I was there, I was there, with the benefit of old age she could assure us that she herself shot the bullet at the Montenegrin in the cocked hat, or that she’d run the scarfaced assassin through with her saber, she hesitates, in any case the kind old Marseillaise with the singsong accent is positive, the King was very handsome, very young, he smiled to the assembled crowd as he passed by on that October 9, 1934, which is in a way my birthdate, I killed for the homeland sixty years later, would I have assassinated the hieratic sovereign in cold blood in his motorized coach, maybe, convinced of the necessity of killing the head of the hydra of oppression, I would have found my accomplices in Lausanne, they would have let me in on the plan, the instructions, Mijo Kralj the coarse brute and Ivo Rajić the cunning, if I fail they’ll make an attempt on Karageorgevitch with a bomb in Paris everything’s ready the dictator just has to behave himself, a toast of gin to the health of Vlado the bloodthirsty “Chauffeur,” his face slashed by a knife during a brawl in Skopje the somber, would I have had his cool, his courage, confronted the horses and the dragoons’ swords without wavering, in a hotel on the Côte d’Azur, the day before, a young blond Croatian woman would have given me the weapons, a handsome brand-new Mauser C96 she got in Trieste, kindly provided by Mussolini’s agents, with two boxes of cartridges and a backup revolver, in the improbable case that the Mauser jams, she is beautiful and dangerous, she knows there’s not much chance I’ll come back alive, that there’s even every chance I’ll croak, killed or arrested by the French police, for the Cause, for Croatia, Franjo Mirković Mama’s father has been in exile since 1931, in Hungary at first, then Italy, with Pavelić and the other big-name “insurgents,” those Ustashis for whom the assassination of the monarch constitutes the first coup and it will earn Pavelić his first condemnation to death in absentia, in France, it’s strange that my grandfather chose this country for his exile, a coincidence, he was never bothered outside of Yugoslavia, nor was he even, so far as I know, pursued by Tito’s agents who will end up wounding Ante Pavelić with three gunshots in his Argentine refuge, my grandfather was a simple intellectual without any great political responsibilities in the final analysis, unlike his friend Mile Budak, the rural writer great killer of Serbs, a bogus ideologue and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the NDH — Budak won’t escape the partisans, he’ll end up with twelve bullets in his flesh after a lightning-fast trial, his family massacred near Maribor, the mustachioed pen-pusher didn’t have the luck of my grandfather, who had left a little earlier with Mama and her brother for Austria through the Croatian and German lines, in that end-of-April 1945 month of dust, lies, and panic, at the Slovenian border you have to choose between two routes, the one to Italy and the one to Carinthia held by the British, Franjo Mirković with wife and children is arrested by the English then released immediately, he has money, cousins in France he arrives in Paris at the same time that my paternal grandfather comes back from deportation, in a train, all the trains are leaving in the other direction, southwards now, the soldiers the deported the conquered the conquerors are taking the same route in the opposite direction, just as Antonio the father of my busy bartender goes back to Calabria or Campania and pauses by the train tracks in the middle of a field, will I go back home, what’s waiting for me in peace Ulysses is afraid of his wife his dog his son he doesn’t want to go back to Ithaca he doesn’t want me to down my gin set the cup on the counter I want a cigarette the bartender smiles at me he asks “un altro?” I hesitate but I’ll get blind-drunk if I have a third, inebriated as the beautiful Stéphanie the sorrowful said, a couple enters the bar they ask for a mineral water and a beer before going back to second class, I hesitate I hesitate I’d like to go out get some air like Antonio back from the war, go on, two’s a crowd but three’s company I say va bene, un altro, what weakness, what weakness, to guzzle lukewarm gin at six euros apiece in a train car, è la ultima, that’s the last mini-bottle whatever happens I’ll have to change drinks, move on to Campari and soda, the last time I got drunk in a train was in the night express that took me to Croatia with Vlaho and Andi, we had taken the bus from Trieste to a tiny no-account village on the Slovenian border to catch the Venice-Budapest stopping in Zagreb around 4:00 in the morning, the steward in our car was a Hungarian he had astronomical supplies of firewater in his cabin, sweet-smelling stuff real eau de Cologne alcohol made from cloves or God knows what Magyar horror, but he was funny and generous, he complained to us about having to go back to war, he spoke a funny Latino-Germanic-Hungarian gobbledygook embellished with a few Slavic words, a tubby guy who smoked like a steam-engine in his cubbyhole, I remember his face clearly as I will remember the tanned face of the bartender of the Pendolino Milan-Rome,