Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

Home > Other > Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) > Page 33
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 33

by Giles O'Bryen


  ‘They have a long list of things to do,’ Eleni told me. ‘Anna has bought her smart new clothes and they go to museums or the cinema. Katya doesn’t refuse, but whenever they are at the apartment, she goes to the bedroom to be on her own.’

  ‘Has she said anything yet?’

  ‘No. It’s very hard on poor Anna.’

  It soon became clear that if the only purpose of these meetings was to discuss the progress of Katarina’s recovery, they were pointless. Our conversation digressed: politics; the war; our respective families; my spying job, as she called it. I discovered that Eleni was an aficionado of Westerns, her favourite being Destry Rides Again, starring Jimmy Stewart – a fine exploration of how a society responds to moral leadership, she explained. I think she knew that I was half in love with Anna; and she sympathised, for she was half in love with Anna herself. At our third meeting, she produced a newspaper folded to display a pixelated photograph of a heavy-shouldered man standing outside a courthouse with a lawyer at his side. It was an old photograph, but I recognised the face.

  ‘Look what happened, James. Haclan Adjani is dead.’

  She translated the article for me. A rival family, observing how the Adjani clan had been weakened by the collapse of its interests in Skopje, had taken the opportunity to raid their stronghold in northern Albania and pretty much wipe them out. Haclan and three of his men had been knifed and their bodies dumped in a stone drinking trough in the village square. The tree which shaded their bodies had been daubed with an upside-down cross.

  ‘Such violent people. The cross is I think supposed to be an insult – the Adjanis are Catholics, as I told you. But of course their killers are too ignorant to know that St Paul was crucified upside down, and the symbol is seen as respectful. Anyway, now your friend Mr Strang does not have to arrest him.’

  ‘Convenient, that.’

  ‘Do you think he arranged it?’

  The newspaper report was curiously lacking in detail – the rival family was not even named. It occurred to me that if MI6 wanted rid of a man whose testimony might be awkward for them, I knew just the sort of murderous bastards they’d dispatch to northern Albania to get the job done.

  ‘Probably not,’ I said, feeling in no state to judge whether this paranoid turn of thought was justified. ‘It doesn’t seem right that he should die in some blood feud, though, after what he’s done.’

  ‘Justice is good, but anyway I am glad he is dead,’ said Eleni. ‘Also, I am glad it was not you who killed him.’

  On the way back to Maria’s I bought a pre-pay cellphone and went through the rigmarole of calling Sergeant TJ Farah.

  ‘You’re like a nasty stain,’ he told me. ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘I just wanted to ask you something, TJ, there’s no need to get the hump.’

  ‘Oh, it’s me getting the hump now, is it, not some fucked-up Rupert disturbing my Sunday nap every time he wants his arse wiped.’

  ‘Is it Sunday?’

  ‘No it fucking well isn’t.’

  ‘Did you know that St Paul was crucified upside down?’

  ‘Christ on a bike, you really have lost the plot.’

  ‘Just a thought. You won’t want to answer this, TJ, but I swear it won’t get back to you. And if you don’t trust me, you have a photo in your vault of me killing someone in the woods, so—’

  ‘Yeah, all right, Jimmy, ask some more fucking stupid questions and I’ll try not to answer them.’

  ‘Were you in the Balkans last week? Specifically, northern Albania?’

  ‘You still in Skop?’

  I admitted that I was.

  ‘You want my advice, here it is: leave the Balkans now. Go home. Chain y’self to the settee, throw the key out of the window and drink a bottle of Scotch.’

  ‘I can’t, TJ, I have unfinished business here.’

  ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ Indignation was sending the familiar sing-song cadence of his voice into a chaotic tailspin. ‘Serbia’s getting bombed to shit. They’ve already taken out a refugee column. Yesterday it was the Chinese fucking embassy. There’s half a million people on the move. Nobody gives a monkey’s wank about your unfinished business.’

  ‘I know. Except me.’

  His voice softened. ‘Take the result, Jimmy. It wasn’t the one you wanted, but it’s the one you got. Go home. Watch your back. And stop making enemies.’

  Easy for TJ to say – he knew nothing about Father Daniel. When not working for Maria or making good-hearted love with Karela, I sat in a rhombus of spring sunshine at the back of the yard behind the restaurant and read English newspaper accounts of the NATO bombing campaign.

  They were written in excitable journalese by flak-jacketed war correspondents and carried photographs that were shocking but beautifully composed, as if to ensure that any compassion they might inspire would be neatly contained. The articles ended with a recital of the soberly smug platitudes that are pasted together to create Ministry of Defence press releases. Limiting collateral damage through intelligence-directed targeting, they claimed. Some of that intelligence provided by myself, I reflected bitterly. They were deploying the latest high-accuracy guidance systems, naturally, because the campaign was all about the MoD’s favourite contradiction in terms, precision bombing.

  There is no such thing. A bomb is never precise, especially not when tossed into the skies from 30,000 feet. A single BL 755 cluster bomb (of which around 300,000 would be dropped during the NATO campaign) contains 147 bomblets. On impact, each is forcibly inverted by an explosive charge and transformed into a molten slug capable of penetrating the armour plating on a tank. Simultaneously, the bomblet’s coiled casing shatters into 2,000 pre-shaped anti-personnel fragments which spray out over a circle nearly a hundred metres in diameter. On average, fifteen to twenty bomblets per cluster bomb fail to detonate, and unexploded bomblets would be found a kilometre and more away from the target coordinates of NATO strikes. These erroneously named ‘duds’ or ‘blanks’ are temperamental things: a breath of wind or even a change in atmospheric pressure can trigger them. Precision? I don’t think so.

  They were using A-10 Tankbusters, too. The A-10 fires 30 mm depleted uranium shells – an effective way of wrecking an armoured vehicle. And, by the by, of turning it into a radioactive playhouse for the use of local children when hostilities end. Decisive action to avert a humanitarian catastrophe, the politicians trumpeted, intoxicated with the image of steadfast statesmanship their advisers had prepared for them. We cannot stand by while the Balkans descend into chaos. No, I thought, you simply have to join in.

  After a series of phone calls in which her obduracy outlasted the ignorance and/or indifference of various administrative staff, Maria got an appointment with the UNHCR. But she didn’t tell me about it until after she’d been.

  ‘You are too angry, James, you would frighten them. Then they say nothing.’

  ‘So what did you do,’ I said crossly, ‘bribe them with a chicken shashlick?’

  ‘There, just like I said. Angry.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re right. What did you find out?’

  ‘Eleven children from the refuge arrived at Blace two days ago and were taken in by the UNHCR team. It was Father Daniel who handed them over.’

  ‘Father Daniel? I hope they checked everything properly. Where are the children now?’

  ‘They were transferred to Stankovic Two. A horrible place, but they are safe.’

  ‘What did they say about the pages from the Book of Prayer you sent them?’

  ‘The discipline Father Daniel used was not appropriate, and he should not have been frightening them. But this was all they could know for sure.’

  ‘What about the internal examinations?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, yes, they think maybe these were spiritual examinations. There is a phrase Catholics say: examine your conscience. It means—’

  ‘I know what it means,’ I said, exasperated. ‘So this regime of beatings and “interna
l examinations” is merely inappropriate?’

  ‘They will make further investigations. You must be patient, James.’

  ‘I don’t understand why Father Daniel took the children to the border.’

  ‘You want him to be one hundred per cent evil. Perhaps he is not.’

  ‘I wish we could be sure the children are OK.’

  ‘You can go to Stankovic Two and see for yourself, but still you won’t be satisfied.’

  ‘No, I won’t, because who’s to say there won’t be more? Father Daniel’s refuge was the source of Adjani’s child-trafficking business, but it was never a business for him, was it? You’ve seen those pages, Maria. It’s an obsession. It’s his life’s work. You think he’ll stop just because Haclan’s dead? I don’t.’

  49

  It was still dark when the taxi dropped me at our regular crossing place into Kosovo. I had several pockets full of food, a pair of compact binoculars, a hunting knife and my Browning Hi-Power. I jogged up towards the hills.

  It felt good to be running unencumbered through the cold air, while dawn stirred the pools of mist that lingered over the smooth face of the plain. It felt good to be away from the confused, uncertain city and all the hurt it held, to be seeking a resolution that was in my own hands and on my own account. I skirted a succession of wooded hillsides, heading east towards Blace and hoping to find the track that led to the refuge. I didn’t see or hear a single patrol: Serbian artillery units had reportedly set up nearby, but most of their infantry were engaged in firing and looting villages further north; and with refugees arriving at Blace in their thousands every day, the Macedonian authorities had better things to do than dispatch their soldiers to sections of the frontier that could only be reached on foot.

  I arrived on the flank of the hill above Blace and looked down on the river valley which carried the road to the border and then on south to Skopje. There had been 30,000 refugees, they said, in that no-man’s-land between Kosovo and Macedonia; now, the camp was empty. I looked through the binoculars and saw trails of sodden clothing, smeared plastic sheets hung over branches, pushchairs pointing their snapped struts at the sky. A few dozen stragglers were picking at the open mouths of discarded plastic bags. Even though the camp had become notorious, it was impossible to see it abandoned without feeling that some tragedy had taken place.

  It wasn’t until I swung the binoculars north that I saw the tide of new arrivals awaiting their turn in the hell of the just-vacated holding camp. They were squeezed into a side-track so that the main road could be kept clear, and every square foot of it held a human form. Those who hadn’t made it onto the track were waiting in the woods above, and as my eyes became accustomed to the shapes they made amongst the trees, I saw that the entire hillside was teeming with people. The precise, intrusive glare of the binocular lens picked out rope-bound bags over bowed shoulders, the bodies of children slumped in their parents’ arms, faces bruised with misery and exhaustion. I swept back and took in the border post itself, the place to which they were fleeing. The steel and tarmac sprawl, set out beneath its dome of bluish, arc-lit air, looked cold and empty as death.

  I lowered the binoculars and moved on. After twenty minutes, I came across a thirty-foot crater surrounded by trees snapped off at head height. I looked for evidence that this might be a NATO cluster bomb rather than a Serbian artillery round. There seemed little reason why anyone should pound this patch of deserted hillside. Serbian, I decided.

  A couple of minutes later, I heard a series of hard, hollow bangs from the far side of the valley, then the faint whistling of shells. . . A muffled whump and a plume of earth erupted lazily from the forest on the far side of the valley, closely followed by half a dozen more. I studied the pattern of artillery rounds being lobbed into the sky for signs that the long gun barrels might be swinging my way; but it was a patchy kind of bombardment and I guessed its main purpose was to drive the fleeing Kosovars down to the roads, where they could be more easily herded to the border.

  Soon afterwards I came across a group of families sat round the remains of a fire in a damp clearing, the adults talking urgently among themselves while their infants lay huddled in the gaps between them. To one side, a woman crooned over a child in her lap – a child too big to be comfortably held, and whose long, pale shins stuck out like the limbs of a mannequin. Over the next forty minutes, I must have seen several hundred refugees hiding up in those woods.

  I knew that if I kept on this bearing I would find the lower of the two tracks that led up to the refuge, but when I did, planted square across it was a Serbian armoured vehicle. Six soldiers were leaning against its plated flanks – evidently very confident in the accuracy of their colleagues’ gunnery, since the track ran along the foot of the hill on which the shells had been landing.

  I should have backed away at least three hundred yards before circling round them, but I was distracted by thoughts of what lay ahead. Cocky, too – a characteristic of foolish young Ruperts, TJ would have informed me. I smelled the man about the same time as he saw me. Crouched in a hollow of trodden bracken with his trousers round his ankles. He stood abruptly, hands tugging at his waistband. I drew my knife and went for him. Not fast enough to stop the shout in his throat. He saw the blade and ducked sideways, caught his foot in a thicket of stalks, fell. I pounced, swept the curved wafer of steel down towards the sinews of his throat. The bloody hunger, they call it, that smooth, impatient feeling, that palpable surge of blood in the veins, that flash of clarity, cold and undeniable. . .

  But I denied it. I stayed my hand an inch from the stubble of his jaw. Better to go hungry than do this wrong.

  He was slight, with a pale, ratty face. His eyes dilated, lips trembled after speech. I put a finger to my lips, then drew a hand across my neck. He raised his head enough to nod, let it fall back, and stared at me groggily. Seeing his white face and the lick of hair stuck to his forehead where his helmet had tipped back, I was glad I hadn’t cut him. He looked too much like the boy in the farmhouse loft.

  Shouts from the men by the armoured vehicle. Orders. I hammered the pommel of the knife against his temple. He sighed and his eyelids twitched. I plunged twenty yards through the undergrowth, slid down a short bank into a stream, followed its course down the slope for five minutes, then hauled myself up by the roots of an old ash tree and ran on until I pitched head first into a mound of bracken.

  I lay on my back, panting as quietly as I could, cocooned between the soft, musty earth and the dull orange of the bracken fronds. Far above my head, the fretwork of twigs at the fringes of the canopy shuddered against the flat blue sky.

  The shouts stopped. They’d found him. I listened out for a while, but they didn’t come looking for me. Until he came round and told them otherwise, they’d assume I was a refugee who’d been startled by the sight of their defecating comrade and given him a thump on the ear. They wouldn’t want to go tramping through the forest in pursuit of such a worthless foe. I stayed there for half an hour while the ground exhaled its sharp rooty smells and the dried fern stalks crackled in time with my breaths. Eventually I heard the grumpy cough of a big engine firing up and the Serbian vehicle rattled off down the track.

  I made my way back to the track and jogged uphill, looking for the overgrown path down which we’d plunged in rain-lashed darkness all those weeks ago. TJ would have found it as surely as a fox finds a gap in chicken wire, but I didn’t. It wasn’t much of a path anyway. I crossed the ditch and clambered up through the woods, and after an hour emerged onto the higher track, with the refuge just twenty minutes away.

  50

  I stepped back into the woods a hundred yards from the refuge and listened to the birds singing and the whispering trees. The place looked deserted, just as I should have expected. But I hadn’t, and felt obscurely disappointed. I worked my way closer and found a hiding place wedged between two stacks of rotting timber. There was the ugly building with its boarded windows and rickety steps up to the glazed
front door. Still no sign of occupation.

  I looked at the place where the Mitsubishi camper van had been parked and we’d stopped with Azza on his stretcher, staring at the sky through morphine-glazed eyes. I looked down the track to the farmhouse and memories paraded in my mind, as bright and clear as if they’d been polished every day.

  You don’t have time for this.

  I left the shelter of the timber stack, crossed the track and ran up the steps to the front door. Listened to the silence again, then tried the handle and pushed it open. I made a quick search, found no one, then wandered back through the empty rooms. A kitchen with a big catering stove and open shelves with white plates and glasses sitting upside down on squares of kitchen roll, a trestle table and ranks of plastic chairs. A crucifix on the wall, Christ’s face turned aside in sorrow and suffering, the clouts in his hands and feet expressively crude and thick. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Well, why? What next, girly pics and a cardboard box of knuckledusters?

  No. Dormitories with flimsy little wooden beds, pale brown blankets tucked in tight, a pair of cream wardrobes with doors that wouldn’t close. On the wall of the corridor that joined them, a colour print of the Virgin Mary pulling her robe aside to display her sacred heart, decorously rendered in ruby and silver. A large bathroom with three tubs, the enamel scoured grey and lines of black mould around the tiles. And then a room that was different from the rest: a Turkish rug on the floor, an oak desk and chair facing a window that looked out over the valley, electric heater, and a large, high divan bed. Was this where it happened? I sat at the desk and pulled open a drawer full of hanging files. There was a green folder for each of the children – I found Katarina’s and opened it.

  An admission sheet dated 16 January 1999 – the day after she’d been snatched from the Roma village.

  Katarina Corochai, twelve-year-old girl brought to us by a woman who would not give her name or address. She said she had found the girl wandering lost outside her village. She said she asked around to see if anyone recognised her, but no one did. The woman demanded the usual fee for her expenses, which I paid her, and she left. K is quite hollowed out with fear. She said she was from Pristina and gave me her address.

 

‹ Prev