I moved quickly to the kitchen door and went inside. White plates and saucers occupied the slots on a wooden draining board like the skeleton of some fossilized animal. A coffeepot stood on the cooker. It was cold to the touch. The tap was dripping cold water into the butler’s pantry sink. I started slowly up the creaking wooden stairs. For a few seconds I heard raised voices in a room above my head and then the sound of a single shot. The shot brought me up short; then I heard seven more.
Gun in hand, I bounded up the rest of the kitchen stairs and into the hall. An officer’s peaked cap with a letter U around the Croatian flag lay next to Dalia’s unopened post on the table. A strong smell of gunpowder was drifting through the house. After eight shots, someone was dead. But who? I caught sight of my own reflection in the big mirror on the hall tree where the hat she’d been wearing in Munich was hanging next to some of her many handbags. I was wearing an anxious, puzzled look. Where was she? Was she all right?
“Dalia?” I yelled. “It’s me, Gunther. Where are you?”
I heard something hard fall on the floor. It might have been a gun. I ran into the drawing room.
The black lyre-shaped clock on the mantelpiece was ticking loudly, as if to remind me that time could not be turned around and that in the ten seconds it took to fire eight pistol shots everything had changed forever. I hadn’t minded the paintings by Emil Nolde before, but there was one in particular that now seemed sinister: grinning, garishly colored grotesque masks that looked more Halloween than African. And it struck me now that they were laughing at me. What were you thinking? How could you have been so foolish? This is where your carelessness gets you. How did you think that this could end well?
Wearing a plain white summer dress that accentuated her tan, Dalia was sitting on the piano stool with her back to the piano and facing the white leather Swan Biedermeier sofa where she and I had first kissed. She was lighting a cigarette with a fireside match. The P38 I’d left in her bedroom now lay empty but still smoking on the floor about a meter away from Colonel Dragan’s dead body. His light gray dress uniform was covered in blood from the several shots she’d fired at his body, although the one through his right eye would by itself certainly have killed him. The whole eyeball was hanging off his cheek like a carelessly served poached egg.
She saw me look at the picture and smiled a sad smile. “I’m not so sure that Hitler wasn’t right when he told Joey to get rid of these paintings,” she said. “It’s not that they’re degenerate. I don’t know what that means in the context of something like art. It’s that the artist’s colors feel like they’re a part of the human soul. They feel as if they’re so much more than just colors. You know what I mean? But for that picture, I don’t know that I would have shot him. You see, it reminded me of who and what he was. I know that doesn’t sound like much of an explanation to a man like you. To a policeman. It’s not very logical, I’ll admit that. But looking at that picture now, that’s how I feel. Somewhere on the color spectrum between heaven and hell.”
Her approach to art appreciation was more convincing than mine.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said. “About your father. When I told you he was dead I only meant to spare you the knowledge of who and what he was. To protect you from the truth.”
“He’s dead now,” she said. “At least, I hope he is. I mean, that was certainly my intention. To kill this evil bastard.”
I supposed she had shot him because she’d believed exactly what I’d told her, which was that her father was dead, and that she’d assumed the man in her house was an impostor. He must have scared her. Something like that. I don’t know. People have been murdered for a lot less than that. I knelt to the side of the body with the least amount of blood on the carpet and pressed my fingers against the dead man’s neck, which was still warm to the touch. The hot metal grouped in his chest was making the shirt under his tunic smolder a little. Dark arterial blood was spreading quickly underneath him, like he was an animal lying on the floor of an abattoir.
“He’s dead all right,” I said, standing up again.
I had to admit that she’d made an excellent job of it. Colonel Dragan had cut his last throat and placed the last human head on his rockery at Jasenovac. If I was at all sad about what had happened it was only because no one should ever find themselves in a position where they end up killing their own father, no matter how terrible he might have been. You don’t ever get over something like that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I could see that I now had the awful task of telling the woman I loved the unpalatable truth: that the man she had just shot and killed really was her own papa.
Forty-five
Life moves at the speed of light when there’s gun smoke still hanging in the air over a dead body. In just a few seconds a gun changes time forever and everything else that follows. Why had I left it there? It was all my fault. And I could see no way on earth of making this better now.
“Good,” she said. “And you needn’t worry. He’s certainly not my father.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m sorry. Look, I know I told you that your father was dead, but he’s not. Or at least he wasn’t. This is Father Ladislaus. This is the man I gave your letter to, in Jasenovac.”
“It’s you who doesn’t understand,” she said. “Oh, I don’t doubt that he’s who you say he is. That this man — Antun Djurkovic — was Father Ladislaus, better known now as Colonel Dragan. But I can assure you he was not my father. I know that because I also know that this is the man who killed my father. Not to mention God knows how many others in Yugoslavia since.”
“Thousands,” I muttered, still uncomprehending.
“So you have met him,” she said.
“Yes. When I was in Croatia I went to a concentration camp where he and another priest were killing Serbs for the pleasure of it. I told you he was dead because I thought it best you didn’t need to know what a monster he was. No one should have to know something like that.”
“That was kind of you. Kinder to me than I’ve been to you, perhaps. Fetch me a drink, will you, Gunther? A brandy, I think. I owe the truth to you, at least.”
I poured us both a drink and then sat down on the sofa and waited patiently for the truth to come out of her. She swallowed the brandy in one gulp, wiped a tear from her eye, and then lit another cigarette. I noticed a tiny fleck of blood on the hem of her dress.
“Believe me, Gunther, I’ve wanted to kill this man for a long, long time. Dreamed of killing him. Many times and in many different ways. But now that he’s dead, I’m surprised to find that I’m not nearly as happy about it as I’d imagined I would be. Why is that, do you think?”
“It’s a hell of a thing killing a man,” I said. “It always seems like the bullets go through two people: the person who gets shot and the person who does the shooting. I know what you’re feeling. But if you’re in any doubt about what you did, angel, then let me assure you that this person badly needed to be shot, like a rabid dog or a crazy pig. You can’t hear them yet but there are ten thousand bells ringing in heaven for the death of this man and lamentations only in the darkest corner of hell that one of theirs got what he richly deserved.”
“I’m just sorry it was so quick. I always wanted him to suffer more for what he did. I mean, I think he was dead after the first shot, but I kept on firing. I’m not sure how.”