16.
blue light on blue faces
and a blue voice from the blue box
now (fall 2010)
He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. They’d roused him the night before around midnight, summoned him to the station just as he was starting to drive home, figuring that with so little traffic he’d be in bed in twenty minutes max. At the edge of town he swerved, cutting across double solid lines, and raced to Gundulićeva Street. His colleagues had secured the area and were holding anyone who might have seen something. A few tipsy kids had found the body. In a ditch, not far from the Serbian consulate, a man lay on his stomach, his face in the mud. They’d figured he was “dead drunk” when they spotted him stretched out like that and walked over to him, hooting and swigging booze. All they’d planned to take were his cigarettes; that’s what they kept saying. Digging through his pants pockets and the inside of his jacket, they thought he was breathing. Using a cell phone as a flashlight, they saw that the mud on the man’s temples was mixed with clotted blood. Then they panicked and fled, but the one who’d gotten blood on his hands decided it would be better to go to the police. The two others cursed his mother because they still weren’t home when the police came knocking at their doors that night, and their shocked parents nearly fainted dead away. The police soon rounded up all three kids and brought them back to the scene of the crime to question them. Inspector Grgić arrived to find quite a crowd, so he parked at the entrance to the consulate. There were clusters of people scattered throughout the courtyard, like dark magpies descending on a meadow. Death was nothing new in the city, but it was associated more often with massacres than with this sort of intimate affair; people found this variety more difficult. About a hundred feet away, across the road, stood a group of his colleagues led by the coroner. A little farther on, the father of one of the boys who’d found the body was having a heated dispute with a policeman, with allusions to an attorney and trauma. Grgić, without a word of greeting, addressing his colleagues with only a nod, strode over to the ditch and crouched by the lifeless body. A small spotlight shone on the bloody hair and the pale, mud-splattered face of Nikola Vrcić, junior reporter. There were gobs of saliva and half-digested food around his mouth, and his right arm, though still attached to his body, looked as if it weren’t his, or as if somebody had slapped it on as an afterthought, backwards, to his shoulder. Even a quick glance showed the death had been violent, but the cause wasn’t easy to pinpoint. A nasty blow to the head, bloodstains on the pale concrete of the freshly laid curb some five feet from the ditch, the battered body and probably a fractured arm. Traces of vomit on the face. Once the larger spotlights were set up, they could see skid marks. The inspector paced slowly around the scene of the crime, making larger and larger concentric circles and checking the night sky more often. It was dark and pierced by stars, at once clear and black, as deep autumnal nights sometimes are. Steam rose from his nostrils and mingled with the smoke from the cigarette he’d pinned between his fingers. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all; he should have left years ago. He’d seen everything at least once before—time was all that was needed for it all to be revealed. Over the last five years that Grgić had worked in the city, he wasn’t living, or rather, sleeping, here—if, indeed, he ever slept. His home was in a small town some fifteen miles away, where he’d moved after his divorce and his training in Zagreb. He’d spent the war attending high school in Germany and stayed on there for a time to avoid serving in the army, then he returned and enrolled, in the early 2000s, in a two-year course in forensic science. At the time he never figured he’d always be moving within the same circle of people, and that half the time he’d be on the other side of the law in order to be complete and functional. He jailed petty dealers, gamblers, the occasional pedophile or rapist, but, alone, he couldn’t break through the glass ceiling. To find a colleague who was willing not to take the line of least resistance was nearly impossible. The big fish he wanted and needed to lock up, the ones who had constructed and poisoned the system, were most often the very same people who, after he’d wrapped up an investigation successfully, decorated him with medals and meted out the praise. He had been following what was going over the last months in the city among the local powermongers; he’d followed the preparations for the privatization of the port, the games around bribery and the recording of the mayor, the appearance of a suspicious Romanian investor Ilinčić was pushing. The criminal activity fostered by the city leaders within the legal system was unfolding precisely as described in Criminal Organizations 101. Grgić knew he’d never make any headway if he attempted to clean up the criminality within the municipal ranks, but he was deeply aware nonetheless of what was going on around him. In that context, the violent death of the junior reporter looked to him like a private settling of accounts, if indeed it was deliberate, though he could already guess where the media speculation would go with this. Before he decided on any firmer conclusion, he glanced once more at the motionless body before he turned to walk back to the building of the consulate. In the reading room, on one of the chairs upholstered in green velvet, sat Velimirović, hunched over, his cell phone on his ear and his back to the door. The inspector stopped before entering and waited for Velimirović to finish, while straining to catch as much as he could of the conversation.
“Oh, yes, serious. Yes, yes. Very young . . . thirty-two . . . Look, the police are outside. We’ll insist on an in-depth investigation . . . Yes. Two weeks ago . . . He received letters. Sure . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, and when he spotted Inspector Grgić he abruptly cut short the conversation, communicating with him already with his eyes.
“Call you later. Bye.”
“Good evening,” Grgić greeted him as he stepped into the room and swept it with a glance.
“Not a good evening.” Velimirović rose from the chair, glowering.
“You’re right, not so good.” They both were silent for a moment, and then Grgić asked: “The two of you were together this evening?”
“Yes we were, as you’ve probably heard. There was a poetry reading here, and when it ended, people began to disperse, and Nikola came over to say goodbye, saying he’d go out and catch the poet to set a time tomorrow for an interview. It must have been an hour after that when the police came in and said some kids found him in a nearby ditch.” He stopped for a moment and then went on: “He didn’t get there by himself.”
“So do you suspect anybody?”
“You know our situation,” he said, trying to push things in that direction, just as Grgić had predicted.
“Yes? What situation? Would you be more specific?”
“Nikola was very active in the arena of minority rights, our local paper and so forth, and you can see for yourself what’s going on in town, how they’re smashing the signs, inflaming passions . . .” It was almost magnificent to observe Velimirović up close while he was doing what he did best.
“You’re suggesting that a person motivated by nationalism killed him?”
“I am not suggesting anything,” Velimirović suddenly hedged, throwing his hands in the air. “I’m just saying we mustn’t ignore what has been going on here recently.”
“Clearly,” confirmed Grgić, going along with Velimirović’s game. “The two of you were close? Had he ever let on that somebody wished him harm?”
“There are plenty of bad people around,” Velimirović started saying, and then, suddenly, for the first time that evening, he remembered Nikola’s cell phone, which would end up, most likely, in the hands of the police, if it hadn’t already, and the messages they’d exchanged, and he broke out in a cold sweat. He knew he wasn’t listed on the phone under his real name, but it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to find their way to him if that was what they were after. Grgić immediately noticed the change in Velimirović’s demeanor, though even he couldn’t have guessed what had alarmed Velimirović. They’d been cautious, but nobody could have imagined that one of them would end up in a ditch. The last message sent had been about the previous night they’d spent in Nikola’s apartment.
“Do you have anything more to ask, or . . .” asked Velimirović, ashen.
“Not for now. I’ll have a word with the people outside, but we might summon you in the next few days to come down to the station and give another statement.” Velimirović nodded absently. Gray figures were still pecking about in the yard; they would have dispersed—by then it was after one o’clock in the morning—but the police wouldn’t let them leave. Grgić had gotten nothing more from them than statements like the one given by the woman who’d moderated the poetry reading: He followed the poet out and didn’t come back in. After the final investigation he went to the station to put the papers in order. He was done by three in the morning, and then dropped off to sleep in an office armchair. He was woken by a colleague who shook him by the shoulder. The day was dawning.
“Up off your ass. The mayor’s been murdered.” He thought he must be dreaming; he didn’t know where he was. He leaped to his feet. “Oh, fuck this life; everyone has gone crazy!” He splashed himself with water in the men’s room and then went out to see yet another corpse, and then he grabbed a cup of coffee before he’d give the single sentence at the press conference that applied to both: “No comment at present; our investigation is underway.”