Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

The call in the night that had woken Ivor Jowett had been a whispered communication. The men he dealt with always dropped their voices when they spoke of Fuat Selcuk, because they knew the reach of his arm. T hat morning, Fuat Selcuk had left Erzurum by light aircraft and had flown to Ankara. At the airport, a bright, brave young spark on surveillance duty had chanced his luck and moved close enough for an

'overheard'. The spark's target had met an Ankara-based associate and had said: 'It'll be a dog fuck of a day. All the way there to meet a bastard from England, who thinks he is the top fuck. I'll eat him. .. ' and the associate had said, 'Or he'll eat his fucking balls.. . ' and they'd gone beyond the hearing of the listener.

Fuat Selcuk had caught an afternoon flight to Damascus, then an evening connection to Zurich – his caller had told him.

Why would he do that?

She brought the tea, and Ivor Jowett told his wife about the call.

Her eyebrows arched. 'Taking a hell of a risk, isn't he, the Brit, dealing with a man like that?'

Maggie was hunched over the recorder, listening hard, pressing the phones against her ears. A tight little frown dented her forehead. Frank watched her.

Salko and Ante pushed themselves up from the far wall and sauntered towards her table. Her eyes were screwed tight, she concentrated, then she shrugged. 'I can't make it out.'

She passed the earphones to Frank. He listened, scratched under his chin. 'There's a problem… something about the peach-bottom boy.'

Frank gave the earphones to the men; they were slipped to each in turn.

Salko said, 'Serif has lost the boy, Enver. He took the dogs out. They have come back, but not the boy.'

Ante said, 'He's talking about an accident. They are going to telephone the Kosevo Hospital. Such a thing has not happened before.'

Fahro said, 'You can hear the worry of him.'

Frank translated and Maggie scribbled down what they'd said. Moments like these always brought a slight joy to her. She pried into her targets' lives. She heard their happiness and she was with them in crisis.

At the other end of the tap, she sensed the panic. The first search party had gone out. She imagined them, in their black jeans, black T-shirts and black jackets, the gold chains garlanding their necks, coming back and reporting failure – they were sent out again. She was the witness to the growing chaos. All the days in the basement workshop at Ceausescu Towers, and the evenings whiled away with the foremen technicians at Imperial College, the nights curled in her chair with her dog and the electronics magazines, had a value when she played the voyeur. She had no interest in the whereabouts of the boy, it did not matter to her if he was prone on a hospital bed, or had gone walkabout, or was drinking himself stupid in a bar, or was in a morgue on a slab. It was her position as an intruder that thrilled her, did now and had in the past. It was her power to insert herself under her target's skin Those who controlled her walked blind without her skills.

She had neat copperplate handwriting.

My dear Mister,

Tonight a man came to see me. He told me who you were. He described your career as a criminal of importance. I asked his name and how did he know such things and why he told me them, but he did not give me answers.

I hate criminality and its exploitation of the weak, and its very selfishness. Therefore, Mister, I should hate you (I see no reason why the man who visited me should have lied), but…

But I think it is impossible for me to hate you.

The man said that you had sought me out as a recipient of charitable goods in order to create an authentic alibi of good works; you used me; you wished to create respectability for your Bosnia with Love lorries which would return to the UK loaded with the class A narcotic – heroin. That is cause for me to hate you, b u t…

But I am a good judge (I hope) of a genuine man.

I see many who come here with insincerity.

Whatever were your first motives for bringing the lorry to the UNIS Building, Tower A, I wish to believe they were replaced by a spirit of true friendship and true affection.

I was not with a criminal in the village of Visnjica. A criminal would not have played cards in the village with the old men, and given them dignity, and would not have held the hand of a child without a father, and given him kindness. A criminal would not have come with me to Gorazde and shown such sympathy for the plight of unfortunates. I was with a man who cared, who had a love for fellow human beings – that is my judgement and it is precious to me.

Perhaps, Mister, when you came here you did not bring sympathy and love. Perhaps you learned them here, in my company (if I am wrong then I am a simple and stupid woman but I think you gained a softness here that you did not travel with)

… I think you are a good man. Wherever I go, whatever is my future, I will remember you and your kindness. I had hoped – until this man came and told me of you – to see you each time that you visited Sarajevo, to spend time with you, and to grow close to you. You would have made a light where there is darkness, summer to winter, brought hope where there is despair. You should be proud of what you did, with your decency.

We will not meet again,

With love, and may God watch over you,

Monika (Holberg)

She sealed the letter into its envelope.

March 2001

'You'll meet him in a minute, the foreman, Five-D.'

The Englishman, Barnaby, walked down the hill towards the bunker and the junction where the turning led to Ljut village. His guest, an attentive young man, hurried at his side. The lights shone boldly in the repaired houses of the nearer village and were bright pinpricks across the valley, beyond the river, in Vraca.

Within a quarter of an hour, the sun's strength would wipe out the electricity's glow from the new windows of the houses of the twin villages. Just before the autumn weather had closed in on the valley, the previous year, five and a half months back, the certificate of clearance had been issued for the corridor of land under the line of power pylons, and the engineering teams had moved on to the site. For a further month, into November, the teams had worked inside the narrow corridor of yellow tape, had lifted the pylons and raised the cables and had restored the power. There had been no further accidents. The power had been switched on. Light had blazed, glowed, shone from each home in the two communities that had been reoccupied. The bulbs were never switched off. The German charity World in Crisis paid the bills.

On the two occasions Barnaby had been to the valley to plan the main clearance operation, he had gained the impression, very distinctly, that the Muslims in Vraca and the Serbs in Ljut kept their lights on through the day whether the sun shone or didn't, and through the night whether they were awake or asleep. It was not for him to tell the villagers that the German aid and generosity were running out.

Because all of the donors were now scrambling to turn their backs on the country, and the funding for the de-mining gangs was drying up, Barnaby had brought the journalist to the valley. Fenton, from a London broadsheet with a daily circulation of less than four hundred thousand readers, was the best recipient Barnaby could find. The work had barely begun, the funding for mine clearance was required for another two decades, minimum. He needed journalists from mass-circulation newspapers, and he needed politicians to tramp down that lane and a thousand others, but they were beyond reach. Instead, he had Wilf Fenton. He always tried to be cheerful when he brought a guest to a minefield.

'Why do you call him Five-D?'

The way Barnaby told it, there were Five-Ds on a hundred sites. It was a regular part of his introductory patter. He knew, from his dogged persistence in seeking out funding, that anecdotes played better in journalists' copy than statistics.