by Alen Mattich
Strumbić had properly stitched up della Torre. Next time, della Torre thought, I’m not just going to shoot him in the leg. And I’m going to use a gun that works.
“I love you,” she said, catching him off guard. He hadn’t realized she was still on the line.
“I love you too,” he said. “Take care. Take care in your new life. I hope it’s better than the old one.”
DELLA TORRE’S OPTIONS had narrowed. To one.
Clearly Strumbić had turned up. With Messar working on the case, there was no chance of laughing it off over a beer and sausage, or burying it somewhere in the UDBA archives. And with the Zagreb police involved, it meant Strumbić’s side, whatever story he’d told them, would feature high up in the credits.
His best bet was to stay out of reach and then, from a safe distance, think about what to do next. A little trip to Italy. He’d explain himself to Anzulović once he got there.
A thought crept into his head. It might be time to return to the U.S. There was always a danger the UDBA would track him down. The firm was savage with apostates. They’d killed dissidents and defectors across Europe — Spain, Italy, Germany, France, England — and as far as Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Argentina. He’d investigated more than twenty of the hundred or so killings that he knew about. But there where whispers of more, many more. Foreign police seldom investigated closely. Western governments never wanted to make too much of an issue about it. Everyone had wanted to be on the good side of the only Communist country in Europe not within the Soviet orbit. Tito’s secret police had been allowed to act with impunity, so much so that it left dictators the world over aggrieved at how much the UDBA was allowed to get away with. Libya’s Gaddafi and Romania’s Ceauşescu had protested on separate occasions to various European governments at the free rein given to Tito’s agents when their own were treated harshly.
Della Torre’s next thought was how far the Renault 4 could get him. Out of the country for sure, if he was clever about it. Assuming the car didn’t shake his teeth out first.
It would be difficult to drive through any official border crossing. The political situation made guards on both sides of the fence jumpy. If anything, it was worse in Slovenia, Yugoslavia’s westernmost province, which stood between Croatia and Italy. The Slovenes had developed a taste for independence and were becoming difficult with any non-Slovene Yugoslavs. And the Yugoslav army units stationed in Slovenia were belligerent in return. This ruled out the shortest route to the Italian border, along the Zagreb-Ljubljana motorway. He could go north to Vienna, from which he could fly direct to the U.S., but he didn’t want to curse Irena’s escape route if he were caught. But another way came to mind. And it was all the more attractive because it meant driving through Istria.
Istria meant going home, however briefly. Della Torre’s family was from that little triangle of land on the northern reaches of the Croatian coast on the Adriatic Sea, south of Trieste.
That’s why he had an Italian name. Istria had been Italian or Austro-Hungarian or Venetian long before the Yugoslavs took over the area after the Second World War. And although in the early 1950s there had been an exodus of much of the Italian population, many remained, especially those with long ties to the land, centuries old in the case of the della Torre family.
The della Torres had always stayed, despite Istria’s frequent changes of ownership. Which happened often. Political maps showed that in her ninety years, della Torre’s grandmother had lived in six different countries without once moving from the village in which she’d been born.
Istrians spoke Italian and Croatian; some spoke Slovene too. But above all the people spoke Istrian, a mash-up of the other languages with plenty of its own special flavours. They were a stubborn people, notoriously stingy because they worked hard and knew the value of their labour to the last dinar. And they were averse to politics, to politicians, and to other people’s wars.
Della Torre was fond of the place, its red soil, its vineyards and forests, its hilltop towns and beautiful, ancient Venetian cities on the coast. It was where his father now lived. They’d bought the old farmhouse, a wreck not far from his grandparents’ village, when they’d come back to Yugoslavia. Della Torre’s mother had died in Ohio, and his father was so grief-struck that he had abandoned his academic post and returned with his twelve-year-old son to his homeland. The son who had become a thoroughly American boy.
They moved to Zagreb, where his father was welcomed back to the university. He’d always been well liked and had been warmly and honestly congratulated when he’d won a fellowship to an American university to research and teach the development of central European Slavic languages.
Long weekends and holidays, the two della Torres, man and boy, would drive to the house in Istria, rebuilding it up from the large wine cellar on its ground floor and its antique ten-thousand-litre wooden wine barrels to the the oval windows just under the eaves. The house was a small fortress of stone blocks and heavy lintels, but on the inside it was open and spacious and had all the American luxuries. People came from every corner of Istria to wonder at a machine that washed dishes, a refrigerator as big as a larder, kitchen gadgets that did strange things, a hot shower as powerful as a rainstorm.
The house stood in splendid isolation on a small hill, surrounded by woodland, vineyards, and fields. There was a village nearby, where his father’s family lived. Almost every name in the village was della Torre. They were farmers and winemakers, most of whom had many hectares of unregistered land to get around Communist restrictions on the size of holdings. Sometimes they visited the old village, but mostly he and his father kept to themselves.
So father and son worked on the house and on their dozen or so rows of vines or the small orchard of peach, fig, apricot, and plum trees, and when they were in Zagreb they had an old hand to tend to the land.
Sometimes they’d drive down to the coast and spend the day swimming, careful to avoid the spiny urchins that made a hazard of the stony sea floor. They’d picnic on one of the salty hams his uncle cured and gave to them every year as a Christmas gift, on cheese they had bought from neighbours, and on their own fruit, while sitting on cushions of stacked Mediterranean pine needles. They had a small wheat field that produced enough flour for them to bake their own bread.
At the peaks of the tourist season, they’d avoid the coast and stick to the empty countryside. When the tourists went home, they’d go back to Poreč or Rovinj and sit in cafés in the old parts of town, the broad, smoothed blocks of white Istrian stone underfoot, in among high, narrow, Venetian-styled Renaissance houses with their ogee windows. He’d drink Fanta and his father would speak English or Italian to him, the languages they’d always spoken at home in America. But as the years passed, della Torre increasingly took to responding in Croat.
After his father retired and moved to the farmhouse, he’d become, if anything, even busier. Della Torre’s father discovered a facility for explaining the intricacies of central European history to non-specialist audiences. He wrote well-received articles for highbrow Western publications explaining the region’s modern politics within a historical context. As Yugoslavia went through its paroxysms after Tito’s death, he focused his writing on local matters but broadened it to a more general readership.
He became a major contributor to the popular international press, writing in Italian, English, and German, explaining what was happening in the country with an almost uncannily neutral perspective. The secret police left him alone not only because his son worked for them but because they, like just about everyone, valued his insights. People might not have liked some of what he said, but no one accused him of political or nationalist motivations. He was Istrian, after all.
His father’s intellectual rejuvenation heartened della Torre. He hoped one day to earn similar contentment. But he had a feeling it wouldn’t come anytime soon.
To get t
o Istria, della Torre first had to head southwest, towards the tense border country between Bosnia and Croatia where large communities of Serbs resided.
Della Torre drove back through Zagreb’s suburbs. He avoided the highway to Karlovac, instead taking a narrow, slow parallel route. It was just as well. He counted two police roadblocks on the highway, and there were probably more that he couldn’t see.
Further south, the road joined the main highway in a bottleneck, which was where the police tended to focus their effort. He took the westward fork well before the junction. The road rose from the flat Karlovac plain into deep pine forests that marked the genesis of the high spine of mountains dividing central Croatia from its coast.
Traffic was light in the mountains. There weren’t many people travelling to or from the seaside midweek in the early spring. It gave him time to think.
He wondered what it would be like to go back to America. To live there.
It almost made him laugh. What could he possibly do in Ohio? Did Cleveland have a pressing need for secret policemen who spoke Croat? True, he’d trained in law. But he couldn’t see himself opening a practice in some small midwestern town. I’m sorry, sir, unless you’re inquiring about contract details pertaining to assassinations on foreign territory or the limits of dissent in Communist autocracy, you might be better off speaking to someone else.
He’d never returned, refusing as a child to go on either of the trips his father had taken to America to visit old colleagues and his wife’s grave.
What could he remember of Ohio? What could he remember of his mother? Or his first day at his American school, a new immigrant with no language, sitting on the floor by the piano with the other kindergarten children, listening to his white-haired teacher playing songs he’d never heard before and weeping quietly to himself because he needed to go to the toilet but didn’t know how to ask. Wept and then wet himself. What could he remember?
Had it been any easier when he’d come back to live in Zagreb?
Superficially Croatia wasn’t foreign. He’d spent most summers with his relatives and spoke Croat almost as well as Italian, though neither with quite the fluency of his English. But when he’d moved there permanently, he’d been treated like a freak. Though plenty of Yugoslav kids had lived in Germany — their parents were Gastarbeiters working for the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart or at one of the other big engineering firms around Munich — no one had ever met an American. A gringo.
Did he ride horses to school? Did the Indians ever try to scalp him? Everyone was rich in America, so why didn’t he give them some money? He thought he was too good for them, didn’t he. Because he’d lived in America. He always managed to defuse the antagonism through self-deprecating humour or a goofy, vulnerable charm. But he’d always felt foreign.
Funny — what had bothered him most as a kid was that he didn’t understand the sports. Especially football, or soccer, which wasn’t the American football he knew. He’d known nothing of Dinamo or Red Star or Partizan or Hajduk or Lazio or Real or Barça or Juve or Arsenal.
Arsenal. He patted the shoulder bag by his side, trying to remember when he’d last fired the Beretta.
The light was fading; he was hungry. Just as well he glanced down to look at the fuel gauge. The warning light was flickering. He pulled into a petrol station in a clearing in the mountainous woods, giant pines looming all around, where an attendant, a teenage girl, filled his tank. He paid her out of the pile of dinar notes he’d got for the BMW, hoping they weren’t forged. It’d be a shame to accidentally rob this little place.
There was a good rustic restaurant at the other end of the clearing, so he parked the car, grabbed his overnight bag, and strolled over through dewy spring grass by the side of the road.
The place was nearly full, the smell of slow-roasted lamb suffusing the air. He ate what everybody there was eating: lamb with ajvar, a pulped relish of roasted red peppers, eggplant, and garlic; proper fried potatoes sprinkled with rosemary; and a salad of finely chopped cabbage with oil and vinegar. It reminded him of all the times he had stopped at this place with his father. Talking about everything and anything. Or maybe not everything . . . Had they ever spoken about his mother?
He ordered a small pitcher of slightly sour, strong white wine, which he watered with sulphurous fizzy mineral water. Somehow the mixture produced something satisfyingly drinkable.
It was dark by the time he left, and he was tired. His knee throbbed, though if he didn’t move his left arm the rib didn’t hurt much. He wanted to press on, but a fog had started to drop on the mountain and he didn’t want to drive into a ravine. So he folded down the Renault’s seats and made himself as good a bed as he could, using the bag with the Beretta as a pillow.
He had drifted off into half-dreams when he was suddenly woken, startled by a pounding noise over his head. The car was rocking. Della Torre half opened his eyes, wondering how and why he’d driven the Renault into the sea. There was no sign of morning under a low lid of cloud picked out by the petrol station lights. He sat up and slid the window open.
“You can’t sleep here,” said a half-bear, half-man.
“I just did.”
“Well, you can’t.”
“Why? Was I snoring?”
“It’s not allowed.”
“Because?”
“Because it’s the rule.”
“Whose rule?”
“The people-who-run-the-petrol-station’s rule.”
“Who’s that then?”
“That would be me. And I don’t want people breaking my rules when I come on my shift.”
“What’s the time?”
“Five o’clock.”
“You mean it’s tomorrow already?”
“If you don’t get a move on pretty quickly, I’ll send you back into yesterday. Understand?”
“Understood. And thanks for the hospitality.”
“Gypsy bum.”
Della Torre decided it was just as well he pushed off. The fog had mostly lifted, though a few wisps clung to the trees or swept across the road where there were clearings. He’d stop for a coffee once he’d got to Rijeka, a large port city on a wide gulf situated in the inner elbow between the top of the Dalmatian coast and Istria.
Once past Rijeka, he decided to follow the coastal road rather than go through the Ucka tunnel. It would add about an hour to the drive, but there was often a police roadblock at the tunnel entrance.
The sun rose behind him, sharp and clear, casting a bruised pink light across the Adriatic Sea in front of him. Down at the bottom of the cliffs, night had clung on.
Eventually he cut inland and drove through the heart of Istria. As he travelled north he grew tempted to call in at his father’s for breakfast and a chat, but he knew that would be fatally stupid. The UDBA would be waiting for him.
Instead, he stopped for a few minutes by the side of the road a few fields away from the house and smoked a cigarette. From a distance in the morning light, the house looked pristine, though he knew all its little imperfections. The cracked stone lintel over the main door. The temporary, now semi-permanent wooden cover over the wellhead on which was inscribed “della Torre 1877” — the house had been built by another branch of the family. The rusting iron frame holding up a massive spread of vines that kept the big cellar and a broad first-floor terrace shaded. The conical pile of builder’s sand at one end of the front courtyard. The silt of papers and books and oddments that clogged the lives of single men.
Then again, there were some imperfections he wouldn’t want to change. The slight asymmetry of one of the oval windows under the roofline. Or the blocks of stone in the house’s façade that had been splintered by German machine-gun bullets. It was funny how every memory in this part of the world eventually ambled into a war.
Della Torre headed back north by no
rtheast towards Italy, where his mother’s family had come from. None of them were left, or no one close; all were either dead or scattered into the winds. But he knew the countryside well. He stayed off the main roads, following a small track into the Slovene part of Istria. Since the vote, the Slovene police had taken to stopping cars at the border, almost as if it were an international boundary, and the Croats were beginning to reciprocate.
There was only a narrow corridor of Slovenian Istria separating Croatian Istria from Italy’s Trieste. Once in Slovenia, he stopped for breakfast and made a phone call.
“Anzulović?”
“Gringo, is that you? Where are you?”
“Umm, I think I’d rather not say, though you’ll know soon enough.”
“Feel like explaining yourself? Seems you neglected to mention a teeny, tiny little thing to me yesterday.”
“You mean about Strumbić?”
“Something like that.”
“I didn’t want to burden you with details.”
“So generous of you. If you’d rather tell it to Messar instead . . .”
“Not really. Listen, I know you’re an upstanding Communist, but would you do me a little favour — would you pray for me?”
“Anything for you. Where?”
“How about at the cathedral. Nine o’clock. Wait for the bell to chime and maybe you’ll answer my call.”
“I think the spirit may move me.”
Della Torre hung up. Anzulović had understood. Everybody’s telephone calls, including Anzulović’s, were recorded. The only line that escaped being monitored was the fax line to their secretary’s office, which for some unfathomable reason caused the UDBA’s recording devices to develop the mechanical equivalent of epilepsy.
