‘And the good news?’ said Angel, who was, by contrast, a good-news kind of guy, having heard enough bad news to last a lifetime.

Hendricksen smiled.

‘The Vuksans can’t go back to Serbia,’ he said, ‘not yet.’

‘Why?’ said Louis.

‘Because someone has started blowing up their relatives.’

Chapter XXVII

By common consent, the area around the Stalingrad Métro stop, at the border between the 10th and 19th arrondissements in northeastern Paris, was regarded as being among the less salubrious spots in the city in which to linger – and that was even before the building of a migrant camp near the avenue de Flandre. The camp had since been forcibly dismantled by French police, leading to running battles with residents, but its removal had not done much to raise the tone of the locale. By day it was mostly fine, but night brought out the predators.

Aleksej Marković was not unduly worried by the possibility of predation, mostly because he was more dangerous than any other predator on the streets. Marković had murdered his way across whole swathes of Bosnia in the company of Ratko Mladić, Spiridon Vuksan, and the VRS, the Bosnian Serb Army, during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. If there was a man in the vicinity of Stalingrad who had killed more men or raped more women than he, Marković might have enjoyed shaking his hand, although only after making sure that he was dead, because Aleksej Marković had grown circumspect in middle age.

He had never expected to survive his twenties, but as the years went by, and his collection of scars increased without putting an end to him, Marković had decided that the concept of living to old age was not without its appeal. He had watched other men fall by the wayside, rendered harmless by bullets, disease, prison, poverty, and even domesticity, while he flourished. Much of his felicity he ascribed to the proximity of the Vuksans. If ever Marković needed confirmation that God had been on their side in the war against the Turks, the Ustashe, and their Western allies, it lay in the potency of Spiridon and Radovan Vuksan. God would not have blessed them with wealth and long life otherwise. Their success was a tribute to the righteousness of the Serbian cause, and Aleksej Marković had benefited as a consequence, so he did not question their orders or doubt the wisdom of their decisions. This included the recent action against De Jaager and the others who had found themselves in the Amsterdam safe house – or, more accurately, the unsafe house – at the wrong time.