Zagreb Cowboy (12 page)

“Just don’t touch the fucking leg. They’re being stingy with the painkillers. A bit of local, and that’s mostly worn off,” Strumbić said, feeling sorry for himself. He rubbed his leg. “It was like I said. Gringo and these three hicks came down and made me an offer. I said no thanks and one of them shot me.”

“Not della Torre?”

“Might have done. Couldn’t tell. Gun went off, bullet hit me, and suddenly I had other things on my mind.”

“Julius, I won’t fool around with you here. We haven’t got a huge amount of time. You see, I actually know what happened. You set Gringo up with those Bosnians. For some reason they screwed up and Gringo decided to take a bit of revenge on you.” Anzulović was guessing, but figured it was probably close to the truth. “What happened to the Bosnians?”

“Who knows? They disappeared. Their car’s wrapped around a tree, but they went,
puff
, into thin air,” Strumbić said, not bothering to deny Anzulović ‘s accusations.

“Now, Julius, you’re right. I’ve got Gringo’s interests in mind. He shouldn’t have shot you, but he did. When it comes up in front of the judge, he’ll get plenty of sympathy. Nobody thinks it’s a bad thing to wound somebody who conspired in trying to kill you. Except between here and there, Gringo might end up in a lot of trouble. If your Zagreb cops get hold of him, whoever is trying to get rid of him will have a free ride. So we’ll do our best to get him into
UDBA
custody. But that’s not an optimal solution either. Not for you, anyway. You see, Julius, life for you will be very tricky if Messar happens to get hold of Gringo or the Bosnians. Sure, Gringo will be in trouble for selling you crap files, but not as much trouble as you’ll be in for having stolen good ones off him. Or for being party to a hit on him. I may not be able to bury this, because your bosses want to give me as much grief as possible. I don’t know what advantage you thought you’d have in fingering Gringo. Did you think it would make you a hero with the Zagreb force? Or did you think that if you blamed the Bosnians they’d think it was a fight between a bunch of crooks and a corrupt cop? No, don’t answer me. I’ll put it down to shock. Normally you’re not that stupid. I suggest you start writing another version of what happened, one that puts Gringo in a better light. And then maybe, just maybe, we can make this whole thing go away, find the Bosnians, and figure out who wants to kill one of my employees.”

Strumbić stared sullenly at Anzulović. Before he joined the
UDBA
, Anzulović had a reputation for being able to cut through seven degrees of bullshit, and Strumbić knew that Anzulović was at least Messar’s equal in solving a case.

“Messar is as good an investigator as we’re likely to find,” continued Anzulović, “so there’s a very, very good chance we’ll have Gringo in by this afternoon. Which means you’ll have to pull your quill out and make Shakespeare look like an Albanian ditchdigger pretty damn quick. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Good. How bad’s the wound?”

“I’ll live.”

“How long they likely to keep you in here?”

“They say they’re sending me home today.” Strumbić didn’t sound too happy about the prospect.

“Even better. Tomorrow morning I want you in my office with that affidavit. I’ll have a lawyer in to witness it. Make it believable. And make it good. My motto is that what makes movies bad is bad scripts. Write me a script that wins Academy Awards. Explain exactly what happened, exactly the way it happened, so long as Gringo’s one of the good guys. Got that? I’ve got an urgent appointment right now. But you be sure you’re at that office at nine a.m. sharp. Understand?”

“Like you said it in Greek and I was born in Athens,” said Strumbić.

“Goodbye, Detective,” Anzulović said.

“I’d like to say it was a pleasure,” Strumbić said to Anzulović’s retreating back.

Anzulović looked at his watch as he was walking to the parking lot.
Della Torre.
He shook his head. The situation had certainly become complicated.

The young lawyer . . . No, he wasn’t young anymore. Della Torre was seeing the tail end of his thirties. Yet to Anzulović he was the same young prosecutor he’d first met when Anzulović was with the Zagreb detectives, what was it, a decade before? There’d been something joyfully boyish about him. Not quite naive but maybe an underlying optimism. Growing up in America must have rubbed off on della Torre. It was an attractive but strange quality for someone to have in Yugoslavia, a country where if people weren’t complaining they weren’t conversing.

The air felt crisp after the hospital’s oppressive heat. Anzulović
quickened his step to the car, which he’d parked over the middle of two spaces. It felt colder in the car than it had outside. He’d heard the newest Mercedes had heated seats. He could have used them right then. Though he might as well wish he were Cary Grant.

His thoughts drifted back to della Torre. There was something Hollywood about his looks, though Anzulović could never pin down who it was that the lawyer reminded him of. None of the recent actors. None from the previous generation either — not Newman or McQueen or Eastwood. Though there were shades of Kristofferson playing Billy the Kid.

He couldn’t figure it out.

Anzulović wouldn’t have minded della Torre as a son-in-law, if he weren’t already married to Irena. They made a nice couple. Clever. Attractive. With a genuine streak of goodness. Though anything Gringo had, Irena had more of. Shame they were on the rocks.

There was something innately lucky about the lawyer.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Della Torre’s mother had died when he was a boy. He’d been dragged back from America, back from the land of unlimited promise to . . . to this.

Anzulović checked his watch and pressed down on the car’s accelerator. Right now, the only thing that mattered was that if he hurried he might just be able to make it to the pastry shop before it shut for midday.

DELLA TORRE WALKED
back through Zagreb’s main square, Trg Republike. There had been talk about changing its name back to the old one from before the Communists, Trg Ban Jelačić. It was named after Duke Jelačić, a bald man with a big moustache who’d run the country for the Austrians at one time. His statue had been taken down by the Communists when they’d changed the name. Apparently someone had kept it hidden since the war.
No doubt another cavalryman on a prancing horse,
thought della Torre.
Another Zagreb cowboy.

The sound of an explosion made della Torre flinch. Pigeons, scrawnier than he remembered, wheeled into the air. It was the midday cannon booming out from the old watchtower on the hill. It aimed south towards the Bosnian border, where Croatia’s Serbs were getting restless.
Maybe they should start loading it with shot
, della Torre thought.

The drizzle had lifted slightly, but it was the sort of day that had all the colour wrung out of it. Trams trundled into the square. People hurried to wherever they were going. Few ambled these days.

Della Torre’s stomach churned with uncounted cups of strong, sweet coffee. He’d sat in the café after Anzulović left, but then finally went for a walk. He thought better that way.

Somebody wanted him dead. Somebody high up in Belgrade, if Strumbić was to be believed. They’d still want him dead now. An old Communist based in Zagreb had been dug up out of whatever hole he’d been in to make the arrangements. So either the people in Belgrade were no longer in a position of power or they didn’t want official involvement.

Serbia was changing too, just like Croatia was. The nationalists were also running the show there. The old cadre who’d helped Tito build a Communist Yugoslavia from the ashes of the Second World War had been sidelined everywhere. Even the Yugoslav army barely clung to the Yugoslav ideal. Every day it became more and more an instrument of Serb nationalism.

What had he done to nettle the old Yugoslav Communists?

Della Torre figured they’d used the Bosnians because the
UDBA
had made a fine art of integrating criminals into the secret service, hiring them as assassins and agents. Old habits . . .

Pilgrim. Swedish centrifuges. The Montenegrin. That’s all he had in his little notebook. The centrifuges were cylinders like big pipes, two metres or so in length, shipped to Belgrade in their thousands during the mid-1980s. From Belgrade, they’d been sent on abroad, only he couldn’t recall where to, if the files had even mentioned it. It was only because the file had been connected to the Montenegrin that he’d noted it, collected it, added it to his curiosities. What the Montenegrin had to do with it wasn’t clear, just that he’d been involved with something called Pilgrim and Pilgrim had something to do with centrifuges.

He was a strange curiosity, the Montenegrin. A thorough, utterly ruthless professional killer. Sometimes he was subtle, slowly reeling in his quarry with the right bait, placed perfectly on the right hook.

Della Torre had been the hook when, more than a decade earlier, they’d first met in London.

What had the Montenegrin said? “You work for the prosecutor’s department. As an officer of the Yugoslav state, you have some responsibilities. I have one for you to discharge. There is a man called Svjet who goes to the Croatian Mass at the Brompton Oratory on Sunday mornings. Go to the service. Get to know him. You don’t need to record anything; just make sure he gets to know you and trust you.”

He dared not ignore the
UDBA
man.

So he met Svjet. Got to know him and his family. The old man had married late because of the interruption to his life — seven years on Goli Otok. He could be tedious about politics, but drag the conversation away from the Church and Croatia and he changed. He was full of humour and insight into film and art and books. He played the viola and performed duets with his daughter on the violin.

When, at the end of the academic year, della Torre had to go back to Zagreb, the Montenegrin came to see him again, handing him a package. Papers, he’d said, about Bušić’s killing. Give them to Svjet.

Della Torre hastily arranged a meeting with the old man. Nothing could have kept Svjet from coming. Ante Bušić had been a close friend, another dissident writer and also part of the Croatian Spring movement. He’d been killed in Paris by the
UDBA
a couple of years before. Svjet had more than once told della Torre how he reminded him of a younger Bušić. Maybe his fondness for della Torre had really just been nostalgia.

Years later, when he left the prosecutor’s office and joined Department VI, della Torre became reacquainted with the Montenegrin. Though now the Montenegrin wasn’t just an
UDBA
agent but also the head of the wetworks operation.

With the job came the opportunity for della Torre to look into the
UDBA
file on Svjet, though he’d long suspected what had happened. He’d been coaxed to Trieste by the package
della
Torre had given him about Bušić. He’d been picked up there by
UDBA
agents, people who worked for the Montenegrin. Svjet had been taken back to Belgrade. And then he’d disappeared. The file said nothing more. But it didn’t need to. It had been the story of many other dissidents. Kidnapped and disappeared.

As far as he knew, Svjet’s wife and daughter still lived in London. As far as he knew, they’d spend their lives wondering. He’d never spoken to the Montenegrin about it. It was never one of della Torre’s cases.

There was a certain irony to his present circumstances. He’d spent years hunting down the
UDBA
’s killers. Now he was the hunter hunted. His big hope was that Croatia would win her independence. Soon.

He’d walked a big loop around the centre of Zagreb. The fine morning mist penetrated the city’s mood, leached right through him.

He had to do something about the car. It was a shame; he was getting to like driving a
BMW
. But Anzulović was right — the minute Strumbić was free, he’d have every cop in Zagreb looking for it. Della Torre would offload the
BMW
after he’d had a bite to eat.

There was a decent sausage stand at Černomerac, near the garage Anzulović had told him about. He drove there, parked just off the square, and bought a fat steamed kobasa, pinkish red and swollen to bursting out of the ends of its skin. It came with a thick slice of white bread and a dollop of hot, smooth mustard. He bought a third-of-a-litre bottle of Karlovačka beer and, briefly, thought about the Bosnians. He wondered if they’d been found yet and whether any of them had survived. Certainly not the swimmer.

“Dead today.”

“What?” della Torre said, startled out of his reverie by the sausage man.

“I said it’s dead today. I mean, plenty of people around, but not a lot of business. I guess nobody eats anymore.”

“The country’s on a diet.”

“Yeah, well, there’s some that eat very well. All those Bosnian smugglers are onto a gold mine. They go south, they go north, but wherever they go, there’s a Deutschmark to be made. They keep the business pretty sewn up too. Try and muscle in and they plant you in the ground headfirst. I hear there’s whole fields of sprouting legs in the hills down south.”

“Paints a picture. You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Nah, just what I hear. Černomerac is where they all come through if they’re coming this way or going that way,” he said, pointing towards Bosnia. “Reason I mention it is because you look like you might be interested in something like that but might not know too much about how to set yourself up, if you know what I mean. For a consideration, I could acquaint you with people who could help make sure you don’t get hurt.”

“That’s very generous of you,” della Torre said. “Soon as I leave the police, I’ll come straight to you.”

“Don’t mention it,” the sausage man said, suddenly wary. “I mean that — don’t mention it, and the sausage is on the house.”

“Gee, thanks,” said della Torre. “But I distinctly remember having paid for it already.”

“So you did, so you did.” The sausage man turned away, busying himself in the kiosk.

Della Torre noticed that there were indeed many Bosnians about. All those slightly too short trousers, white socks, and dark shoes. Was there really a uniform? he wondered. He washed down the last bite of sausage with the beer and entered a stall that fringed the Dolac market. He picked up a cheap imitation leather shoulder bag, something to hold his passport, wallet, Beretta, and carton of Luckys minus a pack. He lit one and sauntered over to the
BMW
, which he’d parked within sight.

He circled around a bit before he found the entrance he was looking for. It was a narrow, unmarked carriageway that ran through a late-nineteenth-century block of flats. Once through he was in a large courtyard with rickety wooden garages all along one side. He supposed they must have once been either stabling or cover for carriages and wagons. An old and very large walnut tree grew in the middle of the courtyard, and beyond it was a car repair shop. The courtyard was surrounded by five- and six-storey apartment buildings with the same thick walls, dormer windows, and red-tiled roofs as his own. They formed the perimeter of a rather large city block. Della Torre suspected there was another carriageway leading through the apartment block on the other side, though he couldn’t see it. Cars, mostly decrepit Zastavas and Yugos, littered the yard.

Della Torre drove slowly around the walnut tree and stopped near the repair shop’s open entrance. Someone was standing in the mechanic’s pit, underneath a Citro
ë
n, hosing it with compressed air. Della Torre wandered into the oil-stained workspace, where he spotted a man sitting at a desk in a corner office. He realized he’d forgotten the name of the man Anzulović had told him to talk to. He hadn’t even written it down. He cursed himself.

The man looked up. “What can I do for you?” he asked between blasts of compressed air.

“I wanted to talk to somebody about my car.”

The man got up and moved close enough to della Torre to see that the car in question was a
BMW
. He was short, solidly built but not fat, and about ten years older than della Torre, with a big widow’s peak and watery blue eyes. A friendly-looking fellow.

“I’m afraid we’re pretty booked up for repairs. Wouldn’t be able to see to your car for a couple of weeks, and then it might take a while to get parts. You know how it is. You’ve got to pay the suppliers with marks first, and then a week later they tell you they haven’t got it in stock and they have to order it from Germany. You might try the Mercedes garage on the Samobor road. They do all the German cars. Should be able to sort you out,” he said, edging back to his desk.

“You must be the only people around with a full workload. Outside of the hospitals,” della Torre said.

The man shrugged. “Lead a good, clean life and the Lord rewards you.”

“I’m not really here to get my car serviced. Actually, I was told that you might be interested in buying it.”

The man walked back towards della Torre, passed him, and did a little turn around the car.

“Nice Beemer, good condition, what is it, last year’s model? I’d be tempted to buy it for myself if I had the money. But I don’t. And we only mend cars here.”

“Shame, really. A friend of mine said he’d used your sales service and found it impeccable.”

“That’s nice of your friend, but either he’s pulling your leg or you’ve got the wrong garage.”

“Sorry I wasted your time. I’ll tell Mr. Anzulović that the garage no longer does the special service he promised me.”

“Anzulović, you say?”

“Yes, Anzulović.”

“Colleague, is he? Or a neighbour? Or somebody you met in a bar?”

Della Torre considered his answer and decided the truth was as good as anything.

“I work with him.”

“And what line of work might that be?”

Della Torre was at a loss. He hadn’t expected this question and didn’t know how to answer it. Had Anzulović been on an official job here? Had he told them what he did or had he used some cover occupation?

The man rubbed his stained hand against his overalls and pointed it at della Torre. Della Torre wasn’t sure what had happened.

“My name’s Fresl. Come on in.”

He shut the door behind him and signalled della Torre to sit. Della Torre offered Mr. Fresl a Lucky from his new pack, figuring the full ashtray on the man’s desk wasn’t just there as an
objet d’art
.

“Thanks, but I prefer my own Player’s,” he said. “I can see from your inability to answer my question that you are in fact in Mr. Anzulović’s line of business,” he added, laughing. Della Torre was still none the wiser.

“Not many people go around advertising that they’re secret policemen.”

Della Torre smiled uncertainly.

“If Anzulović sent you, either you’re sound or my number’s up. Not much I can do about the latter, but if it’s the former, we can do business.”

And then it dawned on della Torre. Anzulović had been selling the
UDBA
’s official Mercedes to this outfit. And he’d been reporting them stolen to recoup more cash from the State insurer. It was one of the ways he’d managed to keep his staff paid. Another dangerous game.