THE HEART OF DANGER (19 page)

flee

that night, they went into the woods and they said they would try

to

walk in the woods and the hills until they reached the lines of the

Croatian army. I don't know what happened to them. The rest of us, 104

we

thought that it was a mistake by the regular army to fire on our

village, we thought that there would be liaison with Salika, with

our

friends and neighbours and work colleagues. We thought they would

tell

the Partizan officers that they should not fire on us. They fired

on

our village all through the Wednesday. There were only rifles in

the

village to shoot back at them. It was on the afternoon of the

Wednesday that her boy was wounded .. ." Seeing Mary Braddock in

the

kitchen, drinking the coffee, feeling the warmth of the Aga,

listening

to the calm telling. The sixteenth birthday party, and Charles away

on

business, and Mary trying to do the right thing, and inviting in the

teenagers of her friends in the village on the Surrey/ Sussex border,

and buying a new dress for Dorrie, and Dorrie not wearing it, and

the

village boys from the council houses crashing the evening, and Dorrie

dancing. "Across the lane from the church was a big farmhouse,

Franjo's and Ivana's farmhouse. It was the oldest building in the

village, it had the best and the biggest cellar. It was where the

wounded fighters were taken. It was the fighters who were hurt

because

they tried to hold a defence line, they could not hide in buildings.

Some were hurt, dead, some were hurt, wounded. She brought him back

from the defence line to the cellar in the farmhouse of Franjo and

Ivana. She was so small and he was a heavy boy and he could not help

himself. She carried him back across the fields from the defence

line

and the snipers were shooting at her, and we could hear their voices,

the snipers, and they were shouting to each other and making bets

as to

which would hit her. She brought him to the cellar and she went again

across the fields to the defence line to bring another back .. ."

Dorrie dancing. Dorrie in her jeans and black T-shirt. The boys,

her

friends, smoking their marijuana and passing the pills, and the

teenage

kids of Mary's friends drifting away and frightened. Mary coming

from

the kitchen, helpless and control lost, and Dorrie on the oval

walnut-veneer table that had cost Charles 2,800 at auction and

105

stripping out of her jeans and the T-shirt and her pants as she danced.

Mary standing in the doorway, stunned, silent, seeing Dorrie's

shallow

breasts and seeing the straggle of the coming hair, hearing the

splintering of the antique table. "She was alone with the wounded

fighters all through the Wednesday night. By the time the darkness

came on the Wednesday night, the Partizan snipers had come so close

that the farmhouse of Franjo and Ivana was cut off from the rest of

the

village. We could not reach the cellar and the boys there were too

hurt to make their own way out. She could have come. In the darkness

she, alone, might have managed to come. I think she chose to stay

..

." The council house boys clapping their hands, speeding the dance, the

white flashes of Dorrie's body. The dance finished when the table

had

collapsed and splintered. Dorrie drunk, Dorrie smoking, Dorrie

popping

the pills, Dorrie swearing abuse at her as she stood stunned, silent,

in the doorway. Mary had told it calmly. Mary had said that it was done to hurt her. "It was on the Thursday afternoon that the village fell. On the morning of the Thursday, before it was light, many

people

had left the village, gone with what they could carry into the woods.

I

and my sister, we could not go, our home where we had sheltered was

close to the store in Rosenovici and that is on the east of the village

and it was open to the shooting from Salika. "There were very few

of

us left in the village when it fell. I had thought that it would

be

the regular troops who would come into the village when the flag was

raised. There was a sheet tied to a stick and it was held out from

a

window of the store. It was people from Salika who came into the

village, it was our friends and neighbours and work colleagues. They

came across the bridge from Salika. They all wore uniforms, but I

knew

them as the carpenter who had made the table for my kitchen, and the

gravedigger who had made the grave for my father when our own

gravedigger was ill, and the postman who brought the letters to our

village, and others that I knew, and commanding them was the man who

was a junior clerk in the co-operative at Turanj. They took

everything

that we had, our wristwatches and our earrings and our necklaces and

106

our money. They put us onto a lorry and they took us to a camp at

Glina, what had been the prison there. I urinate blood because of

what

was done at Glina "And Dorrie, what happened to Dorrie?" "She was with

the wounded in the cellar of Franjo's and Ivana's farmhouse when the

village was taken .. ." "What happened to her?" The tears streamed on

the woman Maria's face. Jovic said, "She doesn't know. She has told you everything that she could know .. ." Penn had been hunched

forward

on a small hard chair, and he had been writing hard. He sat back.

He

saw the face in the doorway, and the shabby washed-through uniform.

He

did not know how long the van driver had been listening, the man with

the full and round face and the cropped skull and the tattoo on his

neck. The woman, Maria, was speaking, and she had taken Penn's hand

with urgency. She was choking the words. When he looked back to

the

door the face of the van driver was gone. He realized what the tattoo

was, the wings and the parachute. Gone. Jovic translated, without

emotion, without expression. "She was an angel. She stayed with

them

when no one else stayed with them. She was an angel in her

prettiness,

and an angel in her courage .. ." Penn squeezed the woman's hand.

He

followed Jovic out into the sunlight. There were children playing,

kicking a ball, there were women hanging out washing on lines slung

from the trees that were in first blossom. Jovic asked, cool, "It

will

be good for your report, yes?" The potential reader had to know the man. If the man were not a composite, not a picture, then quite

impossible for any future reader of the file to comprehend. Not

easy,

damn difficult, to make the picture. Henry Carter, sweating now

because Library was so damned hot, tried to make a shape of the morsels

available. NAME: Penn, William Frederick. DOB: 27 May 1958. FOB: Cirencester, Gloucs. PARENTS: George Wilberforce Penn (farm

labourer)

and Mavis Emily (nee Gordon). 4, the Farm Cottages, Ampney Crucis,

Nr

Cirencester, Gloucs. EDUCATED: Driffield Primary, and Cirencester

Comprehensive (name unlisted), 5 O levels, A levels in Geography and

History.

107

EMPLOYMENT:

SUBSEQUENT

EMPLOYMENT:

MARRIED:

MARITAL ADDRESS:

HOBBIES: RECREATION: INTERESTS: SUMMARY:

Home Office 1978-1980, clerk grade. Security Service 1980-1992

(resigned). Worked in F Branch (Subversives) and A4 (Surveillance).

"Capable officer in area of field work, but limited in ability to

analyse complex material." .. . (Join the club, young man!) .. .

Resigned after being informed by Personnel that progress into General

Intelligence Group was restricted to academic graduates.

Alpha Security Ltd, Wimbledon, SW19, as private investigator.

Jane Felicity (nee Perkins) 1989. 1 son, Thomas Henry, DOB 9 January

1993. 57B the Cedars, Raynes Park, Surrey.

None listed. None listed. None listed.

Had reached a plateau at Security Service. Was unwise to challenge

promotion system. Could have continued at existing level. Perhaps

believed he would be persuaded to stay, to withdraw his resignation.

"Deeply wounded' that no such persuasion was offered? (my note HC).

Not much there, damn all there, the old desk warrior thought, and

absolutely nothing there to give prior warning as to how the young

man

would react when confronted with that bloody awful place, with that

surfeit of bloody awful misery.

More for Penny to type up when the dragon, the day shift supervisor,

went for her rest-break and canteen tea.

He had a great bank of experience, seldom mined and seldom tapped,

and

it was a lesson he had learned .. . The dull men who were without

hobbies, the ordinary men who were without recreations, without

interests, usually managed to confound with surprise .. . God save

108

the

dull and the ordinary and the boring. God protect the human species

from exciting and unique and fascinating men .. . that was a lesson

Henry Carter had learned.

If it had not been for the war he would have been the mayor.

The Headmaster stood at the back of the hall of his school.

There was an order in these things, and the appointment to office

of

mayor would have come, that year, to the Headmaster, if it had not

been

for the war.

All of the village had gathered in the hall. A meeting was held in

the

school every month. He had never spoken out before, he had never

stood

up before to be counted, but he thought that as Headmaster he would

be

listened to. His was a position of importance in the village

community

of Salika, he believed it his responsibility to speak.

Because of the war, Milan Stankovic, nothing more than a clerk, was

mayor. And not mayor for a year, but now in his second term, and

there

would be a third. Milan Stankovic, nothing more than a clerk, was

mayor because he commanded the Territorial Defence Force, because

he

controlled the black market, because he could provide gasoline or

diesel or spare parts or crop seed, because he killed. And the bodies

had been dug up and taken away, and the Headmaster felt the confidence

to speak.

He was at the back of the hall and standing alone. He would have

to

crane on tiptoe, when he spoke, if Milan Stankovic were to see him.

Nothing more than a clerk, and sitting in a fraud's uniform at the

table facing the audience of villagers, and beside him were the

carpenter and the gravedigger and the one who had delivered post when

there were letters to be delivered, before the war had come. The

carpenter and the gravedigger and the postman also wore the uniform

of

soldiers, they were the new elite of the village. He had not talked

109

to

the Priest, had not confided that he would speak at the meeting, he

had

no trust in the Priest.

The Headmaster believed a new age of darkness had come to the village.

It was his duty to speak. He was a small man with sparse greying

hair

above a short beak nose that held his iron-rimmed glasses. When he

stood on his toes, when he could see Milan Stankovic, the image was

blurred. His glasses should have been changed, but it was not

possible

now to get the replacement, because of the war. He had taught many

of

those who sat between where he stood and the table, and they followed,

like sheep, a false deity. He thought it his duty to denounce Milan

Stankovic.

He felt no fear .. .

The Priest should have been beside him. Of the men in the village,

only he and the Priest had known higher education. He felt the Priest

slipped from the responsibility of duty. He had a text, as the Priest

had a text each Sunday. The text had been taken from an anthology

of

quotations, in the English language, that had been a treasured

companion since his graduation from the university. Mr. Edmund

Burke,

1729-1797, political theorist: "It is necessary only for the good

man

to do nothing for evil to triumph." He had been across the bridge

two

weeks before when Milan Stankovic, who was a clerk, had been to the

junket in Belgrade, he had seen the digging and seen the bodies lifted

from the grey-black earth and seen them bagged. He had felt the

disgrace of his village. That sense of disgrace was the keener

because

he had looked into the face of the elderly American who had supervised

the exhumation, and seen contempt. He was sixty-two years old. He

was

respected throughout the village.

He was not afraid .. .

They sat in front of him, they stood in front of him, the sheep. They agreed to everything proposed by Milan Stankovic. Hands -rose in

110

acceptance of what was proposed. They needed leadership, the sheep.