It was Radovan who had organized the support structures for the Bosnian and Croatian Serb forces during the wars; Radovan who had provided funding for the ‘volunteers’ recruited to fight in Serb-held territories in Croatia; Radovan who had personally supervised the handover of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Serbian criminal warlord Arkan, whom he had known of old; and Radovan, ultimately, who had arranged Arkan’s assassination in the lobby of Belgrade’s InterContinental Hotel in January 2000, when it became clear that it would be better for all, Arkan himself excepted, if he did not live long enough to be questioned about war crimes by the inquisitors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Without Radovan Vuksan’s efforts, the War in Croatia would have been significantly shorter and less genocidal than it was. Yet any blood on his hands was purely metaphorical. He was an organizer – a brilliant one – but with no taste for either committing or witnessing mass murder. Some might even have called him a coward, but they would have been wrong, for Radovan’s moral failings were deeper and more complex than the term allowed.

The blood continued to drip from the ceiling. The sound it made as it splashed on the table was unnerving to him. From the position of the spreading stain he thought the old woman, Anouk, was probably the source. She had a lot of blood in her, and the mattress on which they had placed her was thin. It was not a surprise that it had become soaked through so quickly.

Radovan took a handkerchief from his pocket, dampened it at the sink, and used it to clean his pate. The cigarette was calming him slightly, but then the girl, Liesl, began to make a high-pitched mewling noise that he could discern even over the music. Radovan had never heard a human being emit a sound like that. It was beyond any ordinary conception of pain, and he guessed the girl would not last much longer. He turned the music up a notch, and realized he would never again be able to listen to Schumann with quite the same pleasure.