The Naming of the Beasts

From Alexander the Great International Airport I went straight to downtown Skopje. The airport was a strip of tarmac and a Coke machine, but the city itself was pretty impressive. Sprawling along both sides of the Vardar River, and standing on the main drag from Belgrade to Athens, it’s always seen a fair bit of passing trade. Admittedly it’s also had its fair share - maybe slightly more - of wars, pogroms, earthquakes, corruption, industrial collapse and apocalyptic mismanagement, but it’s always managed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. Today it looks like any other medium-sized metropolis, with old and new buildings jostling each other for position on most streets, and a pall of smog closing down the middle distance.

From my hotel - a Holiday Inn on Pijade Street - I called Jovan Ditko’s lawyer, a guy named Anastasiadis, and left a message. I’d already called twice from London, had the receptionist take down my contact details with agonising thoroughness, then got no reply. If he didn’t call back this time, I’d grab a cab out to the prison by myself and take pot luck. They could only say no. Well, that and beat me with rubber truncheons; but with EU membership still pending, I was gambling they’d be wanting to keep their noses clean.

As it turned out, though, the phone rang less than ten minutes after I’d hung up.

‘Mr Castor?’ The man’s voice was rich and resonant, and held barely a trace of accent.

‘Yes,’ I confirmed.

‘Dragan Anastasiadis. I believe you wanted to see a client of mine.’

‘That’s right. Jovan Ditko.’

‘And you are interested in Jovan Ditko because . . . ?’

‘I’m a friend of his brother, Rafael.’

A sound like soughing wind came down the line. ‘Ordinarily,’ Mr Anastasiadis said, ‘this would be a difficult thing to arrange. Since you are a foreigner, I would have to submit your name to the prison authorities and wait for approval. But today it is relatively easy. If you take a cab to the prison gates, I will meet you there.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’ And then, before he could hang up, ‘Mr Anastasiadis?’

‘Dragan.’

‘Dragan. Why is today easier?’

‘Because Jovan’s last appeal failed this morning, Mr Castor. Tomorrow he will hang.’

All prisons I’ve ever been in have felt pretty much the same to me. They may be more or less grim, more or less grey, more or less tolerant of torture and the meticulous demolition of the human spirit, but the same pall of despair and abnegation hangs over them all, a psychic fog sublimed out of shipwrecked lives. For an exorcist, the genius loci is always a very real presence: after my first few minutes in Irdrizovo Prison - an innocuous cluster of low whitewashed buildings behind an endless chain-link fence, vaguely reminiscent of a high-security Butlins - there was a taste in my mouth like rancid tin and a throbbing pain behind my eyes.

Dragan Anastasiadis seemed oblivious to this miasmic atmosphere. A tall fat man dressed immaculately in a light blue linen suit and a cream shoestring tie, he had met me at the gates as promised, shaken my hand and offered heart-felt commiserations that I didn’t really need - I’d never even met Jovan Ditko - and shepherded me past the various guard posts with dispatch.

He kept up a courteous, consultative manner in front of the guards, talking about the mechanics of the appeals process and the hopes he’d entertained that the president might be persuaded to intercede with a stay of execution at the last moment. But when we were briefly alone, waiting in a bare anteroom for someone to escort us through to the maximum-security wing, he let the mask slip.

‘The truth, Mr Castor,’ he said, ‘is that this entire legal process was a farce. The death penalty in Macedonia is available only for treason and the most atrocious war crimes. The man Jovan killed was a colonel in the army, but the motive had nothing to do with war. It was about a woman. The prosecution did not even contest this. But to kill a colonel, apparently, is a war crime - even if you kill him because he is having sex with your fiancée. And even if there is no war.’

He shrugged lugubriously.

‘What about The Hague?’ I asked. ‘I know you’re not part of the EU structure yet, but even a theoretical ruling . . .’

I broke off because Anastasiadis was already shaking his head. ‘For that very reason,’ he said, ‘they turned us down. They can’t afford to prejudice future relations with the Macedonian state by interfering in their sovereign affairs before they have any legal right to. No, my route ran along well-worn channels, and it became clear quite early in the process that the verdict would always be guilty. And to be fair, Jovan is guilty, as far as that goes. It was a horrible murder, marked by extreme and shocking brutality. But the death sentence offends me in my soul. And for a man I have defended, the offence is double. It is a guilt I have to carry now - that I could not stop this. It is a dyspepsia of the soul that will not go away.’