He could feel the weight of his anger rising in his chest, but he forced himself to be patient. He needed to control his emotions; otherwise, they might spoil all his preparations and the game he had devised this afternoon for Lena Novak. He must be calm, he told himself. He must remember the patience of the shepherds and hunters in the mountains above Zagreb. They knew that missing sheep always returned, bleating for help, and that, sooner or later, the prey came looking for the hunter. Those were the laws of the wild. The laws he had believed in all his life. He went over to the door and checked the street. He watched as a young woman pushed a pram past the pub doors. Try as he might, he could not remember Lena Novak’s face very well. He had offered escape and a new life to so many girls from the east that recalling the details of one in particular was like trying to remember a glass of cheap wine he had drunk a long time ago. The kind of wine you gulp down carelessly, not thinking of the headache it might leave you with in the morning.
