Curiously, Ilić did not appear to be alone. A teenage girl was sitting opposite him drinking a hot chocolate, her face mostly hidden by a black hooded sweatshirt bearing the name of some band of which Frend had never heard but that he knew he would have hated from the first note. No young girl had any business being around a man like Zivco Ilić, thought Frend, not unless her business was being around men like him. She did not look up as Frend approached the table and took the chair to Ilić’s right.

‘I wasn’t expecting us to have company,’ said Frend. ‘Who is the young lady?’

Only now did the girl peer out at him from under her hood, and Frend felt a great urge to get up and walk away, to abandon the Vuksans and his own existence in order to hide away from creatures such as this. Here was no teenager, only a mockery of one. Her eyes were rheumy and old, the teeth discolored, and her skin was covered in very fine lines, like a piece of fruit in the process of decay. Her fingernails were unpainted and tapered to points, reminding him uncomfortably of Simo Stajić’s. Frend experienced a profound sense of absence: a dearth of feeling, of morality, even of good or evil, as though her antiquity and her otherness made a mockery of those concepts. One might as well have expected to encounter such higher functions in a spider or a scorpion, entities barely altered since prehistory.

‘This is Zorya,’ said Ilić.

Here, then, was Spiridon Vuksan’s witch. Frend had paid little attention to Radovan’s references to her, dismissing her as one of Spiridon’s indulgences, another indication of his innate primitiveness. Now, exposed to her presence at last, Frend accepted that he had been wrong. Spiridon Vuksan might have been a superstitious peasant by birth, but for this credulity he deserved to be excused. Zorya was unheimlich. A century earlier, Freud himself would have come running from his rooms on Berggasse just to set eyes on her.

‘Were you careful?’ said Ilić.

‘I believe so,’ said Frend. ‘But then, I advised against this meeting to begin with. A drop could have been arranged.’

‘Spiridon wanted it this way. I just follow orders.’

Spiridon, not Radovan. Frend thought this was interesting, but also worrying.

‘Did he say why?’ asked Frend.

‘I didn’t ask. That’s why they call it an order.’

A waiter arrived, and Zorya hid her face once again. Frend asked for a tea that he didn’t want and placed a folded copy of Der Standard on the table. Inside was a picture of Hendricksen and an envelope of €100, €200, and €500 notes: €10,000 in total. By prior arrangement, Ilić would take the newspaper and photograph with him when he left.