Zagreb Cowboy

by Alen Mattich

  “No. But I air it out when he leaves.”

  “Do you mind if I sit? I was in a car accident a couple of days ago and I’m still sore,” he said.

  Her face registered a brief flash of concern but then she brought it back under control. He could see her thinking it probably served him right.

  “So how do you rig it? I mean, staying here without him knowing?” he asked.

  “He calls about a week before he comes, and I move out until he leaves.”

  “All your stuff?”

  “Most of it stays, except the clothes.”

  “How do you explain it away?”

  “I offered to furnish the place and he liked what I did.”

  “He bought all this furniture?”

  “Oh, no. I took it when I moved out of the place I was sharing with a banker boyfriend. He owned the flat and I owned everything in it.”

  “Don’t tell me: Strumbić bought this place around the same time that you split with your boyfriend and it was just too tempting to move in, seeing as he was never going to be here.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “So what happens when he moves here permanently?”

  “It doesn’t sound like he will for a while. That’s what he told me. It was for his retirement and he didn’t look that old. But when he does, I’ll move out and take my stuff with me.”

  “So what’ll you tell him? Sorry, but your furniture is gone? Here’s a camp bed?”

  “He’s renting the furniture for now, just to keep the place homey.”

  Della Torre stared at Harry, astonishment washing over him like a cold shower. “He’s renting the furniture from you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re not paying him to stay here?”

  “No.”

  “How much is he paying you?”

  “Not much. Just a couple of hundred a month. That’s all.”

  “He’s paying you a couple of hundred pounds a month so that you can live in his flat.”

  “He’s not paying me to live here. He’s paying for the furniture.”

  Communism was a pig of a system, but at least he understood it. Capitalism was something else. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes, I do,” Harry said. She walked round and opened the window behind della Torre. “So where are you planning on staying?” She sat down at the far end of the table, away from him.

  “You seem to have a comfortable spare bedroom.”

  “That’s for friends.”

  “Of Strumbić’s?”

  “Of mine. You were going to tell me how you got the keys.”

  “I wasn’t, but I will. I stole them. Sorry, that’s not right. They were on the ring with the BMW key when I . . . um . . . borrowed his car.”

  “You stole his car?”

  “No, he lent it to me.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t on speaking terms.”

  “Only temporarily. We had a little disagreement, but I’m sure it’s fine now.”

  “I see.”

  “But really, we’re old friends. That’s why he said I could stay here.”

  “He said he’d always be in touch before he came. He didn’t say anything about lending the apartment to friends.”

  Della Torre shrugged. “Maybe he forgot . . . I have to say, you took it well, finding a stranger in your apartment wearing your dressing gown.”

  “My school taught us to be prepared for every situation.”

  “Some school. For commandos, was it?”

  “A girls’ school in west London. Much tougher than the army.”

  “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

  Della Torre wasn’t a particularly sociable person. In fact, he preferred to be on his own. But his charm and easy smile made people want his company, made them want to talk to him. He prattled for a little while, admiring the apartment and the furnishings, asking innocuous questions she could answer easily until some of her wariness dissipated.

  She gave him a long look during a break in the conversation. “You know, you remind me of somebody.”

  “Don’t tell me, it was on a wanted poster.”

  “No. You look like . . . the name’s on the tip of my tongue. George . . .”

  “Washington?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “The Third?”

  “No, and not the Second, First, or Fourth either. No . . .” She wandered off to look for a magazine and came back, holding a page open. “Hamilton. George Hamilton.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  She showed him a picture of a man at least fifteen years older than he was.

  “I’m not sure I’m very flattered.”

  “No, not how he looks now. How he looked in the late 1970s.”

  “Oh.”

  “You should be flattered,” she said, colouring slightly. “Though your hair could do with a bit of growing out. And that moustache — I know they’re popular in east Europe, but I think you’ll find they’re pretty unfashionable in the fashionable parts of London. In fact, they’re unfashionable in the unfashionable parts of London too. They’re sort of a minority interest. Although I’m told some men find them very attractive.”

  “Oh,” he said, feeling the bristles under his nose. He’d had the moustache since he’d been conscripted into the Yugoslav army after university. Irena wasn’t a particular fan, but most of the men he knew had one. “My clothes are in the machine. Do you mind if I finish washing them before I go? Otherwise, I’ll have to take your dressing gown. I don’t feel like getting arrested for indecent exposure.”

  Harry got up and checked on the machine.

  “You’ve been running it on a delicate woollens setting. I had to start it up again,” she said when she got back.

  “Sorry. It’s an unfamiliar machine. So how long will it take?”

  “To wash and dry? About three hours. You sure you don’t have any other clothes?”

  “Just an old cardigan.”

  “Well,” she said, giving him a long, hard look, “you might as well stay for supper.”

  ANZULOVIĆ DIDN’T DO stakeouts. He was too old. He’d done enough of them as a young cop to have lost any vestige of a romantic illusion about the routines of detective work. That’s why he’d taken the UDBA job. It meant he’d never have to run up another set of stairs again unless it was to catch a movie. It was a pen-pushing job. Sometimes arm-twisting. Or politician-stroking. But those were the limits of the physical work he wanted to do.

  So why, he asked himself, was he watching it drizzle in the forlorn Dolac market, waiting like some hungry, near-toothless wolf? Why wasn’t somebody else doing it for him? Somebody who could write a nice crisp report that he could read over a freshly made coffee in a warm, dry office?

  He didn’t have to answer himself.

  Messar had lost track of della Torre. And he’d been irritated when Anzulović had let Irena leave, though Anzulović mollified him slightly by pointing out that they might be able to track down della Torre through her. The UDBA had some leverage over the friend she was staying with in London.

  Messar was also managing to accumulate an interesting dossier on Strumbić. As well as bits and pieces about the Bosnians, though they were out of reach. But so far he hadn’t found out about della Torre’s little money-making sideline with Strumbić, nor about della Torre’s hobby files. Anzulović had tidied those up himself.

  Anzulović found it strange to be directing an operation that, he was, at the same time, trying to subvert. Or maybe not so strange. Those things happened in the UDBA.

  Belgrade was still only peripherally involved. Messar had used UDBA agents to track della Torre and t
o monitor various people, but as far as Belgrade was concerned it was still a routine investigation. Internal witch hunts were frequent enough that they didn’t tend to generate much interest from the top brass unless one of them was involved.

  But if the Belgrade hierarchy became interested, if Pilgrim proved to be not just a bee in some old Communist’s bonnet but a nest of vipers, then none of them would be safe. Not Gringo. Not Strumbić. Not Anzulović. Not even Messar.

  Anzulović hoped the Dispatcher would give him some clues. He had to be the old man Strumbić had met at the Metusalem Restaurant. No one else fit the description. But having reviewed what there was of the old man’s file, he questioned how much he’d know about Pilgrim. He’d been called the Dispatcher for a reason. Under Tito, he had merely taken orders and passed them on.

  There was only one way to find out. And that meant waiting in the near-empty Dolac market on a damp early spring day, lighting one cigarette with the embers of the last.

  Dolac was the old town’s open-air food market, a walk along a broad promenade between flower stalls from Zagreb’s main square and up a flight of stairs. A shorter flight at the opposite end of Dolac led to the city’s twin-spired cathedral.

  In normal times, the market was packed from first light to midday, when it shut. Professionals, wholesalers, and restaurateurs would get there early for the best of the day’s produce, while later it was thick with housewives and grandmothers circulating between the tightly packed tables laid out with fruit and vegetables, homemade jams, cakes and cordials, nuts and sweets, honey and beeswax candles. The meat, dairy, and fish stalls were in covered arcades that formed two sides of the square.

  But uncertainty about the future, the war, steep inflation, and general economic malaise had crippled trade. Few people had the money to buy, and those who had something to sell tended to keep it for themselves, insurance against even worse times.

  Anzulović knew all that. Even so, he was shocked by the state of the market. He hadn’t been in months. His wife or daughters did most of the shopping, and he’d long since stopped listening to their complaints about how little they could find.

  Early spring had never been a good time to buy fresh food, but these were the Dolac’s hardest days since Tito had broken with the Soviets.

  Only one stall in three was manned; those missing made for forlorn gaps. A few old ladies wandered around the square, wilted beetroot leaves or limp kale hanging out of their woven plastic baskets. The produce on offer was either more of the same or too dear. Beetroots. Potatoes indistinguishable from clumps of mud. Tired leaves.

  It was even worse in the covered part of the market. Anzulović counted six open stalls, each with slim pickings. A bucket of sardines, a few squid, and an unidentifiable whitefish fillet were displayed at the fishmonger’s. The two butchers were no better, one limited to formless lumps of red meat that could have come from a horse or an ox, and the other selling waxy-looking pig oddments. Anzulović was too depressed to even bother with the cheese stalls. Only those with money and connections in Zagreb could still get good food. He was beginning to forget what normal times had been like.

  What it must be like to shop in an American supermarket! Though he’d always suspected the ones he saw in movies were figments of Hollywood’s imagination. Della Torre had told him it was true, the supermarkets really were like that, but Anzulović put it down to unreliable childhood memories.

  He wandered around the square, keeping his eyes on the steps up to the old town. It was getting towards noon, and he worried he’d missed the old man.

  The Dispatcher had been Tito’s hangman. He’d made sure the right people were there at the end with the nooses around their necks, that the rope was sufficiently strong and long, and that the hinge on the trapdoor was well greased. It was said his tendrils reached into all corners of Yugoslav life, through the army, the political establishment, the criminal underworld. Even the Church.

  He’d been a man in the shadows. But in the late 1960s he’d completely disappeared from the scene, not long after Tito discovered someone had been tapping his telephone calls, bugging his office and car. The files said the Dispatcher had been sent to Goli Otok. But unlike most, he came back from the island of the living dead alive. Alive and even more powerful than he’d been before.

  In the early 1970s, when Croatia’s reawakening national identity threatened to become an independence movement, Tito found he needed the Dispatcher. Once he’d reappeared, high-minded Croat liberationists found themselves breaking stones on Goli Otok, or in exile, hounded by the UDBA’s murder squads.

  And then, after Tito’s death in 1980, the Dispatcher had disappeared again into a quiet retirement in Zagreb, where the UDBA kept half a sleepy eye on him.

  Retired? Anzulović shook his head. Do people who have swum in blood all their lives ever retire? Or do they lurk in the shadows, waiting for the next opportunity to drink from the infernal pools? The times were becoming ripe for Yugoslavia’s vampires to rise once again. A sketchy observation report noted that the Dispatcher had been more active lately. His telephone, long silent, had begun to ring again. And there were visitors. The old man’s days once again involved more than just a morning routine of going to the Dolac market to collect his cigarettes and newspaper and cutlet for lunch.

  Anzulović was skulking in the covered market when an old man made his way down the shallow flight of stairs from the old town. He was limping, walking with a stick, his wispy hair looking like a wreath of white laurel. The square, dark-plastic-framed glasses that magnified his eyes were unchanged, and he looked at least a decade younger than his eighty-plus years. Though his file photograph was a dozen years out of date, there was no doubt this was him.

  As the Dispatcher was buying his cigarettes and newspaper, Anzulović mulled over how to approach him. He had hoped to do it in the thick of the crowds. Pull him aside for a quick chat. But he didn’t want to expose himself now, where even a casual observer wouldn’t fail to notice him bending over the ancient gnome.

  Anzulović’s difficulty resolved itself as the Dispatcher made his way towards the covered part of the market. Anzulović backed into a metal shutter, where he was sheltered by some concrete arcading.

  “Excuse me, you wouldn’t have a light?” he asked as the old man passed, the ember on Anzulović’s cigarette clearly glowing in the gloom of the arcade.

  “Seems to me that you’re wanting either a lesson on how to smoke or a conversation about something else.”

  “Very perceptive of you, sir.” Anzulović used formal language with the old man.

  “When you get to my age, you’re surprised if you’ve seen something only twice. There used to be a time when it wouldn’t be safe for a stranger to stop me in public. Not a chance. Not safe at all. But these days, well, how much supervision does a pensioner need, anyway?”

  “So you know what I’m going to ask about?”

  “I’ve got a general idea you’re not looking to pass the time of day about the weather or how Dinamo did over the weekend. And I suspect you know who I am. So what can I do for you, bearing in mind I’ve mostly forgotten anything remotely interesting to anyone?”

  “I’m pretty sure you won’t have forgotten this.”

  The little man’s owlish eyes stared up at him.

  “Sometime in the last month,” continued Anzulović, “three amateur Bosnian criminals tried to kill a man called della Torre. I’m trying to find out why.”

  “I wish I could say the name rings bells. But it doesn’t. And as I may have mentioned, I’ve been retired more or less since Tito died. Write your number down for me, and I’ll give you a call if anything comes to mind. I’m often fresher in the afternoon, after I’ve had a little siesta.” He made to leave, but Anzulović put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. A firm hand.

  “The Bosnians are now ex-Bosnian ex-hitmen, as
I’m sure you know. But before they ex-pired, they ex-plained a thing or two about what had happened. They mentioned being hired by a certain elderly gentleman.”

  “How indiscreet of them. But even so, I’m not sure how I can help. I don’t know any old gentlemen. They’re all dead. And some might say that when they were alive, they weren’t gentlemen.” The Dispatcher looked at him, bemused.

  “What I don’t understand is why an old professional like you should employ such abject amateurs.”

  Was that a flicker of embarrassment Anzulović saw crossing the old man’s face? Or had it been merely irritation?

  “Are you taking issue because you think I did a job badly? I thought the man was your friend.”

  “No, I’m glad you made a mistake.” Anzulović smiled. “I suppose anyone coming out of retirement might be a bit rusty. But really, what I want to know is who you were acting on behalf of. And why.”

  The old man turned away without responding.

  Anzulović sighed. “I suppose this conversation could be much less cordial,” he said.

  “Are you making a threat? If you are, you must make yourself clear. I need things spelled out. Vagueness won’t do. I’m afraid the subtlety is all gone.” The Dispatcher shrugged, showing no fear, his expression returning to an ironic half-smile.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then I must warn you. Someone who spent four years on Goli Otok fears very little from life.”

  “You had a daughter.”

  “I had a daughter.”

  “When Tito packed you off to Goli Otok, you thought that at least your daughter was safe because she was in Munich. But she wasn’t, was she.”

  “Yes?”

  “And she had two children. And because Munich was too close after all, they moved to Canada, didn’t they.”

  “Did they?”

  “You still speak to them once a week.”

  “Ah, I see what you’re getting at. You must forgive me. The years constantly creep up on me. Canada, yes. But I’ll give you a little advice for free. You’re a policeman . . . or something.” Anzulović showed no sign of agreeing or disagreeing. “If you speak to your people, you will understand very quickly that I am not a person to abuse lightly. I have many friends who still have considerable influence.”