The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  He said at what time he’d be home. They would eat together because he couldn’t afford restaurant meals – he couldn’t resign, go elsewhere, because no openings existed to a writer familiar only with corruption and criminality. A last kiss and a last hug at the door. Ivo went to work, a busy day because that evening the weekly magazine went to print. Twice he looked behind him and neither time did he see anything that threatened or evidence of ‘discreet’ police protection.

  It was a good landing and they were quickly off. Mark Roscoe presumed that the speed of disembarkation was due to lack of traffic. No other plane just in or about to get up and go. He paused at the top of the steps. The sun came up off the apron and reflected into his face and he blinked, almost blinded. He groped for the dark glasses in his shoulder bag and squinted around him. A new airport, no passengers to speak of and no visible trade. He assumed some government from old Europe – or the IMF, the OECD or the World Bank – had dumped down a packet of cash, regarding an airport at Osijek as a valid investment. It was shiny new, like a shoe that had yet to be scuffed. There had been a map on the plane, in the pouch in front of him, and without it he would have had trouble in working out where he was.

  He walked into the arrivals hall. His ignorance was like a blister on his heel, and he cursed quietly that he hadn’t made time to learn about the region, and Vukovar, which was down the road from here, the river and … Megs Behan was close behind him. He had told her Harvey Gillot’s travel plans but the breaking of an official confidence had seemed a small matter on an overnight vigil outside a high gate on the Dorset coast. Fun being with her there. Here, it was different. He turned. She was shuffling towards him – shuffling because her footwear was lightweight holiday gear. A floral print skirt flowed from her hips, the cheesecloth blouse was thick enough to hide what lay beneath. The hair was a mess. He thought her a great-looking woman and about as different from his Chrissie as chalk was from … The older man was behind her and came slowly, as if his feet, knees or hips gave him trouble – he had no idea why two minuscule nips of whisky had been planted on him, just enough to savour and enjoy a taste. Right, ‘there’ was not ‘here’, and he had not expected that Megs Behan would buy the ticket. Her presence undercut his professionalism a little. He let her reach him.

  ‘I just wanted you to know, Miss Behan, that this is a serious investigation. We’re at a difficult stage in the inquiry. Any degree of interference would be regarded with …’ She had that gaze, mirth and a degree of – like him being pompous was a let-down. He ploughed on: ‘What happened in England – completely different picture to now. I want to stress, most important, that I won’t tolerate any stunts you may be considering. Try anything and I’ll get the locals to throw the book at you. A Croat cell is rather less friendly than one in West End Central. As I go about my business, I don’t want to see or hear you.’

  He cringed at his tone. Chrissie would have yawned. The woman, Megs Behan, looked at him and winked – bloody winked – so that half of one side of her face was crinkled, then stepped aside to permit him to go before her to the immigration check.

  He showed his passport. No smile. He assumed that the tanks had advanced this close to the city of Osijek. He had never seen one on the move, only in newspaper photographs, on television or in a cinema. He had been thirteen when the tanks might have come this close and he remembered nothing of it. His father hadn’t talked about it and there had been no mention of it at school. It would have been worse in Vukovar of which, then, he had known nothing. That ignorance, Roscoe reckoned, had made him pompous. He was given his passport and waved through.

  A man advanced on him, balding, in a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, drill khaki slacks and burnished shoes – had to be embassy.

  Could place him, but not the old beggar who had given him the whisky. Turned once, fast, and raked the queue of passengers behind. He saw Megs Behan and the old guy, their desultory conversation, and couldn’t make the links.

  A hand was held out. Another man stood a dozen paces behind the embassy guy. ‘Mark Roscoe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was given a name, didn’t catch it, then a card was offered, but his attention was on the one who had held back and watched.

  An envelope was produced from a briefcase and handed to him. It had come through, he was told, on secure communications. He should open it. He saw a face, plate or portrait size, of a teenager photographed in a police station, then the same face but in marginally different levels of artificial light. The back of the second picture carried the stamp of Feltham Young Offenders. There was an email printout. He read:

  Hi Mark. We believe contract for our Tango given to Robert (Robbie) Cairns of Rotherhithe. He is also wanted for questioning re murder of woman, believed mistress, found strangled in Cairns’s property. Talk soon. Cheers, Guv’nor.

  Life had a kick-back: no more crap about where tanks might have been or about him being the complete new-age prig. Real stuff, real talk.

  He shook the hand. ‘Thanks very much for coming this far, appreciated … The local police – when do I get to liaise?’

  A slow, tired grin. ‘Welcome, Mr Roscoe, to eastern Slavonia.’

  Confused: ‘I’m sorry, I came to liaise with local forces and to …’

  ‘Let’s go and have a cup of coffee, Mr Roscoe.’

  It was explained. The coffee was passable. He, Mark Roscoe, was coming into the territory of the famous few. ‘It’s where the defence in 1991 was epic. It’s where untrained and inexperienced men and women of the war, which enabled a free state to be born, fought and died. At any level of public life in Croatia it is political suicide to take on the veterans of Vukovar. They are sacred. A man, as I understand from my brief, cheated a village of just about its entire wealth, and for nearly twenty years remained anonymous to the living. He has now been identified, has a contract on his life. For reasons beyond my comprehension that individual is now travelling here. God knows what his intentions are. The police locally will not protect him, or co-operate with you. Are you following me, Mr Roscoe? If he intended to make a somewhat melodramatic gesture behind a cordon of policemen and be safe in their protection, he has made a total error of judgement. He is on his own, should he be daft enough to come here, and there will be no shield to hide behind. I would also remind you, Mr Roscoe, that you have no jurisdiction on this territory. To believe otherwise would be to invite comprehensive embarrassment to yourself, me, my colleagues and our government. Well, as you understand, I’m sure, it’s a long drive back to Zagreb and I’d like to get on. Good luck to you, Mr Roscoe. A final thing – if this man Gillot should show up, I wouldn’t stand too close to him. Life still comes quite cheap here.’

  The diplomat grimaced and shrugged, as if imparting disappointing news was a necessary role of his life, then backed away. He stopped beside the other man who had shadowed them when they met, and Roscoe realised that the whisky dispenser from the aircraft was with them and seemed to share a joke, and that Megs Behan was close to them.

  *

  ‘He was on the job, going at it hammer and tongs, and the Hereford Gun Club charged in through the front door and up the stairs, and the joker went out from under her, over the windowsill and straight into the air. He landed in the garden, and she was left there, gagging for it, and a dwarf Glaswegian corporal who’d reached the bedroom said in his best vernacular Serbo-Croat, “Madam, would you like the benefit of any help I can give in finishing off what that shit-face started?” She chucked a chamber pot at him and knocked him stone cold. Wonderful days.’

  ‘Hard place, Foa, Mr Arbuthnot. Still is.’

  ‘Just a little memory of good times. The joker, for going out of the window, did the medial ligaments of his right knee, was given twenty-two years at The Hague, a war criminal. The corporal had concussion for a week. Anyway, time to press on.’

  It was almost done by sleight of hand, not up to a magician’s or conjuror’s standards but expert enough as a brush contact in
Sokolniki Park to have been missed at thirty paces by an FSB tail. The package came from the other man’s pocket, was never fully visible and dipped, like a relay baton, into Benjie’s hand, then was sunk into his leather bag. The man who gave him the package was the station officer from Zagreb, an uncle by marriage to Alastair Watson, and old links lingered. The ‘joker’ with the bust knee had been a major in the Yugoslav National Army, a regular, and indicted for the killing of Muslim villagers during the ethnic cleansings around Srebrenica and Goražde. He had been tracked down to the hateful small town of Foa where he would have believed himself safe until the Reaper called, but had been wrong. He wouldn’t have known that an intelligence officer with an impressive pedigree was in Bosnia-Herzegovina, looking to round off a career with trumpets and triumphs. Benjie didn’t know whether Megs Behan understood a word of it.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much else I can do for you, Mr Arbuthnot.’

  ‘Already it’s more than I’d dreamed possible. And you say Bill Anders is in town? Excellent. We can drink wine, eat dinner, and I’ll hear about dissections and autopsies on rotten meat.’ Perhaps he had played the buffoon, his supreme art, long enough. His voice dropped. ‘It’s because he was an asset, a useful one.’

  Quietly said, ‘Not a problem.’

  The voice boomed again: ‘I’ll tell Alastair I met you, couldn’t get sense, that you were drunk as a marquis – I’ll tell him.’

  Soft spoken: ‘What you asked for and what I’ve given you were authorised at VBX. I have to hope there won’t be disappointment. Go carefully.’

  Chuckled laughter, handshakes, and they were gone. Benjie Arbuthnot had been a big enough figure in the Service to warrant a little attention when he requested it. That a station officer had driven to Osijek, a little more than a hundred and thirty miles each way, and had delivered a package was proof of the esteem in which he was held – and his ability to play the bombastic idiot was undiminished. With the idiot there could be an old-world charm, consideration for others. A matchbox was attached to the package with Sellotape and he removed it, pocketed it separately.

  He advanced on the detective. ‘I gather from Miss Behan that you’re headed for Vukovar. I’ve a hire car booked. Can I offer you a lift? The name’s Benjie. It’ll take about half an hour.’ He liked to organise. When he organised, he controlled.

  Megs Behan didn’t consider herself a fool, thought herself sharp enough to realise that Benjie Arbuthnot had a razor mind, and decided he probably gathered up people like her and the detective. It would have been a habit. She fancied also that she could recognise a lie or an evasion.

  He drove well, but near the centre of the road. He seemed to have confidence in overtaking lorries, tankers, and took no hassle from blind bends. She didn’t share it and twice, from the back, she’d let out a sharp gasp.

  Roscoe had asked, ‘Where did you learn speed driving, Mr Arbuthnot? Fairly limited opportunities, I’d have thought. Police, military, anti-hijack course?’

  A lie. ‘Nowhere, actually. Just sort of comes naturally. Foot down on an open road.’

  And then Roscoe had asked, ‘So what brings you to Vukovar, Mr Arbuthnot?’

  An evasion, a sweet smile: ‘Oh, just some loose ends in an old man’s life that need tying before the curtain call.’

  They passed mile upon mile of fields where the corn stood tall and the sunflowers had ripened. She thought that lies and evasions killed the art of conversation, and wondered where in Harvey Gillot’s life this man had walked and whether he had been central to it. How near was it to this road that a village had come together to pass a death sentence?

  He was unlike any of the other men of the village that Penny Laing had met. He waved Simun away, as if the boy was a dog to be put back into a kennel. He had said his name was Josip. He had a pudgy face, but it showed humanity. He was shaven but wore a frayed cotton shirt with a disintegrating collar and appeared to be uncared for. He gestured that she should follow him. She looked back but the boy had already turned. Simun lit a cigarette and his face gave no indication of annoyance that she had been taken from him. She gritted her teeth and scurried after Josip.

  He didn’t have the same worn, scarred tiredness in his eyes, or the lines acid-etched around the mouth or scrawniness at his throat. She had seen the scars on Simun’s father’s body, and had stared at the folded trouser leg at Andrija’s knee. Then there was Tomislav’s shrine, and she had been in the kitchen where Petar and his wife lived but couldn’t speak to each other. There was a light in this one’s face.

  ‘I am not one of the heroes, Miss Laing. I am not of the Three Hundred and was not at the pass at Thermopylae. I ran away.’ It was good English, fluent, idiomatic, and a little sad mischief played in the eyes.

  ‘About as late as possible, I loaded a car and went with my wife and our children. I left my dog behind. I am ashamed of that, leaving my dog. Not everyone, I promise you, Miss Laing, was a hero.’

  He led, she followed. They went up a path that was overgrown, the weeds and grass brushing against her knees. Branches bounced off him and against her; she used her arms to protect her face.

  ‘We have made an industry of playing victim. The defence itself was truly heroic and I cannot comprehend how men and women survived so many days in such hell. I could not have. In Zagreb, where I had fled with my wife and children, there were occasional snatches of film – black-and-white, soft focus – of the battle around Vukovar, long-lens pictures from far across the fields. We saw only smoke rising in the distance and climbing through the rain. How men and women stayed alive, and sane, I do not know … except that I was in the gaol in Zagreb afterwards – you should know it was for fraud, not violence, nothing sexual. I am respectable – and it was not easy … but it was nothing compared to the existence here and what happened afterwards, the men in the corn, the women taken anywhere that a Serb could drop his pants and not get his arse wet in the rain. It was awful, and myths were born.’

  She could see a building ahead, walls that had once been white, and realised then that among the grass and nettles, the thistles and cow parsley were felled gravestones, but they had been toppled as if vengeance had been wreaked on them. The building had a roof of nailed-down corrugated sheets, and graffiti on the lower walls. The door at the back of the porch hung crazily.

  ‘Only the Croats were victims? How far back should I take you, Miss Laing? They do not speak often here of the “excesses” of the Croat regime, the Ustaše, in the Second World War, the massacres at the concentration camp of Jasenovac, the burning of villagers inside their churches and the throwing of Orthodox priests over cliffs … and they do not speak often of the early stirrings of the Croatian state in that spring and summer of the Homeland War, the creation of two tiers, the second and lower for Serbs. It does not justify what happened here, in Vukovar or at Ovcara – but no one is only a victim. You should know that, Miss Laing.’

  They went inside what had been a church. Enough light came from broken windows and gaps in the roofing. She listened but her eyes wandered. Should she feel superior? She doubted it: churches and chapels had been firebombed across Northern Ireland when the poison there, as here, had burst out. It was only a matter of degree. The painting on the wall to her left was faded but she recognised a white horse rearing, a man astride with a plunging sword, a dragon snarling. Penny Laing had not expected to be in this shadowland and find a symbol of her England: St George was busy dragon-slaying.

  ‘The Croat police came into Serb houses and looked for the young men. If they did not find them they shot dead their fathers, grandfathers and uncles. It happened, but is not in the stories of the victims. Here, nobody comes. A few of us have in the past brought building materials and paint and made this interior respectable so that we are not ashamed. We come only at night. The icons were looted, the murals are past repair and the roof does not keep out the winter. No Serb lives here and has need of a church. No one wishes for a reconciliation and no lessons from confl
ict are learned.’

  Who was she to stand in judgement? A village broken, shells and mortars falling, snipers at work, the dead not properly buried and the wounded without morphine in a cellar, yet the church of the enemy was clean and polished and, of course, it had been broken into, trashed. She would have done it herself. She had few certainties to lean on. They went out into the light. He looked at her, seemed to decide whether or not she was worth sharing with – and shrugged.

  ‘The ultimate claim for the cult of the victim is that the delivery of the Malyutkas would have saved the village, perhaps the town as well. It is a myth. I did research when I came back here. The Malyutka has a minimum range of half a kilometre, too far. It is not effective below five hundred metres. It is very slow and the controller must guide its flight with a joy-stick – his signal travelling on an unravelling wire. If he is fired on and flinches, he loses control. The manual says that a controller of a Malyutka must, to be proficient, have achieved more than two thousand simulated firings, then fifty more every week to maintain his skill. We had one man who knew a little of the weapon, and no one else who had ever handled one. It was for nothing. There could have been a hundred Malyutka missiles and the defence here would still have failed. There was exhaustion, hunger, and too many wounded with no drugs. The myths grew flesh and the legends added skin. I tell you truths, but no one in the village would hear them.’

  He stopped, took her hand and held it. He bit his lip and breathed hard.

  ‘I should tell you also, Miss Laing, that it was I who set in motion the process for the killing of the arms dealer. I made the contacts and paid over the money given me. In this small matter I take responsibility.’