Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

"Now, see here…"

"You want to do it yourself? You're free. You make your own programme, just tell me what time, what place, and you arrange it.. ." But then Bill Penn was not a graduate, didn't have the bloody intellect, and had been heaved. Bill Penn was not material for General Intelligence Group. Bill Penn was clerk grade, executive officer grade, pathetic grade, with need of a nanny to hold his hand tight. Bill Penn was the jam my bastard' who had londed the big fat one, and who was out of his depth, and who shpuld have stayed on debt collection and rummaging through dustbins and Service of Legal Process and surveillance tailing of a jerk who didn't know he was watched. Two days had been wasted, and he had nothing to report. "Do what you can," Penn said. The streets were bright and full. The windows lit the young faces gazing at the heaped goods from old Europe. The best of London and Paris and Rome and Frankfurt brazened in front of the wide teenage eyes. Cameras and computers, furs and fridges, Scotch and silks, all there and piled high in the windows on Trg Bana Jelacica. Perhaps Jovic read him. "An illusion," the artist said. "We have nothing but independence. Old men say that independence is important. Myself, I prefer to have two arms, no war, and I prefer to paint rather than trail round with an innocent. You are goddamn patronizing, Mr. Penn.. . Surprise, surprise, they have nice goods in their shops. They are affluent… Innocence to me is shit. Innocence means that you did not bother to find out before you came… Right, Mr. Penn, understand our truth. We have no work, we have inflation, we have no factory production, but our shops are full and so you congratulate us. Who has money, Mr. Penn, to go to the shops? Profiteers? Black marketeers? Pimps, spivs, crooks? Anything can now be bought in our independent nation state… What do you want, Mr. Penn? If you want a woman, you can buy her. If you want a gun, you can buy it. If you want a life, Mr. Penn, you can buy it. You would be surprised, in your innocence, at how cheap comes a woman or a gun or a life…" They had reached the club. The music battered out onto the pavement. And the lights strobed from the doorway and fell on the anger of Jovic's face, and he thrust the stump of his arm into Penn's face.

'… But you would not be interested in the price of a woman or a gun or a life. I apologize for forgetting your interests… Would you feel everyone who died here was a pig? Was it only Miss Dorothy Mowat who was a pig?"

They were inside, they had a table. Penn wore his uniform, his charcoal-grey slacks and his white shirt and his quiet tie and his brushed blazer. They ignored him. He bought the beers for Jovic and Jovic's friends and they ignored him. The hash smoke played at his nose. He wondered if Dorrie had been here; it was her kind of place and not Penn's. They talked, excited, laughing, in their own language and he bought more beers and the bottles crowded the table, and Penn felt a fool and a failure, and one of the girls leaned her head against his shoulder as if he were a pillar or a wall. The music of a band, New Orleans Creole jazz, punished him. He was a failure because it had slipped beyond his control.

"Jovic, the morning…" Penn was shouting, and the head of the girl was leaden against him. "What do we do in the morning?"

Jovic was banging his empty glass among the empty bottles, and there was a sneer in his face. "Was she really a pig of a woman… ?"

"Yes, Mr. Penn, it was me that exhumed the cadaver…"

Penn felt a small tremor, excitement, masked it because that was his training.

Jovic had collected him from the hotel. Jovic had been morose and wrapped within himself. They had queued for a tram, squeezed on and strap-hung with the morning crowd. Jovic had played his own game, no talk, led him as if on a string, and taken him to the hospital. Jovic had abandoned him in a hallway of chaos in the hospital, and argued with a reception woman, and then with a manager, and then with a doctor. Jovic had led him through corridors and through swing doors and past wards, finally down concrete steps to a basement.

"I heard that Mrs. Braddock was in town, two weeks ago? When I heard she was in town I was stuck away up in Sector East. We've a big dig there, the Vukovar hospital people. I just hadn't the opportunity to break away. My problem now is, I've a plane to get myself from Zagreb to Frankfurt, and I've Frankfurt to Los Angeles tonight. Fifteen minutes is my maximum…"

Penn's hand was gouging into the briefcase, for his notebook, for his pencil, but not too fast because it was his training to hide rich and raw relief.

The Professor of Pathology from Los Angeles was a big man. He was well preserved, but Penn reckoned him over seventy years of age. The white hair was thin on his scalp and the skin beneath was dappled and discoloured. He had not shaved that morning and had white stubble for a beard. A scrawny neck, and hands with prominent veins. He seemed a man who cared.

"I can tell you when she died, that was early December in 1991. I can tell you where she died, in a field where a grave had been dug with an excavator outside Rosenovici village in Glina Municipality. I can tell you how she died, not with full technical detail, but knife wounds at the throat, blunt instrument blows to the lower forward skull, then a close-quarters killing gunshot above the right ear. I regret, and you have to believe me, that I cannot tell you who killed Dorothy…" Penn was writing fast. They were in an outer office and a woman brought the Professor a plastic cup of coffee. There was a vigour in the growling voice of the American, but a tiredness in his body and he drank deep on the coffee. "It's a hell of a place there, the village that was Rosenovici. It's a place of foul death, it's where murder was done. Those responsible for the killing, they would have come from across the valley, from the sister village, it's Salika. We had the one chance to get in there and took it. They watched us, the people from Salika, and because of their guilt they hated us. They won't talk… And they were careful, those sort of people always are careful, there were no survivors that I got to hear about, no eyewitnesses… To know who killed those men, and Dorothy, then you would have to cordon that village and find every knife, every hammer or jemmy or engineering spanner, every Makh-arov PM 9mm-calibre pistol. The knife would, probably, still carry blood traces. The hammer or jemmy or spanner would still hold tissue that could be matched. The pistol, that's straight…" Penn looked up. The American had heaved himself up from the table and gone heavily to a filing cabinet. He was ripping the drawers back on their runners, jerking up files, discarding them, searching. Beside the filing cabinet was an open doorway. In the next area was a mortuary slab and there was a skeleton body on the slab. The bone sections were marked with tie-on labels and at the far end of the body was the skull and there was an adhesive red arrow on it, and the arrow pointed to the dark pencil diameter hole. On the floor beside the mortuary table were three bags that Penn could see, unzipped, holding a mess of bones. The filing cabinet was slammed shut. The Professor laid in front of Penn a see-through plastic file cover which contained a crudely drawn sketch map, and another file which held black and white photographs. The photographs were tipped out, where he could see them, and the Professor's fingers shuffled them. He saw her face. Not the face of the photograph with her mother and stepfather, not the face posed with the village boys. He forced himself to look at the face of death, swollen, wounded. He closed his eyes momentarily. There was a rattle on the table. The bullet, misshapen, in a tiny plastic sack, bounced in front of him, rolled, was steady. The bullet was dull grey.