by Tom Saric
She stared at him. Her lower lip quivered with anger.
“He lied to you. He lied to your daughter. He killed fourteen people. One of them was a little girl named Natalia. I know I don’t need to make the connection to your own daughter’s name.”
“Why would he do that?” Tears dripped down her cheeks.
“Sometimes, in war, people get scared. They get angry, and in a rage they can kill people.” Braun decided to leave out the other possibility—that most war criminals were rabid psychopaths, capable of killing and not feeling anything but triumph.
Sara lowered her head. Her body shook.
Braun walked around the table and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d succeeded in turning her around. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lovrić. We will help you.”
She nodded, then sat up and wiped her tears.
“Mrs. Lovrić,” he continued, “we need to sort this out. I need to know if you know anything about where he went, or who he might have gone to see. If he had any contacts from his past.”
She stared over Braun’s shoulder at the wall.
“Think of this as a way for you and Natalie to have some closure on this episode in your lives.”
She began rocking back and forth as if in a trance. Eventually she snapped out of it and locked eyes with him.
“Am I under arrest?”
Braun curled his bottom lip and shook his head.
“Can I go home after this?”
“You’re free to go.”
She took a deep breath in and said, in a deadpan tone, “Well then, Mr. Braun, in the interest of time, let me tell you that I don’t know where my husband is. I didn’t have any idea about his past before you told me. I don’t know why he kept it from me, but I trust that he had a reason.”
She stood up, adjusted her coat, and put a hand on the door before stopping and turning back to him.
“Also, I just want to say: you can go fuck yourself, Mr. Braun. My husband is innocent.”
She walked out.
Robert Braun stood in front of the door to Jack Kostick’s office feeling small. He’d just lost his only lead. He’d pushed her too hard. Pavić had a decade to convince her that he was an honorable person, and Braun had tried to turn her in fifteen minutes. It was brash, and now he was left without a lead on Pavić’s whereabouts.
He knocked on the door and opened it. Kostick sat behind the desk, rubbing the back of his neck while staring at a computer screen. He looked up.
“Anything?”
Braun shook his head and lowered himself into the armchair across from Kostick.
“You think she’s covering for him?” Kostick said, slurping his coffee.
“I don’t think so, but she’s hard to read. I think she believes that he is innocent.”
Kostick raised his eyebrows. “Innocent of shooting Jurica?”
“No. Of war crimes.”
Kostick took another loud sip. “Is he?”
“I don’t know. That’s not up to me to decide.”
“But you must wonder. I mean, you’re prosecuting a crime that happened over a decade ago. I don’t have enough evidence to sort out what happened with him last night.”
“There is enough evidence for a trial. He entered a Serbian civilian’s home with another soldier. Fourteen people were shot and one young girl went missing. He later claimed that the people were killed before he arrived and that he simply stumbled upon them. The house was completely destroyed in the battle, but autopsies were done and bullets recovered from the victims were the same make as those issued to him.”
“Okay,” Kostick grunted, and returned to the keyboard.
“It’s not up to me to decide guilt, Detective. I’m here to bring him before justice. What I can say is that he is guilty of evading justice. Twice. It is my duty to find him.”
Kostick rubbed his forehead and pointed at the computer screen. “This case is strange to me. I’ve been writing today’s report for the past three hours.”
“Cases of war criminals are never straightforward.”
“I realize that, but look at what happened. He shot Jurica, point-blank. I have Jurica on record identifying Pavić as the shooter. I’m sure that ballistics will show that the bullet was from Pavić’s gun. But what’s the motive? Jurica initially said that he was a private eye, which was untrue. He had no identification, so we can’t even be sure of his real identity.”
Braun nodded in agreement. The issue of Jurica’s identity would hang over the entire investigation. Jurica had a gun, so Pavić could argue self-defense. But these charges had little bearing on the bigger picture: Pavić was wanted in The Hague, which was simply more important.
As he watched Kostick type, a feeling of dread came over him. Now that Pavić was charged with murder in Canada, the Canadians would want him tried there first. It would be a nightmare extraditing him to The Hague. Part of him wished that Pavić had made it across the US border so he could claim him and move him to the Netherlands before the Canadians could react.
“But then,” Kostick continued, “it looks like Jurica gets killed in the hospital. Meanwhile, Pavić crawls through an underground tunnel and disappears.”
“Perhaps he stopped at the hospital to finish the job.”
“How would he know where Jurica was? Or that he was even alive? The power was cut to his home while Jurica was bleeding out in the backyard.”
Braun rocked his head from side to side. No explanation for that.
There was a knock at the door. A young constable entered, holding a stack of papers under his arm.
“Jack, we’ve gone through the hospital security tapes thirty minutes either side of the nurse’s last check.”
He handed him the stack of papers, which were black and white stills of the security footage.
“We haven’t seen Pavić in any frame, entering or exiting the building. It’s possible that he entered earlier and left later, but that would have kept him in the hospital for over an hour. We’re still checking through all footage.”
Kostick spread the papers in front of him. “So what do these photos show?”
“It was late, and there couldn’t have been more than fifty people passing through the hospital during that hour. Most of them were night-shift doctors, nurses, or janitors. A few families came and went. But I figured that if someone came to kill the victim, he would probably be male, and he would probably come alone. Only two single males entered the hospital during that time.”
He pointed to two photographs. One was a young man with baggy jeans and a baseball cap turned sideways. He carried a Subway bag with a sandwich inside. The other was a thin man in a toque, wearing a trench coat.
“The young guy took the elevator”—he flipped the photograph over—“and got off on the seventh floor. We can see that because the only camera on a unit above the elevators and stairwell is on the seventh: Labor and Delivery.
“And he doesn’t come back into the frame during that time.” He flipped over the photograph of the man in the trench coat. “This guy doesn’t take the elevator, though. It looks like he heads to the stairs, and we don’t see him again in any frames.”
“Not exiting?” Kostick said.
The constable shook his head.
“Any footage from that back alley?” Braun said.
“No, only the main indoor areas are covered by security cameras.”
Kostick unfolded his reading glasses and put them on. He picked up the photograph of the man in the toque and held it under his desk lamp, then looked over his glasses at Braun. “Did things just get more complicated?”
Braun smiled while clenching his jaw. He didn’t need Kostick’s judgment at this point. The fact remained that the identity of Jurica’s murderer was secondary. Capturing Pavić was still priority number one.
“Good work,” Kostick said to the constable, collecting the papers into a stack. “Can you get these labeled in evidence?”
The constable nodded and carried the stack to th
e door.
“Oh, and this too.” Kostick picked up a piece of paper from his desk, the warning that Pavić had sent out with his daughter that read тигар. As Kostick dragged the note across his desk underneath the desk lamp, Braun’s eye caught something on the paper.
“Can I see that, Jack?”
Kostick handed it over.
Braun held the paper under the desk lamp and slowly rotated it. The light showed a series of indentations across the middle of the page.
“Do you have a pencil?”
Kostick opened his desk drawer, fished around the bottom, and held up a dull pencil. “You can’t draw on that.”
Braun grinned and grabbed it.
“This page is from a notepad,” Braun said. “Something was written on top of this.”
Kostick stood up and reached for the pencil, but Braun turned and lightly shaded in the indentations across the paper. An etching came in clearly:
84 Skalinska
Braun held it up.
“Where’s that?” Kostick said.
Braun recalled the street from a previous visit. “Zagreb.”
19
Bulić, Croatia
On the A1 motorway, thirty kilometers from Ante Čapan’s village of Bulić, Luka saw the pearl white BMW three cars back. He pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and his Hyundai rental car surged forward, its tiny engine humming through the rocky countryside.
Luka glanced in the rearview mirror. Two silhouettes sat in the front seats. The sunlight glared off the windshield, preventing him from determining their age or gender. Were they following him? Three sightings since leaving Zagreb. How could that be dismissed as a coincidence? The first: in the dimness of the tunnel through Mala Kapela, which cut through the mountain’s belly. The vehicle’s bluish-white headlights swerved between lanes and settled into position two hundred meters back. The second: rounding a foothill approaching Maslenica; there the car was accelerating, maintaining a visual on his Hyundai.
And now, the third: he was approaching Maslenica Bridge, which spanned an inlet off the Adriatic.
He turned the radio off. A thick silence enveloped the car. He stared in the mirror at the white BMW floating in the strip of grey, keeping a steady, measured distance behind him.
He took the turnoff for Rijeka towards the older, single-lane highway. As he curved around the cloverleaf, the two cars between him and the BMW stayed on the main highway. He lost sight of the BMW and accelerated through the turn, tires screeching.
He slowed at the toll, enough to fish coins out of his pocket and fling them out as he rolled through, then sped into the next turn, onto the road that cut through a narrow valley.
He looked at his rearview: nothing. He pressed forward, the Hyundai rattling over the bumps in the highway. An engine revved behind him.
A look over his shoulder. There it was, chrome grate glinting in the sun, gaining speed around the corner, closing the space between them. He pressed the accelerator, weaved past a truck driving fifty, and swerved back into the lane. Again, the BMW kept on him, passing the truck. Luka gripped the steering wheel and downshifted with a clunk, and the Hyundai lurched forward.
A sign for Gračac pointing left. Not where he needed to go, but from the look of it, the road was small and narrow. He cranked the wheel, the momentum sending the back end fishtailing. He spun the wheel the other way, trying to correct, but the car slid sideways onto the shoulder, shuddered, and slammed against the guardrail.
Luka’s head smacked the door frame. He looked up as the BMW flew past the intersection, carrying along the other highway. It didn’t take the turn. It didn’t even slow down to get a look at him.
He quickly determined nothing had happened. The car hadn’t been following him. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure if the first two sightings were even BMWs.
Watching the empty intersection, Luka felt a sense of self-pity and self-disgust. Here he was, parked on the shoulder of a tiny gravel road, running from an imaginary car. When did seeing things that weren’t there cross that line to madness?
He put his head back, stared at the ceiling, and laughed, then took a deep breath. Running and hiding felt so comfortable. Why, then, did he feel so uneasy?
Two men roughed up his elderly father…
The Hyundai climbed a hill between the abandoned orchards and olive groves, overgrown and wild, grasses waist-high and yellowed. The village of Bulić stood atop the hill, the dirt road winding through a single row of stone homes. Once a route where hundreds of tons of fruit, almonds, black olives, and red wine traveled by horse and wagon, it was now a potholed, cracked pathway between homes pockmarked by bullets and broken windows, overlooking a fertile valley that was last used as a minefield.
What did Ante Čapan’s father tell the two men? Nothing? Was the old man stoic enough to keep Ante’s whereabouts from them? Or did he just not know?
He parked the car on a patch of grass underneath a blossoming almond tree. As he got out, a gust of north wind slammed the door shut.
Three men in sleeveless shirts sat on the steps of a home sipping from beer bottles, their arms coated in splatters of white paint. Behind them, a concrete mixer and three shovels sat beside a half-repaired wall, a patchwork of shrapnel craters left to be filled and painted, signs of war waiting to be hidden. Six eyes were on Luka—the stranger in a village where tourists did not come—nonchalantly scrutinizing the new arrival as only villagers could.
The oldest one stood up and put his beer down. Chest hair poked out from underneath his muscle shirt; greasy grey hair was matted to his forehead. His suspicious eye caught Luka’s but slipped down, assessing the entire image of the visitor. He reached in his jeans pocket, pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights, and tapped it against his palm, packing the cigarettes.
“Dobar dan.” Good day.
The man labored over, as though the walk across the road took everything out of him. Luka’s fingertips tingled. He let his shoulders drop.
He pointed at the newly built church up the road. “The church looks beautiful. When did it get finished?”
“Three years now.”
Luka nodded, as though it checked out with him. “I haven’t been here since 2002,” Luka said. “It looks great. You guys did it?”
Thawack, thwack, thwack. The man tapped the cigarette pack against his thick, meaty hand.
“I did,” the man said, and turned his head to the side. “Are you Vinko’s son?”
“I’m from Lepuri,” Luka lied again. “Well, I was, but I left after the war.”
“Your name?”
“Mateo Lovren,” Luka said, repeating a surname he remembered from the phone book in Tomislav’s office.
“Mario’s son?” The man squinted.
“Mario is my uncle. Stanko’s my father. Was my father.”
“Stanko.” The man shook his head. “Don’t know him.”
Thawack, thwack, thwack. His eyes narrowed and fixed on Luka. The corner of his mouth twitched up.
“He moved away years ago to Zadar.” Luka’s voice cracked. He needed to find Čapan. “Listen, I’m hoping to catch up with my friend. That’s who I came here to see.”
“Who’s that?”
“Ante Čapan.”
The man was now smiling to himself, completely out of sync with the rhythm of their conversation. “Ante’s not here.”
“What do you mean?” Luka did his best to sound surprised. “When’s he coming back?”
“Not today.”
“Is his father here? Pero?”
The man stared at Luka and then looked over his shoulder. “He might be down in the field, but I’m not sure.”
“Maybe I’ll go and see.” Luka began strolling down the hill towards the field.
“You know what, I’ll come with you. Sometimes he’s in the shed and won’t open it if he doesn’t recognize the person.”
Luka walked alongside the man, hands in his pockets, not focusing on any of his surroundings for too
long as though he had been in Bulić a hundred times.
Fifty yards down the hill they came upon a windowless shack made of old timber with a metal corrugated roof. The man continued rhythmically slapping the cigarette pack against his palm.
He moved a shovel out of the way and knocked on the door, calling for Pero. No answer. He opened the door latch and looked inside.
“Must be down in the field,” he said.
Luka nodded and took several steps down the slope, examining the grey-yellow valley.
“Wait a minute,” the man said. “Did you say Stanko? Your dad?”
Luka forced a smile. “I did.”
“When I was a boy, your dad had come down from Germany where he was working. He came to visit my dad, and he brought all sorts of chocolates.” He beamed, holding Luka’s gaze. “Good man.”
“Yes, he was.”
Luka paused and stared at the ground, hesitant to say anything more. The man now seemed to believe him, so adding anything else would only reveal inconsistencies in Luka’s story.
“I don’t see anyone down there,” he said, looking down the hill.
Thawack, thwack, thwack.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. He looked at the dirt road in the valley. A car was hurtling down it. A white car. Pearl. He recognized the contours of a BMW. Four times?
The air around him fell quiet. Luka was only vaguely aware that the beat of the cigarette box in the man’s palm had stopped. The car that had reappeared four times since he’d left Zagreb now monopolized his attention.
He felt someone behind him. Before he could turn, an arm wrapped itself around his neck and squeezed. Luka scratched at the elbow and clawed at the man’s face. Black spots flashed in his vision, accumulating and melding together.
Luka opened an eye and just as quickly squeezed it shut again as the throb in his head took hold. He felt his heartbeat in his neck. He was sweating; his damp shirt clung to his skin. He smelled boiled chicken. He heard shuffling and clicking. As he became more aware, he realized he was sitting in a hard chair. He tried to wipe his brow, but his hands were bound behind him. He took a breath and felt a band across his chest.
