Our Man in Iraq (12 page)

“No, really, it was just an accident.”

“No hassle, mate, it’s . . .”

“Cheers!” I cut him short.

Markatović called, whining straight away, “Any news about the bank? Do you think they’ll save it?”

“I’m thinking about how to save my own ass here,” I said.

“What do you think, should I wait?”

“How should I know? You haven’t sold anything?”

“No. We agreed that I shouldn’t.”

I thought I’d scream at him and tell him we didn’t have any bloody fucking agreement. Then I remembered that I’d screamed at him the night before, and toned it down. “Don’t try and shift the responsibility to me. I have nothing to do with it. It’s your money.”

“I’ll keep waiting,” he said quietly.

“What choice do you have? And I’m waiting for that idiot to get in touch.”

I clicked
www.my-dosh.com
, a stock market forum. Members bandied around information but what they wrote wasn’t necessarily reliable. If one of them had RIJB-R-A shares he’d just find arguments to stop the avalanche. Someone under the pseudonym Cravat had reliable information that the government was going to financially rehabilitate the bank, otherwise it would be a political problem in the Rijeka region. Maybe that was Markatović. Another group showered him with abuse. The only support for him came from forum member Radex. Maybe that was Markatović too. The outgunned often use multiple pseudonyms to help create public opinion. Now I logged on with my handle, Trumbo Rich, and expressed moderate support for Cravat and Radex.

I started ringing the bigwigs. I’d interviewed the Minister of Economics twice while he was in opposition, so it would have been proper for him to answer my call. But he didn’t. His spokeswoman took my breath away with her icy decorum and redirected me to the Office of the Vice President, where I chose a more aggressive tack and told them they’d better issue some kind of statement.

“What? Make something up?” she said. “We said everything at the press conference.”

“You didn’t say anything. Is the government going to back the bank or not?”

“The bank is not the government.”

“There are rumors that they’re handing it back to you. You didn’t say anything about that.”

“What we didn’t say is pure speculation.”

“But you didn’t say ‘no’ either.”

“We didn’t say anything.”

“Aha, just as I was telling you.”

“I will not be provoked. I’ll get back to you if the Vice President—”

“Good,” I said.

I’d exhausted my journalistic aggression. I don’t know how the others managed. I wasn’t born for this muck.

I held my chin in my hands and stared out into the sky, which was still dark and overcast as it ruminated on the Red Bull generation with its horns and wings.

Then Charly dashed into the office. “Today is one big hassle.” He had to give off signals of being overworked and terribly stressed so no one would think of giving him any. “I saw Sanja’s interview, by the way. I’ll go and see it.”

Then he darted to his computer and started to type like a man possessed.

Finally Silva turned up too. She said she’d been talking to a woman waiting outside.

“The muvver of Niko Brkić who was s’posed to play in Nantes?” I asked.

Silva nodded, it seemed she was interested in writing it up, which surprised me. She wanted to take up some work that was a bit more serious. What did I think?

“What category would it go under?”

“Abuse in sport,” she said.

She presented her theory: essentially, there was nothing positive in sport.

I nodded.

“In sport, like in modelling, they get you when you’re a kid and have no idea what’s going on. A mafia is milling around you the whole time. And he’s still underage. You don’t know how things work.”

I knew they’d sent her to Milan when she was seventeen, she was there for a while but didn’t make it into the top league. So she came back and pretended she’d made it abroad, because who’d know anyway? So she played the role of model, went out with shady types, figured in the “On the Heels of the Glitterati” column, earned a penny or two in local photo shoots, turned up at glamorous events, did cocaine, and was not all that far from elite prostitution. She was brought down to earth when she got pregnant by a source who wished to remain anonymous.

“Sports are absolutely feudal,” Silva said resolutely.

I headed off to interview Mr. Olenić, who’d witnessed all the reforms of the last decades. I’d never have thought of him if he hadn’t put in an advert for his inner-city flat. I’d gone to see the place a week and a half earlier; it was too expensive, but I made an appointment for an interview.

On my way, I picked up the photographer, Tosho, who volunteered to drive.

Out by the café, Anka Brkić was still holding her position. She was probably waiting for Silva now. I said hello as we went past.

When we got in the car, Tosho offered me a joint.

“I don’t know, I’m hung over.”

Still, I took two drags, and Tosho smoked the rest. We
weaved our way through the heavy traffic. Whenever someone blew their horn, Tosho would just take a deep breath and let out a weary “Aww man!”

The number of cars in Zagreb had increased enormously; credit lines were opened up after the war and the period of isolation, and after the decade of self-denial a period of compensation had begun. People bought things left, right, and center, shopping malls shot up like mushrooms after the rain and Croatia entered the WTO and similar organizations just when Naomi Klein published
No Logo
with the aim of spoiling our fun.

“Good grass. Who do you get it from?” I asked.

He hesitated.

“Never mind. Silly question,” I said.

“No no, it’s not a secret. I get it in the neighborhood from a kid who calls himself Joe. But, y’know, one day I saw ’im going into a bar and another mob was sittin’ out the front. I called out, ‘Joe,’ and fuck—all of them turned to look!”

“No shit?” I said absently.

“When they’re making a deal over their mobiles, everyone calls each other Joe because of the cops. That’s how they speak to each other: Hi Joe, any news? Yeah, Joe, lots of shit goin’ down.”

“So they’re all Joes.”

“And now, y’know, if the cops were after Joe they could jus’ forget it. There are fifty guys called Joe in the neighborhood. Now when I go into the bar, the waiter calls me Joe.”

We finally fought our way through to the inner city; a fine rain had begun to fall, and by the time we got to Mr. Olenić’s door we were a little wet and out of breath.

The old economist received us in his cold, dark flat; he was freshly shaved and wore a black suit with a white shirt and Bordeaux tie. He was over eighty but well-preserved, with the demeanor of a retired conductor.

We sat down at a coffee table in the living room. He spoke about the economy under socialism. “Economic freedom always resulted in internal political democratization. Starting in the mid-fifties, we had introduced self-management in the factories and workers councils and we tried to make a specific kind of market. It wasn’t like in the countries under Russians. We were out of it, as you know. What was stopping the reforms was the political bureaucracy class afraid of losing its power.”

Mr. Olenić reminisced about times past with a slightly raised chin, as if he was posing for one of the Old Masters. I poured myself some of the whiskey he’d kindly put out on the table. Quality stuff. He was so broke that he was selling his flat, but he made a point of having whiskey. That’s what I call attitude.

Tosho went around, crouching and standing up again. He gave me a pained look in between two shots to signal that I should animate Olenić a little. He wanted me to ask a question that would aggravate the old man a bit—make him gesticulate and show a lively face rather than speaking like a Russian newsreader.

“You participated in the Yugoslav reform of 1965. Why did it fail?” I asked.

“That reform was implemented by Kiro Gligorov, the finance minister at the time.” He raised a finger. “But you can’t say it failed. The international community assessed it as a significant change in a Communist country. That was the end of the command-planned economy.” He held up his palms, as if to ask: What more do you expect? “The people on the ground started to make their own economic decisions. It brought decentralization, but then there was the backlash.”

“Yes, yes,” I nodded, as Tosho snapped away.

“But, on the other hand, all that resulted in the constitution of ’74. The economy was behind that. Many in the old political structure opposed the reforms, and the reckoning with
Aleksandar Ranković,” he gestured as if sweeping a chessman from the board, “was an attempt to remove that resistance.”

Tosho got up off his haunches; sweat beaded his forehead. “Brilliant.”

“Pardon?” said Olenić.

“Ranković—the secret police, right?” Tosho said. “Good that you removed him.”

“I didn’t remove anyone.” The old economist gave me a look as if at least I understood. “Those are processes.”

“Yes, processes,” I seconded.

Olenić stretched out his arms expressively. “You take out a piece here, and things collapse over there.”

“OK, I’ve done my bit,” Tosho said. “All the best, Mr. Olenić.”

“See ya Joe,” I quipped.

“Goodbye, Mr. Joe,” the old economist said.

My throat was dry so I poured myself another whiskey. And a glass of water.

Olenić spoke about growth they had in the sixties and seventies, which stopped with the debt crisis in the eighties, and how with Tito dead there was no one with the authority to make decisions.

Finally he spoke about his involvement in Ante Marković’s attempt to make an easy transformation to capitalism at the time the Berlin wall fell. “We announced privatization with workers as shareholders and we did a few of them. Today, some of them remain and are among the best companies in the country. We wanted privatization with a human face. The Slovenians achieved this, very different from the way things later turned out here. But Marković was blocked by Milošević. Once again, it was the political bureaucracy afraid of losing power, only now in nationalist garb. And so Yugoslavia collapsed and war started.”

My mobile was ringing. Unknown number. I hoped it was a call from the ministry to do with Rijeka Bank.

“Just a minute, please,” I said.

“It’s me, Milka.”

“Who?”

“Me. Aunt Milka. C’n you ’ear me?” she yelled.

“We’ll have to talk later, I’m doing an interview now.”

“Tell me where ’e is,” she yelled. “Don’t you tell me what to do—he’s my only son!”

“I’m at an interview now.”

I hung up. The phone rang again, blaring “Satisfaction.” Olenić, that living witness of fall and ruin, sat there and looked at me.

“They’re slow, but they’re after me,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“A quote from Admiral Mahić,” I said.

“A naval commander?”

“Bosnian poet.”

I turned off the phone.

I couldn’t think of any more questions, so I poured myself another whiskey.

“Is that the end of your questions?” he asked, a smile breaking across his face.

“What do you think will become of Rijeka Bank?”

His smile evaporated. “You know that we are freed now. But, ironically, in this period of national freedom all our banks were sold to foreigners. So, we are freed of the capital too.”

I was listening and thinking about getting free of Milka.

“It’s like that in all small countries in Eastern Europe. Maybe that was the function of the freedom.”

“An interesting way of putting it,” I said.

“Let them think about that now!”

“But the Germans want to get rid of the bank now. The government could have it back.”

“Listen,” Olenić said, leaning in, “Yugoslavia was a sum total of small nationalities that united to fight the big ones. That’s how we Croats got rid of the Italians on the coast and the Germans on the continent. We couldn’t have done that by ourselves. Once we’d done that, we got rid of Yugoslavia too, i.e. the Serbs. Now we’re going our own way, independently, but we’re pitched against the big players again—the Italians and the Germans. That’s the whole story.”

“A story full of the suffering of innocents,” I said, taking a sip of whiskey.

“The Italians and the Krauts have now taken over all our banks. Of course, when I say ‘Krauts’ I mean the Austrians as well. The Hungarians are also in the wings; they’re not as significant, although there is the oil giant INA.”

“Let’s return to Rijeka Bank. The Germans are offering to give it back. Do you think the government will take it?”

Olenić went to the window. He opened the curtains and looked out. Rain pelted the glass.

“All that’s irrelevant, at a deeper level. I helped build up socialism. That was essentially an act of resistance to global capital.” He looked resignedly through the window, perhaps contemplating what was left of his life’s work. “We’re just going round and round in circles. To defend ourselves against the Germans we’d have to join up with the Serbs, and vice versa.”

“But I’m more interested in the short-term.”

“I’m not!” Olenić snapped. “I don’t have time for that at my age. I know what newspapers are. If I talk to you about Rijeka Bank you’ll put that in the title and throw out everything significant.”

He stood there silently, weakly backlit by the light fighting
through the window. This old guy came from serious times. By some miracle he was still here; perhaps he was the last of them. Old modernists. How serious they were, how focused and goal-oriented. If I met the Tito of 1937 today—if he stepped out of a time machine and into Limited and told me what he thought—I’d likely swear he was mad.

I poured myself another whiskey.

Lightning flashed outside, and he turned and looked at me. He probably considered me a drunkard. It seemed he was waiting for me to go.

But I couldn’t go yet; I was short an anecdote. So I started talking in a roundabout way about Kiro Gligorov. Earlier, Olenić had pronounced his name with affection.

He sat down again. He poured himself a little whiskey too, a good sign.