Gorila

By Dusan Savkovic

Since 1970s, the best-selling novel Gorila, the first in a three book series by Dusan Savkovic, has become a sacrilegious bible for Eastern European mobsters—La Nouvelle Vague or The New Wave—much the same way that Mario Puzo’s The Godfather became the adopted wisdom of the US Mafia ("an offer you cannot refuse"). To this day, Gorila remains a story of fascination in the European underworld. The Gorila trilogy is now available for the first time in a vibrant English language.

From the New Yorker article, by Richard Brody (April 10, 2011):

"The novel, by Dusan Savkovic—about a famous French actor’s bodyguard who finds out about orgies involving high strata of French society, attempts blackmail, and is killed by Corsican Mob hired by the actor—is more or less a roman à clef about Stevan Markovic, who was a bodyguard for Alain Delon and was in fact murdered, in 1968 . . . (Samuels writes: 'A friend of Delon’s the Corsican gangster François Marcantoni, was indicted, but there was insufficient evident to convict him of the murder; Delon was questioned but never charged.') . . ."

The Movies Editor from The New Yorker, Richard Brody

"Gorila muses about the intertwining of fact and fiction: tellingly reveals the connection between the Parisian underworld and the top layers of French society . . ."

• Language: English
• Publisher: GORILA ENTERPRISES, LLC
• Release date: May 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988693432

Dusan Savkovic

Dusan Savkovic was born in Belgrade (1922 – 1990). He was one of the most prolific and provocative Serbian writers. During his lengthy career, he was a successful journalist, novelist, drama and TV writer. A few films and TV drama series were based on his work: Plaintiffs; Love on the Country Side; Stories Over the Full Lane. He also wrote the bestselling trilogy: Gorila 1, Gorila 2, Gorila 3, and In the Embrace of Paris. Savkovic also received numerous awards for his critically acclaimed bestseller Hatchet.

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Gorila Enterprises, LLC

English Language Translation Based Upon the Upcoming Film/TV Production

DUSAN SAVKOVIC

Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Sasha Bogunovic

Copyright © 2012 by Gorila Enterprises, LLC

All Rights Reserved. No part of this English language translation version of the book by Dusan Savkovic based upon rights granted to Sasha Bogunovic and assigned to Gorila Enterprises, LLC may be reproduced or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from Gorila Enterprises, LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the translator’s and assignee’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

The English language translation version of Gorila is based upon exclusive rights granted by the owner of the Serbo-Croation works by Dusan Savkovic to translator Sasha Bogunovic and his heirs, assigns, affiliates, and representatives for the creation, exploitation and distribution of upcoming Film/TV productions of the English language versions of Gorila 1, Gorila 2, Gorila 3, and In the Embrace of Paris. All rights granted to translator Sasha Bogunovic have been assigned to Gorila Enterprises, LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author and/or translator’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for any third-party content in any form or manner, including but not limited to third-party content distributed electronically on the internet or in any other medium by any other means.

eISBN: 978-0-9886934-3-2

Smashwords Edition November 2012

Table of Contents

Title Page

Also By Dusan Savkovic

Prologue

Dedication

Epigraph

CHAPTERS

1: Paris is Burning?

2: Le Chantage

3: The Bloody Countryman

4: Uncle Jon

5: Lost Love . . . Los Angeles

6: Cowards and the Corsicans

7: The Witch at the Ballet Rose

8: The Scorpio

9: The Superstar

10: Hotel Ideal

11: The Samurai and the Gorilla

12: Knock, Bang, Do What You Want

13: The Corsican

14: The Sleeping Cell

15: Don of Foxhounds

16: Pretty Prince

17: Madame Sailor

18: The Hollywood Gunman

19: The Favor

20: The Arabian Nights

21: One Cute Girl

22: Dirty Cops

23: Corsican Torture

24: A Trip Across the Atlantic

25: Gorilla’s Revenge

26: Eyes Wide Shut

About the Author

ALSO BY DUSAN SAVKOVIC

GORILA 2

GORILA 3

IN THE EMBRACE OF PARIS

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PROLOGUE

When I first read Gorila, almost thirty years ago, I was about fifteen years old. Like most young men of that generation, born in 1968, living in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, I used this book to teleport myself to a place and event that was strange, mysterious, and dangerous. I have never believed that this book needed an introduction, and neither would the author himself if he was alive today.

Dusan Savkovic, the prominent journalist and author of the Gorila trilogy, was a great friend of mine. I feel honored to have translated his writings, as well as to depict his grand oeuvre. I knew him for many years, and every time we had a conversation, or a simple talk, I was deeply amazed by his open-mindedness and courage. This prologue of mine is just a small tribute, an article dedicated to him and to his pioneer literary work, Gorila.

Some might believe that Gorila is not a typical book or a novel. If I were to categorize this piece of literature, I would say it is an interpretatively drawn, vintage poster with a stamp that says: Made in 1968.

It is an old, rusty, handcrafted piece of paper you can hang on the wall of your living room and stare at for hours while listening to The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, or other iconic bands of that era. The year 1968 was both tragedy and horrific entertainment: deaths of heroes; uprisings; suppressions; the end of dreams; blood in the streets of Chicago, Paris, Saigon. It was also the year that man for the first time orbited the moon. That year was more than just a densely packed parade of events, more than an accidental alignment of stars. It was a catalyst for change, a class and sexual struggle between generations, between the haves and haves-not, rich and poor, a war between past and future for entire countries and the world, a violent struggle to grow up. The Movement of 22 March would also be featured on the poster, referring to the defensor fidei, a generation who lived in Paris in the same year. On March 22, 1968, outstanding artists, poets, and musicians, together with students, organized a demonstration at the University of Paris at Nanterre. They were bitter about the government and the bureaucratic decision regarding the school funding system and were demanding the right to entertain girlfriends on campus overnight: political or sexual revolution or both one might wonder. At the same time, a group of young men escaped Communist regimes in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, and many other Eastern European cities, seeking their place under the Parisian sun.

They were young, they were handsome, exotic, full of life, and the desire to live. They had chosen to start over in Paris, running away from their checkered pasts. Some were fugitives from the law, with their puzzled hearts longing for free love, the air of freedom, aromatic wines, beautiful women, and foreign money.

Gorila is loosely based on a true story about these Don Juan-vagabonds—Stevan Markovic, Milos Milosevic, and Uros Milicevic—Belgrade’s enfants terribles who decided to make their first butterfly’s flight across the Parisian sky. Their fate was that of Icarus, who made it too close to the sun, and Belgrade’s black angels burned fatally. Still, their urban myth continued to live, and my friend was brave enough to pack two suitcases and set off for Paris. This was how Gorila began.

Savkovic was sent to Paris on a journalistic assignment to write a report about the suicides (or attempted suicides) of numerous young women from Eastern Europe, particularly the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia). One of these women was the beautiful sister of the famous Parisian bodyguard, Stevan Markovic—who by the way, had at one point been featured on the front page of Paris Match as the sexiest man alive. After throwing herself in front of a metro train, she miraculously survived, though remained handicapped for life, and was recovering at a convent outside of Paris. Savkovic wanted to write a story about her, but would only be able to see her with permission from the brother, the bodyguard. The permission was never granted. The encounter between Savkovic and the bodyguard is explained in detail in his non-fiction book, In the Embrace of Paris, in which Savkovic talks about his accidental and indirect involvement with the Affaire Markovic. Twenty days after Savkovic returned home from Paris, the bodyguard was murdered. The news spread like the plague across Europe, and the French press even gave it more weight and importance than the bombings in Vietnam.

A few years later, Savkovic wrote the roman a clef, Gorila, which became a local bestseller, followed by Gorila 2 and Gorila 3. The real life characters behind Gorila were the famous French actor, Alain Delon and his bodyguard, Stevan Markovic, murdered in 1968. There were rumors that Markovic had been running sex orgies and blackmailing the participants and that a prominent politician’s wife—many speculated George Pompidue’s wife—was involved. The Corsican mafioso, Francois Marcantoni, a friend of Alain Delon, was indicted for Markovic’s murder, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him. Delon and his wife Nathalie were also questioned but never charged.

At the beginning of every beginning, there was a word, and on my Gorila poster, that word would be bravery. First of all, this book is a true odyssey about all people from all around the world who have left their homes, wives, and children, their neighborhoods, and all the magic of the small pleasures their hometown offers, to hunt for a better life. Usually these young men did not return home in glory, but their personal charms—a lighter, a key chain, or a tobacco case—were sent back to their hometowns with the formal words regarding their death. These people died like true heroes, and their personal stories remain unwritten. They were starved, worked under difficult conditions, and hoped for the day when they would be discovered. The difference between what our fate writes for us and the fairy tales our mothers’ soft voices read to us before bed time, is that the third son and the poorest young man do not get the hand of the beautiful princess; they remain pitiable and unfortunate, or if they are lucky, they are blessed to experience the dream, but just for a little while.

Savkovic once told me that in France he had heard the words le chantage together with the word amitie, and that le chantage (blackmail) had been brought into the French dictionary, not as word, but as an act, around the same time of 1968. I would put it on my poster for two reasons. The first is a personal, subjective epilogue to my work as the translator of this book. Even though Serbian is my mother tongue, I had to admit that I had a feeling, for many days and months, that I was reading a language that was not my own. The original language Gorila was written in the Serbo-Croatian of the 1970s, a street slang that was mixed with French words. In linguistics, this is called code-exchange, where the speakers modify both their mother tongue and the language they are learning and/or being accommodated within the certain geographical area or with other nationalities. Since Gorila’s vocabulary comes from Pigalle, Montmartre, Saint Germaine, and other Parisian streets, squares, and cafés, it is a natural derivation of domestic French, Balkan Serbo-Croatian, and Corsican Franco-Italian. Therefore, I have spent many hours figuring out what my dear friend wanted to say, and it took me a while before I figured out the mixed up words and phrases of those young adventurous émigrés.

The second reason is that le chantage has become one of my favorite French words. It just sounds melodic, and it cunningly reveals the true colors of the time.

Donna, female, elle, kvinne, flicka: all the world’s syllabic words for the divine creature of Eden, her majesty, the woman. Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief with a glittering hand, raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt, as the French poet Baudelaire had, exactly one hundred years ago before the fatal 1968, said in his poem dedicated to female brutal beauty and electric sexuality. Gorila is an external tribute to female eternal beauty, cat eyes and red nails, Moulin Rouge erotic costumes, black stiletto heels, royal-blue satin sheets. The plot of the book is concentrated in the la ville d’ amour, Paris, with all her burning red lights and sex orgies, so called ballet rose. Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll went together, making an explosion for the senses. From this inner context, Gorila is a struggle for love we could only imagine and dream of, for it admits that it is not afraid to love and be loved in return. Many would agree that Gorila is an emancipated break-through, ars poetica, that uncovers the female fight for freedom and pleasuredom.

The vintage poster of Gorila is a picture of us all, but the book is not for everyone. It is violent, explicit, and gruesome in some parts, and as a reader you might need a strong stomach. We are who we are. Great. Stunning. Greedy. Mischievous. Schizophrenic. Erotic. Weak. Beautiful. Alive. Forgotten. Reborn. Most of the vulgarity was left in French, it just sounds better and more eloquent, and if I offend any reader with my choice of English words, I would like to say in advance, Pardon my French.

S. B.

To Mrs. Savkovic.

Gone but not forgotten.

Now I know why tigers eat their young.

—Al Capone

CHAPTER 1

Paris is Burning?

The telephone rang off the hook mercilessly. Stephan awoke grudgingly and began to curse. Damn, this annoying phone. He had forgotten to turn it off upon coming in from a night out in town. He got out of bed, naked, as always when at home, and approached the damned gadget still buzzing. He picked up the receiver and heard a cracking male voice. It was Milo, one of Stephan’s countrymen who lived in Paris.

What do you want? Stephan asked rudely. Don’t you think it would have been better to look at your watch before calling me?

There was a dead silence on the phone line.

Forgive me, Steve, Milo said. Right now it is exactly 8:05. I thought you would be already up and running.

Stephan blew up.

You thought! You thought! What do you want? Speak! Stephan cut him off, ready to hang up and return to bed. What is it? Paris is Burning?!

Milo coughed into the receiver. Man, I wanted to buy a couple of pieces from your wardrobe. You know . . . the usual.

All right, come on by, replied Stephan, but if you’re planning on haggling over the price, don’t even bother.

Everything will be cool, responded Milo, but don’t take off if I’m a couple minutes late. I’d like to see you, talk a bit . . . Steve, you listening?

Stephan hung up; he did not feel like sleeping anymore. He stood naked in front of the large mirror on the wall noticing his bronzed body. It was remarkably sculpted. His palms brushed over his bare chest, covered with short, curly hair. That was him: the bronzed shapely body with cold, green catlike eyes; the high forehead, the powerful cheekbones, and the light chestnut hair that fell in restless waves upon his forehead. He stood there for five more seconds examining his body with amazement. Then he walked to the window, pushed the curtains aside, and flung it wide open.

The odor of car exhaust overtook the room. It was the sign that rue du Colisée was coming to life. A stream of cars slowly flowed toward Franklin Roosevelt. There, with the help of a stoplight, the boulevard fanned out into all four different directions of the mysterious Parisian world.

Damn countrymen, Stephan thought as he gazed—half hidden behind the curtain—at this river and its rubber tires. A man could get away from anything in this world, anything except a fellow countryman in a foreign land. They would bury him if they wanted to.

But, on this particular occasion, his countryman Milo was a godsend. Stephan did not even have a wrinkled ten franc bill in his pocket. He would sell Milo something from his wardrobe to survive another Parisian day. Stephan observed the noisy street. Everything looked in its place, just like every other day. The show could begin. The curtain rose slowly.

Across the street, Mademoiselle Louise, the bartender at Café La Flamme poured detergent over the white metallic chairs placed in front of the café, and then rinsed them with warm water. To those interested, she revealed her rather large, half-naked and very non-French buttocks. The merchant, Monsieur Phillip, was already at his post, deep within his lair filled with the various odors of tobacco and printer’s ink. There was Raymond as well, the bookseller, with his huge, dinosaur-like head and disheveled mane. Mama Renee with her fresh baked goods was trying to cross the street, giving the impression that she ran the neighborhood.

Five after eight. Unremarkably, his countryman hadn’t been late. Stephan remained by the window for a while longer. Morning had brilliantly taken over, and he began to feel its warmth on his naked skin. The city was waking from slumber, crowing and fluttering its wings like a rooster atop its mound of dung.

Soon Mama Renee would have breakfast ready. (Stephan, uhuhuh, are you alone, my dear! the fine woman would exclaim. Ahahah, what a breakfast indeed! Ahahah.) Tea, fruitcake, fresh lemonade, and currant jam.

To hell with all of this, Stephan thought. "The currant jam, Mama Renee, and her maternal smile framed by her silvery white hair and angelic halo. A lie, it’s all a stinkin’ lie. The maternal smile, the fruitcake, Milo buying a clothes from the wardrobe, Monsieur Maurice, the corner butcher who would have to lend him a hundred francs if Milo didn’t show up. The butcher’s sour face and his words of concern and advice laced with the odor of garlic. The pinball machine in Café Lonchan. It’s all bullshit. Never ending bullshit."

Ten after eight. He spent five minutes staring at the river of cars flowing by beneath his window. What to wear, if anything at all? A pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt. He felt most comfortable in his blue jeans and a sweaty, reddish T. He looked for his jeans in the closet, but couldn’t find them; he muttered unintelligibly as his eyes searched beneath his bed, through piles of old newspapers and race forms from the track, but the jeans lay on the rug, next to the bed, exactly where he had left them the previous night.

He had spent ten years in Paris, but had yet to acquire the virtue called cleanliness. The mess didn’t bother him at all. Very rarely would he allow Mama Renee, or any of the cheap little whores who spent nights in his bed, to clean up. Frustrated, Mama Renee would clutch her head out of disgust and cover her eyes. She was convinced that Stephan would stay like this until his dying day.

(Stephan, don’t tell me you weren’t raised among wild animals in some dark forest, this fine woman would say from atop a ladder while removing his underwear from the chandelier.)

The bedroom was in a continual state of disarray. Ashtrays were full of cigarette butts. The filthy sheets, stained by alcohol and pockmarked by cigarette burns, draped the furniture—sheets which no decent human being would ever consider spending the night on. The closet was typically left open. It was full of very expensive suits bought in or specially ordered from the most famous boutiques of Paris and London. Everything that Alain had thrown away through the years had found its way into Stephan’s armoire, even crumbs like Mama Renee would say, Crumbs which had fallen from the wealthy dinner table of Alain Dupre.

From time to time, actually only as a hated last resort, Stephan would sell some pieces of Alain’s former wardrobe to his countrymen. They, in turn, would parade their wears in the cafés of St. Michel and Montparnasse. They would brag that they had once belonged to Alain Dupre. Stephan would strictly forbid them from doing this, and told them repeatedly not to, but these young pimps who wore out chair-covers at Deux Magiciens couldn’t resist, especially given the embroidered initials of the famous star. Several of them had paid dearly for crossing Stephan’s warning, and as late, his collection of Dupre’s wardrobe wasn’t so eagerly sought after.

Stephan could care less. He knew that the sale of this hand-me-down clothing, shirts, ties, sweaters, and shoes wouldn’t change his situation in any way. Nor would the hundred or so francs allow him to grow wings, the ones that he secretly hoped for.

The apartment in which Stephan lived had two large rooms, a bathroom, and an entry. The first of these rooms, which was accessed from the entry, must have been the reception room. It had a beaten up sofa in the style of something from Louis XIV, with peeling gold leaf. Its legs would wobble when someone sat on it. There was a table, which did not belong to the decor, a Chinese rug, covered with large blue flowers, and some oil paintings by some celebrated master that Alain had bought after making his hugely successful film Cry. He later learned that they were fakes, and so they ended up in Stephan’s apartment. Piles of Paris Turf, the racing journal that listed the various statistics of thoroughbreds, their trainers, and race times, a poster of Che Guevara, some pictures of jockey Ives St. Martin, and a telephone . . . that was about it. The reception room never served its intended purpose, for Stephan would greet his guests in his bedroom, naked as the day he was born.

The house belonged to Alain Dupre, the famed star of the silver screen, and one of the best paid and most sought after actors in the world. Alain, his wife Catherine, who also fostered ambitions of being an actor, and their three-year-old daughter, Michelle, lived in the upper two stories of the luxurious and spacious house right above Stephan’s apartment. In the good old days of up to a year before, Stephan was a beloved figure in Dupre’s household. He was Alain’s favorite, a friend, a confidant, a half-brother, a bodyguard that one could only wish for, a man in whom Alain had the deepest trust and whom he continually bragged about. These days you’d rarely hear someone saying: There goes Stephen, Dupre’s bodyguard, a gorilla unlike that in any zoo . . . Now they usually said: There goes Stephan, Dupre’s baby-sitter.

Stephan would spend sunny afternoons with little Michelle in Jardin du Luxembourg. It was Catherine’s explicit wish that he personally take care of the little girl. Stephan behaved like