Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

The boxes were ticked more boldly when darkness blanketed the causeway. He had his privacy here. Isolation. Protection. Anonymity. There was only one road, along the causeway, linking the island to the mainland. Gillot liked that. The island was a place where strangers were noticed if they stepped off the few tourist paths and were away from the Bill on the southern tip where the lighthouse was. In the trade he practised, close to the edge of whatever goddamn legislation had most recently been enacted, he assumed he was under variable degrees of surveillance by the plodding HMRC Alpha team. And there were other risks – it was inevitable in the trade that toes would be trodden on and noses disjointed.

His security, and his family’s, had dictated the move to the island. He had not explained it frankly to Josie, had not told her of two warnings coming within a month. In Tel Aviv, an Israeli had told him, ‘You sell to the Jews. If the Arabs you deal with knew of your link to us it would go bad for you, as it would if you sold them items we had not first sanctioned. We, too, have a long arm.’ Four weeks later he had been walking across Martyrs Square in the heart of Damascus with his guide from the defence ministry. The man had waved expansively at the space and said, ‘This is where we executed the Israeli spy, Cohen, who betrayed us. It was, and is, the correct punishment for spies and betrayers.’ In his old home he had felt vulnerable, threatened. On his return from Syria he had slapped it on the market, gone in search of a remote property and had bought one with little reference to Josie. This was now his home and he powered the Audi through the narrow, winding streets of Lower Town and up towards Higher Town. He felt again the warmth of coming home. And, yes, he looked forward to seeing his dog.

He would have been there in daylight but for the meeting in Frankfurt. He lived within a network. Brokers came to him; he went to them; confidentiality and trust were guaranteed. A German dealer had access to the shipping – the rust-bucket freighter – that would sail from a Bulgarian port to a Georgian dockside. Trust was everything in the world he had inherited from his mentor, Solly Lieberman. His hand had been gripped by the German’s as the price was agreed, the dates of payment and of the cargo being loaded. Once, he would have talked to Josie about the deal and cracked open a bottle. A floodlight played on the war memorial, the highest point on the island. He swept past the hotel, then veered east towards the coast road. He would go past the gaols and then on to the wide old road that would take him home, to its warmth and security.

It was a hell of a good deal, worthy of celebration – and if Harvey Gillot had to celebrate alone that would not kill the pleasure.

The Audi’s lights raked the front gates of his property. He used his zapper, drove inside and parked.

She didn’t come to open the car door for him, but at least the dog was barking a welcome from inside. He was home, where all the boxes were ticked.

Josip was always going to be on the periphery of the inner circle in the village. A moment in his history had determined that he was outside the dominant group. He did not try to scale the barriers. Instead, he ingratiated himself, was too useful to be rejected out of hand. The result? His opinions were canvassed and his advice was accepted.

‘That is what happened in 1991. Now, at last, we have his name.’

A few bends downstream from the town of Vukovar lay the sprawling village of Ilok – best known for the quality of the wine produced in the local vineyards. Ilok was an historic crossing point over the Danube, and a modern bridge linked Croatian and Serbian territory. For centuries trading had been part of the two communities’ lives and hatreds were brief, violent, then put to one side by those for whom trafficking was a way of life. Before Serb main battle tanks and armoured personnel carriers had crossed the bridge to wipe away resistance at Vukovar and the satellite villages, trading had been primarily in cigarettes coming from Turkey or Montenegro and destined for the German and Austrian markets. Once the inconvenience of full-scale war was removed and infant statelets were born, smuggling entered new dimensions: women, arms, class-A narcotics, computer chips and illegal immigrants were moved from Serbia to Croatia across the Danube, and the favourite route was east to west, where mature forests came down to the riverbanks and small inlets were not watched.

‘He stole what was paid to him. He betrayed the village. It is a matter of honour.’

Josip came to Ilok.

High on the hillside above the river there was a castle in a state of ongoing decay but government funds for restoration were exhausted. Other than the lawns and walls around a church on the site, it was pitiful and abandoned, but a good place for a rendezvous. He met two men and they sat together in the shade, smoked and shared a bottle of mineral water. The heat blistered down around them as they talked.

‘We cannot do it. We want to hire a man who can.’

The two men Josip met, who sat on the fallen masonry with him, featured prominently on the police computers in Belgrade and Zagreb, and the older one was listed on Europol’s Fifty Most Wanted, which circulated in European capitals. Alone of the villagers, Josip had contacts in organised crime, which now he tapped into.

There was a scrap of paper, preserved in a plastic wrapper. There was a name, a telephone number and the address of a hotel on Croatia’s northern Adriatic coast.

How to find a man who could be hired… how to find a man who would kill to order…

‘The village has condemned him. For us, there is no forgiveness. Harvey Gillot is dead.’

In the summer of 1991, Josip had been thirty-five, an insurance salesman able to practise successfully under the loose commercial constraints of Yugoslav Communism. He had opened offices in Vukovar, Osijek and Vinkovci; near the bus station in Vukovar, close to the town hall in Osijek, and with a view over the railway shunting yards in Vintovci. He lived in the village, was married, had two small boys and was held up in his community as an example of the virtues of thrift and hard work. Although three offices sounded grand, the rewards were solid rather than great and the future seemed secure. Anyone with an overview of his affairs, professional and domestic, would have realised that his commitment to the village was less than wholehearted. His wife was from north of Zagreb, where her parents lived.

In May 1991, a few kilometres from the village and close to the big shoe factory at Borevo Selo, twelve Croatian policemen had been killed by Cetnik paramilitaries; twenty more were wounded. A month later artillery shells fell regularly on Vukovar; the columns of smoke could be seen from the village and the communities prepared for full-scale fratricide – civil war between neighbours. Zoran, the teacher – who had taught Josip mathematics – led the village in a hectic programme of preparation: trenches were dug, the bunker was strengthened, drugs were stockpiled, ammunition and weapons distributed. Tomislav’s wife, a Serb, left with her younger children, but her eldest son stayed. Nobody in the village helped her as she walked past the fortifications, then over a wooden footbridge that spanned the Vuka and away along a track that would take her to Brsadin where her family were from. She took one suitcase and did not wave to her husband and eldest son.

That night Josip’s wife told him that she, too, would be leaving. She was a Catholic Croat. Their children were Catholic Croats. He was a Catholic Croat. The similarities between her and Tomislav’s wife were minimal. At four o’clock the following morning he had written a letter of abject apology, scrawled Zoran’s name on the envelope and left it sealed on the kitchen table. He had driven away at a few minutes after five, and the dog had run after them to the outer roadblock where there was a chicane between two felled tree trunks. The children had been sobbing, and the picket at the roadblock had caught the dog; they would have seen the cases, bags and bedding in the car, and would have known that a coward did not have the stomach to fight.