The Heart of Hell (22 page)

THERE WAS A
modern steel door at one end of the cavern ledge that opened into a small concrete platform built onto the rocks at the base of Dubrovnik’s walls. They left Miranda in the cave, telling her they’d be back later, or at the very least they’d tell Higgins where to find her. She said nothing.

Strumbić barred the door from the outside with a metal rail, though he left the padlock undone. After a quick glance around, they stepped out onto a narrow path that followed the base of the city walls. The rocks looked like raw, crumpled butcher’s paper below a vertical sheet of parchment.

The late afternoon light was smudged by grey clouds, but even so della Torre blinked hard as he stepped out of the gloom.

“My guess is that they’re going to be relying on technology to find us. The little box. They’ll figure we have to surface sometime or other,” Strumbić said. “They might have people on the walls, but I bet they’re looking into the city, not out here. Just in case, let’s not be fat German tourists about making ourselves scarce.”

Once they moved away from the entrance to the dungeon cave, the path quickly became precipitous, in places barely a goat track. It rose, becoming almost sheer where the city walls turned inland. They had to hug the chiselled stone to avoid smashing themselves on the rocks below and then falling into the sea with cracked skulls and broken limbs. It was slow and painful going, sometimes an upward scramble in which the stone and scrub tore their hands, at other times a dangerous slide. They moved centimetre by centimetre, but eventually they reached the beach under the fortress’s main northern drawbridge.

Without attracting attention to themselves, they headed away from the old city towards the peninsula, in the northern suburbs, Strumbić leading the way. Careful lest they be spotted, Strumbić ducked from one private garden to another, climbed a low wall or pushed through shrubbery, steadily moving farther from the ancient walls.

They passed a smouldering, newly gutted car. The Serb gunners, bored with reducing outlying villages to dust and cinder, had shifted their sights to Dubrovnik’s suburbs. There was no method, no system to their shelling, nor any great urgency; it was a desultory effort, like boys taking potshots with their air rifles at random targets. But on the ground, the sense of panic was growing, sending ever more people to huddle within the sanctuary of the city fortress.

Della Torre knew war would come to the old town eventually. Higgins had said the Serb Chetnik militias were taking over the campaign, edging out the regular Yugoslav forces. Theirs was an atavistic hatred for Dubrovnik and what it stood for: bourgeois wealth, golden youth, gilded lives, foreigners and their condescension to the primitive people beyond the hills. The Chetniks grew frustrated at Dubrovnik’s refusal to capitulate, even as its citizens grew dirtier, more frightened, more hopeless; irritated at Dubrovnik’s pride in its long history of independence.

Della Torre feared for all those now seeking shelter within Dubrovnik’s walls. Because ancient stones wouldn’t stop the mortar bombs, the rockets, the high, arching shells.

After crossing a dozen gardens, they came upon a wooden door set into a wall. With a last look around, Strumbić unlocked it.

The house behind the wall was from the first decade of the century — Hapsburg art nouveau with a dash of Italianate influences. The windows were sealed with metal rolling shutters, but even so, it was a handsome two-storey building.

“Home,” Strumbić said, unlocking the front door. “Swimming pool outside, views of the Adriatic and sunsets, an emergency generator I keep running so the ice doesn’t melt — you can’t hear it, because it’s in a separate building. The only real downside is that I can’t open the shutters. The Serbs would flatten the place if I lit it up.”

“Yours?” della Torre asked, looking around in amazement at the wide hall with its big terracotta floor tiles and high ceilings.

“Borrowed,” Strumbić said. “Look around. It’s been decorated by an Italian pimp, all white plush and gold trim. Do you really think that’s my taste?”

“Let me guess. Some big shot in Belgrade owns it.”

“Actually, it’s owned by a Herzegovinian mafioso who we banged up in the spring. The house isn’t conventionally documented, if you know what I mean. I’m the only person who knows who it ultimately belongs to.”

“Julius, you are remarkable.”

“No, it’s just that everyone else you know lacks imagination and gumption,” Strumbić said. “We’ve got a couple of hours. Why don’t you go up and have a bath.”

“There’s a water shortage in the city, but you’ve got enough to run baths?”

“I’ve got enough to fill a swimming pool. Which I’ve done. Bath is upstairs, room to the right. It’s in the master bedroom. By the way, you might have a rummage in the dressing room. You’re more the Herzegovinian’s build than I am.” Strumbić walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge door. “I’m afraid it’s only imports. Do you want a Heineken or a Budvar?”

“Budvar,” della Torre said, flabbergasted, as Strumbić produced a bottle.

“Whatever else you might say about them, the Czechs make decent beer,” Strumbić said.

“What else would you say about them?”

“Nothing, except they got their asses handed to them by both the Nazis and the Russians and spent the whole time saying, ‘Thank you very much.’ And when they come here, they’re cheap fucking tourists.” Strumbić opened the beer. “Take this, have a shower or a bath or whatever, and then we’ll eat when you come back down.”

Della Torre was too nervous to soak, so he had a quick shower in an opulent marble-covered bathroom with gold taps and a floor mosaic that depicted either two women having sex or possibly a Christmas wreath.

The Herzegovinian’s taste in wardrobe ran to too-tight bleached jeans and tank tops. But in among that, della Torre found a pair of blue cotton trousers and a shirt with buttons that went all the way up to his clavicle. The trousers were a size too generous around the waist and broke a little farther down his shoes than he liked, but he wasn’t complaining.

When he made his way back down to the kitchen, he found Strumbić frying a couple of steaks. Pasta was cooking in another pot. Suddenly della Torre was ravenously hungry.

“Help yourself to another beer,” Strumbić said.

Della Torre opened the fridge and pulled out another Budvar. “I’m worried about Miranda,”

“I just got off the phone to Higgins.”

“Phone?”

“Yes, a thing with a handle you can speak into that’s not a shovel.”

“I didn’t realize they worked.”

“Oh, you can still make calls inside Dubrovnik. You just can’t get a line out, unless you have a satellite phone. And, until the Americans came, there were only three of those in town.”

“I was told there were only two,” della Torre said. And then, when Strumbić gave him a long look, he again understood his stupidity.

When the steaks were cooked rare, Strumbić threw fresh cep mushrooms into the pan and then added cream and chopped parsley and chives and poured the sauce over the spaghetti. It reminded della Torre that the extent of his own cooking skills was limited to frying eggs.

“You were saying about phoning Higgins,” della Torre said as they sat at the glass-topped dining table under a gold and crystal chandelier.

“I was saying that I called Higgins, who knows a boy who knows the way down to the dungeon door. Excellent storage space, by the way. Though cigarettes get a bit damp. The boy’s to let your friend out as soon as the fireworks start.”

“Fireworks?”

“A surprise, Gringo. Enjoy the food — it’s going to be a long night.”

They sat outside, smoking, drinking beers, and watching the sun set in an apocalypse of reds and oranges as the air filled with evening damp. When it was completely dark, they went back into the house.

“Right, Gringo, help me open the shutters upstairs.”

In the dark, guided only by a flashlight, they went from room to room pulling open the roller blinds. They did the same on the ground floor.

Strumbić disappeared into what he called the utility room. He was in there for a quarter of an hour and then came out looking satisfied. At the front door, he punched a code into the burglar alarm and then played with the settings.

He put the batteries into the transmitter he’d found in della Torre’s bag and then switched the unit on, shoving it behind a sofa cushion in the sitting room.

“Time to go,” he said.

They strolled out of the house, which Strumbić locked, and walked through the door in the garden wall and back into the street.

Strumbić led them in the darkness to the Mercedes, parked nearby, which he started up as della Torre got into the passenger seat. And then, switching on just his parking lights, he drove off at speed, tearing through the suburbs and up the steeply rising road behind the fortress city, where he pulled over by the side of the road.

“What’s up?” della Torre asked.

“Hop out and have a cigarette. We’ve got a show to watch.”

They leaned against the rock face in the dark, the Merc between them and the road. A few cars passed. In the distance, past the citadel, della Torre could see the almost festive lights of the Yugoslav navy ships, such a stark contrast to the city’s fearful darkness.

He wasn’t sure what he was meant to look for, or where. The amber glow of Strumbić’s cigarette butt flew cartwheels in the air, ending in a spray of sparks.

And then it happened. A brightness lit up in the middle distance. White-yellow incandescent lights. Floodlights. A solitary house picked out clearly in the darkness. And then the shrill sound of a distant alarm.

The brightness and noise lasted for a minute. Two minutes. Three. And then he saw the flashes. Half a dozen in rapid succession like dry lightning. The shrieks of passing shells and explosions followed almost simultaneously. And then bigger guns from farther away started up, bellowing roars from up the mountains. The house went up in red, green, orange streamers. They could feel as much as hear the shock of the bombardment.

Strumbić laughed with a maniacal joy. “Holy fuck. Jesus, will you look at that,” he said over and over.

“Julius, what the hell?”

“If those Americans don’t learn a lesson from this, well, I’m sorry, but they’re unteachable.”

They got back in the Mercedes and drove. Strumbić parked it off the road just past the Argentina, leaving the keys in the ignition. “Hope somebody else gets as much pleasure out of it as I did,” he said.

Like della Torre, he carried only a holdall, though his was bigger. And it was a leather Louis Vuitton.

They walked back to the hotel, but instead of going through the main entrance, Strumbić led della Torre to the service doors at the side of the old wing. He passed a folded note to the porter. Deutschmarks, della Torre saw in the brief flash of light as the door opened. Strumbić took the service stairs two at a time. On the third floor he stepped into the corridor and knocked at the third door. When he didn’t hear anything, he slid in a key and turned the handle. Only then did della Torre notice that Strumbić had a gun in his hand.

Della Torre followed. The room was being used but was empty at the moment. Strumbić locked the door behind him and motioned della Torre to follow him to the balcony, where they took the two available seats. From the distance beyond the old city, they could see a glow and hear the sound of fire engines.

“You rigged it up so that when the Americans located the transmitter, they’d break into the house and set off the alarms,” della Torre said. “How’d you know the Serbs would start bombing?”

“Why do you think there’s a blackout? They see a pool of light on Croat territory at night, and they assume it’s a target.”

“Julius, had you put your mind to noble causes, you’d have discovered the cure for cancer by now.”

“Or baldness,” Strumbić said. “But you know, I don’t think I’d like the attached celebrity. I’m sort of a low-key person.”

“I’d be surprised if anybody survived that.” Della Torre was suddenly worried about Anzulović.

“Funny thing is, bombardments like that are a lot more show than tell. It’s surprising how often people survive. But it’ll shake up the Americans, anyway.”

“What now?”

“Now we wait for our ticket out of here.” Strumbić looked at his watch. “Boat leaves in two hours and forty minutes. The Americans will be picking themselves up and trying to figure out what the fuck happened to them, while we’ll be slipping out of a city under siege more easily than stepping on a number nine tram.”

They smoked and sat back in the chill of the evening, listening to the voices of people talking on the terraces below as if an evening bombardment not five kilometres away was the usual sort of light entertainment. And then the voices faded, and all that was left was the sound of a Cole Porter tune from the bar piano and waiters tidying up glasses and cutlery. And then only the sounds of sleep and whimpering children.

The door opened and Strumbić stood up, gun in his hand. “Steve, my friend, how is?” he said in English, sitting back down.

Higgins joined them on the balcony, perching on a footstool. “Julius,” he said, and then turning to della Torre: “Marko, nice to see you.”