Gypsy Roulette

The dailies report that in Cacak a Belgrade resident has been apprehended under suspicion of being a hit man. He received 50,000 German marks for the execution of two residents of Cacak. If rumors are true that in Belgrade an assassin can be had four a couple of hundred German marks, this guy’s pretty expensive. If the apprehended individual in question is really what investigators think he is, then he did not justify such a high price for his services. He did a half job. True, he did kill two, but he’s been caught and might very well "squeal" on whoever hired him. Therefore, the hit man should return the money. But for my part, what I’m interested in is another angle to this story.

One of the assassinated residents of Cacak, a local folk hero, went by the name of Cheesecake. I used to know a Steva Cabbage Roll who got his name for being able to consume an entire pot of cabbage rolls without being, supposedly, as the saying goes, any the worse for it. I’m guessing that this Cheesecake from Cack got his name for similar reasons. But the story about him did not register with me because of assumed gluttony, but because of an entirely bizarre detail recently related to me by a colleague. Namely, this Cheesecake never entered his car alone in the morning, but paid Gypsy kids a hundred marks every morning just for getting into his car and starting the engine. There were countless candidates for this "Gypsy Roulette".

Somehow the Gypsy kids, may God save their souls, divined that this Cheesecake was not meant to die from an automobile bomb, but from a bullet, as it ultimately proved true. But the image has been haunting me for some time: Mr. Cheesecake approaching a Gypsy kid, handing him cash and the keys to his car, removing himself to a place of safety and waiting to see whether it’s true what they say — that Gypsies can fly to heaven.

Cruel, but our entire existence is not far removed from this. When in the morning, the Serbian Roulette starts to spin, nobody knows what the end of the day will bring. The answer is simple: I was told, again by colleagues, that a certain director of a certain newspaper asked his porter to go and shake up his car for him before he gets into it after work. The Porter told him: "Shake it up yourself!" There, that’s where the simple answer lies. But, as is often the case in life, the simple answers are the hardest to apply.