‘Then let’s find somewhere to stay. There’s a hotel I used to –’
‘No.’ Michael was firm. ‘You know the drill in Serbia. Every hotel guest gets registered with the nearest police station. Even if they don’t recognise our names, they’ll see we don’t have an entry stamp. Do you even have a passport?’
Abby patted her trouser pocket and felt nothing. She remembered reaching for it at the checkpoint; the hand closing around her wrist, dragging her out of the car; the passport falling unheeded into the mud.
A pang went through her. She felt herself dissolving away, a little girl lost in a foreign city. No way to get out, nothing even to prove who she was.
Michael didn’t seem to have noticed. He checked his watch. ‘Anyway, we’ve got a meeting to go to.’
She trailed after him through the bus station and out on to the busy street beyond. Michael held the umbrella low, covering their faces. Abby clung on to his arm and tried not to get soaked by the passing cars.
‘Where’s the meeting?’
‘On a splav.’
Abby had never been on a splav before, though she’d seen them in the distance during her trips to Belgrade. They were a Belgrade institution – bars and nightclubs on rafts that lined the banks of the Sava and the Danube for over a mile. Some looked like houses, and others like boats: the one they’d come to had a curved steel roof and exposed girders more reminiscent of an aircraft hangar. It floated about twenty yards out in the stream, tethered to the shore by a very makeshift bridge of scaffolding poles and planks. A sign above the door said
Abby looked at the rickety gangway, slick in the rain, and the grey river sweeping under it.
‘We’ll be in trouble if we have to leave in a hurry.’
‘I didn’t choose the venue.’
They wobbled and tottered across the wet planks. A security guard gave them a rudimentary pat-down – a reminder that this still wasn’t a city entirely at peace with itself. A sign on the door said NO GUNS, which didn’t reassure her.
Inside, the room was vast and dark, though even the darkness couldn’t disguise how empty it was. The walls were painted a burgundy so deep it looked black, broken every so often by electric pieces of neon sculpted into aggressively abstract shapes. A DJ stood in a box in the centre of the room, turning out high-wattage music, but no one was dancing. The few customers had mostly retreated into the booths at the edge of the room. One of them, an old man sitting on his own, looked up as they entered, and beckoned.
‘Who is he again?’ Abby asked as they crossed the floor. She was trying to be discreet, though with the music so loud she had to shout to be heard.
‘Mr Giacomo. He’s what, in the old days, you used to call a fence.’
There was a lot of the old days about Mr Giacomo. He had spiky white hair buzzed flat across the top of his head, tapering to a widow’s peak like the bow of a boat. His face was tanned and lined, his eyebrows bushy and wild. He wore a brown tweed suit and no tie, his white shirt unbuttoned somewhere near the borders of decency. He stood as they approached and ushered them into the booth. He didn’t shake hands, but beckoned a waiter over and ordered two Sidecars.
‘You had a good journey?’ he enquired. His accent was unlocatable: it could have come from any one of the half-dozen countries bordering the Adriatic. He stared tactlessly at Abby’s face, and she felt herself blushing. Her ordeal in the forest had added several bruises and one long scratch to the marks that Dragovic had inflicted in Rome. She looked like a domestic violence poster.
‘We had some problems getting here.’
He nodded, as if it were the most natural thing. ‘It is your first time in Belgrade?’
His questions were aimed entirely at Abby.
‘I’ve been before.’
‘You have visited the castle? The ethnographical museum?’
‘Mr Giacomo does a lot of work in museums,’ Michael said. He was trying to make a joke, but Giacomo didn’t smile.
‘Mr Lascaris, you went to some trouble to arrange a meeting with me. I am a busy man, but I have obliged you – even though your profession and mine are often … antagonists.’
He spread his hands on the table and leaned forward. ‘What is it you want from me?’
Michael lit a cigarette and exhaled. The neon on the wall made the smoke glow red; the strobe lights from the dance floor flickered on the edge of the cloud like distant lightning.
‘I want to know what Dragovic is after.’
Giacomo’s eyes narrowed. ‘That is not a good name to say out loud – especially in this city.’ He tapped his ear. ‘Even if you cannot hear yourself, always somebody else can.’
‘Dragovic has been turning Europe upside down for the last two months.’ Michael made a point of repeating the name. The beat of the music accelerated, pounding like running footsteps. ‘He’s looking for something.’
‘A man like him is always chasing something. Guns, girls, drugs … Maybe even a customs inspector from the European Union.’ Giacomo took out his own cigarettes and tapped the pack on the table. ‘Maybe this is something you know more about than me?’
‘He’s after some historical artefact. Probably Roman. From the way he’s going about it, he probably knows what it is. I thought you might, too.’
Giacomo considered it. ‘The man you mentioned, he does not share his thoughts with me often.’
