Belgrade Noir

He only needed to travel to Belgrade and attend the probate proceeding. Upon accepting the villa, and the incredible amount of cash that he would be left with after he sold it, he would, of course, have to accept the origin of his newfound wealth. And most likely everyone from whom he had been hiding his unfortunate identity would find out where the money had come from. Ilija Soldo might have been able to bear it somehow, if only it didn’t seem that he was in the process of becoming a Serb — again.

He lied to his wife and said he was going on a business trip to Budapest.

And that’s how we find him, confused and a little afraid, as he leaves the hotel and crosses sunny Obilićev Venac to a taxi stand.

The court hearing will begin on time and won’t last longer than twenty-five minutes. On parting, the judge, a young and friendly woman, will ask him about Hvar, the Croatian island her family used to have a house on — the last time she was on Hvar was that summer before the war, when she was three years old, but she doesn’t remember anything — and he will give her a friendly smile and, in order to not disappoint her, lie and say he loved Hvar too, even though he’s never been to the island.

The decision regarding his inheritance was in a plastic envelope. He laid it on the bedside table, resolved to not leave the hotel again until morning, when he would return to Zagreb. He sat in the hotel bar, which had been one of the centers of Belgrade social life after World War II, the place where the state and party heads, secret police agents and generals — some of whom Ilija had heard and read about, though it didn’t interest him much — used to meet. It was important to him to pass the time and return to Zagreb as soon as possible. He felt like a good and faithful husband who had just cheated on his wife.

He returned to his room around nine, after sitting alone in the corner of the empty bar, where it seemed no one came anymore, drinking fifteen whiskeys, all in an effort to sedate himself and forget what had happened that day. He lay in bed and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep. He got up and went to the window, struggling to unlock it. Barely succeeding, he leaned against the window ledge, breathing in the night air for a while and taking in the sounds that carried from Republic Square and Dorćol. Suddenly, he was struck by the thought of what it would have been like if he had gone to the other side in 1991, if he had — instead of joining the Croatian volunteers — left for Aunt Smilja’s in Belgrade, and that thought made him afraid and ashamed and he tried to think of something else, of raspberries, which he had heard grew very well in Serbia, of plums, which somehow, he supposed, Serbia had more of than Croatia, and in the end, though he tried to avoid it, he began to think intensely about Serbia and what kind of a country it really was. What did it mean to him after he, one way or another, had spent the best years of his life fighting against it? It meant nothing to him. Like all other countries that meant nothing to him, including the one he lived in. A country is there so a person has something to lose and something to compromise himself for. He thought about that, closed the window, lay down, and finally fell asleep.

He was climbing up the stairs. With difficulty, one foot in front of the other. He was heavier in his dream than in reality. He barely managed to reach the fifth floor, already more out of breath than he’d ever been in his life. He knocked on the door of the apartment where the clerk Hinko Ajzler lived. He was investigating the circumstances surrounding a street incident in which Ajzler had shoved a Mrs. Petronijević, because, he said, her poodle sneered at him. The old woman had fallen and broken her hip, and three days later her son-in-law, also a senior clerk in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, filed a complaint. And now they had sent him, a known softie, to investigate Ajzler. They knew that Inspector Joso Rakita never said no. In his dream, Ilija Soldo was Inspector Joso Rakita, the year was 1941, the day Friday, April 4, but it didn’t surprise him at all that in his dream he could simultaneously be Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police in 2019.

No one, however, opened the door. And just as he was starting to wonder what to do and to pity his unfortunate fate, someone tapped Joso Rakita or Ilija Soldo on the shoulder.

“Sorry, sir!” Mento Josef Konforti, the postman, no taller than a seven-year-old and equally timid, introduced himself. “It’s been days since Mr. Ajzler has opened the door. Everyone thinks that something has happened to him.”