Within a few metres of the edge the smell starts, unmistakably a decomposing animal corpse. High, strong and sweet, it has a quality about it I can only think to describe as alive. It seethes, enters your nostrils like a swarm of tiny insects. The rain had cleared the air and now the heat of the sun releases the stink, along with the smell of earth and rotting leaves and something else, wet ash.
Autumn rains have left the ground soft. The earth gives way beneath my boots. There are tyre tracks. Someone has been up here, hunting from the back of a pick-up truck, dazzling the deer with the headlights and then chasing them down, possibly to their deaths over the edge. On the grassy slope which borders the steep edge of the ravine a couple of rocks have come loose and rolled away, leaving streaks of earth. A crow swoops and another: defending their find from me, this intruder. I expect to see a buck with a broken neck, but there is nothing. In the place where the ravine shelves less steeply some of the topsoil has washed away. I climb down, it’s easy enough and Kos outpaces me. Her fur is raised and her nose is down, suddenly she’s very interested, zig-zagging, sniffing the ground. Whatever is there has been buried and the foxes have got to it, and now the rain has done the rest. Kos barks. She barks and bounces the way she does when she has found something and wants my attention. I know because of the pitch of her bark, which is both a call and a warning: she has found something she either cannot handle alone, like a large boar, or else cannot understand.
A human body. Wearing a blue wool sweater, a polo-neck stained with what at first looks like earth or blood, but is actually scorch marks. I squat down to take a closer look, to check the unbelievable truth of what I am seeing. The face has been burned away, the nose is gone, the nostrils are dark holes, the lips are no more, the gums shrivelled and the teeth are bared like an animal’s and black in places. Reddish, singed hair, like doll’s hair. Fingers curl around a handful of soil. Candle-coloured fingers. A woman sprawled and stiff on her back, legs open, knees bent.
Everything else disappears.
I stand up. My heart is beating wildly, the blood rushes to my head. I try to call Kos but my throat has closed and my mouth is dry, I can hardly make a sound, much less whistle. I step forward and yank her collar. I look around, but there is nobody watching us except the crows. For a moment I feel dizzy, the periphery of my vision is closing in black. I have stopped breathing and when I begin again I breathe hard, inhaling the awful smell deep into my lungs. The thoughts come fast, as I try to rationalise what I am seeing. I even think that perhaps this is some kind of overflow from the cemetery, where at one time the burials had become too many. Rogue gravediggers, perhaps, disposing of bodies they are paid to bury. But I know better, I know evil when I see it, the smell of it.
I was right about the foxes. There are more bodies, buried less than a metre down and they have been unearthed by animals and the elements. A short distance away an exposed shin, partly eaten, I can see the teeth marks, the torn flesh and gnawed bone. There is clothing: shredded and burned. I pick up a stick and use it to turn over pieces of a garment: denim, a jacket perhaps. It too is partly burned.
The bodies haven’t been here for very long. My stomach bucks and the bile rises. I bend over and retch, drily save for a string of yellow. I have a terrible thirst. I pull the collar of my shirt across my mouth and poke in the earth with the stick, the wet leaves and ash with the stick. A twisted leg. The heel of a trainer. A yellowed hand, bent sharply at the wrist. Beneath the fingernails there is dirt. Dark unravelled entrails, strewn about by the birds, I suppose, caught in the low branches of a bush. The belly itself is a dark, gleaming hollow and the flies, chased away by the rain, are returning in their scores, bluebottles buzzing loud as bees. Every few seconds I have to stand to breathe, there’s a light wind that comes from the west. I turn my face into it until I can bring myself to look again. I have a duty. I count. There are at least five people, though there could be more.
A crow swoops down and rises back to the branch with a coil of intestine in its beak. The sudden movement makes me start and straighten. I lose my grip on my rifle and it lands on the corpse with the open belly. As I reach for it my hand touches the cold flesh and I snatch it back, I fight the urge to flee. I wonder again if I am alone here, whether I am being watched by whoever did this. I stand there, listening, holding my breath, but there is no sound. I am alone, standing on the edge of a ravine: the landscape I know so well is suddenly a new danger. Now the silence is terrifying. I turn and run. Once away from the ravine, under the cover of the trees, I stop. Up in the trees the other crows start to squabble over the piece of entrail. I try to think what all of this means. Of one thing I am certain: these are not the men I killed and threw into the swimming hole. Those men, the soldiers, are long gone. I have dealt with death. I dealt with the deaths of those men, disposed of their bodies. But these deaths are different. These are different people. These are people I know. One of them, the one with red hair, is a woman.
I think I know who she is: the baker’s wife, mother of the Mongol daughter. Perhaps the Mongol is buried there, too, the whole family. I don’t know.
I don’t know.
19
Things in Gost had begun to get to some people.
Grace, the first to see the damage, was red-eyed with crying. Laura stood with her hand over her mouth and her arm around her daughter. Matthew was sitting at the outside table, sleep-slow, his mind fractionally behind his body. He’d been woken up by Grace’s shouts.
Paint all over the mosaic: white gloss paint. Loops of it cover the rising bird, sliding immensely slowly downwards. Clots of paint lie under the water on the mosaic of fish and weeds. A trail of white between the wall and the fountain. No sign of the can. Whoever had done this had brought the paint with them, because it wasn’t mine. The gloss paint I’d been using was locked away in the outbuilding and anyway was blue. It must have happened the night before or very early in the morning, while they were all asleep. Not one of the family heard a thing.
‘How could this happen?’ asked Matthew.
‘You wouldn’t have woken up anyway,’ said Grace. ‘Maybe none of us would.’
‘I mean there’s no one else around here. They’d have had to come in a car or else it’s a very long walk.’
‘Probably they parked somewhere and walked the rest of the way,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘That would figure.’
‘But why?’ asked Grace. She rubbed an eye leaving a streak of white across her cheek. Paint on her face and hands.
‘They’re louts. Too many young men who don’t want to work and then don’t like it when other people have some money,’ I said quickly.
‘We’re going to have to go to the police,’ said Laura. ‘I mean, this is awful.’
I doubted, I said, they’d be moved to mount much of an investigation, though I could be wrong. It would be very interesting to see what they would do, certainly nothing that they thought would be bad for tourism. It was an idea in which people had never lost faith: the hordes of tourists who would one day return to fish and cycle and hike in the hills, transform the grey fate of towns like Gost. On the other hand they would want Laura to feel they were taking her seriously. They would make a show of investigating, but they had no interest in actually finding the culprit.
‘How do you get this stuff off?’ asked Grace.
‘We’ll do it. Easier before it dries too much.’ I touched the paint lightly with my forefinger. The skin was still quite thin and the paint was wet beneath, meaning it hadn’t been thrown all that long ago. If I’d gone up into the hills that morning, as I so often did, I even might have caught them in the act. Because so many of the tiles were glazed the paint wouldn’t be too hard to get off. On the whitewashed surface of the wall, white on white, it barely mattered.
‘What about the police? They’ll want to see it,’ said Laura.
&nbs
p; I said most likely a photograph would do and so Grace went to fetch her camera.
A few hours later you could hardly tell it had happened. I fetched some soft rags from my house and we wiped away the worst of the mess. On the glass and glazed tiles the paint hadn’t taken. Worst affected were the cream-coloured tiles that made up the background, which were some kind of soft stone. For those we had to use stripper, trying not to do too much damage to the surface. I only had a third of a can remaining and so I left Grace at work while I headed into town to pick some up.
In town I went to the hardware shop (the one which is not part-owned by Fabjan, of course) and on my way back I caught sight of Krešimir. This time I made sure he didn’t see me: the last thing I needed was a repeat of the other day when he’d lost his temper with me at the Zodijak. Most probably he was going home for lunch. He was dressed for the office in a jacket and trousers, a pair of loafers. I watched him for a while, more or less to enjoy the sight of him. I wondered how he was feeling. The talk and the rumours slid through every street and house in Gost and, whenever the blue house was mentioned, so was Krešimir’s name. Krešimir Pavić. People would fall silent at his approach and drop their gaze, begin to talk again once he was (almost) out of earshot. They’d be enjoying it. Of all of this I was certain. He walked like he was in a bit of a hurry, with his shoulders square and his chin out. To look at him you’d think everything was fine. But I know Krešimir like nobody else. He hates to be shown up, he hates it. So he puts on a bit of bluff, meaning the more confident he looks the worse it is. At the door of the house he stopped and searched for his keys, but not finding them he rapped on the door. I expected to see his wife, but when the door opened there was Vinka, her black hair pulled back in the style she’d worn all the time I’d known her; from where I stood I could see the sharp divide of colour at the roots. Her face was skeletal, skin like uncooked fish. She was without lipstick but her eyebrows were crayoned sloppily and comically high on her forehead. Unsteady on her feet, she almost fell out of the door as Krešimir shouldered past her and would have, but for the fact she managed to catch the doorframe. Unseen, I watched as she turned to follow Krešimir, patting her hair like a faded belle and closing the door behind them.
I fried sausages and onions for my supper and peeled and boiled some potatoes. It occurred to me I would miss Laura and the family when they went. In four weeks I’d grown used to having them around. That moment I decided to call my mother and Danica. My mother had finally moved into her own flat, the years on the waiting list had paid off. All the same it was she who picked up the phone when I telephoned Danica and Luka’s place. Over the sound of the television in the background she began to complain. ‘The bedroom’s damp. It makes my legs hurt.’
‘Won’t the social housing people come to fix it?’
‘They say they will, but they make me wait. If you were here you could do it for me.’
‘I could, but then so can Luka.’
Silence. Then, ‘I don’t like to ask. He’s busy.’
I said, ‘Let me talk to him for you.’
‘Thank you,’ said my mother, not really satisfied. She’d never stopped asking when I was coming. To stop her doing so again I asked to speak to Danica. Danica came to the phone. I heard her telling my mother she’d take it in the bedroom.
‘She’s watching her television programmes. Those Brazilian soaps.’
‘How is she?’
‘Getting older, she misses you.’
I didn’t reply and when Danica didn’t say anything either, I said, ‘She says there’s damp in the bedroom of her new flat.’
‘I know she does, but the flat is fine. I think she’s lonely there on her own.’ She paused. ‘I was going to call you. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’
‘Well here I am.’
‘Luka and me, we’ve been accepted to go to New Zealand.’
The news winded me. Danica told me the application process had taken a year, but they had almost reached the end now. All they were waiting for was the official letter.
‘When will you go?’
‘Before Christmas.’
‘And Mother?’
‘She wants to come with us. She’s a dependant, so she’s allowed so long as we take care of her. A lot of families have moved to Auckland. She’ll probably even know some people.’
I was silent. Down the line I could hear Danica breathing and, faintly, the sound of the television in the other room. Then she sighed. ‘Life goes on, Duro.’
After the phone call I ate the food I’d cooked and tidied up the house. I found the strip of braided thread Grace had given me the day I killed Kos. I put it in a drawer where I saw the green and blue tiles I’d brought from the blue house. I thought about the attack on the mosaic. For all that I disliked Krešimir it would be too easy to blame him. Krešimir’s methods are far more underhand. He likes anonymous letters and poisonous words. Though I was not at all tired, for some reason I remained ravenously hungry even after I’d eaten. I fried more sausages and drank several glasses of wine. I tried to read the newspaper, but I wasn’t really in the mood, I was restless. I turned on the television and let the pictures and canned laughter blot out my thoughts. I ate the sausages with my fingers straight from the pan, sitting in front of the television. I flicked channels. A re-run of ’Allo ’Allo, which had been one of the most popular television programmes in the country twenty years ago. I watched it for a while and even laughed, helped by the wine. Also now for the first time I could understand the joke of Officer Crabtree’s accent. ‘Good moaning,’ he says to René. ‘Good moaning.’ I laughed, but the joke quickly wore off. I switched channels, pressing the remote control over and over, until the television stopped responding. I still didn’t feel the least bit tired but I could think of nothing I wanted to do, so I prepared to go upstairs to bed and a night of sleeplessness.
Before I went I opened the door and stepped outside. The night was warm, the air that slipped past me into the room brought with it the scent of the night, clean and fragrant. A light wind was blowing, dry from the desert. Down on the coast it carried a red dust that coated your skin, and sucked the moisture from everything, even the fruit on the trees. The last strip of light lay across the horizon. Whirr, whirr. Pat, pat, pat. Whirr. The nightjar. I closed the door and slid the bolts.
I climbed the stairs, washed and got into bed, between clean sheets that smelt of nothing. I lay for a while staring at the ceiling and then, though I hadn’t thought I would, I went to sleep after all, a half-sleep, patterned with dreams. I dreamt I was eating a fine meal, soup and meat, surrounded by people who knew me. Even though it was a dream I could taste the food, even the texture of the meat. The dream switched. I was in the woods following a great boar. The boar was unafraid of me, as I was of it. He walked ahead and I walked behind at exactly the same pace. I wasn’t carrying a gun, just walking through the plantation in the same direction. Zeka started to bark and I shushed him, but he disobeyed me and went on and on. And then I heard the sound of a girl calling me . . .
I surfaced like a man who has nearly drowned. Outside Zeka was barking. My chest heaved and my heart was beating hard, my neck was damp with sweat. I lay still and listened. A banging on the door. A voice calling my name. Grace. I pulled on a pair of jeans, ran down the stairs and opened the door. Grace’s face was round and pale in the darkness, her eyes wide with fright. She was wearing nothing but a nightdress. She said, ‘Oh Duro, you have to come. There’s a man in the house.’
‘A man? Who is he?’
‘I don’t know who. He said he wanted to talk to Mum, and I was frightened so I called her. Now he’s got her and won’t go. I think he’s drunk and he seems very angry about something, but she doesn’t know what he’s on about.’
‘How did he get in?’
‘The door wasn’t locked.’
&
nbsp; I went to the back door and picked up a shotgun. ‘Stay here,’ I ordered Grace. I was without shirt or shoes, the gravel sharp beneath my bare soles. In less than a minute I reached the blue house. I ignored the front door and skirted round to the back; barefoot and on the grass now I made no sound. Inside, a single light from a table lamp and Laura, sitting on the sofa. She was wearing a robe; the family had evidently been in bed when the intruder arrived. She was sitting up very straight on the sofa, as if to attention, expressionless, her hand at her throat like she would strangle herself. I couldn’t see any sign of a man, but Laura’s posture was enough to tell me of the threat in the room. Whoever was with her was hidden by the angle of the wall. I listened: the rumble of a male voice. Krešimir?
The Hired Man Page 25