“You messed up, Toxic. Ivo is dead. Zoran is dead. Branko Brown is dead. And Branko Karlovać as well.”
“And Dikan?”
“Boss is OK.”
Radovan breaks in, smiling from the driver’s seat, talking into the rearview mirror:
“Dikan told me to kiss you. When you’re dead! Ha ha.”
“Shut up and drive!” Niko shouts.
So cargo it’ll be. My final fifteen minutes have started ticking. Heart switches from Britney pop to funeral fugue. The black Audi takes us past the long aluminum factory, on the outskirts of town. The soft radio delivers Louis Armstrong, blowing his trumpet “Cheek to Cheek” and telling us he’s in heaven.
“Who killed them? The Feds?” I ask, casually bringing my left foot behind my right.
Being able to speak my language again this close to the end is like a former chain-smoker being offered one last cig before the big event. Croatian words exit my mouth like lustful smoke rings. Actually, seeing Niko’s face again, makes me want to smoke.
“You killed them, Toxic.”
I killed them. The dumpsite hit must have triggered a series of TJs. But the Feds don’t kill people. At least not until they’ve heard their life story through the dirty underwear placed over their heads, encouraged by the crazy police dog barking at their naked genitals. I don’t get it. I was just a hitman. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. And now I’m to blame? I focus on simpler things. I have to keep talking.
“You kill Munita?” I ask my old friend and former roommate, while discretely pushing the tip of my left shoe against the heel of my right.
“Munita?” Niko repeats with a smile and a short nasal blow.
“She had a great body,” Radovan says. “But an ugly head.”
Niko laughs. Niko laughs and this is the right moment. I push the bottom of my right heel with my left toe, quite hard, until the sole breaks loose from the heeclass="underline" I manage to “open” the shoe at the back, and by raising the foot, and shaking it a bit, the small gun gently rolls out from the back of my shoe. It’s on the floor now. I step on it with my left leg. I’ve done this a hundred times. Been practicing hard all winter. Niko doesn’t notice a thing. He’s still laughing.
“Ugly head,” the meatloaf repeats.
He then turns off the main road and heads down a dirt road in the direction of the mountains. The snowdrifts are almost gone. The moss on the lava is green. The nothingness around us is absolute. No trees, no birds, no nothing. Just some scruffy rocks and splashes of moss here and there. This lunar landscape is pretty far from the white cliffs, decorated with cypresses and olive trees, that I know from the hills around Split. I’ve started to appreciate the ice cold emptiness now, but I have to admit that I still miss my Adriatic spring. Suddenly I start humming our Lijepa naša, the national anthem of Croatia:
“Drava, Sava, keep on flowing,
Danube, you know where you’re going.”
Niko pricks up his ears, but he can’t make out the song, nor the words. I hum a little louder. My eyes get warm. Every time you hear this song, some twenty thousand Croats appear in front of your eyes, all dressed in the red-and-white national jersey, roaring in the stands and crying their lungs out before our last game in France ’98.
“Tell the sea and tell the sand
That a Croat loves his fatherland.”
“SHUT UP!” Niko shouts. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
“OK,” I say. “Can I have a cigarette before you kill me?”
“You started smoking again?” Niko asks.
“Don’t worry. It won’t kill me.”
He looks at me as if he wants to shoot me immediately. He probably would, if the Audi were more than two hours old.
CHAPTER 34
BOK
Radovan parks the car in a rough parking area next to the road and the silence of the land takes over. I try to keep my cool as Niko gets out of the car, leaving the door open. He makes some quick modern dance moves, showing the surroundings to his great gun. Yeah, man. You better watch out for those White Hats. I casually bend forward and manage to pick the small gun up from the floor, without the driver noticing. I mean to do him right away, but when Niko shouts for me to get the hell out of the car, I fucking hesitate. Discretely, I pocket the piece and exit the car with my heart playing all kinds of music, like a radio gone haywire.
I’m fucked.
The bright spring night is freezing cold. Niko orders me to walk ahead of him, away from the road, and then shouts at Radovan, still inside the car. I make my way across the harsh, uneven lava surface. Here and there are patches of light green and gray moss, and we have to step over some oblong, narrow openings in the lava floor, which look like miniatures of the Grand Canyon. Clefts, you might call them. I try hard to walk naturally while doing my best to conceal the loose sole of my right shoe. I hear Radovan get out of the car. The car door slams, filling my ears with sound. The last door of my life… I could just as well turn around now, grab the gun, and ice them in a flash.
No. Won’t do. Niko is fast enough.
Finally he tells me to stop. I get it. They’ve really done their homework. We stop at the edge of a lava cleft that’s big enough to serve as my coffin. Iceland will swallow me up like an unlucky tourist.
I turn around to face my friends and executioners. We all shiver with cold. It must be around two degrees Celsius. Not a car, a bird, or a plane can be heard, and the air is completely still. The silence is absolute. I think about Gunnhildur. She must be in the car by now, driving around aimlessly, desperately. Or maybe they’re still at the house, held hostage in the sofa by the Ukranian entry, thinking I must have gone out with an old buddy from Mob School.
Niko orders Radovan to give me a cigarette. Actually, I’d almost forgotten about it. The blockhead brings out the packet and throws me one. It’s a Pall Mall. There is absolutely no limit to the strangeness of this guy. Though he looks like a white Hulk in a suit, his favorite artist is Celine Dion. He’s watched Titanic thirty times, he once told me. I ask for a light, and the bald one searches his pockets without success. Niko keeps his Desert Eagle pointed at me. I keep my eyes glued on the barrel, while he uses his free hand to fish a lighter from his pants. He throws it at me. I pretend to catch it, while allowing it to escape my hands. It lands on the lava floor. I excuse myself before bowing to get it. It’s from the Zagreb Samovar. I hesitate a moment before picking up the lighter, giving Niko a quick look. He’s as tense as a bound eagle. “Don’t fucking fuck with me!” Obviously, he can’t wait to bomb my face with a long bullet from his big black gun. Still, he promised I could have a final smoke. For old times’ sake.
This could be my moment, I say to myself as I grab the lighter. But no. I hesitate again. Without doing anything, I get up and light the cigarette. It shakes in my mouth like a tractor’s gear-shift. My heart repeats the same beat over and over again, with the sound of a CD stuck on a scratch.
I remove the cigarette from my lips and give it a good look, those 3.5 inches of paper and tobacco. I’m 3.5 inches from the grave. I’ve got 3.5 inches to work from. Now, 3.41, to be exact.
I started smoking in the war. In those crazy days, every cigarette you could get your lips on represented seven minutes of cease-fire, a glimpse of heaven in the midst of hell. After the war it became the opposite: every cigarette brought back seven minutes of shooting and bombing. So I quit. This one here can only bring back my scattered memories: my mother cursing in the kitchen, Hanover fucking Hauptbahnhof, the Winnipeg guy and his bloody wallet, Gunnhildur’s stick-red smile. I smoke it as slowly as possible.