Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  "I know nothing .. ."

  "Too fucking right ... I doubt you know the length of your dick. My job is to" keep our access into Sector North. And all this is after I suggested to New York that I could do without a wet-behind-the-ears puppy giving me shit from the high moral ground."

  "Where?"

  "Glina Municipality .. ."

  Marty looked at the map, where the magnifying glass rested. "Where?"

  "The rumour is he was picked up in Rosenovici .. ."

  He swayed. He felt the cold on him. He remembered what he had seen, the man in the Transit Centre, the man with Ulrike. He remembered the lecture he had given, goddamn patronizing, and the answer, "I've just a report to write, then I'm gone." He remembered the Bosnian Muslim woman that the man had talked to, and she had been in Rosenovici. He rocked.

  "It's just a rumour .. . I am a busy man. Do you wish to leave on your feet or on your face?"

  Marty had no more anger. He let himself out, quietly.

  It was the irregulars, from Glina town, who interrogated the Headmaster.

  They were the men of Arkan, who was Zeljko Raznjatovic, and they called themselves the Tigers, and they were men freed from gaol cells in Belgrade. They had come at first light from Glina, and they had taken control of the headquarters building in Salika. They had come to the village because he was known to them, because Milan had once posed for a photograph in front of the War Memorial with their leader, Arkan ... it was as if his only function that morning was to make them coffee. They had taken his room and his radio and his desk, and they stubbed out their cigarettes against the bared stomach of the Headmaster. The screaming rang in Milan's ears. It was the agonized screaming of the man who had taught him at school, of the man who had been Evica's friend. With the cigarettes, crushed and stubbed out,

  Milan heard of the Englishman's journey of discovery, and of Katica Dubelj who was the journey's guide. After the screaming and the telling, the irregulars of Arkan took the Headmaster from the cell of the headquarters and out into the road that cut the village. They wore plain belted one-piece uniforms of grey-green, and when they came out into the road they had put black hoods over their faces so that only their mouths and their eyes were visible. Out in the road they did not need Milan to bring them coffee, so they sent him from house to house in the village to get the people to come and watch, and he did as he was ordered, until there was a small crowd in front of the Headmaster's home. He could not face his own people, nor could he face the Headmaster who was made to stand in front of the door of his home, nor could he face the weeping wife of the Headmaster who was held back by the irregulars. They shot him first in the legs, and then in the stomach, so that death would be slow.

  When the Headmaster died, the men of the village and Milan, led by the irregulars, were climbing the track in the woods, going where the Headmaster had told them they should go.

  Ulrike drove the car, and Ham talked all the way. Ham talked his bullshit, of battles and fire fights, and Ulrike drove and said nothing, and Penn lay across the back seat of the car.

  He was leaving behind him Dorrie's place. He was quitting Dorrie's war.

  The boot print was sharp in the mud of the track, and the man had worn military boots when he had been brought to the school. They had the clear tread of the boot to tell them that the Headmaster had not lied when the cigarettes had been stubbed out against his stomach, and the evidence quickened their pace up the track through the trees. There was a light rain falling in the trees and heavy cloud coming from beyond the hill, and Milan could see the rain, later, would be heavier. He was at the head of the column and walked immediately in front of the leader of the irregulars. His own people were behind him and he could not see their faces and he did not know what their enthusiasm for the work was. It was where the Headmaster had said it would be, the cave entrance between the two large rocks, and in the worn mud close to the entrance was the boot print squashed over the lighter traces. Milan could smell her .. . There were many torches crowded into the narrow cleft of the cave's entrance, and the beams caught her. There was laughter behind Milan. The torches found her cringing back at the far wall of the cave, like a trapped rat. There was more laughter behind Milan. Milan turned. He called forward Milo who had the scratches on the cheeks of his face, and he gestured forward Stevo who had the bruised privates. There were many pressing behind him to see the trapped rat that was Katica Dubelj who had fed him and most of them with their lunches at the school .. . She was the trapped rat and her mouth seemed to snarl at the torch lights, and she had no teeth, and she was the evidence. He knew that the man had not been found, and he knew that a lorry with failed brakes had crashed the checkpoint at Turanj, and he knew that his name was on a file in Karlovac, and on another file made by the Political Officer at Topusko, and the trapped rat was the eyewitness. He wondered if he would tell Evica .. .

  The hand of the leader of the irregulars was on his shoulder, pushing him into the cave.

  "You're not telling me, in honesty, that you wrote it up .. . ?"

  "Of course I wrote it up, Arnold, I wrote up what you told me."

  "Georgie, it was in confidence .. ."

  Georgie Simpson didn't like to face him. Not that he would have described Arnold Browne as a friend, not really possible for Six men to be friends with Five men, but he was almost fond of the man. They had nothing in common, not hobbies, not holidays, not career paths, but he had come rather to enjoy their weekly session and weekly lunch. That would all be behind them now, the sessions and the lunches, there would be different men given the job and few enough confidences exchanged then .. . He didn't like to face him because Arnold Browne made no attempt to hide his quite positive anguish.

  "I'm not proud, and I'm not a happy man. I put a memorandum in, I reported our conversation .. . This morning, Arnold, and I might face a firing squad for telling you, this morning I was summoned on high. I was instructed to telephone you, arrange an extraordinary meeting, I was to pump you, Arnold. You said your man was "dogged" .. ."

  "You reported my confidences back, you should know what I said."

  Georgie Simpson ignored the sarcasm, no citations to be won here, best ignored. "You said your man would go to the end of the road .. . We have a listening post at Zagreb airport. We monitor Serb radio traffic principally. We have 2,500 troops in Bosnia, we have to know what's planned. Please don't interrupt me, Arnold, please don't. The radios are monitored twenty-four hours, but obviously we're not wasting our time interpreting whether General Mladic wants express delivery of new loo paper, soft tissue. We have trigger words. When a trigger word comes up then the transmission gets classified Immediate for analysis. Obviously their tongue-twisted version of "British" is a trigger. It's been pretty shambolic transmission, but we picked up "British spy" and "British investigator", captured then escaped, and the transmission was coming out of a village called Salika, and there was a name .. . What I'm telling you, Arnold, in confidence, is that Salika is adjacent to Rosenovici, and the name of the spy, investigator, is Penn .. ."

  He thought he might have smacked poor Arnold Browne across the bridge of the nose, to make his eyes water.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Your people are out of their depth, Arnold. They are meddling in matters beyond their remit .. . Our station officer, Zagreb, if your dogged Mr. Penn gets safe back to base, will pick him up by the scruff of his neck and throw him on the first plane to Heathrow. And your lovely lady will be told by my hairy-arsed director to cease interfering. Your Penn is a busted flush, I'm afraid, and we'll be taking his legs off at the knees .. . Sorry, Arnold, but it's a sharp game, ours, and that's the way it'll always be .. ."

  corner.

  Penn dictated and Ulrike typed and Ham whined away in the corner. He was rambling, contradicting himself, coming to stand behind her and reading what she had down on paper and changing it. It was full of errors because it was an old stand-up typewriter that she had begged from reception and the ar
ms were forever sticking because it had been on the floor of the back office and was clogged with muck. Ham was muttering to himself, wallowing in his own pity, and they ignored him except for when he filled the glasses.

  "No, I need what Alija said before I have what Sylvia said, and what Alija said should be in direct quotation, because she is the more important eyewitness. "The women who were with me, they said she was so brave. The women said she was an angel .. ."I want that in direct quote."

  "So, where then does Maria go, does she go after the American? You know what this will do, Penn, when it reaches them? It will break them, you know that .. . ? Right ... for the top copy, Maria and then Alija and then Sylvia, and then your journey .. ."

  Ham said, splashing the drink from the bottle, "Get it down you, squire, 'cause you bloody earned it, and don't leave yourself short of credit. Take the bloody credit for what you did. We never got the bloody credit for what we did, the Internationals, when we held those fuckers at Sisak. If they'd broken us at Sisak, where Billy and Jon Jo were zapped, where Herb who was A.W.O.L. from the Guards was fragged, where the big Oz guy went, they'd have been in fucking Zagreb for tea. Didn't give us any bloody credit .. . You make double bloody certain, squire, those posh smart arses know what you did .. ."

  Slow going in the hotel room, the writing of Penn's report.

  And what it would do to them, that was not his problem.

  Because Mrs. Chadwick had the flu, Mary worked in the kitchen alone. Most times, when there was dinner for friends, Mrs. Chad-wick came in to help. Mary was happier alone actually .. . Other friends, of course, had daughters still at home who would flick the recipe pages and find the outrageous and get the exotic into the Aga. The sun was going down, slanting through the window and onto the wide pine table .. . She hadn't a daughter .. . She worked briskly at what she did best, boring food. She had the clock on the wall to guide her, and if she worked briskly then everything would be in place, and there would still be time for her in the last light to walk the dogs through the village to the church .. . The report was two sheets, closely spaced typing, and there were Penn's last notes handwritten in the margin. He glanced down at the two sheets, and the words were a jumble for his eyes. There was precious little left in the bottle, and there was precious little down on two sheets of typing paper .. . precious little to tell of eleven days. They were all allocated their lines, and they had caps for the typing of their names. He should have felt an elation, should have felt proud and strutted the length of the room. But there was only an emptiness ... He should have wanted to share his pride. He had no conceit. It did not seem significant to him that he had made the march, learned, and ultimately broken clear from the certainty of death ... He had been close to Dorrie and he thought that he had joined the queue of those who had failed her. In his terms, her life was worth just a report. It was the measure of how she had driven him, mocked him, that his best effort was just a report. It was as if, in his mind, she had given him the one chance of his life to walk alone from the herd, to walk tall above the herd, and he had failed to take that chance. He felt a failed man, not a changed man. The old disciplines were supreme. A clear and brief report sent immediately, a fuller report to follow, just what he would have done after a week's session in the surveillance team, what he would have done for a client of Alpha Security ... He would never forget her, and now he would turn his back on her. He would go back to the office above the launderette, and the maisonette that was too small. People liked to say there was one bloody chance in this bloody life and they were probably bloody well right. He glanced down at the sheets of paper and Ulrike looked up at him and she waited for him to nod his satisfaction. He wondered whether the report would be read in the kitchen or taken to the old elegance of the sitting room, whether she would take it upstairs to Dorrie's bedroom. Just a mass of words now, blurred by the Scotch, but the names with the caps were highlighted. Three lines for the Croatian war crimes investigator, seven lines for the American Professor of Pathology, five lines each for Maria and Alija and Sylvia, four lines for the Croatian Liaison Officer .. . Three lines for Ham who had gotten him there, four lines for Benny Stein who had taken him out of there .. . fifteen lines for the Headmaster, twenty-one lines for Katica Dubelj, and on the lower half of the second page were twenty-five lines that quoted the words and described the body and face, and the village, of Milan Stankovic. Under the long paragraph concerning Milan Stankovic, killer of Dorrie Mowat, there had been room for Ulrike to type his name. Penn nodded. He was satisfied. He took the room's gratis biro and he scribbled his signature above his own typed name, and then he wrote the fax number with the international code at the top of the first sheet. It was his report and he was finished. He put his hand, momentarily, on Ulrike's shoulder, and he felt the hardness of her bones, and he took his hand away in shyness because he could remember the soft fingers that had dabbed the iodine into the cuts on his face. The road had turned. At the point that the road had started she had been a horrid young woman, and he could see, the last time that his tired eyes speed-read across the two pages, the words 'courage' and 'bravery' and 'love' and 'angel' ... He hoped that she would read it in the bedroom, alone, where she could not be seen .. . Just bland bloody words that filled two pages of a report and they did no justice to so many, and they short-changed the Headmaster and Katica Dubelj .. . just a bloody inadequate report. No place for the fear, no space for the terror .. . Just a report, something that money could buy when it was thrown at a problem. He hoped she would read it in the bedroom, alone, because his report might just break Mary Braddock. "You still with us, squire?" Ham slurred. "Still with you, Ham." "Let me give you my advice. Good advice from real combat .. ." Ham belched, and he was rolling across the room, and the last of the bottle was going on the desk and on the typewriter's keys. "It's just a fucking job, squire .. . What you need, squire, is a little of the old home comfort, a lot of the old bottle .. . You need to get well pissed, have a bit of a cuddle, forget it because it was just a fucking job .. ."

  He saw the kind care of Ulrike, different to the stand-off mischief love of Dorrie. Perhaps it was 'old home comfort', perhaps it promised 'a bit of a cuddle'. Probably it was getting 'well pissed' .. . He might ring Jane in the morning, and he might not. He might get a plane in the morning, and he might wait until the afternoon .. . The city moved noisily below the window of the hotel room. It would be a long time, Penn thought, before he heard again a silence like that of Rosenovici village, and the lane past Katica Dubelj's house to the field, and the grave pit in the field.

  "Don't come back empty, squire."

  Penn let himself out of the room. He walked down the corridor towards the wide central staircase, and the sharpness of the pain in his body was replaced by a stiff ache that was everywhere. There was a television crew in the lobby with their boxes around them and their light meters and clipboards and their self-importance and they noticed him as he came down the stairs, and the plasters and the cuts and the bruises and the grazes seemed to amuse them.

  He asked for a bottle of Scotch at the reception, soonest, charged to his room, and he gave the woman on reception the two sheets of paper for the fax.

  "Yes, send it now, please .. ."

  Fifteen.

  "Good God, didn't realize it was so late .. ." Henry Carter had a watch on his wrist and there was the big digit clock on the wall, and it was many hours since he had looked at either. Past midnight, and time did not seem any more to matter that much, not now that he had reached the chronological moment when the fax sheets assumed relevance. The supervisor, apologetic, as if it were an intrusion to disturb him, handed him a bacon sandwich. '.. . That's really too kind, that's very considerate. The time just seems to have run away with me." As it had .. . The dragon of the day shift would not have brought him a bacon sandwich, not if he had been faint with hunger, and the dragon would most certainly not have permitted the transistor radio that played jazz piano. Rather a pleasant atmosphere, if he had not had the
photocopies of the fax sheets in front of him .. . He pushed them aside so that the diced onion filling would not fall on them. It was as if they tolerated him as a harmless fool, without snap or bite, but the old desk warrior had the hard core of experience that helped him to understand only too well the compulsion that pushed men forward. One memory hurt him the worst. Mattie Furniss, running a section, revered and respected, had been held in a torture cell in the Iranian town of Tabriz and had broken out. Mattie Furniss, given up for lost, had walked alone to the mountains on the Turkish border. Proud Mattie Furniss had declined to admit that the pain of torture had broken him .. . They'd sent for Carter, summoned the weasel. Carter, the weasel, had destroyed good old Mattie Furniss and won from him the truth. Of course there were bloody casualties in this life .. . Mattie Furniss, with the shotgun barrel in his mouth and his toe on the trigger, was a casualty. He could see as yesterday the church, hear as yesterday the hymns, recall as yesterday the shame as he had sat far from the altar and the widow with her daughters. The file on the desk in front of him, taking on an ordered shape, scratched the memories.