He went inside. He had no business buying books in Croatian. Perhaps it was to talk that he crossed the threshold – but the buds of memory ripened again: he had been here. A man greeted him and a cigarette hung loose from the upper lip. Harvey Gillot told the man he had been at the shop in 1991, and there was a smile. English spoken. He had been here, Harvey Gillot said, at the time of Vukovar, and the man’s smile was wiped. ‘It is a dark corner. We believe there was a treason. Vukovar was sold. It was the deal that was done.’ He was sure he remembered the shop and pausing at its window, rain sluicing on to his umbrella. He climbed higher and reached, as he had then, the cathedral. A wider square and a Christ figure that was floodlit, high on a
plinth, and fountains. He had stood on a slab in front of the cathedral and killed three minutes or four, had allowed the quiet of the place to play round him. Now, that evening, he walked into the gift shop beside the doorway and a nun greeted him, would have recognised his Englishness and told him firmly she was about to close. He said that he had been there in 1991, at the time of the battle for Vukovar. She was tiny. He might have snapped her apart with two hands, broken her. ‘It could have been stopped. The West could and should have. They were betrayed, and the government did nothing. It was allowed to fall and the people were allowed to die. It was deceit.’ The nun was no more than five feet tall and waved him away with an imperious gesture. Harvey Gillot couldn’t have said why he had spoken the name of Vukovar to strangers or what he had hoped to learn.
He knew he was close and old memories returned. The flower, fruit and vegetable markets had closed and the last of the stall-holders were washing down the slabs under their pitches, but that night the rain had done it for them. He saw the café-bar in the side-street.
There was a brighter light shining from it than there had been on a November night, and tables and chairs were outside. He was drawn there, a bloody moth.
He was confused. The counter had been ripped out, replaced. Stained wood had given way to plastic and chrome. An old man had been behind the counter, guarding bottles, glasses and a display cabinet of tired sandwiches. Now two girls were there, hanging out, with bright lipstick and heavy eye-shadow, and the coffee machines were new. He went inside and asked for coffee. Did he want
latte
or
cappuccino?
If they had been born then, they would have been carried in arms. There was bright light, bright music from America, and bright-faced girls looked at him with a growing impatience.
Latte, cappuccino
or, perhaps,
mocca
from Yemen? He cited the privilege of the customer, changed his mind and asked for a beer. He was given no choice: a Budweiser bottle was opened and passed to him.
He drank it from the neck, as he had that night, and then a
neat Scotch. The man, Zoran, a schoolteacher, had hollow legs. He had worn once-decent grey slacks that had no shape and were mud-spattered, and a foul, filthy shirt, a tie, a sweater with earth smears, an overcoat and muddy shoes. He had thought then that the man had dressed to impress: he had come from the conflict zone and sought to keep up appearances. He was unshaven and his eyes were hollow, sunken, but had rare life in them.
Drank beers and chasers. Talked about the deal and shook hands on it. A plastic bag was passed, then set down on the vinyl flooring, worn almost through, by his feet. What was in the bag? ‘Everything we have.’
Enough to pay for fifty Malyutka kits? ‘It has to be enough. We have no more to give.’
How was it, where he had come from? ‘We survive, we exist … With the Malyutkas we will survive better, exist longer.’
Subject closed. He had drunk with an educated, middle-aged man, who had walked through a cornfield with a plastic bag, but had no war stories, no derring-do crap … How many times, with Solly Lieberman, had he sat across a table or perched on bar stools and listened to men telling hero-tales and thinking the world should stop and listen. What did the guy want to talk about? A Wembley win for Tottenham Hotspur in the spring, how they would do under the new owner, and … They talked about football and Harvey Gillot knew nothing about it and didn’t like to tell the man that football bored him. They had drunk some more, then gone over for a last time, slower because of the drink, the arrangements for ferrying the gear across the cornfields and into the village.
One Budweiser and a couple of whiskies, then out on to the cobbled street.
Then he had held the plastic bag. The man, Zoran, had caught his face in two hands, kissed him on each cheek and was gone. He had seen the man pause near a streetlight and turn to wave, the rain cascading off his face. Then he had lost sight of him.
It was a bright night, a good piece of the moon showing, and
the stars were up and clear. He was glad he had climbed the hill and found the bar, and he started off down the same street as he’d used that night, on which the schoolteacher had walked away. His chin shook and his cheeks were wet, as they had been then, when it had rained.
He went to find a taxi and negotiate a price.
Neither of them had spoken to him. The guy who had come into the park, found him by the statue heads and walked him to the apartment, was in the passenger seat. He had been with him when he had chosen the Jericho. He was still in the suit, his tie not loosened, not a hair out of place. The driver was the same size and dressed in the same way. They’d talked among themselves, quietly, in their own language but had not addressed Robbie.
It was a BMW, a black sports utility with tinted windows. Robbie assumed it was armour-plated, the boss-man’s wheels, his personal driver and personal muscle. They had been, for the last half-hour, on side roads, with deep potholes that had made it lurch – not that he would have slept. When they had stopped at a fuel station, his door had been opened and the muscle had pointed to a lit sign at the side of the building – the toilets. When he’d come back he’d been given a bread roll, spiced ham and a bottle of Coke. He’d thanked them, and they hadn’t responded. There had been heavy traffic, tankers, and lorries with trailers on the main highway, but the road they used now was deserted. They made good speed, and on bends the headlights speared across fields of high-growing corn, miles of it.
The last place they had been through – he’d seen the name – was Marinci. A one-drag place with a crossroads in the middle and a church, a shop. Few lights and none of them bright. They had come to a road bridge and Robbie had seen the signs in an overgrown field, a white skull and crossbones on a red base. They bumped hard going over it and he was still wondering what the sign meant when the vehicle swung hard left, didn’t follow the
pointer to Bogdanovci. There was a new nameplate but it came too fast for him. He thought it was near to the end of the journey.
The road they went on was narrower. Further to his left, and sometimes picked up in the lights, there was a high tree-line, as there had been at the bridge, and the surface was poorer. There was a dull glow of lights ahead.
They came into the village. If he leaned forward he could see the satnav screen built into the front panels. Now the cursor closed on the red arrow that would be ‘end of the road’, the destination. A man had stepped forward from the shadows and was caught in the headlights. He was supported by a crutch and his right trouser leg was folded short at the knee. A woman followed him and Robbie saw a face with no emotion. Her arms were folded across her chest. The driver braked.
Words were spoken. Robbie Cairns couldn’t understand them. His door was opened.
He stepped out, ground his fingernails into his palms. Did that to regain his concentration. Who am I, what am I? He was Robbie Cairns from Rotherhithe. He was top man. He had taken a contract, had been head-hunted – was big, important. ‘This it, then?’ he said. ‘This where we’re going?’
He took a couple of paces forward. The man on the crutch didn’t move towards him and the woman kept her arms tight across her chest. He realised that the driver had kept the engine ticking over, and now the muscle slammed the door at the back, gave a sharp wave towards the darkness, then was back in his own seat and closing his door. The BMW did a three-pointer, backed on to the grass in front of a house and spun. Its lights were in Robbie’s face, and he blinked. Then all he saw were the tail-lights going away – fast.
‘For fuck’s sake, don’t you wait?’ he shouted after them. ‘Don’t you take me back? Where the fuck am I?’
The brightness out of his eyes, Robbie Cairns saw the faces of those who’d waited for him. They were on a veranda, with a dulled interior behind them. Then he saw the chrome of the coffee machines at the back and the poster adverts for Coke and
Fanta. There were metal tables and lightweight chairs, all taken. Eyes peered at him. Where it had started? Did they own the contract? Had they hired him? Better clarity on the faces, and most were men’s but a few were women’s. Only one was young and smooth-skinned. Robbie held tight to the Charlton Athletic bag, and in it was the tool of his trade: not a fucking hammer or a plumber’s wrench or a spirit level or pliers or a spanner, but a Jericho handgun. He was in the back end of nowhere.
‘Right. So what happens?’ he called, defiant. ‘What happens now that I’m here?’
He heard the scrape of the chairs, then the hissed breathing of those with smokers’ chests. There was the flash of a match as a cigarette was lit and the faces seemed old, worn and weathered. They made a circle about him. They moved, he moved.
The young one said, ‘They think you are shit. They have been told they wasted money in buying you. They believe, now that Gillot is coming, they could do the job for which they paid you. They say that this is when they see whether you are shit or whether you will earn their money. They are veterans of war. The money paid to you was from loans advanced against disability pensions. They are poor people. If you fail again they will kill you and they will kill Gillot, and they will bury the two of you together. It is not far that we have to walk.’
He was alone. The young one had slipped away from his side and seemed, seamlessly, to rejoin the cordon ring around Robbie. They had only the moon’s light to guide them. They left the village and went by a high wall. There was a gate in it and above the gate, in silhouette, a cross. He assumed it to be a cemetery. Would they bury him there or in the fucking fields that closed in on them, big crops rising to above their heads? They walked, men, women and Robbie Cairns, in the watery light, along a path that led through the cornfields and, far ahead, an owl screamed.
She wrote her message, finished it, revised it, was satisfied and read it back for a last time.
| To: | Dermot, Team Leader Alpha. |
| From: | Penny Laing. |
| Location: | Vukovar, Croatia. |
| Subject: | Harvey Gillot. |
Message: I find no evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of Harvey Gillot, arms dealer, in connection with alleged sale of weapons to a village community near Vukovar. The events of 1991 remain confused and few opinions can be considered objective; also the passage of time has dulled memories. The only individuals other than Gillot who were party to a deal – if, indeed, there was one – were killed that autumn and neither left a written record. I recommend that I observe matters here for the next twenty-four hours, in accordance with Gold Group requirements, then pull out and return to London. Regards etc.
She pressed
Send.
The bar beckoned. She’d noted that refugees from HMRC turned to alcohol when a career went turnip, the same when a police officer realised his job might be crap, and she had seen it with a diplomat at the embassy in Kinshasa who had lost faith in finding anything worth nailing a flag to.
The thought of hunting down Harvey Gillot, turning up at his door at dawn and the guys having the battering ram to break it down, a dog barking, a woman screaming and the power of stripping away dignity, had thrilled her. The experience of lying under a teenage boy, or on him, letting his tongue and fingers roam free, had been as brilliant as anything she had known. They were gone. Sod it. Nothing special about her, not blessed, and drink beckoned.
She snapped off the laptop and let it power down, touched her hair, applied a light coat of lipstick, switched off the light, locked the door and went down the hotel’s stairs. Penny Laing heard, ‘I fancy I see another recruit. This rate, if we’re to stay exclusive, we’ll need to blackball a few …’
*
He saw her look at him, wouldn’t have known who she was, had not the hippie-style girl, little Miss Megs, murmured the name and then a limited biographical sketch –
God, her, from Revenue and Customs, Alpha team and hunting bloody Gillot. Penny Laing. Be standing room only to watch the bastard show himself …
Benjie grinned. He ruled. He had before they’d adjourned to eat, when he had taken the central chair at the long table in the dining room, Bill Anders on one side of him and the truculently amusing Steyn on the other. Back in the bar, he still held his audience, enjoyed himself and kept the staff busy. Arbuthnot thought her a woman in need of humouring – she looked as though she had just walked into a bloody great brick wall.
‘Don’t think we’re going to have room for many more. I understand you’re Miss Laing. Please, join us. Come along, and I’ll take your application for membership.’
He would have appeared – he knew it and rejoiced – a buffoon who had drunk too much, but he had extracted from each of them everything concerning their presence at the ground-floor bar of the Lav Hotel in Vukovar, which was in the far northwest of eastern Slavonia. A glass was brought for her, local wine was poured – she wasn’t offered a choice and didn’t seem to resent it. He thought she looked ready to do damage to the bottle and to anyone who interrupted, contradicted, challenged her.
Did she know everybody? She shrugged.
Did she know Miss Megs Behan, campaigner extraordinary against the evils of the arms trade and representing Planet Protection? Did she know Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe of the Metropolitan Police, a firearms officer without a weapon and an investigator without authority? Did she know Professor William Anders, forensic pathologist from California, and did she know Dr Daniel Steyn, general practitioner, dabbler in psychology and resident in this town? And himself? ‘I’m Benjie Arbuthnot, long put out to grass. I just happened to be passing through these parts and was able to give a lift in a hire car to … Cheers, Miss Laing.’