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plot a murder, with ruthless indifference to his wishes or his life. Somehow he’d survived when others had perished. And now he was left waiting to see where the forces beyond his control would drive him next.
    The view of Zagreb’s rooftops drew him away again. He was fond of the city, the pretty medieval centre, with its sagging wood-framed houses, surrounded by the well-ordered Hapsburg lower town with its ochre buildings and grand provincial architecture. The utilitarian tower blocks of the Communist-built new town, along with most of the other monstrosities of the new order, were thankfully out of sight.
    There was a solitary socialist encroachment he didn’t resent: the impossibly tall chimney of the Savica power plant. He felt a perverse pride in its narrow elegance, its tip banded red and white like layers of ash and ember on a cigarette. To him it was a gesture of defiance by a poor, backward eastern European city; it was as if Zagreb had looked to London with its Big Ben, Paris with its Eiffel Tower, and New York with its Chrysler Building and said, Smoke this.
    He picked up the telephone and dialled. There was a dead tone. He waited a minute and then punched in the numbers again, and at last the phone rang. It was still ringing when he heard a knock at the door. He put down the receiver.
    A young lieutenant poked his head into the room. “Captain — sorry, I mean Major.” Della Torre’s promotion was already two months old, but people still forgot. “There’s a lady here. She insists on seeing you. I tried to deal with it, but she’s pretty forceful.”
    The woman pushed past the lieutenant before della Torre could respond. She was as thin and as severe as a Roman matron, her hair piled up in tight curls and cut short at the sides. Her pale, almost lead-white complexion merely added to the effect.
    “Major, is it? Well, Major della Torre, you are a difficult man to track down. No one is at the old UDBA offices, and when I went to police headquarters, the desk sergeant pretended he knew neither me nor you. I had to pull rank,” she said, slightly out of breath.
    There were spots of red in her cheeks from the eight-storey climb to the office. Two of the building’s three elevators had broken down, their German manufacturer reluctant to send parts on credit to a government that no other country recognized. Clearly, she’d been too impatient to wait.
    “That’s fine, Lieutenant,” della Torre said, standing. “Mrs. Strumbić is of course welcome.”
    The young officer made a half-hearted effort at a salute and then sidled out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
    “Won’t you sit, Mrs. Strumbić? Can I offer you a drink?” della Torre asked.
    He felt ashamed for not having visited her, at least informally. Guilt had made it hard for him to face up to the man’s wife. He’d sacrificed Strumbić to save three people from the Americans. And to save himself.
    Officially, he had been told to steer clear of anything that had to do with the Šipan killings. Both he and Julius Strumbić were implicated in the events. But Strumbić had gone missing, and as a colleague, della Torre had a moral duty to the man’s wife.
    As the daughter of the fearsome and now dead chief of Zagreb’s uniformed police, she knew the job could be dangerous. Her stoicism was undoubtedly fortified by the mutual antagonism between her and her husband. And she was used to Strumbić’s long, silent absences.
    Della Torre wondered if she knew just how corrupt her husband was — and how wealthy his corruption had made him. Strumbić had numerous foreign bank accounts and mistresses and secret apartments and houses — even one in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world. His wife was an intelligent woman, so she must have had an inkling. But then, being the daughter of Zagreb’s police chief, maybe she knew it was all part of the game, the great socialist con in which the only sin was to be caught, exposed,