Zagreb Noir Read online

  But which unit? By the time the story reached Domagoj there was no way of telling where it had originated from nor where in the ground-level maze lay that terrible dungeon. All Domagoj had to go by was the dark green color of the garage unit’s door, which was not much since that was the original paint on all doors in the She-Mammoth’s underbelly. So Domagoj resolved to search the corridors until he found the girl, strengthening his resolve by dressing in his old military camouflage outfit and fighting the cold with a small brandy bottle in each of his breast pockets.

  He walked the corridors for a full day, rarely meeting anyone, not greeting anyone. He listened at every dark green door but heard nothing. On the second day, Domagoj Delić systematically knocked on and then listened at all the doors—two hundred and fifty or so of them—regardless of color. On the third day he slept late, spent the afternoon drinking and thinking in the park, then stalked the corridors until dawn. On the fourth day, December 23, he met Emil Kosovac.

  Emil Kosovac was thirty-six or—as he often thought of himself—three years older than Christ. The comparison was apt since Emil felt he would have been better off if he had croaked three years earlier while things were still going his way: he’d had a mother, a halfway decent job, and a girlfriend. In the meantime his girlfriend had left him, he had lost his job and was working part-time as a warehouse monkey for minimum wage, and his mother had died after a two-year bout with cancer, leaving him nothing but a shitload of old yet worthless pieces of furniture that he had to move out of her flat by Christmas.

  I should’ve called the junkies and let them take the whole fucking lot, Emil thought, while tying the last antiquated piece, a two-color wardrobe, on top of his twenty-year-old Nissan Primera. By “junkies” he meant the recovered addicts who collected and repaired old furniture. In the end, Emil did not call them for he did not want anyone else to make a buck off his junk, if a buck was to be made at all. This he doubted more and more as he was making slow progress through the pre-Christmas traffic, the wardrobe on the Nissan’s roof. Emil hoped for a string of green lights, no overzealous cops, and enough space in his garage to fit this last piece of crap.

  There was space but just barely. It took Emil an additional hour to rearrange the furniture so that the unit’s door, when lifted, would fit neatly over the wardrobe. All that work and for what? he wondered. He would not be able to give away the junk, let alone sell it. Why then? Memories? Were such memories good enough to be worth all this hard work, these long cold hours? Emil stretched his aching back and cursed, within a single thought, his rotten luck, his dead mother, lazy-ass junkies, the bitch who had left him, and his whole fucking life that was perfectly mirrored by this roomful of crap lit by a bare, winking lightbulb.

  “Who do you have in there?” Domagoj Delić stepped out of the dark. Most light fixtures in the She-Mammoth’s garage were long broken, leaving the job to the shy daylight, gone by four in the afternoon.

  “What?”

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” Domagoj said. “I said who.”

  “What do you mean by who, you fuckin’ moron?” said Emil. The fatigue started to seep into his limbs. All he wanted was to close the door, forget the whole furniture business, find a place to park his car, take some aspirin, and sleep until his morning shift. He did not call for this drunken idiot and he felt not at all charitable.

  “You’ve got. A girl. In there,” Domagoj said, smugly triumphant.

  “You are out of your mind,” Emil snorted, and turned to switch off the light.

  “That’s why you. Have. All the furniture.” Domagoj tried to push himself by. “Lemme see!”

  “Oh, fuck off!” Emil’s outstretched arms hit Domagoj’s chest. Domagoj toppled easily and was now paddling on the ground like an overturned turtle.

  “You have no right!” Domagoj was yelling after Emil, who closed the door and was now backing the Nissan slowly through the narrow passageway, all four signals flashing red. “No right to. Do that. To the poor girl!”

  Emil found a parking spot nearby, across the road from the elementary school. Domagoj was chasing after him the whole time, shouting at the top of his voice that Emil had no right to keep the girl in the garage. A few idle passersby stopped to watch the show. Emil knew there was nothing he could do but get out of there as quickly as possible. He locked the car and stuck his fists—the right one balled over his keys—deep in the front pockets of his jeans so as to avoid the temptation to deck the drunkard. After a few steps, he realized that he was stooping like a guilty person, so he made a conscious effort to walk upright.

  “Good people, look at him!” Domagoj was bellowing. “He is a criminal! The worst kind! He keeps a girl in his garage! A hungry girl! In the cold!”

  Some of the passersby had heard that rumor before so they tried to make out Emil’s face, to see if he was someone they recognized. One woman snapped a photo on her cell phone: perhaps she could sell the picture to a tabloid for a hundred kuna or more? The cell phone was not very good so the picture turned out too dark. Still, perhaps it would be a conversation piece? A girl in the garage, imagine if it were true!

  Everybody got a good look but nobody tried to stop Emil—why get involved? Domagoj followed him to Emil’s foyer, hollering accusations the whole way. Emil unlocked the foyer door—its metal frame was dark green too, but with a much fresher coat of paint than the garage doors—and thought he had left his problem on the other side of the wired glass, with the drunkard. Perhaps it would have been so, if not for Leda.

  Leda was seventeen, a short, thin, blond angel with a carefully practiced bitchface, a jacket too short, and shoes too tall. She hung around the She-Mammoth’s terrace level with a plainer friend looking for boys to mooch a drink or two from and then dis.

  “You think he’s for real?” asked Leda’s curly friend.

  “Naah,” said Leda. “Didya look at him?”

  “I know, right?” said the friend. “No way, huh?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Leda, but her eyes said something else. Her life was boring, everybody she knew was boring, Christmas was the most boring time of the year, but this . . . somehow, this was interesting.

  Leda missed Emil going to work the following morning—it was way too early for her to get up—but she sat perched on the She-Mammoth’s dark green railings, waiting for him to return home. A kind old busybody warned her about the danger to the kidneys from sitting on the cold metal and Leda thanked her sweetly but remained on the spot. Around noon she ran to a café to pee and then came back to her watchtower. She spotted Emil shortly before three p.m., quickly clapped her hands, and moved to the staircase he would most certainly use to get to the terrace.

  “Hey,” she said when he reached the top of the stairs.

  He glanced at her, puzzled. For a moment he thought she was someone he knew, but when this turned out to be false, his confusion grew. Why would a strange girl greet him on a shitty Christmas Eve afternoon? A strange, quite pretty girl. “Hi,” he said; it came out as a strangled cough.

  Emil waited for the girl to say something but Leda kept giving him nothing but a pout and an eyelash stare. He soon concluded that he had imagined the greeting and headed over to the supermarket to buy cigarettes and a few groceries he would need over the next couple of days. Leda chuckled and ran after Emil with a quick, poodle-like, tiptoe gait.

  In the supermarket, Leda cut the cashier’s line to stand right behind Emil. An older bearded gentleman grumbled about it but she waved a candy bar at him to show she was only buying one item and melted his resistance with a chipmunk smile. Then she leaned forward and startled Emil by brushing her cheek against the sleeve of his worn-out leather jacket.

  “Is it true?” she stage-whispered. He looked at her with bewilderment bordering on fear.

  “What?” he asked.

  “About the girl,” she replied.

  “No,” he said, looking around uncomfortably. Nobody was paying any attention to the two of them except for the b
earded gentlemen who was idly mindfondling Leda’s perky buttocks. “God, no.”

  “Too bad,” sighed Leda. “I wanted to see her.”

  That surprised Emil and he gave the girl another good look. Really, really pretty. Maybe even the prettiness that lasted, although you could never be sure about that. A bit on the short side which was not a bad thing: if taller, she would have been totally unattainable. As if she’s attainable now! Emil ridiculed his own train of thought. And yet she was talking to him, that’s . . . that’s something, at least. He glanced at her: she pretended not to look at him while suggestively sliding her lips over the unwrapped candy bar. The little minx, approved Emil.

  It was his turn at the cash register. He paid and was packing his few items in a plastic bag when Leda showed the empty candy wrapper to the cashier and proclaimed that she had forgotten her money. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the cashier while looking at Emil. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Now everybody was staring at Emil: Leda, the cashier, the bearded gentleman, and all the harried customers behind him. Emil was looking at Leda, at her smirk, at the wisp of hair that carefully half-hid her eye.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll pay.”

  Leda slipped out of the supermarket while Emil was getting his change and for a moment he thought the whole elaborate game was about getting a free candy bar. But she was waiting for him outside. It was barely past three p.m. but the huge mass of the mammoth building was already blocking the light of the setting sun and the streetlights would not go on for another hour. Leda was a dark, elfin figure awaiting Emil in their own private twilight.

  “Hey,” she said and giggled.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Will you show her to me?”

  “There’s no one to show.”

  “But there was, right?”

  Emil thought about this. Leda was waiting for his answer with bated breath and it had been a long time since a girl, especially a girl this beautiful, had expected anything from him with such intensity. It was impossible to say no to a beautiful girl, reasoned Emil. “Yes,” he said.

  She beamed. “Show it to me!”

  “What?”

  “The garage.”

  “Okay.”

  They went down a flight of stairs and into the somber underground. Neither of them spoke a word. Leda was humming the chorus of some awful pop song that she ironically adored and Emil was basking in her presence. There was no one else down there, as usual.

  Emil lifted his unit’s door, turned the bulb on, and let Leda squeeze in. Then he pulled the door back down, not admitting even to himself what he was hoping for.

  “Niiice,” Leda said, looking at the furniture. Emil could not tell whether she was being sarcastic or not. “I thought, y’know, there’d be bare walls and stuff. Chains. This is kinda comfy.”

  “Well . . .” Emil was thinking hard what to say, “you don’t want to, um, damage the merchandise.”

  “Merchandise!” Leda laughed. She, too, had seen the poster in the library window and wanted to be that good looking when she grew up. She believed she was getting there. “What did you feed her?”

  “Bread,” Emil said. “Water.”

  “Classy!”

  “She wasn’t here long.” With every sentence the girl in the garage became more real to him.

  Leda sat on the couch, pushing down with her palms and her little ass to test the springs. She looked up at Emil, first at his crotch and then at his face. Emil was licking his lips. Leda said, “Did you ever, y’know, test out the merchandise?”

  Emil dropped the plastic shopping bag on his mother’s old scratched dresser and first knelt, then sat on the couch. His fingers went and touched Leda’s hair. She did not seem to mind; if anything, her eyes mocked his guarded approach. “Yes,” he said.

  “What did you do to her? Y’know, in the end?”

  Emil cupped her sweet face with his palms and was lost in the moment but not enough not to know that everything depended on his next answer. What did he do to the girl in the garage? Did he sell her? Let her go? Those were not the answers the young body in his hands was quivering for.

  “I killed her,” he whispered. Her shiver and her kiss told him he had guessed right.

  They fucked fast and hard on the old couch in the garage on Christmas Eve. The girl was eager and definitely not a virgin, and Emil was very glad that six months ago he had remembered to put a condom in his wallet.

  While they were still lying on top of each other, in the few minutes before the December cold penetrated the warmth of their embrace, Leda asked: “How did she die?”

  “Ugly.” Emil paused to think up an answer that sounded true. “I couldn’t bear to watch her die so I tied her to that chair,” with his chin he indicated the low off-white armchair, “and put a plastic bag over her head.” He was quite enjoying the frisson his tale produced in Leda. He stroked her pale arms with his large, rough palms.

  “Was she beautiful?”

  “Very,” Emil nodded, and kissed her. She sighed like a kitten, then wriggled from under him and picked up her jeans from the floor.

  “Gotta go,” she said. “Mom’ll kill me if I don’t help her with dinner.”

  Emil wanted to ask her if he would see her again but was not sure whether merciless killers do such things. “Okay,” he said, feeling empty.

  “See ya!” Leda chirped, pushing the garage door three feet up, then ducking under and disappearing.

  Emil sighed and reached for the shopping bag. He tossed out everything to find the cigarettes, opened the pack, and lit one with the lighter he had fished out of his jacket pocket. The warmth of the cigarette smoke reminded him how icy it was in the garage so he started to slowly dress himself. His mind’s eye was full of the girl he had just fucked, the girl whose name and phone number he had forgotten to ask for. Girls are good, he thought. Sex is fucking great, man, even fucking Christmas doesn’t suck so much if you add some sweet fornication to it.

  He squashed the cigarette butt against the wall. Who knew that this garage, this fucking furniture, would do him such a solid? Who knew, indeed? He pulled the door up. The single bulb strained to light a few yards of the garage floor and in the process revealed the lumbering, unstable mass of Domagoj Delić.

  “Oh fuck,” Emil groaned. “You again?”

  Domagoj was high on booze and himself. He had figured there was no better time for the slaver to show up than the evening when all the decent people would be celebrating, and he was right. He pointed an accusing finger at Emil—well, almost at him—and said, “I saw her. I. Saw. Her.”

  “The fuck you talkin’ about?”

  “The girl,” Domagoj grinned. He had not felt this good since he and the boys had been at the frontline, more than twenty years earlier, drinking hard, roasting pigs, and fighting the Serbs. This guy seemed like he could be a Serb too. Domagoj poked the guy’s chest with his cruddy forefinger. “I saw. The girl. Coming. Outta here.”

  Emil slapped Domagoj’s hand away. “Are you a moron or are you a fuckin’ moron? If she came out, then she was no prisoner, right?”

  Domagoj waved his finger left to right. Shook his head too. “That’s what you. Want me. To think,” he said. “That’s why. You’ve let. Her go.”

  “The fuck?”

  Domagoj poked him again. “You got scared,” he said. He tried to stand tall and look menacing but a grin kept slipping out, betraying how much he was enjoying himself. “Of me.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Emil, and turned his back to Domagoj in order to collect his stuff and then get out of there. He was in too good of a mood to waste it on this cave-dwelling imbecile.

  Domagoj grabbed him in chokehold but not a very strong one, so after a moment of panic, Emil managed to elbow the drunken vet in the ribs and free himself. However, Domagoj was not going to quit: he stumbled forward, his arms flailing, his mouth spouting obscenities. Emil was not a very good fighter but this was not a hard fight. He
managed to step aside and grab Domagoj’s greasy hair with both hands. Domagoj yelped and Emil spun him around twice before throwing him against the wall.

  “Had enough, you moron?” Emil panted. “Had fucking enough?”

  “Fuck you, you fucking Serb,” Domagoj croaked. “Fuck your fucking mother, you motherfucker!”

  “Leave my mother out of this!” Emil yelled, and kneed Domagoj in the gut. Twice. The drunkard started to puke. Great, Emil thought, just fucking great. The spectacle was making him sick too, so he turned away, and within a second Domagoj was on his back again.

  This time Emil made short work of the fight. He shook Domagoj off, grabbed him by the throat, and slammed his head five or six times against the cupboard in the garage. When Domagoj lost consciousness, Emil dropped him in the off-white armchair, and fumbled another cigarette from the pack with shaking hands.

  What to do with this moron, he wondered. And why the fuck couldn’t something nice ever happen without a pile of stinking manure following the very next moment? Emil watched the cigarette smoke billow around the bulb. Then he glanced at Domagoj. The guy looked pale. Maybe dead. Emil felt his back turn to goose bumps so he went over to the armchair to check. Domagoj was breathing shallow but undeniable breaths.

  The fucker, Emil thought. The cigarette was helping him think. The fucker has to be dealt with, scared to the point that he would never ever think of bothering Emil again. Scared fucking shitless.

  Emil crushed the cigarette against the side of the dresser and started looking through the drawers. In one of them, he was sure, he had some duct tape—he’d taped the drawers tight so they would not open during transport. He finally found it and taped Domagoj’s arms and legs to the armchair. He looked over his work and then, as an afterthought, put a piece of duct tape over Domagoj’s mouth too. There was no one in the She-Mammoth’s underbelly but it couldn’t hurt to eliminate any noise.