The Heart of Hell (27 page)

“THE FUCK?” STRUMBIĆ
said, staring at della Torre as if he’d lost his mind.

“In English,” della Torre whispered.

“You crazy fucking?” Strumbić said in English.

“Three things. I believe him when he says that the rest of the papers are at his house in Vukovar. I believe him when he says what we have is worthless without the rest. And three, how long do you think it’ll take for those people back there to find us if we try to get out of the country by any of the usual border crossings or by going through Bosnia?”

Strumbić thought about this for a while. “But is war in Vukovar. How we can cross front lines?”

“I know the only man who can help. He’s there and I have something he wants, enough for him to be willing to help us.”

Strumbić stared at della Torre for a long while. And then he leaned forward in his seat, tapping the driver on the shoulder. He passed him a hundred-Deutschmark note, promising him another if he got them as close to Vukovar as possible.

The man kissed the note, folded it, and then slid it into his shirt pocket.

There was traffic on the road, and the driver looked like he’d been at the wheel for days. His thinning black hair was greasy and uncombed, his shirt rumpled. Maybe he slept in the cab; some did. But he drove efficiently, without asking too many questions, and kept the radio on a Hungarian classical station.

As they crossed the Sava on the big bridge close to where it flowed into the Danube and passed into the sterile Communist suburbs of New Belgrade, della Torre recalled the story of Jason. With the Golden Fleece in his possession, Jason went up the Sava until he reached the limits of its navigable waters, beyond Zagreb. And then he and his men went up into the mountains and trudged through the dangerous forests patrolled by bear and wolf, until at last they crossed Dalmatia’s bleached spine. Had Jason been with Medea then, or had he already abandoned her? It didn’t matter; his flight had taken him to the Adriatic, joyous, victorious.

Della Torre wondered if he’d make it too. He watched the countryside pass. The radio played the prelude to
Parsifal
, and for a long time both Strumbić and della Torre were silent, the Zastava charging through the flatlands.

“How did you know about the stove?” della Torre asked after a long while. Strumbić passed him a Winston. The cigarette trembled in della Torre’s hand as Strumbić lit it.

“Because I’ve got one just like it.” Strumbić grinned, though it looked more a grimace. He too was feeling the after-effects of their escape.

“You’ve got a safe in a fake stove?”

“Real stove. Hollowed out and used as storage. Excellent hiding place. I keep my fake secrets in it.”

“Your fake secrets?”

Strumbić inhaled and then blew the smoke out of his nose. The driver rolled down his window a hand’s width, and della Torre did too.

“Sure, don’t you have them too?” Strumbić asked. “You know, not terribly sensitive documents, false record books that might get you into a little trouble but not too much. A bit of money. Some deeds. A small illicit bank account.”

“Why?”

“That’s not really a question, is it?” Strumbić said. Sometimes della Torre’s naivety shocked him. “Because people will keep digging until they can pin something on you. So you give it to them. Take Mrs. Strumbić. She’s a pro, unlike the police department’s bloody internal affairs department. That place is full of morons who can’t be let loose on a public road. Anyway, think she trusts me? Course not. She’s not stupid. She spends her life looking for the rope to hang me by. But as long as I give her enough thread to do a bit of embroidery, she’s content.”

“So where do you keep the real stuff?”

“Everywhere and nowhere, Gringo. But mostly in here.” He tapped his head. “A safe nobody can get into.”

“And if you forget?”

Strumbić shrugged. “What you don’t remember, you can’t regret.”

The tension following their narrow escape from Dragomanov’s apartment slowly faded. But soon enough it was replaced by the anxiety of the approach to Vukovar. The drab browns of the late autumn landscape and the greyness of the skies melded into the malevolence of the military camouflage they passed with increasing regularity: the canvas-sided transport trucks, the heavy guns facing backward on tractor-wheel trolleys, the soldiers — most in standard uniform, though in places there was a worrying number of irregulars.

They approached a roadblock, and as the driver slowed into traffic, he said, without turning back towards them, “The fare’s just gone up. Two hundred. Paid in advance.”

Strumbić grinned. He pulled out his wallet, and tore a hundred-Deutschmark note in half, and passed it to the driver.

“What the hell?” said the driver, looking at the bill.

In his other hand, della Torre saw, Strumbić now had his service automatic. Keeping it down, out of sight of neighbouring cars, he chambered a bullet. The sliding click was unmistakable to anyone who’d heard it before.

“You know what that was?” he asked.

“Yes,” the driver said, subdued. But there was a belligerence to his tone.

“Let me explain it to you another way. If you do something stupid at the roadblock, you will not only not get your hundred Deutschmarks, you will gain a hole in the back of your head. Not right away, mind, because we will show our
UDBA
identification and the soldiers will let us pass. But the next time we stop. Say, when you take a piss. I won’t need to take back that half-bill because I’ve got the bigger half, and German banks will redeem a torn bank note if there’s more than half of it. And because I’m not a thief, I’ll leave the hundred you already earned for your next of kin. It will cover your funeral expenses, if anybody ever bothers to identify you. On the other hand, if you don’t make a fuss, you will earn that larger half of the note. And maybe more. Plus your wife won’t have to have your shirt dry-cleaned. Does this transaction sound agreeable to you?”

A long pause. “Yes.”

“Why don’t you show our driver your identification card, Gringo, just in case he doesn’t believe us.”

Della Torre held out the old
UDBA
card so that the driver could see it clearly by glancing down.

The taxi slowed and then pulled over onto a gravel verge. Soldiers, submachine guns hanging off their shoulders, walked from car to car. Sometimes the occupants were asked to step out and their vehicles were searched. But mostly they were either waved on or, occasionally, turned back towards Belgrade.

“Can’t take rifles, machine guns, or anti-tank weapons past here. Got any?” the boy in the Yugoslav army cap said.

“Nope,” Strumbić said.

“Where are you going?”

“To visit our auntie.”

“Where’s that?”

“How far’s the road open?”

The boy shrugged. “Up to Tovarnik, I think.”

“Well, then, that’s where we’re going.”

The boy looked puzzled for a second and then waved them on.

“See how easy it is to be cooperative?” Strumbić said to the driver as they carried on along the suddenly emptier road. And then to della Torre, more quietly, he said, “Makes you wonder what sort of fuckers we’ll run into in Vukovar if they’ve got the army screening for anti-tank weapons. Who the fuck goes around with anti-tank weapons?”

“Militia,” della Torre said. “Chetniks.”

They reverted to silence, subdued by the flat skies and the raw earth and the smudge of smoke on the horizon before them as the radio played a late Beethoven quartet.

Tovarnik was at the border of Croatia and Serbia. Once upon a time, the border had been an irrelevance, a red line on maps to keep functionaries busy. Now that line was being drawn in blood.

“Matoš was born here,” the driver said.

A couple of the poet’s lines threaded their way to the front of della Torre’s memory:
I didn’t weep. I didn’t. Struck wordless, /
I stood in the great hall full of the beautiful dead . . .

Vehicles were being turned back at the Tovarnik checkpoint. Many stopped and parked on the opposite side of the road or on a gravel parking lot to the side of the roadblock, their occupants either walking into the small town or leaning against their cars, smoking.

Everyone seemed to be dressed in the olive drab of military uniform. Many wore Chetnik hats, and a few had outrageous beards and moustaches that echoed the Serb militiamen from half a century before. Tito had killed Chetniks as ruthlessly as he had Croatia’s fascist-supporting Ustaša. But Tito was dead, and the Chetniks had risen again.

Once again a young regular soldier stopped them. “You can’t go any farther. This is a military zone.”

“So what’s everyone waiting for?” Strumbić asked, jabbing his thumb at the Chetniks.

“There’s a bus that takes them in.”

“To Vukovar?”

“Where else?”

Della Torre got out of the car. The other members of the young soldier’s squad took an immediate interest. They stood, rifles swung towards della Torre.

“There’s no stopping here. Move the car,” the young soldier said.

Della Torre had his
UDBA
card in his hand. “You know what this is?”

“Yes,” the boy said uncertainly.

“I’ll spell it out for you. U-D-B-A.”

The boy nodded uncomfortably, looking over towards his buddies, who had in that moment found other things to occupy their attention.

“Gorki’s Wolves are over there, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” the boy said. Gorki’s Wolves, his paramilitaries, had haunted this borderland since before the siege. And, della Torre knew, they would stay late. If there was an authority beyond the military hierarchy these soldiers would yield to, it was Gorki. Because he was beloved by the Belgrade powers, a warlord who reminded them of the glories Serbia could aspire to. Glories, and riches — the Wolves were notorious for their rapacious looting.

“Well, I have an appointment with Mr. Gorki —” he started to say.

He hadn’t noticed the man who now stepped into his field of vision — a man with the wolf’s head flashing on his shoulders.

“Do you, now,” the man said. “And who might you be?”

Della Torre faltered for a moment. He should have known Gorki would have his own people at the checkpoints.

“Major della Torre,” he said, as coolly as he could.

“Of
UDBA
. Funny, I thought
UDBA
had been replaced by the State Security Service. But what do I know?”

Della Torre didn’t answer.

The man had a radio set clipped to his hip, which he now put to his ear. Cars behind the taxi started honking, but the militiaman paid them no attention. The conversation the man had was brief, and then, still with his back to them, he had another one, turning briefly to have a look at della Torre.

“Ivo,” the man called over his shoulder, “I’ll take these people in. Seems Commander Gorki would like to see our friend here with the Italian name.”

A second paramilitary touched his finger to his forehead but otherwise showed no interest.

Gorki’s man sauntered to the taxi’s passenger side and got in next to the driver. Even before the barrier was lifted, the militiaman retuned the car radio to a Belgrade station playing nationalist tunes.

“Proper music,” he said, and then stabbed his hand forward to direct the taxi driver.

STALE SMOKE HUNG
listless in the sky. Earth had been churned raw by tanks and heavy guns among amputated trees. Having seen the destruction in Dubrovnik, della Torre thought he was prepared for the ruins of Vukovar, but what he saw now could have only been conjured in hell.

“Mother of God,” he said to himself.

No wall was unmarked; the smallpox scars of bullet holes defaced every façade, and many buildings had fallen in on themselves. The taxi slowed. A path had been cleared along the road, but the tires crunched as if on cinders.

Strumbić watched, stunned, swearing near silently, a thin stream of
fuck
s becoming a prayer to ward off evil. Even the taciturn taxi driver sat up straight, gripping his steering wheel, his sallow complexion blanched. Only the militiaman in the front passenger seat observed what passed with indifference.

They drew towards the fringes of the town, a village just beyond Vukovar’s southern suburbs. Della Torre marvelled that Vukovar’s water tower, visible in the near distance, had managed not to collapse. It looked like an ancient Roman ruin, flayed of its concrete skin, its bloody brick exposed.

The taxi driver switched off the radio. The militiaman turned to him as if to protest, but then just said, “Left there. Pull in behind the trucks.”

They stopped in the shade of a mostly collapsed office building. Opposite was a villa without a front wall. In what was once a large kitchen and dining room, a folding card table had been set up, surrounded by an assortment of chairs. Della Torre was wondering what had happened to the original furniture, but then he saw that a washing machine and a tall grandfather clock were being carried out of the neighbouring house into one of the army trucks. The looting was efficiently organized.

A massive, square-built man with a large, round head was sitting at the card table, speaking into a large hand-held radio set.

Della Torre got out of the cab with the militiaman, who told Strumbić and the driver to stay in the car. The half-dozen men with Kalashnikovs ensured that they wouldn’t think of doing anything rash.

Della Torre and the militiaman walked through crushed concrete, glass, and shattered tiles. The man at the card table motioned for della Torre to sit and flicked his fingers at his soldier, who left the room.

Della Torre noticed what looked like a big dog lying to the side of the table. The creature looked up at him, half-curious, and then lay its head back down on its front legs.

“Wolves need an astonishing amount of exercise. I have my men run with him every day so that he covers, I don’t know, thirty kilometres,” Gorki said. His voice was pleasant. He was moderately good-looking, though the eyes were too wide-set and the mouth too small and thin-lipped. His uniform was pristine, his hair neat, and his face close-shaven. The faint scent of lavender surrounded him.

“So, Major, we keep encountering each other,” Gorki said. “I think the documentation I saw the last time we met was out of date. It said ‘Captain’ and you didn’t correct me to say you’d been promoted.”

“I had other things on my mind.”

“Of course you did. So who are you working for now? The Americans again? The Croats? The Europeans? They’re itching for us to call a ceasefire, to make a truce, so that we can all shake hands and walk away and be friends,” he said with a broad smile, sharing a joke. “Or are you working for yourself?”

“I need your help.”

“Help? I’ll help dig your grave.” Gorki roared with laughter. “You must realize we’re enemies. I have no obligation to you. So you will join the rest of the Ustaša prisoners, and then we will decide what to do with you when we have tidied up Vukovar.”

Della Torre felt light-headed. His throat was dry and he held his hands against his body so they’d stop trembling. For Gorki, Vukovar’s defenders were indistinguishable from fascist Croats of the Second World War. He would have no compunction about murdering them.“I have something to give you in exchange for your assistance,” he said.

“What could you possibly have that I can’t get for myself?”

The wolf kept its eyes on della Torre.

Della Torre swallowed, summoning up his courage. “The Montenegrin.”

Gorki grinned, eyes raised as if he was waiting for the punchline. “What makes you think he interests me?” he finally said.

“It’s a gamble I’m taking,” della Torre replied, willing himself to speak evenly and clearly. “I know there’s history between you two. I think he was responsible for the death of someone you were . . . friends with. And you’re not a man who forgets. Or forgives.”

He knew very little about their history, only that there had been a boy at the fringes of the Yugoslav mafia in Sweden who’d helped the Montenegrin with Palme’s assassination, at a time when Gorki was, coincidentally, in a Swedish prison.

“Even if it were true,” Gorki said, waving away one of his soldiers, who’d drawn up to the house on a motorcycle, “why would you think that I won’t just have my men beat the information out of you?”

“It’s a gamble I’m taking,” della Torre repeated.

Gorki laughed and shook his head. “People take extreme gambles when they run out of options,” he said. “Okay, Major. Say I was interested. What would you want in return for this information?”

Della Torre knew that if he asked for too much, he’d be refused, and Gorki’s men would extract the information from him. He’d seen the corpses of people that Gorki’s Wolves had tortured. They’d killed for no reason other than to satisfy visceral, sadistic hatreds.

“I want for me and my colleague back there to be taken through the front lines into Vukovar.”

Gorki’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not giving away any military secrets if I tell you that we will completely take over the town in a day or two. Three at most. I won’t be responsible for what happens to the fascist Ustaša who have been instrumental in destroying Vukovar. They are insects to be exterminated. If you are there, we will crush you too. Tell you what, Major, if you ask to be taken somewhere safe in Croatia instead, I will allow it.”

“So you have Vukovar completely surrounded?”

“Essentially.”

“But the reports say there’s still a route through the cornfields.”

“Major, there are ten thousand people in Vukovar. A few dozen get in or out by that route. Four times as many try and fail.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Gorki considered him. “Why, I’m wondering, are you so eager to make your way into a condemned city?”

Della Torre toyed with the thought of not responding, but he knew that an unsatisfactory answer would raise the man’s suspicions and ensure a refusal. “My wife works in the Vukovar hospital,” della Torre lied, supposing that a few doctors might remain after the evacuation. “I want to get her out.”

Gorki thought for a long time. “Yes,” he said. “Very well. I’ll make sure we show you a way into the town. What happens to you after, I won’t be responsible for. Now for your part of the bargain.”

Della Torre stared into the man’s hazel-green eyes. Gorki was an intelligent man who spoke half a dozen European languages well. And he had fooled many with his charm and seeming civility. He was ruthless and deceitful, yet also believed himself to be a man of his word. “He’s in hospital. In Herzeg Novi. A private room. An unnamed patient.”

“My men will give you and your colleague a drink. You can wait over there.” Gorki pointed to some chairs laid out around a table under a restaurant umbrella, set up in the middle of the street. And then he picked up the telephone.

Della Torre and Strumbić waited. Strumbić was holding his old-lady handbag, which no one questioned. Gorki’s men had let the taxi driver leave, though they made him take an unpaid fare back to Belgrade. He’d been only too relieved to go. And Strumbić had done as he’d promised and given the man the other half of the torn German note.

An hour later, Gorki made an impatient flicking motion with his fingers. “The boss wants you,” a militiaman told della Torre.

He approached carefully. Gorki’s expression betrayed nothing. Della Torre wondered whether the Montenegrin had been discharged, gone home, disappeared. Or maybe he’d died and della Torre’s gamble had failed.

“You are correct,” Gorki said. “Mr. Djilas is in the hospital. It’s a poor bargain you’ve given me, though. He’s said to be in a coma. His organs are failing and he’s expected to die. But you knew that, eh?”

He waved over one of his men, who was working a combat radio set by an armoured personnel carrier.

“That boy who you brought in yesterday. The one you cornered in the sewer,” Gorki said.

“Calls himself Plavi, and he’s a little faggot,” the soldier said, spitting on the ground.

“I didn’t ask you to describe his habits. He was to remain unharmed.”

“We haven’t touched him.”

“Bring him to these men and then take them to the sewers so the boy can guide them into Vukovar.”

“You want the kid free? The little fucker’s been a complete pain in our ass for a month now —”

“I’m not asking, I’m ordering. Do it now.”

Gorki stood, and the wolf stood next to him. Both looked dangerous. Gorki leaned over the little table and stared at della Torre.

“Goodbye, Major,” he said. “Pray you die before you see us again.”