The Heart of Hell by Alen Mattich Read Free Book Online

friends, well, they’d both known a woman there too. She was hard to forget.
    So why did he have a hard time believing that’s where Strumbić had run to? Maybe because the Americans would have looked for him there already.
    “Think his old lady knows about the London place?” Anzulović asked.
    “No,” della Torre said, after giving the question some thought. “She would have her hands on it by now. She doesn’t know a quarter of what he actually has.”
    “A tenth.”
    “A hundredth.”
    “I wonder if even he knows how much money he’s salted away.”
    “He was organizing a scam when I last saw him in Dubrovnik,” della Torre said. “Something about smuggling pirated heavy metal CDs knocked off in Turkey.”
    Anzulović shook his head. A slow, sad motion, at once showing disbelief and an absolute understanding of how the world worked. Corruption suited some people better than others. Strumbić was good at being on the take. He revelled in it, lived for it, even. But della Torre’s one foray into shady dealings had left him with a bullet in his elbow and a price on his head, which he still hadn’t been able to rub off. It was at the beginning of the year and he’d been short of funds. Like almost everyone. At the time, Strumbić was in the market for UDBA ’s secrets, so della Torre had passed on to him what he thought were a few inconsequential files, and Strumbić paid him enough to buy the occasional carton of Luckys. But one of the documents, the Pilgrim file, had come back to bite him. An ancient Communist had gotten wind of the leak and set a couple of Bosnian killers on della Torre. He owed his life to Strumbić.
    “Everybody else in the whole fucking country is hiding behind the furniture, scared to death about what’s coming, and what does Julius do? He sells them shitty stolen music,” Anzulović said. “Well, good luck to him in London, and well done to him for getting out. I used to resent him. But now I know he’s the only sane human being this country has ever produced. Except maybe Irena.”
    “No, she’s gone mad too.”
    Irena was della Torre’s ex-wife. A doctor, she had recently gone east to Vukovar because so many of the local medics had evacuated the city when the Serbs were besieging it. Tito had kept Yugoslavia together with charm, hubris, and an iron fist. But he’d died ten years earlier. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent continent-wide upheaval, bitter nationalist rivalries between the country’s ethnic groups, especially the Serbs and Croats, had created a violent rupture. And Vukovar was on the fault line. Della Torre had been adamant that Irena shouldn’t go. She went anyway, with her British “friend” (was paramour still the right word?), a specialist in bullet wounds. It’d been a week since della Torre had last managed to speak to her. The phone lines were unreliable in these times of war, and anyway, she spent most of her days in the operating theatre.
    Anzulović shrugged. “Still trying to convince her to leave? They need doctors in Vukovar. Is her Dr. Cohen there still?”
    “They need to evacuate the city,” della Torre said, ignoring the question. “Because when they finish flattening it, no one’s going to be living there anyway.” And then, after a pause: “Yes, as far as I know he’s still there with her. But I haven’t been able to get through for a while. Last I heard, he was only allowed to assist. I guess British imperialist doctors don’t have the right sort of political training to heal the proletariat.”
    “New regime, Gringo. Remember, we’re now capitalist revanchists. No longer socialists with an inhuman face.”
    “I find it so confusing. Aren’t we supposed to be nationalist socialists these days?”
    “Shhh,” Anzulović said, suddenly alarmed. It was one thing to joke about how the newly independent Croatia was shedding the trappings of Yugoslav Communism, but to hint back at the country’s Nazi