Belgrade Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS

  Underneath It All Runs the River of Sadness

  Oto Oltvanji

  Block 45, New Belgrade

  An Ad in Večernje Novosti

  Kati Hiekkapelto

  Fontana, New Belgrade

  How to Pickle a Head of Cabbage

  Vesna Goldsworthy

  Knez Mihailova Street

  Undermarket

  Mirjana Đurđević

  Vračar

  PART II: THE DARK CORNER

  A Different Person

  Vladan Matijević

  King Aleksandar Boulevard

  Black Widow, White Russian

  Muharem Bazdulj

  Palilula

  Regarding the Father

  Vladimir Arsenijević

  Topčiderska Zvezda

  PART III: ONCE UPON A TIME

  Neon Blues

  Dejan Stojiljković

  The Manjež

  The Case of Clerk Hinko, a Noose, and Luminal

  Miljenko Jergović

  Maršala Birjuzova Street

  Phantom of the National Theater

  Aleksandar Gatalica

  Republic Square

  The Man Who Wasn’t Mars

  Vule Žurić

  Pioneer Park

  PART IV: KISS ME DEADLY

  The Touch of Evil

  Verica Vincent Cole

  Lekino Brdo

  Alter Ego Inc.

  Goran Skrobonja

  Učiteljsko Naselje

  The RAT

  Misha Glenny

  Dorćol

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  The Dark Side of the White City

  It was summer 1997, two years after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, and two years before the war in Kosovo and NATO’s bombardment of Belgrade. Serbia was under sanctions and life was difficult. I had been working as a journalist for two short months when my editor sent me to cover the suicide of a famous Serbian painter. The crime scene was terrifying—in front of the elevator lay the body of the artist covered in blood. In one hand, he held a plastic bag containing the bread and milk he had purchased just a few minutes before in a nearby supermarket, and in the other he gripped a pistol that was still pressed against his forehead. Neighbors told us that just a few moments before he had sat in a kafana, drinking šljivovica. As I continued documenting the scene, a brand-new red Mazda pulled up and parked in front of the building. Two neat, clean-shaven, dangerous-looking men in very expensive suits exited the car, approached the policemen conducting the investigation, and showed their Serbian secret service IDs.

  “Keep doing your job, we’re here on other business,” they said. The police officers stepped aside, allowing the men to enter the building. A few minutes later the agents reemerged accompanied by one of, at the time, the biggest stars of turbo-folk music. Dressed in a luxurious coat, and caked in makeup, her high heels elegantly stepped through the blood pooled in front of the elevator. She paid no attention to the macabre scene accented by the fresh dead body lying in front of her as she entered the red Mazda.

  If you read the previous paragraph, and you fully comprehended it—recognized turbo-folk, reminisced about your favorite kafana, recalled the sort of sanctions Serbia lived under, and remembered why one European capital was bombed in 1999—then you will find it easy to understand the fourteen short noir stories in this anthology. If you did not, this will be a great opportunity to learn about and understand the city that Momo Kapor, one of the most famous Serbian authors, described as “a low-budget New York.”

  Short stories best describe the time in which they are set. John Selden, an English lawyer and scholar, said, “[T]ake a straw and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels.” The historical facts of a time period fail to properly encapsulate the human experience when compared to the fictional works of the same era.

  Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier said, “Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.” Belgraders would likely object. His ugliest city in the most beautiful place, throughout history, was usually the most beautiful city in the most terrifying part of the world, as Serbian writer Milorad Pavić often noted.

  Belgrade, meaning “White City,” is located in Southeast Europe at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, at the crossroads of different civilizations. Belgrade was conquered by Celts, Romans, Slavs, the Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarians. Since its construction, the city has been battled over in 115 wars, razed forty-four times, and changed its name fourteen times. Just in the last hundred years, Belgrade has been the capital of four states: the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under the leadership of Marshal Tito, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and finally the Republic of Serbia, which was reborn as a result of the disintegration of the previous state in a series of bloody ethnic wars.

  Ivo Andrić, the only Yugoslav Nobel laureate, once noted that this grand city seems to always be torn and split, as if it never exists but is perpetually being created, built upon, and recovered. While Belgrade was destroyed in both world wars, the city ultimately emerged as a winner, on the side of the Allies.

  Four authors in this collection set their stories in that Belgrade—the Belgrade we are proud of, a city of heroism, an ally in the fight for justice and freedom. In these stories, key characters travel through time and different decades of Belgrade’s history, as the authors show the world that our glorious past cannot be ruined by the dark cloud hanging over the city during the nineties and its bloody conflicts. It should be no surprise that vampire is the only Serbian word in the English language.

  The wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia are a leitmotif in four stories. In them, the authors bravely speak about bloodshed, and no stone goes unturned.

  During this period, Serbia was completely isolated from the rest of the planet. And as isolated turtles on the Galapagos Islands evolved differently from their fellow turtles on the mainland, the culture in Serbia developed in ways that didn’t exist anywhere else. The mobs were killing each other, dead bodies were buried in concrete, eventually becoming embedded in the foundations of buildings and bridges. Still, there were no random killings and the streets of the Serbian capital were among the safest in Europe. It should be no surprise that Belgrade is known as a city of absurdity.

  Citizens found pleasure in “embargo cakes”—delicacies made from only flour, water, sugar, and any fruit you could scrounge up—and listened to turbo-folk, a synthetic mesh of techno and folk.

  But this book is about a lot more than war. Alfred Hitchcock once said that certain creepy parts of Belgrade unnerved him and would be ideal settings for thrillers. Thieves, traitors, spies, corrupt doctors, psychiatric patients, former policemen, mafia clans—they all appear in the pages of this book.

  Even in the worst periods of its history, Belgrade was always a multicultural, multireligious, and multinational city. This anthology illustrates that. Alongside our Serbian authors, there are stories written by Croatian, Bosnian, British, and Finnish writers. The same is true for our great team of translators, which includes Americans, Serbians, Bosnians, and an Albanian.

  Herbert Vivian, a Briti
sh journalist, author, and newspaper proprietor who visited Belgrade in the late nineteenth century, wrote that more often than not when a traveler visits a famous place expecting a lot, he or she leaves disappointed. “This happens with Athens, Rhine, St. Peter’s Church in Rome. But then again, I went to Belgrade not expecting anything—the decorations, the sights, not even the joy or anything interesting—and now I am a victim of its seductive charm, and I have to leave it with utmost pain. This is a new feeling: to fall in love with a city.”

  Right now, you likely believe there are a number of cities throughout the world that would make better settings for good noir stories. But I am quite certain that after reading this book, you will find yourself seduced by the dark charm of the White City.

  Milorad Ivanović

  Belgrade, Serbia

  September 2020

  PART I

  While the City Sleeps

  UNDERNEATH IT ALL RUNS THE RIVER OF SADNESS

  by Oto Oltvanji

  Block 45, New Belgrade

  “If I win, you’ll help me spy on the neighbor on the fourth floor,” Kozma said. Not waiting for my answer, he moved his bishop.

  Not the bishop, I thought.

  We sat at a concrete table in the children’s park squeezed in among three four-story buildings. If nothing else, in the blocks you were protected from the wind. When you get old, the wind becomes your greatest enemy.

  Kozma and I lived in Block 45, the last one in the row beside the riverbank. After us there was only the end of Belgrade, but it could easily have been the end of the world. At night, the darkness on the other side was that deep.

  Before us stretched Block 44, which was kind of logical, but it was preceded by number 70, while on the other side of the wide avenue sprawled blocks 63, 62, and 61. Someone had had a lot of fun with numbering them.

  All of it was part of New Belgrade, over 200,000 souls in the country’s largest dormitory. That’s what they used to call it anyway, but now big business had found its way here too. Car dealerships, shopping malls, private hospitals, a lot of eradicated green areas. Our little park was among the few resisting rampant urbanization.

  Blocks and their history was my hobby, because retirees need to have one. Well, they don’t have to, but if they don’t, they quickly go mad. It started with me wanting to know who’d built the uneven ceiling in my apartment. Every morning, I would try to imagine heroes of the socialist labor of the sixties draining the surrounding swamps, as part of the Yugoslav postwar reconstruction. I had trouble imagining it.

  Just as I had trouble coming up with a defense against Kozma’s bishop. Checkmate in two moves. When I looked up, Kozma was smiling at me.

  I sighed and toppled my king. “I didn’t agree to anything.”

  “But you will, won’t you?” He raised his eyebrows. “Now you have to.”

  I didn’t have to do anything, and he knew it. At our age, everything happens voluntarily. That’s why I loved this oasis of ours, where we hid from the world, too-frequent elections, pension cuts, and uncollected garbage. That’s why I loved this block, this park, this table. Our table.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to come here anymore?” shouted the girl with restless eyes as she hurried across the park.

  Kozma and I rolled our eyes. Not everyone agreed it was our table.

  They called her Gigi, nobody knew why. Nicknames don’t always have rational explanations. She was between fifteen and eighteen—it was hard to say. Somewhere along the way I’d lost my sense of youth. Didn’t matter, she was far too young to be shouting at the elderly.

  All the girls she dragged along with her wore torn jeans and baseball hats. They all carried phones and beer cans in their hands even though it was only two p.m. (since they were probably underage, the time of day was, in fact, a moot point). One of them rolled a spray can between her fingers

  Gigi stepped up onto our table, kicked over our chess pieces, and climbed down on the other side as if walking across a pedestrian bridge. “Mom and Dad think I’m in a gang, the school thinks I’m in a gang, the police think I’m in a gang.” She was virtually growling at Kozma. “All because of you.”

  She swung her arm but only tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Kozma twitched and closed his eyes anyway.

  I stood up. “Now that’s enough.”

  “Shut up, Grandpa. You’ll get yours too. Being tall won’t save you.”

  I remained standing and the moment passed. The aggression fizzled out of her. She seemed to realize it too.

  “I’m watching you,” she said, backing away. “If I see you after dark, you’ll be sorry.”

  We watched them go. The last one gave us the finger as they disappeared toward the river. I turned to Kozma, who squatted down to collect the pieces.

  “Almost getting beat up by little girls doesn’t bother you?” I asked, while he stood up and started arranging the pieces. “Are you dragging me into one of your failed projects again?”

  “So, you want to do it?” he asked quietly.

  I sighed. “What have you come up with now?”

  “It’s not like with the girls, Ranko, I swear. This one’s the real deal. I think he’s killing women. New ones come to him twice a week, but no one ever sees them leave. They come in, they don’t come out. I’m worried. Why are you looking at me like that? Here, you can be white this time.”

  * * *

  In his former life, Kozma was a policeman. During his career he sat in an office, a pencil pusher. Maybe that was the problem: too much paperwork, too few actual cases.

  So his retirement hobby was quite different than mine. He wanted to solve a case for once in his life, to see how it felt. That desire was stronger than any realistic possibility of him actually succeeding, and it was certainly against the law. Officially he did not represent any authority in any capacity anymore.

  And he had already made some blunders. Because he reported their daughter to the cops, Gigi’s parents were even more unpleasant to us than she was, if that’s possible. Kozma’s former colleagues had to warn him on several occasions, and they even threatened me. They asked what I was doing the whole day instead of keeping him on a short leash.

  But Kozma was my best friend and my first neighbor. You don’t say no to either.

  After our second chess game—Kozma won both—I reluctantly looked up when Kozma whispered, “Here he comes.”

  He pointed to a balcony on the fourth floor where a pale young man wearing John Lennon glasses stood. He scowled at the yard below, his gaze not reaching our park, flicked a cigarette butt into the air, and went back inside.

  “What do you say?” Kozma asked.

  “He doesn’t look like trouble, if that’s what you mean. Or crazy. If you’re so sure, why don’t you report him?”

  “He could be innocent.”

  “Ah. You’re not so sure then.”

  Kozma smiled. “But what if the police don’t find anything? He’ll become cautious, and then they’ll never catch him.”

  “How do you even know women don’t leave his apartment? They might just sleep over and leave later.”

  He made a circle around his eye with his thumb and index finger.

  “You look through a spyhole? The whole night? You’re crazy, not him.” I shook my head. “What do you think he does with them if they don’t come out?”

  He started sawing his forearm with the side of his palm.

  “And stuffs their arms and legs into suitcases? C’mon! How come no one sees him removing the suitcases?”

  “From now on we’ll be watching for that too. That’s why I need you.”

  Glancing impatiently down at the board, I noticed Kozma’s rare oversight. I had an open passage to his queen, and after that his king was for the taking too.

  “So, you have a plan?” I asked, mostly to divert his attention, and moved my knight. He seemed not to notice the threat since he responded with a pawn. His queen was mine.

  “A new one is coming tonig
ht, first time this week.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Speaking of which, we have to go. I’m taking the first shift.”

  He stood up and started packing away the pieces, and with them the triumph within my reach. I sadly watched him close the wooden box and put it under his arm. He marched off not bothering to check if I followed.

  I did follow. What else could I do?

  We went around the building to the front entrance. We both lived on the ground floor, my apartment next to his.

  In front of the neighboring entrance, virtually another building merging with ours through a double wall, there was a black limousine waiting, blocking us and cars from both directions. A robust, gray-haired man in a long coat exited the vehicle and hurriedly entered the next building. The limousine waited for one of the other cars to move and only then backed out of the street. Our neighbor Mira was sitting on a bench across the street smoking a cigarette. I asked her what was going on.

  “Some big shot,” she whispered. “Goes to see the cardiologist on the fourth floor.”

  “I know him,” Kozma said. “The loudmouth threatening everyone in Parliament.”

  I didn’t really know what he was referring to because I didn’t read the newspaper, but it was enough information for me. A cardiologist on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator was quite the joke. A patient was prepped for the exam before even reaching the doctor.

  If you wanted to truly disappear and never be found, the blocks were the perfect spot. Hiding in plain sight, inside the concrete beehive. Our labyrinth was a constant nightmare for the so-called real Belgradians from across the river, spoiled by conventional names and arrangements of streets, and for the couriers delivering stuff to people who behaved as if they did not wish to be found.

  And you could make others disappear. Who knew if anyone would ever notice. What if Kozma was actually onto something? This predator could have been operating right under our noses for years.

  “What did you mean about taking the first shift?” I asked.

  “Just like in the army, two hours. The women usually arrive around eight, so we still have a little time left.”

  Did I expect anyone to come tonight? Not really, but I was ready for Kozma’s game. We entered his apartment, the layout of which was the mirror image of mine, if we ignored the additional seventy-five square feet his had, another mystery that was probably the result of the builder’s negligence.