Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

The woman came off the bed, and she was tucking her blouse into the waist of her trousers, and then she was buttoning her blouse, and she seemed to look at Penn as if to satisfy herself that he had made up his mind. She did not question him, just checked him, and she was slipping from the bed and going for the telephone on the shelf beneath the mirror.

And the small man, the man who was crouched down on the floor with his rifle, shook his head like he heard something that he could not believe, and he said, "That, squire, is the biggest piece of fucking madness that I have heard. Just 'cause the cow winds you up, doesn't mean you fucking have to."

The woman was dialling a number.

She looked at the scars and bruises and cuts. "I didn't know."

He said simply, "We loved her, all who were touched by her came to love her. Your problem, Mrs. Braddock, is you knew nothing about that love."

His hand was laid on Evica's hand. Just for the moment she allowed his hand on her hand. She took her hand from under his. Milan's hand lay on the kitchen table. He drummed his fingers, he looked into her face. She did not criticize him with her eyes because the log bin beside the stove was not filled. She did not criticize him because he had sat at the table rereading old newspapers through the whole of the morning while she had been with Marko at the school. She did not criticize him because he had not risen from their bed before she had gone with Marko to the school, had not been to the store in the village to see if there was fresh bread, had not swept the floor of the kitchen. Evica pushed the last logs of the bin onto the fading fire of the stove. She did not criticize him because she had to go out into the shed behind the kitchen door to get potatoes and beetroot, and she was wearing her washed and ironed blouse and her neat skirt that were appropriate for the acting headmistress of Salika's village school, and she took the emptied log bin with her. Her face, when he had laid his hand on hers, was without expression. He could not know from looking at her face whether she was ashamed of him, whether she was frightened for him, whether she loathed him. The body of the dog was pressed against the kitchen door as if waiting for the mistress to come, as if the master were no longer of importance. They had been married more than a dozen years ago, when he was the basketball star of the Glina Municipality and she the prettiest girl in Salika village, and he did not know her. The boy, his Marko, came to him, sat on his lap, sturdy weight on his upper thighs, and he thought that perhaps the boy had been crying as his mother had walked him home from morning school, and there were the scars of fighting on the boy's face. She came back into the kitchen. She was carrying the log bin, filled, and a cardboard box of potatoes and beetroot, and he could see the stain of dried mud on her blouse, and the strain of her arm muscles because the logs were damp and still heavy. And he could see, near to the broadest of the smears of dried mud, the place on the waist of her blouse where she had stitched a short L-shaped rent in the material. She did not criticize him because it was impossible now to buy new clothes. She did not criticize him because she could no longer go to the shops in Karlovac and Sisak. She did not criticize him as if he were responsible, as if it were personal to him, for the war. She had dumped the bin. He held tight to his son. She was tipping potatoes and beetroot into the bowl in her sink for washing and peeling and cutting. She knew of the death of the Headmaster, and she would know of the killing of Katica Dubelj, she had translated the accusation of the stranger who had come to their village… and he did not know what she thought. It had rained hard in the night. Through the window he could see the cloud on the hill above the village across the river. Her back was to him. She worked methodically over the sink.

Milan said, "Because the stream is in spate it cannot be today, and I do not think it can be tomorrow, but when the pace of the stream is settled then I will take Marko to fish. Far up the stream, up past where they graze the sheep, where they plough, there is a good pool. I saw trout there. We will dig some worms, we will bring you back a trout…"

He laughed out loud and he cuddled the boy who was heavy on his upper thighs, and the weight of Marko tautened the belt at his waist and dragged the bulk of the holster into the flesh of his hip and he would always wear the holster now, and she did not turn to face him, and he did not know what she thought.

He was waiting for them at the entrance to the barracks.

Marty signed them in, and the Swedish sentries issued, lazily, visitor's permits for Ulrike and the Englishman and for the mercenary and for the tall woman with them who was elegant and beautiful.

He showed Ulrike where she could park the car.

Marty walked them from the parking lot to the freight container.

He took them inside the freight container, and he apologized for the wet mud on the vinyl flooring, and he shut down his screen and he tidied away the papers on his desk, and he said he would make coffee for them. If she had given him more warning with her telephone call requesting a meeting, then he would have gone out of the Ilka barracks and bought flowers for Ulrike Schmidt. He was filling the kettle, finding the mugs, getting the milk carton from the small fridge, looking in his cupboard for sugar.

The elegant woman, the Englishwoman, came right at him. "Mr. Jones, you are a war crimes investigator…?"

And Marty hadn't even gotten round to establishing who had milk and who had sugar.

"That's correct, ma'am."

"You are here to prepare cases against war criminals with a view to eventual prosecution?"

"Correct again, ma'am."

"What progress are you making, Mr. Jones?"

"Precious little, ma'am."

"Why are you making precious little progress?"

He grimaced. "Do you have all day…?"

"Please, Mr. Jones, just explain."

"It depends, ma'am, on why you want to know it."

The Englishwoman took from her handbag two sheets of faxed paper, and she passed them to Marty. He began to read. The kettle was starting to blow, but Ulrike made that her job. He read the synopsis of a killing. Ulrike spooned the coffee into the five mugs and they talked among themselves about milk and about portions of sugar. He was reading the brief text of eyewitnesses and the Englishwoman's eyes never left him as he read. He was reading the material that crossed his desk each day, that was recorded on his camcorder, that was held on his audio tapes. There were photographs pinned to the interior walls of the freight container, bad atrocity photographs, and the Englishman stared at them coldly and Ulrike ignored them, and once the mercenary made a joke of them, but the Englishwoman seemed not to see them. She watched him as he shifted from the first sheet to the second, as he weighed the names, as he drank it in. He thought of telling the Englishwoman, telling her how many thousands of civilians had died in former Yugoslavia, how many of the ethnic minorities had been cleansed, how many 'concentration camps' existed, how many homes had been burned, how many acts of criminality had been perpetrated against the defenceless. When he finished his reading he could have told her that in the catalogue of bestiality the 'incident' at the village of Rosenovici was minimal. Those that trusted him, those who were the eyewitnesses and who provided his 'snapshot' experiences were hungry and tired and traumatized, they no longer possessed the spark of action. She was smartly dressed, like a big oil man wife. She had fine skin, like a woman who was cared for with money. He supposed she believed it her right to jump to the head of any queue he made for the priorities of his catalogue of bestiality. He handed her back the two sheets of paper.