Mark felt his heart sink. The old formula left no room for doubt. This ancestral sentence had come out of the buried passages and clefts of the mountain and was now taking wing in the wide open. People in the crowd were still asking about the assassin in everyday language — So who is this Angelin Ukaj? What made him want to hit the boss? Why?… But the proud and unbending saying of old flew straight to the heart with its single, repeated message: Angelin of the Ukaj hath slain Marian of the Shkreli.
Mark thought he recognized the man in the felt hat whom he’d seen at that grim meeting in the warehouse…. He was observing the crowd with great attention, and it seemed to Mark that icy flames sprang forth now and again from the mans eyes. Mark’s heart sank even further.
Someone took his elbow. It was his friend from the music section.
“Let’s go to the hospital,” he said. “The boss is supposed to be dying.”
They set off at a brisk pace. Mark asked: “So who is this Angelin Ukaj?”
He got no answer for a moment; then, in a burst, “I don’t know. I heard a rumor that he was a fellow from the High Quarter. But what does it matter? He was only the doreras, the hit man.”
Mark shot a glance at his friend that seemed to say, So are you also part of the plot?
The head of the music section looked worried as he shook his head.
“It really is as if it was being reborn … the Kanun, I mean. Just what we needed!”
Mark would have liked to add, “And woe betide us!” but instead, his voice uttered words he had not even thought of: “You don’t happen to know if this fellow has a sister?”
The other man shrugged his shoulders.
“No, I don’t. I never even heard his name before.”
There’s a tough day ahead! thought Mark.
* * *
Shortly after noon the director of the Arts Center breathed his last in his hospital bed. Toward four, a small crowd gathered in the courtyard of the Arts Center, believing that the coffin would be brought there to lie in state. Inside the building, the telephone never stopped ringing, but that didn’t mean people had any better idea of what had happened. In the end, someone from the town hall came to announce that the deceased, in accordance with his wishes, would be buried the next day in the village of his birth, Black Rock.
Nearly everyone who heard the announcement was dumbfounded. The boss wants to be buried in the mountains? For they had all forgotten that that was where he came from, and more precisely from the hamlet called Black Rock. Younger folk, who were not interested in general in where other people came from, would more likely have assumed that Marian had come to B— from Tirana, not from the high plateau.
As they moved off, they talked about the way the boss had dressed, about his politeness and elegance, especially about those bunches of flowers he had delivered to his wife, just like a distinguished European. But some felt really disappointed as they made their way homeward. They would never have dreamed that a man so young, and so modern, could have come from such a desolate hole. Others just nodded their heads, gave a deep sigh, then, accustomed as they had been for so long to take nothing on trust, whispered in each other’s ears, “Do you think the boss really wanted to be buried at Black Rock?” And then there were those who shook hands with acquaintances only to find out whether the bus really was going to leave from the town hall, and to check that it would not take more than an hour to get to Black Rock.
Mark had a cup of coffee at the bar of the Town Café and then went back up to his studio. He had a hunch that he would find a note from his girlfriend under the door. She hadn’t shown her face since her uncle had turned up. “Don’t fret, darling,” she had told him. “As soon as he’s gone, everything will return to normal. Just be patient.”
With a flutter in his heart, he pushed open the heavy door. He forced himself not to look down to check if there was a piece of paper on the floor. But a strong intuition told him there wasn’t.
He lit a cigarette and began to pace the room. He kept on walking up and down until his knees began to ache, and then he sat down.
The young woman arrived after night had fallen. He recognized her footfall on the stairs and stood at the door to greet her. Her face was white as a sheet. Without a word, she collapsed into his arms and burst into tears.
“My brother,” she wailed between her sobs.
“It did occur to me,” Mark replied. “I tried to banish the thought of him from my mind, but I couldn’t. Good God, the worst of our fears has come to pass!”
They both said the last sentence together. Unless, of course, they did not say it at all, but only thought it in unison.
He stroked her hair and tried to calm her down. But when she asked what would happen now, he had no answer to give her.
Right after the murder, the police had searched her family’s home, but her brother had already gone into hiding. The whole business was full of contradictions: there was a highly public side to executions of this kind, yet the murderer was obliged to go under cover.
“It’ll work out in the end,” Mark said, looking as forlorn as ever. “There’s got to be a solution. There always is.”
They were sitting on the sofa. Mark kept turning his head toward the bay window. It was getting darker and darker.
The funeral procession drove very slowly along the mountain road. The hearse led the way, with a town-hall car following with the bereaved. Behind that was a jeep with NATO markings, a leftover from a recent mission to patrol the Kosovo border. There were two coaches, jam-packed with friends of the family, which could barely make the sharp curves. All of a sudden the tiny hamlet of Black Rock came into view, startlingly close up, as if seen through a zoom lens. Roofs, houses, windows, and the church with its recently repaired steeple stood out in the mist. It seemed so close you could touch it by stretching out your hand — but a moment later, after a hairpin turn in the mountain road, the village seemed to move off in a huff, into the far distance.
Farther on, the road dropped down before rising again. Black Rock, first seen up on high, almost in the clouds, now turned out to be deep down, lower than the rolling mist. A skittish place!
As he watched the landscape playing these games with the eye and the mind, Mark could not really concentrate on what the head of the music section was saying to him from the next seat in the coach. Black Rock now seemed to be dancing a crazy Irish reel.
The other passengers were talking at the tops of their voices, smoking like chimneys and coughing their hearts out.
“The killer made only the very slightest alteration to … how should I say… the outer dress of the execution ritual,” Mark’s friend and colleague explained to him. “Do you remember that grim meeting we went to? Where they were all adamant that the deed could only be done by a single shot? Well, the marksman kept to the rule: he fired only once. Tve heard it said that he even called out to his victim before pulling the trigger. The question now is whether he’s going to carry on with all the other rules from the Kanun, or stop short at this point. Did you see the two policemen who got into the other coach? I’m sure they’re coming up to Black Rock to arrest the murderer if he turns up at the wake, as the old Code dictates.”
“I doubt it”
“What do you doubt? That hell come to the wake, or that he’ll get arrested?”
“Both,” Mark replied.
His friend pursed his lips. “You know, this business is getting more absurd every minute,” he added after a pause. “None of it makes any sense.”