She dropped his hand and her enthusiasm gushed.
'I am so grateful, so happy - it is what your friend, Mr Dubbs, said you would bring?'
'Just what he said. Would you like to come and look?'
She bounded down the stairs. Her blond hair bounced on her anorak's collar. He had to scramble to keep up with her. She wore no makeup. His sisters, all past their fiftieth birthdays, and the brat girls they'd produced, all carried handbags full of powders and scent squeezers and mascara brushes. They tripped along on heels. She went down the stairs, two steps at a time, on muddied old walking-boots. He struggled to keep up. She was waiting for him at the bottom of the last flight, grinning and arching her eyebrows and he was laughing. He didn't laugh often, but the droll grin and the eyebrows forced it from him. They crossed the hall. On the outside steps he whistled for the Eel's attention in the lorry cab, and pointed to the rear doors of the trailer. When the Eel opened them for her, she scrambled up athletically, and began to rip the adhesive binding tape off the first cardboard box.
Sweaters, jackets, knitted woollen socks, coats, trousers, all were thrown up, then stuffed back. She looked into the depth of the trailer and her gaze hovered on the stacked boxes.
'They are all like this one?'
'Best as I know it, they are - but there's everything.
It's not just clothes, it's toys too.'
'Fantastic - it is marvellous!'
Her eyes were alight. Mister lived in a world where enthusiasm was forbidden, and gratitude made debts.
Mister shrugged. 'I'm glad it's all going to help.'
'It is what I needed.'
She dropped down from the trailer. He didn't offer his hand to steady her - she wouldn't have needed it.
Mister said, 'I'm pleased it's wanted. I honestly thought you'd have more of this sort of stuff than you could handle—'
She interrupted him, seemed to think nothing of cutting him short. 'Once, yes, but not now. It is "donor fatigue". People are tired, abroad, of giving to Bosnia.
They see no benefit and hear nothing good. They give to East Timor and Kosovo, and a little to Chechnya.
There was a window for Bosnia and people looked in, were sympathetic and gave, but the window is now closed. The refugees suffer as much now as when the window was open. The need is as great, but the goodwill does not exist.'
'I'm glad to be—'
'I used to have warehouses filled by the generosity of people in Europe, even in America, but they are empty now. There is a village near Kiseljak. We have brought DPs - displaced persons - back to live in their old homes. They are complaining, they say they have nothing. They say it is worse than the refugee camp.'
'I'm happy that—'
'In three days we are taking ambassadors, administrators and generals to this village to see the achievement of bringing these people home. We need money for them, for all the DPs. Many more than two million people fled their homes in the war. We have to have money to get them home. We need the international pledges, and each month it is harder. If the people seen by the VIPs are unhappy, complaining, the visitors will not write memoranda urging their governments to pledge more. It is a very little village, but it is very important...' The torrent of words subsided. There was innocence and a wide grin of apology on her face. 'I am sorry, I interrupted you -
twice.'
Very few men, and fewer women, interrupted Mister. 'It's nothing. I'm glad to be of help - happy to have done something worthwhile.'
'I need the lorry for this afternoon, to deliver.'
'Probably better you use your own driver, someone who knows the roads.'
'Of course. Where do you stay in Sarajevo, Mister Packer?'
He evaded the question effortlessly. 'I'd like you to know that I intend this should not be a one-off.
There's plenty more where this load came from. I'm looking to offer regular deliveries. There must be a load of other people needing the same help as those in your village. Jason, give the lady the keys. I don't know how often I'll be able to get over here myself, but I promise you haven't seen the last of Bosnia with Love. It's been my pleasure meeting you, Miss Holberg. Just leave the keys at Reception when you're back and Jason'll collect them tonight. You'll have to excuse me, I've a few things to attend to - and, good luck.'
He sauntered away. Every week a lorry would arrive in Sarajevo, under cover of the bright-painted Bosnia with Love logo and filled with any kind of junk and chuck-out that the Mixer could lay his hands on.
And every week an apparently empty lorry would leave from Sarajevo with a hidden class A load that would not be measured in grams and low kilos, but high kilos to a tonne. At ferry ports, frontier crossings and at border Customs posts, Bosnia with Love, doing good works, would be a familiar sight. No bastard in uniform would stop a charity vehicle, going in or coming o u t . . . The Cruncher's plan was in motion.
He hadn't given her the name of the hotel where he stayed.
She was on the fifth floor, dialling on her telephone for the drivers' pool, Ankie was bringing her coffee and she was gazing idly from the window, when she saw him.
There were only a few generous people, in Monika Holberg's experience, who did good work and slipped away from the limelight, who did not want medals, official congratulations and invitations to international receptions, who shunned flashbulbs. She thought Mr Packer was one of them.
From her vantage-point, she watched as he went into the rear entrance of the Holiday Inn.
'He cannot do the meeting this morning,' the young man, Enver, said. 'He is sorry if that makes an inconvenience for you.'
The Eagle's response was curt. 'Mister Packer is not only an important man, he is a busy man.'
'The meeting will be in the afternoon, at four o'clock. I think he has interesting news for Mister Packer.'
'I speak for him - he'll be there.'
They'd been on a final cup in the coffee shop. The young man had found them there, bringing the dogs with him. The Eagle reckoned that in any other coffee shop, in any other city, the boy and his dogs would have been thrown out. One of the dogs had lunged at the cake trolley. It was disgusting, unhygienic. The Eagle had left Mister and Atkins at their window table, had gone to intercept Enver. He'd had a bad feeling about it the previous night, and the meeting's postponement had ratcheted it up. He never saw the enforcement side of Mister's business, was insulated from it, but the sight of the addict's pulped face had unsettled him. Between three and five years back, Mister had run a small side-show of enforcement business. A middle-rank figure was in debt to another middle-ranker who did not have the muscle strength to get himself paid. Mister bought out the debt, less twenty per cent, and sent the Cards round. The debt was paid - before or after the fists, coshes or a shotgun was used - and Mister's profit margin was one pound in five, or ten thousand in fifty thousand. The Cruncher had liked to call it 'diversification', but Mister didn't do it any longer because ten thousand pounds was chickenshit. The druggie's bloodied face had been the Eagle's sleeping companion, and his temper was on a short fuse.
They've put you off again, Mister, they're giving you the runaround. Do we sit much longer in this hole? That's what I'm asking myself. Personally . . . '
Mister asked softly, 'Are they suggesting another time?'
'Four o'clock in the afternoon.'
'That's not a problem, then. That's when it is, fine.'
'So, we've a day to kick our heels.' The Eagle snorted, and sat down, confused. He had expected, been damned certain he'd see, Mister's snarled anger at the slight . . . but everything was fine. He did not understand. Earlier, the Eagle had been explaining cash-flow and the notice required to move substantial money orders, then the need for decisions on the conversion of a Caymans account from dollars into euros, and the further movement of funds into an Israeli bank . . . and he'd given up because he hadn't had Mister's attention.
Mister said to Atkins, 'You know this place. We've half the morning and half the
afternoon. Show me round. We'll do the sights.'
The Eagle was left worse than confused. He was bewildered.
'You want me to drive?'
'I'm quite capable - don't mind me saying it, you're a right misery today.'
'Is that so?'
'Lighten up, you're piss poor company About lasl night?'
'Forget i t . . . It's not your business.'
She ripped through the gears. The transmission from the Toyota's beacon was a continuous strong bleep. A light flashed, with constant reassurance, on the screen she'd bolted under the dash. He'd spelled it out last night, after he'd returned to the hotel and sent his signal. He'd come to her room and she'd had to clear a chair of her underclothes so that he could sit down. He'd told it in a monologue of fifteen minutes.
All the time he'd talked he'd never looked at her or her underclothes as she'd sat on the bed with her robe round her shoulders. He'd stared at the drawn curtain. She'd sent him to his own room after telling him that everything, always, seemed better in the morning. There had been a man in Ceau§escu Towers, old guard, who'd clung with his fingernails to employment because there was nothing else in his life, who had been a rookie youngster on the team running Oleg Penkovsky, the best source ever out of Moscow.
She'd been with him in Beirut and she'd asked him how it was in the Century House building, home before the Towers, when they heard first that the Russian had been arrested, and then when they'd heard he'd been executed. He'd said, over king prawns and a bottle from the Beka'a, 'It's like when you've a good dog. As long as it's able to retrieve for the guns it's special. When it can't pick up birds you tell the keeper to get on with it. You hear the shot behind the stables, and you don't even blink. Hard things happen, and that's recognized by any man worth half a peck of salt.' She'd heard that the old warrior had died six months after they'd finally burned him out of the building . . . She'd taken what he said as a mantra ever since.
He was white-faced, had been since they'd met. All the time they'd watched and followed the lorry to lower A, his fingers had been knotted tightly together.
'I can see my room from here.' Mister was crouched close to the firing position, and Atkins heard the tremor in his voice.
'They used the fort for artillery spotting,' Atkins said. 'They couldn't have hit your room, not at this range, with a sniper rifle, but they could have put a tank shell through it.'
He had brought Mister and the Eagle to the strongpoint, high and south of the city, past a modern memorial of slate-coloured marble that was set into snow-spattered flagstones then walked into the old fortress. He didn't think the Eagle cared a damn for it, but Mister's fascination was obvious. In front of a two-storey barracks building of off-white hewn stone blocks was a small parade area, closed in by the lower wall with the gun slits. The slits each had two shutters that closed on rollers. They were made of intimidating black-painted metal and were bullet- and shrapnel-proof. All the time Atkins had been in Sarajevo serving on the general's staff and wearing the blue beret, he had cursed the strongpoint and its view down on to Snipers' Alley, the Holiday Inn and every damn building that mattered. The city was laid out as a peaceful tableau and made benevolent by the snow.
He remembered ruefully what he had thought then, that the spotters for the guns had the power of life and death, could see the panicked groups at the water stand-pipes, the groups round market stalls, and the schoolchildren, and could decide on which to call down the shells of the heavy guns.
'You couldn't hide from it, could you?' Mister said.
'Only if you'd done a deal, Mister.' Atkins remembered how much the blue beret men had hated the warlords - Caco, Celo and Serif. 'Some could, because they did deals. Serif, yes, he'd fight one day a week, and six days a week he'd be trading across the front line, particularly before the tunnel was dug. Drugs, ammunition, jewellery if they could steal it, food, alcohol, they all went back and forth across the front line. That was the other side of the war . . . '
'Am I hearing you right, Atkins, ammunition?'
'The Serb warlords sold the Muslim warlords - the likes of Serif - ordnance that was fired back on their own men. They achieved power by holding the line, and made themselves rich by trading.'
Mister had straightened up and he stared hard at Atkins. 'You're telling me not to trust him?'
'Not as far as you can kick him, Mister. Here, you trust nobody.'
'Ink on paper?'
'Worthless . . . Nobody.'
Atkins saw, first time he'd seen it, a pensive scowl cutting Mister's face. He had engineered the occasion.
They could have gone to monuments in the city to the Ottoman time of greatness and seen mosques and galleries that were half a millennium old. They could have gone to the Imperial coffee-house, the interior unchanged since Austro-Hungarian rule. Instead, he had taken them to see the front line and had prepared the message he wanted to pass on. Mister was thinking.
They were walking back from the barracks' parade-ground, away from the gun slits and the view of Mister's bedroom far below. The Eagle wandered ahead of them then veered off the flagstones, his shoes sinking in the snow as he went to examine the marble of the memorial. Atkins had told them when they'd arrived that the memorial was for Tito's fighters killed in the world war.
Atkins shouted, a pressing, ruthless yell, 'Stop right there. Now, come back. Retrace your steps.
Exactly...'
For a moment the Eagle stood statue still. Then he turned, fear on his face.
'Put your feet precisely where you walked, and move.'
The Eagle came back to them. In the bright sunlight, in the crisp wind, the sweat dribbled on his forehead.
Step by step, through the snow, until he reached the flagstones.
Atkins said, 'This was a military position, it would have been mined. You were walking on snow. You didn't know what was under it - could have been flags, concrete or earth. If it had been earth there could have been mines. You never walk off-road here, or off the hard core - not if you want to keep your legs. Of course it's been "cleared", but there's no such thing as guaranteed clearance, and won't be for a hundred years. Just don't go walkabout.'
They went in silence to the Toyota.
He drove them along a winding road, away from the memorial, that cut down into a valley. The traffic signs were now in Cyrillic script; he told them they were in Serb territory. They went past old women sitting on collapsible stools with big plastic bags by their knees. He said it was where they sold smuggled cigarettes from Italy, at eighty British pence a packet.
They went left and climbed, came to the crest of the hill. The road hugged the rim. Below them, again, was another view of the city. He drove on another hundred and fifty metres then pulled into what had once been a car park for a bungalow restaurant, but the building was wrecked and bullet-pocked, and its roof timbers were charred.
He slipped out of his seat and walked away from the Toyota. Mister and the Eagle followed him. He remembered watching, with image-intensifier binoculars handed him by French troops, a night attack up through the Jewish cemetery towards the trenches that were now in front of his feet. He stood on a narrow strip of cracked concrete. He had willed on, that night, those Muslim troops, civilians in ill-fitting uniforms and with outdated weapons, scrambling up the hill and advancing into the machine-gun fire from these trenches. He had shouted his support to them into the darkness, and they wouldn't have heard even the whisper of what he screamed over the volume and intensity of the gunfire. He thought of who he was now, and what he did now, and he spat the bile from his throat. He had not planned that memory or that thought.
'I can see the hotel, but I can't see my room,' Mister said.
The trenches were a metre wide and a metre and a half deep. Where the machine-guns had been sited, which had driven off that night attack, with the grenades and the bayonets, there were still heavy logs of pine laid flat to protect the Serb soldiers. The water in the pit of the trenches was frozen, and caugh
t in the ice were dulled rusty cartridge cases. Further along, going east and in front of what had been the restaurant's conservatory dining area, the trench was reinforced by a twenty-metre length of half-moon concrete section. He could have told them, because it was what he had been told years back, that the section came from the Olympic Winter Games bobsleigh run, but he didn't bother.
Atkins said, 'The gunfire would have broken up their little kitchen gardens. Both sides grew cannabis plants right in front of their forward positions. The warlords, that's Serif and those on the Serb side, encouraged the planting of cannabis. They reckoned that stoned guys wouldn't think too much about the war, and they also reckoned they'd fight harder because they wouldn't want to abandon their crop.
Can you think what it was like up here in winter if you weren't drunk or stoned out of your mind? The little men fought, stoned, pissed and half dead with cold, and the big men - like Serif - got fat on their backs and their bodies. He's scum.'
'I do business anywhere I can find it, if the price is right.'
'I thought it might help you, Mister, to know where your new partner is coming from. I thought it might help you to know what sort of man he is, and what's his power base. He danced on graves . . . ' Atkins let his words die.
He turned. Neither of them had listened to him.
They were already walking back to the Toyota.
Didn't he know it? He was a fly in the spider's skein. He trotted after them to the vehicle.
'You all right, Atkins?'
'Never been better, Mister.'
'You know what? I reckon it's the tourist trail. They're doing the battlefield tour . . . It's not Utah or Gold Beach, or the Passchendaele Ridge or that farmhouse at Waterloo, but he's getting the Sarajevo scene. Don't you think?'
'How the hell do I know?'
'Just making conversation, sunshine . . . You'd be doing me a favour if you spat it,' Maggie said.
They were a clear quarter of a mile from where the Toyota was parked. Joey watched it through the binoculars.
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