Belgrade Noir

In the dream he didn’t have to go down the stairs and climb again to the fifth floor with the notary Dušan Marković, an ill-tempered, fat, middle-aged man who was the spitting image of the minister of foreign affairs, Cincar Marković (who Ilija Soldo only knew about in his dream), along with two more colleagues from the police, the aids and witnesses for his investigation of Hinko Ajzler’s apartment. The repeated ascending and descending of stairs in dreams, as in a good story or novel, is an unnecessary detail that the consciousness censures. This fact provided Joso Rakita with a sense of relief.

He pulled the pick out of his pocket and easily opened the shoddy lock. He was hit with the stench of urine, gravy, and some sort of chemical. The stench was more real than anything he’d ever experienced in real life. Inspector Joso Rakita was seized with terror, as was the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, Ilija Soldo. He approached the bed on which, gray as the wall behind him, lay a balding man with a clothesline tied in a sloppy noose around his neck. On the nightstand by the bed there were two empty bottles of the phenobarbital Luminal, a sedative once made famous in Hollywood movies, which is still used today as an antiepileptic. But Joso Rakita hardly noticed the bottles of Luminal, because more interesting to him, as to Ilija Soldo in whose head he resided, was the amateurly-tied noose. He couldn’t have hung himself like that, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the man was alive, staring bug-eyed at the low ceiling.

Along Ajzler’s right eye, below the yellowish iris, crawled a small black ant, sliding across it as if on ice.

Rakita moved to pluck the ant from Ajzler’s eye with his fingers.

And then something happened which could hardly be translated from dream to reality. Suddenly the person lying there was no longer Hinko Ajzler, and the fingers did not belong to Joso Rakita; instead the ant was crawling across Joso’s wide-open eye and Hinko’s fingers went for it. He could feel the ant moving but he couldn’t blink or move his eyeballs.

At this point, he awoke with a scream. He grasped his neck, but there was no noose. Underneath him, his halfway-expelled shit was smeared across the hotel bedsheets.

This should have been the greatest fright in the life of the Croatian war veteran and esteemed policeman Ilija Soldo, the inheritor of the most beautiful villa in Senjak.

But this was just the beginning.

For the next ten nights upon returning to Zagreb, Ilija Soldo couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of any thoughts. He said nothing to his wife, nothing of his trip to Belgrade instead of Budapest, nothing of the considerable wealth he had inherited, nor of the dream he’d had the last time he’d fallen asleep. Over time, his silences and lies multiplied.

On the eleventh morning he got on a bus to Belgrade. He called in sick to work and told his wife that he was traveling to Vinkovci, out toward Serbia, where a few days earlier a thirty-year-old railroad worker had smothered his two children and then disappeared. He’d left a short note for the mother of his children, who in the police report was listed as his “domestic partner,” where he wrote that he had smothered the children because she had been cheating on him with a waiter from the railroad station café. He was suspected to have escaped across the border to Serbia.

As awake as Ilija had been over the past days and nights, he rode east on the empty highway. When they crossed the border and entered Serbia, he closed his eyes, thinking he’d be able to sleep now. But no. The world was just as clear, real, and awake as on the other side of the border. What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either!

Those words, as if regimented, were drilled into his head: What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either.