Belgrade Noir

One could enter the hotel garage from Maršala Birjuzova Street. Somewhat tucked away from the city, the street was murky, gray, and a bit damp, as if the sun never reached the ground or first floors of the buildings, most of them erected before World War II. The garage was tight, he could hardly maneuver in his Volkswagen Touareg rental. He was greeted by a short, older man whose modest attire made him look more like a beggar than a bellhop, garage guard, or receptionist. Murmuring pleasantries that he didn’t pay attention to, the man led him into a cramped elevator that took him two floors up. He found himself in a hallway, where along the walls hung framed black-and-white photos of the hotel’s illustrious past: a small, smiling black man in the role of an elevator operator, the architect and owner of the hotel with his family, the 1940 New Year’s celebrations, Miroslav Krleža, one of the hotel’s most famous guests… That same Krleža, a Croat, the best-known writer of the Yugoslav era, rushed headlong to Belgrade, to his Serbian friends, and he fought with gusto over national difference; his greatest pleasure was staying right here at the Hotel Majestic, the postwar gathering place of those the writer considered to be the most interesting of the epoch, but whom the outside world found most repugnant.

At the end of the hall there were stairs which descended to the reception desk. After checking in, the guest would climb back up these same stairs — there were five of them — to the elevator that went up to the rooms. It was a complicated system of ascents and descents, whether by foot or elevator, but the guest easily got the hang of it and quickly made himself at home in the hotel.

In the room, there were heavy curtains the color of ripe cherries and bed covers the exact same color and apparently cut from the same cloth. He detected an odor that reminded him of his very early childhood: kerosene. Kerosene, from where?

He hadn’t smelled it in thirty years.

He took the elevator, then went down the five stairs to reception, past the receptionists without even glancing at them, and exited through the main hotel entrance onto Obilićev Venac. The glare of the August sun caused a sharp pain, first in his eyes and then in his head. He stood there until it passed, and when he looked up again, he was surrounded on all sides by the colorful tables of the nearby cafés and restaurants. He could hear the humming of hundreds of people, mostly young women and men, who all seemed unbearably happy to him.

For the first time it occurred to him how strange it was that the street he had entered the hotel garage from was dominated by the gloom of the cloudy preautumnal afternoon, while on the opposite side, in front of the hotel’s main entrance, it was a sunny summer’s day. As if the Hotel Majestic stood on the border of two climate zones.

Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police division, a still-attractive man of fifty-two years, was in Belgrade for the first time in his life. Just two months ago he’d believed — and repeated to himself a hundred times — that he’d never set foot in this city. The main reason for not coming was not that Ilija was a Croatian veteran who’d fought in the war beginning in the spring of 1991 — first against the Serbs and the Yugoslav People’s Army in Slavonia, then on the Dubrovnik front, only to fight against the Bosnian Muslims two years later; and then again against the Serbs in the spring and summer of 1995. He didn’t hate those people he had looked at through the crosshairs; how could he hate those who were his only real company during the war and whose fate he shared, in both life and death? And he knew that they didn’t have anything against him. He hadn’t killed prisoners or civilians, nor had he set fire to villages or shot at random, and somehow it appeared to him that those he’d fought against hadn’t done that either. Those sorts of things always happened wherever he wasn’t, though often in his vicinity, only two or three kilometers away. And so, it always evaded him somehow. And why would he now hate his enemies, with whom he shared those years in winter, in snow, in rain, and in scorching heat? And why would he not go to Belgrade?