The Tower and the Telephone

You have seen the tower: the renderings, the famous name in gold letters, the promise of cranes over Belgrade and glass catching the evening light over the Sava. You have not yet looked for the prosecutor, Rade Bajić, who examined how that project was being arranged and then found that the telephone in their pocket may have been reporting on them. Let us follow the money a little further, and introduce the people who have been left out of the account.

The defenders of such a project deserve a fair hearing, and their strongest case is this: a capital wants investment, investment wants certainty, and an inquiry into an allegedly illegal scheme is the opposite of certainty. Better, they say, that the building rise and the paperwork be forgiven than that Belgrade frighten away a name the whole world recognises. I do not dismiss it. Builders need work, and a city deserves its skyline.

But consider what was actually purchased when someone, with means beyond any private grudge, placed advanced spyware against the official charged with asking questions. It was not silence about one tower. It was a lesson, and a lesson is delivered to everyone who watches.

The first person to learn it is the informant who might have called Bajić next week. The informant does not know the details of the software, only that the prosecutor’s line is no longer a confidence but a broadcast to the very people being investigated. That call is never made. Nobody reports a call that is never made, and so it appears in no ledger anywhere.

The second person is the young prosecutor in the next office, holding a file about some other contract with some other powerful patron. They have seen what happened down the corridor. The file is not burned; it is simply set at the bottom of the pile, where files go when ambition has done its arithmetic. Here is the unseen harvest of a single intrusion: not one case harmed, but a hundred cases politely declined.

The third is the investor the tower was supposed to attract. An honest foreigner deciding whether to build a factory near Belgrade does not read brochures; they read what happens to people who enforce contracts. If the person who audits a deal can be watched by the people who made it, then a contract there is not a promise but a hope, and hopes command a discount. So the capital the scheme was meant to welcome learns to stay away, and the dishonest capital, which never minded, stays.

You see the joke, though nobody in Belgrade is laughing. A government bugs its own prosecutor to protect a monument to confidence, and in doing so places a tax on confidence itself, collected from every Serbian who will one day need a court to believe them.

The tower has a price that appears in the accounts. The spyware has a price that appears only in what never happens. So I ask the reporting the one question it has not asked: when the ribbon is cut and the photographs are taken, who will be standing just outside the frame, phone switched off, deciding that some other case can wait?