Belgrade Noir

But he couldn’t quite complete the plan in his head. How would he actually fashion a situation whereby giving her the bottle of wine would not appear, well, weird? Would he suggest that they drink it together? Or simply walk away with a euphoric smile on his face? These were details he had yet to finalize. But he felt that he had at least a seed of an idea.

Newly inspired, Miloš flipped open the lid of his computer. It was six thirty p.m., around the time that Katarina usually arrived home. He was in luck. The RAT told him her computer was already on. He switched on the camera. Early on, he had programmed the little green light at the top of her Mac only to turn on if she used it. So, as he was watching her, she would be ignorant of his presence.

As soon as the familiar room came up on his screen, he noted that something was odd. Something was distorting the image of the room which was by now seared into the screen of his mind. Then he spotted it. There were two glasses by the now familiar bottle of French wine. Not one.

Miloš’s insides began to churn. He’d known that this moment would come at some point. He’d known he would have to watch his beloved Katarina have sex with somebody else. In his mind, he didn’t reproach her for it. How could she carry any blame? She was unaware of the depth, the sincerity, not to mention the existence of his passion for her. He believed that once their friendship and companionship were established, then the cursory carnal pleasures that her other male friends delivered would disappear into the woods.

Suddenly, Katarina returned, switching off the main bedroom light as she entered before flicking another switch. Her bedside lamp threw but a modest dull circle of light across the left side of her bed. The lamp was beyond Miloš’s field of vision and so it was only the dark shapes of Katarina and her friend that he observed in a state of controlled frenzy as they impatiently removed each other’s clothes. Miloš was close to tears as he watched her being defiled and dishonored. But he could no longer restrain himself and less than a minute into the event, his reluctant excitement was seeping stickily into the keyboard.

He felt transformed into a bottom feeder in an ocean of shame. He had never felt so miserable. He was desperate to slam shut his laptop in order to end the tortured on-screen show and its associated sighs and grunts. But he knew well that this would soak his motherboard with the viscous liquid and render it unusable. All the data of his Xenonauts conquests lay there. So he did the only thing he could: he started to cry before finding some tissues with which he could clean up the mess and turn the machine off.

Over the next few days, Miloš refused to even open his computer. Not only did he stop spying on Katarina, he actually stopped playing Xenonauts. At work, he retreated into his own thoughts. Bane and Jovana tiptoed around him — aware that something was very wrong, but apprehensive about doing anything that might trigger what they suspected was an emotional volcano.

Five days later, Miloš could no longer resist the lure of Xenonauts and so he lifted the lid on his laptop. He stared at the keyboard, the focus of his recent embarrassment. He thought he detected a couple of small stains which he carefully removed with a dab of water on a tissue. Before long, he was back — this time in a new environment that the aliens were seeking to establish as their base in the Middle East.

It was soon after he had stumbled across an oasis south of Mosul that the alert sounded. It was six thirty-five p.m. Katarina had returned home. He froze the Iraqi action and flipped over to her webcam, his heart pounding. Deploying those hawk eyes which had been the downfall of so many aliens, he clocked the two glasses next to the wine.

Jealousy, anger, prurience, desire, tristesse, curiosity. Which impulse would take over? As they vied for his attention, something most unexpected occurred, recalibrating all his emotions into a wave of astonishment. A dinner plate came flying through the door and sailed right across the bedroom before exiting into the bathroom, followed by a loud crash which was efficiently picked up by the microphone on Katarina’s Mac.

Worse followed. Much worse. Miloš heard Katarina scream as she fell back into the room before the man with a swift, expert sleight of hand immobilized her. It reminded him of the Vulcan nerve grip that Mr. Spock was able to deploy so fatally in his close-combat encounters aboard the USS Enterprise. The man squatted over her with his back to Miloš. Having kicked her to ensure she remained on the floor, the man turned to grab Comrade Tito before raising the statuette above his head in preparation to strike.