Page 85 of The Nameless Ones

‘It means there won’t be any more trouble, or not of the bomb kind.’

She smiled at him. It wasn’t a sad smile exactly, but sadness was somewhere in the mix.

‘But there’ll be another kind of trouble along soon enough, right?’

‘Trouble follows me,’ said Parker. ‘I think that was the title of a book.’

‘It follows you like a dog,’ said Macy, ‘because you keep feeding it. Speaking of which, have you eaten?’

Parker looked at his watch. He hadn’t realized how late it was, but he wasn’t very hungry. The IED had served to deprive him of his appetite.

Then he looked at Macy and thought again.

‘Were you thinking of getting something?’

‘Maybe Boda.’

‘You buying?’

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘why not?’

Later, as she lay sleeping beside him, Parker watched the stars defy the darkness. She would leave in the morning. Perhaps they would do this again, but it did not matter. It was enough to connect, enough to touch and be touched, if only for a night.

Enough, briefly, to defy the darkness.

Chapter LXX

From where he sat, Radovan Vuksan could see no stars, only darkness. The drapes were closed, and the bedroom was dim. The chair was an antique, akin to a throne. It gave him the aspect of a judge, one forced to pass a sentence with which he did not entirely agree, but to whom the option of clemency had been denied.

He had not slept well that night. He had not slept well in a long time. Radovan was worn out by bloodshed, even at one remove. It seemed that he had known little else since before Tito passed away in a Ljubljana hospital in 1980, the room fetid with the stink of gangrene. Tito’s Croat wife, Jovanka Broz, had been permitted to remain at liberty only for long enough to wave his coffin into the House of Flowers before she was incarcerated in a rotting Belgrade villa. There she had remained hidden for decades without a passport or identity card, lest any reminder of her late husband’s existence should interfere with the process of dismantling his precious Yugoslav republic.

Because even then Radovan and his brother had been aware of what was coming. Their father, Sergej, had warned of it for years. The country was an artificial construct, six republics bound together by the iron will of Tito, like six thorny stems held in awkward proximity by barbed wire. As soon as Tito died, they would fall apart, and the resulting frictions would lead to a conflagration.

Sergej Vuksan had been a senior official in UDBA, the Yugoslav secret service, with special responsibility for monitoring the activities of dissidents abroad, particularly Croatians. Sergej’s own sympathies, carefully concealed, lay with the Serbian nationalists. Like many Serbs, he had no love for Tito, an ethnic Croat raised as a Catholic, even as he helped to secure the dictator’s rule. He had raised his sons in the expectation that, when the inevitable conflict commenced, they would do their duty to further the cause of Serbian independence. Each, in his way, had obliged, Spiridon by shedding the blood of Turks and Croats, and Radovan by ensuring that the resources were available for him to do so. Whether Sergej, had he lived, would have approved of his sons’ subsequent transition to mundane, self-interested criminality was another matter, but dementia and mortality had negated the necessity of such an awkward conversation.

Now Serbia was an independent nation once again, if still something of a pariah in Europe, but the Udbasi had not gone away. Instead they had integrated themselves into the structures of the new republics according to their political or national loyalties, principally in order to feather their own nests. Within Serbia, powerful elements had recognized the usefulness of employing UDBA tactics against their enemies, which now included the Vuksans. This, Radovan knew, was what Spiridon failed to recognize: The Vuksans were engaged in a battle not only with ambitious men like Matija Kiš and Simo Stajic but also with the entire apparatus of the Serbian state. It was a fight that the brothers were destined to lose.

So Radovan sat in his chair, watching the dawn come too slowly.

Shortly after 10 a.m., he made the call.

Radovan was taking a chance, of course, one of which his brother would not approve, but perhaps the Vuksans were still owed a favor or two, if only out of respect for their late father. The Serbian consulate in Vienna was situated on Ölzeltgasse. Radovan dialed the number and asked to be put through to the liaison officer for the head of mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. When he was informed that Ms Ciric was not available, he asked that she be contacted as a matter of urgency, and left a number and the contact name Vrana. Five minutes later, the phone rang.

‘Tell me you’re not actually in Vienna,’ said Teodora Ciric.

‘I have never lied to you,’ Radovan answered. ‘I don’t intend to start now.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To meet, to talk.’

‘You have a price on your head.’

‘I’m aware of that. I wish to find a way to avoid the shedding of more blood, including my own.’

‘You should have thought of that before you and your brother opened a butcher’s shop on the Herengracht.’

‘Teo, for old times’ sake—’