Belgrade Noir

That led me to believe that he was our main suspect. It could be that Aćim Dugalić had not been in Apis’s good graces. And that he’d ordered his execution. In a conversation I had with an officer from Apis’s innermost circle, a man from Niš named Vemić, I was informed that Dugalić had been known as someone who had “chosen the rival party.”

“Traitor…” a drunken Vemić told me, sitting at a table in the kafana Zlatna Moruna, the Golden Sturgeon.

“And what does Apis do to traitors?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said, agreeing to another glass of rosé.

He looked at me with glassy eyes and added, “He sends Nemanja.”

So there we were. Major Nemanja Lukić. A suspect. Possibly a killer.

“What do you know about him?” I asked my father as he stoked the fire beneath the still.

“Arsenije never proved that Lukić killed Dugalić.”

“That’s not what I asked. Do you have any paperwork on him? Photographs? A dossier?”

“Lukić had been a doctor too. He trained in London. Since he spoke good English, our folks gave him to Ryan to help him out and assist in operations. Lukić had been a member of the Black Hand as well.” He stood, broke a piece of dry wood, and tossed it aside, looking at me anxiously. “Grandpa left the case unsolved on purpose, which you probably know…?”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t get why.”

“Why? Because some secrets need to stay secret.”

“Is that some kind of Black Hand motto?”

“No, son… Just, Grandpa figured it wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“He figured?”

“I suppose so. Murder during wartime? When so many people were already dying, who was counting one more body? But fuck it… Grandpa was a stubborn guy. Like you.”

“Good to hear it’s genetic.”

“So’s alcoholism. Just saying.”

“Ah, what are you gonna do.”

“I’ll tell you something that isn’t in the journal.”

“I’m listening.”

“One night, about a year before he died, he got drunk — you know how he got. He told me that in 1915, he got a visit from Lukić. Right in the Glavnjača. He’d never come so close to shitting his pants in his whole life.”

I got to thinking, and my old man went back to stoking the fire under the still as though nothing had happened.

I didn’t know a lot about my grandfather. Just what my father had told me and what I remembered through a haze. I was only nine when he died. But there was one thing I was sure of when it came to Arsenije Malavrezić: he didn’t scare easy.

“If you really want to dig through it,” my father piped up again, “there are some documents in the clinic archives.”

The guy had to be nuts.

After all, how with-it could someone be who’d decided to spend their whole life surrounded by books and document registers that no one cared about?

The archivist in the clinic center, a tubby, middle-aged guy, collected vinyl fucking records. For half an hour he blathered on at me about how he didn’t have enough room at home, so he’d brought some of his collection to the archives. He just droned on and on about it. But I had to put up with this idiot, at least until I got what the archive had on Lukić and Ryan. Then I’d tell him where he could stick his vinyl.

He pulled out a file and handed it to me. I started leafing through the documents.

“He’s an interesting guy,” said the archivist. “Dr. Lukić.”

There were photos in the file too. Mostly from the war. Soldiers, officers, nurses, prisoners of war, the sick and wounded… everything to do with misery. War really is hell. That’s why we keep doing it — we’re a hellish people.

There was a photo of Dr. Ryan as well. He’d been the real deal. Dressed in his uniform, a face that radiated certainty, a close-cropped soldier’s haircut, and large, piercing eyes.

“And what’s this?” I asked, pointing to a photo of Serbian and British officers standing around a big cannon.

“British war mission. Members of the Royal Navy. They organized a blockade of the Danube and defended Belgrade in 1915 from the Austro-Hungarian flotilla that was bombing the city day and night. Admiral Ernest Troubridge was in command. That’s this guy here. And next to him is his second-in-command, Lieutenant Charles Lester Kerr. This one right here.”

The archivist wasn’t as useless as he’d appeared at first glance. He seemed to know his way around a few things besides vinyl records.