Zagreb Cowboy (5 page)

“Nice doing business with you. And thanks for the beer.”

“Detective, please don’t do anything to make us think you are being duplicitous. My friends are very generous, but they can be vengeful when their generosity is abused.”

“
S
O YOU SOLD
me for fifteen thousand pieces of German silver?” della Torre said.

“Don’t get stuck on the number. He could have offered fifteen marks or a hundred and fifty thousand. Whatever it was, I had to take it. It’s hard negotiating with a stranger who’s slapping your nuts with a stick.”

“No idea who he was?”

“No. He looked familiar, like one of the old Communists you saw in the background of Tito’s photographs. I swear he was probably dug up out of Mirogoj,” Strumbić said, referring to the beautiful and imposing Zagreb cemetery under whose long arcades many of Croatia’s great and good were buried.

“It was at the Metusalem?”

“Yes. I don’t know much about the place. Looked it up when I got back to the office but it was red-lined. So the people who run the restaurant are close friends of the State. Or its enemies.”

“I’ll look it up,” said della Torre. “By the way, the Bosnians did the Karlovac job.”

“I know. Idiots told me. It’s not like they didn’t know I was a cop.”

“Maybe they thought you were corrupt.”

Strumbić’s instant and genuine hurt expression made della Torre backpedal, despite himself.

“I mean like the Karlovac cops.” He couldn’t believe he was offering a roundabout apology to Strumbić for calling him crooked.

“Called a mate in Karlovac. They’d made a real mess there. The amount of covering up the cops did should have won them an Oscar. I think next time when they’ve got a job, they’ll just do it themselves.”

“So why didn’t they shoot me in Zagreb? Or drop a grenade in my soup?”

“Maybe you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Maybe all they really wanted to do was take you for a nice Sunday evening drive.”

“Trust me, it was a hit. I wasn’t going to be coming home,” della Torre said. “And they made it pretty clear you were next.”

Della Torre pulled the little notebook out of his breast pocket and flipped through the pages, looking back through months of tight, small-handed notes that filled about two-thirds of it. It was unlined so that he could condense as much information as was humanly visible onto a page in his immaculately neat, almost technical writing. He used the finest draftsman’s pen he could find.

“Did he say anything more about Pilgrim? I never gave you a file about Pilgrim.” He’d kept a record of everything he’d passed on to Strumbić.

“Sold.”

“I never sold you a file about Pilgrim.”

“Gringo, we have a deal, right?”

“What deal?”

“I’m honest with you and you accept the truth in an honourable and noble way.”

“What are you telling me, Julius?”

“We have a deal?”

“Julius.”

“Do we?”

“We have a deal. I promise not to shoot you.”

“Okay. Okay. You remember when I came round to your office with that attestation from the ex-
UDBA
guy who’d drowned his wife?”

“The one I wasn’t interested in.”

“That’s it. Remember you poured me a shot of Bell’s?”

“How could I forget? You asked for it the second you got into the office, reminding me you’d bought it for me in the first place.”

“And you got it out of your locked filing cabinet?”

“Because that’s where I keep it.”

“And then you got called away.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d arranged to have your secretary give you a buzz to tell you Anzulović wanted you.”

“Anzulović didn’t want me. He wasn’t in.”

“That’s right.”

“It was a mix-up, she said.”

“It was a bottle of French perfume, she meant.”

“I see. So you corrupted the office secretary. I’m not liking where this is going, by the way.”

“Gringo, listen. The files you kept bringing for me, they were crap. I won’t beat around the bush, but they were crap. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, some of the stuff was amusing. Good for a laugh. A few helped me drag some favours out of people. But frankly, most of it wouldn’t have made it onto page twelve of the evening paper.”

Della Torre figured Strumbić was exaggerating. But not much.

“So why’d you buy them?”

“Because, Gringo, I didn’t want to see you starve. It was my Christian duty.”

“You’re telling me you bought files from me, that you knew were useless, as an act of charity?”

“That sort of thing,” Strumbić said. He gave della Torre what he thought was a beneficent look, the sort a kind priest might give. But it just made him look like a hungry scavenger.

“So you never managed to sell any of the stuff I gave you.”

“Sold me.”

“Sold you.”

“There is this guy at the Italian consulate who was in the market for any old dross. But I’m telling you, Gringo, I barely broke even. I mean, once you factor in my costs, I was taking a loss on that rubbish. Once you gave me something worthwhile and I overpaid for it, thinking I’d encourage you. But you just didn’t get it.” Strumbić ignored the non-pecuniary advantages of having something on prosecutors and judges.

“And?”

“And, well, I felt that you owed me maybe a little more. Okay, maybe I was wrong, maybe I overstepped the bounds a little. Just a little. But can you blame me? Really?”

“Julius.” Della Torre looked at the cop coldly, tempted to hit him. Just the once.

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.”

“You stole files from my office. You created a ruse to steal from me. Those were my private papers.”

“I wouldn’t say steal. I’d say borrow. I borrowed the documents with every intention of returning them. I promise. And I was going to cut you in. Share and share alike, right?” Strumbić kept up a pleasant expression but he was pale in the light of the naked bulb and sweat beaded his brow despite the evening’s chill.

“You know Anzulović hates it when you come round the office? Calls you a snake. He’s right.”

“Anzulović.
He
and
that
Messar
think
they’re
white
r
than
white,”
said Strumbić. Anzulović was the head of Department VI and
Messar was one of della Torre’s colleagues. “I’ll tell you something about Anzulović. He may have clean hands, but what about his wife, eh? She’s a manager at Nama,” Strumbić said, referring to a department store chain. “Never short a dinar, those people. They’ve got their scams running. Hiding stock, marking it sold on the inventory sheets, and then putting it back on the shelves when the prices have gone up, pocketing the difference. Why do you think that most of the time there’s no coffee or toilet paper to be found for love or money, and then suddenly that’s all you can find? And his daughter works for them now too.” Strumbić sounded wounded.

“Julius, right now the issue isn’t Anzulović’s wife. Right now it’s about me trying not to shoot you.”

“We had an agreement, Gringo.”

“Oh?”

“Gringo, you’re not the violent sort. You’re a lawyer. You’re the sort of lawyer who’d be working for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now. You don’t want to shoot people. You’re an honest man” — the words were stumbling over each other — “trying to do the right thing, doing an impossible job in impossible circumstances when the world’s against you.”

Della Torre knew Strumbić was playing on his sense of martyrdom. As a young prosecuting lawyer he’d been roped into Department VI soon after its formation. Anzulović, a senior detective himself hired from the regular Zagreb police force to run it, had tapped della Torre because of his knowledge of Italian and English and because he’d trained in international law, all useful for investigating the
UDBA
’s activities abroad. It had paid well, and ironically it was — had been — a mostly honest job. One of the few truly honest jobs in a country rotten through with corruption and compromise.

But the
UDBA
was widely hated. It didn’t matter that his job was to keep it as clean as possible. To most people the
UDBA
was poison. It may not have pervaded society as deeply as East Germany’s Stasi, but its long reach meant that no one was comfortable expressing honest political opinions, even to their spouses. Its penal colony, the Adriatic island Goli Otok, was a frozen hell in winter and a burning hell in summer from which few came back to join the living. But what the
UDBA
did better than any of those other hated organs of state viciousness was the murder of its dissidents. The organization and its predecessors had liquidated more than ten thousand souls during internal purges over the decades. It did so without compunction and with naked brutality, and there was no country in which an enemy of the Yugoslav state could feel safe from the reach of its long and crimson arm.

“So what do I do now? Go back to Zagreb and wait for the next hitman to show up?”

“Look, Gringo. If it makes you any happier, I’m in it at least as far up my neck as you are. You sure those Bosnians are fixed?”

“Like a row of cabbages,” della Torre said wearily. “Mind if I pour myself a drink and help myself to another of your cigarettes?”

“Don’t insult me. We’re informal here. You know you don’t have to ask,” Strumbić said extravagantly.

Della Torre poured a tin mug of wine straight from the tap in the barrel, thinning it with a finger of bottled mineral water that tasted of soap, and lit one of Strumbić’s Lucky Strikes. A moth batted itself against the light bulb.

“They should have pumped an anti-tank rocket into my apartment,” della Torre said.

“Maybe next time. Or maybe they’ll find some people who can drive.”

“So what do you do now that these people from Belgrade think you shafted them?” della Torre asked.

“I’ll have to go somewhere else for a while. Just like you,” Strumbić said, chewing on the inside of his lip.

“The place on Šipan?”

“Problem with the island is all the locals know when you’re there. If somebody who doesn’t like you knows one of the islanders, you’re stuffed. Opatija is out of season. You end up looking like a priest in a whorehouse.”

“So, not unusual, in other words.”

“Hah. You know, you’re almost funny sometimes. But the people in Belgrade know about all those places anyway.”

“What about your little bolthole in London?” della Torre asked.

Strumbić grimaced. London was his ultimate sanctuary, the place he had lined up for when he finally disappeared with his money. Ditch the wife. Ditch the jobs, official and otherwise. Ditch the aggro. Live it large in a proper city where he wouldn’t be afraid somebody would snitch on him about the car he drove or how fat his wallet was when he pulled it out to pay the restaurant bill. The action was better. And if he wanted sun, he could get to anywhere from London. Not just to Croatia, but to places that had proper hotels and did food other than just meat on a stick.

Nobody else knew about the London apartment. Only della Torre.

He’d been at Strumbić’s weekend place on a sunny afternoon the previous summer, eating cherries right off the tree and drinking wine, shirtless and sweating. Strumbić hadn’t owned the apartment long and was dead pleased about it. Bravado and the long-bottled-up urge to tell somebody made him talk. Ironically, della Torre was probably the safest person to say anything to. He was selling files to Strumbić and had no desire to get on the cop’s bad side. Besides, secret policemen knew how to keep their mouths shut. Better than priests. Better than lawyers, even. So a secret policeman lawyer was the best of all.

“I’ve done the smartest thing you’ve ever heard,” he’d said, savouring the wine.

“What’s that? Turned honest?”

“What sort of cretin do you take me for? I’ve lined up my retirement plan.”

“I thought you were going to work till you keeled over. Which must be sometime next week, the way you’re going.”

“Naw. Bought myself a place.”

“Another one? How many have you got? Two flats in Zagreb I know about, that villa on Šipan, this place, and haven’t you got some farm outside of Varaždin? How much do you need?”

“They’re all in this country. I’ve bought something abroad, for when the shit really hits the fan.”

“Oh yeah? Where? Albania?”

“That’s not even humour. London.”

“London?”

“Yeah, a place called Hampstead. Big apartment right in the middle of the park.”

“The Heath?”

“That’s right, you were a student there for a while, weren’t you?”

“I try to forget,” della Torre said. He’d spent the gloomiest eight months of his life in London, doing a course on international law paid for by his then employer, the Zagreb prosecutor’s office. It was where he’d had his first dealings with the
UDBA
. Dealings that had compromised him, eroded his principles. Back when he still had them.

But he shifted his thoughts back to Hampstead. He’d had some nice walks in the big park there, wandered around John Keats’s house back when he’d still read poetry. A decent place to escape London’s relentless urbanity if you couldn’t afford the plane fare out.

“The building’s right in the middle of the Heath. I mean, not in the middle middle. It’s on the edge. But the park surrounds it on three sides. Up near the top of the hill. Big brick building with these white, what are they called? Dormers. White dormers. I’ve got this fourth-floor apartment, just below the penthouse, windows on two sides. Look out my living room and London’s spread out like a whore on her back. A good-looking, expensive one, covered in jewels. I tell you, it’s fantastic. Too bad you’ll never see the place. Two hundred square metres, even bigger than my Zagreb apartment, in one of the classiest parts of town.”