Killing Pilgrim (21 page)

“That’s nice,” said della Torre, waiting for his pulse to slow.

“You’re not?” she asked, noting the sarcasm in his voice.

“Not what?” he asked.

“An animal person.”

“Only when they’re on a plate,” he said flippantly. “Except for cats.”

“Oh, you’re a cat lover then?”

“No. They taste too much like rodent,” he said.

She screwed up her face at him in the rear-view mirror, as if he was a drunk who’d soiled himself in public.

“Or so I’m told,” he added hastily.

She paused for a while and then asked, “Rodent? What sort of rodent?”

“Oh, I don’t know, squirrel . . . or rat.” He squirmed at the memory. Being in the commandos had been an unpleasant way to spend more than two years of military training. Unpleasant in many, many respects. “I imagine most rodents taste alike.”

There was another long moment of silence. A faint smile played on the edge of her lips.

“She saying pussy taste like beaver,” Strumbić said.

“Are beavers rodents?” della Torre asked.

“Some are. Though not the ones you eat,” Rebecca said, deadpan.

After a pause, Strumbić guffawed.

“What?” della Torre asked.

Strumbić explained the joke to him in Croat. Trust Strumbić to have an imperfect grasp of English except for the vulgarities, della Torre thought.

Strumbić got out to piss in the bushes and Rebecca stretched her legs. Della Torre handed her a chilled Capri Sun. He noticed how, when she’d finished, she didn’t throw it onto the verge but rolled up the package and stuck it in a paper bag she kept in the compartment at the bottom of the driver-side door. She was neat, besides being an animal lover.

Midway through a stretch, she stopped and stared along the road behind them.

“Marko, what do you make of that?” she asked, pointing.

In the distance, near the crest of a hill they’d descended and where the road reappeared after a bend, della Torre saw a faint glint.

“Looks like a car,” he said.

“Yes. And what about that car?”

“It’s not moving.”

“Do you remember passing a car back there?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

She pulled out a pair of field glasses from the canvas bag, portable but powerful Zeiss binoculars. When she’d had a good look, she passed them over to della Torre. The resolution was astonishing, as good as the big, heavyweight glasses he’d had to use when he was in the military. It wasn’t a car but a truck. A black truck. Its doors were open and he could make out two figures standing next to it.

“Black Hilux,” Rebecca said.

He lowered the binoculars and looked over towards her. She’d braced herself against the Merc and was resting her elbow on its roof, using it to stabilize her arm as she focused the big telescopic sight from her rifle. It was considerably more powerful than the Zeiss. Strumbić was standing behind her, taking it all in.

“Friends of yours?” Rebecca asked generally.

“Black Hilux, you say?” della Torre asked.

“Yup.”

“I saw one in Zagreb a couple of times.”

“There was one that tried to follow us to Julius’s cottage. It picked us up when we were driving back, as we passed through . . . what’s it called . . . Samobor,” Rebecca said. “And they were following us this morning from Zagreb, though they’re a bit slower than us. We’d have lost them if it hadn’t been for the traffic jam at the police roadblock.”

Della Torre considered the woman, making a mental note not to underestimate her. About anything.

“Know anything about it, Julius?” della Torre asked.

Strumbić shook his head. “Not my friends. Maybe
UDBA
. Serbian
UDBA
. Maybe interested in Americans. Maybe Croatian
UDBA
. Maybe mafia. Is much smuggling from Bosnia. Drugs to boats in Zadar, Split, and to Italy.”

“Even though the Serbs have closed the roads?” della Torre asked.

“Smugglers know different ways. Pay money to go.”

“If they’re mafia, what do they want from us?”

Strumbić shrugged. “Mercedes?”

Della Torre nodded. “Maybe they’re just lost tourists.”

“Maybe.” Rebecca’s look suggested she didn’t believe it.

She took one of the metal cases from the boot, unlocked the combination, and put it on top of the one next to della Torre. She didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t need to.

They set off again, though at a more measured pace now. Their turning wasn’t far off and they didn’t want to go racing into a Serb roadblock. Rebecca kept her eyes on the rear-view mirror.

They turned off the main road without seeing any signs of Serbs or anyone else. The single-lane byroad was tarmacked but rough at the edges. The forest flashed past, Strumbić continually having to remind Rebecca to slow down as he tried to locate where they were on the map. At one point they raced past a unit of irregulars lounging by their cars in a little clearing.

“What do you think?” della Torre asked Strumbić. “Theirs or ours?”

“Whoever they are, they’ll end up doing more damage to their own side. It was like they were out for a picnic,” Strumbić replied in Croat. “But that’s probably the last we see of that Hilux.”

The mountain forest gave way to a broad valley of rolling hills. More hedges and flat fields of maize and wheat were scattered among red-tiled houses and hamlets. The fields were broken by single trees and sheep meadows.

Before long they hit a cluster of hamlets, and not far past the hamlets, Gospić.

They stopped at a roadblock made up of a couple of sawhorses put up by a unit of the Croat militia, the half-police, half-army that provided what security it could to these parts.

A tall soldier wearing a loose shirt and a slack expression bade Rebecca lower her window.

“You took a wrong turn. You want to go to the seashore. No tourism here.
Kein Tourist, verstehen?
” And then, turning to his friends, who were eyeing the car, he said in the broad, slow accent of a boy from the hills: “Get a load of this redhead, boys. How long you think she spent on her back to buy this motor?”

“Ask her how much and I’ll tell you how long,” one of his fellow militiamen called back.

The soldier turned back to Rebecca. “You get to the coast down that road,” he said, pointing to a side road. “Down that way a kilometre, and you get to the coast road. But first there’s a tax. A Gospić tax.” He paused in thought. “A hundred Deutschmarks.
Hundert Deutschmark
,” he translated helpfully.

“Listen, son.” Strumbić talked across Rebecca from the passenger seat. “Why don’t you keep your trap shut and the road open. We’re driving into Gospić, where we’re going to stop for a little break, and then we’re driving onto the highway once we find somebody who can direct us past the Serb roadblocks.”

Della Torre was surprised, thinking that Strumbić might pay his way out of this like he had earlier. But on reflection, he knew Strumbić was right. The police were professionals and they knew that there were rules about successful bribe-taking. These were stupid farm boys. Show a willingness to pay them a hundred Deutschmarks and they’d ask for two hundred.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” the boy said in a slow, leisurely way. His disregard for the passengers of the Mercedes spoke of a dangerous combination of stupidity and bravado.

“Julius,” Rebecca said, “let me handle this.”

She smiled apologetically to the soldier and fiddled with the gearshift. The soldier sauntered to the front of the car and started waving Rebecca backwards. Rebecca looked over her shoulder as if to reverse, revved the engine, and then popped the clutch. But rather than going backwards, the car jumped forward, knocking the soldier flat on his back in the middle of the road. The car didn’t hit him hard enough to do much damage, and Rebecca braked the same instant. Della Torre was shocked into silence. Strumbić hooted with laughter, while half a dozen irate militiamen surrounded the Merc, their rifles raised.

Rebecca rushed out of the car and went straight for the fallen soldier, bending over him. He’d raised himself up onto his elbows. His immediate outrage cooled. From where he sat, della Torre could see the militiaman wasn’t looking into Rebecca’s face but rather somewhere lower. The magic of a low-cut blouse.

She cooed over him and stroked his head, making apologetic gestures to show that she’d meant to reverse rather than go forward, until the group of militiamen relaxed and started to laugh at their fallen comrade, who hadn’t suffered anything more than a couple of bruises.

Della Torre joined her, showing his ID to the men. Unlike the cop at the roadblock, these boys didn’t realize that the
UDBA
was no longer a force. One of the militiamen hurried down the road to a nondescript restaurant in an unfinished two-storey red and white cinder-block building, from which a flustered and reluctant senior officer followed. He was a middle-aged man, thinning up top and fat around the middle, his green shirt untucked and open down the chest.

“You run the militia here?” della Torre asked, having informed the officer of his rank and who he was.

Apprehension flickered across the officer’s face. “I’m told that you tried to run over one of my men.”

“An accident,” della Torre said dryly. “I suggest you discourage them from demanding bribes and from being insubordinate. Because pretty soon you’ll have some professional officers coming this way. And a few of those professional officers would be happy to summarily execute soldiers they consider to be in a state of mutiny. That’s just a friendly word of warning.

“Now I need you to show me on this map how we can get back to the main road where we won’t bump into any tree trunks your Serb neighbours might have left lying around. And where we might get an edible lunch in Gospić.”

Gosp
i
ć
was a typical small Croat town. It had a big square, a church with a tall baroque steeple, and an entirely forgettable restaurant.

They had an indifferent lunch, fried schnitzels for the men and an omelette for Rebecca. They sat on a pleasant shaded terrace next to the main road and within sight of the little river that passed through the town. Strumbić spent much of the time recounting the looks on the soldiers’ faces when Rebecca hit their friend.

“Clutch slipped,” Rebecca said nonchalantly. Della Torre tried not to think about how the boy’s finger had been on the trigger of his rifle. But all of the militiamen had had their safeties on, and they had all ducked out of the way when the car jumped. They hadn’t looked like they were up for much of a fight.

After a quick round of black coffees, during which Strumbić and della Torre desperately puffed down a last cigarette, they left Gospić, following a small, dusty road, long lines of cracks running along its asphalt so that its edges more or less crumbled into the verges. The landscape gave way to another set of long fields, with isolated low hills breaking up the valley floor, while to their right the mountains piled up into the blue distance beyond.

The way out of town was much like the way in, though in this direction the militiamen hadn’t bothered to block the road, content to merely eye the passing Merc from the shade of a giant mulberry tree.

They drove through a smattering of hamlets, each little more than a few houses strung along the road. Della Torre suspected it wasn’t just the heat of the afternoon that made this feel like a newly abandoned landscape. There were no animals; no sheep, cows, or horses. No dogs sleeping in the shade of shuttered houses. There was no other traffic on the road, and inside the Mercedes there was no sound other than the hum of the air conditioner and the rumble of tires on the aged road. It reminded della Torre of the countryside around Vukovar. Silent and seized with fear.

He watched Rebecca in the rear-view mirror, her eyes frequently flicking to read the road behind them. He could see the consternation behind the half-tint of her big sunglasses. He turned to look back. In the middle distance, a cloud of dust was being kicked up by a black car.

“Hold on, boys,” she said, accelerating the Mercedes. The road twisted. For long patches it was paved, only to give way to gravel for a few hundred metres and then revert to rough asphalt. The ground rolled, and fields were broken by copses.

Rebecca spotted a farmer’s track between a clump of shrubs and a cornfield. Barely braking, she turned off the road like a rally driver and bounced the car into the tall, ripe corn.

“Wait here, I’m having a look,” she said, getting out of the car, but first helping herself to a Beretta from the aluminium case next to della Torre. “Try not to have a party while I’m gone.”

Not long after, they heard a heavy car pass fast along the road, scattering gravel behind it. Rebecca strolled back.

“The Hilux?” della Torre asked when she’d slid into the car.

“Yup.” He noticed that she put the handgun on the floor under her seat. “What do you fellows suggest?”

“Maybe he going to Zadar too,” Strumbić said.

“Maybe,” della Torre echoed. “Though I’d guess they were probably looking for us.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same thing,” said Rebecca. “The question is whether they’re just following us to see where we’re going or if they want something from us.”

“You mean if they want to talk to us?”

“Or something.”

“But they could stop us in Zagreb, no?” asked Strumbić.

“Zagreb’s a busy place,” della Torre said. “People who drive cars with tinted windows tend to like their privacy.”

“What do you think? Wait a little while and let them think we’re long gone? Go back?” Rebecca asked.

“I’ve got a feeling you already know what you want to do,” della Torre said.

“Why don’t you boys have a cigarette? We’ll have a drink and then carry on. The way they were moving, it looked like they thought they’d lost us. I don’t think they’ll stop.”

They sat smoking in the cornfield while Rebecca scouted the road again before pushing off. The route through the country was quicker than the coast road, but della Torre couldn’t help but wonder what the eventual cost of speed might be.

They were back on the half-paved road, driving between wheat and cornfields and vineyards broken up by the occasional copse. The farther they drove, the more the landscape became lumpy with rocky escarpments, the white stone of the Velebit Mountains rising up through the reddish brown earth like rows of cracked teeth from bleeding gums.

“
Winnetou
is film here,” Strumbić said as they passed a narrow green valley in between two ranges of high rock.

“Winnie what?” Rebecca asked.

“
Winnetou
. Film from book. Is made here.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, unconvinced.

“Is about famous Indian Winnetou and cowboy friend Old Shatterhand. Cowboy and Indians, you know.”

“I know cowboys and Indians, but I’ve never heard of either of those people.”

Strumbić was dumbfounded. Everybody had heard of
Winnetou
. Even if they hadn’t read the books, they’d seen the films. They were famous.

“German movies made with the Yugoslavs,” della Torre said, remembering something Anzulović must have told him once. “They’re based on books by Karl May. May was a German who wrote a bunch of adventures about exotic places. Had a hell of an imagination. I don’t think he ever left Germany, and most of what he wrote was from a prison cell.”

“A bad guy, was he?” Rebecca asked.

“I think it was debtor’s prison. Anyway, he’s famous in Germany and here. And everybody in Germany and Yugoslavia loves cowboys and Indians. Mostly because of him, I think. He was Hitler’s favourite writer. “

“German and Yugoslav cowboys and Indians?” She laughed.

To Strumbić, nothing hitherto had emphasized Rebecca’s strangeness quite as much as the fact that she didn’t know about
Winnetou
. Sure, it was odd finding a woman who could handle a rifle like she did. But not to have heard of
Winnetou
? He’d once arrested a middle-aged farmer for killing his father with a potato. Shoved it raw down the old man’s throat because he’d turned the television off during a broadcast of one of the
Winnetou
films.

They were driving between a cornfield on one side and a vineyard on the other, and approaching a wooded hillside crowned with bare white rock, when the front of the car erupted. It sounded like they’d hit a dog or burst a tire. Rebecca swerved instinctively and slammed her full weight on the brake, not even coming to a full stop before throwing the Merc into reverse. Another thud. The car bellowed as she opened the throttle fully, clouds of dust rising in front of them, obscuring the road.

“What the fuck?” della Torre said, pinned to his seatbelt by the backwards acceleration.

“Is not tire?” Strumbić shouted over the car’s roar.

Another thud, and steam burst out of the hood and the car stopped dead.

“Out. Out fast. Get into the corn. Grab the bags,” Rebecca yelled.

They were scrambling out of their seats when a round hole punched through the windshield a little to the right of centre. Another hole appeared, lower and to the right. Della Torre felt air on the back of his neck, and from the corner of his eye he saw that the back windshield had disappeared. They spilled onto the tarmac, crouching behind the false protection of the open car doors, della Torre managing to grab one of the hard cases and the canvas bag. He’d left the other case in the back seat. There was no sign of Rebecca.

“Fucking Gringo. Why is it that whenever I’m with you, somebody ends up shooting at me?” Strumbić said as they threw themselves into the cornfield.

“Rebecca?” della Torre called.

“I’m here,” she replied from the vineyard on the other side of the road.

“Can you see where they are?” della Torre asked.

“The trees in front, where the road curves,” Rebecca called back.

Della Torre waddled in a squat back to the edge of the cornfield, where he could see down the road and smell the dripping petrol and hot oil pouring out of the car. Rebecca was opposite him, crouching between two rows of vines across the line of fire.

“Not a very good shot, is he?” She spoke to him across the asphalt killing zone, her voice even, controlled.

“Gives us hope,” della Torre called back in a hoarse croak, trying to make himself heard without calling attention to himself.

Steam boiled furiously from the Merc’s punctured radiator, spreading a little cloud over its dented hood. As the other two talked, Strumbić crawled, head down, deeper into the corn. Now and again a metallic thud hit the car or the sound of rending plants resounded through the cornfield, causing both men to flinch.

“Have you got the rifle?” she called over to them.

Della Torre crept back to the case, which Strumbić had dragged with him, and opened it.

“No. I’ve got the machine gun and the other Beretta,” della Torre said.

“Can you load up and give them a spray or two so I can get to the car?” Rebecca asked.

“Don’t be crazy.”

“Just do it.”

Della Torre slid a long, curved magazine into the Heckler & Koch and handed it to Strumbić, taking the Beretta for himself.

“On three,” he called to her. “One. Two —”

Strumbić was up before della Torre finished counting, his arm raised, pumping bullets in the general direction of the woods. Della Torre did the same. A cob of corn exploded somewhere beside della Torre’s head; he couldn’t be sure whether it had been hit by a bullet from the woods or Strumbić’s wild firing.

“I ever mention I don’t like being shot at?” della Torre said, wiping flecks of green and yellow pulp off his face.

“Okay, I got it,” she shouted. “Throw me a box of bullets from the canvas bag. Wrap it up in plastic so they don’t end up scattering everywhere. They’re the big ones.”

Della Torre found them, the biggest calibre in the bag. The square box was heavy and he squat-ran back to the edge of the cornfield, where he could see Rebecca crouching on the other side. With a heave, he got the box over to her just as a bullet ploughed a furrow in the old tarmac in front of him.

“What you think? Wait until they tired and they look for us?” Strumbić asked.

Rebecca ignored them as she assembled the rifle and scope. “Julius, you stay there and fire the occasional round into the woods just to keep them occupied. Marko and I are going in a bit closer.”

Della Torre wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about her plan. But neither was Strumbić.

“That’s great. I get to stay here for some crazy shooter to use as target practice,” Strumbić complained in Croat, but he let off a quick buzz-saw burst of bullets in the direction of the woods.

“Julius, if you don’t mind, see if you can avoid hitting me in the back. At least not until you intend to,” della Torre said.

“Gringo, if I want to shoot you, first I’ll shoot off your dick, and only then will I turn you around and shoot you in the back.”

“Okay. So if I lose my dick, I’ll know it wasn’t an accident.”

“Julius, shoot high so you don’t hit us,” Rebecca shouted from the vineyard. “I don’t want to be on the wrong end of that spray gun. Marko, only fire when you know it’s them. All right. Let’s go.”

Both della Torre and Rebecca moved away from the dead Mercedes and each other — he, deeper into the corn rows, while she walked along the vines. He could hear the angry bark of a powerful rifle and the tall cornstalks ripple and shred as though lashed by a metal-tipped bullwhip.

Now and again he heard the woodpecker hammer of Strumbić’s machine gun — three, four sudden bursts, and then silence.

Once he’d got far enough away from the car, a good fifty metres from the road, della Torre hazarded a look through the plants’ tasselled tops. At a quick estimate, he figured three hundred metres separated him and the shooter. He continued his reluctant walk towards the wood, stooped and cautious as he moved through the corn, trying not to ripple the stalks for fear of alerting the gunman. But the shooter seemed to be concentrating on Strumbić, who was returning fire from farther back in the cornfield.

The road ran between him and Rebecca, straight towards the hill, before curving sharply to the left on Rebecca’s side, following the contour of the land. Eventually she’d have to leave herself exposed if she wanted to cross into the wood. Not that it would be much easier for della Torre. The cornfield ended about twenty metres before the wood; in between was a strip of weeds and piles of white stone shifted from the field by generations of farmers.

He was already near the edge of the cornfield. Farther to the right was a mown meadow. If he tried crossing there, the shooter would have a clear view of him. Worse still, there seemed to be heavy brambles in that direction, and bushes with long, ugly thorns. He’d have to take his chances here.

The heavy rifle hidden in the wood barked regularly. From the delay between shots, della Torre guessed it was bolt-action. From the damage the Merc had sustained and the raw, throaty sound the gun made, he figured it was around .50 calibre.