The Heart of Hell Page 32

  After coming back from America, he and his father had rebuilt the house with frantic urgency. It was the only means for his father to survive his wife’s death, and now it was decaying. The stones would outlast them. They’d survived seven generations and would stand, one on the other, for seven more. But the wood was slowly rotting under loose roof tiles. Plaster crumbled. The roots of a great vine dislodged mortar and lifted the packed dirt of the cellar floor.

  Maybe, if he were lucky, della Torre could grow old in that house with his books and music, a solitary man with the taste of a nineteenth-century Sicilian aristocrat.

  He came back to the present when the middle-aged woman sitting next to him in that dark hospital corridor spoke. “I remember my mother telling me how during the Second World War my eighteen-year-old sister died, my father died, my grandparents died, the baby in my mother’s arms died,” she said. “And I remember thinking to myself, Dear God, I could never survive that. And yet here I am. The same has come to pass for me and I’m still alive.”

  Della Torre looked at her lined, exhausted face and wondered what survived of the person she had been only a few months before.

  This thought was interrupted by an outcry at the hospital’s entrance: “Come, quick. We need hands.” The urgency of the appeal galvanized della Torre and a handful of other waiting men.

  Dawn had broken; the skies had cleared and it was a beautiful late autumn morning. They crossed an open patch of ground on the north side of the hospital and went up a wide road towards the Eltz Palace, keeping out of the line of fire. The grand baroque building was surrounded by lawns and set back from the road. Its plastered faÇade, still an imperial yellow where it survived, had largely been peeled back to rough red brick. The ancient chestnut trees on its grounds had been butchered by shellfire into sad, twisted stumps.

  “This way.” The soldier waved them over. Rocket-propelled grenades fizzed past them, sending up clots of earth when they hit parkland. From farther away they heard a howitzer’s deep bellow, its shells thankfully dropping somewhere in the main part of town, behind them.

  They found their way to the building’s cellars. The early-­morning light penetrated through the caved-in roof into a grotto not even Bosch could have depicted. The floor was awash, ankle-deep, in wine that had burst from giant barrels. The room looked like a cistern of blood. And then della Torre realized there really was blood mixed in with the wine. Deep scarlet was seeping from the torn bodies of women and children lying in that shallow, infernal pool. Their pale, pinched faces betrayed their final moments of pain.

  Body of Christ. Blood of Christ.

  The militiaman had been mistaken. There was no one left to save. Della Torre staggered out of the building into the shelter of a corner and sank into a crouch, disbelieving the horror of what he’d just seen. He left the others to deal with the carnage and the burials.

  The hospital had swung into full gear when he got back. He made his way to the nurses’ station in the basement, a Maginot Line between the doctors and unsorted patients. On learning who della Torre was, a kind orderly took pity on him and led him to the small lounge set aside for the doctors to take their rare breaks. Both Irena and David Cohen were there, playing cards laid out on the cushion between them.

  Della Torre smiled at Irena and then, uncertainly, at Cohen, who rose from the other end of the sofa, scattering the cards.

  “Doctor,” della Torre said, holding out his hand after bending to give Irena a half-kiss.

  “Marko,” Cohen replied. He was tall, slightly stooped. His hair was cut very short, showing a widow’s peak. His nose was a beak in a thin face, his eyes deep-set behind a pair of small, round glasses. His Adam’s apple protruded prominently from above the open collar of his shirt. He was close-shaven, exposing a reddish rash along his right jawline. He took della Torre’s hand gently. “How’s your elbow?”

  “A bit stiff still, and my left arm’s noticeably weaker than the right one, but it seems pretty healed up.”

  “The strength will come back as long as you exercise, but I’m afraid some of the flexibility may be gone permanently.”

  Della Torre shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I only ever used that arm to fill my shirtsleeve.”

  Cohen smiled politely.

  “Sit down, Marko,” Irena said, pointing him to a sofa on the opposite side. “We’ve caught up on some sleep. The cards are an excuse not to think for ten minutes, while the operating theatre is prepped.”

  She spoke in clear but accented English. Della Torre replied in the same language, out of politeness to Cohen. “When was the last time you got out?” he asked.

  “We take turns touring the bomb shelters,” Cohen said.

  “I meant out of Vukovar.”

  “Shopping in Paris, lunching in Rome? We’ll get around to it eventually,” Irena said lightly.

  “You’ll get rickets, sitting around in your caves.”

  Irena laughed. “Rickets in here or shell splinters out there.”

  “Which is the main reason I’m here,” della Torre said.

  “You’re our fix of vitamin D?” Irena said, her voice more arch than amused. “Marko, my little ray of sunshine.”

  “Irena, you need to leave Vukovar. And you too, Dr. Cohen. The town can’t survive another couple of days. The militia are leaving.”

  “We know, Marko,” Irena said quietly. “It’s the end of the road. But we’ll be safe in the hospital.”

  “They’ve been targeting the hospital with artillery from day one.”

  “The international observers will make sure we’re safe. And we’ll just have to stick up for ourselves against the soldiers.”

  “It’s not the Yugoslav army that’s coming, Irena. It’s Gorki’s Wolves, the Chetniks. I know what they’re like —”

  “Marko, we can’t abandon our patients. And we encouraged the militia to leave. There’ll be less fighting. It will make things easier, cleaner.”

  “Look, martyrdom is all good and fine in the history books, but . . .” Della Torre threw up his hands. But what?

  “I have no intention of being a martyr, nor does David. And the decision to stay and work here is ours alone.” She looked at David, who smiled, almost shyly, in return. He stood.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “I need to find some clean scrubs. It was good to see you, Marko. Take care of yourself. We’ll do the same here.”

  The men shook hands, awkwardly but with real warmth.

  “We’ll see you in Zagreb,” she said to della Torre when David Cohen had left. “In a few days or a week, but it won’t be long.”

  “Irena —”

  “I know, Marko. I promise, I’ll take care of myself.”

  “I was going to say I love you.”

  “I know that too.”

  He hugged her, feeling her small bones against him. A bird trapped in a city’s apocalyptic cage.

  He prayed she was right.

  He kissed Irena again. Then he left the hospital, led by the boy who would take him to Boban and the way out of Vukovar.

  BOBAN WAS IN command of a group of about forty militiamen, joined by della Torre, Strumbić, and Plavi, who was now wearing a dress with a green geometric pattern over a checked shirt and blue jeans, the outfit completed with a blonde wig. “Camouflage for the cornfields,” he explained.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to della Torre as they marched off through the ruins of Vukovar to the beat of thumping shells and rocket-propelled grenades. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident . . .”

  Della Torre couldn’t assuage the boy’s guilt.

  The ragged troupe varied in age; some were teenagers not much older than Plavi, while others were approaching middle age. Everyone was dirty; their clothes, odd assortments of military and civilian, were torn. Most, though, had managed to keep their rifles. Della Torre patted the
Beretta in his pocket.

  One big young fellow with pale eyebrows and lashes reminded della Torre of the oxen that were rapidly disappearing from Istrian farms, baggy white creatures, placid and calm as if always ready for the yoke or the slaughterhouse.

  They reached the battered end of the town, which was marked by a cluster of farm buildings. Farther across the fields stood a concrete grain silo. Unmilked cows bellowed in their swollen agony from relatively undamaged sheds.

  “Have to get someone in to deal with them after dark,” Boban said. “The yard’s in the line of sight of a sniper. He’s been a pain in the ass for three days now, but we can’t get to him. You can’t see him. He’s over in those trees about a kilometre away.”

  Della Torre was focused on what looked like a pair of fallen mannequins in the field just beyond the barns. Corpses. One was being nuzzled by a pig. A pair of chickens pecked warily at the other, scattering whenever the pig raised its head and grunted.

  “What a death. What a way to finish life, being eaten by your livestock,” Strumbić said.

  “Have you got a cigarette?” della Torre asked. “I’m all out.”

  “Here, keep the pack.” Strumbić passed della Torre a mostly empty packet of Lords. “I’ve got another one, though I tell you, it’s been work to find them. Cost me twenty Deutschmarks.”

  “Not too bad for a packet of cigarettes, all things considered,” della Torre said. They’d become a de facto currency and were in painfully short supply.

  “A packet? Try each cigarette,” Strumbić said, though he wasn’t complaining, just stating a fact.

  “Fuck. I’ve never tasted a twenty-Deutschmark cigarette before.”

  “You’ll find that knowing how much they cost makes even shitty Lords taste like Havana cigars.”

  Boban turned to the men. “This is the most dangerous area. We go in two groups, in pairs, up the road to that cornfield over there. Once we’re in, it’s reasonably safe. Corn won’t stop a bullet, but the snipers can’t see you. It’ll be different when they start using heavy machine guns. They’ll figure it out one day, but for now we’re all right.”

  Della Torre nodded. He and Plavi were in the second group. They stooped, running low and hard. Blood pumped in della Torre’s ears, and his heaving breath deafened him to any other sounds. The high corn was a blessed sanctuary, and he slowed down, winded.

  A soldier posted just inside the cornfield wouldn’t let him stop. “Never know when they’re going to start dropping shells. If the sniper had half a brain he’d have called in the artillery, but all he does is sit there and take potshots.”

  They met up with the others at the end of a wide path, deep in the crop.

  “Only just sighted us when I was coming through,” Boban said between gasped breaths. He’d been the last of the squad. “I swear I heard the bullet whistle past my ear.”

  They went deeper into the cornfield, single file along the rows. They waited in a crouch at the edge of a narrow wood and then moved through it quickly and silently.

  “Serbs have been using the wood as a screen,” Boban said.

  After walking a while, they forded a long, zigzagging drainage ditch. Della Torre slipped on muddy grass and half-fell. His right leg was sodden to the crotch.

  They heard bullets whistle through the corn nearby, like deadly insects, and overhead the screech of shells destined for the town and the thudding of the guns.

  It was in the depths of another field that Plavi fell. When della Torre reached down to help him up, he saw the clot of blood, as thick and bright as strawberry jam, on the boy’s face.

  “Boban,” he called, his voice high with fear. “We’ve got a casualty.”

  Boban rushed back while the whole troop stopped.

  “Spread out. Stay down and low, and shut up,” Boban ordered.

  He and della Torre checked Plavi’s vital signs. The boy was still breathing, but the side of his head was a bloody mess. Boban tore open his kit bag and pulled out a big block of gauze and a bandage, working fast to put on the compress.

  “Shit,” he said. He raised his head and looked around. “We have to keep going. He’ll get better care in Vinkovci than in Vukovar. If he makes it that far.”

  Boban called in a terse report on his radio. They improvised a stretcher with rifles and a pair of jackets. The boy was slight and easy for four men to carry, even in the makeshift litter.

  “Poor kid,” della Torre kept saying. And then, to Strumbić: “He was so traumatized by shooting Dragomanov’s nephew.”

  “Probably,” Strumbić said.

  “He was clearly still in shock this morning,” della Torre said. “It was a horrific accident for a fourteen-year-old.”

  “He might have been in shock, but it was no accident. The safety was on and there was no bullet in the chamber when I gave him the gun. I did it on purpose so he wouldn’t accidentally shoot us when we came back into the room. He was understandably jumpy.”

  Della Torre fell back half a stride, taking in the revelation. “So he did it on purpose?”

  “Unless he accidentally switched off the safety, accidentally chambered the bullet, accidentally aimed from around three feet away, and then accidentally pulled the trigger. There was a scorch mark at the entry wound. At first I thought it might have been from the kerosene lamp burn, but it didn’t quite fit. And Dragomanov’s nephew certainly didn’t threaten him. He was out cold from a combination of shock and codeine.”

  “But why?”

  “Why? Have you had a good look at this fucking place? It’s a mystery why people don’t rip chunks of flesh off each other with their teeth,” Strumbić said. “How do you keep even a margin of civilization in these circumstances? The kid probably wondered what it was like to kill a man, and here was a golden opportunity.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Jesus is dead, Gringo. Don’t you remember your Communist catechism?”

  The jog through the cornfield was hard work. The ground was rough, tripping them up. Every five minutes the stretcher bearers rotated, though Boban took more than his share of the duty.

  As they marched, two other men were hit. One was wounded slightly, while the other, the big, blond, bovine one whom della Torre had noticed earlier, was killed instantly. They carried his body too.

  The sun rose and began to dip again, and della Torre started to wonder how much longer his shoulders would be able to bear his regular stints carrying the wounded and the dead.

  Boban’s men were uncomplaining. And of them all, Boban worked the hardest.

  And then, when della Torre had grown convinced that the journey had no end, they reached a road guarded by a Croat defence force platoon. A couple of hundred metres beyond was a hamlet with a local command post. Medics loaded Plavi and the other injured man into an ambulance that was waiting for them. The dead man was zipped into a heavy black body bag, with his light haversack placed at his feet. A neat row of about twenty bodies was lined up on the verge, waiting for transport. The militia who had escaped earlier in the day had been slaughtered when a stray Yugoslav shell hit them less than a kilometre from the hamlet. A few were civilians.

  Behind them, in Vukovar, the noise of the bombardment continued, but here they were safe among dozens of defence force soldiers and auxiliaries. Della Torre was just taking a long swallow of slivovitz when he heard a familiar voice.

  “Nice to have you back in one piece, Gringo.”

  Anzulović smiled softly, smoking one of his usual Lords. But rather than offer one to della Torre, instead he produced an unopened packet of della Torre’s own brand: Lucky Strikes. “I figured you would have had a hard time finding these in the past few days. We heard that you got to Vukovar and that Boban was getting you out.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. Thanks,” della Torre said as he took the packet.

  Anzulović sta
red at the smoke rising over Vukovar, only fifteen kilometres away. “You wonder how anyone can survive that . . .” He turned back to della Torre. “We lost you after Dubrovnik. We didn’t hear you’d been through Herzeg Novi until after you left.” Anzulović took a drag of his cigarette. “I was told that the Montenegrin died yesterday.”

  Della Torre winced.

  “The Americans finally got news that he was in hospital. They had people there . . . From what I understand, he was already on the way out. His organs had packed up. Septic shock.”

  Della Torre moved away from the collection of houses towards the cornfield, where there were fewer people about. He turned abruptly to Anzulović. “How long have you been helping the Americans?”

  “I don’t know myself. I get orders, and I mostly do as I’m told.”

  “So said all the concentration camp guards.”

  “Gringo, I like you. I always have. You won’t thank me, but I figured if I was the guy doing the Americans’ bidding, you’d at least have someone looking out for you.” Anzulović turned around to face the hamlet. Della Torre followed his line of sight. Grimston and two other men stood apart from the clusters of Croatian militiamen. Casual, aloof. Observers. They stared at him without acknowledging him, though della Torre wondered whether there was a look of smug satisfaction on Grimston’s face. “So, rather than let them shoot you or kidnap you where they could stick you in a military jail and leave you to rot forever, I pointed out that with your cooperation they’d be able to get Strumbić and the Montenegrin. And then maybe we’d discuss some terms to get you off the hook.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Speaking of Julius, where is he?”

  Della Torre looked around. It struck him that he hadn’t seen Strumbić since they’d emerged from the cornfield. He could see Anzulović growing uneasy at his puzzlement.

  “Boban said Strumbić was coming out too,” Anzulović said.

  “He was with us,” della Torre said, still trying to spot the man.