At that moment Nikolai Ivanov, i.e. the actor Dude, pulled out the prop pistol, placed it against his temple, and fired. A stream of real blood rushed down from his head like a fountain. A body, which at that very instant died, convincingly collapsed on stage. The audience was impressed by this realistic theater of what appeared to be a daring stage direction. The applause did not fade. Next to the dead Dude the other actors, always craving praise, kept returning to the stage. Seven curtain calls — is that not enough? Only when the curtain finally fell did someone scream. Soon word got out that an unknown individual had planted an old trophy pistol on Dude, loaded with real bullets.
The detective in 2019 was Slobodan Jovićević — he was without a nickname; a worker, a purist, quiet, assiduous, precise in accommodating his supervisors, yet talented in solving difficult cases.
As soon as he heard about the shooting, Jovićević rushed from the Majke Jevrosime Street police station, which is responsible for the National Theater district. Ivanov did shoot himself onstage, but the detective had suspicions, and immediately classified the case as premeditated murder. The question was: who killed him? Again, this time, none present were allowed to leave the theater before being interrogated. When he was done with the audience, Jovićević addressed his questions to the actors. Everyone had a good alibi. They were all gathered backstage; only the actress playing Sasha was with Dude before the audience. She had the best alibi.
Jovićević returned to the police station to think, having ordered the actors not to leave Belgrade, which some of them accepted only begrudgingly because it disrupted their plans for guest appearances in the Romanian town of Cluj. As he was leaving the theater, the detective failed to notice a shadow which quietly slipped backstage, descending underground with silent footsteps, and continuing one level farther down via metal stairs. The phantom opened a rusty door, slammed it behind him, and disappeared from this era.
Seventy-seven years earlier, in September 1942, on this very stage, another murder occurred. The victim was the actress Jovanka Dvorniković. According to the press — not only Opštinske Novine, but also Novo Vreme — this time the authorities were far more prepared. Here is what the reporter from Novo Vreme observed:
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?”
I realized that I needed to calm down and that I shouldn’t reveal who I was. I needed money — and to be honest, I stole some. I returned to the rear of the theater, and got a haircut at the barbershop, Sweeney Todd. I couldn’t place the name of the shop, so I asked. “Don’t you know?” replied the young barber. “It’s a famous film. Sweeney Todd shaved his customers and, in the end, slit their throats, turned their chairs upside down, and threw them in a pit. Ha-ha! Maybe we’ll do the same to you.”
They shaved me and didn’t slit my throat. I knew, however, that I could slit throats, poison, and kill whomever I wanted, passing back and forth through an ordinary rusty door. On the future side, the first murder I committed occurred during the twenty-sixth run of Chekhov’s drama Ivanov. I returned to 1942 and killed Jovanka Dvorniković, then again escaped to 2019. At that moment, I felt powerful, unbelievably grand. I, Dr. Erich Hetzel, assassinate people with impunity, sowing fear at the National Theater. I am not sure if I still do it because of my wife Barbara, or whether my power has become like a scar which suits my face nicely…
Whom to kill next? wondered Dr. Erich Hetzel in 1942. Should he assault the lives of the most famous actors: Olga Spiridonović, Pavle Bogatinčević, Ljubinka Bobić, Žanka Stokić, Nevenka Urbanova, Milivoje Živanović?
Or should he first check what they had achieved and what legacy they had left behind in the future? Once again, he passed through the time door, now without running away from the sound of the steps of justice at his heels. He realized that Spiridonović, Bogatinčević, Bobić, Stokić, Urbanova, and Živanović had laid the foundations for our theatrical life after the German defeat and the creation of a new Yugoslavia. What did the scar on his face tell him? To begin eliminating the most famous and, by doing so, not only avenge the National Theater but also its entire history.
Luckily for the history of theater, he stopped, mulled it over, and decided to kill those who, owing to their talents, had not deserved any recognition, including those in the audience. In 2019, he was the perpetrator of one more spectacular murder onstage; in 1942, two more, by which point the final tally of this serial killer reached six.
Confident after his sixth victim, puffed up like a bird, Dr. Hetzel believed he was God. He had no guilt; he eliminated bad actors one after the other and spared the future greats. In both time frames, he practically expected doormen to kiss his hand when he walked into the building; however, in such a state of mind, he underestimated the skill of those two detectives: Slobodan Jovićević from 2019 and Mika Golubjev from 1942.
Just like Mika the Toothpick, Jovićević also bumped into the boiler room door, only to realize that the suspect was nowhere to be found in the room where there was no way of escaping.
Jovićević thought to himself.