The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  She rolled down her window and heard bellbirds ringing through the trees. She had never heard so many in one place. She stopped the car and listened. The ringing had an intoxicating, almost magical quality. From time to time there came a whipbird’s call.

  The sun was gentler here, filtered through the trees. Occasional shafts of light picked out the pale, peeling trunks and variegated colours of different species. Now that she was deep inside it, the bush was no longer fearsome in its immensity. It had a close, intimate beauty, and she understood how someone could become attached to such a place.

  As she drove on, she realised there was no sign of other people—no poles, no fences and no buildings. Only the road, until she finally came to a gate with a sign that brought her straight back to the world of men:

  Khandalah. Private property.

  Trespassers not welcome. Keep out.

  Anna opened the gate, drove through and then closed it behind her. After a while the track descended sharply, becoming steeper and rougher until she realised that, if she went any further, she might not be able to turn the car around to get back out.

  She pulled into a small clearing. She took the bag of notebooks and recording gear, and slung it on her back. She put the Nagra over her shoulder and set off downhill.

  The shrill pulsing of cicadas was now the dominant sound. It grew louder and louder as she stumbled down the path.

  Eventually she saw a second gate. It was open and there was a dwelling beyond it. She saw a movement on the other side of the gate and stopped. She was about to call out when a gunshot split the air. For a moment the cicadas and birds went quiet and the explosion of sound hung there in eerie silence before the insects regained their voices.

  Anna called out, ‘Hello! Is that you, Petar?’

  There was no reply, so she called again. ‘I’m coming down. Don’t shoot.’

  She began walking towards the dwelling. A man staggered from the bush. There was a rifle in his hands. The way he was moving she thought he was drunk or drugged, or both.

  ‘Petar?’ she called again.

  ‘Stop! Go back,’ the man yelled. ‘Get off my land!’

  ‘Petar? It’s you, isn’t it? I’ve met you before.’

  ‘I already spoke to the police. Turn around and go away.’ The man raised the rifle carelessly and pointed it in her direction.

  ‘I’m not the police, Petar. I won’t go, not until I talk to you.’

  He jerked the rifle up and fired over her head. Again the bush sounds stopped before gradually returning.

  ‘Petar,’ Anna pleaded as she came nearer. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘Remember you? Who are you?’ He peered at her, squinting into the sun. ‘No! Don’t come any closer.’

  Anna kept walking towards him, her hands away from her body, open and unthreatening.

  ‘You’ve changed, Petar, but I still remember you. We’ve met before. I was with Marin.’

  He became agitated. ‘Liar!’ he cried. ‘That’s a lie. A lie! Who sent you?’

  She was close to him now, perhaps ten feet away. He was walking in circles, or rather stumbling, the rifle pinned to his chest.

  ‘It was a long time ago, Petar. Nearly two years. My name is Anna. Do you remember? I was having dinner with Marin at that Lebanese place he liked to go to and you came to see him.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said, shrugging and shaking his head. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You were pretty out of it.’

  Petar now stopped his incessant movement and, to Anna’s surprise, he sat down in the dirt with the rifle across his lap.

  ‘That is possible, it’s possible.’ He let out an odd laugh. ‘Fuck that for a joke. Why are you here? Who sent you? Are you another fucking spy? First the police, then the spies. All buzzing round like blowies on shit. Who the fuck are you, anyway?’

  Anna sat down cross-legged in front of him before answering, putting the Nagra and her shoulder bag to one side. This close to him, she could smell the alcohol leaching from his pores. She fixed her gaze on his face, trying to get his eyes to stop darting about, to settle him.

  ‘I’m trying to find Marin. He’s my friend. I’m not a spy. I hate spies.’ ‘Everyone’s trying to find Marin,’ Petar said, his voice shifting from calm to fretful. ‘The spies are trying to find him. I told them nothing. Nothing. Not a word from me.’

  ‘I’m not a spy, Petar,’ said Anna soothingly. ‘You could ask Marin about me.’

  Petar pointed at the Nagra, its dials and meters visible. ‘What’s that, then? If you’re not a spy.’

  ‘I’m a journalist. That’s my tape recorder. I couldn’t leave it in the car. I had to park way up the hill.’

  ‘You try and turn that on, I’ll put a bullet right through it.’

  ‘I’d never turn it on without asking you.’

  Petar’s head dropped, and for a moment she thought he had passed out. Then she heard that he was sobbing, quietly at first, but after a while his shoulders began to heave.

  ‘I don’t remember you. No,’ he cried out, raising his head to reveal tears streaking his dusty face. ‘I don’t remember anything much. I’m totally fucked up. Memory’s gone to shit.’

  Anna said nothing, waiting for him to say more.

  But then his mood shifted again. ‘You shouldn’t be here! No, you should not … I shouldn’t even be here. I’m not meant to be here. I should be with them.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where should you be, Petar?’

  He waved his hand in a chopping motion, so violently that it nearly knocked him sideways.

  ‘Don’t worry about that! Forget it. It’s none of your business.’

  ‘You mean you should be with Marin? Where he is?’

  Petar stared for a moment and then jabbed a finger at her. ‘What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘Your other name …’

  ‘Rosen.’

  ‘Rosen? Rosen, is it? That’s a Jew’s name, isn’t it? Don’t think about it—just tell me.’

  ‘Yes. I was born a Jew.’

  ‘My father says I have to watch out for Jews.’

  ‘Why’s that, Petar?’

  ‘The Jews want to hunt us down, because of the war.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean! Don’t act dumb. We were on the German side. Now the Jews want to hunt us all down. Don’t trust fucking Jews.’

  ‘You weren’t even born then, Petar.’

  ‘Doesn’t fucking matter. You hate us because of what we believe in.’

  ‘Marin didn’t think that. I was his girlfriend, Petar. I know he cared for you as best he could. He wanted to help you get well, your big brother. Didn’t he?’

  Petar’s head dropped again, staring at the rifle, his shoulders still heaving. Without warning he snatched at the barrel and pulled it under his chin, fingers on the trigger.

  ‘Don’t do that, Petar.’

  ‘I’m not strong like him. I’m the weak one.’ He was weeping now with self-pity. ‘The bad seed, that’s what my father says. That’s what he thinks of me.’

  ‘Please put the gun down.’

  ‘Marin thought it too. I know he did. He never said it in words, but I could always see it in his eyes. He’s not good at hiding what he thinks. He couldn’t do it. He felt sorry for me—’ Petar broke off and threw the rifle aside, sobbing like a child. ‘I never wanted his pity. It just leaves you shrivelled up and small.’

  ‘Marin didn’t think that at all. He loves you.’

  ‘Love that comes from pity. He thought I was defective. Something not right. Something broken that he couldn’t fix. So he stopped me doing things. But then I showed him what I could do. I showed them all!’

  Anna desperately wanted to ask what he had done, but she sensed it would trigger his paranoia again. She would come back to it.

  ‘Petar, the reason I’ve come her
e to see you is because I’m worried about Marin. I’m afraid he’s in trouble. I’ve … been dreaming about him.’

  Petar’s expression changed, as if a sudden wind had washed the pain away. He wiped at his face.

  ‘He’s in your dreams?’ he asked. ‘What happens?’

  ‘They’re strange, like visions. I wake up with this fear that Marin might have been killed.’

  ‘I have dreams, too.’

  ‘About Marin?’

  ‘I have dreams and fucking nightmares.’ Petar jumped to his feet. Towering over Anna, he hit the side of his head with the heel of his hand. ‘I want them out of my head. Out! I want to be left alone. It’s fucking my head. My head!’

  Petar’s legs seemed to buckle under him. He stumbled to his knees and, before Anna could reach out to him, he toppled over. He lay there in the harsh sun, unconscious.

  Anna slapped his face until his eyes rolled open. He mumbled in a delirium. Then she managed to pull him up and manoeuvre herself under one of his arms. In this fashion she helped him down the hill and into the largest of the two dwellings.

  From a concealed position high above Khandalah, two men watched Anna struggling to support the weight of the semiconscious man as she made her way across a clearing of long grass. The men had one pair of powerful binoculars which they shared from time to time. From their position they could see the two buildings—both of them old, rundown wooden farmhouses with rusty tin roofs and brick chimney stacks. There were several ancient couches on the covered veranda of the main dwelling; they lost sight of Anna and her burden when she hauled the man on to its veranda and into the house.

  To the right of the farmhouses the land dipped steeply to the river, while to the left was a wide section of pasture that was wild. No other dwelling was visible in any direction. Khandalah was isolated from the rest of the world. The men knew that isolation was the reason Ivo Katich had purchased it in the first place.

  It had taken them a long time to find it. The woman was a problem they had not anticipated. Previously they had watched the drunken spy come and go. They had monitored his movements and were aware that he had left town first thing this morning. They could not afford a run-in with the Australian security services, so they had waited. Their brief was to be as inconspicuous as possible. No one must know they were here, or their purpose. The arrival of the woman was an inconvenience, but they would have to wait her out as well.

  If Anna could have seen the men watching her, she would have recognised the taller of the two as the tattooed junkie who had purchased heroin at the Snake Pit.

  The other man was older, thinner and appeared to be in charge. He swivelled the binoculars from the veranda back to the area near the gates where she had confronted Petar Katich. The rifle was still there on the ground and nearby were the two items she had been carrying. The man had been wondering if it would be worth the risk of snatching the weapon; but then Anna came out on her own, picked up her bags and the rifle, and went back into the house.

  *

  Anna came back inside with the Nagra, her bag and the rifle. She carried the gun as if it were about to go off. She sat down with it, trying to figure out how to remove the magazine; then she worked the bolt and ejected the round in the breech. She opened a kitchen drawer at random and dropped the cartridge and the magazine inside. Having made it safe, she propped the rifle against the wall.

  When she put her head through the open bedroom doorway, she saw that Petar was sprawled unconscious across the bed. She looked around the sparsely furnished farmhouse. The place was dirty and dishevelled, but not the filthy junkie’s lair she had imagined. In the living room was a couch and a couple of old sagging armchairs with blankets covering the worn upholstery. The fireplace was full of ash and charred logs, but there was dry timber beside it. A standard lamp was lying on the wooden floor, as if it had simply given up the ghost and toppled over. Scattered across the floor was a collection of empty stone jars; another jar, half-full of a clear viscous liquid, sat on the battered coffee table with a glass alongside it.

  Anna picked up the jar and sniffed its contents—industrial-strength alcohol, some kind of homemade brandy, she guessed. She took a sip and it burned all the way to the pit of her stomach.

  She decided to make a cup of tea and rummaged through the kitchen until she found what she needed. She spooned tea leaves into a pot, lit the gas stove and put the kettle on. She cleared away dirty cups and plates from the kitchen table and piles of old newspapers. Among the detritus she found an exercise book mostly filled with a tight scrawl written in pencil. She flicked through it, page after rambling page, and then she read the latest entry:

  The same nightmare over and over. I’m in the pit. Slowly slowly I claw my way out. A dead man come to life and crawling over piles of stinking bodies. I wake up in breathless panic. The stench of corpses on my skin. It’s your fault, Jurjevic, you fucking Serb lover. How did you get my address? Of all the shit you sent me I can never get those fucking pictures out of my head. The old photos, you can’t unsee them, you just can’t.

  They’re propaganda, right? The old man’s always told us that. The communists dressed up men in Ustasha uniforms and had them take off another man’s head with a saw, or slit throat after throat until their faces and bare chests were so covered in blood they were drunk with it, laughing and proud. Or they made them hack heads off with an axe, or beat out men’s brains with hammers, or stand in pits full of bodies to get their souvenir photos with the fuckers they just killed.

  It could only be propaganda, right? My father wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a blood-sick monster, was he? Not him. Not such a good old fellow. He’s crazy, but not that kind of crazy. Even so, it still takes all my strength to pull myself out of the pit he put me in.

  Now Branko, he could have done all those things. I can see him with a curved knife strapped to his wrist cutting throat after throat, and throwing the bodies aside like a shearer tossing sheep. Then I think of the two of them, young men, mates together in the uniform, Ivo’s arm over Branko’s shoulder, Branko’s over Ivo’s, and then I remember the bodies lying on George Street. I think of those people a lot, bleeding and twitching on the pavement.

  That’s how the day starts. Every day. Then the mind starts to rev up and I can’t stop it—it’s like an engine without a governor. It just revs up and up and up until I can’t stand it. The roaring in my head is unbearable. You can drink and drink, but the only thing that slows it down is the smack. Thank God for that, but it’s only temporary, and then I come back down into the pit and I think of the line from the old Croatian poem my father once recited to me—‘Weak children are born in joy but these offspring perish quickly.’

  The whistle on the kettle screamed and Anna jerked back to the present. She jumped up and grabbed it off the flame.

  The bodies lying on George Street … bleeding and twitching on the pavement.

  Was that a confession, or an accusation? Whichever it was, Petar’s journal was evidence. She had no choice but to hand this over to Sharp. The police would have to question Petar again.

  She poured boiling water into the pot absentmindedly and the smell of brewing tea was good. It stilled her mind. But she had a strong sense of the sickness that clung to this house. Its presence emanated from the man in the bedroom: the sickness of guilt.

  What else was in the journal? Of the many revelations contained in the one entry she had read, one of the strangest was the reference to Jurjevic. This could only be Marjan Jurjevic, her contact in Melbourne, the dissident Croat and enemy of the extremists in his own community. Jurjevic had been targeted for assassination by the Ustasha and yet here he was in contact with the leader’s son.

  She knew exactly the old photos Petar was referring to. Jurjevic had given her the same material. Black-and-white photos of unimaginable brutality, proudly taken during the worst excesses of the 1940s by the Ustasha perpetrators. It was a time when the written policy of Pavelic’s government in Zagreb, with th
e direct assistance of a cohort of Catholic priests, was for them to convert one-third of Orthodox Christian Serbs—Jews were never given that option—expel another third, and then kill the final third.

  Officers of Hitler’s SS, who had been sent as military advisors to their new Croatian ally, wrote detailed accounts of the horrors they witnessed. Even the SS could not stomach the Ustasha’s savagery. For Anna, those accounts—field reports from German military officers—were convincing evidence.

  Anna poured herself a cup of strong tea and stirred sugar into it. She needed to settle her own mind. She knew that Jurjevic would have sent Petar those German SS accounts, along with the documentation put together by the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. These provided the necessary background information about those gruesome photos. But did Petar have copies of the documents that she had been able to source—the ones that detailed Ivo Katich’s own direct involvement in these killings, when he was the commander of the Mobile Court Martial in Bosnia?

  She opened the journal again and was about to start reading when noises from the bedroom interrupted her. Petar was awake. His door slammed shut and she heard him rumbling through drawers. Then silence.

  She stood nervously outside the door. The man was disturbed and out of control. Who knew what he was capable of? She considered fetching the rifle and reloading it, but she knew she would never be able to shoot him if it came to that, and he might be strong enough to take it back and use it against her.

  In the end, she knocked softly on the door.

  ‘Petar, are you all right?’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he called. The tone was plaintive and followed by a deep sob.

  ‘I’m coming in.’

  ‘No, stay out.’

  She cracked the door open and caught a glimpse of his slumped figure in an old rocking chair by the bed, then a small flame. She opened it fully and saw him shaking like a leaf, cooking up a hit of heroin on a spoon. He glanced up at her, a tormented face.