Killing Pilgrim (30 page)

“Thanks, Bill,” Rebecca said.

“I guess you could park next to the house. But you’d want to be pretty sure of your parking brake. Like I said, the road is steep,” della Torre said.

“Where does he have sentry points around the bay?” Rebecca asked.

“Who knows? He’ll have people who live all around. The local cops will keep him posted. So will all the fishermen. He’ll have military people on his side too; some of them are there to make sure the Yugoslav forces don’t make a move against him. Shopkeepers, street-sweepers. It’s like dealing with a mafia godfather. Everyone wants to stay on his good side.”

“But not so much that they won’t insult his kid,” Rebecca said.

“You have to understand the mentality here. People would think they were doing him a favour. As if to say that they understood and wouldn’t think badly of him if he put her away. It wouldn’t cross their minds that he might want to do otherwise. This is still the sort of country where they either hide the handicapped or put them on a stool with a sign around their neck and a begging bowl in front.”

Della Torre wasn’t sure what sort of reply he’d expected from Rebecca, but her indifference to what he’d said unsettled him. “How long do you think it’ll take us to get down there using this inland route?” she asked.

“Depends on the border. With a free run, an hour and a half, two maybe.”

She nodded. And then, still staring at the photographs in front of her, she asked: “You getting along with that Canadian?”

The question caught della Torre off guard. But why should anything surprise him?

“Higgins? Seems a nice guy,” he said and then, like an afterthought: “He is a journalist, isn’t he? Or is he your competition?”

“What makes you think we’d know?” Rebecca said.

“Are we playing games now?”

“He’s a journalist. Though how long he’ll be a journalist in Croatia is another matter. Your deputy defence minister doesn’t take kindly to people asking too many questions about him,” she said.

Della Torre absorbed what she’d just said. He realized she’d mentioned Higgins as a way of slipping in the warning. Why? So that he could pass it on to the Canadian? Just how tied in with Horvat were these Americans?

“What time do you think we should show up at Mr. Djilas’s?” she asked.

“He said he’d be back in the afternoon and that he’d feed us. Which means we should be there by around six. It’ll be a drive back in the small hours. Dinner might start early, but if we want him to talk, it’ll go on late.”

“So we have lunch here and head off soon after.”

“That’s about right.”

“What do you think, boys?” Rebecca asked the two Americans.

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said Rob. Or Bill.

Della
Torre couldn’t help smelling blood when he stepped into the Hilux. Maybe it was just the steaks.

He was still thick-headed, but sleep, pills, and lunch had knocked the edges off the pain. Even so, he could have done without the tape Rebecca plugged into the sound system. It was a pop compilation; not as rough as the music in the bar the night before, but it wasn’t Schubert either. The song titles written on the case, he saw, were in somebody else’s handwriting. But when he asked her about it, she said nothing.

They followed the coast road south, past the small port town of Cavtat and Dubrovnik’s airport, and then cut inland.

There were some Croat militiamen about who made half-hearted efforts to stop them and then watched the truck pass into no man’s land. The small paved road ran up into the hills that framed the mountainous point where the southern tips of Bosnia and Croatia met Montenegro.

The road was clear into the hills, though they could see a manned post up on a ridge. They didn’t encounter the Yugoslav border guards until they’d driven over the crest, which looked across limitless low brush and sun-bleached mountains. Green and white. At night, the vista would be an impenetrable blackness far inland.

A truck was parked across the track at the bottom of a stony valley, where it met a bigger road that stretched far into the uninhabited distance and, in the other direction, south into Montenegro. One lonely building stood at the crossroads, a wooden hut with a tin roof and an elevated water tank next to it.

Two men wearing army fatigues and sporting machine guns made their way from the building. Rebecca stopped the Hilux and della Torre got out. On the hillside he could see a stone-and-sandbag emplacement.

Della Torre handed his and Rebecca’s American passports to the militiamen, each with a hundred-Deutschmark note on the picture page.

“What’s this for?” said the militiaman, waving the money at him.

Only then did della Torre notice the strange flashes on the soldiers’ shoulders. One patch was the Serb’s white double-headed eagle with a sword. Della Torre couldn’t read the writing on it. The other was an image of a wolf’s head.

“That’s for the various fees for crossing the border,” della Torre said.

“It says here you were born in Yugoslavia. Why do you have an American passport? Are you a spy?”

“I was born here and I speak the language, but I’m an American.”

“An American spy who wants to bribe us to cross the border.” The man looked at him with dead eyes.

“If you look, both passports have visas.”

“If you have visas, why do you put money in them?”

“I don’t know how long you’ve worked the borders, but there are always fees to pay.”

The soldier pocketed both banknotes. “Both of you out of the truck. Put your hands on the hood. It’ll make my corporal nervous if you start dancing around, so I suggest you stay still. I’ll see what you’ve got in the back.”

Della Torre and Rebecca did as they were told. They watched through the windscreen as the soldier opened up the back of the Hilux and picked through their things. He walked to the front of the truck with a bottle of slivovitz and a box of biscuits. He had the expression of somebody who had picked up a cup of hot coffee only to find he was drinking warm mud.

“There’s import duty on these,” he said.

“How much?” della Torre asked.

“Fifty,” the soldier said.

“Dinars?”

“Deutschmarks,” the soldier replied.

“They’re not worth a fifth of that. I’ll tell you what, they’re presents for a friend. I’ll give you ten Deutschmarks. Otherwise you can keep the stuff,” della Torre said. He wasn’t sure the soldier wouldn’t keep the stuff anyway.

“Twenty. And only because I’m a nice guy,” the soldier said.

Della Torre shrugged. It wasn’t his money anyway.

“Pay the nice man twenty Deutschmarks,” he said to Rebecca. “It’s a tax.”

She paid.

“What’s this?” the soldier said, still picking through their things.

“Steak,” said della Torre.

“What do you need to bring steak for?”

“In case we get hungry.”

“It’s raw.”

“Tartare.”

“What?”

“That’s what they call raw chopped steak.”

“I thought that was called ground beef.”

“It’s ground beef if you cook it. Tartare if you eat it raw.”

He could see the soldier making a mental note. Americans were barbarians who didn’t cook their meat and didn’t bring with them anything worth stealing.

“The visas are irregular,” he said. Della Torre doubted that the Americans had got anything wrong. More likely they were going to be “taxed” further. “You and the lady can get into the truck. You’re going to drive to the border post. It’s two kilometres along this road. My corporal will be following you. And don’t think because you’re American you can get away with any funny business.”

Della Torre translated for Rebecca, adding, “I wouldn’t try that trick of running anybody over this time. Just keep it nice and easy.”

The other soldier backed the militia truck, a new-looking Land Rover with a spotless paint job, out of the way so that Rebecca could drive past. She drove slowly down the centre of the road, the Land Rover hard on their tail. They passed through the barren landscape; there were no buildings or signs, just road and rock. And then, from nowhere, a soldier sauntered onto the median line in front of them and signalled for them to turn off onto a dirt track. They followed into a little clearing, where they stopped at a tired farmhouse flying the Serb and Yugoslav flags.

Della Torre wondered how much effort the U.S. government would make on his behalf. As a native Yugoslav, he belonged to a diplomatic netherworld.

They parked and the soldier from the Land Rover took the keys from Rebecca. He was holding both of their passports. He walked them to the house, where they were made to wait on a dark-stained bench that was more a pew, in what had been someone’s sitting room. There wasn’t any other furniture. The only decoration was a framed picture of Mary, her radiant heart almost anatomical in its detail. Della Torre rubbed his hands on his trousers and made to stand up once or twice. Rebecca sat patiently, unperturbed.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, though it had felt much longer, before the soldier returned.

“You.” He pointed to della Torre. Rebecca stood up but the man told her to sit. Della Torre followed him to an upstairs room, what looked to have been a bedroom once, though now it was bare except for a desk and an old walnut wardrobe. And then he laughed out loud.

“Sergeant Major,” della Torre said, exhaling relief. He hadn’t seen his old sergeant major, the one who’d trained him in the commandos, for . . . he tried to remember. “How long has it been?” he said, taking the older man’s hand.

The sergeant major was in his late fifties. His moustache and his short-cropped hair were more salt than pepper, though he looked fitter than della Torre.

“Lieutenant Gringo. Must be at least six years. Maribor, wasn’t it?”

The sergeant major had long before retired from the army, but he’d never been good with money. Slipping into a senior position with the border police was a fine way of supplementing his meagre pension, what with the ad hoc taxes and fines he could levy, not to mention the occasional carton of cigarettes or soap powder that fell off the back of a truck.

“It’s major now,” della Torre said, smiling.

Of all the non-coms who’d kicked his ass during his army days, the sergeant major had been his favourite.

“Ah, forgive me, Major. Just goes to show how far brains will get you when you aren’t good for anything else.”

Della Torre shrugged good-naturedly.

“So, Gringo, what’s this about you being a spy? This thing real?” He waved della Torre’s American passport at him.

“Between you and me?” della Torre said, lowering his voice. The older man nodded. “It’s as real as a can of Coke.”

“Well, I always knew there was something funny about you. You were as useful as a three-legged donkey. Never knew why the commandos took you. Always did figure they were training you for a spy. So who are you working for?”

Della Torre nodded at the passport and reached into his wallet, pulling out his
UDBA
ID card.

“Well, that tells me everything and nothing. Good thing for you I was here.”

“You’ve been knocked down to guarding border posts at the arse end of the world,” della Torre said.

“At least it’s not Kosovo.” The sergeant laughed. “Gringo, this here is a world of shit. I was sent here to set up a border station, now that we’re different countries and all. Or I think we are, anyway.” Like most of the army’s professional classes, he was Serb. “And then suddenly these guys with the fancy shoulders drop in on us from hell knows where and decide to throw their weight around.”

“Who are they?”

“They call themselves the Wolves. They belong to a fellow named Gorki.”

“I know about him.”
And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

“They figure the Croats need a bit of sorting out around here. Who am I to tell them what to do when they’ve got Belgrade behind them? So they moved the border a bit farther up the valley and they tell everybody what to do. They made a little headquarters for themselves back there —” He pointed with his thumb behind him. “— and they play their games. Frankly I’m surprised they let you through without shooting you first.”

Della Torre nodded. “Any idea why they’re here? Last I heard they were pissing on Vukovar.”

“They’re there, they’re here. They’ve got more volunteers than they know what to do with. They call themselves patriots. But from what I’ve seen, they go to wherever they can smell money. Belgrade says they’re allowed to keep what they steal. And I guess he thinks there’ll be plenty enough to steal around here.”

“What? Rocks?”

“Rocks around here. Richer pickings in Dubrovnik.”

“They’re heading for Dubrovnik?”

“Who knows what happens when the ceasefire ends, eh? Between you and me and these four walls, the local militias have mobilized. They’re in the mountains, but they’re ready for something. The Yugoslav army is with them and they’ve got plenty of big guns. So your guess is as good as mine.”

“You going to let us through, Sergeant?”

“What’s your business, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t mind. To have dinner with an old
UDBA
colleague.”

“No spying?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’d like it to be none of my business and that if you get into trouble you don’t mention the fact that you know me.”

“Never saw you before in my life,” della Torre said.

“In that case, here’s your passports. No problem with the visas that I can see. Except the inking on them’s too good. Nobody stamps this neatly in any of our embassies.” He handed them over to della Torre, who smiled back. “I’m not being funny,” the older man continued, “but you’ve just got to watch these militia guys. They’re all amateurs, but some of them are vicious.”

“Criminals.”

“Exactly. Here, you can’t go without having a drink first.” The sergeant pulled out a bottle and a couple of glasses. “Maybe we should get your friend up here to join us.”

“She’s driving. Anyway, she’s a waste of good slivovitz.”

“Bottoms up.” They knocked back the scorching home-brewed alcohol and shook hands.

“When you coming back through?”

“Sometime late tonight.”

“Save it till the morning. Drive down this road at night, you’re liable to get shot at.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

• • •

Della Torre walked back down the stairs to the living room. Rebecca hadn’t shifted from her seat. She was smiling at Gorki’s militiaman. The soldier affected an air of cool detachment, but the blush on his neck gave him away.

Della Torre and Rebecca got back in the car and drove on, unimpeded. Della Torre explained what had happened.

“Stroke of luck my old sergeant is running the post.”

Rebecca said nothing.

“The Wolves are dangerous. We shouldn’t cross back over too late. We’ll have to eat and run,” he said. Surely the thought of being trapped on this side of the border would make her think twice about doing anything foolish.

“We’ll figure it out,” Rebecca said.

The road wound through the valley, and as they approached the coast they took the fork to Herceg Novi. Della Torre longingly watched the green sign pointing back towards Dubrovnik pass by. They drove unmolested. There was plenty of military traffic, though nothing like a general mobilization.

They skirted the port town, following the signs for Kotor. Once they got to the waterfront, all they had to do was go left. There was a single road, and that was the road they needed to be on. They crawled along for a while behind a horse-drawn wagon, its rubber wheels the only concession to the last decade of the twentieth century.

And then they reached the channel to the inner bay. Under leaden skies, the landscape was forbidding. Dark, cavernous mountain walls funnelled into what looked more like an alpine lake, belied only by the palms that lined the shore. A ceiling of cloud obscured the mountaintops, casting their slopes into black shadow, while tendrils of mist hung halfway between the peaks and the water. The late afternoon sun had broken below the cover, oozing bloody light.