a bus from behind the lines. Her father, of course, had known total war and refugee status, and her father's first wife had been killed when the bombers had come to Magdeburg. One of the men from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees office in Zagreb, smart and smelling of body lotion, made a joke to her, as if it were clever to laugh as the bus came through, as if it were adult, and she ignored him, indeed she barely heard him. The bus neared the checkpoint and there were Serbs standing at the far side of the sandbagged position that the Nigerians manned, and the Serbs would check the print-out list of names against the papers of those on the bus. She had never, and she had written to her father and mother in Munich of this, never ever seen shame on the faces of the Serbs when they checked through the new batch of refugees. She knew from the print-out that the refugees represented the population of the last village in the Prijedor area to be cleansed. There would be a village, small houses and a mosque and a shop and once neat fields and a car repair yard, that would now be flattened, and the population of the village were moving away from homes that no longer existed, and they would not know if a future was left to them. Their village was the bus, and after the bus their village would be in the corners of the sleeping rooms of the Transit Centre at Karlovac. And the wretched fool, the young man from the UNHCR in Zagreb, was still laughing at his joke and she could not remember what he had said… She saw the broken windows of the bus. The front windscreen, to the right of the driver's vision, was a skein of cracks that radiated from the stone's impact point, and three of the left side windows behind the driver had caved in. She saw the faces of the refugees. The young man was talking at her again and she did not hear him. So quiet and so cowed, the faces of the refugees, without expression. The stoning might have been by the Serbs in Prijedor, or it might have been later in the journey, or it might have been when they were in the last Serb village before the final checkpoint. She had never travelled beyond the checkpoint, never been behind the lines, and she found it close to impossible to understand the ethnic hatred that had driven Serb people to expel their Muslim neighbours, and there was no shame. She was a small woman. Her tight waist was held close by the belt of her denims. Her hair was mahogany but flecked now with grey that had not been there before she had come to administer the Transit Centre. She wore a pressed white blouse, open at the throat. She used no make-up, because cosmetics might seem to offer an insult to the refugees who came from the villages of Bosnia, and who had nothing. She set a smile on her face. She was dwarfed by the men around her. She was smiling briskly and going towards the door of the bus. Later, she would hear the atrocity stories. She would hear who had been raped and who had been tortured and who had been beaten… She saw herself as the symbol that the past, rape and torture and beatings, was finished. The young man was beside her, towering over her and talking fast, like a cockerel parading for a hen, and he would, because they always did, offer her his telephone number for when she could next get to the city and there would be a promise of dinner, and she would ignore him as she always did. She paused at the door of the bus. There were Serbs on the steps and she stared them out defiantly until the first weakened his resolve and made room for her. They came down off the bus's steps and made a point of brushing their bodies against hers, and behind them were the faces, expressionless, of the refugees. There was no shame. The history of her own country had been only academic to her before her posting to Croatia. Something taught in secondary-level school by defensive teachers. The Nazi years, the arrogance of men in uniform, the brutality of men with guns, the fear of dispossessed refugees, had no reality for her until she had come to Croatia. Before Croatia she had been among the thousands of young persons living the comfortable existence of the aid agencies… Now it was all changed. The culture of the agencies was to turn the cheek, smile, deflect the insult, and that had been possible for her until she had come to Croatia. There had been little to prepare her for what she would find. A flight to Geneva, a job interview, a three-day course, and she had been pitched into Karlovac. She had learned on her feet… She had learned to hate the men in uniform and their guns. Because there was no shame, Ulrike Schmidt yearned to see them stamped down and humiliated. She cried inside for a reckoning day to be delivered to those who felt no shame. One day… Her father had told her, and he had known because he had been employed as a junior interpreter by the British prosecutor, that the guards at the camps in the Neuengamme Ring had taken photographs of the naked Jewish women running past them towards medical inspection, and felt no shame. She thought that the young Serbs who pushed against her breasts in the doorway of the bus felt no shame and thought themselves safe, safe from retribution. The chief guards at the Neuengamme Ring of camps had been hanged by the British, but they had not thought they would be hanged when they took their photographs. She prayed each morning, after the clamour of the alarm, for strength. She made warmth in her smile. 'What motivates me is my belief that if war criminals are found to be beyond justice then we are entering a new age of barbarism…' The man chain-smoked. They had been on the hard chairs in the corridor for an hour. 'Bringing men to trial, to a court of law, will be difficult, it will take many years, but it is the most important thing…' The man rested his elbows on the filled desk. They had come through heavy sets of old doors, climbed dark wide staircases, nudged their way past heaped and cobwebbed files. 'Revenge killing is useless. It is necessary to find truth, then justice…' The man coughed thick phlegm to his lips. Penn had been told by Jovic that it was the ministry office for accumulating evidence on war crimes. They had sat a long hour before they were ushered from the corridor and into an office. He had tried conversation to kill the time and failed. 'It is necessary to have meticulous preparation of evidence. I am determined we will not move outside legality. If, when, it comes to trials, it would be catastrophe for a prosecution to collapse on technicality.. .' The man talked as if to an audience and the smoke eddied in the wisps of his beard. An hour in the corridor, and now half an hour as the working of the office was portrayed. Penn wrote his notes carefully. He could not complain at Jovic's translation, steady and at a good pace. He had the name of the man, and his title and the notes made good reading. The pity was that the notes were rubbish, they didn't matter. He had tried to steer the conversation, twice, and twice had been ignored because this was prepared speech time for visitors, and visitors were supposed to duck their heads in respect. A secretary had put her head round the door, grimaced at the man. Penn knew the form. The speech would end. Handshakes, farewells, and the man would be sweeping out of the office to a new appointment. 'I work in conjunction with the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International…' 'Rosenovici, in the Municipality of Glina.' Penn said it loud. 'I receive no money from my own government
…' 'There was a battle in December of 1991 for the village of Rosenovici, in the Municipality of Glina.' Penn battered on. 'The material I gather will go to the United Nations Commission for the Prosecution of War Criminals…' 'You are a busy man, I am a busy man…' Penn saw that Jovic queried him and his eyebrow was lifted in trifled amusement. '… I am not interested in war crimes. I am not concerned with the prosecution, or freedom, of war criminals. I want to know what happened in Rosenovici in December of 1991 when Miss Dorothy Mowat was murdered. I apologize, but that is all I am interested in.' He saw the annoyance furrow the head of the man. 'The greatest human rights abuse in Europe for fifty years, you are not concerned?' 'I want to know what happened in Rosenovici in December in 1991 when Miss Dorothy Mowat died. Point…' He saw the sneer creep over the man's mouth. 'You cross the great continent of Europe, You visit our poor and humble country. You arrive late after the war in which my poor and humble country has fought for its very survival. You come when the finest of our young people have made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives, after our old men have been tortured, disembowelled, after our old women have been beaten, raped, after our children have been slaughtered… But you want only to know how a young Englishwoman was killed… You are not concerned with law and justice, but with making a report…' Penn said evenly, 'I have been paid to make a report on the circumstances of Miss Dorothy Mowat's death.' The sneer played wide. 'And she was precious, and the thousands who have died were without value? To make her so precious, was she a queen?' There was the scrape of Jovic's chair beside him. It was the end of the interview. Penn stood. He felt so damned tired. It had been time wasted, as time had been wasted at the embassy. Penn said, 'From what I heard, what I was told, she was a pig of a woman.'
'There's no goddamn hot water…' Marty stood in the door and shouted in frustration. The towel was loose at his waist. '… I want goddamn hot water.'
'There is no hot water.'
'Heh, smart man, I am not a fool. I know there is no hot water. I want my shower, I want hot water. I pay for hot water…'
'There is no hot water. There will be hot water for your shower in the morning.'
The doctor sat at the bare wood table and his study books were in front of him. The evening had come and the light was poor in the room, but the doctor had not switched on the electricity nor had he switched on the immersion that heated water for the shower.
The American yelled, 'Damn it, I pay for hot water. It's part of the rental that I can go take a shower, and not in the morning. I want …'
And Marty let it go. He let it go for his own survival. If he did not let it go, if he kept shouting about the need for hot water for his shower then he would get the big story, again. The big story was Vukovar. Not that Marty
