Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'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.'

The man unlocked his hands and reached for a glass of water, which slopped to the floor on its journey from the table to his lips and back.

'I was lucky. A restaurant opened in a basement, a safe building, and I was taken on to play for the diners. There were restaurants open, for foreigners to eat in, where the food had come through the tunnel under the runway at the airport. I was lucky to be chosen as a musician there because the kitchen allowed me to eat what was left on the plates, but that was in the last year of the war.'

Joey listened, stone-faced. He could remember nothing of the war. If it was on television at home his father had broken off from whatever he was talking about and muttered his contempt for people of such savagery. If his mother had the remote, she flipped channels. The war had not registered with him. It had been far away and someone else's problem.

'They were not interested in hearing me play a violin even if I could have found another one. I played the electric guitar. I did not complain. I would have preferred to play Mozart, the violin concerto, K216, Allegro, but I preferred more to eat, so I was the backing to the chanteuse singing Elton John and Eric Clapton. It was survival… In war, sacrifices must be made.'

Joey asked of Frank, 'Where did he play?'

The question was put and answered. Frank said,

'He says he played at the DiscoNite, and he still plays there.'

'Ask him what he saw.'

Frank recited. 'I have been shown a photograph of the face of the dead man. He was drunk. He was alone and staggering. I saw him cross the Obala Kulina Bana and then he went to the wall above the river. He was leaning on it and swaying. I had the impression he might have been vomiting over the wall. The last thing I saw of him, he was heading towards the bridge. That is all I can tell you.'

Even across the barriers of language, Joey could recognize a rehearsed speech; there was no attempt at disguise.

Frank said ruefully, 'It is the same, verbatim, as his statement.'

'Who owns the DiscoNite restaurant?'

'Same man as the Platinum City.'

Joey shrugged. Yes, he knew, but he had needed to hear it. There was no banknote for the violinist who did not bother to hide a lie. They went out, closed the outer door after them.

Joey said, 'If I were to threaten to break his hands, to smash his fingers, so that he would not play again a violin or an electric guitar… '

Frank looked at him, shook his head. 'Forget the illegality, right? They have been through the war.

They are hardened to any cruelty that you or I are capable of inflicting. You wouldn't be able to do it, nor me.'

Joey was a farm boy. His father was the factor of a landowner's estate. He had seen rabbits dying in snares, and enmeshed in nets when fleeing from ferrets. He had seen huntsmen dig out vixens and their cubs from the dens and toss them to the hounds.

He had seen badgers choked in sealed setts. He had seen, when beating for the owner's shoot, the fluttering fall of winged pheasants before the dogs caught and shook them to death. He had hated what he had seen. 'I know.'

'You said last night, "When I find out how he was murdered and why he was murdered then the door begins to open for me." You said that.' Frank's voice was hoarse as if he realized he walked on an unmapped road. 'If it's that important, if – and your hands and mine would stay, sort of, clean – then their own people could do it.'

Frank showed Joey in. The building was at the heart of a little empire of white prefabricated boxes. The room was reached down a hushed corridor covered with lifeless green synthetic carpet that stifled the sound of shoes. Policemen and women, in a polyglot of laundered uniforms, their national flags sewn to their upper sleeves, busily carried papers from office to office, laid them beside colleagues who laboured at computer screens. The corridor smelt of fresh ground coffee and fresh heated croissants. There were no raised voices. Here, speech was as muted as the murmur of the computers.

A quiet voice responded to Frank's knock. Joey was shown inside.

It was a tiny workspace shoe-horned between walls that were little more than screens.

The walls were pincushions for leave charts, maps, duty rosters, and photographs of children, and the shield insignias of police forces from all over the world, from the Czech Republic and South Australia to Mexico. It represented a brotherhood he felt no part of.

'You're Mr Cann, Customs and Excise of the United Kingdom. Frank's told me about you. How can I help?'

Joey had no insignia to offer. The office co-ordinated the training of the Bosnian police to deal with the threat of organized crime. It was the start of their fourth day in Sarajevo, the third of Mister, the Eagle and Atkins, and a routine had been established.

For both Joey and Maggie a routine was important.

They came from structured employment and an ordered division of responsibilities suited them.

Maggie Bolton was up early and had driven the blue van to the parking area close to the Holiday Inn hotel, to tune the audio equipment monitoring room 318.

Joey would follow later and join her, after his visit to the headquarters of the International Police Task Force. When their Target One left the hotel they would both follow, as best they could, and share the surveillance through the day and the evening. When Target One returned to the hotel, Maggie would resume her watch with the earphones, and Joey was free to roam.