Belgrade Noir Page 13

  * * *

  That’s right. They threw me off the police force.

  Not because I’d been an alcoholic, not because I’d been irresponsible or disrespectful . . . Not even because I’d spoken out about the old government, or that I’d called the old head of police a horse’s ass. No, they booted me because I’d fucked the deputy mayor’s wife.

  I’d have real problems if I’d banged the actual mayor’s wife. But the deputy mayor? Can you imagine what a loser he was if I’d screwed his wife?

  My old lady was no help. “If you’re . . .” she said. “I knew that your dick would fuck you over for good. Even when we were married you couldn’t keep it in your pants. I can only imagine how it is now that you’re fucking divorced.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that . . .”

  “Oh, now that you’ve smartened up so much? Been to your dad’s recently? What’s he doing?”

  “The fuck do you care?”

  That’s usually how our conversations ended.

  Well, what more was there to say? My ex-wife was a minister of culture, and I was an inspector without a job. In Serbia. In transitioning Belgrade. Basically, a bum. A loser. Or just another asshole drunk on the nonstop hunt for cash.

  * * *

  I paid my bill and headed to the Manjež.

  In the kafana the waiters eyed me suspiciously. As though I’d come to inspect their heating or steal their silverware. I politely asked for Hajji Pešić, and a waiter pointed me to a table in the corner.

  A woman getting up there in years was seated, a proper lady, with her hair done like Jackie Kennedy, a five-hundred-euro manicure, and jewelry that could buy a building in the fanciest part of town. Beside her was another woman, an old lady in a wheelchair.

  I cautiously made my way up to them and opened my mouth to introduce myself, but Hajji Pešić just tapped ash from her long cigarette into the ashtray and said, “Sit, Malavrazić.”

  I planted my ass on the chair across from her.

  “Drink?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  As my double vinjak arrived, she decided to introduce the old woman: “This is my mother, Jefimija Dugalić.”

  “A pleasure, madam,” I said.

  She smiled cynically at that. Mean old hag.

  “You look like him,” said Hajji Pešić.

  “Like who?”

  “Your grandfather.”

  “You knew him?”

  “No. But my mother did.”

  The old lady nodded.

  “That’s . . . nice.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Hajji Pešić pushed a folder across the table to me. It was old, battered, and on the front was written, Police Administration Belgrade.

  I opened it. In it were some papers and black-and-white photographs of a handsome man in a three-piece suit, with a mustache like Clark Gable’s. Taken a long time ago, before World War I. There was an obituary between the papers with the name Aćim Dugalić. The name didn’t ring a bell.

  “That’s my grandfather,” said Hajji Pešić, as though reading my thoughts. “My mother’s father.”

  “Uh-huh . . .” I shook my head, not understanding.

  “He died—well, actually, he was killed—almost a hundred years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  The old lady nodded her head.

  I closed the folder, sipped some vinjak. I still had no idea what was going on.

  “You have the autopsy report there too,” Hajji Pešić explained, waving away smoke. “The report from the head inspector who led the case . . .”

  “Who cares about these reports after a hundred years?”

  “I do, and so does my mother. The killer was never found.”

  “And you’d like me to find him?”

  “If you can . . .”

  “Maybe I could, if you could get me a time machine.”

  The old lady laughed.

  “You can help us without that.”

  “Me? But why me?”

  “Did you see the name of the inspector who led the investigation?”

  I opened the folder again, glanced down at the piece of yellowed paper. At the bottom was clearly written: Arsenije Malavrazić. My grandfather.

  “So . . . ?” said Hajji Pešić.

  I looked at the old lady. Hey eyes shined with anticipation mixed with boundless sadness. I was suddenly reminded of the schnauzer that had died on me last year. Ah, what a dog . . .

  “We’ll pay you, of course. How much?”

  “Fifty euros a day, plus expenses.”

  “Expenses meaning vinjak, cigarettes, and taxis, I suppose?”

  “Tools of the trade.”

  She opened her expensive bag and handed me an envelope. Inside was more than was needed, but I didn’t protest.

  “Get yourself a new shirt,” she said, and stood.

  She pushed her mother to the door with the waiter’s help. The old lady waved as they moved her down the ramp at the doors.

  I ordered another vinjak and looked through the folder again. Aćim Dugalić in black-and-white photographs, smiling and long dead, the report from my grandfather that I’d study in detail later, the obit that didn’t say much except that he’d died young, not even twenty-five years old . . .

  Then I looked at the autopsy report. Poor Aćim had had a spectacular death: he had been beheaded. At the bottom was written the name of the doctor who had examined the body: Dr. Edward Ryan, an American.

  * * *

  My old man had been a cop, working in the criminal justice department with the Belgrade police. When he retired, he turned to one thing exclusively: making rakija. But strangely, he never drank it. He left that to me. I knew why: when you grow up watching your own dad destroyed by drink, you get to thinking that you’ll never have a drop of the stuff yourself.

  I found my father in the backyard, in front of the still. The house he rented was a few streets down from the Gusan.

  My grandfather had also been an inspector. His mentor had been Tasa Milenković, the first school-trained Serbian policeman. He worked before and after the war in the Glavnjača.

  It had been a happy spot. The Glavnjača was the nickname for the administrative building of the Belgrade police, but it was also the infamous prison where criminals and political prisoners were housed. Between the first and second world wars, it had been packed with Communists in particular. The police, like today, had been corrupt and in the pockets of criminals and politicians, so they served mainly as the cudgel of state authority and a good litmus test to show what condition the country was in. In the Glavnjača people were interrogated, tortured, and then killed. My grandfather himself had taken part in an incident where two inmates had barricaded themselves in a room with ammunition. They’d tried to negotiate with the city governor. Instead of negotiations, they got shot.

  My old man kept away from all that and made an impressive career as an inspector in the criminal justice department. He nabbed scum and felons off the streets, rapists and killers, once he even caught a college professor who had raped a student. The guy got himself out thanks to his political buddies with a lot of pull. The girl withdrew her statement, and he walked out a free man. But he didn’t know how we Malavrazićes are. My old man waited a few months and then got in touch with two crooks from the block who owed him a favor. They almost put our respected professor in a wheelchair. He wasn’t raping anyone else after that. My old man called it “crime prevention,” which was, obviously, more important than the risk of a suspension.

  “Come to see if I’m still aboveground?” he asked as a greeting.

  “Don’t be like that . . .”

  “Hand me the hydrometer.”

  While he tested the strength of the rakija, not looking at me, he asked a question: “What did Hajji Pešić want?”

  “Is the waiter from the Manjež snitching on me?”

  “No. The maître d’. I got his son out of jail ten, no, fifteen years ago. He
drank a little too much and stole a car and wrecked it.”

  “Nice to see your old connections still paying off. How do you know Hajji Pešić?”

  “She came to me as well. A few times. She offered money . . .”

  “You refused, of course.”

  “Of course. How could I not?”

  “But why?”

  He stood, threw two logs into the fire under the still, wiped his hands on his blue work pants, and peered intensely at me. “Because it’s better if no one finds out the truth.”

  “Why do you get to decide that?”

  He smiled ironically. He went into the house, and I sipped some almost-done rakija. It had a mild sharpness and a strong aroma of grapes. My old man was a master.

  He came back out when I was already on my third glass.

  “Don’t overdo it. It’s got methyl in it. It’s not fermented.”

  “I noticed,” I said unsteadily, draining the glass.

  He handed me a dusty, used notebook.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your grandfather’s journal.”

  “Journal? I didn’t know this even existed.”

  “Now you do. Now you can find out about your . . . hmm . . . employer. Why she’s hired you. Was the grape good at least?”

  “The grape? Excellent.”

  I took the notebook feeling some sort of sacred respect. And some tingling glee. Maybe I wasn’t a total loser after all. Something told me that I’d solve this case that even my grandfather hadn’t been able to.

  * * *

  Serbs and Americans had once been friends.

  Then came the nineties.

  I remember that sometime at the beginning of ’93 I saved a boy from a hanging whose only crime was that he’d worn a shirt with John Wayne on it, and so had insulted the pride and patriotic feelings of a few fans. I also remember that they’d had a good go at him before my colleague and I intervened. The legendary Duke on his chest had taken on blue and red hues, as though some hack artist had wanted to overlay his old black-and-white films.

  And it had happened overnight. That hatred. Just like everything else in Serbia.

  We grew up on John Houston, Frank Capra, and Don Siegel movies. All the girls were hot for Clint Eastwood. When you said “gentleman” you thought Gregory Peck. We all wanted to be Gary Cooper in High Noon. We wore Levi’s. Drank Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Listened to Michael Jackson and Madonna. Yul Brynner played the part of a partisan in Battle of Neretva, the most expensive film made in the former Yugoslavia. Robert De Niro sat on the steps of the Sava Center while he watched flicks at the Belgrade Film Festival, FEST, the largest showcase of films on the Communist side of Europe during the Cold War. They say that before the festival he’d gotten lost in southern Serbia and was taken in by some nice folks in the village of Čokot, a stone’s throw from Niš.

  And then came the nineties. And everything changed.

  Hate is the feeling most easy to manipulate. And there was a lot of hate in those years. It spilled out over the edges of our television screens, barked at us from our radios, leaked out like the black oil from The X-Files in freshly printed newspapers. It waited for us in places we least expected it. To beat and break us, like those who beat up the boy whose life my colleague and I may have saved.

  Hate came from the other side too. The Americans gifted us a parcel of bombs in 1999.

  But that didn’t make Dr. Ryan any less significant, any less heroic.

  I read my grandfather’s description of him in his journal:

  I met Dr. Edward Ryan, called Eddie, the head of the American Red Cross in Serbia, in the Belgrade army hospital. A solid, strong man, you didn’t know if you were looking at a soldier or a doctor. He was a little of both. I’d seen him earlier, how he briskly walked down the Belgrade streets while the people cried out, “Viva, Ryan!” He was famous even before he came to the Serbian capital. Somehow the residents of Belgrade got wind of his heroism in Mexico, how when the Mexicans put him in front of a firing squad and accused him of being an American spy, he just smoked his pipe and waited for them to shoot, cool as a cucumber.

  And now he was smoking that same pipe, looking at me as though he suspected something. Then he offered me some rakija. On the worktable lay an undetonated grenade.

  “I like being around death,” he told me. “So I’m always on the edge. Sharp as a bayonet. Ready for action.”

  And he really was.

  With him, generally, there was no bullshitting. He knew he’d lock up his closest colleagues if they turned on him. He worked day and night. When he wasn’t in the operating room he was roaming around Belgrade, picking up supplies, food, medicine, and training people amid the ruins.

  He came to Belgrade on October 16, 1914, three months after the Austro-Hungarians attacked Serbia and started World War I. He stayed when they occupied it, the first time in autumn of 1914, and the second time in the autumn of 1915. The Germans wouldn’t touch him since he was a citizen of a neutral country. Which he knew, and used to his advantage. He saved the hospital by ordering that an American flag be raised on the roof. The Austrians weren’t allowed to shoot it.

  I asked him about the headless body. He shrugged, and then said, rather cynically, “Well, we can rule out natural causes.”

  The headless body. Aćim Dugalić.

  My grandfather wrote that the deceased had been in a special company responsible for creating diversions. It wasn’t clear who was in charge. But one name did stand out.

  Apis.

  Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis, the leader of a secret society called the Black Hand—and also the conspirators who, in May 1903, killed King Aleksandar Obrenović and Queen Draga, and put King Petar from the rivaling Karađorđević dynasty on the throne. At the time he was something of a kingpin of all the Serbian secret services. A dangerous man.

  My grandfather went on in his journal:

  That led me to believe that he was our main suspect. It could be that Aćim Dugalić had not been in Apis’s good graces. And that he’d ordered his execution. In a conversation I had with an officer from Apis’s innermost circle, a man from Niš named Vemić, I was informed that Dugalić had been known as someone who had “chosen the rival party.”

  “Traitor . . .” a drunken Vemić told me, sitting at a table in the kafana Zlatna Moruna, the Golden Sturgeon.

  “And what does Apis do to traitors?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said, agreeing to another glass of rosé.

  He looked at me with glassy eyes and added, “He sends Nemanja.”

  So there we were. Major Nemanja Lukić. A suspect. Possibly a killer.

  “What do you know about him?” I asked my father as he stoked the fire beneath the still.

  “Arsenije never proved that Lukić killed Dugalić.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Do you have any paperwork on him? Photographs? A dossier?”

  “Lukić had been a doctor too. He trained in London. Since he spoke good English, our folks gave him to Ryan to help him out and assist in operations. Lukić had been a member of the Black Hand as well.” He stood, broke a piece of dry wood, and tossed it aside, looking at me anxiously. “Grandpa left the case unsolved on purpose, which you probably know . . . ?”

  “Yeah, I know. I just don’t get why.”

  “Why? Because some secrets need to stay secret.”

  “Is that some kind of Black Hand motto?”

  “No, son . . . Just, Grandpa figured it wasn’t worth the trouble.”

  “He figured?”

  “I suppose so. Murder during wartime? When so many people were already dying, who was counting one more body? But fuck it . . . Grandpa was a stubborn guy. Like you.”

  “Good to hear it’s genetic.”

  “So’s alcoholism. Just saying.”

  “Ah, what are you gonna do.”

  “I’ll tell you something that isn’t in the journal.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “One night, a
bout a year before he died, he got drunk—you know how he got. He told me that in 1915, he got a visit from Lukić. Right in the Glavnjača. He’d never come so close to shitting his pants in his whole life.”

  I got to thinking, and my old man went back to stoking the fire under the still as though nothing had happened.

  I didn’t know a lot about my grandfather. Just what my father had told me and what I remembered through a haze. I was only nine when he died. But there was one thing I was sure of when it came to Arsenije Malavrezić: he didn’t scare easy.

  “If you really want to dig through it,” my father piped up again, “there are some documents in the clinic archives.”

  * * *

  The guy had to be nuts.

  After all, how with-it could someone be who’d decided to spend their whole life surrounded by books and document registers that no one cared about?

  The archivist in the clinic center, a tubby, middle-aged guy, collected vinyl fucking records. For half an hour he blathered on at me about how he didn’t have enough room at home, so he’d brought some of his collection to the archives. He just droned on and on about it. But I had to put up with this idiot, at least until I got what the archive had on Lukić and Ryan. Then I’d tell him where he could stick his vinyl.

  He pulled out a file and handed it to me. I started leafing through the documents.

  “He’s an interesting guy,” said the archivist. “Dr. Lukić.”

  There were photos in the file too. Mostly from the war. Soldiers, officers, nurses, prisoners of war, the sick and wounded . . . everything to do with misery. War really is hell. That’s why we keep doing it—we’re a hellish people.

  There was a photo of Dr. Ryan as well. He’d been the real deal. Dressed in his uniform, a face that radiated certainty, a close-cropped soldier’s haircut, and large, piercing eyes.

  “And what’s this?” I asked, pointing to a photo of Serbian and British officers standing around a big cannon.

  “British war mission. Members of the Royal Navy. They organized a blockade of the Danube and defended Belgrade in 1915 from the Austro-Hungarian flotilla that was bombing the city day and night. Admiral Ernest Troubridge was in command. That’s this guy here. And next to him is his second-in-command, Lieutenant Charles Lester Kerr. This one right here.”