‘Tomasz thinks it is exciting, all these soldiers and guns.’
‘If the peace conference works out, then we’ll be going home, guns and all.’
‘Peace conference? The one near Paris? Ha! I don’t think they are planning for peace. People who are powerful, they like war. They have armies and they want to show how they are big and strong. What is Milošević without a war? I will tell you: an old fool who ruined his country.’
Her eyes, cocked behind the glass of her black-framed spectacles, challenged me to disagree. Since I’d been helping to prepare for war myself, I decided it would be disingenuous now to argue that peace was nigh.
‘You know of the Battle of Kosovo?’ Maria went on. ‘It took place in the year 1389. They have stories and songs about it. The earth is red with the blood of Serbian men, they sing, it is wet with the tears of Serbian wives, tra-la. Kosmet is the heart and soul of Serbia and they will defend it until they are all dead.’
‘I heard you should expect twenty thousand refugees here in Macedonia.’
‘There are already twenty thousand refugees in Macedonia, and the war has not started. But what is a number to the kings and queens in Paris? You should go and get drunk, James. It will make you to forget your troubles for a time.’
10
I ignored Maria’s advice and went back to my apartment, read a technical journal I’d brought with me in case my chronic enervation hit a new low, then lay down for another night with my nasty dreams. Next morning, I called Father Daniel again, but got no answer. I went out into the street and took a cab to 77 Syrna Street. I wanted to see the place again, judge if my misgivings were justified. And I had an image of the sleepy-eyed young woman who’d opened the door, of my hands reaching for her warm, plump waist inside the folds of her dressing gown.
It was a beautiful day, the sun slanting between clumps of wind-blown cloud, but the house still looked forlorn. A gust caught the plastic sheeting on the roof and it clattered and flapped, then I heard a shout from the yard and the brindled dog slunk round a concrete gatepost and scuttled down the street for twenty yards before turning to look back over its shoulder. I knocked on the front door. No answer, so I knocked again.
A heavily built man in filthy blue overalls appeared from behind a grey VW Passat saloon parked in the yard.
‘I left a girl here the other day,’ I said. ‘I want to know if she’s OK.’
He gave me a blank stare. He didn’t understand me – or if he did, he wasn’t going to say so. He had a scar down one cheek, a ridge of pale skin that cut across the black stubble. I had the impression he was expecting me to back away.
‘A girl,’ I said again, taking a step towards him.
‘No girl.’ He made a shooing gesture with his hand.
‘Yes, a girl,’ I said hotly. ‘About twelve. From Father Daniel’s refuge in Kosovo.’
He recognised the name and I saw calculation in his eyes. The taxi that had brought me here accelerated away down the street. I’d told the driver to wait. He hadn’t even collected his fare.
‘No girl. Fuck off.’
‘Think I’ll wait here.’
I sat down on a section of the broken porch. The big man continued to stare at me, his hard face betraying nothing. Then he stumped off round the corner of the house.
I pulled out the cellphone and dialled Father Daniel. This time, he answered.
‘Father Daniel – you got my message?’
‘Your message?’
His voice was faint and he sounded even more dispirited than I remembered.
‘About the girl. I wanted to know if she’s back with you.’
‘Oh. . . I don’t. . . I don’t think so, no.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t think so?’ I said. ‘The place where I left her, seventy-seven Syrna Street – what is it exactly?’
‘I don’t understand what you are asking.’
‘The house on Syrna Street,’ I repeated. ‘It doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the UNHCR. Or a Catholic refuge for that matter.’
‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not looking for help,’ I replied angrily. ‘Do you follow up what happens to the children after they’ve been left there?’
‘There’s all the UNHCR paperwork – at the refuge.’
‘And you’ve spoken to the children themselves, once they’re settled?’
‘No. I have to—’
I never heard the rest of his sentence. A shadow moved in fast from my left. I wouldn’t have seen it if the sun hadn’t been so low in the sky, and the iron bar would have crumpled the back of my skull. I rolled sideways, felt the timbers of the fallen porch shiver as the bar landed. I rolled again, sprang to my feet, then hurled myself backwards as the second blow swung towards my ribcage. A thick iron bar with a rusty cog attached to the business end.
He was wielding it one-handed. A man of great strength, going at me deliberately, no malice in his eyes, just plain intent. I crabbed backwards over the rubble of a broken-down wall. He stepped in, drawing the iron bar back. A chunk of mortar came into my left hand. I flung it as hard as I could and it grazed his cheek – enough to make him hesitate. By the time the lump of iron hammered into the broken wall, I was on my feet and driving my fist into his temple. The weight of the swinging bar had pulled him down into a half-crouch, and the blow took him off balance. I saw his knees wobble as he heaved his weapon from the pile of brickwork. His arm was out straight, braced with the effort. I kicked hard, the crook of my ankle impacting the underside of his elbow. The joint popped up. He let out a grunt of shock, then went for the iron bar with his other hand. I picked up a lump of brick the size of a grapefruit and steadied myself to ram it into his mouth.
If he’d been full of heat and fury, I would have killed him. I was eager to kill him. But I needed the excuse and he knew it. He straightened up, arm dangling, temple red and beginning to swell, and surveyed me as a churlish man might survey a small child who has spilled milk on his shoes. The top buttons of his boiler suit had got torn off and I saw a small blue cross roughly tattooed on the pale skin of his upper chest. His mouth formed a sneer of contempt, then he turned his back on me and walked away, disappearing round the side of the house where his brindled dog sat anxiously sweeping the dirt with its long tail.
The cellphone had been crushed when I’d fallen into the broken wall, so I couldn’t call Father Daniel and tell him that his UNHCR liaison’s halfway house was in fact the den of a murderous troll. I didn’t hang around for the troll to fetch a gun, either, but ran back down the street and round the first corner, then on another few hundred yards until my way was blocked by a railway track behind a high steel fence.
There were no turnings off this street. I was about to retrace my steps when I heard a vehicle approaching from the direction of Syrna Street. I dropped down behind a white van. A car was idling at the corner – the grey Passat I’d seen at the house. Two men got out and the Passat pulled away. I heard it revving hard for a hundred yards or so, then the engine dropped to an idle again and doors banged. The troll, organising a pursuit. . . I tucked myself in behind the rear wheel of the van and looked along the kerb.
One of the men was walking along the pavement towards me, a phone clamped to his ear. He stopped alongside a black rubbish hopper, placed his hand over a bulge at his waistband, then shoved the hopper aside with the sole of his foot so it teetered off along the pavement.
I checked the other side and saw a second man. There was a garage next to the house across the pavement from me, not twenty yards away, but nowhere obvious to run for cover next. Anyway, this was their patch: once they’d seen me, they’d know how and where to hunt me down. I crouched helplessly in the narrow oblong of gritty, pockmarked road behind the van, visualising their methodical progress as they worked their way along the street towards me.
I could handle one of these men, armed or not, but if the other had time to call for help. . . I l
ooked back at the chain-link fence. Run for it, then. An urban fence like that is always holed somewhere. But it was still a couple of hundred yards away. My shoulder brushed the handle of the van’s rear doors. It felt loose. I gave it an experimental tug. Something scraped noisily against the inside of the doors. I stopped and checked the street again. They didn’t seem to have heard. It was clear that the lock was broken. I eased the doors apart, but after three inches they held firm – wired shut with a length of galvanised steel cable. I braced my knee against one door and pulled the other open as far as I could, then thrust my hand in and tried to work out how it was fastened.
I had an image of my pursuer stepping level with the back of the van and finding his quarry with his arm jammed in the rear door. The stupidity of it made me suddenly furious, and I pushed hard, ignoring the creaks from the hinges. My fingers found the place where the ends of the cable had been twisted round the door bolts, but the stiff braids would not yield to the clumsy pressure of my fingertips. I needed a few more inches of reach to get any purchase. There! I felt the wire braids slacken. Then I heard a voice. Thirty yards away, maybe less. The man on my side of the street, talking on his cellphone. I had just a few seconds to prise apart the last kinks in the cable, open the doors, climb in, close the doors, hide. Silently.
I got the cable off. That was it.
I started to whistle. A jaunty whistle. The whistle of a man attending to some workaday task in the back of his van. The whistle of a man who thinks he’s alone but doesn’t care if he isn’t. It wasn’t easy. I crashed open the van doors, cleared my throat and spat. Then I whistled some more.
He stepped round the edge of the door and I was right there, my face in his face, my knee thudding into his groin. He doubled up with a sickly moan. I wrapped his throat in the cable and dragged him into the van. He lashed out and his foot banged against the door, which swung back and crunched against his shin. His body jack-knifed and we lurched backwards into the dark space, flailing around in a clutter of hard-edged lumps and lengths of things that scraped along the van’s sides as they fell. He had one hand plucking at the wire pinching the flesh of his neck, the other reaching for his gun. But he wasn’t a big man and I rolled him over easily, then drove my knee into his spine and yanked back on both ends of the cable.
I meant to choke him until he blacked out, expected to feel furious resistance from the muscles of his neck and shoulders. But I used too much force. Far too much force. There was a dull crack and his head tilted back at an impossible angle. The twisted wire caught under his jawbone and before I could slacken my grip I’d ripped one end of his jaw clear of his skull. He made a retching noise and his body slumped.
I had time now. It was easy. I pulled the gun from his waistband. Registered the dark shadow as it moved across the bonnet of the car parked behind the van. Watched the shadow hesitate. Noted how the squeals and clanks from the goods train grinding along the track at the end of the street would muffle the snap of the gunshot. Took aim at the face now framed in a rhombus of pale sky. Pulled the trigger. Recorded in my mind a picture of a man bringing his hands up to his shattered face and stammering some words I did not understand. Reeling sideways into the van door. The door bouncing against its hinges, folding him into the gutter. The soft thump as he fell.
I loaded the dead man into the van with his dead mate and wired the doors shut again, then climbed out through the front, wiping my fingerprints off everything as I went. I jogged to the steel fence alongside the railway track and soon found a place where it had been peeled back. I crawled through into a ribbon of waste ground at the foot of an embankment and set off towards the centre of town, picking my way through pockets of dense, spiny undergrowth and ragged drifts of garbage – rotting cardboard, plastic crates, rubbish bags torn open by scavenging teeth. I heard no shouts or speeding vehicles. I wasn’t going to report this to the police. The troll wasn’t going to, either, being the sort who would have killed the two men himself if he’d discovered how they’d fouled up. The street had been deserted – and if anyone had heard the gunshot, they’d probably already thought better of it.
After walking for twenty minutes, I found a pile of dried grass and leaves arranged in the shape of a bed under a spray of wiry bramble. I lay down on it. There didn’t seem to be any reason to hurry back to my apartment. Nor to hurry on to anywhere else.
I lay in that desolate place for an indeterminate length of time, staring up through the trembling lattice of thorns as the sun inscribed its feeble arc across the wind-scoured sky. A week ago, I’d been a callow, arrogant Army Intelligence officer with a brilliant career ahead of him. What was I now? I thought about what I had done and how I might rescue the girl from the house on Syrna Street, which I could not pretend to myself had anything whatsoever to do with the UNHCR. Then I thought about the man with his jaw hanging off, and the one with his hands held up to his bloodied face, stammering. Then I managed not to think at all, until I realised I wasn’t alone.
An old woman was squatting at my feet, muttering and prodding at my boots with a twig. As soon as I saw her, I felt that I must kill her.
I sat bolt upright, shocked that this thought had taken hold of my mind with such force and clarity, even for an instant. She must have seen how dangerous I’d become, for she got quickly to her feet and scrambled away into the bushes. I climbed out of her lair and walked on until the embankment levelled out and I saw a signal box ahead. I dropped down to the chain-link fence and looked for a way out. The fence adjoined the back wall of a warehouse covered with soot and graffiti, its cracked windows too high to reach. A smell of paraffin drifted on the air and I heard bangs and the grinding of a big diesel engine.
The warehouse gave way to a low-built workshop, beyond which there was a fork in the line, with a section of track leading off to the front of the warehouse. There were double gates on the far side of a concrete yard. All I had to do was cross the track, then walk to the gates. There were men operating a hoist to unload wire cages of stone from a line of trucks into a pair of lorries parked alongside the track. I experienced again that sense of distance from the ordinary run of humanity which had beset me in Maria’s café the evening before – only this time the gap was more like a gulf, the comfort and security on the far side quite out of reach. I would have to fight again. I would have to run.
I crouched there for a long time, studying in turn the bulging worms of cement between the breeze blocks of the workshop wall and the knot of muddy weeds embedded in the earth at my feet. I’d killed four people in the last three days, and delivered an innocent girl into the hands of evil men. How had this come about? The memories looped through my head, a giddy parade which I could not find the strength of mind to stop.
Eventually I emerged from this trance sufficiently to realise that there was no choice to be made. I walked up to the track, looked left and right, as any sensible man would, stepped over the rails, and carried on across the yard. A few of the workers stopped to watch my progress, but no one came after me, and the man in the hut by the gates merely grimaced. It was some relief to be back on the streets. I had an address and I was going there, that was all.
11
I don’t drink often, a failing which invokes equal measures of incomprehension and contempt in my Regimental colleagues. But Maria had said it would help me to forget, and the prospect of forgetting was enough to take me down to the Bar Vodno that night.
The Dutch KFOR had been replaced by a unit of Swedes embarking on the same ritual of steady effacement, the breaking down of consciousness into a state of myopic fixation and chaotic impulse. This was the state I craved, the world very small and very close, a gaudy swirl of eyes, hair, cheeks, mouths, hands, glasses, bottles, bulges and curves. Everything else could be elbowed away to the margins, a fog of things ignored or denied.
I sat at the bar and drank cold lager and wondered if cold lager always tasted of ash. Men came and stood next to me to buy drinks and made convivial noises in my ear a
nd I raised my glass in gestures of bonhomie; but nothing like a conversation ensued. A fat woman with melancholy eyes put her arm around my shoulders and wriggled herself against me in a coquettish manner, and I remember smiling and taking her by the waist. But she disengaged herself and walked away, giving me a solicitous look as she went. I don’t know how many beers I drank, but though I forgot everything else, my mind would not release the memories I needed to shut out.
The Swedish soldiers started to include me in their rounds of shots, and the memories became lurid, looming up at me from pools of glossy darkness. I took the hard little glasses that were full of some fierce spirit and clinked them with my new friends, grinned when they grinned and slapped their heavy backs and roared at jokes I didn’t understand. Then one of them asked me who I was and what I was doing in Skopje, and I couldn’t reply but only stammered, and then I brought my hands up to my face like the man I had shot. They didn’t like that. I had something to hide. I was taking the piss. I was a fucking weirdo. The mood turned evil and I had to leave.
‘You buy drinks now, English shit!’ one of them shouted after me.
I started walking and didn’t look back. It wasn’t raining, but the air was heavy and cold, the pavements damp. It was about eleven and the streets were full of people, hundreds and hundreds of them in pairs or little knots or gangs – some hurrying along in a modest, fearful way, some wrapped in each other’s arms, some smart and out to impress, some singing or shouting or dangling their fists. I bought a hamburger and stood under a shop awning to eat it. I thought I must be drunk by now, though all I really felt was a sense of being hollowed out. A taxi rolled by and the driver leaned from his window.
‘You want I take you good place? Have a drink, nice girls, OK?’
I climbed in and the taxi sped away.
‘Four clubs you like in town,’ said the driver. ‘Best is Vegas Lounge. Nice young girls, fresh. OK?’
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 8