Belgrade Noir Read online

  Ilija Soldo suffered a serious brain hemorrhage that night and fell into a coma from which he has not awoken to this very day. For the next seven days he lay at the Military Medical Academy Hospital in Belgrade and was then secretly airlifted back to one of Zagreb’s hospitals. The Zagreb media have not reported this event, nor have they said what happened to the chief of homicide investigations in the largest Croatian police department, and what kind of a secret mission led one of the most recognized Croatian officers to Belgrade. In Zagreb, the revelations published in the Belgrade tabloids were taken as yet another, though this time quite bizarre, expression of Serbian hostility toward Croatia.

  PHANTOM OF THE NATIONAL THEATER

  by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Republic Square

  Translated by Nada Petković

  My name is Dr. Erich Hetzel. I am a theater director. I am German, an evangelical Christian, but because I married a Jewish woman, I found myself on the Nazis’ list of seven artists at the National Theater to be eliminated in 1941. I remember it was a hot day, shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade on April 6, when our interim director Veljković summoned me to his half-destroyed office above Republic Square and said: “My dear Dr. Hetzel, you, a pure-blooded Aryan, why did you need this affair with a Jewish woman . . . ? Well, what should I do now? You, so to speak, ‘dug your own grave.’ Here, look at Articles 18 to 20 in the decree of General Förster, the military governor of the German-occupied territory of Serbia. In Article 18 it reads clearly: A Jew is considered any person descended from at least three Jewish ancestors (this assumes the parents of both one’s father and mother).”

  Veljković looked at me with a weasel-like gaze and continued: “Rather, in your case, whether or not your dad’s dad is Jewish, you fall under Article 19. Look—look what it says: In the same way, a Jew is a Jewish mutt married to a Jewess. And there we are! What am I to do? You are married to a Jewish woman. No, no, I have to oust you from the National Theater. You’ll put on one more performance, and that will be the end. Let your Old Testament god save you, my esteemed Dr. Hetzel.”

  Barbara, my dear wife, what a strong and murderous rage I felt in that moment. I thought I would become a killer that very day, as soon as I clenched my hands around the neck of that Veljković. Instead, I didn’t join the trade until 1942.

  * * *

  That same year, Miodrag Mika Golubjev was the detective on the job. He wore a pinstriped suit with an always starched shirt collar. He gnawed on a toothpick and had an unfilled cavity in his upper molar, which didn’t smell too bad. He was careful not to show his stubborn dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit, which could ruin his reputation. With his mediocre education, Miodrag Mika had been known as a clever policeman even before the war. He turned down an offer from his cousin Sergei Golubjev—the Belgrade police chief Dragomir Jovanović’s right-hand man—to transfer to the Special Police Department and become “Mr. Officer who chases Communists.” Instead, he chose to stay with the Criminal Investigation Bureau, affirming: “Never will the time come when people are killed for their Communist ideas; rather, crimes of passion will rule in the new social order.”

  The track record of Detective Miodrag Mika Golubjev in 1941 was as follows. He solved two murders-for-hire at the open market, one particularly cruel family homicide in the home of a former upper-class Belgrade family in the Dedinje quarter, and the murder of an old lady on Krunska Street, committed by an insane provincial student on the basis of some philosophical ideas. His feats during the first year of the German occupation included catching two arsonists, a woman who’d committed infanticide, one pedophile, and one pillager.

  “He was lucky,” his colleagues gossiped when he was promoted and assigned the most difficult case in 1942. “It will rain on his parade,” jabbered less successful detectives from the crime division, and it appears that—at least at first—they were right.

  The following article that ran in the local paper Opštinske Novine attests to this:

  The Criminal Investigation Bureau, every day throughout all of Belgrade, prevents violence, arson, and vile homicides that many believe could be committed today and go unpunished, under the veil of war, poverty, and limited access. Nothing can surprise the well-prepared detectives from all seven of the Belgrade quarters. They’ve seen all sorts of riffraff and vagabonds, even before the Germans seized control of Belgrade. And yet, one brutal and ferocious murder before the eyes of hundreds of spectators surprised even the most seasoned police officer of the First Belgrade Precinct.

  The drama Elga by Gerhart Hauptmann was staged at the newly reopened National Theater. In one scene, a confirmed bachelor, played by the actor Miodrag Marinković Baća, alias Dude, is waiting for his sweetheart, but there is no sign of her. The bachelor twiddles his thumbs, smooths the lapels of his frock coat, and, in the end, dozes off. The bride is due to appear, trailed by a flood of audience laughter, and poses many daunting questions to which the snoring bachelor has no answers. This is how it happened, except that the bachelor did not snore as written in the script, rather he fell “dead asleep.” One after the other, her questions went unanswered. Silence. According to the script the bachelor is supposed to startle and jump—but he didn’t move. The prompters were puzzled, the stage manager didn’t know what to do; the actors started improvising, until suddenly, Dude fell from the chair, blood running from his lips, completely soiling his coat.

  As a result, the National Theater audience certainly witnessed the most vile murder of 1942. As we have been informed, the case was assigned to the best detective in the First Belgrade Precinct, Miodrag Mika Golubjev, who arrived at the crime scene in no time and forbade spectators from leaving the grand hall of the recently reopened theater. Word has it that throughout the night he questioned the audience—member by member—and only in the wee hours did he begin interrogating the actors.

  The set designer Vladimir Žedrinski, a refugee from Russia, muttered something in Russian and the composer Mihovil Logar, a refugee from Slovenia, said something in Slovenian. The others rattled on in some unknown language. Out of those potentially involved in the crime, only the director, Dr. Erich Hetzel, was missing from the scene. Thus, this experienced policeman immediately had a suspect; he tossed away his toothpick, called it a day, and went home to get a few hours of sleep.

  We will inform our loyal readers as to how the event unfolds.

  I, Erich Hetzel, killed Dude. What a moron—he is not guilty of anything. I have a plan to kill—one by one—all the actors in the National Theater. I’ll do it because of my wife Barbara, who has drawn me into Judaism. I am banned from further work at the theater. Elga, by Gerhart Hauptmann, was my last performance. They believe that I’ve fled to a village like a protagonist in some Russian drama, but I am still hiding in the theater building. I descend floor by floor. I am now closest to the bloody stone of the Turkish gallows upon which the National Theater was built. In old times, the Turkish Stambol Gate stood here—the starting point of the road to Istanbul—but it was also the place where criminals and rebels were hung as a warning to travelers entering and leaving the city.

  No one knows as well as I do the passageways and doors of the National Theater. One of the doors is quite peculiar . . .

  * * *

  It is now 2019. The actors have just ended a big strike and replaced one director with another, who is just as disliked as the previous one, so they wonder what to do: should they go through directors like Kleenex or take charge of the situation? But how? From that deep and fruitful thought, a forgotten event (although recorded in the nation’s theatrical history) stirs them. Someone was murdered onstage.

  In 2019, the role of Nikolai Ivanov, a long-standing member of the Council of Peasant Affairs, in the Chekhov drama Ivanov, was played by Svetolik Beložanski, also known as Dude. Toward the end of the play, the Dude from 2019 spoke his lines:

  IVANOV: What do you mean, come on? I’ll put an end to all this here and now. I feel like a young man
again, it’s my old self that’s speaking. [Takes out his revolver.]

  SASHA: [Screams] I know what he wants to do. Nikolai, for God’s sake!

  IVANOV: I’ve rolled downhill long enough, it’s time to call a halt. I’ve outstayed my welcome. Go away. Thank you, Sasha.

  SASHA: [Shouts] Nikolai, for God’s sake! Stop him!

  IVANOV: Leave me alone! [Runs to one side and shoots himself.]

  At that moment Nikolai Ivanov, i.e. the actor Dude, pulled out the prop pistol, placed it against his temple, and fired. A stream of real blood rushed down from his head like a fountain. A body, which at that very instant died, convincingly collapsed on stage. The audience was impressed by this realistic theater of what appeared to be a daring stage direction. The applause did not fade. Next to the dead Dude the other actors, always craving praise, kept returning to the stage. Seven curtain calls—is that not enough? Only when the curtain finally fell did someone scream. Soon word got out that an unknown individual had planted an old trophy pistol on Dude, loaded with real bullets.

  The detective in 2019 was Slobodan Jovićević—he was without a nickname; a worker, a purist, quiet, assiduous, precise in accommodating his supervisors, yet talented in solving difficult cases.

  As soon as he heard about the shooting, Jovićević rushed from the Majke Jevrosime Street police station, which is responsible for the National Theater district. Ivanov did shoot himself onstage, but the detective had suspicions, and immediately classified the case as premeditated murder. The question was: who killed him? Again, this time, none present were allowed to leave the theater before being interrogated. When he was done with the audience, Jovićević addressed his questions to the actors. Everyone had a good alibi. They were all gathered backstage; only the actress playing Sasha was with Dude before the audience. She had the best alibi.

  Jovićević returned to the police station to think, having ordered the actors not to leave Belgrade, which some of them accepted only begrudgingly because it disrupted their plans for guest appearances in the Romanian town of Cluj. As he was leaving the theater, the detective failed to notice a shadow which quietly slipped backstage, descending underground with silent footsteps, and continuing one level farther down via metal stairs. The phantom opened a rusty door, slammed it behind him, and disappeared from this era.

  * * *

  Seventy-seven years earlier, in September 1942, on this very stage, another murder occurred. The victim was the actress Jovanka Dvorniković. According to the press—not only Opštinske Novine, but also Novo Vreme—this time the authorities were far more prepared. Here is what the reporter from Novo Vreme observed:

  Led by the great German Reich, Serbia becomes the safest country of the new Europe. The wisdom of our keepers of public order is completely by the book. Do you recall, respected readers, the murderer at the National Theater? He escaped the authorities by a hair, and why, I beg your pardon? Because a killer is always at an advantage. By the time the crime is uncovered, people are alerted, and the detective arrives at the scene of the crime, the killer has had enough time not only to flee but to commit another murder. After realizing that he was dealing with a crafty beast, Detective Miodrag Mika Golubjev, with a toothpick in his mouth, returned to the National Theater night after night. Not that our guardian of the law had begun to like our theater, nor did he care in the least for the actors themselves, but he knew that only by working at the crime scene would he be able to act quickly.

  He was right. As soon as Jovanka Dvorniković paused midsentence and stopped center stage, the detective, sitting in the dark in the third row, clearly saw the actress foaming at the mouth (typical for cyanide poisoning). He jumped up immediately, threw away his toothpick, ripped off his hat, sprang over the two rows in front of him, and ran after the phantom shadow. He almost caught it backstage, but the shadow disappeared behind a large prop. Chasing the suspect, the detective descended one floor, then another. When, according to Golubjev himself, both the persecuted and persecutor were close to the bloody stone of the Turkish gallows lodged in the foundations of the National Theater, the detective saw the hunted man shut a rusty door behind him. Golubjev ran to the door, opened it, and found a small and empty boiler room. One detail puzzled him: the suspect could not have escaped because the room had only one door. Golubjev searched, but he found no one behind the boilers.

  When I killed the Dude of 1942, I ran through that rusty door, but when I slammed it shut, there was no boiler room in front of me; rather, there was a door which led directly to the street. I was immersed in a strange futuristic era. I glanced at a newspaper and saw that the date was June 11, 2019. Some oddly shaped cars sped down the street behind the theater, which had been extended all the way to Braće Jugovića Street; one of the vehicles almost hit me when I, like a sleepwalker, stepped into the street despite the red light. I asked an old woman where the Germans were, and whether the curfew still existed; she looked at me in astonishment and said, “Have you escaped from a movie set or the psychiatric hospital?”

  I realized that I needed to calm down and that I shouldn’t reveal who I was. I needed money—and to be honest, I stole some. I returned to the rear of the theater, and got a haircut at the barbershop, Sweeney Todd. I couldn’t place the name of the shop, so I asked. “Don’t you know?” replied the young barber. “It’s a famous film. Sweeney Todd shaved his customers and, in the end, slit their throats, turned their chairs upside down, and threw them in a pit. Ha-ha! Maybe we’ll do the same to you.”

  They shaved me and didn’t slit my throat. I knew, however, that I could slit throats, poison, and kill whomever I wanted, passing back and forth through an ordinary rusty door. On the future side, the first murder I committed occurred during the twenty-sixth run of Chekhov’s drama Ivanov. I returned to 1942 and killed Jovanka Dvorniković, then again escaped to 2019. At that moment, I felt powerful, unbelievably grand. I, Dr. Erich Hetzel, assassinate people with impunity, sowing fear at the National Theater. I am not sure if I still do it because of my wife Barbara, or whether my power has become like a scar which suits my face nicely . . .

  * * *

  Whom to kill next? wondered Dr. Erich Hetzel in 1942. Should he assault the lives of the most famous actors: Olga Spiridonović, Pavle Bogatinčević, Ljubinka Bobić, Žanka Stokić, Nevenka Urbanova, Milivoje Živanović?

  Or should he first check what they had achieved and what legacy they had left behind in the future? Once again, he passed through the time door, now without running away from the sound of the steps of justice at his heels. He realized that Spiridonović, Bogatinčević, Bobić, Stokić, Urbanova, and Živanović had laid the foundations for our theatrical life after the German defeat and the creation of a new Yugoslavia. What did the scar on his face tell him? To begin eliminating the most famous and, by doing so, not only avenge the National Theater but also its entire history.

  Luckily for the history of theater, he stopped, mulled it over, and decided to kill those who, owing to their talents, had not deserved any recognition, including those in the audience. In 2019, he was the perpetrator of one more spectacular murder onstage; in 1942, two more, by which point the final tally of this serial killer reached six.

  Confident after his sixth victim, puffed up like a bird, Dr. Hetzel believed he was God. He had no guilt; he eliminated bad actors one after the other and spared the future greats. In both time frames, he practically expected doormen to kiss his hand when he walked into the building; however, in such a state of mind, he underestimated the skill of those two detectives: Slobodan Jovićević from 2019 and Mika Golubjev from 1942.

  Just like Mika the Toothpick, Jovićević also bumped into the boiler room door, only to realize that the suspect was nowhere to be found in the room where there was no way of escaping.

  Jovićević thought to himself.

  Mika the Toothpick thought to himself.

  Unexpectedly, Mika Golubjev arrived at a genius idea.

  He was unsure how it occurred to him that th
ere had to be a time portal through which the killer escaped by the skin of his teeth. He continued this train of thought: In that future time, the killer certainly could not be content with a quiet life, as he had shown himself a person who persists to the end without fear or hesitation. That meant he killed both here and there. The detective of the future could not be aware of him, but Mika Golubjev, from the past, would somehow figure out how to warn his colleague of the future so that each of them could trap the killer on either side.

  It immediately occurred to him how to do this. Today’s newspapers turn yellow after seventy-seven years, but with a little luck, they are still available. Hence, our detective of the First Belgrade Precinct placed an ad in Opštinske Novine. It read:

  I have an unusual tomcat. This cat has proven to have seven lives. In his first life, while with me, he caught four mice. He butchered all four and threw them at my feet to show off. Then he died. I kindly ask the owner in a distant future, with whom my cat now lives his seventh life, to take good care of him, and closely watch his movements. In his first life, my cat had his own little house. In his seventh life, he certainly also has one. I propose that I, the cat’s owner from his first life, and the unknown owner from his seventh life, sneak into his little house and ambush him.

  Initially, the night editor didn’t want to accept the ad. He dismissed the text as gibberish. Had he not been a well-known detective, moreover a relative of the frightening Sergei Golubjev of the Special Police, the night editor would surely not have run the ad. But he had to. The typesetters were laughing while piling the letters into their short rows.

  “A cat who has a little house.”

  “Owners to move into the house and ambush the cat.”