Belgrade Noir Read online

  “Frame this cover page and put it by that Dürer print,” she said, before turning and leaving the office.

  November 16, 2018

  Well, like a true representative of those without imagination or courage for actual drastic changes in their lives, to which, gladly or not, I now belong, I chose a “fart” instead of a “bang.”

  The Fart, directed by Neda Adamović, looks like this: tabloid headlines, bold with avarice, scream that the illegitimate daughter of Vimark TV’s owner takes part in his reality show! I am sure that for a man who at a certain point in his life started to believe that money could transform a ravenous cannibal into a Renaissance man, those headlines were more painful than a bullet through his head. Yes, a bullet was my original plan. But I abandoned it when I realized that the anger in me was more complex than simple rage directed at Viktor Marković.

  Mind you—he was certainly a very suitable devil for the exorcism I needed to perform.

  New headlines kept coming as I’d predicted. Divorce! Rumor has it that Mr. Marković “has very specific tastes in sex.” Namely, it seemed that Mrs. Marković had received photographs of an unidentified long-haired blonde doing something nasty with Mr. Marković. I could just imagine horny readers making faces of disgust, wondering at the same time if they should try something like that. Marković can insist the images are photoshopped until he’s blue in the face, but who would believe a man who let his own daughter fuck in front of a camera?

  And just like NATO—thanks to Goran and his permanently geared-up journalistic instinct—I have an infinite wealth of weapons. Such as the many images of certain high-ranking men with “specific tastes” enjoying the company of Marković’s merry “secretaries.” To stop these photos from leaking to the press, I had a price. Goran and I were laughing while we split the money. Truth be told, it was quite therapeutic.

  As for Milena, she is an adult now and ready for her fate. I won’t give up on her, of course. Even with the set of genes she inherited, I hope she will eventually realize the difference between the real starry sky and the one where the shine of the stars is measured by their nudity and vulgarity.

  And if I share a few things with her, she might like the fact that her mother can be a badass bitch too.

  You see, I can avert my gaze as much as I want, but I must accept that Evil is ultimately appreciated these days. To people made insensitive by all the loud distractions of modern times, it is exciting and exotic. How else would all those snakes, parasites, and leeches, all those stains on the face of humanity, become media darlings?

  There’s one thing consoling me in this newly found cynicism: I am not a killer. Of people, countries, or culture.

  ALTER EGO INC.

  by Goran Skrobonja

  Učiteljsko Naselje

  Translated by Nataša Milas

  After many years, she visited Učiteljsko Naselje again.

  She’d grown up in this neighborhood, but since she’d moved away she’d had no reason to come back. She remembered the place—located between Konjarnik, Šumice, and Zvezdara—as unpleasant, shabby, and depressing.

  What she saw from the taxi—a small, inexpensive, autonomous, and noiseless electric Asian vehicle—Marija didn’t recognize, nor did she associate it with any of her childhood memories. The neighborhood that she remembered consisted of several narrow streets and residential buildings erected around two large factories built back in the 1960s when the area was still at the edge of urban Belgrade. At the time when Marija left Učiteljsko Naselje, huge concrete buildings with broken windows were turned into furniture warehouses, yoga and pilates studios, and squats for struggling artists. The same streets were now covered with solar panels, placed on every corner, looking like phantasmagoric, dazzling sculptures.

  Marija got out of the car in front of a restaurant—quite a popular one, judging by the various web ratings. When she turned around she found the entrance to the business she was looking for in a four-story building. Next to the large aluminum and glass doors, there was a brass plaque with AE Inc. engraved on it. It was abbreviated from Alter Ego Inc., the full name of Isak’s start-up.

  She wondered again why Isak had placed such a promising company in this part of the city, assuming that the reason could only be the cheap rent. Everything else in the neighborhood was far from being prestigious and appealing to ambitious investors and international firms. She shrugged, turned back again, looked over at the indifferent facades of the buildings and the indifferent faces of the passersby, and approached the intercom. A split second later—as if somebody had been watching her the entire time—a soft buzz sounded and the door opened before her.

  * * *

  The director was excited. He spoke very quickly: “Mr. Lero explained everything to me. Trust me, you’ll be delighted when you see what we’ve achieved so far. The technology our start-up has developed is quite revolutionary and I’m excited that we’ll be taking the key step in its testing thanks to you—”

  “Excuse me,” she interrupted. “How long will this all take? I have a lot of errands today.” This was true: she’d taken the day off but had a waxing appointment at one. She had lunch with Isak after that, and then another appointment at the beauty parlor.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied, “we’ll do it as fast as we can. Do you want to start right away?”

  “Of course.” She looked over empty walls and modest office furniture. “Here?”

  “Oh, no ma’am, absolutely not.” He got up and theatrically opened the door. “This way, please.”

  The director hurried to the elevator and smiled again nervously. When they entered the elevator, she watched as he pressed -2.

  The door closed and Marija felt the elevator sliding below street level.

  * * *

  She had met Isak Lero at a reception at the Swiss ambassador’s residence.

  Her husband had received an invitation because he had been placed on the list of some of the major NGOs that followed the work of the most promising coders and openly recruited their services for foreign technology giants. Aleksandar Vranješ had previously programmed several interesting apps for mobile platforms. The most popular among them was the Trailblazers platform intended for drivers navigating Belgrade’s chaotic traffic. Trailblazers’ algorithms had enabled autonomous vehicles to monitor the situation and constantly report to each other where they were going in order to optimize traffic flow, and had significantly reduced traffic congestion. As he liked to say, these algorithms had definitely put him on the map—which the invitation to the residence of His Excellency proved. This had happened at a time when the two of them would go for days without uttering a single word: he was buried in work and programmed at night and slept during the day; she went to work, moving through the day like a zombie, sleeping at night. A depressing time. The time after Mina.

  The only thing she remembered from this reception—which she’d attended unwillingly—was Isak. Amid the throng of officials and the waiters who were clumsily dragging themselves through the crowd carrying trays with canapés and cocktails, she tried to find her way to the nearest chair, where she planned to stay until Aleksandar had had enough of chatting with the IT team and took her home. At some point she snuck out to a room on the ground floor of the residence. As she looked around, slightly perplexed, she became aware of someone’s presence.

  “Would you like to get out of here too?” asked large man in an elegant jacket and a light-colored shirt without a tie. She looked up at his face—he was much taller than her—and saw a mild frown creasing his forehead.

  A man who knows that you don’t say “Wanna,” but “Would you like,” she thought to herself.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, looking sincerely concerned.

  How terrible I must look, if he only took one glance at me and figured out that I wasn’t feeling very well, she thought. I like his voice.

  “I can’t stand the crowds,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s stifling in here.”

/>   “We’ll take care of that.” He smiled and Marija realized that it was hard for her to look away from his warm eyes. How old is he, she wondered, in his fifties?

  He gently took her by the arm and led her through the corridor. He opened the door, which allowed in a refreshing breeze and the scent of late spring. “Here, this way,” he said, and they continued to an illuminated garden.

  “Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” He paused as she obediently sat on a wooden bench near a white gravel path. He noticed the expression on her face. “Maybe some water . . .”

  She put her fingers on his hand and smiled, now more naturally. “Campari and juice, please. If they have it.”

  He nodded. As he went back into the house to find an open bar and bring her a drink, she felt that something had irreversibly changed. She accepted the change as a life-saving exit.

  More than three years had passed since that evening. More than three years of their secret relationship, and almost as long since Aleksandar became a leading developer in Lero Technologies, the main investor in the Alter Ego Inc. start-up.

  * * *

  “I won’t bother you with details,” said the director as he walked next to her. “I’m sure you are familiar with the basic principles of the procedure.”

  They walked between glass boxes in which men and women in white coats stood by unusual machines, hospital beds on wheels, computer workstations, and chairs that reminded Marija of well-equipped dentist offices. In some boxes, these machines—3-D printers she now recognized—were painfully, slowly forming something that, she realized, feeling the hair on the back of her next stand up, looked like different parts of human bodies.

  The director stopped and pointed to a long glass wall and motionless figures behind him. She gasped. There were a few dozen of them. They stood motionless. They were naked like old classical statues, but were made of a material that was so convincing that she couldn’t help thinking that someone was detaining these men and women, making them stand so stiffly with no hope of ever being allowed to move.

  “We’ve run into a lot of problems,” the director muttered, moving to a section in the corner of a large, well-lit underground room that reminded Marija of the automatic photo booths she had seen in old movies. “Mainly legal in nature: in this sphere, things develop rapidly, but bureaucracy decides on the rules and lags behind hopelessly. EU directives covering artificial intelligence and robotics have become obsolete ever since the first computer passed the Captcha test. They can’t understand, they just can’t understand . . . But, somehow, we will get to the bottom of it. Mr. Lero has a good legal team.”

  “Do I . . . need to come in here?” she asked.

  The thin man smiled and nodded. “This won’t take long,” he said. “We’ve perfected the scanning so well that what used to take hours may now be accomplished in just under fifteen minutes. But this is not the key—your DNA is the basis for the print, while the scanning results are actually used for the finishing touches. The main thing is to capture the personality of the subject—your personality: the inner rainbow of the mind, your special light, whatever you want to call it. Recording and storing it in the mainframes that occupy the whole underground floor beneath us. Yottabytes and yottabytes of data—all that makes you, one, unique. And now, thanks to the algorithm for which this will be the final test, one more—doubled.”

  Yes, she thought, entering a small room, the door slamming closed behind her, this algorithm wouldn’t exist without my husband.

  She examined the memory foam mattress lifted upright at an angle on a shining hydraulic stand. She sighed and began to undress. At one point, as she neatly folded the black blouse and the tight pencil skirt Isak loved so much, she thought that the director was probably watching her on the screen out there. She shrugged her shoulders and went to the mattress. The time for shyness had long passed. Soon all employees in this company would have access not only to the image of her naked body but also to all her memories and thoughts. Isak explained to her that she shouldn’t worry, that this database—the data that made her her—would not be accessed by anyone without the appropriate password, a password that only the director of Alter Ego and Isak would have. She knew that for the commercial realization of this process one of the key conditions was the protection, safety, and inviolability of client data, but then again . . . how many people would be willing to risk exposing themselves to such an extent?

  “We can start now,” she heard the director’s voice through the speaker. “Buckle up, please.”

  She did. The hydraulics hissed, the color of the lights changed, the bed began to shift its incline, and Marija closed her eyes.

  * * *

  “Do you even know why you are doing this?”

  Marija sat on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the promenade near the Sava River with Tamara, her best friend.

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “a few weeks ago we had a bad fight.”

  “You and Isak?”

  “Of course. I wish I could have a fight with Aleksandar.”

  “Let me guess: you’ve been thinking about where your relationship is going?”

  “Well, yes,” Marija answered. “I complained that he’s so closed off, that whenever I bring up my divorce from Aleksandar and our happy future life together, he just shuts down. I told him how much this was tearing me apart—how much it hurts me—that I completely give myself to him, that I sacrifice myself . . .”

  “And?”

  “Imagine what he said! Wait, I’ll try to remember exactly how he put it . . .” She frowned slightly after taking a sip of her cocktail. “Something like this: What are you actually sacrificing? Your relationship with your husband? As far as I know, it was ruined before we met . . . Would—if the situation were different—you sacrifice your relationship with your child for us? He went straight for the jugular.”

  “That’s awful,” said Tamara with a smile. “But he’s your awful guy.”

  Marija finished the last of her cocktail and lit up another cigarette. “You know, I shouldn’t have told you all this. About the experiment. I mean, it’s all still very top secret, a big project for Isak’s company, but you’re the only one I can really trust—”

  “Don’t worry,” her friend cut in, and waved the waitress over to order another round. “I always keep our secrets. What are your plans? How are you spending these fifteen days while waiting for . . . your replacement?”

  Marija leaned back in her chair while Tamara ordered two more cocktails, and waited for the waitress to walk away. “Isak organized a trip. The first eight days—Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon. Then a week in the Côte d’Azur.”

  Marija sat back and put out her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. After a minute or so, she sighed and said: “I would love it if Aleksandar found someone . . . if he cheated on me. To find out. I think it would change everything.”

  * * *

  “Let’s call her . . . Marija 2.0. All right?”

  The director was smiling so broadly that Marija felt nauseous. Or was the cause of that nausea deeper? She felt uncomfortable as she watched her copy sitting silently on a chair in a laboratory glass box.

  She was dressed in a simple white nightgown. Bare ankles and feet with nails painted in her favorite color, arms folded in her lap. The eyes of Marija 2.0 were closed, the face completely devoid of expression.

  She felt her mouth drying. Somewhere in the back of her head, a hard-core panic was setting in. This was not like standing in front of a mirror. This was something completely different. Marija gulped and moistened her lips with her tongue.

  “Her memory now includes your experiences from the last few days to avoid unwanted holes in memory,” the director continued breezily. “Everything we recorded this morning has been smoothly transferred to her personality.”

  “Please . . . please,” Marija said, “I want to . . . I want to see it . . . without clothes.”

  The director looked at her,
raising his eyebrows. He nodded his head and typed something on the tablet. Marija 2.0 opened her eyes, slowly stood up, and pulled the nightgown over her head.

  Marija didn’t pay attention to the fact that her body—even if it was just a copy—was exposed to the view of the director and other lab technicians. An irresistible curiosity now prompted her to walk around the naked woman standing in front of her, to carefully see her body from all sides. Suddenly she wanted to see herself as Isak saw her. She was both excited and filled with anxiety.

  She remembered yesterday’s conversation in bed, after having sex, when, half-jokingly, she said, You’ve done all this just so you can have a threesome—with two of me. He’d wanted to answer her, to dissuade her, but he’d only dropped a kiss on her lips that were still hot from his gentle bites and said: You know, I didn’t even think about it, but now that you mention it . . . well—I think it would be hot to see you make love to yourself. Would you do that for me?

  Would she?

  As she watched her replica, she felt a flurry of almost pleasurable anxiety. She used to fantasize about lesbian sex—she assumed that all women did—but usually in her threesome fantasies, where she and another woman (sometimes Tamara, sometimes another friend, or someone she didn’t know at all) shared the same lover, there would inevitably be those exciting, forbidden touches. But if the other woman was her, herself? She looked down the upright back of Marija 2.0, to her firm buttocks, sculpted muscles, golden skin with a few tiny spots, and thought about making love to herself—she knows exactly what turns her on, she feels it under her toes and under her tongue, the juices and the warmth that Isak feels every time they sleep together.