The birthday girl

by Stephen Leather

  Sagalle shook his head. 'The nearest airfield would be Boulder, and you'd still have a long drive from there. How many of your men will be coming?'

  Utsyev frowned. 'Why do you want to know?'

  'Clothing, sir. If you're going to the Rocky Mountain National Park you'll need to wear something less conspicuous than twothousanddollar suits and cashmere overcoats.'

  Utsyev nodded and took a mouthful of the bourbon. 'Four.

  Three of them are about his build.' He gestured at Kiseleva with his thumb. 'The fourth is a woman.'

  If Sagalle was surprised that one of Utsyev's team was female, he didn't show it. 'I'll have suitable clothing delivered to the hotel tonight with the vehicles, along with a selection of footwear.

  There'll be four untraceable handguns in the trunk of one of the vehicles.'

  Utsyev grunted. Sagalle had clearly thought of everything.

  Utsyev wondered what it would take to get a man like Sagalle on his team. Probably a hell of a lot more dian he paid Kiseleva.

  'We'll drive up later tonight,' he said. He rubbed his left temple with his knuckles. 'I ain't feeling so good.'

  'That could be the altitude, sir,' Sagalle said. 'You're about five thousand feet higher than in New York. It'll pass in a day or two.'

  'I hope I'm not still around in a day or two,' Utsyev growled, and took another pull at his drink. Sagalle looked as if he was about to suggest that alcohol wouldn't help his acclimatisation, but then seemed to think better of it. 'Maybe I'll get some shuteye while I wait for my crew to get here,' Utsyev said.

  That'd help,' Sagalle agreed.

  The limousine pulled up in front of a white pyramid-shaped building a dozen storeys high. Sagalle handed Utsyev a business card. 'This is the number of my mobile phone, Mr Utsyev. You can reach me night or day. If there's anything you need, call. I'm at your disposal until this matter has been concluded.'

  Utsyev and his two men climbed out of the limousine and watched as it drove away through the gently falling snow. 'Until this matter has been concluded,' Utsyev repeated to himself. He rounded on Kiseleva. 'You hear that? That Sagalle is a class operator. You should fucking learn from him, you hear?'

  Kiseleva's lips tightened until they almost disappeared. 'Yes, boss,' he said through gritted teeth.

  Freeman drove the Bronco slowly down the track towards the cabin. There were no safety rails on the bridge over the stream so he took extra care to stay in the middle. The powerful headlights illuminated the wooden cabin and he saw that smoke was still feathering from the stone chimney. It was a welcoming sight, but the cabin still looked far more isolated at night than it did during the day. The trees and hillside behind disappeared into the blackness and outside the beams of light he couldn't see a thing. He'd been out longer than he'd expected, because Katherine hadn't been home. He'd left a message on the answering machine, but then decided to keep trying, certain that she wouldn't be out too late. By eleven o'clock he was still getting the machine. Either she'd fallen asleep and had turned the ringer off in the bedroom, or she was out with the girls. He had begun to worry about leaving Mersiha on her own for too long, so he'd left another message saying that he'd call again in the morning.

  He parked in front of the cabin and turned the engine off. He sat for a while in the darkness, alone with his thoughts. The daughter who lay asleep in the cabin was a totally different girl to the twelve-year-old who'd pointed a Kalashnikov at him when he was chained up in the basement in Sarajevo, and he'd almost forgotten the circumstances under which they'd first met. He went back in his mind to the time she'd levelled the assault rifle at him and tightened her finger on the trigger. She was quite prepared to kill him. He remembered how he'd been sure that his life was going to end on the cold concrete floor. He'd known then without a shadow of a doubt that she was a killer, yet he'd still been shocked to the core when she'd told him the story of her white hairs. He knew he was getting close to discovering her secrets, that she was preparing to open up to him in way that she'd never done with anyone before, and the prospect thrilled him. But he was apprehensive, too, because he had a feeling that what she was going to reveal to him would change for ever the way he saw her.

  He climbed out of the Bronco. When he slammed the car door the noise echoed back from the mountain like a gunshot. He shivered. It was a cold night, cold enough for snow. He looked up at the myriad stars above. There were no lights nearby and the air was so clear that he seemed to be able to see right to the other end of the galaxy. He walked softly across the deck, not wanting to disturb Mersiha if she was asleep, and let himself in.

  The cabin was creaking as it settled down for the night, friendly groans and cracks like an arthritic old man drifting off to sleep.

  He tiptoed upstairs to his bedroom. On the way he put his ear to Mersiha's door. She was moaning, then he heard words, but he couldn't make sense of them. He turned the handle and pushed the door open. She was talking rapidly, the words tumbling over themselves, but even if she'd been speaking slowly he wouldn't have understood. She was talking in her native language – harsh, guttural sounds that owed little to English. Her arms and legs were moving listlessly and her head was thrashing from side to side. Freeman walked over to her bed on the balls of his feet and sat down beside her. He couldn't make sense of what she was saying, but she was clearly in distress. He wanted to wake her, but he remembered Art Brown's words – it was better to let her sleep through it. He reached over and took her hand in his.

  It felt so small, like a child's, and it was damp with sweat. 'It's okay, pumpkin,' he whispered, 'I'm here.'

  Her brow furrowed and she began to pant like an overexcited puppy. Sweat was pouring off her face and soaking into the pillow. Freeman watched her anxiously. He'd never seen her as troubled as this, even during her first weeks in America.

  He wondered if it was because she'd started to open up to him, if by knocking down the walls she'd built up he was in danger of unleashing a torrent of bad memories. He squeezed her hand gently, not hard enough to wake her but in the hope that wherever she was in her dreams she'd know that he was there with her.

  Mersiha ground her teeth as if she were in pain and began to breathe through her nose. Suddenly she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open. She took a deep breath and Freeman realised she was going to scream. He put his arms around her and pressed her to his chest, telling her over and over again that it was all right, that he was there and it had only been a bad dream. Her body was trembling as she sobbed into his shoulder, and he caressed the back of her neck. He could feel the tension at the top of her spine, as if the bones had been replaced with steel rods. 'I'm here, pumpkin. I'm here.'

  'I'm sorry,' she said.

  'There's nothing to be sorry about,' he said. 'It was only a nightmare.'

  'It was horrible.' Her arms slipped around his waist as if she were hanging on to him.

  'What was happening?'

  'I was at the school.'

  It wasn't the answer Freeman had expected. 'The school?'

  Mersiha gripped him tighter as if it were the word itself which was causing her pain. 'Mersiha, can you tell me what happened?'

  He felt her shake her head. 'It might help.'

  She sniffed. 'It was when I was little,' she said. 'The year before I met you.'

  'You were twelve?'

  'Uh-huh. It was spring. The fighting had been going on for two years. I'd almost gotten used to it. I don't think I could remember what it was like before the snipers, you know?' She sniffed again and Freeman thought she was going to stop talking, but she continued. 'We ate all our meals in the dark, with the shutters closed. We never walked when we were outside, we always ran.

  We ran to get water, we ran to the relief convoys for food, we ran to feed the animals. We ran and we bent over to make ourselves smaller targets. I can remember my mother holding my hand and telling me to hurry because the Serbs would shoot us if we didn't run.'

  She released her grip around his waist
and brushed tears away from her eyes. 'And you used to run to school?' Freeman said, trying to encourage her to continue talking.

  She shook her head. 'No. There was no school. The Serbs kept shelling the building. My mother and father taught me at home.'

  'The nightmare. What happened in the nightmare?'

  'My father had just left the house with a woman whose daughter was about to have a baby. The baby was coming out the wrong way and the woman said my father had to be there.

  He went. He always went, no matter how dangerous it was.'

  'He was a good man.'

  Mersiha nodded. 'He was too good, that's what my mother said. She didn't want him to go. The woman was a Serb and she had two sons, both of them fighting. It could have been one of her sons shooting at us from the hills.'

  'Your mother said that?'

  'No, she would never say anything bad about anyone. She was like my father – she always thought the best of everyone. But she didn't want him to go outside. It was too dangerous, she said.

  Stjepan told me the woman was a Serb. Afterwards.'

  'Afterwards?'

  'After he rescued me from the school.'

  The school again. Freeman didn't know what its significance was, but he didn't want to ask her directly. He said nothing as he waited for her to continue.

  'We stood to the side of the kitchen door to watch him go, standing in the shadows so the snipers wouldn't be able to see us. I didn't see what happened, but we heard a burst of gunfire.

  Six shots, maybe more. My mother looked at me in terror and I could tell that she knew he was dead. I dashed out of the door but she grabbed my sweater and pulled me back. I was screaming that we had to go and help him but she told me to go upstairs and hide in a cupboard.' She smiled at Freeman through her tears.

  'She wasn't the sort of mother you argued with, you know?'

  He nodded. 'I know.'

  'I went upstairs and hid, like she said. I knew she was going out to help my father, and I wanted to go with her, but I had to do as she said. I had to obey her. Even in the cupboard in my parents' bedroom I could hear shouts. Men yelling. And screams. My mother screaming. I put my fingers in my ears and hummed. Can you believe I did that? I was humming because I didn't want to hear her scream.'

  'You were only twelve,' Freeman said. 'There was nothing you could have done.'

  'I closed my eyes and I hummed, trying to shut it all out, trying to pretend it wasn't happening. I don't know how long I stayed that way. It felt like hours but it probably wasn't more than a few minutes.'

  She fell silent. 'What happened?' Freeman asked.

  'They found me,' she said quietly. 'Two of them. One of them was older than my father. The other was taller and thinner and had a gun in his hand. An automatic. I didn't know anything about guns then, but now I know it was an automatic. At the time all I knew was that it was a big gun. They dragged me out of the cupboard and threw me on the bed. I could hear my mother screaming downstairs, and men shouting. I didn't understand what was going to happen, Dad. I knew what my mother and father did in bed. The house we lived in was quite small and sometimes I'd hear them make love late at night, and I knew all about babies and stuff. But I didn't know that men could do it to a girl, not a girl like me.'

  Freeman closed his eyes and swallowed. Part of him wanted it to stop right there because he knew that what he was going to hear would break his heart, but he also knew that he wasn't doing this for himself, he was doing it for Mersiha. She had to get it out

  in the open so that she could start to heal. 'Where was Stjepan?' he asked.

  'He'd left three months earlier. The Muslims had started to fight back and he was one of the first to join up. He kept sending word back to us that he was okay, and occasionally we'd get a letter, but he wasn't around. Most of the time we didn't even know where he was.' She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. 'They ripped my clothes off. I tried to stop them but they were so strong. They were laughing and one of them, the old one, kept drinking from a brandy bottle. No one but my parents had seen me naked before, not even Stjepan. I tried to cover myself with my hands, but what could I do? They were too big. The young one slapped me across the face and told me to lie still. Then the old one started arguing about which of them was going to go first. I didn't understand what they meant.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, heavy footsteps made by men wearing boots. Two more men came into the room, men with rifles. One was chewing on a loaf of bread, the other threw apples to his friends. They carried on eating as they discussed who was going to go first. I was crying, but the more I begged and pleaded for them to let me go, the more they laughed.'

  Freeman put his arm around her shoulders. Mersiha bowed her head as she continued her story. 'I tried to get under the blankets but they pulled them off the bed and threw them on the floor. All the time my mother was screaming downstairs. Then her screams got louder and I realised they were bringing her upstairs. They dragged her into the bedroom. She was crying.

  I'd never seen my mother cry before, no matter how bad things got. Even when she argued with my father she never cried, but when they threw her on the bed next to me tears were streaming down her face. Her face was red from where she'd been slapped and her dress was torn. She saw what they'd done to me and she tried to lie on top of me, to protect me, but they dragged her off.

  One of them had a knife and he used it to tear her dress off, then her underwear, until she was as naked as I was. The men started to compare us, saying which one they wanted, as if we were pieces of meat being haggled over by housewives, and all the time she was begging them to let me go. She said they could do anything they wanted with her, just so long as they let me go.

  They laughed. They said they were going to have us both anyway.

  I kept asking my mother what had happened to my father, but she wouldn't say.

  'Two of them held my mother's arms while the young one, the one with the gun, raped her. She was looking at me all the time, telling me not to worry, that it would be all right, that it'd soon be over. She kept reaching for my hand but the men kept hitting her. They kept saying stuff about giving us Serbian children, that we'd have sons and that our sons would go out and kill Muslims.

  My mother never stopped looking at me.'

  'She loved you very much,' Freeman said, his voice faltering.

  'The old man raped me first. His breath was foul and he kept trying to kiss me. I begged him to leave me alone and then I pleaded with my mother to get them to stop. I feel so bad about that now, because there was nothing she could have done. I can't imagine how she must have felt. I mean, it was bad enough what was happening to her, but to have me there and to have me…'

  She began to sob uncontrollably. Freeman had never felt so powerless in his life. He held her in his arms and waited for the crying to subside.

  'I was only thinking of myself,' she cried. 'They were raping her and all I could think of was that I wanted them to stop hurting me. I was so selfish.'

  'No,' he whispered.

  She shook her head. 'She passed out eventually, or maybe they beat her unconscious. I can't remember. The men didn't seem to mind whether she was awake or not. They just carried on raping her. It went on for hours. Hours and hours. Men kept coming into the room, leaning their rifles against the wall and laughing with their friends, then pulling their trousers down and dropping down on top of me. One of them made me sing while he was doing it to me. Niko, Nona, Sto Srbi Imade. No one has what the Serbs have. All the time he was on top of me. After a while it stopped hurting, I couldn't feel anything. I was numb.

  Physically and mentally. I didn't even protest any more, I just kept my legs open because the wider apart they were the less it seemed to hurt. I turned my head to the side and stared at the wall and let them get on with it. I tried to blank it out.

  I kept thinking of other things. Walking in the hills with my dad. Playing with Stjepan. Eating dinner. Watching television.


  Horses. I loved horses and imagined I was riding a big horse and that it was carrying me away, taking me to a safe place.

  'Eventually it was over and they dragged us off the bed and carried us downstairs. They wrapped my mother in a blanket and they gave me a shirt to wear. I thought they were taking us outside to kill us, but I didn't care. I wanted to die. I wanted it to be all over. I couldn't walk so two men dragged me by the arms. Down the road was a large truck and more soldiers were loading women into it. I recognised some of them, girls I'd gone to school with, friends I'd played with. Their mothers. Their grandmothers. They'd all been beaten and raped.

  'They dragged me by my father's body. He was lying in the gutter. He didn't look like my father any more. Half of his face was missing. He hadn't just been shot – they'd gutted him with a knife and stabbed him around the groin. The blood had run down the gutter and into a drain. And they'd stolen his boots.

  That's the thing I remember. He was lying dead in the gutter and someone had stolen his boots. I remember thinking that they shouldn't have taken his boots because his feet would get coM.'

  She leaned her head against Freeman's shoulder and fell silent. He could feel her breath on his neck each time she exhaled. He stroked her hair. There were no words he could say. The only comfort he could offer was physical contact.

  'They'd killed all the Muslim men. All of them. I heard stories later of the things the Serbs had done to them before they killed them. They made fathers kill their own sons, they made them do things to each other. They killed them with knives, they smashed in their skulls with rifle butts, they raped wives in front of husbands and then murdered the men in front of their women.

  Ethnic cleansing, they called it, but there was nothing clean about what they did. My father was lucky. At least he died quickly.'

  She paused for breath, then continued as Freeman sat transfixed.

  'They threw me in the back of the truck. I sat next to my mother, but she didn't seem like my mother any more. Her eyes were blank, like she wasn't there any more. I put my arm around her shoulders but she didn't notice. Then she started shivering.