Killing Pilgrim

by Alen Mattich

  There were a couple of sleeping bags, which della Torre and Strumbić spread out over the truck bed. They shifted a couple of army surplus duffel bags to the side and lifted the men in, heads hanging out the door, as Rebecca wanted.

  Strumbić looked over the sniper rifle that had destroyed the Merc and against which he’d been duelling. It was a heavy, brutal weapon. Della Torre had been right: .50-calibre bolt action with an attached duopod and a big scope.

  “Some cannon,” Strumbić said. “Thank fucking god they didn’t know how to use it, or right now I’d be spread over three fields. Thank god it wasn’t Rebecca pulling the trigger.”

  “We’ll drive these fellows to the Merc and give them a Viking funeral,” Rebecca said.

  They all climbed into the Hilux, Rebecca taking the wheel. She drove carefully so that the bodies wouldn’t roll out.

  When they got to the shot-up Merc, they shifted the corpses into the seats. It was surprisingly hard to fold them to fit, especially the driver. Harder still doing it without making a bloody mess of themselves. But they managed, and then shoved in the Bosnians’ possessions and wallets after della Torre wrote out their details in the small black notebook he always carried. Strumbić held on to the Bosnians’ Deutschmarks. The massive .50-calibre rifle they wedged into the Merc’s trunk.

  They loaded the Hilux with their own bags. Strumbić suggested keeping the Bosnians’ food, but both della Torre and Rebecca vetoed him.

  The Merc looked forlorn, the men awkwardly slumped in its interior. Rebecca borrowed Strumbić’s cigarette lighter and damped the rag della Torre had used to wipe the blood off the Hilux with another splash of slivovitz. Having stuffed it into the carburettor and fixed down the accelerator on the car, she lit the rag. They drove off just as the fire was building in the engine. They were around the bend before they heard the first small explosion. The second and its fireball followed soon after, releasing another billowing black plume into the clear blue sky.

  Della Torre knew it wouldn’t take much investigation to figure out the Bosnians hadn’t been killed in the car, even after this inferno. But he doubted the police would make the effort. They’d stick to their first impressions. Separatist Serb gangsters killed some people foolish enough to be driving through this no man’s land. UDBA types who’d bullied their way through Gospić earlier in the day. The woman with them? Must have disappeared. Slovene whore, probably.

  As long as the boy got through to Bihać, there’d be no reason for the cops to challenge their prejudices. Even if they found him, they’d be inclined to put the blame on the Serbs, probably attributing it to in-fighting.

  Would the boy get back? Della Torre was hopeful. He’d got away and Bihać wasn’t far. He’d have to cross Serb lines to get there, but these Bosnians from the hill country learned to live in the woods from a young age. He’d manage, especially with some money in his pocket.

  “You know much about car,” Strumbić said to Rebecca, having put on his seat belt without needing a reminder.

  “Honey,” Rebecca said, looking ahead, alert, “there’s not a lot I don’t know about cars. Or guns . . . Or one or two other things.”

  They didn’t talk. They drove with the windows open and the air conditioner running, the thick afternoon air cut by a steady cool blast, mitigating the abattoir smells of death, home-brewed slivovitz, other men’s sweat and fear that clung to the truck. They didn’t pass another car until they got to the main road, and even there, traffic was impossibly light for a summer’s day. Croatian cops were rerouting traffic at both ends. It was hard to believe this had once been — should still have been — Dalmatia’s main north–south road. The Serb rebels had put a ligature on Croatia, hoping the infant republic would die away.

  It wasn’t long before they were deep into the last chain of mountains in the Velebit range. Stark, sharp high rocks like bleached bone erupted from the dense forest, so that the vista was reduced to a primitive painting of blue, green, and white. They crossed high over the watershed. The forest was replaced by scrub and a dry, stony landscape as they descended the other side of the mountains. The air was redolent of lavender and thyme and the thick resin smell of summer pine.

  Another half-hour and they were within sight of Zadar’s walls. They had planned to stop for the night farther south, but Rebecca drove straight towards the ancient port city, with both men’s unspoken consent. It was still high afternoon. Della Torre could trace in his mind the whole of the shooting. It felt as if it had lasted for days, and yet, he realized, from the first shot to the funeral pyre, it couldn’t have taken more than three-quarters of an hour.

  All he wanted now was to shower. Cleanse the horror of the afternoon off his skin. His lawyer’s mind spun. He hadn’t been complicit in the execution of the older man. The man had anyway been fatally wounded and the final shot had no significance. There was a risk in keeping him alive because . . . But his mental gears kept slipping back to Anzulović’s command. That he keep a tally of corpses so one day there could be a reckoning. In the kingdom of man, not just of heaven.

  • • •

  Rebecca pulled the car into a parking spot under a spreading palm tree in Zadar’s old town, one of a row separating the road from the long stretch of the seaside promenade.

  They carried their bags and Rebecca’s hard cases to a tall, Italianate hotel. Strumbić sorted out the rooms. One with a balcony for Rebecca, an adjoining twin for him and della Torre, all on the American woman’s credit card.

  They showered, changed, and met at the hotel terrace. Rebecca’s eyes were still shiny and bright, though della Torre could see the tiredness in their corners. The adrenaline had long run out, but the experience of death remained sharp.

  “A toast to Rebecca. She is great hunter. Živeli,” Strumbić said, raising his second glass.

  Della Torre lifted his half-heartedly. He knew he’d have had a hole in him big enough to put beer bottles through were it not for Rebecca’s reflexes and instinct. And yet she horrified him. Maybe because he knew Yugoslavia was at the dawn of an era of Rebeccas, a time when it wouldn’t be unusual even for women to kill in cold blood.

  They drank and then ordered food.

  “Anybody have any ideas why those fellows wanted to shoot us?” Rebecca asked. They’d talked a little about it in the truck. Speculated. But the way she asked, she seemed to know they were hiding something from her.

  Della Torre didn’t say anything. Rebecca kept her eyes on him. Strumbić shrugged.

  Della Torre hadn’t told them what the boy had said, that the Bosnians had been after a cop. Strumbić? Or him?

  “Think maybe somebody doesn’t want us to go to Dubrovnik?” she asked.

  Again, no answer.

  He was thinking of the other Bosnians, the ones who’d tried to kill him and Strumbić in the spring, whom he’d run from and who’d tracked him down in London. He’d call Anzulović later, give him the names of these dead Bosnians, find out whether they had anything to do with the first ones.

  The sun flattened itself against the horizon, throwing a sparkling blade across the Adriatic so that they had to turn their eyes from its orange light.

  Strong coffees were followed by stronger drink. Eventually the waitress left the bottle of slivovitz at their table.

  “Živeli,” Strumbić said, thick-tongued, raising his glass.

  Della Torre flagged, not quite keeping pace. For a while, he’d kept his eye on Rebecca, seeing whether she’d play the same trick she had at the Esplanade, of only touching the liquor to her lips. But she was drinking. She dropped the Bosnians and took up smiling broadly at Strumbić, encouraging his bold, wolfish looks as they drank to each other. And then it was as though della Torre wasn’t even there.

  A folk combo — fiddle, three tambours, guitar, and accordion — dressed in the traditional national costume, pitched up on the waterfront promenade, playing
and singing for themselves, it seemed.

  “Sounds like something halfway between ‘Cielito Lindo’ and ‘Zorba,’” said Rebecca.

  “Dance?” Strumbić said, rising unsteadily. He bowed with his hand held open before him in an unintentional parody of a nineteenth-century dandy.

  “Dance? I’m not sure I can even stand,” Rebecca said, throwing her head back and laughing, but putting her palm into Strumbić’s waiting hand.

  Della Torre excused himself, though neither of them was listening. His legs threatened to rebel against his upper body, carrying him under protest into the hotel and to the elevator, where he stood, leaning hard against the wall for a long time, trying to remember what floor he was on and what that number looked like.

  Somehow he got back to the room without mishap. He threw himself heavily on the bed, only to see that he’d left the door wide open. With Herculean effort, he rose and shut it and lay back down. He wanted to talk to Irena. He knew he should call Anzulović to tell him what had happened, but it was really Irena that he wanted. It took him three attempts before he dialled correctly. The phone rang for a long time, but there was no answer. She couldn’t have gone to Vukovar already, could she? She was probably at work. Working the night through. Her absence from his life had become a growing wound. It was his stupidity, his selfishness, his fault.

  He fell asleep in his clothes. Sometime in the night he heard Strumbić come back, stumble around the room, and turn on the bedside lamp. Theatrically hushed conversation went on around him, and then the light went off again. When he went to the toilet in the night, the other bed seemed empty, though della Torre wasn’t sure. He woke in the morning to the sound of a small animal in his head banging pipes with a hammer. There was no sign of Strumbić.

  Della Torre decided to go for an early-morning swim. He found his swimsuit, borrowed a hotel towel, and walked across the road, under the line of palm trees, to the broad steps that descended to the sea. He swam as hard as he could, parallel to the white stone promenade, until the morning sun warmed him in the water.

  When he got back, he saw Rebecca and Strumbić breakfasting on the terrace. Rebecca looked composed — a little tired, but as serene as she’d been on the first day he’d met her. Strumbić was dissolution personified. Pasty except for the rings under his eyes, overweight, cigarette in hand, a man who looked so far beyond redemption there wasn’t a map in heaven or hell that could lead him back.

  “Good swim?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes,” he answered, not knowing how to tell her that it hadn’t washed him of his sins but had only made him feel them all the more sharply, through the tiny cuts where his skin had been scored by thorns.

  “I’m tempted, but maybe we ought to get going. It’s a long drive. We’ll share it today,” she said. “Though I think Julius is likely to sleep most of the way.”

  “I’ll do some driving,” della Torre agreed.

  He shuddered to think of travelling at Rebecca’s speed on some of the roads farther south, the single lane in each direction with a hard cliff face on one side and a sharp drop into the sea on the other.

  But the trip was uneventful. Strumbić snored from the back seat much of the way. Della Torre and Rebecca alternated every few hours. He insisted on it and she didn’t argue. The Hilux was easy to drive; it didn’t have quite the Merc’s luxury or naked power, but it was fast enough.

  They stopped at a roadside place for lunch and took a good break every two hours. The previous day had affected them all. When she drove, they listened to Rebecca’s music. Tapes of Michael Jackson and Prince and people he’d never heard of. He’d brought only a single tape of his own, Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. They listened to that twice and then turned off the stereo. The tight, winding road demanded the driver’s attention. The hard landscape of scrub and mountain, falling away to the blue-green sea below them, at once mesmerized and sharpened the senses. They didn’t talk about the previous day. Or about what they were going to do in Dubrovnik.

  They didn’t need to. He knew now, without a doubt, that they weren’t going there to talk to the Montenegrin. They were going there to kill him.

  From the road, high up the steep mountainside, the island of Šipan appeared like a jade dragon rising out of a sapphire sea. Signs pointed to Dubrovnik ahead, but on Strumbić’s command they pulled off the road and followed a narrow tarmacked track down the hillside to a village in a cove. Strumbić pointed out a house on the beach and had Rebecca drive behind its high wall to a hard standing under a bougainvillea-covered trellis. The house was owned by an absent fisherman who’d made the parking spot available for Strumbić’s use.

  Given the village’s tiny size, it was guarded by a surprisingly substantial concrete harbour wall, with various motor cruisers tied up alongside the breakwater. Strumbić sauntered over the mole’s wide white flagstones to one of the smaller boats and peeled back its sun-faded blue canvas tarpaulin. The vessel rocked under his weight as he rolled the cover onto the bottom of the boat. The engine started at the first attempt. Strumbić explained that the fisherman kept the launch fuelled up and tuned. They loaded the boat, and — after Strumbić passed around life jackets, much to della Torre’s surprise and relief — they set off across the channel.

  Šipan’s verdant lushness had surprised them after the harsh, stony scrub of the mainland. A ridge of high hills stretched the length of the island, while the green was separated from the sea by a white band of rocky shore.

  There were two harbours and two villages at either end of the island, about six kilometres apart. Some houses were scattered between, along with the ruins of dozens of summer palaces from Dubrovnik’s Renaissance. These days there remained only a couple of hundred islanders — old people and a handful of fishermen. There wasn’t anything for the young. A few people like Strumbić had holiday houses on the island and sometimes tourists came to stay, spending a night or two in rooms let out by the locals. Mostly, though, it was day trippers, and not many of them either. Ferries weren’t frequent, and Šipan was just far enough from Dubrovnik, and sufficiently devoid of attractions, that only adventurous travellers bothered to visit, a few young Germans or wealthy Italians on their yachts.

  Strumbić’s house was about half a kilometre from the southern village. It had been built in the early nineteenth century by a rich sea captain, for his retirement. It looked like a child’s drawing, a stretched cube two storeys high, white stone with a red-tiled roof, green shuttered windows, and not much ornamentation. Situated a little way up the hill, it overlooked the sea and had a clear view of the mainland and the islands farther south. Strumbić took the crossing at a gentle speed, sparing them sea spray. When they landed, he tied the boat to a concrete jetty, where he left them waiting while he walked briskly up the hill towards the house. He was back a few minutes later in a beat-up Yugoslav version of a Fiat 500. They piled the luggage into it, and della Torre and Rebecca walked behind it the hundred metres or so to the house.

  From Zagreb Strumbić had arranged for a local woman to open up the villa and stock it with necessities from the tiny shop that doubled as a post office, about a kilometre up the road from the village. There were only two telephones on the island, his and the one at the shop. The government had intended to make the villagers pay to bring the line from the mainland, but no one could afford it. So except for emergencies and special occasions, the islanders did without. Strumbić said he’d thought of undercutting the post office by offering the locals cheaper calls from his phone, but had decided against it. His privacy was worth more than the money.

  Della Torre took his bag and one of Rebecca’s cases into the cool interior of the house. It had a cantilevered stone staircase, and the floor’s black and white marble tiles formed the pattern of a compass rose, cracked and worn with age. The high ceiling was crossed with heavy oak beams and plastered in between. Della Torre stepped into the sitting room to th
e right of the hall. The kitchen and dining room were on the other side. Two big windows offered a splendid view of the sea to the south, and two sets of French doors opened onto a cobbled courtyard in the back, where he could see a pair of old lemon trees in broad stone planters that had once been wellheads. The room was furnished simply, with wooden benches covered in big, linen-covered cushions. On one wall was a large speckled mirror in an ornate rococo frame, and on another a large nineteenth-­century painting of the Battle of Lepanto.

  The elegance of the decor astonished him. There was plenty boorish about Strumbić. He was crude and vulgar with women. His education was truncated and his tastes narrow. He only ever seemed to read the cheap pocket paperback graphic novels sold from kiosks. The films he watched were shoot-’em-ups, westerns, war, or crime. He was contemptuous of artists and writers, and his dress sense was no better than that of a typical Yugoslav functionary.

  And yet . . . he was smart. One of the cleverest people della Torre knew, though his brains were fully devoted to corruption. He was tone deaf to classical music but had a resonant, melodious voice when he sang folk songs late at night in bars. He’d long gone to fat but could dance a waltz or a polka better than a boy half his weight and age.

  Most of all, he had exquisite taste in real estate. His marital flat in Zagreb was grand and elegant. The garret in which he put up his current mistress was charming. He’d designed his country weekend retreat near Samobor himself. The apartment in London was a cool, expensive space. Even so, none of them matched this villa.

  For some reason a fat, well-thumbed coffee-table book sitting on a waist-high stand caught della Torre’s eye. He flipped through it. It opened onto a creased page with a photo spread that showed a similar floor to the one in Strumbić’s entrance hall.

  “Bought the place as a ruin. Cheap until I started doing it up,” Strumbić said wryly, as he stepped into the room. “You get some people on the island who can do things, but if you want craftsmen, you need to get them from the mainland. Materials too. It’s a pain shipping stuff by fisherman’s boat, let me tell you. Then there’s the fittings. What you get in this country is crap. Had to bring them in from France and Germany, tiles from northern Italy.” He shook his head at the effort.