Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

We drove on, through strangely named villages that were not much more than a couple of ruined houses. Ahead of us the sky was as gray as a dead mackerel. On either side of the road stood tall fields of ripening maize with ears that were longer than beer glasses and almost as thick, piles of still-steaming manure, plum trees, hazels heavy with nuts, then trees and more trees. A flock of starlings swooped up and down above our heads in the shape of a biblical pestilence. A herd of cows was seated so casually by a river I half expected them to have brought a picnic basket. A trio of ponies stood in the shade of an ancient oak. This was rich farming country and yet we might have been in the previous century.

We saw a trail of smoke on the horizon and caught the slight scent of cordite in the air. Then we heard the sound of artillery fire from somewhere up ahead. I slowed to a stop and we listened for a moment.

“Ours?” I asked.

Geiger looked at Oehl, who nodded and said, “Hotchkiss,” and then lit a cigarette as if this was all that needed to be said.

A Hotchkiss was a French-made tank and after 1940 we had more than five hundred of them.

We drove on and into a small village close to the Bosnian border and here, in the playground of an empty school, we saw the Hotchkiss and stopped to watch as the two-man Ustaše crew fired the thirty-nine-millimeter gun of the French tank at a semi-ruined building on a distant hillside. A few Ustaše soldiers lay sleeping in a field at the edge of the playground as the tank fired over their heads, which added a touch of madness to what was happening. Others seemed to be taking bets on the marksmanship of the Hotchkiss gunner. They all looked like they were in their teens. None of them paid us the slightest attention.

“Who are they shooting at?” I asked. “Proles? Chetniks?”

Oehl said something to one of the tank’s bearded crewmen and, grinning broadly, the man said one word: “Gadanje.”

“Target practice,” said Oehl.

Geiger handed me some binoculars, and as the tank fired again I looked in horror as an inadequate French-made round whistled feebly through the clear blue sky and hit the building, smashing some of the red-and-yellow brickwork.

“It’s a church,” I said, horrified.

Worse was the fact that there had been people inside the church; two bodies lay in the rubble. One of the Croats cheered and began to clap and the man sitting next to him handed him a banknote as if he’d won his bet.

“Why the fuck are they using a church for target practice?”

“It must be a Serb Orthodox church,” said Geiger. “They certainly wouldn’t be shooting at a Catholic one.”

“But a church is a church,” I insisted.

Oehl laughed cruelly. “Not in Yugoslavia it isn’t.”

“But can’t we order them to stop?”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” said Geiger. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to spoil their fun. Just because we’re on their side doesn’t mean they couldn’t turn nasty. It’s only in Zagreb and Sarajevo that your rank makes a halfpenny’s worth of difference between you and them. Out here on the black earth of Slavonia it makes no difference at all. Things like the Geneva Convention and the rules of war only mean something back in Berlin. Down here they don’t mean shit. The one rule when it comes to dealing with the Ustaše in the field is that you don’t get between these lads and their play.”

Oehl was asking one of the men on the grass verge a question. Then he turned to us and said, “He says there’s a sort of hotel at the end of the street. We might get some coffee there.”

Leaving the Ustaše to their amusement, we drove a short way up the street to the Hotel Sunja, where my impression of the place was severely affected by the fact that immediately in front of the hotel, and hanging from the only gas lamp in the village, was the body of a man. At least I thought it must have been a man; there were even more flies on his head than there had been on the dead horse. Geiger and Oehl paid the hanged man no attention at all, as if it were hardly unusual to see a man hanged in front of a hotel, and went inside and, after a minute or two, I followed.

It was dark in the hotel. One of the small windows had been blocked up with a piece of timber. Gradually I made out a few dust-covered tables and chairs and a bar of sorts where Geiger was banging the counter with the flat of his hand and shouting for service. Eventually a man appeared from a back room. He was wearing a black felt hat with a red carnation on the brim, a filthy white shirt, and a black waistcoat. The red carnation struck me as a ludicrous embellishment for an innkeeper to be wearing when there was a hanged man decorating his doorway.

Geiger addressed him three times and on each occasion the man shook his head before finally he said something that Geiger seemed to think was very funny; he was still laughing when he came back to the table where Oehl and I were waiting, and sat down.

“Three times I asked that Slovenian bastard for coffee,” he said. “Once in Croatian, kava . Then in Bosnian, which is kahva , and the third time in Serbian, which is kafe . And each time he says no, right? Like you saw? By now I’m thinking he hates Croats, or hates Germans. Maybe that’s his fucking brother hanging on the lamppost outside, right? So I said to him, ‘What’s the problem, why is there no fucking coffee? I’ve asked you nicely, haven’t I, you bastard?’ And he said, ‘We’ve got coffee, all right, we just don’t have any water with which to make it.’”

Geiger started laughing again as if this were the funniest thing he’d heard in a while; and, judging from his face, maybe it was. I’d never met a more unpredictable man. His smile seemed just as likely to presage something awful as something amusing or pleasant. I lit a cigarette and said nothing. By now I was starting to realize the price that was going to have to be paid for my night with Dalia Dresner. It was the price that Faust pays, perhaps, for a night spent with Helen of Troy.

“See if you can find something to drink, Sergeant,” said Geiger. “I’ll make some light in this Neanderthal’s cave so we can see what we’re doing.” And while Oehl disappeared into the back of the hotel Geiger stood up, smashed the chair he was sitting on into many pieces, and tossed them into the fireplace alongside some old newspapers. He lit a match and tried to make a fire, but without success. He was still trying to light it when Oehl came back with some bread and cheese, and three tall stoneware bottles.

“Plum rakija,” he said. “Homemade.”

“You’ll never get that fire started,” I told Geiger. “Not without smaller sticks or some wood shavings.”

Oehl opened one of the bottles and tasted it, let out a gasp and handed it to Geiger. “Fucking hell. This is good stuff. I reckon there’s more alcohol in this than was inside my old grandpa on the day he died.”

“Nonsense,” Geiger told me, “I’ll get this going in just a few seconds,” and without a moment’s hesitation he took a huge mouthful of spirit and then gobbed it all into the fireplace, at which point the whole wall and some of the floor — not just the fireplace — went up in a ball of fire as if a flamethrower had fired blazing oil and petrol into an enemy trench.

I jumped out of the way but not soon enough as I felt my eyebrows scorch, much to Geiger’s loud amusement.

“What are you trying to do, you lunatic?” I yelled. “You’ll set the whole place ablaze if you’re not careful.”

“I told you I’d get that fire going, didn’t I?”

Oehl smiled and handed me his flask. “Here, Captain,” he said, “sit down and have a drink. Welcome to Croatia. This is proper rakija. Not that milky whore’s piss we were drinking earlier. Best you’ve got a real drink inside you when we cross the River Sava.”