The Knights of Zagreb

I met Yuri in Gaza city, at the opening ceremony of Palestinian National Television. This was in the garage below Chairman Arafat’s mansion. It all seems a long time ago now, though it is only six or seven years. At the time I was with the World Bank and Yuri was working at the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv. Since then, we have both gone through big career changes. I needed to spend more time in England, and so I became a financial journalist. Yuri needed to earn more money, so he left the diplomatic service and took a contract with the United Nations administration in Bosnia. That is a terrible job, believe me, but Yuri is a single parent with a fourteen-year-old son at an English boarding school. He has to make the fees each term.

My son is almost the same age, and also at private school, though this was his mother’s decision. Evan lives in Coventry with Sally and her husband, and I see him on long weekends and holidays. Although I moved back to England to be closer to him, we seem to spend all our time together in foreign countries -wherever the low-cost airlines want to take us.

A case in point: a nineteenth-century Viennese-style hotel in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.

The choice of destination was pure Yuri. We still exchange e-mails fairly regularly, and when I mentioned I was looking for a cheapish weekend break, he wrote to say he was spending the holidays in Zagreb with Misha, his son: would it be a conducive plan to hook up, the four of us together? A week later, I was running around London, collecting Misha from Waterloo station, Evan from Euston and getting us all to Stansted airport via Liverpool Street. Yuri met us at Zagreb airport in a UN Landcruiser. This was eight o’clock at night and I was already exhausted. When Yuri told us he had good news and bad news, I admit I expected something seriously askew. The bad news, we would all be sharing together. The good news, he had booked us into the presidential suite.

The presidential suite, even at a knock-down price and with communist-era plumbing, is still very impressive. There are three bedrooms, a large salon and a smaller study with a PC and an Internet connection. We asked the hotel to put a Z-bed in the study, and Yuri told Misha that was where he was sleeping.

We make the oddest pseudo-family unit. Yuri is basically a soldier: military school, army, picked for spy school and then the diplomatic service, now with the UN. I guess I am an academic: graduate school, World Bank, now a journalist planning a book on the rise and fall of neo-liberal economic theory. Actually, as I write our CVs, I see there is a similarity: we both spent our entire lives in the public sector, in schools and in government jobs, within NGOs and international bodies. My knowledge of business is entirely voyeuristic and theoretical. Unless Yuri has undergone a personality transformation and taken up smuggling or prostitution – still the growth areas in Bosnia, I hear – he knows even less about the business world than I do.

Our sons are more different. Misha is incredibly tall and awkward, with some acne problems and strident opinions on everything. Evan is average height, monosyllabic but with a measure of urban cool. This is not a fond father speaking, I know that urban cool is not a universal currency. But I imagine it plays well in Coventry, even at private school. And I am certain that Misha has a rotten time at his public school. He complains that he is surrounded by idiots.

‘Do you tell them that?’

‘Of course I tell them.’

‘What do they say?’

‘They call me Commie, because I was born in Russia. Or they call me Psycho.’

I know I shouldn’t ask. But I do. ‘Why do they call you Psycho?’

‘Because I lose my temper.’

I shoot Evan a look, praying that he doesn’t do anything to annoy this angry, gangling geek. A geek with a punch. At that moment, Yuri comes out of the bathroom, shrugging as he tells us he cannot do anything about the noise.

‘Let us agree now. If we use the toilet at night, we don’t flush until the morning. You understand that, Misha?’

‘Of course I understand it. I’m not stupid.’

So the holiday begins.

The toilet hisses and fills and empties and gurgles: imagine a North Korean water-cooled nuclear reactor, in typhoon season. It is three o’clock in the morning when I pull on a T-shirt and trousers and patter through to our presidential salon. I stare out over Zagreb: the moon is almost full, lighting up the grey stone of the Austrian quarter, all chunky square buildings and boulevards striped with shadows and crossed with tram lines. I look at it for ten minutes and decide there is no chance of me falling asleep in the next few hours, so I return to the bedroom, put on my shoes and go down to ask the porter for directions to a bar.

‘Are you in the presidential suite?’

‘Yes. But I’m not the President.’

‘Who are the other men?’

‘The older one’s my bodyguard. He’s ex-KGB.’

‘And the younger men?’

‘The tall one is my valet.’

‘Valet? What’s this?’

‘A manservant. Everyone in England has one.’

‘No way, mate. I lived in England for six years. I didn’t meet anyone with a manservant. What about the other guy?’

I decide to start telling the truth. ‘He’s my son.’

‘Is that right? I like him. I asked what he’s listening to on his headphones, he says the Grateful Dead.’

‘I’m very proud of him. So what about a bar? A quiet one, I just want to sit and read a book for an hour – no girls, no music. OK?’

The bar is in the corner of what looks like an old public building. I find music and girls inside, but they don’t come as a package: it’s not a strip club or a brothel. There are blinds on the windows and a mix of old rock tracks on the tape deck. I order a whisky soda, take a table against the back wall and start reading my comic.

The guy sits down and says, ‘Ah, English. You speak English?’

I have been reading quietly for about twenty minutes, so I guess I have had my share of peace. As I look up, the comic tilts forwards in my fingers and the front cover falls into the shadows. The man had been trying to read the title but now it is hidden.

‘What’s that: The légume of… what? The légumes of doom? It’s about mutant carrots infected with radioactivity? I love comics, all of them. Superman, Spiderman, Turkman.’

‘It’s league, not légume. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen .’ I lift the cover up, so he can see for himself. ‘I brought a novel with me but ended up hating it, so I borrowed this off my son. It’s about a group of Victorian literary superheroes, like the Fabulous Four or the Justice League of America.’

‘I think that’s Fantastic Four, my friend, unless you read the queer version.’ He clicked his fingers towards the barman, signalling ‘two the same’, before turning back to me. ‘You don’t mind if I join you. I remember I read about this League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in a film magazine and it set me thinking, you know. Ideas, ideas, ideas. You can’t bottle them, but if you’re smart, maybe they’re worth something. My name is Ðuro, by the way. Remind me, the Extraordinary Gentlemen, yeah? Who you got? Captain Nemo and Jekyll and Hyde?’

‘The Invisible Man, Allan Quartermain and Mina Murray.’

‘I never heard of Quartermain,’ he said, lifting the two whisky sodas off the waiter’s tray. ‘And Miss Mina Murray is no gentleman.’

‘No. She’s a vampire. Salut .’ We lift our glasses to each other and once the whisky has settled in our stomachs we start talking. I say, ‘You know what’s odd: that I used to read Alan Moore’s comics at the age my son is now. I used to read Judge Dredd, remember him? The idea that Evan reads the same guy twenty-five years later, it’s as though time has stopped, there’s no progress any more. Even the music he listens to is twenty and thirty years old.’

‘If something’s a classic, then it’s a classic. And maybe Alan Moore gets better with every passing year.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe if I compared Judge Dredd and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen side by side, I would see a development. But I don’t know, they seem on a par. What was your idea? Was it for a comic book?’

‘Oh yeah. My idea. I want to call it The Knights of Zagreb : four guys with superpowers and they’re all from Zagreb.’

‘Is this going to be a story about Zrinski and Frankopan?’

Đuro laughs. ‘You did the museum tour already? But no. Forget about Zrinski and Frankopan. My idea, we concentrate on the villains, not on the heroes. The League of Extraordinary Villainy . Or my original title, The Knights of Zagreb .’

‘Who are the villains?’

‘Number one, I think… have you seen the film The Usual Suspects ? The villain is named Keyser Soze, and he comes from the Balkans. After his family is raped and murdered, he is transformed into the Devil. And, as the poster says, his greatest trick is to persuade the world that he does not exist. So, again, number one, I would take him: Keyser Soze.’

‘Is that a Croatian name?’

‘Are you serious? It’s a fake name. Like a nom de guerre . Like my second knight. His name is Dimitrios, which might be Greek. Or maybe Dima, which could make him Serbian. Or maybe he’s from some place like Anatolia, with a Russian father. Whatever. I don’t know if you ever heard of him, he’s in a movie called The Mask of Dimitrios , a black-and-white film with the same cast as The Maltese Falcon . They left out Humphrey Bogart, but almost everyone else is there. Dimitrios is a mystery criminal with hundreds of names but none of them real. He may be dead, he may be alive, no one knows. There are only the stories, as he roams the world committing different crimes. In the film, he comes to Zagreb to kill a guy.’

‘So Dimitrios and Keyser Soze. Who else?’ Then I remember the American TV programme that finished the previous week. ‘What about the terrorist guy from 24 ?’

‘You’re reading my mind. What is that guy’s name, anyway?’

‘Well, it’s Dennis Hopper, but I can’t remember the character’s name. I’ll look it up when I get back to the hotel.’

‘So you’re interested?’

‘What do you mean, interested? I wouldn’t say I’m bored.’

‘Are you interested enough to invest in the concept?’

‘Sure. I’ll write you a cheque from the Bank of Broken Dreams.’

When I get back to the suite, Misha is awake and on the computer. I ask whether he can look up the website for 24 and, looking over his shoulder, read that Dennis Hopper plays Victor Dražen, a man who ‘by all accounts does not exist’. The main criteria for a Balkan villain seem to be a pseudonym, a mysterious background and the possibility that the character does not exist: Keyser Soze, Dimitrios and now Victor Dražen. The perfect addition to the Knights of Zagreb.

I go to bed and soon I’m dreaming about the league and the kind of villainy they could get up to.

As we go down to breakfast the next morning, Yuri tells me that he feels as though the staff are staring at us.

I shrug. ‘We’re in the presidential suite. We’re going to attract a certain amount of attention.’

‘I told them we were nothing special. Just a group of friends on holiday.’

‘But then I told them you were my bodyguard.’ I hand him my sunglasses. ‘Can you put these on and try and look tough?’

Yuri takes the glasses, telling me they’re better than his anyway. Misha and Evan are ahead of us, talking together and getting along better than I ever expected. We are going to have breakfast in an Austrian-style coffee house – Yuri swears it is the best place in Zagreb. We cross a main street, out of shadows and into bright sunlight. There is a moment when the boys disappear into the whiteness, and as the contrast returns the whole world has changed. Armed police block the road.

There has been a bank robbery – we missed it by ten minutes. Yuri soon has all the details: there were three men armed with assault rifles and a fourth man drove the getaway car: a Landcruiser. Yuri nods his head. ‘Good car.’ The UN loves these four-wheel-drives so much they buy them by the thousand. Clearly they are also useful in Zagrebian bank robberies because the thieves got clean away. They just smashed through the traffic, putting several drivers of smaller cars in hospital. No one had been killed, but it was apparently a savage robbery. Aside from the traffic accidents, a guard had been beaten unconscious.

That night, I sit in the bar in the corner with Ðuro and he tells me that such a well-organised job could only have been carried out by the Knights of Zagreb.

I say, ‘They’re not real, you know.’

‘But the organisation and the execution, they were absolutely perfect. These were not ordinary criminals.’

‘You invented the Knights of Zagreb yesterday, to try and prise money out of me.’

‘Fine. I’m not saying you have to believe me.’

‘And there were four of them anyway. You only have three men in the Knights of Zagreb.’

‘No. There are four. I just didn’t mention the last guy yet. The driver.’

‘The driver? Please. Which one is he? The super-villain with the power to use a stick shift in tense situations?’

‘Evel Knievel.’

That shuts me up. For about three seconds. ‘Was Evel Knievel from Zagreb?’

Ðuro shrugs. ‘What do you think?’

‘Is that the rule? If they have a ridiculous name, then they come from the Balkans?’

‘Hey, I don’t invent the names. What do I know? I’m just from Zagreb. It’s English and American and French guys who make up these characters.’

‘Aha.’ I feel as if I have just won a point. ‘You admit they’re fictional. So how did they rob a bank today?’

I lose my key some time during the night. It is too late to knock and risk waking everyone up: although I’m sure that Misha will be on the computer. I take the elevator back down to reception and ask the night porter to let me in with the master key. As he returns upstairs with me, he asks why I don’t wake up my valet.

‘What else is he there for?’

‘I’m scared of him. Scared to wake him. Scared to sack him. We call him Psycho.’

‘Get your bodyguard to take him out.’ The night porter mimes cocking a gun.

‘Good idea.’

The suite is dark and I go to bed without switching the light on. I drank four large whiskies in the bar and I sleep so well that I am groggy when Yuri comes in and begins questioning me about the wall safe. Eventually, I understand that the safe is open and our passports have been stolen.

‘Where were you last night?’

‘In a bar.’

‘Did you bring anyone back?’

‘Not that I noticed. What are we going to do, call the police?’

The police take a couple of hours to arrive. Two of them interrogate the night porter, while the third policeman slumps against the desk and offers Yuri and me cigarettes. I feel they are wasting their time with the porter: he had a pass key to the room, but only Yuri and I had keys to the safe. If the porter is a suspect at all, it is because he was the man who recommended the bar to me. Who knows, maybe he telephoned ahead, warning them that a fool was heading their way.

Yuri translates the porter’s replies for me. ‘He says he knows nothing. He thinks it was an inside job.’

The porter is shooting meaningful looks at Misha, who, fortunately, seems to be oblivious.

And that’s almost it. The story of Zagreb. The police go through the motions, even questioning the guy working the bar where I had spent the previous two nights. Yuri tells me that the barman recognises my face but doesn’t recall that I had any drinking companions. I was just a lonely drunk. I could complain, but true or not, his story brings the investigation to a close.

The next day, we visit the police station and the police provide us with an incident report. Evan and I will apply for replacement passports when we return to the UK. Yuri calls a friend in the Russian embassy in Belgrade and has replacement Russian passports Fed-Exed to the hotel by the morning.

Our flight tickets can only be reissued at the airport. Apparently, it’s no problem, we need only turn up an hour early. Yuri drives us in the Landcruiser and tells us he will wait until we are safely on our way back to Britain. The woman at the airline desk accepts my credit card as proof of identity and, while new tickets are being printed, she hands me an envelope.

‘This arrived yesterday, Mr Thin.’

My name is hand written in hurried capitals: James Josef Thin. I think, how odd, to write my full name like that. Even if Joseph is spelled wrong.

I tear open the envelope and inside are rough photocopies of four mugshots, laid out on a sheet together. I recognise Kevin Spacey and Dennis Hopper, photographs taken from their roles in The Usual Suspects and 24 , and later learn that the third man is Zachary Scott, the actor who played Dimitrios in A Coffin for Dimitrios . The last photograph is mine and underneath, in neat block capitals, is the name Ðuro Drušković aka Josef Thin. He has used the photograph from my passport, which I guess is now his passport.

Across the top of the sheet of paper, the words The Zagrebian Knights are formed ransom-note-style in letters cut out of a newspaper.

I wonder whether to keep the information to myself but I am the type who would crack under pressure. So as we drink our last Croatian coffees and wait for the boarding information, I show Yuri and our boys the photocopy. Misha wants to go straight back to the police, but I am inclined to forget it. Yuri and Evan both side with me. As I tear The Knights of Zagreb into small pieces, Yuri says, ‘It’s maybe a joke. It’s maybe a can of worms. Leave it half open, like that.’