Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'Come on, Mister Charity Man, let's hit Gorazde.'

She disentangled herself. Her face was flushed. It was eighteen years since he had married his Princess and in that time he had not touched another woman.

They drove alongside the Drina river, passed the wreckage ol the front line, and went on through the flattened emptiness of no man's land.

Goraz. de was a finger town pressed down between the hills.

Mister never reached across her and looked into the mirror, never saw that he was tracked. He would sleep with her. After the meeting he would sleep whole night with her before going to the airport and taking the plane home. Because he would sleep with her, afterwards, he knew, was certain of it, he would be supreme at the meeting.

A methodical man, with a long training of counter-intelligence operations behind him, Sandor Dizo was a survivor. Eighteen years of his professional life had been in the service of the 111/111 State Protection Directorate, but in 1990 he had effortlessly changed allegiance – not desk, chair or working hours – and had become an executive of the Office of National Security. He had the same view of the roofs of Budapest, from the same room, as he'd had before the collapse of socialism. Then he had worked to stifle internal dissent, now he turned the same standards of intellect to combating the rise in newly democratic Hungary of the influence of organized crime. He had unlearned the practices taught him by the KGB instructors, and had learned those of the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States and the Security Service of the United Kingdom. He was today's man.

The work of that day, and many others past and many to come, was his surveillance of the movements of Russians who were active in the vory v'zakone crime group. If Sandor Dizo had had available to him today the powers of coercion he had enjoyed prior to 1990, the opportunities of the old days, there would have been no Russian criminals on Hungarian territory, but those powers had been withdrawn. He was now a creature of government by computer, provided by the Americans, and fieldcraft, taught by the British. Instead of broken noses and broken necks, he followed the new rules and provided the printouts listing the coming and going of the Russians and filled the files with their photographs. It was not a surprise to Sandor Dizo that the Russians now flourished in Budapest. They ran prostitution, controlled the clubs, moved and sold narcotics, laundered money through the recently opened hanks, directed the country's oil-distribution Mafia; they were behind every rip-off fraud of public and private enterprises, they trafficked weapons, and they killed. Being an exact man, Sandor Dizo could list each of the one hundred and sixty killings and attempted murders and bomb explosions on his capital city's streets since he had joined the Office of National Security. On the fingers of one of his plump hands he could count the minimal number of arrests and convictions of those responsible. Without interfering with their operations, he had gained a comprehensive knowledge of the Russian groups.

Nikki Gornikov had left Budapest that morning. He had been photographed leaving his apartment on Prater Street, and photographed again on Line 2 of the Metro. He had then been seen to take the classic anti-surveillance procedure of diving for a taxi, had been spotted at the airport and watched on to the Vienna flight. By the time those strands of information had been sifted on Sandor Dizo's desk, Nikki Gornikov could have driven a hundred miles from Vienna, or could have boarded any of a dozen flights. He called him ironically, when he thought of him, Baby Nikki because he was a forty-nine-year-old bear bull of a man with a face made ugly by smallpox and knife fights. On Baby Nikki there was a fifteen-page computer printout and a four-centimetre-thick file was laid down by the American and British tutors of a democratic intelligence service, he noted the departure of Baby Nikki Gornikov, of the vory v'zakone group, from Budapest, put another page in the file and hoped the man – wherever he had gone – might slip, stumble, fall under a convenient tram or trolley bus. The place for such a man, so sadistic, cruel and vicious a man as Nikki Gornikov, was the prison yard at dawn.

His tasks of the morning done, Sandor Dizo called to his secretary in the outer office for coffee, and some biscuits if there were any.

'It was their graveyard, but when the Muslims were put out of their homes, the Serb boys used it as a football pitch.'

After her death at St Matthew's hospice, after the funeral service in church, his mother's body had been cremated. Her ashes now lay in an oakwood casket in the crematorium's Garden of Remembrance. It was a lovely garden, clean-raked and dignified in winter, bright with flowers in summer. If kids had come into that garden, just across the North Circular from where he lived, to play football over her casket Mister would have taken a shotgun to them, or a pickaxe handle, or an industrial strimmer, or a chainsaw. None of the little tossers would have been in a state to kick a football again – none of the little bastards would have had the knees to walk again, let alone run. But that wasn't Monika's answer.

' I don't blame the Serb children,' she said. 'They know nothing else. They have never been shown another way.'

'Isn't there a proper pitch in the village where all the kids can play?'

'There was, but it was a park for tanks. It was destroyed. There is no pitch.'

He stood beside her and looked across the graveyard that was a soccer field

She had gone into the UNHCR field office in Gorazde, left him lor less than five minutes, which had seemed an age lo him. Then they'd driven on through the town and out of it. Beyond the old no man's land they'd reached a village where the majority ol the homes were intact, pretty, perched on hillsides, and had fields where cattle browsed on the first of the spring's fresh grass. The village was called Kopaci, she'd said.

He saw the gravestones, low, old and poorly carved, that had been used as goalposts. The other stones, which had been near the penalty spots, at either side of the penalty boxes and across the half-way line, had been uprooted and thrown aside. They marked the sidelines ol the pitch. She had changed him, he knew it A few kids stood with their parents and grandparents by two houses. The families had returned from exile lor their former homes, to find their graveyard was a football pitch, well worn and often played on, It had no grass but had been smoothed by boots and trainers into flattened wet mud.

'I'm going to meet them are you coming with me?'

He shook his head. 'More coffee with a spoonful of grit, more losing at cards? No, thank you.'

'A quarter of an hour they have to be reassured. If they give up, go back into Gorazde, then five years is wasted. It is important to spend time with them if only a few minutes… '

'I'll be here,' Mister said. 'Won't be going far.'

He started to walk down the hillside track The warmth was on his face and his back. He was humming his Elvis. He reached the end of the track, where it joined the road. He was strolling and had not a care. He could not remember when he had last walked on a country track, if he ever had

… Because of the warmth, he slipped out of his coat and carried it on his arm. He was at peace. He looked up the road, wondering how far he should walk and what he might see… and he saw the blue van.

It was parked a hundred yards up the road and faced the junction. The sun, reflected off the van's windscreen, dazzled him for a moment, but when he edged forward and twisted his body further, he could see through the windscreen.

He saw the small pale face, the tousled hair and the big spectacle lenses.

Mister thought the head would turn away, duck, try to hide itself, but it did not.