The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  And he did it as a high-street bank manager might have explained that a customer was a little overdrawn – not a repossession matter, not going to bring in the bailiffs. ‘It’s quite hard to put it together, Mr Gillot, because you have no business connection with Croatia … Sources available to Vauxhall Bridge Cross have come through with information that a contract has been taken out on your life. Can’t sugar that one. A hitman – vulgar phrase but the one we use – is, if the reports are to be believed, under contract or will be imminently.’

  No answer, but Roscoe thought a sweat bead was forming on the forehead just below the hairline, and there might be another. He’d give it to the guy: eleven out of ten for control. Impressive.

  ‘We’re not flush with information. Well, scraps from the table. The contract has been taken out by what is described to us as a “community”. It is also indicated that the carrying out of the contract is still probably in the planning stage. What “community” means, I really don’t know but …’ He let his voice tail away. What had he expected from the man whose trade Penny Laing had described as ‘loathsome’? He’d probably thought there would be shock, some bluster, and a patter about ‘there must be some mistake’. There was not. Tell a man that a gang of people on the other side of Europe had hired a hitman and imply that he’s going to come up close with a Luger, a Walther, a Mauser or a Baikal, and it was fair to expect panic and hyper-ventilation but there was silence across the table. Gillot seemed to tilt his head back as if that would help him think better and recall his memory.

  With a flick of a smile Gillot said quietly, almost a whisper, ‘You call it a “community” but it’s a village. The contract will have been taken by a village.’

  ‘Where?’

  Roscoe thought Gillot talked like a sleep-walker.

  ‘I never went there, but I was told it was close to a town called Vukovar. There is, I suppose, between the people there and me, what might be called an issue.’

  They had paused for a few moments on the open square, with marble slabs that ran on the west side by the Vuka river, close to where it flowed into the Danube. There was a statue near to them of the dead President Franjo Tudjman – some said he was the founder of the new, free, independent Croatia, and others claimed he was the traitor who had sacrificed Vukovar, its defenders, and the people of the villages on the Cornfield Road. They huddled around Mladen. Josip insinuated himself into the huddle and told them what they should say and how much they should ask for. The group broke apart.

  Andrija, with Maria beside him, went to the Banco Popolare on Strossmeyer.

  Tomislav, holding his dog on its string, walked inside the Slavonska Banka next to the ruin of the Grand Hotel.

  Petar, accompanied by his deaf wife, went past the armed security guard and into the Croatia Banka.

  Mladen had Simun at his shoulder as they pushed through the swing doors of the Privredna Banka Zagreb.

  And flitting between them, the broker of the deals, Josip, was advising, prompting and reassuring. They were all veterans and could show their disability allowance cards. All had the security of their pensions for heroism and service in the struggle to liberate their country. The pensions were collateral against a loan they might want to take out. In each bank, a manager asked to what purpose the loan would be put. Andrija wished to purchase a ticket to Australia to visit cousins. Tomislav wanted to buy a motor car with an automatic gearbox. Petar wished to hire builders who would construct for him and his handicapped wife a new kitchen. Mladen and his son had the chance to invest in a picture gallery in Osijek where his own work could be sold and that of other veterans of the war of independence. For such men, in Vukovar, there would be little bureaucratic delay. Papers were produced, the numbers from pension books and disability forms noted, signatures recorded. Each was loaned the kuna equivalent of five thousand euros. A total of twenty thousand euros was guaranteed. It had been done as Josip said it should be.

  Mladen led them back towards the car park beside the bus station for their journey home as the light failed and the gaunt corners of buildings still unrepaired from shellfire cut the evening sky.

  He left through the same door. Roscoe had shaken his hand, a strong grip. He walked quickly to his car, back erect. He thought they would be watching him from vantage-points and might even have changed windows to see him go to the far side of the car park. Who loved an arms dealer? Nobody. Nobody Loves Us and We Don’t Care: an anthem of the backers of a Polish entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, the chant of an east London football team’s supporters. It applied also to the brokers of weapons. They would want, from the upper windows of the Weymouth police station, to see his shoulders droop. He reached his car, flashed the zapper, got in, belted up and drove away. He didn’t give them a backward glance. He headed for the main road that would take him back to the causeway and across it. Then he would climb high on to his refuge island.

  How long had he been waiting? A hell of a long time. Too damn long.

  His home would be empty except for the dog. Daughter at school, and Josie had said she would be in London all day. She had gone early and would be back in the evening, laden with Regent Street bags. He would be there on his own: he could reflect on a meeting at the docks in Rijeka and a bagful of junk that had been dumped a long time ago.

  The detective, civil enough, blunt, not pussying around, had asked: ‘The issue between you and this village, Mr Gillot, would it be enough for them to want you dead nearly twenty years later? To pay to have you dead?’

  He’d shrugged. It was slow going out of Weymouth behind towed caravans, and he sensed that tempers were fraying around him. Heh, you think it’s hell to be stuck in traffic for a few minutes? he thought. He was an ‘alone’ man, didn’t want to share and didn’t need to. He was a pariah. Clear as neat gin that the detective was weighing what he said and trying in his head to work out a threat assessment. Roscoe had told him he would be heading back to London and that there would be another meeting of the Gold Group. Afterwards, the best advice on offer would be given. A caravan and a taxi had shunted. No injuries, just argument.

  He had only asked two questions. First, he had almost grinned, how much would it cost to have him slotted? ‘Depends who they go for,’ the detective had answered. ‘Digging deep in their piggy-banks, they’ll be looking to put ten K euros in a top man’s hand. If they’re doing economy class it might be as little as two K, but whether he’s an expert with a reputation or cut price and on the climb, he’s also going to be listing expenses, and there’ll be middle men looking for a cut. Depends what sort of village it is, how wealthy.’

  He had asked, second, where the village would find the man. ‘Not a Croat, not a chance,’ Roscoe had answered. He’d thought the detective appreciated the chance to show off a little expertise. ‘A big cocaine dealer was taken out in Liverpool and all the newspaper talk was of foreign assassins flying in and out, but the hitman had to wait in a doorway opposite a gym where the target worked out. Can’t be a foreigner – voice and clothes would be a giveaway. If it’s true, the village, the people there, have to get a line into what’s available for hire in UK.’

  ‘I’ll hear from you,’ he’d said.

  ‘You’ll hear from me, Mr Gillot, when I’ve talked with colleagues. We’re able to put things in place quite quickly. It’s what we do,’ Roscoe had said, and had passed him a business card with a mobile number pencilled on the back. ‘Any time, use it.’ Then the handshake, and then he’d walked.

  Harvey Gillot, wondering what he would find, drove home.

  A team had arrived that would work for one week of that summer month with the professor. They were students of forensic anthropology from a department of the University of Vienna, and came with their scalpels, brushes, trowels, folders of aerial photographs and ground-probing radar gear. They brought tents, too, and a mobile cookhouse, and seemed to think themselves blessed to spend a week with William Anders. They had made a base camp behind a line of trees that
shielded them from the memorial to the victims of Ovcara.

  ‘No community here is more guilty than another,’ Steyn said.

  Anders could have kicked him into his car and told him to drive back to Vukovar. It was, for Anders, one of the pleasures of his life that he came each year – in the heat of summer – to search for the remaining sixty who had been butchered near to the storage sheds of the collective farm and buried away from the main pit where the two hundred cadavers had been recovered. It gave him, this annual reunion, a sense of purpose that rewarded him after many of the real shit places he went: Mexico and the work of the drug cartels was bad now, and there was heavy work in central Africa still, but the search for the last grave at Ovcara, the company of the Austrian students and their lecturers, was a boost to his ego and seemed worthwhile.

  Steyn said, ‘Blame a Serb and he’ll talk to you of what happened at Jasenovac camp in 1942. Brzica, a guard, won a bet among his colleagues and slit the throats of one thousand three hundred and sixty prisoners with a short-bladed knife in one day. He was a Croat.’

  The Vukovar water tower was in the far distance, on the skyline, with the last light on it, and the students threw long shadows as they finished the day’s work. That evening Anders would drink a bottle of Ilok wine and sit with them. There was a woman lecturer among them who … He knew all the stories and case histories that Daniel Steyn recycled each year but he didn’t begrudge him the chance of an ear to bend. The statistics of Jasenovac were disputed among partisan historians: maybe a half-million Serbs died there at Croatian hands, and maybe it was no more than sixty thousand. And Steyn would tell him that Serb Orthodox priests were hurled over cliffs to die on the rocks below, and the people of Glina were herded into a church, the doors barricaded and the building fired.

  ‘I’m saying, Bill, that brutality and evil are not a prerogative of one side. There’s equal blame, equal guilt.’

  For the last two hours of the day’s work, Steyn had been sitting in long grass, watching them. He had only interrupted the quiet when they packed up for the day. Anders thought the doctor poor company, but a peddler of truths and therefore not to be dismissed.

  ‘There’s no sense of reconciliation, Daniel?’

  He heard the snort of derision. ‘Can’t be reconciliation. Croats won’t apologise for what they did alongside the Nazis, and Serbs won’t for what they did here. Nothing’s forgiven, forgotten.’

  ‘Should we care?’

  ‘If we don’t, no other bastard will.’ Steyn laughed, Anders joined him, and they went to the food tent for the first beer of the evening. The sun dipped on fine rich countryside, on fields that showed good crops of corn and sunflowers, and where the grapes ripened well. Behind Anders’ back there were trees and behind them the site of a mass grave. There were times here when he struggled to find logic. And he couldn’t explain the travelling belt on which the cycle of killing moved, at slow speed but with a treadmill’s inevitability … as if there was a demand for it, insatiable.

  There were inter-Service rivalries – that was why the young woman, Penny Laing, from the Alpha team of Revenue and Customs had been so scratchy after the police-dominated Gold Group meeting – but they were minor when set against the cold shoulders on offer from one police force to another. Roscoe recognised the antipathy, and would have been blind and deaf if he hadn’t.

  Well, they were yokels down here, peasants and cousin-daters, so they resented the arrival of a detective sergeant from a specialist crowd up in the smoke. The coffee offered him had been foul, the water was warm in the bottle he’d been given and the room they’d made available was below the ranking of ‘nothing special’. He thought it was out-of-order treatment. He’d been handed a slip of paper as he’d stood in the lobby to watch Gillot, his Tango, drive away. A local honcho wanted to see him.

  He was expected to debrief the locals on his intelligence, the probability or possibility of an attack on their territory. He answered questions with studied vagueness that verged on insubordination. Couldn’t do anything else. Didn’t know, did he? Mark Roscoe was afloat, but in deep water. He did not know whether the threat to Harvey Gillot was probable or possible, or merely a concoction of half-truths, whispers and rumours. The local big man had silver on his epaulettes and an air-conditioned office that enabled him to sit in full regalia at his desk. He had looked pretty damn pissed off when he was told that the risk assessment had not yet been completed.

  He had spoken to Harvey Gillot of a man who was ‘expert, with a reputation’ or ‘cheap and on the climb’.

  Roscoe quit the police station, a modern eyesore that left, he thought, a footprint of ugliness on the town. In his car, on the way to the main road and then the link to the motorway, he thought what a goddamn backwater this was. It came, like a kick in the shin, that it was the sort of place where Harvey Gillot, with an unresolved issue from long ago, would choose to live. Roscoe would have said the odds stacked against him were pretty manageable if the contract was underfunded. Different if it was backed with money to burn. The dump they had retrieved from beside a fireplace, in a cupboard and under the flooring, had been low grade. The hit in the Tottenham area – no witnesses, a targeted man who would have been aware of the risk, killed without that three seconds of suspicion – had been high grade. His team didn’t get to hear about high-grade people, only reached the crime scene in time to pick up the bodies.

  ‘Of course no one used it, Megs. Cop on.’ She had in front of her the morning’s broadsheets and tabloids, and had gutted each one for coverage of her press release. She had flipped channels between TV breakfast shows and had half listened to radio news stations. She had found, seen, heard no reference to her work. It had taken nearly three months to prepare. There were photographs of kids dead on dirt roads and more kids holding AKs and RPGs, but the name of Planet Protection was nowhere. She had rung a friend – sweet man and bent as a corkscrew – who had always been good with her material. ‘Not even one fucking paragraph. For Christ’s sake, Giles, not one.’

  ‘I did what I could. No one in Editorial wanted to suck it.’

  ‘Did you shout and stamp?’

  ‘Megs, I pushed as hard as I could. What I’m saying, it needed some balls. No balls and no spice means no coverage. Are you going to hate me, Megs?’

  ‘Might just cut your tongue out.’

  ‘My features editor said there was nothing new from the last Amnesty release, and the news editor said your statistics didn’t count too much against the “mood of the day”. The editor said – this is the evening meeting – that people in the UK today have their own problems, like bankruptcy, being out of work and losing their homes. Megs, you want coverage, you’ve got to spice it up and give us some balls – balls. Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Hearing you. Look, it’s been a pretty foul day for me. Want to take me for a meal tonight?’

  A pause … He wasn’t exactly jumping. Then, ‘Really sorry, Megs, but I’m on an extra roster tonight. Can’t do it.’

  He had average expenses for a hack. Usually when she invited herself they managed a trattoria, and mended the world over pasta and a litre of plonk. She’d let her hand rest on his thigh under the table. In spite of his orientation he didn’t seem to mind, and they were good mates. She could have done with a meal, a freebie, and there was damn all in her purse. ‘Are you telling me my research is boring? Would that be an apt description of me, my work?’

  He surged. ‘Megs, I love you and I admire you – your enthusiasm and dedication. What you’re doing, campaigning against the international arms trade, is pretty near the lowest level of everybody’s priorities. Dealers are nasty people, merchants of death, bad people, traffickers in misery – but where? Not at the end of my street, not in my factory and not in my office. You have to liven your act up, Megs, then come back to me. Sorry I can’t do a meal tonight. Take care.’

  The phone went dead in her ear. She swept up the day’s papers, cleared them off her desk, carried th
em to the big black bag that hung from a hook and dumped them. She felt fucking miserable, as if she’d been kicked.

  Then Megs Behan dug in her cabinet and tugged out a file: Harvey Gillot.

  She looked for a photograph. A devil in a good suit. A monster in a laundered shirt. It was a two-year-old image, and there was no smile as he passed the protest line, as if the people behind the crash barrier and the police cordon didn’t exist. Where would she find the spice, the balls?

  ‘You said, Dermot, that we needed results for Alpha team to survive.’ Penny Laing stood with her feet apart, arms akimbo.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’ll do it verbatim. You said: “We are a natural target for budget slicing. To survive we need collars felt, court cases convened and sentences passed.”’

  ‘And if that’s what I said—’

  ‘The passing of years doesn’t diminish the guilt of criminality.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘There was, in Croatia, a desperate need for weapons or independence would go down the drain. There was a UN embargo on selling weapons to the country and it was a dealer’s free-for-all, Christmas come early. The town of Vukovar was on the rack, and a deal to sell weapons at that time would have been illegal – an offence – and could be prosecuted. Dermot, if we believe that pillock Roscoe, we have to accept that Harvey Gillot was there and intending to trade. It’s where to start.’

  ‘Vukovar is “where to start”? You’re suggesting?’

  ‘We go there, build a case. Have to start in Vukovar or, to be more exact, a village outside it. We need it, Dermot.’

  ‘You’re talking about haemorrhaging the team’s budget. I have to decide whether the time and effort are worthwhile, the cost and—’

  ‘The cost is minimal.’

  ‘But there’s the time and the effort.’