Belgrade Noir

My old man kept away from all that and made an impressive career as an inspector in the criminal justice department. He nabbed scum and felons off the streets, rapists and killers, once he even caught a college professor who had raped a student. The guy got himself out thanks to his political buddies with a lot of pull. The girl withdrew her statement, and he walked out a free man. But he didn’t know how we Malavrazićes are. My old man waited a few months and then got in touch with two crooks from the block who owed him a favor. They almost put our respected professor in a wheelchair. He wasn’t raping anyone else after that. My old man called it “crime prevention,” which was, obviously, more important than the risk of a suspension.

“Come to see if I’m still aboveground?” he asked as a greeting.

“Don’t be like that…”

“Hand me the hydrometer.”

While he tested the strength of the rakija, not looking at me, he asked a question: “What did Hajji Pešić want?”

“Is the waiter from the Manjež snitching on me?”

“No. The maître d’. I got his son out of jail ten, no, fifteen years ago. He drank a little too much and stole a car and wrecked it.”

“Nice to see your old connections still paying off. How do you know Hajji Pešić?”

“She came to me as well. A few times. She offered money…”

“You refused, of course.”

“Of course. How could I not?”

“But why?”

He stood, threw two logs into the fire under the still, wiped his hands on his blue work pants, and peered intensely at me. “Because it’s better if no one finds out the truth.”

“Why do you get to decide that?”

He smiled ironically. He went into the house, and I sipped some almost-done rakija

. It had a mild sharpness and a strong aroma of grapes. My old man was a master.

He came back out when I was already on my third glass.

“Don’t overdo it. It’s got methyl in it. It’s not fermented.”

“I noticed,” I said unsteadily, draining the glass.

He handed me a dusty, used notebook.

“What’s this?”

“Your grandfather’s journal.”

“Journal? I didn’t know this even existed.”

“Now you do. Now you can find out about your… hmm… employer. Why she’s hired you. Was the grape good at least?”

“The grape? Excellent.”

I took the notebook feeling some sort of sacred respect. And some tingling glee. Maybe I wasn’t a total loser after all. Something told me that I’d solve this case that even my grandfather hadn’t been able to.

Serbs and Americans had once been friends.

Then came the nineties.

I remember that sometime at the beginning of ’93 I saved a boy from a hanging whose only crime was that he’d worn a shirt with John Wayne on it, and so had insulted the pride and patriotic feelings of a few fans. I also remember that they’d had a good go at him before my colleague and I intervened. The legendary Duke on his chest had taken on blue and red hues, as though some hack artist had wanted to overlay his old black-and-white films.

And it had happened overnight. That hatred. Just like everything else in Serbia.

We grew up on John Houston, Frank Capra, and Don Siegel movies. All the girls were hot for Clint Eastwood. When you said “gentleman” you thought Gregory Peck. We all wanted to be Gary Cooper in High Noon. We wore Levi’s. Drank Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Listened to Michael Jackson and Madonna. Yul Brynner played the part of a partisan in Battle of Neretva, the most expensive film made in the former Yugoslavia. Robert De Niro sat on the steps of the Sava Center while he watched flicks at the Belgrade Film Festival, FEST, the largest showcase of films on the Communist side of Europe during the Cold War. They say that before the festival he’d gotten lost in southern Serbia and was taken in by some nice folks in the village of Čokot, a stone’s throw from Niš.

And then came the nineties. And everything changed.

Hate is the feeling most easy to manipulate. And there was a lot of hate in those years. It spilled out over the edges of our television screens, barked at us from our radios, leaked out like the black oil from The X-Files in freshly printed newspapers. It waited for us in places we least expected it. To beat and break us, like those who beat up the boy whose life my colleague and I may have saved.

Hate came from the other side too. The Americans gifted us a parcel of bombs in 1999.

But that didn’t make Dr. Ryan any less significant, any less heroic.

I read my grandfather’s description of him in his journal: