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15
It was nearly eight PM. Gazing down the canyon that is 49th Street from twenty-six floors up I was reminded of Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover often called the “New Yorker’s View of the World.” Steinberg called it “View of the World From 9th Ave.” Hundreds of cities, universities, corporations, and throwers of cocktail parties ripped off his idea.
The piece’s reference point was above the avenue looking west. It showed a detailed Manhattan streetscape, the Hudson River, a wasteland bordered by Jersey, Mexico, Canada and the Pacific Ocean. Nothing of consequence lay in between. Farther to the west Japan, China and Russia rest as insignificant as Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska.
McClain and Fishman agreed to come to the Beekman. I met them in the lobby. Fishman was carrying Mislava’s cinch-top bag.
“I would love a beer, gentlemen.”
We boarded the elevator and rode the twenty-six stories to the cocktail lounge on the roof of the hotel. We took a small table in a tall window looking west down 49th Street into mid-town. I ordered a Brooklyn Pilsner. My companions smiled at our waitress but declined to order.
“That’s Mislava’s bag, isn’t it?”
“Well…” Fishman poured the contents out onto the tale. “Perhaps you can clear up some problems we have with that very thing.”
“No gun there?”
“Gun’s gone to ballistics. Everything else is here, though.”
Strewn on the table were tissues in a cellophane package, a few inexpensive make up items, pill bottles, balled up gum wrappers by the score, a cell phone, contact lens case and cleaning solution, some currency rolled tight and wrapped with a thick rubber band, photographs, some whole and some torn and a denim wallet with the Old Navy logo.
Fishman drew my attention to a copy of the photograph I had received when I agreed to locate Ivana Grdesic. He spun it on the table so it faced me.
“Do you know the women in this picture?”
“I do. The one on the left is Mislava Hrvat, my former client.”
“Your left or my left,” Fishman asked.
“Sorry. Mine. She’s much heavier in this picture. And her hair’s different, too. It is she, though.”
My beer arrived in an elegant, heavy-bottomed crystal pilsner glass. I excused myself, raised the glass to the detectives and took a swallow. Perfect. I cleaned the residual foam from my upper lip with my lower.
“The other is Ivana Grdesic, the woman I was commissioned to locate in Portland.”
“So this one is Grdesic?” McClain was tapping on the photo.
“Right.”
McClain picked up and unfolded the wallet. He pushed it across the table to me. Fishman sat back in his chair and looked around the room. He coveted my beer. I know he did. McClain rested on his left elbow straightening his tie with his right hand. He crossed his legs beneath the edge of the table.
“Any ideas about this?”
The billfold contained an identification card with a slightly out of focus color Polaroid picture. The card had been issued by a school in Northern Ireland and bore the name Mary Francis Flaherty. The picture was of Mislava Hrvat.
“What I know probably won’t clarify anything for you guys. When Ivana Grdesic’s body washed ashore the Boston papers mentioned that she went – or had gone - by that name. I wasn’t in the country at the time so I don’t know the context in which that information was released. I am sure Bevilaqua at the Massachusetts state cops would have some idea.”
“We expect to hear from him tomorrow, but flip to the next card, Mr. O’Keefe. Tell us what you think.”
“But,” I was now tapping the picture, “Why Mislava has an ID with that name…I have no idea. I don’t know anything about that or the school in, where is it, Portrush, Northern Ireland?”
“Flip the card again Mr. O’Keefe.”
One of the differences between the Serb culture and that of the Croats is the alphabet each uses. The Serbs, with ties to Russia and Orthodoxy, use the Cyrillic. The Croats, mostly Roman Catholic, write with western letters. The third card in the stack in the Old Navy wallet was another ID card. The language was Croat. It contained another Polaroid photo of Mislava Hrvat, this one in sharp focus.
“Hmm, wow. I can’t explain this either, gentlemen. Can you?”
“Not yet.”
The identification card, the right upper corner of which carried the image of the woman who blew her own brains out in a dingy delicatessen earlier today as I lay inert at her feet, said it belonged to Ivana Grdesic. So did the next one in the plastic-coated stack. And the next one.
“May I see her phone? She made a call from my car. Perhaps the phone saves the numbers of calls she made.”
“Certainly,” said Fishman as he pushed the silver phone towards me. He sounded like Curly Howard when he said soitenly.
If this phone had that feature I couldn’t figure out how to gain access to it.
“Whyn’t you just hit redial,” McClain offered.
I just hit redial. It rang six times.
“You have reached the Croatian Consulate in New York City. Our business hours are Monday…”
“Gentleman, she didn’t call the Croatian Mission, she called their consulate.
The two NYPD detectives declared themselves off duty with a “whadaya say” followed by shoulder shrugs and a “yeah, sure…why not?” McClain pulled back his starched cotton sleeve to consult his round-faced analog watch. Fishman rolled his left wrist palm up, angled it to the light and squinted at his plastic digital. McClain called in.
“Fish” Fishman swept up the contents of the cinch-topped bag with that forearm into a neat little wave in front of him. He placed the items back in the bag while McClain got the attention of the waitress. He ordered a round by making a circle with his index finger pointing down at the table.
“So, you called Bevilaqua then?” I asked.
“Umm. And Whitney up in Portland. And we have a call in at the Croat Mission. We are waiting to hear back from all three. I guess we’ll have to call the Croat consulate tomorrow, right Fish?”
Fish shrugged. McClain took off his silk tie, rolled it around his hand and put it in his jacket’s flapped pocket.
“For whom did you ask at the Mission?”
“Anyone named Grdesic or Hrvat.” McClain pronounced them pretty well.
“It’s funny,” I said. “ In Croat Hrvat means Croat. It’s is as if you called the Mexican Mission and asked for Mr. Mehicano.”
I thought it was interesting. I was alone.
“Anyways, Mr. O’Keefe…”
“Fintan, please.”
“Sure, Fintan…seems those are both rather common names among Croatians. I had to ask if there was anyone with either name who suffered a family tragedy recently. The community relations woman said she thought not but she’d find out. Fish and I will pay them a visit tomorrow.”
“Do we have any idea who the guy in the deli was? I can’t help but think that had someone in any sort of official Croatian capacity been shot in the mid-thorax in midtown in mid-afternoon amid the work-a-day legions they’d know about it.”
“What are you, a poet? Fish, you hear that?”
“He’s a PI: a Poetic Investigator.” Fishman raised his glass while elongating the final syllable. It came out taaaaaah.
“The guy’s name was Niko Matulich,” said McClain. “He didn’t work for the Mission…at least the CommRel woman didn’t know him and couldn’t find him in the directory. He lived on Staten Island. Had a ferry ticket, a New York driver’s license, credit cards, and a fair amount of US and only US currency on him, so he seems to be a local. There are detectives down Staten Island looking into the guy for us as we speak.”
“Man, this is some good beer, ain’t it Frankie? Never had one before. And I live in Brooklyn, for Christ’s sakes.” Detective Fishman was holding his to the light. “Pretty, too.”
“It’s good, yeah, it’s very good, Fish. My son-in-law’s into the different beers. Me, I’m pretty much a Budweiser on the couch kind of guy, but I know a little about wine. He goes on brewery tours, makes his own and things, you know. It’s all mostly lost on me, but this is tasty.”
I ordered another for each of us.
“You guys mind if I eat something? I didn’t get any lunch.”
16
The entity known as Yugoslavia has had a number of different incarnations. The one that followed the fall of the Communist bloc and the death of Marshall Tito, once known around his neighborhood as Josep Broz, was more a creation of outsiders hoping to foster a little stability among its testy republics than something for which its citizens had clambered. This lack of internal commitment to the idea of Yugoslavia, coupled with what is perhaps the best-armed civilian population on the planet, seasoned with competing nationalistic aspirations and the grim-faced, itchy trigger finger mistrust only religious and ethnic differences – real and imagined - can generate made this reality of Yugoslavia folly.
The rhetoric, often as inflammatory and destructive as Mr. Molotov’s cocktail, hasn’t changed very much in the last one hundred plus years. Nor has the clockwork conveyer of the dead.
Among the Serbs, the Croats, many Albanians, most Montenegrins, and Kosovars sharing the Balkans it seems that attaining one’s own nation’s goals has to come at the expense of one’s neighbor attaining his. The grudges and lockstep hatred are as deep as a mountain glen at dusk and as wide as a cartridge belt draped across the narrow chest and bony shoulder of a fifteen year-old boy.
When Croatia declared herself independent of the Yugoslavia that was in the throes of self-immolation in the early 1990s, many western countries, including Germany and the United States of America, recognized her right to do so immediately. Just like that there was a sovereign nation known as Croatia backed by some impressive international muscle. Problem: not everyone living in Croatia was Croatian.
The Serbs, both in areas they controlled and ones they did not, saw it as a plot of the newly slapped-back-together Germany to gain in peacetime what they could not by conquest four decades earlier. Serbian politicians even warned of the rise of a Fourth Reich.
The World War II snuggle-up of the Croats with the Nazis still informed and shaped perhaps more than any other single factor the decisions each of the groups made about their Croat cohabiters in the region. A freestanding Croatia made her non-Croat citizens more than a little ill at ease.
Croats blamed the Serbs for most things bad in the world. The Serbs shared the tunnel vision, they just stood at other end. The same tunnel held trains, big long trains running headlong in both directions. The bad feelings bled all over the other groups as well. No one felt safe. Few were safe.
And everyone had guns.
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