Murder in Dubrovnik Page 2

  “Never come back,” the older fisherman said.

  The man picked up the newspapers and got up slowly, the pain in his neck and ribs making it hard to walk. “May I have that?”

  The fisherman who had gone through his pockets held up the waxy paper that he’s balled up in his hand. He flung it on the ground.

  The man picked up the waxy scrap and walked away from the fishermen. They watched him struggle to his boat and push off from the docks. He expected them at any moment to change their minds and overrule the older fisherman. But they let him go.

  He motored five miles down the coast. Once he had dropped anchor he opened a bottle of distilled grape alcohol that he had stolen from an unlocked island konoba the previous night. The boat bobbed lightly in the morning chop. It had been his home for 21 years and smelled of mold and rotting fish.

  He felt the rakija take effect, spreading through his chest and arms. He took long gulps straight from the bottle. When he put it back down it was nearly empty. The pain subsided.

  He spread the newspapers out on the grimy wooden table. Each of them had pictures of a massive yacht on the front page. Inside were more pictures of the yacht, and stories about its owner.

  He read all the stories carefully. Looked at all the pictures. When he was done he read the stories again, to make sure he hadn’t missed something.

  There was no mention of the American woman.

  He put the newspapers aside and opened the tackle box where he kept fishing gear. He placed the waxy paper inside of it. It had been water-damaged and was already fragile, and the fisherman had damaged it even further by roughly crumpling it. He stared again at the writing and was glad that he could still read the letters. It would have devastated him to find that he could no longer read the message on it.

  Seven smeared, blurry letters. Like pink watercolor. Like faded blood.

  M-A-T-S-U-S-O

  He looked out the boat’s scratched porthole. Squinted his good eye and saw the faint glimmer of the yacht. How many summers had he trailed it, helpless and invisible at the edges of its orbit, waiting for payback? He had lost count.

  His quest had been a lonely one, but he believed he would soon have company. The Americans would be looking for her, he imagined. They would want to know what happened to Amanda Murphy.

  Chapter 3

  The 32-seat 707 rumbled and swayed out of Munich, rose above German forests, flew low over Austrian farmland.

  Marko rested his forehead on the scratched plastic glass and watched the sky get dark in northern Croatia. A sea of lights around the capital city of Zagreb, then vast dark pockets in the villages of the country’s interior.

  Hours ago, at the beginning of his journey, he had been handed a file by a police department courier in the international terminal at SFO, but he had avoided opening it during the long flight to Munich.

  He opened the file for the first time.

  Subject: Female Caucasian, 32 years old.

  Temporary working residence: Den Haag, Holland.

  Official residence: San Francisco, California.

  Subject took a leave of absence from her job as an attorney for the United Nations to travel in Europe. She had been in constant contact with her mother via email, text and phone. Then, three days ago, the contact just stopped. Repeated attempts by her mother to reach her were fruitless.

  No emails, text messages or phone calls.

  Nothing.

  He pulled a small envelope from the file and shook its contents onto the tray table. A photograph of the subject landed on top.

  Marko stared at the photo of Amanda Murphy on the airplane tray table.

  She was at a party, smiling and looking just off camera. Behind her Marko could see other people in the room, but Amanda’s face took up nearly the entire frame. The person taking the picture wanted to capture that face.

  It was the same face Marko had first seen when she was sixteen and he was seventeen, but she had gone from a pretty girl to a beautiful woman. The traces of baby fat were gone. Her smile, once shy, was alert and confident.

  He saw a woman who felt secure she had made the right choices in her life.

  Finally the blackness of the sea was in sight. The crew began making its final preparations. A flight attendant smiled at him, and Marko had a sudden flash to the last time he had been in an airplane.

  He was 13 years old. Like this trip, it had also been sudden. He remembered waking up in a hospital, then a flurry of preparations – someone dressing him, adults arguing over him. A doctor, some familiar faces from his village. Paperwork, someone dispatched somewhere for a suitcase. Then he was on a plane, where stewardesses who spoke his language fussed over him.

  He remembered an airport in Germany. An official spoke to him in subdued tones before handing him off to another set of stewardesses, who spoke a language he didn’t speak and kept watch on him for a long trip that ended, he eventually learned, in San Francisco.

  The plane bumped the tarmac, snapping Marko back to the present. The 707 sputtered to a stop at Dubrovnik Airport.

  He caught a taxi, and when it had driven six miles he turned his head toward the sea and looked across the tops of the pine trees.

  There was a house there. He couldn’t see it amid the trees, but he could picture it. The gravel walkway that led to the terra cotta steps. The modest terrace that looked out on the sea. The red tiled roof in the moonlight. The small cove spread out before it.

  His house.

  He remembered something he hadn’t thought about in years.

  It was an absurd family memory. As a small child he used to fit his head through the wrought-iron railing that separated the living room from the dining room. A dozen vertical bars, connected at the top to a handrail. When he was about six years old he stuck his head through the bars, with more trouble than usual, in a game he liked to play.

  -Look at me, mama, I’m in jail.

  -Such silly antics, Marko.

  His mother was preparing dinner, his favorite – green peppers stuffed with rice and ground lamb. He watched her put a glass baking dish in the stove, then brush her hair from her face as she looked at him and suppressed a smile.

  -Get your head out of there before you get stuck.

  He found he couldn’t pull it back out.

  Several minutes of light hysterics followed, his mother pouring olive oil down his cheeks and tugging on him, the cold steel railings digging in and pinching his ears. She ran out to find his father in the fig orchard. When they returned, his father tried to pull the bars apart to ease his head out, but they wouldn’t budge.

  His father left and came back a few minutes later with a hacksaw. Marko watched him work the saw horizontally across the bottom of the railing, small black particles of iron dust floating in the air, until the railing gave way and he pulled it back gently, just enough to allow Marko to remove his red, glistening head. His father pushed the railing back into its original position, where it fit back snugly into place, and gave it a light shake to make sure it would stay firm.

  His mother toweled Marko off as his father chuckled.

  -Our boy is growing, he said.

  In a few minutes the taxi left the main coastal road and slowed down as the streets began to clog with cars. Soon he was getting out of the car next to a medieval drawbridge. Outside Dubrovnik.

  The town was perched on sheer limestone cliffs, across the Adriatic Sea from the boot of Italy. Thirty-foot stone walls, built in the 12th century to repel invaders, loomed over him. Marko could hear the rising murmur of voices from inside the walls. He imagined the warren of narrow alleys branching from elegant cobblestoned boulevards. He pictured thousands of people inside, filling the small, roughly square city, less than a quarter mile across in each direction.

  He stood at the western gate, watching people stream over the drawbridge in the evening heat.

  Forty-eight hours. That was all Karen needed from him. Then he’d get back on a plane to San Francisco and aw
ait his fate.

  He stepped onto the drawbridge and walked through the city walls.

  Chapter 4

  Olga Korchov, the Russian ambassador to Croatia, took a sip of her wine and lifted her broad, handsome face toward the sun.

  Her lunch companion, Konstantin Berberov, the chief financial officer of TurboRus, studied her carefully.

  They were thirty miles up the coast from Dubrovnik, sitting on the terrace of a restaurant that overlooked a sleepy harbor where a few modest skiffs floated. The restaurant was nearly deserted and there was little chance anyone from Dubrovnik – or more importantly, anyone from the Irina, the mega-yacht that served as the floating summer headquarters of TurboRus – would stumble into it.

  Olga put the glass down and moved it a few inches away, almost reluctantly, as though it was a shame to ruin such a pleasant day with business.

  “A lot of young women visit the Irina, don’t they?”

  “There are parties, yes.”

  Konstantin avoided the more social aspects of the yacht’s summer residency in Dubrovnik harbor, usually shutting himself in his stateroom or spending his evenings in town, away from the sordid scene. For Konstantin, the Irina was a workplace for a few months during the summer. For the bodyguards and for his boss, Alexander Maximov, it was an excuse to sample the summer bounty of young women eager to attend a party aboard the largest yacht in the world.

  “Any incidents this summer? Any problems resulting from these parties?”

  Konstantin shrugged. “Nothing the lawyers haven’t been able to handle.”

  A look of concern crossed Olga’s face, as though a troubling puzzle was resisting her efforts to solve it.

  “I’ve learned through diplomatic channels that a woman is missing. An American woman. A policeman from San Francisco has arrived in Dubrovnik to investigate.”

  She reached down into her satchel and produced a thick sheaf of papers that she handed across the table. Konstantin began to leaf through the report.

  A photograph on the first page showed a young man with close-cropped brown hair and a lean face that hinted at Slavic roots.

  Name: Marko Belic, a.k.a Marko Bell.

  “He’s a Croatian native, which is why they’ve sent him here,” Olga continued. “He left as a teenager, after seeing his parents murdered by Serbian paramilitary in ’91. An opening salvo in their bloody little war. The missing American is his former girlfriend.”

  Konstantin turned the page and lingered on the photo of the pretty American woman.

  Name: Amanda Murphy.

  Konstantin kept his face a stern mask. Olga was watching him closely.

  “A witness has linked her to the Irina,” Olga said. “But the policeman’s visit is a formality, conducted mainly to satisfy the missing woman’s family with a show of commitment by the San Francisco police. He’s expected to leave Dubrovnik tomorrow.”

  Konstantin didn’t understand why Olga was giving him this information, but he was getting used to that feeling. He was an accountant – order and logic meant everything to him. But nothing that had happened in the previous 24 hours made any sense to Konstantin Berberov at all.

  Yet Olga Korchov was giving Konstantin a possible way out, and the American policeman was the key.

  Konstantin thought again of the picture of Marko Bell. Something in the man’s lean face worried him. He was a man who had changed his name, his life. What kinds of things was a man like that capable of?

  Chapter 5

  Marko rented a one-room apartment just off the main boulevard but barely slept, the nine-hour difference between San Francisco and Dubrovnik scrambling his body clock. By seven a.m. he gave up and listened to the sounds of the alley coming to life. Delivery men brought in fresh catches of fish. Shopkeepers unlatched iron gates and slid them open. Then the low murmuring of the first tourists of the day, their sandals and loafers making soft clopping and sliding sounds on the polished cobblestones.

  The gentle sounds were unmarred by engines or car horns. No vehicles were allowed inside the city walls. Dubrovnik was a quiet city, a small jewel of Southern Europe. A soft chime of a city.

  One thought kept running through Bell’s mind.

  Why had Amanda come to Dubrovnik?

  He showered and shaved and headed outside. The main boulevard was called the Placa. It ran east to west in a straight line directly through the center of town, like the spine of a fish, with alleyways branching off north and south like soft bones. A Gothic cathedral, a bell tower, and large outdoor cafes ringed the main square. In an hour the town would begin to cook under the August sun and the streets would empty of locals, leaving only the tourists. For now, with the sun still low over the sea, the square was cool and crisp in the shade of the stone walls.

  The town hadn’t changed in twenty years. Or in 500 years.

  He turned and walked past the City Café and through a vaulted portal in the stone wall, emerging onto the packed harbor outside. Fishing skiffs, tourist catamarans and fifty-foot luxury yachts crowded together along the concrete piers, their fenders rubbing and squeaking.

  A thousand yards out was a boat that made the rest of the vessels in the harbor look like plastic children’s toys.

  To call it a yacht didn’t do it justice. Mega-yacht, maybe. Super-yacht.

  Marko saw a helicopter parked on it. A huge satellite dish. Several levels, like a cruise ship. It was an impressive boat. Huge and expensive. Marko didn’t know much about yachts but he thought it must be one of the biggest in the world. Maybe the biggest.

  What kind of person would need a boat that big? Middle Eastern royalty, maybe, or some Hollywood producer. But probably a Russian.

  Marko crossed back into the town square and took a seat at an outdoor table at the City Cafe, in the shade from St. Blaise Cathedral. Waiters carried trays full of pastries and white cups of steaming coffee.

  Marko badly wanted bacon and eggs and American coffee. That wasn’t on the menu. He ordered a croissant and a double espresso from a waiter who returned in a moment with the food and coffee.

  “They’re back,” Marko said. Meaning the tourists, after the war.

  “There’s more and more every year,” the waiter said. “I’m not complaining. Let St. Blaise keep them coming back until this pile of rocks sinks into the sea. At this rate I’ll be able to buy my boat in another three years. Ferries to the islands for 100 Euros a pop. Historical and cultural narration included.”

  Marko nodded toward the crowded harbor on the other side of the stone walls. “It looks like there’s lots of competition.”

  “I’m not worried about that," responded the waiter. "Plenty of charlatans will take their money and dump them into a crowded cove. They’ll have to fight with pissing Czechs for a square meter of space. I’m selling the quality of the experience.”

  The waiter had a shaved head and a prominent nose. As he spoke he was expertly unloading Bell's cups and plates onto his table and swiveling his head to keep tabs on other customers.

  “The tourists are getting better, by which I mean richer,” the waiter continued. “Arab sheiks, the Hollywood crowd. Used to be you’d see a couple of real heavy hitters each season. Now they’re clawing over the wall to get in. Goodbye, Balkans. Welcome to the European Union.”

  The waiter sat down to continue the conversation while keeping his eyes moving. Suddenly he had one elbow on the small table and was leaning close, with his voice low and casual as though they were longtime friends. On the waiter’s left hand the letters T-O-M-A-S were tattooed, one letter per knuckle.

  “See that big yacht outside the harbor? A Russian oligarch. Owns half the motherland’s natural resources and scares the hell out of Putin, even.”

  Marko thought back to Russian mobsters he had run across in San Francisco. They were small-timers wearing garish tracksuits and gold chains. Local gangsters running bookie operations and dreary prostitution rings. This Russian seemed an entirely different breed.

  “Anybod
y ever get to visit the boat?”

  The waiter lowered his voice and leaned closer. “Sure, if you’re rich and famous. Or young and beautiful. Every night is a party out there. The rest of us? We dream.”

  Marko smiled and nodded politely. "Seen many Americans this summer?"

  The waiter grinned and leaned close enough that Marko could smell aftershave and a light scent of cigarettes on the man's clothes. Suddenly he was crooning tunelessly. “Young American, young American, she wants the young American. David Bowie, brother! The best, am I right? The Americans have discovered us. The real party people. Ibiza has gotten monotonous. Now they’re here. They want someone to take them away to a deserted island where they can take a little pill, take their clothes off, swim naked, screw all day. I’m going to have a big-time stereo system on my boat. Techno music, as loud as they want it. It's time for us to forget the damn war and start getting serious about capitalism. The beauty is that there’s room for vertical integration. I can supply the food. I can supply the booze. I can even supply the pill. Do you know what I’m saying, brother?”

  Marko drained the espresso in one long gulp but still felt exhausted. “Sounds like a promising business.”

  “And working shifts here at the café is the perfect customer acquisition system. I see and hear everything in this square. ”

  Marko slid the three-by-five photo of Amanda out of his shirt pocket. “Have you seen this woman?”

  The waiter gave him a sly smile. “Which police are you?”

  "Which police am I?"

  "That's right, which police? The local yokels don't go around asking questions about Americans. Maybe you're Interpol, FBI, CIA, some agency that doesn't even have a name? Or maybe New York City police? I've seen those TV shows. You look like you could be one of those deceptive ball-busters. Clean-cut on the outside but no fun to deal with when the cards are on the table, yeah? For a minute I thought Zagreb, but you don't have that capital stink on you."