The Woman from Bratislava (38 page)

‘It was,’ Toftlund replied irritably.

‘Your first?’

‘If you must know, yes.’

‘Ah, it’ll pass.’

‘What the blazes would you know about that?’

‘I’ve had three.’

‘A week from now I’ll be a father,’ Toftlund went on, growing even more annoyed – although as much with himself as with Teddy.

‘Is that a first too?’

‘Yes, dammit.’

‘Me, I’d need to count up how many I have and with whom.’

‘God, you’re asking for it,’ Toftlund seethed. ‘Yep, that’s Teddy. My wives used to say the same thing. And a lot else besides.’

Toftlund glowered at him then stalked back to the bar to finish his drink before, at long last, their flight was called. Apart from those occupied by Teddy, Per and the two Red Cross nurses or doctors all the seats on the plane were taken up by young,
black-haired
men.

‘Cannon fodder for the UKC, the Kosovo Albanian liberation army,’ Teddy muttered as they fastened their seatbelts.

‘For once in your life would you shut up,’ Toftlund hissed back.

‘Off to the mountains to kill Serbs,’ Teddy went on, nothing daunted. ‘Drummed up from around Europe and the US to serve
the great cause of Kosovo and the UCK. They don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for.’

‘Well, that’s not our worry. We have to find your half-sister. The rest is none of our business.’

‘You’ll find, Inspector, that in the Balkans things have a way of becoming your business whether you like it or not.’

The aircraft accelerated. Toftlund looked away from Teddy and stared pointedly out of the window. The Airbus climbed steeply over the mountains. The minute the captain switched off the ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ sign and with it the ‘No Smoking’ sign one would have thought a fire had broken out in the cabin as all the
Albanian
youths lit up as one man. It was an incredible sight. Toftlund could not remember the last time he had flown in a plane in which people were smoking. Teddy chuckled and groped about in his own pockets while Toftlund felt the pungent smoke stinging his eyes and throat. The four flustered Slovenian stewardesses bustled up and down the aisle, pointing to the ‘No Smoking’ sign, which had come back on and flapping scandalised hands in front of their faces as they endeavoured, with remonstrations in English, to have the fire put out. The young Albanians simply carried on talking and smoking, until an older man – ramrod straight and with a flat, bald head – marched down from the rear of the plane, shouting and bawling in Albanian. The chastened youths tried frantically to put out their cigarettes, stubbing so vigorously that sparks flew up around their hands. Teddy laughed so hard that Toftlund thought he was going to burst a blood vessel.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he gasped. ‘I just love Albania.’

They flew over snow-capped mountains on the long
roundabout
route to Albania. The usual approach paths were closed to allow the high-flying NATO F-16 fighters to swoop unhindered from their bases in Italy across Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo with their deadly cargo of laser-controlled precision missiles. As the plane approached Rina Airport, between Tirana and Dürres, Toflund saw rivers like dun-coloured ribbons winding through the
mountains, and small villages dotted here and there among green and brown fields. He felt hollow and tense, unsure what awaited them down there, and as usual when he felt a twinge of
uncertainty
he tried to concentrate on the task ahead of him. They began their descent and Per pointed out to Teddy the long, straight row of American Apache attack helicopters ranged up at the airport. Right next door was the American army camp: regimented khaki tents planked straight down in the mud like soldiers.

‘The Apache,’ Toftlund said. ‘The world’s most efficient attack helicopter. Wait till the Serbs get a taste of that.’

‘It’ll never happen,’ Teddy shouted above the din of the braking engines, hanging on for dear life to his armrest as the aircraft made its long descent, wallowing and bucking like a ship in a storm.

‘Of course it will. They’re here to support the troops on the ground. The infantry will be moving in at some point.’

‘Those days are gone. In our part of the world we’re not
prepared
to accept losses. Those helicopters might be efficient, but they’re also vulnerable. Neither Uncle Sam nor Mother Denmark wants its boys coming home in body bags. There they sit, and there they will continue to sit. Meanwhile, from high in the air our valiant lads will bomb Milosevic into submission. It’s only a matter of time. We bomb TV and radio stations and newspaper offices, power stations, bridges, roads, oil depots, people. We bomb
Yugoslavia
to the brink of perishment and starvation. That is how we wage war today.’

‘At some point in every war they have to send in the infantry. The foot soldiers always have to clear up after the cavalry. That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been.’

‘True. But only after the enemy has laid down his weapons. Then, however, they can expect to be there for years. Because down there on the ground seeds of hate are being sown that will have to be harvested by generations to come.’

‘You know it all, don’t you?’ Toflund said.

‘Star Wars, that’s our game. We leave the dirty work on the
ground to the UCK. In this war they’re the ones who have to look the enemy in the eye. I’m telling you: your modern Westerner want to see no corpses.’

‘So you say,’ Toftlund retorted, not even trying to conceal his irritation as the plane’s wheels hit the bumpy, rutted runway and braked. Beyond the window the host of cargo planes and Hercules troop carriers gradually came into focus at this airport which had never seen so much traffic – not until now, that is, when with awesome efficiency all the world’s relief organisations and its most powerful military machines were pumping men, equipment and, not least, money into a society which would otherwise have ground more or less to a halt.

Chaos reigned at passport control, where the cigarette smoke billowed around Toftlund and a solitary, timid sign showing a cigarette with a line through it. There was no system to the queues which were forever forming and breaking up. The military-
looking
young man from Ljubljana Airport presented an American passport and a slip of paper to a moustachioed, cigarette-smoking man in a blue uniform and was ushered past the control point. The youthful volunteers for the UCK were lined up like soldiers and marched off into the terminal. The weather was warm, the
temperature
possibly as high as seventeen degrees. But it felt as if there was rain in the air. The airport ground was a sea of mud strewn with deep, swilling puddles; everything was coated in a layer of grime and damp.

Amid the throng Per spotted a middle-aged man who looked rather like a Red Indian who had taken a wrong turn, or a relic from the hippie era. The fringing on his light-coloured leather jacket bobbed up and down along with his long, grizzled ponytail. He wore tight, black jeans and pointed, high-heeled boots, had a gold earring in his right ear and rings on almost every finger. His skin was badly pockmarked. He hadn’t been on the plane, had he? He moved with easy familiarity among the innumerable blue
uniforms
, whose only purpose, apart from their constant smoking,
seemed to be to increase the confusion. When the ageing
Albanian
hippie raised his hand for a second in a gesture that could have meant anything or nothing, Toftlund noticed that he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. The guy stuck a hand in his pocket and slipped one of the blue-clad officers some green dollar bills. He made no attempt to conceal this transaction. The officer nodded, the hippie raised his hand again and four young
Albanians
came round the barrier and picked up two large boxes sitting right next to the battered boom. They carted them off with the customs people paying them no apparent heed.

‘Welcome to mafia country,’ said a voice in Danish. ‘Don’t you just love Albania already?!’

The voice belonged to a tall and very skinny man in blue jeans and a blue denim shirt. ‘T. Poulsen, UNHCR’, the badge on his left breast pocket said. On his right shoulder he bore the UN logo and a tiny Danish flag. He had a friendly, youthful face, intelligent eyes and short, fair hair. At first glance he looked to be in his early twenties, but the fine lines around his eyes revealed that he had to be a good ten years older than that.

Teddy offered his hand:

‘Thank God, the cavalry has arrived! Teddy’s the name.’

‘Torsten Poulsen, Emergency Service Agency. Welcome to Albania.’

Toftlund eyed the newcomer. He had seen him somewhere before, but could not recall where. Poulsen smiled and eyed Toftlund in return.

‘You don’t remember me, do you, Per?’

‘I can’t quite …’

‘Langeland, close on fifteen years ago …’

The penny dropped.

‘But, of course, Lieutenant. So this is where you ended up.’

‘Here, there, wherever the Agency sends me.’

They shook hands, both grinning from ear to ear like old army chums.

‘What’s all this about, then?’ Teddy asked.

Poulsen lifted Teddy’s holdall, saying:

‘Let’s be on our way, before it gets dark. We don’t drive at night in this country. Per blew up a factory that I had been detailed to guard. We had a whole company. There were only three of them. And yet they managed to steal up on us, set their explosives and get away without us knowing they’d even been there.’

‘Oh, right, playing at soldiers and all that,’ Teddy remarked carelessly.

‘Per was a frogman with the Royal Navy in his last life. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Like the Crown Prince?’

‘Before the Crown Prince,’ Toftlund put in.

‘Well, I suppose somebody has to defend the mother country,’ Teddy announced airily and proceeded to make his way up to the actual passport desk, leaving the other two morons to wallow in their stupid, old-soldier reminiscences. Nothing brought out the lad in a grown man like a reunion with an old pal from their army days, a time when everything was manly and uncomplicated. Teddy had served four months with the Civil Defence Corps, so he had got off lightly. Nonetheless he recalled that time as a long and boring waste of his fine gifts. Not only that, but he had had to put up with taking orders from people whom, in civilian life, he would never even have spoken to, never mind listened to what they had to say. He stood patiently while the woman behind the desk took his ten American dollars and meticulously inscribed his name in a large, lined ledger which reminded Teddy of his
childhood
. There had been a time, so many years ago that he did not care to think about it, when his mother had kept the household accounts in just such a ledger. His gums were beginning to ache again and he could tell that all those hours in an aeroplane seat had not done his back any good.

His backache was not helped by the twenty-kilometre drive in Torsten Poulsen’s big, white Toyota Land Cruiser to the port
of Dürres. The blue UN logo and the Danish flag were painted on the sides of the four-wheel drive. On its nose waggled a long and powerful radio antenna. Toftlund’s mobile was now nothing but a useless electronic gadget with no connection to anything or anyone. The road was narrow, dirty, full of holes and swimming in mud and water. The rusting hulks of old cars lay here, there and everywhere, as if a giant had played with them for a while then tossed them away. Horse-drawn carts crawled along the road which was lined with people selling everything from berries to petrol in clear plastic containers. On every street corner stood lethargic, chain-smoking policemen, each armed with a lollipop with a green circle in the centre. None of them appeared, though, to be doing anything about the chaotic traffic. The countryside was scattered with dingy houses and little concrete bunkers which looked like mushrooms attacked by rot. There they lay, sagging and abandoned, and in the narrow slits through which the
revolution’s
forces were meant to defend their native soil, grass and other weeds had now taken up their positions. Some of the
toadstool
bunkers lay on their sides with their rusty iron struts sticking out like stiffened entrails into the polluted, blue-grey air. Thus the heroic stand had ended. The abortiveness of socialism, and of raw capitalism, hit you like a slap in the face in Albania. On the banks of a shallow, muddy-brown, noisome river lay what looked like a veritable car cemetery. In their various stages of ruination, decay and rusting, the cars resembled a nightmarish sculpture, or a scene from a film about man’s total destruction of his own environment. Not far from the airport they passed a road bridge stretching into nothingness. It had slumped slightly in the middle. It looked like the work of a madman: a bridge to nowhere. Poulsen explained that one of Hoxha’s nephews had designed and built it. Not until it was more or less completed did it transpire that he knew
absolutely
nothing about building bridges: the first car to drive onto it had caused it to fall in on itself. That had been fifteen years ago. Now it just stood there. Albania was like one big rubbish tip, or
some futuristic landscape over which a war has swept, leaving
everything
at a standstill.

Confidently and with care, Poulsen wove his way round cattle, horse-drawn vehicles, noisy little Italian mopeds, pedestrians and craters which could have swallowed up a VW Beetle. The road had clearly been tarmacked at some point. Now there were more holes than tarmac. But what worried Toftlund most were the raggedy little kids who milled barefoot around the white car whenever Poulsen slowed down, as was often necessary, to little more than a snail’s pace.

‘It’s those bloody Italian soldiers,’ Poulsen said, tooting
furiously
at two little boys with dirty faces and hands who were trying to clamber up onto the Toyota’s running board, yelling for
chocolate
. ‘When the first of the Italians got here they threw chocolate to the kids. Now they swarm around the cars. It’s only a matter of time before we run one of those poor brats down. They flock round the big trucks too. It gives the drivers sleepless nights, I can tell you.’