‘Maybe we should try Parker,’ said Angel. After all, he reasoned, if anyone was likely to be in difficulties, it was the private detective. The man could attract trouble in a vacuum.

‘I did,’ said Louis, ‘while you were asleep. He’s safe; his daughter, too.’

Angel watched a police car pass. Ordinary people could turn to the law in times of need – well, as long as they weren’t minorities living in the wrong neighborhood, but nobody claimed the law was perfect, and even justice wasn’t colorblind. Men like Angel and Louis, on the other hand, were required to make their own justice, forging it in their image.

‘Could you be mistaken about this?’ said Angel.

‘No.’

Angel rubbed his eyes. He felt a lassitude that no sleep could relieve. Sometimes a man just became enervated by suffering. There seemed to be no end to it.

‘You need to rest,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be fresh when it comes.’

‘I’ll be there shortly,’ said Louis.

Angel returned to bed. When he woke again in the night, he was alone. He heard music playing softly from downstairs, but did not move. He closed his eyes, and waited for death’s inevitable approach.

Chapter IX

It was said that the Gestapo in Lyon, under their repellent chief Klaus Barbie, finally grew so frenzied in their torture and execution of prisoners that the floor of their headquarters at the École de Sainte Militaire could no longer accommodate the by-products of the butchery, and the very ceilings of the building began to bleed. Radovan Vuksan had thought it an exaggeration until he retreated to the kitchen of De Jaager’s safe house in the hope of avoiding what was taking place upstairs, only to find droplets of blood exploding upon his bare head and redness pooling on the table. He looked up in time to see fluids leaking through the floorboards and stepped aside to avoid any further misfortune. He lit a cigarette, and saw that his hands were shaking.

Unlike his brother and the rest of the Vuksan clan, Radovan had not fought directly in the Balkan conflicts – or principally the ‘War in Croatia’, as it was known to Serbs – although arguably his role had been more important, and lethal, than those of his comrades who had taken lives. Radovan had worked as a ‘senior advisor’ at the MUP, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, his role and title being deliberately unrevealing, even innocuous. The MUP was one of the most powerful ministries in the land, with responsibility for local and national law enforcement. With Radovan’s assistance, it became more powerful still, helping to arm civilians and local militias of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia, and secretly channeling funds to the RSK’s president, Milan Martić.