Mikhail Mehmet Bulatovic was sitting at one of the smoky tables. Two ugly great brutes were standing behind him. The three guys from before were actually rather pretty in comparison.
Bulatovic was wearing a suit at least twenty years out of date, and was badly shaven, as though his tough skin had put up furious resistance to his razorblade. The kind of character that Zollo deeply loathed. A megalomaniac bumpkin who thought he was the Tsar of all the Russias just because he had some cop in his pocket and sold drugs at the head of a gang of cutthroats. No rules.
These were the kind of people who kept the wheels of the international drugs trade in motion. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of provincial little Caesars in pursuit of cash and glory.
Bulatovic nodded to him to sit down on the other side of the table. Murderer’s eyes, grey and expressionless. Zollo had never seen eyes like them. He held out a rough hand and took his seat. He was offered a glass of brandy which he barely sipped.
One of the men from the port said, ‘Mikhail don’t speak ’Talian, says it fascist language. I do, I made war against ’Talians. You speak, I translate.’
‘I want to know where to pick up the goods, and where to deliver the payment.’
This was quickly translated.
Bulatovic uttered a few words.
‘He says the day after tomorrow in Dubrovnik. At the docks. You check the goods, then you pay.’
Zollo nodded.
‘He say also that you in great danger here. Mikhail has many enemies, people who want to get their hands on his business. You understand? He got to keep everyone in their place. He spend money to pay soldiers, and to defend your way of life. If he don’t check everything, his enemies kill you for ruining his business.’
The usual shitty stuff. The tribal elder had stepped forward, just to tighten the rope.
Zollo got to his feet.
‘Tell him the price is the same as it was the other times. I’ll look after my own back. Ok?
The guy translated and Bulatovic went on staring at him for a few seconds, as though weighing something up.
Zollo felt like a cavalryman defending his scalp against the Indians.
He turned on his heels, not wild about the idea of turning his back on these people. Before he left he spat on the floor.
As he walked towards the ship he wondered how long it would take for them to come after him. The tavern door closed behind him.
And here they were.
He stopped and calmly lit a cigarette.
It was the two bodyguards.
They were clutching.45 calibre Lugers. Scrap metal.
He didn’t like trials of strength. They were just rhetorical gestures to show whose cock was the hardest. But that was how these people were, they spoke an ancient language.
He drew his Smith and Wesson, complete with silencer, and shot them both in the left kneecap before they had time to take aim.
He finished them off with a flurry of kicks and the jack-knife he kept in his pocket.
By the time he got back to the tavern his jacket was creased and he had a bloodstain on his sleeve. Bulatovic and the interpreter sat petrified at the table. It was the same colour as they were; they looked as though they were part of a single wooden sculpture. Zollo walked over to them, his face unchanged. The drugs dealer heard a plop in the glass in front of him. As his brandy turned red he saw two ears floating in it. Zollo murmured, ‘Now you know who’s hardest.’ He turned to the interpreter. ‘See you in Dubrovnik.’ This time he looked over his shoulder as he left.
Chapter 51
Mljet, 29 April
It happened five years ago. Kardelj, who had had dinner with me that evening, was clarifying the issue of Leninist theory in Yugoslavia, and rejecting the accusations of ‘Trotskyism’ issuing from Moscow. The mirror spied on us from the end of the corridor, our lookalikes copying our every move, perhaps preparing to reproach us. Here we were, well fed and clothed, so unlike the days of the konspiracija. Was it just vanity that dictated the stance that would consign us to history? We discovered (at dead of night it’s inevitable) that there was something monstrous about the mirrors. Kardelj said the mirror is an infernal machine, because it separates the individual from the community, stimulating his petty-bourgeois narcissism. I replied, ‘So how do you trim your moustache, by leaning over puddles?’ adding that, on the contrary, the mirror unites the individual with the community, and its admission into proletarian houses has cemented class pride, that sense of decorum thrown back in the bosses’ faces, ‘We have been naught, we shall be all! We can be, and we are, more stylish than you are!’ It was thanks to that decorum, to that pride, that the war was won.
Here I am. In a week I will be sixty-two. My temples are greying, I have a hint of a double chin, but I still get by, I have a young and beautiful wife. Stalin is dead, I’m alive. And I’m no longer an ilegalac. When I look in the mirror, I don’t miss those days. How could I? Two wars, prisons, fights, flight and privations. Lepoglava, Maribor. I haven’t had so much time to read since then. I still remember the smell of each book, the paper with its different colours and typefaces, every single copy brought into the jail. I used to read wearing pince-nez glasses that made me look like an intellectual. Me, a worker, the son of dirt-poor peasants.
And now I’m at the wheel of the new Yugoslavia, I’m wearing a new panama hat and in twenty minutes I’m going to be meeting Cary Grant. The coffee pot is hissing, the coffee is ready. Will he be one of those people who hold up their pinkies when they hold the cup? And what if he wants tea? No, he’s an American now, Americans drink coffee. The first American I ever met. when was that? At the Lux, in the shower, almost thirty years ago. Tell him about that?
White suit, sky-blue shirt, indigo tie matching my socks.
That interview in Life magazine, when we went to the UN. Lovely photographs, but Bebler and Djilas said I looked like a ‘South American dictator’, that I would have to be less ‘showy’ or I would repel Western public opinion. Strange, just a few weeks previously I had been talking to Kardelj about mirrors.
They’re stubborn, they don’t want to understand. They’ve never saved to buy the feathered hat of the gymnastic association. In Kamnik (what would it have been, 1911?) and Vienna, the dancing school, fencing school, skiing. Taking care of every detail, always improving your own way of doing things. In 1913 I became regiment fencing champion, I was admitted into that big tournament, I came second and made such an impression that I was sent on a course for junior officers. Small steps along the way that brought me to see the October Revolution and become a Bolshevik. Could I have led our revolution without a presence appropriate to the task? Small steps, and that hat.
One day even Djilas will understand: the League of Yugoslavian Communists governs this republic with the consensus of the people who founded it, a mosaic of races, religions, traditions. At the top you need rituals and certain roles. Without rituals and shared symbols, without a guarantor of the community’s cohesion, we would be finished. Every detail of my public face is a symbol, it must transmit the message: ‘I am everything and you are everything along with me! ’ The perfect cut of my uniform gives concrete form to the pride of the workers.
Stalin looked as though he was being choked by his jacket collar. The first time I saw him, he looked painfully clumsy. I cut a fine figure even in Buckingham Palace, a real man among bloodless dandies and doddering old fools. Bringing a breath of revolution and a brave new world to Buckingham Palace. Isn’t that a titanic enterprise as well?