Zagreb Cowboy

by Alen Mattich

  “No, they moved on. I don’t know where to.”

  “So?”

  “It was strange, that’s all. They were centrifuges made in Sweden by some German company based in Cologne that for some reason was connected to the Montenegrin.”

  “Centrifuges? You mean the things hospitals use to do stuff to blood?”

  “I guess so. My notes don’t say what they’re for. But there were a lot of them. Thousands.”

  “Sounds like a lot of blood,” Anzulović said.

  “Who knows, maybe it has something to do with AIDS?”

  “Horrible disease. Killed Rock Hudson. Not the greatest actor, but God’s a pretty harsh critic if that’s what it came down to.” Anzulović looked hard at della Torre. “Something you’re not telling me about? Who stole the file?”

  Della Torre sat back in his seat and exhaled a long breath of smoke.

  “Strumbić.”

  “Strumbić, eh? Figured it must have been something like that. He’s got more tendrils than a . . .” — Anzulović looked around for inspiration — “. . . than we do. So who wants you dead?”

  “You mean other than a bunch of Bosnians who did the Karlovac job? I don’t know. Strumbić says they were hired by some old Communist who happens to know the management at the Metusalem. It’s a restaurant up in the old town.”

  “I know it.”

  “Can you do me a favour? Can you look up who he runs with? Maybe find out who the old man is so I have a better idea of who hates me enough to have me dead.”

  “I take it you don’t want to come into the office because you’re worried these people in Belgrade might have some connections to the UDBA.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And what are you proposing to do, then?” Anzulović asked.

  “I was wondering what you might think about my taking a little time off. A couple of months. I’ve got some holiday built up. I don’t feel great about being in Zagreb when there are people who want to kill me and they’re being helped by the cops.”

  “Cops? Or a single cop? Are you saying Strumbić is in this with somebody else from the Zagreb force?”

  “No. Just Strumbić. I think.”

  “Okay. It’s important to be clear about these things. Some people want to kill you, possibly ordered by somebody in Belgrade, though we don’t know this for sure, and Strumbić was coerced into helping. Is that working for you?”

  “Yes,” della Torre admitted.

  “I’ll tell you what, Gringo. I’ll go back to the office and do some digging and come back with what I get. You just stay nice and cosy here. I agree with you that you’ll be better off going away for a little while. Nobody’s getting much of anything done here these days anyway. I’ll put it down that you’re on extended leave. I’ll make sure your salary is still paid, whatever good that does. We’ll investigate from this end. It’ll give us something to do now that we’ve been put on ice. Keep the troops motivated. I have no idea what we’ll do if we find out Belgrade’s behind this thing. You’d better hope for Croat independence in that case. Anyway, I’ll be back in a little while. Cool your heels until then.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “You should be. And for the record, we never talked about you selling information. Right? Or about how you keep records of things you shouldn’t,” Anzulović said, helping himself to one of della Torre’s cigarettes. “Nice, these.”

  “Want a carton?” della Torre asked.

  “That a bribe?”

  “No.”

  “Shame, because if it was, I wouldn’t feel that I had to pay you back, and I can’t afford American cigarettes,” Anzulović said.

  “It’s a present.”

  “In that case, thank you very much.”

  Della Torre walked to the car with Anzulović and pulled out a carton of Strumbić’s cigarettes. Anzulović held it close.

  Della Torre went back to the café, ordered another coffee, and lit a cigarette. He bored into his little black book, wishing his notes had been more expansive. Centrifuges? They didn’t even seem to have much to do with Yugoslavia. From what he could remember of it, the file looked like an analysis of foreign industry. Okay, so there were a lot of centrifuges, a couple of thousand, and they’d been transhipped through Belgrade, but it was hard to see how a bunch of machines designed to spin blood, as Anzulović had pointed out, would be of interest to anyone. He’d made reference to a couple of oddities about the file in his notebook. The machines appeared to be quite large. They were described as long tubes, and — if the shipping dimensions were anything to go by — more than two cubic metres per unit. And they’d been re-exported, but if the original files had mentioned where, he hadn’t written it down. He didn’t know anything about centrifuges. He’d ask Irena.

  What could they have had to do with the Montenegrin? Other than that the UDBA’s wetworks spilled a lot of blood. The document dated from the mid-1980s. That’s when the spread of the AIDS plague had become clear and terrifying. By then people knew it had something to do with bodily fluids. Maybe that’s where the centrifuges came in. For a moment he had a ridiculous thought, that the UDBA’s wetworks were using AIDS as a means of killing dissidents. But he dismissed it just as quickly. When the UDBA killed, it liked to spread terror around the community of dissidents about their political activities, not about whom they shared needles with.

  By the time Anzulović got back to the café, della Torre had been there the best part of two hours. Anzulović handed him a thin file.

  “Just the highlights. It cost me four packs of Luckys to get the archivist to piss off long enough to copy them. They were in the restricted section, but he’s being friendlier these days now that the Communists are looking shaky.” There was a long and meaningful pause, which della Torre chose to ignore.

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t say much. The people associated with the Metusalem are Belgrade through and through. Owned by a retired Communist who spends most of his time in Crkvenica,” Anzulović said, referring to the Adriatic holiday resort. “But he has plenty of old friends. One of them is the Dispatcher.”

  “Who?” The name rang a bell for della Torre, but he wasn’t sure why.

  “One of Tito’s men. Disappeared into quiet retirement after Tito’s death. Watchers have seen him at the Metusalem recently.”

  “Yes, of course. Spent a time on Goli Otok and then did Tito’s dirty work during the Croatian Spring.”

  “That’s the fellow.”

  “Have you got anything on him? I mean, why he might be interested in me?”

  “Not much. I’m sure there’s stuff in the archives if I dug around. I’ll have to get the archivist in a better mood, though. Leave it to me and I’ll have a look while you’re on holiday. I’m always curious about people who want to kill my staff. By the way, is there anything else you might want to tell me?”

  Della Torre looked thoughtful and then shook his head.

  “No?”

  Anzulović’s beeper went off. He looked at the number.

  “Office calling. Like they couldn’t tell me what they wanted when I was there. I hate these bloody things. You can never get away from them. Probably some overdue bill or cretin politician,” he said. “So what are you planning on doing with the car? I’m assuming Strumbić will want it back. He’ll have his friends on the Zagreb force looking for it if you borrowed it without asking nicely.”

  “He’s okay for a little while.”

  “What’d you do, tie him up?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I didn’t tell you this, but there’s a garage just this side of the tram station at Černomerac. The owner knows me. He’ll do you a deal for the Beemer. Just don’t go around telling everyone. And I’ll make sure you can disappear for a while. Bereavement. Death
in the family ought to do. But keep your head down. I’ll think about how maybe to keep you alive until we can arrange to get you killed off by the coming war. Oh, and I’d wait until lunchtime to go to Černomerac. They can be busy in the morning.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Who knows where the cards are going to fall? Not just for you but for all of us . . . hmm, sounds like something out of Casablanca,” he added to himself as the beeper went off again. “I’ve got to go. Good luck, and let me know where you pitch up. And remember, this is just a holiday while we try to figure out who the hell wants you in a cosy two-cubic-metre place of your own in Mirogoj. Don’t be thinking about making it permanent or anything.”

  FOR A LONG time, Besim the driver thought he was blind. He knew he was alive, but he couldn’t see anything. His face hurt. He could taste blood, his face was sticky with it. His tongue was enormously fat, and he could feel something digging into it. His lips were swollen, and he had to breathe through his mouth because his nose didn’t seem to work. There was a ringing in his ear as if he was sitting in a church bell.

  He tried to speak but he could form little more than grunts and snuffles. He was holding something. Yes, he knew what it was. A pistol. He remembered pulling it out of his holster as his head was being pulled back by that rope. Caught him right under the nose. He’d tried to keep control of the car with his left hand and bring the gun around with his right but it had all happened too quickly. He’d only just pulled the gun out and was drawing it in front of himself when there was the explosion of noise. And then he couldn’t remember anything.

  He felt the fresh air on his face but he knew he was still in the car seat. Ingrained habit made him reach forward and feel for the key in the ignition. It was there and he turned it. A headlight blazed forward, the radio came on, and a windscreen wiper flapped in the air. The bonnet was crumpled in front of him but he could see past the car on the passenger side. Slowly the scene in front of him assembled itself into something he could understand. The headlight pointed downward. He could see a stream and some shapes, and he could hear someone shouting his name in a hoarse, guttural tone. He bellowed in return, sounding like a wounded cow.

  The shape below made its way to the side of the headlight. As it drew up alongside the car, he realized there was something familiar about it, though it seemed to twist to one side.

  “Besim, Besim, are you alive? Put the gun down before you shoot me. Point it down. That’s better. Think you can get out of the car?”

  Besim nodded uncertainly. With some effort, he managed to wrench the door open. But he underestimated how much of a drop there was. He fell heavily to the ground and then slid headfirst down the slope until a protruding root stopped him. He hadn’t thought his face could hurt any more than it did. He was wrong.

  “Besim. Besim, what are you doing?”

  Besim got up and grunted.

  “Come here, over to the light, let’s have a look at you. Allah, you look like somebody hit you in the face with a shovel. Did you shoot yourself in the head?”

  Besim rocked slightly, trying to shake his head.

  “Can you talk?”

  Besim did his little snuffle-grunt but then gave up. It hurt his mouth too much. A big, hard object pressed between his palate and tongue. He spat it out and then realized it was probably a tooth.

  “Your cousin isn’t doing too well. He’s dead. I think he drowned. Maybe he couldn’t swim. Could he swim?” The banana-shaped Bosnian had found Besim’s cousin face-down in the bottom of the stream, looking like something he once saw in a nature documentary. Or was it a war movie? He couldn’t remember.

  Besim shook his head. At least it hadn’t been one of the cousins he’d been fond of. Or one who had a lot of brothers. This one was older and liked to run things, even though he was pig ignorant. He was the one who’d got their dodgy guns from some fly-by-night dealer in Banja Luka.

  “Here, give me a hand. Let’s get him up to the road. Maybe we can flag a car down or something.”

  They went to the stream and dragged the corpse back up the hill as best they could. Twice they lost their grip and it started to roll back down the slope. When they got up to the road, they couldn’t see a thing. There was a weak glow from the car’s surviving headlight reflected back up the gully, but that was all. The moon had disappeared and clouds covered the stars, but they could see a faint smudge of grey where a gap in the trees offered them a view east along the broad Sava River valley. Dawn would be breaking before long.

  In the distance they heard a car.

  “Besim, here, let’s get your cousin into the road.”

  “Wha?” Besim seemed to say, though the banana-shaped Bosnian wasn’t sure.

  “Here, like this.”

  They dragged the corpse by its feet so that it stretched across the middle of the road.

  “Don’t worry. If he gets run over it won’t hurt too much. He was never too polite anyway,” the skinny, crooked Bosnian said. He grabbed hold of Besim and pulled him out of view to the side of the road.

  The farmer in the green Zastava swerved when its feeble headlamps picked out the body ahead. His brakes squealed and he got out quickly.

  “Fucking drunks,” he said aloud. “Lying around all over the roads these days. No wonder they’re always getting killed.”

  He prodded the body in front of him with his boot.

  “You — get up, you, and get out of the fucking road before somebody squashes you flat. Couldn’t blame them if they did.”

  Behind him he heard a door slam. The farmer turned in surprise as Besim revved the engine and popped the clutch. The car leapt forward, dropping the man hard to the ground. Besim braked before he ran him over.

  “Mary, mother of God. You hit me with my own car. You could have killed me.” The farmer was flat on the ground, voice trembling, his face the length of a nose away from Besim’s cousin. “Shit. This man is dead. This is a dead man. Sweet God, don’t kill me.”

  “Get up, mister,” said the banana-shaped Bosnian.

  The middle-aged farmer struggled to his feet. He could make out an oddly twisted man pointing a gun at him.

  “I’ve got nothing, sir. Nothing. I was just going to Zagreb. I’ve got an appointment with a specialist early this morning. But I’ve got nothing to steal.”

  He was about to reach into his pocket when the Bosnian said, “Keep your hands in front of you.” The Bosnian thought for a moment. “Now here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take your trousers off very slowly. And when you’ve taken them off, you’re going to go down into that gully, down to where that stream is, where it’s lit up by the car. Then you’re going to get into that stream and squat down and put those trousers over your head. And if you move I’m going to shoot you. My friend is going to take your car, and I’m going to stand here and watch you, and if you move, you’re dead.”

  The farmer trembled out a “Yes sir, yes sir” and did as he was told.

  “Okay, Besim. Let’s get your cousin in the back seat. We’ll have to get him back home to bury him. And you’re going to have to get your face looked after. I don’t feel none too hot either. Then we’re going to come back and find that della Torre and that Strumbić and I’m going to shoot them and you’re going to run them over. After we’ve got our money.”

  CAUGHT IN A convoy of Yugoslav army vehicles heading towards Slovenia, Anzulović took longer than he’d expected to drive out to the hospital. Having to take one of the old Zastavas made it all the less pleasant. There were a couple of official Mercs left, but one was in the garage for servicing while somebody else was using the other one. Maybe Messar.

  Setting off, he’d had a little fantasy about making a quick stop in the centre of the little town. Under the ornate verdigris steeple of the yellow Baroque church, in sight of the ruins of an old castle built
for the tax collectors of the Magyar nobles who’d once ruled those forested valleys, was a pastry shop.

  It wasn’t just any pastry shop but a pastry shop that specialized in one specific sort of cake, an improbably fluffy custard cream on a delicate filo base topped with yet more filo and a dusting of powdered sugar. The pastries had the absurdly ugly German name of kremšnita. There were cake shops that sold versions in Zagreb, but nothing to compare with the ones in Samobor. The mere mention of a Samobor kremšnita made Anzulović blush with joy and anticipation like a teenage girl. Even the smallest pretence would spur him to take the round trip to Samobor if he could make it coincide with the shop’s criminally short opening hours — confined to when the pastry was freshly baked and still at blood temperature.

  Except now that he had a reason to be in Samobor, he didn’t have time to make a detour into the centre of town from the provincial hospital on its fringes. Maybe on the way back, though he’d have to hurry. The shop shut for lunch.

  Messar was waiting for him at the front reception, where he gave Anzulović a quick rundown. Messar was tall and blond; he looked the way movie people thought jackboot-wearing Germans ought to look. But his ethnic Germanness went deeper than looks. He operated on German notions of efficiency and was a stickler for rules, though when the two conflicted, he preferred efficiency. Efficiency meant that he had one of his junior officers monitoring the Zagreb police frequency at all times, as well as the ticker of telephone traffic to and from the police headquarters produced by the UDBA’s communications team.

  Which was how Messar had come to know that a Zagreb cop had been shot by an UDBA officer. That was the entirety of the message he’d left for Anzulović, along with instructions for Anzulović to meet him at the Samobor community hospital. And because Anzulović trusted Messar, as he did all his staff, and because there was the prospect of kremšnita at the end of it, he went when called.

  “So what’s the emergency, then? An UDBA agent shooting a Zagreb cop ought to be cause for celebration,” Anzulović said with forced levity.