Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  Penn, in sight of the break of the tree line, coming to the open greyness of the field, saw the cat.

  There had always been cats at the tied cottage, semi-wild and only fed in the worst of the winter. Penn knew cats.

  It was a big brute with nothing handsome about it.

  The cat was black-coated but the white flash at its chest alerted Penn to its advance.

  Penn stopped. The cat was a distraction. Couldn't help but watch the cat, and if he was distracted by the big brute then he might blunder in the dropping light against the fine khaki wires that were the antennae. He stopped and the antennae wires, motionless, were squared about him. The big brute came fast towards him. The throaty growl of the cat called to him. He could see its ribcage.

  The cat crossed open ground, a dozen paces from him, and at the centre of the open ground was the spike of the antenna's wire. Penn reckoned the cat would have been a household pet or a farmyard ratter, and the cat had been abandoned in the flight from the village, perhaps by one of those who now lay as skeletons deep in the woods.

  The big brute hesitated because Penn stood still. He could see the knots and the burrs in the cat's coat.

  The throated growl had become a purring roar. Penn knew cats .. . On the carpet floor of dead leaves there were no stones for him to throw at the cat. Unless he moved past an antenna wire he would not be in reach of a dried branch to throw at the cat. He could not shout at the cat, he was too close to Salika, down through the trees and across the river, he could not shoot the cat with his Browning 9mm automatic pistol. Penn knew the way of an abandoned cat that had found a friend.

  The cat arched its back. The purr riddled the wood. A cat with a friend always wanted to show its pleasure by arching its back, then finding a surface to rub against, and the surface nearest the cat was the needle-thin antenna of the mine.

  Penn cooed at the cat. The back of the cat was against the antenna. Penn slipped to his knees, and stretched out his hand and he murmured his love for the cat. The antenna wavered as the vigour of the cat was arched against it. Ten pounds of high explosive in the mine below the antenna, maybe twelve pounds,

  enough high explosive to take the wheel off an armoured personnel carrier, enough to immobilize a tracked vehicle. Penn urged the cat, gently, to come to him. The cat left the antenna and the wire swayed like a dying metronome. Penn's heart pounded. The cat, wary, circled Penn, and there were antennae on either side of him, and an antenna wire behind him. He cooed, murmured, urged the cat to come to him. Again the high arch of the back, again the fur bedded against the wire, to his right .. .

  The cat came to him.

  One movement .. .

  The cat was against his knee.

  One chance .. .

  The cat howled its pleasure.

  If he missed the one moment, the one chance, Penn thought the cat would sc udder out of his range and find an antenna wire to snuggle against.

  Penn grabbed the cat with two hands. No friendship, no love, he held the cat tight. The cat bit at his wrists and its back claws slashed at his upper arms. Penn held the cat as if his life depended on it, as if his life rested on an antenna wire not being bent over. He tramped in the last light past the antennae, through the final trees, going towards the field with the cat hacking and spitting at him.

  He was through the minefield.

  Penn threw the cat hard away from him.

  He stepped over the barbed wire strand.

  The cat snarled, as if its friendship had been betrayed, and stayed back from him, and there were no antennae for the cat to arch against.

  "All right, you old bugger, I'm sorry. Please, don't do that to me again, but I apologize."

  The cat watched him. He took a slice of ham from the paper bag in his backpack and tore it into quarters, and flipped the meat towards the cat.

  The cat dived for the food.

  In front of Penn was the field. He could see the small wall of earth in the corner of the field. He could make out, just, the outline of the broken roofs of the village and the jagged rise of the church's tower.

  It was what she would have seen, where Dorrie had been .. .

  It was warm for the late afternoon.

  Benny Stein sweated.

  It was hard going, getting the sacks of seed out of the back of the Seddon Atkinson lorry, but best to be in there with the local Knin 'coolies' because that way their sticky fingers couldn't pilfer so bad. Best not to make it easy for them.

  A pretty little town, Knin, pity about the people, and when they'd done the unloading then he'd try to find the energy to climb the long zigzag road from the warehouse by the football pitch down on the river and get up to the old fortress above the town. He was good at photography, prided himself, but the Canon with the 125mm lens was back at the hotel in Zagreb, and if he'd pulled out a camera up by the old fortress then the guns would have been raised and they'd have been bawling. It was the people that spoiled Knin, and the people didn't seem to him to have any bloody gratitude for him hiking down their way with his lorry and fourteen others.

  He sweated, he heaved a sack of seed. He brought it down from the tail of the Seddy. He carried it to the trailer. They were good guys who worked with him, good crack.

  Sweating, gulping, "Heh, wasn't that the Hun Frau at Turanj? Wasn't that the Frau there?"

  A good guy, packed in stockbroking to make five hundred quid a week driving a lorry into Sector North, "Too old, Benny, you are, for looking at skirt .. ."

  "Too bony for me, the Frau. What was she there for?"

  A good guy, a banker who had dropped out of gilts, taken a money cut to run a truck into Sector North, "Getting fruity, Benny? Getting the hots? She was waiting for a refugee bus .. ."

  "You know what? She had that look, a lot of broads give me that look. Half Hackney's broads, most of Palmers Green's, they have a sincere romantic problem 'cause of me. I take cold baths, I walk away from it, too bloody complicated for me, but she had love. You know the Argie one .. . ?"

  The tickle of laughter from the one-time banker and the onetime stockbroker. Benny recited,

  '.. . An Argentine gaucho named Bruno,

  Once said, "There is something I do know:

  A woman is fine

  And a sheep is divine,

  But a llama is Numero Uno!"

  '.. . Well, you know what I mean .. . Perhaps she's got a big fellow, a big NigBatt guy, and she's pining. There's not a refugee bus scheduled through today .. . that's all."

  He knew when the refugee buses came through. Refugees were something from Benny Stein's past. He'd had his little laugh from the Frau, and he thought her the grandest woman he had ever met, and when they were not driving, nor doing maintenance, then he would hitch a ride down to Karlovac and head for the Transit Centre, and his last project had been carpentry for the little desks and low stools of the kindergarten .. . He understood about refugees because his grandparents had walked out of Czechoslovakia fifty-five years before and his father had walked with them, and all they had owned was stacked in an old pram that they had pushed as they had walked. He'd thought, looking at the Frau's face, that it wasn't just a bus arrival she waited for.

  He had walked into a gate, and he had ripped the shins of his trousers on fallen wire, and he had cracked his knee on a dropped gravestone, and he had been in the ditch.

  It was black dark in the village and Penn had a little chat to himself, waspish.

  It was imbecile to be padding about the ruin of the village in the black dark, and he should get a better grip of himself, slow down, stop the charge. Do it like he had done it as a child, when he had gone early in the morning into the top copse where the keeper bred the pheasant chicks in the summer, and sat under the widespread oak and waited for first light when the sow brought her badger young from the sett. Going back to the basics of his life .. . The only course where he had beaten the graduate intake into Gower Street had been the rural surveillance course and crawling up in the wood's night,
so quiet, that when he had put his hand from behind over Amanda Fawcett's mouth she had squealed and wet her jeans. The only time he had won an instructor's praise, and Amanda Fawcett, stuffy bitch with a 2.1 out of Sussex, had had to wear her shirt tails outside her trousers for the rest of the morning, and a fucking malicious grin she'd given him on his last day, coming out of Administration when he'd given in his ID. And Amanda bloody Fawcett, graduate, General Intelligence Group, paper pusher, wouldn't have made it a hundred yards off the river bank .. . After the little chat to himself, Penn stood a long time quite still, and he allowed the night sounds of the village to play around him.

  The owl's shout, the whine of a swinging door, the creak of a dislodged roof beam, the motion of the stream against the piles of the bridge, voices that were distant and brought on the wind.

  He stood in what he thought had been a square and the only building clear to him by its size was the mass of the body of the church. There were lamps lit in the windows of the houses across the stream where a community lived, breathed, and he could see sometimes a wavering torch on the move. There was an occasional small beam thrown up from the bridge, and it was from the bridge that he heard the young men's voices larking their boredom at guard duty. He stood quite still. He thought that when Dorrie had crossed the road, where he was now, with the torn lengths of the women's clean clothes, she would have had flares to light her way, and there would have been buildings burning. He could not see the farmhouse outline where the cellar had been, where she had run to. He had the map in his mind.

  When he had calmed himself, then he moved again.

  He went slow and he had one arm outstretched in front of his face and his other arm in front of his legs. Twice his fingers brushed into low rubble and once his fingers caught at a lowered telephone wire. It was a rough lane that he took, and sometimes his lower hand flicked against the taller weeds that grew between the ruts of the lane. He tried to make each stride a measured one, and he counted each stride that he took because Alija had told him that the house of Katica Dubelj was 150 paces from the square. There was a new sound catching at him, and he could not distinguish it. A few paces from Katica Dubelj's house, where it should be, and the new sound was there again. He had counted out his strides, and he groped off the lane and his fingers found a fence set around with clinging thistles and sharp nettles. He tracked the fence and he came to the wall of the house of Katica Dubelj. He came to the door. If she were alive she would come back to her home every night, or every third night, or one night in each week, if she were alive ... It was what Penn thought, what had brought him to the village of Rosenovici, that there was the small, minimal, chance she would come. It was past the house of Katica Dubelj that Dorrie had been marched to the field, with the wounded, to the grave. He would wait through one night for her to come, if she were alive .. . His fingers were off the stone, then into the void, then feeling the rough plank surface of the door .. . It was the sound of a man who cried out. Penn was drawn forward. The words of a man with pain in his mind. At the end of the lane was the broken strut of a gate, across the entrance to a field. He had that sense of the openness beyond the gate that his fingers rested against. He heard the words cried staccato and growing in his eyes was the failing light of the torch beam. The shapes were appearing, gathering strength. The words were of anguish. He saw the earth wall around the pit, it was what he had seen from the tree line in the dusk. Going closer, going in stealth. He saw the shape of the man who knelt in the pit. Penn looked at the grave, at the burial place of Dorrie Mowat, and a man knelt in the pit in prayer. An old man spoke the prayer of a personal agony, and knelt in the pit with his head hung. Going closer, drawn forward, he could think of no threat that would come from an old man, in prayer, kneeling in the pit where Dorrie Mowat had been buried. Going closer, as to the sett of the old badger sow. Crossing the ground where she had been stabbed, bludgeoned, shot. Going covert, as to the culvert drain where Amanda Fawcett hid. Stepping silent in the loose slither of the mud over which had been dragged the joined bodies of her lover and Dorrie Mowat. Drawn forward .. . It was luck. His father said that men who got lucky, most times, deserved their luck. He came at the old man from behind. He came in a sharp movement, across the small torch beam, threw an instant shadow, and was over him, and the strength of Perm's hand was across the old man's mouth. If he prayed at the grave he could be no threat, if he was no threat then he could be a friend, and Penn needed some luck. Into the blinking, staring eyes. Did he speak English? The head nodding. Would he shout out? The head shaking .. . Penn needed some luck. He took his hand from the old man's mouth, and he came around the old man and he saw the tremble in the old man's body, and he thought of what the fear had done to Amanda Fawcett. He took the old man's thin hands in his own and he held them as he had held his grandfather's hands on the night before death. He squatted in the mud in front of the old man and the small beam of the torch was beside him. The old man wore a suit and a tie knotted slimly at the collar of a white shin, and to the thighs the suit trousers were soaked wet, "Who are you?" "My name is Penn .. ." "Why do you come here to a place of evil?" "I come to find the truth of the death of Dorrie Mowat .. ." The old man took back his hands and he reached with his fingers for Penn's face. '.. . I come to find how she died, and to find who was responsible .. ." The fingers brushed in gentleness on the harshness of Penn's jaw and followed the contours of his nose and his mouth, as if to be certain that he had not discovered fantasy. '.. . I come to find the eyewitness, if she is alive, the woman who is called Katica Dubelj." The old man switched off the torch. He took the sleeve of Penn's coat, and they stumbled together out of the shallow pit. Getting closer to the tart mischief of Dorrie Mowat, edging nearer to her .. . The old man led Perm away across the wetness of the field. All together, huddled in darkness, Branko and Stevo and Milo had taken a position in a ruin that was across the square from the church. They shivered and chewed on cubes of cheese and had a small corked bottle of their own home brew. Nothing, not a cat, not a man, no one could move through the village without passing them. Across the stream, the big clock in the tower of the church at Salika beat out the chimes of midnight. The Headmaster wheezed as he climbed the track. "I am the Headmaster of the school .. ." Penn wished he would shut his face. "I am the Headmaster, but I am now rejected because I have spoken out against the shame of our people .. ." They made enough noise going up the track, without adding to the noise with talk. "I should now have been the mayor of the village, but ignorance rules and savagery .. ." Penn thought that Ham would have punched the old man, the Headmaster, until he stopped his talk. "When we had only one school, before I was Headmaster, the children from Rosenovici came to our school in Salika, and Katica Dubelj was one of the women who gave the children lunch. Because I know her, I have a responsibility for her .. ." Penn had been led, at a brisk pace, into the woods at the top of the field. The tight grasp, sharp fingers, all the time held at the sleeve of his fatigue coat. He could not see ahead of him, beyond the immediate drooped shoulders of the Headmaster, and the lowest branches whipped off the Headmaster and into his face and across his body. He guessed the path that wound up through the wood was the secret of the Headmaster and the lowest branches that cut at his face and snapped back at his body told Penn that the path was rarely used. It was a good way to go, and between the brisk pace of the climb there were rest halts when the Headmaster gasped for breath and his lowered shoulders shuddered from the exertion, and Penn heard the chime of the far-away church for the half-hour and then for the hour. Once there was a cacophony of noise rushing away from them, the stampeding flight of a wild pig or of a grown deer. "We lived together, in the old days, we had our friendships across the prejudice of birth, until the madness came. The madness has destroyed what was a fine community, destroyed, because Rosenovici is across the stream from us but always with us. We cannot shut away the sight of Rosenovici. We look at what we have done, every hour of daylight we see what we have done. The heart has been torn f
rom us. I help you, Penn, because you have the power to hurt the madness .. ." It was the smell that first caught Penn. He was wondering who would believe him, Mary Braddock or Basil at Alpha Security or Arnold Browne, and the smell was of stale excreta. He was wondering whether any of them, safe at home and deep in their beds, would believe that he had trekked behind the lines, gone there because he had taken the money, and the smell was of unwashed filth. He was wondering whether Jane would believe him if he shared it, whether she would back away from him and hold little Tom clear of him, and the smell was of lingering dirt. He was wondering if it mattered, whether anyone believed him .. . What mattered to him was truth, and the truth was Dorrie Mowat's smiling cheek, and he had never before searched after truth. It was in his mind to think about those who rejected the truth. They were in their beds and in their chairs in front of the droning televisions and in their bars with their elbows slouched on the counter, and they were bored with the truth. They were in the other maisonettes of the Cedars, and in the roads of Raynes Park, and in the pubs, and they were hurrying with their bags of washing to the launderette before it closed, and they were the late workers in the offices of Five, and they turned their fucking backs on the truth. They were 900 miles from him, and they had not the space in their hearts to yearn to find truth. Bloody good, old chummies, wash your hands of it, scrub them with soap, old girls. Lucky old you, old chummies and old girls, because the truth is boring .. . The torch beam now shone ahead, and the Headmaster mouthed small cries, as if warning of their approach. Penn thought, from what the torch beam showed, that in daylight he would have walked right past the mouth of the cave, but he would not have walked right past the smell.