Spiridon Vuksan had not survived for as long as he had through good fortune alone. He accepted that luck played a part in every man’s life, but so also did preparation, decisiveness, and ultimately, ruthlessness. Neither was Spiridon blind to his own flaws, not least of which was pride, although he balked at categorizing it as a sin, particularly when it came to his relationship with the country of his birth. It pained him that men like Matija Kiš and Simo Stajić were preventing him from returning to his homeland, a country that he and his brother had fought to build from the wreckage of Tito’s former dictatorship. Spiridon was a patriot. He had the scars to prove it. Kiš and Stajić were scavengers, filling their bellies from the battlefield sacrifices of braver men.

Now others were striking at Spiridon from the shadows: a peškir killer, a negro, a crnac, seeking revenge for De Jaager’s death when he bore some of the responsibility for having fulfilled the original contract on Andrej Buha; an American, too, which meant it was his people who had bombed Serbian troops from the sky in 1999 because they were afraid to fight them face-to-face.

As well as this Louis there were the muslimani, the Turks, no better than the balijas Spiridon had euthanized in the woods of Srebrenica and Žepa, descendants of the Ottomans who had beheaded and impaled patriots for rebelling against their rule. If Spiridon ran from men such as these, how could he ever hold his head high again? Better to let his beard and hair grow long like a monk’s than look upon his reflection in a mirror and see only a kukavica, a coward.

But his brother was counseling caution: a ‘strategic retreat’, Radovan termed it, while they consolidated their forces and waited to see what might emerge from the Kiš-Stajić axis, because Radovan, like Spiridon, was convinced that the union would not hold. Kiš was too politically ambitious and Stajić too unpredictable. Soon one of them would turn on the other, and Radovan’s opinion was that Stajić would end up with a bullet in the back of his head. Every killing left a vacuum, Radovan told his brother, and the Vuksans, with planning, could be in a position to fill it. They just had to bide their time.