Killing Pilgrim (42 page)

“I seem to have left them in my office. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Try anything stupid and the officer outside will have something to say about it,” Brg said and left the room.

Strumbić counted twenty seconds after the door shut and then reached forward for the phone on the interview table. He picked up the handset. It was for cops to make internal calls only. But internal calls could be switched through to other police stations — it was one of the country’s few communication systems that actually worked properly.

Strumbić called the Zagreb police department’s automated switchboard. Once he had a connection, he dialled the code to get an external line. And then, from memory, the private number he needed. Easy.

The phone rang. And rang. Della Torre didn’t answer.

Strumbić figured he had five minutes. Maybe ten at most. He held the phone to his good cheek with his shoulder, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a packet of Lords and a transparent orange imitation Bic lighter.

Brg’s Lords and Brg’s cheap plastic lighter.

As the phone continued to ring, he checked the contents of Brg’s wallet and took out a couple of thousand dinars, just in case he needed money to bribe the guards. He didn’t know how long he’d be a guest of the Dubrovnik police. But he left enough that Brg wouldn’t immediately suspect he’d been robbed, and then he flipped the wallet under the table so that it sat just under the detective’s chair.

Strumbić had spent years perfecting his pickpocketing and lock-picking skills, which he had learned from the masters. Thieves as good as the Serb Borra, who’d become famous travelling around Europe in circuses, entertaining people with his magic: his ability to take watches off men’s wrists; ties from around their necks; hell, even glasses from their faces, without their noticing. Strumbić’s gypsies were just as good. Only for some reason they’d never managed to become as rich as Borra.

Where are you, Gringo?

He pressed down the receiver. He had to find somebody to get a message to della Torre. Anzulović? No, too risky.

He dialled another number. A squeaky voice answered.

“Hey, doll, it’s Julius.”

“Yes?”

“Listen, it’s urgent. I need a favour from you.”

“Julius? No one here by that name. I’m afraid you have the wrong number,” she said, hanging up.

“Bitch,” Strumbić said aloud, grinding the cigarette butt onto the linoleum floor. This time, he’d really sort her out. Like he’d done for her cop boyfriend. Even now it galled Strumbić to think that one of his own men, one of his own police officers, had been sleeping with his mistress in the secret little apartment Strumbić had set up for her. He gave her money and she’d done the dirty on him. Stupid cow. And now she refused to help him.

For some stupid, sentimental reason he’d let her stay in the place after finding out her deceit. He was too soft. No, it was her tits that were too soft to give up. But Strumbić’d made sure the squaddie got busted down to traffic — and then, when cops were being transferred into the civil defence force, Croatia’s proto-army, that he was sent to the front line in Vukovar.

He wouldn’t forgive her again, though. He’d sort her out properly this time. He’d put her back on the street, where he’d found her.

His mental clock was ticking down. Three minutes? Four, tops? There was one last chance. One last call. He had to make it count. He knew he had no other choice. He’d do it only as an act of desperation. Not just because he’d rather have his teeth knocked out with a chisel than talk to his wife, but because he knew they’d be monitoring his home phone.

“It’s me.”

“Where are you?” Her voice grated on him like steel on slate. “Light in the toilet has gone again, and all sorts of people have been trying to get in touch with you. Phoning non-stop. Constantly at the door.”

“Listen. Take a message, will you.” He tried not to raise his voice, tried not to yell.

“Minute you leave the apartment, that light stops working. What did you do to it? You rig it up to make me miserable, don’t you? Have to use candles. A month you’ve been gone without word.”

“Will you shut your trap and just listen for a minute, woman,” he hissed. He could see her pinched face, top lip pursed under her sharp nose as if she’d detected a bad smell. Her thin frame, desiccated by a lifetime of bitter complaint. How many times had he told himself that if it wasn’t for her strudel he’d have left her long before?

“Don’t you be swearing at me. If my father was still alive, you’d be watching your tongue.”

“Well, the old thug isn’t, is he?” he said, exasperated. “Will you just for once in your life stop yammering at me and listen?”

“So that’s how it is, eh? What’s next? You going to beat me? You going to break my arm like Franz down the way did to his old woman? Knocked her right into hospital and left her blacker than blue. Only last week . . .”

Strumbić felt every second evaporating with a pulse of cold dread. He’d have happily beaten her. He’d have beaten her for twenty years now. But not while the old man, Zagreb’s thuggish ex-chief of police, had been alive. No, not now either. If he’d ever laid a hand on her, he knew she’d cut his throat in the night. And no one would blame her.

He caught himself. Forced himself to be calm. Forced his voice to become even, neutral, pleasant.

“I’m sorry, darling. Really, I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot. I will get a good electrician in to look at the light. A proper one, not like the monkey last time.”

“And a new washing machine . . .”

“And a new washing machine. Could you please do me a favour? Please?”

“And all sorts have been looking for you.”

“Who?” he asked.

“How do I know? Police,” she said. “Detectives. People. Past couple of days.”

Anyone trying to discover who he was phoning would only be able to trace this call to the Zagreb police department. But he’d still have to be careful about what he said.

“Can we get back to that favour?”

“What?” She didn’t sound mollified, but it was an opening.

“Could you please write this down?”

“I’ll remember it.”

“Please could you write it down.”

“I’ll remember,” she said. “My memory’s as sharp as it was when I was seventeen, and when I was seventeen I could recite, verbatim —”

“Okay, okay,” he said, trying to hide the exasperation in his voice. “Use that seventeen-year-old memory. Can you get in touch with Marko della Torre? He’s in military intelligence. My new office. Get in touch with him, get a message to him. Tell him I’m with our colleagues —” He paused, trying to think of something della Torre would understand that no one else would. “— near that Italian staircase he liked so much.”

Della Torre had marvelled at the staircase in Strumbić’s villa on Šipan Island. He’d know that the Italian staircase meant down south and that the colleagues were the Dubrovnik cops.

“Why can’t they get in touch with him if they’re colleagues?”

He felt a hot, wet tear on his cheek. It was as much as he could do to control himself. “It’s an undercover job. Top secret. Inside stuff.”

He could almost hear her snap to attention. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? A top cop’s daughter knew her duty.

“Della Torre,” she said.

“Tell him that I’m a guest of our colleagues but I’m using my pub name.”

“Your name’s a pub?”

“My pub name.”

“Your pub name?”

“Yes. He’ll know what I mean. That’s as much as I can say.” Smirnoff was the name he’d used in London. Della Torre knew all about that. And pubs were found in London.

“I’ll make sure he gets the message,” she said, all efficiency.

He heard the door open behind him and put his hand on the phone’s kill switch without saying goodbye to his wife. For once, he knew she’d do as she was told.

“Calling someone, Mr. Smirnoff?” Brg asked.

“I was just about to ask them to page you. I was starting to feel lonely.”

Brg nodded and went round to sit on his side of the table. As he pulled out his chair, he stopped for a second and stared down at his feet. He bent over, picking up his wallet. He slid it back into his pocket without looking at the contents and sat down, staring at Strumbić with a strained expression.

“Did you manage to find some cigarettes?” Strumbić asked, as sweet as candy floss.

“Why don’t we get back to those questions, Mr. Smirnoff? I don’t have a lot of time to waste on you. I’ve got three dead Americans to worry about.”

For the first time that morning, Strumbić felt a chill. He didn’t like the way the detective said “Smirnoff.” Nor did he like that the number of dead Americans had risen to three.

In the back of the patrol car the night he was arrested, he’d listened to the cops talking about the two dead Americans on Šipan. They were keeping an eye out for anyone making the crossing from the island. The mention of dead Americans had quieted Strumbić, made him think twice about revealing who he was.

He’d been dealing with some Americans on an official job only days earlier, while setting up his distinctly unofficial CD-smuggling scheme. In fact, one of them had stayed at his villa on Šipan. She still had the keys to the place. Two dead Americans on Šipan. A third now.

He had nothing to do with their deaths. But it wasn’t something he wanted to argue from a jail cell. He knew it would be hung on him, on Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, unless they found out what had really happened. And as far as he could tell, they had no clue.

Strumbić hadn’t a scintilla of doubt that della Torre was somehow tied in with the deaths. Della Torre would have to get him out of the mess. Just as well then that, however much trouble della Torre kept landing in Strumbić’s lap, he was also the only man Strumbić trusted with his life.

“I don’t really know how I can help, Detective,” Strumbić said, helping himself to one of the cigarettes Brg held out, not allowing himself to show any of the unease he felt. “Like I said, I was fishing and suddenly found myself in the middle of the O.K. Corral.”

The Dubrovnik detective rifled through a second file he’d brought into the room, pulled out a sheet, and contemplated it for a long, quiet moment. He raised his tired eyes, took a final long drag on his cigarette, and trapped the other man in his gaze. Strumbić’s amusement at having so thoroughly picked the other man’s pockets faded a little. His certainty of having found a safe haven, a comfortable little hideaway, was evaporating. He found himself feeling increasingly unsettled. It wasn’t an emotion he was used to. Brg ground out the cigarette in a cheap tin ashtray.

The Dubrovnik detective contemplated the man in front of him, more seriously than he had less than half an hour earlier.

Brg had gone back up to his office, pissed off at the petty smuggler he was having to deal with when all he wanted was sleep and then to report back to Zagreb that the American redhead had been found.

Brg was sure that in his tiredness, he’d left both his cigarettes and lighter on the ferry. He got another pack out from the carton he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. But
the spare matches he had to hunt for on his desk.

It was while he was shifting the papers that the roll of fax paper with the dead woman’s photograph fell on the floor. He picked it up and it unspooled. As he looked down the pages, folding them so that they’d fit more neatly into the file, his eye lighted on a photograph of a man: middle-aged, greying, receding hairline, flabby face, and tired eyes. Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, formerly detective lieutenant with the Zagreb police. Missing, wanted in connection with the deaths of two men in a villa on the island of Šipan and a suspect in the disappearance of the American woman Rebecca Vees, now in an Italian morgue. He must have seen Strumbić’s photograph a dozen times before without noticing it. It was fuzzy, barely bigger than passport-sized. Unlike the woman’s picture, it hadn’t been posted anywhere in the station. No one else in the force had seen the picture. Why? Because the note next to the photograph said the suspect had probably fled the country, most likely destination Italy or the United Kingdom.

England. Marks & Spencer.

Seeing the picture now was like a shot of slivovitz injected into a vein.

Detective Brg brought the incriminating fax with him to the interview room. He sat comparing the photograph with the man in front of him for long minutes. The other man didn’t break the silence. Brg’s eyes prickled from the cigarette smoke and fatigue. At last he spoke, quietly, without aggression.

“Why don’t we stop playing games, Detective Lieutenant. Or is it Captain Julius Strumbić?”

Brg gave Strumbić credit for not betraying any emotion. Strumbić merely smiled.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken, Detective. My name is Smirnoff.”

He turned the fax towards Strumbić.

“This piece of paper says it isn’t.”

Strumbić leaned forward and pulled the thin thermal paper across the stained blond wood table, turned it with three fingers, and considered.

“It’s a reasonable likeness, though it’s a pretty small picture and not particularly clear. Could be me. Could be any one of a hundred men within a kilometre of here. What did you say you want the man for?”

“As a witness, probable accessory, or possible perpetrator of three murders.”

“Three? The Americans? Sounds like a dangerous fellow. But like I said, it’s not me.”

“What do you say, Mr. Strumbić, would you like to have a friendly chat with me or do you want to wait for the Zagreb investigators? I hear they’re a lot less friendly. Plenty of former
UDBA
types.”

Silence. The
UDBA
was Yugoslavia’s hated former secret police. Strumbić knew more than a few of them. Like della Torre.

“What I don’t get is if you killed those men, why, just a couple of days later, you’d want to be smuggling stuff onto a dock in a village on the opposite side of the channel,” Brg continued. “I mean, you don’t strike me as being stupid. They don’t make stupid people detectives in the Zagreb force, do they?”

“Detective, those are all very good questions. But you’re asking the wrong guy.”