Belgrade Noir

It was not too long before we felt like we knew his routine. Each morning around half past eight he would leave his mansion in the Dedinje neighborhood — that paradise for the nouveau riche fuckers and sons of bitches alike — sitting in the back of a shiny black car with tinted windows. The silent driver would take him to the headquarters of his construction company in New Belgrade. Other than for an occasional business meeting or lunch, the car would leave the company garage around seven in the evening and head back to Dedinje. But it didn’t go toward Tolstoy Street. Instead, it would continue straight toward the Pink Television building where he would pick up his wife who had just wrapped up her daily TV show. Together, they would then go off shopping or to some kind of cheesy social event with politicians or whatever, or to some sort of reception. Or maybe to dinner. Then finally back home to Tolstoy Street. Occasionally drunk. And bickering or arguing more often than not.

Whatever the tabloids write about them, their lives appeared remarkably uneventful to us, their paths beaten and well worn out.

This discovery depressed Zoe and me quite a bit. To the point that we were ready to abandon everything. There didn’t seem to be a single crack in the routine of our prey. But then one night, just as we got into a vicious argument in the car, parked not far from his mansion, he slipped past us, dressed from head to toe in fancy sports gear. That’s how Zoe and I discovered, to the eternal shame of all lesbian detectives ever, that our prey runs three or four rounds around Hyde Park every Wednesday around midnight. And sometimes on Fridays too. And always with the tiny headphones of his MP3 player implanted deep in his ears.

We felt stupid beyond belief to have missed this for so long. But we quickly made a decision: we’d come up behind him while he stretched after running. And we would easily overpower him. Using the darkness and discretion offered by the Topčider woods, we’d knock him out and stuff him into the trunk. And then we’d drive to the darker recesses of Košutnjak Park to do away with him in peace and quiet.

My name is Maja, BTW. From a very young age, they filled my head with stories about how my name relates to spring. To the month of May, precisely. Maja, or Maia, they chirped, is the Roman goddess of fields and produce associated with nature’s awakening and rebirth.

My mother was a mean-spirited woman who taught me many false things. And so it took me awhile to independently uncover that the truth about Maia — like the truth about many other things — was totally different than what I’d been told. I was quite relieved when I learned that Maia was no hormone-driven psycho goddess who frolicked in a white gown on freshly bloomed fields weaving flower wreaths, but actually one of seven mountain nymphs — a dangerous bitch, if you will. Titan’s daughter who fucked Zeus in the darkness of a cave and gave birth to Hermes, god of thieves, merchants, and orators.

As for Zoe, her name means “life” in Greek. That’s what Hellenized Jews, translated from the Hebrew havvah, called the biblical Eve. It was only logical that someone entirely unburdened from any history and free from it, like Eve, would appeal so strongly to Zoe, who wanted more than anything to free herself from the weight of her own past. To the extent that she changed her previous name to the one that, she felt, suited her much more. And thus became Zoe.

And now we can safely make a great leap over time and space to this very moment when the two of us, Zoe and I, the dynamic duo of lesbian-detective-avenger-murderesses, are driving in our little Japanese car through the Topčiderska Zvezda roundabout with a heavy load in the trunk.

They’ve taught you Newton’s laws, I assume? They definitely have, you’ve just forgotten. You don’t remember those kinds of things. What’s it good for? you think. But you’re wrong. Take Newton’s second law, for instance. Or the law of force. Owing to the fact that the total mass of our car is now greater than usual, and by about two hundred pounds of male body weight which, bound with rope and tape, is jerking violently in the trunk right now, its rate of acceleration is slower than usual. Because of that, this dizzying movement around a quarter of the Topčiderska Zvezda roundabout is taking forever.

I’ll use that time to tell you how Zoe and I met.

It was seven years ago, during an open mic poetry festival at an alt-cultural center in Belgrade where I performed among a crowd of comparable losers. At the time, presenting myself as a radical poet-performer still seemed exciting to me. I believed passionately in the transformative power of words. My idealism began to fade when I realized that those who fared best at the aforementioned festival were the notorious psychos. And maybe a talentless idiot or two.