Killing Pilgrim

by Alen Mattich

  He wouldn’t forgive her again, though. He’d sort her out properly this time. He’d put her back on the street, where he’d found her.

  His mental clock was ticking down. Three minutes? Four, tops? There was one last chance. One last call. He had to make it count. He knew he had no other choice. He’d do it only as an act of desperation. Not just because he’d rather have his teeth knocked out with a chisel than talk to his wife, but because he knew they’d be monitoring his home phone.

  “It’s me.”

  “Where are you?” Her voice grated on him like steel on slate. “Light in the toilet has gone again, and all sorts of people have been trying to get in touch with you. Phoning non-stop. Constantly at the door.”

  “Listen. Take a message, will you.” He tried not to raise his voice, tried not to yell.

  “Minute you leave the apartment, that light stops working. What did you do to it? You rig it up to make me miserable, don’t you? Have to use candles. A month you’ve been gone without word.”

  “Will you shut your trap and just listen for a minute, woman,” he hissed. He could see her pinched face, top lip pursed under her sharp nose as if she’d detected a bad smell. Her thin frame, desiccated by a lifetime of bitter complaint. How many times had he told himself that if it wasn’t for her strudel he’d have left her long before?

  “Don’t you be swearing at me. If my father was still alive, you’d be watching your tongue.”

  “Well, the old thug isn’t, is he?” he said, exasperated. “Will you just for once in your life stop yammering at me and listen?”

  “So that’s how it is, eh? What’s next? You going to beat me? You going to break my arm like Franz down the way did to his old woman? Knocked her right into hospital and left her blacker than blue. Only last week . . .”

  Strumbić felt every second evaporating with a pulse of cold dread. He’d have happily beaten her. He’d have beaten her for twenty years now. But not while the old man, Zagreb’s thuggish ex-chief of police, had been alive. No, not now either. If he’d ever laid a hand on her, he knew she’d cut his throat in the night. And no one would blame her.

  He caught himself. Forced himself to be calm. Forced his voice to become even, neutral, pleasant.

  “I’m sorry, darling. Really, I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot. I will get a good electrician in to look at the light. A proper one, not like the monkey last time.”

  “And a new washing machine . . .”

  “And a new washing machine. Could you please do me a favour? Please?”

  “And all sorts have been looking for you.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “How do I know? Police,” she said. “Detectives. People. Past couple of days.”

  Anyone trying to discover who he was phoning would only be able to trace this call to the Zagreb police department. But he’d still have to be careful about what he said.

  “Can we get back to that favour?”

  “What?” She didn’t sound mollified, but it was an opening.

  “Could you please write this down?”

  “I’ll remember it.”

  “Please could you write it down.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said. “My memory’s as sharp as it was when I was seventeen, and when I was seventeen I could recite, verbatim —”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, trying to hide the exasperation in his voice. “Use that seventeen-year-old memory. Can you get in touch with Marko della Torre? He’s in military intelligence. My new office. Get in touch with him, get a message to him. Tell him I’m with our colleagues —” He paused, trying to think of something della Torre would understand that no one else would. “— near that Italian staircase he liked so much.”

  Della Torre had marvelled at the staircase in Strumbić’s villa on Šipan Island. He’d know that the Italian staircase meant down south and that the colleagues were the Dubrovnik cops.

  “Why can’t they get in touch with him if they’re colleagues?”

  He felt a hot, wet tear on his cheek. It was as much as he could do to control himself. “It’s an undercover job. Top secret. Inside stuff.”

  He could almost hear her snap to attention. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? A top cop’s daughter knew her duty.

  “Della Torre,” she said.

  “Tell him that I’m a guest of our colleagues but I’m using my pub name.”

  “Your name’s a pub?”

  “My pub name.”

  “Your pub name?”

  “Yes. He’ll know what I mean. That’s as much as I can say.” Smirnoff was the name he’d used in London. Della Torre knew all about that. And pubs were found in London.

  “I’ll make sure he gets the message,” she said, all efficiency.

  He heard the door open behind him and put his hand on the phone’s kill switch without saying goodbye to his wife. For once, he knew she’d do as she was told.

  “Calling someone, Mr. Smirnoff?” Brg asked.

  “I was just about to ask them to page you. I was starting to feel lonely.”

  Brg nodded and went round to sit on his side of the table. As he pulled out his chair, he stopped for a second and stared down at his feet. He bent over, picking up his wallet. He slid it back into his pocket without looking at the contents and sat down, staring at Strumbić with a strained expression.

  “Did you manage to find some cigarettes?” Strumbić asked, as sweet as candy floss.

  “Why don’t we get back to those questions, Mr. Smirnoff? I don’t have a lot of time to waste on you. I’ve got three dead Americans to worry about.”

  For the first time that morning, Strumbić felt a chill. He didn’t like the way the detective said “Smirnoff.” Nor did he like that the number of dead Americans had risen to three.

  In the back of the patrol car the night he was arrested, he’d listened to the cops talking about the two dead Americans on Šipan. They were keeping an eye out for anyone making the crossing from the island. The mention of dead Americans had quieted Strumbić, made him think twice about revealing who he was.

  He’d been dealing with some Americans on an official job only days earlier, while setting up his distinctly unofficial CD-smuggling scheme. In fact, one of them had stayed at his villa on Šipan. She still had the keys to the place. Two dead Americans on Šipan. A third now.

  He had nothing to do with their deaths. But it wasn’t something he wanted to argue from a jail cell. He knew it would be hung on him, on Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, unless they found out what had really happened. And as far as he could tell, they had no clue.

  Strumbić hadn’t a scintilla of doubt that della Torre was somehow tied in with the deaths. Della Torre would have to get him out of the mess. Just as well then that, however much trouble della Torre kept landing in Strumbić’s lap, he was also the only man Strumbić trusted with his life.

  “I don’t really know how I can help, Detective,” Strumbić said, helping himself to one of the cigarettes Brg held out, not allowing himself to show any of the unease he felt. “Like I said, I was fishing and suddenly found myself in the middle of the O.K. Corral.”

  The Dubrovnik detective rifled through a second file he’d brought into the room, pulled out a sheet, and contemplated it for a long, quiet moment. He raised his tired eyes, took a final long drag on his cigarette, and trapped the other man in his gaze. Strumbić’s amusement at having so thoroughly picked the other man’s pockets faded a little. His certainty of having found a safe haven, a comfortable little hideaway, was evaporating. He found himself feeling increasingly unsettled. It wasn’t an emotion he was used to. Brg ground out the cigarette in a cheap tin ashtray.

  The Dubrovnik detective contemplated the man in front of him, more seriously than he had less than half an hour earlier.

  Brg had gone back up
to his office, pissed off at the petty smuggler he was having to deal with when all he wanted was sleep and then to report back to Zagreb that the American redhead had been found.

  Brg was sure that in his tiredness, he’d left both his cigarettes and lighter on the ferry. He got another pack out from the carton he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. But the spare matches he had to hunt for on his desk.

  It was while he was shifting the papers that the roll of fax paper with the dead woman’s photograph fell on the floor. He picked it up and it unspooled. As he looked down the pages, folding them so that they’d fit more neatly into the file, his eye lighted on a photograph of a man: middle-aged, greying, receding hairline, flabby face, and tired eyes. Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, formerly detective lieutenant with the Zagreb police. Missing, wanted in connection with the deaths of two men in a villa on the island of Šipan and a suspect in the disappearance of the American woman Rebecca Vees, now in an Italian morgue. He must have seen Strumbić’s photograph a dozen times before without noticing it. It was fuzzy, barely bigger than passport-sized. Unlike the woman’s picture, it hadn’t been posted anywhere in the station. No one else in the force had seen the picture. Why? Because the note next to the photograph said the suspect had probably fled the country, most likely destination Italy or the United Kingdom.

  England. Marks & Spencer.

  Seeing the picture now was like a shot of slivovitz injected into a vein.

  Detective Brg brought the incriminating fax with him to the interview room. He sat comparing the photograph with the man in front of him for long minutes. The other man didn’t break the silence. Brg’s eyes prickled from the cigarette smoke and fatigue. At last he spoke, quietly, without aggression.

  “Why don’t we stop playing games, Detective Lieutenant. Or is it Captain Julius Strumbić?”

  Brg gave Strumbić credit for not betraying any emotion. Strumbić merely smiled.

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Detective. My name is Smirnoff.”

  He turned the fax towards Strumbić.

  “This piece of paper says it isn’t.”

  Strumbić leaned forward and pulled the thin thermal paper across the stained blond wood table, turned it with three fingers, and considered.

  “It’s a reasonable likeness, though it’s a pretty small picture and not particularly clear. Could be me. Could be any one of a hundred men within a kilometre of here. What did you say you want the man for?”

  “As a witness, probable accessory, or possible perpetrator of three murders.”

  “Three? The Americans? Sounds like a dangerous fellow. But like I said, it’s not me.”

  “What do you say, Mr. Strumbić, would you like to have a friendly chat with me or do you want to wait for the Zagreb investigators? I hear they’re a lot less friendly. Plenty of former UDBA types.”

  Silence. The UDBA was Yugoslavia’s hated former secret police. Strumbić knew more than a few of them. Like della Torre.

  “What I don’t get is if you killed those men, why, just a couple of days later, you’d want to be smuggling stuff onto a dock in a village on the opposite side of the channel,” Brg continued. “I mean, you don’t strike me as being stupid. They don’t make stupid people detectives in the Zagreb force, do they?”

  “Detective, those are all very good questions. But you’re asking the wrong guy.”

  Brg was fading. Questions kept crowding his mind. Irritating, tiny details overwhelmed his brain. It was as if Strumbić wasn’t there and he was asking himself.

  “Says here you own that villa in Šipan. Where two of the Americans were killed. We had a look and it’s not in any official records. All we could find was that it was registered to an Italian company. Your company, Mr. Strumbić?”

  Strumbić was surprised at the turn of questioning, but played along.

  “Thought Italians could only own up to forty-nine percent of a property in this country,” Strumbić said.

  “Oh, well, that’s the clever thing. One Italian company owns forty-nine percent of the property and a Yugoslav firm owns the rest. Except forty-nine percent of that Yugoslav company is owned by an Italian company. Coincidentally, the same Italian company. The rest is owned by another Yugoslav company. You guessed it, forty-nine percent of that is owned by the very same Italian company. In the end, the only domestic ownership we could find was some lawyer in Varaždin who owns less than one percent. You won’t be surprised to hear that he is only holding on behalf of a company based near Venice. Illegal, but what can you do? Lawyers. Anything to do with you, Mr. Strumbić?”

  Strumbić shrugged sympathetically. “What our country’s coming to.” He shook his head sadly. “All the ills of capitalism have already filled in the cracks left by the noble but failed Communist experiment.”

  Brg felt his head nod forward. He needed sleep. He knew that dwelling on stupid details was just a sign of how tired he was. The villa’s ownership? Who cared about the complicated scheme designed to hide the owner. Strumbić owned it. And Strumbić was there, sitting in front of him.

  Brg needed to be sharp to deal with Zagreb. And he needed to be even more on the ball to handle as wily a character as Strumbić.

  Four hours of solid shut-eye. If he left for home now, he’d get that much rest and be awake again by lunch, have a bite to eat, and then come back to the station, refreshed. Call Zagreb, tell them he’d wrapped up the whole of the mystery, found the missing woman, had the lead suspect in a jail cell. Formally charge Strumbić with everything from smuggling to murder to fraudulent property ownership.

  Hell, how could it hurt to delay calling them by a couple of hours? The woman wasn’t going to get any more dead, and Strumbić, well, he’d already been sitting around in prison for more than two weeks. Another quiet morning wouldn’t do any harm. Just in case, Brg would have a cop stand sentry outside Strumbić’s cell. Keep an eye on him the whole time.

  Four hours. Brg thought. What could possibly go wrong in four hours?

  Acknowledgements

  Olof Palme’s assassination on that cold February night in 1986 remains one of Europe’s great unsolved crimes of the postwar era. For anyone who wants to know more, Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme by Jan Bondeson is a well-written and detailed account of the murder and the Swedish authorities’ botched investigation.

  There are numerous theories about who might have been behind the killing and why. One is that the Yugoslav government was somehow involved. This isn’t particularly far-fetched. The UDBA may not be in the popular imagination like the KGB or the Stasi, but of all the organs of state security operating from Europe’s Communist bloc, the Yugoslav secret police was perhaps the most murderous beyond its borders — even if its known targets were Yugoslav dissidents or somehow related or associated with them.

  Della Torre’s Department VI, however, is a work of fiction, as are all the characters in the book, apart from Palme. Some of the events I write about leading up to the Yugoslav wars of independence in the early 1990s, such as the police assault on Borovo Selo, actually happened. But any similarities between the people in my book and anyone who ever lived and breathed is coincidental.

  That’s not quite true. Steve Higgins, an American journalist and a friend, was real flesh and blood. He had nothing to do with former Yugoslavia, and he was a far more charming, clever, and gently ironic man than the one who appears in my book. And he’d have been a fine novelist had he only been given the time.

  I owe thanks to numerous people for help and support in writing this book. I’ve dedicated Killing Pilgrim to my children, but my wife, Lucy, deserves top billing for her understanding and patience with a husband who spends far too much time at the computer and far too little doing the stuff he ought to be doing.

  Janie Yoon is what every novelist dreams of but few are blessed with: an editor who has both the skill and determi
nation to make the very best book possible.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Hilary McMahon, a realist in a world of fantasy. And to friends, readers, and family who made deep if not always obvious contributions, especially Andrew Steinmetz, Fred Biggar, Luke Vinten, Robert Kirkby, Nives Mattich, Bill and Elaine Vinten, and my parents.

  About the Author

  Alen Mattich is the author of Zagreb Cowboy, the first novel in the Marko della Torre series. He was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and grew up in Libya, Italy, Canada, and the United States. He went to McGill University for his undergraduate degree and then did postgraduate work at the London School of Economics. A financial journalist and columnist, he’s now based in London and writes for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. The third Marko della Torre novel, The Heart of Hell, will be published in February 2015.

  About the Publisher

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”