Coming

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  I found him sleeping at the dock, thoroughly drunk, with his head on the table. After I’d poured a bucket of water over him and slapped him around a bit, he was ready to cooperate.

  ‘I’ve chucked a case of beer and a bottle of Scotch into your boat so you know I value your labour,’ I told him.

  ‘Gimme me a cigarette and tell me what you want,’ he said.

  ‘The German who disappeared two weeks ago: what do you know?’

  ‘Five hundred deutschmarks and I know everything.’

  We met at three hundred. And it was worth every cent of it. You don’t hear a story like that every day, even when you’re in my line of work. As I’d assumed, Johnny had taken the paedophile to Albania. Pimps were waiting there and took them to a house by the beach, where boys were kept confined.

  ‘You know me, I’ve seen lot – thank God I’ve got a strong stomach, but that made even me feel sick,’ Johnny said. ‘I left him there and went back to the boat. Not five minutes had passed and I’d just opened a warm beer, when there was a commotion in front of the house. Then shots rang out. A lot of shots, several magazines full, I’m pretty sure it was a Yugoslav service pistol. Stuff the old man, I thought, and started up the powerboat to move away from the coast a bit. Through my binoculars I saw a man with an Albanian skullcap coming out of the house, carrying a boy in his arms. Two women ran out of the undergrowth towards them. I turned the steering wheel and stepped on the gas. Fortunately the old man had paid me in advance.

  I stayed there with Johnny until evening. We didn’t talk. What was there to say? We just drank beer after beer and watched the river flowing by. I didn’t feel like going home, where she was waiting for me, impatient to hear news of her father who she seemed to truly love.

  She was a wonderful girl and didn’t deserve to find out. As soon as I heard Johnny’s story I decided I’d lie to her. And I did. For a month I told her: ‘I’m onto something,’ then ‘I’m making good progress,’ and finally, ‘I think I’m really close now.’ She became more and more vulnerable and would burst into tears ten times a day without visible reason. The whole thing had become an ordeal for her. I had to put an end to it and was just waiting for the right moment.

  One morning I woke up and thought how happy I was with her. I kissed her hair and leaned over to whisper a few affectionate words. The time had come – I broke the news to her at breakfast that her father was dead. I told her that he’d been fishing near the far arm of the Bojana River delta. He must have strayed into Albanian waters. Border guards came and hailed out to him in Albanian. He answered in German…They shot him. He was buried there, in Albania – the grave could be anywhere.

  ‘I knew it,’ she repeated through her tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Now you’ll have to find a way to continue your life. I presume you’ll be going soon: you must have a lot of commitments waiting at home.’

  She looked at me as if I’d stabbed her in the back. When I returned from work that evening she was gone. She didn’t leave a farewell letter, only an envelope with money and the message: For the extra costs.

  As it turned out, she also left me a son, who’d send me mails a quarter of a century later. Now I stood at the computer printing those texts, although I knew his fantasies wouldn’t help me in the investigation. Before I left the house, I checked I had everything: key, mails, revolver and bottle. I’d left my phone in the car and could hear it ringing. It was Dragan Vukotić. He wanted to know if I had any news for him.

  ‘Not yet, but soon,’ I said.

  ‘And when might soon be, seeing as we won’t be around tomorrow?’ he snarled.

  ‘Listen, I’m onto a hot trail and following it like a bloodhound,’ I told him. ‘I think it’s just a matter of hours until I nail him down.’

  ‘I hope you do, for your sake – I’ll have my revenge, in this world or the next.’

  The fellow’s name was Lazar – I learned that from the Vukotićs’ neighbours. It was incomprehensible to me how a police force, even one as ignorant and apathetic as ours, could overlook such an important detail. They probably gave up on their work, which they were never terribly motivated about anyway, and laid down their batons and pistols to sit and wait like so many others. But not me: I, with my Protestant work ethic, have always felt lonely amidst Balkan irresponsibility and laziness.

  So his name was Lazar and he worked for the Vukotićs as a caretaker. The neighbours weren’t able to tell me when the Vukotićs first employed him, nor where he originally came from. And they didn’t know, of course, where he’d gone after killing the family which had accepted him. ‘The Vukotićs led a secluded life: we didn’t feel welcome there, and so we never dropped in,’ they told me.

  As soon as I found out about Lazar, every piece of the puzzle fell into place. The Vukotićs had opened up for him because they knew him. He robbed them because he knew the house: as caretaker he had access to every corner of every room. He’d probably discovered they had a safe while repairing the floorboards in the living room. It was presumably then that he conceived the crime he ultimately committed. Only one thing had me fazed: the safe which my son speaks about in his mails. Inspector Jovanović didn’t mention a safe when I bribed him to tell me everything he knew about the case. So now I phoned him. He answered, drunk and despairing.

  ‘Listen, mate, I think you forgot to tell me one important detail about the Vukotić murders,’ I reproached him. ‘Was there a safe at the house and had it been broken into?’

  ‘Yes,’ he mumbled and replaced the receiver.

  Good, I said to myself: I have a suspect who had a motive. Now I just have to find the scumbag. The way things are going, I’ll still manage to get tanked up tonight.

  The snow seemed to be falling more thickly now. A right bloody blizzard! Even with the high beam on, I could hardly see two metres in front of me.

  Lines of refugees struggled past by the roadside. When the snow first came in June, people still hoped it was a practical joke of nature. But then the sea rose and carried away the joke. When day dawned, the foundations of the hotels and planned skyscrapers on Velika Plaža beach, hyped up to be a copy of the bluish, futuristic towers of Abu Dhabi, were under water. A few days later the sea swamped a village of weekenders up behind the beach. Ugly, illegally built houses sank in the swirling waters as the sea took over the responsibility of the building inspectorate. Whoever fled when the first waves were lapping their houses was able to take a few belongings with them. The optimists copped it bad, as usual: they’d thought the worst-case scenario was far-fetched, so they eventually had to be evacuated by helicopter from the roofs of their houses. People struggled to the town in makeshift rafts and boats and kissed the ground when they landed, as if they’d discovered a new continent. But the water kept surging further inland until it also flooded the suburbs. Camps were organised in hilly parts of town for the people who’d been forced to leave their homes, as all reports in all languages said in the same pathos-ridden tone. These folk now plodded the town like zombies in search of food. The shops had long been closed because supplying a town surrounded by water was impracticable, so the impertinent starvelings forced their way into houses and tried to steal food. Contrary to all international conventions on the rights of refugees, the residents shot them and threw their bodies out onto the road so cars would run over them and hungry dogs tear them up.

  They announced on the radio that there’d been another fifty-centimetre rise in the sea level globally – they used precisely that word. In Ulcinj itself, the water reached all the way up to the town council building. They took the opportunity to remind listeners that the Bojana River sometimes used to overflow its banks in winter months before the dam on the Drin River was built, with the floodwater coming all the way up to where the post-earthquake council building was built. The studio guest was an environmentalist, an idiot who claimed this was yet more proof of the theory that all of nature was in equilibrium.

  ‘The water has returned
to where it once was, you see, because water has a memory, just like the planet remembers,’ he said with thrill in his voice.

  ‘But what’s happening now, in your view?’ the compère wanted to know. ‘Where is this wave of cold coming from? And these floods?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the ecologist admitted, ‘but I appeal to listeners not to be taken in by stories about a catastrophe, because one thing is certain: there is a rational explanation.’

  Of course, just like there’s an irrational one. As usual, all we lack is an explanation which might explain things.

  ‘And now to recap on today’s main news,’ the anchorman recited: People all around the planet are awaiting the end of the world tonight.

  Then the international news editor took the microphone. Among the mass of trivia he read, a story from Izmir caught my attention. A man with a deranged son had decided to clean up an overgrown and neglected olive grove. It had once belonged to a prominent dervish who taught that the olive tree brings people closer to God.

  Although he was getting on in years, the man worked day after day in the olive grove. It was close to the sea but far from the road. The only way up to the dervish’s host of olive trees was along steep, narrow paths, over dry-stone walls and through thick scrub. But the man didn’t mind. The more effort he invested in the task he’d set himself, the sooner God would heed his prayers and heal his son, or so he thought.

  When the young man asked if he could go with him and help with cleaning up the olive grove, his father concluded that God had heard his prayers and taken pity on him. Ever since childhood, the young man had lived in the confines of his room, alone with his attacks of madness and the medication which didn’t help. His father naturally interpreted the wish to join him in this good work as a first sign of his son’s recovery.

  They set off together for the olive grove one morning. That evening, the son returned home alone.

  The police inquest revealed that he had killed his father and thrown his body into the sea.

  When they asked him why he did it, he said God had ordered him to.

  Chapter Six

  in which Emmanuel tells of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, a secret society of his resolute followers, the burial of The Book of the Coming and the day of its resurrection

  from: emmanuel@gmail.com

  to: thebigsleep@yahoo.com

  As I’ve mentioned, Fra Dolcino left a manuscript in the Franciscan monastery on the banks of Bojana River announcing he would be resurrected. It was hidden in the walls of the friary. Several years later, when it became clear that all further resistance to the furious Novarese besieging Mount Rubello was futile and only defeat and death lay ahead, he entrusted his secret to a handful of his closest pupils.

  Over three centuries later, in the garden of the imperial palace in Istanbul, the Sultan asked: Where do you wish to be exiled? Sabbatai Zevi replied: To Ulcinj. He had Dolcino’s secret in mind.

  What we read today as the biography of Sabbatai Zevi may correspond to the historical truth about him. On the other hand, it may be that most of the things we know about him, starting with the year of his birth and through to the year of his death, are only what he wanted us to know. Sabbatai Zevi was a first-rate manipulator, a Wildean figure before Wilde, with his life as his chef-d’oeuvre. His antics, sometimes incomprehensible and ludicrously inconsistent but always spectacular, were part of a grandiose project intended to convince the Jews that he was the Messiah. There’s not the slightest doubt that he believed it himself.

  The year of Zevi’s birth is given as 1626. Was that really so, or did Zevi dictate that year to his biographers so that the very date of his birth would seem to confirm his messianic status? After all, there’s a Jewish belief that the Messiah will appear on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. Zevi’s playing with dates of great significance to Jews doesn’t end there: the self-proclaimed Messiah was born in Smyrna, now Izmir, on 9 August. That was a Sabbath. He died in Ulcinj on 30 September 1676. That was Yom Kippur.

  Zevi died ten years after the failure of his key prophecy – the one according to which he was the King who would return the Jewish people to Israel. Zevi had presaged that this would occur in 1666. He certainly reckoned with the interesting associations awoken by the three sixes. In fact, his whole biography is in three sixes: the year of his birth, his unfulfilled prophecy and his death all end in a six.

  The books say that Zevi stood out even as a child. He didn’t get on easily with the other boys studying to be rabbis. He had periods of deep melancholy alternating with phases of wild euphoria. (Dr Schulz would definitely have recognised the symptoms of bipolar disorder.) At the time, many considered them a sign that the young Zevi was the chosen one. At the age of twenty-five, Zevi proclaimed: ‘I am the Messiah and will return my people to Israel,’ and he immediately declared the abolition of God’s Law. He called on the followers gathered around him to eat non-kosher food. He put on a lunatic performance and publically wedded the Torah. In a later phase of his messianic madness, he tore up and trampled on the Torah, and then dedesecrad leather tefilins containing the holy verses. This man, whom two women had left because he’d shown no interest in them, now became sexually insatiable. He demanded of his followers that they bring him their maiden daughters to create a harem. What was more, he claimed he could have intercourse with virgins and they would remain pure.

  Zevi’s theologians wrote: ‘As long as taboos regarding incest prevail on Earth it will be impossible to carry out union from above. The mystic annulment of the ban on incest will allow man to become like his Creator and learn the secrets of the Tree of Life.’

  While Zevi enjoyed the pleasures of promiscuity, the Sultan was worried. On 6 February 1666, he ordered that Zevi be arrested. The Jewish prophet had become a danger to his throne. Jews from all over Europe poured into the Empire to follow the Messiah. Others were preparing to sell all their belongings and follow him to Israel. Many Christians, even learned ones, attentively and optimistically awaited confirmation that Zevi held the truth. Henry Oldenburg wrote to Spinoza: ‘All the world here is talking of the return of the Israelites to their own country. Should the news be confirmed, it may bring about a revolution in all things.’

  Instead of leading to revolution, Zevi was led in chains before the Sultan. He was given the choice: Islam or death. If he didn’t wish to adopt Islam, the Sultan was prepared to let him demonstrate his power: a master archer would loose an arrow at his breast, and if he was indeed the Messiah it cer tainly wouldn’t be difficult for him to perform a miracle and stop the arrow. Zevi didn’t hesitate for an instant: he removed his Jewish cap and donned a Turkish turban. The Messiah had changed faith at the last moment.

  Aziz Mehmed Efendi, as Zevi was called after his conversion to Islam, didn’t relinquish Judaism completely or sincerely, and certainly not voluntarily and free of coercion. He continued to perform Jewish rites and even to preach in synagogues. The fact that he’d become a Muslim didn’t prevent him from continuing to claim he was the Jewish Messiah. The Sultan, who’d hoped Zevi’s conversion would make Jews flock to Islam, watched this messianic carnival with increasing consternation.

  In the end, he decided to banish Zevi. It seems this is just what Zevi had been hoping for. He tried to persuade the Sultan that Ulcinj was an ideal town for exile – at the outer edge of the Empire, at the end of all roads. He’d be quite far away and out of sight there, in the fortress above the sea.

  Ulcinj was populated at this time by pirates: both local buccaneers and Barbary corsairs. It was the most recalcitrant town in the whole of the Ottoman Empire. The people of Ulcinj feared neither God nor master. Being so wild and reckless, they’d sabre Zevi if he dared to bother them with his follies, the Sultan thought. ‘Let it be Ulcinj then,’ he pronounced.

  The Ulcinj pirates were a plague on shipping and even raided the Venetian possessions in the Adriatic. In the years to come, the Sublime Porte’s conflict with these outlaws would escal
ate into an undeclared but no less savage war. The Pasha of Skadar was ordered to attack and set fire to a dozen of the Ulcinj pirates’ vessels. When the Sultan sent a missive to Ulcinj the following year demanding that further ships be burned, the pirates killed the messenger and threw his body from the town’s walls.

  The Venetian authorities, for their own part, were itching to take action but realised that Ulcinj lay in Turkish territory. They didn’t want to risk war with the Empire. Instead, they sought to resolve the problem by diplomatic means. One Venetian dispatch even appealed to the Sultan’s vanity: ‘All the inhabitants of Dalmatia and Albania are astonished that you allow the pirates of Ulcinj to so audaciously flout your authority.’

  The ship carrying Zevi and twenty-nine families of his followers approached Ulcinj. A black cloud was circling above the town and the travellers watched it in trepidation. As they disembarked on the beach below the fortress, the birds were on the sand, waiting with beady eyes. They seemed to be sizing up the newcomers, whose hands trembled and knees knocked: ‘As if we’d arrived in Hell!’ one of the women wailed. More and more of the feathered creatures poured forth, cawing, from caverns beneath the fortress, which would ultimately collapse in the earthquake of 1979, and rose up above Zevi and his following like a black flood to sow fear in even the bravest hearts. Imagine the sky above us in black turmoil as we ascend the stone stairs towards the fortress gate. Anxiety and despair are in the eyes of Zevi’s followers, but in Zevi’s I see only joy, for the circling murder of crows which blocks out the sun has shown him the sign.

  Fra Dolcino’s followers had been unable to keep the secret he’d entrusted to them. Drunken mouths let it slip out and inquisitive ears were listening. As stories have a way of finding those who want to hear them, the story about Fra Dolcino and his hidden manuscript made it all the way to Smyrna. Zevi listened with disdain to those who spoke of Dolcino being a madman, illusionist and trickster. He knew Dolcino had hidden his book because he intended to return. But there could only be one Messiah. Therefore Zevi was determined to destroy the book of the ‘false prophet’.