The Heart of Hell

Also in the Marko della Torre series

Zagreb Cowboy

Killing Pilgrim

Copyright © 2015 Alen Mattich

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This edition published in 2015 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mattich, Alen, 1965–, author
          The heart of hell : a Marko della Torre novel / by Alen Mattich.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-437-2 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-77089-438-9 (html)

I. Title.

PS8626.A874H43 2015                     C813’.6                C2014-906567-1
                                                                                         C2014-906568-X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014951754

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

The excerpt on page 294 is from the poem “Utjeha Kose” written in 1909 by Antun Gustav Matoš from
Pjesme
, published by Izdanje Narodne Knižnice, Zagreb, Croatia, 1923. Translation by Alen Mattich.

The line on page 304 is from “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from the musical
Oklahoma
, lyric by Oscar Hammerstein II, 1943.

The excerpt on page 305 is from
The Divine Comedy
(“Inferno”) by Dante Alighieri, first published in 1472. Translation by Alen Mattich.

The lines on page 341 (“As flies to wanton boys . . .”) is from
King Lear
, Act IV, Scene I, by William Shakespeare.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For my parents

PROLOGUE

BARI, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 1991

I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all
—
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,
T. S. Eliot

THE WATERS OF
Croatia’s Adriatic are crystalline blue and turquoise to a depth of ten metres and more, so that the coral fans and round black spiny sea urchins on distant bare rocks appear to be no more than an arm’s length below the surface. The clarity engenders a sense of vertigo. Schools of fish are seemingly suspended in unaccountable space between the skin of the surface and the seabed, where they flow and flutter like leaves on the wind while their shadows undulate far below.

The waters are kept pristine by friendly currents that carry rubbish to Italian shores. Which was why the Italian state police in Bari, on the western Adriatic, where Italy’s heel meets the rest of the boot, eventually turned their attention directly east by two hundred kilometres, to Dubrovnik, at Croatia’s extreme south — a corpse had washed up on one of their beaches.

Yugoslavia was hurtling towards civil war after Croatia had declared independence only a couple of months earlier. In the past, Rome would have made formal requests to Belgrade for police cooperation; these would have then been passed on to the local authorities in Croatia’s major coastal towns. But the Croatian leadership was no longer speaking to Belgrade, and the Italian government did not formally recognize the Croatian state. So the head of the police in Bari took it upon himself to make an informal call to the senior detective on the Dubrovnik force, with whom he’d worked before, and who he knew spoke good, if German-inflected, Italian.

This was how Detective Brg found himself taking the ferry from Dubrovnik to Bari. The crossing was slow, but there were no longer any direct flights, and to have gone by way of Zagreb and Rome would have taken as long and cost eight times as much.

Detective Brg’s first instinct had been to send someone else or to regretfully refer the Bari police to Zagreb. He just didn’t have the time to take a day off from his other duties to inspect a corpse in a foreign jurisdiction on the off chance that it might have floated over from his shores. He was handling an ever-growing number of responsibilities in the Dubrovnik police’s increasingly depleted squad.

And that too was down to politics.

Dubrovnik is a distant appendix in Croatia’s far south, at the end of a narrow strip of land along the Adriatic coast, separated by a chain of mountains from Bosnia and Montenegro, two republics that were still within the control of the Yugoslav federation. Though an ancient and massive fortress city, Dubrovnik would be all but impossible to defend against a modern military onslaught. Theoretically, that didn’t matter — it had no military value. It was purely a site of historical and touristic interest, and the Croatian government assumed it would be left alone so long as nobody there provoked the Yugoslav army.

But the Dubrovnik authorities weren’t so sure. Within their modest means, they set about quietly creating a defence force. Unfortunately, it was built around the police department, leaving regular policing duties to a small, very overworked team led by Brg.

What swayed him to make the trip was the description of the body. A red-headed woman, a little above average height and probably in her late twenties or mid-thirties. He’d been working on a case that involved the violent deaths of two American men found in a villa on an island less than twenty kilometres to the north of Dubrovnik, and that also involved a missing American woman. A redhead, aged thirty-two, 170 centimetres tall, and weighing around fifty-eight kilograms. Zagreb had official control of the investigation, but inept bureaucracy and a diplomatic impasse with the local American consulate had left Brg’s team working on the case more or less unaided.

A detective from the Bari force was waiting for him at passport control. Because Brg was pressed for time — he was adamant that he had to be on the overnight ferry back to Dubrovnik — they skipped a courtesy visit to the station and instead drove them straight to the morgue.

The medical examiner was a locum, a retired professor named Dr. Angelo Albini. In Brg’s experience, pathologists tended to be supercilious stuffed shirts, irritated at being questioned, intolerant of the smallest sign that a cop might not understand the jargon. Then again, he thought, with that sort of bedside manner it was just as well they were only inflicted on the dead.

But Dr. Albini was unlike any Yugoslav pathologist Brg had ever met.

The professor looked like a pink-cheeked elf, with white hair, bright eyes, and an ebullience that belied his age. He moved with obvious discomfort and a heavy limp, but his incessant chatter was that of a ten-year-old boy expounding, with endless digressions, on his latest enthusiasm.

“Detective Brg, Detective Brg, very interesting case this one. Very interesting,” Dr. Albini said, leading Brg to a bloated and bleached body on a stainless steel table in a sterile, windowless room. “Brg? Sounds German somehow. German, is it? You speak Italian with a German accent.”

“My father’s family was from the north, near the Austrian border. They’re all German-speaking. Brg is the Slavicized version of Berg,” Brg said, trying to sound detached as his stomach turned at the smell and sight of the once-living flesh before him. He understood now why his local police liaison had another, suddenly urgent piece of business to attend to.

“Ah, of course, of course. Austro-Hungarians, the lot of you up there. Our own Tyroleans speak with a German accent. Very interesting, very interesting.” Brg couldn’t tell whether the professor was referring to his name or to the dissected corpse he now leaned over. “I must apologize for the aroma. I’m told the compressor on the air conditioner failed.” He lifted an arm to expose the corpse more fully. “New parts. Take forever, eh.”

New parts for the corpse or the compressor? The old man was beginning to overwhelm Brg as much as the gruesome yet somehow sanitized effigy in flesh.

“German, eh?” Albini said. “You should have been here three days ago. You could have talked to the German couple who found her. Camping. Not her — the German couple. She was bobbing around on the beach. Must have been a heck of a shock. Well, probably for her too. But the German couple, you should have heard them. You’d have thought they’d found a body on the beach.” He tittered at his little joke. “Have to feel sorry for them. Well, for her too. But the German couple ran all the way back to town to raise the alarm, and what do our police do? Say thank you very much? Not likely. Fined them for camping illegally. Not just fined them, but didn’t issue them a receipt. We all know what that means. You Yugoslav — my apologies,
Croatian
 — police probably don’t know much about corruption.” He gave Brg a theatrical wink. “But we Italians can write whole encyclopedias about it. Shame nobody ever thinks to bribe medical examiners, eh? Never think of it. Poisoners might, I suppose, but never get round to it. Anyway, here she is, our inanimate guest.”

Brg nodded. He pulled from his briefcase a thin, shiny sheet of fax paper showing a photograph of the missing American woman. It was hard to reconcile the image with what was in front of him.

Albini hobbled over to Brg’s side of the table to have a look at the fax.

“Gout. Me, not her. Terrible. Look at my poor leg.”

Albini pulled up his trouser leg to expose his limb, swollen to twice the normal size and as red and purple as a bottle of claret. It looked like it might have belonged on a corpse. Brg nodded with what he hoped looked like sympathy, but the old professor had already switched his attention back to the subject at hand.

“You wouldn’t think a girl who looked like this could look like that, but that’s what a couple of weeks in the water will do to you,” Albini said.

“A couple of weeks?”

“Probably. I’d put it between ten and twenty days.”

Brg nodded. The Americans had been killed a little more than two weeks before, and the woman had gone missing around the same time.

“The weather’s been cold but the sea’s still warm, and that usually speeds up decomposition. She’s been nibbled at by some of the sea life, but she’s in much better shape than you’d expect. Probably because the Adriatic has been all fished out. Nothing left to feed off corpses, eh? Just as well, wouldn’t do to be served corpse-fed fillet of mullet.”

Albini hobbled back around the table, nodding knowingly at the body, its whiteness made all the more stark by the cold fluorescence of the overhead lights.

“What can we say, what can we say? Haven’t written my report yet, of course. That’ll take another few days, and by the time it gets processed you might not see anything official for another month. This is just me and you talking informally, right?”

Brg nodded and began to say “Of course,” but the old professor cut him off.

“Well, if you look at her musculature and fat content, she was very healthy. Very healthy indeed. Athletic, even. All the organs clear of disease. Officially, I’d put her age between twenty and forty, but unofficially I’d say early to mid-thirties. Don’t ask why. I’ve been doing this sort of work for fifty years. Eventually you figure things out in ways that aren’t worth explaining. Hair, red. Real red, no dye. No indication of poison or heavy metals or drug use in the hair samples. Teeth, very good. A bit of dental work. The quality suggests northern European or North American. When I say North American, that could mean Australia or New Zealand too. We found some coral embedded in the skull. That and the pattern of abrasions suggests she drowned at a rocky part of the coast. We’re sand on this side, so it means more likely the eastern Adriatic. Head’s heavier and tends to sink lower, gets dragged along that way until the gases associated with decomposition float the body again.”

Brg had taken out his notebook. He was finding it hard to transcribe the professor’s words while translating into Serbo-Croat at the same time, and instead ended up writing a pidgin Italian. He prayed he’d be able to decipher it later on.

“Drowned, you say?” Brg asked.

“Oh, yes. Quite a lot of water in the lungs and residuals of foaming that you get only with drowning. Though the foam doesn’t tend to last this long. Saltwater drowning too. There’s that movie, can’t remember what it’s called, where somebody was found drowned in a pool, except the water in the lungs was salt.” Albini paused for a moment. “Or the other way around. Something we always check. Too easy to drown somebody in a bath and then pop them in the sea. Except it’s not very easy to drown somebody in a bath. People tend to struggle, and then you get all sorts of other indications the drowning wasn’t accidental. Abrasions, odd bruises. And then they have to get the body into the sea. People tend to notice bodies being lugged around. What was I saying?”

“She drowned.”

“Oh, yes, quite clearly. And not an accident or suicide either, in my professional opinion,” he said.

“Why is that?” Brg asked, intrigued by the professor’s methods.

“Tied up. She was tied up in such a way that she couldn’t have tied herself up. Needed somebody else to do it. Suppose you could be suicidal and get somebody to tie you up and pop you overboard. But then it’s not suicide, is it?”

“Somebody tied her up and threw her in the water?”

“Oh, yes. Proper fishermen’s knots. Houdini couldn’t get out of those. Maybe they drowned her because they failed to kill her some other way.”

Brg looked puzzled. Albini pointed to an injury high on the fleshy part of the corpse’s hip.

“Puncture wound. Probably from a projectile. Bullet would be my guess. Pattern of bruising suggests not too long before she died. But it didn’t cause her death. Would have been painful, but not fatal. Well, it might have got infected and then it would have killed her a few days later. But it wasn’t the cause of death.”

Once again the old professor paused, shaking as if a small tremor was running through him. “Ay. Never get gout. Hurts like the devil but doesn’t kill you. Maybe I’ll get somebody to truss me up and toss me off a bridge. Sorry, that’s a joke, by the way. Pathology, very funny business.”

Brg nodded, struck speechless. By the corpse. And Albini.

“Right, what more can I tell you? Ropes were probably Yugoslav-made, judging by the fibres, but we’re running tests on that still. She wasn’t. Yugoslav-made, that is. Or if she was, she didn’t live there. Wasn’t just the teeth telling us. Her clothes were all American-labelled. Everything down to the underwear. She’d also been fitted with an American intra-uterine device — that’s birth control to you. No evidence she ever bore a child, but these things can be deceptive. What more can I tell you? Oh. She probably floated over from around the Dubrovnik coast.”

“Let me guess,” Brg said. “She had a postcard in her pocket.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Wouldn’t have been very useful anyway. People carry around postcards from all sorts of places. No, it’s the hydrological office that tells us. Normally the stuff that washes up on the beach here comes from farther north, north of Split, towards Fiume. What do you call it? Oh, yes, Rijeka.”

Albini smiled slyly, watching to see whether Brg would take the bait. Fiume had been an Italian city with a majority Italian population, but it was nonetheless given over to the Yugoslavs after the First World War as part of the postwar redrawing of boundaries. The Yugoslavs renamed it Rijeka. Both words mean “river.” The port town was briefly “liberated” by the Italian nationalist poet and adventurer Gabriele d’Annunzio and a handful of his followers. D’Annunzio then went on to declare war on anybody who did not support Fiume’s return to Italy. Including Italy. D’Annunzio was eventually defeated and the postwar settlement was reimposed, though he emerged a hero. For many, that rebellion had marked the beginning of European fascism. For some, Croatia’s nationalist rebellion against Yugoslavia was merely a continuation of something D’Annunzio had started.

Brg ignored the comment. Living under Communism had taught him that debating history or politics only ever led to an argument at best and jail at worst.