Mister let her hold his hand.
The shutter clattered on automatic. Through the viewfinder, using the 300mm lens, Joey watched them laughing and holding hands. Eight frames, or nine, and then his view of them was obscured by the old mill building above the stream. He lay on his stomach, crushing down last autumn's fall of leaves, and huddled behind the camera.
'What other charities, Mister, do you help?'
'Well, bits and pieces.'
'You can tell me - I admire your modesty. Too many people boast. Tell me.'
'I do things for a hospice. You know what a hospice is? Yes? I help them . . . I put a roof on a church
'Is that your life, Mister? Helping in Bosnia, helping in a hospice, helping a church?'
'Well, not entirely.'
She squeezed his hand. He felt the warmth of her smile.
'Come on.'
In the distance he heard the helicopter rotors start to turn. They'd barely been on the ground half an hour. The VIPs, in a slithering column, retraced their way through the village, and the media were boarding buses. The villagers drifted from the track and meandered in little groups towards the few rebuilt homes. He was surprised the visit had been so short, and she must have read his thoughts. She told him that it was important the visitors were not bored, were enthusiastic, went back to their offices and wrote the reports that would bring in more donations from their governments.
Children now surrounded the two of them as they walked along a mud-packed path. With one hand she held Mister's, with the other a child's. He saw the way they touched her, pinched at her coat sleeve, gripped the hem of her anorak, and he saw the love in her face for them. They went towards a narrow plank bridge spanning the stream. He felt the little tickle in his trailing hand and looked down sharply. A small boy had reached to take the trailing hand. Mister was about to reject him, snatch his own hand away. He'd never allowed his sisters' children to get close to him. His sisters always scolded their children if they came close to him and told them not to 'bother' their uncle. He knew nothing of the trust of children. He let the small boy take his trailing hand as they went across the loose-fastened planks of the bridge. A little girl came behind the boy and took his free hand for the bridge crossing, and Mister saw the upturned tag of her anorak; Marks & Spencer, a cast-off. As he came off the bridge, still holding the little boy's hand, Monika looked at him and winked. She approved. He could not remember the last time that pleasure and pride had coursed through him at such a small thing. She took him to a house.
'They have no electricity, only heating-oil for the fire and a gas can for the stove. A little paraffin is given them each month for light. If we get more people back, have more homes for them to move into, we can pressure the authorities to spend money and restore the electricity supply. There are three families living here, nineteen people. Work has been done on the ground floor, but not yet upstairs because they are waiting for more building materials to be brought. It is not possible for them to buy the materials themselves because they have no work, no money, but at least they are, again, in their homes . .. How many bedrooms do you have in your house, Mister?'
'Five.'
'How many people?'
'My wife and myself.'
They went inside. He hovered behind her, and she was greeted like a true friend. He saw in the gloom two of the boxes, unpacked, on which were scrawled Bosnia with Love. Leading to the one table were mud smears across the bare concrete floor. An old man sat in a chair near to the table and smoked; his pullover bore the woven insignia of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill and crossed golf clubs under the stitched writing, and he smoked as if that were the luxury left to him.
There was a line of institution beds, with metal frames, dull blankets. The little girl careered away and bounced onto a bed, but the small boy kept hold of Mister's hand. The women were of all ages, but only old men were crowding into the room. The child wanted, Mister thought, to hold the hand of his father
. . . There were four bedrooms always empty at his home by the North Circular Road. His father visited, occasionally, but would not stay over. His mother had never slept in his house. He and the Princess had no friends they would have invited, nor her father and mother. They never entertained in the dining room with the big mahogany table and the matching set of eight chairs. If it was necessary to entertain, for business, he went to a restaurant, the Mixer arranged a private room at the back, a Card sat in the kitchen and another stood at the private room's door. He had so many bedrooms. He had hotel bedrooms and service accommodation bedrooms and time-share bedrooms.
He had more bedrooms in Cyprus, the South of France, on the Spanish coast and in the Caribbean and
. . . He had the money to rebuild the village and bring every man, woman and child back to it and to dress all of them in Armani or Yves St Laurent, to give them electricity, plumb in the sewage, put boards and carpets under their feet and curtains at their windows, to build a factory for them, and to bring them pedi-gree cattle. If he had done that he would not have noticed the loss.
He was served coffee. To Mister it was bitter and the sludge at the bottom of the tiny cup caught between his teeth. It was the coffee of Green Lanes that he drank in the spieler cafes with the Turks, and he was practised in hiding his disgust as he drank. A dog-eared set of cards was cut. The stakes for the game were used matches, plucked from a filled ashtray and Mown on to remove the tobacco dust. It wasn't easy lor him to play, and twice he grimaced at Monika, The small boy held his hand, would not let go of it. He played, and the time slipped away. He made certain he was never the winner. At home, in London, he would never be a loser, and not a loser in the old city of Sarajevo when he played the high-stakes game with Serif, whom she called criminal scum. He lost the matches he had been given. She was at the far end of the room, with the women, and she glanced al him, lapped the face of her watch.
They went out into the dusk. It was only when they left that Mister realized a crowd had gathered in the room and outside the door to watch him fail at cards, and lo he close to her. She kissed many cheeks, he shook the many hands pressed on him.
On the slippery path he took her fingers so that she would not fall. It was an excuse. She wore good walking boots, he had smooth leather-soled shoes.
They went across the bridge, clung to a handrail that was a slack strand of rope, and walked on the track down through the village. The shells of the burned-out houses remained in darkness. Brighter lights shone out from the undamaged homes where the generator engines thudded and where uncovered windows showed the flicker of television pictures
. . . He heard the patter of the feet that followed him.
'Why don't they go back and get them, the TVs?'
'Because they are beaten people, Mister, they have no more any spirit to fight.'
'Then they've no future.'
'The other future is to start the war again, Mister. Of course you are angry - I am angry - but violence, criminal violence, solves nothing. It is the way of the barbarian. The place for the criminals is not at the head of armies of thugs and thieves, it is in gaol where there are bars and where there is no key.'
They reached her jeep. The engine was on and her driver slept in the sealed warmth. He heard a low, guttered, hacking cough behind him. He turned. For a moment the small boy cringed away, was a retreating shadow figure on the empty track. He reached out his arms and the child came to him. He lifted the little boy and hugged the thin frame to his chest. Monika was with him. Together they held the child. He kissed the child's face, and Monika kissed his. He put the small boy down and watched him go into the darkness.
'If the visitors had done what you have they would have learned ten times, a hundred times, more. I thank you.'
'For nothing.'
They climbed into the jeep, were driven away from the village. On the seat between them her hand rested on his.
June 1998
Three times Husein Bekir had conceded defeat in the past five hours. Thr
ee times the patronizing victor's satisfaction had been on Dragan Kovac's face.
Each time he lost, while the retired police sergeant poured more brandy, burped on his lunch, and called him an old fool and a man without intelligence, Husein immediately set the carved wooden pieces back on the board, and they played again. He had played the last game, and the next would be the same, with a desperate intensity that furrowed his forehead, that made his hand tremble as he lifted a piece and slapped it down in its new position. His concentration was on his own moves, and what he anticipated would be Dragen Kovac's moves, but above all he searched for a sign of his opponent's cheating. As yet he could not find such a sign and that confused him hugely. If his opponent did not cheat, the implication was clear to Husein he, himself, was inferior . . . Of course Dragan kovac cheated. He heard a distant voice calling, his name, but ignored it. The grandchild and the dog were also ignored, and had slipped out of the door to search for entertainment.
When the bottle's mouth hovered over his glass, Husein put his hand clumsily over it and succeeded only in tipping over the glass. His head was bent over the board and he saw nothing of the fields below the porch, and he did not look up to find the voice calling his name, and he did not glance at the mulberry tree beyond the sagging fence of barbed wire, and he did not see the dog chasing alter the ball his grandson had thrown for it. He tried, his concentration fading, to plot the defence of his bishop, and he thought it was with unnecessary ostentation that Dragan Kovac wiped the spilled brandy off the table.
Until she reached him he had not been aware of Lila's approach up the track.
As he peered down at the board and looked for answers, he saw at the edge of his vision her river-washed rubber boots, which came to the top of her muscled shins. When was he coming home? she asked: he was coming home when the game was finished. Who was going to milk the goats? she asked he would milk the goats when he had finished the game. What was more important, milking the goats or drinking and playing games? Where was his grandchild? He did not know. She snorted at him in derision, and he heard Dragan Kovac's chuckle. There was the cackling of her voice, and he lost the threads of his defence. He looked up. He was palpitating with anger. He looked around. The child was high in the mulberry tree beyond the fence. The dog sat under the spread of the tree with the ball in its mouth and the saliva dripped from its jaws. Did he consider it responsible to allow the child to climb a tree - from which he might fall - and not even know where he was? Did he consider it responsible to be drunk when in charge of the child, his grandson? Under his breath, holding his head in his hands, he swore.
If he wanted to get back his chill, she said, that was his business, but she was not permitting him to abandon her grandson up a dangerous tree. If he got his chill back, through his own stupidity, when he should have been milking the goats, then it would not be she who nursed him. He wriggled in annoyance, and Dragan Kovac reached, grinning, for the bottle.
Husein Bekir saw his wife, Lila, stamp away from him in her shining rubber boots. She was stout, strong for her age, heavy-built. She seemed to plough through the long uncut grass below the porch towards the drooping fence in front of the mulberry tree. She straddled the fence, caught her skirt on the wire, extricated herself, leaving a thread on the barbs when she swung over her back leg, then went into the shade under the tree's leaves. He saw the deepening lines in his friend's forehead, and his eyes were screwed to narrow slits. His mouth gaped open, as if he tried to clarify a little moment of memory from far back, and could not. Then his friend's tongue flapped idly, but no words came. She was calling the child down.
Husein did not know what memory seeped back into the mind of Dragan Kovac, nor what his friend tried to say.
The child was pale, thin, like the scrawny dog gliding on the baked earth under the tree, had no meat on him and was lightweight.
His woman, Lila, was solid and heavy.
She moved under the tree so that she could better steady the child when he dropped down to her and her voice was harsh with her command as if she had no patience.
Dragan Kovac hissed, 'It's where they did it - put them I remember, it's where—'
'Put what?'
The mine exploded under her foot.
For Joey, it had been the journey from hell.
The nightmare had begun after he had seen Mister and the woman leave the village in the UNHCRjeep.
It had been hard to track them at the end, in the failed light. He had kept a distance back from them, but had seen Mister pick up a child and hug it, and then the small boy had run up the track past him. Joey had walked another mile through the long strip of the village, to where the blue van was hidden in trees beside the river. As he'd approached, stumbling over fallen branches, he'd heard the charge of their escape.
They would have run when they'd heard his approach. The van's doors were open. He'd sworn.
He'd reached inside, felt the dash and found the loose wires from the radio. His foot, as he'd stood by the door, had brushed against bricks. He'd sworn aloud He'd gone round to the passenger side, found the pocket open, and the torch hadn't been there. Mori-bricks against his hand on the passenger side - bricks to hold up the van, because there were no bloody wheels, no tyres. He'd sworn again in fury. Of course he had seen the poverty of the village, abject poverty, but he'd never thought that a little of the poverty might be removed by the acquisition of his tyres, his goddam wheels. He'd started to walk.
He dragged himself up the stairs of the hotel. A man had been sitting, smoking, an empty coffee cup in front of him, close to the reception desk, and he'd been given his key by a scowling night porter whose eyes were never off the man. He went up to his landing.
A man lounged in a chair at the top of the stairs, seemed to strip Joey with his gaze. He, too, wore the uniform of the man in the foyer - jeans, a cigarette, close-cut hair, a black leather jacket. A short-barrelled machine pistol, two magazines taped together, lay on his lap. Joey knew the face but couldn't put a place to it. It confused him, but in his exhaustion he didn't stop.
He went past the door of the room that had been Maggie's; there was a light under it and low voices, the scented fumes of cigarettes.
He let himself into his room, dumped his bag on the bed and took out the camera.
Opening up his laptop, he wrote his report, his fingers hammering on the keys.
He'd walked to the main road, then gone west along it. He'd hitched every car and lorry that had passed him, but none had stopped and some had nearly clipped him. He'd reached a village and seen a cafe's lights. He'd gone into it. Was there a taxi in the village? Shrugged responses, there was no taxi. Was there a telephone to call a taxi from Kiseljak?
The telephone was broken. He'd headed off, continued walking.
The report was typed out. He was tired, so bloody tired. He was cold, he was damp, he was hungry. He snatched the wire cables from his bag. His fingers shivered. It was slow going, and his temper was fuelled - should have taken him thirty seconds but it took him minutes - and he linked the cables to his laptop and his mobile, and hit the transmission-code keys. The first time, with his clumsiness, it didn't go through, second time it did.
He had walked for an hour and a half to reach Kiseljak. No taxis, no buses. In the police station he had gone half-way down on his knees, and flagged them with his ID. A police car had taken him to Rakovica, half-way to Sarajevo, and the driver had gestured that he could go no further, that he was not allowed beyond his area. Again, he had walked. A lorry with a drunk driver had lifted him as far as Blasuj, then dropped him. He'd walked in the dark, another hour, almost crying in his frustration, towards the always distant lights of the city, his goal.
Joey wired the digital camera to his mobile, and dialled. And the camera's pictures were downloaded to London. The mobile's screen message told him they were received.
He'd walked into Ilidza. No taxis in Kiseljak, Rakovica or Blasuj, and half a hundred bloody taxis in the Ilidja suburb. He'd b
een driven to the hotel, He'd staggered in through the door, into the bright light mud on his boots, his trousers and his coat.
He remembered, the recognition seeped into his mind, where he'd seen the men . . . They had been in the back of the truck. When he had been picked up in the truck, and the door had been opened for him, the interior light had come on. They had been in the back - Ante and Muhsin. He had seen their faces -
Salko and Fahro - before he had nestled down in the front seat and slammed the truck door, and the light had gone out. When they had come from the truck and had gone into the druggie's block, they had worn balaclavas and he hadn't seen their faces. He'd seen their faces when they'd come out of the block, work done, before they'd pulled their hoods back down.
'An excellent meal,' Mister said, and pushed his chair back from the table.
It had been the same meal, the Eagle reflected, that they'd eaten every night, but it was the first time Mister had praised the food. He'd talked, rambling, about his day, about war and poverty, about hatred, and the Eagle and Atkins had been his audience. If it had been hot, stinking hot, he would have diagnosed Mister as a sunstroke case, but there hadn't been any fierce sun . . . She wasn't mentioned. The Eagle began to think the unthinkable.
Almost as an afterthought, Mister turned to Atkins.
'You did all right today?'
'Went well, Mister.'
'You got the place?'
'We did a reconnaissance on the house and we've found a position where there's a clear field of vision on to it, a clear field of fire.'
'And tarmac?'
'Tarmac and frozen ground. The ground's smooth.'
'That's great, well done.'
The Eagle thought Atkins was a bloody puppy lapping praise.
'That's what we do tomorrow - should be a bit special. I mean, seeing it actually fired, that'll be sort of exciting . . . Good night, guys.'
Mister walked away from the table, left them, and his whistling echoed out ol the restaurant. It was, of course, unthinkable, and he had known Mister for twenty-eight years, and the Princess for eighteen of them - unthinkable.
The Untouchable Page 34