Zagreb Cowboy by Alen Mattich Read Free Book Online Page A

something about Anzulović. He may have clean hands, but what about his wife, eh? She’s a manager at Nama,” Strumbić said, referring to a department store chain. “Never short a dinar, those people. They’ve got their scams running. Hiding stock, marking it sold on the inventory sheets, and then putting it back on the shelves when the prices have gone up, pocketing the difference. Why do you think that most of the time there’s no coffee or toilet paper to be found for love or money, and then suddenly that’s all you can find? And his daughter works for them now too.” Strumbić sounded wounded.
    “Julius, right now the issue isn’t Anzulović’s wife. Right now it’s about me trying not to shoot you.”
    “We had an agreement, Gringo.”
    “Oh?”
    “Gringo, you’re not the violent sort. You’re a lawyer. You’re the sort of lawyer who’d be working for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now. You don’t want to shoot people. You’re an honest man” — the words were stumbling over each other — “trying to do the right thing, doing an impossible job in impossible circumstances when the world’s against you.”
    Della Torre knew Strumbić was playing on his sense of martyrdom. As a young prosecuting lawyer he’d been roped into Department VI soon after its formation. Anzulović, a senior detective himself hired from the regular Zagreb police force to run it, had tapped della Torre because of his knowledge of Italian and English and because he’d trained in international law, all useful for investigating the UDBA ’s activities abroad. It had paid well, and ironically it was — had been — a mostly honest job. One of the few truly honest jobs in a country rotten through with corruption and compromise.
    But the UDBA was widely hated. It didn’t matter that his job was to keep it as clean as possible. To most people the UDBA was poison. It may not have pervaded society as deeply as East Germany’s Stasi, but its long reach meant that no one was comfortable expressing honest political opinions, even to their spouses. Its penal colony, the Adriatic island Goli Otok, was a frozen hell in winter and a burning hell in summer from which few came back to join the living. But what the UDBA did better than any of those other hated organs of state viciousness was the murder of its dissidents. The organization and its predecessors had liquidated more than ten thousand souls during internal purges over the decades. It did so without compunction and with naked brutality, and there was no country in which an enemy of the Yugoslav state could feel safe from the reach of its long and crimson arm.
    “So what do I do now? Go back to Zagreb and wait for the next hitman to show up?”
    “Look, Gringo. If it makes you any happier, I’m in it at least as far up my neck as you are. You sure those Bosnians are fixed?”
    “Like a row of cabbages,” della Torre said wearily. “Mind if I pour myself a drink and help myself to another of your cigarettes?”
    “Don’t insult me. We’re informal here. You know you don’t have to ask,” Strumbić said extravagantly.
    Della Torre poured a tin mug of wine straight from the tap in the barrel, thinning it with a finger of bottled mineral water that tasted of soap, and lit one of Strumbić’s Lucky Strikes. A moth batted itself against the light bulb.
    “They should have pumped an anti-tank rocket into my apartment,” della Torre said.
    “Maybe next time. Or maybe they’ll find some people who can drive.”
    “So what do you do now that these people from Belgrade think you shafted them?” della Torre asked.
    “I’ll have to go somewhere else for a while. Just like you,” Strumbić said, chewing on the inside of his lip.
    “The place on Šipan?”
    “Problem with the island is all the locals know when you’re there. If somebody who doesn’t like you knows one of the islanders, you’re stuffed. Opatija is out of