Belgrade Noir

Led by the great German Reich, Serbia becomes the safest country of the new Europe. The wisdom of our keepers of public order is completely by the book. Do you recall, respected readers, the murderer at the National Theater? He escaped the authorities by a hair, and why, I beg your pardon? Because a killer is always at an advantage. By the time the crime is uncovered, people are alerted, and the detective arrives at the scene of the crime, the killer has had enough time not only to flee but to commit another murder. After realizing that he was dealing with a crafty beast, Detective Miodrag Mika Golubjev, with a toothpick in his mouth, returned to the National Theater night after night. Not that our guardian of the law had begun to like our theater, nor did he care in the least for the actors themselves, but he knew that only by working at the crime scene would he be able to act quickly.

He was right. As soon as Jovanka Dvorniković paused midsentence and stopped center stage, the detective, sitting in the dark in the third row, clearly saw the actress foaming at the mouth (typical for cyanide poisoning). He jumped up immediately, threw away his toothpick, ripped off his hat, sprang over the two rows in front of him, and ran after the phantom shadow. He almost caught it backstage, but the shadow disappeared behind a large prop. Chasing the suspect, the detective descended one floor, then another. When, according to Golubjev himself, both the persecuted and persecutor were close to the bloody stone of the Turkish gallows lodged in the foundations of the National Theater, the detective saw the hunted man shut a rusty door behind him. Golubjev ran to the door, opened it, and found a small and empty boiler room. One detail puzzled him: the suspect could not have escaped because the room had only one door. Golubjev searched, but he found no one behind the boilers.

When I killed the Dude of 1942, I ran through that rusty door, but when I slammed it shut, there was no boiler room in front of me; rather, there was a door which led directly to the street. I was immersed in a strange futuristic era. I glanced at a newspaper and saw that the date was June 11, 2019. Some oddly shaped cars sped down the street behind the theater, which had been extended all the way to Braće Jugovića Street; one of the vehicles almost hit me when I, like a sleepwalker, stepped into the street despite the red light. I asked an old woman where the Germans were, and whether the curfew still existed; she looked at me in astonishment and said, “Have you escaped from a movie set or the psychiatric hospital?”