Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic

heavily. He looked like a good-natured alligator. He hadn’t just had a snort, had he?

      ‘Boys,’ said Dolina in a grating, throaty voice, ‘I see, er... I see ya’re good.’

      He smiled at me with an expression as if he were looking at a newborn baby.

      ‘We’ve got work to do,’ he creaked in thick southern dialect and patted us on the back. ‘I got the councillors to walk out with me. Nice political crisis, y’know, and then elections and all that. Ha, ha, ha, microregional elections... Ha, ha, fuckin’ elections...’

      His bodyguards smiled too.

      ‘Just get the advert done for me and we’ll move on from there,’ he said to Markatović as he got up. ‘You’ll have the money tomorrow.’

      * * *

      ‘Don’t do that to me any more!’ I growled at Markatović when they’d gone.

      ‘Hey, I’ll devise the campaign for him in half an hour,’ he sighed repentantly, and then added with a wistful glance: ‘But, like, I can’t be the owner of the firm, line up the job and then do it myself too, y’know – that’d look dilettantish to him. I have to bring someone else in so he sees, like, that I’ve got workers, staff. Sorry.’

      I glanced around the cigar bar. Just the place where I’d act the worker. ‘Thanks a million,’ I said. ‘I’d downright forgotten that I belong to the working class.’

      ‘But I’ve devised everything already,’ he consoled me. ‘Now I just need to hire someone to do the design.’

      ‘The designer is a worker,’ I said. ‘And you’ll need a photographer too – he’s also a worker.’

      The old goth stayed serious. ‘If you want, you could travel down south, like, and tour the area. We can pay for all that, it’s just that I don’t have time to travel. Besides, it’s better that someone else goes, like I said, so they see a whole team is involved.’

      ‘Markatović!’ I glared at him as if I was about to bash him with the ashtray.

      ‘OK, OK, I just wanted to mention it,’ he said.

      Then his mobile phone rang. It was his wife, Dijana, and he told her that he was negotiating things with me – business matters.

      He tried to sound soothing as if he was rocking her on waves of optimism and, yes, he’d be heading home in ‘half an hour or so’. I don’t know if she fell asleep in the middle of his story or if she hung up on him. He just looked at the mobile in surprise.

      His wife had always wanted to be remembered to me in the past. ‘Dijana sends her regards,’ Markatović would say when he’d finished.

      He didn’t say that any more.

      I got the impression that Dijana considered us both alcoholics. Who knows, maybe she thought I was a bad influence.

      ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ Markatović said.

      He was there for a while, and when he came back he spoke softly:

      ‘Know what? I’ve got some coke. Want me to give you a bit?’

      ‘Oh –,’ I uttered, not knowing what to say.

      I didn’t have all that much experience with it.

      There hadn’t been any coke in our circles until recently. But now, it seemed, we were making progress... And the whole country was under development.

      ‘Er, I wouldn’t now,’ I said, ‘I have an editorial meeting in the morning.’ Then I thought it could be a treat for Sanja and her mob after the première and I could show off.

      ‘Well, actually – give me a bit,’ I said.

      He handed me a packet under the table and I stuck it in my pocket.

      I felt a bit strange.

      ‘How long have you been into that for?’ I asked him.

      ‘Just recently, when the atmosphere’s right,’ he said.

      I looked around. Not exactly what you’d call atmosphere.

      ‘Don’t think... It’s not heroin,’ Markatović said.

      ‘No, I’d never take horse,’ I quickly agreed.

      ‘Me neither,’ Markatović said. Then he nodded and made a face as if a tragic memory had just crossed his mind.

      I nodded too.

      For a second we felt like boys on the right path.

      Then Markatović started talking about the stock market. He leaned towards me. I could write a guide for stock-market beginners for his publishing house – the basics, kind of – because he knew I played around with shares a bit. He tried to persuade me; he said we lacked a reference book in Croatia because people were inert and still had socialism in their heads.

      But you’re full to bursting with new ideas, aren’t you, I scoffed inside. Fortunately he didn’t seem to take those ideas seriously. He’d prattle about them vigorously for a while, and then he’d never mention them again.

      ‘I’ll think it over,’ I told him.

      A waitress, young and wasp-waisted, came up to the table. ‘I’ll have a beer,’ I said.

      Markatović ordered coffee. Then he had an afterthought: ‘No, wait, better whisky – and a beer.’

      ‘Coffee’s going to make a wreck of me,’ he said in justification. ‘You mustn’t mix coke and coffee,’ he added.

      All that coffee all day was killing him, you could see it. His face was puffy and – surprise, surprise – he’d developed a beer belly. I’d say he looked quite a bit older than me although we were the same age; we’d first met at an Economics entrance exam long ago when we’d both just left the Yugoslav People’s Army.

      Looking back, that was rather a fateful encounter.

       My way

      We sniffed each other out back at the entrance exam for Economics and discovered that we’d both been cajoled into going to that faculty, despite our inclination towards philosophy and art. To get me to enrol in Economics, my folks bribed me with a Sony hi-fi, a state-of-the-art system back then with a double cassette deck, and Markatović’s folks bought him nothing less than a Yugo 45 to drive. But for us the most important thing was to come to the big city with all its concerts, clubs and the vibrant social scene.

      The rest of the group at the entrance exam were already discussing where they’d work after uni. The majority were counting on government jobs, while the more avant-gardist advocated entrepreneurship and risk, which there would be more and more of in our country too, they said. We sided with the pro-riskers. But we were hardly accepted into their ranks because we seemed too much of a risk; compared with the crowd from Economics, Markatović and I looked like outright vagabonds, even to ourselves, which we couldn’t have imagined back in high school. The crack corps of sex, drugs and rock’n’rollists didn’t make it to uni – those first waves of rebels get bogged down early on, cannon fodder of the subculture.

      Now we, in turn, advocated creative business. We pretended to admire Bill Gates and his ilk, came out with their quotes and generally sowed confusion among the straight-and-narrow Economics students. Markatović claimed to have read in The Economist that Gates was working on a combination of a computer and a washing machine and as such would bring a computer to every home, which others considered impossible. He was inspired by that idea throughout the 1990-91 academic year and acquired several disciples, particularly among female students.

      To tell the truth, our debauched lifestyle was only accepted to a limited degree during the first semester. The nerds soon closed ranks and we were declared no-hopers, especially seeing as the girls liked to sit around with us in the cellar canteen. We enjoyed that dubious reveller’s reputation,