Zagreb Cowboy (28 page)

THE PAIN WOKE
della Torre. Irena was already there, sitting, reading some notes.

“Ow, Jesus, does this never stop?” he said, clutching his side.

“I’ve got good news and good news for you.”

“Don’t tell me. The suffering will end soon because I’m going to die. And the other good news is that you won’t need to divorce me then.”

“Pessimist. Take this tablet and stick it up your rear end. I’ll leave you in privacy while I get a coffee.”

He did as he was told. She was gone longer than he’d expected, but even before she’d come back, the pain had completely disappeared. It was as if he’d never suffered at all. The agony of the previous night seemed an abstract memory.

“Wow. What was that?” he asked, smiling when she walked back into the room.

“That was your first bit of good news.”

“Powerful medicine. Works miles better than the morphine. What was it?”

“Ibuprofen. A pill you take when you’ve got a sore head. It merely confirms where yours is.”

“Ha,” he said, though his smile was genuine.

“It’s a very effective anti-inflammatory.”

“So what’s the other good news? I’m assuming it doesn’t also involve my head being up my ass.”

“No. Your X-ray shows that your stone has almost dropped out. A couple of hours and it should be gone completely. You’ll pee it out and it’ll be as if it had never been there. Even better news is that it’s the only one. You might get another one in the future. If you don’t take care of yourself, you will. But it might not happen for a long time. And I had a look at your lungs as well while I was at it. Clear as a baby’s, though I haven’t a clue why.”

“I keep telling you, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side smoked from before he could talk, wasn’t sober a day in his life, and lived to be ninety-six.”

“Somebody has to win the lottery. But it’s a bad basis on which to plan your future.”

“Speaking of tests, I meant to ask you something in Zagreb, but there wasn’t time.”

“It’s too late, Marko.”

“Too late for what?”

“For whatever you wanted to ask.”

“About centrifuges?”

“Oh, sorry, I thought it was something else.” Irena blushed slightly. “So ask me about centrifuges.”

Della Torre was momentarily puzzled but then ploughed on.

“What do you know about them?”

“Centrifuges? They’re a spin cycle on a washing machine.”

“No, real ones. The sort you use in hospitals.”

“What about them? They separate solids out of liquid solution. Blood, mostly — they spin the blood cells and platelets out of the plasma. You can test each component separately. Or at blood centres they use it to separate the products so that plasma, red cells, and platelets can be transfused to people who need them.”

“Do they use it to get rid of
AIDS
from blood?”

“Are you worried about becoming infected? You don’t need a transfusion, you know.”

“No, it’s not about me. I want to know why somebody would want a whole bunch of centrifuges, whether it might have something to do with
AIDS
.”

“As far as I know,
AIDS
is viral, and I’m not sure they’d be willing to use suspect samples for transfusion. I don’t know anything about purifying contaminated blood with centrifuges. How many is a whole bunch, by the way?”

“Thousands.”

“For blood? That really is a lot. I doubt there’s a thousand centrifuges in all the hospitals in Yugoslavia.”

“I don’t know that they’re for blood. I’m just guessing. But I don’t know what else they’d be for.”

“What kind of centrifuges are you talking about? I mean, what do they look like?”

“Tall, fairly narrow cylinders, as far as I can remember. About two metres long, and they look like water-mains pipe, I think.”

“And lots of them?”

“Yes, apparently there were a few thousand sent from Sweden to Belgrade in the mid-1980s. I thought they might have something to do with
AIDS
.”

“They don’t sound like hospital centrifuges. They sound more like the ones they use to purify nuclear fuel. What level of purity you’re looking for and how much of the fuel you want determine how many centrifuges you need.”

“Nuclear fuel?” he asked, puzzled.

“We’ve got some at the university in Zagreb. About a dozen or so. That mostly covers what we need at the hospital for radiotherapy and the physics department’s uses.”

“I’d forgotten you did nuclear medicine.”

“Oh, it only took up three years of my life.”

“I was in London for one of them.”

“Yes. Anyway, that’s the prime reason they gave me this X-ray job without demanding any training. I guess having most of the coursework towards a Ph.D. in a subject lets you off lab technician qualification,” she said.

“So tell me more.”

“What more?”

“I mean, would anyone need more than a dozen?”

“Sure. You need a few hundred to purify the fuel for a power station. And a couple of thousand to make a bomb.”

“A bomb? We never made a bomb in Yugoslavia, as far as I can remember.”

“We had a program. I remember in the late seventies having to compete with the national weapons lab for equipment and radioactive material. And people. I don’t think it was a big secret. Tito talked about it in the papers. But it mostly ended when he died, if I remember well. It was too expensive to keep going.”

“Maybe Belgrade restarted the program in the mid-eighties.”

“Maybe. But I’m pretty sure they didn’t. We’d have noticed at the university. They’d have taken our physicists and equipment, like they did in the seventies. But there wasn’t any interference with my radiological work. So unless it was top secret and somehow conjured a couple of hundred experts out of thin air, I doubt there was any program.”

“Oh. Now that you mention it, I think they were mostly exported again.”

“There you go. Yugoslavia bought the centrifuges from Sweden and then sold them on to some suspect Third World dictatorship afterwards,” she said. “Capitalism with a Communist face.”

“Would we have been allowed to?” he said, mostly to himself.

“Not really. These things are tightly controlled. The West let us have a program because they knew we were more scared of the Soviets than we were of America. I don’t think they’d have been happy for us to sell the equipment on to some tinpot dictatorship,” she said.

“Some
other
tinpot dictatorship.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“So we’d have been doing it quietly.”

“I never heard anything about us buying thousands of centrifuges. And I know a lot of physicists.”

There was knock at the door. Irena opened it.

Harry stepped into the room, her expression for all the world looking like Billy the Kid’s when he ran into Pat Garrett that last time.

“I can come back when you’re free,” she said. She was wearing a severe skirt, cut just above her knees, and a cotton jersey. Her hair was pulled back. There was a certain bloodlessness to her expression. She smiled, but her eyes had a wariness in them.

“No, that’s fine. Come on in, Harry. This is my radiologist. She happens to be my ex-cousin’s husband’s wife.”

“His cousin’s ex-wife.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Must have been a surprise. Finding each other in the same hospital,” said Harry in a tone suggesting nothing was about to surprise her.

“A big one. For both of us,” della Torre said.

“I’ll be back in a bit. When the urologist comes,” Irena said in English, leaving the room.

“Hi. Do I get a kiss?” he asked.

Harry stared at him without answering. She reached into her bag and pulled out his wallet.

“When I got home, I went through your wallet. In case I had to find your next of kin.”

Della Torre winced, suspecting what was coming next.

“I noticed an ID with your picture on it. It said
UDBA
. I had no idea what that meant, but it looked pretty important. I mean, it clearly wasn’t a bus pass. So I looked it up. It’s handy having lots of modern history books. And do you know what?”

“Look, I can —”

“Please let me finish. Do you know what they say about
UDBA
? It’s the Yugoslav secret police, notorious for domestic repression, running concentration camps, and killing dissidents in foreign countries. Is that what you are?”

“Harry —”

She held her hand up to silence him. “Of course you are. Once I got over the shock, I looked at your things. Italian and American passports? They look real. Are they? A gun and bullets. Do you know you can go to jail in this country for having an unlicensed handgun? Who’d you come to kill?”

For some reason, he’d put the Beretta back together while she’d been away. Out of boredom. Or maybe unease at being alone in the apartment. It crossed his mind that she might not have recognized it for what it was had he left it in bits. Though it would have been hard to justify the bullets. They looked nothing like earplugs.

There was a long silence. Her look was cold, and underneath that it showed fear.

“I have some explaining to do. But I didn’t lie to you.”

“You’d need to be a lawyer to argue that,” she said in disgust.

“Okay, maybe there were a couple of little white lies. But most of what I told you is true. I am a lawyer, though I work for the
UDBA
. But I’m not one of the bad guys. I investigate the secret police for corruption. Actually my job is — was — to investigate
UDBA
killings, the ones you mentioned. About five years ago, an internal department was set up to prevent the
UDBA
from becoming a law unto itself. I’d been in the prosecutor’s office and I joined from there. A lot of those killings, I’m sorry to say, were legal. I mean, within Yugoslav law. My job was to find the ones that weren’t.”

“So if they had somebody to kill, they’d go to you to make sure all the paperwork was done properly,” she said bitterly.

“No. No. I investigated past assassinations. I had nothing to do with current
UDBA
operations. Really, I didn’t.”

She looked sceptical.

“It’s a hard job, Harry. Everybody in the
UDBA
hated us because they were afraid we’d find out what they were up to. But as far as the wider world is concerned, we’re as bad as the rest.”

“My heart bleeds. Nobody made you do it.” She stood with her back against the wall.

“You’re right. But to tell you the truth, it was one of the few jobs where I really felt as if I could properly serve justice. And I did. We caught killers and had them put away —”

“In concentration camps?”

“Living under a dictatorship means compromise. For everyone. You can’t lead a pure life. It’s just the way it is. I’m sorry.”

“So why did you come here? Was it a holiday?”

“I was running. Somebody wanted to kill me for something I knew. Even now I don’t know what.”

She didn’t look convinced. He shrugged.

“Somebody wanted me killed and Strumbić helped to set me up. So I shot him. Accidentally. But now I’ve got killers and the police — Strumbić is a cop — after me. I had to go.”

“We’ve been stealing from a killer?”

“No, I don’t know of anybody Strumbić has ever killed. But he’s a crook. That’s where he got all the money to pay for the place in London. We just stole it back from him.”

Her eyes had turned a grey shade of blue. They were wet. She looked as pale as he’d been the previous night on the hospital gurney. He worried she’d faint.

“You’re right, I didn’t believe you. I just thought you were running some scam. That you were some con man.”

“Look, Harry, I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re in any danger. Strumbić will be tied up in Zagreb for a long time yet, and when he does come, we’ll be long gone. As far as the money goes, he’ll just eat the loss for a quiet life.”

“I hope you’re right.”

So do I
, thought della Torre.

“What about your second cousin’s ex-husband’s mother-in-law’s niece who works at the hospital just accidentally?” Harry watched him expectantly. Della Torre scratched his head and sank further into the bed.

“If I were to tell you she’s my cousin’s ex-wife’s best friend, would you believe me?”

“No.”

“What about a long-lost great-aunt?”

“No.”

“What sort of answer might be satisfactory?”

“Maybe telling me she’s your ex-wife, and whether she’s really still your wife.”

“Why would you think she’s not my ex-wife?”

“Her ring finger has fresh marks. It looks like she’s only recently stopped wearing it. Have you got divorced since you’ve been here?”

“You’re sharp. Ever think of becoming a secret policeman?” His smile got no response. “It’s very amicable.”

“I’m sure it is amicably ambiguous. If it weren’t, you’d probably be glowing by now.”

“Glowing?”

“She was the one who operated the X-ray machine on you, wasn’t she?”

“Ah, yes. Glowing. We’ve been meaning to get divorced, but, well, neither of us really had a good reason. But now she seems to have found herself a very smart and very nice doctor. I might get to meet him.”