Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

"A dog couldn't work in there."

But he was an Anchorage boy. Anchorage bred them stubborn. What he had learned from twenty-two months in New York, turning round paper on member nations' subscription debts, and what he had learned in Zagreb had given him a deep-running hostility to the fast-created empire. They had the good apartments, and the good allowances, and the good life, while Marty Jones survived in a stinking hot goddamn oven.

"Maybe a dog would be doing something more useful than your war crimes shit. Let me tell you a few facts of life, young man. War crimes talk is just a sedative for the poor punters outside of here who've joined the "Can't We Do Something Brigade". There will be no war crimes tribunal. You may want to jerk yourself off each night at the thought of Milosevic, Karadic, Mladic, Arkan or Seselj, standing in the dock without a tie or a belt or shoe laces it won't happen. Like it or not, and don't patronize me by thinking I like it, it c? nnot happen because I need those bastards, and all the rest of the grubby little murderers that walk this godforsaken corner of earth. I need them to sign a peace treaty for Bosnia, then a peace treaty for occupied Croatia, and I'm not going to get them to sign if there's a sniff of handcuffs in the wind…"

"Then you give the world over to anarchy, intolerable anarchy."

"I need a lesson from you? Where have you been? You have been fucking nowhere. Peace between Egypt and Israel if the Brit buggers were still hammering for Begin to be tried for terrorism, for Sadat to be tried for making war? Peace in Namibia if half the South African Defence Force were to be wheeled in front of a court on genocide charges? I know reality because I have faced reality…"

"Your argument is morally bankrupt."

He faced the big, gross-set Irishman. He would screw him down, screw him down hard, if the opportunity ever came his way. Screw him down so that he screamed.

"And your office is a converted freight container, so fuck off back there…"

Marty went back in the sunlight across the parade ground, back to his video and audio tapes and his computer disks.

The gravedigger, Stevo, had been on the expedition to the church at Glina, but it was not personal to him.

It was personal to Milan Stankovic and the postman, Branko, and the carpenter, Milo, but not to him because no one from his family had died in the fire of the church.

They were ahead of the buses, it was usual for Milan to have a car when he needed it, and the fuel to go with it. Before the war, before the rise of Milan, they would all have been on the buses for the annual journey to the church at Glina. Since the war, the gravedigger had not been able to make the particular long journey that was personal to him. His own mother and father had been murdered in the Crveni Krst concentration camp that had been sited at Nis, near to Belgrade. He knew that Milan, and he was grateful that Milan had tried, had last year attempted to arrange the long journey for him, but there had been shelling on the road that week, near to Brcko, and all traffic had been halted. His father had died in the big breakout, 12 February 1942, from the camp at Nis, machine-gunned against the wall by the Croat Ustase guards, and his mother had died at the hands of the Croat Ustase killing squads on the hill called Bubanj that was near to Nis where a thousand were killed each day, and they were buried now, together, amongst the trees on the hill called Bubanj.

The buses would be far behind them now, and the old Mercedes with in excess of 150,000 kilometres on the clock powered them home. He knew it was not the ceremony at the ruin of the church that affected Milan. It was not the ceremony and the prayer and the singing of the anthem and the reciting of the poem of the Battle of Kosovo that left Milan sullen and quiet, because he had been that way for too many days since the digging in the field at the end of the lane in Rosenovici.

And the others in the car had taken the bastard mood from Milan Stankovic.

And because it was not personal to him, where they had been, the gravedigger, Stevo, thought it right to break that bastard mood. He leaned forward. The radio in the car played, faint and r distorted, and the singer was Simonida with the one-string gusla to back her. He tapped Milan's shoulder. "Milan, I love you… Milan, if you were dead, I would dig the best hole for you… Milan, why are you now such a miserable bastard…?" The gravedigger thought he could break the mood with mischief. '… Milan, you are a miserable bastard, you are a miserable bastard to be with. If you want me to, Milan, I will go and dig a hole, as deep as I can dig it, so that I have to chuck the earth up over my shoulder, and you can go and lie in the hole and I will chuck the earth back on top of you, and that might cure you of being such a miserable bastard…" He had reached forward, and his fingers worked at Milan's shoulders, like he used to see the postman's fingers, Branko's, at Milan's shoulders when he loosened him before a big match of basketball. '… Milan, you are a miserable bastard to be with, and you make everyone else a miserable bastard. Look at us, we are all miserable because you are a miserable bastard…" And the man pulled himself forward, and broke the grave-digger's hold on his shoulders. And he thought he could play Milan because he had the sort of black humour that would make Milan laugh. The gravedigger was on the crest, and he could not see Milan's face. If he had seen it he might have sat back into the seat, let the springs tickle his arse, but he could not see it. "You know why you are such a miserable bastard, Milan? You are a miserable bastard because you are scared…" The gravedigger could not see Milan's face, and he could not see his hands. '… You are Scared. Have been scared since that old American came and farted over at Rosenovici. Why are you scared? Then he saw Milan's face. He saw the erupted anger. He saw the hands and he saw the pistol. The face was against his, bright red and flushed. One hand coming past his eyes and locking into his old straggled hair and pulling his head forward. One hand holding the pistol and driving it through his teeth, grating them, until the foresight ground against the roof of his mouth. And he had seen Milan kill, and he could not doubt that Milan would kill. And he had seen a bastard Ustase killed by a bullet fired from a pistol deep in the mouth, and seen the crown of the head, where the hair was thinning, lift off. And the postman had swerved the car, gone half into a ditch and come out, and the carpenter cowered away against the far window of the back of the car.

And the anger was gone. The foresight of the pistol scraped the roof of the gravedigger's mouth and against his teeth and nicked at his lip. And the smile was there, as if Milan was saying that he was not scared.

Stevo's mouth was raw agony and he could feel, already, the wet of his trousers at the crutch. He did not tell Milan that he thought he lied with his smile. He squirmed in the wetness that he sat in.

Laughing. "We should go get the hag in Rosenovici. Lie up for her, like it was wild pig we were lying up for. Milan, you miserable bastard, you should be with us…"

But the shoulders had ducked down, and he could not see the face, whether it still smiled, whether it was still angered. For the old American had come to Rosenovici, and Milan Stankovic ran scared.

The map had shown the escarpment of high rock in the trees. It was where he had found the small torn shreds of the chewing gum wrapper, and he recognized the brand name of the wrapper, and he knew that Ham had been there, as Ham had said he had. There was a field of winter grass below the escarpment on which he lay. He could see the trails across it and the flattened grass in the middle. He could not see blood, but Ham had said he would not be able to see the blood. It was clear in Penn's mind, and the clarity killed the excitement that had been with him through the length of the day. He looked down onto the flattened ground where two men, wounded, had been skewered with knives, and he looked down onto the trails in the field where the bodies of two men had been dragged and no point in further thinking on it, the flattened grass and the trails in the grass, and Ham had not talked of the risk of capture. Penn moved down from the escarpment, down again into the depth of the trees. The shadows were longer, the grey merged with the falling gold of the evening. He had slept just, during the length of the day when he had rested up, he had eaten a pie and not yet missed his sandwiches. It was two hours back that he had left his resting place through the day, a shelter made by an uprooted oak. He had slept just, then woken at the sound of children's voices, but they had not come near him. Penn checked the map when he had reached the base of the escarpment rock. There was a plan, a fragile plan, in his mind. A better man, a Special Forces man, would not have moved across the damned river without a solid plan locked in his head. He did not have that training. The plan grew. He would get to the village of Rosenovici, he would walk at night along the route where they had taken Dorrie, where she had been. He would walk past the house where Katica Dubelj had lived. He would look for her in her house, and only there, nowhere else that he knew to look. It would only be a gesture, to look for Katica Dubelj, because he did not think she would speak English and he knew nothing of her language. He would find the disturbed grave in the corner of the field. It would be right for his report that he had walked the road through Rosenovici, and along the lane and into the field. It would be important for his report that he had gone to seek out Katica Dubelj… It was not good enough for Penn that he should take a name from a telephone directory and embroider a story. Basil would have said he was a fool not to flick the pages of a directory. Jane would have said he was an idiot. Dougal Gray, who had been his friend in the Transit van, would have understood. With the plan he reckoned it possible that he could look back into the eyes of Mary Brad-dock, see her respect, and take her husband's money. He could tell them that he had walked where Dorrie had been. He moved away slower than before he had come to the escarpment, before he had seen the flattened grass and the trails in the grass. He thought he could move for another two hours before darkness came. "I'm so sorry to trouble you… Tell me, please, is the crossing point at Turanj open?" Ulrike Schmidt sat in her office. The Transit Centre was awash with the noise of shouting, screaming, laughing. The evening cooking smells filtered to her. Her assistant, a nice Ghanaian girl, but happily scatty, stared across from her own desk, confused. Ulrike had never before rung the liaison office with the request for information as to whether the Turanj crossing point was open, and her assistant knew it. "Thank you, but could you, please, make certain. Yes, I'll hold." She was thirty-nine years old. She held the telephone like a conspirator, like a teenage girl who spoke by telephone to a teenage boy and did not wish to be heard. When she went home, every two months for a weekend, back to Munich and the apartment near the Hauptbahnhof, then her mother and father told her of their pride. And her mother, each time on the one evening that she was at home, before they went to dinner in a restaurant, would sidle into her room and ask her nervous question. It was difficult to be truthful, and more difficult not to be truthful. No, she had no plans. No, there was not a particular man. It was difficult to be truthful because her mother's face would cloud and the question would not be repeated. The answer, always, was followed by the breezy excuse that life was too hectic, work too ferocious, to share. There were flowers and there were invitations, but there was no particular man. "Definitely, the crossing point is open. You have heard nothing about it being closed tomorrow? No… Thank you. It was just a rumour. I am so sorry to have troubled you. Good night." She put down the telephone, and her assistant was watching her, puzzled. Ulrike blushed. She gave no explanation. If she had given her assistant an explanation, truth, then the girl might just have climbed onto the central table in the office where the computer was, and danced. Her assistant was scatty enough. But the truth was that a man she cared about was behind the lines, across the river, in the place where the stories came from of atrocity and bestiality and torture. She cared because he took a road that was different from the turned cheek and the fixed smile. The truth was that if a man had been captured behind the lines then the border crossing at Turanj would have been closed. The Serbs always closed the crossing point when they discovered incursion into their territory. If the crossing was still open then he stayed free. It was the end of the day, and the end of the map. There was a brisk rain shower falling into the upper branches of the trees. The last of the light showed Penn where he should spend the night. No mines laid off the track because there were tractor ruts and the tread of worn trailer tyres. A small tin hut had been abandoned beside the clumsy heaps of cut wood, and Penn judged it was where the timber men sheltered from heavy rain and where they made their coffee and ate their food. The men who came to the hut would be the same as the timber men on the estate of his childhood, who had talked with him and amused him, and they would kill him if they found him. Too dark for him to move further, and the hut was the final point on Ham's map. He squatted down in the hut, then curled onto his side, closed his eyes. In six hours, three at dawn and three at dusk, he had covered twelve miles according to Ham's map. It was important that he should sleep. Ham had said that where the map ended was six miles from Rosenovici, perhaps seven but not more. He would go forward, blind, in the first light of the morning. She was old, and Ham could not afford a girl. She was old enough and cheap enough to look for trade in the side streets off the square behind the big earth ramparts of Karlovac. It was usual for her trade to be with the Muslim men of the Transit Centre. Ham did not know her, he had not been with her before. It didn't matter to him that she was old, but it was important that she was cheap. Chicken shit pay from the army, and the slimmest cut left in his pocket from selling on the imported cigarettes, she had to be cheap. He lay on the bed. He could see she was old from the single unshaded bulb, hanging down from the ceiling, and he could see the flab ridges of her waist after she had unbuttoned her blouse, and the wide weight of her buttocks after she had peeled down her knickers. She smoked while she undressed, not the imported cigarettes that he handled but the loose filled sort that came from the factory in Zagreb. He had heard a child cry out in the night, from behind a closed door, and she had shouted back at the child. When she was naked, the prostitute straddled Ham on the bed, heavy above him, and her last gesture before earning the money that she had whipped from his hand and buried in her bag was to reach across him and grind out her cigarette.