The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  Through the Steyr’s scope he saw Lovric running towards the woods. Then a blast came from the darkness. Shotgun pellets sprayed across Lovric’s left shoulder, spinning him around. His left arm went limp; it hung by his side and he dropped the sack of food. Lovric was motionless, illuminated by a porch light at the back of the house, his left side a bloody mess. When he began to move a voice from the farmhouse called out to him to stop.

  Marin watched Lovric turn towards a small figure, framed in the doorway by a kitchen light. The Browning was in his good right arm and he threw it up. The figure stepped into the light and the image resolved into a boy, perhaps thirteen years old, with pimples on his face, a mop of black hair, wide eyes full of terror. He had a hunting rifle at his shoulder trained on the thief in his yard. Lovric hesitated and Marin knew he would not shoot the boy.

  Fathers can be such cunts.

  When Lovric lowered the pistol the boy shot him in the forehead.

  Lovric crumpled to the ground. A farmer with a shotgun jumped a fence, ran into the yard and shouted something at the boy. Then he put a round into Lovric’s chest for good measure. Marin had the man in his sights. He held the target for a moment, but then he lowered the rifle, picked up the packs and withdrew into the deep darkness of the forest.

  Working by torchlight under his poncho, Marin emptied Lovric’s pack, taking from it the food, a few useful items and a wallet he found tucked away in a pocket. He buried the rest, including Lovric’s rifle. The militia would come to collect his body and they would search the area forensically. Best they found nothing.

  He took another compass bearing, got to his feet and headed south as fast as he could. There was no time to lose. No time to grieve.

  He moved at double time for two hours, stopping only to check the compass. South, always south—go far enough and you’ll hit the Adriatic.

  Before dawn he found another hiding place in the narrow, concealed entrance to a small cave. The faint stench of some long-dead animal clung to its walls. Lying there on his back, he allowed himself to think of Lovric and for the first time he felt the despair, which he had held at bay for so long, come gnawing at his entrails.

  There was security, but no comfort, in the darkness. He pulled out a torch; after all, he had two of them now. He could afford a little light. He dug around in the pack and found his father’s brandy, and the wallet he’d retrieved from Lovric’s pack. He flipped it open and, behind the plastic window, he saw the little boy, the son Lovric had left behind. The boy had a cheeky grin, which was to be expected, but he was destined to grow up with an unfulfilled longing. The loss of a father, a piece of his soul missing forever. Marin didn’t even know the boy’s name. He drank all the remaining brandy and fell asleep, overwhelmed, at last, by exhaustion.

  Marin slept undisturbed for ten hours and woke with the inkling of a plan that centred on a single idea. Hungry and dehydrated, he drank half the water in his canteen, then ate two apples, a pear and a large chunk of the remaining salami. He pissed into a pannikin and put it where he wouldn’t knock it over. Then he emptied his pack and peered at the contents in the dim light.

  He set aside his military gear. He stripped down to his underwear and boots, and pushed the pile into the darkest corner. He wiped the Steyr clean of fingerprints and laid it on top of the pile. He felt no reluctance leaving it behind—the weapon had killed enough people and he had no intention of staging a final shootout if the army tracked him down. He did the same with the Browning, his spare ammunition and every piece of equipment that might carry prints.

  Moving awkwardly in the small space, he dressed himself in the jeans and T-shirt he’d stowed at the bottom of the pack and pulled on the jumper he’d brought for the cool mountain nights. He took the photograph of Lovric’s son and slipped it into his passport. Then he wiped the wallet clean and threw it on to the pile.

  He refilled the pack with the remaining food, the canteen, torches and spare batteries, a filthy sleeping bag, tin plate, utensils and the few books he’d brought with him. The pack looked like something a young Western tourist might have picked up in an army disposal store, but he decided he would ditch it at the first opportunity. In the pocket of his jeans was a roll of US dollars, to which he added the stash of Yugoslavian dinar he’d found in Lovric’s pack.

  That night Marin climbed high into the glacial valley between the peaks of the Cvrsnica and Vran mountains. Then, crossing the saddle, he began a slow descent, making it to the foothills before dawn. Here he crawled into a cave to see out the day.

  When night fell he set out for Posusje, a large town straddling the main road to Mostar, which was a further fifty-odd kilometres to the south-east. His plan depended on reaching Mostar, but he had no idea how he could make such a long journey.

  As he came closer, by his reckoning, to Posusje, the forested country gave way to cultivated farmlands. He entered a wide field of waist-high crops laid out in long neat lines. He stopped to pinch off some leaves, crushing them in his hands.

  The sweet fragrance of a fresh pack of Drum.

  He looked around at this vast crop, recalling what Lovric had told him about the tobacco routes through the mountains. For years the smugglers had made a killing. The rich tobacco of Herzegovina became so popular that Joseph Stalin used to crumble cigarettes from the region into his pipe. Lovric told the story with a punchline. ‘A smooth, clean taste …’ he had mugged, holding an imaginary pipe. ‘Number one choice of dictators everywhere.’

  On the edge of the tobacco fields Marin found a series of large wooden buildings. He scouted around for dogs. There were none, because no one lived here. Two of the buildings were tobacco barns with unlocked doors, racked from top to bottom with drying leaves. He concluded that none were ready to be smoked. He knew it was a foolish risk, but what better place to top up his tobacco pouch?

  The third building was much larger; it appeared to be a storehouse. It was locked, of course, but he was determined now. He took off his pack and used a drainpipe to climb up to the wooden slats of an air vent, where he was able to wriggle his way through. Once inside, he flicked on his torch. The walls were stacked high with neatly compressed, yellowed bundles of dried tobacco. In the open space in the middle was a truck.

  Marin went around to the back of the vehicle. It was packed with identical bundles of tobacco. He immediately understood the implications. It wasn’t here to unload: it was packed and ready to go.

  A way out! A way out, by God! But where was the truck going? Maybe there were papers in the front? He shone the torch, revealing a sign, neatly painted in yellow letters edged with black on the green enamel, beneath the window. Fabrika duhana Mostar d.d. Mostar.

  Mostar Tobacco Factory. Mostar! Marin could barely believe his luck. Lovric must have been sitting on his shoulder as an angel. After considering his options, he scanned the walls and found a door, which he unlatched and propped open while he retrieved his pack.

  It took him an hour by torchlight to unpack the truck and create a large enough space for him to crawl into backwards, leaving two bundles of dried tobacco to be pulled back in to reseal the hiding place. He had no idea what time the driver would come to make the return journey, so he pissed in a far corner. He drank a little water and climbed on to the back shelf of the truck.

  He left just enough of a gap to allow a flow of air, but the sickly sweet smell of the tobacco was intense. He fell asleep wondering if he’d ever again enjoy rolling a cigarette.

  He woke to the sound of a door slamming, followed by the whirr of the ignition until it caught with a roar. There followed a series of rapid growls as the driver pumped the accelerator and then let it idle. Marin heard the diesel’s steady ticking before the truck was finally crunched into gear and driven out of the building.

  The journey was uneventful. There were no roadblocks as far as he could discern. He was bumped around and tossed from side to side but, for the first part, he felt the elation of an escapee who has left mortal danger behind.


  Then he began worrying about how to get out of the truck unnoticed at the other end. It would all fall apart if he were discovered. A simple phone call to the police and he would be a fugitive, trapped in a city with every eye on the lookout.

  Eventually the truck slowed and jerked along in low gears, in what Marin assumed to be city traffic. After some time, the brakes squealed and the truck wheeled left, bumping into a driveway, then it turned right sharply and stopped. He heard the handbrake engage, the door open and slam shut, footsteps retreating … and then nothing.

  Marin pushed the loose bundles of tobacco aside and listened for the sound of men. The truck appeared to be in a warehouse loading dock. It was quiet, apart from passing traffic. He paused, straining to hear anything that he may have missed. He froze there for a moment, his limbs unwilling to move. Still he heard nothing.

  He shuffled forward on his elbows and climbed carefully out of the hiding place, dragging his pack behind him. He lowered himself to the ground, paused again to look around once more, straining to hear any human activity. There was nothing. The driver had left the truck unattended.

  He crept out of the covered dock into the sunshine. Beside the old factory building there was a line of fir trees in an unkempt garden, and he walked through it unchallenged and out the front gate into a busy street. At the first intersection he looked up at the street sign—Marsala Tita.

  ‘You’re fucking kidding,’ he said, and laughed out loud. The absurdly simple final leg of his escape had spilled him out on to Marshal Tito Boulevard, or Avenue or Drive or whatever. Of course they’d name every main road after the murderous old tyrant. If Lovric was still on his shoulder, this was surely his last joke. He started laughing again.

  A man on the street stared at him as if he was crazy. Maybe he was. Marin saw a middle-aged woman looking askance and he stopped. When he showed her his palm, as if to say ‘no worries’, he noticed a tremor in it. He dropped his shaking hand, made a fist of it and walked on, anxious not to draw a crowd. Further down the road he asked a passer-by in English where he could find Stari Most.

  ‘You want bridge?’

  Yes, the bridge. Of course, the bridge. The famous fucking bridge. He smiled the harmless smile of a foreign backpacker and nodded. How was the man to know he had recently transformed from terrorist to tourist?

  Straight ahead, the fellow indicated: straight down this road, maybe two kilometres. You can’t miss it.

  So he continued on Marsala Tita. It was a long, wide street with old buildings on either side, three or four storeys high. There was a stream of one-way traffic heading in his direction. Ahead of him a green mountain dipped steeply into a gorge through which, he knew from the map, the Neretva River ran. Taking his bearings, he figured the river was to his left.

  It was still early, but a hot summer’s day was brewing. Marin took off his jumper and shoved it in the top of his pack. He stopped at an optometrist to buy a pair of sunglasses, replica Ray-Bans, and there he saw himself for the first time in a mirror. He’d washed in a riverbed a day ago, but the dirt seemed to be ingrained. With his ragged beard and red eyes, he looked like a hippy coming down from a mushroom trip. Further along he found a pharmacy and bought himself shaving gear, a tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush and a bottle of aspirin.

  As he got closer to the old town, he started to see other foreigners. He heard a couple talking with American accents and approached them to ask if they knew a good place for breakfast. The young man was a TV version of a Yank, with a flat-top crew-cut, a freshly pressed shirt and chinos. He regarded Marin with alarm, as if Charles Manson had just tapped him on the shoulder. But his girlfriend was more than happy to give Marin directions to a ‘really cool place’ above the river. When she smiled at him, her boyfriend gave her a hard look. Best to wash and shave as soon as possible. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention.

  But first he needed to eat. The smell of meat cooking somewhere on a grill was an irresistible lure. He had never been this hungry. He followed the girl’s directions into a side street and down a set of stairs that led to a terrace café. And there he stopped.

  As hungry as he was, Marin was nonetheless transfixed by the scene in front of him. He’d seen pictures, of course, but no two-dimensional photograph could possibly convey the sense he had of having walked into the medieval past, into a still thriving corner of the Ottoman Empire. The fine, high arch of Stari Most, the Old Bridge, rose nearly thirty metres above the blue-green river, flanked by stone towers and minarets. The bridge, the towers and the surrounding buildings seemed to flow up organically from their footings in the raw, rocky banks of the river, all rendered from the same pale limestone. Behind his sunglasses, tears welled up as Marin was assailed by a wave of unexpected emotion.

  He allowed an imperturbable Bosnian waiter to lead him to a table by a low stone wall overlooking the gorge. He ordered Turkish coffee and burek which came quickly. The waiter poured the sweet, silted black drink from a beaten-copper pot. His father, despite his hatred of the Turks, still made coffee like this. And with his first taste of the burek, Marin’s eyes moistened again as he remembered his mother in the kitchen, pressing spiced meats into a soft pastry, and the fragrance of them cooking in the oven. All around him in the bright sunshine young tourists chattered like songbirds. He had the strange feeling that he had stepped on to a stage set. He closed his eyes to blink away the tears and saw again, in the darkness, Lovric crumpling to the ground.

  When Marin had finally devoured a long meal of many courses, the waiter, encouraged by a large tip, led him to a bathroom with a basin and a mirror. The steaming hot water seemed an incredible luxury and he stripped to the waist. He shaved off the ragged beard and washed away the accumulated sweat and grime, until the creature in the mirror more closely resembled the young Western wastrels en route to Istanbul, Tehran and Kabul on the hippy trail. It was a good enough impersonation. He cleaned up his mess and left the place.

  Nearby he found a phone box with an intact local directory. He located the name he was looking for and an address on Ulica Gojka Vukovica. It was a short walk to the house and, by chance, there was a small café across the road from it. He took an outside table, pulled from his pack a battered copy of Sevastopol Sketches and settled down to wait.

  Before midday the traffic dwindled to a few passing cars and then, echoing down the near empty street, came the call to prayer from a nearby mosque. The muezzin’s song, though redolent of the supplanted Ottoman faith, was not jarring to him. It seemed natural enough in this anachronistic place, yet he still felt offended by the idea that God was peering down at his puny undertakings from high above the minaret.

  Then the front door of the house opened and an old man, wearing a good suit and a crimson fez, stepped into the street, dutifully answering the call to prayer. The man passed close by: he was a handsome, well-made fellow with white hair and pale blue eyes.

  Marin waited a short while before crossing the road and knocking on the door. It was opened by a middle-aged woman who looked at him with a puzzled expression until he said: ‘Hello, Mother. It’s Marin.’

  16.

  Three days before Christmas, on a warm, clear morning, George Negus walked to Parliament House. His route took him alongside the artificial body of water he derided as Canberra’s Lake Geneva knock-off. Even its giant waterspout had been carefully calibrated to peak nearly thirty feet higher than the famous one in the Swiss city.

  Negus felt irrationally pleased that antipodean engineers could throw water further into the air than their European counterparts, but his nationalist sentiments were still offended by the foreign trees that lined the lakeside pathways—the elm and oak, the claret ash and ornamental pear. Eucalypt forests still ringed the city, but here in the centre the natives had been lopped down to pretty up the place with interlopers. Why had the exotics been given pride of place?

  Walking now in their pleasant shade, he found himself even more disturbed by the bucolic qui
escence that had settled on the capital less than three weeks after ‘the great event’. This was so at odds with his own surging emotions. As a Queenslander, he’d grown up with outlandish weather events, and now the Labor Party had made landfall on a somnolent nation with the very intensity of one of those tropical storms whipped up in the warm waters of the Pacific.

  How could a single fucking leaf be left on these trees after the cyclone of Whitlam’s victory? Everything should still be in the air—roofs torn off, multitudes of red tiles flying about like shrapnel, and people exposed to the open skies, clinging on for dear life to whatever was nailed down as their Holden cars were lifted into the roaring winds. The old certainties were gone, swirling about in the tempest.

  The conservatives had been vanquished. Nothing would ever be the same, would it? And yet … And yet the lake was placid, the trees rustled, commuters commuted, public servants prevaricated, carols played in shopping centres and girls in miniskirts, as always, turned his mind to earthly things.

  But in Lionel Murphy’s office the storm still raged. His boss, the new attorney-general, was full of the animal spirits of revolution. Murphy was out to change the country, and nothing would alter his course. His momentum was unstoppable.

  To Negus’s surprise, Murphy had even managed to work his charms on the incumbent departmental secretary, the venerable Clarrie Harders. Everyone had expected Lionel to sack the old public servant who for many years had advised his hated predecessor, Senator Ivor Greenwood—aka Ivor the Terrible.

  ‘How can you keep Harders on, Lionel?’ Negus queried Murphy soon after the election. ‘It’s not just that he’s a Greenwood man—he’s a bloody anachronism.’

  Murphy smiled indulgently at his upstart press secretary. ‘He’s a good fellow, George, you’ll see.’

  ‘They reckon he’s in line for a knighthood. Aren’t we supposed to be getting rid of them?’