The Serbian Dane

by Barbara J. Haveland, Leif Davidsen

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Iranian Mullahs have offered a $4 million reward to the person who carries out their fatwa, the death sentence of the internationally acclaimed author Sara Santanda. A Danish daily newspaper has in cooperation with Danish PEN Centre invited her to Copenhagen, and police officer Per Toftlund of the Danish Secret Police is put in charge of protecting the author. A politician in parliament strikes a deal with dire consequences. And somewhere in the former Yugoslavia a young man signs up for murder. The man is Vuk. He is the Serbian Dane.

Release date: July 24, 2007

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 165

Sample

Franji Draskuvic, writer and philosopher, was a happy man. He was well-pleased with himself and his carefully tended beard, with the late summer sunshine, in which his fine city of Zagreb looked as lovely as a young maiden, and with the fact that the powerful new Croatian army had finally driven the fucking Serbs out of Krajina. But above all, Draskuvic was pleased with the broadcast he had just made on Croatian national radio, from a studio watched over by a picture of the president. As was his wont, he had made his address in a voice that was soft, not much more than a whisper really, yet firm. Introduced just the right note of huskiness into his voice, a rasp that sent a cold but delicious shiver running down the spines of his devoted listeners. The grand, flowery, patriotic sentences had flowed from the little mouth buried within the bushy grey beard and been swallowed up by the microphone, to be recorded on tape for broadcasting in the afternoon to all the good citizens of a strong free Croatia.

Draskuvic was a Balkan intellectual and proud of it. In pointed yet lofty terms his broadcast had once again made it quite clear who had the right to Krajina. It had exposed the lies of the Serbs and the international mafia who claimed that this was old Serbian territory. But Draskuvic was here to tell them that the Serbs had been put there three hundred years earlier by those lily-livered Austro-Hungarians to form an outpost against the heathen Turks. In exchange for land, these Serbian barons were to defend the outermost frontier of the empire. The Serbs were nothing but colonists. Now Krajina had been liberated. At long last. In the face of international boycotts and Russo-Serb conspiracies, and with the help of the Germans and the Americans, Croatia had rebuilt its glorious army. Its troops had fought like true patriots and proved that a new balance of power now prevailed in the Balkans. After four years of mortification, Croatia was ready to defend its sacred soil. For the first time the Serbians were on the run. Now they were being given a taste of their own medicine. When it came to the crunch they had turned and fled like mangy dogs, while the UN troops, those scurrilous lackeys of the traitorous international community, cowered in their pathetic little foxholes.

‘Spit on them, true patriots! They deserve nothing but your contempt!’ he had urged. Television footage of Serbian refugees with their ridiculous belongings packed into ancient farm carts gave him great satisfaction. The only thing that annoyed him was that they were allowed to drive off on tractors that were doubtless stolen. They should be made to walk. To crawl on their bleeding knees. They had much to feel sorry for. He had briefly considered going to Krajina to see the fleeing curs with his own eyes and perhaps speed them on their way with a few well-chosen words. It would be reported in the press, of course. For a moment he saw the picture in his mind: a distinguished European intellectual who was not afraid to join the brave sons of the people. But no, he must restrain himself. His life was too important. He was a great poet and an old man, and so he stayed in Zagreb. He fought on his own front. The intellectual front. It was every bit as vital as the other fronts. The soldiers could not fight without spiritual nourishment. Did they not want to know why they were fighting? Would they not need moral and spiritual strength? He had closed his broadcast by saying:

‘Fellow countrymen! Go with God to Krajina and make that liberated soil fertile once more!’

Draskuvic was a happy man. Despite the heat, he was wearing a suit. Under his arm he carried a Croatian magazine to which he had contributed an article on the need to purge liberated areas of impure elements. Draskuvic regarded himself as a thinker and a patriot. He wrote of valour and patriotic justice in exactly the same way as Serbian intellectuals wrote about bravery and honour. Intellectuals who never saw the blood and the suffering. He penned his venomous commentaries as a counterweight to the malicious spoutings of the Serbs. From other safe offices and comfortable apartments the intellectuals disseminated the words that generated and nurtured hate.

Slowly he made his way through the crowd to his favourite café. He nodded distantly to people who recognized him and eyed with disgust a couple of tipsy UN soldiers who were attempting to chat up two young girls. The soldiers were from the Ukraine, so the girls were unlikely to be interested in them, unless the men had made enough deutschmarks from their smuggling activities to win them over. He made a mental note for his next radio broadcast. About the necessity of keeping oneself pure in the dark hour of conflict. It would provide yet another moral boost to those fighting at the front, he thought with satisfaction.

Vuk watched him from a distance.

Vuk was sitting astride a battered motorbike, the number plate of which was caked with mud. He was wearing a helmet with the visor down. In his blue jeans and worn, brown leather jacket he looked like any other young guy in the capital of independent Croatia.

Vuk observed Draskuvic closely. The rolling gait that lent an almost feminine sway to his fat arse, and the belly that ploughed the air ahead of him like a heavy-laden, flat-bottomed barge on the Danube. This was the fifth day Vuk had waited for him at the café. On the first Vuk had worn a suit and sat at one of the tables set out on the pavement. On the second day he had walked past dressed in the uniform of the Danish UN contingent. On the third day he was back in his suit. On the fourth he wore a short-sleeved shirt with a pair of beige chinos and the kind of padded gilet that the foreign correspondents loved to swan around in.

Draskuvic’s routine never varied. He arrived at the radio station at 9.00 am; at 10.30 am he strolled down to the café to have coffee and read the newspapers. To Vuk it seemed quite crazy that he was not more security-conscious. The country was at war, and Draskuvic was one of the bastards who, with his propaganda, had whipped up hatred against the Serbs. Didn’t he realize he was a possible target? Was he really that stupid? Or that arrogant?

Vuk was perspiring heavily. He could feel the beads of sweat running down the back of his neck and over his cheeks. His T-shirt clung to his back and stomach. It was hot inside the close-fitting helmet and the leather jacket, but it wasn’t just that. He had a tendency to break out into a sweat before a hit. People talked about the sweat of fear, but that they described as cold. So maybe it wasn’t fear or nervousness that caused it, but simply an excess of adrenalin. His hands were steady enough. His senses became ultra-sharp, registering details so accurately and so clearly that they seemed almost to be etched on his mind: a woman’s shapely cupid’s bow, the almost black eyes of a child, the Ukrainian soldier’s pimply cheek, the yellow paint flaking off a wall, the grating cough of a broken exhaust silencer, the reek of low-grade petrol and an unwashed body passing close by his motorbike. Draskuvic, his vulnerable belly and unsuspecting, almost child-like, smooth-skinned face.

Draskuvic sat down at an empty table in the second row from the front but still in the shade of the canopy. He was well known to the waiters, they brought him his coffee and a newspaper. Draskuvic lit his cigar, and Vuk started his motorbike. It purred into life. The engine revved, revealing to anyone who cared to notice that beneath the dirty battered exterior lay a relatively new engine. He pulled the zip of the leather jacket halfway down, stuck his right hand inside and curled his fingers around the butt of the Russian-made Markarov. It held eight 9 mm bullets. It was a pretty clumsy pistol, but Vuk found it reliable: like most old Soviet equipment, it was simply made and worked well in tricky situations. The Markarov had quite a hefty butt, but that was no big problem. In any case, he was wearing a pair of fine leather gloves. At this distance it wasn’t accuracy he needed, but penetration. Two tables away from Draskuvic a young couple were talking quietly. They sat with their faces close together, the way lovers do. Farther back in the café some elderly men were playing cards. To Draskuvic’s right was a group that might pose a threat: three Croatian soldiers, but they weren’t wearing any visible weapons and were obviously drunk. They had probably been drinking all night and would carry on drinking all day. They were having an incoherent argument about whose turn it was to buy the next bottle of slivovitz. They had spent the past fifteen minutes bragging about their exploits during the Krajina campaign. The Serbian dogs had dropped like flies under their fire.

Traffic was light on the narrow side street. An old, grey-streaked Mercedes drove slowly past, leaving a trail of uncombusted diesel in its wake. An elderly couple carrying an empty string shopping bag hirpled past in the gutter. A mother scolded her child and hauled it away howling in protest.

Vuk took three deep breaths and thought of the Commandant’s words: no dramatics, not ever. Leave that to actors in the movies. Quick in. Quick out. Don’t think about anything except survival.

He dismounted from the bike. The rubber soles of his Reeboks made no sound as he walked the few steps across the narrow thoroughfare towards Draskuvic while pulling the pistol out of its shoulder holster and cocking it in one long, controlled movement. Draskuvic looked up. He may have glimpsed Vuk’s face behind the smoked visor, although there’s no way of knowing. Vuk shot him twice in the face and once in the chest. Draskuvic toppled backwards. The cigar dropped from his lips onto his jacket. Before Drascuvic had hit the ground Vuk was walking calmly, but with long strides, back to the motorbike. He didn’t hold on to the pistol, instead he let it slide down onto the tarmac as he swung his leg back over the bike. There was no shortage of guns in this country. He gained a second by dropping it instead of returning it to the shoulder holster. Those few people who managed to react were looking at Draskuvic, not at Vuk. Their eyes stayed riveted on the blood that was spurting over the table and gushing onto the café floor before, war-hardened as they were, they threw themselves to the ground and started shrieking. The first screams broke out as Vuk put the motorbike into first gear and sped off around the corner.

A brown, leather-clad back and a pair of blue jeans astride a motorbike. Probably a Japanese make. It looked old, but that might have been mainly due to the dirt and mud. That was all that witnesses could remember.

The bike was in fact quite new, stolen a couple of days earlier from a notorious smuggler who hung out down by the harbour in Split and was still considering whether to report the theft, seeing that he had brought the bike over the border without the knowledge of the relevant authorities.

Vuk turned onto the main road and drove on, fast but not recklessly, for a few hundred yards. He parked outside a supermarket and took off the helmet. He hung it over the handlebar, pulled a small, snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver out of the motorbike pannier, stuffed it into the pocket of his leather jacket and walked off down the pavement without a backward glance, slipping the jacket off as he did so and slinging it nonchalantly over his shoulder, one finger hooked through the loop at the collar. He had tucked the gloves into the jacket’s other pocket. His hair was black. Passers-by saw a young man like so many others, with black hair and a dark bushy moustache. He was well built. A pair of bright blue eyes did, however, mark him out from other young men and prompted a few women to look twice at him. He turned down a side street, unlocked the door of a tan-coloured Lada and drove away.

Here the Croatian police lost track of him. No one could remember the registration number of the car, and descriptions of the hit man varied so much that an Identikit picture was out of the question. The killer had vanished into thin air. Or into the chaos of war.

The young man who called himself Vuk drove south-east, towards Slovenia. He took it nice and easy. Traffic was light. The little villages were bathed in the golden glow of late summer. Red-tile roofs were pocked with black shell-holes. A breeze tugged at white curtains and sent them billowing out of broken windowpanes. Very few people were about, even though the war had moved on. After driving for a couple of hours Vuk stopped on a hilltop and looked down onto a broad highway. Dust swirled up around a convoy: hay-wagons towed by tractors, and small carts, each drawn by a single horse. Blue diesel fumes hung in the air. The carts were laden with clothes, old furniture, pots and pans and mattresses. The children were vacant-eyed, the men unshaven. The women’s colourful headscarves were coated with fine dust. He followed his countrymen with his eyes. Now they too were tasting the dust of flight. He smoked a cigarette and watched them for a while, then climbed back into the car. He drove a couple of hundred yards down a dirt road and parked the Lada on the fringe of a clump of trees. He took a well-worn rucksack from the boot and placed it on the ground; removed an explosive device from the rucksack, set the detonator to go off in five minutes then threw the device into the front seat of the car. He pulled on the leather jacket, slung the rucksack onto his back and strode briskly, but not too hastily, away from the car, heading downhill towards the River Sava, which divided Croatia from Bosnia-Herzegovina. He did not look back when he heard the dull boom and the crackling sound of the Lada burning. Then the petrol tank exploded and a black cloud of smoke rose into the air. It was a long time since anyone had paid much heed to a bomb in the Balkans. But somewhere in that blue sky an inquisitive NATO plane might wheel lazily around and fly down to see what was burning. The pilot would see a car in flames and a tiny dot walking down a track. A shepherd, minding his own business. Yet another lone refugee in a land of refugees.

Evening was drawing on when Vuk came to a little house on the outskirts of the village. He was dog-tired and his shoulders ached. White smoke rose from the house’s one chimney. Roof and walls were intact. The war had not knocked at this door. Vuk scanned his surroundings carefully. A solitary dog came running along the side of the house, its tail between its legs. It was yellow and scrawny, but it didn’t bark. He was raising his hand to knock when the door opened.

‘Hello, Vuk, I’ve been expecting you,’ said the woman who had opened it. She was very young, with long black hair and beautiful dark eyes that seemed somehow lifeless.

‘Hello, Emma,’ he said and kissed her on the lips.

‘I was watching for you,’ she said. ‘It’s been on the news already.’

Vuk made no response.

‘About the Croatian writer,’ she went on.

‘It’s best that you know nothing.’

‘Come in, Vuk. Are you staying the night?’

‘I’ll cross the river later tonight.’

‘That’s a pity. But…he sent a message, the Commandant. He needs to speak to you as soon as possible.’

For the first time Vuk smiled. His face lit up. The tense lines seemed to melt away, and he became the boy he was beneath that stony face.

‘Come on in, Vuk. Let me wash your hair,’ Emma said, and she too smiled.

The living room was simply and tastefully furnished with a dining table and a bookcase full of hardbound books. There were pictures of the Bosnian mountains on the walls, and in one corner a lamp shed a warm light over an armchair and a small table decked with a crocheted mat. A book and some sewing lay on the table. It was a very neat feminine room. Beyond it a tiny kitchenette was visible. A pot of water steamed on the hob. A short hallway led to a bedroom containing a double bed. Over the bed hung an Orthodox crucifix.

Vuk’s eyes followed the movement of Emma’s slender legs under the thin stuff of her dress, as he took off his leather jacket and his shirt. His body was slim but muscular. A scar ran across his left shoulder: it looked like an old knife wound. Emma took one of the chairs from around the dining table and set it on some sheets of newspaper spread out in the middle of the kitchenette’s tiled floor.

‘Sit down, Vuk,’ she said.

She picked up a ladle and poured the hot water from the pot into a bowl on the kitchen bench. She added cold water and tested it gingerly with her elbow before dipping a sponge into the warm water and wetting his black hair.

He sat with his eyes closed while she gently soaped his hair. He savoured the feel of the strong soft hands slowly massaging the soap into his scalp. The suds turned black and ran down onto the newspapers as she rinsed his hair, then lathered it again. By the third rinsing his hair was a light blond. Very carefully she dampened his moustache. He sat perfectly still. Then, with one quick tug she ripped it off, like a mother removing a plaster from a child’s knee. Vuk opened his eyes. Emma’s face was very close to his. He smiled.

‘Hello, lover,’ she said.

He kissed her.

‘Stand up,’ she said.

He stood up. Emma undid his belt and pulled down his trousers. He had closed his eyes again, merely lifted one leg, then the other. She ran her hand down the back of his boxer shorts and pulled them off too. He stood quietly with his eyes shut. Another scar from yet another knife wound undulated across his hip like a little snake. She touched it lightly, and his skin broke out in goosebumps as he recalled the pain of the Croatian’s knife. She poured the water down the sink and ladled more warm water from the pot into the bowl, before dipping the sponge into it again and slowly washing him down. She started at his shoulders and ended with his feet. He stood there naked and perfectly still. His fair skin reddened easily, and she could see that she was having an effect on his penis, but she could also sense his self-control. She wiped off the soap with a freshly rinsed sponge. Then she pulled her dress over her head and lifted a clean towel that she had left lying on the kitchen bench next to the bowl.

Vuk opened his eyes when he heard her pulling her dress over her head. He smiled, and the smile spread to his blue eyes. She dried him all over, slowly and sensually. Rubbed him down gently but firmly. Again beginning with his face and shoulders and working her way down. When at last she softly stroked his balls, his cock rapidly swelled, she pushed him back onto the chair and settled herself on top of him.

They stayed quite still. She tipped her head back slightly. He cupped his hands around her buttocks.

‘Stay with me tonight, Vuk,’ she said.

‘I’ll stay with you.’

‘What about him?’

‘He can wait. The war’s lost anyway. The treachery has begun. One day more or less won’t make any difference.’

‘Stay tonight and keep the demons away,’ she said.

‘I’ll stay with you tonight,’ he said and held her close.

The demons would visit her anyway, he knew. They came in the mornings, in the cruel grey dawn, before the light broke through. Ghosts, skeletons, spirits and ethnic purgers. Shadows from the land of the dead that had visited her family and wiped it out in the first year of the war four years earlier, when she was only fifteen. Now they returned every night in her dreams, but the nightmares were more real to her than her waking life.

Vuk envied her. Emma could feel pain and guilt. Vuk could feel her body.

The rest was coldness.

These days, when Lise Carlsen woke, it was always with the shade of some stupid dream on the fringes of her still more or less slumbering consciousness. She woke up panic-stricken, feeling somehow outside of herself. As if she were hovering over the double bed in the light of a late August morning, looking down on herself and her husband, who lay there curled up in a ball or on his back, his lips straining, as though he were struggling to say something. She never remembered her dreams. They faded as soon as she heard the sound of the radio. Music or voices. It woke her just before the news: she had no wish to wake up to death and destruction; better to start the day with pop music or the latest traffic update. For thirty-four years she had taken sleep and the waking from it for granted. As far as she could remember, at any rate. She had been such an easy baby too. Slept soundly at night and woke up cooing and smiling, content to lie there on her own for a while, playing with her fingers or toes. Or so her mum said. But this summer sleep did not come easy, and she woke up with the flat taste of unresolved dreams lingering at the back of her mind.

Lise Carlsen rolled onto her back and gazed at the ceiling while listening to the closing strains of the Take That number that was being played constantly on Radio P3 that summer. It was going to be another scorcher, she could tell. The curtain barely moved in the soft breeze. Ole groaned and turned over onto his side with his back to her. Time was when he would have slipped his hand into hers and snuggled up to her. Or she to him. Her heart sank still further at the thought that the only memory she had of their lovemaking the night before was a stickiness between her legs; there was no recollection of pleasure. They were both naked. There was nothing else for it in this heat. She longed for rain and cool air. The hot weather generated sweat and lust and moved one to reach for the nearest body. And it didn’t really matter if one’s feelings were lying dormant. The heat craved release. It caused the hormones to run riot. She slid the duvet down to her waist, folded her hands behind her head on the damp pillow and listened to the radio that had woken her. She could not really have said why she greeted the coming of each new morning by listening to the seven o’clock news. She didn’t remember a word of it afterwards. Not until she heard it all repeated an hour later. But she derived a certain comfort from being reminded that her own troubles were as nothing compared to the horrors with which the smooth neutral tones of the newsreader brought her back to reality each morning. Maybe it was because Ole hated being woken by music and chatter. Could it be that what she was really trying to do here was to drive him out of the marriage bed? Or out of the marriage? She was a journalist, earned her own living, could buy her own clock radio, had bought it, plugged it in and used it. So there! Was that what she’d said? Was it perhaps also a sign of her own lack of resolve that she had turned the volume down so low that she could hardly hear it herself? It would have taken a bomb to wake Ole, so it really didn’t bother him at all. While the slightest sound could wake her. These days, at any rate, when every nerve ending seemed to have been dusted with itching powder.

There were all the usual stories: an incipient stage battle over the forthcoming budget, the never-ending war in Yugoslavia and the continuing drought. She wasn’t listening; instead she was trying to figure out why she felt so miserable and why she always seemed able to shake off this feeling once she’d had her shower. Then she heard Santanda’s name mentioned. She pictured the writer: a pleasant little woman with a round face, brown eyes and the ability to speak about difficult, life-and-death issues without making one feel uncomfortable. She didn’t catch what it was all about. Only the mention of both Sara Santanda and Iran. And the Danish foreign minister, speaking on a sluggish phone link, deploring the fact that the crucial dialogue with the clerical government in Teheran had not given the expected result. Well, she would catch the story again at eight o’clock. If it was big enough. Otherwise she would just have to wait until she got to the newsroom.

She nudged Ole and got out of bed. He sighed, but she noticed that he opened his eyes before she disappeared into the bathroom. He smelled faintly of stale alcohol.

‘Turn off that radio, for Christ’s sake,’ she heard before she shut the door.

As always, a shower helped. First the hot water then the cold. Once out in the spacious open-plan kitchen, with the light cascading through the window and the faint hum of the Østerbro morning traffic in the background, what she herself would have called her black waking thoughts disappeared. Then she no longer longed for rain and cold. They would return soon enough to Denmark, where grey seemed to be the most constant hue. She loved the warmth and sunshine. She poured water into the coffee machine, set the table, boiled eggs and sliced bread for toasting, while making up her mind yet again that she would speak to Ole about it. I mean, if you couldn’t talk to your husband about a little bout of the morning blues, who could you talk to? And he was a psychologist. He was paid to listen to people with serious psychological problems. Maybe that was why he was so bad at listening to her? Maybe she didn’t conform to his textbook theories? Maybe the problem was that she only ever told him half of what she was thinking and feeling.

Lise collected the newspapers from the hall. Her own paper, Politiken, and Berlingske Tidende, so that she could check out the competition’s arts pages. She opened Politiken straight away and found that her piece on the new gallery had been given quite a decent space under a three-column headline, but Berlingske
Tidende had used a picture as well. And those dummies at Rådhuspladsen wondered why circulation was dropping! She turned to the foreign news and ran a quick eye over the headlines. She would read each report in depth after she had had her breakfast, or once she got to the office. She preferred to get out of the apartment quickly at this time of day. Somehow she found it hard to concentrate here. She dumped the papers onto the big, scrubbed-oak table that dominated the kitchen-cum-living room. The coffee machine gave a little hiss. Outside a bird was singing half-heartedly.

Ole came in and kissed her on the cheek before settling himself with the main section of Berlingske Tidende. Once he had been a radical socialist, now he had his own practice.

‘D’you think you could switch off that radio or at least turn it down?’he said.

‘I want to hear the news. It’ll be on in a minute.’

‘Surely it can’t make any bloody difference whether you hear it now or in an hour’s time.’

‘I’m a journalist.’

‘So?’

‘So I need to know what’s going on, Ole.’

‘You can do that at work.’

‘We have this same conversation every single morning.’

‘Well, there’s a reason for everything…’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He looked up from his paper. The two slices of bread popped out of the toaster. Instinctively she turned to take them.

‘That we seem to put all our energy into arguing about little things instead of having a serious talk about why our marriage appears to be in trouble.’

For a moment she stood there saying nothing, holding the hot slices of bread. Then they burned her fingers, and she almost threw them onto the table, wafted her fingers and said ‘Ow’. She really did not want to talk about this right now. She wanted to be the one to say when the time was right.

‘There’s no need to exaggerate. Are you going to tell me you didn’t have a good time last night? Just because I like listening to the radio in the morning.’

He turned back to his newspaper.

‘I’v. . .