by Alen Mattich
He decided he’d take the first flight to wherever he could catch a plane across the Atlantic. For a short sojourn. The departures board offered slim pickings, though there was an evening flight to London on British Airways. The thought of London made him cringe, but at least it was easy to get to other places from there. First, he had to buy some clothes and a small suitcase. He’d break down the Beretta and put it into the case to be checked in for the flight. He was pretty sure security wouldn’t like his carrying a gun on board in hand luggage.
Getting a suitcase was no problem, but apart from ties and handkerchiefs, he had no joy finding someone to sell him a new wardrobe. He’d slept in his clothes, sweated in them, smoked about fifty cigarettes in them, and he guessed he’d be about as welcome as a ripe cheese to whoever would be sitting next to him on the flight. But it didn’t matter. If London was short on charm, at least it wasn’t short of shops.
As it happened, there were only a handful of people on the flight, which may have explained the delay. They were meant to take off at eight p.m. but left the ground not much short of midnight. It was well after two in the morning English time before he’d got through customs and immigration at Gatwick Airport. And then he had to wait until half past four for the first train into Victoria Station. He could have taken a taxi, but he’d decided not to bother to change much money. He’d convert his Deutschmarks into dollars at Heathrow, where he’d get a flight to Chicago.
So he stuffed the envelope full of German cash into his back pocket, took a seat on the first train into town, one of the old-style slam-door trains dating back to the war, and slid his small suitcase — which contained nothing more than pieces of a handgun, a box of bullets, a carton of Luckys, and some scrunched-up newspaper to fill in the space — into the overhead locker. He kept the shoulder bag with the remaining cigarettes and travel documents next to him and shut his eyes, preparing for the hour’s journey it would take to get into London.
The carriage was almost empty except for a group of teenagers who filled a couple of rows at the opposite end. The door slammed next to him. He opened his eyes. A woman, or at least he was pretty sure it was a woman, sat down opposite him just as the guard blew his whistle and the train pulled out with a lurch.
She had close-cropped hair, three earrings in one ear, and none in the other, and was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. In one hand she held an open tin of beer. Her build was almost entirely block-like, matching her rather cubic head. He couldn’t even guess at her age. She could have been a couple of years older than him or a decade younger.
She leaned forward in her seat, rocking more than the train’s motion warranted. She struggled to bring him into focus.
“Travellin’, eh?”
Della Torre tried not to nod.
“Yeah, I like travellin’. Used to do lots. Up to Newcastle. Been to Cardiff too,” she said.
Della Torre thought, Maybe if I shut my eyes, she’ll take the hint.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Cardiff,” he said at last.
“Thought so; you sound Welsh. Or West Country, anyway.” She took a swig from her tin. “Want some?”
Della Torre wondered if there was anything in the world he wanted less.
“No, thanks,” he said, resigned to his fate for the next hour.
“Can’t say I blame you,” she belched. “Tastes like piss.”
Maybe all beer in the world except for Karlovačka tastes like piss, he thought.
She was quiet for a moment, her eyelids struggling against gravity. Della Torre found it hard to keep his own eyes open. At least she’d distracted him from the chest-tightening feeling the return to London gave him. His exhaustion was fed by the soothing rhythm of the train’s clacking wheels. He didn’t notice falling asleep until someone punched him in the head.
He started out of his seat, but a second blow knocked him back down. Three youths were standing over him, two holding knives. He could hear others elsewhere in the carriage.
“Yo money, be fass. Everything out yo pockets.”
Della Torre thought longingly of the Beretta in the suitcase overhead. Out of reach and in bits. Would he ever have his gun when he needed it? A blade pushed against his neck hurried him. He took three sets of keys out of his pocket. His wallet came next. They took all the notes out of it, all the sterling he’d only just acquired, some lira, and the nearly worthless dinars. And they took the envelope full of Strumbić’s cash. Other than what he’d spent on ferry and plane tickets, the rest of the money was still there. The best part of fifteen thousand Deutschmarks.
“Hey, what’s this, bro?” one of the teenagers asked another.
“Don’t you know nothing? That’s German money.”
“Yeah? You buy anything with it?”
“Yeah, you buy a BMW with that shit.”
“BMW, that proper nang.”
They turned back to della Torre, “What else you got?”
They ignored the suitcase but dumped the contents of his shoulder bag on the floor.
“Smokes in this one and some diary thing,” one said, throwing the notebook aside and helping himself to as many packs of Luckys as he could hold in one hand.
“Time to peg it, this our stop,” one of them said, his head hanging out of the window. A kid pulled the emergency stop cord and before the train had quite screeched to a halt, they were gone, across the tracks and into the night, carriage doors left flapping open. Gone with Strumbić’s money. No, gone with della Torre’s money.
He lit a cigarette and stared out into the cold darkness, too tired even to think of chasing the kids. Pointless, really. They were at some junction, without a station in sight. At least they’d left him some cigarettes. He put the keys and his empty wallet back in his pockets and replaced the items in the overnight bag.
The police, when they finally came, were sympathetic. Another single male passenger and a middle-aged couple on the carriage with him had also been robbed. Della Torre’s companion had been left alone. In fact, she hadn’t woken up until the police got there, and then complained bitterly about how they were persecuting her.
They wrote down her details and left her to take the next train into London.
Della Torre went to the police station to give a short witness statement. The policeman said he’d be contacted for a longer one later on. For some reason, maybe because it popped into his head, della Torre gave his childhood address in Ohio.
Even now he couldn’t really remember what the kids looked like. Big teenagers. Two black, one white. For a while the investigating officers got excited when they saw him limping and the way he favoured his left arm. They were disappointed when he said his injuries had nothing to do with the robbery. The punch to his head had left no visible bruising, so there was no chance of a grievous bodily harm conviction.
“There’s been a lot of ‘steaming’ on trains in this part of London,” PC Nicholas said. “That’s what they call it. Gangs of teenagers rampage through carriages late at night, robbing passengers and then pulling the emergency cord between stations. It’s mostly a south London thing.”
He had short ginger hair, protruding ears, and an innocent, open expression. He couldn’t have been much more than a teenager himself.
“Usually it’s late at night. This is the first time I’ve heard of them doing it this early in the morning. It’s not very nice for a visitor from abroad. It’s not very nice for anybody. Have you been to London before?”
“I’ve passed through once or twice,” della Torre said, nursing a bland cup of black coffee.
“Have you given any thought to what you’re going to do? I mean, the Italian consulate might be able to help out, at least to get you back to Italy. I’m not sure what they can do about getting you to the U.S. You haven’t got travel insurance, have you?”
>
“No,” della Torre said.
“They don’t always pay out anyway. Not if you’ve been robbed of cash.”
Della Torre had counted up his resources. They’d taken everything out of his wallet and the envelope full of Deutschmarks, but they hadn’t touched the passport wallet in his overnight bag. He’d always kept some emergency cash in various currencies in it, though, feeling flush with Strumbić’s cash, he’d given most of his reserves to Irena. All told, in Deutschmarks, dollars, and lira, he had around four hundred pounds sterling left. It might be enough to get him a one-way ticket to the U.S., but then what?
If he husbanded the money carefully, it would last him about three weeks in London and then might even leave him with enough to catch a coach back to Zagreb. He was pretty sure he’d be fed on Goli Otok, or whatever the equivalent was now that they’d shut the penal island for good. At least until whoever’d hired the Bosnians got to him. He lit a cigarette.
“Would you like me to drive you somewhere? Anywhere within reason. I mean, anywhere in central London or to Heathrow?” asked PC Nicholas.
Della Torre fiddled with the keys in his pocket. He took out all three sets. His apartment keys. And those for the Renault. The UDBA was sure to impound it. And then there was Strumbić’s set, the ones that had been on the ring with the key for the BMW. And a thought dawned on him.
“Do you know where Hampstead is?”
“Sure, north London, big park. Very nice. Very posh.”
“Can you drive me there?”
ANZULOVIĆ WAS SLUMPED against the back of his chair. His long face had the look of an antlerless moose. He’d always had the habit of getting in early. He laughed it off whenever a colleague mentioned it, saying his wife and daughters drove him out of the house. There might have been a little truth to that. But the reality was that, outside of the cinema, he’d never liked to be surprised. He liked to know what was going on, to be able to plan and organize, to stay on top of things, so that when the inevitable shovelful of rusted nuts and bolts was thrown into the machine, he knew how to sort things out.
Not that there had been much to do during recent months. They’d stopped receiving orders from Belgrade, and much of the UDBA’s normal operations in Zagreb had shut down as the many Serbs on its staff left the increasingly hostile atmosphere. He felt sorry for those in mixed marriages, especially where it was a Croat married to a Serb, or either married to a Bosnian Muslim. Those families were going to suffer trying times. They were suffering already.
Della Torre came into Anzulović’s mind just as there was a knock on the door.
“Come.”
It was Messar. He shut the door behind him but remained standing.
“What’s the news?”
Messar looked at him for a while.
“My men were stopped by the Italian police. It wasn’t random. Somebody had put them up to it.”
“Do you think Gringo planned ahead to make sure he didn’t have a welcoming party?” Anzulović asked neutrally.
“Maybe. But I think he had help from this side.”
“Oh?”
Messar just shrugged.
“So what now?” Anzulović asked.
“There’s the Bosnians. From what I’ve been able to find out, they’re back in Bosnia.”
“Can’t you get someone to track them down and pick them up?”
“No, they’re from near the border, by the Krajina,” Messar said, referring to the swathe of Serb-occupied lands in Croatia next to Serb-dominated parts of Bosnia. There was no chance a request from Zagreb would hold any water there.
“So what do I tell Kakav?”
“I don’t think you need to tell him anything. We’ll monitor both della Torre apartments and his father’s house. We’ll track him down when he gets in touch.”
“And what do we do when we’ve tracked him down? Leave Zagreb to sort out an extradition? Good luck to them,” Anzulović said. Croatia was still part of Yugoslavia, and as such any extraditions would have to be organized through Belgrade.
“Or we get the UDBA to do it the old-fashioned way,” Messar said.
“Ah yes, make him an offer he can’t refuse,” Anzulović said. Messar stared at him. “That’s from The Godfather, by the way.” Messar still didn’t react. Why did none of his staff ever watch any decent movies? They lapped up Laurel and Hardy, and local crap, which usually involved some superhero partisan and a dose of soft-core or alternatively was an ersatz western. But that was it.
“Until then we’ll keep a lookout for the Bosnians. And a close eye on Strumbić. There’s more to this story than he’s telling us. My best guess is that he and della Torre were involved in some dirty deal and then fell out.”
“Anything else going on?”
“With this case?”
“With the world,” Anzulović said and then quickly added, “Never mind. Keep me posted.”
Messar left without saying anything.
Anzulović looked around the office. It was, he supposed, grand. The proportions were, anyway. Tall windows looked out across a park. But like most of Zagreb’s late-nineteenth-century buildings, it had been badly adapted to the modern world. The ceramic stove in the corner of the room had been converted from wood to gas, but the process of keeping it lit and running smoothly was beyond him. Rather than freeze, he kept the room too hot but left a window slightly ajar. Which meant there was always a cold draft.
Yugoslavs had mostly lived well during the past couple of decades. Before that, the poverty had been palpable. And so had been the oppression of living under a Communist ideology in a police state. But the 1970s and ’80s had been better. Not like in the West. Still, people had cars and televisions, and most ate meat more or less whenever they wanted it. Those who did well, the professionals, could save enough to buy Volkswagens and German washing machines. They could even travel abroad, though it was expensive.
The past year and a half, though, had brought back memories of those difficult times. He could feel them coming back, the deep, brutal poverty of his childhood, when children from the villages in the hills didn’t have shoes, when food was little more than cabbage or beans with the occasional scraping of pork fat to flavour it. Mean times.
And mean times made people angry. There was solidarity with those they considered their own, but strangers would suffer.
Anzulović looked up at the peeling and chipped whitewashed walls, dingy with dust towards where they reached the ceiling in a gentle curve instead of a cornice. Maybe the answer was for the people to save themselves. It was too late for him. His daughters? No, they’d never go anywhere else, fearing the world beyond their narrow borders.
But it wouldn’t be too late for Gringo. Or for Irena.
“SORRY, THIS IS a non-smoking car,” said PC Nicholas when della Torre popped open another pack of Luckys.
“Clever car. It’ll live longer that way,” he said, reaching for his matches.
“Sorry. You don’t understand. People aren’t allowed to smoke in this car,” said PC Nicholas.
“You’re not Bosnian by any chance, are you?”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll chew my fingernails instead.”
“Did a mugging here last week,” PC Nicholas said, pointing to a nondescript street corner.
“Is that really something you should be admitting to? You being a policeman and all?”
“What? Oh. No, it was a case I took on. I didn’t mug anyone. Someone else did,” he said, slightly flustered. “There’s been a wave of bag-snatchings along here. A couple of kids on bikes. My case.”
“Any luck so far?”
“Not really,” he admitted, but then quickly added, “It’s just a matter of time.”
“Wait long enough and you might get a deathbed confess
ion.”
A minute later PC Nicholas let out a honking laugh. “I get it. I didn’t know Italians were so funny. Though you sound pretty American. I’ll have to use that one.”
“Have it on me,” della Torre said. The police radio cut in and out in the background, parcels of static.
Despite the misery of his circumstances, he had warmed to this young cop. There was no affectation. No fake toughness. Just a keen earnestness and concern.
Had the train robbery happened in Zagreb, the police would have shrugged their shoulders and said he ought to have paid more attention before getting into a carriage full of teenagers. But only after leaving him to rot in the station waiting room for the best part of a day. On the other hand, he didn’t know of a cop car in Zagreb that was without a full ashtray.
It was a slow drive through London’s nondescript and rubbish-strewn southern suburbs; rush-hour congestion kept them crawling for long stretches.
“Wouldn’t it be quicker with the lights flashing and the siren on?” della Torre asked.
PC Nicholas looked scandalized. “Not unless it’s an emergency. And I’m afraid you don’t count.”
Della Torre wondered whether the young cop would feel the same in ten years’ time, when he had to get his kids to school and everyone was running late — PC Nicholas had proudly told him his wife was pregnant. But della Torre kept his mouth shut. At least the cops here started off honest.
They crossed the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge. Della Torre admired the way the river seemed to bend around them. For a moment, London offered up the stately beauty the tourist brochures always promised. He caught a glimpse of Westminster to his left, and on the other side St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge. It brought on a prickling of unwanted memory.
Then they were back in the endless monotony of the city’s dirt-grey Georgian and Victorian architecture, punctuated by socialist-inspired bits of concrete functionalism.
But it was different when they got to Hampstead. They eased into an elegant world of white stucco villas and cottages that might have been transported out of country villages onto this expensive film set.
