Killing Pilgrim (2 page)

The couple kept glancing nervously at the silent stranger in the cheap coat. He stepped away from them and they walked, perhaps slightly faster, though it was hard to tell.

Pilgrim and his wife hadn’t gone more than a couple of metres before the Montenegrin started following again, hand deep in the overcoat pocket, gripping the butt of the gun, index finger straight beside the trigger. With a practised thumb he cocked the gun as he drew it out of his pocket, and in a smooth move he slid his finger between the trigger and its guard.

The red and white muzzle flame was brief and bright against the city’s hollow, artificial light.

The first bullet took Pilgrim down. The second, fired immediately after, was wasted.

Pilgrim fell hard, in the way the Montenegrin had seen other men fall, not even twitching once he’d hit the ground.

They were at the bottom of an alley that led up to a set of stairs, near the top of which the Montenegrin had parked his car. He jogged away from the dead man, along the alley and then up the stairs, which he took two at a time, keeping his right hand in his pocket to prevent the still-warm gun from falling out, and gripping the rail with the other.

Halfway up, he stopped, thinking he could hear footsteps behind him.

But from below, there rose only the echo of a woman’s screams.

He counted as he climbed. Eighty-nine steps.

Soon people would be coming. Very soon.

The car wasn’t far now. He knew this was only the start of a very long night. But it had been a good beginning. A lucky one.

Behind him Pilgrim lay prone, his wife kneeling, keening by his side.

Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, was dead.

ZAGREB, AUGUST 1991

At
first only a single air-raid siren wailed in the distance, somewhere to the east. But like the baying of dogs, its call was rapidly taken up, so that within moments the whole of Zagreb was caught up in the fearful ululation.

Marko della Torre watched from the window of his office as nervous pedestrians stopped, looked skyward as if sniffing the air, and then rushed away, heads bowed, ducking the invisible enemy. He felt a bead of sweat run under his arm to his scarred elbow.

Zagreb’s sticky summer heat was made even more oppressive by the fear of looming war, which piled up like impossibly high and ever blacker thunderclouds. So far, all the city’s air-raid warnings had been false alarms. It had been less than two months since Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. The country had been cobbled together after the First World War from a collection of the Balkans’ Slav nations, anchored by the relatively large and powerful Serbia. But any sense of brotherhood was riven by two alphabets, three religions, innumerable dialects, and a history of mutual loathing. From the first days, the country’s smaller republics had chafed under Serb hegemony. The Nazi invasion during the Second World War triggered a civil war. Tito’s Communist Partizans won and for nearly half a century bound the country through fear and ideology. And an effective secret police apparatus, for which della Torre worked.

After Tito died, an unwieldy rotating presidency from the country’s various republics kept things going for a decade. But a crumbling economy, endemic corruption, and a deep vein of cynicism collided with the end of Communism, and the richer, western republics of Slovenia and Croatia had decided to go their own way.

Slovenia took over control of its borders from the federal police and military units. The Yugoslav government had responded by sending its air force to attack the rebels and commanding its military units to recover the federal government’s authority.

But the federal authorities acted without any great conviction. Yugoslavia had one of the biggest armies in the world, out of all proportion to the country’s modest size. Slovenia’s force was limited to little more than traffic policemen and farmers called up from the reserves. And yet, after ten days of desultory bombings and small, localized engagements, the Yugoslav army was ordered to withdraw. Slovenia was allowed to secede because nearly the whole of the population was ethnically Slovene.

Croatia wasn’t so lucky. There was no way its proclamation of national sovereignty would go unchallenged. One in eight of its inhabitants considered themselves ethnic Serbs. And Serbia effectively ran both the federal government and the Yugoslav army. There was an impasse. Croatia might have declared independence along with Slovenia, but its rulers made no effort to physically enforce their new country’s sovereignty. The Croat government rightly feared the Yugoslav tanks and fighters.

So far the federal presidency in Belgrade was too split to make any authoritative decisions. And anyway, the Europeans had brokered a temporary truce. Though that was going to end in a few weeks.

Meanwhile Serbian leaders were consolidating their power over the federal system. They made up most of the army’s officer class, and held most of the senior posts in the government bureaucracy, and Serbia was the heartland of heavy industry. Even the rulers of compliant republics were fearful of what would come once the Serbs decided to make their own greater nation. Especially the Bosnians. Bosnia was a microcosm of Yugoslavia, wedged between Serbia and Croatia and made up of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. They knew that whatever storm broke elsewhere, it would hit them like a holocaust.

Once the Serbs were sure of their strength, air raids were sure to follow the sirens. And with them, the tanks and the big guns.

Della Torre watched and waited for the all-clear. But the sirens kept on with their urgent nagging. He spread the slats of the thin metal Venetian blinds with his fingers and looked skyward. Were those vapour trails? The thought made him pull back from the window. The Croat government had taken over all the Yugoslav federal buildings in Zagreb, including his. Especially his.

Della Torre figured the federal forces might have a special interest in destroying the
UDBA
’s regional headquarters in Zagreb. The
UDBA
was Yugoslavia’s notorious department of internal security. The secret police. It held plenty of documents the Yugoslavs would want incinerated. Besides, Serb staffers had long since vacated the building. Della Torre doubted the Yugoslav pilots would be particularly concerned for the welfare of any Croats working there. And not just because people in every walk of Yugoslav life hated the
UDBA
. It was time to leave. Before he got bombed. Or before the all-clear sounded and he got caught.

The corridor was empty. Everyone had gone down to the basement shelter. Officially he was still on sick leave, nursing a not very old bullet wound in his elbow. The bandage was off, but his scar was puckered and pink.

He should have stayed away, but the combination of a deep thirst, being broke, and knowing there was a three-quarters-full bottle of Bell’s nestled in the locked bottom drawer of his filing cabinet had made him tempt fate. If Anzulović spotted him, he’d come to the erroneous conclusion that della Torre was ready to return to work. Ready to drink and ready to work were entirely different states of being.

Captain Anzulović was in charge of
UDBA
’s Department VI and was della Torre’s boss. Department VI had been created five years earlier as a sop to Yugoslavia’s increasingly activist parliament. In Tito’s time the parliament had been a nursery for the dim but well-behaved sons and brothers of the dictator’s old cronies. After his death they’d started to find a spine and a conscience. One of their bravest acts was to insist on the creation of an agency that could monitor the
UDBA
. Someone to watch the watchers everyone feared. The
UDBA
tried to neuter the department by making it part of the apparatus and then sticking it in Zagreb, well away from the heart of the organization. But they’d underestimated Anzulović, drafted in from the Zagreb police force.

Anzulović hired the most competent people he could find, including Marko della Torre, a smart young specialist in international law whom he had poached from the Zagreb prosecutor’s office. In Department VI, della Torre was given responsibility for reviewing the
UDBA
’s program of assassinating Yugoslav dissidents in foreign countries. No other secret police force in the world was as successful at killing people beyond its borders — not the
KGB
, not the Stasi, not the Securitate, not Savak, not even Mossad. The
CIA
didn’t even register as competition. Della Torre’s job was to find and prosecute any
UDBA
operations done outside the scope of Yugoslav laws. Killings done for the personal motives of people in power.

Della Torre slipped out of his office into the high, long corridor, trying to keep his heels from clicking on the terrazzo floor. He was halfway down the hall, almost at the emergency staircase, when a familiar voice stopped him dead.

“Where are you going?” It came from behind the frosted glass window of a half-open door.

“I thought maybe I’d see whether they’d done up the bomb shelter. You know, new wallpaper and carpet to cover up the bloodstains, that sort of thing,” della Torre said.

“Nope, still looks like Frankenstein’s cellar. Come on in.”

“Don’t you think maybe it’s worth going down —”

“Why? Do you suppose the bombers are flying from Belgrade via Reykjavik? They could have sent Zeppelins, bombed us, and been back by now if anything was happening,” Anzulović said, irritated.

As they spoke, the warning gave way to an all-clear. Della Torre cursed under his breath as he hovered near the door, feebly trying to hide the bottle of Bell’s behind his back.

“See? Anyway, don’t stand there looking like a lemon. Come in,” Anzulović said. “Sit. And shut the door behind you.”

Della Torre slipped the bottle onto the floor behind the chair leg as discreetly as he could.

Anzulović allowed himself a half grin. “You shouldn’t have. Though it’d be rude not to.”

He reached a long arm into a low cupboard on one side of his desk, from which he pulled out two dusty cut-glass tumblers. One had a hairline crack.

“I was only stopping in to say hello. As part of my convalescence. You know, until the doctors say I’m fit for work,” della Torre said.

“And to pick up your medicine? Sort of prescription I like,” said Anzulović.

It was only a little past ten in the morning, but della Torre poured two fingers into each glass. The whisky was warm and burned just the right way. Anzulović offered della Torre a cigarette from his pack of Lords and lit a match for them both.

From the corridor came sounds of people returning to their offices.

“How’s the funny bone, by the way?”

Della Torre rubbed his elbow. “Keeping me in stitches.” He knocked back what remained in his glass. “Well, thanks for taking an interest. I’ll let you know when my sick leave’s over. Assuming there still is an office . . .”

“Or that you’ve still got a job,” Anzulović said, finishing the sentence. “Well, the office is moving.”

He blew smoke through the tufts of hair growing out of his nostrils so that he looked like he was stoking a miniature brush fire. He was in his mid-fifties, nearly twenty years older than della Torre, but already looked ripe for retirement. The saddlebags under his eyes made his hangdog face look even more basset-like.

“So have I still got a job?” della Torre asked.

“Good question. All those nasty bits of the
UDBA
that everyone hates so much, they’re being absorbed into the Croat Interior Ministry.”

“A new, better
UDBA
, eh?
Plus ça change
. . . What about us?”

“You can imagine how hard the new, improved
UDBA
fought to keep us with them,” Anzulović said dryly. “And oddly enough, now that the Croat government has power over the security apparatus, they’re no longer very keen on having an anti-corruption unit either.”

“Funny, that. So where’s this leave us?” della Torre asked.

“We, my dear Gringo . . .” Della Torre still disliked that nickname, though after twenty years he’d become inured to it. The kids at school had started calling him that when he and his father had moved back to Zagreb from America. They were obsessed with cowboys and Indians — everyone in the country was — and anybody who’d lived in America had to be one or the other. The name stuck, and now the only people who used his given name were his wife and his father. And Harry, the English woman he’d met in London. “We are being absorbed into military intelligence.”

The Croat military had been patched together from the various local and regional police services. Their personnel weren’t known for their brains or insight.

“And because I know how happy this will make you, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The military intelligence unit is being run by your number one fan: Colonel Kakav.”

Della Torre choked, whisky fumes scorching his lungs.

“Of the Zagreb police?”

“The one and only.”

Della Torre slumped in his chair. Kakav was a bureaucrat attached to the Zagreb police. He was an oleaginous, self-serving political coward with considerable resentment against the state security apparatus. And, lately, della Torre.

Earlier that spring, a senior Zagreb police detective called Julius Strumbić had been shot by an
UDBA
agent. Namely, one Marko della Torre. It was Kakav’s life ambition to nail an
UDBA
agent and here he had one. “Shit.”

“Ah, you put your finger right on it. Or, rather, in it. Kakav was very eager that you be part of his team. Mentioned it more than once.”

“Because then it’s that much easier to hang me high?”

“Probably.” Anzulović wasn’t showing much sympathy.

“I thought that little misunderstanding had been sorted out. Didn’t Strumbić write an affidavit to the effect that it was an accident and we’re friends again?”

“He wrote a statement but he still hasn’t signed it. Like you, he’s officially on leave. Post-traumatic stress for getting shot twice in less than six months.”

“There’s no one more deserving,” della Torre said.

Strumbić set new standards for police corruption, even in a force as dirty as Zagreb’s. He’d amassed huge wealth and had never been caught.

Anzulović cocked a bushy eyebrow at della Torre. “I thought you said it was an accident.”

It really had been an accident. A complicated accident.

He had been selling third-rate files to Strumbić, making just enough to keep smoking his Lucky Strikes. Everything was fine, except somewhere in among the dross was a document somebody cared about. It got back to people in Belgrade that it had come from della Torre, and they called the Dispatcher, Tito’s old fixer in Zagreb. The Dispatcher specialized in making problems go away. He’d arm-twisted Strumbić into setting up della Torre for a bunch of Bosnian killers.