In his former life, Kozma was a policeman. During his career he sat in an office, a pencil pusher. Maybe that was the problem: too much paperwork, too few actual cases.

So his retirement hobby was quite different than mine. He wanted to solve a case for once in his life, to see how it felt. That desire was stronger than any realistic possibility of him actually succeeding, and it was certainly against the law. Officially he did not represent any authority in any capacity anymore.

And he had already made some blunders. Because he reported their daughter to the cops, Gigi�s parents were even more unpleasant to us than she was, if that�s possible. Kozma�s former colleagues had to warn him on several occasions, and they even threatened me. They asked what I was doing the whole day instead of keeping him on a short leash.

But Kozma was my best friend and my first neighbor. You don�t say no to either.

After our second chess game � Kozma won both � I reluctantly looked up when Kozma whispered, �Here he comes.�

He pointed to a balcony on the fourth floor where a pale young man wearing John Lennon glasses stood. He scowled at the yard below, his gaze not reaching our park, flicked a cigarette butt into the air, and went back inside.

�What do you say?� Kozma asked.

�He doesn�t look like trouble, if that�s what you mean. Or crazy. If you�re so sure, why don�t you report him?�

�He could be innocent.�

�Ah. You�re not so sure then.�

Kozma smiled. �But what if the police don�t find anything? He�ll become cautious, and then they�ll never catch him.�

�How do you even know women don�t leave his apartment? They might just sleep over and leave later.�

He made a circle around his eye with his thumb and index finger.

�You look through a spyhole? The whole night? You�re crazy, not him.� I shook my head. �What do you think he does with them if they don�t come out?�

He started sawing his forearm with the side of his palm.

�And stuffs their arms and legs into suitcases? C�mon! How come no one sees him removing the suitcases?�

�From now on we�ll be watching for that too. That�s why I need you.�

Glancing impatiently down at the board, I noticed Kozma�s rare oversight. I had an open passage to his queen, and after that his king was for the taking too.

�So, you have a plan?� I asked, mostly to divert his attention, and moved my knight. He seemed not to notice the threat since he responded with a pawn. His queen was mine.

�A new one is coming tonight, first time this week.� He looked at his wristwatch. �Speaking of which, we have to go. I�m taking the first shift.�

He stood up and started packing away the pieces, and with them the triumph within my reach. I sadly watched him close the wooden box and put it under his arm. He marched off not bothering to check if I followed.

I did follow. What else could I do?

We went around the building to the front entrance. We both lived on the ground floor, my apartment next to his.

In front of the neighboring entrance, virtually another building merging with ours through a double wall, there was a black limousine waiting, blocking us and cars from both directions. A robust, gray-haired man in a long coat exited the vehicle and hurriedly entered the next building. The limousine waited for one of the other cars to move and only then backed out of the street. Our neighbor Mira was sitting on a bench across the street smoking a cigarette. I asked her what was going on.

�Some big shot,� she whispered. �Goes to see the cardiologist on the fourth floor.�

�I know him,� Kozma said. �The loudmouth threatening everyone in Parliament.�

I didn�t really know what he was referring to because I didn�t read the newspaper, but it was enough information for me. A cardiologist on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator was quite the joke. A patient was prepped for the exam before even reaching the doctor.

If you wanted to truly disappear and never be found, the blocks were the perfect spot. Hiding in plain sight, inside the concrete beehive. Our labyrinth was a constant nightmare for the so-called real Belgradians from across the river, spoiled by conventional names and arrangements of streets, and for the couriers delivering stuff to people who behaved as if they did not wish to be found.

And you could make others disappear. Who knew if anyone would ever notice. What if Kozma was actually onto something? This predator could have been operating right under our noses for years.

�What did you mean about taking the first shift?� I asked.

�Just like in the army, two hours. The women usually arrive around eight, so we still have a little time left.�

Did I expect anyone to come tonight? Not really, but I was ready for Kozma�s game. We entered his apartment, the layout of which was the mirror image of mine, if we ignored the additional seventy-five square feet his had, another mystery that was probably the result of the builder�s negligence.

Kozma set up a folding chair in front of the door. I spotted numerous grease stains around the peephole, probably from his forehead. Next to the doorframe, a notebook was hanging on a string. I had one just like that, but in my kitchen. I used mine to write down every penny I spent, keeping track until my next pension payment arrived. I doubted Kozma had his for that purpose.

I asked him how long he�d been spying on the young man.

�Four girls,� he said. If they came twice a week, it meant Kozma had been active for at least a fortnight. All that time I�d failed to notice he had a new project. What kind of a friend and neighbor was I? I wondered.

We sat mostly in silence until we heard the heavy front door open or the buzzing sound of the intercom, and then he�d spring to his feet, peer through the peephole, declaring, �Baby,� or, �Dog.� He would write it down in his notebook. During Kozma�s shift, we welcomed two babies and three dogs back from their walks.

When the front door opened for the first time after eight, he got up again to take a look. I knew he saw something interesting because his back stiffened.

�It�s her,� he said.

�Let me see.�

I had enough time to catch a quick look before she disappeared to the left toward the staircase. Deep slit skirt, strong calves, assured walk. Black hair hiding her face. I listened until the clatter of her heels died down, then I unlocked the door and stepped out.

�What are you doing?� Kozma hissed.

While I was sneaking out into the corridor, I felt his disapproval behind my back, but despite this he followed me. We stood by the handrail listening to her footsteps, counting floors. She stopped on the top floor and knocked on a door. Someone opened it without any greeting. The door slammed shut behind her.

Kozma dragged me by my collar back into his apartment. He peered at me intensely in the darkness of his hallway, as if expecting me to admit defeat, but the fact that some woman had shown up on the fourth floor did not necessarily mean anything. I said nothing.

�Now you�re waiting for her to come out, or not come out,� he said. �Wake me up at half past ten.�

It�s all Mom�s fault. I�m lying in a big double bed with a tall, squiggly iron headboard. That�s the only furniture in the entire apartment. Nothing in the living room or in the kitchen. Windows without curtains. The sky outside looks the same as back home in the village, the fluffy gray clouds float by, heavy with rain, water pours down the windowpane. Everything�s quiet and I feel like I�m about to cry.

The bed�s covered in satin sheets with a bit of a sheen. Or they had a sheen, but not anymore. Mom chose them from the ones in her chest, saying she�d only used them a couple of times. First time away from home and in a new place, won�t hurt to have something that smells of home, she�d said. It will help you sleep.

I can�t move. If I try to lift my head, the fog comes down with a terrible pain that rips and burns everywhere. I can�t feel my hands but I can see them above me, dripping with blood. They�re cuffed to the iron headboard and my mouth is stuffed with some type of leather gag. It�s difficult to breathe. Every part of me is broken. Mom�s fine sheets are rumpled, doused and dappled in brown and red blood and feces and other bodily fluids.

It�s the morning after my wedding and my wife�s gone, having left me tied to the bed. She told me as she was leaving that she was never coming back. She said it with an evil laugh. I know Mom would save me, but she can�t because she doesn�t know where I am. I can�t call her with a gagged mouth and tied hands, and besides, I don�t have a phone. Mom wouldn�t let me have a mobile phone. She told me I�d get brain cancer from any radiation near my head.

This was all Mom�s idea. It wasn�t me who wanted to get married. I was happy with my quiet life in our village. She became obsessed with marrying me off. Yesterday was the same, she was fussing outside the courthouse where we got married, having packed three bags full of food so that I�d last until the morning. She told my wife that I�ve always liked to eat. And made us swear that as soon as we were awake we�d return home so that she could make us a proper breakfast. She saw I was nervous and said I�d be all right, nothing would change, except now I had a wife and she�d live with us. Only one night away from home and we�d see each other in the morning as usual. Oh dear, did she get that wrong? I haven�t had a single bite to eat. My wife started torturing me as soon as we got here. It�s likely that before starving I�ll bleed to death or my wounds will get so infected that I�ll die of blood poisoning. There�s no one who knows where I am and I doubt anyone will come until my corpse starts to smell. It�s not my wife�s home and the marriage ceremony was just an act. That�s what the woman said before she left.

�Katya!� Olga shouted. �Katyusha! Would you be so kind as to�?�

I pretended not to hear. It was four a.m. and the hag could not know that I was awake. Gusts of the ko�ava rattled the windowpanes with a force gathered from as far east as fuck knows, in squeals almost as high-pitched as Olga�s. Knez Mihailova sits on the brow of the highest hill between here and Russia, at the rim of a vast Pannonian plane. We�re talking about a hundred meters above sea level, but you�d have to hit the Ural Mountains before you found anything to rival the Knez in terms of altitude.

As the shutters shuddered and the curtains billowed in spite of the double glazing, I carried on pretending not to hear Olga�s clucking: a couple more minutes, just for fun. I opened the window a centimeter, shook the ash off the photo, and flicked the butt sideways, in the direction of the university building where I would teach a class, beginners� Russian, later that afternoon.

That was my other occupation, my cover if you will: an adjunct lecturer, with a decade�s worth of waiting for a permanent teaching post, working four hours a week at a rate barely sufficient to buy a pack of cigarettes. Most people around here held two or three jobs, and often in combinations much odder than mine. A medievalist whose desk I kept borrowing for my office hours drove a taxi at night, while his tax-inspector wife moonlighted as a babysitter. My academic speciality was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: there was no money in FMD, not enough for a pack of cigarettes. Even Russian language was a tough sell, now that English killed all others like a giant rhododendron sapping the life of any plant that comes near it.

�Katya, Katinka�� Olga called me by a selection of Russian diminutives in implicit affinity with my academic interests. A vicious Serbian nationalist in most respects, she also fancied herself Russian and saw no contradiction in that. Her father had studied in St Petersburg long before the revolution, and he brought her Russian mother back to the Serbian sticks, along with his diploma from the military academy.

�Would you be so kind as to give me a hand here, KA-TA-RI-NO-CHKA�?� she yelled from the kitchen. I finally got out of bed and shuffled over in my nightshirt as slowly as I could.

She was wiping her greasy claws on her pinafore, having already deboned a large chicken. The skeleton was sitting on the sideboard waiting for me to wield a meat cleaver. She believed that bones had to be broken in order to add a je ne sais quoi to the broth. She thought chicken soup a cure for all known ailments, possibly including all those I had ever had in mind for her. And she liked to cook at dawn on the lower nighttime electricity rate. We had performed this act before.

I tied an apron over my nightshirt. It was a birthday present from Olga, which had the English words Take That written on it. She�d purchased it from one of the contraband pop-ups in the street below. Have I mentioned that she was a cheapskate?

�Thank you, Kitty,� she cooed as she watched me drop bits of carcass into the large cauldron of boiling water. Carrots and parsnips floated in the liquid like amputated fingers. Kitty � not quite a Russian diminutive, but a Tolstoyan one nonetheless � that�s what she called me when she was trying to use her dusty charm on me. She was too transparent to be efficiently manipulative, but it never stopped her trying.

She switched the lights off as soon as there was a faint promise of gray dawn outside. In the Serbian Academy building across the street, one or two windows were still � or already � lit: an early cleaning job or a sleepless geriatric trying to save the nation. I am not sure which is deadlier in its dotage, the male or the female of the Serbian species.

I took my apron off and shuffled back to bed. Olga turned the burner down, put the lid on the pot, left the soup to simmer, and followed me into my room. Annoyingly, she proceeded to lift the blanket and squeeze in next to me, fully clothed and without asking my permission. We had been here before too, in bed together, and not in any improper, sick way, but just her wanting to talk. I never knew which was worse, her cleaving to me like a barnacle, or hovering above me by my bedside, with her bony little bat shoulders and her straggly hair all messed up, while she rabbited on and I pretended to be half asleep. The woman had no notion of privacy, insofar as the concept even existed in the Serbian language. Privacy was for those who had something to be ashamed of, and she was shameless.

�And then the gate opened and on the other side was my father in full dress uniform, holding his ceremonial sword right up in front of his face� What do you think that means, Katinka?� She tended to describe her dreams so intricately that it was possible to fade out for three or four minutes and still catch her drift. The sword, in all its gem-encrusted glory, was worth a pretty packet. She kept it tucked away under her bed. I am not sure if she was hoping to protect her inheritance or her virginity from nocturnal intruders by hiding it there.

�Money?� I tried feebly.

She was not pleased. One-word dream interpretations were blatant shortchanging. My analysis should have been at least as detailed as her account. Was I not a literary critic of sorts? And the linking of her dearest daddy with something as vulgar as money was inappropriate, the very opposite of noblesse oblige. She kicked me in the shin with her dry hag-hoof.

�Do be a dear and fetch that Sanovnik from my bedroom, Kitty darling.�

She possessed a six-hundred-page dream dictionary precisely for occasions such as this, and she studied it every morning, while the images were still fresh in her failing mind, with all the fervor of the most dedicated yeshiva student. Variants of father dreams alone, I knew already, had a dozen pages to themselves. Swords, four pages. All of it fortune-telling, not Freud. This could take several hours. The shorter her future became, the more she wanted to know about it in advance.

And she was equally interested in my dreams. I never remembered any but I occasionally indulged her by inventing one. Making a wreath of marigolds, for example: I came up with that only last week. I have no idea where the marigolds came from, but I was pleased to catch a glimmer of greed in her little eyes when she found, in her dream book, that these flowers portended a large fortune. She seemed almost jealous that she had not dreamed of marigolds first.

�Unless,� she went on, �unless the flowers were wilted, in which case, Katyusha, your dream means exactly the opposite. You will lose a fortune. Except,� she giggled with childish pleasure and jabbed me in the chest with a bony finger, �you have nothing to lose, do you?�

I left her searching for dead fathers and silver swords and got out of bed to sort out her medication. Olga consumed her medicine by the kilogram and religiously, the way vegans munch their granola. She had a pillbox from Switzerland consisting of sixty-three chambers: nine largish compartments for each of the seven days of the week, their names inscribed in three languages. The damn thing was bigger and, once loaded, heavier than the stone tablets Moses received from God on Mount Sinai. Some of the medication was Serbian and cheap, some Western and expensive. The list of her health conditions was long � what can you expect at ninety-two?

One of my regular weekly duties was to place the pills in their proper sections and ensure that they were taken at appropriate times. I always had to find a good moment to complete the task of sorting, an occasion when Olga would be distracted and preferably elsewhere in the apartment. What she got from me were placebos, if that indeed is the proper word. Placebo means something pleasing in Latin, I believe, and I hoped my pills would have the opposite effect.

I had long collaborated with a chemist in Mirijevo, one of those suburban hells which cluster around Belgrade like cold sores and in which a house built with official permits was rarer than a lottery jackpot. The man was a sort of illegal legal drug dealer, whose business, based in the garage of his concrete suburban house, was flourishing amid medical shortages. He was happy to sell off the genuine stuff, particularly the Western kind, so long as it came in its original boxes. If she knew what I was doing, Olga would have admired my entrepreneurial spirit. She was all for waste not, want not.

The replacement capsules I doled out contained harmless substances. I was too good at my job to risk imprisonment for poisoning. I made her take camomile extract, essence of chrysanthemum, yeast, bicarbonate of soda, natural cake dyes � whatever looked right, happened to be approaching its best-before date, and was available at the Chinese supermarket amid the tower blocks of New Belgrade.

I had assumed this regime would have killed her by now, this non-taking of crucial medicines for chronic conditions, as it had finished off my previous two ladies � each within a couple of years, give or take a few months and a few extra nudges from me. Olga, however, seemed healthier than when I moved in. More than that, she appeared to flourish.

�You have a magic touch, Kitty,� she cooed as I returned with her morning pills: a fig-based laxative, a couple of beetroot compounds, and a milk-thistle lozenge. She opened her mouth and extended her bird tongue toward my left hand which held the capsules, and then to my right which proffered a glass of water. A gust of the ko�ava rattled the window.

�That silver sword, Katya, it�s no good, I found. No good at all,� she said. �Double betrayal. Someone is plotting against me. I am thinking of missing my mah-jong party this evening.�

�You shouldn�t read too much into your dreams,� I said.

Hari drags herself through the market like a beaten cat. From each stall, the lively colors of the Indian summer scream at her � hills of red peppers, small cucumbers, purple eggplants, all sorts of greens, big and small, with names she doesn�t even know, fifty shades of screaming green and orange pumpkins. All that�s missing is something blue.

It should be a magical sight. But it all just makes her want to vomit. She trips on a box and stumbles. Grapes. Aha, here�s that blue, or, rather, more of a plum. She clutches the edge of the stall with both hands, catching her breath, pretending she�s just looking.

�Are you okay?�

�Everything�s fine,� Hari mutters, turning her head. Standing next to her in the stall is a gray, withered old woman, her gaze worried and hard. With a straw hat on her head, a too-wide summer dress � ha, wait, bablje leto, what in America they call Indian summer, we call �old woman�s summer� in Serbia. God, the things that come to my mind. Or maybe she is not an old woman at all?

�Want some water?� comes a faint voice from across the stall. A young peasant, dressed in the latest fashions from the Chinese markets, extends a half-filled plastic bottle with a calloused hand.

�Go ahead, I�m not sick.�

Hari barely shakes her head no and stares at the peasant, who appears to be in her early thirties. Missing a front tooth, she gives her a half smile. Cynically, or is she tripping?! And � wait � she�s wearing a wig � a cheap synthetic nest, the color of hazelnut � in this heat?! The wig has shifted to one side. A woman with no hair, not even one visible strand.

�Wait, I have a full one,� the straw hat digs through her canvas bag, her harsh voice matching her gaze.

The straw hat underneath which there is no hair, nor a wig? Am I hallucinating or has the illness spread to my head? Hari now shakes her head no to both women, as well as to herself, but does not let go of the stall edge.

�We know each other,� the straw hat says, like she�s making a statement, not asking a question.

Hari throws her another look. A real ghost.

�I don�t think so. I remember faces. Excuse me, I need to go. And thanks.�

�You�ll be fine. I�ll walk you out,� declares the straw hat. Turning to the peasant she adds, �Mara, I�ll see you tonight.�

That authoritative tone! There�ll be no escorting, sister, fuck off. Hari gathers enough strength to turn and walk faster, at least up to the market gate.

But at the gate of the hundred-year-old house on Petrogradska Street, a new wave of weakness comes over her. She is unable to insert the key into the lock. And there is no one to call. The owner of the house, Laki, her best friend and partner in their failed business, has taken his wife to the mountains for two months. They�re saving their marriage. They left Hari to take care of the house. For Hari it is conveninent. With her chemo treatment coming up, she can easily walk from Laki�s house to the hospital in ten minutes, instead of having to drive from New Belgrade across crowded bridges. She�ll also avoid the stress of having to find parking around the medical complex. Frazzled after her surgery, she did not object too much when Laki pointed all of this out.

She finally manages to get the key to work, locking the gate behind her. Once in the garden, she tears off the colorful bandanna from her head, wiping away the sweat from her bare scalp, convinced she�d imagined what just happened.

Harijeta, Hari to her friends, fifty-plus, former chief inspector with the Serbian police in the homicide and sexual crimes division, former chief of security in a large department store in Chicago, former returnee to Belgrade. Soon she will be the former co-owner of the private detective agency Lucky Charm, which she started with her friend Laki, this she has firmly decided. Soon she will also be a former oncology patient, at least so she hopes. She needs to make it through her last round of chemotherapy, which is hitting her especially hard. Damn chemo brain� Everything is in a fog. But this, too, will pass. Provided that she does not die in someone else�s home, in this elite part of town.

Peppy, I�ve decided to kill someone. I decided in one instant and then didn�t think any more about it.

A river of people was flowing around me, King Aleksandar Boulevard, the bulevar, was breathing deeply. The sun-roasted cars were racing around, beggars asking for money. Street vendors were offering sunglasses, umbrellas, underwear, socks, shoelaces, insoles, cosmetics, children�s toys, medications that hadn�t yet expired, to passersby. They sold their goods from improvised stands made of cardboard boxes and pieces of clothesline.

I was standing, just like every morning, close to the �eram market and shouting from a wobbly footstool: �Vlast ima kapacitet!� (�The authorities have a tremendous capacity!�)

Hardly anyone looked at me, the rumble was constant, but I didn�t give up. Kombucha was playing Clapton on his guitar, I had to outshout him too.

�The authorities have a tremendous capacity! The authorities have a tremendous capacity!�

I didn�t give up my political protest. People in this city don�t care about anything but politics and the crime report; if you want them to pay attention to you, you have to stay within the framework. The daily newspapers have turned into mouthpieces of the regime, no one reads them, people have more faith in me. And I have faith in the people. I eavesdrop on other people�s conversations.

Yesterday by Lipov Lad kafana a patient fell out of an ambulance and died instantly, last night on Maxim Gorky Street a man bashed a woman�s head with a beer stein�

Every so often in Belgrade a husband kills his spouse. The women have never looked better, every second one could be a runway model, but they get no benefit from their beauty. I say that some devil has entered into people, but no one gives a damn. Inspector Vasovi� gives me a barely perceptible nod. He goes to the market every morning, but when he�s not in his office he has no interest in what�s happening in the city.

She was beautiful and instantly reminded me of Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoevsky�s The Idiot. She had blond hair and dark eyes. She acted like she was thirty years old and, as it turned out, was exactly that. She looked a bit older than she was, in fact, but not in a bad way. She had a kind of alluring maturity, an aura that said that she hadn�t been a kid for a while. Said her name was Na�a. I wondered what she was doing at my apartment door.

It was spring of 2014. I was forty-six years old, freshly divorced, and freshly unemployed. Fortunately, I still had an apartment. I�d recently read in some book how apartments on the ground level exude a peculiar loneliness. I�d bought the apartment on the ground floor, at the very end of Palmoti�eva Street, across from the Institute for Mental Health � which taxi drivers referred to as the loony bin � more than twenty years earlier while the war in Bosnia was still going on and Serbia was still under sanctions. It was relatively cheap � that�s how it was in those times � and apartments on the ground floor were always the cheapest. It was important for me to be in the center of the city, so living on the ground floor didn�t bother me. I even enjoyed that feeling of peculiar loneliness I already carried with me. It wasn�t so bad that the apartment came with it.

She said that Nikolina, a friend of hers, had given her my address. They�d met at some diplomatic reception, then saw each other a few days later at a caf�. She asked Nikolina if she knew anyone in Belgrade who could help her with an investigation. It had something to do with Bosnia, so Nikolina recommended me, since I�m from Bosnia, know half of Belgrade, have good connections, and am generally an okay guy.

In 1993, the same year I bought the apartment, Na�a�s father was killed. That�s what she told me as she came into the room and sat on the armchair I offered her. I sat directly across from her. She said that she was born in Rudo, a little town in Bosnia along the border with Serbia. The place is only known for the fact that the first brigade of Tito�s partisan army was founded there on Stalin�s birthday in 1941. That was the twenty-first of December. However, after Tito�s break with Stalin in 1948, the date was subsequently changed to the twenty-second of December in our history books.

Na�a�s father, as it turned out, was a Bosnian Muslim, while her mother was originally a White Russian. Her father was a senior official during the Communist era, a true Yugoslav. When the war started, he was certain that nothing bad would happen to him. Still, a Serbian paramilitary unit raided their house in Rudo and took Na�a�s father. For years he was missing until they found his remains in a mass grave ten years after the war.

Not long after they took her father, Na�a and her mother escaped to Montenegro, where Na�a�s uncle lived. Several months later, they left for Sweden. Na�a finished high school and college there, gained citizenship, and now worked at the Swedish embassy in Belgrade. She�d been here almost a year and a half and loved it � it felt good to return to her childhood culture. And then, a month ago, as she was jogging through Ta�majdan Park, she nearly froze with terror. On a bench, in the area of the park closest to St. Mark�s Church, she had noticed an old man reading a newspaper. He looked familiar. Then she realized: it was the commander of the group that had taken her father.

When I asked if she was sure, she completely lost it. I said it was hard for me to believe that after twenty-two years she could clearly remember a face she�d only seen once. She looked at me contemptuously and said that in those twenty-two years there wasn�t a single day or night that his face wasn�t the first thing she thought of when she woke up in the morning, and the last thing she thought of before falling asleep.

I asked her if she knew anything about him � his name or something. She said she only knew that he wasn�t from Rudo but from somewhere in Serbia. Some said he was from Priboj, and some said he was from Ra�ka. They called him Vojvoda, which was an aristocratic title often used for Chetnik leaders. I told her to describe him, and she spoke slowly but without pausing, as if she had repeated these sentences to herself over and over: �He was wearing white sneakers, light-blue jeans, and a black T-shirt. He�s balding a little in front, but barely � you could say he�s got a high forehead. Big brown eyes. A large nose speckled with capillaries, like an alcoholic. Clean-shaven. Above his left eyebrow there�s a deep scar in the shape of a rotated parenthesis. He�s slim, doesn�t have a belly. Medium height. On his right forearm there�s a tattoo of a cross.� Then she fell silent. I asked her if she remembered tattoos and scars from the time she first saw him, when they took her dad. �Of course I remember,� she said. �I remember everything.�

I looked at this young woman who every day remembered the trauma she�d experienced when she was only nine. They took her father and killed him around the same time I had returned from America. Actually, it was my second return. The first time I went to America was in 1987 when I got a scholarship to improve my English and finish high school there. I returned, served in the army, then enrolled in law school in Sarajevo. I went to America from a normal, healthy country, and in just two years � one of which I spent in America, the other in the army � the country started to fall apart and it seemed like there was no hope for it. In the spring of 1990 I went back to America, and this time I enrolled in a sociology program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Everything there was great, while everything in my homeland was already seriously going to shit.

And although both my mother and father are Serbs � respectable and wealthy people, the director of a bank and a lawyer � I didn�t feel like a Serb until the beginning of the war. I had a Yugoslav passport, I served in the Yugoslav army, I stood for the Yugoslav anthem, and I felt proud of seeing Yugoslavia�s flag fly when our athletes won medals.

Then the country started to fall apart and everyone did some fucked-up shit. Serbs made up the country�s majority, so most likely did the most shit, but they were far from being the only ones. In America, however, and especially since the siege of Sarajevo began, a consensus was reached that Serbs were guilty for all of it, at least judging by newspapers and TV reports.

Na�a�s father was definitely killed by Serbs. I asked her what she wanted from me. She said that she wanted to find and identify Vojvoda so she could send that information to the prosecutor�s office in Sarajevo. Allegedly, there was an investigation that�d been open for a while but they didn�t have enough information to indict anyone. Na�a took out a purple 500-euro bill that the local punks call a Gaddafi because the Libyan dictator supposedly had a weakness for them, and would hand them out to waiters and musicians when he was in a good mood. She asked if that would be enough. I nodded my head and asked if she wanted a receipt. She smiled for the first time since she entered my apartment.

�No need. You look like a trustworthy guy.� She took out a business card and set it on top of the bill. �Here�s my number and e-mail address. Call me when you find anything out, but don�t mention any details except in person. When you call, I�ll come over.� Then she stood and slowly walked out.

How did she feel when she thought her father was still alive? I remember I was completely unhinged when the siege of Sarajevo began because I didn�t know what was happening with my parents. But thanks to connections and money, they were able to reach Belgrade by the summer of 1992. It�s not that as Serbs they had any major problems in Sarajevo until then, but there was suspicion and provocation. In any case, they were lucky to have escaped the city in time. Still, a lot of our relatives, like many of my schoolmates, stayed in Sarajevo.

In the fall of 1992, after two years of being an excellent student, I practically gave up on my schooling in America. I almost never went to lectures. I incessantly watched television and read newspapers, and at school I fought with colleagues who repeated stereotypes about �Balkan savages� without thinking. Ironically, I only confirmed those stereotypes with my aggression.

I drank a lot, and the American prices for alcoholic beverages took a chunk out of my student budget. In the spring of 1993, I realized there was no way I could pass my exams, nor did I feel particularly motivated to take them. When I called my family in Belgrade, it seemed like they were good: Dad was working again in some bank, though not as a manager, and Mom had succeeded in getting a job in the office of one of Belgrade�s best attorneys. I knew that they�d managed to get most of their savings out of Sarajevo. I decided to return to Belgrade � if it�s possible to return to a city you�ve never lived in, only knew from a few short visits, and knew as the capital of your home country, Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.

And yes, my parents told me that I had fucked up by coming back, but on some level they were also happy. I guess that�s why they gave me the cash for this apartment. They were living in a big apartment in New Belgrade that had enough rooms to make one mine, but they understood that at the age of twenty-five and after three years of living on another continent, I just couldn�t share an apartment with them. They gave me enough pocket money to live off of. Out of love for them, I enrolled in law school in Belgrade, though I had even less motivation to study here than I did in America.

For the next five or six years, I mostly fucked around. I found a couple of buddies, witty and smart types who, because of the general breakdown of society, had given up on their ambitions, studies, and careers. We�d get together at my apartment, listen to music, drink, and smoke. If I was alone, I would read, watch films, and wander through the city. Near my apartment, on Kosovska Street, there was a movie archive where they showed classic old films two or three times a day. I loved black-and-white crime films with Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum the most, but my absolute favorite was Jean-Pierre Melville�s Le Samouraï with Alain Delon. I got a big poster of the film, framed and hammered it to a wall in the living room. I often strolled through that strange district of Palilula that leads from the city center toward distant suburbs. My favorite walk was from George Washington to Roosevelt Street. I�d go, say, past the Botanical Garden, then walk down November 29th Street, amble all the way to Pan�evo Bridge, turn toward Bogoslovija, then walk down to New Cemetery, cut through Liberators of Belgrade Cemetery, pass through Professorial Colony, through all those beautiful houses where intellectuals and White Russians who escaped the October Revolution lived during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then up through Dalmatinska and back home.

There were, of course, women. I mainly indulged in brief and rather meaningless relationships, mostly with younger female students. At some point my parents realized that I wasn�t studying or doing anything, so they decided to try to discipline me by withholding money. It was sometime in the fall of 1998, a few months before the NATO bombing of Serbia began. I had just started working as a night guard. Some guy had a private pharmacy on March 27th Street near Palilula Market. Drug addicts had broken into the store a few times looking for narcotics and strong painkillers. He needed a guy on duty from midnight until eight in the morning. It was perfect for me: I usually read at night and slept in the morning anyway.

I bought a gun just to be safe, but no one actually tried to break in once they saw the light on and a guy inside. In February of 1999, I met Katarina there. She pounded on the door; she urgently needed Voltaren suppositories. Her son had a fever, and she couldn�t get anything else to work. Even though I wasn�t the pharmacist on duty and it wasn�t in my job description to sell drugs, I gave her a box. Two nights later, she came to thank me. I invited her for a coffee, and so it began.

She was four years older than me, her son was in third grade, she was divorced. We married in November of 2000, right after Slobodan Milo�evi� fell from power and things were returning to normalcy. I was thirty-two and went back to college. It just suddenly made sense. Katarina�s husband had left her with a large apartment on Cviji�eva Street after the divorce. When we got married I moved in with her and rented my ground-floor apartment to students. Katarina was a dentist and earned good money, so she supported us financially while I, through some of my parents� connections, got a job as a lawyer in one of the few banks that were still state-owned. The pay was good, and the position was mostly protocol. I barely lasted five years there.

Katarina supported my idea to open a kafana. I found a perfect place near the pharmacy I�d worked at as a night guard. I�d sit in the kafana, sipping a White Russian cocktail, imitating the hero of the only film from the nineties that I loved the way I loved old black-and-white films: The Big Lebowski. The kafana did quite well for some time. I enjoyed being the owner, flirting with girls who came in, treating them to drinks and all that, but I tried not to engage in full-on adultery. But then I hired An�ela as a waitress. An�ela was twenty-five and I was forty-five, but the age difference didn�t bother her. And stereotypically � in the middle of a midlife crisis � I was madly in love again, and this infatuation fucked up both my business and my marriage. Less than a year later, the kafana was bankrupt, Katarina had left me, and in the end I left An�ela too.

More than twenty years after I bought the apartment on the ground floor, and fifteen years after I started renting it out to students, I went back there. I didn�t know what I would do with myself. I had some savings because I kept the money various tenants paid me over the years in an account that I mostly hadn�t touched.

It was at that time that Na�a appeared at the door. After she left the apartment I looked at her business card. At the top was Sweden�s coat of arms, below was her name, then farther down, Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden, while her number and e-mail address were at the very bottom. I was considering where to start.

My friend Mirko was a journalist specializing in stories about war and war crimes; I could ask him if he knew who came from Serbia to run riot in Rudo and thereabouts. At one point while owning the kafana, one of my bartenders was from Priboj. His name was Petar. He was too young to remember the war, but Priboj is a small place, and he�d know who to see about a guy by the nickname of Vojvoda.

Mirko didn�t answer the phone, so I called Petar. He still worked as a bartender, but now in some neighborhood near Bogoslovija. His shift had just started and the bar wasn�t crowded, so if I had time, he suggested, it�d be best that I come over right away for a drink.

Like he�d said, the kafana was practically empty. Petar was listening to Leonard Cohen. I sat down at the bar and ordered a whiskey. I started in a roundabout way, saying I�d recently heard from a high school friend now living in Canada that he hangs out with some guy from Priboj supposedly called Vojvodi�. Petar frowned and said he�d never heard of any Vojvodi� from Priboj. I said maybe I remembered wrong, maybe that�s not his last name, maybe they just call him Vojvoda. Petar burst into laughter: �Hey, now that�s a different thing. There�s a guy in Priboj who everyone calls Vojvoda, but fat chance he ever went to Canada.� I started asking questions, but the answers disappointed me. It turned out he was some village idiot, a slow kind of guy who lived on charity. He was called Vojvoda because before the war, during the rise of nationalism, he used to sing Chetnik songs in the street.

That couldn�t be the guy who had taken Na�a�s father. I lit a cigarette, and as I put the lighter back in my pocket, I felt my phone vibrate. A message from Mirko. He�d been doing an interview outside the city in Novi Sad earlier and hadn�t been able to answer. Now he was on his way to Belgrade and hadn�t been able to grab a beer. Great, I texted back and sent him the address of where I was. As time passed, the kafana slowly filled. Petar had less time to chat, but when I realized he couldn�t help me I wasn�t really up for talking anyway. I waited for Mirko, turning to the door every time I heard someone walk in. They were the typical early evening kafana customers from the edge of the city. Like in one of those Springsteen songs, these were people who�d lost something that was the center of their lives: sometimes a woman, sometimes family, sometimes work, sometimes an apartment � sometimes all of it at once � and they were just looking to get through the day. They bet on soccer, bummed cigarettes, drank the cheapest rakija only to pass the time faster, until it was time to go to sleep, and after hundreds and thousands of these days and nights, it came time to die.

At first glance, Mirko looked like a regular at one of these joints: unshaven, balding, with an eternal cigarette in his hand. Disheveled clothes. He was, however, one of the most reputable journalists in Serbia. He had been a brilliant medical student at the time the war broke out. In the summer of 1992, during the break between his third and fourth years, and after he�d taken all of his exams, he was hired as a fixer for foreign journalists reporting from Bosnia. He never went back to school, or even to his old life. The horrors he witnessed urged him toward a search for truth through writing. He became a journalist, focusing on writing about the war, war crimes, criminal privatization, and transitional theft.

He was very skinny and could drink three, four liters of beer without seeming drunk. It wasn�t clear to me how he could hold that much liquid in his body. He was on his third pint when I asked him about a guy named Vojvoda who ran around Rudo and that area.

�You know what,� he said, �that�s the thing about the war in Bosnia. It was so awful that there were some places where, for no reason whatsoever, thirty or forty people were killed, but your automatic reaction was to say that nothing notable happened there since in neighboring cities hundreds, even thousands, were killed. Same with Rudo: shit happened there, but much less compared to Fo�a or Vi�egrad. But I think I remember a few accounts of the guy you�re thinking of. He ran a small unit that mainly targeted prominent rich people who sometimes managed to survive because of their connections with local police and military at the beginning of the war, in small towns where there wasn�t any direct armed conflict. They would pay money for protection, and it would keep them safe for a few months. In addition to Rudo, I think he also showed up in �ajni�e and Trebinje, all during the summer of 1992. By early fall he was gone. He was probably a careful guy, stole as much as he could, then went back to Serbia to milk it as long as possible. Yeah, he was definitely from Serbia, somewhere close to the border, like southeastern Bosnia or eastern Herzegovina, but I don�t know how you singled out Priboj and Ra�ka � it could�ve easily been some other place. I think he had one of those generic names like loads of other Serbs � our �John Smith,� if you know what I mean.�

When I asked him if it was possible that Vojvoda was in Belgrade these days, Mirko said of course it was possible; people from all over Serbia were moving to Belgrade en masse.

We parted ways around ten in the evening. I was completely plastered; he looked like he had been drinking tea the whole time. On the way out he said, �You know, if you want to find this guy, the best thing would be to check out Romanija, a hole-in-the-wall near the Pan�evo Bridge run by Ranko � they call him �Leopard.� He did five years in prison for crimes around Rogatica. A lot of people who fought in that area hang around there. Someone there�s gotta know him. But be careful, those guys are fucked up. And take money to buy them a few rounds of rakija. That�s the easiest way to loosen them up.�

On the way home, I went to KGB for one more drink. It was a kafana near my apartment named after the Russian secret service, an appropriate symbol of the Serbs� ambivalent attitude toward everything Russian and Communist. With that thought in mind, I ordered a White Russian. I was resolved to only have one. It wouldn�t bode well for me to be hungover tomorrow.

My life would certainly be different if I�d been rational enough to stop drinking when I should have. And unfortunately, KGB is one of those kafanas that�s open as long as there�s a customer. So I stuck to the bar until four in the morning, drinking at least five cocktails too many.

It took me ten minutes to drag myself home, then I slept for ten hours. I woke up around half past two in the afternoon. A cocktail hangover is fucking rough, but when a man gets enough sleep everything�s better. Anyway, it was unlikely that Romanija would even open before four or five in the evening, and it was highly unlikely that the types I was looking for would come in before nightfall.

I first went to the Stara Hercegovina restaurant to eat some veal soup, pljeskavica with kajmak, and �opska salad. That combination raises the dead. I had to be somewhat fresh: in order to gain the trust of the old drunkards there, I�d have to drink too.

At six thirty p.m. I was at Romanija. The kafana was in semidarkness because only one flickering bulb illuminated it. Inside were five tables, two of which were occupied. At each sat a guy in his sixties. On the tables were checkered tablecloths and ashtrays. I sat down and ordered �ljivovica, a plum brandy.

The fat, middle-aged waitress looked grotesque in a miniskirt. As she came toward me with a tray in her hands, one of the guys smacked her ass. She acted like she didn�t even notice. Another guy stared into the darkness through the window. No one here seemed particularly communicative.

After drinking two brandies alone, it turned out my lighter wasn�t working, so I went to beg a light off the guy who had unsuccessfully attempted to sexually harass a pudgy woman. I figured he was giving communication a wild shot. The whole time, the other guy stared off into the dark like a zombie.

This guy handed me his lighter without a word. When I lit the cigarette he motioned for me to join him at his table, again without a word. He waved at the waitress and said: �Give us two rakijas on his tab.� I nodded my head. He asked me why I was in the bar. Said he�d never seen me before.

He had a strong Bosnian accent, which gave me an idea: I told him, �I�m Sarajevan; the war started while I was a student in America, I lived there a long time and recently came back. Some friends from high school told me about a graduation reunion, and I only then learned that my best childhood friend had been killed in the war. His name was Bogdan and he died as a Serbian soldier somewhere around Rudo, so I�m interested in knowing more about his death, since no one in our class is in contact with his family. You know how it is in Sarajevo: before the war we were all together � Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews, you know � and after the war, everything fell apart.� I made up a bunch of lies from a kernel of truth, hoping it wouldn�t sound like complete bullshit.

The guy started giving me shit. �Why didn�t you come back from America to fight with your people?�

My problem with the war was that they were all my people; Na�a was surely more my people than this idiot or Vojvoda, but I had no intention of saying that out loud. I was even okay with him giving me shit � at least then I knew he believed me.

My interlocutor motioned for the waitress to get us two more rakijas, then casually nudged the zombie: �Hey, were any of our guys in Rudo?�

The other guy was silent for a minute, like he didn�t even register the question. Then, without even taking his eyes off the window facing into the dark, he replied: �Stevo was there, with some guy called Vojvoda.�

At first, my guy couldn�t remember who Stevo was. I talked nonsense about how I didn�t know if Bogdan had a tombstone, how we�d like to put together some money to get him a cross � maybe even write up a story since we wanted to publish a booklet about our class for the reunion. After another round of rakija, the guy murmured that I obviously had money for drinks, since stonemasons and printers didn�t work for cheap, so maybe I could jog his memory. I gave him fifty euros, and he immediately remembered that Stevo�s last name was Peri�, then asked the waitress for his number. We had another drink.

In the meantime, three other people came into the kafana and sat at an open table. They called the guy from my table to join them. As he stood up he said, �You have what you came for, so you should get out of here. If you call Stevo, tell him Ranko the Leopard gave you the number.�

I was tipsy, but not enough to fall asleep easily, so I returned to KGB. I smiled a little to myself for not realizing that the guy who�d slapped the waitress�s ass owned the joint. Him asking her for Stevo�s number came back to me. It seemed like he was one of those old-fashioned types who didn�t even own a cell phone. I decided to try something crazy. I took out my phone and wrote a message to Stevo: Hey compadre, I�m sitting here with Ranko the Leopard. He gave me your number and says you know Vojvoda. I haven�t seen him for thirty years, and we�ve known each other since we were kids. Give me his contact info if you can.

I didn�t even finish my first White Russian when his reply came: I don�t see him much anymore, but I know his wife owns a flower shop on Ilije Gara�anina Street.

My hands started to shake. It was nearby, and not just near me now, but near Ta�majdan Park where Na�a had seen him. I paid for the cocktail and headed for the street. I knew it was too late and there was only a slim chance of the shop being open, but I wanted to see where it was. The street wasn�t too long and not very close to the cemetery, so I doubted there were many other florists.

Sure enough, there it was near the intersection with Takovska Street: a tiny, inconspicuous flower shop with Owned by �or�e Jovanovi� written on the glass door. I stood there and laughed aloud. Ah, the patriarchy, I thought. This one wouldn�t allow his wife to formally own the shop if his life depended on it.

Walking slowly to the apartment, I wrote a message to Mirko: Could our �John Smith� be �or�e Jovanovi�?

He replied within a few seconds: Fuck if I know. I could swear that was his name, but if you wrote Jovan �or�evi�, I�d probably tell you the same thing.

Normally I didn�t make cocktails at home, but I had a bottle of whiskey handy. As I set a glass on the table in front of me, I saw Na�a�s business card. Warmed by alcohol, I texted her: There�s been a little progress in the investigation. See you tomorrow?

She responded in less than five minutes: Are you in Palmoti�eva? I�m nearby, and can come right away.

Without even thinking I responded: Come over.

I lit a cigarette and for the first time started thinking about what I really wanted to say to her. I wouldn�t tell her everything, not yet. I�d tell her I had a lead on a guy from Vojvoda�s unit, and explain a bit about how I investigate, tell her a few stories.

The cigarette hadn�t even burned out when I heard knocking on the door. I opened it. She was smiling, had obviously been out, and was a little drunk. She looked younger to me than the last time, in a short skirt and heels with a little too much makeup.

She came in and I offered her a drink. She nodded. I handed her a glass, she took a good long sip, and then she looked at me. �So, did you find him?�

I lit another cigarette. �Not yet, but I�m close.� I told her what I�d been up to, leaving out a few details. I didn�t tell her I already had the number of a guy in Vojvoda�s unit, but that I was going to get it.

When I was done, she dropped her head. I thought she�d fallen asleep, that she was comatose from drinking, but then I noticed her shoulders shaking. She was crying. It wasn�t like I couldn�t really console her from a professional distance. I approached her, kneeled in front of her chair, and took her hand.

�Don�t cry,� I said.

She abruptly stood up, and I stood too. She hugged me and mumbled something I didn�t understand, probably thanking me. I stroked her hair, felt on my cheek that her cheek was wet, and then suddenly, and a little surprisingly, that her lips and tongue were too. We kissed, and I realized that this was why I�d called her.

We stumbled to the door that divided the living room and bedroom, where we fell onto the bed. The rest is history.

When I woke up, it was still early morning, but she was already awake. She acted completely sober, as if she hadn�t drunk anything the night before. She was lying at the end of the bed, flipping through a book. It�s easy being young, I thought to myself. �Want coffee?� I asked.

�Sure,� she said, so I got up to make coffee.

When I came back, she�d already gotten up. She wasn�t fully dressed, just wrapped in the shirt she was wearing the night before.

She took a sip of coffee. �You know, last night I wasn�t myself. My emotions got the best of me. Like everything came full circle. Like my dad rose up from the grave to tell me everything would be okay.�

I put my index finger to her lips. �I understand everything,� I said.

She stayed for another half hour. Told me to let her know if I learned anything new, and that she�d tell her mother nothing until it was certain. �You know,� she said, �my mother hasn�t really lived her life since that day. She�s not herself anymore; she�s not a person, not even a mother; she�s just a widow, a widow dressed in black.�

At the door, she asked me if I needed more money. I said what she�d given me was already too much.

When she left I went back to bed. I was tired and thrilled. I lay my head on the pillow that still smelled of her, and slept until two in the afternoon.

When I woke up, I went to Stara Hercegovina for lunch. I didn�t exactly know what to do next. I needed additional proof of identity, as well as another witness, before calling my friends in the police department and prosecutor�s office so they could arrest this guy. Now I was even less in the mood to reveal his identity to Na�a; it was more important to me to make sure he went to prison. If I just told her who he was, the rest would fall on her, and she was a foreign citizen who had no idea how the system in Serbia functioned. She�d already suffered enough.

After lunch, I went back home, then read about trials for war crimes on the Internet: the Hague, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. I didn�t dare dream too much about Na�a, but I wasn�t afraid to fantasize about how grateful she�d be if Vojvoda was thrown in jail. I caught myself playing psychoanalyst, thinking that, because she lost her father so young, she certainly had a weakness for older men.

I sipped some whiskey, and around ten I was drunk enough to send her a message about how great the previous night had been. She didn�t reply. I kept drinking, and around one I was intoxicated enough to go to sleep.

When the phone woke me in the morning, I hoped it was Na�a. It wasn�t; it was Mirko. �Hey man, you know something I don�t know?� he yelled into the receiver.

�Mirko, dude, I just woke up. I have no idea what you�re talking about.�

He laughed. �C�mon, take a shower and wake up. In half an hour it�ll be all over the Internet. Early this morning at Ta�majdan Park near St. Mark�s Church, someone shot �or�e Jovanovi�. I asked around a bit. Turns out his old friends call him Vojvoda.�

And before Mirko hung up, in a tiny fraction of a second, shorter than the one between the moment I felt that her cheek and then her lips were wet, I realized that although I�d said nothing to her, everything she�d needed was in my phone. I realized that I�d never hear from or see Na�a again. And I realized that I should stop drinking White Russians. Even without them, I�d think of her too often.

Whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

��Isaac Newton

I leaned over the terrace railing and puked into the hanging flowerpot. I wiped my mouth with my tie, called the waiter and ordered another double vinjak, Serbia�s national treasure, created as the Communist version of cognac for the working class.

�Disgusting!� the woman at the next table spat at me. I turned to her with a polite nod and showed her that she could suck it.

My double vinjak arrived as my phone rang.

�Mr. Malavrazi�?� came a hoarse voice. Hoarse from age, the bottle, or maybe throat cancer, I couldn�t be sure.

�That�s me,� I said, sipping my drink.

�Could you spare a few minutes to discuss a case?�

�Depends on how much time you�re asking for�� Now my voice was hoarse. Vinjak, of course.

�I know you�re busy, but you have to be interested in this.�

�I don�t have to do anything, sir.�

�Ma�am.�

�Ma�am?�

�Ljudmila Hajji Pe�i�.� Ah. Her husband�s family had completed their hajj, the Orthodox pilgrimage to the grave of Christ in Jerusalem.

�Your services were recommended to me.�

�By whom?�

�Your grandfather.�

�My grandfather?�

�You�re the grandson of Arsenije Malavrazi�, correct?�

�I am.�

�Well��

�Ma�am, my grandfather has been dead a long time. It would be difficult for you to get a recommendation from him. Unless you�re St. Pete�s secretary?�

�It�d be easiest if I explained everything in person.�

�All right.�

�The Manje�. Tonight at nine.�

The line went dead and a mysterious rhythm pulsed from my phone�s earpiece. Every beep was another question I asked myself: Who is this woman? How does she know my grandfather? And how could a long-dead fart recommend� me?

My head hurt from the mystery. I ordered another double vinjak.

One could enter the hotel garage from Mar�ala Birjuzova Street. Somewhat tucked away from the city, the street was murky, gray, and a bit damp, as if the sun never reached the ground or first floors of the buildings, most of them erected before World War II. The garage was tight, he could hardly maneuver in his Volkswagen Touareg rental. He was greeted by a short, older man whose modest attire made him look more like a beggar than a bellhop, garage guard, or receptionist. Murmuring pleasantries that he didn�t pay attention to, the man led him into a cramped elevator that took him two floors up. He found himself in a hallway, where along the walls hung framed black-and-white photos of the hotel�s illustrious past: a small, smiling black man in the role of an elevator operator, the architect and owner of the hotel with his family, the 1940 New Year�s celebrations, Miroslav Krle�a, one of the hotel�s most famous guests� That same Krle�a, a Croat, the best-known writer of the Yugoslav era, rushed headlong to Belgrade, to his Serbian friends, and he fought with gusto over national difference; his greatest pleasure was staying right here at the Hotel Majestic, the postwar gathering place of those the writer considered to be the most interesting of the epoch, but whom the outside world found most repugnant.

At the end of the hall there were stairs which descended to the reception desk. After checking in, the guest would climb back up these same stairs � there were five of them � to the elevator that went up to the rooms. It was a complicated system of ascents and descents, whether by foot or elevator, but the guest easily got the hang of it and quickly made himself at home in the hotel.

In the room, there were heavy curtains the color of ripe cherries and bed covers the exact same color and apparently cut from the same cloth. He detected an odor that reminded him of his very early childhood: kerosene. Kerosene, from where? He hadn�t smelled it in thirty years.

He took the elevator, then went down the five stairs to reception, past the receptionists without even glancing at them, and exited through the main hotel entrance onto Obili�ev Venac. The glare of the August sun caused a sharp pain, first in his eyes and then in his head. He stood there until it passed, and when he looked up again, he was surrounded on all sides by the colorful tables of the nearby caf�s and restaurants. He could hear the humming of hundreds of people, mostly young women and men, who all seemed unbearably happy to him.

For the first time it occurred to him how strange it was that the street he had entered the hotel garage from was dominated by the gloom of the cloudy preautumnal afternoon, while on the opposite side, in front of the hotel�s main entrance, it was a sunny summer�s day. As if the Hotel Majestic stood on the border of two climate zones.

Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police division, a still-attractive man of fifty-two years, was in Belgrade for the first time in his life. Just two months ago he�d believed � and repeated to himself a hundred times � that he�d never set foot in this city. The main reason for not coming was not that Ilija was a Croatian veteran who�d fought in the war beginning in the spring of 1991 � first against the Serbs and the Yugoslav People�s Army in Slavonia, then on the Dubrovnik front, only to fight against the Bosnian Muslims two years later; and then again against the Serbs in the spring and summer of 1995. He didn�t hate those people he had looked at through the crosshairs; how could he hate those who were his only real company during the war and whose fate he shared, in both life and death? And he knew that they didn�t have anything against him. He hadn�t killed prisoners or civilians, nor had he set fire to villages or shot at random, and somehow it appeared to him that those he�d fought against hadn�t done that either. Those sorts of things always happened wherever he wasn�t, though often in his vicinity, only two or three kilometers away. And so, it always evaded him somehow. And why would he now hate his enemies, with whom he shared those years in winter, in snow, in rain, and in scorching heat? And why would he not go to Belgrade?

Something else tormented Ilija Soldo and warranted that he keep his distance from Serbs if he happened to come across them in the police force, and had kept him from going to Belgrade. Although he�d been born and raised in Zagreb, and despite sharing one of those characteristically Croatian surnames, Ilija was � through both his father and mother � a Serb. His father Marko, an old partisan, veteran of the struggle against Hitler and the German occupation, had spent his whole professional life in the police force and, of course, had not hidden the fact that he was a Serb, born in eastern Herzegovina where Soldos � although rare � also could be found among Serbs. But it didn�t bother him if someone mistook him for a Croat. And so, little by little, as interethnic relations in Yugoslavia deteriorated and Marko grew closer to retiring, he tended to keep quiet about not being from the majority, but from the minority � that is to say, the Serbian Soldos.

At the end of the eighties, as the Communist system collapsed, and the first political parties were established, Jo�a Maruni�, the former chief of the secret police and Marko Soldo�s friend, invited him to be one of the founders of the HDZ, the radical Croatian nationalist party which was to be supported by the powerful and influential Catholic Church. What else could Marko do other than accept? Maruni� knew, of course, that Soldo was a Serb, but most likely he�d thought that in having one of them on board, he�d keep those extremists under control.

His mother Jelica, a housewife from one of those Serbian villages in the Banija region, did not think too much about it and quickly agreed to the change in their family�s identity. If you have luck with your first and last name, then it�s easier to present yourself as a Croat to Croats, and a Serb to Serbs. But it�ll burden you later on when you constantly have to think about who and what you really are, and who and what you certainly are not.

And this was the reason why Ilija Soldo promptly, even earlier than 1991, before the destruction of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Croatian army, joined up with the volunteers and spent all those years at war with the Serbs. It would probably be going too far to say that he�d been fighting against himself and the latent Serb within him, but the fact was, he couldn�t prove to himself that he was a Croat. He needed that war, after which no one was ever going to think that he was anything else.

And everything would have gone well, there wouldn�t even be this story and everything that�d follow, had Ilija�s father not had a sister named Smiljana, and had Smiljana not been married to the doctor Milo� Stanojevi�, a renowned Yugoslav neurologist, who she had lived with in a villa in Senjak, the richest residential area of Belgrade. Marko Soldo had broken off all relations with his sister back in 1972, after quarreling bitterly with her husband about the political situation in the country. Dr. Stanojevi� had thrown Soldo out of his house when Soldo called him an American spy and a fascist scoundrel. They didn�t speak again until the beginning of the war in 1991. Soldo didn�t even contact his sister when, two years earlier, Dr. Stanojevi� had died unexpectedly. She, however, called him the very first autumn of the war when she heard on the radio that Yugoslav army planes were bombing Zagreb. She was afraid that they had killed her brother, and that was all that mattered.

After that they maintained their relations at a distance, staying in touch but not visiting each other. Aunt Smilja, as they called her endearingly, would have � had they ever invited her � gladly come to Zagreb, but they never did, lest their family�s shame and fraud be uncovered, and their neighbors and all of Zagreb find out that they were not Croats, but Serbs.

Out of all this, Aunt Smilja had one great sorrow: she would never see Ilija again. He�d been six years old when she had last seen him. That was the day when her Mi�a � as she called her husband � threw Marko out of the house, and Jelica and the child left with him. Smiljana and Milo� could not have children, so her nephew had meant more to her than any son could have meant to his mother. Ilija represented all of her unborn children.

This was why she left him the villa in Senjak in her will.

To Ilija Soldo � who lived with his wife and their four children in a two-bedroom apartment in Zagreb, in one of those buildings from the seventies built during the time of the most vibrant socialist construction projects, producing what people called the �cans� because they were coated with waves of aluminum siding � Auntie�s villa in Senjak felt like an unfathomable source of untapped wealth. It was worth well more than fifty times his own apartment.

He only needed to travel to Belgrade and attend the probate proceeding. Upon accepting the villa, and the incredible amount of cash that he would be left with after he sold it, he would, of course, have to accept the origin of his newfound wealth. And most likely everyone from whom he had been hiding his unfortunate identity would find out where the money had come from. Ilija Soldo might have been able to bear it somehow, if only it didn�t seem that he was in the process of becoming a Serb � again.

He lied to his wife and said he was going on a business trip to Budapest.

And that�s how we find him, confused and a little afraid, as he leaves the hotel and crosses sunny Obili�ev Venac to a taxi stand.

The court hearing will begin on time and won�t last longer than twenty-five minutes. On parting, the judge, a young and friendly woman, will ask him about Hvar, the Croatian island her family used to have a house on � the last time she was on Hvar was that summer before the war, when she was three years old, but she doesn�t remember anything � and he will give her a friendly smile and, in order to not disappoint her, lie and say he loved Hvar too, even though he�s never been to the island.

The decision regarding his inheritance was in a plastic envelope. He laid it on the bedside table, resolved to not leave the hotel again until morning, when he would return to Zagreb. He sat in the hotel bar, which had been one of the centers of Belgrade social life after World War II, the place where the state and party heads, secret police agents and generals � some of whom Ilija had heard and read about, though it didn�t interest him much � used to meet. It was important to him to pass the time and return to Zagreb as soon as possible. He felt like a good and faithful husband who had just cheated on his wife.

He returned to his room around nine, after sitting alone in the corner of the empty bar, where it seemed no one came anymore, drinking fifteen whiskeys, all in an effort to sedate himself and forget what had happened that day. He lay in bed and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep. He got up and went to the window, struggling to unlock it. Barely succeeding, he leaned against the window ledge, breathing in the night air for a while and taking in the sounds that carried from Republic Square and Dor�ol. Suddenly, he was struck by the thought of what it would have been like if he had gone to the other side in 1991, if he had � instead of joining the Croatian volunteers � left for Aunt Smilja�s in Belgrade, and that thought made him afraid and ashamed and he tried to think of something else, of raspberries, which he had heard grew very well in Serbia, of plums, which somehow, he supposed, Serbia had more of than Croatia, and in the end, though he tried to avoid it, he began to think intensely about Serbia and what kind of a country it really was. What did it mean to him after he, one way or another, had spent the best years of his life fighting against it? It meant nothing to him. Like all other countries that meant nothing to him, including the one he lived in. A country is there so a person has something to lose and something to compromise himself for. He thought about that, closed the window, lay down, and finally fell asleep.

He was climbing up the stairs. With difficulty, one foot in front of the other. He was heavier in his dream than in reality. He barely managed to reach the fifth floor, already more out of breath than he�d ever been in his life. He knocked on the door of the apartment where the clerk Hinko Ajzler lived. He was investigating the circumstances surrounding a street incident in which Ajzler had shoved a Mrs. Petronijevi�, because, he said, her poodle sneered at him. The old woman had fallen and broken her hip, and three days later her son-in-law, also a senior clerk in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, filed a complaint. And now they had sent him, a known softie, to investigate Ajzler. They knew that Inspector Joso Rakita never said no. In his dream, Ilija Soldo was Inspector Joso Rakita, the year was 1941, the day Friday, April 4, but it didn�t surprise him at all that in his dream he could simultaneously be Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police in 2019.

No one, however, opened the door. And just as he was starting to wonder what to do and to pity his unfortunate fate, someone tapped Joso Rakita or Ilija Soldo on the shoulder.

�Sorry, sir!� Mento Josef Konforti, the postman, no taller than a seven-year-old and equally timid, introduced himself. �It�s been days since Mr. Ajzler has opened the door. Everyone thinks that something has happened to him.�

In the dream he didn�t have to go down the stairs and climb again to the fifth floor with the notary Du�an Markovi�, an ill-tempered, fat, middle-aged man who was the spitting image of the minister of foreign affairs, Cincar Markovi� (who Ilija Soldo only knew about in his dream), along with two more colleagues from the police, the aids and witnesses for his investigation of Hinko Ajzler�s apartment. The repeated ascending and descending of stairs in dreams, as in a good story or novel, is an unnecessary detail that the consciousness censures. This fact provided Joso Rakita with a sense of relief.

He pulled the pick out of his pocket and easily opened the shoddy lock. He was hit with the stench of urine, gravy, and some sort of chemical. The stench was more real than anything he�d ever experienced in real life. Inspector Joso Rakita was seized with terror, as was the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, Ilija Soldo. He approached the bed on which, gray as the wall behind him, lay a balding man with a clothesline tied in a sloppy noose around his neck. On the nightstand by the bed there were two empty bottles of the phenobarbital Luminal, a sedative once made famous in Hollywood movies, which is still used today as an antiepileptic. But Joso Rakita hardly noticed the bottles of Luminal, because more interesting to him, as to Ilija Soldo in whose head he resided, was the amateurly-tied noose. He couldn�t have hung himself like that, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the man was alive, staring bug-eyed at the low ceiling.

Along Ajzler�s right eye, below the yellowish iris, crawled a small black ant, sliding across it as if on ice.

Rakita moved to pluck the ant from Ajzler�s eye with his fingers.

And then something happened which could hardly be translated from dream to reality. Suddenly the person lying there was no longer Hinko Ajzler, and the fingers did not belong to Joso Rakita; instead the ant was crawling across Joso�s wide-open eye and Hinko�s fingers went for it. He could feel the ant moving but he couldn�t blink or move his eyeballs.

At this point, he awoke with a scream. He grasped his neck, but there was no noose. Underneath him, his halfway-expelled shit was smeared across the hotel bedsheets.

This should have been the greatest fright in the life of the Croatian war veteran and esteemed policeman Ilija Soldo, the inheritor of the most beautiful villa in Senjak.

But this was just the beginning.

For the next ten nights upon returning to Zagreb, Ilija Soldo couldn�t sleep. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of any thoughts. He said nothing to his wife, nothing of his trip to Belgrade instead of Budapest, nothing of the considerable wealth he had inherited, nor of the dream he�d had the last time he�d fallen asleep. Over time, his silences and lies multiplied.

On the eleventh morning he got on a bus to Belgrade. He called in sick to work and told his wife that he was traveling to Vinkovci, out toward Serbia, where a few days earlier a thirty-year-old railroad worker had smothered his two children and then disappeared. He�d left a short note for the mother of his children, who in the police report was listed as his �domestic partner,� where he wrote that he had smothered the children because she had been cheating on him with a waiter from the railroad station caf�. He was suspected to have escaped across the border to Serbia.

As awake as Ilija had been over the past days and nights, he rode east on the empty highway. When they crossed the border and entered Serbia, he closed his eyes, thinking he�d be able to sleep now. But no. The world was just as clear, real, and awake as on the other side of the border. What doesn�t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either!

Those words, as if regimented, were drilled into his head: What doesn�t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either.

He quickly glanced across the endless flat land in the direction of Sremska Mitrovica and Ruma, following the perfect geometrical shapes of the black, freshly plowed earth, and he tried to think about something far away from what his life was mutating into, away from the villa in Senjak and Aunt Smilja�s inheritance, away from the lies which he was guarding himself from the world or from himself with, away from insomnia which, he was sure, was caused by that strange, terrible dream in the Hotel Majestic. And that�s how he came to the case of the crazy switchman from Vinkovci, who had smothered his nine-month-old daughter and a three-year-old son with a pillow, and then wrote to his wife that this was how he was punishing her and promised that if she mended her ways, he would give her new children. He was crazy, but really, should police be the ones dealing with crazy people? How could he conduct an investigation against a disturbed mind? He thought about it, and then by association, through those mysterious and inexplicable trips that a person takes as they transition from one thought to the next, from thinking about the world to thinking about themselves, it occurred to him that what he was currently going through was also a criminal case in need of further investigation. The fact that the crime had happened in his dream, or perhaps it wasn�t a crime but a suicide, didn�t change anything. Or it changed only the fact that now he couldn�t go to the police, neither in Belgrade nor in Zagreb, and report his suspicions of murder; now he had to investigate the case himself.

All kinds of nonsense occur to you while riding the bus from Zagreb to Belgrade. Especially if you�re a police detective who hasn�t slept in ten days.

It was late afternoon, almost evening, but the main hotel entrance on Obili�ev Venac was still bathed in light. The other side, the entrance on Mar�ala Birjuzova, was surely dark. Was it Ilija Soldo who thought that? Later he�ll be sure it was. And maybe it really was.

Luckily, there were rooms, as there would be in ten, twenty, thirty days, whenever Soldo came back on his regular future trips to Belgrade, when he would depart every eleventh day, after not having slept for the past ten nights. This will go on for six months, and each time it�ll happen according to that fatal identical scenario, which would probably make a good twelve-hour experimental film that wouldn�t be shown in regular theaters, but maybe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But the story about a case, which Ilija Soldo, the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, finds himself in the middle of, requires that all those nights at the hotel be told in the same breath, and that the reader or listener bears in mind the unbearable and frightening repetition, the monotony of terror that our unfortunate Ilija endures.

The receptionists get to know him. He lies, saying that he is a traveling salesman; he isn�t going to tell them that he�s a police officer. They look for the best room for him, he�ll even sleep in the presidential suite, where Marshall Tito and his minister of police in Communist times allegedly held meetings with the many heads of their secret police � regular citizens had no idea how many there had been; he agrees to all this only to avoid appearing suspicious to the receptionists. Then he enters the elevator, and once in his room, he gets undressed, lies on the bed, and five or six hours later wakes up to his own scream. The same dream repeats itself without any variation, only each time he finds out more and more about himself, about Inspector Joso Rakita, a Croat from Lika, serving in the Belgrade police at the beginning of April 1941. He already knows as much about him as he knows about the other one, supposedly his actual self, Ilija Soldo, who in his dream exists alongside Rakita. He is, however, unable to change anything in his dream, like not breaking into Hinko Ajzler�s apartment, or not attempting to pluck the dead ant from Hinko�s dead eye, or not turning into the dead Hinko, who he still knows nothing about.

The logic of dreams differs from the logic of reality. This logic ought to be investigated so that one knows how to behave in their dreams, or so that a good police investigator can investigate his own dream.

During these six months he didn�t say a word to his wife. She, of course, noticed that Ilija wasn�t sleeping. At first, she urged him to see a doctor, but he didn�t want to, so she got him sleeping pills, which he took, though they didn�t do a thing to help him sleep. Finally she started to suspect that her Ilija was having an affair. This suspicion generated domestic hell, which, besides the two of them and their four children, involved the neighbors, her parents, her brother and sister-in-law. He derived a strange pleasure from this since it distracted him from his dream and the futile investigation he was leading, becoming ever more convinced of the difficulty of carrying out an investigation from afar. Is there a greater distance than the separation of dreams from reality in the very same head?

After six months, the investigation led him to the following conclusion: the only place where he could fall asleep was the Hotel Majestic; everything around that hotel, Belgrade, Zagreb, the whole world, was the space where his insomnia dwelled. At night, as soon as his head hit the hotel pillow, after a few hours of deep and empty sleep, similar to being in a coma, he had the same dream; in the middle of that dream was the police case from the beginning of April 1941, most likely from Friday, April 4.

He went to the Croatian State Archives, then to the Zagreb national and university libraries, digging through newspaper documents, searching in vain for the name Hinko Ajzler. He also asked about him in Belgrade; through his police connections he requested that Serbian colleagues look into the name, but they likewise found nothing. Finally, by complete accident � most great discoveries are made by accident � he discovered on the Internet that the Archives of Serbia had digitized their entire collection of the daily newspaper Politika, from the very first issue, printed on January 12, 1904, to the very last, printed on April 6, 1941, a few hours before the German bombing of Belgrade. It took him ten minutes to find an unsigned article with the headline �Mentally Disturbed Clerk Poisons and Hangs Himself,� appearing on the tenth page of the issue from April 5, 1941. The text described his dream word for word, while the accompanying photograph showed Hinko Ajzler looking just as he had in the dreams, perhaps slightly younger.

Ilija Soldo was tremendously relieved. So, the case had existed in reality, although that reality was imprisoned in the depths of the past, in the year 1941. This completely freed him of the fear that had tormented him from the start, so unspeakable that it couldn�t even be mentioned in this story � that he had gone insane and that his dream and the persistence of his insomnia were only symptoms of a serious and irreversible psychological disorder. If everything was as real as in this article from Politika, then he couldn�t be crazy. Especially since there was no way he could have known about this article before he�d first had his dream.

He came upon a detail in the article that would, it seemed, lead to the unraveling of this case. The murder, or suicide � as it had already been suggested in Politika�s headline � took place on April 4, 1941, on the fifth floor of a building located at 30 Kosmajska Street. Easily, without anyone�s help, and using only the Internet, he found out that in 1941 Mar�ala Birjuzova was called Kosmajska. On the virtual map of the city, intended for tourists and those who easily get lost in Belgrade, he was pointed to the gray and damp street that he�d taken to the Hotel Majestic�s garage on his first visit. That perpetually quiet, empty, and gray street, that clouded-over street, while Obili�ev Venac, which the main hotel entrance opened out onto, was always bright and sunny.

Although he only arrived at this great discovery on the third day without sleep, by early morning the next day he was already on the bus to Belgrade. As he approached the border between Croatia and Serbia, at one time two warring countries whose mutual intolerance was turning into some sort of cultural tradition, his wife, whose name has been omitted here to avoid putting her in an awkward position, was packing up herself and the children, firm in her decision to get a divorce. But in Ilija�s crazed euphoria he didn�t care about anything anymore, because it seemed he was on the verge of cracking the greatest case of his police career.

Before he went to the hotel, Ilija Soldo walked up and down the short street called Mar�ala Birjuzova � named after the Soviet general and one of the liberators of the city, who was killed in a plane crash on his way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the city�s liberation � and recognized that the building in which Hinko Ajzler had lived no longer exists. It was most likely destroyed during the bombing during World War II, perhaps even by April 6, 1941. He peeked over a tall wall which surrounded a synagogue and peered furtively at a police officer, who had come out from the little glass house to monitor the man who kept crossing back and forth in front of him. But he let him pass, which is how the young Belgrade police officer by the name of Perica Utje�anovi� � the son of Jova Utje�anovi� and Stoja Utje�anovi�, n�e �opi�, who came to Serbia in August 1995 in a long line of Serbs expelled from Croatia during Operation Storm, the last major Croatian war operation, settling in Bor�a, the poorest suburb of Belgrade, now married, a father of two-year-old twins, a little girl and boy � would never find out that he had failed to identify a senior Croatian police officer, who in the subsequent days and months would be in the headlines of all of Belgrade�s tabloids.

Ilija Soldo suffered a serious brain hemorrhage that night and fell into a coma from which he has not awoken to this very day. For the next seven days he lay at the Military Medical Academy Hospital in Belgrade and was then secretly airlifted back to one of Zagreb�s hospitals. The Zagreb media have not reported this event, nor have they said what happened to the chief of homicide investigations in the largest Croatian police department, and what kind of a secret mission led one of the most recognized Croatian officers to Belgrade. In Zagreb, the revelations published in the Belgrade tabloids were taken as yet another, though this time quite bizarre, expression of Serbian hostility toward Croatia.

My name is Dr. Erich Hetzel. I am a theater director. I am German, an evangelical Christian, but because I married a Jewish woman, I found myself on the Nazis� list of seven artists at the National Theater to be eliminated in 1941. I remember it was a hot day, shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade on April 6, when our interim director Veljkovi� summoned me to his half-destroyed office above Republic Square and said: �My dear Dr. Hetzel, you, a pure-blooded Aryan, why did you need this affair with a Jewish woman�? Well, what should I do now? You, so to speak, �dug your own grave.� Here, look at Articles 18 to 20 in the decree of General F�rster, the military governor of the German-occupied territory of Serbia. In Article 18 it reads clearly: A Jew is considered any person descended from at least three Jewish ancestors (this assumes the parents of both one�s father and mother).�

Veljkovi� looked at me with a weasel-like gaze and continued: �Rather, in your case, whether or not your dad�s dad is Jewish, you fall under Article 19. Look � look what it says: In the same way, a Jew is a Jewish mutt married to a Jewess. And there we are! What am I to do? You are married to a Jewish woman. No, no, I have to oust you from the National Theater. You�ll put on one more performance, and that will be the end. Let your Old Testament god save you, my esteemed Dr. Hetzel.�

Barbara, my dear wife, what a strong and murderous rage I felt in that moment. I thought I would become a killer that very day, as soon as I clenched my hands around the neck of that Veljkovi�. Instead, I didn�t join the trade until 1942.

A new and powerful revival of the grotesque took place in the twentieth century, although the word revival is not exactly suited to the most recent forms.

��Mikhail Bakhtin (translated by H�lène Iswolsky)

April 30, 1999

Whether it�s Jack the Ripper or the armed forces, the pathology is the same: the killer first objectifies the victims to obliterate their humanity, so they are not human beings anymore, just collateral damage, Neda thought to herself, walking through the strangely quiet streets of Lekino Brdo, so innocent and quaint under the April sun as if totally unaware of what could happen to it at any moment. She was still seething at what she�d just seen from her friend Mariana�s thirteenth-floor balcony: Avala � the hill which, with its meager 1,700 feet, qualified as a mountain � without its TV tower! During the night, the precisely guided NATO missile had wiped the tower out, and the resulting scenery belonged in a parallel reality. Like everything else these days, for that matter: how could Serbia, the country which had always been on the right side of history, always the good guy, be bombed by the allies? Maybe because, as the saying went, it was in a habit of winning in war and losing in peace? But who could win over NATO? Martians?

�Making war to get peace is the same as fucking to get virginity,� Mariana had said as they drank coffee made from tepid water from the water heater, since this part of town was once again without electricity.

Neda couldn�t agree more.

Air-raid sirens began their shrill scream while she was entering �the little woods� � a wooded area that covered the block below her old high school � which usually had a calming effect on her nerves. Feeling like she was about to explode without any help from a NATO missile, Neda started singing from the top of her lungs: a song Belgrade Gypsies had sung during World War II, while German Stukas bombed the unfortunate town, which seemed to be everybody�s favorite target.

NATO intervention was the last straw for Neda. A private language school where she was teaching German collapsed under Western sanctions, leaving her without an income. So once again, she was depending on her parents. Upon retiring, her parents had moved to a village in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, and once in a while they would send her some cash and homemade goods. Making her feel worthless, if not suicidal.

Neda decided there was no reason to hurry home, to the little house on Todora Dukina Street, where she expected at any moment to turn into collateral damage under its old bricks. After all, it was in these woods where she had had her first kiss. A first kiss, perhaps the last day of life � wasn�t she a proper heroine from some Remarque novel?

The woods seemed empty, save an old man who sat on a bench by the path, staring at nothing as he ignored the sirens. Either deaf, thought Neda, or just didn�t give a shit. Perhaps he found it better to be killed by a bomb than to fade away in some poorly supplied hospital, living on bread with margarine.

The sirens stopped as suddenly as they had started. Knowing what was coming, Neda chose a bench for herself and sat to wait for the hard rock delivered by NATO to overpower the Gypsy lament.

After many years, she visited U�iteljsko Naselje again.

She�d grown up in this neighborhood, but since she�d moved away she�d had no reason to come back. She remembered the place � located between Konjarnik, �umice, and Zvezdara � as unpleasant, shabby, and depressing.

What she saw from the taxi � a small, inexpensive, autonomous, and noiseless electric Asian vehicle � Marija didn�t recognize, nor did she associate it with any of her childhood memories. The neighborhood that she remembered consisted of several narrow streets and residential buildings erected around two large factories built back in the 1960s when the area was still at the edge of urban Belgrade. At the time when Marija left U�iteljsko Naselje, huge concrete buildings with broken windows were turned into furniture warehouses, yoga and pilates studios, and squats for struggling artists. The same streets were now covered with solar panels, placed on every corner, looking like phantasmagoric, dazzling sculptures.

Marija got out of the car in front of a restaurant � quite a popular one, judging by the various web ratings. When she turned around she found the entrance to the business she was looking for in a four-story building. Next to the large aluminum and glass doors, there was a brass plaque with AE Inc. engraved on it. It was abbreviated from Alter Ego Inc., the full name of Isak�s start-up.

She wondered again why Isak had placed such a promising company in this part of the city, assuming that the reason could only be the cheap rent. Everything else in the neighborhood was far from being prestigious and appealing to ambitious investors and international firms. She shrugged, turned back again, looked over at the indifferent facades of the buildings and the indifferent faces of the passersby, and approached the intercom. A split second later � as if somebody had been watching her the entire time � a soft buzz sounded and the door opened before her.

That evening, his usual saunter turned into a breathless sprint down Dositijeva. Once home, he kicked off his shoes and walked quickly through the large, empty apartment until he reached his bedroom. He switched on his computer and immediately accessed the phone remotely.

She was twenty-five years old. Along with Serbian, she spoke English, Italian, and German. She traveled a lot but he could find nothing about her employment. He realized that this was her personal phone and she must have used another one for work. Her friends were not just Serbian but from across Europe and the US.

He hesitated before entering WhatsApp but eventually got up enough courage. He knew that this would reveal much about her intimate life. He was torn between his vision of her purity and his barely controllable desire to soak in the imagined reality of her sexual being.

Just as he decided to finally click on the app, an alert flashed on his screen. The remote phone had been attached to another device. Milo� rushed to his laptop and flipped it open before feverishly typing in various commands. Within a minute, he had access to her desktop. Using the RAT, he activated her camera.

Her bedroom was predictably elegant. Minimalist but not austere. Above a luxurious but tasteful sofa, there was a poster of a giant cat smirking and holding a gun. Below this, a small table upon which sat a large metal statuette � a man in a great coat smoking a cigar. Milo� zoomed in. Underneath the bust on a little plinth was the inscription: Comrade Tito. To the left was what looked like a walk-in closet and to the right side of the computer, Milo� assumed there was a door leading out of the room. Against the wall, a large double bed.

Katarina started playing something on her iTunes. Milo� had never heard the song although he identified it as German. So he looked on her computer � Udo Lindenberg, �Unterm S�ufermond.� She was lying on her sofa, and as the melancholic sounds floated over her, he focused on those green eyes and realized that she had begun to cry.

He was frozen with a sympathy that he couldn�t articulate. Least of all to her. As the song came to an end, she left the room, returning with a large glass of red wine. Milo� longed to be there to offer her comfort. But, real as this was, it was mediated by virtual deception.

At this point, Katarina started to remove her top. This was too much for Milo� to process and he slammed his computer shut.