If Milena ever broke her neck it would be on this staircase. The steps were high and badly lit, and the fact that the wobbly rail had been shored up with some kind of makeshift wooden strut didn’t improve matters much. Tanja’s house, which clung to the hillside halfway up the slope between the old city and the harbour, had once been a shack, but Tanja had turned it bit by bit into a veritable jewel. The best thing was the underfloor heating. No, the Finnish sauna. No, best of all was the big west-facing picture window. The view of the River Sava, the harbour and Branko’s Bridge was breathtaking.
Milena pulled the front door shut behind her – as so often, it had been left slightly ajar – and called out, ‘Hello? It’s me!’
She heard the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, and then Tanja’s voice. ‘Sweetie, dinner in two minutes!’
Between bags and boxes stood the little silver suitcase that Tanja used for short trips, and next to it a pair of burgundyred boots. Petals from some forsythia branches in a giant vase lay strewn all over the floor.
‘This was a great idea,’ Tanja shouted. ‘You forgot your keys, so you just drop in. So spontaneous – so not you! It’s utter madness.’ Barefoot, she stood at the stove in her jogging pants and a grey silk pullover, which was too tight over her ample bosom. She was poking around with a fork in a pot full of boiling water.
Milena gave her friend a peck on the cheek and, casting an eye over the pretzels and sweet mustard on the table, declared, ‘You’ve been to Munich.’
A Bavarian white sausage landed on her plate. ‘I was at the hairdresser’s there. Long overdue – you should have seen me.’ Tanja brushed back her red curls with her hand. ‘This frizz can only be tamed by Tommy. And just look at the colour!’
Milena nodded. ‘It’s perfect.’
Tanja stuck a spoon into the mustard jar. ‘By the way, how come you don’t need colour? Where’s your grey?’
‘I need to lose some weight.’
Tanja handed her a glass and poured beer into it. ‘You’ve got curves and that’s good. Not that it’s of any interest to us, but men love it. Look at your ambassador.’
‘He’s not “my ambassador”!’
Tanja put away the bottle. ‘What does he do, if you don’t mind me asking?’
Milena drank the foam, which tasted wonderfully of wheat, and licked her lips. Armed with plates, bottles and the bag of fresh pretzels, they moved into the living room. ‘I bumped into him by chance yesterday, in the Kosovo Office.’ ‘What were you doing in the Kosovo Office?’ Tanja asked, lighting the candles.
Milena cleared the pile of newspapers off the sofa. On top was a Swiss paper embossed with a stamp reading ‘Senator Lounge’. Tanja had obviously purloined it from the airport. On the first page, top right, there was a small news item: ‘Bilateral talks between Serbia and Kosovo put on ice for the present.’ The official reason cited was the ongoing investigation into the murder of two Serbs in Kosovo.
‘Come on,’ said Tanja, ‘sit yourself down.’
Milena pushed the newspaper aside and asked, ‘Have you heard about the two old people who were shot in Kosovo?’
Tanja nodded with her mouth full; she knew about the case.
Milena told her about Ljubinka, who had married not her uncle but Miloš Valetić instead, and about the children, or at least the daughter, whom she had been able to track down – Slavujka, the independent small-time entrepreneur, who wanted nothing to do with Kosovo and the past, and had been more critical of her parents’ return than her brother, who appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth.
‘You know,’ Milena said, ‘I keep asking myself: what kind of people are these who break into a house and shoot an elderly couple whose only crime is to be Serbian? It all sounds so unbelievable, so totally crazy, and the more I think about the case, the more I get the feeling that there’s some other connection we don’t know about. And when we find it, the whole thing will suddenly look very different. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘I’m going to have to disappoint you.’ Tanja took her plate off her lap and put it on the low glass table in front of her. ‘I can honestly see it going down exactly the way you describe it.’ She took a sip of beer. ‘Don’t get me wrong, but just put yourself in the shoes of the people down there, the Albanians. For them these people are not a nice, elderly couple from Belgrade who want to spend their twilight years there, in that place…’
‘Talinovac.’
‘For the local population they’re just more Serbs who want to claim part of Kosovo as their own. A provocation.’ Tanja pulled her knees towards her and sat cross-legged. ‘We’ve no idea what happened in Talinovac over the past years and decades, who humiliated whom, robbed whom, beat or even killed whom and who this house actually belonged to that was assigned to Ljubinka and her husband.’
‘So what do you suggest we do now?’
‘Nothing! You leave it to the international organisations and human rights activists who are milling around down there and are watching every move the politicians and police make. They need to apply pressure. You keep well out of it. Advise me what I should do about Stefano instead.’
Milena was turning the glass in her hands.
‘Are you even listening to me?’ Tanja stretched out her leg and gave Milena a nudge. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. Stefano wants to introduce me to his parents.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Quite so. He’s bringing his mum and dad here. For Easter. From Nicosia. Direct flight.’
Milena screwed her napkin into a ball. ‘And then what? Is he going to propose?’
Tanja laughed. ‘Darling, it’s going to be quite a production and I don’t dare to predict how it will end. The man’s simply refusing to obey my rules: I put up a stop sign and he goes and jumps it and crashes into a wall at full speed, time and again. Crazy, eh?’
‘Yeah.’ Milena nodded. ‘Crazy.’
That night she couldn’t get to sleep. The moon shone brightly through the curtains of the study, bathing the sofa bed that Tanja had made up for her in its light. Beneath the desk shone the fluorescent yellow laces of a pair of trainers that Stefano must have left there. Tanja’s lover was a beautiful man from Cyprus, fifteen years her junior, with enormous feet. She’d met him on New Year’s Eve and immediately fallen for him. Milena rolled over to face the other way.
The mattress was firm, the duvet was warm and the T-shirt Tanja had lent her was comfortable. But the silence was unnerving. They were plumb in the centre of town and yet there wasn’t a sound to be heard. No car engines, no trams, no snoring from an elderly lady in the next room. No cat scratching the litter tray. No Adam sleepily crawling into her bed. Milena tossed and turned again. The green light on the computer was flickering. Or was she imagining things? She pushed back the bedcover.
She staggered across the hallway into the kitchen, took a glass from the cupboard and held it under the tap. Then she walked into the semi-darkness of the living room, picked up the camel-hair blanket from the narrow daybed and took it over to the big sofa. Propped up with pillows behind her back, she looked down at the city lights, Branko’s Bridge and the Sava, that dark ribbon flowing quietly along. After only a few hundred metres it joined the Danube.
Maybe Tanja was right. Even if she found Goran, she’d hardly be able to prevent him from what he was determined to do. She couldn’t halt the vicious circle of violence all on her own.
She pulled her legs tight to her chest and hugged her knees. Once upon a time, Tanja and she had sat on the embankment wall down there by the River Sava and dreamt that the world was their oyster. Life had consisted of only the future, and they’d told themselves that it was just waiting there for them, two silly girls, to come along and make it complete and brilliant.
And the battles they’d had with one another, especially on Friday evenings! Tanja always wanted to go dancing instead of to the Designer Café, where she reckoned only intellectuals – in other words, boring guys – hung out, guys like pale Boris from the high school with the dark-rimmed spectacles, who still had no idea that Milena, even way back then, had chosen him as her life partner. Tanja did not want to have endless discussions, especially not about existentialism, Freud or other ideologies. She was interested in practical things – wanted to know how far you could go, and how to hit it off with boys – and reported back in detail to Milena on the outcome of her experiments. When Tanja failed to win a place at Belgrade University because of her mediocre results in the final school exams, she declared that she wasn’t going to let a bunch of old farts spoil her dream of becoming a doctor, and announced that she was going to study medicine in the Bosnian provinces instead. And so she ended up going to Tuzla.
Every Sunday evening Tanja had squeezed onto the overland bus, boned up on anatomy and spent her time in Tuzla dossing on the sofa in the flat of an elderly aunt. Milena had felt like she was missing a limb until Tanja reappeared in Belgrade every Friday evening. During that period, her friend grew up, becoming quieter and more reflective.
Milena was already living in Berlin, working on her doctoral thesis and about to marry Philip, when Tanja decided to specialise and become a surgeon. Back then Yugoslavia was already paralysed by incessant political crises. When the telephone connection was functioning normally and they could chat late at night, Tanja often sounded exhausted and dispirited. As a junior doctor still in training, she always got the difficult and hopeless cases to operate on – especially children of penniless parents, cleaners and factory workers, who could not slip the doctors a bribe and lacked the cash to buy medication on the black market. The public health system was on the brink of collapse and was not providing a service worthy of the name anymore. Tanja gave these patients the money she earned, operated on them at night, even by candlelight during power cuts, but in the end she could do little more than stand by helplessly and watch parents holding the slender, translucent hands of their dying children. Then the Yugoslavian Civil War broke out. Tanja went to Knin, into what was then the Republic of Serbian Krajina, into the thick of the battle zone. She hardly ever talked about her experiences there, working in the army’s field hospitals.
Milena folded the blanket and put it on the sofa, went into the kitchen and quietly put the glass into the sink. It had taken her a long time to understand why Tanja had then proceeded to buy herself a place in one of the private clinics in the hills above Belgrade, in Dedinje, and why she suddenly switched to specialising in plastic surgery – pandering to the dreams of stars and starlets, the nouveau-riche members of the affluent society who mistakenly believed in eternal youth and beauty – rather than dedicating herself to the sick and wounded who really needed her help. Wasn’t this a cynical move on her part, a betrayal of all her ideals? One day, however, Tanja had explained calmly why she’d done what she did: she’d simply seen too much misery in the past, and had imbibed enough pain to last her a lifetime.
From then on, Milena kept her mouth shut. She appreciated Tanja always being to hand when non-bureaucratic help was required. The most recent instance had been the women from Bosiljegrad, who dreamt of independence and of owning their own hothouses in a region close to the Bulgarian border, where there was no other hope of making a living. Milena had heard of their idea and told Tanja about it, and not long afterwards they had met these women. Barely half a year later they had made a start on the building of the first greenhouse. ‘Milena,’ Tanja used to say, ‘you’re my social conscience.’
By now, morning had broken and Milena was wide awake. On the computer the little green light was flickering. She pulled up a swivel chair, sat down and pushed a pile of cards and expensively lined envelopes aside. Evidently every gallery and every boutique in town had the plastic surgeon on their mailing list. Shaking her head, Milena moved the mouse. The screen lit up.
By default, the internet browser opened with a search engine’s home page. Milena placed the cursor on the free field and stopped to think. Goran’s employer. She typed ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ and added ‘Belgrade’.
The first search result was an immediate hit: ‘Safe ‘n’ Secure – homepage’. She opened it.
Young people in light blue shirts or blouses, models with epaulettes and dark ties, radiated friendly smiles from the screen, encouraging trust and inspiring confidence. A mission statement in large letters proclaimed, ‘Your security is our business’.
On the left, a menu popped up. Milena scrolled down. ‘About us’. ‘Our service’. ‘Contact’.
She scanned the brief texts. The company installed burglar alarms, and smoke and motion detectors, complex security systems. The firm cited its long experience in such matters. Branches in Novi Sad, Niš and other Serbian cities. Headquarters: Belgrade. Telephone number, email address. All very professional, serious and transparent.
Further down there was a section on security for buildings and individuals. One hundred and eighty trained employees. International experience and co-operation with companies in Austria and Canada. The firm’s clients in Serbia included an American software corporation, a Spanish fashion designer and a big Serbian retail chain. It even had some government clients. Milena scrolled through the list. The Serbian Foreign Ministry. The Serbian Defence Ministry. Various sub-departments.
She clicked and suddenly leant forward in surprise. Safe ‘n’ Secure was also responsible for security at the State Chancellery for the Affairs of Kosovo. Milena reached for the cigarillos lying on the windowsill – Tanja’s favourite, cherry flavour – and helped herself.
If Goran was employed by Safe ‘n’ Secure, then it was theoretically possible that he might once have worked at the State Chancellery for the Affairs of Kosovo as a bodyguard or in security. That would establish a direct connection between Goran, Safe ‘n’ Secure and the government department.
She accessed her own email server in order to post a message to Siniša, telling him about her discovery and sending him the link, and in the process noticed that she had received a new message from Slavujka Valetić the previous night.
‘Hello Ms Lukin,’ Slavujka had written. ‘Please find attached a photograph of Goran; it was taken about two years ago.’ Milena opened the attachment.
The man pictured sitting at the table, with his legs apart and his arms cockily folded, had an odd face: his mouth was surprisingly small, though his lips were beautifully formed. His dark eyes were deep set and seemed gentle and melancholic, while his crooked, broad and fleshy nose looked almost brutal. None of the individual features of this face fitted together. The wrinkles around his eyes could have been laughter lines, but might also have been crows’ feet. The man was in his late twenties, but with his receding hairline and the shadows under his eyes you might take him to be in his late thirties. There was something dangling inside his open collar. Milena enlarged the image and saw that it was a thin chain with a small pair of silver football boots.
She leant back in the chair. Goran Valetić – estranged from his sister. But since his parents’ death he had obviously tried to re-establish contact with Slavujka. What a bitter irony: as an employee of Safe ‘n’ Secure he was responsible for security, maybe had even been trained as a bodyguard, but he had been unable to protect his parents. She wondered what he had in mind now. Most likely he knew how to use a gun. Would he take justice into his own hands and take revenge on the Albanians in Talinovac? The thought that he might already be on his way to where his parents had died disturbed her.
Milena put on her jeans, slipped into her pullover, grabbed a piece of paper and wrote, ‘Good morning, Tanja – by the time you read this I’ll already be on my way. It’s this business with Goran Valetić, but I’ll be back tomorrow evening at the very latest. I’ll call you. Milena.’
She put the note on the keyboard where Tanja couldn’t miss it and picked up her bag. In the hallway she paused to listen for any sounds of movement in the flat, but no one was stirring. She pulled the door quietly shut behind her.