The Untouchable (24 page)

It was the familiar abbreviation of Radovan, the given name of their leader, Karadzic, to confer respect and admiration.

The sector was at peace, there was no fighting in the valley. On the orders of their sergeant, the soldiers manned the two bunkers every morning for the hour before and after dawn, and every evening from the hour before and after dusk. Then they had no duties other than cleaning the bunkers, their sleeping quarters and their weapons. Rado was the attraction.

The betting started at the time he was named.

In the grazing fields, among the weeds of the unploughed arable fields and between the fallen posts and sagging wires of the vineyard, lay the skeletal outlines of the heifers. Rado seemed not to notice the upturned weather-whitened ribcages. Occasionally, not more than once a day, he would raise his massive neck, throw his huge head high and bellow for company. He was doomed, all the soldiers knew it, and they bet on which hour, which day, which week, his great hoofs would wrench the trip-wire of a PROM

mine, or brush the post holding a PMR3 mine, or drop his weight onto the squat antenna points of a PMA2

mine. He seemed immune, invulnerable, so they watched him, fascinated, from the high ground, and the bets were laid.

The sergeant was their bank and issued the betting slips. A thoughtful man, he had realized that unpayable debts between his soldiers would increase tension among them. He had ordered that all bets should be of not a
pfennig
more than a single German mark, the only currency they valued, and that no soldier could wager more than twice a day. He set the odds, collected the money, and left enough in a plastic sack to pay out a winner, using the profit margin to buy little luxuries in the market in the town -

cigarettes, vegetables, cooking utensils, blankets.

Long, hot, fly-blown days followed one another.

While the soldiers slept, ate, smoked, read magazines or wrote to their homes, one man was always deputed as sentry, but his real job was to watch Rado.

There was a full-canopied ash tree between the grazing fields and the arable fields. It was ten minutes to two o'clock. The sentry in the bunker saw Rado rise from the tree's shade, first by extending his rear legs, then kneeling on his front legs before straightening them. His tail flicked his back to clear the flies.

He looked around him and sniffed. Perhaps he needed water from the river or to eat. Rado went slowly. The long grass was pushed aside by his lowered muscled belly, and flattened by his hoofs.

Each step he took, pressing with such weight on the ground, seemed deliberate and purposeful. The sentry watched, and the sound of the flies droned in his ears. Through the shimmer of the heat, Rado's progress, proud, strong and tall, was the only movement in the valley.

There was a flash of firelight... then a puff of grey chemical smoke . . . then the rush of the explosion . . .

The fire was gone, the grass and earth fell b a c k . . . the smoke started to d r i f t . . . then quiet and stillness.

The great beast keeled over. For a moment its four legs were upright, visible above the tall grass, then they were thrashing. The cry of the castrated bull rang out across the valley. The sentry was leaning against the hot metal of his machine-gun, his hands covering his eyes so that he could not see, but he could not shut out Rado's call for help. The tears flooded his face.

The others had heard the explosion, had broken from their meal or their siesta. The bunker filled with soldiers. He was pulled aside. From the earth floor of the bunker he saw the sergeant lock the butt of the machine-gun against his shoulder. In the sentry's mind was the desperate kicking of Rado's legs. A single shot for aiming, then the burst of fire and the bunker was filled with cordite stench and with the rattle of the ejected bullet cases. The weapon was made safe. The sentry dared to stand and look through the firing port.

There was nothing to see, no movement in the grass near the river.

He did not know it, none of them could have, but the bullets that ended the pain of the animal would be the last fired in the war over the fields of the valley.

'Hello, didn't expect to see you in here . . . I went for a walk. My room's too h o t . . . will you have a drink?'

Atkins had come in from the street, had gone to the atrium bar, bought a beer, and had seen him. It was still short of eleven o'clock and Mister was in his room. The bar of the eight-storey hotel was deserted except for them and a bored waiter. The Eagle sat, disconsolate as a reformed alcoholic, with a half-consumed orange juice in front of him. He was lonely, sad, and had been thinking of home, wrapped in the thoughts of the Chiddingfold house and the stables, of Mo and the girls.

'Fine as I am, thank you.'

'May I join you?'

'Be my guest.'

He knew little of Atkins, except that Mister valued him. It was the way of Mister that life and business should be boxed, kept apart. A policeman, over lunch, had once told him that the Irish terrorists used a cell system to cut off an information leak if one cell should be arrested. It was the same principle. He knew as little of Atkins as he did of the Mixer or the Eels or the Cards. The only one he knew, because he drew up the legal contracts for the deals, was the Cruncher -

who was dead. Atkins ripped off an anorak and a fleece then dumped them beside the chair. Low music played through loudspeakers.

Atkins looked directly at him. 'If you don't mind my saying so, and I don't mean to be impertinent, but you don't seem totally on board.'

'Is it that obvious?' He was too tired for denials.

'Funny thing, when I was here before, twice, at this time of year we lived like Eskimos. We were wrapped up in every coat we could fit on, Tuzla and Sarajevo.

There wasn't the heating-oil. Your nose was half frozen when you woke up, you could get frostbite, or damn near it, in bed. Doesn't seem right to be here and cooked. I've turned the thermostat down and opened the window - seems pretty obvious to me.'

'I do what I'm asked to do and when I have a role to play I'll play it,' he said wearily.

Atkins pressed. 'What's wrong with the concept?'

The Eagle was careful. 'That's a leading question -

I might rule it inadmissible.'

'I'm not a blagger - I suppose that's the vernacular of your clients. I hold my drink, my water and my secrets. You're an educated, intelligent man, a professional...'

He interrupted sharply. 'Don't ever underestimate him because he hasn't a conventional career training.

He is a very clever man.'

After a lifetime of living with it, the Eagle understood every facet of questioning and interrogation. He could recognize when he was being pumped for opinions and those questions that came from personal confusion.

'But you're not on board. It's there for anyone to see that you don't approve. Does anyone ever stand up to him?'

'It's not that simple. I give advice when it's asked for. I keep my mouth shut when it's not asked for.'

The question was asked again. 'But does anyone stand up to him?'

'A few have. They're either dead, maimed or living their lives behind locked doors. Do you need to know?'

'That was high risk today. It was
fun
but it was taking a hell of a chance. I wouldn't have done it, but

- I'm not ashamed to say it - I hadn't the balls to tell him. He doesn't know this place, has no idea about these people.'

'I told him that, and my opinion wasn't asked a second time. The grave took the only person who I've known to stand up to him - his mother.' The Eagle would not have said that in his office, in his home, wouldn't have said it anywhere that was familiar. In the great cave of the atrium bar, he felt, in truth, so goddam lonely. He spoke quietly and Atkins had to hunch forward to hear him. 'We're in this together, you and me. If we ever get out of this bloody place, Cruncher didn't, and get home and I thought that you'd repeated this conversation, then I'd see to it that you needed crutches to walk on . . . '

'His mother?'

'She stood up to him.'

Incredulity splashed Atkins's face.

'He idolizes the memory of the woman.' He should have stopped and talked about the weather. But he was drawn forward, did not stop. 'She was a good, decent, salt-of-the-earth working-class woman. I am not patronizing. It all came out when she died. The only time he's been maudlin. I had to endure an hour of self-pitying shit. It was the usual grubby little story.

1981 was the year. He'd just started to buy heroin in Green Lanes, off the Turks, and he was pushing into an existing dealer's territory to sell it on. There are few surprises in this life, and that dealer was not a happy man. He came looking for our lord and master. He was shot in the stomach. The only thing the dealer said to the detectives at his bedside was "No comment", said it again and again. I was down at Caledonian Road with Mister. He's very good when being interrogated, a legal adviser could not ask more of a client. Nine questions out of ten he would say nothing and stare at the ceiling, but at the tenth he would speak. "On the advice of my solicitor I cannot answer your question at this stage." It can't be used in court then that he refused to co-operate, the blame for it shifts to me. He doesn't answer questions because he'd have to lie, and lies are caught out. The detectives hear a lie and move on, then jump back to it twenty minutes later from a different line of questions. Lies don't work. The police knew he was responsible for the shooting, but they hadn't forensics, hadn't a victim's accusation, and hadn't a lie. It was two years before he was married and moved out of Cripps House. The police searched the flat. It was, my words at the time, "a vindictive and destructive search".

They wrecked the place. Anything that could be broken was broken. It was an act of frustrated vandalism. He came back from the police station, cocky and free. His father was at work, but not his mother.

'She turned on him, laid into him, that's what he told me. And he hit her across the face with his fist.

Blacked her eye and split her forehead. She wouldn't go to the surgery for stitches, she told his father that she'd walked into a door. She carried the scar on her eyebrow, the hair never grew on it again, for the rest of her life. His father isn't a fool - he'd have known a door didn't make that sort of injury. It was never referred to again. He tried to buy his way out of the guilt, but they didn't want a retirement home at Peacehaven or Brightlingsea. They stayed in Cripps House, maybe as a reminder. They could have lived like millionaires, but they wouldn't have it. There's a pretence in his life that his mother and father always supported him, never criticized him, that they took the line that "the Old Bill just got lucky" and it was the

"bad company that led him on", and "deep down, he's a decent boy", the usual old crap. That's not true.

His mind is compartmentalized, and hitting his mother is ringfenced and excised from memory. It was only the shock of her death that brought it back, for an hour, on my bloody shoulder. He pumps money into the hospice where she died and into the church where they had the funeral, but that's as far as it goes. No one else ever stood up to him.'

'Why are you here?'

'Try
greed,
young man. Try that for a reason.'

'That's two of us, I suppose,' Atkins said softly. He gathered up his anorak and fleece and wandered to the lift.

The Eagle had a house in the country with horses, all paid for; Atkins had a two-bedroom flat in Fulham that could go on the market for half a million. The Eagle had a 7-series BMW coupe in the drive and a top-of-the-price-list Range Rover for Mo to drag the horsebox; Atkins had a Lotus sports, soft top. Without Mister, the Eagle would have been a struggling lawyer dependent on legal aid pickings; without Mister, Atkins would have been another failed ex-soldier struggling on the consultancy circuit, bullshitting for a living. Of course it was greed, for them both . . . If the gravy train hit the buffers it would be here, because Mister was off his territory. Did Atkins know that, or was Atkins a fool? Too tired to make an answer, the Eagle went to his room. He was guilty for having talked, but Atkins, too, was guilty, for having listened. God, he wished he could drink, but he dared not.

'I just want to hear the statement, not the story, and then I want to get out,' Joey said.

The story, translated in full by Frank, no edit, was of the daily life in Sarajevo under siege. 'It's better you hear it. You won't understand the truth unless you hear the story,' Frank answered him from the side of his mouth, a murmur on his lips. 'I think you should let me handle it, my way.'

They were close to what Frank called the Jewish cemetery. He said it was where there had been the worst fighting, where the Muslim infantry had sustained the worst casualties. Frank told him that the cemetery was still stuffed with mines, ordnance, unexploded grenades and bodies, and hadn't yet been cleared, but there wasn't too much of a hurry because all the Jews had gone to the death camps sixty years earlier. From the layout of the windows, there would have been eight apartments in the building. Only two of the windows had lights on. The rest of the building, Joey thought, was too damaged to be lived in. It was a bare room. The largest feature in it, more dominating than the bed, the cooker, the washbasin and the plastic garden table, was a metal bookcase. It could have held more than five hundred hardbacked books, and it was empty. A small, thin man with cavernous cheeks and bad, gapped teeth sat on the bed. His hair was wispy thin, and his hands were locked together as if to stop them shaking. The fingers were gentle and thin.

'It was a living death. We had no electricity, no water except from the river, no sewage system, no food, no transport, no work. To look forward to, we had only the escape of death. We existed alongside death for month after month. There were some in my block who for three years did not go outside their front door, never went out. There were some who put on a tie each day and a filthy shirt, then walked into the city, never running, as if it were normal. There were others who ran everywhere . . . The ones who stayed in, they could as easily have been killed by a tank shell. The dogs did well. If you were killed and not picked up, if it was too dangerous to retrieve you, the dogs had you, would feast on you. They ate better than us. In the winter, when there was snow and rain we had enough water. We would boil it up and put in grass or nettles or leaves, and that we would call a Sarajevo soup. To heat the water, we burned books. I had many books, I could make many fires. I am a musician. To make a better fire one day, to heat my soup more quickly, I burned my violin.'