Zagreb Cowboy by Alen Mattich Page B

pretty harsh critic if that’s what it came down to.” Anzulović looked hard at della Torre. “Something you’re not telling me about? Who stole the file?”
    Della Torre sat back in his seat and exhaled a long breath of smoke.
    “Strumbić.”
    “Strumbić, eh? Figured it must have been something like that. He’s got more tendrils than a . . .” — Anzulović looked around for inspiration — “. . . than we do. So who wants you dead?”
    “You mean other than a bunch of Bosnians who did the Karlovac job? I don’t know. Strumbić says they were hired by some old Communist who happens to know the management at the Metusalem. It’s a restaurant up in the old town.”
    “I know it.”
    “Can you do me a favour? Can you look up who he runs with? Maybe find out who the old man is so I have a better idea of who hates me enough to have me dead.”
    “I take it you don’t want to come into the office because you’re worried these people in Belgrade might have some connections to the UDBA .”
    “Something like that.”
    “And what are you proposing to do, then?” Anzulović asked.
    “I was wondering what you might think about my taking a little time off. A couple of months. I’ve got some holiday built up. I don’t feel great about being in Zagreb when there are people who want to kill me and they’re being helped by the cops.”
    “Cops? Or a single cop? Are you saying Strumbić is in this with somebody else from the Zagreb force?”
    “No. Just Strumbić. I think.”
    “Okay. It’s important to be clear about these things. Some people want to kill you, possibly ordered by somebody in Belgrade, though we don’t know this for sure, and Strumbić was coerced into helping. Is that working for you?”
    “Yes,” della Torre admitted.
    “I’ll tell you what, Gringo. I’ll go back to the office and do some digging and come back with what I get. You just stay nice and cosy here. I agree with you that you’ll be better off going away for a little while. Nobody’s getting much of anything done here these days anyway. I’ll put it down that you’re on extended leave. I’ll make sure your salary is still paid, whatever good that does. We’ll investigate from this end. It’ll give us something to do now that we’ve been put on ice. Keep the troops motivated. I have no idea what we’ll do if we find out Belgrade’s behind this thing. You’d better hope for Croat independence in that case. Anyway, I’ll be back in a little while. Cool your heels until then.”
    “Sorry, boss.”
    “You should be. And for the record, we never talked about you selling information. Right? Or about how you keep records of things you shouldn’t,” Anzulović said, helping himself to one of della Torre’s cigarettes. “Nice, these.”
    “Want a carton?” della Torre asked.
    “That a bribe?”
    “No.”
    “Shame, because if it was, I wouldn’t feel that I had to pay you back, and I can’t afford American cigarettes,” Anzulović said.
    “It’s a present.”
    “In that case, thank you very much.”
    Della Torre walked to the car with Anzulović and pulled out a carton of Strumbić’s cigarettes. Anzulović held it close.
    Della Torre went back to the café, ordered another coffee, and lit a cigarette. He bored into his little black book, wishing his notes had been more expansive. Centrifuges? They didn’t even seem to have much to do with Yugoslavia. From what he could remember of it, the file looked like an analysis of foreign industry. Okay, so there were a lot of centrifuges, a couple of thousand, and they’d been transhipped through Belgrade, but it was hard to see how a bunch of machines designed to spin blood, as Anzulović had pointed out, would be of interest to anyone. He’d made reference to a couple of oddities about the file in his notebook. The machines appeared to be quite large. They were described as long tubes, and — if the shipping dimensions were anything to go by — more than two