Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

I took off my shirt and set quickly to work, hoping that the sound of the bees might help me to stay as calm as they seemed while they collected pollen. But my heart was thumping in my chest. I knew my companions were right. This was no place to stop. You could have hidden a whole division of partisans in the trees by the road. Even now I felt unseen eyes on the small of my bare back.

It had been a while since I’d changed a tire but I managed it in double-quick time. I was just about to shout out that I’d finished when I realized that both Geiger and Oehl were gone and that I was alone on that quiet road. Where were they? In the trees? Down by the river? I waited for a long moment, hardly daring to call out in case I alerted any partisans to our presence. But after a while I fetched my pistol and walked quickly down to the riverbank to wash my hands and fill a canteen. I was almost back at the car when I heard a loud burst of gunfire up ahead. Whether it meant we were under attack I couldn’t tell so I knelt down by the car and waited. A minute passed and I decided to get back in the car and start it up in case we needed to make a quick getaway. After another minute I put the car into gear and crept slowly up the road, to where the gunfire had come from.

Geiger saw me before I saw him. He and Oehl were standing in a small forest clearing, staring at something in the bushes.

“It’s all right,” he said. “False alarm.”

I stopped the engine and got out to look. The bodies of two men lay untidily in a bush, like lost items of laundry drying in the sun. Large red stains in the center of their chests seemed to be getting bigger by the second. Neither of the two was older than sixteen and both were extraordinarily handsome, which seemed to make their accidental killing even worse. It was only gradually that I perceived them to be identical twins. Next to their bodies a dog was whimpering with grief and trying to lick one of the twins back to life. An ancient-looking, single-barreled shotgun lay on the ground a few meters away.

“False alarm?” I said. “What about the gun?”

“Just hunters, I reckon. Out for their pot. Not Muslim partisans, that’s for sure.”

I stared at the twins; there was nothing about their dress that distinguished them in any way from the men I’d seen working on the new minarets in Zagreb.

“How can you tell?”

“The dog,” said Oehl. “No Muslim would keep a pet dog.”

“Poor bastards were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Probably fell asleep hiding in the bush, waiting for a pigeon, and then we happened along. I heard something in the bushes, saw the gun, and opened fire. Simple as that.”

“Pity,” observed Oehl. “Nice-looking lads. Twins, I reckon.”

Then while we still watched, miraculously one of the twins shifted and groaned at the same time, as if the dog had worked some kind of blasphemous miracle. But not for long. Some residually civilized part of me was just about to suggest that he wasn’t beyond help when Geiger killed both man and dog with another short burst from his submachine gun.

“He was just a kid,” I said.

“Come on,” said Geiger. “There’s no time to waste with stupid sentiment. Let’s get moving again before the shots bring someone to investigate. With any luck we should make Banja Luka before dusk.”

Occupying some high ground a couple of kilometers north of Banja Luka, the Franciscan monastery in Petricevac was easy to see. Umbilically attached to an imposing Roman Catholic church whose twin spires soared over the surrounding countryside like the tall hats of two ancient wizards, the monastery itself — with a hip roof and two large dormer windows — was more elegant country mansion than medieval cloister. A couple of old cars were parked on the gravel driveway and the general absence of any agriculture was evidence that these were monks for whom contemplation did not involve looking at a spade or tending a vineyard. The few trees served only to obscure the little road that led up to the monastery, which meant I drove around the place several times before finding an approach to the entrance. No one — not even a chicken or a dog — came to greet us. Perhaps they already knew better than to speak to three SS men.

I sounded the horn and stepped out of the car. Geiger lit a cigarette and leaned back in his car seat to angle his debauched face in the last of the day’s sunshine. I looked up at the many windows of the monastery without seeing so much as a single curious head. The place appeared to be deserted. And yet there was a vague smell of cooking in the air.

“Perhaps they’re Trappists,” said Geiger.

“These are Franciscans,” I said. “Not Cistercians.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Don’t ask me, but there’s a difference.”

“Like the SS and the SD, perhaps,” offered Oehl.

“Well, whatever they are,” said Geiger, “maybe they’ve taken a vow of silence.”

“Let’s hope not,” I said. “Otherwise we might be here for some time.” I collected the file of photographs of Father Ladislaus and walked toward the main door.

“If all else fails,” said Geiger, following me, “I could fire this in the air.”

I turned and saw that he was still carrying the daddy.

“For Christ’s sake, leave that thing in the car.”

“Believe me, when it comes to ending a vow of silence, you can’t beat one of these bastards.”

“Nevertheless. Please.”

Geiger shook his head and handed the daddy to Oehl before following me up a short flight of limestone steps to a set of black wooden double doors with an elliptical transom. On the wall by the doors was a large iron cross and a picture of a sleeping monk holding a skull whom I took to be Saint Francis with a putto playing a lute above his head. I hauled twice on a large bellpull and at the same time peered through some light green sidelights.

“That’s not my idea of a vision,” said Geiger, looking at the picture. “I don’t often doze off with a skull in my hand.”

“I think the point might be that we’re all going to fall asleep and die one day. Like that kid you shot on the road today.”

“While we’re here I’ll light a candle for him, if it will make you feel any better.”

“You do that. But it certainly won’t make that boy feel any better.” Seeing movement behind the glass, I added, “We’ll want to see the abbot.”

The door opened to reveal a muscular-looking man wearing a brown habit with a bald head and a large gray beard. Speaking fluent Shtokavian — which Geiger had explained to me is a dialect of Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin — Geiger told him we urgently needed to see the abbot.

The monk bowed politely, asked us to accompany him, and we entered the monastery. This was an uncomfortable, hollow place of long echoes, semidarkness, hidden eyes, tangible silences, and the sour smell of baking bread. We walked the length of a long, uncarpeted corridor — which looked and felt more like a prison than a place where men lived by choice — that ran between damp walls painted two institutional tones of green and beige and past doors of plain wood that were without adornment of any sort. Bare lightbulbs hung from the plain ceiling. Another monk was sweeping the unvarnished floorboards with a rush broom, and somewhere a small bell in a clock was striking the hour. A door in some faraway chamber banged shut, but as Geiger and I marched behind the bearded monk our jackboots were the loudest thing in that building and sounded almost profane. We passed by the open door of a barely furnished refectory where forty or fifty men were silently eating bread and soup, and in a distant room a man began to loudly recite a monotonous prayer in Latin, which felt more superstitious than holy. I did not get the impression I was in a place of retreat and contemplation, more like some cold anteroom of purgatory that was a very long way from heaven. I shouldn’t like to have stayed there. Just to be in that place was to feel you were already dead, or in limbo, or worse.