The Heart of Hell Read online

  He and Strumbić took a turn around the building. A large gated archway led to a central courtyard, where they could see about a dozen top-end German and Italian cars and a couple of Zastavas that looked like beggars at a banquet. In the centre of the block, a great spreading chestnut tree officiated. Della Torre wondered whether its conkers dented the cars when they dropped in the autumn. All along his road in Zagreb, they fell with a sound like hail on shantytown tin roofs.

  The carriageway was also guarded, though the sentry boxes here were under the shelter of the entrance arch, behind the wrought-iron gates. Two foot patrols, each with a pair of uniformed police, made the rounds. And there was a patrol car at each of the building’s long ends.

  “Well, nice to see our masters take their security seriously,” Strumbić said.

  “I think maybe today we’ll go to that place across the road, have a coffee, and watch for their shifts to end,” della Torre said.

  “Well, we shouldn’t make it too obvious. I’d be surprised if the staff weren’t bosom buddies with the sentries.”

  There weren’t many pedestrians, and della Torre knew that if he and Strumbić loitered, they’d be clocked by the police and quite possibly asked to present documents. His UDBA ID definitely wouldn’t pass muster here, and when they found his Croatian military document, his circumstances would almost certainly become very unpleasant.

  “Maybe somewhere else,” Strumbić said as they were about to cross the road to the café. He stooped suddenly and pulled della Torre by the sleeve.

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Just keep your head down and walk fast. Remember that American who escorted me on the flight to Zagreb because Rebecca found me inconvenient in Dubrovnik? You know the guy, seemed to be running their whole show.”

  “John Dawes?”

  “That’s the man.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, but I don’t want to go back and ask.”

  They found another café with a worse line of sight but no other customers.

  “He’s probably just there for the coffee. The American embassy’s not too far away.”

  “Or an early morning beer,” della Torre said, lighting a cigarette and passing the packet to Strumbić.

  “Maybe he’s here for the weather.”

  “There are plenty of other leading ex-Communists who live in the building. He could be visiting any one of them.”

  “All of them.”

  Neither found the joke funny just then.

  They stared out the plate-glass window, straining to see the apartment building’s front door.

  “They’ve beaten us to him,” della Torre said.

  They both had the same thoughts. The Americans had tried to kill the Montenegrin. They were hunting for them both. After that, only Dragomanov would be left.

  “Or they’re keeping an eye on him. Or waiting for us to show up.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t delay our visit,” della Torre said. “Though it won’t be fun trying to figure out how to get in.”

  “You’ve got the apartment number, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we can work out approximately where he is.”

  “Third floor.”

  “The building’s a lot like mine,” Strumbić said. He lived in one of the best Hapsburg blocks in Zagreb. Most of the apartment buildings from that era were more like a collection of very large townhouses, separate buildings each with a front door leading to a staircase with two large or four small apartments on each floor. But Strumbić’s was an integrated block, big enough to have central corridors with larger apartments facing the street and smaller ones looking into the courtyard. The biggest apartments were at the ends of the corridors and faced both the street and the courtyard. Strumbić had one of those, and they were betting Dragomanov did too.

  “You know what?” said Strumbić. “Normally I’d have said let’s spend some time scouting the place, do some planning. But fuck it, Gringo, we haven’t got time. What we’ve got instead is money. You got your gun?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we have to settle our bill with the ladies,” Strumbić said. “Might as well get ourselves sorted there now. If things go tits up, we won’t want to hang around.”

  It was early and only two people were at the brothel, a middle-­aged receptionist and a girl barely out of her teens, sitting on the sofa and smoking a cigarette with her morning coffee. Strumbić drew the receptionist aside.

  “Janica, what do you know about that hairdressing salon . . .” he was saying as della Torre disappeared upstairs to their suite. He packed his few things and popped the Beretta into his jacket pocket, and then waited for Strumbić to sort himself out. They left their bags with the receptionist.

  “You know where to send them in case we can’t get back,” Strumbić said, passing the woman a fifty-Deutschmark bill.

  “You’ll be back,” she said with a wink and a smile. Their footsteps echoed down the stairwell as they left.

  Strumbić led them to a hair salon della Torre hadn’t noticed. It was one of the various shops set into the ground floor of Dragomanov’s building, around the corner from the main entrance to the apartments. The place was marked by a narrow, tall window in which an unlit neon Frizerka sign hung, along with a poster of a woman whose hairstyle was a 1970s Yugoslav imitation of 1960s British chic.

  Strumbić pushed the door to the left of the window and walked up the steps into the long, narrow salon. A woman sitting under a large dryer hood flicked her eyes towards them, and the youngest of the three hairdressers got out of her chair and gave them a bland, bored look. She, like the others, was wearing a baby-blue uniform dress with white piping. Her hair was cut straight in a bob that looked like a wig.

  “This is a ladies-only salon,” she said, the vowels rounded in what might have been mock elegance if they hadn’t sounded so earnest.

  “Is Mrs. Gavrilović here?”

  One of the older women stood up and approached him. “That’s me.”

  “Janica said you might be able to do me a favour.”

  She stared at him and then nodded. “We can have a cigarette outside,” she said.

  Della Torre stood, embarrassed, while Strumbić and the woman stepped out onto the pavement, out of sight of the main window. “Getting cold,” he said to the women there, who looked at him appraisingly, as an auctioneer might consider a prize steer.

  “Winter,” said the youngest of the three. “Every year it’s the same.”

  The other two laughed, and the girl said, “What?” Blushing, she turned her back to della Torre.

  He sat down on a red leatherette seat, but not for long. The woman Strumbić had been talking to came back in. “Your friend’s waiting for you,” she said.

  “What’s up?” della Torre asked, stepping back onto the pavement.

  “Now we wait for lunchtime. We’d better wait in that friendly café. I don’t feel like being stopped by a cop and having to explain why I’ve got a gun in my pocket.”

  So they sauntered over, behaving like any pair of Belgrade bureaucrats armed with newspapers and cigarettes.

  “So what do you tell Mrs. Strumbić?” della Torre asked, once they’d ordered sandwiches.

  “About what?”

  “About how much time you spend away. About how you’ve got more money than a pasha. About anything.”

  “I tell her whatever she’s willing to believe.”

  “And you think that’s enough.”

  “You ever hear the one about the guy whose wife tells him she’ll divorce him if he ever comes home drunk again? Well, he goes out and drinks most of the night and throws up on himself. His friend says, ‘Not to worry. Put a twenty-Deutschmark note in your pocket, and when you get home, you tell your wife that some stupid German tourist vomited on you
but gave you a twenty-Deutschmark note for the cleaning bill.’ So he goes home. Wife opens the door and is immediately outraged. But he holds up his hands and says how somebody threw up on him and gave him the money for the dry cleaning bill. ‘But you’ve got two twenty-Deutschmark notes,’ she says. ‘Ah,’ he replies, ‘the other one’s from the guy who shat in my trousers.’”

  Strumbić roared with laughter until the tears trickled out of the corners of his eyes, and della Torre found it impossible to resist the humour.

  At twelve thirty they left and went back to the hair salon. The older woman was waiting for them at the front door. Otherwise, it was empty.

  She led them in, and then to a door at the back. “You steal anything or tell anyone about this, and I’ll make sure Janica hears about it,” she said.

  The door opened into a stockroom that smelled of peroxide and perfume. Strumbić passed her two twenty-Deutschmark notes. His calling cards. Della Torre marvelled at how the cop hemorrhaged money without batting an eye.

  She found a key for a door that led to a very steep set of wooden stairs, switching on the light for them. “We don’t reopen until three. Make sure you’re out by then.”

  Strumbić didn’t reply.

  The cellar was low and smelled of damp. It hadn’t been used to store coal for at least a generation. Now it was filled with junk: a couple of old hairdresser’s chairs, dusty drying hood, boxes, paint pots, and a child’s bicycle. But the path to the little door at the back was clear. They walked through cobwebs.

  The back door had swollen into its frame so that it budged only when Strumbić put his shoulder to it. Cautiously they stepped into the courtyard. A buttress of wall hid them from the guards at the carriage gate, but they had to surface soon enough when they crossed the car park, the open space under the chestnut tree, to the building’s back door. Della Torre ducked between a Mercedes and a canvas-sided truck.

  “Get up,” Strumbić said.

  “The guards will see us.”

  “So what? It’s their business to keep people out, not to bother anybody who’s already in. For all they know, we came in through the main entrance and had to come out here for a smoke or to fetch something for whoever owns this car. Just act normally and they’ll mind their own business. But if you go scuttling around, they’re going to start wondering.”

  So they walked between the car and truck and then across the courtyard, as if in conversation. Not hurried but not aimless either.

  The back door was unlocked. It led down to the basement, and they stepped into a dimly lit low corridor bounded by storage rooms along both sides and ending at the bottom of the main stairwell. To climb up, they knew they’d be in sight of the guard at the desk just inside the main entrance. With hands in pockets, slightly stooped, they took the stairs looking as if they were talking about money. When they got to the first landing, they moved to the wall side, out of sight of the main doorway. It was all della Torre could do to stop himself from bolting. His heart pounded as though he was running it at a sprint.

  When they got to the landing they wanted, they followed a long corridor off the staircase, lit mostly by daylight. At the end they saw a door with a black plastic rectangle with the name Dragomanov engraved in white. It had three locks needing three different keys, one ordinary, two special security.

  “I guess we either knock on the door or break it down,” della Torre said.

  Strumbić knelt at the door. “Gringo, you stand facing the hallway, give me a bit of cover.”

  “What are you going to do, slip yourself through the keyhole?”

  “Something like that.”

  Della Torre saw he had a ring of keys in his hand and then realized it was a set of lock picks.

  “Eyes on the corridor,” Strumbić said.

  “That’ll be fine for the simple lock, but those picks won’t work for the security locks.”

  “They don’t have to. Didn’t you tell me that a nurse comes once a day, and so does the housekeeper or whatever she is?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are the chances a nurse or housekeeper triple-locks behind them when visiting? What are the chances he gives them copies of the security keys? He’ll make it secure at night. But if people are coming and going, it’s just going to be this one.”

  Strumbić worked quickly while he spoke, manoeuvring the pins in the mechanism.

  “Two one-point-five-millimetre hex keys do the trick, one straight and one curved. I keep them with a couple of bump keys. If I can’t pick them I can bump them open, if they’re standard types. Crowbar works best for security locks,” he said. The lock clicked and he pulled down the handle, pushing the door silently.

  “Old people are always being burgled because old people’s places are usually easy to break into,” Strumbić continued. “No matter how many locks they have on their doors.”

  They stepped into the apartment’s long, high central corridor. Strumbić shut the front door behind him as quietly as he’d opened it. Rooms led off along both sides of the hall. The floor was a polished parquet with a long Persian runner, and on the walls were coat hooks and a shoe rack, followed by gilt-framed mirrors and a couple of dark paintings. One of a pair of double doors immediately to the right was open a fraction. Strumbić, gun in hand, pulled it wider and sidled in. He stepped back out, shaking his head. The door on the opposite side was to a storeroom. They walked along the corridor slowly. The following door was open, showing a dated but well-furnished kitchen with a big window overlooking the internal courtyard, a row of potted plants covering its sill.

  The next room was connected to the first one Strumbić had looked into, and to the following one as well. A sitting room opening onto a formal dining room. They were both furnished with massive, overstuffed Biedermeier bookcases in bird’s-eye maple, a matching table, and 1930s sofas and chairs. Both were also unoccupied.

  They found Dragomanov in the room after that. The old man turned, startled, when della Torre opened the door.

  “YOU — BUT YOU’RE not to come until this afternoon. How did you get in?” the old man said.

  It took some effort for della Torre to recognize Dragomanov, the man at Tito’s side in photographs, in the background of Tito’s meetings with foreign leaders, in the glossy centre pages of books about the war and about the foundation of the Yugoslav socialist paradise. Only a shadow of that once famous Dragomanov remained in the frail shell before them.

  He rose, stooped, leaning back against his grand desk. His thinning hair was as white and wispy as spun sugar. The man was gaunt, his skin and eyes yellow, and his arms so thin that the bones of his wrists protruded awkwardly below the loose cuffs of his flannel shirt. Against that fragile skeleton, the round, distended belly looked absurd. His hold on life seemed as tenuous as a withered autumn leaf’s. The wind wouldn’t blow hard or long before it carried him away.

  Yet his voice and manner still conveyed authority. “You’ve no right to be here so early,” he said again as Strumbić followed della Torre into the room.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Dragomanov,” della Torre said.The old man looked confused. “They said an American was coming.”

  “That’s me.”

  “But I was led to believe you didn’t speak Serbo-Croat.”

  “Well, I do,” della Torre said. “This is Mr. Smirnoff.”

  “Russian? Bulgarian?”

  “Neither.”

  “And your name is?”

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Dragomanov.”

  “I would like to see some identification,” Dragomanov said, frail but unyielding. Slowly, glacially, he retreated behind his desk, putting the massive piece of furniture between himself and the men.

  “Mr. Dragomanov, we don’t have time —” Della Torre stopped short as Strumbić moved to intercept the old man.

  “Will this d
o?” Strumbić asked, halting Dragomanov’s progress with his Beretta. “Do you mind moving out from behind the desk? Wouldn’t want you accidentally treading on an alarm button or just happening to find a gun in a drawer. Too many temptations.”

  “You’ve come to threaten me?”

  “Only a little,” della Torre said. “We’ve also come to warn you. There are men who we suspect would like you dead.”

  “Mr. . . . whoever you are, there have always been men who want me dead. And as far as I can tell, you do too. Who are you?”

  “My name is della Torre. Does that ring any bells?”

  Dragomanov went momentarily rigid and then settled heavily in the nearest armchair. His breath caught in his throat.

  “So you know who I am,” della Torre said, taking an overstuffed club chair opposite the old man. Strumbić continued to make a slow circuit of the room, taking an interest in objects on the shelves and papers on the broad desk, like a curious child in the presence of a dull adult conversation.

  Dragomanov said nothing. His jaundiced, hollow eyes were wide, expressing something between fear and wonder.

  “I’ve not come to kill you,” della Torre said. “Only to ask you some questions.”

  “How did you get in here? Where did you get the key?”

  “That’s not relevant.”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Everyone’s for sale these days, eh? Was it the nurse?”

  “We don’t have much time. Other people are coming. What is it about the Pilgrim file that the Americans don’t want us to know?”

  Dragomanov barked a short laugh and then coughed until his eyes were wet with tears.

  “Would you like some water?” della Torre asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, his breathing settling into short, quick gasps. “I don’t know which of my diseases will get me first.” Slowly, he caught his breath. “Pilgrim, eh?”

  “Pilgrim,” della Torre started again. “It’s the file that made you set those Bosnian killers on me. You know they were amateurs, don’t you?”