21.
Dum dum
I will hate icy cold
with a heart cased in seven skins
I will shoot straight in the back
I am born to rule
now (fall 2010)
The pressure nearly thrust his eyes from their sockets. His tongue went blue and sagged in the corner of his mouth; his spit swung from his chin to his neck when the metal bar with weights on the ends pressed him across the throat. It stopped the flow of oxygen, first to his lungs and then slowly to his brain, and the internal organs, all the way to the tips of his fingers. The last to go was his sense of hearing. He heard the thrum of the ventilation system, the radio jingles over the loud speakers, tambura players, festivities, shrieks, then silence, thrum, why, who, Kirin, Plavno, the bells, calls for help from the garage, Mariška’s jeers, the crackling of the flames, wind in the high tops of poplars, the dark. He was as strong as a horse, and Schweppes strangled him on his weight-lifting machine for an eternity. The dirtiest job of these last years. Everything had been urging him to leave as soon as he took care of the mayor, but he’d stayed a day more, hoping to see her. Meanwhile, after almost twenty years, quite by chance, at the cash register of a gas station, he ran into the reservist who’d saved his life back then. They recognized each other the same millisecond, pretending they’d never seen each other before. The next night, before dawn, just as he was getting ready to leave on a long vacation, Marko summoned him over the Spanish network. He’d accessed it the evening before while making arrangements for his return to Madrid. He hadn’t expected Marko would contact him, and even less that he’d ask for a favor. He owed it, and he couldn’t refuse; that would be beneath him. They got together early in the morning at the Štrand, along the riverbank, where Marko had gone fishing as a boy. The boats rocked in the shallow waters, enveloped in mist and dark, half submerged, the paint peeling, rusty. Schweppes’s car was parked on the access path, its lights off. Marko went down to him on foot, and when Schweppes saw him coming he got out of the car and lit a cigarette.
“Hello.”
“Well, finally.” Schweppes nodded.
“Yes, finally.” Marko glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.
“You’ve been here the whole time?”
“Yup. And you? What brought you back to these parts?”
“A gig. I should have been long gone by now. Yes?”
“Ilinčić.”
“Ilinčić?” Schweppes was quite surprised, and then, barely visibly, he smiled.
“I have ten thousand, no more.”
“This is me paying back my debt. We’re good.”
“He’s alone at the gym, six a.m., every morning.” Marko glanced at his watch. It was exactly five. Schweppes nodded, bemused.
“Ilinčić . . .” While he said the name pictures came back to him of his mentor, the man who brought him into the profession, who was responsible for his initiation, for his first murder. The killing of Kirin, the Osijek policeman, which released the genie from the bottle. When the accusations began raining down about adhesive tape and garages, doubting his loyalty and knowing that only Schweppes knew everything, Ilinčić thought the time had come to get rid of him, but Schweppes was too adept and had an animal’s nose for caution. By then he’d already matured and had spun his own network of people and spies and he learned, in time, of what lay in wait. He found a way to twist the man’s arm and save himself. He didn’t hold this against the man, not much; he might have done the same thing himself, but still this burned him. Ilinčić had been the father he never had—the father he’d killed for, but still, a father, better any father than none. The king was now old, and too many people nursed grudges against him, and now it was up to Schweppes to do him in. There was something poetic in this, almost archetypically just.
“Well, okay, old man . . . I have a flight at noon. That does it, I hope, and we never have to see each other again.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” said Marko. Everything in him wanted to run from that place. “So, take care . . .” he added.
“Oh, I’d like to ask”—Schweppes stopped him—“what were you thinking then?”
“Then?”
“Yes, when you saved the convoy.” He’d never been able to understand.
Marko stood, half facing him, staring pensively at the water. “It was pointless for you to be killed . . . so much senseless death.” He turned away, and Schweppes watched his back. Marko lifted an arm as if in greeting, or farewell, or absolution, but Schweppes still didn’t understand.
An hour after he parted ways with Marko, when he walked by the front desk into Ilinčić’s gym, when Ilinčić spotted him, the expression on his face was a mixture of fear, surprise, disbelief, and a confused smile. Already panting, he was sitting, legs sprawled, at the weight-lifting machine. Schweppes came over to him, arms flung wide, a smile on his face; it had been more than ten years since they’d laid eyes on each other. They’d killed so many people together, done so much evil that neither of them could remain indifferent. There was something warm in the encounter. But something told Ilinčić this was a little early in the day for a visit, that Schweppes was no longer a kid, that he hadn’t found Ilinčić just to say hi. The only thing he couldn’t detect by intuition was why, or rather, why now?
“Hey, old man.” Schweppes was the first to speak. “How long has it been?” Ilinčić was still holding the weight. He didn’t react fast enough.
“To what do I owe the . . . ?” he asked, genuinely surprised.
“Let me help you.” Schweppes stood over him and, straddling him, took the
