13.
The first and the last day
is this only a lie?
is it only trickery?
now (fall 2010)
The message flashed onto Ilinčić’s cell phone at 5:30 a.m., while he was lifting weights in the basement of the private hotel gym that had previously housed a disco. He always got up early and exercised. Despite his age, he kept himself in shape, a step ahead of everyone. His man on the police force let him know the mayor had been killed before the media got a hold of it. The message was delivered flatly, as if he wasn’t sure whether Ilinčić himself was involved in some way. If he wasn’t, the city’s boss needed to hear about it before everybody else did, but if—which the man thought more likely—he was involved, then when Ilinčić took complete control he’d remember who’d proved loyal and reliable and kept him in the loop. The news was so shocking that Ilinčić stopped working out, straining to make sense of the unexpected murder while his pulse gradually returned to normal as big beads of sweat leached from his pores. He puzzled over this murder that he’d known nothing about and who could be behind it. He took a quick cold shower, instead of the longer one in lukewarm water that he preferred, while his thoughts turned to the little girls from the local orphanage who were ordered in on weekends for the amusement of the Forestry Maintenance crew. He dressed and went upstairs to the restaurant to have breakfast and an espresso. His suspicions circled around the poltical and criminal factions in the city, without dwelling on anyone in particular. After the recording of the bribe offer was made public, the mayor was dead politically, and for an act as radical as this murder there must be a powerful motive. The other thing bothering him was the worry that there was someone out there who’d had the audacity to aim so high, sidestepping him and his connections and daring to perpetrate something this outrageous in his city. The third was the serious possibility that he would be considered a suspect and talk would start circulating that he was implicated. Someone might well turn up who knew that Ilinčić had been pressuring the mayor to change the future lessee of the port. Very little happened in the city without Ilinčić’s blessing. He had a finger in every pie. He’d placed almost everyone who was serving on the city council. They didn’t dare think with their own heads, except those who were genuinely stupid, and they were easy to manipulate. Like the fanatic young hawk from the radical right-wing party who sabotaged the passing of a law regulating the holding of pigs and sheep only because the document submitted by the minority party was written in both alphabets. The kid was caught hook, line, and sinker by the nationalist program, thereby vulnerable to endless forms of manipulation. Precisely because of him and those like him, all the processes in the city had ground to a halt, and the money kept pouring in. Like when, five years ago, the national government and various funds invested millions of euros in the city’s commercial zone. They built up the infrastructure to support several industrial plants, but to this day not a single one of the factories had opened. Six of the investors pulled out. Parallel to building the infrastructure, Ilinčić had built a magnificent summer home for himself on the island of Pag, and the city of Pag then became their sister city. Now focus had shifted to the port: the only company anywhere in the area that was making a profit, the only undertaking with no losses and which was not laying off its employees. Approval had finally come down from above for its sale, or, as formulated in the spirit of democracy, its lease. Whoever was running city hall when the lease of the port went through, with its annual trans-shipment capacity of over a million tons of freight, would bring in enough revenue that they would never again have to worry about their own subsistence, if, indeed, the right lessee were found. Everything had to be set up with care, the tender prepared meticulously. The chaos reigning in the city was convenient in this regard, but what with a murder investigation possibly forthcoming, the dead mayor could get in the way, too. In this sense, dead Ante could prove useful. If only the Serbian kid had been a year or so older. After the tragedy, Ilinčić had come up with a plan: when this administration fell, he’d install someone, again, with a strong camera presence. He’d hold the tender and transactions for the port, standing, as always, in the shadows and skimming off the cream. Now, because of the murder, things would get tricky—too many police would be poking around, and they wouldn’t be the usual local cops; instead a team he didn’t control would be investigating the city power structures, and he’d have to keep a low profile for a time. Journalists, scandals he hadn’t staged himself, morons who’d blurt out something. He could see this coming. He didn’t like it. And he didn’t like the way that young woman was hanging around his hotel. He’d immediately sniffed out that she was Kirin’s daughter, a female version of her father. She’d struck him as familiar as soon as he laid eyes on her, focused as she’d been on her laptop. And when she gave her name as Kirin, looking him boldly in the eyes, he’d frozen. He couldn’t be wrong, even though she’d said she was from Omiš. Bullshit, from Omiš. The widow had given up, finally, on pursuing an investigation, though she’d been unexpectedly persistent, but he’d always assumed that at least the daughter wouldn’t stick her nose
