The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  'It'll be from something out of the past - don't take too much credit for it.'

  He said coldly, 'You'd know about that because you worked in dirty corners that are now history. You won't mind me saying it, but the Cold War was utter shit, irrelevant, perpetuated by spooks to keep themselves on the payroll. This is something that matters.'

  'I worked with men, I was at the cutting edge, I was 189

  with real men,' she flared. 'All this business about legal, it's pathetic. They were real men, the best and the finest.'

  'Dust in the past,' he said.

  He disliked so much of her, and didn't know where to focus the beam of his dislike. There was the crimped care of her makeup and her dress, and the crispness of her accent, and the fact that she had been there before and knew it all when he knew nothing, and the academic precision of her kit in the back of the van. There was the sense of class, privilege and superiority in her every speech and movement.

  For Joey, being in Sarajevo and close to Target One was the sweet pinnacle of his short career. For her, as she showed him, it was a tedious spell of tacky work to be endured.

  'God help your lot,' she said, 'if you're the best they've got.'

  Silence cloaked them. She smoked. The evening descended around them. When she dragged hard and the tip glowed he could see her face. Utter calm contentment. She should have been, was meant to be, offended by his rudeness. He thought a test had been set for him, a provocation to make him expose himself, as if then she could calculate his value, his competence. He eased himself out of the van's cab.

  Before he closed the door after him, Joey asked ruefully, 'You'll be all right?'

  'Course I will,' she said. 'Why not? This is Bosnia.'

  Spring 1993

  Two old men, though they were far away from it, dreamed of the valley. They remembered only the best times, when the first of the year's warm days heated the soil and the flowers came and they could hear the river flowing over the ford, and a friendship of more than half a century

  The new home of Husein Bekir, his wife and grandchildren was a bell-tent in a camp on the edge of the town of Tuzla, some three hundred kilometres to the north-east of the valley. She had taken the small ones to the queue for bread baked from the flour brought by the United Nations convoys. He shared his home with two other families and it was an existence that was a living hell to him. When she had stood in that queue for perhaps three hours she would bring back the bread, and then she would go away again to queue with the children to fill the plastic buckets with water from the tanker that was also provided by the United Nations. With the sun on his face, Husein sat outside the tent, too listless to move, and tried to scratch from his mind the detail of the colours and contours of the valley fields. The camp was a place of filth and in it there were early signs of epidemic disease. Increasingly frequent warnings of the risk of the spread of the typhus bacteria came from the foreign doctors. It was only by struggling to recall the valley, more blurred now than the previous month, more hazed than in the winter, that Husein stayed alive. There were others, who had come from similar valleys and been displaced, as he had, who had given up the fight to remember and were now buried or lay on the damp mattresses against the tents' walls praying for death. Husein had promised himself that he would return, with Lila and the grandchildren, to the valley. He heard nothing on the radios that blasted through the avenues between the rows of tents that gave him cause to believe his pledge could be redeemed, but his fierce, awkward determination kept him alive . . .

  . . . A wind came off the Ostsee and beat at the high windows of the block.

  With two other families, Dragan Kovac had been dumped in a twelfth-floor apartment on the outskirts of the town of Griefswald. All day, each day, he sat by the window and stared out. That morning he could see little because the wind carried loose flakes of snow from dark low cloud. The arthritis in his knees, worse through lack of exercise, would have made it hard for him to walk outside, but he yearned, even with the pain, to stumble forward into clean air so that he could better remember his home and the village of Ljut. He was trapped in the building. The twelfth floor was his prison. It was forbidden for him, as it was for the other refugees housed in the block, to leave it.

  From his vantage-point he could see the police car parked across the street from the front door. Engine fumes spewed from its exhaust. A police car was always there now. The food they needed was brought to them by earnest social workers. The imprisonment of Dragan and the other refugees in the block of the Baltic town had begun five weeks before when the crowd had gathered under cover of darkness. Rocks had been thrown to break the lower windows, then lighted petrol bombs had rained against the walls, and there had been the shouted hatred of the young men with the shaven heads, the screams of old slogans. He had thought that night - as the yelling of the skinhead nazis had beat in his ears - and every day since that it would have been better to have died in his village when the 'fundamentalists' had attacked, better never to have left his home. But he had not stayed: he had been one of the few who had escaped.

  He had lumbered as fast as his old legs would carry him, flotsam with the flight of the soldiers, away from his valley, without the time to pack and carry with him even the most basic of his possessions. He had been put with many others onto a lorry that rumbled into Croatia, then onto a train that had wound, closed and with the blinds down, across Austria and into Germany then had traversed the length of that huge country. His home was now - and he had little understanding of great distance - some three thousand kilometres to the north-west of the house with the porch and the chair, and the view to the farm of his friend. The two families who shared the apartment with him showed him no respect, and said he was lazy and a fool and that he, the former police sergeant, was responsible for what had happened in their land.

  Tears ran down his cheeks, as the snow melted and slithered down the glass of the window. It was so hard for him to remember the valley, but he thought - trying to see the image of it - that it would still be a place of simple beauty.

  Neither of these old men, abandoned to live as statistics, sustained by grudging charity, protected from the fascist gangs, knew of the harsh realities of the valley that was their talisman of survival.

  Neither remembered where the mines had been sown; neither could have imagined that those little deathly clusters of plastic and explosive would have shifted. They remembered only the good times, before the mines had been laid, when the valley felt the sun and was a bed of bright flowers, and the Bunica river was low enough to be crossed and they could meet and talk. Good times before the madness had come.

  They used the hotel restaurant. Atkins had asked Mister if he wanted to go out, said Reception would recommend a restaurant, but he'd shrugged away the suggestion. It was a slow meal, poorly cooked and ineptly served, but that didn't matter to him. He'd ordered mineral water with his food and the Eagle had taken his cue from him, but Atkins had a half-bottle of Slovenian wine. He didn't have to tell them that he was tired, had no interest in talk. The restaurant was on the mezzanine, three floors below his bedroom, and close to empty. He used the meal-time to think about a riposte to the insult he had received from a man too busy to meet him. It was not in Mister's nature to turn the other cheek. Weakness was never respected. Atkins told the Eagle about the hotel's history in the war: it had been the centre for journalists and aid workers, it was continually hit by artillery fire; only the rooms at the back were safe for occupancy; for weeks at a time there was no power to heat the building, but it stayed open, staff and guests living a cave-dweller existence. Pointing out of the big plate-glass windows and down at the wide street that had been Snipers' Alley, to the dark unlit towers of apartment blocks beyond the river, Atkins told the Eagle about the marksmen who had sheltered high up there and fired down on civilians going to work or queuing at bread shops and water stand-pipes, trying to get to school or college, and the callous disregard of it. The Eagle's face showed that he wis
hed he was anywhere other than in that restaurant, in that city.

  Mister ate only what he thought was necessary for sustenance. Each plate brought to him was taken away half finished. The insult, and what he would do about it, consumed him. Out of an insult, and its answer, came strength. The insult provided an opportunity for him to demonstrate his strength. When he was twelve years old, a teacher had called him 'an evil little swine, a thief' in front of the class; he had followed that teacher home after school, put on a balaclava, punched the man to the ground and kicked him again and again; charges could not be brought, the teacher could not make an identification; he had become king, much feared, among the twelve-year-old kids. As he'd grown older he'd left a trail of the same fear behind him, in gaol and on the streets. The man running Hackney and the east when Mister was climbing the ladder's rungs had said that Mister was a Tittle shite with no future' and was now walking on sticks because pistol bullets had disintegrated his kneecaps. A man in Eindhoven, a dealer who was careless with buyers' money, had fled naked during the night with his wife and two children from a house that had cost him a million and a half Dutch guilders while the fire that destroyed it blazed around him. A man who had hacked him off in a pub, who now had no tongue and no fingers, might today have died.

  Mister was experienced in answering insults. He had considered his problem, decided on his response.

  He didn't wait for coffee.

  In his room he felt safe, in control. He knew of nothing that should make him feel otherwise. A full day awaited him in the morning. He was soon asleep.

  Under his room the city's late-night traffic prowled and did not disturb him.

  'Is there anything more about that lorry?'

  It was late evening and Monika Holberg was just back in her office in the UNIS building, Tower A, and she was tired, which was rare for her, and irritable, which was rarer. She had been on a field day out in the country, west of the city. She kicked off her muddied hoots and slung her heavy anorak at the door hook.

  Whether she was in the city and trawling through office appointments or away in the country villages, she wore the same anorak and boots. She had no other life in Sarajevo other than her work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She was tired because her driver had gone sick, there hadn't been another available so she had driven herself, and on the way back - on the mountain road from Kiseljak

  - the rear right tyre of the Nissan four-wheel drive had punctured, she'd had to change it herself, and the nuts had been hell to shift. She was irritated because the village she'd visited beyond Kiseljak was light years from being ready to receive and impress the visitors she would be escorting there next week. She was a driven woman. It was not in Monika's character to accept that second best was enough, whether in vehicle maintenance or visit preparation. Her secretary was on the other side of the thin partition that separated their cubicles, brewing coffee and making a sandwich.

  'What lorry is that, Monika?'

  'The lorry from those British people. What do they call themselves? "Bosnia with Love"? Isn't that what they call themselves? I need that lorry.'

  'Maybe Ankie took the call - when I was at the meeting or at lunch.'

  Monika rolled her eyes. Her secretary was not a driven woman. Her main concerns were what she was earning in salary and living allowance from UNHCR

  and what a sacrifice she made, and how she hated Sarajevo. She was fat on the city's back and her hair was always freshly styled. The desk was littered with small squares of sticky yellow Post-it notes, fastened where there was space among a haphazard strewn-paper sea. She was bending over her table, skipping the secretary's messages and identifying those of Ankie, the Dutch girl, who fielded her phone when it rang unanswered.

  'There isn't a message from Ankie about the lorry.'

  'Perhaps there was no message - can we talk about it in the morning?'

  She was brought the sandwiches and the coffee.

  Monika had eaten nothing since a rushed breakfast at dawn, and it was the first half-good cup of coffee. Her secretary was gone. But, she needed that lorry and its load. The village had been sullen and unresponsive.

  Ambassadors, functionaries and officials from the international community were coming to the village next week. Unless the mood lightened the VIPs might be whistled, jeered at or, worse, ignored and cold-shouldered. A little man, dapper and dancing in expensive shoes, had waltzed into her office two weeks previously, come in off the street, Fra Andela Zvizdovica, and had offered a lorry full of clothes, toys, basic household goods, and talked about what he called 'jumble sales' and 'coffee mornings' and 'fete collections'. Monika Holberg spoke fluent English, as well as Spanish, German and Italian, but these were words that she could not translate from her experience of an island upbringing off Norway's coast north of the Arctic Circle. She needed the lorry and its cargo to wipe the morose depression off the villagers' faces before the visit. Donors, she had learned, wanted hope, required stoic optimism, if they were to dig again into their pockets and deeper than the last time.

  She had a promise of the lorry but no word of its arrival in the city.

  She wolfed her sandwiches and slurped her coffee.

  She had believed the promise that the lorry's contents would be hers to distribute. Thirty-three years old, tanned, weather-beaten, blond-haired, and uncaring about her appearance, Monika Holberg was another piece of the mosaic that was falling quietly into place, and she also had no knowledge of it.

  She threw the cardboard sandwich plate, and the coffee beaker, at her rubbish bin, missed, and started to rip the messages off her desk.

  Joey had said on the stairs, 'We'll call him the Cruncher, Target One's accountant. He was murdered.

  What you suspected is proven. When I find out how he was murdered and why, the door will begin to open for me. Then I get to know what our Target One is here for.'

  'I'll do my best,' the policeman had said, and had hit the door with his fist. 'Can't do more than my best.'

  There was a veneer of respectability, cigarette-paper thin, about the room and its tenant. She was middle-aged going on elderly, and her face was deeply lined, but on the dressing-table were the jars and powder tins that would have helped her shed a few years. She wore an old dressing-gown that had once been flamboyant, but which was now faded, and Joey could see the careful stitches where it had been repaired. Her hair was gathered into curling rollers.

  Her hands betrayed her immediate past. She had seen better times: now they were scarred, reddened and swollen. She smoked as she talked, clamping a short cigarette-holder between yellowed teeth. She had only one room.

  Her name had been the first typed on the page that Judge Delic had given Joey. He'd had no option but to call the only other official link to the killing, the policeman, Frank Williams. The policeman was involved because he had pulled the body from the river and written the report. It was against Joey's instincts to break Church ranks and confide in a policeman, even if the man was separated from the world of Crime Squad and Criminal Intelligence, sawing on a buried nail in a log. He'd been told the policeman had to clear involvement with a superior and, if that was achieved, get away when he could.

  He would not have been there without the policeman, would have had no chance of finding the attic garret room, and having gained admittance he would have had no language to hear her statement. She sat on the bed from which she had been disturbed. Frank was opposite her, at the table under the ceiling light.

  Beside his hand was a one-hundred Deutschmark note that was on offer but not yet handed over.

  She talked.

  Joey's eyes roved round the room as he listened to Frank's translation.

  He was trained to notice, listen and suck in the relevance of what he heard and saw.

  ' . . . It is what I have already told the police who came to see me. I can only say the same because that is the truth. I can tell you what I saw and nothing more. I am truthful, I have always been truthful. You
want me to repeat it, I will repeat it. It is hard in They went out into a dark, empty street, the gloom clinging to them. Joey said what should happen the next day. He had his street map and he thought he was only a few minutes' walk to his hotel. He was about to drift away when his shoulder was caught and he was spun round.

  The lilting softness was gone from Frank's voice.

  'You do understand that's a powerful man, as powerful as they come in this city.'

  'What do you suggest I do? Go home?'

  Chapter Seven

  'A good journey?'

  'No problems, Mister,' the Eel said. Jason Tyrie had driven for Mister for sixteen years, and his uncle before him. 'I did the border at Bihac. It was two fifty DMs on the Croat side and seven fifty for this side's crowd. The warehouseman is one fifty a week. You can buy anyone here.'

  The Eel had been in a column of lorries bringing supermarket food over the frontier from Croatia. The sums he'd paid out to Customs, on both sides of the line, had been the going rate for avoiding inspection and duty, and getting the documents stamped. All the drivers carried wads of German notes. The lorry, 'Bosnia with Love' painted gaudily on its sides, was parked in the shadowed rear of the warehouse. The Eel had left the bonnet up, had scattered tools on the concrete floor. The inquisitive, or the prying, would have thought it was there for repairs. The warehouseman, minding his own business, was out in the cold morning air hosing vehicles clean and sweeping away the lakes of water into the drain.

  'Right,' Mister said. 'Let's get to work.'

  He had the Eagle, the Eel and Atkins to help him.

  Atkins had been up early and had been to a vehicle dealer. The Toyota four-wheel drive, smoked-glass windows, had been bought for cash. The papers that went with it, which made a pretence of a legal purchase, were economic with its history: they made no mention of its former ownership by the OSCE. The Toyota had been stolen from outside a hotel in Vitez used by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, had been resprayed and the plates had been changed - close examination would have shown the OSCE logo on the doors, but Atkins had said that didn't matter. No one was looking for such things. They made a tunnel into the back of the lorry, Mister and the Eel passing boxes down to the Eagle and Atkins. They burrowed towards the bulkhead, shifting only enough of the clothes and toys collected by the charities to give them access. Far to the back of the lorry were the heavier boxes. Mister was in charge and revelling in it. The Eagle was sweating, had taken off his coat, loosened his tie, and when he thought Mister wasn't watching him he left Atkins to take the workload. Atkins stacked the boxes. The ones they were after were bulkier, more awkward to push and lift, though the contents had been stripped down to the minimum.