The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  The Land Cruiser braked, soil flying up from the wheels. A girl climbed out of the front passenger seat and a man from the back. The villagers did not surge forward or seek introductions, and the priest caught their mood.

  The girl had a good voice. ‘I’m sorry you’ve all had to wait so many hours for expert help to reach you. I’m grateful for your patience. I’m Kristina, from the Department of Pathology and Forensic Science at the university hospital in Zagreb. Under government statutes it is required that all graves from the Homeland War, those with the possibility of genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime, must be investigated with rigour and care. I was delayed because I went to the airport and was fortunate enough to meet one of the principal experts in his field today. He was due here in two days’ time, after giving a lecture in the hospital in Zagreb tomorrow to government and media, but this situation is more important and the lecture has been postponed. He has come directly from the airport following his flight from the west coast of America. He is Professor William Anders.’

  Petar saw a big man, solid, muscular, without surplus weight. He had a strong chin with two days’ growth on it. Petar had never been on an aircraft. The furthest he had travelled from the village was to the refugee camp for displaced persons near Zagreb. There were big bulges under the man’s eyes and the lower rims of his dark glasses rested on them. He wore lace-up walking boots, a creased pair of jeans, a shirt and a cotton jacket. He looked as though he had slept rough. On his head, shading his face from the sun, now low, was a wide-brimmed leather hat. As he was introduced to them he was lighting a cigar.

  Smoke eddied towards them. The man spoke, the girl translated when he paused: ‘I understand. I know how you feel. There are bodies, perhaps of loved ones, and they have not been laid to rest with due dignity. Now they have been discovered and everybody says, “Hey, hold on, wait. An important man is honouring you with his skills and his presence. Be patient.” I’m going to tell you some facts, and then I want to make a promise to you.’

  Petar thought his voice similar to many he had heard on programmes broadcast on Croatian TV. He noted control, authority and sincerity.

  ‘The facts. A judge said of the big crime down the road at Vukovar, “Silence condones. Once awareness exists it is unthinkable to remain silent.” He went on, “The families demand truth and justice.” A colleague of mine who worked here and across the border at Srebrenica liked to say, “Bones are often our last and best witnesses. They never lie and they never forget.” Maybe there was a crime and maybe there wasn’t. If there was a crime, it will be me who says so.’

  The man and his translator threw long shadows.

  ‘I said I would make you a promise. I am now about to do that. I promise I will investigate this grave – I’m told it’s likely to hold the bodies of four local men – to the best of my ability. If there has been a crime I will discover it and search for evidence that will convict those responsible. My work is to find the guilty. Men swaggered when they had victory behind them and a loaded rifle in their hands. They murdered and believed themselves safe from justice. I tell you, those men cringe when confronted with the weight of evidence I produce. They piss their pants. You have my promise.’

  He flicked ash from the cigar’s tip, let it fall to the ground. He had them all, Petar understood, in the palm of his hand.

  ‘I don’t know this village, but I know the town. I was there thirteen years ago. I came to Vukovar to help in the excavation of the war-crime site at Ovcara. I forget nothing. My promise then was to search for the evidence of murder. I continue to honour the promise. Better than I, you know the figures. There is a difference between the numbers taken forcibly from the hospital, when Vukovar fell, and transported to the farm at Ovcara and the numbers of bodies recovered from the mass grave. Somewhere, on that farm land, there is another grave that holds the bodies of sixty men. Because of my promise I come back each year and help to hunt for that grave. I gave my promise, the same promise I make to you.’

  The shadow of the man’s hat covered Petar’s boots, had climbed towards his knees. Perhaps that was why Petar was chosen. The eyes fastened on him.

  The translator asked, ‘What happened here?’

  ‘I drove the tractor with the plough. For nineteen years this ground has been mined. We have been told it is cleared. We looked for the bodies.’

  ‘You knew bodies were here?’

  ‘We knew that here, where it was mined, was where our men had been. They waited on the path.’

  ‘On the Cornfield Road that linked Vukovar to Vinkovci?’

  ‘They were on it.’

  ‘Who was there?’

  ‘Our schoolteacher. He had gone out three weeks before to buy weapons. We received nothing from Zagreb. We were betrayed by Zagreb.’

  The priest tutted but received an acid glance from the American, muttered, hung his head and was quiet.

  ‘Continue, please.’

  ‘Everything we owned in the village was collected and given to Zoran, the teacher. He asked for our trust. What we collected was taken to a meeting and given to a supplier of weapons. A deal was made. That night, Zoran went with three others to receive the missiles and launchers that our valuables had bought. Everything was given as payment. We waited for their return. They would have been heavily burdened by the weight of the weapons. They didn’t come. There was mortaring in this area but that was near dawn and they should already have been long back. With those weapons we could have kept the Cornfield Road open. Their tanks cut it. We lost the road through the corn, we lost the village and Bogdanovci, and a week later we had lost Vukovar. The teacher had sworn to us that the man he had met and paid was honourable. We know now that the lorry with the weapons never reached the far end of the Cornfield Road. Some say it never loaded or left the docks at the harbour where they were supposed to be landed.’

  As he spoke, Petar saw that Mladen, who led the community, bit his lower lip, and the Widow, in black blouse, black skirt and black stockings, with brilliant white hair, stood erect and gazed high over the American’s head.

  ‘How many were with the teacher?’

  Petar said, ‘He had taken with him my friend Tomislav’s boy, my friend Andrija’s cousin … and my only son.’

  ‘If there was guilt we’ll find it, and I’ll work to name those who should face justice.’

  From the back of the Land Cruiser, the professor and the young woman took long rolls of tape and circled the raised arm. The professor told the people of the village that he would sleep in the back of the vehicle and that the dead would not be alone. Petar walked back to his tractor, started the engine and led the way back to the village.

  Before they had gone far they heard the chugging beat of a small generator and lights lit the place. They had a man’s promise. He could picture his son, Tomislav’s, Andrija’s cousin and the teacher. It was owed them that the guilt should be uncovered and punishment meted out.

  3

  He thought it would be quick and without pain. He thought it would end the misery. It was two years since Andrija had last tried to end his life. He had waited until his wife had gone down the village street to the shop, then had hobbled to the far end of the garden, put a pistol into his mouth and pressed the barrel to the roof. He had squeezed the trigger, depressed it, and … nothing had happened. He was not dead and he had wet himself.

  His pistol had jammed. The malfunction in the mechanism would have resulted from inadequate maintenance, cleaning and care. He had allowed corrosion of the metal parts to spread internally.

  Now Andrija was ready again.

  He lived on the northern edge of the village, one of the last houses on the tarmac road towards Bogdanovci. He was now at the bottom of his garden, shielded from the house by a row of bean plants that had reached the top of the hazel poles. He could see the tip of the spire of the rebuilt church at Bogdanovci, and he could remember: they had gone from here. On a November night, in light rain and total darkness
, the schoolteacher had led, Petar’s boy and Tomislav’s had followed, and his cousin had been at the back. They had taken with them the pram chassis, two wheelbarrows and the handcart from the farm. The guilt ate at him. It had grown more acute with each hour since the lone arm had been turned up by the plough, and had been agonising as the grave workers had excavated the sodden, shapeless corpses. He wanted it ended. This time, Andrija believed his wife was in a front room and wouldn’t have seen him go out of the open kitchen door at the back. She would know nothing until the explosion.

  He laid his crutch on the grass, wet from the night’s dew. Soon, as the sun rose, the moisture would be taken from it. There was shade thrown by the beans, and the grass was fresh and cool. He bent his one knee and subsided; the right leg was off just above the joint. He had steadfastly refused a prosthetic limb. Getting down on to the grass jolted his spine, hurting him, and he winced. He reached into his jacket pocket and took from it an RG-42 hand grenade, the fragmentation type. The ring rattled the canister as he moved it. Inside its casing were – Andrija knew weapons and how to handle them – 118 grammes of high explosive. A similar amount, packed into an anti-personnel device, had all but severed his right leg.

  In the breakout, the women and the wounded left in the cellar below the church, he had managed to get some two and a half kilometres clear of the village – a third of the distance to the safety of the forces round Nustar or Vinkovci – and then had triggered a POMZ-2 anti-personnel mine fastened to a stake, with a fine trip-wire in the long grass to activate it. He had already been in the corn for sixty hours and was dehydrated, famished, exhausted. He was alone, with no comrade to help him. He had made a tourniquet above the wound from the laces of the boot on his right foot, now useless, and had dragged himself a little more than five kilometres. It had taken two more days to reach the lines. He could remember the dawn breaking over the cornfields when the teacher, the boys and his cousin had not returned. He had lain in cover with his sniper’s rifle and waited for sounds of them approaching, ready to give covering fire …

  The grenade had a delay on the fuse of four seconds from the pulling of the pin. He would not be the first of his village: two men had used a grenade in the last year to end the torment. There had been three from the other villages, more from the town. Two years before he had thought it would be easier with his handgun. He held the grenade in his hand, a big hand, the grenade snug in it. Before the war he had delivered post in the three villages, a good job that offered status, security and a uniform. He had not worked since they had come back to the village.

  He heard his name called, three or four times, with rising impatience. His wife, Maria, had a strong voice, a short temper.

  Since they had come back to the house, thirteen years ago, and rebuilt it, they had not slept together as man and wife. He had not penetrated her; she had not opened herself to him. She had never told him how many had raped her. A section? A platoon? Regular troops from the JNA? Cetniks of Arkan, the terrorist? In 1991, when the village had been held and then fallen, Andrija had been twenty-three, a star athlete and handsome, so women had said. Maria had been twenty-five, a beauty and raven-haired. Now he was crippled, disabled and destroyed, and she was haggard, her hair grey, without lustre, and cropped short. They were removed from each other, ate their meals in silence and slept so that they did not touch. Many in the village were scarred by the siege and the defeat.

  He rolled on to his stomach. The grenade gouged into his belly and the index finger of his left hand was inside the ring. He could pull it. He could end it.

  He considered what his life consisted of. There was no joy and everything was a burden. He ate with her, cleared the plates, then sat on the porch and watched cars and lorries go past. People who walked by would call to him but he would seldom answer, only sucking at a cigarette. In the middle of each morning he would head down the road to the café, swinging on the crutch. There, he would be with Tomislav and Mladen and they would fight again the battles on the different pinch points of the perimeter. They could take two hours to re-create the moments when the last RPG-7 round had been fired against a slow-moving tank, and two more hours to chew on the killing, with the Dragunov sniper rifle, of a major whose death had stalled an infantry advance. They took a minimum of two hours to talk over the bayonet battle at close quarters on the far side of the village when twelve had stopped forty in their tracks. They were never defeated, never found wanting in tactics or strategy as they sat in the café, toyed with the coffee and smoked. Always they were betrayed – by the government, which had not allocated resources and fresh men, and had not broken the siege of the town and the villages – but they had also suffered the treachery of the weapons paid for but not delivered. Betrayal. Treachery. Every day in the café they blamed defeat on the two evils.

  Her voice was sharper, demanding to know where in the garden he was.

  She had collected everything of value in the village in a plastic shopping bag, and during the day, through the night, the quiet times and when the bombardment was fiercest, the people of their community had come to the kitchen of Andrija and Maria’s home and had brought with them everything of value they possessed – jewellery, ornaments, heirlooms, cash, insurance policies, house deeds. It had all gone into the bag and been transferred to the care of Zoran. Maria had stripped the villagers of all that was precious to them. It should have bought the weapons but had not.

  The anguish was worse because a grave had been found. The American had been at Andrija’s house the last evening and had asked translated questions concerning the clothing his cousin had worn that night, nineteen years before. He was asked what colour undershirt and underpants, what pattern on the socks and what sort of boots. He had had no answers. He had sat in his chair and said he did not know. He thought his ignorance shamed him.

  He had nothing to live for. Devils beset him. Only in death would he escape them.

  He was kicked.

  She stood over him.

  His wife used the toe of her flat shoe to push him from his stomach on to his back and the grenade was exposed. It was Maria, a principal voice among the women in the refugee camp, who had demanded that each woman never replace her rings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches and earrings until the betrayal and treachery were answered. He closed his eyes. She bent over him and he felt her breath on his face. She did not kiss him – had not kissed him on the day they were reunited in the refugee camp of wood huts in the mud on the south side of Zagreb, or on any day since – and did not run her hand over the stubble on his cheeks or tousle his hair, but she took his hand. She prised the grenade away from him and he thought his finger would dislocate as she freed the pin.

  So, it would go on. The misery and the anguish were on a conveyor-belt and he had no escape from them.

  Andrija did not know how betrayal and treachery could be answered, and did not know how freedom could be regained. She walked away from him, with the grenade. Had he been prepared to pull the pin? Many had. He pushed himself on to his side, took his weight on his knee, then levered himself up with his crutch. He thought he would go to the café and fight again a day of the war.

  He did not know how the evil done would be answered.

  There had been a moment, for Robbie Cairns, of indecision. It had been overcast, sultry, that morning, on the south side of the river. His T-shirt had stuck to his chest and back when Vern had picked him up in the car. New number plates. They had crossed Southwark Bridge and gone north – had been close to the location when rain had spattered the windscreen. Rain mattered.

  In rain, would Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson put on a raincoat or hoist an umbrella, then go down the street for his newspaper and a pot of tea? Would he say he could pick up the runners and riders later, skip the café and do without his walk? Robbie Cairns didn’t fancy hanging about between the electronic gates and the estate agent’s with the recessed doorway, or waiting opposite the newsagent on the other side of the street. He wore a lightweight
windcheater, as unremarkable as everything else about him, but it had an inner pocket in which the Baikal pistol nestled. He would hardly want to be stuck out on a pavement, armed up, not knowing whether the target would come to him or stay in and watch breakfast TV or shag his missus while the rain hosed his windows. It wasn’t Robbie Cairns’s style to ask his elder brother for advice. Enough times in the past Vern had been driving him towards a target when Robbie had, abruptly, aborted. He only had to say it was ‘turn-round time’ and Vern would spin, cut across traffic lanes and be well gone. Vern was not one to debate – he did as he was told.

  The indecision moment passed quickly. Some rubbish, plastic bags and a sheet of tabloid newspaper were blowing down the pavement, and a glance into the direction the wind was coming from showed that the rain was temporary.

  They’d done all the talk.

  No reason for him to do more explaining about where he would wait and where he would hit. He had done all of that the previous evening. Then he had put the detail of a killing out of his mind, and most of that evening he had been on the sofa with Barbie, watching TV, not thinking about being up close to a target and doing the hit between the eyes with a converted Baikal.

  If he had wanted to abort he would have said so. Vern didn’t prompt.

  The first time Robbie Cairns had taken a life was a week after his twenty-first birthday. He was doing debt collecting, going the rounds for a local man who dealt in tablets and skunk, and the joker at the door had told the fresh-faced lad who had come for the envelope to ‘Go piss yourself’. Then he had laughed and spat at Robbie’s feet. A little of the mess had gone on Robbie’s shoes. Robbie had not told the local man that his debt was as yet uncollected. He had gone into the family network, had hired the handgun and a half-dozen shells for the magazine. Three nights later he had been back at the door and was ringing the bell. Two issues to be resolved: unpaid debt and respect.