THE HEART OF DANGER (17 page)

who was a pig?"

They were inside, they had a table. Penn wore his uniform, his

charcoal-grey slacks and his white shirt and his quiet tie and his

brushed blazer. They ignored him. He bought the beers for Jovic

and

Jovic's friends and they ignored him. The hash smoke played at his

nose. He wondered if Dorrie had been here; it was her kind of place

and not Penn's. They talked, excited, laughing, in their own

language

and he bought more beers and the bottles crowded the table, and Penn

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felt a fool and a failure, and one of the girls leaned her head against

his shoulder as if he were a pillar or a wall. The music of a band,

New Orleans Creole jazz, punished him. He was a failure because it

had

slipped beyond his control.

"Jovic, the morning .. ." Penn was shouting, and the head of the girl

was leaden against him. "What do we do in the morning?"

Jovic was banging his empty glass among the empty bottles, and there

was a sneer in his face. "Was she really a pig of a woman .. . ?"

Six.

"Yes, Mr. Penn, it was me that exhumed the cadaver ..."

Penn felt a small tremor, excitement, masked it because that was his

training.

Jovic had collected him from the hotel. Jovic had been morose and

wrapped within himself. They had queued for a tram, squeezed on and

strap-hung with the morning crowd. Jovic had played his own game,

no

talk, led him as if on a string, and taken him to the hospital. Jovic had abandoned him in a hallway of chaos in the hospital, and argued

with a reception woman, and then with a manager, and then with a

doctor. Jovic had led him through corridors and through swing doors

and past wards, finally down concrete steps to a basement.

"I heard that Mrs. Braddock was in town, two weeks ago? When I heard she was in town I was stuck away up in Sector East. We've a big dig

there, the Vukovar hospital people. I just hadn't the opportunity

to

break away. My problem now is, I've a plane to get myself from Zagreb

to Frankfurt, and I've Frankfurt to Los Angeles tonight. Fifteen

minutes is my maximum .. ."

Penn's hand was gouging into the briefcase, for his notebook, for

his

pencil, but not too fast because it was his training to hide rich

and

raw relief.

The Professor of Pathology from Los Angeles was a big man. He was

well

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preserved, but Penn reckoned him over seventy years of age. The

white

hair was thin on his scalp and the skin beneath was dappled and

discoloured. He had not shaved that morning and had white stubble

for

a beard. A scrawny neck, and hands with prominent veins. He seemed a

man who cared.

"I can tell you when she died, that was early December in 1991. I

can

tell you where she died, in a field where a grave had been dug with

an

excavator outside Rosenovici village in Glina Municipality. I can

tell

you how she died, not with full technical detail, but knife wounds

at

the throat, blunt instrument blows to the lower forward skull, then

a

close-quarters killing gunshot above the right ear. I regret, and

you

have to believe me, that I cannot tell you who killed Dorothy .. ."

Penn was writing fast. They were in an outer office and a woman

brought the Professor a plastic cup of coffee. There was a vigour

in

the growling voice of the American, but a tiredness in his body and

he

drank deep on the coffee. "It's a hell of a place there, the village that was Rosenovici. It's a place of foul death, it's where murder

was

done. Those responsible for the killing, they would have come from

across the valley, from the sister village, it's Salika. We had the

one chance to get in there and took it. They watched us, the people

from Salika, and because of their guilt they hated us. They won't

talk

.. . And they were careful, those sort of people always are careful,

there were no survivors that I got to hear about, no eyewitnesses

.. .

To know who killed those men, and Dorothy, then you would have to

cordon that village and find every knife, every hammer or jemmy or

engineering spanner, every Makh-arov PM 9mm-calibre pistol. The

knife

would, probably, still carry blood traces. The hammer or jemmy or

spanner would still hold tissue that could be matched. The pistol,

that's straight .. ." Penn looked up. The American had heaved

himself

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up from the table and gone heavily to a filing cabinet. He was

ripping

the drawers back on their runners, jerking up files, discarding them,

searching. Beside the filing cabinet was an open doorway. In the

next

area was a mortuary slab and there was a skeleton body on the slab.

The

bone sections were marked with tie-on labels and at the far end of

the

body was the skull and there was an adhesive red arrow on it, and

the

arrow pointed to the dark pencil diameter hole. On the floor beside

the mortuary table were three bags that Penn could see, unzipped,

holding a mess of bones. The filing cabinet was slammed shut. The

Professor laid in front of Penn a see-through plastic file cover which

contained a crudely drawn sketch map, and another file which held

black

and white photographs. The photographs were tipped out, where he

could

see them, and the Professor's fingers shuffled them. He saw her

face.

Not the face of the photograph with her mother and stepfather, not

the

face posed with the village boys. He forced himself to look at the

face of death, swollen, wounded. He closed his eyes momentarily.

There was a rattle on the table. The bullet, misshapen, in a tiny

plastic sack, bounced in front of him, rolled, was steady. The

bullet

was dull grey.

"Find the Makharov PM 9mm pistol, match the rifling, and you have

a

case. Find the pistol and you have evidence. You with me, Mr.

Penn?"

"With you."

"Maybe not in my lifetime, but some time ... In the Hague, in Geneva, here, maybe in London ... I am an old man, Mr. Penn, maybe not in

my

lifetime, but I believe in the long arm of law. I believe in cold

and

unemotional justice. I believe in the humbling of the guilty by due

process. I want to believe it will be in my lifetime. I have only

scraps to work from, but I see a picture. She was a fine young woman

.. ."

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Penn's voice was small in his throat. "Tell me."

He was looking down at his watch. The woman who had brought his

coffee

was grimacing at him, and pointing to the clock on the wall. His

bags

were beside his chair. He slapped his finger on a photograph, two

shapes that were just recognizable as corpses, locked, legs and arms

together, torsos together, skulls together. Penn stared back into

the

opaque watering eyes.

"I have only scraps .. . She was a fine young woman because she did not

have to be there. The scraps give you a jumble of a mosaic, and you

have to put the mosaic back together. She didn't have to be there.

They were all wounded, all the men. They all had old wounds, mostly

artillery or mortar shrapnel. They were the guys who had fought for

the village, and they had been hurt bad, and everyone who was fit

enough to quit had run out on them before the village fell. They

were

left behind to the mercy of the attack force. She was a fine young

woman because she stayed with the wounded .. ." He thought that he could hear Mary's voice. The stealing of a Visa card, taken from

her

mother's handbag, and the forging of her mother's signature. "She

didn't have an old wound. She could have gotten out, but none of

the

men could, they would have been, each last one of them, stretcher

cases. She stayed with them. It would have been her decision, to

stay

with them. That makes for me a fine young woman .. ." He thought

he

could see Mary moving easily in her kitchen, and pouring his coffee

and

bringing it to him. "There must have been one boy that she loved.

It

has to be love, Mr. Penn, to stay with those who are doomed when,

yourself, you can be saved. Think on it, Mr. Penn, think on it like I've told it. It's my best shot at the truth. I'm an old man, I've seen about everything in this life that you wouldn't want to see.

She

makes my eyes, Mr. Penn, go wet. At the end, she was trying, Dorothy

was trying to shield her young man from the knives and the blows and

from the gunshot. The scraps tell me that, from the way they lay

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.. ."

He heard Mary and he saw her. "A fine young woman, a young woman

to be

proud of .. ." The room had filled. There was a director and there were managers, and there were staff from the mortuary. No more time

for Dorrie Mowat. The Professor smiled at Penn, as if it wasn't his

fault aircraft didn't wait. The director and the managers were

pumping

the Professor's hand and embracing him, and the women on the staff

were

kissing him, and one had brought flowers for him. Penn had screwed

up

the farewells to two months of unpaid work. He heard it said that

the

car was waiting, and they were running late for the flight. The

crocodile swept up the stairs from the basement mortuary and along

the

corridors and through the swing doors, and cut a swathe across the

lobby. Penn followed and Jovic was silent behind him. From the open

door of the car, the Professor caught his eye, called through the

crowd, and held the flowers against his chest, awkwardly. "Good

luck,

Mr. Penn. Build a case, stack the evidence. I'd like to think

we'll

meet again, in court .. . good luck." He didn't say it, that he was just there to write a report. He waved as the car pulled away. The Botanical Gardens were always his choice for a rendezvous. It was

where the First Secretary chose to take his informants. The

Botanical

Gardens on Mihanoviceva, a little tatty now compared with the time

before independence, still gave good cover; there were sufficient

evergreen shrubs and conifer trees to offer discreet privacy before

the

main summer blooms. It was his second posting, and it was the fourth

month of his final year as field officer in the Croatian capital,

and

he had known Hamilton, Sidney Ernest for most of that time. The file

on Hamilton, Sidney Ernest, designated Freefall, was fat, which meant

that the First Secretary, as he had told his desk chief on the last

London visit, knew about as much of the repellent little man as it

was

possible to know. So the business was done behind trees and shrubs

presented to the city of Zagreb in the cheerful days of non-alignment.

The map of a route taken across the Kupa river, across the territory

of

Sector North, was paid for with American dollars. The First

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Secretary

checked that the map was of some small value with minefields marked

and

strong points identified. He was brusque to the point of rudeness

as

he discussed the map and the action behind the lines. Of all his

informants in Zagreb he believed that he disliked the man, Freefall,

more than any other. He strode away. The map would lie in the fat

file. The mortuary office was a colder place with the Professor

gone.

Without his presence, without his passion and his caring, it was a

colder and a darker place. Penn thought the work would slip more

slowly. He was an interloper, and he was not offered coffee. But

they

gave him what he wanted. He left with photocopies of the sketch map

of

the grave site at Rosenovici, and of the Professor's notes on the

exhumed bodies, and of the photographs of the dead, and of the

written-out detail of the killing bullet that had finished the life

of

Dorrie Mowat. Penn followed Jovic out of the hospital lobby. He

felt

a sense of bewilderment. He reckoned that he knew right from wrong,

that his mother and his father had taught from the time he could

remember that there was good and there was bad. Too damned simple,

wasn't he? Too damned simple to understand how the wounded could

have

been bludgeoned and knifed and shot. It was beyond his comprehension

how a man could have looked into Dorrie Alowat's face and killed her.

The photocopies were in his briefcase. The spring sunshine caught

at

his eyes, the freshness of the air surged to his lungs.

It was good to be gone from that place of cold and darkness.

She found him in a corridor leading off the main walkway that skirted

the second floor of the Transit Centre. The walkway looked down onto