Belgrade Noir

She responded in less than five minutes: Are you in Palmotićeva? I’m nearby, and can come right away.

Without even thinking I responded: Come over.

I lit a cigarette and for the first time started thinking about what I really wanted to say to her. I wouldn’t tell her everything, not yet. I’d tell her I had a lead on a guy from Vojvoda’s unit, and explain a bit about how I investigate, tell her a few stories.

The cigarette hadn’t even burned out when I heard knocking on the door. I opened it. She was smiling, had obviously been out, and was a little drunk. She looked younger to me than the last time, in a short skirt and heels with a little too much makeup.

She came in and I offered her a drink. She nodded. I handed her a glass, she took a good long sip, and then she looked at me. “So, did you find him?”

I lit another cigarette. “Not yet, but I’m close.” I told her what I’d been up to, leaving out a few details. I didn’t tell her I already had the number of a guy in Vojvoda’s unit, but that I was going to get it.

When I was done, she dropped her head. I thought she’d fallen asleep, that she was comatose from drinking, but then I noticed her shoulders shaking. She was crying. It wasn’t like I couldn’t really console her from a professional distance. I approached her, kneeled in front of her chair, and took her hand.

“Don’t cry,” I said.

She abruptly stood up, and I stood too. She hugged me and mumbled something I didn’t understand, probably thanking me. I stroked her hair, felt on my cheek that her cheek was wet, and then suddenly, and a little surprisingly, that her lips and tongue were too. We kissed, and I realized that this

was why I’d called her.

We stumbled to the door that divided the living room and bedroom, where we fell onto the bed. The rest is history.

When I woke up, it was still early morning, but she was already awake. She acted completely sober, as if she hadn’t drunk anything the night before. She was lying at the end of the bed, flipping through a book. It’s easy being young, I thought to myself. “Want coffee?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, so I got up to make coffee.

When I came back, she’d already gotten up. She wasn’t fully dressed, just wrapped in the shirt she was wearing the night before.

She took a sip of coffee. “You know, last night I wasn’t myself. My emotions got the best of me. Like everything came full circle. Like my dad rose up from the grave to tell me everything would be okay.”

I put my index finger to her lips. “I understand everything,” I said.

She stayed for another half hour. Told me to let her know if I learned anything new, and that she’d tell her mother nothing until it was certain. “You know,” she said, “my mother hasn’t really lived her life since that day. She’s not herself anymore; she’s not a person, not even a mother; she’s just a widow, a widow dressed in black.”

At the door, she asked me if I needed more money. I said what she’d given me was already too much.

When she left I went back to bed. I was tired and thrilled. I lay my head on the pillow that still smelled of her, and slept until two in the afternoon.

When I woke up, I went to Stara Hercegovina for lunch. I didn’t exactly know what to do next. I needed additional proof of identity, as well as another witness, before calling my friends in the police department and prosecutor’s office so they could arrest this guy. Now I was even less in the mood to reveal his identity to Nađa; it was more important to me to make sure he went to prison. If I just told her who he was, the rest would fall on her, and she was a foreign citizen who had no idea how the system in Serbia functioned. She’d already suffered enough.

After lunch, I went back home, then read about trials for war crimes on the Internet: the Hague, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. I didn’t dare dream too much about Nađa, but I wasn’t afraid to fantasize about how grateful she’d be if Vojvoda was thrown in jail. I caught myself playing psychoanalyst, thinking that, because she lost her father so young, she certainly had a weakness for older men.

I sipped some whiskey, and around ten I was drunk enough to send her a message about how great the previous night had been. She didn’t reply. I kept drinking, and around one I was intoxicated enough to go to sleep.

When the phone woke me in the morning, I hoped it was Nađa. It wasn’t; it was Mirko. “Hey man, you know something I don’t know?” he yelled into the receiver.

“Mirko, dude, I just woke up. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He laughed. “C’mon, take a shower and wake up. In half an hour it’ll be all over the Internet. Early this morning at Tašmajdan Park near St. Mark’s Church, someone shot Đorđe Jovanović. I asked around a bit. Turns out his old friends call him Vojvoda.”