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ferocious attention was fixed on the Sony digital camcorder he held in his large callused hands. A few feet away from him, three small boys were kneeling in a cluster around a large, gray-muzzled gundog with a withered hind leg. The ancient dog was lying on his right side, stretched out, one blind eye ringed in white, panting heavily. The boys were prodding the feeble dog with a wooden spoon and laughing. Like the wolfish sounds of the children down below them on the seawall, their laughter was harsh, cruel, taunting—the piping yelps of little jackals.

    Gospic found their laughter an annoying distraction and he would have kicked them away, or had one of his women do it, if it were not for the fact that one of them was the current sexual amusement of the man sitting beside him on the bench; a stiletto of a man with an air of dissipated elegance, blue-lipped, of indeterminate age, wearing a beautifully tailored gray silk suit. This man, Stefan Groz, a senior capo in the Serbian mafia that controlled most of Montenegro, was also watching the little LCD screen on the Sony camcorder, where a video was playing.

    In the video was a view of a large, private swimming pool set out on a terrace overlooking a tree-filled valley with olive groves in the middle distance and what may have been a tall, wrought-iron gate down at the bottom of a long, curving drive paved in terra-cotta stones. The villa next to the pool was built and furnished in a style its owners mistakenly imagined to be Château French, opulent and deeply vulgar, and reeking of criminal money, the way these villas do, from Baghdad to Boulder. A party of some sort seemed to be in progress, several hard, hoggish, heavily tattooed men in far-too-tiny Speedo swimsuits, swilling some clear liquid from glass bottles—perhaps vodka or slivovitz—and many younger women, wearing little more than uneven tans and frightened smiles, were gathered around the pool.

    In the video, their voices could be heard, braying and drunk, but the sound was poor, and the film appeared to have been taken by a concealed camera. The men urged the women to drink from the same bottles, looked resentful until they did. Everybody was getting loose and crazy. A woman was pushed into the water by one of the men, an immensely fat, towering, bald-headed hairy goon with a large tattoo entirely covering his pork-white chest—an American eagle with its wings outspread and pierced straight through the breast by a lance bearing the flag of the Kosovo Liberation Army—this man was then shoved by a drunken friend, and soon they were all in the water, laughing, splashing. The half-naked women were being roughly handled, but they endured it. A young woman in the deep end began to cough. She looked up, and a thin ribbon of mucus was running from her nostrils. A girlfriend moved to help her, but she became distracted by the sight of a man who was holding his hand over his eyes. This man—the bald-headed goon with the dying American Eagle tattoo— began to convulse and vomit. The camera never wavered; within six minutes, all the young women were floating lifeless in the water, and only two of the stronger men had managed to climb out of the pool. There they died, in apparent agony, on the white marble. The video ended, the screen glowing blue. Gospic leaned back against the bench and closed the screen with a snap.

    His face was flushed and his breathing a little fast. Groz closed his hooded eyes and wiped his wet lips with a lace handkerchief. Both men sat and stared, unseeing, out at the narrow fjord beneath the balcony.

    Nothing was said for a few moments. The boys had the dog pinned against the stone pillars now, and it was baring its old brown teeth at them, a humming vibrato deep in its barrel chest.

    “Well, well,” said Groz. “That was Dzilbar Kerk, wasn’t it? DoDo?”

    “Yes. It was.”

    “I thought I recognized him. Of course, that ridiculous tattoo.”

    “I was with him when he had it