THE HEART OF DANGER (32 page)

trousers at the crutch. He did not tell Milan that he thought he

lied

with his smile. He squirmed in the wetness that he sat in.

Laughing. "We should go get the hag in Rosenovici. Lie up for her, like it was wild pig we were lying up for. Milan, you miserable

bastard, you should be with us .. ."

But the shoulders had ducked down, and he could not see the face,

whether it still smiled, whether it was still angered. For the old

American had come to Rosenovici, and Milan Stankovic ran scared.

The map had shown the escarpment of high rock in the trees. It was

where he had found the small torn shreds of the chewing gum wrapper,

and he recognized the brand name of the wrapper, and he knew that

Ham

had been there, as Ham had said he had. There was a field of winter

grass below the escarpment on which he lay. He could see the trails

across it and the flattened grass in the middle. He could not see

blood, but Ham had said he would not be able to see the blood. It

was

clear in Penn's mind, and the clarity killed the excitement that had

been with him through the length of the day. He looked down onto

the

flattened ground where two men, wounded, had been skewered with

knives,

and he looked down onto the trails in the field where the bodies of

two

men had been dragged and no point in further thinking on it, the

flattened grass and the trails in the grass, and Ham had not talked

of

the risk of capture. Penn moved down from the escarpment, down again

into the depth of the trees. The shadows were longer, the grey merged

with the falling gold of the evening. He had slept just, during the

length of the day when he had rested up, he had eaten a pie and not

yet

missed his sandwiches. It was two hours back that he had left his

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resting place through the day, a shelter made by an uprooted oak.

He

had slept just, then woken at the sound of children's voices, but

they

had not come near him. Penn checked the map when he had reached the

base of the escarpment rock. There was a plan, a fragile plan, in

his

mind. A better man, a Special Forces man, would not have moved across

the damned river without a solid plan locked in his head. He did

not

have that training. The plan grew. He would get to the village of

Rosenovici, he would walk at night along the route where they had

taken

Dorrie, where she had been. He would walk past the house where Katica

Dubelj had lived. He would look for her in her house, and only there,

nowhere else that he knew to look. It would only be a gesture, to

look

for Katica Dubelj, because he did not think she would speak English

and

he knew nothing of her language. He would find the disturbed grave

in

the corner of the field. It would be right for his report that he

had

walked the road through Rosenovici, and along the lane and into the

field. It would be important for his report that he had gone to seek

out Katica Dubelj ... It was not good enough for Penn that he should

take a name from a telephone directory and embroider a story. Basil

would have said he was a fool not to flick the pages of a directory.

Jane would have said he was an idiot. Dougal Gray, who had been his

friend in the Transit van, would have understood. With the plan he

reckoned it possible that he could look back into the eyes of Mary

Brad-dock, see her respect, and take her husband's money. He could

tell them that he had walked where Dorrie had been. He moved away

slower than before he had come to the escarpment, before he had seen

the flattened grass and the trails in the grass. He thought he could

move for another two hours before darkness came. "I'm so sorry to

trouble you .. . Tell me, please, is the crossing point at Turanj

open?" Ulrike Schmidt sat in her office. The Transit Centre was

awash

with the noise of shouting, screaming, laughing. The evening

cooking

smells filtered to her. Her assistant, a nice Ghanaian girl, but

happily scatty, stared across from her own desk, confused. Ulrike

had

never before rung the liaison office with the request for information

as to whether the Turanj crossing point was open, and her assistant

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knew it. "Thank you, but could you, please, make certain. Yes, I'll hold." She was thirty-nine years old. She held the telephone like a

conspirator, like a teenage girl who spoke by telephone to a teenage

boy and did not wish to be heard. When she went home, every two months

for a weekend, back to Munich and the apartment near the Hauptbahnhof,

then her mother and father told her of their pride. And her mother,

each time on the one evening that she was at home, before they went

to

dinner in a restaurant, would sidle into her room and ask her nervous

question. It was difficult to be truthful, and more difficult not

to

be truthful. No, she had no plans. No, there was not a particular

man. It was difficult to be truthful because her mother's face would

cloud and the question would not be repeated. The answer, always,

was

followed by the breezy excuse that life was too hectic, work too

ferocious, to share. There were flowers and there were invitations,

but there was no particular man. "Definitely, the crossing point

is

open. You have heard nothing about it being closed tomorrow? No

.. .

Thank you. It was just a rumour. I am so sorry to have troubled

you.

Good night." She put down the telephone, and her assistant was

watching her, puzzled. Ulrike blushed. She gave no explanation.

If

she had given her assistant an explanation, truth, then the girl might

just have climbed onto the central table in the office where the

computer was, and danced. Her assistant was scatty enough. But the truth was that a man she cared about was behind the lines, across

the

river, in the place where the stories came from of atrocity and

bestiality and torture. She cared because he took a road that was

different from the turned cheek and the fixed smile. The truth was

that if a man had been captured behind the lines then the border

crossing at Turanj would have been closed. The Serbs always closed

the

crossing point when they discovered incursion into their territory.

If

the crossing was still open then he stayed free. It was the end of

the

day, and the end of the map. There was a brisk rain shower falling

into the upper branches of the trees. The last of the light showed

Penn where he should spend the night. No mines laid off the track

because there were tractor ruts and the tread of worn trailer tyres.

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A

small tin hut had been abandoned beside the clumsy heaps of cut wood,

and Penn judged it was where the timber men sheltered from heavy rain

and where they made their coffee and ate their food. The men who

came

to the hut would be the same as the timber men on the estate of his

childhood, who had talked with him and amused him, and they would

kill

him if they found him. Too dark for him to move further, and the

hut

was the final point on Ham's map. He squatted down in the hut, then

curled onto his side, closed his eyes. In six hours, three at dawn

and

three at dusk, he had covered twelve miles according to Ham's map.

It

was important that he should sleep. Ham had said that where the map

ended was six miles from Rosenovici, perhaps seven but not more. He

would go forward, blind, in the first light of the morning. She was

old, and Ham could not afford a girl. She was old enough and cheap

enough to look for trade in the side streets off the square behind

the

big earth ramparts of Karlovac. It was usual for her trade to be

with

the Muslim men of the Transit Centre. Ham did not know her, he had

not

been with her before. It didn't matter to him that she was old, but

it

was important that she was cheap. Chicken shit pay from the army,

and

the slimmest cut left in his pocket from selling on the imported

cigarettes, she had to be cheap. He lay on the bed. He could see

she

was old from the single unshaded bulb, hanging down from the ceiling,

and he could see the flab ridges of her waist after she had unbuttoned

her blouse, and the wide weight of her buttocks after she had peeled

down her knickers. She smoked while she undressed, not the imported

cigarettes that he handled but the loose filled sort that came from

the

factory in Zagreb. He had heard a child cry out in the night, from

behind a closed door, and she had shouted back at the child. When

she

was naked, the prostitute straddled Ham on the bed, heavy above him,

and her last gesture before earning the money that she had whipped

from

his hand and buried in her bag was to reach across him and grind out

her cigarette.

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He tried to think of his Karen. It was always best when he closed

his

eyes and thought of Karen. But he could not find her in his mind.

The

pillow sunk below his head. She felt for him, opening his trousers.

He

could not find Karen in his mind. He saw the thin and faded wallpaper

of the room on the sixth floor of the block on Mihovilica that was

away

from the old walls of Karlovac and near to the river and the bridge

that carried the main road to Zagreb, and there was a narrow framed

picture, not straight, of the crucifixion, and there were a child's

plastic toys on the floor near to the chair where discarded clothes

had

been dumped. The bed heaved as she worked harder with her fingers.

Couldn't help her, couldn't respond to her, couldn't think of Karen.

Because the bed heaved, iron springs screaming, the child behind the

closed door cried out again, and the woman ignored her child. Her

face

was above him, she had the waist of his trousers down to his knees,

and

his pants pulled back, and he could not respond to her. There was

contempt at the woman's mouth. She had already been paid, and her

interest was going.

Couldn't think of Karen.

He could only think of Penn.

He, had checked at the operations centre before going out of the

barracks in the old police station. Casual questions. Was it all

quiet over there? Any balloons going up over there? Bored answers.

It

was all quiet over there, just a sniper, two rounds,

near the milk factory that was across the river where they had the

salient, nothing else. He was thinking of Penn, and Penn should now

be

at the end of the map because that was the schedule drawn for him,

and

Penn should now be holed up in the woodcutters' hut. The shiver came

to him, and he thought of Penn who was alone, and the thought

shrivelled him. The big mouth with the thick lipstick rim hovered

above Ham, and he could not turn the face and the bagged eyes and

the

187

grey-flecked hair into the face of his Karen. And the big mouth with

the thick lipstick rim curled at him in disgust because he could not

respond. He hit her. He smacked with a closed fist into the side

of

her face. Faces replacing the pain in hers. The face of the barman that he had punched in the bar at Cullyhanna because the barman had

back-chatted the patrol. He was hitting her with both fists, belting

feverishly into the flab lines of her stomach. The face of the Irish

sales representative who had jogged his arm, spilled his pint, in

the

pub in Aldershot, put on the floor with the fag ends and the beer

puddle and kicked. She was off the bed and whimpering in the corner,

crouched among the clothes she had dropped. The face of Karen, when

he

had belted her, when she'd cried, when she'd packed, when she'd gone

out of the front door with her bag and his Dawn. All the faces,

fleeting, gone .. . Penn's face stayed. He pulled up his pants and

his

trousers. Ham left the door of the bedroom open behind him, and the

door of the apartment, and the woman whimpered and the child cried.

He

jogged down the stairs. Ham thought only of Penn, and his fear. The compliment, that Benny Stein would not have recognized, was that he

was

the most popular, the most revered, the most talked about driver in

the

aid convoy team sponsored by the British Crown Agents. Going off

through those bloody awful people, through their bloody awful

villages,

was not worth thinking of without Benny Stein to humour them along.

The Seddon Atkinson, his lorry, was loaded full, eight tons of wheat

flour, yeast, sugar, and seed.

And now the damn tricky girl was playing up on transmission, the only