The Hit List (40 page)

The woman looked at him, looked down at the briefcase in his hand. 'You had better come in.'

Slater followed her into the pastel-coloured lounge and she indicated an armchair covered in a crocheted shawl. In the other chair an obscenely large cat snored on a newspaper.

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Pea?' she asked him severely. ?lease.'

ie sat down and she disappeared through a curtain Elastic strips into the kitchen. Opposite him, net framed a blue-brown expanse of wind?ed sea. On the horizon he could make out the �e form of a container ship. It barely seemed to be

ig

),' said Aleksandra Marcovic, placing a loaded tray ismall dining table. 'You know Branca.'

lack of curiosity about my name, thought It's almost as if she knows that she would never Id the truth, so she's not going to bother asking. I'know Branca,' he nodded, 'and she asked me to

and show you some pictures.' er eyes narrowed. 'What pictures?' >an I show you? And then ask you to tell me who aple in them are?'

shrugged. 'If that's what Branca suggested, then that's OK.'

ter was longing to ask her how she knew Branca eld back, knowing that he would never be able to how he knew her himself. Was this woman ps connected to the RDB in some way? : took the laptop out of his briefcase and carried it < to the table. The machine, no larger or heavier i/a London A to Z, had been assigned to him for t-writing and communications purposes, and had dally protected hard disk. Powering it up, he the copy of the Fanon-Khayat CD into the

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drive. The dark blue screen lit up with the words renaissance 1945 and a password dialogue box, into which Slater typed iserlohn. The tide page dissolved, to be replaced with a half-dozen tiny thumbnail phbtographs. ,

'Sugar and milk?' asked Aleksandra Marcovic.

Thanks.'

'A biscuit?'

'Please.'

With these rituals observed, she seated herself at the chair next to him, and took a pair of plastic-framed spectacles from a case. Glancing at her, he could see curiosity on the broad features. Positioning the cursor over the4irst thumbnail, he clicked.

A black and white image resolved itself.

Next to him, Marcovic froze. 'Oh my God,' he heard her whisper. 'Oh my God, no.'

On the screen was a portrait of a young, fair-haired man in his early twenties, standing smartly to attention and holding a card marked 'wegner, Dietnch, hauptmann'. A smudged date-stamp read 28 November 1945. Despite his military stance and fixed gaze, the young man was not in uniform, but wearing a tightly buttoned jacket of tweed or wool. He was" unshaven. One cheek appeared to be badly bruised. Next to Slater, Marcovic was gasping in disbelief. Her hand was across her mouth and she was shaking her head as if in shocked denial of the image before her. For several minutes she said nothing, but simply stared at the laptop screen.

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|tYou know this man?' asked Slater eventually, :ious as he spoke of the inadequacy of the stion.

last saw that face nearly sixty years ago,' said covic, her chest rising and falling as she caught her ith. 'But I've seen it every night and every day since i. We called him Guja, which means the Snake.' I turned to him urgently. 'Why are you showing me

Is he dead?'

(don't know anything about him,' said Slater. 'He to be in some kind of custody, though, in this re. Either British or American from the English stamp. Was that his name, Dietrich Wegner?' fe never knew his name. To us he was just Guja.' id it was during the German occupation of ia, that you . . . knew this man?' lie shook her head, as if to re-establish some ^tion with the present. 'First, show me the other �.'

i broad desk, a conference room with pillars, an itjawed man in a grey suit surrounded by black led SS officers. Hauptmann Dietrich Wegner cognisable on the outskirts of the group, smiling ay.

andsome young man, brown-haired, on a white Beneath his hands, folded on the pommel of his ft, a coiled whip and a sub-machine gun. At his Holding the horse's bridle and smiling, Wegner i Both men's uniforms impeccable. : balcony of a stone-built house. Several men and

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women in hiking clothes drinking and smoking cigarettes. A uniformed man lifting black bread to his mouth. Wegner, wearing a patterned sweater, pointing down to the valley below.

A badly blurred image. A man in a black apron hurrying past a low shed, carrying a knife and apparently wearing some kind of necklace. To one side of him, preoccupied, Wegner.

Four men standing beneath leafless trees by a river, talking. Snow falling. One of the men wearing the robes of a monk. Another recognisable as Wegner.

As each image appeared, something in Aleksandra Marcovic seemed to die. She started mumbling to herself in Serbo-Croat, shaking her head, endlessly repeating the same few phrases. Finally she stood up and walked several times around the small room. She was very pale.

'Where did you get these pictures?' she asked him. 'From Branca?'

Slater nodded.

'It's unbelievable,' she said. 'It's just unbelievable. After so long to see the faces of these men . . .'

Slater was silent. He reached for his tea, which had cooled and was too sweet. He crunched a biscuit between his teeth.

Aleksandra Markovic closed her eyes. Reached into the past.

'I was born in a small town - not much more than a village, really - called Dusovac, on the Tophca River j in Croatia. My parents were Serbian, and had a small

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I had two sisters, Milla and Drina. 'In the spring of 1941, when the Germans partitioned agoslavia and set up the Independent State of Croatia fthe ISC - I was seven. One morning that summer i troops came in a lorry and took away my father. ; lorry was full of other men from the area - we knew of them - and they waved to me and my sisters as lorry drove away. At midday, we heard later, ten full of men had arrived in the market place in a. They were unloaded, lined up against a wall, and pounds ine-gunned. Afterwards an announcement was that they had been executed in reprisal for a patrol which had been ambushed by partisans, rule was that for every German wounded, fifty avian men would be shot, and for every German , a hundred would be shot.

i fact, most of those executed that day were Serbs, augh there were Croatians who resisted, there many who were desperate to collaborate, and j|ed their loyalty to the Third Reich by turning the Serbs who lived among them. They burnt ^looted our schools and churches, banned our lie script, and forced us to wear patches saying fir we were. And that was just the beginning of it - arly days.

tte man set up by the Nazis as the head of the ISC lent was one of the most evil, degenerate es who ever lived -- a monster called Ante c. If you go to the second picture - there -- that's rath the SS officers.

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'Pavelic styled himself the Poglavnik, or Fiihrer, and his followers called themselves the Ustashe. A policy was decided on - probably at that desk there, in the photograph -- whereby a third of Serbs would be forcibly converted to Catholicism, a third would be expelled, and the rest quite simply killed. Permission was given, in effect, for Serb men, women and children to be murdered at will. And hell came to Yugoslavia.

'That summer, after my father was taken away, terrible stories began to reach us. Orthodox priests were being murdered - often tortured to death - Serbian mothers and their children had been thrown over the- cliffs at Jadovno, Serbian corpses were hanging from scaffolds all the way from Kutina to Banja Luca. We were petrified - frightened beyond belief - but we didn't know what to do. We had nowhere to go; to take to the roads would have been suicide. So we stayed where we were, and mourned my father, and lived on the food we grew, and hoped that people would forget we were there.

'Then one afternoon in August we saw smoke, coming from one of the fields, and heard strange' sounds. My sister Drina and I went out to see what wa&| happening, and from the smell we thought someone! was cooking beef. But when we got near we saw .. something I cannot describe. It was a naked man, tie to pegs in the ground, and a fire had been lit on chest. He was still alive.

'We ran away. We didn't dare go near. But whe

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got near the house we saw that we had been lowed by six men in uniform. They caught up with told us to stay where we were, and went inside. |'It took them two hours to finish with my mother my oldest sister Milla, and then there were shots, men walked me and Drina to a truck. We were we were going somewhere we would be looked r. A camp -- not far away -- where we would be safe, pre would be other children there. It was called fiovac.

|f Yugoslavia under the black legions of the Ustashe * hell, Jasenovac was the inmost circle of that hell, ficruelty there was bestial, unspeakable, far beyond iing you would think human beings were capable They burnt prisoners alive, they cut their heads off , saws . . . There were children there -- thousands Jdren - but they received no mercy either. The ite, in fact.'

jr stole a glance at Aleksandra Marcovic. Any of emotion or- expression had been ruthlessly I from her face.

camp was in the south Croatian marshlands the Una and Sava rivers join. We were put in . shacks without even straw to sleep on, fed on gs, and put to work building the guards' s. The wire had gone up at Jasenovac a fortnight but by 1945 there would be a whole network ; from Krapje in the west to Stara Gradiska in t About six hundred thousand Serbs, Jews and \ would be killed there, one way or another, and

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the deepest hatred and the worst torture was reserved for the Serbs.

'If I just tell you what I saw with my own eyes . . . Exactly a year after I came to Jasenovac, a competition was organised to see which of the Ustashe men could kill the most prisoners with his own hands. The winner -- a young Catholic lawyer, I think he was -- managed to cut the throats of thirteen hundred people in one night with a specially sharpened butcher's knife. He won a gold watch and the tide "King of the Killers".'

Slater, speechless, shook his head.

'Even the Nazis protested at this kind of behaviour, but then the Ustashe were animals, not humans. How can youjregard as human people who feed children caustic soda,-or beat them to death with hammers and axes, as happened to my sister Drina? I saw all of these things at Jasenovac.'

She was silent for a moment. The wind pressed at the double-glazing. Beyond the net curtains the sea was the colour of galvanised steel.

'But you asked about the pictures, so let me tell you about this . . .' she smiled bleakly, '. . . this handsome young Ustashe knight on his horse. His name is Dinko Sakic, and at age twenty-one he was made, j commandant of Jasenovac. They said - although I never saw it -- that his favourite weapon was a welder's j torch. When I saw him he was always carrying th�| whip and a pistol. As the photo shows he was a greafl friend of the Guja, the snake. They used to walbjj around the camp together as if they were in

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junds of some beautiful mansion, admiring the and the statues and the views. People said that were . . . you know.' Slater nodded.

the same time there were women prisoners - I j't expect you to understand this - who thought that were in love with one or other of them. Dinko the Guja knew this too, and I think it amused q/

seing Slater's disbelieving face, Marcovic smiled Jy. 'You have to understand that this was a world jut rules, sense or logic. A world of blood, icry and chaos. The Guja was a German SS jter, as you can tell from the uniform, and usually i there were German or Italian officers around the <$he made an effort to behave like human beings, re me, we welcomed the sight of a Nazi uniform

an SS uniform.

at no one bothered to moderate their behaviour the Guja was around - quite the opposite, in ecause they knew that he liked what he saw. He |-to the camp so often I think he must have been I somewhere very close, perhaps at Kostajnica. auldn't keep away, and though I never saw him ch as touch a prisoner I think he was in some . addicted to what he witnessed here.' er pulled down the next image. The hiking

at. The man eating the bread is Andrija bvich, the Poglavnik's minister of the interior.

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Artukovich was also responsible for the Ustashe -- he was a kind of Croatian Himmler. And there again is the Guja in the foreground. Could you go to the last picture?'

Slater nodded,

'I don't know where this is. It could be Jasenovac, or Stara Gradiska or one of the smaller camps, but I think the point of this picture is the necklace worn by the man in the apron. I heard about this, but I never saw it.'

'What is the necklace?' asked Slater.

'Human eyes,' said Marcovic flatly. 'The Ustashe were always gouging out eyes. I heard years later that the Poglavnik liked to have baskets of Serbian eyes delivered to his desk. If you were an ambitious young Ustashe knight it was a good way to get ahead.'

Slater slowly shook his head, appalled. 'I had no idea about any of this.'

'Well, perhaps it's time that your eyes were opened. Next picture.'

The snow-scene by the river.

'This is definitely in Jasenovac, at the south end of the camp by the river. This is the Guja, clearly, but I don't know who these two are. This man, however' she took a deep breath and pointed to the robed monk - 'this man I do know. This man I will remember for all eternity. Can I get you some more tea?'

'Thank you, said Slater. 'That would be kind.' He didn't want the tea, but he sensed that Aleksandra Marcovic needed a break, a chance to rally herself. For

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re minutes, as she busied herself, he stared out of the idow, trying to make sense of the horrors she was counting. When she came back her voice was ieter than it had been before. At times it was almost audible.

,'We called him Fra Sotcma - Brother Satan. I think i real name was Filipovic. He had joined the Ustashe [>m a monastery at Banja Luca, and was promoted to idant of Jasenovac around the time of the ig competition in the Autumn of 1942. He was a 1-looking man with a lisping, almost feminine :e, and of all those Ustashe monsters I would say kt he was the most terrifying. He was only indant for four months - Dinko Sakic rode in |'his white horse at the end of the year -- but the ferry the river to the execution place at Gradina was for all of that time.'