Belgrade Noir Page 2

  Kozma set up a folding chair in front of the door. I spotted numerous grease stains around the peephole, probably from his forehead. Next to the doorframe, a notebook was hanging on a string. I had one just like that, but in my kitchen. I used mine to write down every penny I spent, keeping track until my next pension payment arrived. I doubted Kozma had his for that purpose.

  I asked him how long he’d been spying on the young man.

  “Four girls,” he said. If they came twice a week, it meant Kozma had been active for at least a fortnight. All that time I’d failed to notice he had a new project. What kind of a friend and neighbor was I? I wondered.

  We sat mostly in silence until we heard the heavy front door open or the buzzing sound of the intercom, and then he’d spring to his feet, peer through the peephole, declaring, “Baby,” or, “Dog.” He would write it down in his notebook. During Kozma’s shift, we welcomed two babies and three dogs back from their walks.

  When the front door opened for the first time after eight, he got up again to take a look. I knew he saw something interesting because his back stiffened.

  “It’s her,” he said.

  “Let me see.”

  I had enough time to catch a quick look before she disappeared to the left toward the staircase. Deep slit skirt, strong calves, assured walk. Black hair hiding her face. I listened until the clatter of her heels died down, then I unlocked the door and stepped out.

  “What are you doing?” Kozma hissed.

  While I was sneaking out into the corridor, I felt his disapproval behind my back, but despite this he followed me. We stood by the handrail listening to her footsteps, counting floors. She stopped on the top floor and knocked on a door. Someone opened it without any greeting. The door slammed shut behind her.

  Kozma dragged me by my collar back into his apartment. He peered at me intensely in the darkness of his hallway, as if expecting me to admit defeat, but the fact that some woman had shown up on the fourth floor did not necessarily mean anything. I said nothing.

  “Now you’re waiting for her to come out, or not come out,” he said. “Wake me up at half past ten.”

  * * *

  I fought the urge to go to the toilet frequently. Whenever I ran off to the bathroom, I left the door open so I could hear any sounds from the hallway and I hurried back as soon as I squeezed out those few precious drops.

  During my shift, two students from the first floor arrived home from their night out. I watched a drunken neighbor from the second floor fail at unlocking the door and eventually took pity on him, buzzing him in. “Thank you!” he shouted into the air, to no one in particular, unaware as to who had let him in.

  Then it got quiet in the building, with no one coming or going.

  I listened to Kozma snore. I listened to planes flying over us, a noise I’d gotten used to. Part of the problem was that we got used to everything.

  When no one went in or out for a long time, I started nosing around the apartment. On the kitchen wall I studied framed photographs of Kozma’s family. He lived alone, just like me. It’s probably why we got close so fast. But it was not by choice that he lived alone, as it was in my case. His wife and daughter were no longer with us, and his son acted as if he weren’t—living in Canada and refusing to speak to his father. All the pictures looked yellowed as if from another, more ancient time. They probably were, especially for Kozma.

  The black-haired woman did not come back down. At least not by eleven, when I woke Kozma, having let him sleep an extra half hour.

  He looked at me quizzically and I shook my head. Getting up without a word, he moved over to the chair, while I lay down on the couch, covering myself with his blanket.

  * * *

  I was woken by daylight. I didn’t immediately realize something was wrong, but I slowly became aware that I should have taken over well before sunrise.

  Kozma shrugged. “I didn’t have the heart to wake you. You were sleeping so soundly.”

  He was right. I hadn’t slept that well in a long time.

  “Nothing much happened anyway,” he added. His eyes were so red I did not doubt he’d stayed awake the whole time.

  We heard steps outside. “People going to the market,” he explained, yawning, and struggled to stand up in time to see who it was. “It’s him!” he whispered loudly, although no one could hear us.

  “Is he carrying a suitcase?” I asked.

  He shook his head, frowning. “If he’s headed to the market, this may be the perfect time to get into his apartment. To see for ourselves what’s going on up there.”

  “What do you mean, get into his apartment?”

  “Well, I have the keys.”

  “What? Where did you get them?”

  Kozma could not hide his conspiratorial smile. “It’s a long story.” He opened a locker in the hallway and took a bunch of keys off a hook. “Mira found his keys left in the lock of his mailbox one morning. She took them for safekeeping and tried to return them, but he was gone for the whole day. She told me all about it over coffee. I offered to return them for her because she had to go to her mother’s. Eventually I did, but not before I made copies.”

  “I can’t believe it. How long have you had them? Why didn’t you go into his apartment sooner?”

  “I needed a lookout.” He dangled the keys under my nose. “Coming?”

  I came because I had no other choice. Over seventy years old and this was the first time I was about to break into someone’s home. But I didn’t feel guilty, maybe just a bit excited.

  I prayed that we wouldn’t run into anyone, because we would have had a hard time explaining what two retirees from the ground floor were doing upstairs. Not even the roof would serve as an excuse since it was sealed off.

  It was smooth sailing till the third floor when we heard a door open one level below. We flattened ourselves against the wall and waited for that someone to leave. When we arrived at the apartment door, instead of immediately putting the key in, Kozma knocked. He wanted to be sure no one was home. But if he was right, there would be no one alive in there anyway.

  We both took deep breaths and entered. Inside, there was a long, naked corridor. The apartment did not look so much abandoned as not lived in. That’s why the voices we heard from the next room caught us off guard.

  Behind closed doors, two men were talking. I could pick out a few words, “turnout,” “electoral roll,” and “polling board.” My knees buckled as I completely panicked. I ran straight for the door, colliding with Kozma who reached it first. He darted into the hallway as if launched from a circus cannon and tumbled down the stairs. I followed close behind him, as always.

  On the stairwell between the fourth and third floors, he whooshed past a man who was climbing up, while I ran straight into the guy. I felt as if I’d hit a lamppost and fell at his feet. He grasped me by the shoulders roughly as he helped me up, and only when I lifted my head did I realize it was the neighbor whose apartment we’d just broken into. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his glasses, only my own reflection. An empty garbage can was dangling from his left hand.

  Kozma was long gone. I wrestled out of the neighbor’s grip and hurried down the stairs. He shouted after me, but I paid no attention. I didn’t stop till I got into my own apartment, where I slammed the door and leaned against it. I was sure my pulse would never slow down. I was so out of breath I almost didn’t hear the knocking.

  Through the peephole I saw Kozma nervously glancing around the hallway. I quickly let him in.

  “Are you insane?” I shouted. “He didn’t go to the market! He went to throw out his trash!”

  “We have a bigger problem now,” Kozma replied. “Do you know what we forgot? To lock the door!”

  * * *

  I slept until late afternoon, tossing and turning, waking up even more tired. I was studying the ceiling, wondering how it could even be possible to be that uneven. Which construction company did it? Who approved it?

  I dragged my
self to the kitchen, stepping around a bunch of chess books which were not helping me much. I swallowed a handful of pills. Routine was routine, it didn’t matter if I’d gotten up six hours later than usual.

  Like Kozma, I too had a framed photo from another time, only I kept it in an old suitcase under my bed. I would take it out every morning, wipe off any dust, and wonder how she’d look today, if she were alive, before carefully putting the picture back in the suitcase.

  I opened a chess book to delay going outside. I read a section about the Slav defense, when the opponent declines to respond to the sacrificing of a pawn in a Queen’s Gambit. The purpose was to narrow down the opponent’s maneuvering space in the middle of the board. Too bad I probably wouldn’t have a chance to use it.

  Eventually, I came out with unbridled trepidation. The thing I was afraid of most was that Kozma was right about our neighbor, that he would jump me in the hallway, push me back into my apartment, and torture me for hours.

  Outside, the sky was grayish, but it was still too light for me. Smog, humidity, and concrete often raised the temperature by several degrees. Kozma was sitting at our table in the park when I arrived, staring into his lap, failing to notice me. Soon I realized why.

  UNDER 70 ONLY was spray-painted in black across the table. Dog owners and young parents were frowning at us as if we were the ones who wrote it.

  I don’t know what made me look around, but it seemed logical that they’d stick around to see our reaction. I spotted the girls sitting on a bench just outside the park fence, in two rows, on the seat and backrest, just like soccer players posing for a picture.

  Gigi grabbed her chest as if in pain from an imaginary heart attack and keeled over the back. When she got up, she and her friends laughed at us. They had every right to. They’d scored a strong point on their home turf.

  I wanted to go, but I couldn’t leave Kozma behind, so I sat down.

  “What are we going to do now?” Kozma said.

  “You’re asking me? It’s easy for you, he probably didn’t even see you. It’s always me who ends up bearing the brunt of your nonsense.”

  Gigi and the girls lit cigarettes as one, losing interest in us. Triumph sometimes has that effect on people. Without a real challenge, it becomes boring. Our challenge was on the fourth floor, but his balcony was empty.

  “Nothing’s going on,” Kozma said. “I’ve been watching the whole time.”

  “You’re not giving up, are you?”

  “The conversation we heard in the apartment? Why would anyone talk like that? When I think about it, he may have left the radio on in order to warn off accidental snoops or burglars, because when you hear the radio through the door, you assume someone’s home.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Well, sometimes I do it myself.”

  “And does it work?”

  “I don’t know, but no one has ever broken in.”

  We watched the balcony until it got dark. After that we squinted at it.

  I don’t know what made me drop my gaze four stories to my ground-floor terrace, but when I did, I spied a movement through the windows. At first I thought I’d imagined it. Then it happened again. A shadow moved over from the kitchen to the living room. From my kitchen to my living room.

  I turned to Kozma. “Did you see that?”

  He gave a wide-eyed nod.

  “You know I just shit my pants,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  I got up, but Kozma grabbed me by the wrist. “If you go through the yard, he will see you. Let’s go in through the front.”

  My head was humming, the vein in my neck throbbing. When she saw us leaving, Gigi started rolling her clenched fists under her eyes as if crying. I let Kozma take my hand and lead me around the building. Smoking on the bench across the road, Mira looked at us as if we were old loonies. She was probably right.

  The door to my apartment was slightly ajar, but there was no one inside. I found my garbage can emptied out in the middle of the living room. Everything else seemed intact.

  “He’s screwing with us,” I said. “Now he’s broken into my apartment. But where did he get the keys? The lock doesn’t seem broken.” I shook my head, overwhelmed by a feeling of anger that replaced fear. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “War,” Kozma said.

  * * *

  Kozma turned me into a kibitzer, voyeur, spy. I waited in my hallway until after seven, when he knocked on my door three times. It was a signal that he saw the neighbor leave, this time hopefully farther than our dumpsters.

  While we climbed to his floor, I didn’t care about running into anyone. When Kozma unlocked the door, I heard the voices again, one male and one female, and recognized the words “sonata” and “philharmonic.” I instinctively wanted to turn away, but Kozma smiled and walked into the room, calling me over. He pointed to a radio sitting on the windowsill.

  We had no trouble searching the apartment because not only did it not contain any women—or suitcases or saws—but it was nearly empty. In the middle of the living room there was a double bed with clean sheets; a large mirror hung on the wall across from it.

  The view from the window so high above my own was totally different. In the park, I made out a shadow of someone who looked like one of Gigi’s girls looking up, as if watching this particular apartment. Over the roofs you could see the river, black and swollen.

  “Something here isn’t right,” Kozma said absently.

  The room next to the living room was locked. None of the keys matched, but this didn’t stop my friend. He went on searching until he found a door in the kitchen. We looked at each other. It should not have been there on the apartment’s outer wall.

  This door was unlocked. We carefully peeked inside, mustered up the courage to enter, and stepped into a completely different apartment. It was covered in bathroom tiles, like a hospital. We passed a reception desk and in one small room found a bed and ultrasound and EKG equipment.

  “The cardiologist from the next building over,” I said.

  “They drilled a hole through the double wall and made a passage. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve fallen into Wonderland.”

  “I think we did fall into Wonderland.”

  When we returned to the neighbor’s apartment, Kozma went on knocking on walls and wooden screens. Knock knock knock. Thump. In the living room he found a hidden closet. Two panels, floor to ceiling, hard oak boards, painted white just like the walls. It was not simple but we eventually found an indentation where we could fit our fingers in and slide the panel open. In one compartment there were stacks of cardboard boxes. It looked like the boxes had once contained an assortment of A/V equipment, but now appeared mostly empty. In the other, we found a wardrobe full of women’s clothing, from doctors’ coats and leather corsets to wigs of all colors. On the closet floor there was a similarly wide selection of footwear, from high heels to flats.

  “What’s going on here?” Kozma asked.

  Instead of a reply, someone opened the front door on the other side of the apartment. In the empty space it sounded like a gunshot.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

  Kozma started flapping his hands as if trying to fly. “This hasn’t happened before!” he croaked. “They never come two days in a row!”

  I interrupted him by pushing him inside the closet with the boxes, barely squeezing myself in. Pulling the panel after me, I left a narrow crack to watch through. Kozma leaned over me hoping to see something too. We probably looked like a twisted totem pole, two sorry old men peering from their hidey-hole. I wasn’t sure we were completely hidden from the outside.

  A tall blonde in a business suit entered the room. I’d say I had never seen her before but for two minor details: her skirt slit and those strong calves. She peeked into the kitchen, snapped her bubble gum, and took off her hair in a single practiced motion. Underneath, she had short black hair. Now I was certain she was the woman from the
night before.

  She opened the other wing of the closet and threw her wig inside, then pulled out a leather corset. She took everything off, white jacket and skirt, black bra and panties. I managed to count three tattoos: a scorpion on her shoulder, a crescent moon on her stomach, and a whip on her thigh. She squeezed herself into the corset, her waist becoming so small I wondered how she could breathe. The two of us did not breathe, did not swallow, did not dare look away.

  When she went to the bathroom and we heard her turn on the tap, I whispered to Kozma, “This is where all your women disappeared. Into this closet.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he whispered back. “She’s the same one. But that doesn’t explain­—”

  I shushed him. The front door opened again.

  “I’m in here. Will be out in a sec,” the woman called from the bathroom.

  We heard someone turn off the radio and then our neighbor entered with a paper bag in his hand. He took out a hamburger and bit into it. He had his mouth full when the woman entered the living room.

  “Sorry,” he said between bites. “I’m sick of just snacks.” He wiped himself off and they kissed on the mouth.

  “How come we’re working tonight?” he asked.

  “He begged me for an extra day.”

  The neighbor nodded. “I’m going to get ready.” He unlocked the next room with a little key from his pocket and closed the door behind him before we could see anything more.

  The woman started rummaging through the closet, taking out more clothes. She draped herself with something and put some kind of cap on her head.

  A sound system crackled. Over invisible loudspeakers we heard the neighbor’s voice: “You look stunning, as always.”

  She leaned forward and pointed her bottom toward the mirror.

  We heard him chuckle. “He rang the bell in the other apartment. Go get him. You know he doesn’t like to wait.”