'Hello, didn't expect to see you in here . . . I went for a walk. My room's too h o t . . . will you have a drink?'
Atkins had come in from the street, had gone to the atrium bar, bought a beer, and had seen him. It was still short of eleven o'clock and Mister was in his room. The bar of the eight-storey hotel was deserted except for them and a bored waiter. The Eagle sat, disconsolate as a reformed alcoholic, with a half-consumed orange juice in front of him. He was lonely, sad, and had been thinking of home, wrapped in the thoughts of the Chiddingfold house and the stables, of Mo and the girls.
'Fine as I am, thank you.'
'May I join you?'
'Be my guest.'
He knew little of Atkins, except that Mister valued him. It was the way of Mister that life and business should be boxed, kept apart. A policeman, over lunch, had once told him that the Irish terrorists used a cell system to cut off an information leak if one cell should be arrested. It was the same principle. He knew as little of Atkins as he did of the Mixer or the Eels or the Cards. The only one he knew, because he drew up the legal contracts for the deals, was the Cruncher -
who was dead. Atkins ripped off an anorak and a fleece then dumped them beside the chair. Low music played through loudspeakers.
Atkins looked directly at him. 'If you don't mind my saying so, and I don't mean to be impertinent, but you don't seem totally on board.'
'Is it that obvious?' He was too tired for denials.
'Funny thing, when I was here before, twice, at this time of year we lived like Eskimos. We were wrapped up in every coat we could fit on, Tuzla and Sarajevo.
There wasn't the heating-oil. Your nose was half frozen when you woke up, you could get frostbite, or damn near it, in bed. Doesn't seem right to be here and cooked. I've turned the thermostat down and opened the window - seems pretty obvious to me.'
'I do what I'm asked to do and when I have a role to play I'll play it,' he said wearily.
Atkins pressed. 'What's wrong with the concept?'
The Eagle was careful. 'That's a leading question -
I might rule it inadmissible.'
'I'm not a blagger - I suppose that's the vernacular of your clients. I hold my drink, my water and my secrets. You're an educated, intelligent man, a professional...'
He interrupted sharply. 'Don't ever underestimate him because he hasn't a conventional career training.
He is a very clever man.'
After a lifetime of living with it, the Eagle understood every facet of questioning and interrogation. He could recognize when he was being pumped for opinions and those questions that came from personal confusion.
'But you're not on board. It's there for anyone to see that you don't approve. Does anyone ever stand up to him?'
'It's not that simple. I give advice when it's asked for. I keep my mouth shut when it's not asked for.'
The question was asked again. 'But does anyone stand up to him?'
'A few have. They're either dead, maimed or living their lives behind locked doors. Do you need to know?'
'That was high risk today. It was fun but it was taking a hell of a chance. I wouldn't have done it, but
- I'm not ashamed to say it - I hadn't the balls to tell him. He doesn't know this place, has no idea about these people.'
'I told him that, and my opinion wasn't asked a second time. The grave took the only person who I've known to stand up to him - his mother.' The Eagle would not have said that in his office, in his home, wouldn't have said it anywhere that was familiar. In the great cave of the atrium bar, he felt, in truth, so goddam lonely. He spoke quietly and Atkins had to hunch forward to hear him. 'We're in this together, you and me. If we ever get out of this bloody place, Cruncher didn't, and get home and I thought that you'd repeated this conversation, then I'd see to it that you needed crutches to walk on . . . '
'His mother?'
'She stood up to him.'
Incredulity splashed Atkins's face.
'He idolizes the memory of the woman.' He should have stopped and talked about the weather. But he was drawn forward, did not stop. 'She was a good, decent, salt-of-the-earth working-class woman. I am not patronizing. It all came out when she died. The only time he's been maudlin. I had to endure an hour of self-pitying shit. It was the usual grubby little story.
1981 was the year. He'd just started to buy heroin in Green Lanes, off the Turks, and he was pushing into an existing dealer's territory to sell it on. There are few surprises in this life, and that dealer was not a happy man. He came looking for our lord and master. He was shot in the stomach. The only thing the dealer said to the detectives at his bedside was "No comment", said it again and again. I was down at Caledonian Road with Mister. He's very good when being interrogated, a legal adviser could not ask more of a client. Nine questions out of ten he would say nothing and stare at the ceiling, but at the tenth he would speak. "On the advice of my solicitor I cannot answer your question at this stage." It can't be used in court then that he refused to co-operate, the blame for it shifts to me. He doesn't answer questions because he'd have to lie, and lies are caught out. The detectives hear a lie and move on, then jump back to it twenty minutes later from a different line of questions. Lies don't work. The police knew he was responsible for the shooting, but they hadn't forensics, hadn't a victim's accusation, and hadn't a lie. It was two years before he was married and moved out of Cripps House. The police searched the flat. It was, my words at the time, "a vindictive and destructive search".
They wrecked the place. Anything that could be broken was broken. It was an act of frustrated vandalism. He came back from the police station, cocky and free. His father was at work, but not his mother.
'She turned on him, laid into him, that's what he told me. And he hit her across the face with his fist.
Blacked her eye and split her forehead. She wouldn't go to the surgery for stitches, she told his father that she'd walked into a door. She carried the scar on her eyebrow, the hair never grew on it again, for the rest of her life. His father isn't a fool - he'd have known a door didn't make that sort of injury. It was never referred to again. He tried to buy his way out of the guilt, but they didn't want a retirement home at Peacehaven or Brightlingsea. They stayed in Cripps House, maybe as a reminder. They could have lived like millionaires, but they wouldn't have it. There's a pretence in his life that his mother and father always supported him, never criticized him, that they took the line that "the Old Bill just got lucky" and it was the
"bad company that led him on", and "deep down, he's a decent boy", the usual old crap. That's not true.
His mind is compartmentalized, and hitting his mother is ringfenced and excised from memory. It was only the shock of her death that brought it back, for an hour, on my bloody shoulder. He pumps money into the hospice where she died and into the church where they had the funeral, but that's as far as it goes. No one else ever stood up to him.'
'Why are you here?'
'Try greed, young man. Try that for a reason.'
'That's two of us, I suppose,' Atkins said softly. He gathered up his anorak and fleece and wandered to the lift.
The Eagle had a house in the country with horses, all paid for; Atkins had a two-bedroom flat in Fulham that could go on the market for half a million. The Eagle had a 7-series BMW coupe in the drive and a top-of-the-price-list Range Rover for Mo to drag the horsebox; Atkins had a Lotus sports, soft top. Without Mister, the Eagle would have been a struggling lawyer dependent on legal aid pickings; without Mister, Atkins would have been another failed ex-soldier struggling on the consultancy circuit, bullshitting for a living. Of course it was greed, for them both . . . If the gravy train hit the buffers it would be here, because Mister was off his territory. Did Atkins know that, or was Atkins a fool? Too tired to make an answer, the Eagle went to his room. He was guilty for having talked, but Atkins, too, was guilty, for having listened. God, he wished he could drink, but he dared not.
'I just want to hear the
statement, not the story, and then I want to get out,' Joey said.
The story, translated in full by Frank, no edit, was of the daily life in Sarajevo under siege. 'It's better you hear it. You won't understand the truth unless you hear the story,' Frank answered him from the side of his mouth, a murmur on his lips. 'I think you should let me handle it, my way.'
They were close to what Frank called the Jewish cemetery. He said it was where there had been the worst fighting, where the Muslim infantry had sustained the worst casualties. Frank told him that the cemetery was still stuffed with mines, ordnance, unexploded grenades and bodies, and hadn't yet been cleared, but there wasn't too much of a hurry because all the Jews had gone to the death camps sixty years earlier. From the layout of the windows, there would have been eight apartments in the building. Only two of the windows had lights on. The rest of the building, Joey thought, was too damaged to be lived in. It was a bare room. The largest feature in it, more dominating than the bed, the cooker, the washbasin and the plastic garden table, was a metal bookcase. It could have held more than five hundred hardbacked books, and it was empty. A small, thin man with cavernous cheeks and bad, gapped teeth sat on the bed. His hair was wispy thin, and his hands were locked together as if to stop them shaking. The fingers were gentle and thin.
'It was a living death. We had no electricity, no water except from the river, no sewage system, no food, no transport, no work. To look forward to, we had only the escape of death. We existed alongside death for month after month. There were some in my block who for three years did not go outside their front door, never went out. There were some who put on a tie each day and a filthy shirt, then walked into the city, never running, as if it were normal. There were others who ran everywhere . . . The ones who stayed in, they could as easily have been killed by a tank shell. The dogs did well. If you were killed and not picked up, if it was too dangerous to retrieve you, the dogs had you, would feast on you. They ate better than us. In the winter, when there was snow and rain we had enough water. We would boil it up and put in grass or nettles or leaves, and that we would call a Sarajevo soup. To heat the water, we burned books. I had many books, I could make many fires. I am a musician. To make a better fire one day, to heat my soup more quickly, I burned my violin.'
The man unlocked his hands and reached for a glass of water, which slopped to the floor on its journey from the table to his lips and back.
'I was lucky. A restaurant opened in a basement, a safe building, and I was taken on to play for the diners. There were restaurants open, for foreigners to eat in, where the food had come through the tunnel under the runway at the airport. I was lucky to be chosen as a musician there because the kitchen allowed me to eat what was left on the plates, but that was in the last year of the war.'
Joey listened, stone-faced. He could remember nothing of the war. If it was on television at home his father had broken off from whatever he was talking about and muttered his contempt for people of such savagery. If his mother had the remote, she flipped channels. The war had not registered with him. It had been far away and someone else's problem.
'They were not interested in hearing me play a violin even if I could have found another one. I played the electric guitar. I did not complain. I would have preferred to play Mozart, the violin concerto, K216, Allegro, but I preferred more to eat, so I was the backing to the chanteuse singing Elton John and Eric Clapton. It was survival... In war, sacrifices must be made.'
Joey asked of Frank, 'Where did he play?'
The question was put and answered. Frank said,
'He says he played at the DiscoNite, and he still plays there.'
'Ask him what he saw.'
Frank recited. 'I have been shown a photograph of the face of the dead man. He was drunk. He was alone and staggering. I saw him cross the Obala Kulina Bana and then he went to the wall above the river. He was leaning on it and swaying. I had the impression he might have been vomiting over the wall. The last thing I saw of him, he was heading towards the bridge. That is all I can tell you.'
Even across the barriers of language, Joey could recognize a rehearsed speech; there was no attempt at disguise.
Frank said ruefully, 'It is the same, verbatim, as his statement.'
'Who owns the DiscoNite restaurant?'
'Same man as the Platinum City.'
Joey shrugged. Yes, he knew, but he had needed to hear it. There was no banknote for the violinist who did not bother to hide a lie. They went out, closed the outer door after them.
Joey said, 'If I were to threaten to break his hands, to smash his fingers, so that he would not play again a violin or an electric guitar . . . '
Frank looked at him, shook his head. 'Forget the illegality, right? They have been through the war.
They are hardened to any cruelty that you or I are capable of inflicting. You wouldn't be able to do it, nor me.'
Joey was a farm boy. His father was the factor of a landowner's estate. He had seen rabbits dying in snares, and enmeshed in nets when fleeing from ferrets. He had seen huntsmen dig out vixens and their cubs from the dens and toss them to the hounds.
He had seen badgers choked in sealed setts. He had seen, when beating for the owner's shoot, the fluttering fall of winged pheasants before the dogs caught and shook them to death. He had hated what he had seen. 'I know.'
'You said last night, "When I find out how he was murdered and why he was murdered then the door begins to open for me." You said that.' Frank's voice was hoarse as if he realized he walked on an unmapped road. 'If it's that important, if — and your hands and mine would stay, sort of, clean - then their own people could do it.'
Chapter Eight
Frank showed Joey in. The building was at the heart of a little empire of white prefabricated boxes. The room was reached down a hushed corridor covered with lifeless green synthetic carpet that stifled the sound of shoes. Policemen and women, in a polyglot of laundered uniforms, their national flags sewn to their upper sleeves, busily carried papers from office to office, laid them beside colleagues who laboured at computer screens. The corridor smelt of fresh ground coffee and fresh heated croissants. There were no raised voices. Here, speech was as muted as the murmur of the computers.
A quiet voice responded to Frank's knock. Joey was shown inside.
It was a tiny workspace shoe-horned between walls that were little more than screens.
The walls were pincushions for leave charts, maps, duty rosters, and photographs of children, and the shield insignias of police forces from all over the world, from the Czech Republic and South Australia to Mexico. It represented a brotherhood he felt no part of.
'You're Mr Cann, Customs and Excise of the United Kingdom. Frank's told me about you. How can I help?'
Joey had no insignia to offer. The office co-ordinated the training of the Bosnian police to deal with the threat of organized crime. It was the start of their fourth day in Sarajevo, the third of Mister, the Eagle and Atkins, and a routine had been established.
For both Joey and Maggie a routine was important.
They came from structured employment and an ordered division of responsibilities suited them.
Maggie Bolton was up early and had driven the blue van to the parking area close to the Holiday Inn hotel, to tune the audio equipment monitoring room 318.
Joey would follow later and join her, after his visit to the headquarters of the International Police Task Force. When their Target One left the hotel they would both follow, as best they could, and share the surveillance through the day and the evening. When Target One returned to the hotel, Maggie would resume her watch with the earphones, and Joey was free to roam.
'I don't have much time . . . '
'That's not a Sarajevo habit. God, a man in a hurry, it's almost worth a diary entry. Shoot.'
Frank didn't intervene, leaving Joey to explain what was wanted and to emphasize the requirement for security, secrecy.
The man, relentlessly chewing gum, wore th
e badge of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on his upper sleeve. He listened without comment. He had small, darting eyes that stayed locked on Joey's spectacles. The smartness of the Canadian's uniform and the high polish of his boots unsettled Joey in his faded jeans, sweatshirt, sweater and windcheater. He-heard Joey out.
'Let me tell you, Mr Cann, about my day. I am from a town in Manitoba, you wouldn't know its name, with a population of around fifteen thousand who are mostly Aboriginals. Right now, there, it's late evening, the temperature is around minus thirty-five degrees, and it's my home. I was shipped out of there six months ago, and I'll be shipped back in three months, and I can't wait . . . My day starts each morning at five and I leave my little room out in Ilidza - for which I pay five hundred German marks a month - and I go to work out in a gymnasium that's equipped by the SFOR military. I shower, and at seven I ring my wife, then I get my breakfast in the American camp at Butmir where it's familiar food and cheap. I am in my office by eight o'clock and until five o'clock in the afternoon I put papers from my in-tray into my out-tray, and when the out-tray is full I put them back in the empty in-tray. I break that up with a couple of meetings, most of which are taken up by translation time, and a sandwich for lunch. After five o'clock I go back to my room and cook myself a meal in the kitchen I share with two Swedish dog-handlers, and I might gossip a little with them. After my meal I watch a video or read a book and I'm in bed by nine o'clock.
That way the nights go faster. My regret is that I cannot make the days go quicker. I am wasting my time here. I know that and my government knows it. As each RCMP officer goes home he will not be replaced.
It's not about the cost but about the lack of achievement. Put brutally, Mr Cann, we are kicking soft excreta.
'The place is a crossroads. Every form of criminal trafficking is coming through here. Women from the Ukraine, Romania and Russia, either to work in brothels here or for transit into western Europe.
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