Zilic began to slip any last vestiges of his fortune beyond reach, and to prepare his own departure. Through the autumn of 1999 the protests against Milosevic grew and grew.
In a personal interview in November 1999 Zilic begged the dictator to observe the writing on the wall, conduct his own coup d’état while he had a loyal army to do it, and do away with any further pretence at democracy or opposition parties. But Milosevic was by then in his own private world where his popularity was undiminished.
Zilic left his presence wondering yet again at the phenomenon that when men who have once held supreme power start to lose it, they go to pieces in every sense. Courage, will-
power, perception, decisiveness, even the ability to recognize reality – all are washed away as the tide sweeps away a sandcastle. By December Milosevic was not exercising power; he was clinging to it. Zilic completed his preparations.
His fortune was no less than 500 million dollars; he had a place to go where he would be safe. Arkan was dead, executed for falling out with Milosevic. The principal ethnic cleansers of Bosnia, Karadzic and General Mladic of the Srebrenitsa massacre, were being hunted like animals through Republika Serpska where they had taken refuge. Others had already been snatched for the new war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. Milosevic was a broken reed.
As a matter of record, Milosevic declared on 27 July 2000 the coming presidential elections for 24 September. Despite copious rigging and a refusal to accept the outcome, he still lost. Crowds stormed the Parliament and installed his successor. Among the first acts of the new regime was to start investigating the Milosevic period: the murders, the twenty billion missing dollars.
The former tyrant holed himself up in his villa in the plush suburb of Dedinje. On 1 April 2001 President Kostunica was good and ready. The arrest moved in at last.
But Zoran Zilic was long gone. In January 2000 he just disappeared. He said no goodbyes and took no luggage. He went as one departing for a new life in a different world, where the old gewgaws would have no use. So he left them all behind.
He took nothing and no one with him, save his ultra-loyal personal bodyguard, a hulking giant called Kulac. Within a week he had settled in his new hideout, which he had spent over a year preparing to receive him.
No one in the intelligence community paid attention to his departure, save one. A quiet, secretive man in America noted the gangster’s new abode with considerable interest.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Monk
It was the dream, always the dream. He could not be rid of it and it would not let him go. Night after night he would wake screaming, wet with sweat, and his mother would rush in to hold him and try to bring him comfort.
He was a puzzle and a worry to both his parents, for he could not or would not describe his nightmare, but his mother was convinced he never had such dreams until his return from Bosnia.
The dream was always the same. It was the face in the slime, a pale disc ringed with lumps of excrement, some bovine, some human, screaming for mercy, begging for life. He could understand the English, as could Zilic, and words like ‘no, no, please, don’t’ are pretty international.
But the men with the poles laughed and pushed again. And the face came back, until Zilic rammed his pole into the open mouth and pushed downwards until the boy was dead under there somewhere. Then he would wake, shouting and crying, until his mother wrapped him in her arms, telling him it was all right, he was home in his own room at Senjak.
But he could not explain what he had done, what he had been a part of, when he thought he was doing his patriotic duty to Serbia.
His father was less comforting, claiming he was a hard-working man who needed his sleep. By the autumn of 1995 Milan Rajak had his first session with a trained psychotherapist.
He attended twice a week at the grey-rendered five-storey psychiatric hospital on Palmoticeva Street, the best in Belgrade. But the experts at the Laza Lazarevic could not help either, because he dared not confess.
Relief, he was told, comes with purging, but catharsis requires confession. Milosevic was still in power, but far more frightening were the feral eyes of Zoran Zilic that morning in Banja Luka when he said he wanted to quit and go home to Belgrade. Much more terrifying were the whispered words of mutilation and death if he ever opened his mouth.
His father was a dedicated atheist, raised under the communist regime of Tito and a lifelong loyal servant of the Party. But his mother had kept her faith in the Serbian Orthodox church, part of the eastern communion with the Greek and Russian churches. Mocked by her husband and son, she had gone to her morning service down the years. By the end of 1995, Milan started to accompany her.
He began to find some comfort amid the ritual and the litany, the chants and the incense. The horror seemed to ebb in the church by the football ground, just three blocks from where they lived, and where his mother always went.
In 1996 he flunked his law exams to the outrage and despair of his father who stormed up and down the house for two days. If the news from the academy was not to his taste, what his son had to say took his breath away.
‘I do not want to be a lawyer, father. I want to enter the Church.’
It took time but Rajak Senior calmed down and tried to come to terms with his changed son. At least the priesthood was a profession of sorts. Not given to wealth, but respectable. A man could still hold his head up and say, ‘My son is in the Church, you know.’
The priesthood itself, he discovered, would take years of study to achieve, most of that time in a seminary, but the son had other ideas. He wanted to live in seclusion and without delay. He wanted to become a monk, repudiating everything material in favour of the simple life.
Ten miles southeast of Belgrade he found what he wanted: the small monastery of Saint Stephen in the hamlet of Slanci. It contains no more than a dozen brothers under the authority of the abbot or Iguman. They work in the fields and barns of their own farm, grow their own food, accept donations from a few tourists and pilgrims, meditate and pray. There was a waiting list to join and no chance of jumping it.
Fate intervened in the meeting with the Iguman, Abbot Vasilije. He and Rajak Senior stared at each other in amazement. Despite the full black beard, flecked with grey, Rajak recognized the same Goran Tomic who had been at school with him forty years before. The abbot agreed to meet his son and discuss with him a possible career in the Church.
The abbot’s shrewd intelligence divined that his former schoolmate’s son was a young man torn by some inner turmoil that could not find peace in the outer world. He had seen it before. He could not create a vacancy for an instant monk, he pointed out, but men from the city occasionally joined the monks for the purpose of a religious ‘retreat’.
In the summer of 1996, with the Bosnian war over, Milan Rajak came to Slanci on extended retreat to grow tomatoes and cucumbers, to meditate and to pray. The dream ebbed away.