The Untouchable (20 page)

At a junction stood a massive collapsed building. It looked as if it had been dynamited at the base. It was five bloody years. What did these people do? Why didn't they clear it up? But he didn't ask Atkins. They drove into the dense streets of the city. His first impressions, and Mister always thought them the best, were that the place was a grade A dump, a tip. They hit a long, straight road. On the plane, Atkins had told him they would come into the city on Buleva Mese Selimovica, eight lanes, that merged into the Zmaja od Bosne, which had been called Snipers' Alley. At high speed, they passed a building whose roof was festooned with aerials and satellite dishes, and he thought it must house the telephone headquarters.

Behind it he glimpsed a dispersed mess of Portakabin huts with signs leading to them for the International Police Task Force, but he knew nothing of what they did. Then a lorry park was on the left, and another and another. He saw rows of cabs, trailers and containers, more rows, and warehouses, some intact and some destroyed. The Cruncher's last message from Sarajevo had given the address, the number of the warehouse in a lorry park in Halilovici, where the charity lorry should arrive. He wondered if it was there; it should have been there that morning, or the night before, tucked from sight in the warehouse.

They hammered over a bridge. He saw the murky earth-brown water, foaming on the weirs, running fast. He'd always been fond of the Cruncher. He'd never feel for Sol Wilkes what he'd felt for the Cruncher.

'I want to know where it happened, where the Cruncher went into the river. I want to go there, I want to see it.'

Atkins spoke to the driver. There seemed to be surprise on the man's face, but Mister couldn't tell whether it was at what was asked, or that he should be told what to do. The Eagle sat bolt upright and clutched his attache case as if he believed it might be wrenched from his grip . . . Drab streets, drab people, drab shops. Kids waved to the cars as they went by, and where there was a traffic block they headed into the oncoming lane and sped past. Once, a car had to swerve onto the pavement to let them by. At a junction, a policeman held up the right-of-way vehicles and they overtook jeeps loaded with armed Italian soldiers, whose drivers seemed not to notice them. When they braked hard they were level with a restaurant whose doors and windows were surrounded by silver aluminium. The sign said it was called Platinum City. Opposite was a narrow, ancient footbridge over the river. The cars stopped, the doors were opened. Mister pushed out the Eagle, then followed him.

There was a low wall between the pavement and the riverbank, and a waist-high railing on the bridge.

An old woman in black squatted beside buckets of tired flowers. He saw that men and women in threadbare clothes stepped off the pavement, risking the road traffic to stay clear of the minders. Mister pointed to the flowers. Atkins spoke to the minder from the front of their car. The man went to the old crow, dropped banknotes into her lap and her face lifted in gratitude. He took a single bunch from her buckets, and she offered more for what he had paid, but he shook his head curtly. The blooms were handed to Atkins, a half-dozen drooping smog-encrusted chrysanthemums. Atkins gave them to Mister, who walked to the centre of the bridge.

He was a man to whom sentiment came rarely. He looked down at the rushing water. He was not troubled by history. He did not know that he was close to where Gavrilo Princep had held a hidden pistol and waited for an archduke and archduchess in an open car, and what had been the consequences of the shots that he had fired. Neither did he know that the bridge on which he stood was a monument to the skill of Ottoman architects now dead for centuries.

Nor did he realize that had he stood on that bridge, looking down on the water, seven years earlier, or eight or nine, a sniper's 'scope would have magnified him in the seconds before he was shot. He held the flowers. He sensed the cold and the power of the river's currents. Neither Atkins nor the Eagle had followed him. He was not aware that the space and quiet around him were not accidental and did not see that the minder from the second car had crossed to the far side of the bridge and diverted pedestrians away.

His mood lightened. People died, didn't they?

i mm her had died, hadn't he? Could have been a Ira I lie accident, could have been slipping in the shower, could have been a rent-boy's knife, could have been pissed and fallen into a river. Life goes on, isn't that right, my old friend? Life goes on, with new challenges. It was the nearest Mister could grope towards feeling sentiment at the death of a friend. He threw the flowers into the river and watched the muddy waters suck them down. There was a flash of colour, then they were gone. Had he looked around him at that moment, turned sharply, and not stared into the flow of the Miljacka, he would have seen the faces of the drivers and the minders. He would have seen amusement and the curl of contempt at their mouths.

He walked briskly back to the cars.

He was driven the reverse way along Snipers' Alley to a square block of gaudy yellow topped with the logo of the Holiday Inn.

'When do I get to see him?'

Through Atkins he discovered that Serif was busy at the moment, but when he was free he would see his respected guest.

The cars drove away. They picked up their bags and walked into the lobby.

The Eagle said, 'That, Mister, is out of order. It is plainly insulting.'

Atkins said, 'It's his patch, Mister, and he'll think crude pegging you back will make him a bigger man.'

Mister smiled cheerfully. 'He'll do it once, he'll not do it again. That's my promise to him and I'm good on my word . . . Doesn't seem too bad a place, considering the rest of it.'

* * *

188

Across open ground where the concrete was holed ankle deep by artillery explosions was a line of sparsely filled shops and bars where a few men and youths desultorily made their coffee last. Above the shops and bars were apartments that had been repaired with a patchwork of bricks and cement. In front of the long building a blue van, paint scraped, unremarkable, was parked in a position that gave its driver and passenger good sight of the front door of the Holiday Inn hotel.

'It may be a slow old trade,' Maggie said, 'but at least we're legal.'

'That's right,' Joey answered. 'Ink on paper.'

'I thought you had a chance, b u t . . . '

'He was good as gold, the judge.'

'I think it's the first time I've ever been legal - is that a cause for celebration or tears? Don't know . . . Tell you what I also don't know - why. Why did Judge Delic sign? You didn't break his legs, did you? You didn't drop him a couple of thousand dollars, did you?'

'I didn't ask. He signed, I ran with it.'

She eased back in her seat, the camera settled on her lap. Behind her, in the van's interior, the workshop of her trade was neatly laid out, cosseted with foam and bubble-wrap.

'It'll be from something out of the past - don't take too much credit for it.'

He said coldly, 'You'd know about that because you worked in dirty corners that are now history. You won't mind me saying it, but the Cold War was utter shit, irrelevant, perpetuated by spooks to keep themselves on the payroll. This is something that matters.'

'I worked with men, I was at the cutting edge, I was 189

with real men,' she flared. 'All this business about
legal,
it's pathetic. They were real men, the best and the finest.'

'Dust in the past,' he said.

He disliked so much of her, and didn't know where to focus the beam of his dislike. There was the crimped care of her makeup and her dress, and the crispness of her accent, and the fact that she had been there before and knew it all when he knew nothing, and the academic precision of her kit in the back of the van. There was the sense of class, privilege and superiority in her every speech and movement.

For Joey, being in Sarajevo and close to Target One was the sweet pinnacle of his short career. For her, as she showed him, it was a tedious spell of tacky work to be endured.

'God help your lot,' she said, 'if you're the best they've got.'

Silence cloaked them. She smoked. The evening descended around them. When she dragged hard and the tip glowed he could see her face. Utter calm contentment. She should have been, was meant to be, offended by his rudeness. He thought a test had been set for him, a provocation to make him expose himself, as if then she could calculate his value, his competence. He eased himself out of the van's cab.

Before he closed the door after him, Joey asked ruefully, 'You'll be all right?'

'Course I will,' she said. 'Why not? This is Bosnia.'

Spring 1993

Two old men, though they were far away from it, dreamed of the valley. They remembered only the best times, when the first of the year's warm days heated the soil and the flowers came and they could hear the river flowing over the ford, and a friendship of more than half a century

The new home of Husein Bekir, his wife and grandchildren was a bell-tent in a camp on the edge of the town of Tuzla, some three hundred kilometres to the north-east of the valley. She had taken the small ones to the queue for bread baked from the flour brought by the United Nations convoys. He shared his home with two other families and it was an existence that was a living hell to him. When she had stood in that queue for perhaps three hours she would bring back the bread, and then she would go away again to queue with the children to fill the plastic buckets with water from the tanker that was also provided by the United Nations. With the sun on his face, Husein sat outside the tent, too listless to move, and tried to scratch from his mind the detail of the colours and contours of the valley fields. The camp was a place of filth and in it there were early signs of epidemic disease. Increasingly frequent warnings of the risk of the spread of the typhus bacteria came from the foreign doctors. It was only by struggling to recall the valley, more blurred now than the previous month, more hazed than in the winter, that Husein stayed alive. There were others, who had come from similar valleys and been displaced, as he had, who had given up the fight to remember and were now buried or lay on the damp mattresses against the tents' walls praying for death. Husein had promised himself that he would return, with Lila and the grandchildren, to the valley. He heard nothing on the radios that blasted through the avenues between the rows of tents that gave him cause to believe his pledge could be redeemed, but his fierce, awkward determination kept him alive . . .

. . . A wind came off the Ostsee and beat at the high windows of the block.

With two other families, Dragan Kovac had been dumped in a twelfth-floor apartment on the outskirts of the town of Griefswald. All day, each day, he sat by the window and stared out. That morning he could see little because the wind carried loose flakes of snow from dark low cloud. The arthritis in his knees, worse through lack of exercise, would have made it hard for him to walk outside, but he yearned, even with the pain, to stumble forward into clean air so that he could better remember his home and the village of Ljut. He was trapped in the building. The twelfth floor was his prison. It was forbidden for him, as it was for the other refugees housed in the block, to leave it.

From his vantage-point he could see the police car parked across the street from the front door. Engine fumes spewed from its exhaust. A police car was always there now. The food they needed was brought to them by earnest social workers. The imprisonment of Dragan and the other refugees in the block of the Baltic town had begun five weeks before when the crowd had gathered under cover of darkness. Rocks had been thrown to break the lower windows, then lighted petrol bombs had rained against the walls, and there had been the shouted hatred of the young men with the shaven heads, the screams of old slogans. He had thought that night - as the yelling of the skinhead
nazis
had beat in his ears - and every day since that it would have been better to have died in his village when the 'fundamentalists' had attacked, better never to have left his home. But he had not stayed: he had been one of the few who had escaped.

He had lumbered as fast as his old legs would carry him, flotsam with the flight of the soldiers, away from his valley, without the time to pack and carry with him even the most basic of his possessions. He had been put with many others onto a lorry that rumbled into Croatia, then onto a train that had wound, closed and with the blinds down, across Austria and into Germany then had traversed the length of that huge country. His home was now - and he had little understanding of great distance - some three thousand kilometres to the north-west of the house with the porch and the chair, and the view to the farm of his friend. The two families who shared the apartment with him showed him no respect, and said he was lazy and a fool and that he, the former police sergeant, was responsible for what had happened in their land.

Tears ran down his cheeks, as the snow melted and slithered down the glass of the window. It was so hard for him to remember the valley, but he thought - trying to see the image of it - that it would still be a place of simple beauty.

Neither of these old men, abandoned to live as statistics, sustained by grudging charity, protected from the fascist gangs, knew of the harsh realities of the valley that was their talisman of survival.

Neither remembered where the mines had been sown; neither could have imagined that those little deathly clusters of plastic and explosive would have shifted. They remembered only the good times, before the mines had been laid, when the valley felt the sun and was a bed of bright flowers, and the Bunica river was low enough to be crossed and they could meet and talk. Good times before the madness had come.

They used the hotel restaurant. Atkins had asked Mister if he wanted to go out, said Reception would recommend a restaurant, but he'd shrugged away the suggestion. It was a slow meal, poorly cooked and ineptly served, but that didn't matter to him. He'd ordered mineral water with his food and the Eagle had taken his cue from him, but Atkins had a half-bottle of Slovenian wine. He didn't have to tell them that he was tired, had no interest in talk. The restaurant was on the mezzanine, three floors below his bedroom, and close to empty. He used the meal-time to think about a riposte to the insult he had received from a man too busy to meet him. It was not in Mister's nature to turn the other cheek. Weakness was never respected. Atkins told the Eagle about the hotel's history in the war: it had been the centre for journalists and aid workers, it was continually hit by artillery fire; only the rooms at the back were safe for occupancy; for weeks at a time there was no power to heat the building, but it stayed open, staff and guests living a cave-dweller existence. Pointing out of the big plate-glass windows and down at the wide street that had been Snipers' Alley, to the dark unlit towers of apartment blocks beyond the river, Atkins told the Eagle about the marksmen who had sheltered high up there and fired down on civilians going to work or queuing at bread shops and water stand-pipes, trying to get to school or college, and the callous disregard of it. The Eagle's face showed that he wished he was anywhere other than in that restaurant, in that city.