SCHEVENINGEN PRISON, THE HAGUE
29 DECEMBER 2005
HELPED UP THE STAIRS by the ever-reliable Zwolsman, Marin Katich returned in the early morning to his cell in the detention centre. He had been deemed fit for release thanks to the wizardry of the Dutch surgeon. When the fellow came to see Marin in hospital, he explained that he had worked on many stab wounds to the heart during his time with Médecins Sans Frontières in Rwanda.
‘Compared to what I saw there, yours was not so dramatic,’ said the surgeon. ‘And here we have echocardiogram and ultrasound, so I could be even more precise.’
‘They like to keep their war criminals fit for trial,’ said Marin.
‘Accused ja, not convicted?’
‘You’re a good man, doctor,’ said Marin. ‘I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.’
‘You’ll be back on your feet soon.’
The surgeon was right. Marin had been up and walking around the ward for the past three days, as gingerly as an old man, but walking. And yet they still would have stopped him returning to his cell had it not been for the fact that his attempted assassin had been caught. He was a Croatian, as Marin had expected. His name was Zoran Stolar and Marin smiled when he recalled that Stolar translates as ‘carpenter’—it turned out the man had stabbed him with some kind of modified chisel.
More surprising was that, when they moved him into solitary, Stolar had swallowed a vial of cyanide he’d managed to smuggle in. He had ended up on the same hospital floor as Marin, although his attempt on his own life proved more successful. Marin wondered what hold Jure Rebic had over the man for Stolar to conclude he was better off dead. He assumed that the lives of family members must have been at stake.
It had been two days since Marin had last seen Anna Rosen. She had talked her way into the hospital to see him on the 27th, but she seemed so full of suppressed anger that he barely recognised her as the same person who had come to see him only days before that. She had certainly been agitated at their first meeting; but he believed there had still been a faint connection, like the sparking of exposed wires.
Worse than the anger had been her absolute refusal to discuss Rachel. Marin had tried to tell her that he understood why she had kept his existence a secret from their daughter. Yes, when he thought back on it, he had said ‘their’ daughter and perhaps that’s what had upset her.
‘I don’t have time to discuss that now,’ she said. ‘I’m here to find out exactly what you told her.’
At Anna’s urging, he repeated the long story he had told Rachel. He was conscious that, like an oft-repeated witness statement, it lost some of its impact in its retelling. Nevertheless, he recounted the details forensically: the massacre in the village; the rape and murder of the girl; his execution of the girl’s killer in the village square; the insane behaviour of Rebic and his ultimate mutiny. Then he told Anna about his connection to Ante Lovren: how he had found him working as the parish priest at St Stephens church in Motovun; how the man had been his bodyguard on that terrible day; and how he had asked Rachel to pass Lovren’s name on to her mother because he feared the priest’s life could be in danger.
Anna listened intently to the story, then jumped to her feet.
‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I will be back to see you as soon as possible.’
In the two days since then, however, there had been no word from Anna, Rachel or the lawyer van Brug. Marin had gone from the absurd high of discovering that he had a child—an experience he likened to pressing the morphine button over and over again, with no regulator to stop him—to a strange kind of limbo. He told himself there was no reason for his disquiet, no reason for impatience, having waited so long. Indeed, there was a lightness to his mood such as he had not experienced since the day Moriarty had come to steal his life. Even the mocking ghosts had gone quiet.
Marin was dozing on his bunk in the afternoon when Zwolsman poked his head into the cell and woke him up. The guard, like a humble footman, was carrying a note from Slobodan Milosevic.
Marin read the simple message: Chess 7 pm, after dinner? He picked up a pen from his desk and scrawled beneath it: Yes, if you don’t mind being beaten again.
He folded the note and handed it to Zwolsman. ‘Can you take this to him?’
Zwolsman nodded and waddled back out of the room. His uniform seemed to be getting tighter, and Marin wondered if Milosevic was paying him in chocolate biscuits.
His floormates had left Marin alone since his return from hospital and he had assumed Milosevic would do the same—at best, avoid him; at worst, target him. Marin was sure the ‘boss’ would not have taken kindly to his subterfuge. He had been Tomislav Maric since he got here and now he was Marin Katich, with all that might imply to a student of history like Milosevic. And yet here was what appeared to be an olive branch.
At six o’clock, the cells were locked down and dinner was brought to each inmate on a plastic tray. From seven, they were reopened and the men on their individual floors were permitted to socialise in the common room until nine o’clock. So it was that when Marin passed through that room’s wide doorway en route to Milosevic he saw the Gypsy and the Albanian engaged in a fierce table football contest, twirling knobs like mad things. They stopped when they saw him.
‘Hey, Katich,’ called Ademi. ‘How does it feel, being skewered by one of your own?’
‘I don’t know, Ademi,’ said Katich. ‘How long would you survive on the streets of Pristina before some Kosovar hero put a bullet in your head?’
Hasimovic let go of the knobs that controlled his tiny footballers and came up close to Marin.
‘Off to see The Boss?’ he asked, then lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘There’ll be no protection for you here once he drops you.’
Marin knew he was in no fit state to tussle with these evil little weasels, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘Stop puffing yourself up, Hasimovic,’ he said. ‘Maybe if you learned to play chess, rather than that stupid children’s game, he’d have some respect for you.’
Marin straightened his shoulders against the pain in his chest and walked stiffly down the corridor to Milosevic’s cell, from which he could hear the strains of a pop song. He pushed the door open wider and there was the old dictator slumped on his bunk, a glass of whisky on his belly, singing along to Celine Dion: ‘Bewdy-fall, Bewdy-fall, Bewdy-fall, Bewdy-fall-boyeee …’
‘I prefer the John Lennon version!’ Marin said from the doorway.
Milosevic sat up from his repose, moist-eyed. He gulped down his whisky and pressed Stop on the CD player.
‘Makes me remember Marko, when he’s baby.’
‘Cute,’ said Marin, ‘at least until he started running brothels and abortion clinics.’
The Serb’s chin jutted belligerently, and Marin wondered how much of the whisky he’d already polished off.
‘He’s businessman,’ said Milosevic.
‘They call that horizontal integration, don’t they?’
‘What bullshit you’re talking?’
‘Brothels and …’ Marin began, ‘Oh, forget it. The important thing is that every day, in every way, he’s getting better and better, right?’
‘You don’t look any better. You look sicker than me … Ha! I nearly said “Maric” and now you’re Katich,’ said Milosevic. ‘First I’m in hospital, then you’re in hospital. Did I miss much excitement?’
‘Not much,’ said Katich. ‘Apart from the name change and the stabbing.’
Milosevic pushed a little bedside table between them. A chess board was already set up. Marin went to sit, but the old Serb gestured to him with the back of his hand, as if to a servant.
‘Shut door, we need quiet.’
When he returned, Milosevic made another derisive hand movement. ‘Better sit, Katich, before you collapse like overloaded donkey.’
As he gently eased himself into his seat, Marin saw that Milosevic had taken white without asking and already made his first move. He had pushed up his queen’s pawn two spaces, so Marin met it with his pawn and in the next two swift moves they had their set-up.
‘You play Slav Defence tonight,’ said Milosevic. ‘Ironic, yes?’
‘Are you saying I’m not a Slav?’
‘Slav or not,’ said Milosevic, pulling the whisky bottle from a drawer, ‘you Croats like most to cosy up to Germany. From Pavelic and Hitler to now. You want whisky?’
‘I can’t drink,’ said Marin, trying not to slump. The deep ache in his chest was starting to grate. ‘What I really need is painkillers.’
•
As the game played out, Marin, despite the pain, was starting to get on top. The old Serb kept drinking.
‘So,’ said Milosevic, ‘why the alias? The shame of being a Katich?’
‘I didn’t want to be killed.’
‘Because your father was big time Ustashi?’
‘It was Croats who wanted me dead.’
Milosevic was ignoring the game now.
‘I know your father, Katich,’ he said. ‘He was roving murderer in Bosnia, he kills hundreds of Serbs and communists, he’s Ustasha hangman, he’s bodyguard to Poglavnik. Then he escapes the noose himself, ends up in Australia, and from there he sends Ustashi killers back to Bosnia in the 1960s and ’70s. I remember it. Were you one of them?’
‘What is this?’ asked Marin. ‘Do I ask you about your father? Why he killed himself? And your mother—she couldn’t live with herself, either. What were they ashamed of?’
‘Don’t you fucking talking about my mother! Your father sent terrorists to poison Belgrade water supply. That would be mass murder.’
‘It didn’t happen.’
‘They had koala bears, toys filled with cyanide, you deny it?’
‘It didn’t happen.’
‘Did you take Ustasha blood oath?’
‘I was just a kid.’
‘A blood oath is a blood oath. You really think I’m happy to play chess with Ustashi murderer?’
‘I think you’re drunk.’
‘I think you’re a fucking fascist!’
‘You’re the one they call the Butcher of Belgrade.’
‘Fascist dog!’
‘You call me a fascist? From the time you were a bawling infant, to a kid pissing in your pants, to a fucked-up teenager holding hands with Mira, you and all your fucking communist mates learned the history of the Ustasha like a fetish. Then you get power and you go ahead and repeat all their worst crimes: ethnic cleansing; religious massacres; rape camps to put Serbian seed in Muslim girls; death camps to slaughter their fathers and brothers. Now you sit there in court with your insane arrogance and you lie and you lie and lie and LIE!’
Milosevic rose to his feet, knocking over the chessboard, his face inflamed, the veins in his bulbous forehead throbbing, his mouth working hard, lips quivering. Marin was on his feet now, a tearing pain from the wounds in his chest, two men facing off over the fallen chess pieces.
‘YOU’RE THE LIAR! FASCIST! NAZI!’ screamed Milosevic.
Marin grabbed him by the collar and Milosevic thrust his hands around Marin’s throat.
‘GANGSTER! MURDERER!’ screamed Marin.
They were intimately close, two invalids nose to nose, grappling with each other, each man’s spittle spraying into the other’s face.
Marin looked into the old Serb’s eyes and he saw a moment of wild panic in them, and then their light suddenly dimmed. Milosevic made a spastic jerk and pitched backwards. Marin was still holding his collar; Milosevic was drooling.
Marin took his full weight and lowered him onto the bed. He felt for a pulse in the man’s neck. Nothing. Milosevic’s chest was not moving. His face was suffused with subcutaneous blood. He was dead.
Marin moved fast. He looked up into the ceiling, no cameras that he could see. He picked up the chess pieces and packed them away. He picked up the near-empty whisky bottle with the edge of a sheet and placed it on the bedside table with the empty glass. He stripped Milosevic down to his underwear and placed him in the bed, head on a pillow, facing the wall.
Then he pulled up the bedclothes and tucked them in so that, from the door, all you could see was the back of his head. He folded up the man’s clothes and placed them on top of the dresser. He got painfully down onto his knees and looked around to make sure nothing was out of place. He found that the black king had rolled under the bed. He retrieved it, got back up and turned off the light, leaving only a small bedside lamp. He convinced himself that Milosevic appeared to be sleeping. He knew that there were surveillance cameras in the corridor.
He went to the door, pulled it open and stepped back into the corridor talking all the while to the body in the bed.
‘Next time I’ll play white. That was a tough loss. Yes … yes. No, I’m completely exhausted … A rematch tomorrow, then … Good night, Slobbo … Sure, I’ll shut it.’
He pulled the door shut and limped slowly down the corridor. The cameras saw a man who’d had heart surgery just a week ago—knackered, harmless and exhausted. All of which was true. And yet he had just made another ghost.