"It's obsession, and obsession will break you."
"I tell you, he wasn't flash. He was well-mannered and he was considerate .. ."
"Mr. bloody Penn, he's taken my money and he's taken you for a damn great ride. When he's ready he'll be back. When he's back there will be his bill, and there will be a report that is bullshit. They're grubby people and you chose to involve them."
"Sorry what sort of day was it?"
"A bloody awful day."
"He could have rung me back, could have talked to me. Sorry
She went to her kitchen, started the supper. What hurt was that she had thought Mr. Penn cared.
The media had hit the hotel.
Penn, rueful, sat in the bar and nursed the fourth beer, might have been the fifth.
The circus had hit the hotel.
Penn listened, and he watched.
It was reunion time for those from Sarajevo and those from Vitez and those from Mostar. There was embracing and kissing and bellboys bent under the weight of equipment boxes. He sat apart from them, listened, and his hand twitched to his tie; no ties on show in the circus, no blazers, no pressed slacks, no shined shoes. Penn listened because the talk was of staying alive.
Staying alive was paying the welding company in Sarajevo to fit the shrapnel-proof sides onto the reinforced Land-Rover chassis: "I'd have bought it, too bloody right, 81-mm chunks coming in." Staying alive was not going to Srebrenica across country on foot: "Crazy place, place to get killed, not worth the hassle." Staying alive was laughing for the wild man in Sarajevo who had brought a cow across the airport runway, under the snipers' guns: "Best bloody milk in the city." Staying alive was getting down to the mortuary in Mostar after the shelling: "He was about twelve, he'd got new trainers on, sticking out under the blanket, the trainers made it front page, and it syndicated."
To Penn, listening, they made staying alive just about possible. They were in town for a wedding. They were going back to Sarajevo and Vitez and Mostar in thirty-six hours. It was his decision, whether he had finished, or not begun. It was as if her freedom laughed at him, as if the laugh was recklessly loud in a cavern of silence. As if she danced in front of him, feral, a creature of his childhood woodland, challenging him to follow where she led. He had never been free, had he? Bloody structured, bloody trapped. Duty, stability, discipline, commitment, Penn's gods. It was as if she had never been defeated, not even in death ... as if he had never succeeded, not even in life. He had not known freedom, would never know it unless he followed ... It was like a pain in him. He finished his beer. Penn went out of the hotel, to walk, think. He sat in his kitchen and he fastened the belt that held the holster at his waist. The carpenter, Milo, bent beside the table and eased off his shoes, then dragged on his old boots, and he heard the intake of breath from his wife because the boots shed dried mud onto the floor that she had washed. He went to the refrigerator and took an apple and put it into the pocket of his heavy coat. It was a good refrigerator, the best that could have been bought in Zagreb, but the door was always open because he had learned that to close the door meant the gathering of mildew on the inner walls. There was no power in Salika. It was near to a year and a half since the carpenter had made the two journeys, with the wheelbarrow, across the river and come back with the refrigerator from Franjo and Ivana's kitchen and the television from the house behind Rosenovici's store. They both looked well in the carpenter's home and he spat back at his wife each time that she declared them useless because there was no power. With the holster at his belt, with the apple in his pocket, he took the hurricane lamp down from the shelf above the sink. He could no longer use the big flashlight because the batteries were exhausted. He lit the lamp and clumped in his old boots across the kitchen floor, and left more mud. He went out into the night. He went to his store shed and he took from the nail the sharp bow saw and his big jemmy and the lump hammer. He went past the house of the Headmaster, where a small light burned, and he groped down and found a stone in the road and threw it hard so that it rattled the upper planking of his house. He went past the house of the Priest, the old fool, and past the house of the gravedigger, Stevo, and called out to him, and past the house of the postman, Branko. Short of the bridge, he shouted forward. There would be young men on the bridge, guarding, and it was best to call forward. He yelled his name into the night. The light swirled around him and beyond the light was blackness. No moon that night and he could not see the ruin of the village nor the trees beyond it, nor the outline against the skies of the higher ground. It was to please Milan Stankovic that he went with his pistol and his apple and his bow saw and tools out into the night. They were good boys on the bridge, good laughter when he came to them, and they pulled aside the frame that was laced with barbed wire so that he could go onto the bridge .. . He considered Milan Stankovic the finest man in the village of Salika. He hated to see it, what he saw every day now, the sullen and hostile and bleak face of the best man he knew. Milan had said, that morning, that Evica had complained of the table in the kitchen. It was too old, and the glue was dried out, and the surface was too scratched to scrub clean. There were fine timbers to be had in the ruins .. . The wind was around him as he walked up the lane towards the village of Rosenovici, and there was light rain, and once he stumbled and nearly fell because he had been looking ahead to the edge of light thrown by the hurricane lamp and he had not seen the deeper hole left by the jeeps that had come for the digging ... He did not understand the recent mood of Milan Stankovic. The carpenter thought that he could bring the life smile back to the face of Milan when he presented him with a new kitchen table. At the edge of his light, he saw a cat sprinting away, stomach down, and he kicked a stone fiercely towards its starved ribcage .. . There were none in the village who would come with the carpenter to Rosenovici at night, the scared farts, but he would gather up sufficient seasoned wood from the timbers and haul it back that evening and work through the small hours, catch some sleep, then work again through the day, and have the table ready for the next evening.
The carpenter would have said that he was afraid of nothing.
He reached the village.
There was an owl in a tree up the hill.
He had been back to the village many times, never with Milan. The timbers would not be at the square, not at the store nor the cafe, because the headquarters of the Ustase had been there, and the greatest concentration of tank fire had been there. He had been back for the refrigerator and for the television, and to help others round up the cattle left there, and back for the shooting of the dogs that had been abandoned there, and back to look and to search among the homes for hidden jewellery, and he had been back to stand in the group that had watched the digging. Milan had never been back. There was fine wood in the roof of the church but what had been burned had fallen, and the rest of the roof spars were too high for him to retrieve. The farmhouse with the cellar had not been burned, but it had been dynamited, destroyed, the timbers would lie under plaster and stone rubble. Milan always found an excuse for not returning to Rosenovici.
He stood in the square. The wind played at his face, coming from the east and cold. The light caught at the houses that had been destroyed. The carpenter could see up the road along which they had marched as escort to the wounded. He was not frightened of darkness. He thought he knew in which house he would find seasoned timber. Out of the square and along the lane. He had brought up the rear, pushed them, driven them. It was the lane up which the bulldozer had been directed, following them. He was not frightened of darkness but the silence around him was broken by the wheeze of his breathing and the stamp of his boots, and the carpenter shivered, felt the cold of the wind. Ahead of him, at the edge of the light, was the collapsed gate, then the black expanse of the field. It was through the gate that they had taken them, and then the bulldozer had followed, and the bulldozer had clipped the gate post, collapsed the gate. Short of the field, where the lane bent, was the small house which had not been destroyed. It migh
t have been the postman, Branko, or it might have been the gravedigger, Stevo, but both had claimed to have shot the old bastard Ustase. He could remember it, seeing the flash of her face at the window, the old bitch Ustase, as he cursed them to go faster, and he could remember the face of the girl. It was only a hovel. The carpenter reckoned he would not have put pigs in the house of the old bastard and the old bitch, but the hovel had been there since the time he was born and the timber would be good, seasoned. In his mind, they were both together, the face of the old bitch at her window, and the face of the girl .. . The door groaned as he pushed it. The hurricane lamp threw its light inside the one room. He smelled the damp of the room. It was close and small and he saw the sacking in the corner, as if it was used for a couch bed. Not a place for a pig, not for cattle. He had to work quickly because the oil was poor quality in the hurricane lamp and burned faster than good oil, but good oil was no longer available. He began to rip the wide panel strips from the wall, the best wood and seasoned. He used the jemmy, and then the lump hammer to hack away at the last holding nails. The noise was around him and the dust of the plaster lathe. He often thought of the girl. It need not have happened to the girl. She could have gone, with the other women. The postman, Branko, had tried to pull her away from the two wounded men, tried to save her, and she had fought the postman, had hurt him. The dust clogged at his nose. And when the wide panel strips were free, he reached up and belted with the lump hammer at the ceiling plaster that cascaded on him. The beams were good. He wanted two lengths of beam, each his own height, for the legs of the table he would present to Milan. Making room with the jemmy and the lump hammer for his bow saw .. . The blow caught him. He was turning in the grey white of the dust storm. The shrivelled figure, black, and the hurricane lamp guttering, and the stick raised as a club. His eyes watering from the blow, his vision hazed. He clung to the stick, the club, wrestled it away. Claws in his face. Feeling the drag of the nails, razor lines of pain, on his face. Clutching at thin wrists, seeing the bony fingers reaching for his eyes. The shrivelled figure, black, gone in the mist of grey white, gone into the darkness of the door. He staggered to the door. He had his pistol out from the holster. There was only silence around the carpenter. He fired the pistol up the lane and down the lane and the crash of the shots burgeoned at his ears. He had no target. He did not know where to fire. He emptied the magazine of the pistol, and he ran. He left behind him his bow saw and the jemmy and his lump hammer, and the failing light of the hurricane lamp. He ran down the lane, he splattered the potholes of rainwater, and he ran through the square. He was panting hard when he reached the bridge and he shouted out his name that the guards should not shoot him. He found them scared, cringing, hiding down behind the sandbags, and they had their own light which they shone in his face. He wiped his cheeks. He did not know what he could tell the young men who guarded the bridge across the stream. His own blood stained the palm of his hand. Finished, or not begun. Penn sat on a bench in the park, the darkness around him. Penn thought he had made the decision. To go to the end, that was his father's code. Doing it properly, that was his mother's code. On a bench in Zagreb, with noisy basketball played open air under floodlights beyond the darkness, he thought of them. His father, looking at him direct, pipe clamped in his teeth, would have said that he had taken the money and that if he hadn't wanted shit in his face then he should not, first, have taken the money. His mother, averted head and pursed lips and wiping her hands, would have told him that he was under obligation, but that he should go carefully. When he had swotted for the exams that had lifted him from the countryside, prompted by his history master who had helped with the forms, he had sent off an application for work as a clerk in government. He was going back into the rock of previous years, now, chiselling for guidance. Taken on at the Home Office. He wondered how they would have reacted, at the Home Office, to his query as to whether he had finished or whether he had not begun. Working with paper, pushing paper, annotating paper, moving paper, discarding paper, for the Prison Service department of the Home Office. They would have said, the ones who had worked with him in the clerks' pool, who were still there working in the clerks' pool, that he had finished. Five o'clock, old chummy, time to be gone, always finished at five o'clock, old chummy. One late night and there was a panic meeting between the Home Office and Security Service and an assistant under secretary stamping empty corridors, searching for a file fetcher, finding Bill Penn, clerk. He had run half the night down to the basement and back up to the third floor with the files they had needed. He had brought the coffee. He had gone out for sandwiches. He had kept the files coming, and the coffee and the sandwiches, when their heads were on their bloody knees in tiredness, and a week later the job offer had come through, clerk grade in Library at Curzon Street, then at Gower Street. In Five's Library they would have said he had finished. Into F Branch, pushing paper on 'subversives'. Into A Branch, working with the 'watchers'. The guys in F Branch and the guys in A Branch, they would have said, too damned right, he had finished. The guys in F Branch and A Branch would have been quoting training courses, evaluating back-up, querying days in lieu for extra days worked. But there was no training, there would be no back-up ... It was Penn's decision. He had the obligation, and he would go carefully. It would be for her, Dorrie .. . Not for Mary Braddock in the Manor House, not for Basil and the creeps at Alpha Security, not for Arnold bloody Browne who had not lifted a finger when he'd needed help, not for his Jane and his Tom and the paying of the mortgage for the roof over their heads, but for the love of Dorrie ... He had the photographs of her. The photographs were in the inside pocket of his blazer, dry, safe, close to him. He thought that what he wanted, wanted most in the world, was to share in the love of Dorrie. He saw the face that was loved, the face of mischief, sparkle, hatred, bloody-mindedness, courage, the face that was putrefied and drawn from the ground and wounded with cuts and blows and a pistol shot .. .
And all the rest was shit .. .
It was as if she called. It was as if he should follow. He knew that he wanted her love, certainty, more than anything he had wanted in his life. He craved the freedom that had been hers. As if he heard her loud laughter, daring him.
Not finished, because it was not begun.
Ham saw him come through the door. Then he was looking round, checking the tables, searching for a face.
"Hello, squire, funny seeing you in this shit heap .. ."
Most evenings Ham ate alone. Couldn't abide the crap they served up in the old police station. Most evenings he asked the guys if they'd come down the town and join him, and most evenings they had a reason not to, fuck them. He ate alone in the cafe on Krizaniceva inside the walls of the old city. He pushed out the chair opposite him.
'.. . So what brings you down the sharp end, what brings you to sunny Karlovac?"
"You wanted a bit of tracing done. You wanted to know where your wife was, and your kiddie. I'll do that."
Ham said quickly, "Can't pay a fancy fee .. ."
"No fee, no charge."
Ham said, suddenly doubtful, "Not for fucking charity. What's the game, squire?"
"For a favour."
"You tell me, what's the favour?"
"You said you'd walked into Sector North. I want a route. I want to know where to go, where not to go. That's my fee for the trace."
Wide-eyed, Ham said, "That's fucking dumb talk .. ."
"No charge for the trace, but you give me a route so as I can walk to Rosenovici."
Ham said, "You don't get me to go .. ."
"I want a route, to go on my own."
Nine.
There was the same message on each of the boxes, different languages. The boxes were stacked high to the ceiling cross struts. Baby Food (Nutritional) Gift of the People of Germany. Pasta (Shapes various) Gift of the People of Italy. Medicines Antenatal/ Postnatal Gift of the People of Holland. Rice -Gift of the People of the United States of America. Tents (with blankets) Gift of the People of the
United Kingdom. The biggest section of boxes was labelled as a mobile operating theatre Gift of the People of Sweden and there were cigarettes in boxes, and alcohol, and soya, and hospital drugs. Penn was walked down the corridor between the boxes that filled the shed. He read each label. He thought of the advertisements he saw in the papers back home, and those on the commercial radio stations. He thought of the kids standing in the High Street where he lived and rattling collection tins, and he thought of the women who knitted warm clothes for refugees, and he thought the business was dirty. He had not been brought to the shed for food, medicines, drugs, nor for cigarettes nor alcohol. The mercenary had brought him to the shed because that was where he could buy a gun. Anything could be bought, that was what Penn had been told. Anything he had the money to pay for he could buy in the shed. Ham had brought him out from the old quarter of Karlovac, out through the modern city, and he had seen the scar marks of the shelling, and they had crossed over the Kupa river and headed into the industrial estate. It was a dead city. No smoke from the chimneys, no lorries carrying away finished products. The city had died because the city sat astride the front line. There had been two 5-series BMWs parked outside the shed, and an Alfa. A giant man had come quickly through the door of the shed and his gaze had been hostile, intimidating, before he had seen Ham. There was an office space at the far end of the corridor between the cardboard and wooden crates. Ham had said he should take a gun. Ham had said that walking into Sector North without a gun was about the same as going in bare-arsed. Ham had said that he should pack a gun before he packed his toothpaste. Three men were in the partitioned office at the end of the shed. They lolled back in easy chairs and there was a haze of cigar smoke, and one listened at a telephone and one was talking local language into a mobile, and each wore designer jeans and a loose-fitting designer leather jacket as if for uniform. They were all under thirty years of age. Penn stood distant in the doorway and each casually shook Ham's hand, but the enthusiasm was the mercenary's, and they seemed to Penn to regard Ham as dog shit on the pavement. What sort of gun did he want? Penn shrugged, like they should tell him what was on offer, and there was a big peal of laughter from the heavy man who was not listening on the telephone. Good English spoken. He could have a T-54 tank (Soviet), he could have a 120mm howitzer (American), he could have an RPG-7 rocket launcher (Soviet), he could have a Stinger ground-to-air (American), if he could pay .. . The mocking laughter subsided .. . He could have a Heckler & Koch machine pistol, or an Uzi high-fire-rate sub-machine gun, if he could pay .. . The eyes were locked on him .. . Ham had said to him, where he was going, every male understood the workings of firearms, their culture, cradle-to-grave stuff. Penn felt like stale piss. He knew how to strip down and clean and reassemble a .410 shotgun because that was what he had used around the hedges and fields and woods of the farm where his father drove a tractor. Now he felt inadequate. Penn knew how to strip and clean and reassemble a Browning 9mm automatic pistol because that was what he had been shown on the two-day firearms course organized for newcomers into A Branch. It was fourteen years since he had downed a pigeon with the shotgun, and it was seven years since the two-day firearms course. He asked if they had a Browning 9mm automatic pistol. The heavy man swivelled his chair. The telephone was down and the mobile was switched off. They seemed to strip him with their eyes. The heavy man dragged the keys from his pocket that were held to his waist belt by a thin chain, reached forward and unlocked the tall wall safe. He was spilling handguns onto the desk, pistols and revolvers, short-barrelled and long-barrelled, with or without silencer attachment, old and new. When it came, Penn recognized the Browning 9mm automatic pistol, no silencer. It was pushed towards him, like a toy. He lifted it from the table, held it. It felt strange in his hand, unfamiliar, and he tried to hide that. How many rounds of ammunition? He had fired four magazines on the two-day course. He said that he would like to take fifty rounds. Again the mocking. Two hundred US dollars for the Browning 9mm automatic pistol, one hundred US dollars for the magazines and the ammunition. And twenty-five US dollars each for four RG-42 fragmentation grenades that Ham said he should have. And fifteen US dollars for the olive-green backpack that was pulled off the floor, from among the rubbish. And ten US dollars for webbing and for a canteen and for a knife. And five US dollars for the boots. Penn peeled the American dollars off the wad in his wallet. The heavy man said that he liked to offer a discount, and the discount was five dollars. Penn didn't smile. Penn handed him the four hundred and twenty-five dollars. He stood his ground, waited on his receipt. He hitched one strap of the backpack over his blazer shoulder so that it hung loose against him. He stood in the doorway. "Thank you, gentlemen. I hope you'll give me a good price when I bring them back." Penn was halfway down the corridor between the boxes and crates before their laughter subsided. The nice girl, Penny, who showed some respect for him, brought back the backgrounder sheet she had typed for him. Henry Carter looked up, smiled at her the way that he thought young people liked to be smiled at. He thought she was a nice girl because he had worked with her father, a considerably long time ago, but he always made the point of asking after her father's health, just to remind her that he had pedigree. "Still hard at it then, Mr. Carter?" He rested from his writing. "Yes, it's rather an interesting one." "Very interesting, what I've just typed up for you. Will there be more for me to type up?" "Tomorrow .. ." He grinned, then whispered, "Dragon alert .. ." He could see over her shoulder, the return from tea break of the supervisor. The nice girl, Penny, scuttled away from him. The file was taking shape now, and he placed her typed work where he thought it relevant, near to the start. Good background, notwithstanding the arguable advantages of hindsight, he thought always useful, and the thin biography. Always useful to improve the understanding of a file. Well, if a future reader of the file did not comprehend the situation on the ground, and the prime player's personality, then it would not be easy to appreciate the quite dreadful hazard into which this young fellow proposed to walk. He read back what he had written.
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