Brendan DuBois - Dead of Night

Miriam stood by the wall, started toeing away some of the hay. ‘Peter, Samuel,’ she said, her voice as serious as I’d ever heard it. ‘We’ve got bloodstains here.’

Peter started undoing his rucksack. ‘And we’ve got impact rounds in the far wall. Looks like someone got lined up and shot.’

‘Yes,’ Miriam said.

I felt like I could not say a thing. They had been to such places before, had had experiences, had a history with each other. All I had was my own rucksack and my own pitiful tools. I spared a glance as Peter started working, examining the bullet holes in the chewed-up wall, making soft little exclamations of delight as he found empty brass casings on the concrete. Each casing was picked up and placed inside a tiny plastic bag. Miriam worked just as diligently but much more quietly as she gently brushed away the strands of hay covering the floor. Each of them was now wearing latex gloves.

I took out my own tools: a small laptop, a digital camera and a portable satellite uplink station. I powered up everything and when the camera was ready I input the day’s date and time and our coordinates—with the GPS signal they were accurate to a meter or two. Then I got to work also, photographing Miriam and Peter, and then photographing the evidence as well. It was quiet in the large barn as we worked, and I tried not to let my imagination take hold of me. I concentrated on the documentation that was required of me. Miriam was a forensic pathologist, Peter was a forensic analyst, and I was a former newspaper reporter, just trying to keep records of what had happened here. And all of us were UN employees. Not much in the way of peacekeeping, but it was something that had to be done. Peter and Miriam had their own laptops out and talked cryptically to each other about blood spatters, tissue samples, angles of trajectory and round sizes. I tried to stay out of their way and document as much as I could, letting everything exist only within the tiny screen of the camera. Somehow it made matters just a little bit easier.

Twice I stopped and went over to the laptop and uplink station. There I downloaded the images from my camera, sorted them out and made sure that the correct captions were attached. Then they were uploaded and I got a reply within a minute, saying the photos had been successfully received in Geneva. I wiped the sweat that had collected on my brow, underneath the brim of the helmet. The latest in digital and transmission technology, recording for all time—as long as things were recorded in bits and bytes — a type of massacre that had happened on this planet for millennia. I imagined some sour little Swiss bureaucrat in a cubicle somewhere in Geneva, idly looking at what I had submitted and then placing it in some file or e-mail attachment to The Hague. One more atrocity among thousands. We sure as hell still didn’t know how to prevent war crimes, but at least we were experts at recording them.

Charlie came over, his M-16 slung over his shoulder. ‘Break time,’ he announced. ‘Jean-Paul says it’s time for lunch and some debriefing.’

Miriam said nothing but Peter was on his knees with a small flashlight, looking for more shell casings underneath a piece of farm machinery. ‘We’re rather busy here, Charles. Perhaps later.’

Charlie grinned. ‘Nope. It’s now, sir. Like the good man said. Lunch and a debrief.’

After spending time in the barn with the blood and bullet holes and the scent of decay, I couldn’t imagine being hungry, but Jean-Paul had taken control of lunch and had cooked up some sort of broth, with hard rolls and cheese to accompany it. Maybe it was something to do with his unerring ability not to let the job get in the way of being fed. Someone had placed a canvas tarp on the ground and we leaned up against the sides of our vehicles, eating quietly. Overhead a flock of ravens flew to the south, croaking and calling, and Sanjay said, ‘I hate the birds in this country. They are all so fat.’

Karen said, ‘It’s no wonder. There’s so much to eat out in the open now.’

Miriam moved to take off her helmet and Charlie said, ‘Sorry, ma’am. Body armor stays on.’

‘But this place is quiet,’ she said. ‘Nobody is here. Nothing.’

Charlie nodded, his weapon at his side. ‘Nothing we can see, ma’am. It’s the stuff we can’t see that worries me. The helmets and body armor stay on.’

Peter said, ‘How much longer do we stay here, Jean-Paul?’

Our team leader wiped some broth out of his metal bowl with a piece of bread. ‘We stay until the job is done.’

Peter said impatiently, his eyes flashing, ‘I know that. But how much longer?’ He waved a hand. ‘Not meaning to sound crude, but this is one more farmhouse, one more dead family, in a very long and sad list of other farmhouses and dead families in this state and other states. So sorry and all that, but it’s not Site A. Not by a long shot.’

Jean-Paul munched on his bread, stood up. ‘We stay until the job is done. Site A will take care of itself. Samuel?’

‘Yes?’ I said, stepping up quickly.

‘We need you now in the farmhouse, if that is all right with you.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ I said. Peter looked glumly up at me, like the former British police officer he was, being overruled by a superior he didn’t respect. I walked away.

I found it harder going in the house. In the barn one could distance oneself from what had happened, what horrible things had gone on in there among the hay and tools and machinery. Nonetheless, it was a different kind of place, a place for animals and tools. It wasn’t a home. But inside the house there was no barrier, no distancing, nothing that could act as a buffer for what I saw. Among the couches and kitchen tables and bookshelves and television sets, among the day-to-day comforting items of reasonable and safe life, madness had broken in. Madness that had ripped everything asunder, that had left broken dishes and torn furniture and piles of clothing and shattered photos and twisted toys. Some spray-painted slogans had been left on the walls, some of the letters dripping into fresh bullet holes in the plaster, other letters oozing into the spatter of dried blood. The paint was black and the blood spatter was now a dark brown. I paused, holding my digital camera in my hands. Where to start? Where to even begin? Sanjay was by the wall, measuring the distance between the bullet holes. I think he sensed my hesitation, for he looked over at me.

‘I know how it is,’ he said softly. ‘You see this home and you wonder who they were. You wonder what kind of man the father was, you wonder how the mother treated their children. You wonder how old the children were, what kind of games they played, how they lived here. You wonder what it was like when the men with guns broke in. Who they were. Angry refugees from one of the cities? Or angry neighbors, upset that this family had given aid and comfort to those now considered enemies, outsiders? Then you wonder what happened. Was the mother raped in front of the children? Was the father killed first? Were the children taken away? You wonder how men could do this to people who were fellow citizens of their country, who were civilians, simple farmers. Fellow Americans, as they would say. Samuel, you are wondering all this, and you cannot let it happen.’

My words sounded like they were being strangled in my throat before I uttered them. ‘How? How do you do that?’

Sanjay looked around him, looking so serious and proper, even though he was still wearing his helmet and body armor. ‘By doing what we are doing. By remembering them, by paying witness. You do your job as best as you can, but you don’t dwell on what you can’t see. You cannot let your imagination take over. You have to do your job with what is there. Trust me, that is more than enough.’