‘I walk on my own.’
‘Correction. You walk with me behind you.’
‘You armed?’
‘No.’
‘You have a stick? Pepper spray? Mace? Do you have anything?’
‘No.’
A stork flew over, slow and ponderous, and Gillot told him what he thought. ‘Then you’re goddamn useless – useless. Leave me alone. I go about my business and you’re an obstruction to it. Lose yourself.’
‘You won’t be alone, no chance. They’ll be there. Got me? It’s like they’ve bought tickets for a Tyburn job, seats in the stands. Penny Laing of Revenue and Customs, she’s there – she tried to nail you with a prosecution but gave up on it. Megs Behan, the woman who blasted you out of your home with a bullhorn, is there. A local doctor, he’ll be there, but don’t regard him as useful because he didn’t bring the box of tricks him. I’m carrying it. The forensic scientist who exhumed the bodies – the deaths that put you in this shit – and found a phone number scribbled on paper in a pocket and shopped you, he’s down the track … with an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t. He’s there and has taken on the transport. He calls us all vultures, circling, watching and waiting for a corpse. You won’t be alone. Sorry about that.’
‘Back off.’
‘And the village’ll be there. They put up twenty thousand sterling. It’s a humble place and it lives off war pensions, with disability allowances well-milked, but that was a pile of money to them and they took it in bank loans. It was sliced off down the line as the contract was passed on, and the guy on the trigger gets ten out of the twenty.’
‘I don’t need to know – I’m not running. I have nowhere to run to.’
‘His name is Robbie Cairns. He’s from Rotherhithe, southeast London. Slotting is his work. He kills to make a living.’
‘I’ve seen him, faced him, smelt him.’
‘He’s waiting for you at the end of the path.’
‘Get back from me. I’ll look after myself.’
‘Stuck with you, and not from choice.’
It would not have been true to say that Harvey Gillot snapped. Truer to say that he had exhausted every other tactic for shedding himself of Roscoe’s shadow. He hit him. Surprised Roscoe and himself. A clenched fist, not the one that held the plastic bag, but a left-arm jab. He had never, in his entire life, hit anyone before – not at primary school or at the Royal Grammar School. He hadn’t thrown punches in the office-equipment trade or when he was trying to sell weapons. He had never hit Josie. The blow caused Roscoe to reel, but not to go down. Gillot watched, almost fascinated, as blood came from Roscoe’s nose and was wiped with a sleeve, and then more from a split upper lip. Roscoe stood, lifted his head and would – for a moment – have weighed whether or not to beat ten shades of hell out of Gillot. Gillot nearly laughed. It wouldn’t have fitted the duty of bloody care to return the punch.
Gillot walked on. Reckoned he’d won space for himself.
They were squashed into the car. Dropping off Roscoe and giving his place in the front to the long-legged Anders had made little difference to the lack of comfort, but it had been bearable when they were on the decent road surface out of the town. He was guided by Penny Laing, who directed him at junctions where narrow roads branched off with no signposts. A quiet had fallen on them and Benjie Arbuthnot rated it an inappropriate time to lift the mood with humour. Now he drove the hire car off the road, on to a track, didn’t slow, and allowed the vehicle to bounce.
He followed Penny Laing’s directions. Through the village, with a brief commentary by Anders on the number of casualties suffered in the siege, past the church and the cemetery – he saw through the open gate the fresh graves. No one spoke and all were thrown about inside the car. He did not slacken his speed.
There were markers ahead.
He could see, as dust piled on to the windscreen, bobbing heads that wound in a slow-moving line above the tips of the crop. He had been once in South America when a pope had visited and could remember the huge crowds moving in crocodile formation towards the rendezvous where mass would be celebrated. He recalled taking his elder son to a music festival and, again, seeing trudging queues heading for campsites beside the Thames … Something magnificent and emotional about columns on the move in the early morning and a great event expected. The army ahead of him, however, wore neither the uniform of the faith nor their culture: the women were in black and carried hand weapons and the men were in camouflage fatigues, with firearms on their shoulders. They were strung out along the length of the track.
Anders said, ‘I don’t want to be a pooper, Arbuthnot, but I don’t see our presence being welcomed.’
Megs Behan said, ‘I cannot believe now in the rule of the mob. We have to go on.’
Penny Laing said, ‘We owe him nothing. We’re not in debt to Gillot.’
He made no reply. He could have tucked the car in behind them and crawled at their pace, could have dumped it, turfed out his passengers and walked. He heaved the wheel and went through the corn. The mass of green closed around the windows. He made a bypass, then swung back towards the track.
He saw that the village people formed little clusters ahead, and understood. Penny Laing murmured to him which was Tomislav, who had made a memorial of his home and would have fired the Malyutka missiles if delivery had been made, and which was Andrija, who had been the sniper and had lost his leg in the break-out when the women and wounded were left behind. She indicated Petar, who farmed this land, whose wife was deaf and whose son had died when the consignment had failed to come, and Mladen, who led the village, and his son, who had been carried out as a two-week-old baby through the cornfields. Always a witness, always an observer, Arbuthnot noted, and squirrelled away her blush and the tremor in her voice as she spoke of the boy – good-looking kid. He saw, ahead, that Steyn waved to him and beside him were two crow women.
He had seen enough, so he did a three-point turn that flattened more of the crop, and began his drop-off.
It was Megs Behan who asked the question. It would have been in all their minds but she posed it. ‘Can we save him?’
‘No, we cannot,’ Arbuthnot said. ‘But it’s possible he can save himself.’
Steyn was the first to see him.
He knew Maria, wife of an amputee. She had consulted him on a possible infection of the ovaries. He’d thought her a pitiless woman, but he knew what had been done to her when the village had fallen. He had seen, also once, the elderly widow, who played that part with enthusiasm, had painful arthritis and a great bagful of bitterness at the loss of her husband. He thought each lived in the days and nights of an autumn turning to winter when their lives had depended on the lottery of where a shell landed, or where a sniper aimed his bullet. He thought each lived through that day and night of an enemy unzipping his fatigues, lowering filthy underpants and tearing down knickers.
He stood by the women, and saw him come over a low hill. Crown of the head, the full face and then the shoulders. He knew well the history of the Kukuruzni Put, could imagine how it had been to sprint or crawl between the rotting crop rows. He saw that Gillot carried a white plastic bag in his right hand. He walked briskly but without bombast. No trace of a swagger or the hesitation of the intimidated. Daniel Steyn fancied himself a reasonably skilled and caring general practitioner of medicine, but more as a psychologist. The man did well, struck a good posture. Once an American special-forces officer had come to Vukovar to examine the ground and the strongpoints, and to learn of the battle. They had talked late, over whisky, about bluff. The officer, if the holding cells of the Lebanon hostages of the 1980s had been positively located, would have been on the rescue squad, and he had spoken of one, a Briton, who had successfully played the bluff game on visits to Beirut: simply by his bearing and understated confidence he had created a safety cocoon around him, until the bluff was called. Then he had had no battalions behind him, only a pistol pressed up under his chin. On the Cornfield Road b
luff might play well and might not.
The policeman was behind Gillot. Fifteen or twenty paces. More opportunity for the psychologist: would have been duty-driven, would not have had the flawed personality to claim the right to a ten-hour break – many would – and hands washed of a problem. Steyn saw the dried, dark blood, the stains on the suit jacket, the smears on the shirt. Understood that, too. The bluff factor was not compatible with a bodyguard in tow.
Gillot closed on him.
No eye contact, nothing resigned, nothing fearful and nothing confident – no recognition.
The women were in the middle of the track and the corn grew high at either side of them. The widow had her stick and Maria a grenade bulging in a pocket, a knife in her hand. He thought it the sort of a knife that would be used to cut up a slaughtered pig in a shed behind a village home. They blocked Gillot’s way.
Genius. He reached them and stopped. He looked into the faces, would have seen the emotions that could kill him. He did that little smile, apologetic, but without a cringe. He offered no defiance and stepped to the side. Perhaps they expected argument, might have expected explanation or gushing apology. He was past them. Cleverly done.
At a price. The stick was thrown after him, which must have hurt the widow because the arthritis ravaged her. It caught Gillot on the back of the head, but he rode it. Then Maria hurled a stone, which hit Gillot square in the back, by the bullet holes in his shirt. He staggered but didn’t go down. Steyn thought that if he had he would be gone. He would not have risen again. More stones and earth clods rained on Gillot, but he stayed upright.
Steyn walked with Roscoe.
In front, where the path bent, he saw his old friend, Bill Anders, who was – maybe – the architect of the whole damn thing, and in the group with him was Tomislav, who held an RPG-7. His wife had quit before the heavy fighting had started and gone to the enemy. He understood the hate.
A stone cut the back of Gillot’s head and blood matted his hair.
Roscoe could not have put himself into Gillot’s mind. He thought he should have been on one side of the Tango and the doctor on the other. They should have walked beside him, but the stinging ache in his nose and the swelled lip told him where he was wanted and where denied. The women were behind him. There were shouts, curses … Sometimes the doctor, almost with embarrassment, translated what was yelled at Gillot.
So, Roscoe broke ranks. He jogged a few paces and came near to Gillot’s shoulder. One stone jarred his back, low down, while another hit Gillot and glanced off the angle of his neck.
He did it from the side of his mouth. ‘I don’t want you. I don’t need you. You have no place here. You’re not a party to this argument. Get back. I don’t ask you—’
Gillot didn’t have to finish.
It would have been a stone that a plough had turned up, too heavy for the old woman to lift and throw, so it must have been the younger woman who had hurled it. A good aim. It hit the detective somewhere at the back of the head, then bounced on to the track and corkscrewed into the corn. Roscoe yelped, then took two more steps, or three, and subsided. Gillot left him. There would have been another tedious, futile debate: Gillot’s needs against the other man’s sense of obligation.
He didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have helped him to see the detective. He didn’t want to know whether the man was stunned, out cold, or had merely gone down and then pushed himself to his feet again. He went forward.
What he did and how he acted made, curiously, good sense to Harvey Gillot. Certainly he would not look back and probably not to the side. His focus was in front of him. The corn was an aisle. Further on, ahead, he heard a rumble of voices but they were indistinct and he understood only a choir chorus of hostility.
He heard a cry, croaked: ‘For fuck’s sake, Gillot, turn round and let’s get the hell out.’
He did not. Of course not. He could have turned on the island when two shots were fired, or at the Hauptbahnhof and any time in Zagreb after he had gone to the rendezvous café and revisited where he had met the schoolteacher. He could have turned at the hotel that morning when he’d settled his bill. Best bloody foot forward.
It was a bigger group that was waiting for him. They had trampled down some of the corn and he saw the rusted frame of a harrow or a plough, abandoned. The thin, sculpted shape of an RPG-7, held high, a grenade loaded, poked above the heads of the women and the shoulders of the men. How many of those had he sold? Good one. Harvey Gillot began the mental arithmetic of the numbers of RPG-7s he had flogged. He started with the Middle East and the ones that had gone to Lebanon for use by the army against Hezbollah and the Palestinian factions up in Tripoli and … a load had gone to Cyprus for a paramilitary crowd, and the Jordanians had had some, and the Syrians had stockpiled more. Anywhere that had no oil had had RPG-7s from him. He didn’t do many contracts with oil-producing countries because they could, more easily, buy government to government with brown envelopes attached. They had gone to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, all the fledgling places that were UN newcomers and had broken free from the old Soviet Union. He was doing well, counting high, beyond hundreds and into thousands and— Shit.
They were baying. He thought they looked for blood.
He saw women bend and pick up clods or stones. Some waved knives, rifles were pointed. Then the launcher was lowered, rested on a shoulder and aimed at him. Right. An RPG-7, at close quarters. He knew it had, at two hundred metres, the ability to penetrate 240mm of armour. He was inside that zone – and some – and had no armour of any thickness, just a vest and a shirt that was already holed. The RPG could splatter him. There were AKs too, and the pitch he would have used said that AK-4 assault rifles could kill at damn near half a mile, and a granny could hit with a 7.62mm bullet at less than two hundred metres.
He tried to hold his stride.
No escape. Who, in this world, did Harvey Gillot trust? Would have been, twenty years before, Solly Lieberman, but a bear had had him when he’d gone for a comfort break. Now, only Benjamin Arbuthnot: he had caught a glimpse of his head – hair a little longer, voice a little louder, shoulders a little lower – in the bar when he had checked in at the hotel. Roscoe had referred to ‘an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t’. He set himself that target. Arbuthnot would be along the track, maybe a mile away, maybe five, and if he could reach him he would be … He had faith. About all he bloody did have. He had not come to do penance, most certainly had not come to die. He had come to get the weight of the contract off his back.
He went towards the cluster of men and women. The voices rose in hate chants, the rifles stayed aimed at him and the RPG-7, but he thought they teased him and tried to break him. He walked into the range of the best-thrown rocks and clods.
He was in the avenue, couldn’t divert – and wouldn’t while he had the so-small chance of walking clear.
All the places that William Anders went to work, where he supervised the digging, there were men like the guy who carried the rocket launcher. No colour in his face, and the past sat across his shoulders like a lead weight, the launcher acting as a nudge to the memory. He would not fire, but it was the gesture – and the second was in the military tunic that seemed two sizes too large. Anders reckoned it would have been the guy’s own, that his body had shrunk over the years. The investigator girl had identified him as Tomislav and had said he would have directed the Malyutka missiles. He knew about them. He had flown into Cairo more than thirty years ago, a rookie in his trade, and had been in the Sinai where the Egyptians had started well with them, but the operatives had been massacred when the Israeli Defence Force had mastered a tactic to employ against them: they’d called them ‘Saggers’. Anders had heard then it was not easy kit to use … Not important now. He appreciated that his old friend, the spy, who had shared many of his stamping grounds, might just have done enough to save the life of a long-term asset and might not. In the gods’ laps. With each step he took, Anders despised himself more for being there,
booking a ticket to watch a man die.
He walked well.
They had stones, rocks and clods as solid as bricks and chucked, threw, heaved them at Gillot.
Anders realised well enough the need for release. Understood the torture a community would have endured after nineteen years without a scapegoat to skewer. Bombarding the man with stones might be sufficient to ease that long pain – and it might not. Might be the knives that did it. Did he care? William Anders, professor of forensic pathology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was a fêted expert witness at international criminal courts. From the witness stand he had, frequently enough, given the testimony that would consign a mass murderer to a lifetime behind bars. An arms dealer was no friend of his. But …
He could nod in grudging admiration – admiration that was not freely given. The man walked well, had touched all of them, a chancer, and had manipulated them. He despised himself for being there – would not have been anyplace else for a sack of gold coins.
There was now blood on Gillot’s face, and bruises, and mud had disintegrated on the front of his shirt. Some of the blood scars were from grazes and others from skin punctures. He seemed to ride the impact of what was thrown at him, but didn’t do a boxer’s ducks and weaves. If the aim was good, he was hit; if it was poor, the stone went past him. Anders thought he went slower, that the injuries were sapping him. He passed them.
Anders looked into his face, and read nothing from it. Not defiance or remorse but deadness.
The one with the launcher, Tomislav, spat. A good, accurate aim. The spittle was on Gillot’s cheek and— He didn’t see who threw the next stone – a glancing blow on the forehead and Gillot dropped.
Down for a count?
No.
He was on his knees, then up. In the moment he was down the crowd around the guy with the launcher had surged, then swayed unsteadily and held an unmarked line around Gillot. It was as if a perimeter would not be crossed if he stayed upright. Their discipline held.
The Dealer and the Dead Page 45