Belgrade Noir Read online

  But before that, as if to fulfill his own last wish, he recalled many men, women, and cities, and among them Comrade Mars, from whom he’d received, in this very same park, the directive that until further orders from Moscow he was to do nothing against those who’d prompted his return to Belgrade the year before.

  In those penultimate moments, his life lost nothing of its purpose and meaning. He was a committed Communist who’d been given the opportunity to die honorably for his ideas, and he accepted this opportunity without hesitation, not wanting to guess who might’ve been the one to betray him.

  For he didn’t see his capture as his downfall.

  Sitting on the chair beneath the vast leafy branches, he didn’t just feel strongly, but knew with certainty, that this park was not the site of his death, but the place where the full potential of world revolution would slowly be achieved.

  “Any last words?” asked the German commander of the firing squad.

  “I wish I could stand.”

  The German officer knew how to conduct such conversations, and offered a cigarette to the man tied to the chair.

  “Very kind of you, but my ribs are broken. It would hurt to inhale, and there’s no need to suffer anymore.”

  Helm had declared something very similar at the end of the final interrogation.

  “You need not suffer anymore,” the Gestapo chief, in a spotless uniform, had told him, while his crushed, broken body had tried to arrange itself around the searing stabs of pain that day by day had transformed into a new expression of his undying faith.

  I began with hope in anger and physical strength, I continued with great faith and even greater doubt in the spoken word, and I will meet my end believing only in pain. He’d drawn an invisible line under his secret life before fainting as they’d tried to lift him from the floor of his solitary-confinement cell and carry him out into the street.

  It was as if the Germans had only then realized that a man in his condition wouldn’t be able to walk to the gallows.

  First, they’d wanted to carry him to the park in a blanket, and then someone had suggested tying him to a chair because they could then shoot him like that.

  He’d come to halfway between the prison and the park. He’d watched the sidewalk passing under him and first thought that it was all over, that he was already flying; but then he’d felt the ropes.

  There was still more suffering to endure.

  “Well, you’re going to your death like a king,” said Helm with just a hint of sarcasm, and he smiled back, refraining from saying that he, truth be told, had ceased to exist a long time before, and being invisible was an even greater threat to those he was still preying on.

  He considered saying something witty about the king remark, but he bottled those words up forever and waited for Helm to ask him once again if he was Mars, at which he quickly shook his head, looking the gestapo chief right in the tiny metal buttons of his eyes.

  And who knows what he would’ve told them had they not beaten him?! Who knows what would’ve bobbed up from the bottom of him in that icy ocean of endless silence in which he’d been floating for one whole day, between the first and second interrogations?

  While he sat in his cell and ate the lunch that the waiter, Mladen, had brought from the Ero Gurman kafana along with a message from his best friend Čedo to hang on, he felt for the first time in all those years of uncertainty and conspiracy something that could have been a hint of real fear. But he wasn’t shaken by the fact that his friend had done a stupid thing, as friends do, and ultimately paid with his head for wanting his buddy to “stuff himself with the finest ćevapi even under the Krauts.” While he swallowed the last bite, he was barely able to keep from shaking at the discovery that all the torture devices had been forged for nothing.

  A man should simply be left to himself and the flow of time.

  What if they abandoned him to oblivion? What if they left him in peace? What if no one ever gave him a second thought? What if his terrible secrets were covered in spiderwebs and became worthless?

  Fortunately, the very next day they took him from the prison and brought him once again to Helm’s office on the first floor of the police precinct across the street, right by Terazije Square.

  “Are you Mars?” Helm asked him, and he told him the truth.

  And as soon as they beat him in the same way he’d beaten his own victims so many times, he knew he was safe.

  Instead of time killing him, he would kill time—he would have enough of it to remember, at his leisure, what was most important. Alongside Helm’s investigation, he would finally have the opportunity to investigate himself, but not in order to discover where he’d erred (because he’d made no errors), but in order to revel for the last time in everything he’d accomplished.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Helm said resolutely. “Are you Mars?”

  “No.” He gave the truthful answer intending, while he received all those professionally inflicted punches, to remind himself of the events in his life that had made him worthy of such an end.

  That everyone must die doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has lived. But he had lived, and always at least two lives at the same time.

  For while the Germans were convinced that the man they’d beaten was a black-marketeer and supplier of counterfeit passports who was stubbornly refusing to admit that he was Mars—he recalled his only meeting with the man who, under this pseudonym, had come to Belgrade in the late spring of ’41 carrying a message from Moscow about the postponement of Walter’s liquidation.

  The Germans had, with the help of local scoundrels, already established their rule, but his life hadn’t changed at all. The shadows he lurked in were even deeper now, the secrets safer, but the goal remained the same.

  What had changed was the world aboveground, the scenery in which he constantly moved, changing roles and clothes. For most people, losing one’s life was indeed easier than living it, but this could only help the world revolution.

  The old world had literally crumbled and shown people its diabolical underside, but because of this, there were more women who experienced a completely different kind of change.

  They revealed their slender necks in a novel way; they took slower sidelong glances; and their short, almost inaudible breath said more than a dozen of the most common impertinent words.

  Such was the woman he’d followed home right after he’d said goodbye to Mars. Such were all the woman he’d been with, and he tried keeping the number of women he kissed higher than the number of men he killed.

  “And how do you do that?” asked one of the Kamarić sisters, whose house had been his first refuge upon arrival in Belgrade.

  All three of them were young, pretty, and cheerful; all three knew that Gojko Tamindžić surely wasn’t his real name and he surely wasn’t a locksmith. But they felt that this tall, powerful man who’d been brought to the house by their father’s acquaintance, a prominent Belgrade attorney, had in no time unlocked hearts in which he could leave whatever he wanted.

  The lawyer told their father that he was a war buddy from Kaimakchalan, that he had a nervous disorder he was seeking treatment for in Belgrade. But it was instantly clear to everyone in the house that if someone was crazy, it was the rest of the world, and if there was someone who could heal, it was their new tenant, whom they soon stopped charging rent because his stories about Moscow, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Herzegovina were more valuable.

  He told them about the Russian winter, the Mexican sun, the Spanish bullfights, and the Herzegovinian stećak tombstones.

  And about women.

  “So how many have you had?” asked Vera, and he replied that he’d left a piece of his heart with each one.

  “Do we know any of them?” Nada asked, snickering, and he asked whether they’d heard of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich.

  “And how do you do that?” asked Ljubica, but their father entered the kitchen and said that an unfamiliar man had inquired as to whether
they perhaps had a tenant.

  Five months later they arrested them all.

  It wasn’t the first time the police had surrounded a house where he’d been hiding.

  He could’ve snuck out through the basement, quietly overpowered the two agents standing guard there, and found another safe haven by evening.

  “Why did you surrender?” Helm asked him near the end of the final interrogation, knowing that a beaten man in his condition couldn’t answer him even if he wanted to.

  * * *

  “Why did he surrender?” Makhin asked Stalin as soon as he read the last page of the interrogation notes.

  Stalin stood at the window and Makhin saw in the glass the reflection of his motionless face.

  “He didn’t surrender,” Stalin said under his breath, and then, generously permitting the readers to imagine a newborn silence, pulled on his pipe and exhaled a fragrant cloud that soon vanished into the shadows of the chamber’s high ceiling.

  “He di . . . didn’t?” Makhin stuttered, lacking the courage to put a simpler question behind these simple words.

  “Didn’t,” repeated Stalin, looking his reflection right in the eye. “He merely carried out an order.”

  “I understand,” said Makhin, though to him, as to most of us, it wasn’t at all clear what the hell that was supposed to mean.

  My editor even flew into a fit.

  “Man, you can’t ruin a good story like that!” He was almost screaming when I decided to respond to his call.

  “You really think it’s good?” I asked after a few moments of silence.

  “Excellent. But it will be mediocre rubbish if you don’t change the end,” he said in a calmer tone, justifiably afraid that I’d hang up, remove the SIM from my cell phone, delete the file, and never write another sentence.

  “Listen, man . . . ” He waited to see if I was still there.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Let’s meet somewhere and figure it out.”

  So here I am in Pioneer Park, where I arrived ten minutes prior to our agreed-upon time. It’s a sunny day; children are playing; pensioners are sitting on the benches, reading the paper. Cars and buses speed along the boulevard, behind which sits the National Assembly building, and at the curb on the park’s edge stands an open double-decker bus that will soon take visitors on a sightseeing tour of the city.

  I’ll take my editor sightseeing in the park.

  I’ll show him where the Germans shot one of the most enigmatic and dedicated of Stalin’s secret agents. Then I’ll show him his grave. Later on, we’ll walk the same path that he and Mars took, and then we’ll head toward Terazije, where he’ll have to imagine buildings that no longer exist, where they interrogated the agent, and where he lay in his wounds, beaten and broken.

  “That’s all well and good,” I know he’ll say, after taking his first sip of beer in the garden of some nearby café. “But, man, that part where Stalin is standing at the window saying Mustafa Golubić hasn’t surrendered but rather carried out an order—what does he mean by that?!”

  I’ll look him right in the eye for quite a while, and then helplessly shrug. My editor will stub out his cigarette, stand up, put his hand on my shoulder, and leave, and as soon as I get home, I’ll write two more scenes for the ending.

  The first will take place in the Kremlin, in the same room where Stalin stood by the window and stared at his reflection in the Soviet glass. This time, behind his back will stand one of his most enigmatic and dedicated secret agents, just returned from Mexico, where he’d laid the groundwork for the assassination of Leon Davidovich Trotsky, the greatest enemy of the world revolution.

  The other final scene will take place in a house on the outskirts of Belgrade, which was surrounded by the German police early one morning in June 1941.

  Mustafa Golubić will have shaving soap on his chin, but instead of holding a razor, he’ll be holding his revolver.

  Weighing his options for escape, he’ll remember the conversation he had with Stalin after returning from Mexico.

  “Joseph Vissarionovich, what are my orders?” he asked, interrupting the silence that, in his presence, was more cautious than a wild cat poised to sneak off into darkness.

  “There’s only one more,” said Stalin, not daring to turn and look him in the eye.

  “Yes?”

  “Recognize the opportunity to go out as a hero.”

  Here is that opportunity, Golubić will think brightly, already aiming for the body of the first German policeman he can see through the small bathroom window, but then he’ll realize that he’s been given the opportunity not only to die at the enemy’s hand but to be executed and buried in the very heart of the great city.

  So I will never be forgotten, he thought as he rinsed the shaving soap from his face and looked in the mirror for the last time.

  One could even say he was happy.

  PART IV

  Kiss Me Deadly

  THE TOUCH OF EVIL

  by Verica Vincent Cole

  Lekino Brdo

  November 1, 2018

  Viktor Marković is a dead man.

  Why? The world will be a better place without him, that’s why. Or maybe there are other reasons.

  I know that there is a bit of evil in all of us. Hidden behind the masks we agree to wear for the sake of civilization, it is balanced by goodness, controlled by the societal conventions. Yet at times, evil turns into Evil, a fairy-tale monster that eats children alive. And with this comes the sign. Most people fail to see it, although the sensitive ones often feel a need to avert their gaze from the faces of those in whom Evil lives. I call it the sign of the beast and I saw it on the face of Viktor Marković the moment I met him.

  But I needed time to convince myself of the truth. I was scared, persuading myself for months that I must be wrong. And forgetting, at that, the futility of such exertion: for Evil refuses to forgive weakness. Evil grants no favors. And Evil is contagious.

  Am I not the perfect example? To liberate the world from Evil, I have to let it inside of me. That’s the modus operandi of Evil, whether we are talking NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” or me, Neda Adamović. So it is not really a surprise that it is “other reasons” that guide our actions, is it? There’s no place for noblesse in the story of Evil.

  Yet, I can’t help but wonder—what would some other people do in my position? Could they really kill another human being? Pull the trigger and put a bullet into someone’s forehead—bang bang, you’re dead! Probably not: most noble, gentle people living in pain would rather kill themselves.

  Until yesterday, I considered myself one of them.

  Today I decided that “Neda Adamović, Everyone’s Favorite Victim” will not be my epitaph. That it is time for a bang in my life.

  April 30, 1999

  Whether it’s Jack the Ripper or the armed forces, the pathology is the same: the killer first objectifies the victims to obliterate their humanity, so they are not human beings anymore, just collateral damage, Neda thought to herself, walking through the strangely quiet streets of Lekino Brdo, so innocent and quaint under the April sun as if totally unaware of what could happen to it at any moment. She was still seething at what she’d just seen from her friend Mariana’s thirteenth-floor balcony: Avala—the hill which, with its meager 1,700 feet, qualified as a mountain—without its TV tower! During the night, the precisely guided NATO missile had wiped the tower out, and the resulting scenery belonged in a parallel reality. Like everything else these days, for that matter: how could Serbia, the country which had always been on the right side of history, always the good guy, be bombed by the allies? Maybe because, as the saying went, it was in a habit of winning in war and losing in peace? But who could win over NATO? Martians?

  “Making war to get peace is the same as fucking to get virginity,” Mariana had said as they drank coffee made from tepid water from the water heater, since this part of town was once again without electricity.

  N
eda couldn’t agree more.

  Air-raid sirens began their shrill scream while she was entering “the little woods”—a wooded area that covered the block below her old high school—which usually had a calming effect on her nerves. Feeling like she was about to explode without any help from a NATO missile, Neda started singing from the top of her lungs: a song Belgrade Gypsies had sung during World War II, while German Stukas bombed the unfortunate town, which seemed to be everybody’s favorite target.

  NATO intervention was the last straw for Neda. A private language school where she was teaching German collapsed under Western sanctions, leaving her without an income. So once again, she was depending on her parents. Upon retiring, her parents had moved to a village in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, and once in a while they would send her some cash and homemade goods. Making her feel worthless, if not suicidal.

  Neda decided there was no reason to hurry home, to the little house on Todora Dukina Street, where she expected at any moment to turn into collateral damage under its old bricks. After all, it was in these woods where she had had her first kiss. A first kiss, perhaps the last day of life—wasn’t she a proper heroine from some Remarque novel?

  The woods seemed empty, save an old man who sat on a bench by the path, staring at nothing as he ignored the sirens. Either deaf, thought Neda, or just didn’t give a shit. Perhaps he found it better to be killed by a bomb than to fade away in some poorly supplied hospital, living on bread with margarine.

  The sirens stopped as suddenly as they had started. Knowing what was coming, Neda chose a bench for herself and sat to wait for the hard rock delivered by NATO to overpower the Gypsy lament.

  June 15, 1999

  In Dača’s kafana, time had stopped somewhere in the seventies: plaid tablecloths, glassware with a little line marking volume, a menu limited to barbeque and the daily course of cooked meals. And guests who asked for kilo-kilo—a liter of white wine and a liter of sparkling water.

  “Bread, circuses, and cigarettes,” said Goran, taking a carton of Winstons from his bag, making a face as the exhaust fumes from the number 26 bus, passing down the street, prevailed for a moment over the scent of linden in the air of the kafana’s terrace. “That’s how the saying should go.”