THE HEART OF DANGER (18 page)

the inner square, but he had made his hiding place in a shadowed corner

of the corridor where the daylight could not reach him.

Ulrike dropped down, squatted beside the old refugee. He stank.

She

put her arms around his shoulder. He shook with his tears. It was

a

worn, time-abused face, and the suffering lines ploughed through the

white stubble of his cheeks, and the tears ran across the lines and

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dribbled in the stubble. She did not know him, assumed he would have

come the day before on the bus.

She did not know him, and so she did not know his story, but she could

anticipate it, because she had heard the story too often. When she

sat

in her office with a delegation from the Swedish Red Cross or the

Austrian Red Cross or the German Red Cross, when she blinked into

the

lights behind the television cameras of RAI or ZDF or the BBC, when

she

wrote her letters home she always said it was worst for the old men

who

were brought out from behind the lines. He cried. She took his

hands,

frail and thin and gnarled from work in the fields, and she felt the

bones hard in her fingers. She thought, from his hands, that he had

worked all of his life in fields, that he would have gone into the

woods with a bow saw in the autumn for the winter's fuel, that he

would

have struggled down a ladder each morning of each winter with the

fodder for his few cattle, that he would have been a man of pride.

She

held tight to his hands, tried to no give the old man strength. His

home, his father's home, would have been flattened by an explosive

charge. His barn would have been burned. His cattle would have been

stolen, and his pigs. He might know that his son, the favourite,

had

been killed. It was worst for the old men who had lost everything,

and

hope. The children always searched for Ulrike in the Transit Centre,

and they had discovered her now. The children stood in the corridor

and they watched her as she squatted beside the old man who cried.

She

could not begin to say how the children would be affected by the sight

of their flattened homes and their burning barns and their family's

livestock being driven away, and by the fighting. She could see it

in

the old man, feel the wet of his tears on her face.

She understood the dialect of the village in Prijedor Municipality.

His

voice was a croak of anguish. It hurt her that the children watched.

The children should not have seen an old man who had lost hope,

forsaken pride.

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"Our neighbours, our friends, who we worked with. How could they

do it

to us? Our neighbours, our friends, all of our lives, their lives,

how

could they destroy us? Is there no punishment for what they have

done

.. . ?"

When she had found him she had been going from a top-floor sleeping

room, where she believed, maybe, that marijuana was smoked, down to

the

kitchens. She was behind her schedule. She could not sit any longer

with the old man and hold his hand while he cried. She could offer

him

sedation tablets. Very good, magnificent, brilliant, a bottle of

sedation tablets. Pride, no. Respect, no. Sedation tablets, of

course.

'.. Is there no one who will punish them?"

She could not answer. She took his name. The chief guards of the

camps of the Neuengamme Ring had been punished, with the noose, for

what they had done. The chief guards had been the defeated, the

victors were never punished. She took his name so that she could

leave

a message at the dispensary, on her way down to the kitchens, for

sedation tablets for the old man. Later, the young American would

be

at the Transit Centre. Perhaps the quiet and earnest young man from

Alaska would find time to talk to the old man of punishment. She

would

push him towards in the American, therapy to go with sedation. She

kissed his forehead. She patted the arm of his overcoat that smelled

of his body and his animals' bodies.

He walked with Jovic, following.

Jane would have liked the city. He tried to turn again in his mind

each word that the Professor had told him, but Jane usurped. As if

she

were with him, as if she tugged him back to look into the bright shop

fronts, as if she pulled him towards the cafes in the sunshine, as

if

she demanded of him that he should buy her flowers to hold as they

meandered in the squares and along the ochre-walled streets. Jane

would not have listened to the words, the evidence, of the Professor

100

but she would have danced to the band with Jovic and Jovic's friends.

Loving Jane for her prettiness, loathing her because now she found

him

boring, slow, played out .. . Jane coming down to the tied cottage

to

meet his parents .. . Jane wearing a brief skirt and a gossamer blouse

.. . Jane not helping his mother with the dishes in the sink after

the

tense lunch, because she had spent an hour on her nails .. . Jane

not

walking with her father in the fields after lunch because it was

raining ... He hadn't warned her, hadn't told her, it wasn't her

fault.

Jane had reckoned them dirty, they had reckoned her tacky. Two camps

at the wedding .. .

All his own bloody fault.

"Where are we going?"

"You wanted to see people who were in Rosenovici, did you not?"

The cable fault between sound and camera delayed Marty.

He worked methodically in the freight container to locate the fault,

step by step, then repair it.

He could not do the work outside, he needed the desk surface, and

the

sweat ran on his body and across his fingers.

The freight container, he reckoned, had been parked as far across

the

parade square of the Ilica barracks from the administration block

as

was possible. From the open door of his freight container he could

see

across the parade square, past the drilling Swedish troops, past the

bank of big satellite dishes, to the administration block. He was

treated as if he had the plague, as if those in contact with him,

up

alongside him, risked contamination. He had been told to his face

on

his first day that the preparation of prosecutions was an

'irrelevance'. It had been given him straight in the first week,

"All

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you achieve, winding people up in your naivete, is to further reduce

UNPROFOR's credibility." What they said, those who thought he had

the

plague, was, "Of course there can never be trials, because the biggest criminals are those we need to sort out the mess', and they said it

often. Those who thought he had contamination spat it at him, "What you're doing, Jones, it's just a cosmetic gesture to massage a few

bruised consciences away across the borders." Alone in his

converted

freight container, hot as a cook in a kitchen, he ignored what they

said in the big offices of the administration block. He could cope

..

. He was reared in Anchorage. He knew what it was to be thrown down,

have the optimism belted out of him. Anchorage was 'false springs'

when the depression of the snow hanging on until late April had to

be

hacked. Anchorage was the collapse of oil prices and the good men,

his

father's friends, heaved out of work. Anchorage was where they bred

the philosophy of goddamn-minded obstinacy, pig stubbornness. And,

to

back his obstinacy, he had a degree in International Law from the

University of Alaska, and a PhD from the University of California,

Santa Barbara. His mind, methodical when repairing the sound cable

from the camera, was well suited to the work of gathering evidence.

What they thought of him in the administration block caused no loss

of

sleep. It never had mattered to him, an Anchorage boy, what the men

in

suits thought. They were from his past, the men who came in by

helicopter, the men who rode in the limousines to their oil company

offices, the men who went out in the private jets when they had sorted

the balance sheets and screwed up a few lives, like they'd screwed

up

his father's life. Marty Jones hated money and privilege and

arrogance, and the hate was deep from his childhood. He reckoned,

had

reckoned from the first day he showed up on campus, that the due

process of law was the one, the only, weapon that could cut down the

money, privilege, arrogance of men in suits. The hate had translated

to the power and the cruelty of the butchers. The hate made him a

good

investigator.

He would not take her anything, too demonstrative, not his way, but

he

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looked forward to driving down the highway to Karlovac, and meeting

the

woman who administered the Transit Centre. He thought the German

woman

in the Transit Centre to be the finest human being he knew .. . But

he

would not tell her, did not know how to express that feeling.

Marty wiped the sweat again from his forehead and there was mist on

the

heavy lenses of his spectacles. The camera worked, the audio level

light fluttered .. . But there was no smile of achievement; Marty

seldom risked a smile.

"She called herself Dorrie. I would not forget her .. ."

Jovic said that it had been the camp for officer cadets.

Still taciturn, the artist had explained nothing. Penn did not ask,

he

assumed that Jovic had gone back to the ministry office, and perhaps

he

had apologized for Penn's rudeness, and maybe he had made a joke about

Penn's ignorance, and it could have been that he had just said that

the

Englishman was a crap fool.

Jovic translated, flat, no emotion nor expression.

"Yes, I remember her. She had come to Rosenovici about one month

before the attack from the Partizans. I remember her .. ."

They had taken the tram to the camp for officer cadets. Out to the

west of the city, in what would have been the quarter for skilled

industry, but drab and smoke-grimed. The officer cadets had been

well

provided for. Jovic went forward and talked quickly to the guards.

There was an unmarked van parked up beside the small guardhouse and

the

guards had come from the van where they had been talking to the driver.

Looking over the barrier blocking the entrance into the camp, Penn

had

seen the driver of the van. The face of the van driver was rounder,

fuller, than what Penn had learned to see around him, and there was

a

tattoo at the neck of the van driver, couldn't place the tattoo, and

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the table in the guardhouse was stacked with cartons of Marlboro

cigarettes. The guards at the barrier had wanted Jovic gone. Fast

instructions. Penn guessed the cigarettes were black market, and

knew

it was not his business.

"The front line was already north of our village. It was not possible to go by road. We were isolated in Rosenovici. The fighting was

all

around our village and at night we could hear the guns, and in the

days

we could see the tanks of the Partizans moving forward on the main

road, but the war had not yet come to Rosenovici. We felt some safety

because we had always had good relations with the Serb people in

Salika. We put our trust in those good relations. They were our

friends, they were our neighbours, they were our work colleagues.

We

felt that they would speak up for us. We were no military threat

to

the Serb people in Salika, there were very few guns in our village,

we

could have done nothing to intervene in the war .. ." Her name was Maria. She shared a room with her sister that would have been small

for the occupancy of an officer cadet. She said her sister was in

the

city that day, searching for work. She said that she had been

secretary to the export manager of a furniture factory in Glina. She

said that she was divorced. The room was spotlessly clean. Penn

thought she had little to do, a refugee, but clean the room. As he

listened, his eyes roved over the room, and he saw there were no

ornaments, nothing of the past of a woman he estimated to be in her

mid-forties, no bric-a-brac, nothing to sustain memories. "She came with a boy from Australia. She came because he returned to his home.

When the war started there were many boys who came back to their

country. I suppose they wanted to help, wanted to fight. They were not soldiers, this boy was not a fighter. We believed we would be

safe, and when we found that we were not safe, then all the roads

to

the north were blocked. It was a Tuesday night when the artillery

guns

and the tank guns were turned on Rosenovici. Some people tried to