by Alen Mattich
They got back in the Mercedes and drove. Strumbić parked it off the road just past the Argentina, leaving the keys in the ignition. “Hope somebody else gets as much pleasure out of it as I did,” he said.
Like della Torre, he carried only a holdall, though his was bigger. And it was a leather Louis Vuitton.
They walked back to the hotel, but instead of going through the main entrance, Strumbić led della Torre to the service doors at the side of the old wing. He passed a folded note to the porter. Deutschmarks, della Torre saw in the brief flash of light as the door opened. Strumbić took the service stairs two at a time. On the third floor he stepped into the corridor and knocked at the third door. When he didn’t hear anything, he slid in a key and turned the handle. Only then did della Torre notice that Strumbić had a gun in his hand.
Della Torre followed. The room was being used but was empty at the moment. Strumbić locked the door behind him and motioned della Torre to follow him to the balcony, where they took the two available seats. From the distance beyond the old city, they could see a glow and hear the sound of fire engines.
“You rigged it up so that when the Americans located the transmitter, they’d break into the house and set off the alarms,” della Torre said. “How’d you know the Serbs would start bombing?”
“Why do you think there’s a blackout? They see a pool of light on Croat territory at night, and they assume it’s a target.”
“Julius, had you put your mind to noble causes, you’d have discovered the cure for cancer by now.”
“Or baldness,” Strumbić said. “But you know, I don’t think I’d like the attached celebrity. I’m sort of a low-key person.”
“I’d be surprised if anybody survived that.” Della Torre was suddenly worried about Anzulović.
“Funny thing is, bombardments like that are a lot more show than tell. It’s surprising how often people survive. But it’ll shake up the Americans, anyway.”
“What now?”
“Now we wait for our ticket out of here.” Strumbić looked at his watch. “Boat leaves in two hours and forty minutes. The Americans will be picking themselves up and trying to figure out what the fuck happened to them, while we’ll be slipping out of a city under siege more easily than stepping on a number nine tram.”
They smoked and sat back in the chill of the evening, listening to the voices of people talking on the terraces below as if an evening bombardment not five kilometres away was the usual sort of light entertainment. And then the voices faded, and all that was left was the sound of a Cole Porter tune from the bar piano and waiters tidying up glasses and cutlery. And then only the sounds of sleep and whimpering children.
The door opened and Strumbić stood up, gun in his hand. “Steve, my friend, how is?” he said in English, sitting back down.
Higgins joined them on the balcony, perching on a footstool. “Julius,” he said, and then turning to della Torre: “Marko, nice to see you.”
“Did you get story?” Strumbić asked.
“I got it. You didn’t need me to tell them about the house in the end?”
“No, I had different idea,” Strumbić said. “Same rezultat.”
“Well, thanks for the tip, anyway. It appears that a handful of American observers and journalists were caught in a Yugoslav bombardment at a house they were visiting in the Dubrovnik suburbs,” Higgins said. “I’ll file it first thing.”
“Anyone killed?” della Torre asked.
“Hard to tell,” Higgins said. “House was totally destroyed. Someone seemed to think there might have been two or three people in it or around the grounds at the time.”
“Only two or three?” Strumbić seemed surprised. As was della Torre. He’d been trying to work out the size of the American team and figured on at least six and most probably eight or nine, not including Grimston and Anzulović. And Miranda.
“Did you tell boy to open doors of sea dungeon?”
“Yeah, he went all right. Came back pretty quickly too. Said all he found was a woman’s suitcase.”
Della Torre sensed Strumbić stiffen in the dark. His silence was louder than rifle fire.
“How well did the British woman swim?” Strumbić asked della Torre in Serbo-Croat.
“Very well. She swam every day she was here.”
“Proper swimming? Not lady-with-her-head-above-the-water swimming?”
“Proper swimming, like lady-who-swims-in-the-Olympics swimming.”
“Fuck,” Strumbić said. And then, once more in English: “Sank you, Steve, is interesting information.”
“No problem, Julius,” Higgins said. And then, quietly: “I’ll miss you when you go.”
They lapsed into silence. Both della Torre and Higgins sensed that Strumbić needed a moment to think.
“How’d the boy manage to do it so quickly?” della Torre asked eventually, remembering the painful and arduous trip he and Strumbić had taken earlier in the daylight. He couldn’t imagine having to pass along those rocky cliffs at night.
“Oh, he drops a rope ladder over the walls. It’s a pretty short climb down. From there, the rock rises and there’s only around five metres of wall to scale. He went down, had a look, and came back up straight away.”
“You owe me ten Deutschmarks for that, by the way,” Higgins added. “Short notice and all. Had to pry him off his girl.”
Strumbić pulled out a roll of notes and handed two to Higgins. “Is two hundred here,” he said. “It may be little while we don’t see each other.”
“Mighty generous, Julius.”
“So no woman? Not in water?”
“Not a hair, Julius.”
For the next twenty minutes, the three men waited without speaking, Strumbić looking frequently at his watch. And then, finally, they saw something. The flicker of a light on the water, followed soon after by the low throb of an engine.
“Okay, Gringo. There’s our ride.” But there was a grimness to Strumbić’s voice that della Torre guessed wasn’t just nervousness about breaking through the blockade.
They heard shooting somewhere in the distance. The front line was encroaching. A Serb sniper farther along the bay fired at lights, a crack followed by breaking glass. Sometimes bullets struck hard things so that they made a sound like clackers, those hard orbs suspended on strings that children played with. Or worse still, nothing, so that it was impossible to know where the bullet had stopped.
Strumbić rose and went into the room. Della Torre started to follow, like an eager child worried about being left behind, but Strumbić waved him back. He picked up the phone and spoke briefly. Della Torre stood, anxiously watching. After four minutes the phone rang. Strumbić snatched up the handset before the second ring, listened for a moment, and then walked back onto the balcony.
“Gringo, you know it’s just so bourgeois to use the stairs. Tonight we do things the proletarian way,” he whispered. But there was no humour to his joking.
“Good luck,” Higgins said, briefly shaking their hands.
Strumbić climbed over the balcony rail, motioning della Torre to do the same. He crept along the outside edge to the side of the building, against which a long ladder was leaning. They made their precarious way down, della Torre feeling unbalanced by his bag, worried that his weak left arm would give way.
He stumbled after Strumbić onto the terrace and down the stairs until they reached the swimming pool. In the faint light of Strumbić’s hooded torch, he saw a boat.
A voice in the darkness issued soft, quick commands. Della Torre knew it well — an unmistakeable voice that had spooled out a thread of orders, woven into a leash by which della Torre had led an old man to his death. All those years ago, in his sleep, the memory of that voice had given him nightmares. And yet he’d come to respect, even like, the man behind it. The man who’d once headed the UDBA’s wetworks, the m
an who’d assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, the man who’d killed the Americans: The Montenegrin.
THE GENTLE SPLASH and creak of oars swept in and out of the water as the long, open fishing boat was guided through the rocky shallows. Della Torre heard its fender bump and scrape against the side of the terrace. A man hopped ashore, crouching at the boat’s bow. And then someone else stepped onto land.
“Hello, Gringo. Julius.”
“Mr. Djilas,” della Torre said, feeling the man’s hand on his shoulder. He was a tall man, in his mid-fifties but more youthful than his age, and della Torre felt the force of his strength in that grip. “It’s sooner than I expected to see you.”
“Maybe we can save the reminiscences for the trip,” Strumbić said. “Let’s get a move —”
Two strong beams of light hit them from different points up on the terraces.
“Down. On the ground. Now.” Someone on a megaphone. A woman, speaking Croat. Miranda.
Just then, an equally powerful beam flashed up from the boat, illuminating some of their ambushers. A heavy-calibre machine gun barked upwards, the impact of its bullets shattering concrete as its empty shells cascaded against wood and stone.
Gunfire opened up on them, smaller-calibre weapons but no less deadly. Della Torre and Strumbić threw themselves backwards, the boat rocking under their weight. Strumbić opened up with his pistol. Della Torre slunk down in the boat’s wooden belly, scrabbling around in his bag for his Beretta.
Someone had started the engine, gunning it so that the boat leapt backwards. Della Torre lifted his gun and squeezed off a couple of shots, sightless. The fear of being wounded again grabbed hold of his gut, his elbow remembering the searing pain of a bullet gouging flesh, splintering bone.
Then from the sea behind them came a short series of loud coughs and violent eruptions of red and yellow and green as cannon shells burst against the Argentina’s grounds. The boat’s searchlight switched off, as did those of their attackers, all fearful of drawing further shots from the naval ship. The gunfire stopped as suddenly as it had started. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or two.
Della Torre saw that a fire had started halfway between the sea and the hotel, catching hold in the chemical stores and pump room for the pool; they went up in an instant conflagration that lit the sea and shore like a Fourth of July bonfire. It cast a bloody red glow across the scene, and for a moment della Torre was sure he saw Grimston and Anzulović standing there, then watched them recede into the darkness.
He turned to tell Strumbić, but Strumbić and four of the boat’s half-dozen crew where huddled in the bow. The former cop was pointing a flashlight downwards, and at first all della Torre could see was a red so deep it was black.
One of the boatmen recited a rosary, his voice automatic, panicked. Edging forward, della Torre saw the object of their interest. The Montenegrin.
“You and you, move,” Strumbić said. “You, keep pressing on the wound. That’s right, just press on it hard. You don’t want your boss to bleed . . .” He thought better of adding “to death.”
“How are you, chief?” he asked the Montenegrin. “Pretty sore, I imagine.”
“Sore’s not the word. It hurts like the devil,” the Montenegrin said, panting.
“Course it does. Ask Gringo here. Getting shot is a painful experience. Actually, it’s when you don’t feel the pain that you start to worry.”
“Where’s he hit?” della Torre asked.
“Hip,” the Montenegrin answered. “Caught me as I was jumping in the boat.”
“You sure that’s it? There’s blood all over your chest.”
“That’s not mine, that’s Tihan’s,” the Montenegrin said. “Tripped and broke his nose on the anchor and then bled all over me.”
“I was trying to protect you from getting shot more, boss,” said the man at the Montenegrin’s feet.
“Never mind, Tihan, the shirt’s had it anyway,” the Montenegrin said. And then, to no one in particular: “See if you can get me some water and a mouthful of brandy. You think there’s some morphine on the boat?”
One of his men had already rummaged through the first aid box, pulling out big square blocks of gauze, which they packed onto the wound, binding it as best they could. But the only painkillers the green box contained were aspirins.
“I’ll survive,” the Montenegrin said with gallows humour, though he looked pale yellow-green in the glow of the electric lantern. “Good thing the navy knows we’re passing. I don’t feel like getting shot at anymore.”
He went silent for a while, and della Torre and Strumbić said nothing either.
“Shit,” Strumbić said at long last. “Why do you always pick the crazy ones?”
“What?”
“The Englishwoman we left in the cave. Why didn’t you tell me she was fucking insane enough to swim for it?”
“Because I didn’t realize she was.”
The Montenegrin growled. “Fuck, it hurts,” he said. “So it was another woman, eh, Gringo? You’re intent on having a woman kill me off. Well, I suppose it’s just as well. The alternative is slivovitz.”
“I’m sorry,” della Torre said. “I didn’t know. I was foolish.”
“I hear you got through the blockade in a small sailboat. Gringo, you never cease to astonish me. You were lucky the torpedo boat’s signal officer was drunk and the subaltern was easily confused. That password sequence you used is more than a month out of date. Well remembered, though. If the crew had any sense, they’d have pulled you in and you’d be in a naval brig in Kotor while they worked out whether you’d be hanged for being a spy or merely shot for being inconvenient.”
Strumbić chuckled in the darkness. Della Torre shifted uncomfortably, feeling raw wood under the flecked varnish. That could still be where he was headed.
“Some more of that brandy,” the Montenegrin called towards the man behind della Torre. “And tell them to quit bouncing the boat so much.”
The bow beat against the waves as the man in the wheelhouse gunned the engine, desperate to get his wounded chief home.
“This will be a long war. It’s careless of me to be wounded so early,” the Montenegrin said. The skin on his face looked like a Noh mask in the dim light, the pain painted on. “Even without the Americans there are so many enemies. On my side and yours. Maybe it’s foolish of me to believe I’ll survive it. We understood the old bandits, knew how to appease them. The new ones, they are unpredictable. Allied to the most vicious killers.” The Montenegrin spoke quietly, taking comfort from the sound of his voice but knowing he needed to conserve his strength. “But Snezhana will be well cared for, whatever the case. Don’t worry, Gringo. She’s writing a book about your adventures. You’re the hero.”
Della Torre smiled at the idea of starring in a ten-year-old’s novel. But what a formidable ten-year-old the Montenegrin’s daughter was.
For a long time after that, the Montenegrin said nothing. Were it not for the occasional groan, della Torre would have thought he was asleep. But each time the wounded man took a swallow of his homemade brandy, he seemed to revive a little.
“Oh, Gringo, it would be nice to sit and talk to you of a summer evening, drinking wine until after the sun sets and the cold drives us back indoors. I always enjoyed our discussions. It’s a shame they won’t happen anymore.”
“Perhaps.”
“Oh, you’re right. Perhaps.”
“How is Snezhana?”
“She is well. She mentions you often. It filled her with life, that adventure of yours over the summer. I would have thought a child would suffer nightmares. But she has a thirst for excitement. For once she could experience what she’d long conjured in her mind.”
“It was hardly a fairy tale.”
“And yet it resolved itself like one. The wicked witch was killed and the litt
le girl rescued by a prince.”
Della Torre said nothing.
“This wound makes me think of her. The woman. I’m sorry, Gringo. She was a professional. Like me. It was the normal course of an abnormal life. She understood. There is no time for sentiment in our business. The Americans know that. They are not pursuing Strumbić or me or you for reasons of chivalry or nobility or revenge for your Rebecca or her colleagues. There is something about Palme that they are afraid somebody will find out, and we are stepping stones to that discovery. They will eliminate everyone they need to, for whatever reason.”
“Yes.”
“It is distasteful. But it is the way of our life, Gringo. Yours too, however much you are justified in thinking that your hands are clean.”
The Montenegrin looked tired. Not just tiredness brought on by a deep and painful wound, but the immense exhaustion of a retired executioner. Who more than hangmen know how to weigh mortality?
They passed the rest of the trip in silence, della Torre shivering as the cool sea air blew against him. The warships offshore ignored them. Landward they could see the almost festive glow of Yugoslav army emplacements, the Chetnik camps in the hills, the occasional white burst of rifle fire like a photographer’s flash. Della Torre held tight as the open boat bounced against the small waves, the spittle of sea spray wetting him.
After an hour, the boatmen switched on the red and green port and starboard indicators and a powerful white beam. Strumbić dozed with his chin against his chest, like a habitual commuter on the last train home. Maybe the Montenegrin slept too. His men had covered him in blankets, tended to him tenderly.
It was a long ride south along the coast. Della Torre nodded off more than once, jerked awake by an inbuilt fear of falling or by the boat’s judder against the water. The luminous dial on his watch told him they’d been at sea for more than three hours when he saw the beaded lights of a port town, which a boatman whispered was home, Herceg Novi, in Montenegro. They rounded the long peninsula guarding the mouth of Kotor Bay, a fjord twisting into the darkness of the mountains.
