‘But there’ll be another kind of trouble along soon enough, right?’

‘Trouble follows me,’ said Parker. ‘I think that was the title of a book.’

‘It follows you like a dog,’ said Macy, ‘because you keep feeding it. Speaking of which, have you eaten?’

Parker looked at his watch. He hadn’t realized how late it was, but he wasn’t very hungry. The IED had served to deprive him of his appetite.

Then he looked at Macy and thought again.

‘Were you thinking of getting something?’

‘Maybe Boda.’

‘You buying?’

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘why not?’

Later, as she lay sleeping beside him, Parker watched the stars defy the darkness. She would leave in the morning. Perhaps they would do this again, but it did not matter. It was enough to connect, enough to touch and be touched, if only for a night.

Enough, briefly, to defy the darkness.

Chapter LXX

From where he sat, Radovan Vuksan could see no stars, only darkness. The drapes were closed, and the bedroom was dim. The chair was an antique, akin to a throne. It gave him the aspect of a judge, one forced to pass a sentence with which he did not entirely agree, but to whom the option of clemency had been denied.

He had not slept well that night. He had not slept well in a long time. Radovan was worn out by bloodshed, even at one remove. It seemed that he had known little else since before Tito passed away in a Ljubljana hospital in 1980, the room fetid with the stink of gangrene. Tito’s Croat wife, Jovanka Broz, had been permitted to remain at liberty only for long enough to wave his coffin into the House of Flowers before she was incarcerated in a rotting Belgrade villa. There she had remained hidden for decades without a passport or identity card, lest any reminder of her late husband’s existence should interfere with the process of dismantling his precious Yugoslav republic.

Because even then Radovan and his brother had been aware of what was coming. Their father, Sergej, had warned of it for years. The country was an artificial construct, six republics bound together by the iron will of Tito, like six thorny stems held in awkward proximity by barbed wire. As soon as Tito died, they would fall apart, and the resulting frictions would lead to a conflagration.