‘But the nice kid . . . he had a name?’
‘I never heard it.’
‘We are talking about a lot of money here, Dusko. You never see him again, you never see me again, you have enough to start up in Sarajevo after the war. The kid’s name.’
‘He paid the day he left. Like he was ashamed of the people he was with. He came back and paid by cheque.’
‘It bounced? Came back? You have it?’
‘No, it was honoured. Yugoslav dinars. From Belgrade. Settlement in full.’
‘So, no cheque?’
‘It will be in the Belgrade bank. Somewhere, but probably destroyed by now. But I wrote down his ID card number, in case it bounced.’
‘Where? Where did you write it?’
‘On the back of an order pad. In ballpoint.’
The Tracker traced it. The pad, for taking long and complicated drinks orders that could not be memorized, only had two sheets left. Another day and it would have been thrown away. In ballpoint on the cardboard back was a seven-figure number and two capital letters. Eight weeks old, still legible.
The Tracker donated a thousand of Mr Edmond’s dollars and left. The shortest way out of there was north into Croatia and a plane from Zagreb airport.
The old six-province federal republic of Yugoslavia had been disintegrating in blood, chaos and cruelty for five years. In the north, Slovenia was the first to go, luckily without bloodshed. In the south, Macedonia had escaped into separate independence. But at the centre, the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was trying to use every brutality in the book to cling on to Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro and his own native Serbia. He had lost Croatia but his appetite for power and war remained undiminished.
The Belgrade into which the Tracker had arrived in 1995 was still untouched. Its desolation would be provoked in the Kosovo war, yet to come.
His London office had advised there was one private detective agency in Belgrade, headed up by a former senior police officer whom they had used before. He had endowed his agency with the not too original name of Chandler and it was easy to find.
‘I need,’ the Tracker told the investigator, Dragan Stojic, ‘to trace a young guy for whom I have no name but only the number of his state ID card.’
Stojic grunted.
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing, so far as I know. He saw something. Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘That’s it. A name?’
‘Then I would like to talk to him. I have no car and no mastery of Serbo-Croat. He may speak English. Maybe not.’
Stojic grunted again. It appeared to be his speciality. He had apparently read every Philip Marlowe novel and seen every movie. He was trying to be Robert Mitchum in The Big Sleep but at five feet four inches and bald, he was not quite there.
‘My terms . . .’ he began.
The Tracker eased another ten hundred-dollar bills across the desk. ‘I need your undivided attention,’ he murmured.
Stojic was entranced. The line could have come straight from Farewell, My Lovely.
‘You got it,’ he said.
To give credit where credit is due, the dumpy ex-inspector did not waste time. Belching black smoke, his Yugo saloon, with the Tracker in the passenger seat, took them across town to the district of Konjarnik where the corner of Ljermontova Street is occupied by the police headquarters of Belgrade. It was, and remains, a big, ugly block in brown and yellow, like a huge angular hornet on its side.
‘You better stay here,’ said Stojic. He was gone half an hour and must have shared some conviviality with an old colleague, for there was the plummy odour of slivovitz on his breath. But he had a slip of paper.
‘That card belongs to Milan Rajak. Aged twenty-four. Listed as a law student. Father a lawyer, successful, upper middle-class family. Are you sure you’ve got the right man?’
‘Unless he has a doppelganger, he and an ID card bearing his photograph were in Banja Luka two months ago.’