The Untouchable (44 page)

. . . He heard the patter of the feet that followed him.

'Why don't they go back and get them, the TVs?'

'Because they are beaten people, Mister, they have no more any spirit to fight.'

'Then they've no future.'

'The other future is to start the war again, Mister. Of course you are angry - I am angry - but violence, criminal violence, solves nothing. It is the way of the barbarian. The place for the criminals is not at the head of armies of thugs and thieves, it is in gaol where there are bars and where there is no key.'

They reached her jeep. The engine was on and her driver slept in the sealed warmth. He heard a low, guttered, hacking cough behind him. He turned. For a moment the small boy cringed away, was a retreating shadow figure on the empty track. He reached out his arms and the child came to him. He lifted the little boy and hugged the thin frame to his chest. Monika was with him. Together they held the child. He kissed the child's face, and Monika kissed his. He put the small boy down and watched him go into the darkness.

'If the visitors had done what you have they would have learned ten times, a hundred times, more. I thank you.'

'For nothing.'

They climbed into the jeep, were driven away from the village. On the seat between them her hand rested on his.

June 1998

Three times Husein Bekir had conceded defeat in the past five hours. Three times the patronizing victor's satisfaction had been on Dragan Kovac's face.

Each time he lost, while the retired police sergeant poured more brandy, burped on his lunch, and called him an old fool and a man without intelligence, Husein immediately set the carved wooden pieces back on the board, and they played again. He had played the last game, and the next would be the same, with a desperate intensity that furrowed his forehead, that made his hand tremble as he lifted a piece and slapped it down in its new position. His concentration was on his own moves, and what he anticipated would be Dragen Kovac's moves, but above all he searched for a sign of his opponent's cheating. As yet he could not find such a sign and that confused him hugely. If his opponent did not cheat, the implication was clear to Husein he, himself, was inferior . . . Of course Dragan kovac cheated. He heard a distant voice calling, his name, but ignored it. The grandchild and the dog were also ignored, and had slipped out of the door to search for entertainment.

When the bottle's mouth hovered over his glass, Husein put his hand clumsily over it and succeeded only in tipping over the glass. His head was bent over the board and he saw nothing of the fields below the porch, and he did not look up to find the voice calling his name, and he did not glance at the mulberry tree beyond the sagging fence of barbed wire, and he did not see the dog chasing alter the ball his grandson had thrown for it. He tried, his concentration fading, to plot the defence of his bishop, and he thought it was with unnecessary ostentation that Dragan Kovac wiped the spilled brandy off the table.

Until she reached him he had not been aware of Lila's approach up the track.

As he peered down at the board and looked for answers, he saw at the edge of his vision her river-washed rubber boots, which came to the top of her muscled shins. When was he coming home? she asked: he was coming home when the game was finished. Who was going to milk the goats? she asked he would milk the goats when he had finished the game. What was more important, milking the goats or drinking and playing games? Where was his grandchild? He did not know. She snorted at him in derision, and he heard Dragan Kovac's chuckle. There was the cackling of her voice, and he lost the threads of his defence. He looked up. He was palpitating with anger. He looked around. The child was high in the mulberry tree beyond the fence. The dog sat under the spread of the tree with the ball in its mouth and the saliva dripped from its jaws. Did he consider it responsible to allow the child to climb a tree - from which he might fall - and not even know where he was? Did he consider it responsible to be drunk when in charge of the child, his grandson? Under his breath, holding his head in his hands, he swore.

If he wanted to get back his chill, she said, that was his business, but she was not permitting him to abandon her grandson up a dangerous tree. If he got his chill back, through his own stupidity, when he should have been milking the goats, then it would not be she who nursed him. He wriggled in annoyance, and Dragan Kovac reached, grinning, for the bottle.

Husein Bekir saw his wife, Lila, stamp away from him in her shining rubber boots. She was stout, strong for her age, heavy-built. She seemed to plough through the long uncut grass below the porch towards the drooping fence in front of the mulberry tree. She straddled the fence, caught her skirt on the wire, extricated herself, leaving a thread on the barbs when she swung over her back leg, then went into the shade under the tree's leaves. He saw the deepening lines in his friend's forehead, and his eyes were screwed to narrow slits. His mouth gaped open, as if he tried to clarify a little moment of memory from far back, and could not. Then his friend's tongue flapped idly, but no words came. She was calling the child down.

Husein did not know what memory seeped back into the mind of Dragan Kovac, nor what his friend tried to say.

The child was pale, thin, like the scrawny dog gliding on the baked earth under the tree, had no meat on him and was lightweight.

His woman, Lila, was solid and heavy.

She moved under the tree so that she could better steady the child when he dropped down to her and her voice was harsh with her command as if she had no patience.

Dragan Kovac hissed, 'It's where they did it - put them I remember, it's where—'

'Put what?'

The mine exploded under her foot.

For Joey, it had been the journey from hell.

The nightmare had begun after he had seen Mister and the woman leave the village in the UNHCRjeep.

It had been hard to track them at the end, in the failed light. He had kept a distance back from them, but had seen Mister pick up a child and hug it, and then the small boy had run up the track past him. Joey had walked another mile through the long strip of the village, to where the blue van was hidden in trees beside the river. As he'd approached, stumbling over fallen branches, he'd heard the charge of their escape.

They would have run when they'd heard his approach. The van's doors were open. He'd sworn.

He'd reached inside, felt the dash and found the loose wires from the radio. His foot, as he'd stood by the door, had brushed against bricks. He'd sworn aloud He'd gone round to the passenger side, found the pocket open, and the torch hadn't been there. Mori-bricks against his hand on the passenger side - bricks to hold up the van, because there were no bloody wheels, no tyres. He'd sworn again in fury. Of course he had seen the poverty of the village, abject poverty, but he'd never thought that a little of the poverty might be removed by the acquisition of his tyres, his goddam wheels. He'd started to walk.

He dragged himself up the stairs of the hotel. A man had been sitting, smoking, an empty coffee cup in front of him, close to the reception desk, and he'd been given his key by a scowling night porter whose eyes were never off the man. He went up to his landing.

A man lounged in a chair at the top of the stairs, seemed to strip Joey with his gaze. He, too, wore the uniform of the man in the foyer - jeans, a cigarette, close-cut hair, a black leather jacket. A short-barrelled machine pistol, two magazines taped together, lay on his lap. Joey knew the face but couldn't put a place to it. It confused him, but in his exhaustion he didn't stop.

He went past the door of the room that had been Maggie's; there was a light under it and low voices, the scented fumes of cigarettes.

He let himself into his room, dumped his bag on the bed and took out the camera.

Opening up his laptop, he wrote his report, his fingers hammering on the keys.

He'd walked to the main road, then gone west along it. He'd hitched every car and lorry that had passed him, but none had stopped and some had nearly clipped him. He'd reached a village and seen a cafe's lights. He'd gone into it. Was there a taxi in the village? Shrugged responses, there was no taxi. Was there a telephone to call a taxi from Kiseljak?

The telephone was broken. He'd headed off, continued walking.

The report was typed out. He was tired, so bloody tired. He was cold, he was damp, he was hungry. He snatched the wire cables from his bag. His fingers shivered. It was slow going, and his temper was fuelled - should have taken him thirty seconds but it took him minutes - and he linked the cables to his laptop and his mobile, and hit the transmission-code keys. The first time, with his clumsiness, it didn't go through, second time it did.

He had walked for an hour and a half to reach Kiseljak. No taxis, no buses. In the police station he had gone half-way down on his knees, and flagged them with his ID. A police car had taken him to Rakovica, half-way to Sarajevo, and the driver had gestured that he could go no further, that he was not allowed beyond his area. Again, he had walked. A lorry with a drunk driver had lifted him as far as Blasuj, then dropped him. He'd walked in the dark, another hour, almost crying in his frustration, towards the always distant lights of the city, his goal.

Joey wired the digital camera to his mobile, and dialled. And the camera's pictures were downloaded to London. The mobile's screen message told him they were received.

He'd walked into Ilidza. No taxis in Kiseljak, Rakovica or Blasuj, and half a hundred bloody taxis in the Ilidja suburb. He'd been driven to the hotel, He'd staggered in through the door, into the bright light mud on his boots, his trousers and his coat.

He remembered, the recognition seeped into his mind, where he'd seen the men . . . They had been in the back of the truck. When he had been picked up in the truck, and the door had been opened for him, the interior light had come on. They had been in the back - Ante and Muhsin. He had seen their faces -

Salko and Fahro - before he had nestled down in the front seat and slammed the truck door, and the light had gone out. When they had come from the truck and had gone into the druggie's block, they had worn balaclavas and he hadn't seen their faces. He'd seen their faces when they'd come out of the block, work done, before they'd pulled their hoods back down.

'An excellent meal,' Mister said, and pushed his chair back from the table.

It had been the same meal, the Eagle reflected, that they'd eaten every night, but it was the first time Mister had praised the food. He'd talked, rambling, about his day, about war and poverty, about hatred, and the Eagle and Atkins had been his audience. If it had been hot, stinking hot, he would have diagnosed Mister as a sunstroke case, but there hadn't been any fierce sun . . . She wasn't mentioned. The Eagle began to think the unthinkable.

Almost as an afterthought, Mister turned to Atkins.

'You did all right today?'

'Went well, Mister.'

'You got the place?'

'We did a reconnaissance on the house and we've found a position where there's a clear field of vision on to it, a clear field of fire.'

'And tarmac?'

'Tarmac and frozen ground. The ground's smooth.'

'That's great, well done.'

The Eagle thought Atkins was a bloody puppy lapping praise.

'That's what we do tomorrow - should be a bit special. I mean, seeing it actually fired, that'll be sort of exciting . . . Good night, guys.'

Mister walked away from the table, left them, and his whistling echoed out ol the restaurant. It was, of course, unthinkable, and he had known Mister for twenty-eight years, and the Princess for eighteen of them - unthinkable.

The pictures were passed by Gough round the central table, to be subjected to the team's scrutiny.

'Choice - I'd fancy a bit of il myself,' said SQG3.

'Not what I'd have expected from him, dipping his wick, not from what Boy Brilliant left us on him, out of the character Cann drew,' said SQG8.

'Silly old beggar, getting the flushes at his age, and his Princess won't like it, will not be a happy girl if she gets to see them,' said SQG5.

'She'll get to see them, in good time,' Gough growled. 'What I'd like, at both ends from tomorrow we start to build the pressure. From pressure comes mistakes - only a little diversion and can we now, please, concentrate.'

He gathered up the pictures of his Target One and an unidentified young woman, locked them in his drawer, and they applied themselves again to the first of the rummages that would be launched in the morning that would build the pressure, force the mistakes. The name of Cann, and what he did, dis not deserve another mention. They were too busy, inside their own agenda, to think of him.

He closed his door behind him and went down the corridor. He waved his ID at the man on the landing, thought it was Salko, and saw that both the hands were on the machine pistol. He had left behind his coat and he swivelled to show that there was no weapon in his belt. Outside her room, the one he thought was Muhsin acknowledged him sourly, and Joey thought he was allowed with reluctance to go to the door.

He knocked and heard a scrabble of movement behind it. He said his name. The door opened on the chain, then closed again, then was fully opened.

'Come on in,' she said. 'Join the party.'

She was on the bed, dressed, a filled glass in her hand, shared with a cigarette. Frank Williams, the policeman, in uniform, was in the chair by the window. The last two of what he had called the Sreb Four were hunched on the carpet - jeans, leather jackets and cigarettes, machine pistols against their knees within fast reach - one against the foot of the bed and one against the wardrobe. Joey reckoned they were Fahro and Ante. He saw the metal case on the floor under the window, by the chair.

'It's the advantage of a transit lounge, the duty-free.

I've Chivas Regal and Courvoisier.'

'You're drunk.'

'Have to be drunk or mental to come back here.'

'Why did you turn round?'