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 bluff 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.
Anders joined his friend, Steyn, and the detective, and the three of them were behind him.
‘Not a pretty sight, is it? A vigilante mob is damn near as ugly as it comes. You kind of forget, maybe too easily, what bred the blood lust. He walks well.’
There was no pain. Neither were there thoughts of home and green fields, warm beer and safety. He was past pain. He didn’t think of his wife and daughter, or his dog. He didn’t think of the gulls that wheeled above the lighthouse at the tip of the island or the kestrels that hovered over the scrub. There was numbness in his body and his mind. He didn’t think of friends in the trade, the men he had worked with, those he had settled deals with, or the pilots who had shipped his cargoes, the freighter skippers who had ferried his containers. He did think of old Solly Lieberman.
What they threw that hit him buffeted but there was no pain.
He could just about manufacture a picture of Solly Lieberman, mentor, not in the decrepit office, in the day heat of the Peshawar bazaar, the air-conditioned cool of the bar or in any bloody place they had been together. He saw Solly Lieberman, veteran of the Normandy landings, survivor of the black-market gang feuds in occupied Germany, the guy who had walked away from the risk of covert assassination, condemned for selling firepower to the Arabs or weaponry to the Jews. He saw Solly Lieberman – maybe already had his pants down when the goddamn bear had had him. He didn’t think he would have felt pain, just the numbness.
What an idiot place to die, the one Solly Lieberman had chosen: the tundra forests. What an idiot place to go to: a cornfield path in east Slavonia.
He was on his feet and went forward. He held the plastic bag tightly – fucked if he would back off, and fucked if he’d be anything other than stubborn pig-stupid. He clung to the belief that Benjie Arbuthnot had planted in him, that this was the only way he might live.
He was hit more often, but he didn’t go down again. There was sweat in his eyes and maybe blood. It was hard to see. The launcher was now behind him, gone. New voices were close, a cacophony, deafening, and he was trapped inside the avenue made by the corn. A man held a sniper rifle, and the woman was beside him. The good old Dragunov – could do a good price on a hundred SVD Dragunov 7.62mm sniper rifles and a better price if a PSO-1 telescopic sight was included with each weapon, 6deg. field of vision and integral rangefinder. Good kit and 50 per cent hit chance at 800 metres. He could have rustled up a warehouse full from Bulgaria, Romania or … Who fucking cared?