‘The police?’
‘No, the men.’
‘Which men?’
‘They came back. Two nights later. They made me sit in the corner, there. They searched everywhere. They took everything he had had.’
‘There is nothing left at all of what he was working on for Mr Kobac?’
‘Only the photo. I had forgotten about the photo.’
‘Please tell me about the photo.’
It came out in small details, all via Anna, from language to language. Three days before he died, Srechko the cub reporter had attended a New Year party and red wine had been spilled on his denim jacket. His mother had put it in the laundry bag for washing later.
When he was dead there was no point. She too forgot about the laundry bag and the gangsters never thought to ask. When she was making a pile of her dead son’s clothes the wine-stained denim jacket fell out. She felt the pockets quickly to see if her son had forgotten any money, but felt something semi-stiff. It was a photograph.
‘Do you still have it? May I see it?’ asked Dexter.
She nodded and crept away like a mouse to a sewing box in the corner. She came back with the photo.
It was of a man, caught unawares, who had seen the photographer at the last minute. He was trying to raise his outspread hand to cover his face, but t
he shutter had clicked just in time. He was full-face, upright, in a short-sleeved shirt and slacks.
The picture was in black and white, not of professional clarity, but with enlargement and enhancement was as good as he was ever likely to get. He recalled the teenage picture and the cocktail party photo he had found in New York and carried in the lining of his attaché case. They were all a bit grainy, but it was the same man. It was Zilic.
‘I would like to buy this picture Mrs Petrovic,’ he said. She shrugged and said something in Serbo-Croat.
‘She says you may have it. It is of no interest to her. She does not know who he is,’ said Anna.
‘One last question. Just before he died, did Srechko go away for a while?’
‘Yes, in December. He was away a week. He would not say where he had been, but he had a sunburn on his nose.’
She escorted them to her door and the landing exposed to the winds, which led to the nonfunctioning lift and the stairwell. Anna went first. When she was out of earshot Dexter turned to the Serbian mother who had also lost her child, and spoke gently in English.
‘You can’t understand a word I say, lady, but if I ever get this swine into a slammer in the States, it’s partly for you. And it’s on the house.’
Of course, she did not understand but she responded to the smile and said ‘Hvala’. In a day in Belgrade he had learned that it means ‘thank you’.
He had instructed the taxi to wait. He dropped Anna, clutching her two hundred dollars, at her home in the suburbs and on the way back to the centre studied the picture again.
Zilic was standing on what looked like an open expanse of concrete or tarmac. Behind him were big low buildings like warehouses. Over one of the buildings a flag floated, extended by the breeze, but part of it was off the picture.
There was something else sticking into vision out of frame, but he could not work it out. He tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder.
‘Do you have a magnifying glass?’ He did not understand, but elaborate pantomime cleared up the mystery. He nodded. He kept one in the glove compartment for studying his A–Z city road map if need be.
The long, flat object jutting into the picture from the left came clear. It was the wingtip of an aeroplane, but no more than six feet off the ground. So, not an airliner, but a smaller craft.
Then he recognized the buildings in the background. Not warehouses, hangars. Not the huge structures needed for sheltering airliners, but the sort needed for private planes, executive jets, whose tailfins rarely top more than thirty feet. The man was on a private airfield or the executive section of an airport.
They helped him at the hotel. Yes, there were several cybercafés in Belgrade, all open until late. He dined in the snack bar and took a taxi to the nearest. When he was logged on to his favourite search engine, he asked for all the flags of the world.
The flag fluttering above the hangars in the dead reporter’s photo was only in monochrome, but it was clear the flag had three horizontal stripes of which the bottom one was so dark it looked like black. If not, then a very dark blue. He opted for black.
As he ran through the world’s flags, he noted that a good half of them had some kind of logo, crest or device superimposed on the stripes. The one he sought had none. That cut the choice down to the other half.