Killing Pilgrim

by Alen Mattich

  Strumbić grinned at him.

  Della Torre went back to the cop. “We’re going this way. But thanks for taking an interest in our safety.”

  “You try that and we’ll shoot your car out from under you,” said the cop.

  He stood there, making no move.

  Della Torre rubbed his hand over his face. He should have stopped noticing he no longer had a moustache by now, but it still came as a surprise to him. He was wondering what sort of threat to launch at the recalcitrant cop. In the old days he could have had the man in an UDBA jail within the hour. Things were different now, and this cop knew it.

  Strumbić appeared in the corner of his eye.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Strumbić asked pleasantly.

  He looked like an older version of the Velebit cop, his belly hanging slightly more over his belt, his jowls a little looser, his hairline slightly higher up the forehead. But they’d been stamped from the same mould.

  “There’s a certain reluctance to let us through,” della Torre said.

  Strumbić took the roadmap from della Torre and went over to the cop. They shook hands and the cop lowered his rifle to the ground stock first while Strumbić put an arm over the man’s shoulder. They walked away from della Torre over to the verge on the other side of the highway. Another cop had taken the first one’s place to wave traffic onto the smaller road, dealing with the almost inevitable complaints and questions but at the same time looking over his shoulder to see what was happening to his colleague. The cop in the car had got out and had his hand on the holster of the gun on his hip.

  After a long five minutes, Strumbić and his younger doppelgänger came walking back, all smiles.

  “What are you waiting for, Gringo? Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Where do you think?” Strumbić said, pointing to the empty highway beyond the roadblock.

  When they got to the car, Strumbić thumbed for della Torre to get into the back seat. “I have map. He show me where roadblock is. I sit front, show Rebecca.”

  Della Torre did as he was told.

  The cops waved them through. Rebecca steered around the policemen’s Zastava, driving over the grass verge. Another police car was parked at the side of the road a little farther along, but they were quickly past, driving along a highway cut through mountain forests. With an open road, Rebecca quickly worked her way up the gears, pushing the big Mercedes to autobahn speeds.

  “What the hell happened there?” della Torre demanded.

  “We have nice talk. I ask him how much, and he say fifty Deutschmarks. I give him one hundred and he happy to shut up.” Della Torre could see Rebecca grinning in the rear-view mirror. Strumbić turned around to look at him, as pleased with himself as a dog that had got the steak. “He show me road, best way to Gospić, and then after Gospić back to highway. No Serbs. No problem.”

  “Looks like we were smart to take you along, Julius,” Rebecca said.

  “Of course. You see. I help in Dubrovnik also. You see,” Strumbić said.

  Della Torre sat deep into the leather of the rear seat. He watched the countryside pass, high, dark hills covered in a mixture of giant pines and oak that even the summer sun failed to penetrate. Somewhere to the left, thirty or forty kilometres, was Plitvice, a fairyland of turquoise lakes, each one tumbling into the next in a series of waterfalls made to be photographed for tourist calendars. A fairyland until six months ago, when the Serbs started shooting at Croat police and the Croat police fired back, a busload of Italians caught in the middle the whole while.

  It was astonishing more people hadn’t been killed, della Torre thought.

  • • •

  The Merc’s smooth, quiet ride made him oblivious to the fact that it was eating distance like a glutton. There was a cooler box on the floor space in front of the empty seat. The hotel had organized drinks, snacks, and sandwiches for them. The seat itself held one of the black metal cases, the one with the sniper rifle, along with a heavy shoulder bag.

  They were most of the way to their turning when Strumbić developed an unspoken gratitude for Rebecca’s insistence that he wear his seat belt. It was either a feral dog or a black fox. Whatever it was, it darted in front of the car from the shrubbery which, untended by maintenance crews, had grown wild at the side of the road. Rebecca braked hard, manoeuvring to avoid hitting the animal. The tires squealed, scorching across the hot road, threatening to fishtail the Merc, though Rebecca kept deft control.

  “Close,” she said. The creature had disappeared just as quickly. “Guess they’re not used to cars around here anymore.”

  She pulled over, though they hadn’t seen any traffic at all.

  For a long moment they sat still.

  “If me driving, I hit,” said Strumbić, though he didn’t make it clear whether he’d have done so intentionally or that he was admitting to not being as good a driver as Rebecca.

  “Oh, I’d have hated to. I’m an animal person,” she said.

  “That’s nice,” said della Torre, waiting for his pulse to slow.

  “You’re not?” she asked, noting the sarcasm in his voice.

  “Not what?” he asked.

  “An animal person.”

  “Only when they’re on a plate,” he said flippantly. “Except for cats.”

  “Oh, you’re a cat lover then?”

  “No. They taste too much like rodent,” he said.

  She screwed up her face at him in the rear-view mirror, as if he was a drunk who’d soiled himself in public.

  “Or so I’m told,” he added hastily.

  She paused for a while and then asked, “Rodent? What sort of rodent?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, squirrel . . . or rat.” He squirmed at the memory. Being in the commandos had been an unpleasant way to spend more than two years of military training. Unpleasant in many, many respects. “I imagine most rodents taste alike.”

  There was another long moment of silence. A faint smile played on the edge of her lips.

  “She saying pussy taste like beaver,” Strumbić said.

  “Are beavers rodents?” della Torre asked.

  “Some are. Though not the ones you eat,” Rebecca said, deadpan.

  After a pause, Strumbić guffawed.

  “What?” della Torre asked.

  Strumbić explained the joke to him in Croat. Trust Strumbić to have an imperfect grasp of English except for the vulgarities, della Torre thought.

  Strumbić got out to piss in the bushes and Rebecca stretched her legs. Della Torre handed her a chilled Capri Sun. He noticed how, when she’d finished, she didn’t throw it onto the verge but rolled up the package and stuck it in a paper bag she kept in the compartment at the bottom of the driver-side door. She was neat, besides being an animal lover.

  Midway through a stretch, she stopped and stared along the road behind them.

  “Marko, what do you make of that?” she asked, pointing.

  In the distance, near the crest of a hill they’d descended and where the road reappeared after a bend, della Torre saw a faint glint.

  “Looks like a car,” he said.

  “Yes. And what about that car?”

  “It’s not moving.”

  “Do you remember passing a car back there?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She pulled out a pair of field glasses from the canvas bag, portable but powerful Zeiss binoculars. When she’d had a good look, she passed them over to della Torre. The resolution was astonishing, as good as the big, heavyweight glasses he’d had to use when he was in the military. It wasn’t a car but a truck. A black truck. Its doors were open and he could make out two figures standing next to it.

  “Black Hilux,” Rebecca said.

  He lowered the binoculars and looked ove
r towards her. She’d braced herself against the Merc and was resting her elbow on its roof, using it to stabilize her arm as she focused the big telescopic sight from her rifle. It was considerably more powerful than the Zeiss. Strumbić was standing behind her, taking it all in.

  “Friends of yours?” Rebecca asked generally.

  “Black Hilux, you say?” della Torre asked.

  “Yup.”

  “I saw one in Zagreb a couple of times.”

  “There was one that tried to follow us to Julius’s cottage. It picked us up when we were driving back, as we passed through . . . what’s it called . . . Samobor,” Rebecca said. “And they were following us this morning from Zagreb, though they’re a bit slower than us. We’d have lost them if it hadn’t been for the traffic jam at the police roadblock.”

  Della Torre considered the woman, making a mental note not to underestimate her. About anything.

  “Know anything about it, Julius?” della Torre asked.

  Strumbić shook his head. “Not my friends. Maybe UDBA. Serbian UDBA. Maybe interested in Americans. Maybe Croatian UDBA. Maybe mafia. Is much smuggling from Bosnia. Drugs to boats in Zadar, Split, and to Italy.”

  “Even though the Serbs have closed the roads?” della Torre asked.

  “Smugglers know different ways. Pay money to go.”

  “If they’re mafia, what do they want from us?”

  Strumbić shrugged. “Mercedes?”

  Della Torre nodded. “Maybe they’re just lost tourists.”

  “Maybe.” Rebecca’s look suggested she didn’t believe it.

  She took one of the metal cases from the boot, unlocked the combination, and put it on top of the one next to della Torre. She didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t need to.

  They set off again, though at a more measured pace now. Their turning wasn’t far off and they didn’t want to go racing into a Serb roadblock. Rebecca kept her eyes on the rear-view mirror.

  They turned off the main road without seeing any signs of Serbs or anyone else. The single-lane byroad was tarmacked but rough at the edges. The forest flashed past, Strumbić continually having to remind Rebecca to slow down as he tried to locate where they were on the map. At one point they raced past a unit of irregulars lounging by their cars in a little clearing.

  “What do you think?” della Torre asked Strumbić. “Theirs or ours?”

  “Whoever they are, they’ll end up doing more damage to their own side. It was like they were out for a picnic,” Strumbić replied in Croat. “But that’s probably the last we see of that Hilux.”

  The mountain forest gave way to a broad valley of rolling hills. More hedges and flat fields of maize and wheat were scattered among red-tiled houses and hamlets. The fields were broken by single trees and sheep meadows.

  Before long they hit a cluster of hamlets, and not far past the hamlets, Gospić.

  They stopped at a roadblock made up of a couple of sawhorses put up by a unit of the Croat militia, the half-police, half-army that provided what security it could to these parts.

  A tall soldier wearing a loose shirt and a slack expression bade Rebecca lower her window.

  “You took a wrong turn. You want to go to the seashore. No tourism here. Kein Tourist, verstehen?” And then, turning to his friends, who were eyeing the car, he said in the broad, slow accent of a boy from the hills: “Get a load of this redhead, boys. How long you think she spent on her back to buy this motor?”

  “Ask her how much and I’ll tell you how long,” one of his fellow militiamen called back.

  The soldier turned back to Rebecca. “You get to the coast down that road,” he said, pointing to a side road. “Down that way a kilometre, and you get to the coast road. But first there’s a tax. A Gospić tax.” He paused in thought. “A hundred Deutschmarks. Hundert Deutschmark,” he translated helpfully.

  “Listen, son.” Strumbić talked across Rebecca from the passenger seat. “Why don’t you keep your trap shut and the road open. We’re driving into Gospić, where we’re going to stop for a little break, and then we’re driving onto the highway once we find somebody who can direct us past the Serb roadblocks.”

  Della Torre was surprised, thinking that Strumbić might pay his way out of this like he had earlier. But on reflection, he knew Strumbić was right. The police were professionals and they knew that there were rules about successful bribe-taking. These were stupid farm boys. Show a willingness to pay them a hundred Deutschmarks and they’d ask for two hundred.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” the boy said in a slow, leisurely way. His disregard for the passengers of the Mercedes spoke of a dangerous combination of stupidity and bravado.

  “Julius,” Rebecca said, “let me handle this.”

  She smiled apologetically to the soldier and fiddled with the gearshift. The soldier sauntered to the front of the car and started waving Rebecca backwards. Rebecca looked over her shoulder as if to reverse, revved the engine, and then popped the clutch. But rather than going backwards, the car jumped forward, knocking the soldier flat on his back in the middle of the road. The car didn’t hit him hard enough to do much damage, and Rebecca braked the same instant. Della Torre was shocked into silence. Strumbić hooted with laughter, while half a dozen irate militiamen surrounded the Merc, their rifles raised.

  Rebecca rushed out of the car and went straight for the fallen soldier, bending over him. He’d raised himself up onto his elbows. His immediate outrage cooled. From where he sat, della Torre could see the militiaman wasn’t looking into Rebecca’s face but rather somewhere lower. The magic of a low-cut blouse.

  She cooed over him and stroked his head, making apologetic gestures to show that she’d meant to reverse rather than go forward, until the group of militiamen relaxed and started to laugh at their fallen comrade, who hadn’t suffered anything more than a couple of bruises.

  Della Torre joined her, showing his ID to the men. Unlike the cop at the roadblock, these boys didn’t realize that the UDBA was no longer a force. One of the militiamen hurried down the road to a nondescript restaurant in an unfinished two-storey red and white cinder-block building, from which a flustered and reluctant senior officer followed. He was a middle-aged man, thinning up top and fat around the middle, his green shirt untucked and open down the chest.

  “You run the militia here?” della Torre asked, having informed the officer of his rank and who he was.

  Apprehension flickered across the officer’s face. “I’m told that you tried to run over one of my men.”

  “An accident,” della Torre said dryly. “I suggest you discourage them from demanding bribes and from being insubordinate. Because pretty soon you’ll have some professional officers coming this way. And a few of those professional officers would be happy to summarily execute soldiers they consider to be in a state of mutiny. That’s just a friendly word of warning.

  “Now I need you to show me on this map how we can get back to the main road where we won’t bump into any tree trunks your Serb neighbours might have left lying around. And where we might get an edible lunch in Gospić.”

  Gospić was a typical small Croat town. It had a big square, a church with a tall baroque steeple, and an entirely forgettable restaurant.

  They had an indifferent lunch, fried schnitzels for the men and an omelette for Rebecca. They sat on a pleasant shaded terrace next to the main road and within sight of the little river that passed through the town. Strumbić spent much of the time recounting the looks on the soldiers’ faces when Rebecca hit their friend.

  “Clutch slipped,” Rebecca said nonchalantly. Della Torre tried not to think about how the boy’s finger had been on the trigger of his rifle. But all of the militiamen had had their safeties on, and they had all ducked out of the way when the car jumped. They hadn’t looked like they were up for much of a fight.

  After a quick round of bl
ack coffees, during which Strumbić and della Torre desperately puffed down a last cigarette, they left Gospić, following a small, dusty road, long lines of cracks running along its asphalt so that its edges more or less crumbled into the verges. The landscape gave way to another set of long fields, with isolated low hills breaking up the valley floor, while to their right the mountains piled up into the blue distance beyond.

  The way out of town was much like the way in, though in this direction the militiamen hadn’t bothered to block the road, content to merely eye the passing Merc from the shade of a giant mulberry tree.

  They drove through a smattering of hamlets, each little more than a few houses strung along the road. Della Torre suspected it wasn’t just the heat of the afternoon that made this feel like a newly abandoned landscape. There were no animals; no sheep, cows, or horses. No dogs sleeping in the shade of shuttered houses. There was no other traffic on the road, and inside the Mercedes there was no sound other than the hum of the air conditioner and the rumble of tires on the aged road. It reminded della Torre of the countryside around Vukovar. Silent and seized with fear.

  He watched Rebecca in the rear-view mirror, her eyes frequently flicking to read the road behind them. He could see the consternation behind the half-tint of her big sunglasses. He turned to look back. In the middle distance, a cloud of dust was being kicked up by a black car.

  “Hold on, boys,” she said, accelerating the Mercedes. The road twisted. For long patches it was paved, only to give way to gravel for a few hundred metres and then revert to rough asphalt. The ground rolled, and fields were broken by copses.

  Rebecca spotted a farmer’s track between a clump of shrubs and a cornfield. Barely braking, she turned off the road like a rally driver and bounced the car into the tall, ripe corn.