Zagreb Cowboy (30 page)

He flew into a rage, but before he could do anything he regretted, the transvestite hookers did something he’d never have expected in ten lifetimes.

They apologized.

“We sorry, man. We thought you looking for our type of fun. Hanging in Soho in a boiler suit, we thought you gay. We don’t be charging you. Be cool and have a good night.”

They were big. Much taller than him and, he saw now, muscled. But they held their hands up and made to leave, as if it had all been a misunderstanding. He hadn’t even shown them the gun.

Strumbić didn’t hold grudges. And he could see the funny side of things. They were so solicitous of his feelings, blaming themselves for not making it clearer what was happening, that their regret shone through even his poor English and their West Indian accents. He’d never seen or heard anything of the sort. Normally, outraged punters get beaten up by the transvestites, who then clean him out. Or the transvestite demands the agreed-on fee and ends up getting shot or bludgeoned.

But never, ever had he heard of an amicable apology and willingness to go without payment, or even to find someone who might suit him better so that they could all party together.

Which was what they did. One went down to the hotel bar and picked up a couple of normal, good-looking hookers. And they all had a party. They ordered more booze — much more booze. One of the real girls had some decent white powder, whatever it was. He paid for the lot. It wasn’t a cheap night, though he wasn’t exactly sure quite how expensive. Didn’t matter. This was exactly why he wanted to move to London. To do stuff he couldn’t even begin to imagine doing in Zagreb.

It all went so far beyond the realm of what he’d thought possible that he wondered whether he’d borrowed someone else’s imagination. Some very strange, very perverse, very creative artist of the impossibly degenerate.

As a young cop, he’d heard stories of Weimar from a retired old detective who’d spent his own youth in Germany. He and the other rookies had laughed at the detective’s improbable stories, buying the toothless old man drink after drink as a reward for his concupiscent flights of fancy. About how you could buy three generations of prostitutes from the same family. Or how there were specialized alleys in Berlin for all sorts of perversions. One for female amputees. Another for male ones. One for women who’d do it with animals. How money could buy anything. Never in Zagreb had Strumbić run into more than the smallest corner of the kind of perversity the old man described.

But it now dawned on him: the veteran hadn’t made anything up.

Strumbić didn’t mind that the transvestites spent much of the evening searching for his money when they thought he wasn’t looking. He’d expected no less. They looked everywhere. They tried to pull up the carpet. They checked the curtain rail and the turn-ups of the curtains. They looked in the toilet cistern. They looked through every drawer and under the mattress. He’d left the room safe open, sparing them the trouble. They took the backs off the telephone and the television. He knew because they’d put them back without tightening the screws. They checked his shaving cream to see if it was fake and they just about ripped his suitcase apart, pretending to play some game with it. All they found was the money he’d allocated for the evening. And the Beretta, which didn’t seem to surprise them. It amused him how thorough they were. They showed him grudging respect.

He let them stay until he wanted to leave for the estate agency, which was probably a mistake. It amused them so much that he was putting the blue overalls back on to go out that they followed him: two black transvestites, a couple of ordinary prostitutes, and a pimp who tagged along when he saw them leaving the hotel.

Strumbić was relaxed and happy, having partied harder than he’d ever partied before. Whatever it was that had gone up his nose made him feel sharp and alive, while the endless booze gave him a warm feeling towards his companions. Encouraged by his entourage, he bought a few bottles of whisky from an off-licence that opened illegally after hours to customers willing to pay double the normal price. It was shut at the front, but round back there was a queue of punters placing their orders through a barred window.

At first, Strumbić tried to fob off his new friends with the booze, but they had marked him like lawyers latched on to a rich man’s corpse. Drinking normally made him relax, and he’d compensate by being extra vigilant. But there was something else involved here, the euphoria of total freedom. It made him indiscreet. And his new friends wanted to help.

So all six of them broke into the estate agency.

ANZULOVIĆ WAS STILL
stiff. He had a feeling his back would never properly straighten again. The hotel mattress was even less comfortable than the Merc’s seat after an overnight drive. A broken fan belt en route had delayed them. It seemed the Zagreb mechanic who’d serviced their car had used second-hand spares.

They’d arrived in London late, and he and Messar had found a budget hotel well outside of central London, taken a room with twin beds, and thrown themselves into a snoring competition. Now and again one would wake up the other to tell him to shut up, but mostly they were unconscious. Neither had slept much during their marathon drive through Italy and France.

They drove back into the centre mid-morning, not quite believing how much traffic there could be on a Sunday. Anzulović was sure their trip would be wasted. Who worked Sunday mornings? But Messar insisted. And he was right.

They found a pretty young man guarding the agency door while police and various other people wandered around inside.

“We look man here — Strumbić,” Anzulović struggled to say. He was hopeless with the language, constantly fishing for words with a rusty hook that had lost its bait.

“Sorry, I can’t help you. We’re shut. We had a break-in last night, and we’ve got a real mess to clear up.” Anzulović nodded as if he understood. “They went for the keys, though I shouldn’t be telling you that. They had a party here as well; Smirnoff bottles all over the place. I dread to think what else we might find. Very clever, they were. Disabled the alarm system before they broke in. Filled the box with foam and put tape around the light. Seemed to know what they were doing.” The pomaded young man had been put on the door to keep people at bay. He seemed happy to have somebody to tell the salacious details to.

Anzulović thought he’d maybe understood one word in four.

“My English, not good. Someone speak here . . .
Italiano
?”

“Italian, no, I’m afraid not. I mean, Harry does, but I haven’t seen her yet. She’ll probably put in an appearance. All the agents are, it’s such a mess.”

“
Hrvat
?”

“What’s that?
Cravat
, did you say?”

“You speak Russian?”

“Nope. I’ve got German and French, though, if either of those work for you.”

“Cherman —
Deutsche
?” Messar interjected, understanding the gist of the conversation and then latching on to one of the only words he recognized.

“Is this better?” The young man switched into a singsong Swiss German.

“Yes. Looks like you have some problems here,” Messar said, taking over from a relieved Anzulović, who had only schoolboy German.

“A break-in overnight. It looked professionally done, but then they had a party in the office. They left the place a pigsty. What they did in the rubbish bins! I had to go out back and throw up. Who knows what they took, besides enough keys to unlock half of London. The rich half. We have to spend the morning calling owners. It’s an absolute nightmare.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. We’re looking for a man who has dealings with you. His name is Strumbić.”

The young man shook his head. “Nothing I recognize, but I’ll ask around the office if you like.”

“He might be using another name. I have a picture of him here.” Messar pulled an official ID photo out of his briefcase.

“Oh yes. That’s Mr. . . . the name’s on the tip of my tongue . . . Mr. Smirnoff. Smirnoff, that’s it,” he said, his voice trailing off, looking back towards the bottles stacked on a desk, where they’d been cleared off the floor. “Like the vodka.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

The young man had a faraway look and then a sense of dawning realization. “You know, if I was at all a suspicious sort, I’d say it was that bastard,” he muttered in a low voice, still speaking German. And then to Messar, “Yes, he was here yesterday morning. Very rude and very insistent. I had a feeling that if there hadn’t been other people in the office, he’d have had fun knocking my teeth out.”

“Sounds like him. What did he want?”

“His keys. He said he’d lost them and wanted the spare set we keep for him.”

“Keys for what?”

“His apartment.”

“He has an apartment in London?”

“Yes, in Hampstead. A very nice one, apparently.”

“And he didn’t have keys?”

“No.”

“Did you give them to him?”

“No. He didn’t have any ID on him and said he needed the keys to get it. Some story about his passport being in a bank safety deposit box. I shouldn’t really be telling you all this, but he was such a bastard. Sorry, you’re not friends of his, are you?”

“No, we’re not friends.”

“Good. I didn’t think so. You won’t tell anyone I told you, will you?”

“Not at all,” said Messar, showing his teeth the way a shark might. “So where exactly is his place?”

“Really, I can’t tell you that. His keys seem to have disappeared with some of the others. I just can’t tell you where he lives. That would be wrong. Who knows who you are? I mean, you could be some tax collectors or mafia or something.” He caught Messar’s smile. He held up his finger and ducked into the office, coming out with a clipboard fat with papers. After a moment’s searching, he added, “Besides, we need to send someone to the Pryors on East Heath Road, apartment 4D, first, just to make sure everything is okay.”

“East Heath Road, you say,” Messar said, noting the address down in his little notebook.

“Oh, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything.”

“Well, thank you very much for not talking to us.”

“Thank you for not listening . . . And whatever you do to the bastard, just make sure it hurts,” he added as the
UDBA
men left.

• • •

The pretty dyed-blond nurse got della Torre a newspaper in the morning because, she said, he didn’t watch television and you could never tell how long it would take to be discharged. A doctor had to see him first, another urologist, and he’d fill out a prescription, and then it would take time to get that filled by the hospital pharmacy, so he could find himself waiting until the middle of the afternoon before he got to go home. So she’d taken the liberty of borrowing one of the consultant’s Sundays because he was too busy to read it anyway and it’s a pretty day to go for a walk on the Heath.

He thanked her for the newspaper. It helped to distract him from the cardboard-tasting breakfast and the coffee that somehow managed to be at once acrid and bland.

There was a report that Croatia and Slovenia would declare independence in the next couple of days, though it wasn’t yet a certainty. The Yugoslav army had made it clear that it would respond to any such gesture. He tried to believe that he could stay out of it. Avoid it somehow.

But it was like watching a brush fire in the distance while surrounded by stands of dry eucalyptus with the wind blowing in his direction. He could smell the inevitability even though it still seemed impossibly remote. It was funny to think he was more afraid of going to America than he was of heading back into that conflagration. Or maybe that wasn’t so funny.

A story about a shooting on a train in south London caught his eye. Some teenage muggers had been wounded by their intended victim. The boys Irena’s man had treated, della Torre supposed. There was a pen portrait of the shooter, an anonymous face that looked familiar because it could have belonged to almost any stodgy middle-aged man in a suit. England’s Bernie Goetz, the newspaper said. Good for him, della Torre thought.

STRUMBIĆ SHOWERED, SHAVED,
and dressed. Eagerness to be getting to his place woke him early. Not so early that Mrs. Strumbić wouldn’t have had time to do her ironing, cook a stew, make a strudel, and still berate him over his indolence. But early for someone who’d had the sort of night he’d had.

He was thinking of Mrs. Strumbić altogether too much for his liking. But she kept popping up in his mind with her damned dustpan and brush. And she made awfully nice strudels.

But she couldn’t match the English for breakfast. While he was in the shower, they’d delivered proper hangover food: eggs, bacon, fried bread and mushrooms, beans, tomatoes.

He felt the keys in his pocket and laughed. He’d had harder times getting into cigarette cartons than he had breaking into that estate agency.

He’d popped the back door, the alarm not making a peep. Once inside he’d made a beeline for the cabinet, opened it with the crowbar, found his file, and got his keys. The trannies loved that cabinet. All those keys to all those expensive houses, addresses conveniently attached.

They partied in that office. But only in a mellow way.

They didn’t destroy anything wantonly. Just took some keys and mixed the others up. Spilt a bit of booze. Made some long-distance phone calls. One of the trannies spent most of the night on the line to relations in Trinidad. They drank, sitting in those plush chairs, feet up on desks. They only switched one desk light on. Nobody passing on the street looked in. When they needed to, they pissed in a wastepaper bin. Strumbić was pretty sure that’s all they had done.

There were fond farewells for the trannies, who’d seemed pleased with their haul of keys. He laughed. If there was anything worth finding in those houses, the trannies would find it. He’d been tempted to go straight up to Hampstead. But his money and things were back at the hotel, and by the time he got back, the evening had caught up with him.

After he’d eaten and sorted himself out the following morning, he went into the hall outside his hotel room and waited, making sure no one was coming or likely to be leaving their room and that the maids weren’t around. When he was confident, he carefully extracted the pin that held shut the glass emergency door to the cupboard holding the fire hose and pulled his money out from between its loops.
One day there’ll be a fire. And then
, he reflected,
I’ll be out of luck. But not this time
. He felt the fat stack of large-denomination notes, British and German, and thought about how very much more was waiting for him at his bank, even after its recent pilfering.

He looked forward to getting to the apartment. For a while it had seemed the whole world was conspiring against him, enjoying the fruits of his hard work. Messar keeping an eye on him. Those bastard Bosnians threatening to kill him. Mrs. Strumbić would have given him an infarction had he spent any more time at home. Bloody Branko for not keeping up with the mail, though he couldn’t blame the poor man too much. Those prick kids on the train. The estate agents.

It made him feel like a superman, surmounting impossible odds.

He flagged down a black cab in Piccadilly Circus and enjoyed the ride through Regent’s Park and then up the hill to Hampstead and from there to the Heath. They passed a car that looked uncannily like a green Zastava, but Strumbić corrected himself. Surely he was mistaken. Why would anyone in the civilized world ever want to drive one of those junk heaps?

He looked forward to his new life. But when he got to the flat, he was perplexed.

The key fit. The place was as he’d remembered it. Only it seemed to be lived in. The food in the fridge wasn’t the spare essentials the estate agent was in the habit of leaving for him. It was bits and halves and some things that needed throwing out. Then there were the clothes, mostly women’s, but some men’s as well. He could have asked the porter, but he’d already told the man to mind his own business if he knew what was good for him.

His flat. All the stuff he’d rented off that woman agent — books, furniture, curtains, dishes, everything. And things he hadn’t.

The drinks cabinet in the apartment was well stocked, at least. Whoever’s booze it was. He pulled out a three-quarters-full bottle of whisky and turned on the television. He clicked off the Beretta’s safety and then put the gun on the arm of the sofa and sat down. To wait.

• • •

Della Torre walked back to the apartment. It felt good to be alive and pain-free. In the end it had taken longer than he’d expected to get signed out. And then there was another wait while the hospital pharmacy filled his prescription for painkillers he no longer needed.

He’d been astonished at how leisurely the process of leaving the hospital had been. It was already late afternoon. He’d have to hurry if he was to get home, shower, and change, and make it up to Irena’s place on time. But first he needed a real coffee, not the stewed dishrag they served at the hospital, and a cigarette. He’d take a taxi; he could afford it.

He’d dressed in what he’d been wearing the previous night. No, the night before that. Harry hadn’t brought him a change of clothes. Working the silver cufflinks through the holes in his folded French cuffs, he’d thought of Harry picking them out in that shop on Bond Street. He buttoned the top button on his white shirt and knotted the blue-on-blue Italian tie. He’d had it cleaned, but it was looking tired, old. Like him. There was more white in his hair than he remembered; there were new creases in the corners of his eyes.

It was a lovely, sunny afternoon. People were being dragged onto the Heath by their dogs or their children or sometimes both, wistfully clinging to their Sunday papers, though it was too late to be reading them now. Soon they’d be on to Monday’s news.

Opposite the pub with a big beer garden, the gravel parking lot was full, and the traffic was slow on narrow East Heath Road. Normally he’d go through the Heath, up a long meadow to the apartment building, or maybe take a little circuit through the woods, but this time he took a more direct route on the pavement along the road. He wanted to get back and wash away the hospital feeling that coated him.

He noticed a green Zastava further up the hill. Or he thought it was a Zastava, though it might have been another boxy imitation of an ancient, slightly less boxy Fiat. It was hard to tell with the police van right behind it obscuring his view.

A Zastava in London? Almost as bizarre as a good-looking woman choosing to drive around a 2CV that looked like a circus tent. Surely she could have afforded something else.

Still, he knew that eccentric collectors had bought East German Trabants after the Berlin Wall had fallen. Maybe they were doing the same with other near-useless cars from the rest of the old Communist bloc. He couldn’t see it ever being anything other than a minority pursuit. Maybe Harry’d buy one.

He wondered whether he’d see her at home. The thought that he’d frightened her away, chased her out of his life, depressed him. But it shouldn’t have surprised him. The
UDBA
cast an ugly black shadow, even here.

• • •

“How many times we going to drive up and down this road? I knew we should have got the exact address out of him,” said Besim in the odd, snuffling way he talked these days. The banana-shaped Bosnian next to him was pretty sure it had to do with the car accident, what with Besim’s having had his nose smashed and losing the whole front row of his top teeth. But it might have been a cold.

“It’s that building in the middle, halfway up, I’m sure of it.”

“So why we driving up and down, then?”

“Maybe we’ll spot him faster than if we just walk around.”

They’d arrived the previous morning. The first hour or so, they drove up and down that hill road, and then they decided to walk it. There were houses on one side. They looked for names next to the buzzers, but the English didn’t seem to like people knowing where they lived.

They found a corner store and bought salami and bread and a couple of cans of beer, ate in the park, and then went back to their scouting. The beer helped, so they bought some more, getting merry by late afternoon. They drove up and down a few more times, though Besim said that he’d heard something about how the English stopped people for driving after they’d been drinking. He knew about these things. The banana-shaped one said he couldn’t have had too much to drink, because he could still drive. Besim agreed, but they left the car near the bottom of the Heath anyway and bought some more beers.

They wandered around the park for a while. Growing up in the Bosnian hills, they were good at orienting themselves in woodland. They just strolled and drank until it got dark, when they found a little clearing in the middle of dense undergrowth that was canopied by big trees. Including a hollow one.

“You could fit somebody in this thing,” the banana-shaped one had said, running his hand along a smooth vertical cleft in the wood, around waist-high and only wide enough to take his fingers and only a hand’s-breadth long.

“Get a dolly bird in there, you could have some fun without having to look at her,” Besim snuffled.

“Why wouldn’t you want to look at her?”

“I don’t know, if she was ugly or something.”

The banana-shaped one nodded. It was certainly a big hollow, right through the middle of the ancient tree. Apart from that narrow vertical cleft and a small hole towards the bottom, the only entrance was through the top, about two metres off the ground, though the tree’s protruding roots made something of a ladder.

They’d spent a good night there. They hadn’t even thought of looking for a hotel. Though there were odd squealing and grunting noises throughout the night. Besim thought it might have been wild pigs. The banana-shaped one wasn’t so sure.

“How long you think it’ll take us to find Strumbi
ć
?” asked the banana-shaped one as Besim drove up the hill for the . . . he’d lost count. It must have been a couple of dozen times at least. They’d spent the morning walking around the woods before taking to the car, but had been driving around in it since.

“Till we find him. Not so bad here,” said Besim.

The weather wasn’t too hot during the day and not too cold at night. Food was decent, if expensive. And the park was homey. They’d even found a shelter, like an open-sided cottage, that looked like it would be comfortable if it started to rain. There were signs a tramp was living there, but the Bosnians figured he’d be easy to move along if it came to that.

“Nice-looking women in London.”

“Not bad.”

“Nice-looking.”

They were heading up the hill when the banana-shaped one caught sight of a very familiar-looking pedestrian going in the same direction.

“Hey, slow down,” he said.

“Can’t. Bastard cop’s on my ass,” Besim said, looking in the rear-view mirror.

“Then pull into one of the side roads. I’m seeing somebody that looks like the prick who pushed me off that cliff. You know, that guy in Zagreb we were supposed to do.”

“Yeah? Think he knows where to find Strumbić?”