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from the carton he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. But the spare matches he had to hunt for on his desk.
    It was while he was shifting the papers that the fax roll with the dead woman’s photograph fell to the floor. He picked it up and it unspooled. As he looked down the pages, folding them so that they’d fit more neatly into the file, his eye lighted on a photograph of a man, middle-aged, receding hairline, flabby face and tired eyes. Captain Julius Strumbić of military intelligence, formerly detective lieutenant with the Zagreb police, missing, wanted in connection with the deaths of two men in a villa on the island of Šipan, and a suspect in the disappearance of the American woman Rebecca Vees, now in an Italian morgue. He must have seen Strumbić’s photograph a dozen times before without noticing it. It was fuzzy, barely bigger than passport-sized. Unlike the woman’s photo, it hadn’t been posted anywhere in the station. No one else on the force had seen the picture. Why? Because the note next to the photograph said the suspect had probably fled the country, most likely destination Italy or the United Kingdom.
    England. Marks & Spencer.
    Seeing the picture was like a shot of slivovitz injected into a vein.
    Detective Brg had brought the incriminating fax with him to the interview room. He sat for long minutes, comparing the photograph to the man in front of him. The other man didn’t break the silence. Brg’s eyes prickled from cigarette smoke and fatigue. At last he spoke, quietly, without aggression. “Why don’t we stop playing games, Detective Lieutenant. Or is it Captain Julius Strumbić?”
    Brg gave Strumbić credit for not betraying any emotion.
    Strumbić merely smiled. “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Detective. My name is Smirnoff.”
    Brg turned the fax towards Strumbić. “This says it isn’t.”
    Strumbić leaned forward and pulled the thin thermal paper across the stained blond wood table, turned it with three fingers, and considered.
    “It’s a reasonable likeness, though it’s a pretty small picture and not particularly clear. Could be me. Could be any one of a hundred men within a kilometre of here. What did you say you want the man for?”
    “As a witness, probable accessory, and possible perpetrator of three murders.”
    “Three? The Americans? Sounds like a dangerous fellow. But like I said, it’s not me.”
    “What do you say, Mr. Strumbić, would you like to have a friendly chat with me or do you want to wait for the Zagreb investigators? I hear they’re a lot less nice. Plenty of former UDBA types.”
    Silence. UDBA was Yugoslavia’s hated former secret police. Strumbić knew more than a few of them. Such as della Torre.
    “What I don’t get is if you killed those men, why, just a couple of days later, you’d want to be smuggling stuff onto a dock in a village on the opposite side of the channel,” Brg continued. “I mean, you don’t strike me as being stupid. They don’t make stupid people detectives in the Zagreb force, do they?”
    “Detective, those are all very good questions. But you’re asking the wrong guy.”
    Brg was fading. Questions kept crowding his mind. Irritating tiny details overwhelmed his brain. It was as if Strumbić wasn’t there and he was just asking himself.
    “Says here you own that villa on Šipan where two of the Americans were killed. We had a look and it’s not in any official records. All we could find was that it’s registered to an Italian company. Your company, Mr. Strumbić?”
    Strumbić was surprised at the turn of questioning, but played along.
    “Thought Italians could only own up to forty-nine percent of a property in this country,” Strumbić said.
    “Oh, well, that’s the clever thing. One Italian company owns forty-nine percent of the property and a Yugoslav firm owns the rest. Except forty-nine percent of that Yugoslav company is owned by an Italian company. Coincidentally, the same Italian company. The rest