We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

were exposed, while he pocketed the cold cash. Belgrade to Zagreb, six hundred euros per head; double that to Italy. His business had taken off. The array of services he offered in the chain of human trafficking was far-reaching, though over the last month he’d kept a low profile after a deputy police chief was booted who’d been one of the crucial links in his chain on that route. From a business perspective, this thing with the mayor suited him to a tee, but never would he have done such a thing for anybody but Brigita. Schweppes belonged to a group of local professional hitmen, most of them schooled abroad. He began his training as a kid in Germany, after he was convicted of assault causing bodily harm. When he arrived in Croatia in the 1990s, only just then founded as a state, he offered his services to the secret service through the Boss and the casino at the InterContinental Hotel. Absolution for his earlier sins had to come from the powerful sponsors within the state system and the crime world, which was supported right at the highest echelons of government. A segment of the criminal elite was responsible for assassinations: suspicious traffic accidents, explosive devices attached to cars, sniper kills. One of his first targets was Kirin, a policeman. The bosses of the underground were in agreement all across former Yugoslavia: the murder of one’s opponents and related criminal activity aimed at erasing any connection to the people in charge was standard practice. The war was a boon to them all. If someone from the Zemun clan was interested in having someone hit, he’d reach out to his colleagues in Sarajevo, Skopje, or Zagreb for help. He’d dispatch his hitman to do the job and then have the killer hidden in one of the other ex-Yugoslav countries. Later, the favor would be returned in kind. Faced with this system, the police were hard-pressed to link the murderer to the person who’d ordered the hit, and the investigation was made all the more complicated, and still is, by the poor levels of cooperation among the various Balkan police forces. So the vast majority of these hits remain unsolved. Professional killers who work for the state always exploit moments of crisis; they hide behind political intrigue and turmoil, and their connections with the powermongers mean they won’t be exposed. Although most killers are psychopaths, Schweppes was not lacking in all human emotion. He’d killed his stepfather, and then spent the man’s savings. The police quickly caught him, and it was in a German prison that his training in murder began. These were his glory days; he was so young that he was allowed to return to Croatia to serve out the rest of his sentence. So the path to the casino and recruitment by the secret services was not a long one. After his first murder it was as if a bottomless hole had opened up inside him, and he’d gone over the edge. He didn’t have many choices. The genotype, phenotype, the easy accessibility of weapons and the lack of any ethical constraints in society formed him quickly, fiercely, with no way out. On his way he stumbled across Brigita, and that was as close as he ever came to a moment of atonement. He watched her as she moved among the tables, as she laid her little hand on men’s broad shoulders. He wanted to shield her. Himself and her together. She, on the other hand, admired Schweppes and felt safe with him, but she didn’t need him in that way, and she knew she felt best when she was on her own. Men were a means to an end, not the end itself. Meanwhile she’d earned her university degree and went where nobody else wanted to go, straight into the heart of darkness, because she knew, if she were among the first, that she’d be at an advantage over others and have the chance to set up her own network. The empire soon crumbled, and then began the legal proceedings against criminal organizations. Schweppes’s name and hers both came up, but at that level she remained loyal. She appeared as a witness and testified that she knew nothing, she’d never noticed anything, she was doing the job while she studied so she could get more easily through her schooling. In the end she added that she’d noticed that her boyfriend did carry a pistol. She’d thought this a little strange, just that. But that was what the times were like, other people carried weapons, too. Here their paths diverged. There were no hard feelings, and she knew that because of all this she had the right to count on at least one more favor. She was right: whenever he thought about her, all those feelings came back to Schweppes. Although he was fully capable of standing by, never getting his pants cuffs wet while he watched people drown in the Danube as they tried to swim across it, he could not resist her I need you. This was completely irrational and so rare in his life, because he felt almost nothing for others, with the exception of the hatred he felt for his closest family and indifference for everybody else. And once, gratitude. For a young Serbian man who saved his life at the outset of the war by deliberately changing the route of their van. Schweppes understood that he had done nothing to deserve this. That his life had been saved by the action of the young Serbian reservist was something he only learned of years later, and that the man’s name was Marko, and that he was still living here in the city. He found the man’s contact information through the police, sent him a message and a bottle of the finest whisky. Now that was someone he’d like to meet again, to ask him why he’d done it. He cast another glance at the mayor’s