Belgrade Noir

Here he would start remotely scanning the contents of his latest victim’s phone. His favorite sport was going through WhatsApp. He had noticed early on that people were invariably less discreet and less inhibited on WhatsApp than they were on their normal messaging apps.

He calculated that 73 percent of users talked with disarming frankness about sex in their exchanges. Roughly 18 percent would regularly send explicit photographs or videos of themselves. These were not always what one might expect. One middle-aged man sent short videos of himself eating breakfast naked. Miloš concluded that the recipient was another man. The morning fare consisted of a bowl of fruit. After the recipient had viewed the video, he would send back one word — the name of a new fruit. And the next morning, the sender would once again sit at his breakfast table, but with the new fruit.

Miloš watched this ritual for about a week before getting witlessly bored. But it did give him a few days of contemplation. Whichever way he considered it, intellectually or emotionally, he simply couldn’t grasp why

anyone would derive the least pleasure from this activity, although, he noted, the fruits were ever more exotic, and it had inspired him to track down and sample a passion fruit. Not as easy in Belgrade as you might think, even these days.

Blackmail, threats, and passive aggression were almost ubiquitous on the WhatsApp exchanges. Again, this perplexed Miloš. Why were people so unpleasant to each other? What satisfaction did they derive from this? And did his relative calm mean that he was too ordinary?

In truth, he knew he was far from ordinary, but the vicious and cruel emotional habits of so many humans were still something he could not fathom.

Leaving aside the monstrous intrusion into others’ privacy, his examination of the phones was vital to sustaining Miloš’s good humor. Ever since his mother died when he was fourteen, his emotional life had all but atrophied. His father, whom he suspected of having had a role in his mother’s death, showed no interest in Miloš whatsoever. Recently, Miloš had been researching his father’s past to discover that his rise to wealth and notoriety had coincided with the eleven years of Miloševic’s turbulent reign.

The more he understood his father, the less he liked him. Yet he was entirely dependent on him financially. His father barely exchanged any words with Miloš. But he was generous and did not use money as a tool to blackmail or control his son. There was always food in the house, and on those rare occasions when Miloš asked for something extra, his father gave it to him without hesitation. But in exchange, his father made it clear that he wished to have no relationship with his son beyond this. Miloš was alone.

Miloš sometimes came home to find his father entertaining his rather crude, unpleasant colleagues. There was business in the air, but Miloš didn’t know what, nor did he inquire. Sometimes, instead of a business colleague, the visitor would be an impressionable young woman draping herself around his father. Just as he couldn’t quite understand the stupidity of wealthy people, he was dumbfounded that any woman who was more or less his own age would want to engage in any kind of sexual interaction with his father.

One spring morning, Miloš was at work alone. No colleagues, no customers. He smiled and settled into his chair to explore the Farm in the American Midwest. He had received intelligence that aliens had recently landed. He suspected they may have been preparing for an all-out attack. Again, he was called upon to save the earth from executors of the dreaded Supreme Intergalactic Court.

In the distance, he spotted one and began to creep toward the target with exactly the requisite stealth to ensure that the alien wouldn’t be alerted to his presence. His finger was on the trigger of his laser grenade launcher — the alien perfectly in his sights. Hit this guy and Miloš will have delivered perhaps a fatal blow to the aliens’ tactics of establishing their forward base in North America. But accuracy was everything…

“Good morning.” The interruption caused him to lose his balance. The alien’s head turned. Miloš had no choice but to cut, run, and lose most of the data from the session.

Inside he was seething.

Then he saw the customer. Never had anger dissipated with such rapidity and such sincerity. If this is a dream, Miloš thought, then let me never wake up. Unlike so many young women Miloš had observed, there was nothing artificial about her. No hair dye, no spray-on tan, only the merest hint of makeup, the most discreet jewelry, deep green eyes set in features symmetrical enough to launch a thousand Xenonauts.

Miloš had to close his half-open mouth consciously. It had momentarily suffered an unexpected attack of lockjaw. Pulling himself together, he inquired how he could help her.