got married . . .”

“He’s still a funny guy.”

The telephone rang again. Rejkart answered, moving back behind his desk. He spoke little. His head was bowed as he listened. When he looked back up at the end of the one-sided conversation, his cheeks were slightly more sunken and his face was a little more pale. He forced a smile.

“Sure I can’t get you a drink?” Rejkart asked after he hung up. “I can order you a coffee, but I’m trying to cut back myself. I’m jittery enough as it is, and I spend most of my days having coffee with discontented Serb or Croat villagers.”

“If you’ve got something soft, that’d be great.”

“Coca-Cola?”

“Sure,” della Torre said. He decided he wouldn’t point out that Coke was full of caffeine.

Rejkart got up and appraised some drinking glasses he found in a cupboard.

“I’m not sure how clean they are,” he said.

“I’ll take my chances.”

As he was pouring, something caught Rejkart’s eye outside the window. The glass overflowed.

“Sorry,” he said, finding some paper towels. “I saw someone I’d rather not outside.”

“Girlfriend’s husband?”

There was a hollowness to Rejkart’s laugh. “A fellow by the name of Zdenko. He’s one of the paramilitaries who’ve descended on us from parts unknown, somewhere in Herzegovina. He seems to be the fixer when Horvat’s not around.”

Della Torre stood up to take the glass from Rejkart. He could see a man standing in the shade of a tree. The same paramilitary who’d found della Torre in the café, who’d been standing there the previous day.

“Anzulović’s wife still have that poodle?” Rejkart asked.

“Yup. It’s older, yellower, and Anzulović hates it even more.”

“He still afraid it’ll outlive him?”

“Says he knows it will.”

The telephone rang again. Rejkart picked up the phone and listened. His smile evaporated.

“Yes, yes, I’ll be there.” He looked up at della Torre. “I’m sorry. I have to go. Something’s come up. You’re welcome to wait for me here, but it might take a little while.”

“Maybe I could go with you?”

“Yes, yes, of course. It could be uncomfortable, though. I don’t think dangerous. Well, that’s not true, everything’s dangerous here. But no more dangerous than usual.”

“That’s okay. I’ve already had someone shoot my car — I mean, my wife’s car — yesterday.”

“Yes, I heard. I’m sorry about that. I’m sure if you take it round to our mechanics, they’ll fix it, though it might be a bit of a wait. We’ve got cars stacked up there. Can’t get the parts. Belgrade stopped sending them to us, for some reason,” he said. “We’ll take my car.”

• • •

They headed back towards Vukovar. The place was proving to be a magnet for della Torre. Boban, Horvat, and now Rejkart.

Rejkart asked if della Torre was carrying a weapon. Della Torre said he wasn’t.

“Good,” he said. “The Serbs have been setting up roadblocks. They’re worried about some of the Croat nationalists who have been coming through, so they blockade their local roads. I can usually talk them out of it, but only because I ask them nicely and don’t carry a gun. It wouldn’t do if they found you with one.”

About twenty minutes to the south of Osijek, they slowed down. A small group of Serbs had rolled oil barrels onto the road and were guarding the spot, armed with shotguns. Rejkart stopped the car a good forty metres short.

“Stay here,” Rejkart said to della Torre. “Don’t do anything sudden and make sure they can see your hands. Hang your right arm out the window and put your left hand on the dashboard.”

Rejkart stepped out of the car and opened up his sport coat so that the Serbs could see he wasn’t hiding anything. For a while they kept their shotguns trained on him but had lowered them by the time he’d strolled over. Della Torre couldn’t hear what was being said, but it looked like an impassioned conversation on the part of the Serbs, while Rejkart calmed the situation with modest gestures. Finally, after a good half-hour, they put their shotguns on the ground and, with Rejkart’s help, rolled the barrels out of the road. He shook their hands and returned to the car.